Lytron, Author at Lytron Fort Lauderdale Web Design & SEO Agency

Despite Tech, Business Still All About Connections

Ever since commerce first began in pre-historic times with people bartering with each other for goods and services, success has always been more about who you know than what you know.

Business is about connections, whether they be vendors, customers, suppliers, or even competitors. The more people you know, the more successful your business will be.

Different Arena, Same Game

The rise of the internet and online commerce over the course of the last two decades may have changed the way people buy and sell products, but it hasn’t changed the way the business world works. It is still critical for business owners to expand their list of contacts and continually interact with an ever-widening circle of people.

Whether you are selling a box of corn flakes on the shelves of your grocery store or providing a website for people to order their breakfast cereal of choice and having it delivered to their doorstep the same day, the need for business owners to attract new customers, discover new suppliers, and make new connections with others within their same industry remains the same.

Despite Tech, Business Still All About Connections – Networking Advantages

Tech has changed the way most companies do business. But gives business owners new ways to make critical connections with others inside and outside of their specific industry.

Networking has never been more important. But it also has never been easier. Now it’s possible to participate in networking events, interact with other business people, and seek out and connect with customers, vendors, suppliers, and even competitors right from your laptop.

Face-to-face interactions remain one of the best ways to build relationships with other people within your industry. But it’s no longer the only way to expand your list of contacts.

Attend networking events. But also join online forums, chatrooms, and other online opportunities to create critical connections with more people who can help your business succeed.

Voice Search and Digital Assistants Here to Stay

The latest trend in tech today is the growing popularity of voice search and digital assistants.

Every major tech company now has their own version of this helpful, disembodied technology. Amazon has Alexa. Google has Google Assistant. Microsoft has Cortana. And, of course, Apple has Siri.

Within just the past 12 months, the number of web users who rely on digital assistants to help them listen to their favorite music, answer questions about the weather, set cooking timers, and even unlock doors and turn lights on and off has increased exponentially.

Adapting to Change

This isn’t just a fad. Voice search and digital assistants are here to stay. In fact, Google recently reported that 1 out of 5 internet searches now come from voice queries.

Ignore this change in the way people use the web at your own peril. Today, smart businesses are adapting by using long-tail search keywords and natural language that matches the conversational tone people tend to use with their favorite digital assistants.

For example, for web-based searches, a user might type in “auto mechanics near Cincinnati, Ohio”. But the same person conducting the same search via their voice searching digital assistant might be more likely to say, “Siri, where is there an auto mechanic near me?”

Shift Towards Voice Search

The shift toward voice search will become even bigger as more and more people get the enabling devices in their homes. Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home will likely be one of the most popular holiday gifts this year.

Voice search technology also is becoming more prevalent among automakers who are looking for ways to provide the convenience of online access to their customers while minimizing the risks of distracted driving.

As digital assistants go beyond smartphones and enter our homes, our cars, and eventually our workplaces, the opportunity for businesses to use SEO and content to connect with this growing market increases.

Web Design Florida: Stock Photos vs. Authentic Images

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Have you ever gone to a website and seen a photo and thought, “Hey, I’ve seen that before!” If so, it was probably an image that the web page creator copied from a stock photo service.

Stock photo services can be either paid or free. Free services include Wikimedia Commons and Flickr. You may need to attribute the author of the photo but you can usually use their images without having to pay a royalty.

Paid stock photo sites include Getty Images, Shutterstock, and many others. When you use photos from these sites, you typically need to pay for them. How much depends on the photo.

Benefits of Stock Photos

But both paid and free stock photo sites types include hundreds, if not thousands, of images that can serve to illustrate practically any type of web page content.

Writing a blog about tree houses? You can grab a stock photo of a tree house to include with it. Creating a web page about pet adoptions? There are stock images of sad-looking puppies or kittens that will perfectly illustrate the point you are trying to make.

Stock photo sights are simple to use. You just use the search function with the keywords that describe the photo you want and you instantly can be connected with dozens of appropriate images.

Stock Photos vs. Authentic Images – Authentic Images

Authentic images are those you take yourself using the camera on your smartphone, professional photographic equipment, or other photo-taking gear.

There are two big benefits to using your own photos on your web pages: 1.) You don’t have to pay anybody a royalty (or worry about being sued for copyright infringement), and 2.) They give pages viewers a more personal insight into you and your content.

Most web designers will agree that including images on your pages is critical to connecting with visitors, whether you use stock photos or your own authentic pictures.

First Impressions Critically Important for Websites

When meeting new people, first impressions are important. How people look, the way they act, how friendly and helpful they are all influence your decision whether or not to interact with them.

The same holds true for web pages. In fact, first impressions are even more important when people land on your web page. That’s because visitors will make judgments about the credibility of your web page in as little as 50 milliseconds after they land there.

And one out of every five people who visit your website will leave and never come back.

The First Crucial 10 Seconds

There are two primary questions people ask themselves when landing on a new website:

Is it safe?
Does it provide specifically what I’m looking for?

If a website doesn’t seem safe — in other words if people fear their laptop, smartphone, or another device might become infected by a virus or their personal data may be stolen — they will jump off instantly. With so much malware out there, it’s a legitimate concern.

Similarly, most internet users today don’t have the patience to waste time with a website that isn’t exactly what they are looking for. Within 10 seconds, visitors are likely to size up your web page and decide if you are giving them what they want. If not, they will click off and likely never return.

First Impressions Critically Important for Websites – Testing Your Web Pages

That’s why it’s a good idea to continually test your web pages to see how it measures up to these two questions. Test it yourself using different devices than the ones you usually use.

Plus, you want to have other people test your websites as well. Ask friends or co-workers to give you their initial impressions. Or incentivize your customers to respond to a brief survey to share their thoughts.

A Single Video Can Be Used Multiple Times

Video is one of the most immediate and effective ways to communicate with a target audience.

The types of videos you produce are many. It can be a video promoting your business’s products or services, establishing your brand, or enhancing your reputation within the community. Or it can be an instructional video that teaches viewers something useful that they can use right away.

Or you can simply share somebody else’s video, providing your customers with relevant content that they can enjoy.

A Single Video Can Be Used Multiple Times – Not ‘One and Done’

One of the biggest benefits of video is that it can be used over and over again in a wide variety of different formats and contexts.

For example, let’s say you produce a video that teaches viewers something, such as training your employees on how to perform a specific task or showing your customers how to use a particular product you offer.

You might post that video on your website so that customers, employees, or others can access it and watch it at their convenience. But is that the end of the useful life of that video? Not at all!

Social Media and Other Uses

You can post that same video on your social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and others. It can be posted on all your accounts at the same time or staggered over time so that it appears on one then another a short time later, on a third in another week, and so on.

Staggering the distribution of your video on social media can help expand its audience. If a follower doesn’t happen to catch it on Facebook, for example, they might find it on Twitter when you post it a few days later.

You then can use the video in other places as well, such as an instant message, an email blast, or as a free giveaway during a future promotion.

Unlike other media, video has “legs” that allow you to post it multiple times to get exponential benefits from a single video production.

Fast-Loading Pages Keeps Visitors Coming

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It’s no secret that internet users prefer speed. If pages take too long to load, particularly on mobile devices, visitors are likely to bounce somewhere else.

In fact, recent studies have found that if a web page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, about 40 percent of people will just go somewhere else. That’s a problem if you rely on your business website to attract new customers and hang on to existing ones.

Google and AMP

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, is aware of how important speed is to website creators. That’s why the company launched a new initiative to build a better, faster, and more user-friendly mobile web platform that is specifically designed for mobile devices.

Accelerated Mobile Pages is a project that essentially creates a set of rules that form a simpler, faster version of HTML. Pages that follow AMP load very quickly on mobile devices so that page visitors will stay longer and not bounce off to someplace else.

Because AMP pages feature a more streamlined version of HTML and CSS, pages load about 30 times faster than non-AMP compliant pages. The average AMP-ready page loads in just 0.7 seconds on a standard mobile device, compared to 22 seconds for non-AMP pages.

Fast-Loading Pages Keeps Visitors Coming – Cloud-Based Content

Another way AMP loads faster is that content is cached in the cloud and not delivered from webpage’s server. That frees up a lot more processing time.

The downside is that AMP is relatively new. It was only introduced in February of 2016. So there is still a lot of caution about it among some web page owners who may want to see AMP prove itself before adopting this new technology.

If you a ready to give AMP a try, there is a free WordPress plugin you can use to “amp up” your page loading speeds on mobile devices.

Too Many Bounce Backs Can Hurt Your SEO Ranking

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others use a lot of different kinds of metrics when assessing the value of your website. One of the most important is the number of bounce backs they detect from your web page.

A bounce back is when somebody goes online, finds your website and clicks on it, then immediately clicks back to the search results page — presumably because they did not find what they were looking for on your website. Too many bounces will definitely hurt your site rankings.

Bounce Backs Hurt Your Rankings

Search engines don’t always know why a visitor bounced back from your website. Nor do they care. They simply want to make sure they are providing their search engine users with high-quality results they can actually use.

So when Google detects a lot of bounce backs from your website, it will automatically assume that your website isn’t useful. And it will penalize your website by ranking it lower.

Too Many Bounce Backs Can Hurt Your SEO Ranking – Reducing Bounce Backs

There are many different reasons why your website may have a lot of bounce backs. The most common one has to do with user experience, also known as UX.

User experience is related to things like site speed, site architecture, quality content, and even the colors and fonts you chose to use on your website. If visitors don’t like any of these things, they are likely to bounce back to the search page where they found your website in the first place.

To improve your site rankings, it is critical that you identify the reasons for bounces. Once you can identify what people don’t like about your web pages, then you can do something to correct it.

Fixing bounces is one of the fastest and most effective ways to show immediate improvement in your rankings on the most popular search engines.

For On Page SEO Content Quality Is Still Top Priority

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There are all kinds of things you can do to improve the Search Engine Optimization of your web pages, including both on-page and off-page SEO techniques.

But there is nothing more important than providing your page visitors with high-value, helpful content that they can actually use. If you do nothing else, create high-quality content and your web pages will attract a lot of visitors.

Content and Web Crawlers

Search engines like Yahoo, Bing, and Google use a lot of criteria when judging the value of web pages. But the number one thing they are looking for is high-quality, useful content.

It’s simply supply and demand. People aren’t going to use search engines that don’t give good results they can use right away. So Google isn’t going to rank web pages high unless they meet this measurement first and foremost.

Your web page can have outstanding design, great embedded keywords, and every other type of SEO technique known to programmers worldwide, but if it doesn’t provide visitors with great content they can genuinely use, it’s never going to rank at the top of the search engine results pages for your keywords. It’s really that simple.

For On Page SEO Content Quality Is Still Top Priority – Measure Your Content

To ensure your web page has high-value content, simply ask yourself two essential questions:

Why are people looking for web pages like yours?

What do they expect to find when they arrive there?

If your web page clearly provides visitors looking for specific pages like yours exactly what they want when they land there, there is no way your page won’t rank high. Even if you do nothing else to improve your SEO, your page will attract the attention of the top search engines like Google.

Providing valuable content that people can genuinely use right away is the best way to get your web pages ranked at the top of Google.

Keep Content Short, Snappy, and to the Point

One of the unintended consequences of the rise in popularity of the internet is a shortening of people’s attention spans. When you scroll through dozens of websites per day, you generally don’t have time for a lot of in-depth content.

So it is important to remember when creating content for your website that it should be as concise as possible. This will help keep people on your pages longer.

Two Examples

Sentences should be simple and direct. You don’t have the luxury of using a lot of descriptive words and phrases when visitors to your website can click off at any moment.

Whenever possible, use bullet points or phrases rather than long, rambling sentences. For example, consider these two content samples:

“When you visit the luxurious Comfort Spa, you can indulge yourself with many of our top-shelf amenities, including relaxing full-body massage, inviting mud baths, and professional quality all day cosmetic treatments.”

Or …

“Our Comfort Spa offers:

Full-Body Massage
All-Natural Mud Baths
Professional Makeovers
And Much, Much More!”

Most people landing on your website probably aren’t going to take the time to read the first sentence, even though it offers more details about the services you offer. But they can get the gist of your business’s offerings at a glance when they see the second example.

Keep Content Short, Snappy, and to the Point – Content and Context

Another consideration when creating your website’s content is how people are going to view it. Many people today use their smartphones to visit the websites they want to see.

If you include dense, descriptive sentences on your website, people may not physically be able to read them on their smartphone screens. But they will be better able to see bullet points or key phrases presented in a manner better designed for the devices people actually use.

Keep Content Short, Snappy, and to the Point – Content and Context – The best advice when creating online content: Keep it simple, brief, and easy to see at a glance.

Short, Simple Videos Can Effectively Build Your Brand

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People today prefer videos. That’s just a fact.

Maybe it’s because society as a whole is getting a little dumber and lazier. Or maybe it’s because the smartphone in everybody’s pocket has built-in high definition video capabilities. Whatever the reason, video is just the medium of choice among most people today.

The value of video is that it’s fast, fun, and effective. You don’t have to wade through dozens of paragraphs to get to the point like you do with text content. You don’t have to know how to analyze an image like you do with photos or other images.

With video, all you need to do is watch. It’s that simple. And in that simplicity lies the key to effectively building your brand.

Video Marketing

Most businesses today need to include video as part of their online marketing, if only because their competitors are almost certainly already doing it.

A video is one of the easiest and most effective ways to build your brand and connect directly with customers. Videos can be as elaborate or as simple as you like.

For example, a television commercial essentially is a professionally produced video that promotes a particular product or brand. But you can often get the same results by simply creating a fun, spontaneous video in which you talk honestly and genuinely about your business, your products, or even yourself.

Short Simple Videos Can Effectively Build Your Brand – Video Distribution

Just a few years ago, getting the videos you produced in front of your customers was kind of a problem. It cost a lot of money to run commercials on TV. And getting people to watch a DVD about your company was practically impossible.

Today, however, getting people to watch your videos is simple. Just post it on social media. Or send a link out via email or text message. You can (and should) even include videos on your company’s website.

Like it or not, video is king. And in order for your business to effectively connect with your customers, it’s critical that you find ways to include videos as part of your marketing.