SEO Archives - Baseline Creative | Wichita Web Design and Integrated Marketing

Jun 29

a laptop is open with a document and a pencil representing website content

Why is Content Important for SEO?

By Baseline Creative Blog

If your business has a website, chances are you’ve thought about your search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a tool that helps Google and other search engines find your website when a user requests data. The better the SEO you have on your site, the more likely it is that search engines will offer your website in their search results. While many factors go into setting up successful SEO, one critical element is the content on your website.

Why is Content Important for SEO?

Content is king for SEO. In fact, without content, your website won’t be optimized enough to rank significantly. Search engine ranking is important because 95% of people never navigate past the first page of search results. Every month there are 40-60 billion searches on Google, so the field of content optimization is highly competitive. You need to utilize every tool in your toolbelt to increase the likelihood of your website appearing on the first page. Content is one of the most important tools.

Keywords are Key

One of the most important factors in SEO is choosing the appropriate keyword. Keywords are terms that are often used when people are searching for a business like yours. Keywords should be re-evaluated regularly to make sure they are still relevant and if so, worked into the content on your website in a natural way.

In the early days of the internet, websites would “stuff” keywords into their content which initially was successful in getting your page to rank higher. However, Google now updates their algorithm regularly and keyword stuffing is frowned upon and can negatively affect your ranking.

Once your keywords are researched, they must be implemented naturally in the content itself. The keywords need to be balanced against several factors, one of which is the number of times the keyword is used in the content. Depending on the length of the content, the number of times the keyword is used will change.

Readability is Important

Aside from keywords, good website content will be well-written. Search engines do look at readability to determine how easy a page is to read, as well as how relevant the content is to the keyword and the page. The number of words the page includes is another component search engines consider in ranking. While it’s tempting to limit content on your website’s pages, there must be a good balance between relevant content that is helpful to the user, and too little content that doesn’t provide enough information for search engines to find.

Content organization, including selecting the right headlines, and subheads also plays a significant part in good optimization. Links, and optimizing metadata in the content and on the page are also essential for good SEO.

Blogs Improve Content

Monthly blogs are a great way to continue to incorporate new keywords into your website without constantly updating the content on your main pages. Google and other search engines consider sites that have continuous new content more relevant than stagnant sites. Blogs can be optimized for keywords as well as questions people ask search engines. For example, someone might search for “why do dogs eat grass?” and blog posts successfully optimized for that search inquiry could be included in the results.

Is Your Content Optimized?

At Baseline Creative, we include content search engine optimization in our web builds. We do the research and optimize the content as we either migrate it from existing sites or write new content. But because Google is constantly updating and changing, we also encourage clients to keep up the momentum with monthly SEO optimization. Our digital strategy team does monthly research, reviews analytics, writes content for monthly blogs, and/or updates content on our clients’ websites. Our Google-certified team does the legwork to help your site continue to perform well for your business.

If you’re interested in monthly SEO services including blogs, contact us! We would love to see how we can help your business grow.

Mar 25

10 of the Most Relatable Marketing GIFS

By Baseline Creative Blog

Digital marketing can be so incredibly fun and rewarding. That’s why it’s one of our specialties here at Baseline Creative. We’re passionate about strategy, content creation, design, SEO, and all the things that work together to make digital marketing successful. Marketing professionals, small business owners, and anyone who’s managed a social media profile will be able to relate to the following Top 10 Relatable Marketing GIFS.

1. Off Brand is Not Allowed

Brand, and brand voice, should always be considered in your marketing efforts. You don’t want any of your messaging or imagery to be off brand. Working with a marketing team that knows your business can keep you on brand and set you up for success!

GIPHY

2. Font Choice is Important

Branding is crucial, and an important part of that branding involves font choices. If you use the wrong fonts, you’ll definitely convey the wrong message. Fonts set the tone of everything you say. Baseline Creative started out as Baseline Fonts, so we know a thing or two about font creation and selection.

3. Analytics and Tracking are Cool

If you’re not measuring your efforts, then you can’t know what’s going right and what needs to be improved! Be like the cool kids and make sure you have Google Analytics installed on your site. We give that effort a big thumbs up. If you need help installing the tracking code or deciphering the analytics, Baseline Creative can help! We are a certified Google Partner Agency after all.

4. Don’t Forget to Caffeinate

This one is more of a suggestion, but totally relatable. Our team at Baseline Creative is known to enjoy a nice cup of coffee, or two! The Meryl Streep before and after coffee GIF says it all. Cheers!

5. Content Creation is Important

Content is key when it comes to marketing. From website content, blogs, social media, print collateral, and more, your content needs to be strong and working in favor of your efforts. You want your content to be engaging and also bring traffic to your business. Need help with content? Our team is like the cats in this GIF when it comes to content creation and strategy.

6. Creativity Matters

We mentioned content above, but want to stress that it has to be creative! If your content isn’t educational, entertaining, or evoking emotion in the viewer then it likely needs a creative boost. Don’t worry though, “creative” is in our name! From branding, mood boards, content creation, and more, you’ve got our entire creative team on your side when you work with us.

7. Teamwork Makes the Dream Work

Marketing is best accomplished with a team. That’s why full-service agency life is the best! You have access to an entire team of multi-talented professionals when you work with us. The ability to rely on a team is amazing.

8. We Love having Good Photography to Work With

Nothing is more exciting than having high-quality photography to work with for websites, social media, and print materials. Bad photography can ruin the impact of your messaging, meaning a waste of time and energy for your business. At Baseline Creative, we have a photographer on staff that specializes in custom photography for businesses we work with. Quality messaging paired with quality photography is a dream come true.

9. We Do Our Homework

What homework? Oh yeah, that homework, we did it. Every good marketer should do their homework. That means research, forecasting, analysis, competitor analysis, and more! Google is basically our best friend and if there’s information to find, we’ll find it. If the information doesn’t exist, we’ll help create it. That’s just how we roll.

10. We’re Here to Help

Marketing is incredibly complex. To do it right, takes dedication and hard work. We’ve been helping clients grow their businesses for over 20 years and have built some amazing partnerships along the way. Looking for help with your website, digital marketing, branding, or design? Let’s have a conversation.

Need Marketing Assistance?

We hope you enjoyed these relatable marketing gifs! Need help with any of your marketing efforts? Contact us today!

Dec 11

Marketing in 2021

By Baseline Creative Blog

What will your marketing plan look like in 2021? There are some trends that should be considered when making your plan or working with an agency like Baseline Creative to make your plan.

Social media, technology, and web presence, and cause marketing will be important elements include in your marketing plan in the new year.

Social Media

Social Media will continue to be an important part of your marketing plans. While it may not make sense for your business to be on every social media platform, businesses need to be on social.

Most of your customers simply expect to find you there. In this way, social media serves as a local listing of sorts—which boosts your SEO and makes it easier for people to find you.

For those in retail, food, the hospitality industry, or even health care, social media is a natural fit, and platforms such as Instagram, Twitter, and even TikTok are likely to put your business in front of your customers. For those whose products and services are more business to business (B2B) chances are that a presence on Facebook and LinkedIn is enough. Your marketing goals and target audiences will help determine where you should be on social.

Social media, when done right, can help improve your customer service experience. Responding quickly to customer inquiries, or customer feedback can help you build credibility for your business and can help you recognize the things you do well in addition to opportunities to grow and change.

Influencers will also continue to be an important element of marketing in 2021. While it may look different for every business, an influencer can get your product or services in front of a targeted audience and provide credibility to your business.

Technology

Technology and the ability for your customers to shop, meet, or conduct business online is going to remain vital in 2021. According to Census.gov, online purchasing increased by 44% in the second quarter of 2020 and was at 37.1% in the third quarter. Many experts agree that even as businesses open back up to the public, e-commerce will still be important.

Ecommerce has been the difference between success and failure during Covid. For example, this year, restaurants that never offered online ordering, quickly had to add that to their websites to remain viable as dining rooms were closed during the pandemic. This kind of quick adaptability was critical to success for many. Online shops for retailers, including small businesses, is also a trend that is continuing. Businesses will need to continue to provide virtual, delivery, and online ordering capabilities to remain adaptable in 2021.

In the same vein, search engine optimization (SEO) will be even more important in your marketing plan. As more retailers and businesses compete for our attention, SEO will be key to make sure your website is offered up to the right audience, more often.

Cause Marketing and Social Issues

According to EngageforGood.com, “71% of Americans believe that companies have more responsibility than ever before to address social justice issues and 56% say companies that do not talk about social justice issues in their marketing or communications are out of touch.” This is especially true for Gen Z who are increasing their purchasing power every year, and who expect the brands they support to take a stand on social issues.

Several examples of cause marketing include Nike’s “Dream Crazier” campaign aimed at celebrating women in sports. Ben & Jerry’s ice cream brand has been supporting the Black Lives Matter movement since 2016 and has incorporated their support into messaging on their website, in blogs, and even in products. For Ben & Jerry’s cause marketing isn’t a gimmick, it’s a part of their brand’s culture.

Cause marketing is more than supporting a favorite nonprofit throughout the year. Cause marketing should incorporate your brand and involve marketing, advertising, and public relations as well as internal communications. In short, cause marketing should go beyond just one event or campaign.

Bring on 2021!

Most of us are looking forward to a new year and leaving the trauma and chaos of 2020 behind us. However, we must not forget the lessons we learned in this challenging year and should strive to grow in 2021.

If you need to develop or add to your marketing plan in 2021, Baseline Creative would be happy to help. Contact us for a conversation about how we can help you reach your goals in the new year.

Nov 24

The word Search appears on a computer screen

What is Search Console?

By Baseline Creative Blog

Google Analytics is one of the best tools on the market for analyzing web traffic. Included in Analytics, is a separate, but powerful tool called Search Console. This month we examine this tool and why it’s important.

Another Tool in Analytics

Search Console is a set of tools that helps measure search traffic on your website, measure performance, and helps identify issues that could be hindering your site in search results.

One of the most important features of Search Console is the ability to track how you acquired users. Within the tool, you can see which landing pages get the most impressions and clicks. When analyzing your data, it’s important to see which pages are getting the most traffic and which pages could use more optimization.

This tool also offers insights into bounce rates (how long a user stays on the page) as well as how many pages a user visits during each session. Data on how many impressions your website has on a desktop versus mobile and tablets and which countries your users are coming from is also included. Queries in Search Console allows you to see what users were searching for when they found your website.

Additionally, Search Console reviews websites and sends performance reports detailing elements that need to be changed to improve your site ranking.

Why is Search Console Important?

Knowledge is power, so knowing where your customers are finding your website, and what they are doing when they get there is critical information. Search Console allows us to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each website.

We can see if a landing page needs to be optimized or updated because it’s not showing up in results. Search Console tells us if a blog post is driving significant traffic to your website—or not. When we understand what people are searching for when they find your website through queries, we can optimize keywords or create Google Ads with those terms. Through performance reports, we can see any design elements and page speed issues that might affect search results. This reporting is important because the more we know about how a site is performing, the more we can adjust as needed to improve—and that increases your bottom line.

What Do You Need to Do?

Baseline Creative helps many clients each month with Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing such as Google ads, and website maintenance. If you are interested, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us to learn how we can help.

Aug 31

Bing Places dashboard displays on a smart phone

Oh, the Places You’ll Show Up with Bing!

By Baseline Creative Uncategorized

Google is widely considered the most important search engine, however, Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, is a major player in the search engine world. According to Microsoft, Bing handles 12.2 billion queries each month and is the default search engine for Windows devices. If your business isn’t listed on Bing, you could be missing out on leads and sales.

What Are Bing Places?

Bing Places is a local listing in the Bing search engine. Similar to Google My Business, Bing Places lists your business information including the name, address, phone number, website, hours of operation, photos and a map pin if you have a storefront. When users search for your business in Bing, your business information, including directions will display.

Just like in Google, local listing information for your business is important. Most people don’t use the yellow pages anymore. Instead we search online for the information we are looking for, and if it’s not there, users can’t find it and that leads to lost opportunities for revenue. Optimizing your business listing on the major search engines is a modern best practice. Bing is the search engine that powers Yahoo searches as well so setting up a listing in Bing, also adds it to Yahoo. More listings in more search engines is a good thing for your business.

Alexa, Why is Bing Important to You?

Bing is also important when it comes to the increasing popularity of smart speakers. What do smart speakers have to do with Bing? Amazon uses Bing to pull up local listings. This means, if you say, “Alexa, where’s the nearest grocery store to me?” it will pull up the listings in Bing, not Google. Since Amazon has more than 80% of the market share of smart speakers, ensuring your business is optimized in Bing is vital.

Measuring Results in Bing Places

Similar to Google, Bing Places has a reporting feature that shows you how often your listing was searched, what terms were used to find your listing and how users interacted with your listing (called, visited your website, got directions). This type of information can help determine if additional optimizations need to occur to increase your visibility.

How Do You Get Started?

Baseline Creative can help your business get listed and get verified on Bing Places. Our team can take on the details of creating and optimizing a Bing listing so your business gets all the benefits. Contact us today to learn more.

Jul 31

Website Maintenance—Why is it important?

By Baseline Creative Blog

Website maintenance is important! You can’t just build a website and then forget about it. Well, you can, but you’ll regret it. Websites are a major investment for most companies and as such, they should be properly maintained. What does this maintenance look like?

Security Updates and Version Updates

One important aspect of maintenance includes updates for the various plugins, and versions of themes, and content management systems used to build your website. If these plugins aren’t updated they can stop working properly—which affects the functionality of your site.

As your website evolves, there may be plugins you no longer utilize on your site. In those cases, those plugins should be deactivated to ensure they aren’t creating a security risk. Hackers have been known to access websites through deactivated plugins. Removing unused plugins helps decrease that risk.

The developers who build plugins and content management systems (for example, WordPress) are constantly updating their products. Sometimes this is to debug an issue that has arisen, and sometimes it is to increase the functionality of the plugin. Either way, keeping your plugins and CMS versions updated ensure that your website is always performing in the way it is intended.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In addition to updates for plugins, search engine optimization (SEO) updates are important. A beautifully built website might as well not exist if it can’t be seen by search engines.

Search engines look for up-to-date and relevant content when they crawl websites for the answer to a search inquiry. Your website should have updated SEO to give search engines new information to crawl and present to a user. Search engines also update their algorithms regularly to ensure they are capturing the latest information.

In addition, keywords and metadata can change for your business and should be updated as needed as well to stay relevant for your target audience. SEO is constantly evolving and should be a major part of your ongoing marketing efforts.

Need some help with web maintenance? Baseline offers monthly maintenance and SEO packages for nearly every budget. Contact us to get your site up to date or get more information.

May 14

Google Just Updated…Again

By Baseline Creative Blog, Uncategorized

One thing Covid-19 hasn’t stopped this year is the rollout of the new update for Google and the effect it will have on your search engine optimization (SEO).

Google makes updates to its algorithm often, and most of those tweaks aren’t noticeable to the average user. However, every few months Google releases a broad core update to help tweak the algorithm to provide better results for searchers. These updates may help—or hinder—your page ranking results. On May 4, Google made a “core update” which has already caused noticeable results on page ranking.

Google Search and Covid-19

According to an article in the Search Engine Journal (SEJ), the effects of the update are being felt most with local search, and health-related sites. While Google doesn’t reveal the details of the update, those at SEJ Online speculate it could be because of how much Covid-19 affected search patterns.

SEO—A Constant Need

This latest update and the upheaval it has already caused for some websites is a great reminder that search engine optimization (SEO), is a constant requirement. According to Google, the broad brush of their updates is to look for and rank sites with higher quality content. Other variables, including how fast a website and its pages load, are also factored into the Google algorithm, but content is still king. Google rates website based on a concept called E-A-T. This acronym stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. A beautiful website with unoriginal, untruthful, or unhelpful content will still fail the E-A-T test for Google. With websites, just like with people, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.

Is My Site Affected?

What does this latest update mean for your website? Your ranking may have changed—for better or worse. If rankings have slipped it’s a good time to do an SEO audit to see what has changed.

At Baseline Creative, we review your analytics to see how search volumes have changed, which pages people are landing on, and what they do from there. Do they land on a page and bounce right back out? How much does your social media presence drive traffic to your website? Are they filling out forms so you can capture leads or are they moving on?

As we delve into the data we can see patterns emerge and work to solve any issues. Perhaps it’s adding better, more focused content, or diving into metadata on the back end of the website. Whatever it takes, we work to create and implement effective, organic SEO for our clients.

Get the Insights You Need

Contact us for an SEO audit and to see what opportunities are available to improve your content, your metadata, and your search ranking.

Sep 26

Ranking in Google—Do you have to pay to play?

By Baseline Creative Blog

Search engine optimization is important for a website Ranking in Google is top of mind for anyone who has ever built a website. Google is the industry standard, and according to 48 states now suing the search engine giant, it’s also has unfair control of “online advertising markets which may have led to anticompetitive behavior that harms consumers,” (New York Times). Basically, the government is claiming that those who spend the most money on Google advertising products, such as AdWords, get better ranking which is unfair to websites with good content, but few ad dollars. For those of us in marketing and web development, this comes as no surprise. However, there is more to search engine optimization (SEO) than AdWords can buy and it’s important for businesses to know the value SEO has for their business.

Aug 07

Yelp Reviews—The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

By Baseline Creative Blog

Yelp business practices have come under fire recently Every month, we get calls at Baseline Creative asking for assistance with Yelp reviews and accounts. And every time, we share in the frustration with our clients at the business practices we see Yelp using. Oftentimes, it seems that Yelp is holding the businesses on their platform hostage. More advertising on the platform seems to be the cure for most of those ails, but it doesn’t seem, well, ethical. Read More

Oct 31

Re-Thinking Big (and Little) Data

By Baseline Creative Blog

During a recent event we attended the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) Kansas Chapter’s Professional Development Day, we gained valuable insight about data. Despite more than twenty years of experience, we discovered new techniques and tools for helping our clients achieve their goals. Additionally, it reinforced our confidence that metrics are essential to our work.

As an agency, Baseline Creative knows it is vital to stay on top of these advancements in measurement and analysis. When our work achieves the goals and objectives our clients need—and when there are measurable results we can effectively communicate—we demonstrate the ability of marketing to make a difference for a business owner and are able to establish a long-term relationship with a client. And that’s a winning formula for any agency.