Small Business Design Resources

Quick Tip: Do Keyword Research Before you Write your Website Content

Before you or your copywriter creates content for your website be sure to do your keyword search. Having the keywords ready before you write your website content will save you time and make it easier to optimize your content for search engines. Here are the best SEO keyword research tools to get you started.

Landing Pages: What They Are and Why You Need Them

If you’ve been considering an online advertising campaign for your small business, you’ve probably come across the term “landing page.” The concept of a landing page is new to many small business owners, so don’t worry if you aren’t sure what it is or how it’s different from the other pages on your website. It’s actually a very simple concept that can really increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaign.

What is a landing page?
A landing page is exactly what it sounds like—the page a potential customer lands on after clicking a link. Technically, any page on your website can be a landing page. However, the most effective landing page is one that was created to match the needs of the person who clicked on the link that leads to it. The goal of a landing page is to capture the visitor’s attention and get them take an action you desire—make a purchase, for instance, or fill out a sign-up form.

Why you need a landing page for your advertising campaign
When you create an advertisement, whether it’s a banner ad or an email to your client list, you craft it with a specific goal and audience in mind. You do this to connect with your customers and encourage them to click on the link to your website. But your interaction with your customers doesn’t end there—you want them to take a certain action once they reach your website. This is where the landing page comes in. Sending people to an ad-specific landing page on your website will provide them with exactly what they came to find, making it more likely that they will make a transaction.

Here are a couple examples to illustrate what a landing page can do for you:

Imagine that you own an online store that sells women’s clothing. To market your website, you create an advertisement that promotes your new swimwear collection for summer. To go along with this advertising campaign, you design a landing page that features the top-selling swimwear items. People who click on the swimwear ad are more likely to stick around if they land on this page and immediately see what they’re looking for than if they’re directed to the homepage of your site, which has just a small link to the swimwear section.

Or maybe your marketing goal is to get people to sign up for your email list. To do this, you offer them a free e-book in exchange for their name and email address. When people click on this offer, they’re sent directly to a landing page that contains the form they need to fill out in order to receive the e-book. This will be much more effective than sending them to your website’s homepage, where they will have to hunt on their own for the link to sign up for the e-book. You’ll get many more people to sign up for your email list if you create a landing page specifically for this purpose.

Essentially, a landing page increases the effectiveness of your advertising campaign by immediately engaging visitors who are attracted by your ad. How many times have you clicked on a link only to find yourself on a webpage that seems completely unrelated? That was an example of a bad landing page, and chances are you hit the back button on your browser within seconds. Keep that from happening with your ads with a well-crafted landing page.

Quick Tip: Install an Analytics Program to Check Website Progress

Having an analytics program on your website helps you see what pages bring in more traffic, what needs to be changed/improved, what keywords people are using to find your website and many more factors that can effect your website performance. The two of my favorite are Google Analytics and StatCounter, both are free and simple to use.

Social Media for Businesses: Empty Hype?

I’ve been observing my small business design clients for the past couple of years to see how they choose to use social media to promote their businesses.

My unscientific conclusion: small businesses seem to either love social media and use it as much as they can, or avoid it completely. There’s almost no middle ground, and it’s especially interesting to me that the clients who avoid social media are almost, it seems, afraid to use it.

Businesses worry about using social media for several reasons. The main reason is that they worry they will be wasting valuable time and resources on something that is no more than a hype – a passing trend that will disappear within a few years, leaving all those businesses who poured time and money into social media marketing with nothing.

Another common fear is that since social media is essentially about opening your business to your prospects and clients and having conversations with them, you would lose control of your brand and of your image if you engage in social media.

I would like to address the second issue first. I don’t think you should be afraid of social media. The conversations in social media about your brand are going to take place whether you are involved in them or not. It’s actually better to be involved, to initiate some of the conversations and certainly to follow mentions of your brand in social media (use Twitter Search) and respond to them.

As for the first question, most experts agree that while no one can say for certain that social media as it is now will be here in the same form a decade from today, the general concept of engaging customers and prospects in direct conversations is here to stay. I agree: consumers and businesses are quickly learning to expect two-way conversations with each other instead of solely relying on the traditional one-way promotional messages in print ads and in television commercials.

So, can you show clear return on your investment in social media marketing? This is where things get a bit trickier. Marketing is one area where it’s been traditionally difficult to show hard numbers, and social media marketing is no different. However, social media ROI can and should be measured.

A few ways you can measure the success of your social media marketing campaign:

1. Is your favorite social media channel (such as Twitter or Facebook) among the top ten referrers to your website?

2. When people get to your website through a social media channel, how engaged are they? Do they immediately bounce back, or do they spend a few minutes on your site?

3. What percent of your social media visitors become leads by downloading white papers or eBooks or by subscribing to your blog or to your newsletter?

4. What percentage of social media visitors become clients or customers?

Remember that whatever you do to track your social media ROI, you need to be patient. Establishing a social media account, growing it and cultivating connections with clients and prospects isn’t something you can do overnight. I would say that the typical social media account takes at least six months to start showing results, and the longer you keep at it, the better your results, provided you only follow relevant people and engage them daily.

Quick Tip: Use Stock Photos to Reduce Photography Cost

Stock photos can add a great value to your website when you have a need for generic images. Keep in mind to only use photos that are relevant to the topic that you’re covering. Take a look at this article that covers adding images to your website.