SEO

The Best Email Marketing Tool?

The Best Email Marketing Tool?When you own a business you’re always looking for ways to better organize various tasks and operations management. With so many applications and services, it gets hard deciding which ones are worth the time and money to invest in.

Your website SEO and email marketing are often the victims of the budget and time management crunch.

What’s the Best Email Marketing Tool?

At NuZoo we use WordPress for websites and MailChimp for email marketing for our clients and ourselves. They help run our business and provide the best service to our clients.

These two free and user-friendly tools save time and money, increasing your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) and reaching your clients’ inbox with discounts, sales and links directly to your website.

MailChimp May Be the Best Email Marketing Tool

There are many email marketing services available these days, including Constant Contact and Vertical Response. However, MailChimp works as well as they do, providing a free plan that works for startups and established businesses with up to 2,000 subscribers. At NuZoo we’ve been using MailChimp since 2007, and created dozens of emails and campaigns for clients and ourselves.

As a business, you have to send your clients updates on any sales and promotions, or simply a gentle reminder that you’re still around whenever they might need you. MailChimp offers different email templates that arrange pictures with text to create an email with pizzazz that holds your readers’ attention. The best part is you don’t have to know HTML! You can edit the template at any time, and create multiple templates for different products, services and clients. Having a template just for new clients and prospects allows you to instantly send a Welcome email with discounts and other features and benefits.

MailChimp’s free version allows you to have up to 2,000 subscribers and send 12,000 emails per month. It gives you free reports; campaign stats like clicks and keeps track of your subscribers. This is perfect if your business is just starting up. The “Growing Business” option gives you unlimited emails, and depending on the number of subscribers, monthly rates start from $20. Other features include automating emails like welcome emails; providing recommendations based on behavioral patterns; connecting to Google Analytics; and keeping track of your campaigns’ ROI.

If you’re still sending mass emails through your own email to connect with your clients STOP! We’ve had clients blacklisted for doing this because they’re considered spammers. Contact NuZoo today and in less than a week we can set up your MailChimp account, establish your initial subscriber list, create a template and teach you how to manage it yourself or do it for you.

Here at NuZoo, we also want to tell you why we think WordPress is the best website SEO tool for you.

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Tips for a Successful Video Strategy

Tips for a Successful Video StrategyMap Out Your Video Strategy

Websites aren’t just for written content anymore. Technology has made us more visual and website content has transformed from reading to seeing and watching. Specifically, websites have been an increasing platform for video-based content. Video content provides several benefits for your company or business, and you have to have a video strategy. Videos tell your current and potential customers who you are, they build on your brand, and are an interactive way to engage with your visitors. Today it’s just bad practice to not have any type of video content on your website. According to 9 out of 10 visitors will stay on a site longer if it contains a video, 9 out of 10 visitors will stay on a site longer if it contains a video. Now that you know why having video content is so important, lets talk about tips for a successful video strategy.

The first aspect you should think about when it comes to a video strategy and putting videos on your website is the platform you want to use. The most well known video platform is YouTube. You may think that YouTube is an easy and free way to share your video content with your visitors, and it might be, but our first tip for a successful video strategy is to not solely rely on YouTube as your video platform. While it’s important to utilize and share your social media, when you use YouTube you may lose some control of your video content and platform. Your video platform needs to be easy to control, change, and adapt. It’s also helpful to use a platform that allows you to obtain analytics and statistics on how viewers are engaging with your video.

Intelligent Video Players

If you shouldn’t completely rely on YouTube, then what should you use? The best platform you can use for your videos is any type of intelligent video player. Using an intelligent video player is very important because it’s the glue that holds your video together. An Intelligent video player also can collect information about how your visitors are interacting or engaging with your content. Also, an intelligent video player will have the ability to layer on different elements such as your call to action, such as signing up, downloading, buying, and more. Your intelligent player should also offer a sharing feature so visitors can digitally spread the word, or in this case video, about your company. Intelligent video players are also beneficial because they know how to adapt to all viewing environments whether it’s a smart phone, tablet, or desktop. One of the most crucial reasons that using an intelligent video player over a platform like YouTube is because if you link a video on social media or email marketing, when the visitor clicks the link, it drives them back to your website, not YouTube’s.

Embed Your Videos

The next video strategy tip is to use embeds for your videos on your website. The best way to make sure your audience is being engaged is to play your video through the website. When a video is embedded in a strategic location on your website, it will allow you to explain your product/ service, serve as your call to action, further brand, and more. You can use video playlists to tell a story; you can select and order your videos so they play continuously. Both YouTube and intelligent video players allow the creation of playlists.

Optimizing Your Video for SEO

The last step in your video strategy is optimizing your video for SEO. We have previously written about optimizing your videos for SEO so let this be a little refresher. It all starts with your information. Make sure you have all the fundamental information such as title, video description, tags and keywords that describe your content in its entirety. Don’t forget, you can also transcribe videos.

With how prominent video content is today, you would be doing your website a disservice to not play video on your site. As long as your follow these tips for a successful video strategy, you will impress your visitors and attain new ones.

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Tips for SEO

Tips for SEO12 Fundamental Tips for SEO To Increase the Number of Visitors to Your Website

The amount of information about SEO or Search Engine Optimization is endless. It can be easy to get lost in the plethora of information you can find on SEO. This important website marketing strategy has been proven to enhance your audience’s experience on your website, as well as draw them there in the first place. Before SEO your website might have never reached your audience when they searched on Google and the other search engines; but now, SEO targets your website’s key words so specifically that it is near impossible that your audience won’t be reached. Here are some of the most important tips for SEO today.

1. Know Your Topic

Your website needs to have a topic with content that people can find. This concept sounds simple enough, but you need to know what your topic is so you can optimize SEO to its full potential. If you aren’t correlating your topic with the right SEO strategies, you could be attracting the wrong audience. That being said, although it’s the simplest concept, it’s a crucial aspect when utilizing SEO.

2. Use SEO for Individual Pages, Not Just Your Homepage

One of the biggest misconceptions about SEO is that you only need to utilize it for your homepage. The information your audience is looking for isn’t always on your homepage. What the visitor is looking for could be found on one of your website’s individual pages. Instead of making the visitor search your entire website for what they are looking for, when you use SEO for all your pages, the visitor can be taken right to the page they need.

3. Develop a List of Key Phrases

Before making your list of key phrases that relate to your website, you need to understand what your specific audience is searching for. Consider what they would search for when using a search engine to find what your website offers. Now, compile a list of key words they would use to find your website. Make sure your keywords are simple and words that your audience would use when searching the web. Refrain from using jargon that your audience wouldn’t use. These keywords will become what appears when visitors search for your site, so make sure they are relevant to what your website is about. Use Google AdWords Keyword Planner to help you with this.

 

Contact NuZoo for help with SEO on your website.

4. Utilize Webmaster Tools

Webmaster tools can be very helpful when wanting to get more traffic to your website. Search engines such as Google and Bing have Webmaster tools that are easy and free to use. Through these tools you can see what keywords websites are already using and what keywords tend to bring in the most people to websites. When using Webmaster you can also check your websites search traffic and analyze how many people are visiting your site daily.

5. Sign Up for an Analytics Account

Similar to Webmaster, analytics can help you inspect your website’s statistics, traffic and more! The most widely used analytics service is Google Analytics. Through Google Analytics you can discover how many people are finding and engaging in your website through search engines. Not only are you getting a number of search engine visitors, but you can also find out what people are doing on your website when they get there. Free web services such as Webmaster and Google Analytics are free and help and grow websites so there is no reason not to take advantage of these amazing resources.

6. Know How Your Pages Appear to Search Bots

Different Search Engines may view your site differently. You want to make sure that your website is consistent and appears the same on each browser. One tool you can use for this is Webmaster. With this tool, you can see how your website appears to visitors in search engines such as Google and Bing. This makes sure your website is consistent when using all search engines and browsers. Don’t forget to test this for each individual page within your website!

7. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Having a mobile friendly site is one of the most important tips for SEO. Nowadays, people are using their phones constantly, which is why mobile compatibility for websites is so crucial. To have a successful website your site needs to be computer AND smart phone friendly. It is important for you to know how many of your visitors are coming to your website via mobile devices. You can find out an exact percentage of mobile visitors your website gets through your Google Analytics account as well as how it compares to computer and tablet visitors. It is important to distinguish between mobile and computer users when it comes to website visits. How do you know if your website is mobile compatible? You can use Google’s free mobile friendly tester to find out. Once Google verifies your website, they will tag it as mobile friendly. This will also make your website appear in more mobile searches instead of just web searches. Another important thing to note is to avoid using flash for videos on your website. Instead, use html 5 player – this works on both computers and mobile devices whereas flash just works on certain devices and certain browsers. Or you can use YouTube videos which are viewable on everything.

8. Use Responsive Web Design

Using Responsive Web Design, or RWD, is a great way to guarantee that your website looks great on every device whether it is a tablet, laptop, or Iphone. RWD provides the optimal viewing and interaction experience. It includes easy reading, convenient navigation, and a limited amount of scrolling and resizing. The important thing to remember about RWD is that what your website looks like on a phone will be the same layout and design on a computer. You will save tons of time and energy coding for both computer and mobile when you choose RWD.

9. Concentrate on Page Performance

The first thing you should do when analyzing your page performance is measure your page load speed. Slow web pages are annoying to visitors and often make them leave and search for something else, so you want to make sure your website is fast and efficient. When measuring your page load speed, you want to know your page’s Time to First Byte (TTFB). Google recommends your website to have a <200 ms TTFB.

10. Analyze and Fix Slow Page Loading

You can check your website’s load speed through Google Page Speed. Through Google Page Speed you will find out what areas or aspects of your website are causing the slow speeds. Google Page Speed will give you suggestions on how you can fix your website and alternatives for a faster website. Once you change and fix your website you can compare and find out how your website has improved in speed.

11. Measure Organic Search

What is your search intent for your visitors? Do you want them to buy a product? Download a link? Watch a video? Whatever your intent is, you want to know if your visitors are converting to outcomes that you want. You also want to measure how many of these visitors are organic, which means they didn’t come to your website because they saw an advertisement, instead they came to your site because your site correlated with their search terms. You can easily find and analyze this information through Google Analytics.

12. Fix Any Problems and Execute Strategies

Through this list of tips for SEO you probably have noticed something you could improve about your SEO strategy. SEO is all about driving people to your website and accumulating results. As long as you follow these tips for SEO your website will increase in visitors and accumulate the results that you want. To put SEO in the simplest terms possible, the higher SEO ranking you have results in more people finding your site which results in more and better outcomes for your website.

Contact NuZoo for help with SEO on your website.

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Understanding SEO

Understanding SEOHaving a website for your business can be exhausting, especially if you aren’t getting the results you want.

Understanding SEO helps your website get better traffic and at NuZoo part of our mission is getting you (our audience and loyal customers) to understand what it is and why it is so important to use as part of your marketing strategy.

The Most Overlooked Point About Understanding SEO

SEO is all about giving your audience and visitors what they’re looking for. Sometimes we forget about this when we think about what keywords best describe the content on our websites. You should always ask yourself “Is this word something that a potential customer would use to search on?”

Optimize Each Page

When you ask yourself this question make sure to avoid business jargon or “keyword stuffing” (using too many keywords without really describing your business). Each of your website pages should be optimized. Pick different and specific keywords for each page, this will help bots crawl through your web page as well as make your website much more efficient because it will be organized.

If you aren’t sure if you’re picking the right keywords you can sign up for Google Webmaster and/or Google Analytics. Both of these tools will give you valuable information about your website traffic and organic searches. Use the information provided to create reports and goals, and change your website content and key words. This gives you better control of where your website is going in the search engine rankings, and measuring the outcome of any changes you make.

Responsive and Mobile Websites

Making your website “easy to find” on search engines isn’t the only SEO aspect you should concentrate on; you also have to make sure your website’s appearance is always spot-on.

Mobile has increased in popularity so quickly that making sure your website looks great on any mobile device or browser is vital for survival. Using a responsive theme for your website is your best bet at ensuring your image is never faulty on both mobile and desktop. Paying attention to the size of a font or color of a button for better “finger-access” can end up making a huge difference for your mobile audience.

Website Load Time

A key part of website functionality is load time. How fast your website loads (mobile or not) the better for you and your business. Our patience is extremely thin for loading time and the best way to avoid losing customers because of slow loading time is having less things to load in your page.

For example the more images, videos, infographics or intricate scripts you might have in a page the longer it will take for it to load. Pick your plug-ins and images the same way you pick your keywords wisely and specifically.

To help you measure your loading time you can use tools like Google Pagespeed or Yslow Plugin.

Understanding SEO Is An Ongoing Process

Understanding SEO and how it affects your website, organic search results and customer base is an ongoing process. If you  start with these basics of identifying your keywords, optimizing each webpage, measuring traffic, and having a responsive and mobile website you’ll be on your way up the organic search results.

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