The Importance of Responsive Websites for Businesses in Mobile, Alabama

Jan 14, 2023 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

The importance of responsive websites for businesses in Mobile, Alabama is crucial for success in our digital age.  Not only does it provide a platform for customers to learn about your products or services, but it also allows for increased visibility and accessibility through search engines.

One of the main benefits of having a website for your business is the ability to reach a wider audience. With the majority of consumers turning to the internet to research and make purchasing decisions, a website allows your business to be easily found by potential customers. Additionally, a website can provide valuable information about your business, including hours of operation, location, and contact information, making it easy for customers to find and connect with your business.

Having a website also allows for improved search engine placement, which can lead to increased traffic and higher visibility. By incorporating search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, such as using relevant keywords and creating high-quality content, your website can rank higher in search engine results, making it more likely for potential customers to find your business.

Another benefit of having a website for your business is the ability to connect with customers through social media and email marketing. A website can provide links to your business’s social media accounts, allowing customers to stay updated on promotions and events, and can also provide a platform for email marketing campaigns to promote sales and new products.

A website for your business or organization can also serve as a platform for e-commerce, allowing businesses to sell products and services online. This can increase revenue and provide customers with a convenient shopping experience.

Overall, a website for your business is essential for reaching a wider audience, improving search engine placement, connecting with customers, and increasing revenue. If your business does not currently have a website, now is the time to invest in one and take advantage of the many benefits it can provide.

Having a website for your business is an important step in reaching your target audience and providing a convenient way for customers to find and connect with your business. It also allows for improved search engine placement, social media and email marketing, and e-commerce capabilities. It’s time to invest in a website to help your business grow.

 

5 Best SEO Practices for Mobile, Alabama Businesses

Jan 10, 2023 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

As we look ahead to the new year of 2023, businesses and website owners should be preparing for the changes and advancements in search engine optimization (SEO). Mobile, Alabama, is no exception to this trend, and the following five best SEO practices can help local businesses stay ahead of the competition and ensure they’re visible to the right customers.

1. Optimize Your Site for Mobile: With more people using their mobile devices to search for products and services, it’s essential to ensure your site is optimized for mobile. This means ensuring it loads quickly, is responsive and easy to navigate, and that all content is visible regardless of device. For Mobile, Alabama businesses, this optimization is especially important given the city’s high rate of mobile web usage.

2. Use Structured Data: Structured data is a way of organizing information on a web page that makes it easier for search engines to understand. This can include product reviews, location, hours of operation, and more. By using structured data, businesses can make sure their content is visible and more easily found by customers.

3. Focus on Quality Content: Quality content is essential for SEO success. This includes writing content that is relevant to the business and regularly updated. Additionally, content should be engaging and provide value to readers. For Mobile, Alabama businesses, this could include content about local attractions, events, and businesses.

4. Utilize Local SEO: Local SEO is an effective way to increase visibility and reach customers in your area. This includes optimizing content for local search terms, building local citations, and optimizing for local reviews. Additionally, local businesses should ensure their address and contact information is consistent across all platforms.

5. Take Advantage of Social Media: Social media is an important part of any SEO strategy. This includes actively engaging with customers, responding to comments and messages, and sharing content that is relevant to your business. Additionally, businesses should be sure to include links to their website on all social media platforms.

By following the above five best SEO practices, Mobile, Alabama businesses can improve their visibility and reach more customers in the new year. Additionally, they should keep an eye on any changes and advancements in SEO to ensure they’re staying up to date and ahead of the competition.

Benefits of Combining SEO & Social Media – Website Design Mobile Al – Magnolia Media

Nov 30, 2022 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

When a business kicks off a new website, careful consideration usually goes into its design. Attractiveness, professionalism, and usability are top concerns, all geared toward providing visitors easy access to the information they’re seeking. But all of that hard work is wasted if customers never see a business’s website in the first place.

Search engine optimization (SEO) has long been the foundation of every business’s content marketing strategy. With the right text on a page, it features prominently in search results, beating out competitors for customer attention. But good SEO design starts with the layout of a website and grows. Whether your business is currently designing your website or not, it’s important to ensure it’s getting the best search results possible.

“A professional web designer keeps up with the latest search algorithm changes,” says Abby Olson, director of SEO for Snap Agency, a Minneapolis web design firm. “Even a few small changes can push a business up in search results, reaching customers who wouldn’t have ever learned about that business otherwise.”

Here are a few things businesses can do to ensure their sites are search engine ready.

 

Image SEO

The first step toward optimizing your images for search algorithms is through alt-tagging each picture on your site. This will provide additional content to the search engines as they search your site for text. But image SEO goes beyond tagging. If your image size is too large, it slows down your page load times, which negatively affects rankings, so it’s important to scale your images down where necessary. You should also keep SEO in mind when naming your images, choosing keywords that match the terms your customers are likely to use when searching for the type of products or services you offer.

 

Remove Content Clocks

You may have the best intentions, but that wall you put in place to block access to content could be hurting your rankings. This includes sections you lock down to members only, forms you require be filled out before content can be viewed, and “pay walls” that provide content only after someone has paid to access it. If you do need to block sections of your site, make sure you have several sections open to the public and optimized, especially your landing page.

 

Regularly Update

Google’s goal is to remain useful to the customers that use its services every day. For this reason, up-to-date, current information is prioritized over pages that have remained stagnant year after year. Set up a section of your most important pages that you can regularly update with the latest news or images of your newest products. You should also have a blog and assign someone to create new content for it on a regular basis. This will bring yet another opportunity to incorporate keywords that speak to search algorithms.

 

Optimize Your URLs

Another opportunity for SEO comes in the domain name you choose. Even if you already have a URL in place, you can change your search results by choosing search-friendly page names. A URL like www.yoursite.com/salon-services will satisfy requests from customers looking for salon services, for instance. You can also incorporate geographic information into your URLs to help with location-based searches.

 

Make It Mobile

An increasing number of customers now conduct searches using their mobile devices. Google realizes this and penalizes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly. Good optimization means choosing responsive web design as a foundational step. Additionally, though, you should ensure your site setup addresses the way customers are likely to look for your site, including ensuring your content answers questions asked through voice recognition. Experts recommend incorporating a FAQ section on your site to satisfy today’s question-based voice searches.

 

Speed It Up

Even the most attractive, usable site won’t perform well if your page load times are too slow. Google penalizes slow-loading sites but even if customers do find your page, they’re likely to grow impatient if they can’t access the information they need in a timely manner. In addition to server-level issues, elements built into your page could be slowing things down, including plugins, JavaScript, and social sharing buttons.

Your website’s layout and design could make a big difference in whether or not customers can find you. It’s important to conduct regular audits to ensure your page’s design isn’t hurting your company’s marketing efforts.

SOURCE: http://www.cio.com/article/3175021/web-development/how-search-engine-optimized-web-design-can-boost-your-brand-s-marketing-efforts.html

 

 

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Choosing A Website Design Company in Mobile, AL

Nov 30, 2022 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

Website design companies, marketing firms and agencies are as common as the websites they create, especially in Mobile, Al.  Google returns more than 962 million results for the search term, but as most everything, those 962 million results aren’t created equally. And when you actually choose one from the pile – one that is likely ranked on the first page, if not in the top 3 results – your work has just gotten started.

Sure, a good ranking could help you make your decision, but if you just stop there, you’re getting a company who’s really good at Search Engine Optimization and maybe only partly good at the actual web design part. There are so many other things that should fall in the decision making because it’s not one that should be taken lightly.  This task is also probably handled by a marketing professional who is already overwhelmed with dozens of other “top” priorities.

So how do you know that the company you found in Google is the right company to be responsible for your online web presence?

 

Do you like their website? 

First impressions matter.  You wouldn’t go to a dentist you had terrible teeth, right? No, you wouldn’t. You are looking for someone to help you with your first impression, so you need to be impressed with theirs.

 

Do you like their  designs?

Direct industry experience doesn’t matter — or, at least, shouldn’t matter as much. Even if they haven’t done a slew of sites in your direct industry, don’t discredit it. You know what you like, so what matters is seeing things you like in their portfolio. The work should stand on its own.

 

Does their sales person know their stuff?

Do they need to be the actual developer? No, but they should be able to understand your problems and be able to articulate how their service can address those problems. It’s surprisingly easy to spot people who are just talk. If you’re not overly techy, try looping in your IT department so they can help you make some sense of it.

 

Do you believe their story?

It’s not that people actually try to deceive someone, but if you are having a conversation about your needs and their ability to deliver on those needs, you should just ask yourself simply, “Do I think that they are shooting me straight?”  If it’s timeline, budget, technologies, expertise, or whatever, the story needs to add up.  If you trust your gut, you will make the right decision.

 

Who does the website work?

Sales people are great, but the designers and programmers are the ones actually building your website. Ask where they’re located and if they’re full-time or part-time. What you don’t want is to get into a relationship with a company whose employees are all contractors or working oversees because if there’s a problem with your site, you want it fixed now, not the next time they punch in.

 

Who owns the website code?  

This one is huge.  If you don’t own the work when the project is complete, you should run, don’t walk, from that firm.  You will have more problems in the long term with a company who owns your stuff.  You want to know that they are going to be there for you after the launch because you want them to not because you have no other choice in the matter.

In this industry, the adage that you get what you pay for is by far the truest of all truths. There is no checklist or silver bullet when it comes to this kind of decision, but the above will help steer you in the right direction.

These are just a few tips on choosing a website design company in Alabama, Mississippi, Florida or really anywhere.  If you are ready to get started on your new site, we would love to help.  Please give us a call at 251.377.3073.2423 or email us at info@magnolia-media.com

 

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3 Digital Tools to Go One Up on Your Competition

Nov 30, 2022 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

Not very long ago, promoting a brand was a drastically different task from what we know today. Thanks to the internet, over 40 percent of the world’s population is logging on to a computer and using that tool to gather information. As a result, the way in which we define competition has changed. Businesses today must go to great lengths to market their brands to stand out in a vastly overpopulated market.

In most cases, it’s a safe bet to say there are hundreds — if not thousands — of other people trying to do the exact same thing. So, what does it take to stay ahead of the curve?

Truth be told, there are very few things written in stone when it comes to digital marketing. However, there are a number of fundamental practices that put businesses in a better position to get their name out there. Here are three tools to consider when incorporating these practices into your strategy.

 

SEO Power Suite

Google now processes 3.5 billion searches a day. Think about the sheer number of online experiences that begin with a search engine! Given that few of those searches go beyond page one of the results, you can’t afford to omit an SEO strategy in your marketing mix.

SEO requires a great deal of research and attention to detail. SEO PowerSuite is equipped with four major tools to cover all the bases of an SEO campaign.

  • Rank Tracker — Thorough keyword research is the backbone of SEO. This software allows you to track an unlimited number of keywords and phrases across many search engines (both global and local). This tool even compares present keyword rankings to any other point in time so you can easily determine which ones to pinpoint based on historical performance. Going even further, you are provided with recommendations from 20 different sources of words to use in your strategy.
  • Website Auditor — Conducting a website audit is one of the first steps involved in an SEO campaign. The Website Auditor allows you to conduct an in-depth analysis of your platform and identify any issues that are potentially hurting your rankings. From there, you are given recommendations of how to optimize your landing pages to get the best results.
  • SEO Spyglass — This is the real essence of organic competitive analysis in your search marketing efforts. SEO Spyglass helps you gain a strong knowledge of your competitor’s backlinks to get a feel for his or her strategy, identify that brand’s strengths and weaknesses, and determine where your links intersect. This knowledge puts you in a much better position to build quality links to your own website.
  • LinkAssistant — SEO PowerSuite compiles a detailed list assessing your link-building opportunities, with various techniques like guest posting and reviews. Then, it checks the SEO value of each target and evaluates its quality. It also provides outreach options, verification and reporting functions.

Once you have all this great information, the software allows you access to such huge amounts of data that your competitors might never have. It also integrates data from sources such as Google Analytics, AdWords, Webmaster Tools and more.

Related: 10 Free Marketing Tools Every Entrepreneur Should Know About

SEO plays a huge role in how people find your business. Take your time and equip yourself with the best resources to gain a competitive edge.

 

Avario

Believe it or not, a large portion of marketing involves no public action. The best strategies start with you listening to what people are saying within the industry. A big part of content marketing is simply knowing what topics to create your material around. Once there is a firm grasp of the hot button issues and concerns, you are better equipped to create relevant and meaningful messaging.

Awario helps this process by serving four major functions:

  • Brand awareness — Social media has made the concept of tracking brand mentions easier than ever. Awario keeps up with the top social networks and over 13 billion pages each day to track what people are saying about your business in real-time.
  • Market research — This is perhaps the most important step in starting (and running) a business. Awario allows you to glean knowledge about the hot button issues across your industry as well as the profiles you need to appeal to.
  • Sales opportunities — While monitoring conversations about your brand or field, Awario keeps track of potential customers looking for services you provide. From there, you can target them with your messaging and offer solutions to their problems.
  • Influencer marketing — Awario uses analytics to identify influencers pertaining to your niche. Collaborating with the right figures can do wonders to grow awareness of your brand in different communities. Just be sure you have a good plan on how to reach out!

This program is truly a go-to resource for gaining the proper insights to craft your branded material.

 

Contently

Now that you’ve learned the basics you should know about incorporating SEO into your marketing mix and the pressing topics to address, you need a tool that will help you create the best content and track its engagement.

Enter Contently. This tried-and-true program is meant to help you with three of the main tasks involved in content marketing.

  • Creation — Contently uses key insights mined across the web to push you in the right direction in creating brand material that gains significant traction. Each step of the process is streamlined across your team, from ideation all the way to final approval.
  • Connect — If you are working in a startup or small business, chances are, you are juggling a lot of different tasks. When this is the case, Contently’s software is set up to match you with freelancers through the company’s extensive network of content creators. Once the material has been crafted and approved, you can easily publish it on your most important channels.
  • Data — Without proper analytics, creating quality content is much harder. Using the tracking dashboard, you will gain vital information as to how your content is faring across the web. These metrics are crucial to identify strengths, or how you can improve your messaging.

Content marketing is currently one of the hottest topics in the entire business world. Rightfully so. Studies have found that when content marketing adopters and non-adopters are compared, the adopters have conversion rates that are nearly six times higher than their competitors’. These statistics cause brands everywhere to make room in their budgets for a plan. Therefore, you need to go the extra mile and use the right tools to make your material stand out.

Related: 14 Free Tools Every Solopreneur Needs

Ever since the first transaction in the history of humankind took place, the goal has always been to stay ahead of the competition. As time goes on, this task gets harder and harder. The name of the game is combining superior intellect with the right tools to get the job done. Use these resources to put your messaging in front of as many eyes as possible.

Website Design Alabama – Internal Linking Strategy for Website Design

Nov 30, 2022 | Business Tips, Marketing Articles

It’s crucial for SEO to evaluate and improve your internal linking strategy on a regular basis. By adding the right internal links you make sure Google understands the relevance of pages, the relationship between pages and the value of pages.

 

The ideal structure

We always advise website owners to imagine their website to be a pyramid with the most important content on top. We call those articles cornerstone content. There should be lots of links from topically related pages in the pyramid to that most essential content. By doing that, most link value is passed to those pages. On the other hand, you should also link from those top pages to subpages about related topics. Linking internally to related content shows Google what pages hold information about similar topics.

 

Linking your cornerstone content: an example

We’ve written a cornerstone content article, called ‘The ultimate guide to keyword research’. We want this post to rank for all related search queries about [keyword research] in Google search results. By adding internal links from other relevant articles, like ‘How to start with keyword research’ and ‘7 keyword research mistakes to avoid‘ to the main article, Google will start to understand that the cornerstone content article holds most information about this keyword. So after a while, Google will rank the cornerstone content above the other, smaller posts about keyword research.

 

Don’t forget to link from the top too

Besides linking from topically related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your cornerstone content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. If you do this, the most important posts or pages will get a lot of link value and will become stronger in the eyes of Google.

 

Linking to taxonomies

If you run a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags, helps Google to understand the structure of your blog and helps visitors to easily navigate to related posts.

 

Linking to related posts

Linking to related posts helps Google to understand your site structure, as mentioned before. To read more about a certain subject you can link to one or more related posts at the end of your article. There are plugins and modules that add complete related posts sections to your posts. If you use such a tool, we do recommend testing whether the related posts are actually the best related posts. When you’re not sure, linking to posts manually (or using our internal linking tool – more on that later) would probably be a better solution.

 

Linking to popular or recent posts

The last option we want to mention is linking internally to the most popular or to the newest posts on your website. This section could be added to the sidebar of your blog or the footer of your website to show it on all pages and posts.

The benefit of creating such a popular or recent posts section, is that link value passes to the linked posts from lots of pages and posts. Moreover, visitors will easier visit the posts and getting more traffic is a positive sign to Google as well.

 

More on internal links…

No-follow links

Probably you’re also showing links on a page that aren’t important for SEO. If you have a login link for your clients on the homepage, for example, you don’t want that link to leak link value to your login page: that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results.

In the past, you could prevent losing link value to such links by giving them a ‘no-follow’ tag. A ‘no-follow’ tag means that Google shouldn’t follow the link to the target page: so no link value would pass through this link. Now you might think: “I’m going to ‘no-follow’ less important links to give the most important links more link value.” This used worked in the past indeed, but Google has become smarter. It seems that the link value now just completely disappears when you add a ‘no-follow’ tag to a certain link. Therefore it makes more sense to have fewer links on a page instead of ‘no-following’ some of the links.

Please not that adding a ‘no-follow’ tag doesn’t mean that people can’t find those target pages in Google’s search results. If you don’t want pages or posts to show up in the search results you should give them a ‘no-index’ tag as well. The ‘no-index’ tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.

 

Anchor texts

If you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, it’s important to use the right anchor text. The anchor text is the text that visitors see and where they can click on, so the link is added to this part of the text.

It might hurt your website if you over-optimize anchor text. With over-optimizing we mean keyword stuffing. In the past, you could give all anchor texts the same keyword and Google made your website rank higher for that specific keyword. Nowadays, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text is telling more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So make sure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: you can definitely use keywords but don’t add the exact same keywords to each and every one of your anchor texts.

 

Go link your content

Without links your content can’t rank! With a solid internal linking strategy you can show which content is related and which of your articles are most informative and valuable. If you follow the guidelines in this post both Google and users will understand your site better, which will increase your chance of ranking.

 

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