New Year’s Resolutions for Your Site

2020 has arrived, and the desire to make positive changes in order to better your site has come with it! With a new digital decade upon us, it’s time to stop and think about how you can elevate your site and your business. Here are a few site “resolutions” to consider for the upcoming year.

 

1. Reflect on your website and marketing communication strategy

 

One of the most important steps for a new year’s resolution is reflecting – the internal process of understanding your shortcomings and creating an action plan to overcome them. And it’s no different from your site! Your site is your brand, and your brand is a reflection of you. Dedicating time to reflection helps you to discover where to improve.

 

Need an advisor to guide this process? Schedule a 1-hour consultation!

In other words – you need to embrace site awareness. And a good place to start is with a content audit of everything onsite and offsite. 

 

2. Citations

 

Are your local SEO efforts enough to get you noticed? Citations play a key role in the labyrinth that is getting your site to the top positions in Google search. In fact, the average number of citations for a local business that is in the top 10 spots for Google is 81 (1). It is important to make sure that your citations and listings are up to date. This will also help you see if there are other places/sites that you should be placing these citations and listings. Your local structured citations can be listed via platforms like Google My Business, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. Unstructured citations are less common but still valuable and can be found in blog posts, forum threads, press mentions, etc. (2). These audits will help you see what your SEO was like the previous year and will help you set goals for your SEO moving forward!

 

3. Content. Content. Content!

 

When your audience comes to your site they are looking for one thing, relevant content, and they do not want to have to struggle to find it! This means that the content on your site needs to be clear, concise and convey a message that is contextually relevant. Your audience should be able to find the information that they are looking for fast and efficiently (3). This is essential in keeping people engaged and also in building SEO. Search engines, like Google, value high-quality content and will display those sites whose content they believe will be more valuable to searchers. So, when reviewing your content, it’s important to consider how useful, informative, valuable, credible and engaging it would be considered to users (3).

 

4. Make Your Site ‘Lean’

 

Does your site load slowly? Are there a bajillion images? Is it filled with other UI or content bloat? If it is, it sounds like your website needs a diet! Having a ‘lean’ site isn’t just good web health. It’s a business requirement. Lean sites simplify the front end framework in order to increase speed, make navigation more efficient, and get the right content in front of your audience (4). Having a faster site not only is important in your SEO rankings, it is also proven to lead to more conversions. Intuit is a good case study for this.

Intuit improved its platform performance, reducing page load time from 15 seconds to 2 seconds in the process. This profoundly increased conversions. And they broke down just how significant it was by identifying page load segments and compared them against buckets of conversion improvements.

  • For pageloads of 7-15 seconds, a 3% increase in conversions occurred for each second removed from load time

  • For pageloads of 5-7 seconds, a 2% increase in conversions occurred for each second removed from load time

  • For pageloads of 2-5 seconds, a 1% increase in conversions occurred for each second removed from load time

Your audience almost requires your site to be fast as a prerequisite to qualifying business. Nearly half of users (47%) expect a site to load within two seconds or less (5). These numbers are a critical reminder of how a ‘lean’ site can build your business’s overall performance muscle. Lean means green!

5. Improve User Experience (UX)

 

Another crucial resolution for your site in 2020 should be renewed focus on user experience. This follows from making your site lean. A lean site is a performant site, which provides a better user experience. But it’s more than just fast load times. You need to know your audience, and tailor the value proposition of your site accordingly! A site’s behavior is an extension of its value proposition.

You need to understand what your audience is looking for, what they value, and their limitations as well as their capabilities (6). Make sure it is easy for your audience to find what they are looking for. One tip is to put all relevant information in one place rather than splitting the difference. And don’t ignore navigation! You want (nay, NEED) your site to be easily navigable so that your audience can quickly and efficiently find their desired information. User Experience is a constantly refined process. You should often audit your site for its usefulness, usability, desirability, discoverability, accessibility and above all its credibility (6). Enhancing these elements of your site design could show major results in the new year!

 

With every new year comes a new opportunity to find areas in our personal and professional lives to improve and excel in. Your website is an integral part of your business and as such, it should be continually improved upon as well. Want better business vision in 2020? Take your site to the next level and contact us at 3PRIME to help you achieve your New Year’s Resolutions!

 

 

 

 

Sources:

  1. https://www.brightlocal.com/research/seo-citations-study/
  2. https://www.brightlocal.com/learn/what-is-a-local-citation/
  3. https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-101/content-important-seo/#close
  4. https://gomakethings.com/the-lean-web/     
  5. https://moz.com/blog/how-to-improve-your-conversion-rates-with-a-faster-website
  6. https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/user-experience.html

3PRIME Launches New Responsive Theme for Precision Cutting Services in CT

PCS-new-homepage

What you’re looking at now is the new homepage for Precision Cutting Services. Precision Cutting Services is a high quality tree cutting and lawn care business that performs work in the Hamden and southern Connecticut area. We’ve been performing a wide range of work for Precision Cutting Services for quite some time now. As stated above, we just relaunched their site with a new responsive theme which provides their web portal with several great features. First of all it looks great. It features large, clear pictures of the Precision Cutting Services’ crew at work. Moreover, the theme transforms the website into a responsive viewing experience for mobile devices and tablets. So now it will look just as good on them as it already does on desktops and laptops.

Creating sites with responsive themes serves to not only improve their look but also helps their rankings as it is one of the many features that Google takes into account when placing sites in search results. Think your company’s website could use some sprucing up? Then don’t hesitate to contact us.

3PRIME Relaunches BobMarino.com

We recently performed a complete relaunch of Bobmarino.com. The site is completely updated, featuring new images and design elements incorporated by 3PRIME. It is now a responsive WordPress CMS system.

Bob Marino Aftermarket Specialty Company has been in business for 47 years. They provide aftermarket items and services to car dealerships such as warranties, and a prep and detail service that washes and prepares cars prior to being shipped to customers. Continue »

Marketing By Zip Site Launch

3PRIME has recently launched the new website for Marketing By Zip(MBZ). MBZ is a marketing company which focuses on creating simple solutions and ideas for businesses. It’s always encouraging to work with a company that has similar values and we were happy to help their upgraded site come to fruition. The site that we set up at MarketingByZip.com is easy to use and a great example of functional and attractive web design. It features a CMS which will allow them to update content on the site as they see fit. This was important for MBZ because it allows them to communicate special deals and opportunities to their client base as they become available. Continue »

Your Website and eCommerce

There are some great options for adding eCommerce to an existing website but all involve a variety of considerations

1) How many products are you selling? If it’s just a few, you can skip custom cart development and use PayPal buttons. Make a great product page, and get the code from Paypal. No worries about security certificates and it’s easy to add new products just by adding new pages and generating new buttons. The major downside of this is that there is no “customer management” built into the website and PayPal’s merchant fees are high on a per-transaction basis. But it is by far the easiest way to set up eCommerce on a site. We also set up a payment page for consultants so their clients can pay online through their website.
Continue »

Spam domain renewal – Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing

I have received half a dozen of these in the last week. The emails are unsolicited offers to “renew” your domain with the phrase” Final notice” in the subject to get people to open it. The top looks like this:
domain renewal spam email letter-top

Then we have the “Scare Line”

scare-line

And Finally, the false savings:
false domain savings

$75 for one year? This company and most of our clients are registered with GoDaddy, which has their own methods of boosting sales, but charges a fair price of around $12 per year for domain registration. Savings will not be found in this offer or ones like it!

Other info about this spam domain renewal email

The messages come from “codero.com” and also mentions “sesubmission.com“. It’s a shady tactic but perfectly legal. As they say in the fine print at the bottom:

Note that THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated unless you accept this offer. … There is no pre-existing relationship between DS and the domain mentioned above. This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration.

Need great advice on an on-call basis? You need 3PRIME in your corner! We offer fair billing and never misrepresent what we do. Check out our testimonials and contact us today!

aio-seo pack for wordpress and the %post_title% as text

I ran into this issue for someone this week when cleearing out issues from Google webmaster tools. specifically I was trying to remove the problem of duplicate descriptions for web pages from their blog posts. here’s what All-in-One-SEO has for the meta description setting:

normal-description

Here’s what I wanted it to do:

description-with-%post_title%

But what it did was put add this text to the beginning of my meta description tag!

I tried several other combinations, no luck. so I contacted the plugin developer and said:

Referring to this thread:
I have a client using this plugin, the free version, and I cannot get the meta description in posts to display the %post_title%. I was wondering if this bug was fixed in the pro version.

In their second response I gleened the following solution! Put this as your description:

description-with-%wp_title%

And Viola! My post title, pulled in using the variable “%wp_title%” is included in my meta description. Thanks Semper Fi Web Design, great plugin and valueble support responses!