Oct 20, 2021 | Dental Marketing, Google, Web Design
Do you want to rank #1 on Google? It takes a carefully curated approach to SEO, content, products, marketing, and videos.
More than that, though, it takes a fierce sense of competition. You’ll need to understand what your competitors do, and then do it better. One way to do that is by leveraging videography services to create top-notch SEO content.
The world of content is changing these days. Once, blogs were king. Now, everyone wants entertaining, informative video content. After all, TikTok’s success didn’t occur in a bubble.
To get the scoop on how videography services will help boost your SEO rankings, keep reading! We’ve assembled a guide to the benefits of video SEO, and how you can leverage it to outrank your competitors.
Leverage Keywords
People search for content using keywords. These keywords are unique to their needs, wants, desires, and communication styles.
It’s important that you can map out the user journey, from keyword search to purchasing from your eCommerce site. This starts with keyword research.
This research may be time-consuming, but it’s necessary for effective video SEO optimization. These keywords will dictate your video script, the closed captioning, hashtags, video descriptions, and the social media copy you use to promote the completed video.
It will also control your video file name, video tags, titles, and so much more. When you know your keywords, you can use them at each point of your video’s journey from start to finish.
These keywords will help shove your video to the top of Google rankings. You know what your potential customers are searching for, and the keywords you use match their search terms.
This indicates to Google that you provide value to potential customers, and is able to match the search to results accurately. Sometimes, it may feel like Google is working against you. It’s not—instead, it’s working on behalf of the customer, which is what you should be doing, too.
Include A Transcript
What is your experience as a consumer, with closed captioning? No one speaks the English language perfectly. Everyone has nuanced speech, accents, mannerisms, and unique quirks of speech.
This is worsened by the fact that microphones don’t always pick up speech perfectly. All of this can translate to a ridiculous closed captioning experience.
When someone is matching the captions with the words actually said, the content could be quite different! That’s why it’s crucial for you to invest in video transcription.
This allows HOH people and members of the Deaf community to participate in consuming your content without accessibility barriers. In fact, Google has stepped up to the plate and started prioritizing accessibility.
Here’s how it works. When companies put in the extra effort to invest in high-quality videography services that prioritize accessibility, Google notices. Accessibility means more people can access and gain value from your content.
More people means more traffic and more value. Google prioritizes search results that deliver more value, and this will spike your numbers.
Accessibility is the right thing to do, in order to reduce barriers of entry for your potential customers. But when you’re looking to outrank your competitors on Google, focusing on accessibility and transcription can make all the difference.
What’s the Load Time?
For efficient video SEO, your content needs to load quickly. Here’s the thing—experts have told us that we are living in the goldfish generation. This means that people have the average attention span of a goldfish.
The most popular content on the Internet caters to this. It’s why viral videos are short clips, why there’s a time limit on TikTok reels, and why everything moves at such a rapid, overwhelming pace.
Attention spans are short, which means that companies need to either get to the point or get out. Research shows that if your video takes more than 3 seconds to load, a significant percentage of people will exit out and look for something else.
You’re not the only one delivering your product or service. Plenty of other people are doing it, too. While your angle is unique enough to deserve a customer’s attention, they don’t know that yet.
As a business, you need to leverage your video SEO to earn their trust. The best way to do that starts by respecting their time and their attention span.
When engaging with top-notch video SEO services, you’ll receive a great end product. You should be proud of this representation of your brand—which means you should promote it on social media!
All of your videos should be published on your social media channels. There are two crucial reasons for this. To start with, there’s no reason to turn down publicity.
No one is refreshing your site every five minutes to see if your brand has published a new video. But when you promote it on the company’s Twitter channel, for instance, people will get notified.
With any luck, they’ll click on it, take a look, and engage with it. That’s the type of publicity that no brand will turn down.
It’s also important for backlinking purposes. As Google crawls through content and indexes it, it’s looking for backlinks.
When you publish a new video on your brand website, that’s where the video lives. That’s where the link is located. But when Google notices that Facebook and Twitter backlinked to it, the algorithm perks up and takes a closer look.
After all, backlinking indicates greater value. Greater value means content deserves a higher Google ranking, which can help you sail to the #1 spot.
Engaging with Videography Services
Whether you’re trying to boost your YouTube video SEO or looking for top-notch website brand videos, our videography services have you covered. Our knowledge and expertise can help your brand rise through Google’s rankings and attract attention.
If you need top-notch creative digital marketing services, we’ve got you covered. Contact us today to see how we can help!
Aug 18, 2021 | Web Design
Is there anything more frustrating than waiting for a project to be completed? It’s especially annoying when you don’t have a clear timeline, or you’re waiting for the project to get completed before you start working on other projects.
Whether you’re building a website for your start-up business or you’re redesigning an existing website, it’s important to get some facts on the table before you start. The first question you need to answer is, “how long does it take to design a website?” Getting a website project time estimate from your website designer will help you plan other aspects of your business’ marketing campaigns.
For example, you can’t start a pay-per-click campaign until you have a website to direct customers to. Many businesses use their website as the main point of contact for customers, which is another reason why it’s so important to get a timeline on your website project.
In the article below, you’ll find some information on how long it usually takes to design a website and some content you’ll need to gather to finish the site. Read on to learn everything you need to know about website timelines.
You Need Certain Content Before You Can Expect a Website
If you want a well-designed website, you’re going to need to provide the website design team with some content. This content includes words, images, video, and any animations you might need on the site.
You should have your most powerful images on the homepage. If you’re going to use video on your site, it may be a good idea to have a pop-up video that appears when people land on the website.
Some small business website design firms will be able to help you with videography and photography. This is a great way to get custom images and videos and avoid relying on stock images. Once you’ve gathered your videos and images, you’re going to want to provide the website design firm with some copy for your website.
You’ll need headlines, subheadlines, body paragraphs, and a list of features, products, or services. Whether you do this yourself or hire an outside copywriter, it’s important to make sure the website design firm understands the messaging you want to have on your website.
Your Website Won’t Be Done Until You’ve Taken Care of SEO
Creating a website without thinking about search engine optimization (SEO) is like opening a store without putting up any signage. Your website won’t be an effective business tool unless prospective customers can find it in search results. When you’re considering how to design a website, make sure the website design firms also specialize in search engine optimization.
One of the best ways to make your website SEO-friendly is to add a blog page. Websites that have fresh, original content tend to do better in search results than websites that stay stagnant. The blog page provides you with a place to add lengthy articles that are targeted towards specific keywords.
Different types of websites require different levels of search engine optimization. A one-page website should use keywords in the headlines and subheads while also having optimized metatags.
A website with many pages should have strong internal linking. That means each page has links to other pages on the site. No matter what type of website you’re building, it’s important to pay attention to the speed of the website.
So How Long Does It Take to Design a Website?
Designing a website well takes months, and you should be prepared to wait if you want a high-quality website. The design process timeline also depends on what you need in a website.
If you just need a place to showcase your services or products and provide a way for customers to get in touch, you shouldn’t have to wait more than three months. If you need a detailed website with several different pages and unique features like animation or other functionality, you may have to wait four to five months.
The best website design firms should be able to complete most websites in 90 to 120 days, but this timeline also depends on how much input you want to have. The sooner you can provide the web design firm with all the relevant content, the sooner your website will be completed.
It’s also important to make sure the website design firm knows all your needs upfront. Website designs tend to take longer when the client asks for new features halfway through the project or they’re unclear about what they want the website to look like.
If you’re trying to speed up the website design process, the best thing you can do is develop a clear outline for your website needs and provide the website design team with all the content you’d like featured on your site.
Now You’re Ready to Start Your Web Design Process
One of the most important parts of the web design process is the initial meeting with the design team. To prepare for this meeting, you should identify the pages you’d like to have on your site and the message you’d like the website to project.
Hiring a website design firm will provide you with experts who can answer questions about your site. If you’re ready to build a new website, you can get in touch with the expert web design team at Harris & Ward.
Mar 31, 2021 | Harris & Ward, marketing
There are around 31 million small businesses just in the US. That’s to say nothing about foreign businesses that operate in the same space, a common problem for e-commerce businesses and freelancers. In short, you can come up against a lot of competition depending on your industry.
That makes marketing an essential component in any small business plan. The challenge, of course, is how you can make your small business marketing succeed in the face of that competition. Keep reading for tips that can help you get your marketing in the right place.
Make a Plan
Marketing is one area where you can’t throw it together as you go. You need a marketing strategy that informs a marketing plan. That starts with defining your target market.
What kind of person or business represents your ideal customer? What characteristics define that person or business?
Let’s say you run a dental practice. Is your ideal customer a family or someone looking for cosmetic dentistry?
If you want family business, you structure your marketing plan around things like preventative care for kids and essential procedures. If you focus on cosmetic dentistry, your target market is likely adults with disposable income. For those customers, you focus your marketing on lifestyle and aesthetics.
Once you define your ideal customer, you build a plan around them and their needs or wants.
Set a Budget
Marketing can and will eat as much money as you throw at it, regardless of results. That means you must set a sustainable marketing budget before you begin.
Sustainable means different things to different businesses. For a cash-strapped business, that might mean a couple of hundred bucks a month. For a high-profit business, it can mean thousands of dollars.
Rather than think of your budget in numerical terms, think of it as a percentage of revenue. Assuming you can afford it, a good rule of thumb is around 7% of your revenue. If you can’t afford that, crunch the numbers until you find a number you can afford and work with that amount.
Now, let’s look at specific things you can do.
Professional Website
Your business operates in an Internet-connected world. That means you need a website as a focal point for your business marketing efforts. More than that, though, you need a professional-grade website.
Customers these days regularly interact with websites built by Fortune 500 companies that poured millions of dollars into their site development. Those websites inform customer expectations about look and performance in any given industry. While you can’t compete with the budgets of those companies, you can get a website built by professional website developers.
That means you end up with a site that performs well and meets customer expectations for your industry. It also means you get a website that natively offers any industry-specific features you need.
SEO
It’s difficult to separate search engine optimization from any small business marketing plan, as it’s a core part of digital marketing. SEO is a set of tactics that help your pages on your website rank better in search results. If your site’s pages don’t rank well, people looking for businesses online simply won’t find you.
The most familiar elements of SEO for most business owners are keywords and link building. In essence, keywords are specific terms that people use when searching for products or services. By incorporating keywords specific to your business, you improve your odds of ranking well.
If you focus on a local market, location-specific keywords can help you even more.
Link building takes on two main forms: internal and external. Internal linking focuses on creating a web of links on your site between related content, which tells search engines that your site focuses on a specific product or service. External linking focuses on connecting your site to high-quality resources, which demonstrates you understand your own industry.
Custom Images
Many businesses rely on stock images for their websites. This is a cost-effective tactic, but it’s not an ideal one. There are a finite number of stock images for any given industry, which means you run the risk of using the same images as a competitor.
Custom images help you overcome this problem by ensuring originality. As a bonus, people respond to images in a more meaningful way than they do solely to text on the screen.
Video
Video does the same thing for your that custom images do, but even more powerfully. They let you speak directly to your visitors, which can help solidify an emotional connection. People also recall information from videos better than information they get from skimming written content.
Video has another advantage. It’s an ideal way for you to reinforce your brand message.
You can do slice-of-life videos from inside your company or office or offer messages from the owner. Assuming your brand message is authentic, it’ll shine through in the videos. If people liked your brand messaging before, you’ll reinforce that emotional connection.
Let us not forget the 800-pound gorilla that is social media. Very few businesses possess the staff, budget, or know-how to maintain a presence on every social media site. Yet, a small business social media presence is essential.
Dig down into the benefits and pitfalls of different social media platforms. Then pick a maximum of two platforms to focus on as a starting point. Look for sites that play to your business’s strengths.
If your business has lots of products, an image-focused site makes sense. If your business relies on personality and in-person services, lean more into sites that let you leverage those factors.
Small Business Marketing and Your Business
Small business marketing matters as much as big business marketing for the long-term survival of your business.
That means you need a plan that focuses on your ideal customers and a budget you can sustain. It also means leaning in to the reality of digital marketing.
You need a pro website with solid SEO. Your marketing should use custom images when possible, and video if your budget supports it. Your business also needs a focused presence on social media.
Harris & Ward specializes in small business digital marketing and site development. Have a larger project? We offer enterprise SEO and marketing services.
