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June 9, 2014 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Should You Avoid a Niche-Designed Website?

On June 9, 2014 / page content, web design / Leave a Comment

Niche Websites: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

search-magnifying-glassThere are web design and hosting companies out there that focus on a specific industry or niche. Some create only Realtor websites, others specialize in car repair shop websites, some do only podiatrist websites, and so on. They have advantages and disadvantages, and for some situations they may be the perfect solution. But for others, they can be a very bad solution despite how attractive the process might appear.

The Good in niche websites

  • Considering their specialty, they may understand your target market or readership perfectly; better than other web designers.
  • Often you’ll have a single point of contact for web design, web programming, content writing, etc. instead of different individuals.
  • They may integrate with your back office systems like practice management systems, CRM (Customer Relations Management) systems, etc.
  • They may offer specialized, pre-programmed tools to enhance your website; things like mortgage calculators, diagnostic questionnaires, etc.
  • They may have pre-written content that can really expand and flesh out your website.

The Bad in niche websites

  • You may get stuck. If you’re unhappy with pricing or customer service, you may be unable to pick up your website and plunk it down at another web hosting company.
  • If you’re stuck, you may find yourself at the mercy of abnormally high recurring costs for your hosting.
  • Once you’re stuck, the company may have less motivation to update your site to current standards and your site may begin to look stale.
  • Limited templates may mean your site looks like a lot of other websites that are in your niche.
  • In some cases, you don’t own the rights to the content on your site; it may be legally owned by the website creator, not you, the website owner. That means if you want to move your site away from them, all the content needs to be rewritten from scratch.

The Ugly in niche websites — sometimes

You may be in a niche that doesn’t require SEO. Not every website needs to draw visitors from search engines. Someone new to a community may search online for a pediatrician or a podiatrist, but someone who needs a brain surgeon is very unlikely to search the web to find one. If you’re that brain surgeon, you rely on referrals from other doctors and patients, and your website serves to provide information to people who have already been referred to you. For you, a niche-specific website may be perfect.

But if you’re like most website owners you need to attract new customers, clients and patients via your website. You need to show up in search engines when people look for what you sell or what services you provide. Here is where niche-designed websites may get ugly.

Some may not permit many optimization techniques that will help your website show up for the searches your target is looking for.

Google hates duplicate contentBut perhaps the ugliest thing is something I listed above as a good thing: They almost all offer pre-written content for your website. If you’re a podiatrist, say, they may have content about bunions, ingrown toenails, ankle injuries, plantar fasciitis, and many other conditions of the foot and ankle. Good, right?

Not really.

Pre-written content in niche-designed websites may be duplicate content that hurts rankings.

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The Danger of Duplicate Content

Let’s say you want patients suffering from bunions to find you online. If a dozen local podiatrists have a page about bunions that says the same thing on all of their sites, Google is very unlikely to show more than one of them in search results. What good does it do the searcher if every one of the top ten results has exactly the same information for them?

How likely is this to happen? Well, in a search for a local doctor who treats bunions, I found a podiatrist’s web page that began with this sentence: “A bunion is a bone deformity caused by an enlargement of the joint at the base and side of the big toe (metatarsophalangeal joint).” That page has a good deal of relevant, interesting content. But then when I searched in Google for that precise sentence, I found quite literally thousands of web pages (2,800 to be exact) with exactly the same content. The likelihood that multiple podiatrists serving the same geographical community have the same page on their websites is very high. Any two or three such podiatrists are almost certainly not all going to show up on the first page of Google because of that duplicate content issue.

Those websites will be fine as brochure websites for people who already know the name of the doctor or medical practice, but almost worthless in terms of attracting people looking for a podiatrist on Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

Does your experience with a niche-designed website support or contradict this? Let us know in the comments below.

Find this helpful? If so, we’d appreciate a share on one of the social media buttons on the left or via the Click-to-Tweet above..

May 30, 2014 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

3 SEO Tips For Lawyers – Plus 1 Bonus Tip

On May 30, 2014 / local search, page content, SEO practices / Leave a Comment

21.9% of people needing a lawyer search online.Not everyone looks for a lawyer online.

However, according to Lawyernomics, search is the second most common way people look for an attorney.  If you want your share of those clients, SEO is essential so your website ranks near the top in Google, Yahoo & Bing.

Are you getting your share of clients from search? It’s easy to tell. Pretend you’re a potential client who doesn’t know the name of your firm or of any attorney on staff. Go to the search engine you use the most and see if you can find your website.

If you don’t show up in the top two or three pages, you’re missing out on those clients.

And if other local firms show up prominently, guess where those clients are going for representation?

21.9% of people in need of a lawyer search on Google, Yahoo or Bing.

Click To Tweet

1  — On-Page Local Optimization

Attorneys deal with clients on a face to face basis, so your clients are going to come from a certain radius of your offices. They’ll be searching for such terms as

  • Morristown child custody attorney
  • North Jersey workers compensation lawyer
  • New Brunswick DUI lawyer
  • Wayne NJ estate planning attorney
  • Lake George business attorney

As such, it’s important to have local terms on your web pages so the search engines know exactly where you practice. And it’s not enough to have a page entitled Service Area or something similar; search engines won’t readily connect the dots between that page and your page about child custody, workers comp or DUI. You need your geographical terms on every page.

2  — Local Search Directories

Local three-pack example from a search for a local attorney.You also need a presence on Google Places, Bing Local and Yahoo Local, well optimized for display in the local search results. Beyond that, you need to be listed at local oriented directories like Yelp, City Search, Insider Pages, Yellow Book, etc. It takes explicit action to ensure you’re listed in all those places with appropriate information about your firm.six

Lawyers need an optimized presence on the local pages of Google, Yahoo & Bing.

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3  — Focus on Sub-Practice Areas

Many firms concentrates in a limited number of practice areas. For sake of discussion, let’s say you practice family law and elder law. It’s not enough to have a Family Law page with a bullet list of sub-areas like divorce, mediation, custody issues, and child support and an Elder Law page that lists services like estate planning, wills, medicaid planning, trusts, elder care issues, probate, etc. You need a page about each of those detailed practice areas with meaningful content. Ensure there’s clear navigation on the site so a potential client can find information related to their specific concern.

Attorneys need a page about each of their detailed sub-practice areas

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Bonus Tip – Not everyone comes from search

Content is what converts visitors to clients.Clearly, many potential clients come not from search but via referral: from a friend or another attorney. Those people will still go to your website to check you out and verify your expertise and professionalism. Regardless of how a potential client ends up on your site, it’s up to your website to convert them into a paying client.

You need clarity, reader-friendly copy, appropriate calls to action (“Call now to schedule a free consultation”), and information about the attorneys on staff and their education and experience. But don’t make your content all about you  — you need a clear client-focus to show you’re goal is to solve your visitor’s problem, not to brag about your skills.

Need professional help making this happen? Rank Magic can help.

Find this helpful? If so, we’d appreciate a Like, Tweet or +1. The buttons are right here on the post for that.

We always welcome your comments below.

April 12, 2014 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Combat the Bounce

On April 12, 2014 / copywriting, page content, user experience / Leave a Comment

The Dreaded Bounce  — What Is It?

Visitors who bounce like this are bad for your rankings.
We’ve all done it. Clicked on a link to a web page somewhere and realized it’s not what we were really looking for. So we click the Back button in our browser and move on. That’s a bounce: we bounced right back to where we came from.

Is a Bounce Bad?

Clearly, a bounce isn’t exactly good; that visitor didn’t buy anything. But is it really bad? Or just … meh?

Actually, it’s pretty bad. It’s not just a “so what?” matter.

When someone bounces, especially when they landed on your site from a search page, that tells the search engine that (at least to that visitor) your page wasn’t a good match for what they were searching for. And if your page isn’t a good match for whatever keyword phrase was searched, the search engine probably won’t want to rank your page as highly next time.

This can hurt you no matter how well your on-page keyword optimization has been done, and no matter how many relevant pages on other sites are linking to your page. Bouncing is a negative ranking factor.

Bounces Are Bad for Google Rankings. How Do You PreventTthem??

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How Do You Prevent Bounces?

This is where you need the skills of a copywriter. You need to make your page uniquely informative  — or fun  — or surprising  — or outrageous  — or provocative. And unique. SEO techniques can’t help you with this. Nothing done with search engines in mind can help you with this. You need to craft each web page with your visitors in mind. What do they need? What are they looking for? What will they like?

And you need to ask them to do something. “Click for more.” “Sign up for our newsletter.” “Tell us what you think.” “What are your questions about this?” “Buy now.” These are calls to action, and their efficacy is undisputed. Why do you suppose when you order a fast food burger they always ask you “Want fries with that?” It’s because they sell lots more fries that way. It can work for you, too.

Find this post useful? Then please click on what Share buttons on the left. Or Tweet it with the button above.  (See how I’m using calls to action here?)

Give us your feedback in the comments below.

Need help with your own website’s rankings? Rank Magic can help.

March 9, 2014 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

Don’t Optimize for Google

On March 9, 2014 / Google, page content, user experience / 2 Comments

Huh???

Sure, Google gets twice as many searches as Yahoo and Bing combined, but you shouldn’t optimize for Google. You shouldn’t optimize for Yahoo and Bing either.

It’s the User. It’s always the User.

A poor UX will get you nowhere with Google.Identifying the right keywords and doing on-page keyword optimization is arguably the easy part. The hard part is developing a compelling UX (User Experience). In a competitive niche, that’s what separates the high flyers on Google from the also-rans.

Let’s think about that for a second. It’s always been Google’s goal to present the best sources of information for any given search. That’s why you won’t find multiple listings on the first page of results that all have the same content. They’re out there  — just look at websites developed by vertical market website vendors; they often have pages with lots of information, but pages that are the same on many other websites. Google never wants to show you more than one of those: the rest are all redundant.

User Experience

But it’s more than just having unique content on your site (although that is an irreducible essential). Your site needs to be easy to use, easy for users to find what they want, full of information not easily found elsewhere … it needs a good UX. That’s always been a #1 priority for Google and in their statement of philosophy headlined “Ten things we know to be true”, three of them relate directly to UX:

  • Focus on the user and all else will follow.
  • Fast is better than slow.
  • You don’t need to be at your desk to need an answer.

I’ve written about all of those things in this blog before, but it wouldn’t hurt you to review some of them.

Focusing on the user is Google’s #1 value. We’ve gathered all the stuff we’ve posted on that subject in our User Experience category.

The speed issue is always a concern when we prepare optimization recommendations for our clients, and all of our posts on that subject are neatly combined into our Page Speed tag.

Recognition that people are increasingly accessing the web on their phones is inescapable. But many websites that look great on a desktop or laptop, or even on a tablet may be close to unusable on a phone. We’ve written about that, too.

What are your thoughts? Do you agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below.

Like this post? Please say so with the Like button above or the +1 button below. Or tweet it with the button up top. Thanks for sharing.

How does your UX stack up against your competitors? Need some help beating them out in the rankings? If so, Rank Magic can help
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October 25, 2013 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Do You Write Compelling Headlines?

On October 25, 2013 / blogs, copywriting, email, marketing, page content, social media / 1 Comment

Are you writing good headlines?

You need to write attention grabbing headlines!Your web page or blog post or newsletter may be astoundingly helpful or surprisingly informative, great fun to read and generally a gem that your target market really needs to know about and read. But if your subject line or headline isn’t good “click bait”  — something that will make it impossible to pass up without clicking on it  —  no one will know.

You need to grab them with the subject line. In an email newsletter, it’s the subject of the email. In a social media post it’s the headline you give the post or the first few words of the post. On a web page  it’s the page title that will show up in search results. And in a blog post it’s also the page title, but that often duplicates the primary headline of the post.

How to write good headlines for SEO.

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The Value of Good Examples

One thing I’ve often found helpful, especially when a headline or subject line seems beyond my grasp, is to look at some examples.
Info Marketing Blog reprinted 100 great advertising headlines with a brief discussion of each. Review them and you’ll get a sense of what elements go into a real compelling, click bait subject line.

The Financial Brand has s helpful set of rules for creating a killer subject line, even though their focus is financial.

From an advertising perspective, Crazy Egg has a list of nine steps to follow to create a compelling subject line or headline.

And Position Digital has an excellent set of seven steps to a compelling SEO-appropriate headline.

If you don’t get enough inspiration from these sources, try searching in Google, Yahoo or Bing for headline ideas or how to write a headline. There are some great ideas to get you through that writer’s block.

BTW, if you found this helpful, please share it with friends: Like it or tweet it with the buttons on the left or the Click-to-Tweet above.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts in the comments below.

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