Michelle Martello, digital strategist and web designer at Minima Designs, reminded me today of phone calls I have occasionally received from panicked clients. “My contact form isn’t working! I’m not getting any emails. What to do?” Here are her suggestions …
1. Go test your contact form right now.
When was the last time you tested your contact form? The settings and services running your site can change – and you will never know until someone tells you that you failed to respond to their message.
Two of my favorite WordPress plugins for contact forms (Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7) have undergone various changes in the last few months so you may need to update your settings to make sure you’re getting your messages. The biggest issue? Trying to send your contact form to a gmail address instead of a domain related address (such as me @ gmail.com instead of me @ mysite.com).
The Test: Send yourself a message through your website contact form and have a friend try this as well.
The Fix: If you aren’t getting the message, change the email address that the form is sent to. Still having issues? Test another form plugin. Caldera Forms is another great option. If you’re still having issues, get in touch with your web host and see if they’ve made any mail server changes.
2. Have you added your site to Google Search Console?
Most business owners with a website are aware of Google Analytics and what that tool provides them – all the traffic that comes to their website is tracked, graphed and charted in Google Analytics.
But have you added your site to Google Search Console (formally known as Google Webmaster Tools?) This “sister” tool to Google Analytics opens up a banquet of useful information about your site (such as the detailed search terms people are using to get to your site).
Google Search Console lets you learn a great deal of information about your website and the people who visit it. You can use it to find out things like how many people are visiting your site and how they are finding it, whether more people are visiting your site on a mobile device or desktop computer, and which pages on your site are the most popular.
I like to find out the terms people are using to find my site to help me with tweaking content on a regular basis. If you have any questions about all this, please get in touch.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia @ 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign
J&M Group WordPress Blog
How To Speed Up Your Website
Here are some great optimization tips from Blue Host that will help you improve your site’s speed, user retention, and SEO rankings.
How to Optimize Your Site
The #1 optimization tip: Reduce and compress your images.
Images are the largest part of webpage content, so it’s critically important for web developers to take control of their image sizes and quality to deliver a fast loading, responsive site for their users.
For your images to load as quickly as possible, it is important to resize them before uploading them to your website. Don’t upload images larger than what you actually need to display. Scaling images in the HTML code might display them as desired, but it won’t reduce its original file size. For example, a JPG image that is 800×800 pixels with a 100kb file size will take just as long to load when coded to display at a 200×200 size as it would if you displayed it at full size. If you optimize the JPG to only 200×200 before you upload it, you might be able to get it down to 20kb and reduce the load time significantly.
The PNG image format is actually the best choice as it allows you to store high quality images with a high level of compression. Unfortunately, PNG files are usually large due to the simple fact that they are not compressed.
To compress PNG images, you can use TinyPNG.org, a free online tool that allows you to compress PNG files without losing quality while preserving alpha transparency.
What’s worse is that users have to pay to download your website. While bigger pages hurt performance for desktop users, too, the biggest victims of page bloat are mobile users.
Did you know that Google says site speed plays an important role in their ranking factors. Now you do!
Resources:
10 Steps to Speed up Your WordPress Website or Blog
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia @ 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign
4 Ways to Win With Mobile Marketing Automation
There’s only so much of you to go around, and when everything in your business seems to demand your attention, it’s easy to get downright exhausted. What if there was a way to set your advertising strategy on auto-pilot, just like one of those new fancy self-driving cars or adorable robot vacuum cleaners, if only for a little while?
Mobile marketing automation (MMA) gives you all the conversion of a typical consumer-friendly ad campaign without the hands-on approach that might well drive you and your marketing team crazy. Here’s how you can use it to win the hearts of your consumers and make some sales, too:
Remind, Nudge, Encourage, Prod, Prompt
People have busy lives, and with work, family, and the occasional bit of leisure time all vying for consumers’ attention, it’s not surprising that your email about a new product or service might get lost in the shuffle. You can use mobile marketing automation to send an SMS reminder to email subscribers who haven’t opened your latest message (an excellent example of cross-channel automation), confirm the purchase of movie tickets, or to distribute QR codes and check-in information that will help make your next convention a hassle-free success.
Customize Your Customer’s Experience
Part of providing a superior experience for your customers is customizing how they interact with your website, app, and other mobile marketing materials. By using mobile marketing automation to send out a survey or questionnaire that’s triggered by a consumer’s booking, purchase, or even game play, you’re getting the benefit of that user’s immediate feedback. Unlike old-school print surveys or standardized email forms, automated texts, pop-ups, and ever-effective emails can be customized to reflect the product purchased, the resort or hotel booked, or the level of the game your customer just completed. Personalization is important to consumers – 73 percent say they prefer to do business with brands that will customize a shopping experience based on consumer preferences – and this is a smart way to deliver just that.
Location-Specific Messaging
How cool would it be to walk into your favorite store and get a notice about a sale that very store had on some of your favorite products? There are apps that are now working to do just that, and it’s something you can incorporate into your marketing strategy, too. Local SEO is already proving its value, and this is another way to give your costumers what they want and need right when they can use it most.
Geo-marketing, as it’s being called, has tons of potential applications: restaurants can advertise a last-minute fish of the day special to hungry diners already shopping nearby, salons having a slow day can fill afternoon seats with a geo-targeted walk-in deal, and stores that alert local shoppers to deep-discounted merchandise are reimagining what it means to make an impulse buy.
Give Consumers What They Want
For decades, advertising gurus have longed to get a glimpse into the minds of consumers. Even before Don Draper was smoking cigarettes and ruminating on the buying patterns of the purchasing public, marketers have wondered how to better focus their campaigns on the people who want to participate in them most.
Today, we have new insight in the form of so-called “cookies” that track users’ visits to and activities on your website, eventually delivering information to you that details with remarkable precision exactly what those users are in. You can then use that information to send out automated marketing material targeted to the specific products, services, or product categories that caught each user’s attention.
Have you ever shopped for, say, a new set of dishes and then switched over to Facebook only to find ads for dishes and the online retailer you had been browsing now following you as you scroll through social media? That’s mobile marketing automation at work.
In 2015 mobile marketing automation was set to double in size, and as more and more businesses realize the potential for this hands-off yet remarkably efficient approach, it would be unsurprising to see those numbers continue to soar. As it stands, MMA has only penetrated some 1.5 percent of the market, and already giants like Walgreens, Starbucks, and ESPN are using it with phenomenal results.
What could your business achieve when you’re not even looking? Perhaps, given all the exciting information above, it’s time to find out.
Author Biography
Sophorn Chhay
Sophorn is an inbound marketer specializing in attracting targeted visitors and generating sales qualified leads. Through Trumpia’s SMS marketing automation solution, he helps businesses and organizations communicate effectively with their customers or members. Watch Trumpia’s 5-Minute Demo on how to execute an effective mobile marketing strategy.
What Makes A Great Website? Tools for 2017.
Beauty has always been in the eye of the beholder, except when it comes to websites.
For business owners beauty is always ROI that can be measured and defined. It used to be that great content and design were enough. Today new factors determine a website’s success. Here are some free tools to measure the 4 critical components of Great Websites.
2017 high ranking websites must-haves:
:: Strong performance
:: Mobile optimization
:: Search engine optimization (SEO)
:: SSL security enabled
First Step – The Hubspot Website Grader
Start by checking out how strong your website is in terms of the above four areas … and what to do about it with Hubspot’s Website Grader.
I also heartily recommend Hubspot’s Marketing Grader which measures the marketing effectiveness of a website and provides an inbound marketing score incorporating website traffic, SEO, the blogosphere and social media. It also provides some basic advice on how your website can be improved from a marketing perspective and how your site fares against the competition.
Second Step – Is Your Site Mobile Friendly?
Find out. Take Google’s Mobile Friendly Test now.
Mobile is changing the world. In the US, 94% of people with smartphones search for local information on their phones. 65% of email gets opened on a mobile device before a desktop computer. Surprisingly, 77% of mobile searches occur at home or at work, places where desktop computers are likely to be present.
You absolutely need a mobile-friendly website. Reason #1. Google. To much fanfare last April, Google Search expanded its use of mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal. Websites that aren’t deemed “mobile friendly” by Google’s own analysis tool will fall lower in search rankings than those that do.
The fall in rankings only affects searches done on mobile phones and not tablets or desktop computers. But almost half of all Google searches now come from mobile devices, so this could have a significant impact.
Responsive design is Google’s recommended design pattern. When a website is responsive, the layout and/or content adapts based on the size of the screen it’s presented on. A responsive website automatically changes to fit the device you’re reading it on.
Third Step – SEO
93% of online experiences start with a search engine.
Search engine optimization is key to getting found online today. People make billions of unique searches each month and unlike Facebook flittering, those people are in focus mode. In other words, compared with most Internet traffic, searchers are the most motivated people to hit your site.
Hubspot reports that of the 26,093 websites they measured, scores for SEO were remarkably low. They recommend website owners perform an audit of their websites, seeking out and addressing missing page titles, heading tags, and meta descriptions.
For your SEO needs, do contact us so we can help you achieve your online goals. Our search engine marketing services are quoted based on the campaign size, competition, and current rankings.
“If a customer-focused content marketing program is the sandwich, then SEO is the mayonnaise. It touches nearly everything and enhances the overall flavor of the sandwich, but on its own, it’s not very appetizing!” – Lee Oden, toprankblog.com
Fourth Step – SSL Security
Hubspot strongly recommends that your content management system such as WordPress have SSL capabilities enabled. For Google security is also a top priority. “We hope to see more websites using HTTPS in the future. Let’s all make the web more secure!”, they note.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436
How to Build a Community Website
Need a community website for your volunteer group, club, church, or other community organization? Are you a curious, hands-on beginner that would like to DIY (do it yourself)?
If so, you’ve come to the right place!
Lynda.com has just released its newest course: WordPress and Genesis DIY: Community Website
What does the Course Cover?
DIY isn’t just about copying/pasting and blindly following instructions. The course will give you the “whys” behind every step, so that you end up with not only a website, but also a better understanding of how to plan and scope a web project.
In a little over an hour, you will learn how to create a website complete with:
custom home page
blog
events calendar
discussion forums
contact and submission forms
and more, of course 🙂
You will learn everything from site planning and finding the right plugins, to installing a new child theme and customizing the appearance of your site to make it match your organization.
This course also requires that you have a copy of the Genesis Framework from StudioPress. While you can use ANY Genesis child theme to build your community site, you will need to pick up a copy of the Education Pro theme if you want to follow along exactly with the course.
Start Your Free Trial
* I’m an affiliate for both Lynda.com and the Genesis Framework. Some of the links above are affiliate links.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436