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This article was updated 11/2016 to reflect changes in the industry. Due to the fast paced nature of the web, a site redesign is an important part of the optimizing your site and creating a better user experience. Best practices today may not be viewed as best practices tomorrow. You don’t want to appear outdated, so once every 2-3 years you should launch a new website design or move to a new domain. But launching a new website is one of the biggest updates you can make online. To avoid SEO disaster, you need to invest in planning before you go live and perform tests at each level to minimize problems when you launch. The following launch guidelines have been separated into the four categories: Launch Checklist Before the Launch During the Launch After the Launch New Website Launch Checklist To get started, I’ve created a Launch Checklist so you can monitor the website launch process. This checklist should be kept up to date throughout the entire move and you can even … [Read more...] about The Complete Guide to Launching a New Website

Let’s face it. The foundation of anything (house, structure, or marketing campaign) is the single most important piece of the overall plan. Build on a weak foundation, and you can expect a collapse. The same goes for SEO. Even the best off-page strategy won’t do much if the foundational on-page strategy is not properly in place. Every internet marketer knows and understands this, but I constantly see shoddy on-page optimization when reviewing websites. After recently reviewing two websites with awful on-page SEO work, I was driven to write a detailed guide for new or experienced SEOs who want to effectively optimize their site on-page – the right way. To make this article as short and concise as possible, I have provided links to other great articles in order to expand on ideas that I believe require more in-depth reading, such as Schema markup and keyword research. Website Page Errors Your first step should be to review the site for broken links (404’s) or … [Read more...] about SEO 101: On-Page Optimization Search Engine Journal

And the shot glass is already full of adverts, a bunch of maps, a broadsheet newspaper, a lengthy opinion piece about Taylor Swift and an Argos catalogue. And oh look, now you’ve got milk all over the kitchen counter, but everyone’s just ignoring it as they’re too busy looking into the shot glass because all the information they need is right there. So what can you do, apart from fetching a mop and bucket, stop wasting so much milk and learning to unpack bizarre opening metaphors? Well it may surprise you to learn that many website owners are still struggling with basic SEO techniques. These are the technical, on-page habits that are easily addressable and take very little time to action, but can make a heck of a difference to your overall search ranking. Excelling at these basic SEO skills can therefore put you ahead of the competition. But which of the on-page techniques are still not being implemented correctly and what can you learn from this? SEMrush has … [Read more...] about What are the most common on-page SEO issues and how to fix them?

The creative is stellar. Headline and value prop impactful. Hero image delightful. But peeps ain’t converting. Because the single biggest conversion killer is lurking behind the scenes, completely untouched. Which is a shame, because speed (or lack thereof) often has a bigger impact on campaign conversions than any of that other stuff. The Impact of Speed Google experienced a 20% traffic drop years ago as a result of a 0.5-second delay — 0.5! Think that’s bad? If an e-commerce page fails to load in under three seconds, it stands to lose nearly half its traffic. As a result, some of the savviest online brands now load in under a second. Less than one second! The impact of speed only becomes exacerbated on mobile, where limited processing power and spotty connections are the norm. According to Kinsta’s excellent page speed guide, 74% of people on mobile would abandon if the page doesn’t load in 5 seconds. And this is a world where mobile internet usage is … [Read more...] about 11 Ways to Boost Page Load Time

Naturally, business owners look for justification when investing their money in marketing. Clients who are not familiar with web marketing at a basic level can be hard, if not even impossible to please. I always ask my clients for the short and long-term goals to set realistic expectations. I use this as an opportunity to explain the right way of measuring marketing success. Progress Signals & Conversion Goals I think of progress signals as the bright light illuminating from a lighthouse at a distance. When your signals illustrate a positive trend, you know that you are in the right direction. Otherwise, you steer left/right to realign to your destination. Impressions, CTR, traffic, and of course keyword rankings are all examples of progress signals. I cover this and why keyword ranking is only a progress signal and not a success metric further in this post. Conversion goals are a success metric. Different from progress signals, success metrics are actual proof for return – … [Read more...] about How to Set Website Progress & Success Signals