Softwired Blog

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.

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.

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.

Millions of websites are built on the WordPress platform all around the world. In fact, as of 2020, WordPress is powering 35% of the internet. When a website is brand new it should, in theory, have all updated plugins and security features installed. But what happens after the website is built and several months have passed? Website owners need a plan in place for who will update security plugins, prevent and handle website crashes and hackers, fix unresponsive websites, and ensure that they can edit the website as needed. All of these issues can be addressed through WordPress support.

If you’re thinking about forming a web design partnership with a web design agency partner or a freelance design partner because you need help with web engineering tasks, there are many things to consider. For one, what is the difference between a freelance web design partner and an agency partner and which one will be a better fit for your business?

Websites range from small and simple to large and complex because the needs and budget of each business varies greatly. Web design agencies generally offer three or more web design pricing packages to suit the needs of their potential clients. Your budget and needs will have you considering factors like the level of customization, e-Commerce, newsletter and event calendar integration, and chatbot setup. No matter what web design package makes sense for your business, each package should ensure that you end up with a high-quality website built to generate traffic and leads to your business using responsive web design. It should also be SEO optimized, compatible across web browsers, and convey your brand and message through a great user experience – including quick loading speed.

As a small business owner, you may be wondering what is SEO and how it could help your business? Pretty much every business owner going into 2020 knows that they need a website so potential customers can find them online. Some small business owners try to build their own websites, while others reach out to local web design agencies to build them a website. What they may not realize is that without SEO work by an SEO company, there is a high likelihood that their new website will not show up in search engine results and therefore no one will be able to find it.