Welcome to 2018! 

Every Successful Journey Begins With Clarity

Let's start the New Year out right and De-clutter your Online Presence. 

A successful journey – such as your business journey this year – begins with a very clear vision. The same is true for your clients; they need a clear vision of how to move through their problem and come out on the other side of it. Their vision begins with contacting you.

To receive your potential new client communications, your messages about how to contact you must be clear and precise, in other words, they must clarify the path your new client needs to take.

Today, few people use telephone books; rather, they begin their path to you by using your online information.

When you have multiples of listings out there in multiples of directories, your contact information may be inconsistent from one place to another.

Fortunately, the New Year brings a chance for a new start, a perfect time to evaluate how people have contacted you in the past, how they contact others, and the clarity and consistency of your online information. Cleaning-up and de-cluttering your online presence is the key to providing that clarity for new (and current) clients to contact you. Old and incorrect information about your company can cause mass confusion for your new (and current) customers, as well as search engines.

Let's get started with cleaning up that old and outdated information, but first here are a few questions:

1.  Has your office moved in the last few years or have you acquired a new phone number?
2. Have you changed your business's name or brand?
3. Have you had multiple websites in the past?
4. Have you worked with other marketing companies in the past?
5.   Do you have multiple old and new social media accounts?
6.   Have you had more than one domain for your business?

If you answered "Yes" to any of these questions, chances are, unless you have made proactive efforts to clean this up, this old information is still available online. As Murphy’s Law would have it, folks are going to find it. 

Inform your marketing agency of all information about your firm that may have changed, which will allow them to be proactive in getting it cleaned up. 

Don't let 2018 pass you by with a messy online presence! 

Your potential new clients are searching online for the firm and businesses they want to use clients are the reasons for our journey and our successes, without them, neither can exist.

Every successful journey begins with clarity – clear visions, clear communications, and clear paths for communications. Onward to success!

Google rolled out BIG changes to Google Ads.

Google rolled out BIG changes to Google Ads. They are removing Ads from the right hand side of its desktop search results. 

Searchengineland reported on the story after receiving information from a Google Advertiser. It was later confirmed by a Google spokesperson who stated that Google is removing all ads from the right hand side of search results, worldwide. It will now only place ads centrally, four at the top and two at the bottom of the page. 

To clarify, the elimination of right-side ads impacts all desktop searches worldwide; the addition of the fourth ad above search results will happen for “highly commercial queries.” This would involve searches like “hotels in New York City” or “car insurance”.

Also with the removal of all right-side ads it will appear to users that the desktop and mobile search results look more similar.

There are, however, two exceptions:

1.     Product Listing Ads (PLAs) will appear above or to the right of search results

2.     The Knowledge Graph panels will continue to appear in the right hand side

Google also stated about the change to the additional fourth ad:

"We’ve been testing this layout for a long time, so some people might see it on a very small number of commercial queries. We’ll continue to make tweaks, but this is designed for highly commercial queries where the layout is able to provide more relevant results for people searching and better performance for advertisers."

So what does this mean for advertisers?

Well, with the additional terms added to the top of the page, this will mean the organic listing is lower than it was previously.

It will also mean more work for your Paid Search team, as the competition for the higher spaces in the Ads will inevitably increase with the potential for the average CPC to increase as well.

The Importance of Having A Website for Any and All Types of Businesses.

One of the most surprising things when you look at small businesses is how many of them don't have a website. You would think that in this day and age all businesses would know how important a website is for marketing their business. Clearly this is not the case. Any business that does not have a website is missing out on one of the most powerful marketing tools available to them.

 

A main reason to have a website is to help people find you and your business. These days most people will go online and research products and companies before they make a purchase, if you don't have a website you are missing out on all of this potential new and repeated business. By coming across your businesses website, even if they don't make a purchase this time it is possible they may make a future purchase.

Another important piece to a website is that it helps you establish credibility as a business. Most people just assume that you will have a website since the vast majority of businesses do, at least the vast majority of bigger companies do. There are actually still quite a few small businesses that don't have a website and without one this is exactly what they will remain. Without a website that you can refer potential new clients/customers to it will make your job harder as an owner to establish a know reputation, credibility and ability to build your business. 

With a creation of a website you will give the impression that your company is bigger and more successful than it may actually be. One of the great things about the internet is that the size of your company does not really matter. There is no reason that you can't get your site to rank in Google ahead of a large multinational competitor and funnel off some of their traffic. This is a big part of the reason that a website is even more important for a small business than a big one, it tends to level the playing field. 

Knowing now that clearly there are still a lot of businesses and small businesses that do not have websites. Without knowing all the reasons why they choose not to have a website the main reason is that they are too expensive. It is rather surprising how much small business owners believe a website will cost them. In truth a website can be built for very little cost. Remember you don't need a giant ten thousand page website for your business, just a simple site that tells people about your company, what you sell and how to find you.

Moving A Website... Redirecting Pages.

If we remember that the web is a flattened version of the world, many of our questions are quickly resolved. For example, when moving a website, how should one handle moving from one domain to another or - worse yet - moving pages about within the website such as replacing a topic.

The web is about finding information, and doing so quickly, efficiently and accurately. If your website previously had a page about any topic - let's say redirecting pages - and you wanted to move the page to another position within a new website, the best way then to do so is directly. 

If you redirect all of the pages of your old website to your new website's homepage, you will effectively direct all traffic from the old site to the new site, but it isn't a clean, efficient and accurate redirect. The user would still need to fumble through the page to find the information. 

The better way to redirect users to a new page is to do so directly so that when they visit the old page, they are taken to the replacement page (the exact new page). 

These redirects beg the question... Which type of redirects are best... permanent 301 redirects or temporary 302 redirects. If you plan to undo the redirect down the road, then by all means, you must do a temporary redirect. For all permanent redirects, one should use a permanent 301 redirect code. Permanent redirects are much more apt to be indexed by the search engines and reported in search results than are temporary redirects. The main reason you use a temporary redirect is for true temporary situations in which the redirect will be undone down the road. Temporary redirects also prevent search engines from thinking you were pulling a bait and switch with content in the meantime. 

That being said, how many redirects is too many? If you need to redirect nearly your entire website, it is best to use permanent redirects. Matt Cutts tells us that you can redirect as many pages as you need to redirect, and there is no limit. The only caveat to that statement is not to chain redirects unless you absolutely cannot avoid doing so. With that said, we would raise the yellow caution flag to redirecting an entire website. If you need to redirect every single page, perhaps you might want to consider a new domain name; if that's not possible, proceed with caution and care so that all redirects only need be done once. After the redirects are completed, we recommend re-optimizing the content on the website and pushing on your online marketing.  

Just an FYI on link juice impact with 301's versus links: if you're wondering whether 301's are better for page rank than links, the reality is they're equal; a page loses just as much page rank with a 301 as it does with an outbound link.