These are among our most asked questions, or things we wanted to break down into bite size answers.
Think of branding as identifying yourself as a business or individual. What is your voice, who is your audience, how do you want to appear and appeal to them? Far beyond just logo design and picking colors, branding develops the very core of where those choices stem from, and how you should approach those you wish to serve.
Can a branding service or session help?
If you’ve not developed a persona for the people online you’re trying to reach, or not developed the identity you wish to hold online, then a branding session can absolutely help. Most businesses opt to develop their brand on their own not realizing that branding is a larger order than they might realize, and they’re leaving crucial effort out to make reaching their audience more effective. Further, if customers are having a hard time understanding your product, or you’re having a tough time explaining on their level, branding comes in especially handy in developing a common language that makes it easier to communicate broadly.
A measure of just how well known your brand is among shoppers, households & decision makers is a good idea of what brand awareness is. If you sell sponges, is a person needing one going to associate your business or brand to their need? Establishing a brand awareness is a pivotal part of making yourself top of mind to people searching for a product or service you provide.
Promotion of a good, service or business is the core aspect of marketing, but past that base definition, marketing differs radically in method depending on goals and needs. There are numerous types of marketing. Your marketing methods should always first consider the audience, where are they found, and how to gain visibility.
The way most people characterize online visibility will be how often your business, brand, or website is seen alongside your competition for terms and keywords relevant to your goals online. You might be visible online with a website and a social profile, but visibility in this sense does not mean page 6, it means page 1 and where at among your competing businesses. Sometimes expressed as a percentage based on important keywords.
Ads marketing means paying for ad space on a website, app, search engine, radio network, tv broadcast, streaming services, billboards and other mediums to sell or promote something. Spoken, visual, or textual, you often pay per interaction, position, or time in one form or another.
Using a visual platform such as a website, television, or otherwise (options vary far and wide for mediums) to share ads that catch the eye or leave an impression. A staple of brand awareness campaigns, visual ads might be a marquee at a baseball stadium, a specific sized ad for an online ad network or magazine, or a flashy commercial shown at half time of the big game.
Creating written or visual content and getting it seen and shared online is what’s known as content marketing. Businesses create useful visuals like pdf documents or infographics, or will produce written content on webpages that will be interacted with or referenced. The content itself often has to be promoted in its own way, but this doesn’t mean paying for audience reach.
What is social media marketing?
Promotion of a good or service via a social network like Twitter, TikTok, QQ, & others, both foreign or abroad is social media marketing. This can take the form of a visuals you share, a piece of useful content, a promoter with a video of your product, or using the platform’s marketing suite to pay to promote.
What is search engine marketing?
Making use of a major search engine’s ad platform to advertise something your business does or provides is the crux of SEM, search engine marketing. Ads can be visual, either static and in some cases motion capable, or textual. You can hone your focus to keywords, audiences, and other metrics to ensure that you get your desired conversion.
A desired action on your website, app, or various profile being taken by a customer or visitor is considered a conversion. Conversion are entirely user elected, and can be tracked in tools such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, and more. So sometimes that conversion is a sale, sometimes it’s someone filled out a form, sometimes it’s that a patron visited 3 or more pages.
Search Engine Optimization is what the acronym stands for. This marketing practice is used to improve your website’s position on search engines. Often not the quick play for business that is ad placements, it does develop to become far cheaper than ads. This can be focused on an international, national and local level.
This is the part of website creation that involves how it looks. Various appearances, motifs, and formats are available through a talented web designer. Web design can be pure visual coding, or using a plugin for visually building a website, and a mix of the two. Designers should strive to create websites that bridge the balance of beauty and function.
Web development can be thought of as creating, fixing, or improving an app or website in any fashion but the visual aspect. Where a web designer is the artist, a web developer sets up the easel and canvas. So can be said for websites as development often deals with the mechanics, underlying systems, and interconnections between registrar, host, and email that allow the website you before you to operate and function as you’ve come to expect.
What is a theme in web design?
A theme is a plugin or program that allows you to web design. Themes come in varying sizes, powers, and capabilities, and often are selected based on what the web designer is most comfortable with. If the web designer were a canvas painter, the theme would be the easel, the palette, and brush.
To be a website host is be the service providing server space and providing incoming connections from users with your website. A web host is the very much where your website is in a locational sense, it’s on their servers, and that’s primarily where edits are made. Hosts often have differing methods for access, repair and upkeep of websites.
Is website hosting different from website registration?
Yes. Where a host is where your website is stored, your website registration is the service telling users where their computers can find and load the website they wish to visit. If you thought of a website as a library book, the registration would be Dewey Decimal code you’d use to go find it among the shelves.
While there are plenty of reasons a new website might be nice, for the purposes of marketing, it’s not always necessary to have a new website. So long as we’re providing a good user experience, and we’re not subjected to errors, or have a lot of technical debt built up, and old website can provide more benefit than a new one. However, old builders, legacy tools and plugins, and inflexible frameworks can all be good reasons to make a change.
Is Google Analytics important?
A website can operate and function just fine without Google Analytics attached to it. However, it provides an irreplaceable source of information about your website and how people are interacting with it. Online marketers would tell you that Google Analytics is a paramount tool that unlocks many other objectives and insights.
Is Google Search Console necessary?
Google Search Console is not 100% necessary to operate a website. However, if you were ever interested in how Google’s search engine is interpreting, interacting with, and serving your website, there’s no tool that’s more accurate. Other tools can provide insights, but there’s no replacement for Google’s Webmaster Tools (an old name for Search Console).
What is a pixel? Do I need it for marketing?
A pixel is tiny bit of code that loads and triggers when someone visits your website aiding you in marketing initiatives and tracking of customers. A pixel is not a name you’d expect for code, and it is usually not a visual addition to the page, but something instead that is installed by adding a code to the <head> portion of your webpage. Its specific role for your marketing strategy will differ by platform.
A citation is an instance of another website showing a range of information relating back to your business or website. Often just a Name, Address, and Phone Number for any brick and mortar business, online businesses can benefit from citations that exist on relevant sites, allow a bit of content to characterize yourself, and link back to your website.
Backlinks are cases of other websites that put a link up directed at your own website. They ‘link back’ to you, though these aren’t inherently reciprocal. Backlinks are often a core strategy of SEO agencies, but there’s danger to any website that wants to mistreat the power a backlink can provide, or does poor verification of where that link might be coming from.
Is social sharing good for SEO?
Social sharing has a very mitigated effect on SEO. It can be faked and repeated easily and endlessly through bots. That’s not to say that is has 0 impact, but it does have a low ceiling and a short time before you get into diminishing returns for posting more often. A rule of thumb however is to at least create social profiles with your business’ name, known as a brand lock.
Blogging is important, and can have a large impact on a website as a whole in terms of visitors, interaction, and rankings. Blogs can fill many roles, and the impact they’ll have will be measured from the effort put into them. Short blogs, blogs that aren’t unique from your other pages, or poorly researched topics can all do more harm than good.
Is SEO a better value than Ads are?
Yes, though that probably won’t be felt right away. SEO takes time to get you to where you can be seen without paying for every interaction. Ads do that right away. They take you to the top, but you pay for your clicks or views. A complete online marketing initiative has both involved, but if you need results quick, you go with ads. If you don’t always want to be paying for ads, you do SEO too.
Will SEO work for my business?
Very few circumstances exist where an SEO can’t benefit your business in one small fashion or another. If your business is entirely offline, with no website, no profiles, no presence at all, then SEO is powerless. If your business type is not one supported by Google, then SEO’s power is greatly diminished. Any other online business however has something to gain from optimization.
For the purposes of SEO, a website optimization is a wide-reaching review of your website in its entirety to identify issues, establish an action plan, and execute in order of priority. Not all problems are going to be tangible issues, there may be no indicator that anything is wrong, but an SEO with a good eye and a thorough study can identify problems that are holding you back.
I have a new website, when should I start SEO?
Ideally, SEO was a consideration as the site was built, but there’s no downside to starting SEO right away. An SEO can identify issues with a new build so we start fresh and clean with our appearance, and can help give direction on how to develop your site into something stronger, while supporting it with off-page SEO.
Optimization or support for a website that is not done on the website itself is a good start defining for off-page SEO. This can be content creation, backlinking, press releases and other public relations, citations, and much more. Off-page optimization can be delicate, can be overdone, and can get you into trouble, so there’s a measure of poise and rationale guiding decisions.
Any work done to your website directly to promote it on a search engine is the key point of On-Page SEO. No standards exist within on-page SEO, every website, business, and collective bunch of competition is going to be different and demand strategies that differ between sites. It’s important to note you can over optimize a website, so going too far has penalties too.
Should I make a website for my business?
Even if your business is offline, you can stand to be more successful from having a website for your business. With the amount of people using a search engine to identify a local business providing what they need, you can scarcely afford to not have a website if your competition does. There are several basics to online presence, matching or being better than your competitors is one of them.
Schema is code that sits at the top of your webpage so that it’s the first thing read when a bot comes by. It speaks the bot’s language so to speak, and tells it further how to characterize the content on the page, how to serve it, and additional information that it can use to enhance search results, such as reviews, relevant content, and more.
When you search for anything on Google, and you’re supplied with local results and a map to show where business are in town, that’s called the map pack. These are very often at the top of the page, but that’s not always the case. A map pack ranking can be more powerful than a core organic ranking as it shows on top of those, and showcases a different sort of relevance, your location to the person making the query. This is a staple of Local SEO.
What does high-risk mean in marketing?
If you have something more to lose than just your marketing budget in advertising online, you are probably doing some high-risk marketing. Not all business and brands are accepted into the well known ads networks like Facebook, and Google, and often have to find other ads networks or clever means of showing up without losing out on the opportunity to advertise further. Blacklisted websites, search penalties, and more all wait the inexperienced.
Marketing doesn’t always mean just turning on ads. There are people who are trained in finding items on your website and competition that can hold your marketing efforts back. This supports ads, SEO, content marketing, and even more conventional marketing by addressing user experience in addition to written content, website issues, penalties, citations, brand awareness, and the competition themselves.
What are some common issues found in a website audit?
Common issues that might be found in an audit are poor SEO optimization for webpages and images, poor loading speeds and metrics like content shift, website issues like broken pages or missing redirects, powerful or hidden competition, bad backlinks, bad offpage links, and more. It’s best to use at least two different tools for tests, as the tools are often specialized.
Advertising, remarketing, newsletters, and other items sent via email by a business to a patron or possible customer is considered email marketing. The means of marketing via email are numerous, with tools that do all the work for you so long as you feed it content to send and email addresses to send to. It’s gathering worthwhile contact info that makes email marketing a challenge for some.
Does InSync Media do white label marketing?
Yes! Put the power of our team to work for you. Discounts with higher levels of service or more clientele in the case of a fellow agency. We do this for ads, web design, and SEO, and other lines of service are possible, such as white label hosting. Highly flexible, and act as your agency or service to any other business we need to contact.
Does SEO work better for some industries than others?
While there’s definitely a measure of efficacy depending on your audience and competition, everyone has something to gain from SEO. By and large, SEO is industry agnostic so long as your client base finds you via a search engine or website. So, if it must be said, it works better for any online industry, but even a locally owned gas station can stand to get more business with just a couple best practices.
What makes SEO take longer than other types of marketing?
SEO is slower because the engine that drives it is also a little slow, but not for lack of power. Google, Bing, and other SEs have trillions of web pages to crawl, rank, and think about. When there are so many other things going on online all over the world, it becomes easier to understand why something isn’t seen or valued right away, or even within a few months. SEO requires lots of things to indexed, crawled, and seen online, and that doesn’t happen quickly.
Should I mix and match marketing services?
Ads and SEO are a match made in heaven. SEO can make it cheaper to advertise via ads networks because your site is seen as better and more relevant, and your ads can float your business while you build brand awareness, rankings, contact lists & audiences, or a steady client base. Both of these initiatives together can be a great jump point for other marketing too, such as email marketing, or social.
I got an email saying this company can increase rankings for my business by x amount, is that true?
Maybe? In our experience, a lot of agencies that try this use very subjective numbers, tools, and metrics to spin a narrative their way, and they’ll do that when they produce results as well. There are very few single methods that allow for huge gains in rankings in a short time, and they’re very expensive. Even so, these can be a gamble, there’s no guarantee on how long that work will last.
What can Google penalize my website for?
Lots of things, and not all penalties you’re going to be told about. Websites can be penalized for bad backlinks, poor optimization, over-optimization, slow speeds, and blackhat SEO tactics. Bad backlinks can mean they’re coming in from blacklisted websites, can mean they all say the same thing or point to the same page, or don’t otherwise look like what would naturally happen on the web otherwise.
Can I or Google remove a penalty?
Most of the consequences of a poor website or poor environment are things that have to be fixed before anything will move forward. However, in the case of a manual action, Google may have to step in to remove the penalty. In most cases this can and should be solved by fixing the issues that the search console lays out in the manual action section. AI is widely used here.
Is it harder to be seen in search nationally than locally?
Not necessarily. Competition is the bulk of the answer here. It’s far easier to rank a business that has less people doing the same thing. If you’re a national company that turns car batteries into flower pots, that’s unique and probably easy to get into search. A new car dealership that’s just opened up across the street from 5 others that have been there for 10 years might be pretty hard to rank top 3 for just “car dealership” in Sacramento.
What is Google My Business? Do I need that?
Google My Business is an important tool for business owners to leverage what Google provides to any company, anywhere. This allows your business to show up in the Map Pack, and gives Google data it uses to give your business its identity. No matter what your business is or does, if you need to be found online, a GMB profile can probably help.
What are some tools used by an SEO?
The SEO team at InSync Media uses tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, SEOQuake, BuiltWith, Screaming Frog, Google’s Rich Results tool, Google’s page speed insight tool, as well as what’s contained within Analytics, Search Console, Ads, and Google My Business. This is not a conclusive list, but would get you a start a where a lot of our data comes from.
A redirect is a command relayed to a browser or search engine that any visit to a specific webpage will send you off to another designated one. Redirects come in different forms and have different purposes, and effects. The most common is a 301 redirect, indicating a page has been moved permanently to another web address.
Is making a page canonical different from a redirect?
Yes, where a redirect is an order, a canonical is more of a suggestion. You ‘suggest’ that a search engine use another page instead for anything you might consider this page for in terms of search results. You might use the canonical page function if there are two pages live on the same website that might compete because they’re so similar. You might set one to canonical to the more landing style page, or the one that you want seen first, or to be considered most.
What happens when I take a page offline?
In short, a 404 error. In terms of the effect it has on your website as a whole, that can be far greater of an effect. If take a page offline that was once a crucial part of your website, it’s best practice to redirect that to a new page that takes its place, or another relevant page. Any backlinks you may have had to this page can still help your website, and people with it bookmarked don’t get an error. If this is temporary, consider a 302 redirect.
How many images should I have on a page?
If there was ever a solid single answer for this, there isn’t now. Pictures shouldn’t be thought of as something you need to include, but something that can help your content be understood, or complement it in some way. Images can have value beyond just their role on the page, but many times it’s the role it plays that helps your content and site get further ahead.
Is there a topic we didn’t cover, or a question you’d like answered? Reach out to us, and we’ll get you a proper response. You may even be featured right here.
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