Proliferation

Jun 09
0

What UX Means for Your SEO Strategy

By | Google, SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

There’s a problem with the way many companies are approaching SEO. We’re not talking about a problem at a few agencies in Utah. We’re talking about an industry-wide issue, and the issue is this: In an industry where SEO rules supreme, professionals are starting to treat SEO as war for keywords — when in reality SEO is a war for the consumer. You win that war through UX.

What Is UX?

UX is the standard abbreviation for “user experience.” Let’s be frank — it doesn’t matter how many customers end up on your website if they don’t stay. You could effectively use keywords all day long and have the worst UX on the World Wide Web — if your UX stinks, say goodbye to your customers.

How Does UX Work With SEO?

UX and SEO may seem like awkward stepsiblings at first, each on one end of the spectrum professionals have created in their minds of what makes up a successful Web approach. That’s simply not true. UX and SEO actually together work in beautiful harmony.

Think about it. The whole point of SEO is to get visitors onto your website and turn them into customers. In order to do that, you need to create an experience that attracts people, grabs hold of their interest and helps them accomplish what they came to do. It doesn’t matter if they came to book a trip to Moab, Utah or to buy a new DVD player as long as your website helps them do that in the easiest way possible.

Is UX Really That Important?

Don’t sacrifice UX to try and satisfy a Google algorithm. Amazing UX will naturally create an increase as happy customers share and distribute information about their experiences. Sally in Utah will be more than happy to tell her friend Peggy a thousand miles away about the awesome website she just found. She’ll probably tell all her blog followers too.

Keywords will always be important, but they’re a baseline that Google assumes you are already doing. UX is the new frontier of SEO, and as Google’s algorithms become more sophisticated, you can bet that UX will have a dramatic impact on rankings.

Jun 08
0

Twitter’s New Changes: What They Mean for Marketing

By | digital marketing, marketing agencies, Social Media | No Comments

Lift up your voice and rejoice! Twitter just announced some major changes that will make life at marketing agencies much easier. The changes are a step towards loosening Twitter’s strict 140-character limit in tweets, while still preserving its signature micro blogging charm.

Adios “.@”

 Under Twitter’s current formula, tweets starting with another user’s Twitter handle were only seen by the shared followers of the person tweeting and the recipient. Twitter users created the “.@” to circumvent this rule. When the new changes take effect, users can do away with that pesky period before the handle. Tweets beginning with a handle will be seen by everyone instead of being restricted.

Media Files

 In the past, photos, GIFs, videos, polls and quote tweets could take up to 25 characters each. The new rules do not count media files towards the character total. This is especially welcomed news for marketing agencies that rely increasingly on visual and interactive elements to engage with audiences. Not having to worry about characters being sucked up by media files means more room to be creative and share your message.

Twitter Handles in Replies

 When replying to another user, Twitter handles will no longer count toward the character limit, with one exception: Only names already in the conversation will be exempt from counting. Adding new handles to the conversation will still count toward the character limit.

Retweet Yourself

 That’s right, Kanye. The new Twitter will allow you to retweet and quote yourself. You’re so vain. You probably think this tweet is about you … oh wait, it is.

When Will It Come to Pass?

 In the blog post announcing the changes, Twitter’s Senior Project Manager Todd Sherman said users could expect the updates to roll out in the next few months. He also announced plans to help users get even more from their tweets. Marketing agencies can only hope that means URL links will one day not count toward those precious 140 characters either. Twitter gods, hear our plea.

Jun 06
0

How Google and SEO Changed the Marketing Workforce

By | Google, SEO, Utah, Utah SEO | No Comments

If not for Google, we wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it. Thanks to Google, the increased need for digital content gave rise to a whole new workforce from Utah to the East Coast — and it all started as part of the genesis of online search.

Early in the internet days, search engines like Google made it possible to find information more easily online. To be found in a search, websites had to be relevant, which in the earlier days of the internet (just as now) meant your site had to be associated with certain keywords. This gave rise to what we now call search engine optimization, or SEO.

Initially, some companies would try to game the search algorithms and increase relevance by stuffing their pages full of keywords just to appear more relevant than they actually were. Meanwhile, more forward-thinking SEO firms in Utah were already focused on content and the user experience.

Luckily, Google had higher standards for what a website should be, and a cluttered mess of poorly placed keywords didn’t cut it. To respond to low-quality sites, Google continued to update its algorithms to reward sites that produce content relevant to their markets and keywords, while punishing those with poor content and shady SEO strategies.

This need for relevant — and most importantly — high-quality content changed the way companies approach marketing, and thus gave birth to what we know as content marketing today. Consumers in Utah and elsewhere suddenly had all the information they needed at their fingertips, so it was up to brands to be a part of the conversation by publishing their own content. If brands weren’t providing potential customers information they needed, customers could easily find it somewhere else.

Content became king because it allowed brands to improve SEO in Utah and nationwide, but more importantly, it started connecting consumers with brands they can trust.

This need for content caused a massive shift in how businesses approach marketing. Suddenly videographers, writers and designers were more in demand than ever. Digital marketing agencies popped up to provide these services, and artists of all media types had the opportunity to make an impact in the business world by developing content for brands in need. We thank Google for having the foresight to promote high quality content and give so many people the opportunity to enter the workforce doing what they love.

Jun 02
0

Fiverr, Freelancer, or Fusion: Who’s the Best Pick for Your Site Design?

By | web development, website design | No Comments

There are a lot of ways to get a website built. You can build one from ones of those janky site builders or hack one together on your own with WordPress and a $90 template. For a lot of small businesses in Utah, that might seem like a solid web development decision, but for those who want to stand out, it ain’t gonna cut it.

The best thing you can do is build something fresh from scratch. If you want to stand out among millions of businesses from Utah to Ukraine, it’s the only option you have. The question is, then, who can make it happen?

A lot of businesses are tempted to use freelancers, and several websites have popped up over the last few years that promise to set you up with a professional to get things done. But can they make the cut when it comes to web development?

Fiverr

Fiverr allows you to buy five dollar services from experts. The catch, of course, is that five dollars will usually just get you a quick fix on an existing website. Building something from scratch probably isn’t really feasible. For getting small, quick changes to what you already have, Fiverr might not be such a bad idea, but proper web development for your Utah business? Nah.

Freelancer

Freelancer connects you with an expert or experts who can complete an entire web project. You post information about the job, the scope, and your budget, and wait for someone to pick up your assignment. The trouble here is that while you can pay Freelancer to help you find people, you may not be totally certain about their skill set, ability to understand your needs and so forth. Finding a reputable, experienced freelancer can be a challenge through services like these.

Fusion 360

The awesome thing about hiring an agency for web development (particularly one based near you in Utah), is that you can find one with a proven track record and one that has lots of work samples. An agency such as Fusion 360 has a much, much more hands-on approach as they get to know your brand and we offer supplementary services outside of basic protocol. Content, video production, custom imagery and more are all things we can provide in addition to just the site design.

Ultimately, it’s up to the individual business whether it’s worth it for them to go the inexpensive route and risk being frustrated with a dull site, or find a firm that can deliver the killer digital properties they’re really looking for in a web design.

Jun 02
0

How to Repurpose Content Without Killing SEO

By | SEO, Utah SEO | No Comments

Coming up with new content ideas is the bane of any digital marketer’s existence. Let’s get real. How many articles about SEO can you really write before it all begins to sound the same? Simply republishing articles doesn’t work. Google can sniff out that ploy in seconds, and it will hurt your SEO more than help. So, what can you do to make your life easier and still improve your SEO? Repurpose content.

Repurposing is different from republishing. Republishing is simply copy and pasting, while repurposing is a recycling and refurbishing of old ideas. This can be done in several ways. We’ll share a few of our favorites.

Video

Video is a great way to repurpose content. Say you’ve written a blog post on the history of Utah. You can take this same idea, even the same information, and present it in a new way through video. Your new video on the history of Utah can be shared in ways that the blog post could not. It will also reach audiences that prefer video to the written word.

Infographics

If you’re looking to go viral, an infographic is the way to go. People love sharing infographics because they are a visually appealing way to share data quickly. That blog post on the history of Utah could easily be made into a graphic timeline — and Pinterest, here you come.

Presentations

Some pieces of content may lend themselves to a presentation like Keynote or PowerPoint. Think how useful a presentation on the history of Utah would be to a history teacher, and how quickly that teacher would share it with friends. Using document-sharing sites like Slideshare allows you to share the information while continually boosting SEO.

Podcasts

Could you expand an old blog post into a podcast? Podcasts can reach a more captive audience, like people working out at the gym or driving home from work. You can also invite experts to participate and expand on your chosen topic.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Just paint it a few different colors and offer a variety of sizes.

Jun 02
0

How to Keep People Coming Back to Your Blog

By | Blogging, content marketing | No Comments

So you’ve been busting out content like a madman. You’re stoked because you’ve pushed out content every day this week and you’re positive your content marketing strategy is on lock.Trouble is, your blog traffic stinks. Maybe you have a decent number of unique visits, but nobody seems to be coming back except that one sad soul in his mom’s basement in Utah. You’re getting visitors, but you’re not establishing connections — you’re not building an audience. What should you do? How do you promote more regular readership and get a bigger audience?

Dig Your Hooks in

You need content that hooks readers and gets them wanting more. If you notice a lot of engagement on a particular post, whether it’s questions, comments, or shares, you’re doing something right. If your subject or copy just isn’t compelling for readers, you may need to switch things up in terms of your tone of voice, or the subjects themselves. If your content marketing gives people what they want, they’ll come back.

A niche focus can be your friend as well. There might be a dozen blogs about the life and times of Norwegian black metal flutists, but what about Norwegian black metal fluting in Utah?

Send Direct

If you’re not giving people an opportunity to receive regular email updates from your blog, you’re giving people just enough time to forget you exist. You want more readers than just the Utah basement guy? Get them hooked on your content, but add a regular newsletter send to your content marketing mix. Give readers an easy path to return to you and give them the content they like and you’re golden.

Sharing is Caring

Give your readers an easy way to share things through social buttons and sharing options. And don’t forget that you can’t expect people to find your content in a vacuum (with the exception of our Utah basement fellow). Instead, get on social media and share your stuff there so you can give people every opportunity to spread your message for you.

If you’re churning out lots of content, you’re doing one thing most businesses aren’t. All it takes is a few small tweaks to your promotion strategy to start really ramping up engagement and earning new readers by the minute. With some hard work, your content marketing strategy will start showing the results you desire.

May 27
0

Fusion 360: A New Generation of Revolutionaries

By | content marketing, digital marketing | No Comments

In the year 1776, a piece of paper signed by 56 men started a revolution. Sure, there’d been other revolutions before, but the world had never seen a revolution like this. This was a group of colonies with relatively nothing to their name rising up against the most powerful country in the world, and for what? For an idea that had never been tried before and, as far as the world was concerned, probably wouldn’t succeed. But it did.

That’s the thing about revolutionaries. They can see a future in the distance that others just can’t grasp. With creativity, hard work and a little bit of luck they don’t just embrace the new world. They create it. At Fusion 360, we are revolutionaries.

Fusion 360 doesn’t seek to be on par with the best marketing agencies in the world. We want to lead them. When other marketing agencies reach an advertising peak, we’ll be waving to them from the next summit.

You see, there’s a revolution happening right now. The world of digital marketing is changing and developing and growing, and we were there to sign its declaration of independence from the marketing strategies of the past. Other marketing agencies are joining the fight, but we’ve been out on the front lines for years, right where we want to be.

We’re a tight battalion of marketing soldiers. We collaborate together, eat together and fight many a Nerf battle together. This environment enables us to be creative and formulate innovative strategies. We’re not afraid to share new ideas — because at Fusion 360 ideas aren’t rejected, they’re improved. We work hard, and we play hard because that’s how you keep the spark of revolution burning.

Why are we like this? Why do we insist on rising up for ideas that have never been tried before? Because we are Fusion 360. We are the agency for the digital revolution.

May 27
0

Seven of the Best Easter Eggs on the Web

By | content marketing, digital marketing | No Comments

The Internet is a beautiful thing. It’s a place where ideas flow freely no matter how bogus, and the bizarre and ridiculous are welcomed with open screens. Everyone from digital marketing companies to your weird neighbor down the street who lives in his parents’ basement can take part in the worldwide Web. But there are secrets lurking in the hidden corners of your favorite websites. They’re called Easter eggs, and they are amazing.

We’re not talking about the hardboiled eggs you dye with your mom and hide in the backyard — which, let’s be honest, is a weird tradition no one seems to understand why we do. These Easter eggs are hidden “surprises” coders embed within websites and programs just because they can. Even digital marketing companies have been known to hide a thing or two in their websites. Now, we know you’re entering Nicholas Cage in “National Treasure” mode as you read this, so we’ve assembled a list of a few of our favorite website Easter eggs to get you started.

1. Wikipedia’s Easter Egg

Search “Easter egg” on Wikipedia. Check out the image of two rabbits in the right-hand corner. See the hedgehog? Click it. It’s basically Easter egg inception.

2. Buzzfeed’s Wilkie Takeover

Mark Wilkie is the chief technology officer at Buzzfeed, and clearly someone in the Web department loves him very much. Click anywhere in the white space of the Buzzfeed homepage, and then, type the Nintendo Konami Code (UP ARROW – UP ARROW – DOWN ARROW – DOWN ARROW – LEFT ARROW – RIGHT ARROW – LEFT ARROW – RIGHT ARROW – B – A). Suddenly everything’s coming up Wilkie.

3. Google Images’ Atari Breakout

Feel the need to travel back to 1976? Search for “Atari Breakout” in Google images, and you can play the game to your heart’s content.

4. British Vogue Dino

Even the British digital marketing companies love a good Easter egg. Visit British Vogue’s homepage, click the white space and type in that beautiful Konami Code. You’re welcome.

5. The Bacon Number

Even digital marketing companies love a good web gimmick. They also love Kevin Bacon, though they might not admit it. Someone at Google also loves Kevin Bacon because that person had a brilliant idea called “The Bacon Number”. Bacon Numbers operate under the theory that all celebrities are connected to Kevin Bacon by six or less degrees of separation. Each celebrity’s Bacon Number reflects that degree. Google search “Bacon Number” and the name of any celebrity to find out how close each has come to the incomparable Kevin Bacon. 

In case you were wondering, Chris Pratt’s Bacon Number is 2.

6. Pirate Language

Change your Facebook language settings to “English (Pirate).” Never gets old.

7. Earl’s Court Station

Here’s one for all you “Doctor Who” fans hitting a slow day of work at your digital marketing companies. Head over to Google Maps and search for “Earl’s Court Station.” Entering street view lets you catch a glimpse of a particular blue police box. You can even go inside by dropping your yellow street view dude right on the pin in classic map view or by double clicking the box from street view level.

May 25
0

The Facebook Metrics You Should Care Most About

By | digital marketing, Facebook, marketing, Utah | No Comments

Facebook boasts just over a billion daily active users, making it a huge storehouse of potential customers that businesses can pursue. Since most businesses and digital marketing firms are onboard the Facebook train by now, the next step for them is understanding some of the metrics Facebook provides — and how those metrics can be used to improve posts.

Page Views

Page views refer to how many people have visited your Facebook page. This is useful because it can show you how many people were either curious enough about your brand to look you up, or wanted to interact with more of your posts after seeing them on their news feed.

Reach

For Facebook, reach refers to how many users viewed your post. This helps digital marketing firms because you can see which posts gather the most reach, compared to which aren’t doing so well. While this information is useful, it it’s not nearly as useful as seeing how many people engaged with a particular post.

Impressions

While reach refers to number of people who saw your post, impressions refer to how many times your post was seen. This is different, because the same user can see your post more than once if one of his or her friends shares the post. Impressions are a useful metric because they give you a clearer picture of how many times your message is appearing to your audience — and can be a good indicator of how shareable it is.

Engagement

For digital marketing firms in particular, the keyword for social media is, of course, “social.” Engagement measures the percentage of people who interacted with your posts, either through commenting, liking, sharing, etc. This is one of the most useful metrics — because the best type of content is the kind that’s interesting enough for people to share with their friends. The beauty of Facebook is that if you’re sharing something your audience likes, they will do a lot of the legwork for you.

Videos

A major focus for all digital marketing firms is video. If you’re posting videos to your Facebook page, you’ll want to know how many people are actually watching them, right? What’s more useful, though, is seeing how long people have watched your video. Facebook will provide you with the number of times your video has been viewed for at least ten seconds. If videos consistently underperform and people begin to watch but quickly bounce, that’s a solid indicator that your videos need some improvement.

In Summary

Facebook provides these statistics for a reason, so don’t forget to make studying them a regular part of your social media strategy. Only by analyzing stats and understanding how your posts are performing can you continually improve your digital marketing game.

May 25
0

Amp Up Your Content Quality With Good Grammar

By | content marketing, SEO, Utah | No Comments

Content marketing is the driving force behind convincing consumers to use a company’s services or products. Good content marketing gives information to the consumer and that information convinces them to act.

This strategic portion of advertising uses SEO and keywords to draw customers in. Once the consumers find the written content it is important that nothing drives them away — this includes poor grammatical errors.

A good content marketing agency will be able to take care of your content creation for you and with a string of editors double checking posts, grammatical nightmares can easily be avoided.

Avoiding Error

Remembering the little things is key. If your company is located in Utah and it consistently forgets to capitalize Utah in its blog posts, it is likely that your Utah customers will be turned off by the unprofessional mistakes. This could ultimately affect sales.

Many spelling and capitalization errors can be caught by internal spellcheck programs on your computer but there are several other grammatical issues that can’t be resolved by spellcheck.

If your company uses AP Style as your format, make sure that all posts are written after this manner. Inconsistencies within style are confusing within a webpage. Keep style guides handy around the workplace in order to have a quick point of reference when questions arise.

Online sources can also often offer overviews of specific styles and identify commonly made grammatical mistakes. In order to maximize a company’s content marketing reach, refer to these online guides often.

These guides and sources can be found through any search engine. Before your use one though, make sure to check your source and verify that it is a reputable one. You wouldn’t take Jedi training from Chewbacca so why would you take grammar training from dizzyflowerlover454?

After you have referenced guides and established online sources it is always a good idea to have someone give you a second opinion on your work. Content marketing can be tricky so having a second set of eyes catching your little mistakes is important.

With good grammar though, you can keep customers reading and clients happy.