The New Google Ads

Digital marketing is about to experience another shift, due to Google’s executive decision to restructure its advertising products into three new major groups – Google Ads (replacing the existing AdWords), Google Marketing Platform, and Google Ad Manager. The rebranding has been announced by the company’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce, Sridhar Ramaswamy.

The initiative is expected to start rolling out in July, and is based on user feedback collected over the past few years, combined with Google’s continuous efforts to optimise and simplify its ads products, so that advertisers can reach prospective clients at every stage of the sales funnel more efficiently and effectively.

Below we explain the characteristics of the three rebranded ad products, the innovative Smart Campaigns which Google is launching for small business advertisers, and how keywords will be affected by the new Google Ads.

Google Ads

The service Google Ads was developed as a replacement for the familiar online AdWords. Besides the name change, the new Google Ads will simplify creating ad campaigns and help marketers reach larger audiences by allowing them to buy across all Google platforms, such as search, YouTube videos, app ads, display ads, and Google Maps. While some of these channels have already been utilisingAdWords, this brand of advertising traditionally has been associated with the search engine. Google executives hope that the rebranding with the new, simpler name will remove confusion and increase digital marketing options on all of Google’s platforms.

Google Marketing Platform

The second new brand is the Google Marketing Platform, which combines under one umbrella the analytics tools DoubleClick Digital Marketing and Google Analytics 360, and also includes a new feature called Display & Video 360. This consolidated platform is geared toward larger, enterprise users, allowing separate teams to collaborate on complex ad campaigns and execute them completely, all in one place. The Marketing Platform merges the creative and analytical processes in digital advertising.

Google Ad Manager

The third brand within the new product lineup is Google Ad Manager, which consolidates the two monetization tools for publishers by Google – DoubleClick Ad Exchange and DoubleClick for Publishers. Thischange will establish a unified programmatic platform, which is designed for more efficiency and more earning opportunities for Google’s partners, everywhere thatInternet users are interacting with content.

What are Smart Campaigns?

Smart Campaigns are custom-made programs geared toward small business owners and characterized by requiring relatively little input in terms of time and marketing expertise, while producing substantial results when it comes to driving traffic and bringing in leads. Smart Campaigns are built using the foundations of the previous AdWords Express, though the new program is designed to work faster and more efficiently. This platform allows advertisers to target their ads to groups that are very likely to produce customers for their businesses, with Google’s automated algorithms handling most of the work.

Transitioning from Keywords to Audiences

The rebranding of Google’s ad products marks a shift from keyword-centric to audience-centric advertising. While popular social media websites such as Facebook and LinkedIn have been utilising audience-centric targeting, Google is just beginning to transition advertising focus away from keywords and toward audiences. Thus the new Google Ads are a more comprehensive method for online advertising, and will make it possible for many small businesses to market across multiple channels and reach more prospects.

For marketing agencies and in-house marketing teams, these changes imply some adjustments in the way advertising initiatives are being run. To start off, any paid and organic campaigns that previously featured the keyword “AdWords” will have to be modified. Although the concept of “AdWords” isn’t going to disappear overnight, it is best to continue monitoring search volumes for the terms “Google Ads” and “Google AdWords” as you make the appropriate adjustments.

In Conclusion

Google is always striving to make its advertising platform more efficient and easier to use. As with all its other products, the Internet giant is committed to streamline user experience, so it is easier for people to navigate the ever-growing digital space. While the core marketing processes on Google will not change drastically, the re branded advertising products are expected to allow advertisers to reach larger numbers of people faster and more effectively.

It is increasingly common for businesses to have a professional blog to provide new and relevant content to readers. Blogs can also serve as an important and valuable part of a company’s larger digital marketing campaign. However, with so many business blogs available these days, creating a successful blog is also becoming more difficult due to the wide range of competition.

That’s why if you want to generate interest in your business blog, you need to make sure you have the following three basics:

• High quality, well written material.
• Clear and easy to follow company website
• Innovative user experience to gain further engagement.
• Optimising your content.

Of course to create a truly successful business blog, it is not enough to just provide the bare minimum. However at the same time, without these three fundamental qualities no matter how original or exciting the other aspects of your blog might you’re your company’s blog will ultimately be unsuccessful if it lacks strong informative writing, straightforward organisation, and an optimal website user experience.

Convinced of the importance of these three qualities but not sure how to achieve them? Read on for some tips to help you master these three essential components of digital marketing for your business blog!

1. The Content

The content you are offering may include multimedia sources, such as images, music, videos, or even links to other sites. All of these features need to be of high quality but for the most part, the content you need to focus on improving is the text of your blog.

The first step to better writing for your blog is a clear sense of purpose, topic, and audience. If you want to write a blog post that convinces or informs your reader of something, you need to know what you are writing about and why!

If you are having trouble brainstorming great content for your blog, there are a lot of resources you can use to help you get inspired. Try browsing a site like Quora or Answer The Public to check out what questions people want to be answered? Once you have settled on a topic and started drafting posts, you can improve your writing in a number of different ways.

Need help with grammar and writing mechanics? Try running your blog content through a grammar and spellcheck app like Grammarly, a program that can also help you make sure you avoid accidentally plagiarising another source by checking to ensure you don’t have any duplicate content. There is also a number of other textanalysis apps for you to explore, including Hemingway App, that focus on enhancing readability.

The more time you spend on the various phases of brainstorming, writing, revising, and polishing your blog posts, the better your writing will be and in turn the better your blog will be!

When creating a company blog, you need to focus on creating something that will be a valuable resource to your readers/consumers. It needs to be informative, entertaining and maybe even a little comedic. Humorous content is usually the gear that goes viral. Blogs have a special ability to supply refreshing material on a constant and consistent basis. They contribute to conversations across the web, all the while earning links and listings from different blogs, including blog directories.

2. The Organisation

In addition to strong, well written text the organisation of your site is another essential feature of an effective business blog. An organised blog needs to include an easy to use website with straightforward navigation and well placed content and visuals.

You don’t want people who visit your business blog to be overwhelmed by a great deal of content that is not listed in any particular order. When it comes to digital marketing on your blog, an editorial calendar is an ideal tool to help you schedule and manage your plans for the different components of your blog. Editorial calendars can help you keep everything in order and up to date.

3. The User Experience

In addition to content and organisation, a positive and informative overall user experience is a critical feature of a successful business blog. One of the major steps to enhance the user experience is by focusing on optimisation in your web development.

You’ll want to create content that’s informative and encourages viral sharing. As mentioned above, comedic relief is one important way to do this. Humor can offer a leverage that engages consumers and encourages them to share your content with their friends. Bloggers and webmasters who come across your work will often share through links.

4. Optimisation

Optimisation to build a better user experience for your blog can take a number of different forms. Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, is an important part of an effective blog among other purposes, SEO can improve your blog’s ranking on search engines to make it easier for visitors to find your website. Also sharing through your social media platforms for engagement, while a broad amount of your target audiences use socal media.

The use of carefully researched SEO keywords can substantially improve web traffic to your blog, helping your digital marketing strategy to succeed in the process by drawing more attention and driving more visitors to your company’s site. It is particularly important to include strong keywords in title tags on your blog because title tags can have a significant influence on search rankings.

Along with SEO, other crucial types of optimisation for a business blog include: ensuring that any links on your blog are functioning correctly and optimising images by choosing highquality graphics.

It is also increasingly important for companies to optimise their websites by creating a mobile friendly version so that users can access the company’s website and blogs from their phones or other devices.

Of course, if you want to ensure that your business blog will be a success, there are many other steps you will need to take to develop a high quality blog for your company. Nevertheless the four basic components discussed here being content, organisation and user experience are the major essentials that you need to include in your business blog if you want your digital marketing strategy to be a success. Contact us today for a free quote!

Even though its advent was relatively recent, social media has only continued to experience a vast increase in popularity since it first debuted. With this spread in social media platforms, unsurprisingly, there has also been a rise in social media marketing. More and more, companies are realising that they can take advantage of the types of advertising opportunities available through social media platforms like Facebook and Pinterest.

If you are debating whether or not your own business or company should jump on the social media bandwagon, it is important to learn about some basic social media marketing tips. With the help of the five tips in this guide, you will be able to learn more about what social media marketing really is, how it works, and why it is worth pursuing. Finally, you will also get some ideas for how you can upgrade your own company’s digital marketing strategy to keep your advertising techniques current and make sure you are in a good position to compete with the increasing number of social media savvy businesses. Read on for helpful social media marketing tips to make sure your business stays ahead of the curve!

1. Assess the Selection of Social Media Options

One of the first mistakes that many people make stems from basic unfamiliarity with the diverse range of social media outlets that exist now a days. Most people have at least heard of Twitter and Facebook, but if you do not even know what other options exist for social media marketing, it’s going to be very hard to evaluate which platform is best for your purposes.

As a result, the first step to choosing one or more appropriate social media platform(s) for your own digital marketing strategy is to take a brief moment to consider the sheer scope of available possibilities. I have included a basic list here of some of the most popular and prominent social media platforms. While this list is by no means an exhaustive one, it should at least give you an idea of what types of sites you might want to consider for your own social media marketing plans. Each site name has a link to the homepage of the platform so you can check each one out for yourself to learn more.

• Twitter
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Facebook
• YouTube

This is only a small sample of some of the most popular among the many different social media platforms out there. The range of social media also includes everything from podcasts to Google+ to LinkedIn to personal and professional blogs. Keep in mind that every different platform has its own distinctive advantages and disadvantages, including categories such as the site’s level of popularity, web traffic, ease and convenience of building a marketing campaign on a given platform, and much more. Ask yourself what the highest priorities are for your own business and this will help you choose the platform that is right for your company.

2. Incorporate Hashtags

Even if you are brand new to social media, you have probably noticed how much the use of hashtags dominates the Internet these days. If you have heard the term but still aren’t entirely sure why hashtags are used, the brief version is that they are a social media tool that was primarily popularised by Twitter and has now become increasingly popular as a way to tag content. Hashtags sometimes but not always, include links to specific sites. Twitter is still probably the best known place for hashtag use, but the phenomenon has spread all over the web. In the process, it has also become a useful marketing tool.

Not convinced of the usefulness of hashtags for advertising? This may help change your mind: the majority of the top brands from around the world have adopted hashtags in their social media posts by now. Hashtags that include a link help encourage engagement among consumers in multiple ways. Some examples are piquing interest, attracting attention, building consumer familiarity with brand names and ramping up views on various social media sites. Some companies have also used hashtags to start conversations or dialogues, share customer stories, and solidify support from the public. In short, there are a lot of potential ways for your business to improve its social media marketing with the help of hashtags.

3. Publish Consistent Updates

In addition to helping you expand interest and engagement among potential customers, social media marketing can also be a great way to notify the consumer audience of any new developments in your business. Many companies use their social media posts to spread the word about big sales or promotions, in store events, online deals, etc.

The crux of this social media marketing tip however, is not just that companies should use social media to publish updates, but that companies should use social media to publish consistent updates. If your company only writes a Facebook post to promote events once in a blue moon you aren’t going to have many followers, and even customers who might be interested in following your pages will lose interest if there is never anything new posted.

4. Publish Exciting Updates

Going along with tip #3, you also want to make sure that your content stays fresh. While tip #3 advises you to publish consistent updates, this does not mean you should inundate your readers with a barrage of constant posts. You need to find the right balance between offering content to maintain interest without overwhelming users and driving them away.

One of the keys is to develop content that is as original and innovative as possible. There are a lot of companies and brands for customers to peruse on the Internet, so if your social media content is the same as everyone else’s, you are not going to attract much traffic or interest. The more innovative and exciting your content, the more likely you will be able to mobilise interest from your audience.

5. Use Ads on Social Media to Draw Traffic to your Website

In addition to providing opportunities for companies to draw viewers to their social media posts, another significant purpose for social media marketing can be to bring visitors to your own company website. It can be a difficult process to get a user to actually visit your website, but with the help of social media marketing, you can target potential viewers by taking steps like encouraging users to “Like” your Facebook page so that your business will pop up in their own stream.

Along the same lines, you can also track your social media marketing campaigns to keep a record of your results. Tracking your ads allows you to observe which advertising tactics are the most effective in helping to draw users to your website. There are a lot of different tools out there to help you manage the results of your social media ads, so you need to do your research to choose the proper venue. Here are just a few ideas to help get you started with choosing a social media management application:

• Facebook Insights
• Hootsuite
• TweetReach
• Pinterest Analytics
• Bitly
• Sprout Social

Of course there are many, many more tricks and techniques that go into social media marketing. The 5 tips listed here are meant to serve as an overview to help you jump start your social media marketing campaign. If you follow the tips listed above you will be on the right track to put together an effective social media advertising strategy to help increase your audience’s interest in your brand.

Vivere Marketing can offer further advice on your social media platforms, we’ve managed many local business and larger businesses such as Pet House. Contact us today for a free quote.

In our “Why Use Pay Per Click Advertising and Marketing Strategies?” post, we discussed a few of the reasons you might want to try using pay per click advertising for your business. Now that you know the basics of PPC usage and its purposes, we’ll share a couple of tips for how you can get started with a pay per click advertising campaign of your own. The guidelines below will help you implement a digital marketing strategy to set yourself up for success!

1. Put together a budget.

Especially if you are new to the world of pay per click advertising campaigns, you may not realise how important it is to set aside a specific budget for the advertising costs. However without a PPC budget, it will be very easy for you to inadvertently overspend. The very first thing you need to do is to decide exactly how much money you are willing to put aside for your PPC campaign. Advertising campaign costs do vary considerably based on the specific market you are working within. If you are part of a highly competitive market, the costs of pay per click advertising will be significantly higher than they would be in a less competitive market, this is because you will need to place a higher “bid” to beat out your competitors for good rankings.

When you assemble your PPC advertising campaign budget, in addition to the level of competition in your market, make sure you also consider the probable return rates for your investment as well as your current marketing budget. You can use your records of previous spending on marketing to help you figure out how much you typically spend on marketing for products in order to put together an accurate estimate of the expenses for your PPC campaign.

2. Select your search engine.

Once you have made sure that you have enough funds to start a PPC campaign in the first place, your next step will be to figure out which search engine you want to use. Google is the most popular search engine, so if you want to maximise the visibility of your advertising campaign, Google would probably be your first choice as a search engine that will produce interest in your PPC offer. Google also offers its own Google AdWords campaign tools to help you monitor the results of your pay per click advertising campaign. It is quick and easy to create an account with Google AdWords and they provide a lot of assistance to get your campaign started.

Google is not the only search engine that offers a pay per click advertising campaign, however. One of the other most popular search engines is Yahoo!, which enables you to create a Yahoo! Sponsored Search account for your PPC campaign. Bing is another search engine you can use for a PPC campaign, through its Bing Ads service in conjunction with Microsoft.

Make sure you research each option to ensure that you choose the platform that is best suited to your company and its unique needs.

3. Write your advertisements.

Once you have set aside your budget and selected your search engine, you are ready to start writing ads for your PPC campaign. Some of the most important qualities of an effective pay per click ad are as follows: your ad should be concise, informative, and persuasive.

If you want users to take the time to read your ad, you need to make sure that your pay per click ads are concise. Users will not want to take the time to read an excessively long ad, let alone to click on one. That being said, you will also need to balance the length of your ad with the amount of information it includes. A listing that lacks critical details will not give consumers the specifics that they need to reach your website. To ensure that your PPC ad contains the proper amount of details, pay attention to the format of a PPC ad along with your link, there will be a brief heading

Furthermore for obvious reasons, the ads in your PPC campaign also need to be persuasive. If you’re feeling stuck, you might practice asking yourself, “What could I say to help convince my reader to click on a link to my business website?” If you are collaborating with a professional PPC manager, the manager will be able to offer you a number of valuable, tried and tested insights about how to write the perfect ad for your company.

4. Track your results.

One of the best parts of pay per click advertising campaigns is the fact that they offer you the ability to easily track the outcome of each marketing strategy. This means that you can experiment with different approaches to advertising and directly measure the success of each. Over time, you will discover that certain keywords generate significantly less interest than others, and you will be able to remove the ineffective phrases from your advertisements. With the help of other web tools, you will also be able to find out how users typically arrive at your site, how much time they spend on your site, and even which page they visit the most. You will then be able to use all of this data to adjust your pay per click ads in order to boost traffic to your website.

Another major benefit of tracking the results of your pay per click advertising campaign is the ability to draw in a more interested consumer base. When a person reaches your website via a PPC ad, it means that he or she clicked on the sponsored link suggesting that the user already has some level of interest in your ad. When users end up on your website because they’re drawn in due to an interest in your products, you will be more likely to have visitors who will become customers. In this sense, you can use pay per click advertising to attract a group of users who are more likely to become consumers of your products.

Similarly, you can track the results of your pay per click advertising to determine the geographical locations where your ads are generating the most interest. These are only a few of the many different ways that pay per click advertising can help you draw more relevant traffic and improve your rate of sales.

Mastering pay per click advertising campaigns is certainly not a process that you can complete overnight, but if you are willing to put in the time and effort to arrange a solid PPC ad campaign starting with the first steps listed above, you will put yourself on the right track to a more effective digital marketing strategy for your company. Better marketing through PPC ads can lead to improved search engine rankings, more customers, higher sales rates, greater revenue, and increased success for your company overall, so it is worth taking some time to do it right!

We at Vivere Marketing are Google Premier Partners, which indicates we’re up to date with the latest digital marketing strategies, especially PPC. Contact us today for free quote!

If you are brand new to the field of digital marketing, one of the first concepts you are likely to encounter is pay per click advertising, also known as PPC advertising. But what exactly is pay per click advertising?

The concept is pretty simple: as the name suggests, a business sets up an arrangement with a website whereby the business pays every time a user clicks on the advertisement. Pay per click advertising generally takes the form of sponsored links that are placed on the pages of a search engine. In order to be competitive, companies need to first determine the keywords and search terms that are most relevant to their business. At that point, in order to appear near the top of the search engine results, a company has to place a bid on their desired keywords and search terms. Companies with the highest bids will get a better placement for their sponsored links, in other words the higher the bid, the better the rank will be.

Notably, one of the key components of pay per click advertising is the fact that a business only gets charged money when an individual actually clicks on one of the business’s sponsored links.

At this point you might be feeling skeptical. You might be thinking, “Wouldn’t it hurt a business to have to cough up money every time someone clicks on a link? Does appearing higher in search engine results even make a difference?” The short answer to the first question is that pay per click advertising is a marketing strategy that weighs the cost of placing ads against the potential benefits of improved business. As for the second question, search engine results really do matter and probably a lot more than you might guess.

Read on for some concrete tips and tricks to help you master PPC advertising and incorporate this approach into your company’s digital marketing strategies.

As I mentioned earlier, if this is your first time encountering the concept of pay per click advertising, you might be feeling a bit suspicious. You might be wondering if it is really worth it to pay for sponsored links just to improve your rankings on Google.

One of the first essentials of a solid PPC advertising and marketing strategy is to establish clear purpose. If you want to employ PPC advertising as your newest marketing strategy, you need to know why you are doing it and how it can help you attain your business goals.

Two of the most common purposes for establishing a pay per click advertising campaign are to sell a product or to boost your website’s traffic. However, these are not the only reasons to undertake a PPC campaign. Some other possible purposes include:

• Creating “geo-targeted ads”: Geo-targeted ads enable you to choose wherein the world you want your ads to appear and where you don’t want them to appear. For instance, if your company is a small local business in New Zealand, you probably want to prioritise attracting consumers from within your own country. If, on the other hand, your company is a large international brand, you will want to appeal to a much more extensive advertising “audience.”
• Scheduling your advertisements: Believe it or not, pay per click advertising allows you to determine both where your ads appear as well as PPC allows you to set ads that will appear during your company’s working hours and disappear during non work hours.
• Tracking your results: Another key benefit of using PPC advertising in your marketing strategy is the fact that you can keep a record of the outcome of each keyword advertisement campaign that you initiate. In part, this means that you can determine which keywords are the most and least effective so that you can adjust your campaign accordingly.

These are only a few of the reasons that companies choose to use PPC marketing strategies; as you can probably tell, pay per click ads offer a number of different possibilities. For this reason, pay per click advertising has only grown in popularity in recent years. More and more companies are beginning to recognise its versatility and the many other benefits that it has to offer.

However, in addition to the many opportunities that PPC offers, there are also a few points of caution for those who are beginners to pay per click advertising. Firstly, although PPC is a straightforward idea, be aware that implementing a pay per click advertising campaign is not nearly as simple as it sounds. Generally, you would be better served by finding an experienced professional to help you than by trying to take on PPC campaigns all by yourself.

On the same note, secondly, you need to make sure you understand that PPC is not a singleperson effort. If you truly want to build a successful digital marketing strategy, you need to be willing to work with others. With the help of an experienced PPC campaign manager, designing your new marketing strategy will be a much more manageable experience, and a collaborative approach gives you a far better chance of success than trying to do everything yourself.

Finally if you think PPC is a quick, easy solution to your company’s advertising problems, you should think again. If you want your pay per click advertising strategy to be genuinely effective, you need to be willing to take a longer term view. As long as you are willing to put in the time and effort necessary to set up and maintain an ongoing PPC campaign, incorporating pay per click advertising into your digital marketing strategy is a choice that can have a lot of advantages for your company!

Think a pay per click advertising company would be right for you but not sure about the next step? Read our next post, “The First Steps to a Successful PPC Advertising Campaign,” to figure out how to get started on the road to a new and improved marketing strategy!

We at Vivere Marketing are Google Premier Partners, which indicates we’re up to date with the latest digital marketing strategies, especially PPC. Contact us today for free quote!

Imagine, for a moment, that you are walking around at a mall looking for a good place to buy a specific product. There are two stores right across from each other that sell exactly the same items. In fact, the only notable difference is the exterior appearance of the stores: one of them has dirty windows and a door that is falling apart and the other has a neat, normal looking storefront. Now if you knew you could get the same product at both stores, would you be more likely to go into the clean, well maintained shop or the shop with a sketchy looking storefront?
The question is a complete no brainer: we are more likely to go shopping in stores (and restaurants, for that matter) that look professional, clean, and well cared for. Not only does the environment in such places make for a more pleasant shopping experience but we are more likely to trust that a professional looking store will sell high quality, reliable products. For obvious reasons, stores that want to draw good business need to make sure they have a good image.
Although you may not realise it, the same logic applies to your business website. Think of the storefront example, and then think about how the appearance of a business website can influence whether or not a consumer will shop there. An unprofessional website is the equivalent of the dirty, dilapidated storefront no one really wants to go in to browse.
If you want your own business to be successful, you need to pay attention to the details. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to help you ensure you are using a professional website design. Read on for some concrete ideas about how you can enhance your website and get on the path to better business!

1. The Design

We get into more detail about website design in other blog posts, but for now, one of the most important basics is functionality. You want your website to be visually appealing, certainly, but you should never trade function for appearance. Of course, the ideal is to
have both, but if you had to choose just one, at the end of the day, it is more important for your website to work properly than for it to look beautiful. You also don’t want to make your website’s appearance so extreme or colourful that it becomes distracting—or worst of all, annoying for customers.
The most effective business website design is typically a responsive design, meaning that it is designed so that the pages will adapt in different conditions, based on factors like the size of the browser. There is an ongoing debate about whether or not you should use

Adobe Flash, so you will need to make the decision that is best for your website.
However, be aware that the overall movement of the Internet appears to be gradually moving away from Flash and towards other systems. If you want to stay current, you need to make an effort to update your site technology so that you don’t become obsolete!

2. The Logo

Returning to the mall storefront example, if you were trying to choose between a store with a recognizable, clear logo and name on the front versus a store with a small, crumpled up sign tacked to the window displaying only a hand drawn, barely visible logo, it should be obvious that you would feel safer going into the store with the professional logo. Sometimes, it is easy to get so caught up in the differences between online shopping and in person shopping that we forget how many similar fundamentals they share!
In a virtual context, if you want your business website design to suggest that you are a high quality and trustworthy company, then you need your business’s logo to look professional. Here are some simple steps:

• Make sure that your logo image has a high resolution.
• Make sure your logo is reasonably sized – this means it needs to be visible but
  not over the top.
• Pay attention to the placement of your logo – it should be featured and easy to
  find.

In addition to those tips, some marketing professionals also recommend that you link your logo directly to your homepage. This will make it easier for your customers to navigate back to the homepage.

3. The Contact Section

One pretty common website design error on many business websites is the lack of a clear contact information page. If you want potential consumers to contact you with inquiries, you need to make it easy for them to figure out how they can reach you. The easier it is for users to access your business’s phone number and email address, the more likely you will be to receive questions or expressions of interest in your business.
That’s not all, though. A professional website design needs to not only include a contact section, but it also needs to make the contact information simple to locate. You want to set up your business’s website to be straightforward because this will enable potential customers to quickly and conveniently navigate your website and find the information they are looking for without a hassle. The “cleaner” and more professional your website’s contact section looks, the more likely it is that customers will contact you with inquiries.

4. The Visuals

As websites become increasingly sophisticated, a professional business website needs to incorporate visual aesthetics, but it also needs to avoid extremes. Generally speaking, it is best to start out with neutral colours. Some website designers are tempted to attract attention with lots of bright colours or fancy fonts. However keep in mind that for an elegant website, less is usually more. You do not want your website design to be uninspiring and boring, but making an attractive website does not mean you should bombard your viewers with too much all at once, either.
Many web design professionals agree that it is best to use colour intentionally and strategically. You should also pay attention to any colours within your company’s logo, as these might help you develop an overall colour scheme for your business website. A balance of text and visuals is equally important. If you use photos, make sure they are high quality ones and thoughtfully spaced on the page.

5. The Experience

Lastly, but certainly not least, it is imperative for you to test out the experience of your business website for yourself! You may not pay very much attention to the details of your website design while you are putting it together, but you also need to be able to look at it with a more objective perspective, thinking about how it will come across from the eyes of the consumer. The only way to know for sure what the user’s experience of your
business website will be is to try it out for yourself and then ideally, to eventually gather
feedback from other users. The more you actively try to incorporate an understanding of the user and the user’s point of view, the more likely your business website will be professional and geared towards your customers/clientele.
These five steps are only general examples of advice for how to put together a more professional website design, and many of them may seem obvious at first glance. However, if you pay careful attention to these tips and try to implement them thoughtfully, you may be surprised to discover what an immense difference the smallest details can make! By following these steps, you will put yourself on the right track to bolster business and build a more successful company. For further information or a quote on your business, contact us today!

View our Infographic – on page SEO Checklist 2017

Have you ever landed on a fun-looking website with a fancy design, only to realise that it is so poorly organised that you can’t find anything whatsoever? What about clicking on a link in a search engine only to immediately hit the “back” button because you don’t have the time or energy to waste on finding a result you can locate almost instantly somewhere else?

You can admit it: we’ve all done it. You’re not alone. In an age of increasing reliance on Internet search engines and an ever-more tech-savvy base of users who could practically design a website in their sleep, there’s a shrinking patience for inefficient websites.

It’s no surprise, then, that the function and ease of use of a website’s homepage can make all the difference in determining whether an inpatient shopper chooses to stick around for a while to browse your online store or whether they hightail it to the back button to do their online equivalent of window-shopping elsewhere.

So how can you ensure that your website will spark the interest of the impatient hordes?

The answer is simple: it all comes down to your homepage design. To boost your website’s traffic, you need an effective homepage. What better way to enhance your homepage design than to take a peek at some of the most visited websites on the Internet? Let’s unlock some of their secret strategies for success!

1) Continuity and Convenience

We’ll start with two of the big “c’s”: you want your website to be easy to find and easy to navigate. That’s where continuity comes in: you don’t want your users to have to complete a virtual scavenger hunt just to figure out your company’s phone number! How can you expect anyone to order something from your shop if they have to scale hurdles just to find the shopping cart?

With the variety of different homepage design techniques out there, users will expect your homepage to look nice, but you also can’t count on them to want to take the time to unravel the riddle of a complicated navigation bar. Some of the most visited websites in the world include Google, Amazon, Wikipedia, and Youtube. What do all of their homepages have in common? A simple, straightforward, consistent design that emphasises ease of use for even the most impatient Internet addicts.

2) Optimised Keywords

You can find out a lot more about this fundamental web design success strategy elsewhere on the Vivere blog, but the buzzword here is SEO – aka search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation is a complicated way of expressing a pretty simple idea: improving how your website appears in search rankings.

If you want your business to get attention in a realm where competition lurks around every virtual corner of hyperspace, your website has to have a good position in search rankings. You could have the greatest web design in the universe, but it won’t do you any good if no one ever actually makes it to your website to see it!

One of the fundamental strategies for SEO success is using targeted keywords. As the landing point for your website, your homepage needs to make particularly effective use of optimised keywords. That way, when someone searches a relevant keyword, your website will be one of the first to pop up on their screen.

3) Avoiding Duplicated Domains.

All too often, homepages can have duplicates that exist without the site owners even knowing! For instance, you might think that typing “MyDomain.com” will work just as well as “MyDomain.com/index.php” – but think again! These two URLs have the exact same content but they are on two different pages. Users cannot see this, but someone else can: all the major search engines. You don’t want to end up with duplicate homepages that require redirects, if for no other reason than because it will harm your site’s rankings!

4) Use GOOD visuals.

It’s a common refrain, from the classroom to the board meeting: “use visuals.” A homepage design that only uses huge blocks of text is not aesthetically appealing (no matter how much you like the font!) However, incorporating images or other visual media is not enough on its own and can actually backfire if you don’t do it effectively. Good visuals are high-quality images in a large size (but exercise some judgment here, of course: you don’t want to actually take over the entire screen). The most visited websites know that they need to use visuals and know that they need to use visuals thoughtfully—especially on the homepage.

5) Make your site Mobile-Friendly.

According to Search Engine Watch, as of 2014, use of mobile phones to access the Internet has overtaken Internet access from desktop computers. Clearly, the demand for mobile-friendly websites has only continued to grow and does not look likely to subside anytime soon! This means that the ideal homepage design will also include a mobile or tablet-friendly version.

Particularly for mobile-friendly versions, local business websites should prioritize the placement of their company’s name, address, and phone number at the top of the page. That way, someone who views your homepage from their mobile will be able to call you with one quick, easy tap of their screen.

These five success strategies of some of the most visited websites may seem a bit obvious, but you might be surprised how few sites actually follow these basic guidelines! There are additional, more complex strategies involved in improving your homepage design and boosting traffic to your website, but these five strategies give you some of the most fundamental steps to better online business. If nothing else, hopefully you have learned to never underestimate the power of an effective homepage design—or the massive potential impact of a negative one!