Many of the these services are behind the scenes and code related, but rest assured, these things are critically important to your online marketing efforts. We will spend as little or as much time on these things as you request. We can advise you on how much overall time we need to achieve your desired results and we will schedule time on each task as needed.
Browser Compatibility Testing
If you’ve ever visited a website where some buttons didn’t work or things looked out of place, then you probably just witnessed a website where browser testing was not done. Browsers are all different in how they interact with a website’s code and to make things more challenging, each browser has multiple versions that support different elements.
On all major updates we physically perform a quick test in windows on the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome. We also do an automated compatibility test across all browsers.
If you require physical testing on other browsers such as mobile browsers let us know and we will add that to our testing for your site as well.
Priority for Urgent Updates
For all of our Monthly Packages, we offer priority service for Urgent Updates. We are small but we aim to provide a quick turn around when you need it most. How do we do this? By focusing on providing web maintenance only, not getting distracted on large web design projects. We are streamlining our processes for quick response and getting your updates online.
What about web design? We partner with other local companies to assist you with web design and can recommend firms at your request.
Website Backups
The absolute worst time to think about backups is the moment when your tech support guy tells you your web site is down or your data is lost. The beauty of having a complete backup of your entire website installation is that instead of trying to ferret out all the infected code, or look for an old version of content, it is much easier, faster, cheaper and safer to just delete the site and rebuild it from the backup.
UPDATE for WordPress sites: Have you considered a hosted service, such as WPEngine. They now provide backups for all their packages, and you now control how and when a restore is made.
If you don't host on a site with automatic backups, we can manage your backups for you. We have all the content and MySQL databases on your site backed up to the cloud, so it is accessible anytime and anywhere. We test that the backups can be restored and will restore a backup at your request. The cost of the backups is included in our package, but we reserve the right to charge for extra space.
Website Error Checking
Over time with updates, broken links or styling errors can occur and can cause visitors to experience confusion when browsing your site. Having these errors fixed will provide a better experience for visitors and search engine bots. We check things such as:
- Broken links and spelling
- Verify if everyone regardless of any disability can view your page
- Checking compatibly of your site when viewed on a mobile device.
- Test readability, or how easy it is to understand your content.
- HTML for errors
- CSS Issues, Errors or Compliance warnings
- Check your meta data for each page - ie find pages with missing titles
... Most people never even notice the page titles of a website but they are vital to SEO success. They tell the search engines what the web page is about.
Website Speed Optimization
Don’t lose your site visitors by making them wait. Mobile devices are not as fast as desktops, search engine bots will rank your site lower if it takes too long to load, and speed can be the difference between a good website and a great one. Faster website load times can help increase your readership and traffic. We like to call this the frustration factor!
We perform a Website Speed test on your website and advise you about potential problems and offer solutions for you to choose form.
Maintaing Your Sitemap
Sitemaps can help with navigating of your site, but the most important benefit is helping search engines navigate your site. First steps are registering your site with Google and Bing, and then providing them with an XML sitemap.
Because a site map is not in the forfront of your mind when web sites are updated, we will handle this for you in the background. This is just another reason why web maintenance is so important.
Site Security Monitoring
If you are using Workpress, we recommend you use a hosted service like WPEngine. They automatically scan for, and fix, many hacking attempts on your site. They use Sucuri Security for their backup and security services.
Above and beyond tools like Sucuri, we can also test your password strengths for you and help review your backend procedures to keep you safe.
Web Server Monitoring
A website's high availability is crucial; users who constantly encounter problems accessing the content of a site will not likely come back. As the business owner - you do not want to be the last person to know your website is down or has problems. We can set up a monitoring service for you that tells you when your website is unreachable.
We can also can routinely monitor your website for bandwidth and space utilised, and notify you when your domain or web site hosting needs renewing.
Monthly Website Statistics Reporting
Our monthly website reporting service can tell you a lot about how effective and well designed your site is. For example it can tell you who visits your web site, where they come from, how long they stay. It can tell you which search engines sent visitors to your website over a specified period of time and what exact keywords/phrases the user used to find you and much much more.
Why collect all this information? So we can help people find your site, and help people stay. We evaluate its functionality and locate areas for improvement.
Keyword Research and Development
It may sound easy to pick out the exact phrases people use when searching online though many hours are involved in looking at data to see what people have searched in the past. It would probably surprise you to see ALL the combinations used (keeping in mind it can make a difference whether you use the singular or plural form of a word).
We take the time to do it right and select phrases people actually use as it doesn’t do any good to rank for a phrase no one is searching.
Strategy Meetings
In order to use your CHOICE hours in the most effective way, some plans include online meetings to discuss your Inbound Digital Marketing strategy, such as seasonal services/products that need to be promoted at specific times or the addition of new services/products.
Having a plan will allow us to add content to the website to support your inbound marketing efforts and keep everything in sync.
Social and Vertical Marketing
We allow time in the Plan 10+ for research and collaboration to investigate your marketing plans, and propose ideas for your specific needs that might help find Vertical Markets in the social networks you have established. Tracking the results of social media efforts can be problematic, but that does not mean we should not try, and we will report on finding that we observe.
In 2014, social media will continue to be a necessity for small business marketing, not just a fad that will fade away. It's an affordable way for small businesses to generate leads and promote a brand.
But the novelty of social media wearing off, Business owners don’t need a presence on every social media site that exists, just choose one or two where your customers can be found. Businesses don’t have to post every 30 minutes, but when they do, the content should be worthwhile to readers. Businesses will look for more vertical markets instead of mass marketing to no-one, such as LinkedIn where there is a treasure trove of information that potential clients list on profiles.
Don't forget about traditional media. A combination of social media marketing with traditional marketing tools will have the most impact.
Link Building
A modern definition for link building is content creation. Here’s how it works- you create unique, original content for your website that is really useful and other websites will naturally want to link to it. This is how you organically build links to your website so you won’t have to worry about being punished by search engines.
Our link building service makes others aware of your new content each time it's added to your site. Using this method creates a stronger web presence and will bring no danger of penalties. Please note: We never buys links or participate in link farms as these practices are harmful to your website. The process of modern Link Building is related to Authorship Ranking and Keyword Research and should be used hand in hand with these services.
While Authorship Building takes time, internal linking is also important and cheaper - just like cleaning up your back yard. We will create an internal Link Building Wire Frame, which will assist us and your authors to identify keywords and links to build into your site.
Building Authorship Rank
Once all the basics are in place, we can talk about new tools Google is using to help users find content. Google has realised that people often want to read about reviews and information about products from reputable sources before they head to a retail site to buy something. If you post authoritative and interesting content and reviews, you might be interested in building your authorship rank. We will work with you on this area if you so wish as well.
