World Class Web Design and SEO For Your Business

Most old-school business owners think of social media as a mash-up of emojis, selfies, LOL’s and rainbow unicorns. For your 12 year old daughter it might be, but for a business it is a legitimate important piece of your company’s digital footprint. FYI, currently the keyword ‘Facebook’ is the second most searched word on Google, after ‘Youtube’. Does that give you a sense of how important social media is?

If you are capable of taking a picture of the back yard fence your company just installed for a Lubbock homeowner, then you have the makings of a Facebook post. Even better if you can convince the owner of the new fence to pose with your job well done. Then tag him/her in the picture and you’re on the way to using social media to get new clients. What just happened in this scenario?

1. You got a new follower on Facebook for your business (possible repeat customer).
2. Your business and a job well done showed up on your client’s Facebook page – where his friends will see it – when you tagged him (free exposure).
3. You should easily be able to obtain a positive Facebook review (reputation management).
4. Your client will likely respond positively to anyone commenting on the photo (word-of-mouth marketing).
5. You may get additional leads and clients from this post (inbound sales).

All of this is FREE to you, provided you have set up a free Facebook business page. Now do you think social media is just rainbow unicorns or a massively useful tool for promoting your business?

Maybe you are busy already, and don’t feel you have time to set up and manage something like this, after all there is a learning curve for everything including Facebook. No problem. We are social media experts. We can set it up and manage your social media profiles for you. Next to Google, Facebook is one of the most powerful free tools you can use to promote and grow your business.

The simple answer is Search Engine Optimization. Traditionally, it is the process of optimizing the components and content of a website for the purpose of pleasing the search engine ‘bots’. In years past, your SEO expert would add keywords and descriptions to the meta tags in the HTML code, optimize your HI tags, page titles, URLs, image alt tags. Then he would edit the content on your page to stuff it with keywords. The result might be text that any human would look at and wonder who the heck wrote this drivel? But the ‘bots’ loved keywords, so the site would rank high in Google searches.

The downside of this process was that the top sites for a Google search were not necessarily great sites for humans – hard to read, phony claims, misleading content.

Since those days, Google has worked hard to stay one step ahead of fraudsters who call themselves SEO experts, but in reality are hardly more than hackers looking for an easy buck. These unethical SEO ‘experts’ gave the entire SEO industry’s reputation a black eye, and gave rise to the practice of ‘blackhat SEO’. If your site gets caught using blackhat practices, you can get de-indexed from the Google database – meaning your website will not show up on any searches, even searches for your company name.

Because of these blackhat practitioners, many if not most business owners associate SEO with hackers and loose ethics. Not to worry, StewartSEO uses only whitehat processes. These are processes that do not violate any of Google’s terms of use policies (yes, Google has policies on what is acceptable SEO Lubbock practices, and we follow them to the letter).

Ethical Lubbock SEO builds long lasting results for our clients. Often clients that reach high Google ranking remain there for years, even with minimal maintenance costs.

The real answer to the question of ‘what is SEO, Lubbock?’ constantly evolves. The answer can be found in what Google hopes to provide for its customers. Google’s mission is to display relevant, useful, and quality answers (and websites) for every customer query. If your site provides information that is more relevant, more useful, and of better quality than your competitors, then you have a great chance of ranking higher than them.

What consists of relevance, usefulness and quality in the eyes of Google? That’s the $64,000 question. Google has hundreds of ranking factors – some known, some secret, some speculated about. What Google likes, without question, is a website that provides its visitors with answers to their questions, and provides them in a way that delights the visitor.

StewartSEO, a Lubbock SEO company, can guide you through the maze that is digital marketing.

This question is so ironic, but asked often. How many times do you Google something every day? How often do you end up buying a service or product from a company that you found on the first (or even second) page of a Google search? How many products or services do you re-purchase weekly from companies that you found from a Google search in the past? Even if you deny it or really don’t do this, the fact is that 95% of the world does.

All those companies that you purchased from who are on page 1 for their keywords have been and are likely still paying $1000’s monthly in SEO expenses to reach and maintain that rank.

Any business owner knows that sales is bascially a numbers game unless you’re one of the few master negotiators/salesmen who can sell ice to an eskimo. So when you up the numbers by getting more eyeballs on your website – the digital version of your business – you up your sales simply by odds. If your website is exceptionally good, then you tilt the odds even more in your favor.

That is what SEO does. The results are completely tangible, long-lasting, and are often life-changing. Imagine your website is on page 2 of a Google search, or God forbid, page 3 or deeper. Your website probably has little bearing on how much business you get every day. Maybe your website brings you one or two calls a week, based on the odds.

One day, your website pops up to the bottom of page 1 for your business’ keywords, position #10. Almost instantly you start receiving a few calls per day from your website. As your website moves up the ranks toward number 1, you notice that you are receiving double or triple or quadruple (or even more) the number of calls per day – just from when you site arrived at position 10. Now imagine this is your new normal, ongoing permanently (assuming you maintain your Ethical SEO strategies). Your business and your life are changed dramatically. This is not a simulation; it’s real life.

If you get nothing else from this answer, please get this: GOOGLE SEARCH IS THE NEW YELLOW PAGES, WORD-OF-MOUTH, RADIO AD, MAGAZINE AD, ETC. 

No other marketing medium can provide the ROI of good search engine optimzation, simply because the longevity and effectiveness of ethical SEO.

There really is not a fixed answer to the question of how long search engine optimization takes to kick in for a website. To get the most benefit from a campaign, you should expect to have at least 6 months of SEO work to see life-changing results. That’s not to say that your ranks will not improve right away.

For example, we built a website for a new client. Completely new website, new domain name, nothing indexed into Google Search. Within two weeks of the site being completed, the site was ranking #4 for one of his important keywords. His site still ranked on page 2 and 3 for other keywords (which is still amazing considering the newness of the website), but for one of the keywords we focused on, we succeeded quickly.

In short, we built and ranked a site to position #4 in just over a month. Ranking a website can take as little time as a few weeks, or as long as a few months, but the results are often long-lasting, and provide ROI far exceeding your wildest expectations. Call us to find out what we can do for your business – (806) 758-7959.

Yes, unequivocally yes. There’s no other marketing vehicle that allows you full control of information about your company and is available to anyone who needs the information at any time of the day, anywhere in the world. Your website can be found on mobile phones, desktop computers, tablets, and in the future an even broader reach.

Your website should be your best salesperson. It is a digital version of your company, speaks your message, announces your promotions, takes orders, books appointments, provides answers to questions from potential clients, and much more.

A better question to ask is this: does my website do a good job of representing my company online? Or is it little more than a logo, a slogan, a few pictures, and a bulleted list of products and services? Don’t regress into 20^th century thinking. Phone books are DEAD. Mailers are all but DEAD. Word-of-mouth advertising is not dead, but it has changed completely and moved online. An omnipotent internet presence is imperative for creating a massively successful business, and who doesn’t want that? Your internet presence starts and ends with YOUR WEBSITE. If your website isn’t living up to your expectations, then contact us or call (806) 758-7959. We specialize in turning your website into a useful, lead generating, wallet-stuffing version of your business online.

The look and feel of a website should reflect the marketplace for the organization that it represents. Rather than fancy, or professional, or trendy, a website should cater to its visitors. There are a couple of terms for this called User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI). These concepts dictate the way your website looks and feels.

Some websites that are extremely successful are based on minimalist simplicity – Google, for instance. The Google home page has always been extremely simple, with basically no text, and no images. Just a small menu, a logo, a search box. That’s it. Does that design seem ‘professional’ when compared with a site with lots of text, images, input forms, etc – like Chron.com, Houston’s newspaper website, or Microsoft.com.

What about Craigslist? The front page would make any designer cringe. I’m sure it hasn’t changed since it’s inception. No images on the front page whatsoever, and no content. Just a list of links to various pages. Yet it is the worlds largest free posting site.

The way the site functions for its visitors is the more important factor than just how it looks. If the website provides the visitor with answers to their problems, then the look is not so much an issue. On the other hand, some marketplaces require specific design criteria. An art museum website would fail to convert visitors into customers if it looked like Craigslist. Likewise, Craigslist would fail if it adopted design elements like those used on the website for the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

So the answer is this: a website should be professionally designed with audience appropriate UX/UI design criteria. Usually, that means that it must look nice, but it goes far beyond that. It has to function well for the audience it serves.

Ideally, yes. The saying ‘if you build it, they will come’ hold true to some extent for websites. There are people looking for the product and service you provide, so the audience for your website is out there. There is also a medium through which to present your industry authority – Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.

Whether anyone sees your site depends on many factors, the primary being that Google must view your site as capable of filling a need for its customers (searchers). A well designed site that focuses on providing a specific product or service, and conveys authority (according to Google) about that product or service has a good chance to rank well for relevant searches.

Give too much browser real estate to unrelated topics and you may draw in a different crowd of viewers who bounce as soon as they see your website. Bounce rate is an important ranking factor, so if you are attracting visitors that will leave right away, then your site won’t be very visible to the audience for whom the site was designed.

When we build websites for Lubbock’s businesses, we design it to be found by your audience – SEO is built into every site we craft.

Website design and delivery time varies widely, depending on the organizations requirements. For a site that is primarily informational, the time could be as short as a month. For sites that require more interactivity, such as appointment scheduling, e-commerce, collecting and analyzing data, or processing images, the time requirements could be 6 months or more. Phase deadlines depend on the amount of customization required.

The vast majority of sites do not require customization that would extend a project delivery date beyond two months. Roughly 95% of the sites we build are delivered before three months, and most of those within 6 to 8 weeks.

The cost of a website varies with time to design, and volume of customization and programming. Our websites are built to be found, so there is an inherent amount of customization that gets our customers’ websites ranking in Google searches. Remember, you get what you pay for. It’s unlikely that a cheaply built site will fare very well with the search engines. Although you may feel like you got a bargain, in the long run, you didn’t.

A site with 5 to 10 pages, content provided by the client, and has basic functionality (like collecting customer requests with an online form) could cost under $2000, while an e-commerce site with built in payment processing, user accounts, integrated shipping, etc could cost over $20,000.

The bulk of the sites we develop and deliver are under $4000, but 100% of them are high quality and built with SEO and User Experience best practices.