SEO HARTFORD CT | Wieting Design

Improve SEO For Your CT, NY, NJ Business

February 6, 2020 by Cindy Wieting

Ready to improve your SEO strategy?

Keeping up with ever-changing marketing best practices can be tricky, but if there’s one to rule them all in the digital age, it’s SEO for your CT, NY, or NJ business.

At Wieting Design, a full-service marketing agency, we can help your business improve its search engine ranking. More visibility online means more clients and more business!

How important is the first page of Google for websites?

According to Hubspot, “75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.”

So even if you’ve got a great business and are creating great content on your website, it’s the search engines that determine much of your online success. If potential clients can’t find you on the first page, then your chances of being discovered significantly decrease.

How can you improve your website ranking?

The easiest way to improve your online presence is to work with an experienced digital marketing agency like Wieting Design based in Fairfield County, CT.

If you’re planning to improve your business’ search engine ranking on your own, you need to understand:

-SEO (search engine optimization) best practices – Click for a recap from Moz. In addition, we’ve created a list of practices that may be hurting your SEO.

-Keywords that your clients are searching – Define your target market and what you do, to incorporate relevant keywords into your web content. Remember not to stuff keywords, but to create valuable content for your audience.

-How search engines work – SEO experts estimate that the top search engine uses more than 200 factors to determine a website’s position. Click to learn more.

Free tools to help you understand your website’s SEO & performance:

Search engines use several factors to determine where a website shows in Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others. Use these free tools to better understand how your website is doing and what can be improved:

Website Grader – Use this tool to type in your website address and learn more about the site’s performance, mobile responsiveness, SEO, and security.

Monitor Backlinks – A free trial will show you which websites refer visitors to your page. Backlinks are important because they build credibility and help search engines find your page.

Do you need help with your SEO in CT, NY, or NJ?

Improving a website’s ranking and keeping its position is an ongoing process. Here are just some of the things to pay attention to for better SEO:

-Keywords
-Site navigation
-XML sitemap
-Title tags
-Alt attributes
-Url
-Meta description
-Inbound links
-Outbound links
-HTTPS site security
-Mobile-friendliness

And it doesn’t end there. Emerging technologies are already affecting how search engines rank results. For example voice technology for Alexa, Siri, and more.

There are many tools available online to help your CT, NY, or NJ business outrank the competition. But if you need additional help, we’d love to connect and assist.

SEO & Digital Marketing | Full-Service Marketing Agency | CT, NY, NJ

Wieting Design is a full-service marketing agency in Fairfield County, CT serving Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and beyond.

We are committed to sharing our expertise in search engine marketing (SEM & SEO), website design and development, graphic design, social media, and more.

Whether your goal is to grow your brand, drive more website traffic, or set up a marketing plan, we will adapt our approach to get you the results you need with the services we provide. View our services here or Contact us to learn more.

Practices That Could Be Hurting Your SEO

February 19, 2019 by Cindy Wieting

We all know the importance of using SEO (search engine optimization) best strategies, but are you familiar with practices that may be hurting your SEO? These may often be done unintentionally yet can have a big impact on your website’s ranking.

The following can negatively affect your SEO:

Bad Website Links

Inactive links or broken links go nowhere, and should be fixed or removed as needed. You can manually search for these, or easier ways include using Google Analytics or the plugin MonsterInsights for WordPress. While auditing, also check for nofollow links and redirects – if they exist, ensure they’re correctly placed where needed. Inactive links can stop web crawlers in their tracks resulting in a page not being indexed for search engines.

Spam Blog Comments

Spam links in your blog’s comment section can affect how you’re ranked; watch out for spam bots inserting irrelevant links like these. Using bad SEO strategies, these spambots try creating their own backlinks by commenting on others’ posts but this can hurt your ranking in the process. Links on your page help Google understand what kind of page you are, so a bad or irrelevant link can give Google the wrong impression. Have a good spam filter or monitor your comments to ensure no bad links exist in comments.

Slow Site Speed

You may have tons of awesome content on your page, including videos and high resolution images, but make sure your page is not overloaded. Watch out for oversized images, embedded videos, bad code, and overdue theme or plugin updates. A slow site speed leads to a longer load time that negatively impacts user experience, leading to increased bounce rates. Additionally, search engines may not be able to crawl all your pages when your site is slow (as to not overload). Use Pingdom to check your site speed and see if it needs improvement.

Not Using HTTPS

Safety online is important – users know this and so does Google. Search engines will rank safe sites higher because they want to send visitors to pages worthy of trust. Switch to HTTPS if you haven’t already; an SSL certificate ensures secure data transmission with encrypted data between the server and your site. Check if your hosting package includes this or if you need to purchase a security certificate.

Low Visitor Engagement

Posting quality content can improve your SEO, but there’s much more to it including how users engage. How are visitors interacting with your website? Are they engaged, completing calls to action (CTA’s) or sharing? How much time are visitors spending on the page? Google ranks sites based on how relevant they are, and if you have a high bounce rate it may lower your relevancy score.

Non Responsive Design

Searches being done on tablets and phones are increasing, which means your website needs to be responsive to these different devices. If not, visitors may leave quickly when the page doesn’t load or show correctly, in turn increasing your bounce rate and potentially hurting your SEO. Google is aware of the device trend and has even started indexing the mobile version of sites to make sure that users get the best access to what they’re looking for on phones. AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) can help with mobile speed.

Irrelevant Keywords

Keyword stuffing and using irrelevant words in the hope that your page gets noticed can backfire. Words that don’t match the content on the page will most likely result in a higher bounce rate when visitors realize they haven’t found what they were looking for on the site. Stay true to what your page is about without overdoing it; remember that it’s quality content that counts. (Note: Are you noticing a trend here? It’s all about being pertinent to the subject matter.)

Duplicate Tags and Descriptions

Make sure Google can successfully index your website; factors that may affect this are duplicate content tags or noindex tags. One can confuse search engines while the other will prevent the page from being indexed. Make tags relevant and also remember to tag your images correctly by describing what’s actually on them vs just listing the words you’re hoping to rank for. Be relevant for your topic and Google will reward you rather than penalize.

At the core of SEO rankings is the question – is my site relevant for what I offer and working properly? Keep this question in mind because Google is constantly analyzing this to sort pages in search engine results. At the end of the day, search engines exist to provide users with the best results and this is based on many factors. Some are easy to do on your own while others may require help from a search engine marketing expert like Wieting Design. View our SEO services.

With more than 20 years experience in marketing for local businesses in CT (Connecticut), we can work with you to improve and maintain your search engine ranking. View our past projects or contact us to discuss your local business marketing needs.

Wieting Design | Website Design CT

Wieting Design is a full-service, graphic and website design agency based in Fairfield County, CT and serving all of Connecticut (CT). We are committed to sharing our experience and expertise in website design, graphic design, social media marketing, search engine marketing (SEO), and video production to help build powerful tools and campaigns that work for your Connecticut business. Whether your objective is to grow your reputation, create client loyalty, drive traffic to your website or set up a marketing strategy, we will adapt our approach to get you the results you need with the services we provide.

SEO Competitor Analysis: Key to an Effective SEO Strategy

April 12, 2018 by Cindy Wieting

It is good to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. The saying goes true also for enhancing the efficacy of your website’s SEO strategy.

The most important aspect of determining your SEO strategy is to analyze how your competitors are performing. Researching and analyzing your competitors are the key aspects of designing a successful SEO strategy.

SEO makes base for your online marketing practices and you cannot afford to have a spurious SEO marketing strategy.

Why Competitor Analysis is Important

If you do not know what your competitors are up to then how will you be able to beat them? The world of SEO is highly competitive and fast changing. Your SEO strategy needs to be analyzed at par with your competitors.

The prime aspects of analyzing your competitor’s SEO strategy are-

You can’t keep guessing about what your competitors are doing. It is important to identify the tactics adopted by them to attract customers.
Find out the areas where their strategy is performing well and try to adopt them without getting into any legal hassle.
Prepare a sound counter strategy based on data you receive and not on your speculations.

How to initiate SEO Competitor Analysis

Analyze where you stand- Before analyzing others, first, take a dig at where you are currently standing. Get accurate data of your website on following areas-

How many visits you get per month
True visit-to-enquiry conversion rate
Visits you receive from non-branded organic search
Keyword density and word count in each page of your website
Quality and number of inbound links you receive

Find out your potential SEO competitors– Use your target keywords in search engine and the first 10 websites that come up are your competitors. You are competing with them as you are using same keywords. This is an important step when you have begun building your SEO marketing strategy from scratch.
Ascertain your Competitors- Now take up keyword research to validate the companies, who are competing in your space. You need to diligently follow the online activities of your competitors. Closely monitor their successes and failures. Find out the keywords, which are really getting good page rank.

Keyword analysis usually yields data like-

average monthly search
keyword competition
CPC indicator
URL competition.

Such analyses usually open up newer avenues to design SEO strategy in an effective way.

You can’t stop here- It is not over here rather, it is just the beginning. Values of SEO performance metrics do not remain constant. The factors that ensure your visibility and higher page rank keep changing. As the market behavior changes, remember, your potential customers are also changing the way they type a query. A new competitor can also pop-up any time. So, keep analyzing and keep boosting the metrics. Also, you need to keep measuring following metrics side-by-side-

Your average visibility
Average position
Keyword distribution

Compare the performance of short-term metrics against long-term metrics. In addition, identify the pattern of how good or bad those metrics perform. It will help you in further refining your SEO strategy.

Conclusion

An effective and powerful SEO strategy comes out through intense human research along with the help of some useful SEO competitor analysis tools. You need to implement these analysis results in your regular workflow and measure their outcome religiously on a regular basis.

Wieting Design | Search Engine Marketing Fairfield County CT

6 Ways Your Small Business Will Benefit From Having A Website

November 14, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

If you’ve been reading the news headlines lately then chances are, you’ve heard some famous brick and mortar stores are struggling to compete with online giants. e-Commerce and physical-retail commerce are merging; businesses that exist in shopping centers and malls are expected to be represented online too. But many small brick-and-mortar businesses are still not online, or not prioritizing their online presence.

Having a website can help people in your community find your business. And that isn’t the only benefit. For those struggling to get online, consider that there are at least 6 good reasons to make it a priority in 2018!

Here’s our list for why having a website for your business is an absolute must:

24/7 EXPOSURE. Why put an end to marketing at six p.m.? Your brick-and-mortar location has “office” hours and people who wish to make a purchase or simply have questions will have to accommodate this schedule. But the convenience of a website, is that people can take care of their business on their own time. They can browse, shop, read your FAQs or send you an email—all while you’re sleeping or enjoying dinner out with your family. So quite simply, the more exposure you have, the better chance you have of making a sale.

CREDIBILITY. Research shows that 89 percent of today’s shoppers prefer to shop online over at a store for the convenience, and the younger generation may even be suspicious of a business’ lack of online presence. Including a website in your branding strategy gives you the credibility that consumers are looking for when they are at the point of purchase. Your website should include a blog where you (or someone you hire) writes posts about your product, service or industry in a way that makes you an expert and the go-to website for information or tips. This furthers your reputation and gives you more credibility, which can, in turn, lead to more sales. People expect businesses to have their own websites, just as they used to expect businesses to have a real physical business address.

MARKETING BOOST. Most consumers are already shopping and searching for solutions online. If your business isn’t online, it is behind your competition. One of the best examples of just how social buying decisions are made, visit Pinterest. For example, search for “wedding” on Pinterest and you will find thousands of ideas, crafts, and — to my point — products and venues that can and are purchased and booked. Pinterest users are sharing the items they want and the items they dream of in a social way online. If a merchant doesn’t have an online presence, that merchant is missing out. There are some who say that when we shop online, we lose something, some kind of a social experience had only from going to a store, walking the aisles, and touching the things we buy before we buy them. There is a sense in which this is true, but online shopping is social too, and as a social experience online shopping has the potential to reach a much larger audience.

PRE-SELL PRODUCTS. Having a business website gives you an automatic internet presence. Think of it as an online billboard. Instantly you have another chance to introduce people to your products and services and another way for people to find you. With a website, it’s easy to pre-sell your products that are still in the production process. All you need is one or two quality photos, an alluring description, and an availability date. Get people excited about your new product well before it ever hits the shelves, and gather the customer’s’ pre-sell orders through your website. Keep in mind that an online presence doesn’t exclude a brick-and-mortar shop; you can always allow shoppers to place the order online but encourage them to pick it up at your location. This is a clever way to get people into the store and create a reputation for being a business with stellar online and offline service.

STAY CURRENT. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 470,000 small businesses close every year. This means that today’s mom-and-pop store owner needs to be a marketer, a social media strategist, a PR expert, a skilled salesperson—and, of course, have a top-notch product to sell. While this may sound like a lot, it is easier to do when you have a website, because much of it is taken care for you. For example, building a website with WordPress makes it simple to optimize your site with keywords for high search engine ranking (marketing), link up to all your social media accounts (social strategy), and include quality photos that, with your eye-catching product description, is sure to draw in customers (sales).

CUSTOMER SERVICE. Finally, consider the opportunity to provide better customer service. An online store can be a great extension to a retailer’s customer service offering, adding to the customer service already provided in store or over the phone. An online store can offer a frequently-asked-questions section so that shoppers can find solutions even after regular store hours. Some online retailers are even using live chat to answer customer questions and concerns. Anytime that you can make it easier for shoppers to get information about anything — from inventory levels to return policies — you are helping to improve customer service.

Wieting Design | Website Design Hartford, CT

What Is A Website Redesign And Why Do I Need One?

July 26, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

What is a website redesign?

A website redesign is a complete overhaul of the code, and look of your website. You may decide to keep the concept, but the text content, layouts, and user experience is all totally new. Why does your site need a website redesign?

Websites can last forever BUT there are signs when you should start thinking about a website redesign. If your website loads slowly, is difficult to navigate, isn’t mobile friendly, and your competitors have new websites its time. Your website is the most important asset to your business, when someone is searching online for a service you offer or a product your selling you need to found, and it needs to load fast, be mobile responsive, and have a modern clean feel.

Websites establish company credibility – meaning if you take your business seriously, you will want it to be informative, easy to navigate, engaging, and attractive.

If you’re not sure if you need a website redesign, ask yourself these 8 questions. Make notes along the way of how you’re website is doing compared to your goals.

Why do I need my site to rank high on search engines?

At one time, the key to winning at SEO was to plug your content with as many keywords as possible. But thanks to Google’s ever changing algorithms, it’s all about original high quality valuable content. Google’s search engine algorithms are aimed at helping people find answers from trustworthy sites. If you want to see how your site is ranking, you should be using Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to monitor search queries, click through rates, and your position in ranks. If you want your website to rank, you need to give value on this topic and make it easily accessible.

SEO is one of the best assets you can leverage to grow your brand online, but it’s a slow steady and painful process. First you need to build trust with Google, then you build a healthy authority profile, lastly focus on delivering dense well written content that engages your readers and solves a problem they have. Once you have the content, make sure your site is designed for users to easily access it.

Why do I have low visitor conversion rates?

A conversion rate is the term used to define how many website visitors take a defined action like subscribe to your newsletter, add to cart, or pay for your product or service. What’s a low conversion rate? That depends on your point of view and your industry. The only way to benchmark yourself is to compare yourself against others selling the same product or service. For example in a generic ecommerce industry the add to cart conversion rate is 8% in the United States.

Do a quick Google search for “(your industry service or product) CVR average” and compare to your stats available on your Google Analytics Dashboard. If you are falling short, it may be the visuals, the navigation, or the content on your pages. Are you considering your ideal customer profile and speaking to them directly? Are you creating content they care about or trying to accomplish a hard sale?

Why do I have high visitor bounce rates?

Your bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who come to your website and leave without viewing any other pages on your website. Google Analytics houses this data and will show your bounce rate month over month or year to date. Take into consideration the pages your customers are bouncing from, did they fill out a contact form, did they call your telephone number, or did you refer them somewhere else? If your visitors left on these avenues, your bounce rate might not be a bad thing. On the other hand, if your customers are leaving unplanned, you need to drill down your content, calls-to-action, and create more sticky content. Add links to to more pages on your website and think of where a visitor might want to go next.

On the other hand, if your customers are leaving unplanned, you need to drill down your content, calls-to-action, and create more sticky content. Add links to to more pages on your website and think of where a visitor might want to go next.

If it’s a blog, do you have additional content on a similar topic to recommend? If it’s a product page, do you have similar products that are frequently bought together? Lastly, not all visitors are ready to make a decision about your business, so offer them ways to stay connected with you whether it’s social media links or subscribing to your newsletter. Don’t lose your visitors permanently.

Why is my website experiencing slow load times?

Did you know that 47% of consumers expect a website to load in less than 2 seconds? Web page loading time is a major contributing factor to page bounce rates. If a potential lead hears about your company, visits your site, and waits…and waits…and waits… for your website to load, they already have a negative experience. They’re going to bounce and write your company off because of the traction they experienced before ever learning more about your company.

Your visitors care more about page load time than they do about all the bells and whistles on your site and it affects your SEO too. If you want to know how your website is stacking up, visit PINGDOM.COM. If you’re ranking is low on either desktop or mobile, you have lots of work ahead of you and should work with your website developers to reduce the friction for your visitors.

Has your business grown?

Take a look at your business last year, and the year before; it doesn’t look the exact same year to year. Your business has a unique story that’s always evolving and your website should communicate your growing story. Maybe there has been a shift in the market and you have picked up a new product or service line. Maybe there have been updates in your target market. Whatever the reason may be, business goals can change over the years and your website should reflect the goals of your business as it is today.

We’re all familiar with the saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but this mentality can be hurting your business’s bottom line. If anything has changed in your business, a website redesign can highlight how your business looks today. Too often, companies see the launch of their website as an end point. It’s something that’s constantly in motion, growing, improving and developing.

Why should I re-brand my company?

Your logo is everywhere; from your website, t-shirts, water bottles, baseball hats to your business card. It is there to identify, not to explain. Your website is one of your most important business assets and your branding should be consistent. Your website is your digital business card and in many cases the first impression a potential customer will have of your brand when they visit your website. If the look and feel of the site doesn’t line up with your current brand, then it is time to redesign your website. Consistency is key.

Has the technology on websites changed?

Pretty much everyone owns a smartphone these days – in fact, over 80% of internet users own and regularly use a smartphone. And what’s more, according to Google 61% of users are highly unlikely to return to a website that doesn’t work well on mobile, with 40% visiting a competitor’s website instead – all because the original website they intended to visit wasn’t mobile friendly.

Was your website built in Flash? This trend used to be very popular, but is now highly outdated and is unsupported on mobile devices and tablets. It’s also hurting your rankings for SEO, because search engines cannot read and crawl this content. If your website was built on flash or not designed with a mobile experience first, your website will not rank as high, and the user will take their business elsewhere. MOBILE RESPONSIVE WEBSITES ARE KEY.

How do I know if my website user experience lacking?

Is your website producing the results you want? If your navigation is too long, you don’t have room for calls to action, or visitors have trouble finding the pages and content that’s relevant to them, chances are you’ve outgrown your current website. It’s crucial to put user experience (UX) and functionality as your top priority.

Use data to define what your customers find interesting about your site, where do they spend the most time, where do they drop off? Next, you need to work on gathering feedback. This includes insights from those within and outside your company. Those within will the company will give you a good idea of what is and isn’t working below the surface, while customers and focus groups can provide feedback regarding visual appearance and functionality.

In the end, you should redesign your website as much as you need to as often as you need to. But the only way to know whether you need to is to know your business inside and out. Have your business goals changed? Has your ideal customer profile changed? Having a website can be both a good visual reminder of how much time has gone by since you last examined your business and a way to track how successful your efforts have been.

You should feel completely proud of your site and have 100% confidence in it. If your site feels tired or unexciting to you, chances are your visitors probably agree. A fresh design can be just the change you need to stir up some excitement and liven up your website. For a redesign to be effective, it must stem from the understanding of what does and what doesn’t work on your current website, and how user needs have changed since the last redesign.

If your thinking of redesigning your website give us a call at 203.414.9692 or email us! to learn more.

Wieting Design | Website Redesign Connecticut (CT)

Wieting Design Has A New Redesigned Website

July 11, 2017 by Cindy Wieting

Our new website is launched!

“We believe that this new site will allow our visitors to have a very informative experience as we continue to grow and increase our market presence.” Our new website offers robust information for our clients as well as potential clients to give them a better understanding of the services we offer and the work we do. We have added Video Production Services with some examples of our work, included some new website design work and more information about our studio. We thank all our clients both old and new and always appreciate the business we receive.

Our Services in Fairfield County CT and Hartford CT include:

Website Design
Video Production
Graphic Design
Logo Design
Search Engine Marketing

Our website will be updated on a regular basis with news of launches, business activity and lots of new blogs! Give us a call at 203 414 9692 or email us to learn more!

VIEW OUR NEW WEBSITE

Let us know what you think, we would appreciate hearing your opinion!!!