Softwired Blog

Wow! What a couple of months it has been. I heard about the Pipeline Generation Bootcamp and it interested me but I wasn't sure what I would get out of it. Well, I am so thankful that I did because it has changed my entire outlook on how to grow my agency through digital sales.

Recently I was talking with a client about how they want to improve their digital marketing in the coming year. I was happy to hear this because over the years we've had this conversation and I have always thought they could really benefit from this investment.

Local business listings are online portfolios that have information about your business, including your business name, address, phone number, hours, and other data like parking and price structure. Most of these platforms provide this information for free and do not charge businesses to be listed. In some cases, businesses must manually add their information or claim their business in order to edit their listing details.

Local business SEO* is a variation of SEO. It is the process of optimizing your online presence to attract more business from relevant local searches. By contrast, SEO is optimizing for relevant searches without the location qualifier. The way it works is that people search for products or services for sale in their geographic area to find a local business selling what they are looking for. A list of results then shows up on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Local SEO increases your business’ ranking results and visibility on location-qualified searches.

Building a new WordPress website is a project in and of itself but it should be seen as a living thing that needs ongoing support throughout its life. Once the site is ready to publish, businesses will need to decide where to host their site and who will provide ongoing WordPress support to ensure the security of the site and content management training so edits can be made as needed.

When we talk about inbound marketing we mean the process of attracting leads to your website with relevant content and then nurturing their needs through the sales funnel until they become a paying customer. The first step in inbound marketing is creating relevant content on a regular basis and the best way to do that is by setting up a blog. As HubSpot designers, our agency partners have access to a great blogging platform. The second step in inbound marketing is to capture leads having readers click on a Call to Action (CTA) button that leads to a landing page. The third step is to create a contact form linked from a button on the landing page that allows the business to gather more information about the potential lead. One of the best things about choosing the HubSpot platform for blogging, landing pages and forms is that it allows business owners to analyze performance so they know what content is driving traffic and what content should be edited.

There is no doubt that Coronavirus is wreaking havoc on our physical and mental health, wrecking travel plans and keeping us from visiting with our friends and extended family. It’s also having a devasting impact on the economy and unemployment rate as some businesses are forced to shut down and others are losing revenue as their clients cancel orders. But this isn’t the time to give up. We know that stay at home orders won’t last forever and we hope to see businesses thriving again as soon as possible.

Search Engine Optimization, more commonly referred to as SEO, requires an understanding of how to identify your audience, industry and user intent, how to implement link building and how to conduct keyword research, analytics and reporting, mobile SEO and technical SEO. Businesses will want to hire an SEO company with experience in all aspects of SEO. One thing that many small business owners may not have heard of is footprints in SEO. In reality there are good footprints and bad footprints in SEO and we’re going to dive into what they are in this post.