Panoptic Online Marketing celebrates a very special anniversary this month: it’s been one year since we teamed up with Kathy Estadt of Fresh Focus Group, our sales and marketing partner agency based in Daphne, Alabama. With a background in strategic planning, new product development, brand management and advertising, Kathy rounded out Panoptic’s capabilities nicely, providing insights that give our technical SEO and PPC staff a richer, more informed foundation on which to build online marketing strategies and execute plans for Kathy’s local clients. [Read more…]
Website Redesign and SEO Starter Package for Shoreline Pixels
Panoptic Online Marketing has been working with business owners along the beautiful Connecticut coastal towns that make up the Shoreline area. It’s a joy for our client account managers to get away from the grit and hustle of NYC to spend a few days meeting with clients, prospects and colleagues in Westbrook, Old Saybrook, Madison, Clinton and Guilford. The scenery is gorgeous; farms and forests, the beaches of the Long Island Sound. And local business owners that actively help each other — and the larger community– grow and thrive through their local Chambers of Commerce.
We’ve joined two of these: the Old Saybrook Chamber of Commerce and the Shoreline Chamber of Commerce; it’s through the latter that I met Peter Sikes of Shoreline Pixels, a Google Street View Trusted Photographer. Peter has been providing 360-degree virtual tours for a variety of businesses from New Haven to New London, and we are now teaming up to round out each of our respective business’s capabilities, share leads and deliver great results for our clients!
In getting started, we decided to work with Shoreline on the redesign of its website and make sure the new site was properly optimized for both visitors (hopefully potential customers) and search engines.
The new site provides for better responsiveness to mobile devices and provides Peter with an easy way to add new Virtual Tours to his portfolio, new Testimonials from business clients who have taken advantage of his expert service, and blog/news items for stuff that doesn’t fall naturally into other categories, for example, beautiful shots of moonrise over the Madison Surf Club. We also provided him with an intake form to collect more information from potential customers who may be looking for specific types of digital imaging services.
If you run a business with a physical location — could be a shop, restaurant or bar, hotel or even your manufacturing plant — you should consider a Google Street View for your website. Let us know if you’d like us to introduce you to Peter at Shoreline Pixels.
Never Too Boring to Blog
Let’s face the facts: some businesses are cool and have plenty to blog about. Think bars/restaurants, specialty retail shops, music promoters and anyone designing anything. Other businesses are perceived as not so cool. Lawyers, manufacturing consultants and auto mechanics are an essential part of the American business landscape — and just like every other small business they need to get their services out in front of potential clients and set themselves apart from their competition, but all too often the business owners assume they have nothing to say. Let us assure you: you are never too boring to blog.
Five Things to Look at If You’ve Never Looked at Google Analytics
I’m never very surprised when I meet business owners that don’t monitor their website traffic and usage reports. As a business owner, I know there are many things I probably should be doing that end up falling by the wayside, mostly due to time constraints. But business owners should learn how to read and interpret some basic analytics data – even if they only check it once in a while. Setting up and configuring a free Google Analytics account is a must if you want to start realizing some return on the investment you made in your website.
Once up and running, you’ll see data start to accrue in your Google Analytics. Here are five of the most basic reports that will give you a sense of how visitors reach your website and what they do once they’re there. [Read more…]
Email Marketing Tools: A Quick Comparison
Any small business that isn’t doing some form of email marketing is missing an essential opportunity to deliver their message directly into the inbox of ready and willing customers. Email is still a great way to engage an audience and still provides the best return on investment (ROI) when compared to other online marketing channels. [Read more…]
Three Reasons to Outsource Your SEO and Online Marketing
From time to time I offer SEO tutorials to clients or speak at events where small business owners come for a do-it-yourself SEO overview. I’m always happy to educate people around search engine optimization and all the techniques we employ in our daily work at the marketing agency. Somebody once asked me if I wasn’t afraid of “giving away” my expertise, but I love what I do and I enjoy educating others on how to leverage their websites to meet their business goals – that’s why I’m in business!
I’ve never worried about giving away expertise – the expertise is out there for anyone and everyone to find and study for themselves. The thing is, even when armed with the necessary knowledge not everyone has the time to work on their own SEO and content marketing – especially not the small to medium-sized business owners we work with. And if there is a single lesson I try to impart during my talks and tutorials, it’s that SEO and online marketing requires commitment and consistency. In almost every case I recommend that businesses – even those with in-house webmasters, design teams and marketing departments – outsource their SEO. Here are the three main reasons why
Mobile Usability Matters for Good SEO
It’s been a little over a year since Mobilegeddon rolled out; the Google algorithm update gave mobile-friendly websites a boost in mobile search rankings while penalizing sites that don’t provide a good user experience on mobile devices.
Because Google Search is in the business of delivering accurate and relevant results to its users, the Mobilegeddon update was their way of nudging webmasters towards the inevitable transition to a fully mobile world. Google now gives priority to sites that provide high-quality content with text that is readable and immediately usable on tablets and smartphones – that is, you shouldn’t have to scroll horizontally, or “pinch-zoom” to enlarge the text or use navigation menus or tap on buttons, etc.
Mobile browsing has been overtaking desktop browsing at an unimaginable pace. According to Pew Research, two-thirds of Americans now own smartphones and use them to access the web. So this push by Google is a good thing, and their guidelines for what constitutes “mobile friendliness” are clear and make sense. [Read more…]
Case Study: SEO for Ecommerce Website
Late last summer, a manufacturing client came to us for help with their e-commerce website, which they believed to be underperforming. With over 20 years in the hair care products business, our client was generating over a million dollars in revenue annually and was hoping to expand into online sales — a natural next step for any manufacturer. After all, selling products via the website is almost a no-brainer – it requires no additional sale force and has the potential to bring in as much, if not more, income than offline sales. [Read more…]
Social Media Readiness: Three Points to Consider
So you want to start promoting your business on social media – great idea! The benefits of social media marketing should be fairly obvious by now: greater exposure for your products and services, a chance to interact directly with customers and potential customers – there are even SEO benefits as Google, Bing and other search engines increasingly include social factors when assigning ranking values to web pages. [Read more…]
What is an SEO Audit?
So you’ve signed up a great SEO or digital agency to help you with your online marketing initiatives – congratulations! You’ve taken the first step in leveraging all the cool 21st century technology in the service of growing your business.
What can you expect from your shiny new marketing team? At Panoptic, the on-boarding of all new clients begins with a consultation call or meeting, followed by a comprehensive SEO Audit. [Read more…]
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