1. LEGO.com

Lego features a bright, colorful site eye catching and crafted with their signature colors. Their site is easy to navigate, with categories listed with words and customized graphic icons with short animations that play when the mouse glides over them. Animated website icons aren’t the only feature. They have a rotating list of featured products, as well as showcased categories for quick and easy access to some of their most popular ones.

Screenshot taken from lego.com

Additionally, they offer general shipping deals as well as a VIP membership. Though free, this membership offers several exclusive deals, early access and more. Its perks are clearly laid out, and its points rewards system includes social media posts as a way to earn points. The modern word-of-mouth, this has incentivized people to post and led to an exponential increase in online advertising outreach, invaluable to an ecommerce business.  

Summary:

•  Easy to navigate menus with custom icons
•  Rotating featured product lists
•  Incentivized VIP program with clear and direct info
  
•  Social media outreach marketing directly from customers

2. Chewy.com

Founded in 2011, Chewy quickly grew into a well-known platform for pet supplies. Solely based online, their site was the key to their success. While showcasing their passion for their products throughout the site, they demonstrate the thought put into the customer experience while navigating and using the site. A unique, personalized feature they offer is allowing customers to individualize their pet’s profiles within the site. This personal touch is seen in their email campaign, as well as physical mail they send, especially the “Birthday Cards” they send out to pets. 

They offer customer support through chats and help 24/7 and their return/refund policies are clear and clearly display this throughout the site. They feature competitive prices and constant deals, as well as free shipping after a certain amount along with their Autoship feature. The clean design makes tracking orders and reviewing search history easy. Overall, and importantly, their site is consistently updated and runs smoothly.

Summary:

• Unique, personalized features for customer base
• 24/7 customer support chats are easily accessible
• Clear policies, competitive pricing, and autoship/tracking features
• Consistent site updates increases loading speed and decreases bounce rates

3. GlassesUSA.com

Glasses USA has a well-developed eCommerce brand within a competitive market. While there are other brands which appear in ad space above them in searches, they have kept up their Search Engine Optimization and maintain competitive keywords so that they appear higher in search results.

Screenshot taken from glassesusa.com

Visually, deals are immediately featured with sliding banners on the home page and they are sure to immediately showcase the popular and well-known brands they sell as well. There are several options to begin shopping within the site, whether it’s from the search bar, the menu with an organized layout, or several clearly defined buttons available as a potential customer scrolls through. Additionally, a small sliding header clearly lays out their warranty, shipping and returns policy, as well as their customer support hours and contact info.

Summary:

• Maintains competitive keywords for better search engine rankings
• Several options to begin shopping with visually appealing photos and deals
• Immediately features well-known brands
• Warranty, policies, and support info are clearly defined

 4. newegg.com

Newegg is an ecommerce merchant selling digital products such as computer parts, gaming systems, and certain automotive and office supplies. Their site features a top menu, with deals and larger overarching categories with their main products for PCs. The sidebar menu has clearly defined sections with small arrows that, when glided over, lead to a dropdown menu with even more specific categories.

Screenshot taken from newegg.com

Having a large menu with so many categories may seem a bit too much, however it is good because of two things. First and foremost, it showcases a great knowledge of their customer base, as those shopping at Newegg are more than likely to be searching for a specific part or product. Working in tandem with this, a larger list of specific categories is implemented in such a way that it does not immediately overwhelm the user, as it breaks down into smaller components easily and does not require the user to jump from page to page and/or back and forth.

Summary:

• Well-organized top and sidebar menus
• Expansive inventory for niche markets
• Showcases knowledge of customer base
• Lengthy drop-down menus for simple navigation

5. BarnesandNoble.com

Barnes and Noble, known for their in-person bookstores, has also become known for their online bookstore. Like many of the ecommerce sites in this list, their site homepage is dynamic, with sliding banners, clickable icons, featured books, picture lists and more. Their featured book lists are consistently updated with new releases and as seasons and yearly holidays roll around.

Screenshot taken from barnesandnoble.com

Products featured in rotating banners lists also showcase short quotes from reviews and their picture lists have their star review pictured directly below each book. Another feature they showcase is the ability to “Quick Add.” This gives online shoppers the chance to add a book they want directly to their cart and continue shopping on the same page they were on. This lessens frustration and makes it easier to browse for books as one would in an in-person bookstore. 

Summary:

• Dynamic homepage with sliding banners, clickable icons, featured books, picture lists and more
• Consistently updated featured products
• Reviews and quotes showcased
• “Quick-add” feature eases shopping experience, increases sales

  6. Harrys.com

With a sleek, minimalist design, Harry’s site layout is as direct as their product is; they sell their razors and other grooming products, with an autoship feature as their main draw. Though they have expanded past razors since they first began in 2012, their additional products are featured throughout the page in simple yet eye-catching photos. 

Screenshot taken from harrys.com

Finding a particular product page is simple with built in clickable images and buttons, as well as top of the page drop down menus. Having an optimized graphical user interface or GUI, is important to the user experience as the site both appears and can be interacted with seamlessly. Harry’s is also well-known for advertising across a myriad of platforms such as sponsorships within social media, Youtube and podcasts. 

Summary:

• Direct, sleek, minimalist design
• Utilizes Autoship as the main draw
• Optimized Graphical User Interface
• Advertising across variety of platforms

7. StitchFix.com

Stitchfix found their niche market within fashion and ran with it, all while creating an especially mobile-friendly design for both new and returning users. Their site features an immediate deal for first-time buyers, and immediately leads into their “Style Quiz.” A fashion brand geared towards marketing to those unsure or even uninterested in fashion, this quiz features a way for customers to learn and be told, based on their preferences, products that would suit them best. 

Screenshot taken from stitchfix.com

Both this quiz and the subsequent subscription and personalized online store create an experience that not only removes much of the stress associated with clothes shopping but also one that is hyper-individualized. Their pitch is quick and straightforward, outlined on their homepage with several featured reviews and lastly, another opportunity to go directly to the quiz at the end of the page. Something as simple as not making an online customer scroll all the way back up can lead to a boost in sales. 

Summary:

• Particularly mobile-friendly design with accompanying app
• Straightforward pitch with featured reviews
• “Style-Quiz” for a hyper-personalized online store and subscription
• Call to action bottom-button for navigational ease

8. Wayfair.com

Wayfair, known as an online retailer for a range of home furnishings. Their site also features an optimized GUI, with separate, clickable photo links of featured deals and products, both visual icon and written menus, and suggested types of products an online shopper may be looking for. 

Screenshot taken from wayfair.com

Wayfair also features easily accessible customer service and outlines their general policies and deals. Additionally, they feature exclusive brands, driving those who favor those brands to their site alone. Like many successful online businesses, they also have an app which makes navigating their site and accessing account info even easier.

Summary:

• Optimized GUI with clickable photo links
• Featured deals and suggested products
• Accessible Customer Service and policy info
• Featured exclusive brands

9. ILIABeauty.com

Screenshot taken from iliabeauty.com

Ilia Beauty has grown into a well-known modern online makeup brand, utilizing cause marketing to drive their success. They collaborate with non-profits and emphasize their clean, climate friendly practices throughout their site and among the myriad of profiles on social media platforms they consistently update. 

Products showcase their award-winning status with a small, prominently displayed symbol. As a visual-based product, it is hard for a customer to gauge if a product will suit them solely based on images, but like StitchFix, Ilia Beauty offers a solution in the form of different quizzes, such as one for their foundation shades.

Summary:

• Cause marketing featured on site, within product info
• Advertising among a range of consistently updated social media profiles
• Awards are featured in product photos and descriptions
• Quizzes to match customers with products, increase customer satisfaction

10. HomeDepot.com

Known for their large, warehouse-like home improvement stores, The Home Depot has developed their online site to make the need for many trips to the hardware store easier and less stressful. With organization and layout across platforms, their homepage immediately showcases their membership program with a quick layout of its perks.

Screenshot taken from homedepot.com

Additionally, they feature their curbside delivery as well as the ability to utilize location in order to determine in-store availability if the customer prefers in person or may need their items delivered more swiftly.  

Also prominently displayed is a recently viewed section, so customers, who are often searching for many parts for a complicated project or DIY can easily navigate back to products or between brands they may be comparing. Integrating small functions such as these into their interface creates a more efficient and uncomplicated experience for their ecommerce customers. 

Summary:

• Consistent layout and organization across platforms
• Membership program and perks quickly and clearly laid out
• In-Store availability to increase both online and in-store sales
• Recently viewed section for easy product comparison

Making a Successful eCommerce Business

Many of these online businesses utilize similar strategies within the core of their site for good reason. Visuals and organization work for optimized GUI, as well as consistent updates and usability across mobile, desktop and more platforms. 

Many of these brands come from a place where their brand lends itself to dominating specific sectors of unique keywords, and others have driven their sites development for continuous additions and retention of customers through online searches. 

Many are also well-aware of the unique challenges of online shopping, and ones that may be unique to their business, but have found solutions which make the convenience of not having to leave one’s house to shop even more so.

At Falcon Marketing, we design fully-integrated and optimized eCommerce sites for any kind of business. Work alongside our team and develop and launch your tailor-made, all-encompassing online marketing strategy campaign!

The post Ten Successful eCommerce Websites appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

And then 2020 showed up, forcing most of the world’s population into our homes under quarantine. 

But that also made eCommerce an absolutely essential part of business. Companies that didn’t already have online purchasing options had to pivot or go under, while companies that had already invested in eCommerce doubled down on that side of their business.

In other words, how we do business permanently shifted. So as you start to look forward to 2021 and beyond, let’s try to break down all of the ways that eCommerce has changed in 2020.

Record-breaking Growth Rates

Let’s start with some big statistics. According to Business Insider, retail sales in the US fell by 3.4% in Q2 this year because of COVID-19 and quarantine. Compare that to eCommerce sales, which skyrocketed 44.4% during the same time period (compared to 13.9% in 2019).

That in itself is a change worth noticing, and a good reminder that eCommerce is the future of retail. But if you’ve spent any time in this corner of the market, you know that building a successful eCommerce business is anything but easy.

It’s more than building a website and a social media presence. In some ways, succeeding in this market is even more difficult than physical sales. You aren’t just competing with local businesses — you’re going head to head with online retailers and vendors from around the world.

2020 has turned everyone into an online shopper, which drastically improves the amount of eCommerce business. But that means you also have more competition than ever before, which forces you to rethink your ad strategy and how you position yourself in this growing marketplace.

It’s an important change worth remembering because it’s going to change how you do business online. Or, more particularly, how you strategize and position your products and services to make sure you stay successful.

Personalizing Shopping Experiences

To separate themselves from the competition, successful companies are leaning more into personalized content. We’ve all seen dynamic ads and pages, but 2020 has pushed that idea to new heights…and it’s only going to increase in complexity moving forward.

People want to be pampered and catered to. Not all the time, and not to an outrageous extent. But everybody likes to feel noticed and valued — it’s a major reason why “brand loyalty” exists, and why customers make purchasing decisions based on the quality of customer service.

By creating unique shopping experiences for customers, you’ll be able to personalize your relationship with every person who interacts with your site, store, social media presence, etc.

As eCommerce becomes a more established part of how we interact with our favorite brands, the idea of personalization shifts from “trend” to “expectation.” Ecommerce removes the human-to-human interactions, and that means you’ve got to replace that somehow.

The good news is that this personalization leverages the data that you are already collecting. Social media ads, SEO trackers, and heat maps will all show you how an individual person interacts with your site and your brand as a whole. That can help you shift focus a bit and start to craft a unique shopping experience to get that person back on your site

A survey from earlier this year showed that 48% of customers spend more when their shopping experience is customized. This sort of brand-customer interaction does more than just win someone’s business — you’ll earn their trust, and that has a direct impact on their long-term loyalty and their willingness to advocate your products to friends.

Shifting Focus To New Areas

We’ve all gotten used to the idea of product marketing, or letting our services do the talking for us. Talking about the things you offer is traditional business advertising, and there are a lot of companies that swear by this tactic.

It’s easy to think that if someone comes to a specific product page, they’re getting close to a buying decision and consider that item a solution to their problem. But more than 30,000 new products hit the market every year, and a whopping 95% of them fail. 

The transition to eCommerce shopping has created smarter, savvier customers. How you advertise your brand (and present your products) has to change, even going beyond the need for personalized experiences. 

Another growing trend is the shift to feature marketing. This tactic drills down on a specific feature of a product, highlighting what makes that unique or compelling.

Innovation drives business, and in a lot of cases, evolving an established (and successful) product or service is an easier gamble to make compared to creating something completely new. Feature marketing is how you present that information in a way that generates some interest in that product, even if it’s something people are already familiar with.

For what it’s worth, the leading alternative to feature/product marketing is brand marketing. (And while it’s not a trend unique to 2020, it’s built enough of a reputation to at least deserve a mention.) 

While feature marketing leverages the unique aspects of your products or services, brand marketing looks at what is unique about you. In the same way that people want a personalized shopping experience, they also want to support brands they respect and agree with.

And if you aren’t sharing why you do what you do or why your company matters, customers won’t have any particular reason to want to build a relationship with you. It can be a challenge to tell that story or give a company “personality,” but it’s a fast way to build trust.

Again, there’s no perfect system here. It’s even possible to dabble on both sides of the “product vs. brand” battle. But the goal is the same, no matter which way you go: Win over a person’s trust, whether that’s in your product or in your company. Either way, you’ll also win their business.

Connecting With Brand Representatives

Another way eCommerce has changed in 2020 is the push for “brand representatives.” You’re probably more familiar with the other name for this: influencer marketing.

Celebrity endorsements have played a role in advertising for as long as marketing’s been around. From Super Bowl spots to billboards to social media plugs, you basically can’t escape influencer marketing these days.

Current predictions show that companies could spend as much as $15 billion on influencer marketing within the next two years.

While that might seem like an absurd amount of money, think about this: The average ROI on influencer marketing spend is $5.20 per dollar, and that’s just on average — some brands made as much as $15 on every dollar spent.

To paint an even clearer (and more tangible) picture for you, 80% of people who click to a product page through an influencer ad make a purchase.

This also lines up with the push toward social media marketing. According to a survey by Linquia, 97% of marketers planned to partner with influencers on Instagram — which happens to be the most popular home for influencers in 2020.

So, in other words, influencer marketing has become a trend because it works consistently. And that means there are clear paths to follow if you want to start incorporating this into your own strategy.

Out of these four major changes to eCommerce in 2020, influencer marketing might just be the most complicated option to integrate. Networking with influencers on any channel can be time-consuming, and negotiating contracts might be a source of future nightmares. 

You’ve got to remember that most influencers don’t have backgrounds in business or marketing. But it’s also the clearest line between “industry change” and “solid ROI,” so that might make all of that effort worth it in the end.

Planning For The Future

These four changes might sound like a considerable shift in the path to eCommerce success. And if you haven’t integrated these new strategies, you might worry that you’re falling behind the competition.

But there’s good news. 2020 has been the most ridiculous year your customers have experienced, and the same is true for your market. We’re all still settling into a post-COVID world, and that will buy you time to investigate eCommerce trends and determine which ones work for your business (and serve your customers).

You also need to remember that these aren’t the only changes to take note of — they’re just the biggest ones that seem to affect the most businesses. If you’re not sure how to create personalized experiences or how to connect with influencers, that’s alright. Maybe you can find another area to adapt and grow.

At the end of the day, you know the eCommerce industry. You’ve spent enough time and done enough market research to feel confident in yourself. After all, your company has survived 2020 so far, and that means you can continue to find success.

Ecommerce can be a fickle market sometimes, and it’s always evolving. 2020 in particular has brought a lot of change, but don’t dwell on all the things you can’t do right now. This year is just creating more opportunities for you to fine-tune your process and keep exploring new ideas to set you up for success in 2021 and beyond.

Drew Gula is the copywriter at Soundstripe, a company that produces resources, like storyboard templates, to help businesses improve their YouTube monetization.

The post How Ecommerce Has Changed in 2020 appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

1. Site Speed
   Amazon has taught the world that site speed when it comes to eCommerce can be one of the most important deciding factors between a website that has conversions and a website that doesn’t. According to some internal testing done by Falcon marketing, one of our ecom websites was able to more than double conversion rates by increasing website speed. The quickest and easiest to get improved load speeds are to incorporate a content delivery network (CDN) enabled server for images and scripts on the website, optimize images to ensure they are compressed and enable full server caching. There are many more options on speeding up the website after those initial three steps are taken such as optimizing website code, potentially upgrading plugins/scripts or even replatforming if your website is on an older platform that has less support such as Magento 1.9.
2. Unique Product Offers
   The reality of eCommerce is there will always be a competitor who has better pricing than you will be able to offer on an item that is either quite similar or the same as what you have listed on your website. Looking to be the cheapest is a powerful way to get customers to shop on your website but it’s also a way to set expectations for always having the best possible pricing which is often impossible to maintain.

   One of our websites cwspirits.com has added bottle collections curated by an in-house expert on what customers are looking for when they buy multiple products. The collection sections offer shopping experiences that other websites do not have the ability to offer as easily as this is done in-house creating a competitive edge to the customers that frequent the website in addition to raising the average order value as the collections feature multiple products. The collections also add a simple way for customers to send gifts and find savings from bulk buying without having to do complicated math equations to figure out just how much they are saving.

3. Readily available sales advice
   The next time you find yourself in a brick and mortar store pay attention to how many of the customers will ask an associate for help to find a product or advice on what would be a better choice when comparing a few items. eCommerce needs to deliver the same experience to customers by offering easy comparison between products with descriptions or with sales staff. Many of our clients add on Live Chat, 24/7 email support, phone calls with live people answering quickly and even phone meetings with plugins such as call-page as seen on Rockher.com, a premium diamond ring website where customers can schedule a call with a sales associate to go through the buying experience.

   The eCommerce world is certainly growing quickly and Falcon marketing has seen a rise in the number of customers who want the same personalized shopping experience that they get in the stores when shopping online. By being proactive and offering customer service it not only offers the customer an easy way to get in contact, it also builds trust to the legitimacy of the store so consumers are more confident that the store is legitimate which will certainly increase conversion rates.

If you need some help with eCommerce consulting, don’t hesitate to reach out to Falcon marketing!

The post How to improve conversion rates on eCommerce websites appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

Additionally, Greeny offers products from an array of brands so even if the market looks for cost savings Greeny will always have a readily available product for the consumers.

2. Wine and Spirits – cwspirits.com
Country wine and Spirits have been selling online liquor since late 2016 when Falcon started the website. We have seen first hand the liquor business has succeeded with growth in both visitors and sales and during the recent coronavirus related news sales have sustained and even potentially lifted. The online business, in general, is trending quite nicely as shown:

1. Search volume for the keyword “wine and spirits” according to SemRush:
   

   Volume	246K
   Number of results	849M

   People will always drink alcohol. Alcohol for special occasions, alcohol with a friend, alcohol for a part, you name it, alcohol is there and the online industry rewards companies that offer easy shipping and great pricing, something that Country Wine and Spirits has always been proud to provide. Due to the evergreen nature of the liquor business, it is clear that the trends support the growing industry and the likelihood of an economic slowdown is low.

The post 2 Industries in eCommerce that can Sustain an Economic Downturn appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

We are proud to be the web design company that was chosen to get this redesign done, one of our most ambitious and high profile projects yet!

Frank Fleming thank you for being such an awesome client and we look forward to our continued work together!

Alex Hoffman Yossi Rosenbluth Thank you for the hard work!

#webdesign

The post Sports Encyclopedia Launch Announcement appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

Who: Who first invented SEO

One could argue that the beginning of SEO started with the dawn of the internet going public or when websites first started being launched. However, SEO could not truly become a concept without the creation of the search engine. In 1990 the first search engine (Archie) was invented by McGillan University student Alan Emtage. At the time it was only an index of computer files stored on anonymous FTP websites in a certain network of computers. In 1997 the search engine Backrub was conceived by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin which would later become Google. Backrub was the first search engine that would analyze relevancy and rank websites based on the quality of links as well as how many times the search term appeared on the site. 

SEO was brought into the world organically after the development of website search engines. As more and more people began creating sites, soon the need to show up higher on the rankings became more important. You could say optimization first came from the creation of the search engine itself or from the first person who complained they weren’t at the top of the website rankings list. Either way, SEO did not have one single creator but rather it was formed due to the environment of this new technology itself. These factors are what birthed the need for search engine optimization (SEO), and so began the race for websites and companies to appear higher in the rankings.

What: What is SEO

SEO (search engine optimization) is a digital marketing strategy that takes into consideration just how the algorithms in search engines work in order to increase the quality and quantity of a website’s organic or unpaid traffic. This, in turn, increases the visibility of a website to those using search engines to look up information and/or make queries. SEO is the act of making a website more attractive to search engines and enticing them to place a given website higher in rankings. This can be done through an unlimited number of strategies but some of the most common ones are adding, editing and modifying HTML as well as coding for keywords, using backlinks, inbound links and making sure websites are mobile-friendly.

Where: Where was SEO first started

SEO first began in the ‘wild west’ of the worldwide web where borders and countries had no relevancy in the exchange of information. Some instances of the phrase “search engine optimization” can be seen cataloged around 1997 and some anecdotal evidence has been given about its origins but the term SEO did not start becoming more used in publications until the early 2000s.   

When: What year was SEO invented

You could say that SEO was first invented in 1997 when search engines began to become a bit more sophisticated and allowed for webmasters to perform actions that would affect their site ranking through relevancy, keywords, and backlinking. 

Why: What purpose does SEO serve

Clearly, all of this effort isn’t for nothing. Naturally, helping place websites higher in search engine rankings results in more people viewing the site and finding the product or service the website promotes. This leads to potentially more clients using said service, making sales, or translating those views into leads for any given business.  This provides traffic/customers/leads for the business or site in question doing the tactics. Not only that but SEO has now opened up a new avenue for marketing agencies to focus on thus providing more jobs

The post The History of SEO: Who, What, Where, When, Why appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

Desktop & Mobile Designs

During the design and development phase of your project, it may be in your best interested to request, commission, or design two or three variations of your different website pages. The two most important variations are of course desktop and mobile but creating a third design for tablet sizes may also be a beneficial option. When it comes to the development phase these mockup designs will be invaluable when it comes to the clarity and communication that’s necessary to achieve a great design. It acts as a roadmap for the developer(s) and allows you to work out any design kinks early on before features become more concrete, and in turn, harder and more expensive to alter.

Custom coding these intricacies can be a huge undertaking, so be wary of template services or pre-made website designs that promise mobile friendliness. Oftentimes the end result of these types of services are buggy and unusable on mobile due to the inability to custom code responsiveness. On the flip side, if you’re going through a website design company that handles everything from design to development they most likely have the multi-layered decision making process in place to ensure what’s called responsive design. Responsive design is a different approach to mobile optimization where the website’s hard coding can alter depending on every and any screen size making a mobile mockup design irrelevant. This is achieved by using column design which allows for free scaling page images and elements ensuring a crisp layout on any device.

One point to note when thinking about mobile compatibility is that it is now a factor Google and other search engines use to gauge a page’s success. Previously these engines used ‘screenshots’ of websites to gauge readability and reliability, but now they’re also capable of taking screenshots of mobile views. We’ll go over how to check this for yourself shortly. Just to keep in mind that the more mobile friendly the page is for the user, the higher Google will rank your website and allow it to become a trusted source of information.

Checking For Yourself

I’ve created this simple and handy guide to help you check if your website is mobile optimized and get you started in the right direction to improving your website’s mobile readability.

Step 1: Download Google Chrome

Google offers a free browser called Chrome that comes bundled with development tools and features. Their debug mode is the reason to use this browser as your method of choice and will be a huge help in looking for mobile responsiveness.

Step 2: Use the Inspect Tool

Right-click and use ‘Inspect’ button at the bottom of the drop-down or hit ctrl+shift+i for a simple and quick hotkey.

Step 3: Switch to Responsive Mode

The first thing you’ll see inside the inspect mode might be a little overwhelming, but the majority of tools you don’t have to worry about. For right now all you need to do is deselect the inspect element button in the corner and instead select the device view button.

Step 4: Device Sizing

After you switch to device mode you’ll see one of two things: the first thing you’ll notice is colored bars running along the top of the window. These are simply indicators that outline the ‘threshold’ that your programmer or developer has already included in the code. Essentially, as soon as you pass a certain threshold of size the site design should adjust to compensate for the new ratio. The second thing you’ll notice is a drop-down with common device sizes. Since we’re testing for our own phone size, you’ll want to hit ‘edit’ on this drop-down so we can input a custom size.

Step 5: Add Your Device

A new checklist will appear that dictates the different device sizes you can select from the drop-down. Many of the common sizes are already included but if you’re on a different device like me (I use a Google Pixel 2) then you’ll want to input the name of the device and your custom size ratio.

Step 6: Check for Details

As you can see our website is already optimized for mobile viewing, but in the case that you do see any unwanted text or image overlaps or broken pages, it needs to be repaired by a developer who has experience with mobile responsiveness. Here at Falcon Marketing, all of the websites we create are already built with mobile responsiveness in mind.

The post Mobile Friendly Website Design – How to Check & Why It Matters appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

We reached out to business owners from varying industries to lend their veteran advice when it comes to building your ideal eCommerce platform. Our first guest writer is an expert in the field of eCommerce consultation and auditing. His sound advice comes from a place of an overall ethos to consider when making that first leap.

I’ve been in the eCommerce business for well over a decade, built well over 100 web stores and have used practically every shopping cart platform that exists. We currently have eCommerce sites running on 3DCart, Shopify and BigCommerce. They are spread across those three platforms because each site has unique needs and some shopping carts serve those needs better than others

There is no perfect shopping cart – one that meets the needs of every website. Every shopping cart has weaknesses – things that it lacks that other shopping carts provide. Every shopping cart also has things that it can do that other shopping carts cannot. Although we prefer Shopify for most eCommerce websites, we have to sometimes use other ones for various reasons.

You never really know what a shopping cart lacks until you get in there and start using it. My recommendation is that people should take advantage of the free trials that every shopping cart provides. Figure out which one best meets the needs of your particular website. Once you get to know each shopping cart’s idiosyncrasies, you’ll be able to choose the best one for each project.

-Dave Hermansen, Store Coach

Dave suggests that jumping headfirst into a platform is the best way to experiment with it, get to know the features, and ultimately decide whether it’s something you would continually use for your business in the long-term. This certainly applies to all eCommerce platforms, but maybe more so with leaders like Shopify and WooCommerce that allow you to experiment with a trial period. For some of the more complex platforms, like Magento for example, this line of thinking may require deeper consideration. When it comes to larger, feature-packed, and hard-coded platforms an entire site’s functionality must revolve around these highly technical aspects. Next, we’ll hear from Jeff Moriarty, owner of a Magento website who learned some of these lessons first-hand.

About 5 years ago our company started with Magento. It was great at the time, allowing us to customize everything we needed. Over the years of having this platform, we found it very expensive to run, to update and to resolve security issues. We were spending more on development costs than marketing. It just wasn’t working. At the end of 2018 we switched over to Shopify. Not only is it 1/10th the cost to run, but we can make most of the updates ourselves and Shopify handles all security issues. Plus the themes just look much more modern. While not as customizable as Magento, if you are a small or medium-sized business, it should allow you to do everything you need to run a successful business online.

-Jeff Moriarty,  Moriarty’s Gem Art

Mike Lindamood, an owner of two eCommerce storefronts, has had a similar experience with Magento. Although he attests to the capability of a Magento website, especially to oversee the status of both of his eCommerce websites, it sounds like external pressure from Adobe is forcing his hand. Since platforms are like living, breathing beings, a system that was once the best eCommerce platform for a business may become outdated as needs change and updates occur.

We have had great success with Magento as our eCommerce platform for a decade now, however, with Adobe discontinuing support for version 1 and essentially making everyone upgrade to the new platform of Magento 2 we will be moving our websites to another platform next year. Having to make the security updates ourselves throughout these years has become burdensome and too much for us to handle in house. We are currently looking into migrating our sites over to BigCommerce early next year so they will do all of the upgrades for us. We will miss having all of our websites under one account and being able to share data (Magento was the only platform that could handle multiple websites under one roof), but Bigcommerce offers some great features that will hopefully help us forget about the ease of managing multiple stores that Magento provided.

-Mike Lindamood, WalletGear

One of the other considerations to take into account when building an eCommerce marketplace is the accessibility and marketability of the website and its products. As Alexander Kehoe from Caveni Digital Solutions has explained more in-depth, there are some platforms that allow for much more flexibility in terms of SEO optimization and other important search engine features & functionality.

We’ve used almost every eCommerce platform under the sun, both for ourselves and for our clients. WooCommerce has really been the one that stands out to us, the adaptability of the platform makes it the best to use for the rapidly changing circumstances of the eCommerce world. While alternatives like Shopify have appeared promising at times they can never really capture the same freedom that WooCommerce offers. Another downside of investing entirely into a Shopify-based platform is that your website will often lose out on essential search engine optimization. Alternatively a platform like WooCommerce can be configured to be far more SEO friendly which means more traffic much faster. All in all, WooCommerce has really been the best in our experience and we have no intentions of changing any time soon.

-Alexander Kehoe, Caveni Digital Solutions

Whereas Caveni Digital Solutions has the cumulative experience of building platforms and learning from mistakes of the past, Jeff Neal of The Critter Depot has dealt with those ramifications first-hand. For an eCommerce business just starting out these effects have the potential to have a greater impact on overall accessibility and eventually profitability. Effects like these can become hard to undo the more you invest in the platform you’ve chosen, especially after uploading all of your products. Migrating items to a new store can become a chore but may be required down the line.

We use Shopify as our eCommerce platform.  One great thing about Shopify is how easy it is to get a store up and running.  They automate the merchant integration, taxes, and having shipping calculators available.  It also has a large library of apps, which makes it very easy to customize your specific store.  As an eCommerce platform, Shopify is probably the best option.

But, our biggest frustration is that it’s a lousy platform to optimize SEO.  Their blog is very basic and bare-bones.  It’s not easy to identify which title header you’re using.  Adding media into blog posts is cumbersome, and the template page to compose your article is user-unfriendly.  SEO is our biggest marketing strategy.  And because Shopify has a lousy SEO offering, we’re always trying to find a way to migrate to WordPress and WooCommerce.

-Jeff Neal, The Critter Depot

Even though it was simple enough to get Jeff’s platform running, the tradeoff of poor SEO capabilities may be having an effect on his website as it currently stands. Shopify greatly restricts the amount of SEO customization you can accomplish with limits on plug-ins, rich snippets, code simplification, and much more. That’s where WooCommerce and other WordPress integrated platforms have a much larger strong suit when it comes to optimizing all of these potential marketing opportunities.

Lastly, we’ll hear from an eCommerce store owner that has a more technical perspective on which platform to choose. Although some individuals have the technical capability to customize a more advanced platform if that’s something you may see yourself struggling with. At Falcon Marketing we’re more than happy to help you build your website from the ground up.

Choosing the eCommerce platform that’s right for you takes both reflection and projection.

Reflection in that you need to step back and really evaluate your technical skills and abilities. If you’re not terribly technically astute, then Shopify is your better bet. Go some coding chops? Then you might like Woocommerce better since you’ll be able to customize it more (without getting nickeled and dimed all the time). Really know your way around PHP, CSS, and HTML? Then Magneto is probably more your speed.

The Projection aspect comes into play for platform selection in that if you know you’ll be carrying hundreds of SKUs, then Magento might be a better fit for you, thanks to its native ability to quickly modify SKUs in bulk. Just planning on carrying a few dozen SKUs but hope to do high volume (100+ orders a day)? Then Shopify would be good for you since the system will scale effortlessly with you. Figure you won’t get more than a few orders a day? Then WooCommerce is a better option since it’s cheap to run (i.e. just your hosting costs) and relatively easy to maintain.

-Jamie Burns, BulkMunitions

Having built websites on almost all of the described platforms, it’s difficult making the correct choice for you and your business. Whether you’re still in the planning stages of creating your eCommerce platform, need an overhaul on an existing website, or need to boost your sales through expert SEO and marketing tools, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our team of all-encompassing professionals. We can help you make the most informed decision using our decades of the collective experience and turn your website into your #1 source of income.

The post Which eCommerce Platform Should I Pick? appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an important marketing tool to use whether you’ve been established in the dental industry for a long time or are just getting started. When it comes to healthcare and dental industry websites there can be an intense level of competition, increased spending online is critical in helping your practice reach new customers. Investing in dental SEO can help you achieve these goals in the long run, helping your office grow to new heights.

Around 3.5 billion Google searches are made every day and according to a recent Pew study , 77% of all health care seekers start at search engines to get their information. Furthermore, 4 out of 5 consumers will use search engines to find local information according to ThinkGoogle. With these statistics in mind, you can easily see just why it’s just so important for dentists, especially those with local practices, to invest in dental SEO.

By optimizing your dental website design and implementing SEO you can have a leg up on the competition by establishing your practice’s online presence and helping it gain new prospective patients.

But just how exactly does Dental SEO work in your favor? Let us break down the ins-and-outs of SEO techniques and how they can help your practice be found first when people are seeking out dental services online.

What can SEO do for your business?

-Reach new patients

A successful SEO campaign for your dentistry will get you increased visibility online and help you increase the number of visitors who will migrate to your site organically over time.  Through dental SEO you can increase the number of opportunities for new clients to find you and hopefully become returning patients.

-Improve your authority

In order to optimize your website to be ranked higher on search optimization, it becomes increasingly important for your practice to have a wide breadth of knowledge on your industry hosted on your website and available for visitors to access. Having good information and sources on your page will also help Google identify your dental practice as having a greater weight in the field if you have strong and credible sources of information throughout your dental website design. Google’s spiders (bots) are constantly crawling through the web across billions of links in order to search for the most relevant content and rank it accordingly, which is why it’s become so important to keep your site up to date with good information.

-Boost your presence                        When potential customers are looking up information on dentists there is a greater chance of them searching for a practice that is in the area, or “local”, rather than a single specific practice or dental specialty. This is where keywords come in handy. Through the implementation of keywords on your dentistry’s site, there is a greater chance of having it appear when patients are seeking dental help. A strategic dental SEO company will find the best keywords available to help you compete for the top spot in your area’s search results that works with your budget.

-Optimize your websites look

There are several ways to keep people on your site and make it more navigable to keep them there. Bounceback rate, visuals, fast loading times, all of these can help users stay on your website longer. Attractive dental website design is only powerful when it is coupled with a strong user-friendly interface. 

If your website doesn’t load fast enough, something to the tune of 3 seconds, chances are your visitors are going to leave the page quickly.  This goes doubly so if your website isn’t optimized for mobile view. There’s a large percentage of all searches being done on a mobile phone or tablet so you should always make sure to tailor the content of your website to be more mobile-friendly and improve the experience for on-the-go internet users. Always keep in mind just how sleek your site looks on your phone and how quickly it loads.

What does it take?

–A Level of Investment

Depending on where your practice is located (rural, metropolitan area, etc), how many offices your dental practice may have, and just how competitive the market is in your area there are several strategies that you can take in order to obtain a successful SEO strategy. A combination of both PPC (pay-per-click) ads, local SEO and organic SEO tend to have a much higher impact of success, but it all depends on what you and your practice are willing to invest in your SEO marketing strategy.

-Time and Patience

Dental SEO is a process and not a wand you wave that magically gets to work overnight. Google’s algorithms are always changing so it becomes increasingly important to have a strategy in place to keep your optimization afloat for the proper amount of time to show return on your investment. Investing in it as a one-time strategy can leave you high and dry, making you miss out on the opportunity for many new potential clients.

Organic SEO builds authority and visibility over the course of several months through the use of keywords, blogs, and backlinks, among other factors. PPC can boost you to the front of the page for a short period of time for a fee. When used together in tandem there is a higher effect on the success of the campaign but at the end of the day, it is what you and your practice want to invest in your SEO strategy. Everyone’s experience will look different so make sure to talk with your SEO marketing consultant on the best strategies for your practice. A successful SEO campaign is a lot like starting a dental practice, it’s a process. Perseverance is key to its success.

What does it look like?

-Local SEO and traditional SEO differences for the dental industry

Because of how advanced Google algorithms have now become, the search engine has a high accuracy of identifying user’s search intent. There is a higher chance that the user is looking for local information and so when google responds it automatically sends both the local results as well as the local organic results.

Local SEO utilizes local stacks or the three top local search results that are displayed when a user searches for a geocoded local search term. The three results are highlighted by google maps with a clear and concise view of the business hours, reviews, and contact information. Through SEO you can rank for more local search terms and capture more business because of the way that the search engine reads user intent from past searches and offers businesses that fall outside the exact search category.

Local organic results and organic SEO overall is a bit more complicated than just local SEO. Through the use of keywords, building links, geotags and other factors, organic SEO helps your dental website work to outrank the competitors in your town by optimizing your marketing strategy to work together with the algorithms.

Even though you may not think that your practice will be able to handle SEO on your own, hiring a dental SEO company can become a wise investment in the long run. Through the process of both local and organic SEO, you can reach out to potential customers that you likely wouldn’t have been able to reach otherwise. With that in mind, SEO is not only useful for just the dental industry but can be applied to many other business markets including Construction, CBD, and Lawyer SEO. Depending on the competition in your area, SEO can be one of the more critical factors in getting new patients into your office without too much effort on your part.  

The post Dental SEO : Why You Should Invest in SEO For Your Practice appeared first on Falcon Marketing.

At Falcon Marketing we have years of experience and hundreds of websites under our belt spanning many different industries and practices. Even if your company falls under a category of business we haven’t worked with before, there are likely parallels to competitors within the same spectrum of businesses. Additionally, if your industry is entirely new or not as well documented, our research and development team is capable of extensive and deep analysis of your biggest competitors and ideal market. Our analytics enable us to dissect competitor’s online presence, source of traffic, as well as a range of exposures. There are a couple of factors to be mindful of when searching for an industry specialist to handle your website development and digital marketing which we will outline in this article.

Mindfulness in Design

Whether you’re looking to commission a general contracting industry website or an ADA compliant healthcare web presence, it’s important that the company you pick can accommodate the needs of a diverse range of industries. One key feature to look for when vetting different companies is the professionalism of the websites they’ve built when compared to other industry leaders. If you notice similar motifs like clear iconography or impressive eye-catching elements like integrated videos, you’ll know that the company you’re examining has done their market research and are capable of designing top-tier industry websites. It’s also extremely important to examine inner service pages or lead generation features. The farther you dissect the website, does the quality of the inner pages change? This could be problematic for a number of reasons. Oftentimes inner pages are the ones that a first time user will see the most, so it’s important that those pages, in addition to the landing page, are capable of generating leads and attract new clients.

There are some other key factors to take into account when gauging how successfully a website design company is marketing a company or brand. Firstly, is it easy to access the key information necessary to find or contact the business? If they have a location, is there a stylish map or location page that can help you navigate to the business via google maps? Even if the website’s purpose is to generate digital leads, a physical presence can be equally as important for walk-in clientele. The information present on the website should also match and be integrated with the same data that can be found on Google for maximum digital exposure. These are integral aspects that are often overlooked by inexperienced website firms. Secondly, if the content in those secondary pages is accurate, informational, and instills enough trust in you to reach out to the company, that’s another good indicator that the development company has done their due diligence in market research. Oftentimes industry website design firms in Los Angeles offer content writing services to supplement their page designs. The type of content, both written and visual, has a huge effect on ranking potential for these so-called lead generation pages. When you pick an industry leader that knows the ins and outs of these particular facets you have a much better likelihood of translating your professional website into a real revenue generation tool for your business.

Search Engine Optimization Capabilities

SEO is one of the most abstract aspects of digital marketing, but here at Falcon Marketing, we’ve solidified many of the core techniques that have now become standard in the SEO field. When determining SEO methods based on various industry websites, techniques and methods tend to differ based on competition and the desired outcome of a given website. If we’re doing organic SEO for a general contracting industry website, for example, we often create many informational pages based on the different services that the company offers. Not only does this assist in lead generation by casting a larger net for those looking for generation contracting and construction services, but it can serve a dual purpose when you start to include location-specific keywords contained in the metadata of the site. This can be stored in descriptions, images, etc, and help Google to recognize which areas the business is trying to target. We’ve also taken this concept a step further in the past by creating inner pages for every location the client may find potential clientele. Although this is a labor-intensive and advanced technique, it can work wonders for businesses looking to generate nearby businesses.

The converse would be a business looking for national coverage. eCommerce websites often don’t target specific locales because their goods can be shipped anywhere; in these instances, we target highly competitive keywords that will help our clients to garner nationwide recognition. It’s not enough to only rank for the keyword but to translate that increased traffic into real sales for your company. When we perform eCommerce SEO services our main goal is to make sure our clients see a real return on investment in the budget they may set aside for expert digital marketing. These methods of highly competitive keyword targeting and keyword reinforcement have worked for both national and international eCommerce websites. Just one of the many keys to our time tested techniques involve creating a legitimate and reputable name for a business. We can accomplish this by communicating directly with some of the internet’s largest press outlets. Through years of collaborative history with news websites like USAToday, Forbes, and HuffPost, we can increase the recognized authority score of your website within Google while at the same time attracting a wide and new audience directly to your website.

Using Blogs & Resource Centers

Many other SEO companies advertise the use of blogs and articles to help increase your website’s SEO but very few, if any, deliver a truly valuable and authentic product. Not to knock the competition, but we’ve seen more than our fair share of poor blog sections. So poor, in fact, that it’s evident to anyone with a bit of experience in the field that no real work was put into the content or labor that it takes to create a truly valuable article. Some of the reasons we stand out from the fray are the quality of the content and thoroughly researched keywords that we target as a part of our content development process. There are a couple of methods you can use to determine if a blog section is set up successfully and geared towards maximum online exposure. In all instances, the content on the blog itself should be crisp, clear, and concise. Google favors shorter sentences as opposed to run-on and complex sentence structures. The next thing you can look for is the number of hyperlinks; there should only be about 2-4 hyperlink anchors contained per blog and no repeated keywords or URL’s. Using too many can flag the content as spam and is considered ‘keyword stuffing’. Check to see if the blog itself is tagged with industry appropriate keywords that a user may search for when looking for your business. Images are extremely important as well as the metadata contained within the image itself. If your blog section is missing one or many of these aspects, it may be time to switch to a new SEO company.

In addition to standard blogs, there are more advanced techniques that an SEO company may use, including the use of a blog section as a resource center packed with useful information for the user. Resource centers are a labor-intensive technique that has the potential to turn your website into a wealth of information for those looking for answers to highly specific industry questions on Google. Although it can be difficult to find a company capable of pulling off these kinds of complex SEO techniques, at Falcon Marketing we have over half a decade of experience and paved the way for many modern techniques that can be seen in the industry today.

The post Finding an Industry Expert for Your Website appeared first on Falcon Marketing.