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Five Reasons Why You Should Do a Content Audit on Your Website

Posted on October 2, 2018


Fact: Writing content for a business blog or website is not easy. Not only do you have to cook up some creative copy that gathers the reader’s attention, but you also need to remain consistent throughout the piece to keep them engaged.

You also have to worry about all of the little intricacies of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that will get those eyes to your page in the first place.

It’s a lot of stuff to take into consideration, and even once your piece is published, you can’t just kick back and expect those leads to come pouring in. You’ll have to monitor how well your content is doing through tools like Google Analytics. If it’s doing poorly, you’ll need to address those problem areas.

That, in a very small nutshell, is what content auditing is all about. And if you want to convert as many leads into sales, you’ve got to do it.

Today, we’re taking a look at the five top reasons why you should do a content audit.

  1. You Just Started to Localize Your Content

    2. Localizing your content is the process of adapting the content that you produce based on a specific location. That means adapting your copy to hit local SEO factors in an effort to make your business stand above the local competition, making accurate translations that reflect your business message to people overseas, and formatting your content in a way that is culturally sensitive to the customs of people outside of the United States.

    That’s where a good ol’ fashioned content audit comes into play. It can identify areas in your content that need to be fixed including terminology, any processes, tools, and templates that need altering to fit localization. Outside of the U.S., marketers call this internationalization.

    Adapting your content to fit localization recommendations through accurate translations, and the like, can help establish you as a reliable source of information, gaining the confidence of people no matter where they live while boosting up your conversion rates.

  2. Your Company Merged With Another

    3. Company mergers can be a very complicated thing, and updating your website can be the last thing on your mind. Hiring a digital marketing consultant, however, can get you back on track in no time flat.

    In reality, your content needs to be updated to reflect any big changes. If your content still reflects the old business or department name, your visitors will lose trust, thinking that your company doesn’t care enough to update its online content. If the company doesn’t care to update its content, it can be easily misconstrued that your company doesn’t care enough about providing the best product or service either.

    Unfortunately, perception is reality in the marketing business, so conducting a content audit if or when your company or department merges with another is an absolute necessity.

  3. Attracting the Right Amount of Traffic for the Wrong Reasons

    4. If traffic is flowing into your site like milk into a cereal bowl but you aren’t getting much of an increase to your conversion rate, you may be attracting the right amount of traffic for the wrong reasons.

    What does that mean? Well, it can mean a few things:

    1. Your page copy isn’t targeting a specific buyer persona.
    2. Your copy doesn’t address your target audience’s interests or needs.
    3. Your content isn’t persuasive enough.
    4. Your content fails to clarify a call to action that your visitor must take.

    A content audit can help you identify the problematic blog pieces or web pages that need a little TLC in order to jump-start your dead-on-arrival conversion rate.

  4. Your Visitors are Having a Hard Time Navigating Through Your Site

    5. We’ve all been there – going to a website looking for information on a product, but with no clear pathway to get to where you want to go.

    It’s frustrating, and in most cases, you end up leaving the page without the information you initially went for. It’s no different for visitors to your website if there isn’t a clear pathway to get to the product or service information that they need. If they don’t find what they need quickly, they’ll leave, and your bounce rate will increase.

    Sometimes a quick rearrangement of the site menu bar or helpful links on the home or landing page can direct customers to the information they need. At the same time, a simple content audit can help you identify where the issue is and allow you to fix it.

  5. Rebranding Your Company

    6. Rebranding is a marketing strategy used where your company’s logo, name, slogan, symbol, or design is changed in an effort to revitalize your business, make appropriate changes to two companies that have merged, or to update the direction of the company.

    Rebranding shines when it comes to making your business stand out among competitors as well.

    When you’ve finally taken the plunge to rebrand your company and are left with the titanic task of redesigning your website to accommodate those changes, a content audit is just what you need to tie up all the loose ends.

A quality content audit is your ticket to greater returns. An experienced digital marketing consultant can help you get there.  

A content audit requires a skilled eye to read the data, interpret it, and create a digital marketing plan that can address the areas of concern. As a business owner, you have more than enough on your plate. Let a digital marketing consultant do the heavy digital marketing lifting for you.

Contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to set up a consultation and to learn more about a content audit.

Web Design

Five Moe-tivating Quick Tips for Website Design

Posted on July 31, 2018


Poor web design can make your website lose visitors faster than an ice cream melts during a Texas summer. Want to know how you can make it better to attract and convert customers? Let a digital marketing consultant like me, Mauricio Pina, help guide you through the sometimes tedious realm of website design.

1. Effectively Utilize Visual Hierarchy

Web designers have heard this term many times before but for those of you who might not be familiar with it – visual hierarchy focuses on organizing design elements in an order of importance.

That could refer to the website’s arrangement, size, color, and contrast. Its primary purpose is to guide the visitor’s attention to the important aspects of your website first. When used correctly, visual hierarchy will lead your visitor to your call-to-action (what you are trying to get them to do) without much fuss.

On the other hand, you must be careful when it comes to background colors, contrasts, text, or accompanying images. They could affect your visitor’s ability to read or consume your content.

2. Ensure Your Website is Readable

The readability of a web page is what makes or breaks your whole site. If a visitor cannot quickly scan through its contents because of poor formatting or unreadable text, they will leave to find another website that can cater to their needs.

This goes without saying that your bounce rate will increase, signaling to Google that your content is low quality, meaning you are about to lose some rank. But not all is lost if you’re a little insecure about the readability of your content. Here’s what you need to focus on to ensure that you keep all eyes locked on your web page:

  • Contrast Between Text and Background Color – A surprising amount of entrepreneurs don’t live by this very crucial practice. Often I see websites that have a red background with orange text, or some other mismatched colors that make reading content difficult. Depending on your brand’s colors, take into consideration what color you need to use to make the text visible. For instance, if your brand is heavy in purple colors, use white text.
  • Font Size – Of course, you shouldn’t create content that has a font size of 6 or a font where four words take up the whole page. Focus on using a font size of 16 when creating content for your website, but do keep in mind that different font types have different font sizes.
  • Ditch Serif Font Types for Sans Serif Types Instead – I know in high school we were taught that serif fonts like Times New Roman were the end-all-be-all of fonts to use, but when it comes to creating content online, you need to use a font from the sans serif family.
  • Formatting – Simply put, no one likes to read a wall of text. Break up your content into nice, digestible paragraphs.

3. Make Sure Your Website Is Easy to Navigate

Creativity may compel you to create a website that has a unique navigation pathway but you would only be doing yourself a disservice. Visitors just want the easiest path to get where they are going. Your one-of-a-kind design may look fantastic, but if visitors can’t find what they want, they’ll simply leave to find another provider that can give them just that.

Take these recommendations into consideration when designing your website for easier navigation:

  • Link your business logo to your homepage. At the same time, you will want to keep your homepage clutter-free and minimal; less is more. Fewer things for your visitor to click on makes it easier for them to navigate to where you want them to.
  • Place your Menu in the header on top, categorizing your sections in accordance to importance.
  • Include all of your important links on the footer like your social icons, a shortened version of your Menu, and links to your business’ FAQs/blogs/contacts.
  • Keep your important blogs detailing your business easily accessible and visible, or “Above-The-Fold”.

4. Make Sure Your Website Loads Quickly

Google’s “mobile-indexing first” campaign means the search engine giant will add mobile pages into a search first while using page speed metrics. When your page is loading at an average of 15 seconds, however, that may become problematic. According to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that has taken longer than three seconds to load.

Web pages that have slower loading speeds tend to have a higher bounce rate, and at worst, these slow speeds can affect your conversion rate – that is site visitors that become customers.

To combat this problem, one of the many things you can do is a simple image optimization, ensuring that they aren’t bigger than they should be or saved in an incorrect format. This blog piece nicely details what you should do to reduce your page load speed. Check it out!

5. Optimize for Mobile!

YES! I’m saying it again…optimize your website for mobile!

Times are a-changin’, and mobile is on the up-and-up. According to the Pew Research Center, 77 percent of Americans own a smartphone, and in another 2015 article by the same institution, 51 percent of Americans purchased something using a cell phone. In total, 79 percent of Americans have made purchases online, which is equal to eight out of 10 Americans that shop online.

That means that you are going to want to have your website design properly optimized to ensure that your visitors—and potential customers—stick around on your website when they are accessing it from their mobile device.

A good way to check how your website would look like on a mobile device would be to, well, look it up on a mobile device. Check to see if all the content fits within the device’s screen comfortably. Check the menu for ease of navigation. Check the other pages to make sure they are in line with your mobile optimization.

Mobile is becoming a big thing, and if you don’t optimize your website for mobile devices, you will lose out on a lot of revenue.

A lot to take in? Why don’t you contact me, Mauricio Pina, at (956) 566-4998 for a one-on-one digital marketing consultation?

While some of the tips in this blog may just touch the tip of the web design iceberg, a one-on-one consultation with me can help you build a crisp, clean website that will attract traffic and compel them to stay.

Web Design

Five Tips to Make Your Business Website User-Friendly

Posted on May 28, 2018


One thing I’ve noticed about a lot of business websites is that they really lack a solid punch. What I mean is that these websites don’t have the oomph they need to really grab your attention.

And that isn’t a good thing.

Customers want to visit sites that have a clean, crisp look to them. A quality website screams professionalism, and ultimately, this boost your value in the eyes of consumers.

And this is exactly what you want.

As a digital marketing consultant, I’ve jotted down a whole mess of notes over the years, but these top five tips are what you can use to make your website a revenue-generating machine.

1. Make sure your website is mobile optimized.

This is absolutely important! As mobile search become the most popular method for users to search and shop online, websites that aren’t properly optimized for mobile devices are losing out on major opportunities (and potentially to their competitors).

More than 50 percent of all online searches globally occur on a mobile device. Because of this, Google is working on implementing a mobile-first index, meaning Google will look for the mobile version of your website first.

With the increase of mobile users, websites must adapt to the change or suffer a significant loss of traffic to their business website, which basically means fewer sales. We covered mobile marketing earlier this month here.

2. Logo placement matters.

If you don’t have your company logo on the front page, right at the top, you are doing your business a disservice. Why?

Research shows that the top left corner of your website is the best place for a company logo because that is the first place visitors’ eyes tend to dart to. Failing to have your logo visible is a missed branding opportunity.

3. Skimmify that content.

Let’s be real here for a moment. No one sees a wall of text and says, “Yes, please!”

Poor formatting in content can cause visitors to leave, and when they leave, your site’s bounce rate is going to increase.

Keeping content in short, concise paragraphs will help to maintain readers’ attention. Short paragraphs are a lot easier to skim through as well and visitors tend to skim more than they actually read.

Aside from shorter paragraphs, a good way to compartmentalize all of those good tidbits of information is to use bulleted lists. These lists can encompass the main idea of what your blog is trying to portray, whether it be how to help entrepreneurs organize their websites to maximum user-friendliness or how to keep your small business expenses down.

Lastly, use subheadings within your content. This skimmifies a blog post nicely, allowing someone to find the information they are looking for quickly.

4. For the love of all that’s good, add a search function.

A lot of startup companies forget to add a search function on their websites. It could be because they initially lacked the content to search or just plain out forgot. But if you don’t have a search function on your website, not only are you hurting your business, you’re hurting the traffic visiting your website for crucial information; information that could close a sale.

Couple this with a nice site catalog detailing services, products, or particular categories of content and you’ve got a great start to a user-friendly site!

5. Don’t forget those social media icons.

If your business website was a buttery hoagie roll and the content a thinly sliced pile of hot ribeye, surely Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram would be your grilled peppers, onion, and melty provolone cheese.

See, this analogy for a Philly cheesesteak demonstrates how all of the smaller parts come together to create something wonderful – and digital marketing for successful entrepreneurs is no different. You need all of these aspects working in tandem to achieve the best results.

To do this, you need to have your social media accounts linked to your website. Visitors to your website will appreciate the ability to connect with you on social media, putting them in a direct line of communication where you can relay deals on products or services, new products and/or services, changes that affect the customer, public service announcements, and a whole lot more.

Of course, if you need the eyes of an expert to help you along with the creation of an efficient website then you’ll need a digital marketing consultant like me, Moe. Contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to learn more about getting your website up and running.

Web Design

Moe Money With Your Website

Posted on September 2, 2015

If your business is trying to market its name and attract more traffic on its website, it is essential for the company to avoid common mistakes. A company investing marketing dollars into increasing traffic on their website needs to understand that more traffic doesn’t necessarily mean more revenue.

There are several important factors that must be incorporated into your website if you want your site to be more than just a “brochure type” website. Rather than simply presenting your company or business to the customer through your website, a successful website should be designed to steer the viewer to complete a certain action, thus increasing sales.

POA

To create an effective website, there must be a point of interest or POA. Point of action on a website is what you want your visitors to do. This can be anything from making a purchase, downloading a demo or submitting information.

Website conversion

The definition of website conversion is the percentage of total visitors who follow through after clicking on the company’s desired POA. The percentage of visitors that complete the desired POA signifies the conversion rate for the website. Multiple visitors will take a path that you desire for them to follow, but will not complete the form, download, etc. The percentage that completes an action signifies the conversion rate.

In order to boost the website conversion rate, companies and small businesses need to determine why potential customers drop out at certain points in the process, and eliminate the factors that interrupt possible sales.

Take rate

The number of visitors who show interest in your POA and take action, comprise your take rate. One of the biggest ways to increase your website’s take rate is by making it very clear to your visitors, on every page of your site, what you want them to do. Your site should make it easy for visitors to take the POA, no matter where they are on your website.

Why it matters

Your company or business website should be designed with one goal in mind. Ultimately, your goal is to attract more customers and make money. Website conversion allows you to do just this. Changing certain variables on your website will allow you to increase conversion and take rates.