J&M Group WordPress Blog

The Real Reason To Avoid Site Builders

marciacatlin · May 26, 2019 ·

rock climbing, why you should avoid site builders

For most of us, the days of building websites from scratch have come and gone. That is the good news. Better still website prices are all over the map so you can even get a decent site for the best price of all — zero. But, what is the real reason to avoid site builders?

Should you even have a website? If it’s to build your brand, reputation and customer base, don’t you put quality first and focus on the long-term?

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

If you can turn on your laptop and check out your Facebook page, does that qualify you to create a website on Wix or one of the other scores of easy, automagic website builders? Not to mention optimizing it for Google search.

It does! But here’s why you shouldn’t. When things go wrong, who is there to help you out? No web designer who is ready and able, and knows everything about the modern web, digital marketing and much more.

Sadly, support among site builder services varies widely from email-only service to online FAQs, etc. If you can fly solo, you will be fine with this arrangement!

The WordPress Advantage

How many web designers/developers out there specialize in Wix, Weebly Squarespace, and Shopify? Not many. On the other hand, WordPress now powers 30% of all websites on the web so there is plenty of help when you own a WordPress site.

Scarce Support and No Migration

In order for a website to grow, you have to water it. When you create a website with Weebly, Wix or Squarespace, you don’t get the support you need or deserve.

What if your website goes down or something stops working? Do you have the skills to fix it before your customers notice? Certain parts of a website can stop working and you may not even know it. Customers may be trying to contact you, but you’re not a webmaster. How would you know?

Want to move say your Wix site to another site builder or to WordPress in the future? Unfortunately, you can never export this site so you’ll need to rebuild it from scratch — which means you don’t even own your site builder website!

WordPress vs Website Builders

WordPress is a content management system (CMS)— not a website builder. CMS’s are flexible but have a learning curve. Website builders are less flexible but easier to use.

The Genesis Framework

When starting a business, it’s more important than ever to establish and maintain an online presence. I use the Genesis Framework and StudioPress themes for WordPress exclusively for all the websites I build.

Genesis provides the secure and search-engine-optimized foundation that takes WordPress to places you never thought it could go.

Need to get started on your new website? Fill out our discovery questionnaire and/or give Marcia a call at 561-906-3436.

“I’m not against page builders, but here’s the deal … if you have 300+ posts/pages full of your page builder blocks, it’s going to cost a ton of money to redesign your site or switch to Gutenberg or anything else.
– Rafal Tomal

10 Quick SEO Strategies for Small Business

marciacatlin · May 5, 2019 ·

These days local SEO for small businesses is an ever-changing discipline that requires complex strategies. And, it has never been more important!

Small business SEO is increasingly competitive. Why? Part of the reason is that many local businesses have finally realized the importance of doing the local SEO “basics” and are implementing basic local search strategies. This means more local businesses are vying for a limited number of high-ranking spots.

There are many ways to get started. First, you can start linking in local directories visited by locals. See below.

Top 50 Free USA Business Directories To List Your Local Business

Here are 10 other SEO strategies you can easily use:

Make all URL links readable by humans. For example –backlinkfy.com/news/how-ppc-campaigns-increase-business-exposure NOT http://backlinkfy.com/new/456drt…
Create a simple informative Facebook page.
Make sure you have a mobile-friendly website.
Your meta description tags should be 155 characters or less.
Get your business listed on Google Maps.
Include your descriptive ALT tags with keywords to all images, this helps with SEO.
Update your Title tag, description and location including products or services. Focus on local keywords in your area.
Start a blog on your site and update it often with local activities and other research articles that can help locals.
Create a Twitter account and start tweets from your blog.
Embed Find us on Yelp on the footer of your website.

High-Performance Local SEO
Professional. Affordable. Performance Guarantee.

“We practice what we call ‘holistic SEO‘. This means that your primary goal should be to build and maintain the best possible website. Don’t try to fool Google. Ranking will come automatically if your website is of extremely high quality.” —Yoast

5 Simple Changes to Turn Visitors Into Customers

marciacatlin · April 11, 2019 ·

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

How do you create websites that grow your business? Start by making these five simple changes to your website’s homepage and you will convert more browsers into customers. Here are simple changes to turn visitors into customers. These five changes will surprise you!

Why?

Because they aren’t expensive. They’re not involved. They’re dirt cheap and straightforward. And if you’re not doing them, you’re losing sales every single day.

And because consumers’ average attention span is now 8 seconds – 1 second less than a goldfish.

Getting Started: Does your site answer these questions?

What do you offer?
How will it make my life better?
What do I need to do to buy it?

Step One:
Your header image is very important. Does it say what you do? Both the image and the text overlay.

Step Two:
Be sure you have a call-to-action button/link in the navbar top right. It must be a larger button in a different color. Repeat the button link in the middle of the site.

Step Three:
What does failure look like? Start painting the picture, writing a paragraph about what will happen to the visitor’s business if he/she DOES NOT buy your service or product!

Step Four:
Lastly, your website should spell out a plan for customers to get started with you, ideally in three steps.

GET ALL THE DETAILS & LEARN MORE
<== Click above to watch 3 videos that will increase your revenue.

Courtesy of Donald Miller, CEO of StoryBrand and The 5 Minute Marketing Makeover course. He is the author of Building a StoryBrand and the co-host of the Building a StoryBrand Podcast. Don teaches a workshop in Nashville, Tennessee in which over three-thousand businesses have clarified their message to create better websites, elevator pitches, and marketing collateral.

This is the best web marketing free video course I have ever seen. Period. Brillant & simple. It answers many of the questions I have had over 15 years in the web design business. Finally 🙂

Good Website Design

Remember to focus on your headline and your hook. You want to create engaging intro copy that draws the reader in. Tell the reader what he or she will get from reading your page. Set expectations, and demonstrate why your page is valuable.

Keep the most important information at the top of the page. Journalists have been doing this forever — keeping all of the critical information in the story’s first paragraph, or “lede”. Copy their lead.

Words Matter

Effective writing plays a significant role in any web design strategy.
Writing for mobile has also become a critical skill. Good writing makes the web page look complete and increases the impact it has on your audience allowing you to reach your goals effectively.

Bad websites are cluttered and confusing, indicative of companies that can’t communicate effectively with their visitors. Good websites achieve objectives through a combination of great visual and user experience design.

To get started on your new website, get in touch with Marcia Coffey at 561-906-3436 or by email.

Your Amazing Free Website from Google

marciacatlin · March 4, 2019 ·

Don’t you have yours? It’s your free website from Google!
It guarantees your business will show up on all third-party apps and services that rely on Google’s data. Get your business seen on Google Maps, Search, and other Google properties.
86% of people look up the location of a business on Google Maps.
Plus Google My Business is more important than ever for Local SEO.
If you are a small business with a limited budget, aiming to get the most visibility and traffic from Google, the very first thing you should do is focus on your Google My Business presence.
Sign up for here for Google My Business.
Here are more reasons.
Google has released almost a dozen new features within Google My Business or at least attached to the knowledge panel and business profile, in the last two years. Many of these features have the potential to be really impactful to businesses that are taking advantage of them.
For the last year, Google has been primarily focused on driving ad revenue, including user experience, and including small business engagement. Businesses are feeling the pinch from Facebook’s organic newsfeed changes, and Google sees this as an opportunity to convert some of the activity that businesses had been putting into Facebook into Google, thus bringing them along as advertisers over time.

Perfect Starting Point for An SEO Campaign

Every small business needs its own website that they can build on over time. But in terms of where to focus your optimization efforts, everybody should be looking at Google My Business first. It’s easier to update. You can hire your web designer to set it up or do it yourself. You can post your top questions and answers, respond to reviews, or ask your customers for reviews. You can upload better photos, so that people are more likely to engage with your listing on a phone, as opposed to your competitor.
These kinds of things are easy for a business to accomplish and take less time. They’re less technical, making Google My Business a great starting point for an SEO campaign.
Google’s Ideal Website
In the age of voice, in the age of mobile, in the age of knowledge panels, and structured data, Google’s ideal website, at least for a local business must answer these questions:

Who are you?
What products do you sell?
What services do you offer?
When are you open for business?

Google needs that data. They need it as quickly as possible and as cleanly as possible.
Building Blocks for Small Business
What small business needs to get for the biggest bang for the buck? A basic website that Google can read, and that loads quickly for your customers. After that, it is essential to pay attention to Google My Business.
Questions? Call Marcia at 561-906-3436 or email.

How To Trust An SEO Agency

marciacatlin · February 25, 2019 ·

It continues to be the elephant in the room for small business owners. How to trust an SEO agency. It’s kale and you know you should eat it. But you hate it.
As a small business owner, you may see SEO as an unnecessary expense. You may even believe it is not worth your time and effort because SEO is dying anyway — but this could not be further from the truth. SEO is constantly growing in importance and expanding into new areas. Before, it played a major role for large and midsize businesses. Now it is just as crucial for small businesses.
Inside Google Marketing: 3 ways we think about SEO
Here are important questions you need to ask your future SEO agency or consultant:

Qualifying Questions

- How long have you been performing SEO?
- How did you learn SEO?
- How do you stay up to date on SEO changes?
- Who will be working on my project?
- What will you do as part of our engagement?
- Will we have a formal project plan and list of activities?
- How will we communicate?
- How often will we interact or speak live?
- How long will the engagement last?
- What will we measure to judge progress and ultimate success?
- Will you audit my website?
- Will you review technical SEO as part of the engagement?
- Do you review website personas and map the customer journey?
- How will we perform keyword research?
- Do you map keywords to content?
- Who is responsible for writing content?
- Do you have resources available to help create new content?
- What’s involved in the content optimization process?
- Who is responsible for updating the website?
- Will I be able to review changes before they go live?

Just Don’t …
Start the conversation with a request for backlinks.
Require industry experience unless you’re in a high touch industry like healthcare and pharma.
Ask for guaranteed results.
Ask for a prediction of ROI (return on investment).
Ask for a “quick win” or limited engagement.
Expect a discount or special pricing.
Expect you’ll have a hands-off project.
Credit: What Questions Should You Be Asking Your Future SEO Agency?

The Takeaway

To thrive and survive in the business world today, you need SEO. Whether you have a local business with a brick and mortar presence or you are a niche company with a specialized audience, you will fail without SEO. Without SEO, you have no
visibility online, which means when a consumer searches for what you do, they can’t find you and do business with you.
Extras
Do you want to speak personally on the phone to the CEO of the SEO agency you’re checking out? Want to receive a free SEO and Marketing Assessment?
Check out our High-Performance Local SEO. Then email or call Marcia at 561-906-3436.