seo optimization Archives - Beasley Direct and Online Marketing

Why Most SEO Initiatives Fail and How to Get Marketing and Web Dev Teams on the Same Page

Laurie Beasley — Mon, 03 Jun 2019 03:44:04 +0000

Falling Organic Search Traffic Is the Symptom of Systemic Failures Across Marketing and Web Development

We’ve been involved in auditing and correcting website search engine optimization (SEO) issues for over fifteen years. What almost always spurs the call to us for a website SEO audit project is a dramatic drop in website traffic (or product sales or leads that inevitably came as a result of the traffic drop). Many times these drops have come in waves as Google has made major updates to the search algorithm and websites didn’t keep up. Google has slowed major updates, so recently the problems are coming from poorly maintained websites that are being updated in a rush with little discipline and cooperation between marketing and the web dev team. Or websites that are not being refreshed at all and going stale with little new content for Google to index.

When we start to look under the website hoods of clients we’re auditing, we will most often see issues in all three of the areas for which Google evaluates a site when thinking about offering it as a solution for a search: Technically not well maintained, not keyword rich with well-developed searchable content, and few other sites linking to it signifying few others finding it to be authoritative. You would think that in this day and age of better education and awareness of Google search ranking factors, companies would do a better job. However we find companies are simply not keeping up. Why is this? We offer three possible reasons below that touch on lack of marketing management commitment, staff training, and lack of web dev group understanding of how Google search ranks your revenue earning pages.

Lack of Marketing Management Commitment, Direction and Understanding

Most often we see companies kick off an SEO initiative for some temporary improvement in search rank, but eventually fall back into bad habits causing the same old problems to drag down results. When we’re called in to do SEO training in a company, the directors and C-level staff often sit in. Good for them! Without them understanding and committing to what it takes for their team to effectively execute an SEO strategy, they will not allocate the resources, time or budget to make it happen consistently in the future. Let’s talk about each of those aspects for a minute.

Resources: SEO requires resources. You need to have staff whose job it is to make sure that keyword research is done, updated, and the keywords are implemented across copy, social media and content creation. Who is going to do that? Put someone in charge of that. And make sure it’s updated every time a new product or service is launched.
Time: In order to do the keyword research and optimize for keywords, you need to allow time for copy to be written and maybe re-written or tweaked to make sure keywords are implemented properly. This often adds two to three days to the copy cycle.
Budget: Remember that great, engaging copy makes a sale, but keyword rich copy will get them to the website in the first place. Who is going to write this keyword rich copy? Is your staff the best writing resource? Do you have a copy writing budget? Are the copywriters being given the keywords by page to use as a guideline? Who is assigned to review their work? We often find the weakest websites are written by internal resources and suffer from lack of objective review, convincing copy or keyword integration.

Marketing senior management can only effect an improvement in their web traffic, sales and leads by having a consistent, long-term, and disciplined view of search marketing.

They will staff appropriately for the tasks.
They will do keyword research and update it continuously as new products roll out.
They will train their staff on how to write the meta content and the on-page content to be keyword rich.
They will train their social media staff to incorporate keywords in posts and hashtags.
And they will evaluate staff skills objectively and budget for copywriting or outsource SEO skills to augment where their current team is lacking.

The Web Development Group Often Doesn’t “Get” Google

The other area where SEO initiatives fail is a disconnection between marketing and the web development group. We often find web developers don’t understand Google ranking factors and don’t take them into consideration in web maintenance projects. In almost every SEO audit we do, we find these common problems: dozens if not hundreds of duplicate title tags, internal and external 404 errors, redirect chains & loops, poorly written meta titles and descriptions. These are signs of a poorly maintained site that Google will dock search rank and move onto another site that may offer the same keywords but is better maintained. Combine that with a slow page speed or oversized graphics and Google could possibly pass right over you, never getting around to looking at your content. We even find brand new sites launched with these problems and wonder how much our clients paid the design and web team to build it. Furthermore, website designers sometimes don’t design for mobile. Google indexes websites based on mobile design. On July 1, 2019, Google now requires all newly registered domains to have Mobile-first designed pages when launched. This new standard also focuses on the use of structured data and rich snippets.

The problem is Google search rank factors for revenue earning keywords and pages are not taught in design or website development schools. Further, clients don’t ask whether the team has expertise in it before they hire them. We haven’t hired a web developer at our agency yet that we haven’t had to train ourselves.

The best solution is to pair the web development team with your SEO person in marketing and make sure the web dev team knows they need to meet marketing’s expectations. Or hire an outsourced SEO team to audit the site on a monthly or quarterly basis and provide a list of updates the web team needs to make. Sometimes having a technical SEO person talking to a web dev person is the best pairing. There should be a service level agreement from the web dev group to perform to marketing’s expectations. If not, then marketing should have full liberty to make wholesale changes that it needs.

Proactive Training Is the Best Medicine

It’s never too late to get your marketing and web dev team headed in the right direction. Training courses abound through Udemy, LinkedIn, local university extensions, and exceptional live online courses in a program I run through the www.DMAnc.org. However, I think the best training solution is a custom training program for your company that blends some of the best content from the course work like we offer at the www.DMAnc.org with examples from your own website. For example recently we did a one day training class for the marketing content writers at the California Chamber of Commerce. In the morning, we discussed the general principles of keyword research, how to structure meta descriptions, and on-page content. In the afternoon they gave us five sections of their website and we did a live exercise showing them how to put those principles into practice as a demonstration. To me that is the best type of instruction. If we had the luxury of adding a second day of instruction, we would have had them tackle a section on their own and checked their work. Different training can be devised for the web dev team and provided in the same way in the form of instruction and live exercises.

Be Introspective

Ask yourself and your team: How much money are we losing annually because of poor SEO? $10,000’s? $100,000’s? $1,000,000 or more per year? If you’re not getting many well-targeted organic leads and sales from your website, you need to improve your SEO.

Marketing management needs to commit the right resources and set the right direction for a long term SEO strategy. Your company can dramatically improve revenue earning keyword organic search rank results, gaining more leads and sales. This takes the right resources, time and budget—and the right training.

Need help with your SEO or training? We offer free SEO and PPC audits and full search engine optimization programs and custom training. Contact Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc., at www.BeasleyDirect.com.

By Laurie Beasley, Co-Founder and President, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc.

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Landing Page Optimization Services

BDM Super — Fri, 12 Jan 2018 13:43:01 +0000

Landing Page Audit and Optimization

Through changes in landing page design and execution, we’ve seen conversion rates increase by 200% or more. That’s a good reason to ask Beasley to conduct a landing page audit on your existing landing pages and make recommendations for improvement.

We start a landing page audit by simulating the user experience to discover disconnects within the page that make prospective business fall through the cracks. Does the landing page load in under 4 seconds (that’s Google’s minimum recommendation)? Is your key selling proposition presented above the fold, or on the first viewport on mobile devices? (According to MarketingSherpa, fewer than 50% of respondents scroll to the bottom of the page.) Is the data capture form short? (We recommend 3-5 fields maximum.) Are submit buttons easy to find, with action oriented captions?

We can also help you set up multivariate testing to optimize your landing pages even further. Often a minor landing page optimization change in a headline, offer copy or even the order in which you ask for information can make a noticeable difference in conversion. We particularly recommend pre-populating landing page fields when possible, a step that can dramatically improve results.

At your request, Beasley can perform an independent landing page audit of one or more landing pages and provide a detailed report with specific suggestions and examples of best practices. And remember that we’ll apply those same best practices automatically, if you choose to have us create a complete campaign for you.

SPECIAL OFFER:
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SEO Content Optimization

BDM Super — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 20:47:24 +0000

Content Optimization for SEO / SEO Content Writing

Search engines are hungry for the same thing your customers and prospects want—valuable, relevant, unique and usable content. Remember that Google and its competitors make money through their ads. The more people who use their search, the more ads they can run and the more money they can make. Content is the engine that drives all search. After you’ve fixed any technical issues and identified what keywords to focus on, you need to make the content on your site as good as it can be, using SEO content writing skills.

You also need to make sure that content is visible. Useful articles, loaded with crawler bait, may be hidden several levels down in your navigation. You may have powerful content with generic or “clever” headlines that are lacking keywords. Minor tweaks by an experienced SEO copywriter to this existing content can often make it more visible and get you search points.

Working on SEO content writing optimization with Beasley’s content writing services very often involves the creation of fresh content from the knowledge base within your organization—product marketers who know how things work, customer relations specialists who know what problems are the most annoying, salespeople who know what benefit statements cause prospects to pull out their checkbooks or purchase orders. Our SEO copywriters leverage this knowledge to create unique, original content that also creates “author authority”—Google’s term for content it can identify as original to your site, and thus more valuable than content linked or repurposed from another source.

For a professional SEO copywriter content optimization is an ongoing process because fresh or regularly updated content gains SEO attention. It’s well worth doing because you won’t just have better search results. At the end of the day, by using Beasley’s professional content writing services, you’ll have a much better website that attracts more potential customers.

SPECIAL OFFER:
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Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. was very easy and pleasant to work with, and we are very happy with the results we have achieved. I appreciated the way their VP of Search Marketing, John Thyfault, held our hand throughout the process, explained everything to us and taught us a lot along the way. Communication was very smooth, especially because we had weekly check in calls. I feel that John really understood our needs and was able to cater to our small non-profit. Because of the SEO work we have seen a 12% increase in unique site visitors, and our pay-per-click campaigns average a 1.88% click-through rate. We would definitely work with Beasley and the team again!

— Bethany Orozco, Communications and Southern California Recruitment Director, EnCorps STEM Teachers Program

Beasley went above and beyond to help us solve our SEO issues. Google is constantly changing the algorithms, so they were able to help us find out what was causing our site’s search traffic decline. We’re still working on solving the issues on our own, but we saved a lot of time working with BDOM.

— Tim Winfred, Marketing Director, Q.Digital, Inc.

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SEO Marketing Services

BDM Super — Wed, 10 Jan 2018 18:55:15 +0000

What Distinguishes Beasley Direct and Online Marketing SEO Marketing Services?

Our SEO marketing services combine 15 years’ experience at the leading edge of SEO marketing with a fierce commitment to raising your website traffic, lead counts and sales. You won’t see a “cookie cutter” or template-driven approach to boosting your SEO scores. Even clients with deep SEO experience have said our methodology for improving their SEO marketing delivers customized levels of service they’ve never seen before.

Why will Beasley’s SEO Marketing Services Dramatically Improve Your Results?

Our SEO marketing services integrate state-of-the-art tools with processes designed to boost your website’s organic search rank—raising its visibility to active, in-market searchers. Optimizing the organic/free search rank for your products or services will increase leads, sales and ROI.

Just What is Organic Search Rank? Why is it so Important?

Organic search rank is the position your pages appear on for unpaid search results when people enter an important keyword into a search engine. If your website doesn’t appear on the first page of results, you’re in trouble. It means your website is losing leads and sales to competitors who have good SEO that meets search engine requirements. Further, your website needs to be prepared for a major 2021 Google algorithm update that indexes pages based on Mobile-first design, partly focusing on Page Experience metrics found in the Google Search Console. Your website will need to be mobile designed to rank well.

How do Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. SEO Marketing Services Work?

Beasley SEO marketing services take a 360° approach to maximizing your SEO results. Our three-phase process combines holistic site analysis and solution recommendations, and includes:

Comprehensive Technical Audit

Traffic benchmarks to measure effectiveness of all implemented SEO marketing services recommendations
Authoritative position of the website and pages
Architecture (sitemaps, Google Search Console configuration, blog & news sections, navigation)
Page errors (4xx, 5xx, temporary redirects, loops and chains, review of tags (index/noindex, canonicals, hreflang)
Directory structure (names, URLs, crawl depth)
Internal linking practices and content management system (CMS) review: site security, plugins, h1’s…h6’s, CDN, page indexability, page speed)
Image size
File compression
Mobile Usability (clickable elements, text size, viewport setting, content vs screen size)
We’ve performed successful optimizations on WordPress, Joomla, Crown Peak, Drupal, Magento, Volusion, Shopify, SharePoint and hand built HTML sites.

Deep Content Audit

Keyword research
Writing of META title and description
URL “slugs”—these are the last part of the URL (https://companyname/product-offered/) the “slug” is the /product-offered/ part
Mobile-first design review
On-page copy updates (recommended video, Q&A, content)
Alt-tags for images

Dynamic Link Building

The first step in creating high quality backlinks is something you’ll want to do anyway: make sure your site is full of original, quality content that other sites will be eager to link to. As a professional link building company, Beasley Direct and Online Marketing will identify sites that are desirable and appropriate as link partners through extensive analysis. Often this process produces some surprising synergy: content that has resided unnoticed for years on your site might be the perfect content to offer a niche audience through a link.

Our link building services include:

Researching competitor’s successful link acquisition
Creating a list of high-quality link targets
Removing toxic links
Outreach for link acquisition
Creating Citations (mentions on other sites, industry directories)

Plus, full reports—including detailed walkthroughs and implementation recommendations from our SEO experts—are provided with each of the above.

Are You at Risk of Penalties from Google?

If you haven’t performed an SEO audit lately, your site could easily breach best practices and Google’s latest guidelines—because nowhere in marketing do the rules change faster than with SEO. For starters Google and other search engines constantly change their crawl algorithms, which can affect your website’s organic page rank. Worse, Google constantly updates its definitions of spam—which it penalizes. Almost all sites have some content that’s spammy, since content was created based upon outdated SEO practices. Our expertise eliminates that risk.

How are SEO and Pay-per-Click (PPC) Different?

SEO is distinct from Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing—where you pay for ad placement and results. But there’s no free ride with SEO. Successful SEO takes a lot of work on your part—guided by deep analysis from a professional SEO marketing services company like Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. And remember: Search engines continuously update their algorithms to provide their users the best results. So it takes awareness of their current requirements to ensure the best results for you.

Get started optimizing your site for organic search now.

SPECIAL OFFER:
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We hired Beasley Direct and Online Marketing to help assess ways to improve organic search for one of our financial services clients. The improvements Beasley helped us realize were beyond our expectations. Within a few months of launching the changes, the site is experiencing a 72% increase in organic impressions and a 51% increase in clicks.

— Kevin O’Conner, CEO, Elevation Online

The Beasley team provided us with exceptional service and support. Not only did they increase our SEO results, they educated us each step of the way so that we could apply the same logic to the rest of our site moving forward. Laurie and her team showed great consideration for our needs from the beginning and made sure our work together was customized to our particular requirements throughout our entire project. It has been awesome establishing a relationship with Laurie, John and Andy and we cannot wait to continue working with them!

— Desiree Ernster , Research and Data Analyst, HARTING, Inc. of North America

The Beasley team was wonderful to work with. They patiently and expertly helped guide us through the SEO process. They were very knowledgeable – subject-matter experts, organized, communicated well and in a timely manner and they kept us on track. Beasley was always available to answer our many questions. Before we began working together, we spoke to a few different companies and Beasley was much more advanced and offered so much more than the others. It was a no-brainer for us to choose Beasley.

— Jennifer Ritter Kelly, V.P. of Business Development & Marketing, Ritter’s Communications

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing is extremely well acquainted with all things SEO. My company, Direct Marketing Partners hired them to help with SEO (on page) search and the team was quite helpful in not only performing the work, but also in explaining what they were doing with respect to key words. We undertook a hybrid model whereby BDOM started me off and taught me how to optimize the pages. They were very adept at modifying content to meet both my goals as well as those for SEO purposes. All in all, it was a great start. SEO is a huge undertaking and I recommend the BDOM team.

— Debra DaCosta, President, Direct Marketing Partners

Beasley Direct and Online Marketing, Inc. was a pleasure to work with on our recent SEO project. They were patient, methodical, and thorough. Most and best of all, their focus is on educating the client so future results can be attained without their direct involvement. This is what sold me on Beasley versus the other firms. They were heavily involved with the research and strategy for this initial update and I know they will be there for us to review and guide us in the future.

— Karen Madler, Digital Marketing and Web Development Manager, CMC Rescue, Inc.

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