Category: Search Optimization

30
Dec

Learning to ask good questions

Learning to ask good questions is a useful skill for our personal lives, relationships and spiritual connection with God.

Our most recent website this year has been a favourite – mainly due to who the client is! Yes, I’m grateful to call this beautiful woman my wife.

This small project required a website as a destination for women seeking guidance, prayer help and coaching as they connect to God through prayer.

Guided Prayer Coach website 

Key contributions to the project included:

  • convincing her to “put herself out there” as a prayer coach so more people can benefit from learning to ask God good questions : )
  • finding appropriate visuals for some of the themes of the website ( most of the photos were sourced on Unsplash, with many photos by @priscilladupreez)
  • developing a Q & A page to address some of the questions people may encounter (more to come)
  • doing search optimization research and implementation for a few applicable search terms

 As the Guided Prayer Coach website gains greater exposure in the New Year, we look forward to more women connecting to Jesus in prayer. Here’s to 2023!

See Deanne’s website here:

https://guidedprayercoach.com/

24
Mar

Strategic Inbound Marketing Partnership Poises Mid-sized Company for Growth

Already a successful company due to the trust it’s customers place in the people of this company, Denbow – a leading provider of landscape mulch, soils and green sustainability, is poised for continued growth into 2016. Sales research by Wiebe Industrial showed a healthy sales close percentage but inbound marketing leads were limiting business growth.

Denbow contracted Constructiv Works and POHL Strategic Marketing to evaluate their current digital strategy and tactics and generate an optimized inbound strategy that would make the best use of a range of digital tools including website, online advertising, blogging, social media, SEO (search engine optimization) and email. Gary Davey of Constructiv Works observed,

“It’s not that our clients are doing everything wrong. They often do some of the right things and just need a little guidance and help to make the little adjustments that can have a massive impact.”

And this was the case with Denbow. Jason and Gary came alongside the team to develop the strategy, identify and paint a clear picture of who Denbow’s key customers are through a persona development process.

Persona Development
Other strategy pieces were developed including the company brand promise, customer centric approach and a continual user engagement as integral components of the marketing strategy. Once the marketing strategy was solidified a website rebuild was initiated and the launch of the new website was celebrated on Feb 29, 2016 (also Jason’s birthday).

The new website had a number of key areas of improvement over the old website:

  1. Structure

    The previous website had products and services grouped together by industry on a single page labeled ‘Solutions’. Searching for a specific product or service would require 2-4 clicks and often resulted in the need to download a PDF document in order to get to the specifics.

    Ease of navigation was the objective with the new website. Jason Pohl of POHL Strategic Marketing states,

    “The faster the website visitor finds the information desired, the better the user experience. This makes for happier customers and faster sales. A true win-win.”

    All the products and services can be reached in a single click from the mega-menu on the home page. Products and services are also grouped into product and service subgroups in case a customer isn’t exactly sure of the specific use or application.

    Denbow Mega Menu

    Searching by Industry as well as Professional testimonials of some of the key personas identified in the initial Marketing Strategy are highlighted in the main navigation of the site.

  1. Design

    The Denbow brand colours are maintained throughout the new website. The logo displays on a white background with a minimum ¼” margin to avoid visual clutter and competition with the brand message.

    Important information is communicated higher up in the page, highlighted by headings and makes use of black text on white for optimal sales credibility.

    Large banner images with an inherent “human” element include employees performing the services provided by Denbow and give a strong visual cue of the attention to detail that Denbow pays to customer satisfaction.

  1. Search Friendly

    Based on previous keyword research each page was optimized for a keyword or group of keywords and a meta description was crafted to provide context for pages showing up in Google search results. Image keyword optimization, image size optimization, internal linking and links to external authoritative sites were all a part of building a website that is easily found by Google and prospective customers.

    Concurrently, a tuning of Adwords advertising and remarketing strategy along with the new website upgrades helped bring a lift in new visitors to the website of almost double that of the previous year!

    Website Statistics

    Denbow Marketing Manager Willetta Les demonstrated her satisfaction with the result of the new website,

    “Wonderful, impressive job, guys. Kudos…. – you’re a dream team to work with.

As of April 1, POHL Strategic and Constructiv Works will begin the roll-out of a marketing calendar of ongoing on-site and off-site search engine optimization, online advertising, social media engagement and content development of relevant information for Denbow customers and prospective customers.

As we attract customers with relevant needs to the Denbow website, we gain satisfaction in know that those who arrive there will not be disappointed. “Delivering Satisfaction” really is more than just a tagline and actually speaks to the level of commitment Denbow has to their customers.

04
Apr

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Ranking Signal Deadline

In the past month I’ve been getting notifications from Google that the mobile rankings of some of my client’s websites would be affected due to their inability to display properly on mobile devices. This informative article that I discovered via MOZ’s weekly newsletter, states that as of April 21, 2015, Google will make ‘mobile-friendly’ a ranking signal. This means that if your website doesn’t display well on mobile, according to Google’s criteria, your website will rank lower on mobile search requests. With 25-50% of users on mobile devices (depending on the industry and demographic of users), this could seriously affect web traffic on a previously well-optimized website.

Google's Mobile Friendly test

Google’s ‘mobile-friendly’ test

 

Wondering how your website will fare with this algorithm update? The Google Developers site provides feedback on if you website is mobile-friendly or not. Simply type in the URL of your website and it will return a screenshot of how your site displays on a phone, along with the mobile-friendly response.

So, if your website doesn’t fare so well in the eyes of mobile-focused Google, what are your options? According to insight gleaned from the preceding articles, here they are:

1. Make some pages mobile friendly

With a limited budget, it might make sense to make the highest traffic pages on your website mobile-friendly, as a short-term solution.

2. Add a separate ‘mobile-friendly’ website

This can be achieved by plugins or template sets that are optimized for mobile. This may be a good option for high-traffic e-commerce websites but for most this is not the most effective or cost-effective solution.

3. Responsive site rebuild

If it’s been more than 3 years since the last website build, this option makes the most sense. Most companies or organizations could use a content or brand refresh within that timeframe. With the growing trend towards mobile and tablet use, a website optimized for all devices (mobile, tablet & desktop) makes the most sense from a brand, user experience and long-term budgeting perspective.

Let me know your thoughts below. If you need more information or are interested in learning more about your options, we invite you to get in touch.

Top