Your digital visibility matters to you (or it should if it doesn’t yet). What your customers see when they search you online can actually directly affect your bottom line. What prospective customers find when they look for you or businesses like you influences their purchasing decisions. So how much, really, do your rankings matter?

In reality, rankings should matter, but you should stop caring about them.

Why Your Rankings Should Matter Less

It can be a lot to wrap your brain around if you’ve looked for companies that specialize in digital marketing, such as we do, to hear that your ranking on search is something you should not care about. Maybe you’re new to digital marketing and have heard about the importance of rankings. Maybe you’ve worked with many companies similar to Clix and have been told many times about how much your rankings matter. I’m hear to tell you…stop caring about your rankings.

Here are some reasons why:

You can’t put a click in the bank – This is one of Jason’s, our CEO’s, favorite phrases, and it’s true. A click to your site does not make you money. A conversion from that click is what matters. Factors such as site usability, the content you have, how engaging your videos are, and what kind of message your website tells people lead to the customers that convert. Customers who call or fill out your form are of more value and importance compared to how your company ranks for a particular keyword.

Rankings are just a piece – The metrics you measure for business success should include rankings, but they are not the end all, be all of business. In truth, your rankings only tell part of the story of what goes on in your business. When you work with a digital marketing company, your digital visibility goes beyond only the rank of your website. Depending on your project, it might include improving website design; creating a series of videos to tell your story or share relevant information; giving you data about the quality of your calls so you can make informed decisions about your customer service; and analyzing trends in your industry, among a myriad of other services.

Think themes, not keywords – While digital marketing often means focusing on a list of keywords and where your site stacks against competitors, looking at how you appear within themes is a huge part of giving your site the broadest digital footprint possible. We often talk about the “halo effect” with your keyword themes, and the most successful campaigns focus on more than just a preset list of terms. Rather, showing up for a full range of topics related to your industry is the ideal circumstance, and our efforts go towards making that a reality.

Picture growth – You know your business is successful when you have to stretch into new territory. Part of the measure of that might mean hiring new people to manage your processes, trying new things to better position your business for success, and receiving more revenue than ever before. When digital marketing works well as a sole marketing campaign or in conjunction with your other efforts, growth is the ultimate outcome.

If you like the idea of growing your business, seeing success within your industry through visibility around many topics, and focusing on metrics other than rankings, we can help! Contact Clix to see how we can be your partner for success!

The post Why You Should Stop Caring About Rankings appeared first on Clix.

Other companies might have their own proprietary system for managing your website, but what you might not realize is your website will not be transferable. In WordPress, your website can transfer from theme to theme. There might be updates and revisions to modify, but your content will not be lost. At Clix, we do not lease websites, and we never hold digital assets hostage. Your website is your property—our job is to make it beautiful and functional.

Is WordPress Easy to Use and Good for User Experience?

For a lot of people, updating websites is scary and something they just avoid, but when it comes to WordPress, it’s something we do often and without fear. Other CMS, such as Drupal or Magento, wait to do one large update about once per year that usually breaks your website and requires a web developer to fix. With this in mind, most people won’t update their site and will become outdated. But WordPress does small regular updates, which we do at Clix quarterly on all of our websites. These updates help your site become the cutting edge in the web industry, helping your web rankings in both speed and user experience.

WordPress is an open source CMS that web developers are constantly building new plugins and responsive themes for. No other content management system has this extensive of a library of resources for free downloads, places to purchase more powerful plugins, or online community forums. In other content management systems, if there isn’t a plugin readily available, you have to hire a developer to create what you need, which can quickly add to the total cost of a web build and throw off your budget.

There are all kinds of plugins from Yoast SEO that helps your site to be more search engine friendly, from Smush, which shrinks your image file size, to Better WordPress Minify, which allows you to minify your CSS and JS files for a faster page load time. And if there isn’t a free plugin that fit your needs, there are more robust plugins we can purchase or source a community forum for help. When you use WordPress and partner with Clix for your digital marketing, there is no problem we can’t find a solution for.

WordPress and Responsive Design

Just a few years ago, you would have to design a mobile version of your website so it would look right on your phone. Now WordPress creates responsive websites so when you look at your website on your phone, tablet, or desktop, it adapts to fit the correct resolution for a better user experience and page speed load time.

WordPress is a powerful CMS, and when used to its fullest potential, your company can reap the benefits of its capabilities. Learning how to use your WordPress site might seem daunting, but WordPress is very easy to use, and there are many resources online for beginners. Here at Clix, we want to give you the most advanced site, but also one you will feel comfortable using on your own. WordPress achieves both of these needs.

If you’re ready to use WordPress and partner with a robust digital marketing team, contact us to learn more.

The post WordPress: A Robust, Flexible Digital Marketing CMS appeared first on Clix.

So how do you know who to trust?

First, you have a face to face meeting with the digital company’s representative. You should get a good feel whether or not this person is sincere and do they understand this business. Sincerity is hard to fake. Knowledge, even harder. Before closing a meeting with a prospective client. I always ask them to ask themselves one question “Am I someone you can feel that you trust?” If the answer is yes, then we move on to the next step “If not you need to find someone that you can.”

Secondly, can the company show you proof of past successes with clients? Not promises – proof. I like to show prospects evidence of success. Everyone wants to be on the first page of Google. We can show you how we’ve obtained that for specific clients. We also have case studies that show real proof of increases in website traffic and rankings as well as conversions. Success in digital marketing is a process. It takes a little time. If someone promised you quick results, that should be a red flag.

Lastly, does this company do business with complete transparency? We provide quarterly reports showing progress in all phases of your campaign as they relate to the goals we set. We track all conversions. We do this with things like call tracking telephone numbers and website form submissions on your website. The tracking number will only show to those that landed on your website by doing a Google/search engine search. This way, our clients know how many forms and calls they received due to our efforts. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s all about clicks. Nobody ever put a click in the bank.

I’ve outlined above the three most important factors when choosing a digital company that you can trust. Clearly, there are others, but if a company can’t pass the test of the big three, then they should not be considered.

I tell my clients often that I may not always tell you what you want to hear – anyone can do that. I will always tell you what you need to hear. I believe this is an integral part of building the trust that leads to a successful business partnership.

Any company can be a vendor. We’re not interested in that. We want to be a true partner. If this sounds appealing to you, contact Clix to discuss how we can make a difference in your business.

The post 3 Traits of Trustworthy Digital Marketing Agencies appeared first on Clix.

Creative and logical design will not directly affect your Google Ranking in a technical sense. Creative design is not built for Google – it is built for the user (AKA your client or customer). The ranking increases are a byproduct of having a user-friendly design and functionality. Since the Panda update in 2011, user metrics have become a very important factor in digital marketing.

With that said, I think we need to explore what Google is and how it is supposed to work.

Google, in essence, was created to help users find websites they deem useful or informative. The results that appear on screen after a search query are determined by an algorithm devised by Google to mimic what they think a user wants or, more often than not, by user proximity or previous user history/experience. This algorithm is organic, ever advancing as marketers(and users) become more savvy and obviously to help Google’s business model.

A good analogy is to think of SEO initiatives as advertisements for a retail store and your website as a salesperson or the store’s layout. The advertisements get the person to the store. The layout of the store can affect shopping patterns with the salesperson answering questions and, ultimately, making the sale.

OK, that is neat and all, but how will design effect my Google rankings?

To quote Moz:

“When a search engine delivers a page of results to you, it can measure the success of the rankings by observing how you engage with those results. If you click the first link, then immediately hit the back button to try the second link, this indicates that you were not satisfied with the first result. Search engines seek the “long click” – where users click a result without immediately returning to the search page to try again. Taken in aggregate over millions and millions of queries each day, the engines build up a good pool of data to judge the quality of their results.”

SEO tactics and clean development can only take a website so far. When all of these optimization tools are sharpened, we turn to content and personal interaction with the site. So we know that Google’s algorithm can be directly affectedby how a user interacts with your website. Generally, when a person is an interested party, they interact with the website more (exploring multiple pages and more time spent on site can have a direct effect on Google’s ranking system).

Within this user visit, you have two major aspects that contribute to personal interaction: User Experience(UX) and User Interface(UI). These two facets of design often blend together, in unison, to help a user find what he or she is looking for (or maybe discover new services products, or ideas).

So, What is User Experience & User Interface?

User Experience, or UX, is the overall experience of a person using a product such as a website or computer application, especially in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use.

User Interface, or UI is the means by which the user and a computer system interact, in particular the use of input devices and software.

So basically, UI is how a person interacts with the website, and UX is how that interaction makes the user feel. Common sense tells us that a slick, easy, and fun interface often leads to a better experience. This experience is monitored by Google, giving better designs a rankings or results bump.

The post The Importance of Creativity & Design on Google Rankings appeared first on Clix.

What do you need to answer the “why?” In short, anything you can get your hands on. It’s surprisingly easy to complete a conversion optimization review and implement changes these days as long as you know about the tools available. These tools, along with proper setup and segmentation, can make information gathering a breeze.

What is Conversion Optimization?

Conversion optimization describes reviewing and changing a website based on user behavior to make the most of the elements that users interact with the most. Not only is software used to make judgment calls on what changes to make, but understanding of best practices on website design and technical updates help us along the way. Knowing what users are doing when they land on a page is crucial to determine what changes, if any, a page needs to better convert interested users into leads, ultimately growing your business.

At Clix, we always think about using the strategies below to hone our conversion tracking and optimization:

• Think about each contact opportunity individually. What reason would a customer have to contact us here? Are they being given the chance to do so?
• Consider tracking options. What information is being collected, and who is it being sent to? Is a phone number or a form more appropriate?
• Make sure the proper tracking it set up, and layer as much as possible. For example, if a phone number is the primary contact method, make sure it has its own tracking number, that it has a corresponding event such as a Google Analytics goal, and that if no sensitive information is being collected, that the call is being recorded and monitored for quality on the part of the sales rep.

Those of us who grew up with School House Rock remember that knowledge is power. Now, with the power of the Internet in our hands, knowledge has never been easier to access when you incorporate digital marketing into your company’s business growth strategy. Even a simple call tracking system or a form setup can at least replace a hunch with concrete information. For a lot of businesses, that’s an important first step.

While it’s not a quick process, gathering the information needed to find out why your website is or isn’t working can start today. Over time, you’ll be able to convert potential customers more and more effectively because you can anticipate some of their behaviors. And that is the kind of knowledge that carries real power.

If you’re ready to take the next step and use strategy to drive your website’s layout, ultimately leading to better user experience and increased leads from digital marketing, contact our experienced inbound marketing team for help!

The post Conversion Optimization 101 appeared first on Clix.

A question we often have to address here at Clix relates to if a client owns his or her website. No matter the industry, identifying website ownership, the significance of it, and where Clix comes into play are important factors.

Not sure if you own your domain? WHOIS allows for you to search your company’s website and look for elements that would be indicative that you own your website. Although true ownership circumstances can vary, whether you’re listed on the contact information and whether you have access to the domain’s registrar account are typical indicators. Overall, by understanding your website ownership, Clix can get a better picture of priority items when crafting your custom digital marketing campaign.

Your website domain is a significant asset to your company as a whole. Oftentimes a client may work with a company who builds and manages websites for a specific industry – for example, a chiropractor or law firm. Although the company “specializes” in one field, it does not mean you are getting top-of-the-line service and custom content specific to your business.

Although you may think that your site is rich in content and informational for users, be careful. At times, a company may use duplicate content across the board for those businesses in the same industry. Therefore, what you believe to be a solid section of content on your site, could also appear on a competitor’s site, or elsewhere on the Internet. Thus, you are not providing visitors a unique, rich experience that accurately depicts your brand.

Importance of Owning your Website

At first, you may think duplicate content is not a significant issue. However, your site can end up not ranking as well if the same copy appears in multiple areas. We know you take pride in your reputation and products/services. Therefore, a simple name swap in the content along with the copy and paste treatment is not what you want to happen to your company.

Are you curious if you have duplicate content on your site? A simple content evaluation may shed light on the state of your online presence.

I own my domain name. Does that mean I own my content?

When the time comes for you to leave the chiropractic specific web/marketing company, you will most likely have to work from the ground up to rebuild the content on your site. Some companies leave the partnership with a marketing firm owning their domain, while others do not. Regardless of that factor, if you provider “wrote” the content for your site, you most likely you do not own the content.

As you can tell, working industry specific companies claiming to specialize in a certain area can be a slippery slope. What once seemed like a fast way to get your website up and running could quickly turn into a nightmare. Overall, owning your content and domain are important factors related to your website.

Why should I partner with Clix?

At Clix, we want to be your digital marketing partner through the entire process. If you do not currently own your domain, we can work with you and your provider(s). From there, our team of strategists will create a custom plan that is tailored to the individual needs of your business.

One area we typically begin to address and plan out at the beginning is duplicate content. Our team will work to create not only user-friendly content, but also develop information that is applicable and relevant to users. Supplying your audience with unique content that they are looking for will help contribute to their overall view of your business and experience on your site. We constantly evaluate website performance in a variety of areas to help you ultimately reach your goals.

For more information on how to improve your website with Clix, contact us today to help us better understand your needs and goals as a business.

The post Do You Own or Lease Your Website? appeared first on Clix.

The flexibility we have at Clix allows us to adapt to these ongoing changes and have open lines of communication with our clients, keeping them in the loop. This is what makes Clix unique in the market. We are not a vendor – we are a partner.

Digital marketing is essential for businesses today. The days of relying on a printed directories, billboards, and other dated means of promoting your business are long gone. Every day, more and more people are utilizing the power of the Internet to get their questions answered, so it’s important that your business be a resource for this inquiries. That’s what we do here at Clix. We focus our efforts on ensuring that your website is that resource.

Depending on the nature of your business, there are so many ways to effectively advertise and marketing your business online. There’s SEO, SEM, social media, e-mail marketing, pay per click, etc…. where do you begin? What’s the best option?

It can be difficult, if not impossible, to decide where to go if you decide to start these efforts on your own or hire a catch-all company that doesn’t have strategy at the core of what it does. We can help you navigate through the clutter that is “online advertising” and offer a solution that best fits the needs of your business. Plus, since the Internet is ever-changing, having a team that can adjust plans and shift quickly when software changes and Google algorithm updates impact our efforts is a real bonus to our clients.

These long-term efforts can have a tremendous impact on the bottom line. Our clients who commit to the process have seen a profound return on investment over time. And that is key to what we do. Looking at your digital marketing as a long-term plan allows us to have the flexibility to make strategic decisions that can not only adapt to change but are robust enough to withstand it. There is no “silver-bullet” when it comes to online advertising. Google is getting smarter every day. Thus, your website must be technically sound, cater to your audience, and be a valuable resource in the market place. That’s what we do here at Clix.

If you’re looking for a truly adaptable partnership that can make a measurable impact on your business, using creative strategy and reporting along the way, contact us to learn how we can help.

The post What Does Adaptability Mean in Digital Marketing? appeared first on Clix.

Our business development team understands that in order to grow your business, it is our job at Clix to understand the human side of the work you do. We get to know your leadership team and learn what drives you. Our team discusses your products or services and what makes you stand out from the crowd. We want to know your goals and are willing to adapt to the changes in your goals over time, often adjusting our strategy when necessary. Using digital marketing and the various tools and software available to us, we create strategy that focuses on what our partners need and want from their business.

The human side of business not only needs a dynamic team to work as your marketing partner, but a willing and open minded client that understands the expectations we have in place for them. We thrive on communication and make the best progress on campaigns where there is a collaborative creative process. We love coming up with creative solutions, and we’re most successful when our clients are engaged in the ongoing process of improving their campaign. At Clix, we are ready and willing to listen to the concerns you have about the progress of your campaign.

The benefits of collaboration go beyond the business itself. As your business grows, the employees and families who have contributed to your success also see the ways in which their success is affected. Communities can benefit from the human side of business growth because companies can better contribute and give back to them not only through jobs, but through charity events and fundraising sponsorships.

Digital marketing offers up your business to potential growth you may not have envisioned. You might find yourself having to hire more people to keep up with the number of leads you get per day because your local citations have been standardized and the content on your website is a robust resource. You may find customers tell you the information you provide on your social media platforms enticed them to call, or the follow up emails you are sending through marketing automation provided them customer service no one else has. And to think this can all begins with simply becoming a partner with a robust, adaptable, and knowledgeable digital marketing partner.

If you have a desire to make your business better through tapping into the potential that digital marketing provides, you can go far. But you also need the right partner who will be transparent and honest with you along the way. Clix is that partner and has the track record to prove it. If you have questions about any of the services we offer, don’t hesitate to reach out.

The post The Human Side of Business Development appeared first on Clix.

Digital marketing offers a number of solutions for getting honest, constructive customer feedback. Through a variety of channels such as automation marketing and a focus on local citations, you can use the tools and software digital marketing offers to collect and analyze evaluations of the services or products you provide.

Automation Marketing and Customer Feedback

One of the most clear-cut ways to use digital marketing to benefit your business, automation marketing, allows you to create campaigns that drive engagement and feedback from customers. Campaigns might be focused on surveys to gauge customer satisfaction, or even something as simple as an automated follow up to an opened promotional email can help you determine whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off.

But automation does not exist in a vacuum, and neither do any of your other marketing efforts. An effective automation marketing campaign still relies on high quality customer service from your team, such as personal phone calls to customers or email checkins to touch base when appropriate.

Your automation campaigns are also an opportunity to increase usage of your website, using blogs, website pages, and other digital resources to benefit your customers, giving them the right information they need to make decisions.

Customer Service Software

When people think about digital marketing, they might not realize they can use tools like tracking numbers to not only record their own business calls, but to make more informed decisions about what their staff are doing on the front lines. Using call recording can open up a lot of avenues for internal improvement and allow business owners to hear the questions their customers ask in real time.

At Clix, we have had clients use call recordings to make informed decisions about their staffing and better serve customers’ needs in the office. We also take a proactive approach and give recommendations following our call reports in order to continue to be an active partner in your business success.

Form fills also provide our clients insight into the information customers are seeking. More often than not, having a report of the number of form fills and quality of leads helps our clients determine new information about customers they might have thought about or make adjustments to their website copy in order to move their campaign along. Plus, unlike having an email address on your website – an email address that could be in many other places or handed out by customers via word of mouth – a lead from a form fill can be directly correlated to the success of your digital marketing campaign.

Website Content and Customer Participation

Many businesses may not realize the kind of resources available to them to make their customer service even better, but using your website and other avenues for sharing your content can make a difference. From regular blogs and news updates, to using video and social media to drive engagement to your website, a robust website can set you apart from competitors in big ways.

If you’re ready to use digital marketing to gain customer feedback and grow your business, contact us today!

The post How to Use Digital Marketing to Get Customer Feedback appeared first on Clix.

Basically, there’s three reasons, but first I want to start out with the answer to, “What is local SEO?”

Local SEO goes beyond just making a Google map listing. Local SEO is the active process of building out necessary citations on industry directories or industry listing websites. Basically, this serves three main purposes, and these are very basic and high level. However, each of these is essential to making headway on your business’s web presence.

3 Important Purposes of Local SEO for National Campaigns

The first purpose of Local SEO is backlinks. A backlink occurs when one website links to another one. This may be done because the site being linked to is viewed as a resource or has some kind of reference or relationship they share.

By building out these profiles, every one of the citation websites – or 90%+ of them – ask for a link to the website. Once the information is published, that link is published. So, when an entity like Angie’s List, Superpages, or something of that nature publishes your profile, that very large and very authority website posts a link straight to you. You need these links to be seen as an authoritative page in the eyes of Google.

Even if the links are “no follow” links, or links that website administrators may label as such so they are not counted in the search engines, they are still valuable to the end user because they provide a gateway to your site. So if you find a directory listing you want to update but also know that the link will be a “no follow” link, it is still a good idea to make sure it points to your site so the person who comes to this site and finds you has a direct link to your website.

Secondly, a campaign focused on your industry directories and websites allows for categorization. Entities like Google My Business Pages actually ask for explicit category and tagging information. Once the profile is published, that category and tagging information goes to Google. Google likes when everybody uses their products for obvious reasons. So, if we can actually physically tag and categorize your business and URL in Google databases, we absolutely should go ahead and do that.

Lastly, building out your citations leads to increased digital visibility. Generally being found in more places is a part of every digital marketing campaign and leads to positive changes. The goal is to make you available when and where people are looking.

So, the next time you think, “I don’t really need to be in the maps because I don’t really want people coming to my office,” take a step back and think of the much larger picture here. Local SEO serves many different purposes, and these are just the top three that pertain to everyone, from mom and pop businesses with one storefront to large corporations with a national presence.

The post How National Brands Can Leverage Local SEO appeared first on Clix.