1. Don’t Say It, Show It
Though it is tempting to add as much content as possible to make what you do clear to the user, a website with too much content can often be overwhelming not just for the user, but for the website itself. Instead, try to think of smaller and more effective ways to grab the attention of users. The use of powerful images or even videos can make a huge impact on user retention versus line after line of plain text. This leads to users staying longer, not to mention, an overall cleaner look to the site!

2. Page Prioritization
The most important web pages on a B2B website are typically the home, about us, contact, and product or service pages. These four pages are the most essential on the entirety of your site, each of them fulfilling their equally important roles.

The home page should provide a detailed overview of what services and products your company offers. This is the very first thing your customers see and you absolutely must make a good impression here with critical information and catching visuals.

The product or service page should give detailed descriptions of all of the company’s offerings, as well as pricing and availability. This is what your client is coming to you for, make sure they know exactly what it is you offer!

The about page should potentially include your company’s history, bios for key employees, and a mission statement. This is much more important than you may think! This isn’t just about what you offer or the history of how you came to be – it’s who you ARE. Businesses want to work with people they like, people they share ideals with and this is the place to show what yours are.

Finally, the contact us page should allow users to easily get in touch with the company’s representatives. This should be in every form of contact that you offer, be it a phone number, address, email, contact form or fax!

3. First Engagement
Worried about getting your client to move all the way to your contact page? Look at the potentiality of implementing chatbots on your site. Many chatbots can be used to reach out for that first bit of contact with the client, using a small detached window in the corner of the site. They can be eye-catching without being invasive, making them great for getting clients to message in about their inquiries! Plus, due to their unmanned nature, they can be live 24 hours a day on your site to give customer interaction!

4. Make Use of Keywords
Utilizing keywords effectively on a website is an important part of website optimization. Keywords are words or phrases used to identify a website’s content to both users and search engines. Keywords appear in a variety of places on a website, from page titles and headings to the content and alt text of images. The use of keywords helps ensure that when visitors search for content, they are directed to websites that provide the most relevant information. Additionally, search engine algorithms can crawl and index websites based on their relevance to search keywords. Therefore, effective use of keywords can help boost a website’s visibility and online presence, increasing traffic and potential leads.

5. Calls-To-Action
Maybe the best way to change a view on your site into a sale is with consistent use of a well-placed call-to-action. Whether the CTA be for sending a contact email, filling out to get a quote, or browsing available merchandise, they are a great way to engage the customer and streamline them to the exact features they are looking for. Not to mention they can really bring a slick designed website together!

If you are interested in a new website or updating your old website contact us! (937) 232-1155

Why you need a custom website for your manufacturing business!

As a business owner in the manufacturing industry, you know that in order to be successful, you need to stand out from the competition. A custom website is the perfect way to do just that.

Here are five reasons why a custom website is essential for your manufacturing business:

1. A custom website will help you establish your brand identity.

2. A custom website will allow you to showcase your products or services in the best possible light.

3. A custom website will help you attract new customers.

4. A custom website will help you generate leads.

5. A custom website will help you increase sales.

A website is an important investment for your manufacturing business. Contact Atomic Interactive and learn about the benefits of a custom website and get started today!

Why Getting A Custom Website Is The Best Decision For Your Business

There are many benefits of building a custom website for your business. A custom website can help you stand out from your competition, build trust with your customers, and improve your search engine rankings.

1. Stand out from your competition. Most businesses have a website, but many of them use template designs that look the same. A custom website will make your business look more professional and trustworthy.

2. Build trust with your customers. Your website is often the first impression that potential customers will have of your business. Creating a custom website shows that you are invested in your business and willing to put in the extra effort to create a quality website.

3. Improve your search engine rankings. A well-designed website will be easy for search engines to index and rank. This means that potential customers are more likely to find your website when they search for keywords related to your business. Building a custom website is an important decision for any business. If you are looking to improve your online presence, a custom website is the best way to achieve your goals.

3 Marketing Certifications Every Business Should Have

So, what does every business owner want? If I had to guess, it’s more leads and conversions (unless you’re that guy who purposely wanted to throw me off.) You need leads and conversions in order to have a business, but how do you get those leads? Let’s say you aren’t ready to hire a marketing agency just yet. You just want to take a crack at marketing and see where that goes first. That’s fair enough, but let’s make sure you don’t crash and burn by giving you ways to increase your marketing knowledge. Having even a basic understanding of marketing could do wonders for your business. In this post, we’re going to discuss the top 3 marketing certifications that will give you the education you need to start getting results.

Google Analytics Certification

You may be wondering how Google Analytics will help you get leads considering it’s not technically a marketing tool. I’m here to tell you it is one of the best marketing tools out there. Google Analytics shows how your visitors find your website, which pages your customers click the most, bounce rate, and other data to see whether your strategies have been a success or failure. Without this data, you won’t know how to fine-tune your website to get those leads you’re wanting.

What’s the best part about Google Analytics? It’s free. Yes, you heard it correctly, it’s free. Many marketing certifications charge you hefty amounts of money just to take a basic test and not really offer anything of value, whereas Google Analytics is all value. Google offers study guides through their Google Analytics University and begin prepping for the exams. Just be warned, their exams aren’t easy so be sure to devote some time to studying and taking the exams.

Google AdWords Certification

Since you’re wanting to take a crack at marketing yourself, i’m sure you’ll want results quickly. Google AdWords is a great way to get results fast, but it must be done correctly. If your advertisements are lacking, customers won’t be clicking on your links. On the flipside, if your advertisements are enticing, but the content or page inside the link isn’t what they expected, you lose a lot of money. Google AdWords is a complex beast so make sure to get the certification if you expect to “tame it.”

Google AdWords, commonly referred to as paid search, is a compliment to SEO. Where SEO is more revolved around long-term, paid search is typically meant for short-term. If having leads and conversions right now is what you want, the Google AdWords Certification may a good place to start.

HubSpot Inbound Certification

HubSpot is a certification that allows you to tie everything together. Where Google Analytics is about evaluating the traffic that comes to your website and AdWords being about paid advertising, HubSpot Inbound Certification is about how to use different methods of marketing to bring your customers directly to you. The certification is free and gives you great insight on how people decide to purchase these days. Once upon a time, traditional marketing such as cold-calling/emailing was king, but now it’s about providing value to your customers. By providing value to your customers, it creates relationships and guides them through the buying process and straight to you.

Final Thoughts

If you plan on marketing yourself, it’s crucial to have at least some knowledge on the principles of Analytics, AdWords, and Inbound Marketing. There are plenty of marketing certifications out there, some free and some quite expensive, but once you have become certified in these 3, you will be much farther ahead than most. This will help you turn knowledge into results and get the types of leads and conversions you’ve always wanted.

Runner ups:

Hootsuite Social Media Certification

Content Marketing Institute Certification

Lynda.com’s Marketing Tutorials

Bing/Yahoo Ads Accreditation

Facebook Oracle Certification

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the practice of bringing customers to you, rather than you trying to go to them. Its methodology is customer centric and typically includes SEO, blogging, videos, and valuable content. Traditional marketing is typically associated with cold calling, cold emails, and is disruptive in nature. Traditional marketing became so disruptive that customers slowly began shying away from marketers using these techniques, and in turn, lost companies a lot of money. It comes down to customers not wanting to be sold to, they want to be educated. Providing them value rather than showing off your services will go a long way in building trust and ultimately converting leads into business.

 

Whether you’re a B2B company or B2C, inbound marketing should be your go-to marketing strategy. Not to say traditional marketing doesn’t have its place, but it’s outdated. There are better ways to go about your marketing and I’m here to give you some tips on how to approach what should be your new marketing methodology.

The inbound marketing methodology is meant to engage, convert, close, and bring satisfaction to your customers.

So how do I do Inbound Marketing?

1.) Engage

Engage your potential customers by performing keyword research to determine what keywords they’re searching for and what will trigger their interest. Afterwards, focus on social publishing and blogging to create engagement based on your findings during keyword research. Blogging and social publishing is such an important to the inbound methodology due to the SEO benefits, brand awareness, and providing content that creates trust and builds relationships between you and your customers.

2.) Convert

Next, you’ll want to convert your visitors into leads by leveraging your blogs, social networks, and website. You can do this by creating incentive and placing calls-to-action. You can create landing pages with special offers, E-books, and forms to fill out so you collect the most important currency of all in this methodology, emails.

3.) Close

After you convert visitors into leads and gain their information, it’s time to close the sale. Ways of going about this according to the Inbound method is to incorporate your CRM, email marketing, and workflows to bring in the sale. Some leads will close right away and others may need more nurturing so be sure to segment these groups accordingly.

4.) Satisfaction

Once you close leads and turn them into sales, your job isn’t done yet. Actually, it should never be done. You have the sales and customers, but now you want to keep these customers for recurring revenue. You do this by incorporating surveys, reviews, and continuing to monitor your customers. That one customer and sale could turn into many more sales down the road thanks to inbound marketing and the relationships you create from it.

Final Thoughts

Customers want value. The days of traditional marketing is all but over. By providing value to your customers and nurturing those relationships, you will see better return from your investment. Use the inbound marketing methodology by creating relevant content that guides your customer through their buyer journey and into your door!

SEO for Bing & Yahoo

What if I told you that your business may be missing out on almost 35% of customers. Now that I have your attention, let’s talk search engines. Everyone knows Google is king when it comes to search, but that doesn’t mean you should neglect the others. According to ComScore, Bing and Yahoo hold 35% of monthly searches and that number is sometimes as high as 80% depending on the industry. Obviously that’s not as much as Google’s 64%, but that is still a significant number of searches that you could be showing up for. That means your online marketing strategy shouldn’t only be limited to SEO for Google, but other search engines as well.

So you’re probably thinking to yourself, “Are you saying I now need to do 3x the work; are you kidding me?” Don’t worry, Yahoo uses Bing’s algorithm and index to determine who shows up for what. If you type in keywords, you’ll see Bing and Yahoo almost show identical results. So you don’t have to do that much.

Let’s Talk Statistics:

Now that you’re breathing at a normal pace again, let’s talk about how to adjust your strategy to include a focus on Yahoo/Bing. In 2010, Yahoo began using Bing’s algorithm so they’re essentially the same other than some minor differences. Bing is the primary search engine for Microsoft computers and iPhones. Fun fact: Siri (iPhone’s virtual assistant) is powered by Bing. Furthermore, Firefox uses Yahoo as their primary search engine. With that alone, you’re talking about a large number of users with Bing & Yahoo at their fingertips.

How to SEO for Bing and Yahoo:

So how should you go about making sure your site shows up on Yahoo & Bing? The first step is to make sure you are being Indexed. To ensure your site is being indexed, go to Bing.com and type in “Site:yoursite.com.” This will let you know what pages are being indexed and how you should adjust your SEO and online marketing strategy.

The next step is to have Bing crawl your site more frequently. While you’re tackling your SEO strategy, tell Bing to crawl your site using Bing Webmaster Tools so it will continue to pick up on the changes you’re making.

After you have your site indexed and crawled more frequently, begin your on-page and technical SEO. Be sure to use direct keywords because unlike Google, Bing likes straightforward keywords so be direct and to-the-point.  Keep in mind Bing considers H1 & H2 headings, SEO titles, and meta-descriptions to be highly important. In addition, your content and pages should include some geographical reference so you appear in local search results.

Final Thoughts:

If you search for your site on Yahoo or Bing and nothing shows up, it would be prudent to begin incorporating the steps mentioned above. It’s understandable if Google is your main focus, but to lose out on a third of customers can be make or break for your business. Just imagine what another 33% of customers would do for your business.

Content is King, but Keyword Research Takes the Crown

Most people are familiar with keyword research, but for those of you who don’t, keyword research is when you research various words and phrases that people may enter into search engines. Keyword research is important because these terms can help you formulate an effective content and marketing strategy. Without proper keywords, search engines won’t be able to determine what content is most relevant to the person searching. Even for those of you who are familiar with keyword research, some of you don’t know how to go about it. I am going to outline 3 basic steps that will help you implement a successful marketing strategy and get people to find your business online.

Keyword Research Step 1:

Determine the topics associated with your business and Come up with a list of keywords based on those topics

Brainstorming is the first step in any successful keyword research. By coming up with topics associated with your business, such as products and services, it will allow you to narrow down what keywords you should be considering. Once you have your main topics you want to cover, come up with a list of keywords that not only you, but your customers will be searching for. A great idea is to wear your buyer’s shoes. Take into account what they would be search for since they are the one’s you’re trying to target. A way to do this is to take a look at your buyer persona’s (given you have already done them) because that will give you a better idea as to which customers will be searching for what. You should also consider talking to other employees, customers, and even friends to determine what they would type into Google if they were trying to search for your product or service.

Keyword Research Step 2:

Look at other relevant search terms on Google and see what keywords your competition is using.

Google is your best friend in this process. Google is where you’re trying to appear so looking at Google before any other software can save you a lot of time. With those keywords you compiled in the last step, begin typing those into Google and see what comes up. This will help you determine who’s ranking for what and whether it’s your direct competition or not. If it appears some keywords may be more difficult than others and you need other ideas, scroll down to the bottom of the page and take a look at Google’s related search terms. This will help you compile a larger list and once typed into Google, analyze whether those keywords would be more effective.

Keyword Research Step 3:

Use software to help you figure out the best keywords

There are many tools out there that will help you determine keyword difficulty levels and search volume. What we like to use is Google’s Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Use these softwares to plug in various keywords and flag any terms that are too difficult to show up for or have too low of a search volume. These tools will also give you estimates on whether your business has a chance to show up for the list of keywords you compiled in the previous steps.

Final Thoughts

Once you finish step 3 and narrow your list down even more, you’re finished. Now it’s all about tackling your on-site optimization and content. Incorporate these keywords (without stuffing) throughout your SEO titles, meta-descriptions, page URLs, and content. Just remember, keywords aren’t everything. Even if you get people to your site, if your content isn’t valuable, you won’t see any return. Use your keywords and content as your yin and yang in your marketing strategy. Once you do that, nothing will be able to stop you!

What is Email Marketing & Why is it Important?

Email marketing is a method of marketing that is meant to reach audiences through the use of email. This is usually done in conjunction with advertisements, newsletters, free resources, or other means in order to build a relationship between your company and the customer. This is important because email marketing can reach a large number of people without needing to spend countless hours and money as you potentially would with other methods.

How to Create an Email Marketing Campaign

Set Well-Defined Goals:

The first step in creating an email marketing campaign is to set well-defined goals. Without goals, you’re really just grasping for straws. For instance, are you creating an email marketing campaign for brand awareness or do you want your customers to do something. Do you want your customers to sign up for a newsletter or do you want them to go to your Facebook page? Do you want them to go directly to your website or to a landing page because you’re trying to capture their business for one particular product? Once goals are established, you’ll have a better sense of what you’re trying to achieve and have a better strategy that way.

Get Your Pieces in Place:

Once you have defined goals, you can move on to the next step which is to get your pieces in place. It’s not recommended to simply email-blast people. No one likes getting blasted by emails so you’ll want to give them a reason to open your email and act on whatever it is you’re trying to get them to do. That means you need to add value to your emails. Whether that means giving them a free resource and the opportunity to sign up for more resources or an educational video that enables them to follow your Youtube page. Once you have your resources in place, you can begin compiling your contact list and separating them into categories.

Separate Your Contact List:

The reason why you want to separate your contacts into categories is because not all contacts communicate the same way and some may want different resources than someone else. Email marketing is all about building credibility, loyalty, and funneling your customer to the right places so they act on whatever call-to-action you have put in place. Without segmenting your customers, you won’t see a high conversion rate.

Decide on Email Marketing Software:

The next step is simple; determine what email marketing software you want to use. Whether it be getdrip, mailchimp, constant contact, or the many others out there. You’ll want to use a software that will handle however many emails you’re trying to send and has the features you’re looking for.

What to Include in your Email Marketing:

After you have your goals, resources, contacts and software, you can begin crafting your emails. Many people ask us what they should include in their marketing emails. We have compiled a small list of what to do in order to have a successful email marketing campaign.

  1. Create a unique and interesting headline
  2. Add a personal touch to your emails
  3. Give them a reason to open the email
  4. Ask questions
  5. Include a call-to-action
  6. Give them a reason to act on your call-to-action
  7. Don’t sound automated
  8. Keep it short, simple, and sweet
  9. Make it easy to subscribe to your emails
  10. Make the email easy to read
  11. Include images
  12. Schedule your emails to be sent during appropriate times

Final Thoughts:

If you follow those guidelines listed above, you’ll have a greater of success with your email marketing campaign. If you want your customers to subscribe to your emails and funnel them accordingly, remember to provide value and don’t be spammy. No one wants to feel like they’re reading an email from a robot. We’ve all been a customer before so place yourself in your customer’s shoes and consider what would make you open an email and subscribe. For additional information on how to create an email marketing plan, don’t hesitate to contact us. It may be what separates you from your competition!

3 Common SEO Mistakes

Ranking your web pages on search engines are usually the foundation to any digital marketing strategy. Unfortunately, most people don’t know how to properly execute a solid SEO plan. This article is meant to provide you a quick and easy list that addresses the top 3 SEO mistakes and how to fix them.

SEO Mistake #1: Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is one of the most seen problems with a website’s SEO. Webpages are considered duplicate if they contain identical or nearly identical content. Excessive duplicate content may confuse search engines as to which page to index and which one to prioritize in search results. Using duplicated content across multiple pages may lead to traffic loss and poor placement in search results, and it may even provoke search engines to ban your page. Keep in mind, duplicate content can obviously be due to writing the same content on various pages, but it can also result from duplicate pages or internal issues.

How to fix duplicate content:

  1. Provide unique content on the webpage.
  2. Remove duplicate content.
  3. Add a rel=”canonical” link to one of your duplicate pages to inform search engines which page to show in search results.

SEO Mistake #2: Duplicate and missing meta-descriptions

A meta-description tag is a short summary of a webpage’s content that helps search engines understand what the page is about and can be shown to users in search results. Duplicate meta descriptions on different pages mean a lost opportunity to use more relevant keywords. Also, duplicate meta descriptions make it difficult for search engines and users to differentiate between different web pages. It is better to have no meta description at all than to have a duplicate one.

How to fix duplicate and missing meta-descriptions:

  1. Remove duplicate meta-descriptions and provide a unique description of the page
  2. Provide a unique, relevant meta description for each of your webpages.

SEO Mistake #3: Low text-HTML ratio

Your text to HTML ratio indicates the amount of actual text you have on your webpage compared to the amount of code. This warning is triggered when your text to HTML is 10% or less. Search engines have begun focusing on pages that contain more content. That’s why a higher text to HTML ratio means your page has a better chance of getting a good position in search results. Less code increases your page’s load speed and also helps your rankings. It also helps search engine robots crawl your website faster.

How to fix low text-html ratio:

Split your web page’s text content and code into separate files and compare their size. If the size of your code file exceeds the size of the text file, review your page’s HTML code and consider optimizing its structure and removing embedded scripts and styles.

In Conclusion

There are a significant number of other issues that can arise when optimizing your site for search engines, but begin addressing the one’s mentioned above and you’ll notice a difference. Just remember to take your SEO fixes one step at a time. Patience will go a long way when it comes to SEO.

A picture can really speak volumes in the digital world.

You grab your laptop, tablet, or phone and decide to get online. No matter what website you land on, they will all have (the good ones that is) something in common; relevant and high quality photos. You probably have some basic marketing knowledge and have heard of inbound marketing, content creation, SEO, and the works, but that doesn’t mean much unless you also have relevant photos.  People are visual in nature and without visuals, people tend to lose interest.

Let’s say you’re a 5 star restaurant and you have a decent online presence. You have a website, some positive reviews online, and participate in social media, but your analytics is showing you have a high bounce rate on your website and there’s no increase of traffic to your restaurant. That’s obviously a problem and one of the reasons may be a lack of appealing photos. I’m sure most of you have gone to a restaurant’s website for their menu and wanted to see how good their food looks. This is a pivotal moment in capturing your customer’s business. It’s like when you’re at a restaurant and see someone’s food coming out and you say to yourself “wow, I should have ordered that. That looks amazing.” That’s the same type of feeling you want people to have when seeing your pictures. Whether you’re in the restaurant industry, retail, real estate, manufacturing or aerospace, photos can be used to draw people in.

Images and SEO

SEO must always be managed and adjusted due to Google’s algorithm changes, but one part of SEO that will always remain important is high-quality images. Images are important because more and more people are using search engines’ image-search tool. This means the relevance and quality of your images play a factor in how you rank in Google, Bing, and Yahoo. If your website contains high-image quality photos with the appropriate alt-texts and keywords, your image search alone can pull in a significant number of people to your website.

Better Images Means Better User Engagement

High quality images are shown to drastically improve readability. Here are some compelling statistics from Steamfeed:

  • Articles featuring images get 94% more total views than those without images
  • Photos and videos in press releases are shown to increase views by 45%
  • Over half of customers are inclined to contact businesses which display an image when their content comes up in search results
  • 67% of consumers think that the quality of an image depicting a product plays an important role for them when following through with a purchase
  • 37% more engagement on Facebook occurs with posts with photos than posts without

There are many reasons why photos are an important part of any website. Photos are important for SEO, engaging with your customers, and providing the image you want for your business. Websites or even social platforms that contain high quality images can bring in more users and engagement. Not to mention more sales for your business.These aren’t the days of polaroids, but we are living in a time where digital photos can truly be worth a thousand words.