Most small business owners build a website, feel good about it for a few weeks, and then move on. There’s always something more pressing — clients to serve, employees to manage, operations to keep running. The website sits there, doing its job well enough, and updating it keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the
Your Website Hasn’t Been Updated in Two Years. Here’s What That’s Costing You. Read More »
Marketing has changed a lot in the past 5 years. Since COVID, many businesses have become partially or full time remote, and far fewer are renting in-person offices and buildings to manage their organization. At the same time, Google itself has changed. Now, Google Maps listings are right in the center of search. Businesses that
Every single business needs a website. I meet a lot of small business owners in my travels, frequently talking to people that own or operate businesses with only one or two employees. They also do not have websites. I hear a lot of justification for this, like “no one uses the search engines anymore, everyone
High Volt Digital, the sister organization to Great Leap Studios that provides websites and marketing for insurance agents and agencies, was recently one of the first guests on Up 2 Speed, a new podcast from LyteSpeed Learning. LyteSpeed Learning offers insurance pre-licensing courses and continuing education classes to agents located or licensed in the state
High Volt Digital Featured on LyteSpeed Learning’s Up 2 Speed Podcast! Read More »
Great Leap Studios has been providing marketing and website design for small businesses since 2008. But over the past two years, we’ve been working on a very exciting side project: High Volt Digital. High Volt Digital is our sister site, offering managed websites, digital marketing, and other services aimed specifically at insurance agents and agencies.
Websites and Marketing for Insurance Agents and Agencies Read More »
Switching websites is a great way to change how your brand presents itself. It makes a site your own – bringing it into the new age and making it more modern, accessible, and designed around the customer experience. When a company chooses to switch an old website with a new one, they are doing so
Why Did My Site Drop? Evaluating Website Templates and Google Algorithm Speed Read More »
When marketers talk about SEO, their focus is almost always on Google’s search engine. There is a good reason for this. Google accounts for more than 85% of all online web searches, while Bing comes in around 7%, meaning that the majority of your customers will be reaching your site via Google. But 7% of
When you perform a web search, the first results you often see are those of well known companies and large corporations. But when the combination of pay per click ads and top ranking websites are all large companies, it can lead you to wonder if your smaller business has a chance of standing out online
Can Small Business Websites Compete with Large Companies? Read More »
We discussed in a previous blog post how PDFs can be a valuable way to share information and content on your website. When prepared correctly, Google and other search engines are fully capable of crawling and indexing PDF. In fact, these files regularly appear in search results when they match a user’s query. If you
How to Increase SEO Compatibility of PDFs on Your Website Read More »
Bringing traffic to your website is an important part of SEO and marketing, but traffic means nothing if you cannot then convince visitors to follow through on your call to action. Conversion can mean a number of different things depending on what your site is. It often means that the customer finishes a purchase if
Conversion Rate Optimization through Your Website’s User Interface Read More »
Folsom is a growing business scene, meaning that local businesses are competing on a wider scale, whether with competitors in nearby cities like Sacramento and Rancho Cordova, or with competitors around the world. Having a strong website is important for growing your customer base, and you need an effective business website with a professional appearance
El Dorado Hills is a surprising hotspot for businesses with rapid growth over the past few years. Many local restaurants and retailers draw customers from all over the greater Sacramento area while rapid construction and population growth means the local home service businesses are thriving. In addition, there are a number of key businesses with
Sacramento has a growing business scene. From local businesses who are marketing to customers in the area to the increasing number of businesses that use Sacramento for their headquarters while marketing to customers around the world, the business scene is thriving. Wherever the customers are for your Sacramento business, you need to be able to
PDFs, or printed document files, are a valuable resource for sharing information. From photocopies of original documents to easily printable files to ebooks, the PDF format is one of the best ways to present many types of information. Your business likely already uses PDFs to share information internally and with your customer base in the
Does Using PDFs for Important Content on Your Website Harm Your SEO? Read More »
Content is the foundation of SEO on your website. At the baseline, this content needs to be well written, highly readable, and offer value to your readers as a way to boost your website’s SEO. You also want to be consistently adding new content to your website or blog to maintain your SEO. But if
Writing Content for Your Website with an SEO Focus Read More »
When you have a business that serves a defined geographical area, you need to pay specific attention to your local SEO. In general, SEO will help put your website pages at the top of search results among competitors. Local SEO focuses on those location based searches where your potential customers are looking for a service
Here on our blog, we often talk about how content marketing is an essential tool for your SEO and helping new customers find you on the internet. However, strong content can also be an important tool in customer retention and building loyalty among your existing customer base. With effective content in the right places, it
SEO does not yield immediate results. Instead, it can take a few weeks, or even months, for SEO practices on your website to show results. Since the age of a website can also be an SEO ranking factor, there are several challenges when it comes to SEO for new websites. There is some waiting necessary
When someone searches for something on Google, the search engine looks through its index of sites and webpages to determine which will have the best answers to the users’ query. Those sites are returned in the search results. Google creates this index by crawling all of the pages available on the internet. The Google crawler
How to Make Google More Likely to Index Pages on Your Website Read More »
Since 2009, one of the fields I’ve seen the fastest growth of online marketing focus is real estate. It’s a natural fit and the technology has evolved rapidly to provide some of the most powerful tools we’ve yet seen for displaying organic home listings for local visitors. If you are a real estate agent, broker,
Content Ideas for Real Estate Agents and Brokers Read More »
Every now and then a client will approach me asking for a killer product idea or a marketing plan that will allow them to capitalize on a new product, niche, or field that just cropped up. Especially when it comes to technology and information product marketing, new fields are potential gold mines if you act
Capitalizing on a New Niche without Overspending Read More »
Are you trying to get more traffic to your website? Are the strategies you’ve been trying too expensive or too ineffective? It’s a common problem we see. Small businesses will get online, start a website and then wait for traffic with no results. Others will immediately pour money into AdWords or Facebook Ads and while
Three Free Marketing Ideas to Drive Traffic to Your Site Read More »
Podcasting can be an extremely effective way to build your brand and show your authority in your niche but it is also a time consuming and costly endeavor. You have to buy equipment and software, set a time to record weekly, and then edit and upload the podcast, not to mention the marketing. If you
Three Tips for Getting Featured on a Top Podcast or Radio Show Read More »
If you’ve seen a typical Facebook Page for a brand or company you know that most posts are pretty generic. They’re either observations of upcoming holidays, events or sales, or they’re links to blog posts or new pages on their website. Let’s ignore for a moment the Pages that break the unwritten rules of advertising
What’s the Most Effective Type of Facebook Post? Read More »
I use this word a lot and I realized this morning while on a call with a client that I don’t always fully describe what it means. So in this post I wanted to take a minute and tell you exactly what I mean when I talk about “engagement” as a metric of success in
In early September, Google implemented their biggest algorithm overhaul in more than 10 years with Hummingbird and no one knew about it for nearly 30 days. Why? What was so subtle about Hummingbird that we couldn’t even tell it was happening? Unlike Panda and Penguin which acted as corrections to existing algorithm data, Hummingbird was
We started work with a new client in July who had been getting about 80% of his traffic from paid sources like Google AdWords for more than two years. They were doing well – their site had grown substantially and they were pulling a solid profit month after month – but it cost them a
The Five Step Plan to Ditch Paid Traffic for Organic Read More »
When evaluating a client’s site for the first time, there are a few things I’ve trained myself to look for – those high return actions that can have the biggest impact in the shortest amount of time and with the smallest investment. Here are five of those things and how we can take advantage of
Five Things I Look for When Evaluating a Client’s Website Read More »
Before I started Great Leap Studios I was a freelance writer and that meant writing a lot of marketing copy and blog posts for my clients. It also meant writing the occasional eBook as part of a content marketing campaign for a new business, entrepreneur or Internet marketer. I wrote dozens of them and to
Using Kindle to Become a Thought Leader in Your Industry Read More »
In May, Micah and I started a podcast about content marketing – the Great Leap Studios Content Marketing Podcast (we are a clever pair, aren’t we). But before producing our own podcast episodes we were both actively listeners of numerous other podcasts from top marketers, business owners and tech-savvy speakers in the field. Here are
Last friday a client called me up and asked for a quick blog post. She wanted to cover an event that was coming up that weekend and asked me if it was possible to write it in the following 24 hours. Was it possible to write something that fast? For me, the answer was yes.
Content is a powerful tool. It attracts people to you website, it engages them on important and interesting topics you are covering, and it generates new leads for your business. And sometimes writing a longer, more in-depth, authority piece of content that will stand out as a beacon for potential readers and a link building
This post is not about how valuable content is for your business. I feel I’ve made that point pretty consistently the last couple of years, here, here, here, and here just for starters. Instead I want to address the second most common question I get – what type of content is the BEST when it
What Kind of Free Content Generates the Most Leads? Read More »
A few days ago, Apple officially passed Coca Cola to become the world’s most valuable “brand”. The Apple brand has always been synonymous with a certain level of style, of panache, of consumer driven fervor that gets people to stand in line for three days for the next iPhone or Macbook. But it took until
I make no bones about my position in the content marketing vs. advertising argument. Content is simply better. In terms of ROI. In terms of overall value. In terms of branding. You simply get more from content and inbound tactics than you do from a straight ad. The problem of course is that ads take
Those who read this blog or listen to the GLS Content Marketing Podcast may know me as a content guy. A writer and a marketer who does a lot of website development and branding. But I have hobbies like any guy and so a few of my friends and I started a podcast in August
Podcast Hits 100 Subscribers in 1 Month with Zero Marketing Read More »
After everything that goes into having a new website built for your business, the last thing on most lists is the content. The text on your site that conveys your branding message, convinces visitors to buy or signup for an email list, and that builds relationships with your audience. That stuff is precious gold and
What Does It Cost to Have a Website Written For You? Read More »
As a car service and limousine company, you understand how important it is to continuously generate new leads and grow your business. And today there is no faster and more effective way to do so than by building a website that generates a lot of visitors. Great Leap Studios has worked with car service and
Online branding strategies are not that different from offline strategies. Where businesses buy billboards and radio spots offline, they pay for Facebook Ads and podcast placements online. The difference, however, is that online we have so much more freedom of choice. We can pinpoint demographics, streamline our messages, and generate razor focused messaging that goes
These Five Common Branding Mistakes Cost Businesses Millions Every Year Read More »
I cringe every time I read an article about how SEO is essentially free marketing. Search engine optimization is not free – not by a long shot, and for years I’ve had to untangle a lot of the knots that our competitors put out there among potential clients. It’s why I don’t use that word
The Single Most Powerful Marketing Tool Online…is Free? Read More »
