Website Design and Branding Your Company

Branding your company is as important online, just as much as it is in the real world. If you are thinking about professional website design; make sure that your business is branded correctly. 

When customers pull up your website, you want them to instantly recognize what you are selling and who is selling it.  Branding is used for any type of business from hospitals to clothing companies. Creating your brand may seem easy, but there are some key things you should consider. Your branding should identify your business or product and be easy to recognize. Start your website design with with the basics of branding in choosing the right color and a logo. 

Let’s start with one the hardest challenges, choosing your colors and developing a logo to brand your business. In building and fixing websites, I have seen some ugly colors chosen for websites. Pick a color that you can align your whole business or product image with. Something that may look good to you may not look good to your potential website visitors and customers. There is a whole psychology about marketing and colors, but I will keep it simple. 

Blue is usually a safe color and tends to mean trustworthy and dependable; while yellow is the happy color! Now you can delve into the psychology of color on your own. You can dig deep and even choose a color based on your target audience. In a study by Joe Hallock, it shows a basic color preference by gender. Females preferred blue by 35% and then followed by purple and green. Men preferred blue by 57% then followed by green, black, and so on.

Does color really matter in website design and branding? It matters to have something that grabs potential customers. When it boils down to it, choose a color not just for your eyes, but your website's potential viewers. If you have a law firm that practices criminal law, you are not going to want to choose yellow, but a color like black which tends to give off power. Another color for legal services is grey for authority. 

Nike, Starbucks, and Facebook have one thing in common; you know what their product is without their company name. Although you may not ever have the success of these companies, they are good examples. Their logos are clean designs with simple images that your brain recognizes. Now your business may never be as big as Nike or Starbucks, but it shouldn’t stop you from branding your company. The best logo designs are clean and don’t have intricate details.

Assuming you already have a business name and have now chosen your colors and developed a logo; put it in play. Make sure everything that you have online matched from social media accounts, blogs and of course your website. Make sure that every time an email is sent out from your company that it contains your website, logo, contact, and address. People don’t realize that even an email can be a lost online marketing opportunity. 

SEO and Your Keyword Strategy

The most important element in national or local SEO are the keywords you choose. Everyone has their own technique for choosing the right keywords. The foundation of any SEO campaign is choosing the right keywords, so potential customers can find what you are selling.

 Do You Have Low or No Traffic to Your Site?

Let's start with a website that has been around 6 months or longer and is not getting traffic. What I would start with is a good SEO tool like SEM Rush or even free SEO tools and look at the overall site data. Look to see if your site is getting hits for any keywords. If your site is getting hits, but not for what you are targeting then I would start looking at new keyword targets. You may have keywords that have too high of competition. I know you are in a hurry to start getting business, but the worst mistake is rushing for high traffic all at once.

 Find New Keywords

Start with an outline on paper if you have to. What are you selling? What would someone type into Google to find your product or service? Let's start with an easy example. I want to find a dentist in Jacksonville, Florida. Now the keywords 'dentist in Jacksonville' is going to be high competition. If you have a new site you may want to look for a long tail keyword with lower competition. One tool that is very important is Google's keyword planner. Now the keyword planner does not give exact results, but can give you a good idea of what people are searching for. The keyword planner is under Google Adwords and you can use it without an actual Adwords campaign. You can start with choosing Jacksonville, FL as your city or another depending on where you are targeting. It can't hurt to start with putting in 'dentist in Jacksonville', which will give you an idea for other keywords. Look for ones that have a search volume of at least 10 and shows a - in competition or the word 'low'. You need to start somewhere to start getting traffic.

Starting with low website traffic keywords will eventually lead your site to being able to target higher volumes in the future. So if you found a keyword like 'affordable dentist in Jacksonville FL'. This is not a researched keyword, but only a made up example. This is a long tail keyword because it has more than 2 words in the keyword phrase. A long tail keyword is better because you will not only generate traffic from the exact phrase, but also segmented words from it. If no one else has this phrase on your site then you have a high chance that when those 10 people search on it, then your site will come up. Those 10 people tell Google that your site is relevant to that phrase. Eventually that keyword phrase can turn into more traffic. The reason for this is that you have already showed search engines that you have a phrase that is popular and people are clicking on, so you also have a change of appearing under affordable dentist, affordable dentist in Jacksonville, dentist in Jacksonville FL, and so on.

Now you can't take a keyword and throw it on your site and expect to rank. There are some industries like doctors, lawyers, and dentists that are very competitive. I have many clients that will come to me and say I want to rank for personal injury lawyer in New York City. There are hundreds of personal injury lawyers in New York. The problem is that when I go to their website I see all about personal injury laws and their site has personal injury on every page. But the one thing the site is missing is telling about the law firm and the actual lawyer or lawyers. Again start with lower competition keywords. The next step is building relevant content around that keyword. Find a separate long tail keyword for each page. When you find a keyword for each page make sure that the content flows without over using the keyword phrase.

Back to our example, search engines are smart and if you have your keyword phrase, 'affordable dentist in Jacksonville FL' exactly on the page 100 times, then it's going to send red flags. Use it with relevant words. Use the keyword phrase in the title, description, h1 tag, and in the content. This is just some of the basics of SEO keywords, so I hope this helps.

I have worked with hundreds and possible thousands of websites over 11 years. When the Google craze started we used to throw 100 keywords on a page and they would show up as #1 in Google. That doesn't work anymore and only gets you black listed. Search engine optimization changes with technology and I change strategies as it changes. SEO is not something that someone can learn overnight, it takes research and planning. Today I provide SEO services in Jacksonville FL for local companies and national. When we provide SEO services, each campaign is customized for each client. Our strategies change, as should yours as SEO evolves.

Starting Your Professional Website Design

These days anyone can build a website with the new builders out there. The problem is that although you can build a website or have it professionally built, it needs to generate money. You want a website that attracts potential customers. The first rule of building a professional website that attracts customers is not to rush it. At Jax Marketers, we provide professional web design Jacksonville and are here to give you tips for getting starting.

Things that are important in website design is your target audience and what you want your customers to find you under. When you first pull up a website you should know what it's selling within the first second that it appears. Many times I have pulled up websites that have a great design, but I have to dig to find out what the business is and what they are selling. If it wasn't for doing SEO work on these sites; I would have instantly clicked off. When people search the web, they are usually looking for something specific. Your goal in building or having someone build your website is to meet potential customers needs. The fact is whether you have a website or are building a new site, if you don't get the right traffic you are wasting money.

Website Pages and the Right URLs

We will talk about SEO and keyword research in future articles. When Google or other search engines crawl your site they look for relevant user friendly sites, including those that are mobile friendly. Research your target audience, your competitors, and the keywords you want to go under. There's no problem looking at your competitors sites and see what they are doing to be successful. Each page should be planned around the product or service. One mistake I see when working on websites that are already designed is cramming all services on one page. One example is an attorney that a customer that has a veterinarian clinic. They have 3 pages that list all their services on their home page. The second page of the site lists all of the services again and the last page is how to contact them. What I would recommend is yes highlighting services on the first page, but let's say they wanted to focus on vaccines. I would build a page around dog and cat vaccines or other services. If they keyword was dog vaccines in Detroit, then I would build a url including those keywords. Example being: www.vetclincx.com/dog-vacines-detroit

Planning a website's pages out before you go live is the most important step. Don't go live and try to change all your urls later or it could hurt the traffic you already have. As an SEO company in Jacksonville FL, we work with companies that want new websites or have existing sites. If you have an existing site, it's important to build it out to get the most potential out of it. If you have only 3 pages or only a few sentences, what we do it work on adding new pages and relevant content around your services with target keywords. It's never too late to fix your website to preform better or build the best website to get more customers. 

Welcome to Jax Marketers Blog

We created this blog to help local businesses learn about marketing, SEO, and web design. Many times businesses pay lots of money for SEO only to find their phones not ringing any more. In this blog we hope to share tips and tricks about local SEO Jacksonville and St. Augustine that can help your business with the right targeted traffic. If you have anything you need help with, feel free to send us an email at jaxmarketers@gmail.com