The Benefits of Payment Forms
Now more than ever, goods and services are being bought over the internet. From a business perspective, ecommerce was a very difficult proposition, involving complex, and very expensive, payment gateways in order to have secure transactions on a website. The expense of setting up payments simply wasn’t worth it to non-profits or small, newly-formed businesses. PayPal was the first to provide an inexpensive alternative payment gateway, and since then, several…
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The Key to Reviews is Follow-Up
One of the biggest problems small businesses face is getting customers to write reviews. Time and time again we hear our clients say that they have asked for reviews from satisfied customers, but then it ends there. Why are reviews so important? In order to ensure your business is actively getting new reviews, you need to have a process in place for encouraging reviews, and you need to take the time…
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Google Removed Right Hand Side Ads
Have you noticed anything different about the Google search results page recently? Take a look at this results page from early February… Now let’s look at a search for the same thing in March: So much white space!! But what happened to those ads in the side? Google updated the results page in mid-February and has decided to do away with those ads in the right hand side. Now, in many cases,…
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What Happened to My Google Reviews?
Help! My Google Business Page Looks Different! If you have noticed your Google My Business page looking a bit different lately, you aren’t losing your mind. Towards the end of 2015, Google rolled out an updated view of profiles and announced that local pages would no longer be supporting reviews, categories, directions, stars, photo uploads, interior photos, maps, hours, etc. Over time, more and more people are seeing this updated version…
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Creating an Effective Landing Page
If you have a website but aren’t familiar with landing pages, you should be. Landing pages are pages separate from your homepage that are generally dedicated to a single product or service. If you offer 5 services, each service should have its own page. When you run advertisements online it is generally more effective to target the 5 services with 5 separate ads than one ad that mentions all 5 services. When someone…
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Website Copy Updates to Improve Your Conversion Rate
Imagine this scenario—a potential customer makes it your website. You offer everything they are looking for. Yet, once they arrive on your landing page, they become overwhelmed by information and decide to give up. This problem is all too common. In fact, a study by Chartbeat in 2014 found that 55% of website clicks result in a time on site less than 15 seconds. That’s barely enough time to let…
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Why SEO, PPC, and Social Are Not Enough
If you are familiar with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, then you’ve probably seen the pyramid that defines different levels of a person’s motivational needs. The idea is that if you fulfill level after level of these needs, you become motivated and can eventually reach your full potential, which is called “self-actualization.” In order to reach self-actualization, you must first satisfy each need, making your way from the bottom of the pyramid to…
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Are You Keeping Your Ear to the Ground?
Word of mouth is often the best form of referrals for businesses, especially local ones. With more and more people turning to social media and reviews sites to evaluate a business, the internet has become the new place for word of mouth recommendations. Take, for example, my mom, who recently posted to Facebook asking for recommendations for a cleaning service. Within hours, she had dozens of recommendations. She even had friends…
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