Small business marketing company that specializes in developing a comprehensive and profitable web presence.
You’re busy. You don’t have time to babysit SEO jargon.
So here’s the real question hiding behind the acronym:
In 2026, can Google (and potential customers) tell the difference between “real” and “repackaged”?
Yes. And they’re getting better at it every second of every day.
[Read more…] about EEAT in 2026 Made Simple: Earn Trust FasterIf you’ve been around SEO long enough, you’ve heard the phrase:
“Improve your E-E-A-T.”
And if you’re like most business owners, your next thought is:
“Cool. How?”
Because “E-E-A-T” sounds like one of those concepts that’s either obvious (“be trustworthy”) or impossible (“convince Google you’re trustworthy”).
The truth is simpler. EEAT isn’t a magic ranking dial. It’s Google’s quality lens — a way to evaluate whether content deserves to be shown to real people who are trying to make real decisions. In practice, it’s less about tricking an algorithm and more about removing doubt.
If someone lands on your page, do they feel like:
[Read more…] about EEAT Made Simple for Busy Business Owners: Earn Trust FasterAfter the Page Experience Google algorithm update, there is no one adjustment that’s guaranteed to fix any one specific issue. You have to take a broader view of optimizing your small business website.
A lot of minor adjustments make up big results.
This post is not meant to be an exhaustive ultimate guide; Google says many elements work together to come up with scores, so it’s hard to pinpoint, with any precision, how specific changes affect page experience scores.
What Google does give you, is insights into what’s slowing webpages down or what’s hurting the user experience. Many tools also give advice on how to fix issues.
Web.dev/measure, for instance, doesn’t do in-depth results, but it does give you an idea of what the impact of a particular fix is:
[Read more…] about Page Experience Google Algorithm UpdateIt does, however, mean that we have realized a majority of our clients are in need of services driving leads and traffic to their beautiful websites, and some small businesses do not have the resources to drive organic traffic via social media. So, in addition to being a web design company, we are now also a B2B PPC Agency.
We appreciate that more and more small businesses are developing their digital marketing. We’ve seen some excellent social media and SEO efforts from some of our clients.
However, Pay Per Click advertising, or PPC for short, is one aspect of digital marketing that many business owners don’t know about. Or, don’t know have the technical capabilities to execute.
And that is why we are now offering our fantastic PPC packages to small businesses. We can carry out all of this work for you.
PPC is an internet advertising solution that is used to direct traffic to your website from Google. You then pay Google each time the ad is clicked.
If done well, PPC campaigns can utilize search engine advertising to generate a large number of clicks/traffic/leads to your website. It is a very effective method of promoting your business. It is also easily measurable. This allows small businesses to quantify how effective PPC campaigns have been.
If your campaigns are carried out efficiently, the return on your investment will be clear.
When you search for something on Google, you will be presented with organic results, generated based on Google’s algorithms. You’ll also be presented with paid for adverts, usually at the top of the page. It’s these paid for adverts that have been created and optimized using PPC.
Take a look at the image below and see the Google Ads that appear on Google when you search for “divorce lawyers Sacramento”
When you want to appear in these positions for specific and relevant terms, you must set up a Google Adwords account, select the key phrases you wish to target, and bid for the slots.
Your advert’s position on search results will depend on your Ad Rank. This is a metric that is calculated based on two factors:
We will take care of all of your PPC needs. Our team of PPC experts are at hand to ensure that you are driving as many leads as possible using this measurable and effective marketing method. We have a range of packages available covering PPC and Google Display Networks (GDN), which is similar to PPC but offers you the chance for your adverts to appear on other websites.
We will carry out everything:
Our B2B PPC packages are offered with a minimum three month contract and at the end of each month you will get a report sent to you outlining the work that’s been carried out and the results.
Getting a business website designed well can be compared to laying plans for a new building whereby, in both endeavors, form follows function. The look of a website should be primarily based upon its intended purpose and not the other way around.
Technically, you could build a wine cellar on the top story of your house made out of glass. It would look beautiful and the light in the room would be phenomenal. You now have the nicest wine cellar ever, fantastic.
Except, you actually just built a greenhouse, and your wine is going to be decimated. Likewise, a website can’t ONLY look beautiful and not do its job.
I mean really fast. Like, two weeks ago fast.
High search engine rankings are arguably more important than beauty; after all, your efforts to beautify your site are useless if no one can find it on Google. The key to augmenting your rankings is Search Engine Optimization, a collection of techniques aimed at increasing your search engine visibility:
Once you have a solid traffic plan, content marketing is what makes the difference when getting your business to win on the Web, with original, useful and shareable content your key to attracting an audience and getting leads.
Consider the following facts:
The Internet succeeds where other marketing platforms failed, offering the best tools for effective targeted marketing. Thanks to the Web, you can bid goodbye to wasteful, hit-and-miss prospecting techniques.
That said, if your website isn’t doing what it’s designed to do (e.g. generate leads, raise awareness, and acquire sales), it may be time to take a look at what needs improvement.
Ready to change your website for the better? Contact us today.
Trying to target local customers can seem complicated – especially in the context of a pandemic.
To help you, we created this simple guide of 5 local business marketing campaigns you can use today to target local customers. Use these low-cost, highly effective campaigns as plans to get local customers to come back when quarantines are lifted.
One of the easiest ways to generate more revenue is to get customers
to come back again and again. You can create a retargeting campaign for those who have visited your homepage or a specific product/menu page.
But what if you don’t have an online presence and rely on random foot traffic only? First of all – tsk tsk. Second of all, keep reading.
Even if a person hasn’t visited your website, you can still
retarget them.
How?
By retargeting people who have visited the storefront. Even if you don’t collect a shopper’s contact information, you can use location data to retarget those visitors. After all, if they’ve shopped or just browsed once, they’re likely to do it again. With a display or a social media ad, you can give previous shoppers an incentive to return.
Location data companies—like Reveal Mobile—have the technology to
build audiences made up of people who visit a specific location, such as
a gym, a used-car dealership, a bar, etc. This enables you to do some very smart marketing. With this technology, you can know exactly who has visited certain stores and when. Armed with that audience of privacy-compliant data, you can create a custom audience for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
And the best part is, you’ll know that the people who make up this audience are more open to hearing from you and buying again because they’ve done it before.
This strategy allows you to cut through the noise of unqualified leads, and, instead, gives you hyper-targeted leads. Retargeting everyone who has visited your client’s store is the low-hanging fruit you can quickly deploy to start generating a campaign that drives serious ROI.
Both Facebook and Google have geotargeting tools built into their ad
platforms, and their geotargeting is the fastest and easiest way to get
started using location-based marketing tactics.
If the audience you’re targeting lives in a certain city or county, you can focus in on that location and serve ads using either Facebook or Google.
You can use this tactic to add a touch of personalization with your ad
copy or design, such as “Hey, Sacramentans!” coupled with a local image that fits the campaign’s goals. And it’s an ad you can start working on and submit to Facebook or Google for approval today.
One thing to keep in mind with these ads, while both allow you to target a location, you’ll use different ad tactics for Facebook versus Google. For example, one of the biggest differences between Google and Facebook Ads is search intent.
Google searchers are looking for something very specific, whereas Facebook users are shown ads, abruptly, based on their interests and pages they’ve interacted with. With that in mind, Facebook is more about brand awareness and Google is more about solving answering a searcher’s inquiry.
With some strategic thinking and the use of common tools, your location-based ads can start to make an impact.
You can get more granular and specific with your local targeting.
For instance, you can target people based on seasonality and where they live, as Purple Mattress did in one of their most successful campaigns in the company’s history.
Their idea was, as temperatures rise in the summer, it can be hard to sleep at night. To capitalize on that, Purple started targeting social media users who lived in areas with high average temperatures, like Phoenix, with their Sleep Cool campaign.
Next, if you have a physical store, you can look at people’s proximity to your business. Denny’s restaurants did this by running a geotargeting campaign directly to those who lived within a certain radius of each restaurant.
While it’s possible to run geotargeted campaigns like these using Facebook and Google Ad’s built-in tools, you may need to customize your audiences based on specific locations they visit.
By diving deeper into location-based marketing and looking at proximity
and seasonality, you can find people who are most likely to buy from
you and sell directly to them.
Another targeting strategy you can quickly implement is to look to your competitors for customers to win over. If they’re already visiting and buying from the competition, chances are they are open to considering an alternatie (that’s you).
After all, if you like tacos from Chandos, you’re likely to like tacos in general and are open to trying new ones. This was the sentiment Moe’s used to compete with Chipotle.
Marketers of all stripes attest that this is one of the most valuable tactics for winning market share and growing a business.
Use location-based marketing software to create an audience that can target local customers who’ve visited a competitor’s business. Then create the following campaigns:
Targeting the competition isn’t the only way to increase market share. If you look to target businesses that are related to your business, or businesses that customers go to before or around the same time as when buying from you, you can create a custom location-based audience based on those habits and behaviors.
So think about what other brands your target audience might have an affinity for. What stores do they frequent while also buying from you? Doing this will quickly give you more high intent, addressable audiences.
Earlier today, Google announced that they will begin requiring documentation of user identity as well as geographic location for advertisers. This newest development is tied to their 2018 policy update requiring identification verification for political advertisements.
The Google PPC Verification program will include:
The verification program will begin with businesses in the U.S. It will then be rolled out internationally. This program affects all advertisers in Search, Display, and YouTube. Google stated it will take a few years to complete verification for all advertisers.
Certain industries will be prioritized in the phased roll out, and will be notified accordingly. They will have 30 days to submit the required verification upon receiving notice it is required. Once submitted, it takes about 3-5 days for Google to verify.
Failure to submit the information within 30 days will result in ads being stopped.
Disclosures will show the trademarked/legal name of the advertiser, and not the entity who is necessarily managing the ads.
This means agencies who run ads on behalf of a client will not be required to verify.
However, a Google rep stated agencies and Google Partners will be able to submit on behalf of their clients.
Users will start to see disclosures on ads about the identity of the advertiser, which will appear below the “Why this Ad?” option. The information will include Advertiser name, country location, and a toggle option to stop receiving ads from them.
In Display, the information will be available via the Ad Choices icon, or the “x” that appears on the banner.
In YouTube, the information will be available by clicking the “i” icon or the three dot icon that appears in every ad.
In continuing strides towards ads transparency, Google is attempting to “provide greater transparency and equip users with more information about who is advertising to them,” according to the announcement from Jack Canfield, Director of Product Management, Ads Integrity.
On their blog, Google wrote:
Ads play a major role in sustaining the free and open web. They underwrite the great content and services that people enjoy and support a diverse universe of creators and publishers. But the ad-supported web is at risk if digital advertising practices don’t evolve to reflect people’s changing expectations around how data is collected and used.
The mission is clear: we need to ensure that people all around the world can continue to access ad supported content on the web while also feeling confident that their privacy is protected. As we shared in May, we believe the path to making this happen is also clear: increase transparency into how digital advertising works, offer users additional controls, and ensure that people’s choices about the use of their data are respected.
Google
Two big picture reasons keywords are vital in digital marketing:
The importance of keywords in SEO is in part due to their importance outside of it.
If you knew your customers’ inner most feelings, how would you operate your business differently? How influential would those insights be to your digital marketing strategy? How would it impact the aesthetic of your web design?
The combination of anonymity and immediate access to an infinite amount of information paves the way for an unmitigated look into what your customers desire.
At its core, keywords are a powerful market research tool that can be used a lot of ways.
[Read more…] about SEO Keyword Monitoring ToolsThere are some Instagram accounts that always have many comments immediately after they post. How do they manage to drive so much Instagram engagement? In every case, the account is following best practices for encouraging and facilitating engagement on Instagram.
These methods of increasing Instagram engagement can be executed by any business in any industry and are very powerful when combined as part of your digital strategy.
When someone follows you, comment on a post or two of theirs. You don’t need to say, “Thanks for following me!” Just leave genuine comments on their post.
At first, this isn’t difficult, but when you get 50+ followers a day, you may need to adjust your strategy, get help, or cease altogether. However, until you reach that level of growth, do the work.
To win on social media, you must be social. This next engagement practice comes from @GaryVee who firmly believes in the “$1.80 IG Strategy.” The best part of this tactic is that it is very simple, and is only a two-step process.
Pick ten of the best hashtags identified in your research (go back to our post “Success Leaves Clues“).
Drop a comment on the top nine posts in each Instagram hashtag.
Remember, good comments are: genuine, helpful, or entertaining. Be mindful as people will either follow you or ignore you based on the value your comments provide.
If you find any unanswered questions that you can answer, do your best to provide a complete answer to the question. This is how you establish credibility in your niche. People asking questions show a deeper level of interest, do not overlook this.
Mention accounts that are doing something right as a means to provide value to your audience. For example, in this post, I mentioned both Gary V & the Preview App because they are great examples of the message we are conveying.
To get comments on posts, you have to ask for it. Even when starting out, ask questions within your posts without fear of getting no response. When we made our first IG post, we had zero followers. We thought we would get no response. However, we were fortunate to get a response from @meetedgar as they came across our content due to our hashtags. You have to train your audience to engage with your content.
Ask something that can easily be answered in 1-2 words. Why? Asking a question that is easy to answer is more likely to elicit a response than asking questions that require people to really think about their response.
Engagement induces more engagement. Take care to respond with genuine comments to reinforce training your audience to engage. We suggest you respond to Instagram comments with an @mention to strengthen your relationship with that user and encourage more comments.
Use people’s names in the response. It makes your communication appear more warm and personal.
Exception to the Rule: Spam comments from questionable accounts do not require a response. Obviously generic comments like, “great pic! Follow me back!” or “awesome photo. let’s connect” are to be either reported, ignored, or called out for being spam. I like to report the profile, as well as report the comment to safeguard the IG community.
Any time you comment or respond, be stay authentic. Generic comments make you seem like a bot, and everyone hates it. Worse, IG will flag your account as spammy.
There are many ways to boost brand love and connect with consumers emotionally without sacrificing core business brand values. Brands that operate one way offline but have a completely different online persona can come off as having a “multiple personality disorder” that erodes at your credibility.
Aka CTA – Tell your audience what to do. Tell them to click the link in your bio, swipe up for an email list, download a resource, sign up for email, tag a friend, etc. If you don’t give people direction, they will not take any action and you may have lost a potential follower, customer, etc.
There is no such thing as a successful digital marketing campaign without a successful CTA.
Followers, conversions, revenue, business, and profit depend on calls to action. The CTA is foundational to the success of any online marketing initiative.
Which of these have you been doing? What one are you going to start implementing this week?
If you have any questions, please leave a comment!
Follow us on Instagram @iDesignsCo for more daily tips, and check the Goodies Page for our insider club frequently!
For those of us in the Social Media Marketing industry, Facebook’s F8 conference is paramount to maintain a sense of understanding how the social media landscape will evolve in the following year to come.
On May 1st and 2nd, Facebook announced substantial updates to its several products including:
As Instagram announced on their blog, users will now be able to share content from third-party apps directly to their Instagram stories. As of now, Instagram gave two concrete examples of this via content partnerships with GoPro and Spotify.
Just tap the share button in the Spotify or GoPro app and your content is pulled directly into the Instagram camera. From there you can edit and add to your story or send it via Direct. You don’t have to connect your Instagram account to other apps in order to share to Stories.
Instagram is investing heavily in their stories platform as it continues to gain popularity and users. Buffer theorizes that stories may eventually overtake the traditional newsfeed that users are accustomed to. As a content type, ephemeral “stories” is nearing the billion users milestone; Instagram’s market share is over 300 million daily users. To gain more market share, Instagram is taking action to make it “faster, easier and more creative.”
Facebook is giving Groups better real estate on their mobile app. Zuckerburg introduced a Groups tab that will help users navigate to Facebook Groups more efficiently and promote more interaction with content. This change comes after learning that Facebook groups have 1.4 billion monthly users.
Furthermore, Facebook wants to amplify discovery for groups. Although somewhat vague, Zuckerburg said, “later this year, you’ll be able to discover and join new groups through the tab.”
This is an interesting move by Facebook after shutting down the standalone Facebook groups app last year.
A new update will enable Instagram users to do live video chats in small groups as well as one on one via direct messaging. This is would give marketers, brands and influencers to differentiate their offerings from live public videos.
According to Instagram, over 100 million Instagrammers consume live video daily.
Facebook is focusing on video and group chat services. It was announced that Whatsapp will also be adding group calling in the near future.
The explore tab on Instagram has gone through several makeovers. Once dominated by hashtagged content, the explore tab has been refined several times over as the Instagram algorithm has been put in place to aid in content discovery.
The forthcoming newest iteration of the explore tab will be organized into channels of users’ top interests.
Much like Snapchat filters, Augmented Reality (AR) experiences will be added to Messenger to give brands new tools to experiment with.
The AR will enable users to overlay 2D objects, 3D objects, and animations on top of their image or video and then share in a group, one-to-one conversation, or even add it to their Story.
David Marcus, Head of Messenger, shared some big announcements at the F8 conference.
Messenger now has more than 1.3 billion users every month, and over eight billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses each month on the Messenger platform.
Your small business website is vital to your digital strategy.
Website Backups – nobody has time for that, right? Well, we all know what it’s like to stay up all night working on documents, presentations, reports, etc. Have you ever woke up next morning to discover that you didn’t save the final revision? Or, worse, that your file didn’t save at all? We have. It is gut wrenching.
Backing up computer files is something we are reminded of very frequently because we save a lot of important information as well as valuable memories. We know that we could lose our computer, it can get stolen, the hard drive can crash, or we can accidentally click “delete” at any moment. Without flash drives and the cloud, our information could be lost forever.
I know you’d rather not, but consider imagining the same thing happening to your website. As we have already established, your website is vital to your digital strategy and success. You depend on your website to market your brand, communicate essential information to customers, generate leads, and, for some of you, to process sales transactions. If your website goes down, you will lose money. If your website goes down, your brand will take a hit.
Your host may already be safeguarding your site from hacks and other potential threats, and while many hosts perform rudimentary backups, it’s very probable that their files won’t capture the current version of your website. That’s not a risk you can afford to take. According to Online Marketing Blog – Not a Grouch:
A few people I've talked to think that having their web host create their backups is good enough, but this is far from the truth. The backups that your host provides are not sufficient to make sure you have a bullet-proof site.Click To Tweet
Many web hosts don’t perform regular backups unless their users are specifically paying for that service. Even when hosts do backup information, it will not be immediately available to you in the case of emergency to get your site running again.
If you’re taking the right approach toward optimizing your site for search engines, you’re constantly adjusting your language and refreshing content. Keeping a backup of your site as it is now is crucial.
Your up-to-date sales letters and blog posts are testaments to how much your website transforms. Additionally, your website’s databases are a great example of how rapidly your data is changing. And, if your website has a membership or e-commerce component, most of your valuable content is changing hourly. So, the only useful data only exists in one place – your current website.
The statistics on hacking are remarkable, if not mortifying. Forbes states that 30,000 websites are hacked every day.
Thirty thousand websites…
Unfortunately, it doesn’t even matter how small your business is. If that doesn’t scare you, three out of five organizations that get attacked are bankrupt within six months.
Nothing is invincible; you can add many security measures to protect your site, but hacks are always a possibility. When this happens, you will have enough concerns just dealing with passwords (not to mention trying to prevent further attacks). Routine or daily backups allow you to recover lost, hacked or corrupted files or databases much more smoothly.
And, you won’t have to waste time cleaning code because you can just upload the last working version.
Backup recovery plans are critical so that any website is able to maintain business continuity and achieve efficient, stress-free disaster recovery. As a small businesses owner, you can’t relate to the huge corporate hacks that often make the news. Nonetheless, these breaches are a very real threat to small businesses as we mentioned earlier. Peace of mind is attainable, though, with a high-quality backup solution.
Businesses invest an irreplaceable amount of hours, dollars and resources into developing a website and creating great content. Although websites are rarely completely “lost”, your content is so valuable, that it is definitely worthwhile to invest in a secure, reliable backup and recovery solution.
Don’t lose sleep worrying about what could happen to your website.
Upgrading your website’s core software, or any module, is necessary so you have all the latest security patches in place, but it can go wrong.
Errors can, and do, occur mainly because most software platforms are not created by a single developer. Most businesses using content management systems, rely on various code snippets that are built by third parties. A core software or code snippet upgrade, a back-end settings change, or a programming change can bring an entire website down. Having a good full backup can be a good insurance policy should problems occur.
Data on websites is constantly updated and changing. If you’ve ever lost all your hard work in a file that was spontaneously corrupted, you can understand how easily it would be for a website full of content to also be corrupted, and it is frustrating to try to recover the content.
Save yourself the stress.
Perform small business website backups on a regular basis to prevent wasted time and resources.
Whether the attacks are targeted towards your business, your server, or executed at random, they are becoming increasingly sophisticated and challenging to safeguard against. By backing up your website, you have given yourself the tool to reverse such attacks at minimal expense to your business.