SEO | Wieting Design

5 Reasons Your Business is Failing At Inbound Marketing

March 14, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

At first glance, inbound marketing seems like it’s easy. You set it up, write a few blogs, post on social media, and then you forget it. There’s no such thing as autopilot in marketing, especially inbound marketing. Great inbound marketing involves continuous improvement; it should be getting better week over week and month over month.

Here are 5 reasons your business is failing at inbound marketing:

1.No Targeting – Every piece of your inbound marketing strategy must be targeted to the right audience – the consumers who are most likely to buy from you. You need to do a little bit of market research, create buyer personas and buy profiles so you know who to target. The first time you create a buyer persona you may need to make educated assumptions, but remember to evolve these consumer profiles as data comes in.

2. Bad Content – Writing content that is directed at anyone and everyone is great, but it’s not going to convert visitors into customers or help you reach buying customers. Every piece of published content whether on social media or your blog, should have a similar feel, consistent brand awareness, and be written with your target customer in mind. Stick to your area of expertise and give your readers meaningful content.

3. No Call To Action – Have you ever walked into a building and had no idea where to go? It’s frustrating right. The same obstacle can happen on your website. You’ve written all this great content and carefully placed beautiful visuals, but is your visitor able to find what they need quickly? A call to action is visual directive that guides a user on what to do next whether it’s buy now, download free content, or schedule a consultation. Call to actions should be used consistently across your site, social media, and any blogs or articles you publish.

4. No Tracking -How can you tell what’s working if you’re not measuring your success? With inbound marketing, you have the opportunity to track and measure virtually every piece of marketing to help you constantly restructure and readjust for the best results. With the right tools to track your inbound marketing you’ll learn more about your typical buyer and where to increase your marketing efforts for success.

5. No Strategy – What is the value in converting visitors from your site into leads if you have no site visitors in the first place? What’s the value in attracting visitors to your site if you don’t have systems in place to convert those leads into customers? Where is the value in closing a sale if you don’t keep them engaged and retain them? An inbound marketing strategy will help you generate a consistent marketing cycle that increases website traffic, converts traffic in customers, and creates repeat customers.

You may have done an excellent job getting your strategy up and running, but if you are not responding based on the data and results, then your inbound is on autopilot. If your inbound marketing is still relying on a first iteration of your persona or a content strategy that was developed months ago, you’re still operating on autopilot and failing at inbound marketing. Every piece of inbound marketing builds upon the other pieces and should consistently evolve to grow your business.

If you don’t have an inbound marketing strategy, give us a call at 203 414 9692 or email us for a free consultation.

LOOKING FOR A FRESH LOOK FOR YOUR WEBSITE?

December 14, 2016 by Cindy Wieting

For Cugno Architecture we ensured the original design was scalable and would continue to grow with their business, but our client was ready for a fresh look. The internet is constantly evolving and your website should be too. What does it take to freshen up your website design for the new year?

GOOGLE LOVES TO SEE FRESH NEW CONTENT.

You need to add to your website regularly, so we incorporated Cugno Architecture’s new projects to showcase their brand, and help increase the SEO ranking. If you haven’t updated your content since you built the site, chances are there is some material that can be removed or relocated.

MOVING CONTENT AROUND

What made sense to you a few years back, may not be as relevant today. What are the top objectives of your site? Is it to inform visitors about your brand, get them to join your mailing list, or convert them into buyer? Whatever your top objectives are, they shouldn’t be more than 1 click away!

NEW MOBILE MENU

This is a must for the best user experience. A standard desktop navigation menu can be hard to use from a mobile site or take up the entire mobile viewing window. The hamburger menu is a perfect solution to make navigating your site quick and easy, and exactly what we added to refresh Cugno’s website.

BE CONSISTENT!

If you’ve updated your logo, branding, or color palette you should be using them on your site. Using visuals like images and color schemes goes a long way to improving a visitor’s experience. In this case the vivid photography of past projects takes center stage. A picture is worth a thousand words after all.

Cungo Architecture is a full service architecture firm specializing in high-end custom residences with over 25 years experience. We’ve had the pleasure of working with this local business for over 5 years and look forward to many more years helping them grow their brand virtually.

If you think you might want to update your website give us a call at 203.259.8913 we would be happy to talk with you or email us

Wieting Design | CT Website Design

How to compete in Google Adwords and keep the cost down

November 9, 2016 by Cindy Wieting

Google’s main focus is to make sure users find what they are looking for, and Google Adwords is a great marketing tool to drive more traffic to your site. However, if you’re not careful it can also be a costly venture that can put you out of business. To start in google adwords, consider your lifetime value of a customer (LTV). If your predicted LTV is $10 per customer and your spending $12 to acquire these customers, you’ll eventually put yourself out of business. So, how can you capitalize on Google Adwords and keep the cost down?

Follow this step by step guide to keep your Google Adwords marketing budget in check:

Set a Budget. This is the single most important step. What are you willing to spend across all channels of marketing? Go back to the LTV of your customers and how much you’re willing to spend to acquire them. If your budget is too small you won’t have enough of a budget to test your ads.

Switch from Automatic Bidding to Manual Bidding. Google’s built in bidding system is very competitive and is a great starting point if you’re not sure where to start. Once you get a little more experienced, you’ll want control over how much your spending.

Use a Keyword Planning Tool. Examine keywords that relate to your business and how many average searches are performed per month. Start with the low competition keywords and then gradually work your way up to the higher competition keywords. Another great asset is to use your competition’s website to suggest keywords. This may help you identify new keywords for your site.

Group your Ad Sets Together. If you have a series of keywords and ads that pertain to one product offering group them together. This will help you to avoid spending unnecessary money showing ads that are unrelated to a search phrase. Take Apple for example, they group their ads together based on product. If they showed you a Mac-Book while you were searching for an iPhone, how likely are you to click on the laptop ad? If you’re not grouping your keywords and ads together and leaving them in one giant bucket, you wasting your marketing budget.

Identify the Right Keyword Matches. Broad match keywords or phrase match keywords, are both beneficial in their own set. When you first start an ad campaign, you should set up two ad series to target both types of keyword matches and compare the results. Broad match means your keywords can be loosely matched whereas phrase match requires your exact keyword phrase to be a 100% match.

Use Negative Keywords. If you’ve built your ad campaign using a broad match phrase, you can use negative keywords to avoid certain terms that would not pertain to your product. For example, if we were to run an ad series on website design, we could use “theme” as a negative keyword as we do not offer pre-built themes.

Bid on your Own Brand. It’s your company, and it’s natural to assume that you are already ranking for your company brand searches. But, a good competitor may also be using google adwords to redirect traffic looking for your brand, to their site instead. When you bid on your own brand, you’re promoting your business and reaching more customers.

Direct Click Through Traffic To the Right Page. Have you ever seen an ad, clicked on the link, but couldn’t find the product advertised? That’s because the ad wasn’t set up properly. If you’re not controlling your traffic, you’re wasting your Google Adwords budget. The link should take them to exactly what your ad offered. If your website has a lot of services on one page, consider using a landing page just for that particular product.

Get Involved in your Ads. You should be checking on your ads weekly, or hire a company that will monitor these results for you. If you have keywords that have a lot of impressions, but they’re not converting sales than those bids should be lowered so you can avoid wasting money. Likewise, increase bid spends on keywords that are producing sales. This is another reason why you should manually control your bidding from the start. If you start off with automatic bidding on an ad, you won’t be able to change this later on.

Invest in Retargeting. If someone clicked on your ad, but then bounced from your site, these potential leads didn’t say they were not interested, they just said not right now. Don’t lose these valuable leads, bring them back with retargeted emails.

The above steps will help you get started in Google Adwords and keep the cost down. Before you start advertising, make sure your website is user-friendly on mobile, you’ve optimized your pages for SEO and Local SEO too, and lastly make sure the interface is easy to follow. If your goal is to sell a product, can a user complete the checkout process quickly or is it cumbersome to locate the “buy now” buttons and checkout?

Contact us to find out if your website is ready for Google Adwords and how to get started.

The Costly Mistake of Hiring the Wrong SEO Company

July 22, 2014 by Cindy Wieting

You have a thriving online business, your traffic and sales are remarkable. You have an excellent product to offer and a well-designed website. Then one day it all comes to a standstill. Your traffic has dropped and you can’t understand why. You wonder if your website has been hit by Google’s latest Penguin update. The sad thing is – you have invested a lot of time and energy into your business. It just doesn’t seem fair. This is a typical scenario of someone who has hired the wrong SEO consultant in CT. This mistake will not only cost you money to repair their mistakes, you can lose traffic, sales and profits. Here are a few important things to help avoid this common nightmare.

Check for Valid References.

Would you leave a newborn baby with a child care provider without checking his/her references? Of course not. Your business should be treated the same way. When it comes to hiring an SEO company, make sure you check their references. If they refuse to provide you with their references – it’s time to move on. A legitimate SEO company will have no problem with providing verifiable client references.

Don’t Rely Solely on SEO – Diversify.

Don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Utilize other effective forms of marketing, such as email marketing, social media marketing and PPC advertising. This is an excellent way to build and maintain your client list and drive more traffic to your website or landing page.

Conduct a Thorough Research

– Here are a few important things to ask your potential SEO consultant before signing the dotted line:

– Ask if they sell linkbuilding services. If their answer is: ‘yes’, you should flea like a bird. A reputable SEO company, in 2014, will not sell linkbuilding services. Google frowns upon paid for link services. You could run the risk of getting your website penalized.

– Ask about their content marketing strategy. Do they have one? A good content marketing strategy will include a team of experienced content writers, graphic designers and other content producers. Ask them to give you an example of a typical ROI for one of their clients. An experienced SEO company should be able to provide ROI metrics of at least one of their clients. This is usually a big selling point. If they can provide one client that is closely related to your type of business – even better.

– Do they help build brands? Six years ago, Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO said: “Brands are the solution, not the problem…brands are how you sort out the cesspool.” This way of thinking still applies today. Google loves brands – small brands included. They seem to focus more on brands that are relevant and brands that possess an authoritative voice.