Softwired Blog

Successful businesses have carefully planned marketing strategies that respond to current consumer behavior and to the behavior of their target market(s). With access to websites, social media pages and online reviews at their fingertips, consumers are doing a lot of independent research before choosing a company from which to make a purchase.

Web design is one of those magical jobs that marries creativity and design skills with technical skills into a potentially well-paying career. If you have a background in design, online marketing and/or programming, like working with people and have the aptitude to learn any of the areas you don’t yet have expertise in then you have the potential to earn a living as a web designer.

Whether business-to-business or business-to-consumer, businesses need a strong web presence that translates across platforms in order to succeed. Mobile usage has exploded over the last decade and is expected to continue in an upward trend. According to statista.com, there are now more than 207 million smartphone users and mobile usage represents 63.4% of all internet usage. With this reality in mind, search engines such as Google have created guidelines for websites to implement in order to be included in mobile searches.

If the answer is “NO” to any of these questions you are losing customers to your competition! One of the best ways to keep your commercial real estate website updated and ranking in Google is to integrate MLS listings directly into your website.

The rules of on-page SEO and optimization keep evolving. Long gone are the days when we could manipulate Search Engine Result pages (SERPS) with link-building. In 2017 we are saying goodbye to optimizing blog posts and web content around one keyword and moving toward answering searchers questions with relevant, related sentences and keywords.

The rate of change in technology, social media and online marketing trends is staggering. From year to year ideas may be thrown on their head and concepts may develop rapidly; what worked to attract and convert customers last year may not the next.

Top 5 online marketing trends that will lead to inbound marketing strategies

Consumer search behavior has changed dramatically over the years. This is partly due to increasing familiarity with how to get the search results we want and partly due to the changes in the way that search engines are designed to produce and rank search results.

In the early days of the internet, companies would often use an exact match domain (EMD) to drive traffic - and potential customers - to their website. They could successfully manipulate search results to get the website placed at the top of a search engine results page (SERP). As Google became a dominant search engine, they began to make decisions about which practices would be deemed “white hat” and acceptable or “black hat” and unacceptable. Websites using “black hat” tactics could then risk being penalized by Google. A Google penalty is meant to penalize a website for using “black hat” SEO techniques. It results in a negative impact on a website's search rankings caused by updates to Google's search algorithms and/or manual review.

Many small business owners struggle to come up with blog post ideas. The goal should be to create a list of blog post titles that can be elaborated into relevant content for your business and target customers. As a bonus, you won’t be drawing a blank when you sit down to write a post. The best way to create a great blog post title list is to build it over time. “You need to give your mind time to work on ideas while you’re doing something else” said John Cleese in his Content Marketing World keynote. As you see relevant information, you can add notes, quotes or images to the corresponding titles on a Google document or Evernote. Google documents and Evernote are both great tools for sharing content with colleagues, employees or marketing agencies who may be handling your blog. On that note, setting up a meeting with your colleagues/employees to brainstorm topics together can be a great way to create a blog post title list.

Clients often underestimate the amount of work that it will take to produce web content and overestimate the amount of time that they are willing to put into its creation. As a result, gathering web content from clients almost always translates into broken deadlines, delays and headaches all around. In fact, content is often the last piece missing in the web design process and ends up delaying web launch. The goal should be to make gathering content more fun and effective while maintaining a positive relationship with the client.