Effective web design is important for any business as it can make or break a company. It’s often the first point of contact your customer has with your business, so making a good impression is crucial. Small businesses may not have the resources to market themselves in many different ways, so having a well-functioning and thought-out website that caters to your visitors will help drive success organically. If you haven’t given your website any attention in a while, it may be time to revamp your web design.

Revamping your website requires a carefully planned strategy. If your web team is qualified enough it can be done in-house, but most small businesses will opt for professional help from web design companies and agencies.

Here are 10 tips on how to revamp web design for your small business:

1. Have Clear Goals

Before revamping web design, it’s important to decide on why you are doing this. You should set clear goals for your website’s purpose, and implement a strategy according to them.

Are your goals to increase sales? Or perhaps you want to become an authoritative source of information within your industry? Or will you use your website as a branding tool? While you decide on the goals, also think about how to measure these goals. Revamping your web design will be superfluous if you don’t know how to measure what you’re trying to achieve.

2. Know Your Audience

As a business, it’s important to know that you are creating a website for your visitors, not for you. What you like may not be what your visitors want to see, so it’s imperative to get to know your audience.  

Is your audience looking for specific information, or do they want to interact directly with your business? Perhaps they are seeking entertainment? The design of your website is dependent on this information. Find out what your most frequent visitors are interested in and create the ideal user experience for them.

3. Know Your Competitors

It’s always important to keep an eye on what your competitors are doing, and it’s also helpful when it comes to revamping web design for your small business’ website.

 Have they recently made any big changes to their site? Are they performing better than you? Analyse their changes and take note. Of course, you don’t want to copy their design exactly, but you can take pointers from their design strategy and tailor it to your business.

4. Highlight Your Track Record

When possible, you should always highlight your work on your website. Incorporate your newest work, case studies, or customer testimonials. Regardless of your industry, find a way to communicate your expertise to your visitors when revamping web design. It will add credibility to your business, and your work will speak for itself.

5. Logical Website Structure

Your website’s architecture is very important when it comes to UX. You want the navigation to be as clear and intuitive as possible for your user. Think about how many tiers your website’s structure needs, how to display them on the homepage, and what to name your headers.

A logical site structure isn’t just valuable for UX, but it will also give you SEO benefits. One of the key pillars of good SEO is a clear website structure with relevant headers on your subpages. It’s good to spend a lot of time on this part, not only for your visitors but also for your organic search engine rankings.

6. Valuable Content With Relevant Keywords

The type of content you feature on your site will also have a huge impact on SEO. Create valuable content with relevant keywords to give your visitors the information they need, and to get search engines to favor you.

Conduct keyword analyses to ensure you are using the same language your ideal visitor is using and implement this in your content strategy. Be careful not to overuse keywords though, as you want your content to read naturally. 

7. Integrate Your Social Media Platforms

Make your business more approachable and genuine by integrating your social media platforms on your site when revamping web design. Nowadays most businesses have some kind of social media presence, and it’s a great idea to showcase this on your website. It will add a personable touch to your company and means you are more accessible to your visitors and customers. 

8. Decrease Load Time

An aspect of revamping web design for your business that should not be overlooked is optimising your site’s technical performance. Decrease the load time of your website to improve user experience – visitors will not bother staying on your page if it takes too long to load. Compress images, clean up HTML code, and perhaps reduce the number of plugins you use on your site. This will not only improve UX but will also have massive SEO benefits.

9. Make It Mobile Friendly

Globally, people spend the majority of their time online on their phones, so optimising for mobile is a must if you want to retain the attention of your customers. When revamping web design for your business, this can’t be overlooked. In addition, mobile optimisation is a good way to improve your organic ranking on search engines.  

10. Track Your Changes

Finally, any of the changes you want to implement when revamping the web design of your small business’ site have to be measured. You need to set metrics for measuring success, and this will differ according to the goals you have set.

If your focus is on acquisition, you should monitor the number of sessions, unique visitors, as well as new vs returning visitors. For measuring engagement, analyze time spent on your site, number of pages visited, and the bounce rate. Being able to convert visitors is another common and important goal to measure, and you can do this by looking at the number of online forms filled out, or perhaps registrations for an event.  

Regardless of your reason for revamping the web design of your site, keep these ten pointers in mind when implementing changes. Your website is typically the first impression so it’s important to get it right!

The post How to Revamp Web Design for Your Small Business appeared first on Tim B Design.

If you’ve been in the web design niche for a long time, it’s common to feel like you’re coding and designing the same layout over and over again. There are newer trends coming up every now and then, but most websites look relatively the same. They use the 12-column grid, 2 and 2 column boxed layouts and similar shapes. Admittedly, it’s becoming quite boring to look at and the user experience has also dwindled with time.

Fortunately, there’s a new CSS revolution in the works. You might have heard about CSS Grid and Flexbox. It’s a new way of doing things and you can build amazing layouts much more effortlessly. Thanks to the numerous CSS features, there’s less reliance on graphic software. Actually, there are more expectations in the long run, regarding web graphics. Now it’s easy to modify and create images directly from your browser with just the use of a few simple code lines.

Here’s how you can break the pattern with these amazing CSS tips.

Explore CSS Blend Modes

Some of the coolest website design trends this year include colorizer effects and ductome imagery. They have become quite popular especially with Spotify implementing these effects cohesively and consequently. You can apply the effects on your browser directly and avoid creating multiple colored versions of all your assets.

Using these blend modes, you can always unify the appearance of content across numerous websites. Additionally, you can always set different color versions of any image changing only the color in CSS. The blend modes are 15 in number and include overlay, screen, darken and lighten. Depending on the type of element you’re looking to apply an effect, you can always choose from different implementation methods available.

For instance, you can always use a background color and image set on the blend mode to make it darker or create an overlay with any pseudo elements such as before and after to create a good colorizing effect. If you want to achieve the duotone effect, it’s always a good idea to use a high-contrast black and white image. Apply CSS filters to create a high contrast level for the greyscale.

Adding a mask

Masking is a feature that informs the browser the asset elements that should be visible. It’s useful if you’re building creative layouts and shapes. You can achieve this in three ways: using a raster image such as a PNG format with transparency parts, SVG elements and CSS gradients. Unlike any typical raster image, it’s easy to transform or scale SVG without any significant loss in the quality.

Firefox supports the latest version so you need to use an inline SVG for any masking tasks. You must be wondering if you can use a raster image with transparency levels. Of course, the transparent parts of the image will not be visible, so the opaque parts will be in full display hiding everything else. The feature is particularly powerful since you can apply the same properties to any background images thus defining their repetition, size and position.

Don’t fear clipping

Another amazing feature that comes with CSS is clipping. The boundary of a shape is referred to as a clip path, which is completely different from the deprecated clip property. Clipping clearly defines the area of the image, which should be visible; it’s similar to cutting a piece of paper. Anything outside the path will be hidden completely while what’s inside will be visible.

Take an instance where a circle function sets a mask on top of an image so you can only see the image found within the circle. Additionally, you can always use shape functions or SVG similarly to clip paths, creating more opportunities such as animating them into morphing shapes.

Thinking outside the box

No one mandated that text containers should always be rectangular. Now, you can literally step outside the box and find the newest ways of making your page layouts less boxy and richer. The properties, shape-inside and shape-outside, give you a chance to wrap your content with custom paths in CSS.

Try animation using SVG (scalable vector graphics)

It’s hard to imagine today’s web without the use of SVG. As the name suggests, it scales (there’s your answer for all the responsive web design enquiries). The SVG graphic will always be crisp regardless of the screen resolution of the device you’re viewing it on. Besides scalability, there are numerous features that you can enjoy with SVG.

For instance, you can always manipulate SVG using CSS. You will have a lot of fun trying out CSS animations with the SVG mode and you can achieve numerous amazing effects. It’s common to think that you can use raster images effortlessly with this option, but there’s one huge advantage compared to ordinary images.

Any words included in the SVG mode remain in the text tag so always remain in text mode. Therefore, they are easy to search, select and access. You can always edit them from the code directly. However, you should remember to embed the font face to make sure it’s completely rendered. Animating the SVG mode with CSS is actually similar to animating any element in HTML. You can do it effortlessly with transitions, keyframe animations and transforms.

Once you have understood the SVG code, everything else become intuitive and straightforward because you will do it exactly like you would in HTML. One of the coolest features about SVG is the fact that you can pick up any part and use CSS animations to make it come alive. That means you can create very dynamic and interest effects without necessarily using JavaScript. For instance, SVG comes with DOM API so you can inspect everything using DevTools, one of the best recommendations.

Make a lot of noise

The 80s and 90s are back. One of the most popular design trends this year is glitch, which includes the aesthetics of chaos, jamming and noise. You can easily see the celebrations of errors, failures and glitches on the web. Do you want to play a little more with perspective and become more visually chaotic? Well, you can do so effortlessly by skewing and transforming all the elements on your site.

Try collages

Another trendy aspect in web design is the collage-inspired designs and they are becoming more popular with each passing second. For instance, check out the MailChimp landing page and look out for the collage. Previously, you would attach raster images that you have prepared in a graphics editor. Thanks to the new features mentioned above, you can replicate the effects using CSS. Now you can prepare collages that adjust to the web’s requirements, allowing them to be interactive, animated and scalable.

Don’t forget about browser support

Do you feel held back when you’re using CSS properties since you suspect that different browsers do not support them? You can always seek the assistance of the @support system. You can check the browser for CSS property and value pairs before doing anything. The code included in the tool will only be rendered if all the conditions are true.

Therefore, if the browser hasn’t read the code then you can’t do anything with it. So there won’t be a given part of the code generated by the browser if it doesn’t understand. You can combine features such as masking, blending modes and clipping. The power of SVG is shaped by CSS providing a set of tools that boost your creativity setting you apart from the norm. Now, you can use these tools to create a web version of everything you find on print.

Smart quotes

Most people often ignore their site’s typography, but that’s something that can be enhanced greatly thanks to sophisticated CSS. For instance, if you’re using quotation marks in your code, they are actually primes used for coordinates and measurements. In HTML, if you’re using q tags for the quotations, you can choose to install proper quotation marks automatically, often called smart quotes, before and after the quotation.

CSS hover effects

Most people have a portfolio where you can show off projects in a gallery or grid. When using the grids, most web designers prefer heavy JavaScript libraries that have been outdone with Flexbox. Now you can create grids that actually work in every available browser without the need for JavaScript.

Note that, some properties will still experience some compatibility issues with different browsers, so you need to play around with everything. Well, you should expect that browser support is currently limited, which might still not happen in the future. So it’s time to be creative with your coding and find new ways to utilize everything available to you.

There are a ton of reasons to improve a website’s design. In order to do so, however, you’ll need the right tools. These CSS tricks will have you designing brand new websites that stand apart from the competition in no time.

The post 10 Free CSS tips and tricks to improve any website design appeared first on Tim B Design.

Setting up your online store is the first step to making sales on your store but bringing in the traffic is the way you’re going to get it done. One of the ways of getting that traffic to your store is through SEO.

At a basic level, the more targeted potential consumers visit your website, the greater the odds of them ending up with paying customers.

SEO is critical to the well being of your e-commerce store. If done correctly, irrespective of the size of your company, it will help you make money and maximize profitability. In this article, we will be looking at why e-commerce stores need SEO

1. Helps Customers Find You

Having an e-commerce website without SEO is akin to leaving cash on the table – lots of it. If you take 3-5 minutes to go through your analytics you will realize that Google ranks as one of your top source of traffic and revenue. Google drives the majority of profit-producing traffic for most business. The constantly evolving nature of technology has affected how consumers shop online. Search is now an important part of the shopping experience. Ignoring SEO means you’re invisible to your customers. When you’re visible in search, more customers can find you and engage with your business, but when you’re not, fewer customers will find you and you will make less money. Initiating a superior SEO strategy can boost your revenue by almost 50%.

2. Cost Effective

One reason why e-commerce stores cannot afford to ignore SEO is the cost. In some highly competitive niches, paying for website traffic can cost you thousands of dollars daily. PPC Ads and Banner Ads don’t come cheap. With SEO, you are less dependent on paid traffic and more depended on search traffic which is free. I’m not in any way against buying ads, but with effective SEO, you are less dependent on the paid traffic and can save up your money for inventory and web development. With SEO, you can attract a large number of people without paying for it directly. Every successful e-commerce company has prioritized SEO which offers them time and money savings, while still driving down their cost per conversion.

3. Long Lasting

With SEO, you can continue to get traffic 2 years after. It doesn’t have a shelf life like paid advertising – neither does it depend on your pocket. The long-term effects are clear. SEO last longer than other forms of marketing because you don’t have to start with a clean slate every time. It builds on what you have already done over time. The traffic also won’t stop when you stop focusing on SEO as in the case of paid advertising. In some cases, you can ignore your project for something else – and when you come back, you might even see that SEO has done even more than was expected on the site.

SEO for e-commerce stores is no longer optional. It is critical to your stores’ financial success and it can help spur the business growth that you have been looking for.

Author’s Bio
Kara Tan is a cofounder of Altitude Labs, a full-service app design and development agency that specializes in data driven design and personalization.

The post How Does SEO Help E-commerce Sites? appeared first on Tim B Design.

Don’t get stagnant in your marketing efforts! Many companies have created a lot of opportunity for themselves by pushing heavily into Google AdWords or some old-school E-mail marketing, but don’t get out when the rates start going up, or the open rates go down, and the methods are not as profitable as they once were. It’s crucial to stay nimble and swap out, or play down out-dated methods (within reason for your industry), and start experimenting with heavier marketing budgets in other areas.

Here are five areas where marketing budgets are increasing next year – reasons include:  higher perceived ROI, more proof of concept from other companies doing it, and natural progression. Paid social for instance continues to grow, just because ad budgets that may have been spent on Google AdWords in the past may work better in the context of social proof and a more interactive experience.

1. Video

If you’re not using video, nimbly, that allows you not to pay 1000s of dollars every time you put one out, you’re behind the times. A mid-premium video setup can be as little as $2000 bucks, and pay for itself ten times in the first three months if you have a clear strategy to make compelling videos regularly.

• The Camera:  Canon EOS 70D Digital SLR – This camera allows you to flip the viewer towards the subject in case you’re filming yourself in tutorials or explainer videos.
• The Lens:  Canon EF-S 10-18mm – This lens was suggested by someone doing a video about Casey Neitstat’s (master daily vlogger on YouTube) video equipment. It should allow you to focus on your face or other faces in automatic mode without knowing a lot about focus.
• The Stand:  Joby GorillaPod Focus with BallHead X – This pod allows your camera to stand on tables, or cling to a tree branch, whatever you need.
• The Mic:  Rhodes Video Mic Pro R with Shockmount – This mic allows you to get a focused audio signal on the go.
• The Backdrop:  Simple White Muslin Backdrop – You’ll need something to give a consistent and decently clean feel to your videos, and this backdrop is an option.
• The Lights:  Limo Studio’s Photography Softbox Lights – Decent lighting will require you playing around with different setups, but these lights are a solid option for under $60.

2. Content Marketing and SEO

Content Marketing is just creating things your clients, customers, and prospects would actually want! It’s the best form of SEO and will stand the test of time. Use these methods and tools to get the most out of your content marketing and SEO efforts.

1. Persona planning template:  “Make My Persona” by Hubspot – You’ll want to plan your objectives, and really dig into who your core audience is and what would be most useful to them. Who are the company’s ideal clients? What questions do they have? What resources do they need?
2. Tool for keyword strategy:  Ahrefs – Do the competitive analysis and find what kind of traffic different terms have.
3. For monitoring search traffic:  Google Search Console – Google Search console is invaluable for figuring out opportunities. It allows you to sort by impressions and to find terms you have a lot of impressions for but not a lot of clicks for – earn links and build out more content for these terms!
4. For getting granular on all traffic:  Google Analytics – Beyond just search engine optimization, monitor all of your paid ads, social traffic, and conversions in Google Analytics.
5. Setting meta-titles, descriptions, and basic technical SEO:  Yoast SEO – A great start for SEO, you’ll want to de-index slim content, write meta titles and descriptions, and get your site in order in a general way by configuring Yoast SEO based on your keyword strategy.
6. For planning content in context:  Editorial Calendar Plugin – If you have more than one person in your content team, this plugin can help you coordinate the different components, and plan content in a calendar form.

3. Paid Social

People are still mourning the loss of “free” marketing, as organic social media reach has gone down to almost nill for many brands, Facebook and Instagram are still crazy effective for brands if you’re willing to pay. Whether by promoted posts, video ads, or just straightforward offers – you want to save this for the best shots you have. Here are some keys to making it work.

1. Social Ad Template:  Customer Magnetism – Get your ad sizes right!
2. Ideas for writing social ad headlines:  Formula’s and Strategies – It takes persuasion and finesse with the words you use to make these ads truly effective + and offers that have an emotional resonance with your ideal customers.
3. Ad Refiner/perfector:  AdSpresso – This tool helps you put your images, headlines, and demographics in and tests them all in random combinations and then refines them based on what works over time.
4. Regular posting tool:  Buffer – You need something to schedule your posts at regular intervals and ideal times – Buffer is perfect for this. Then you can go promote ones that get better organic traction.
5. Social Media Analytics:  Sprout Social – For monitoring what’s working and reporting on trends.
6. Social Designs on the fly:  Buffer’s Pablo – Even if you’re not a designer, Pablo allows you to create nice-looking images for social media, and schedule them on Buffer quickly to go out to all your social accounts.

4. Strategic Use of Influencers

If you can find people that own your audience’s attention (in any situation, not just social media), it makes absolute sense to collaborate with them to reach those people. This method has been growing over the past couple years – but it will reach a pinnacle this next year as companies have started to learn how to do it well.

1. Ways to reach out to bloggers quickly:  Pitchbox –
2. Knowing what to charge for Instagram Influencers – 6-12% per post engagement. 10 cents to keep it simple. So if your influencer usually gets 5,000 likes? $500. You’re going to pay less for younger influencers, and more for influencers over 25, and much more for influencers over 35 according to this white-paper.
3. Platform for Social Influencer Connections:  Revfluence – Need to connect with influencers? Here’s a way to scale that and do it quickly.
4. An actual influencer plan:  Klear’s Influencer Marketing Template Plan – Klear suggests influencer marketing yields an average of $6.85 worth of earned media value, for every $1 of paid media.

5. E-mail Marketing and Marketing Automation

One of the third highest perceived positive ROI marketing strategies (the other two are SEO and Content Marketing). E-mail marketing and marketing automation can be wielded well with practice and experimentation.

1. Something to handle your main e-mail list:  Mailchimp – Your main e-mail list needs a home, MailChimp is perfect for this and easy to setup.
2. Something to fill your e-mail list regularly and systematically:  Sumo – Particularly the welcome mat, and ‘exit intent’ popups are extremely effective in getting more e-mail signups.
3. Tracking your leads:  Hubspot Marketing – Another great way to fill your e-mail list (bottom right popout works great.) But it also can capture every lead your site gets for review and another rake to make sure you have attribution around your marketing
4. Way to segment and create trickle out e-mail campaigns:  InfusionSoft – Not crazy intuitive to get started on, but InfusionSoft is insanely useful for creating e-mail funnels and drip e-mail campaigns.
5. Ways to find people quickly and outreach to new e-mail lists:  Ninja Outreach– For guest posting, roundups, and your best content promotion Ninja Outreach is perfect.

I would be silly not to mention offline marketing methods that are growing as well. Brand activations, experiential marketing, and use of VR, and content producers are also going up as people recognize that there is some arbitrage in getting in front of people at the right moments. These methods are particularly effective when you have a captive audience at a trade show, a big event where a lot of ‘early adopters’ show up (like South by Southwest in Austin) or other places where tastemakers often show up looking for the latest and greatest.

But yes – digital marketing and digital related marketing is on a steady rise.

Wrapping Up

These methods are growing because:

A. They Work

-and-

B. People are using their own understanding of where things are moving to slowly increase digital marketing budgets up to 40% (!) this year, up from 36% just a few years ago.

Slowly but surely marketing budgets are increasing. If you don’t find out where the ‘arbitrage’ (the best deals for the most effect) are until other people all have their budgets there as well – you will simply be fishing in a pond with all your competitors. The trick is to find a completely blue ocean (not one red with blood with all the other sharks around) and dominate entirely.

Keep your eye out for marketing methods that involve less competition.

Thanks for reading about where marketing budgets are growing this next year!

The post The 5 Marketing Methods Skyrocketing Next Year appeared first on Tim B Design.

If you want to create a marketing budget – the first important step is to determine what’s a reasonable budget for your particular industry. That can mean as low as 4% for medical markets or really high ‘cost of goods sold’ services, and as high as 40-50% in B2C products – but generally, it’s around 6-12% on average.

Download the one-page marketing budget template

If you’re trying to be aggressive and quickly grow, it will be on the high side of averages – and if you are trying just to maintain, or perhaps don’t have the resources to deliver on any large amount of increase in work, it might be better to stay on the slimmer side. Only 2% of companies do no marketing whatsoever.

Here’s a one-page template that you can use to plan your marketing budget!

Things to consider when using the one-page marketing budget template.

It’s better to keep it simple (at least to start) – you’ll want to determine in a general way what your company spent on marketing over the past year and the revenue for this year. When you have that, look at what percentage it was this year – and dial it up or down based on how much quicker or slower you want to grow.

Using the bottom part of the one-page marketing budget template

The idea on the bottom of the template is to break down your marketing budget into what you want to spend on different, specific marketing methods.

• SEO / Content Marketing
• Email Marketing / Automation
• Social Media Marketing
• Video
• Paid Ads / Remarketing
• Website
• Print
• Radio
• Television
• Outdoor
• Environmental
• Trade Shows

You should use this list as a starting point – but it doesn’t mean that you have to stop here. You can add new elements, or subtract them if it doesn’t make sense for your business.

Consider what has worked in the past – regarding clear ‘return on investment’ and weight your budget in those areas + the areas that most people perceive high ROI. Content marketing, SEO, and E-mail marketing and marketing automation are some of the biggest areas according to polls of Chief Marketing Officers.

Once again, you have to look at the previous results – and other ones that have high ROI in your industry.

Check out our Marketing Budget Calculator if you’re still looking for some more granular numbers!

Presenting your marketing budget to your boss

There’s no virtue in presenting a long-winded document to a boss. Creating a marketing strategy requires in-depth research, but every boss I’ve ever had has appreciated me boiling down to the key points of my plan, and presenting them in a simple way.

If you need to do a cost analysis and a breakdown of your current website’s analytics, and a deeper ROI analysis you should do those things – but don’t let it stop you from making big moves in your marketing budget this next year. You should be prepared with a clear budget, specific goals, and have reasoning built out for why you need them.

This doesn’t mean you should present all of that information to your CEO – your CFO – or whoever you directly report to. It means you should have it available, but if you make the main points of your plan clear and prepare a simple document to present your marketing budget, you will make it easier to digest.

Once again – this is a starting point. But rather than getting stuck on the finer points, start mocking up a general plan and use it to kick off the discussion for your marketing budget!

Good luck – and I hope this One-Page Marketing Budget Plan/Template is useful for you and your company!

The post Easy, Free Marketing Budgeting One Page Template appeared first on Tim B Design.

This 2018 Color Forecast – is based on high fashion, paint companies, and Pantone trends. I use these three broader points, and curation according to my tastes to create my third (!) annual color forecast of yearly color trends.

Check out 2016, and 2017 color forecasts to take a look back, and join me for this delightful tour of new designer’s lines and drawing conclusions based on their choices and other color expert ideas for 2018!

Paying attention to high fashion

Why do I start every color forecast with particular attention to high fashion? I’m not sure – I do know a lot of times high fashion designers are ahead of the curve. Although this being the third year of diving deep on this subject, these trends are slow and mercurial. I don’t feel the fashion designers are moving that quickly.

Pale pink was highly present this year in high fashion lines – but I’m shifting focus this year to a different, very close relative since my past years have both focused on pale pink. Give up the spotlight already!

Beige is back!

I do feel like this year; beige is becoming even more present in high fashion than last year – it has taken a bigger role than pale pink, and now is not just the paint color in your grandparent’s basement bathroom, it’s been given new life. It looks great on people whose skin matches it, and on darker skin tones as well – because well… beige is back. (If you’ve been stowing away your beige jumpsuit from 15 years ago, you may be in luck.)

Pale Gold and Matte Black

Many brighter colors are coming in this year, rich tones, whose cousins were stylishly muted only three or four years ago, are now out and proud. Rich purples, greens, reds, and blues. A consistent though mutated trend is gold and matte black, both muted this year and often coupled with earth tones like brown and money green.

Silver, Silvery Purple & Green, oh my

Silvery colors have been peeking around the corner for years. Perhaps this year they will make a more robust showing in street styles and broader design trends like interior design, print design, etc. The trick in the high fashion designer’s palette seems to be keeping it somewhat matte, and/or mixing it with purple, green, or another color to add interest along with diagonal lines and various textures.

Deep Red & Blue

You may notice that I have a special affinity for Gucci color schemes, and perhaps that skews my take on what is 2018 related, and what is just beautiful, solid Gucci color may be broader, more along the lines of a 10-year trend. I love Gucci’s deep red and blue – along with the occasional accompanying green stripe. The tendency for other designers to run with full saturation, rich colors do seem to be present as well for 2018 fashion lines.

Other Color Experts and Why They Matter

If you’re a designer, you’re likely very familiar with Pantone’s color of the year, which usually gets a lot of press (at least for industries that focus a lot on color). I like to take a good hard look at all of their other color predictions, and other sources like paint companies, as their businesses depend on making accurate and attentive choices in what they are selling. The pressures of the free market push these companies to make intelligent and savvy choices when suggesting color trends, so it makes sense to examine their choices.

Pantone

“The color palette showcases an appreciation for the complexity and distinctiveness of color and the expression of it, which is something that evolves and can be played with,” said Eiseman. “Consumers need more variety, and this expanded palette embraces the lack of gender and seasonal borders we see within the fashion industry.”

Their mainstays suggestions are more along the lines of the aforementioned muted gold, deep ‘sailor blue’ beige or mauve, and silver/grey. They suggest these because they think that the colors are getting brighter, richer, and deeper and need some simpler tones as the mainstays so the overall palette of peoples’ wardrobes will be ‘anchored’ in these simpler colors.

This brings me to the phenomenon of the ‘Groutfit’ – my one foray into ‘male-centric’ fashion for 2018.

A Groutfit is a grey outfit, and Gucci is banking on groutfits, as well as other designers, are working in grey alongside the silver and more intense colors.

Sherwin Williams

What a lovely palette – Sherwin Williams doesn’t miss with its delightful choice for color of the year – a deep blue they call ‘Oceanside’ – my take on Gucci’s deep red and blue seems to be right on point! Here’s their video about this color of the year for 2018:

With this take on blue, and Benjamin Moore’s take on red – it may just be the year of very bold color walls. It’s been happening for a bit now, but if their predictions are a strong indication of where people will go, we’ll be seeing a lot more!

Benjamin-Moore

Benjamin Moore – chooses ‘Caliente’ or a rich, deep red as its color of the year. They suggest in the video below that it symbolizes boldness and joy. Check it out!

As we mentioned above, deep red and deep blue are very ‘in’ this year, and perhaps will be for a few more years, seeing as there was a step into more muted colors for some years (2011-2015.) Bold and deep colors likely will have a reign longer than one or two years.

Wrapping Up

All of this is a survey of the existing information out there about color leaders and experts’ take on 2018 – with a little bit of my perspective mixed in. I hope you’ll further explore with your own lens, and determine your own bold steps for color in your designs for 2018.

There’s a bit more opportunity in my estimation to use color boldly in anticipation of this new appetite for strong colors, and finding ways to complement the silver, mauves, and matte blacks that have been a mainstay for a couple of years.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this “Ultimate Designer’s Color Guide 2018″ and I hope to share with you this annual forecast again next year. If you enjoyed the article, please leave a comment and/or share with your friends and followers!

The post The Ultimate Designer’s Color Guide 2018 appeared first on Tim B Design.

What are the most important factors for SEO in 2018? Well – according to many annual surveys of the most important factors for SEO, thought leadership/deep content and links are always number one and two for many years running. I won’t break with tradition here, but I will share some interesting graphs to give some visual representation to these two key factors, and my take on the THIRD most important ranking factor.

Related: Best Blog Article Length for SEO in 2018 

1. Thought Leadership – Original Content (guides, resources, answers to common questions your ideal demographic might have)

You need content. If you shovel out commodity content for awhile and see no real result, your industry might just benefit from your thought leadership! This means putting in extra effort and time to create resources, guides or deep question and answer hubs that allow people to understand what you do more fully.

Long content ranks better – as evidenced by this study of the top ranking pages and the correlation to the first 3-5 results in Google to higher content pages and articles.

2. Links from high domain authority, high page authority domains (ideally in your niche)

The reason I put links as number two is because without significant content you’ll likely never be able to earn links naturally, and even if you contrive some backlinks – your reign is likely to be shortlived.

Long-term, sustainable high ranking sites put out consistent content.

Links are that all-important number two factor because every link is like a vote on the quality of your site, and your page or article. But QUALITY is so much more important than QUANTITY here. All of my experiments and client work have shown, it’s way more worthwhile to hold out for three really amazing links on higher domain authority sites and working to push the page authority of the pages with the links on them, than any ‘shortcut’ to riches you might take.

There are ways to purchase backlinks, and I don’t disparage you of this route – it’s just crucial to note, it’s better to earn or buy much fewer high-quality guest posts, or links – than it is to throw as many at the wall and see what sticks. This might even hold you back, or at worst get your site or page an algorithmic or manual penalty.

The number one reason to focus on quality rather than quantity when it comes to earning backlinks – is that earning shitty backlinks is a waste of time and won’t help much.

3. On-page SEO factors.

Yes indeed – on-page SEO still matters, but you need to know where to put your effort. The domain age is one of the most important pieces of on-page SEO, but it’s not something you can change, just understand it does matter.

Beyond that, it’s the keyword usage, in the domain, in the URL, in alt-tags, in headings, the first paragraph. It’s not represented, but can also use it in the image file name, in your target tag for links, in italics and bold – as well as the last paragraph of the page as well!

Beyond keyword, research on-page includes HTTPS (more important than ever as an SEO ranking factor in 2018), the number of social shares, and even linking out to high domain authority sources (referred as co-citations), and including the keyword in the meta description. Keywords in meta descriptions aren’t a direct ranking factor per-say, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the fact they are bolded when people search may lead to a higher click-through rate.

For all of these factors, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation – the fact when people put a ton of work into the content they create they might be more likely to implement these factors and other possibilities, may drive up a seeming correlation without being the direct cause.

Bonus: Digital Marketing Experts takes on What’s important for SEO in 2018

“For Google, it’s all about the audience in 2018. So the top factors influencing organic search rankings will focus on the user experience, starting with user intent – pages that respond perfectly to user intent based on the search query are likely to perform better; and ending with the user journey – websites where a higher percentage of users end their quest signal a very strong message to Google. Between those start and end points, a number of other audience-related factors come into play, including click-through rates, bounce rates, time on page, and engagement rates. Of course, the good old factors – titles, links, keywords on page, etc. are still extremely important. The point is, in the future, those factors alone won’t quite be enough to secure top organic positions.”

Farhad Divecha
accuracast.com

“My prediction for SEO in 2018 is similar to what happened in 2017… I believe that backlinks will decrease in value while your content quality, your ability to serve searcher intent, and your on-site user experience will increase in value. Also, I believe that Google will improve its ability to analyze and assign a value to different media types such as video. Video is becoming (if it isn’t already) the most preferred way to consume content. In addition to that, voice search will continue to play a bigger role from here and into the future as well. I’m not too concerned about “how to optimize for voice search” because I believe it will involve a very similar approach. At a 30,000-foot view, those who can fulfill searcher intent the best will win in traditional and voice search.”

Nathan Gotch
gotchseo.com

“I believe we are going to see more featured snippets and answer boxes returning from Google. So, the competition among businesses trying to appear in featured snippets will increase. And this will make SEOs go after a specific combination of factors and techniques to gain these boxes.”

Deepanshu Gahlaut
deepanshugahlaut.com

“Hey everyone, it’s really amazing how fast 2017 has gone by and soon to be 2018. Days are already getting shorter and that cold weather setting in. For the past year or so I’ve been completely focused on blogging and ranking websites. Right now I’m going to say the most important thing to rank and get steady traffic is really good on page. Make sure your contents good and no duplicate. You can take a brand new website and start ranking pretty fast putting up a few articles, doing good on page and building up a few links with social media accounts. Wish you a great 2018.”

Josh Paiva
JoshPaiva.com

“Whether you drink the kool-aid or not, I can’t state enough just how important content is for SEO, and will continue to be. It allows you to (1) bolster a site’s relevance across targeted keyword verticals, (2) attract quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative sites, and (3) speak directly to users who already want to buy your products or services. Think about it: SEO is intentional targeting because organic search users are actively searching for the kinds of solutions you can offer them — meaning that they’re already one step down the conversion funnel. So if you have relevant content, you can rank it; and if you can rank it, you can convert the users who are already looking for it.”

CT Moore
Socialed.ca

“2018 is probably going to be the year Google integrates more advanced AI when it comes to valuing links. Link building is going to get a lot harder and I personally think the emphasis on TRAFFIC (clicks through the links themselves) is going to play a huge role from a link valuation stance. Authority and relevance will of course still be huge, but getting people clicking through from links is going to get more and more important.”

Tom Buckland
HQSEO.co.uk

“As we enter 2018 the internet and as a bi-product search are increasingly becoming about how to find information quickly and efficiently. If you are a source of information you need your content to be easily pulled in by Google so they can use it to deliver answers. If you don’t think about optimizing for search you miss out on opportunity to be the answer provider for pressing questions. Structure your content as if it was made for a machine. Think through your headline, sub-heading, and body as if you were not thinking strategically, but rather completely logically.”

Josh Haynam
tryinteract.com

Thank you for reading “SEO Graphs 2018 – Most Important Factors for SEO 2018 Statistics & Roundup”!

Feel free to use any of the graphs above in your articles and simply drop a link back to this page! If you want all of them in one handy-dandy little zip file click the bottom below to grab them

Download the Top 2018 SEO Factors Graphs Now

The post SEO Graphs 2018 – Most Important Factors for SEO 2018 Statistics & Roundup appeared first on Tim B Design.

Medical and Health SEO Keywords – Highest Volume & Traffic is the result to digging in deeply to Ahrefs, and finding terms that have a significant sway in terms of amount of people searching them per month. I created this list to be a jumping off point and to give some overall idea about the areas that people are really looking for the most, how people are searching in the medical and health industries, and possibly how you might leverage this info for your practice or company.

So here it is! The highest volume & traffic terms for health and medical SEO. (Some lower volume terms are included for context and contrast)

• Keyword Phrase Estimated Monthly U.S. Search Volume
• Health  10k
• Health Insurance   256k
• United Healthcare   745k
• Dental Insurance   8.1k
• Health Insurance Quotes4.8k
• Short Term Health Insurance 2.9k
• Medical Insurance  2.1k
• Temporary Health Insurance 1.5k
• Dental Plans 1.4k
• Individual Health Insurance 1.2k
• Private Health Insurance 926
• Ask a nurse781
• Anxiety 261k
• Sociopath  281k
• Mediterranean Diet 139k
• Zucchini Recipes 74k
• Best Electric Toothbrush 30k
• Matcha  81k
• Weight Loss 80k
• Sweet Potato Recipes 63k
• Hypothyroidism261k
• Fitness Tracker41k
• Best Fitness Tracker 52k
• Vitamin B12 109k
• Eczema 315k
• Fiber 52k
• Stomach Flu83k
• Healthy Snacks 97k
• Kale Recipes 49k
• Brain Food 12k
• Diet Plans 23k
• Bipolar Symptoms 29k
• Fitness 89k
• Vegan 97k
• Ab Workouts 55k
• Yoga for Beginners 24k
• Burpees 73k
• Clean Eating 32k
• Best Workout Songs 11k
• Leg Muscles 35k
• Interval Training 13k
• Healthiest Cereal5.5k
• HIIT 38k
• Squat Challenge 23k
• Foam Roller 42k
• Skinny Fat 24k
• Appetite Suppressant 22k
• High Protein Foods 46k
• Bone Broth 58k
• Push up challenge 9.7k

I will continue to build out this list as a resource to people looking at doing Medical and health SEO – and looking for keywords for the medical and health industry that have a high volume of searches and traffic. 

Keys to finding the best keywords for your health industry niche

Take a look at your competitors, or other hospitals, gyms, nutritionists or whatever business you are in and see what they are ranking for. Take the terms they are ranking for that have the most volume and figure out whether it’s feasible for your situation to create an in-depth article, guide or landing page that captures traffic for that term. If your clinic or health-industry business is locally focused, try pairing the term with your city or state and seeing how much volume there is for that combination. You can do this in Ahrefs or SEMRush. If you need help with anything, don’t hesitate to reach out, you can e-mail me directly at tim@timbdesign.com, and I’ll get back to you very quickly.

Finding the specialty of the site you’re trying to rank

It’s crucial you find the keywords that have the highest volume in your health / medical niche – but it won’t just depend on volume, it also has to line up with your business model. So a one key to really doing great SEO, is first determining a big list of terms that relate to the business or clinic’s specialty.

You can then use this list to determine the way most people are searching for those terms. It’s not always the case that it will be the most intuitive or obvious way – but instead might be something that seems more basic. This is a phenomenon many experts in their industry have to come to terms with – just because it’s not the ‘medical way to say something’ or the ‘health industry parlance’, you need to look outside of the clinical terminology and do research on the way MOST people are refering to things.

The post Medical SEO Keywords – Highest Volume & Traffic U.S. appeared first on Tim B Design.

This will also be up on iTunes soon, so you can subscribe! Or for the moment listen/watch right here below. Also if you find the podcast valuable please rate and review the Podcast on iTunes.  

 
John Locke of Lockedown Design in Sacramento California joins us for a tour de force on pricing in website design, digital marketing, and pricing yourself appropriately in general. Sometimes it’s the right thing to charge more and give better customer service, and higher quality.

Things we talk about:

1. Intro and Small-talk 

2. 4 Tools and strategies for pricing and proposals:

– Project based, rather than hourly strategy for pricing

– Bidsketch – for quick proposals

– Proposify – for the same

– Having clear written down functional requirements as part of the contract or proposal.

3. Encouraging people that aren’t in a position to buy a website to do it themselves (only when it’s appropriate)

4. Times and reasons why it’s important for people to hire a professional to design and develop a website vs. doing it themselves.

5. How to get started doing your first couple websites – and how to price yourself at the beginning

6. When and why to charge more for website design

– You can offer better service
– You can really be there for less people, rather than trying to make bulk websites at a time
– Most people have to make themselves uncomfortable and put themselves out there, unless you’re a design superstar.
– Try to offer the best possible quality you can, and price accordingly.
– If you’re just starting out, charge what you can, do work for non-profits, family and friends.
 

The post Podcast – Ep. 17 – How to Price Yourself Effectively for Digital Marketing appeared first on Tim B Design.

Lawyer SEO Keywords – Highest Volume & Traffic  is intended to give SEO professionals and Law firms a head start on the types of content and landing pages that they might want to go after – by giving some ideas for the top keywords. As part of my general discipline of doing Law firm SEO – this research was done by using Ahrefs and other tools to draw out some solid keywords and give the average monthly searches for a number of law firm and criminal defense related keywords.

Without further ado – here are the highest volume & traffic terms for Law firm SEO. (Some lower volume terms are included for context and contrast)

• Keyword Phrase Estimated Monthly U.S. Search Volume
• Law firm  7.4k
• Lawyer   70k
• Rocket Lawyer 48k
• Investment 78k
• Lawyer Salary 21k 
• Immigration Lawyer 21k
• Chicago Attorneys 150
• Law Office 3.5k
• Find a Lawyer 4.8k
• Attorney at Law 7.4k
• Law office near me 400
• Law office jobs 250
• Consider these location specific location terms(how they might break down to your location)
• Minneapolis Lawyer10
• Attorney Minneapolis 60
• Bankruptcy Lawyer Minneapolis350
• Criminal Lawyer Minneapolis 250
• Minneapolis DWI Lawyer 200
• Personal Injury Lawyer Minneapolis 200
• Minneapolis DUI Lawyer 150
• Murthy law firm 7.8k
• Lexington law firm 6.6k
• Law firm rankings 1k
• Law firm names 1.1k
• Law firm logos 1.8k
• Oh Law firm7.3k
• Criminal defense 1.6k
• Criminal defense Attorney 6.3k
• Criminal defense Lawyer2.3k
• Criminal defense attorneys 800
• DUI Lawyer 2.8k
• Law firms2.8k
• Criminal defense near me400

I plan on continuing to add keywords for Lawyer SEO – and trying to find law firm and legal services keywords that have a high volume of searches and traffic. 

Making sure your legal services company has a specific niche.

It’s all well and good to have a broad array of services and types of customers you serve – but ideally your law firm niches to the point where you have a solid amount of clients, but no-one confuses you for another firm because you’re services are so broad.

Having a concentrated specialty makes finding the right SEO Keywords easy

SEO keyword research is like market analysis. If you see alot of searches in a particular area, and that niche is also lucrative, you can really carve out a place in the local, regional or even national market for those services. Be careful not to go so broad that it’s hard for you to dominate search engines for your given term.

This is just one metric to look at when choosing a legal niche, but it’s becoming an increasingly viable one that is poised to grow as search engine traffic keeps rising.

The post Lawyer SEO Keywords – Highest Volume & Traffic U.S. appeared first on Tim B Design.

You may have noticed that many lawyer, law-firm, attorney, and legal services website designs are as dry and dead as you could possibly get.

So what’s the solution?

Take a fresh shot of inspiration – from this short collection of lawyer and legal services website design inspiration!

Robert Weinberger – Lawyer Web Design Inspiration

The messaging, and the personal feel of this site is definitely on point. You have the introduction that suggests justice will be served on your behalf, and it’s niched to business law – which gives credibility. Anytime you can establish a specialty right away, it allows for people that aren’t in your target market to disqualify themselves, and it also allows the site to be better targeted for more Google traffic (law firm SEO). Beyond that the section ‘Just call me Bobby’ – both gives legitimacy because the business is partly personality driven and backed by one individuals pride (an awesome trust factor if appropriate,) it also says that you can be casual with us – so hop in, we’d love to chat business.

Thomas Kuttner – Law firm Web Design Inspiration

Once again, Thomas Kuttner has carved out a very specific niche for themselves which allows the website to be laser-focused on the goal of defining that niche and getting visitors to the next step. It establishes the law firm as an expert in these kinds of disputes, shares the services in a clean and professional way and then has a big, obvious lead form for people to take the next step. Very solid legal website design.

Acapo – Legal / Trademark / I.P. Website Design Inspiration

This site is extremely modern (almost a little hip, whoops!) No for real, it allows for someone to get the impression that this company is on the cutting edge of style – but also with the technology and methods that they use.

Roulston Urquhart – Criminal Defense / Attorney Website Design Inspiration

Smart, strategic, aggressive advocacy. The copywriting on this website, compliments the big open, professional but stark main image that says – we are smart, but also understanding. Each of the attorney’s faces seem to convey purposefully some of the emotions that a defendent might want to see when they were getting council or facing a court battle. Confident, compassionate, and savvy.

GJEL Accident Attorneys – California Personal Injury Website Design Inspiration

“Winning 99% of cases. Over $850 Million for accident victims and their loved ones” These are things to be proud of – for these accident attorneys, these small details don’t get lost in a sea of text – they’re some of only a few details provided in the introduction, followed by contact information, an easy to use and immediate form, and organizations the company is a part of – which is great for helping visitors trust the site quickly and along with a big positive testimonial nudges them to make a decision.

The post Lawyer Website Design Inspiration appeared first on Tim B Design.

Don’t let your medical website design be dry and un-inspiring! There are tons of things that you can do to both give off a professional feel and showcase the individuality of your organization and attract the kinds of clients that make your practice so special. You want to help more people don’t you? Get jazzed up – about these excellent websites, and enjoy medical web design inspiration!

Massih Orthodontics – Orthodontics Website Design Inspiration

Bright and beautiful Massih pulls no punches, by putting a bright and shiny orthodontist upfront and using a diagonal pattern to break through what you’d normal expect to see on a medical website. They make it social right away with social media icons, and then break into a free introductory session.

I call this a ‘tripwire’ – give something away for free and then sell them on your regular services, or to have the work done. This may not always be appropriate for every medical website, but it’s something to consider.

Southern Ohio Medical Center – Plastic Surgery Website Design Inspiration

I would say this isn’t the strongest example of really original medical web design, but it does demonstrate some very important points that every medical website should have and that is – an easy way to find different providers if there are many, some type of news and events to showcase fresh content regularly (important in medical company SEO), and a very clean and intuitive menu bar that outlines things in a simple way for people to get where they want to go with no hassle.

Viverant – Physical Therapy Website Design Inspiration

Viverant has such an amazing brand, and their website design and marketing really attest to the power of a good brand and color palette. They display a lead generation tactic with a guide as a giveaway, current news, and big fresh and vibrant photography that grabs your attention and doesn’t let go. Great example of health company web design done right.

Ameripharma – Medical, Medicine Website Design Inspiration

I don’t know if I love the ‘self-focused’ photography of Ameripharma’s header image – I’d prefer that the site focused on the solutions it helped it’s customers with – and the benefit that those solutions brought. Medical websites need to focus on photos of real people enjoying the health and care that the company has helped bring them, from my perspective. All the better, if it showcases human emotion, the caring depth of passion providers feel for patients.

Nonetheless, as you scroll the icons with benefits, photos further down, and the icons with the process section are clean and showcase a solid understanding of design – giving white space and only a small amount of text in key places so the website visitor is more likely to read it.

Edina Plastic Surgery – Medical Web Design Inspiration

Maybe not the most cutting website design of all time, but what does Edina Plastic Surgery’s website do well? It keys in on their most important differentiating feature – helping people ‘feel well cared for’, and immediately follows that claim from a real patient testimonial showcasing the truth of the claim. Beyond that the free consultation call to action is emphasized, which is effective in helping nudge prospects to the next step, and ‘Meet the Surgeons’ is emphasized, which is important because no matter what medical profession you’re in – most patients care very much about knowing the medical providers who will be assisting in their work, and would prefer to learn about them before going in to meet them – why not on your site where you have control of the introduction?

The post Medical Website Design Inspiration appeared first on Tim B Design.

There are alot of bad – and unprofessional financial services website designs out there – and I believe the industry can do better. So we’ve curated these great examples of financial website design for your viewing pleasure and inspiration! Check them out – without further ado – financial website design inspiration!

Solarity – Credit Union Website Design Inspiration

Solarity is a credit union that knows what it’s selling. Beyond just the idea of mortgages, they are selling freedom – the idea that you own your own space. This is demonstrated through the emotional, fun, and evocotive header image of a husband and wife dancing in the kitchen. There navigation is simple – so it makes next steps simple as well.

Loanscribe – Debt Services Website Design Inspiration

If you’ve ever had the pleasure, (italics for sarcasm) of owing student loan debt – you may know that one of the hard parts about it is not really knowing how long it will take to pay down at your current rate. Making it simple and easy to calculate and consolidate gives loanscribe an advantage. The better the user experience of your website, the more likely you’ll be able to make a new customer easily – another solid reason to invest in good design.

Lendkey – Borrower and Lender Website Design Inspiration

Not only is this an interesting concept, but the Lendkey website is laid out in a very intuitive and simple to use format. Choose whether you’re a lender or a borrower and the site will then customize the messaging and experience after that. Illustrations showcase why you should trust LendKey with an infographic feel that makes it easy to absorb and understand quickly, a video introduces you if you prefer, and a step by step walkthrough with icons tells you without frill what the process of using LendKey will be like.

Morgan Stanley – Investment and Wealth Management Web Design Inspiration

Probably the best example of financial website design inspiration here – Morgan Stanley takes the color of India’s color festival and uses it to showcase developing nation’s and the financial opportunity there. From there the design uses a convention known as “cards” to show images and text together in a complimentary way that gives you multiple paths forward through the site, and showcases new financial news all the time, to keep you coming back. Very crisp, and modern – clean and well laid out.

Gurtin – Investment services and Bond Management Web Design Inspiration

Gurtin may not be the most visually stimulating example of website design in this list, but one thing they are doing well is showcasing in-depth information, which is great for Financial Services SEO, meaning the more information you present about a service you offer – the more Google will be likely to index and prefer your website to a competitor for more synonyms and keywords you want people to find you for. Ideally you can mix a little more visual design convention in with your deep SEO content, but nonetheless, a great example of Financial services SEO in Gurtin’s website.

The post Financial Website Design Inspiration appeared first on Tim B Design.

Financial SEO Keywords – Highest Volume & Traffic is brought to you courtesy of my in-depth research using SEMRush, Ahrefs, and multiple other SEO tools.  I believe finding the highest volume terms to go after in financial services is crucial to getting the best result for your website – and creating high-quality and high-value resources will help your site rank for the services you offer. If you’d like financial services SEO for your company – send me a message now, and we can schedule a no obligation – free consultation and I can demo some of the tools and methods I use to get your site the highest rankings possible.

Without further ado – here are the highest volume & traffic terms for financial services SEO. (Some lower volume terms are included for context and contrast)

• Keyword Phrase Estimated Monthly U.S. Search Volume
• Financial Services  10k
• Financial Services Companies   2.5k
• Investment Management 3.1k
• Investment 78k
• Mortgage 102k 
• Mortgage Calculator 1.85M
• Mortgage Payment Calculator 241k
• Mortgage Rates 227k
• Life Insurance 113k
• Loans 78k
• Payday Loans 142k
• Quicken Loans 221k
• Student Loans 128k
• Personal Loans 128k
• Retirement Plan 3.6k
• Retirement Accounts 3.1k
• Investment Planning 300
• Investment Plan 600
• Financial Investment 900
• Finance 280k
• Financial Aid 174k
• Financial Advisor 44k
• Financial Calculator 51k
• Financial Planning 11k
• Yahoo Finance 1.4M
• Google Finance 545k
• Financial Freedom 10k
• NerdWallet 85k
• Financial Accounting 9.4k
• Financial Independence 5.1k
• Return on Investment 20k
• ROI 68k
• Investment Banking 20k
• Investment Banker 6.6k
• Foreign Direct Investment 8.6k

I will continue to build out this list as a resource to people looking at doing Financial SEO – and looking for keywords for the financial industry that have a high volume of searches and traffic. 

Keys to finding the best keywords for your financial industry niche

If you are looking for the best keywords for financial service industry websites, you need to drill into what the speciality of the company is first and foremost.

Finding the specialty of the site you’re trying to rank

Just like in any industry, the most effective use of marketing dollars is to determine a niche that you can dominate and really go after with intensity. It doesn’t pay to spread your specialty around all over and to not have a clear focus. If you create an intentional and aggressive niche and become intentional about directing your content strategy to building out guides and how-to posts answering common questions you’re site will be the hub for all things in your specialty – giving you a major advantage in search engine results pages.

Gathering long-tail keywords with decent traffic

When you know what your company is specializing in – it makes it easier to drill down into what lesser high volume terms you could be going after that your ideal customers and clients would be looking for.

Many times this includes location specific terms where someone wants to work with them in their local area.

Aggressively going after the best long-tail terms with less competition

When you do determine decent keywords that are more specific to your situation (i.e. location or niche / specialty,) it’s time to throw your effort 100% into them and figure out what works. After you start seeing more traction in a particular corner of the market – it’s important to not give up, but to throw your whole ‘weight’ into it – and then expand to ‘shoulder’ terms, that are related but not the same.

Building out guides and deep resources for the more competitive terms

When you want to go after terms that have heavy hitters vying for them, you’ll need to create epic content. We help clients create epic content around their specialty because we know it’s the best possible chance to really make a dent in the market for that website. Financial keywords with high volume require significant resources invested to rank for. You need in-depth guides, media-rich landing pages that really tell a story, and even tools that are unique and built to gain links naturally.

Beyond this – you’ll need a link-building campaign to compete with the big boys (bigger financial industry titans) who naturally have link partners and heavy advertising campaigns to rank for.

Wrapping up

Moral of the story? Go for decently high volume terms that are:

A. Specific enough to be considered a ‘specialty’ that not all of your competitors are trying to rank for.

B. In a particular state, city, and region that you can dominate because of your proximity to the people looking for.

C. Be ready for a sustained and heavy effort fight to rank for higher volume terms, create epic content and build resources that are undeniably useful to earn backlinks naturally and find ways to gain more links through community outreach.

I hope you enjoyed this resource to help you find SEO Keywords for the Financial Industry – good luck in your quest to find the right ones for your company. 

The post Financial SEO Keywords – Highest Volume & Traffic U.S. appeared first on Tim B Design.

Outsourcing SEO services makes sense because of the relatively high barrier to entry to doing SEO well. It’s easy to start some kind of SEO in-house, but unless someone on your team is dedicated to constant SEO growth, it can be hard to match the results of an outsourced SEO partner.

For instance, I’m always experimenting with different methods and growing my expertise for five years in regards to SEO – if no one has done this on your team and you rely on high search results for your company should you be leaning on them so heavily?

Should you just learn and implement SEO yourself?

Probably not. Unless your time is not worth a lot, hire a professional.

Small to medium size companies benefit from SEO Outsourcing because it’s often not feasible to hire someone to do this full time, but for half the price of a full-time employee, you can have an expert build traffic to your site. Even for larger companies, it’s important to have an outside company consult and sometimes implement their SEO strategies because internal employees are less likely to drive innovation if they are only working on the one site, and have to deal with internal politics which can be distracting.

What are the different kinds of SEO engagements?

Common engagements are normally retainer based as SEO takes ongoing effort

Project

An SEO project may consist of a tune-up, the initial technical SEO aspects of how your site is built, or competitive analysis looking at what keywords you should go after with your site.

Retainer

This is the most common form of SEO engagement because it allows for consistent effort in a pursuit that makes sense with consistent effort because of the fact many companies are competing with others looking to outrank them.

Hourly

Many SEO Services companies will have minimum engagements, but will sometimes allow other companies to outsource SEO to them with a chunk of hours, or take an engagement with 20 – 30 or 50 hours to try to start the relationship, and then scale.

Consultative

Particularly for larger projects, a more consultative approach may make sense. Consultative SEO may mean the SEO Services professional comes in and educates the internal team about the best practices of SEO and helps them devise an internal strategy for an ongoing effort of creating targeted content, and even building links.

This can be harder to do, maybe more expensive, and might not stick if the company who hires the SEO consultant isn’t committed to internal accountability around the SEO process.

What are typical costs for SEO services?

Bad SEO can cost as little as $500 – while professional SEO is going to be closer to 1.5k and above

Here are some basic ideas for what you might pay for SEO Services and what those price points might get you.

Sub $500 (Likely ineffective, often spammy)

I’ve seen foreign companies offering SEO at less than 500 dollars – as well as some local companies trying to offer this as an add-on to their design services, without really knowing what they are doing.

Unfortunately, providers of this ‘too good to be true’ style of cheap SEO – usually are doing themselves, and their clients a dis-service since good SEO takes time and it takes money as well. It takes time to reach out and work on getting guest posts or other linking efforts off the ground, and it takes time/money to write quality content and make sure the site is technically set up for the best result. If you’re not spending real money on SEO you can expect poor results, I guarantee it. 

500-5k (Average 2.5k)

This is the realm I dwell in – so I can vouch for getting effective results at this level. Particularly the average price here allows outsourcing SEO Services to someone who can then spend ample time or resources allocated to content writing, link procurement, and targeting the SEO work effectively, and making sure the technical aspects of your website are improved as well. On the low end – a 1k engagement might include a lot less content and links, and on the high end, a 5k retainer would include more high-quality content and links.

Content and links being the two most important factors in driving up your rankings.

Enterprise SEO 5k-25k (Average 10k)

5k – 10k and 25k type retainers are more likely to be the jurisdiction of mid to large size companies who have already determined that the price of SEO is a benificial expense for them. They are in good company with people who have decided that search traffic is an awesome way to get more customers, and they are usually in industries where people make buying decisions from searching around and taking the next step on a company’s website. This is in a wide range of industries, but it’s important to note that companies that haven’t yet proven organic search traffic is a significant form of revenue creation should obviously not invest this type of money in SEO Services, but rather ensure its effectiveness at a lower level first.

Things to be suspicious of:

There are a lot of SEO Spammers out there that are eager to sell you bogus claims

Saying they can rank you fast

SEO is actually slightly delicate, in that if you rank fast – that doesn’t always mean your rankings will stick. What’s worse is that if you don’t continue the effort, your rankings could drop somewhat quickly. You want the gains to be slow, but deliberate and most importantly – real. Some kinds of SEO can be quick but volatile, meaning you can actually get a penalty from Google. Scary! I’ll take slow and steady over risking a penalty every day.

Guaranteed rankings

You want your SEO Services provider to be confident – but maybe not this confident. Guaranteed rankings are associated with seedy, black-hat SEO providers that could turn and burn you after the engagement. Most legitimate SEO Services companies don’t take this approach in their sales efforts.

Suggesting results without knowing more about the realities of your market

If an SEO consultant offers ideas about what your return might be – they should at least know something of your competition, and the search volumes for top terms in your industry.

Without having this information – they shouldn’t be offering you ideas of returns; it’s just not realistic.

SEO is amazing, but it’s not amazing for every industry and every scenario. Be wary of anyone preaching the effectiveness of SEO in your situation… without KNOWING your situation. 

Check out this awesome video by Rand Fishkin of Moz, about Crafting an SEO Strategy in 2017.

Selecting an SEO Services Company

Choose someone you can come to an understanding with and hold accountable for key numbers

Talk through the methodology of how they go after rankings

If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough. - Albert Einstein
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Be wary of anyone that can’t explain SEO in common language. If people get too technical about their approach, but can’t re-explain it in a way you can understand – it may mean they don’t understand it well enough.

Commercial break to explain SEO Simply

To put it simply:  SEO means helping your website get more traffic from Google searches.

What gets’s your site higher in Google searches? Targeted in-depth content, answering common questions in your industry, and earning links back to your website from other respected websites.

Why Outsource SEO Services? Because learning a new skill takes time and effort, and you’re likely better off spending your time on things you’re an expert at and letting someone who nerds out on SEO all day handle it instead.

Work on getting clarity around the metrics that are important to your company

You know what you want to see. You may have two or three terms you want to beat some competitors for, but underneath it all we just want more qualified traffic from search engines that earns our company money. Create a bulleted list with the metrics (KPIs:  Key Performance Indicators) that you’re going to judge your SEO company by, and share them with that company, so they have a powerful and clear guiding ‘lighthouse’ to follow during the engagement. This way they know whether they are living up to the standard, or falling short.

Even if you collaboratively come up with these KPIs – you can determine some important goals that will allow the engagement to grow along certain lines and toward something both parties can be proud of. If it isn’t a success because the goal wasn’t met – you can part amicably and on clear terms because there’s no mystery around what the criteria were for success.

Find an SEO Services company where the conversation can be open and flowing

If you have a conversational tone with your SEO company, which allows for pivots and flexibility – you may be more likely to find the right partner without cycling through a bunch of them. No one likes having to go on the hunt for a new vendor, and SEO companies aren’t fond of starting over with a new client when they’ve put effort heavily into one. For this reason, it’s better when there’s back and forth in the client/vendor relationship, and candid rapport.

Things that demonstrate effectiveness

Specific keyword rankings, overall growth in organic search traffic – but most of all $$$ increase from organic traffic demonstrate real SEO effectiveness.

The top terms that matter to you

You know the ones. The ones the CEO was Googling every day for two weeks last month, the ones your salespeople get the most leads from – don’t dismiss CRUCIAL KEYWORDS that earn you money, but expand on them. Just because there are a few terms you’re making money from now, there may be more you can profit from, you just don’t know about them yet. Regardless, tracking movement on the top terms you care about makes sense as part of the measure of success for SEO engagement.

Overall organic traffic

This is probably the real starting point for whether an SEO company did their job or not because this is what you hire an SEO company to improve. This and leads or sales. Organic traffic just means people clicked into your website from a Google search result page.

Disregarding traffic for kinds of content that don’t move the needle on your revenue

You may want to watch it when you get entranced by pure organic traffic though, as it’s sometimes easy to get traffic for low-value terms that will never make a sale. Discount large gains in rankings and traffic for things unrelated to your main business, or blog posts that are a fluke but don’t bring in customers.

Because of these occasional articles, watch the targeting of your blog posts and stick with ones actual customers would look for.

The amount of leads and sales

If the website has proven to be able to convert every 1 out 100 people that click on it, then driving traffic up for terms related to real business and for topics actual customers are interested in, it would likely follow that leads and sales will go up accordingly. This isn’t always as clear-cut as we’d like – but in the end leads and sales are the #1 most important thing that will justify ongoing SEO as an expense, and should be highly prioritized as guiding the engagement. 

What are the deliverables?

Some kind of regular reporting is important to showcase effort + links and content. How much depends on what is part of the agreement.

• Monthly (or regular) reporting – possibly a dashboard or report
• Building out quality Content on the site
• Finding and earning high-quality Links
• Clear details about technical changes

What tools are they using?

Good SEO Services professionals are passionate about their tools – and should be able to give you a little tour of how they come to their targets and monitor progress.

Common SEO Tools:

• Ahrefs
• Search Console
• Analytics
• Google Data Studio
• SEMRush
• BuzzSumo

Why Tools Matter?

If someone isn’t using the top of the line tools in their process, you can imagine they perhaps don’t have the best possible service. Even though our tools are expensive – we can get things done more efficiently and effectively than an SEO professional with poor SEO tools.

What is the ROI of SEO?

Depending on the industry the ROI of SEO can be extremely high. It’s important to be real about the actual opportunity in search traffic for yours – and track the actual dollar value of leads and sales from organic growth.

Keys to determining SEO ROI:

• Find the value of a lead
• Make sure your e-commerce reporting is in place
• Tally up the results and make sure SEO services are driving up profit

The degree you have to push up organic search results to justify ongoing SEO services depends on the industry and average sale price

Your industry and the value of a lead and the value of a sale will dictate how much you can and should spend on SEO. Even though it’s a great use of digital marketing dollars – it will depend on the industry and how much you can make from leads and sales on your website. A good SEO Services professional will dig deep into your business model and try to learn what are the higher value products and services you offer so they can go after those terms. 

How to know if we have the right SEO partner?

When it’s right – you’ll know. Just kidding – just be aware of whether the company you’re working with is responsive to your needs and aggressively pursues results.

• Pivoting with new information
• Updates on developments in SEO
• Results are earning your company more money

Evolving the SEO Services engagement

Because Google’s algorithms are constantly changing, it is important that the methods of SEO specialists do too – if you find a better way to work with your outsourced SEO partner, let it evolve. 

• Sometimes the original agreement needs to evolve
• Examine the relationship and the terms and if need, let it change
• Be honest and clear about what’s important to your to make sure the result is focused

If you went through a solid process to choose the partner – let the relationship breathe and allow time to get results.

It’s important to understand that SEO takes time and that if you overemphasize early results – it actually could hurt your visibility efforts in the long term.

How long will it take to get results?

It takes a solid amount of time and patience to get results from SEO (upwards of a year for significant movement), but in 3-6 months there should be traction and gains that are clear. 

• 3-6 Months for an upward trajectory to be established
• 7-9 for ROI to be more obvious

If after a year ROI isn’t becoming clear, major adjustments are needed – consider a new partner. If this is your 2nd or 3rd SEO company, consider whether SEO Services are the right for your situation

In conclusion

Don’t take any professional’s opinion over the reality of your businesses situation. You know more than anyone whether the ROI is significant enough to warrant continued expense – just know SEO isn’t going anywhere soon. It requires consistent attention and in many industries can yield a substantial return in revenue to what was spent on the SEO Services. 

• Get clarity around what your really want from SEO
• Establish clear goals with an expert
• Be patient but attentive and responsive to areas where your SEO partner needs information – SEO isn’t done in a bubble

Thank you for reading ‘The Ultimate Guide to OutSourcing SEO Services‘ – I hope you find the best possible partner for your situation, but if you’d like more Information check out my SEO Services or contact me now for a free SEO consultation!

The post The Complete Guide to Outsourcing SEO Services appeared first on Tim B Design.

Are you starting the process of establishing your own roofing company? If so, the name is a crucial aspect of communicating your personality, ideals, values, expertise and uniqueness – sounds like a lot, right?

Let’s make it easy for you. Let’s determine the best ways to generate name ideas for your new roofing company.

What’s In A Name?

To break it down – a lot. The things just mentioned, for starters. On top of that, you have to decide whether you choose a straight-forward, informative name to immediately communicate your brand’s main offer or a unique, abstract name that speaks to the curious-minded. The following are some ways you can give your roofing company the most attractive and effective name.

Begin the naming process by deciding what it specifically you want to communicate to customers. Consider the primary advantages or benefits the customer stands to gain from working with a roofing company like yours.

Many companies, not just in the roofing industry, try to develop a name long before anything else. This is a common mistake. In fact, it should be the other way around. Before naming your roofing business, develop your tagline, mission statement, brand message and ideal voice. All of these crucial elements will work in unison to inform the final name of your business.

Here are some quick tips on choosing your roofing company’s name:

• Pick a roofing name that you like and one that appeals to your ideal customer base.
• Choose a comforting or familiar name that conjures up pleasant memories so customers respond to your business on an emotional level.
• Avoid names that are extremely long or confusing.
• Stay away from language that the common consumer wouldn’t understand.
• Don’t add any extraneous information like LLC, Co., Inc., LTD, etc. unless your company is actually one of those things.

Whatever name you choose, make sure it’s meaningful to you, your audience and industry.

At the end of the day, however, any name can truly be effective if you have the right marketing strategy backing it up.

Marketing Ideas for New Roofing Companies

So, if you want to choose that outlier name that you love, but perhaps your business partner or significant other doesn’t, go ahead and pick it anyway – just make sure you have some solid marketing ideas to back it up.

First, understand that your customers are now online.

More and more, the modern-day homeowner is finding construction services online, through search engines. The importance of SEO for roofing companies has never been more apparent. The easiest way for a business owner to improve rankings and move up to spot number one is to increase content and improve keyword targeting.

Start posting articles, landing pages, location-specific service pages – if you have the ability, post videos, infographics, ebooks and whitepapers to really make an impact. Do some Googling yourself and see which keywords you and your competitors are showing up for. Build keyword-specific content to increase your organic search rankings.

Set up multiple social media accounts and become active.

Again, most of your customers have social media accounts and regularly log-in to keep up with their favorite friends, celebrities and companies. It’s essential that you do the same. Start a business page on Facebook, create a Twitter account, and start pinning things to your Pinterest feed. Post informative, useful content on a regular schedule, none of that spam stuff.

If you want to take it to the next level, try paid social advertising. You can dive deep into your targeting with advertisements on social media like Facebook and Twitter, choosing age, location, interests and much more.

Offer new customer discounts to get your name out there

Because you’re a new roofing business, your name recognition is probably nil. To gain your first customers, implement some digital or traditional ads to deliver the deal to your target audience. Once they become aware of your brand, that’s one less barrier you have to cross when sending over a proposal.

Roofing Company Name Ideas

To get you started, use some of the name ideas below!

• Undercover Roofing

• Hot Top Roofing and Repair

• Tarred and Weathered Roofing Co.

• Local Shingles

• The Roof Troop

If you’re not sure where to get started on your roofing company’s name, let TimBDesign assist you. Call one of our construction marketing experts or fill out a form to receive a free, no-obligation consultation. Get in touch today!

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