Softwired Blog

At least 37% of the world’s websites are built on the WordPress platform. It’s an extremely popular option for small to mid-sized businesses, especially. As a result, there are a lot of business owners looking for professional support for their WordPress websites. When looking for WordPress support services, it’s important to understand why you need support in the first place, identify your specific needs and find a WordPress expert who provides these services at a cost you can afford.

A business’ online presence has been important for at least the last decade but today, with more people stuck at home and nervous about shopping in stores due to the Coronavirus, the importance of digital sales cannot be overstated. Second to digital marketing and digital sales are the relationships that businesses build and manage. More and more businesses are investing in customer relationship management (CRM) applications and strategies in order to better their ability to interact with and adjust their responses to their customers. A CRM is a set of applications that a business uses to manage their customer data from across different communication channels such as live chats, emails and phone calls. Data collected may include personal information, purchase history and preferences, complaints or concerns, and keyword patterns. The CRM allows managers to review the data from interactions with their customers in real-time, which means businesses can react to it quickly to adjust their customer relationship methods as needed.

As a project manager I have seen projects run smoothly and others run into roadblocks; often from issues that are out of anyone’s control. Either way, there are many choices to be made along the way for a successful website redesign project. Best efforts by the client and the design and development teams to keep the project moving forward are sometimes thwarted by unforeseen issues. These problems can force a workaround, a delay in the deliverable or even a cancellation of the project.

Local business SEO is important for any business with a bricks and mortar location in a given city or town. Yes, even the mom and pop shop that’s been around forever needs to work on local business SEO. You see, all businesses with a physical storefront need to have an online presence these days. Local business SEO is a series of tools used by digital marketers to help local businesses build their customer base and convert web visitors to customers (conversions).

Digital marketing is a type of marketing that uses the internet, devices with online access, websites, web content and social media platforms to market products and services to customers and increase brand awareness and loyalty. Digital marketing services take on many forms from web design, blogging and social media posting, to SEO, optimization and digital advertising.

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.