But how do you choose the best digital marketing agency? What kinds of things should you look for? And what is going to make one agency stand out from the crowd over the others?

What does the Agency’s Website Tell You?

An agency’s website should be your first source for information. Their site should tell you a lot of background info before you even get around to talking with someone.  The website should highlight their core competencies, what they feel that they do best. What are your primary needs for your business? Does the agency explain these things on their website?

You want to do your homework on a company before you ever even get to the point of speaking with a salesperson. Their website should be an integral part of that. What a company highlights on their website is going to give you a good and feel of what they do best.

Really Talk with Your Current Agency

If you are already working with an agency and trying to decide whether you should find a different one, this should really be one of your first steps.

When you are an existing client, often that agency does not want to disappoint you. Sometimes this may lead to them saying yes to requests they may not really be able to fulfill. They end up making promises they know they can’t keep.

It has more to do with a company trying to do everything they can to make a client happy, and sometimes some digital agencies will take on more than they can really handle. Find out if this is the case for your agency.  Find out if there is any way of reconciling the differences, or if it is best that you look elsewhere.

Make your expectations clear from the beginning. That way, if what you are looking for is beyond their area of expertise, they can be up front about that.

Do Your Homework

Try to have some information and be familiar with an agency before you approach them. Do they list other clients they have worked with on their website? Reach out to them if you can. Find out what they feel the company’s strengths and weaknesses are.  What do they do well? Is this in line with what you are looking for?

How are their search rankings?  And some companies will leave reviews right in the search rankings. What are other people saying about this agency? Does it sound like their skills are in line with your expectations?

Check References

This goes hand in hand with doing your homework. You can always ask for references. Who have they already worked with? Who are they working with now?  What makes them stand out and shine among the many different options that you have?

Once you are armed with all this information, you will be better equipped to make a decision.

Have and Be Clear About Your Expectations

The digital marketing agency you choose needs to be your partner in promoting your businesses and your goods or services.  How much time are you willing to put into the partnership? How much are you willing to spend? What skills does your current team have? What skills do they lack?

Don’t make rash impulse decisions. Be sure that you think through what you are looking for and what you need. Think critically about the questions above and know what you are looking for.

What are Your Marketing Requirements?

Do you know what exactly is it that you need? What are you looking for the agency to do?

Some examples might include:

• Web design and development services
• Content creation and writing services
• Maintaining an updating a business blog
• Do you need an SEO consultant?
• Does your business need a fresh and new website?
• Are you in search of social media services?
• Are you looking for local SEO services?

These are just a few examples. Your list may look very different, or be more extensive. Objectives in outsourcing your marketing could include brand awareness, making sure that your branding is consistent, or even increasing traffic to your website, as well as other avenues. Increasing sales leads may be a significant focus for you.

These steps and tips are going to get you heading in the right direction. There are hundreds of different digital marketing agencies out there. However, not all are going to meet the needs of every business out there. If they did, there wouldn’t be so many different options. The most critical steps are going to be that you need to be clear about what you are looking for and do your homework. Don’t act without thinking.

For any questions on learning more about our digital marketing services, you can contact our seo portland team today…503-933-6950!

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The following plugins are a few that you may not have considered for your website, but they might prove critical in improving your website’s visibility, user experience, data collection capability and other factors.

Sucuri

So many of us take the time to download anti-virus and anti-spyware software for our computer but fail to realize that we should also secure our website. Sucuri is a handy little plugin that prevents malware or other attacks on your website. It works by driving all incoming web traffic through their server where any malicious requests are filtered out.

This method of protecting your website has the effect of improving your website’s performance. In addition to this type of protection, Sucuri has a built-in anti-virus program that checks your website every 4 hours to ensure it’s devoid of malware or other similar problems.

Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation

This WordPress plugin may seem unimportant upon first examination, but it will probably save you plenty of time if you install and use many plugins. It’s basically a plugin that makes other plugins easier to use.

If you’ve had the experience of installing a plugin and then having to hunt around for the new menu items that enable you to access its functionality, then Show Plugin Menu Items on Activation is for you.

It does just that by incorporating pointers next to the new menu items that have to do with the plugin you just installed, so you’re quickly able to access its features.

OptinMonster

Whether you want subscribers for your newsletter or leads to send marketing emails to, you’ll need a simple and enticing way for visitors to your site to opt-in to your email list. The professional, eye-catching templates that come with OptinMonster are excellent at converting visitors into leads, which is the critical first step before converting them into customers.

Sophisticated market targeting and segmentation tools enable visitors to receive customized messages that can be based on their geographic location, the site that referred them to your website, the page of your site that they landed on or other criteria.

UpdraftPlus

We all know that it’s important to regularly backup files on our computer in order to avoid data loss, but it’s also critical to do this for your WordPress website. The free version of UpdraftPlus enables you to schedule backups regularly, so your website is being protected from loss over time without you even having to give it any more thought.

You’ll be happy to know it incorporates popular cloud storage options such as Dropbox, Google Drive and Amazon S3. With this plugin, you don’t need to be an expert to easily backup and restore your website, and it will bring you peace of mind.

MonsterInsights

You may be content to only have the capabilities on your WordPress website that make it minimally functional, but this can be shortsighted. If you want your website to grow, this requires getting information, so you know how to change it to appeal to potential visitors and the search engines.

MonsterInsights is a Google analytics plugin that keeps track of things such as downloads from your site, e-commerce transactions, form submissions and basically every other way a visitor interacts with your website. This plugin simplifies and automates a lot of the collection of this type of data that is critical to better understanding your website’s audience and helping you optimize the way you appeal to it.

WooCommerce

Perhaps you are running an e-commerce website with WordPress, or maybe you wish to add the capability to sell some merchandise to people who read your blog. WooCommerce is such a simple and powerful way to do this that it has become the most popular e-commerce plugin on the WordPress platform.

You can sell physical goods or digital products such as e-books, and it even has hundreds of its own free and paid extensions, so you can customize it for your exact needs. Setting up your online store is made easy with simple documentation, and there is online support for any questions you may have.

Thirsty Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a way for you to monetize your blog or other types of websites by offering people a variety of products that are related to the subject matter of your site. Thirsty Affiliates makes adding and changing links to affiliate sites a breeze.

It comes with click statistics and reports, so you’ll know how many visitors are clicking on your affiliate links. If your blog or website gets a decent amount of traffic and you’re not currently utilizing affiliate marketing to earn more from your site, Thirsty Affiliates can get you started quickly and easily.

Yoast SEO

Search engine optimization can be a tedious task, but neglecting it means your blog or website will be buried under the competition and not found by anyone. Yoast SEO supercharges SEO for your WordPress site and makes optimizing it for the search engines far simpler than trying to manually tweak it for this purpose.

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

If you don’t have the money to hire a digital marketing agency or the time to manually handle the technical aspects of SEO on your own, Yoast SEO will come to the rescue by handling elements of SEO such as XML sitemaps, meta tag editing and so much more.

EWWW Image Optimizer

You probably already know you need some kind of gallery for organizing the images on your website. What some people don’t realize, however, is that images are a big reason for slow loading of websites.

With EWWW Image Optimizer, images you upload will automatically be compressed using its advanced compression algorithm without sacrificing quality. Page load speed is an important factor in search engine optimization and user experience, so make sure your images aren’t holding you back with this simple but useful plugin.

Broken Link Checker

Making sure your website is free of broken links will improve your search engine optimization while also saving frustration on the part of visitors to your site. There are fewer things more annoying when surfing the web than coming across an interesting sounding link on a site and then getting taken to an error page after clicking on it.

This makes your website look unprofessional and will cause many visitors to go elsewhere. Fortunately, Broken Link Checker will monitor your site for broken links, and it notifies you via email or the WordPress dashboard, so you can fix them promptly, and keep the search engines and visitors happy.

If you have any questions regarding WordPress or web design services. Contact Designatude today!

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The intention for publishing this article is to inform WordPress users that are not super technical savvy, on a quick and easy method of speeding up your WordPress site. There are plenty of options out there, some free and some paid, and I will go into a few of those.

I look at this method as being a good temporary upgrade, while giving you time to decide on other alternatives that will give your website near perfect scores for loading speed optimization.

Why is your website speed so important?

Well, first of all, nobody likes a website that takes forever to load. Most visitors, and myself included, will bounce off a website that is taking more than 3 seconds to load. Call me a speed snob, but reality is, that a slow loading site is in big trouble from a visitor and traffic stand point.

Second, as I write this article, Google has officially made website speed a Ranking Signal to become effective for the upcoming months. So from a visitor experience and top Search Engine Optimization results, having a quick loading website is essential for surviving and ranking well in the SERPs.

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

Some Methods for Checking Your Website Speed

There are several free tools out there for checking your website speed. Most of these give you a grade based on several of the factors involved for better speed optimization. For the method I am using and suggesting, I used these 2 tools:

Google Page Speed Insights
Pingdom Website Speed Test

My results after applying my free 5 minute method:

Unfortunately Google did not give me my speed grade, as they are now testing their Beta version of Insights, which I haven’t upgraded to yet. I will update the results for that as soon as I test on the Beta version.

Okay, so these scores are not perfect, but still better than many of the websites out there. I want to emphasize that this is the Free Upgrade. I used 2 WordPress plugins and the task was done in less than 5 minutes.

Image compression, website cache, and combining/minimizing files.

I have found these to be 3 of the most effective methods for greatly increasing website speed. Although there are several variables that come to play for website speed optimization, image compression, site cache, and combining/minimizing files, is a great start. I will be getting into a more in depth look at all the factors that affect your website speed, in my next article.

2 easy to install WordPress plugins.

First off, I installed the very popular cache plugin WP Fastest Cache. It has been downloaded and used by over a 1/2 million WordPress users!

So just download or easily install this through your WordPress dashboard. I checked off the following available free options:

This is the free version! For being free, this plugin does a fantastic job right out of the box. The web designers offer a paid version for just $39.99 that includes image compression and other great functions for increasing your site speed. For the low price, I highly recommend considering the premium version.

The second plugin I installed is the EWWW Image Optimizer plugin. Also, downloaded and used by over a 1/2 million WordPress users!

For this plugin, you can use the basic default settings, and it works just fine. They offer an inexpensive premium option as well.

Simple, quick and effective!

Well, there you have it. 2 very easy to install and use plugins. Both of these free, and very popular for a reason. They both offer inexpensive premium options as well.

Just by taking 5 minutes and using the free versions of the plugins above, my website became faster than over 90% of my competitors!

***I have tried several cache plugins that were tasking to set up, some did wonky things to my site, and were not as effective as the free version of WP Fastest Cache plugin.

These developers did an excellent job making this plugin very effective, and super easy for WordPress users to employ

For any questions on WordPress Web Design, get in contact with Designatude today!

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This is why companies are now emphasizing greatly on the formation and design of their respective websites and on the way it affects the customer experience.

The e-commerce segment has achieved enormous heights in growth and popularity. In the present era, it’s almost impossible for businesses to survive without a proper online presence.

Every element of the website is positioned to serve a specific purpose, which means all the elements involved in the design of your site are significant to the customer’s experience.

This in turn has a huge influence on the perception of the brand, its ability to gain and retain customers, and its reputation among users.

The current digital philosophy – carries a lot of weight for user experience. The design and layout of your site are an extremely important tool when it comes to enhancing customer experience.

As mentioned earlier, your website is the first contact point for your potential customer, and we know too well how much those first impressions count. Therefore, it is highly imperative that you get your user experience (UX) layout right.

Top Reasons Your Web Design Should Be Based On Customer Experience

1.) Brand’s Reflection

Web design showcases the overall image of your brand. All the leading brands in the world are looking to tap into the customer during their first contact.

This is where the importance of your site comes into play as it is the first meeting between you and your potential customer.

When a customer visits your site, they are investing time in your idea. You don’t want to be falling short of their expectations.

The successful companies don’t let this meeting slip away, and they try to catch the customers’ eyes and mind right then and there.

The competition in today’s market sphere is so fierce that you cannot afford to slack when it comes to your brand and its reputation!

2.) Linking of Buyer’s Journey to Marketing Automation

Bringing marketing automation and customer analytics together, allows you to leverage this data to create a better customer experience. If your eCommerce website is designed efficiently, the customer will be able to move smoothly through it and achieving their goal on your website will be much easier.

Not only that, but this will also help you in marketing automation as you will know in a very simple way exactly where the customer went and whether or not they got what they wanted. This makes for a great way to nurture your precious leads and grow them into conversions!

Moreover, the buyer’s journey teaches you a lot about the prevailing market situation. Data from all the activity a user does on your website/app needs to be tracked and stored in a single place and updated within milliseconds as new data comes in.

There’s the newsletter subscription, the account creation, the purchases, the form submissions, the email opens, the clicked campaigns, data from DMPs (Data Management Plan) and so much more.

It is effective if you follow customers along their journey, learn from the analytics and send them relevant messages along the way. It helps you stay on top of the customer’s mind and helps you in positioning your brand in the heart of the customer.

The current day marketing is all about being in the mind of the customers. You need to be their first-go-to person in any sort of need. Once you gain this level of confidence from your customers, then the rest of the way is easy. The most difficult task is to gain the trust of the customer.

When the customer visits your website and gets a wow experience, they should never forget it. The customers also tend to propagate their experiences. If a happy and satisfied customer spreads the word, you are creating free marketing for your brand from the mouth of your customer.

3.) Enables Customers to Act

Companies should identify their legacy, procedures, and technology to create ease and a wonderful experience for their valued customers. Quality web design is a great way to make sure that is done well.

You must ensure to make it easy for customers to take actions on your website, be it through creating high converting product pages, through effective Call to Actions (CTA), or an efficient UX web design. Actions need to be accessible and simple to take, not complicated and different.

When you give customers convenience, and the liberty of choice, you are enabling them to reach the conversion goals you have set for your business on their own terms. Once they do convert, they feel better about their selection and most importantly comfortable with your brand because:

• You give them the liberty to feel in control.
• You have provided an exceptional friction less customer experience.

4.) Better Functionality Of The Website

It is normally easy to assume that a site is functional from a quick glance at the way it is designed. However, it is extremely crucial to keep reviewing it from an objective point of view, the customer’s eye that is, to look for any possible weaknesses.

These weaknesses become deadly when the customer notices it before you and especially when their experience is adversely affected because of the weakness. The functionality of your website can hamper its conversions despite having good quality traffic.

It is always significant to check if all the information you are looking to disseminate is easily accessible. The navigation also needs to be smooth and light. These factors contribute massively to the responsiveness of the user on the site.

Customers expect to have a good experience from all the entry points of a website. They want to surf and move quickly through your site. In essence, they want to access all the information they need from anywhere they enter on your website.

5.) Professionalism

Your website and its design, are the tools that display the level of professionalism present for your business. All the elements in your design should be professionally synchronized in the manner that excites the customers.

Your visitors need to feel satisfied that they are dealing with a reputable business before they start to convert.

There are numerous ways of illustrating expertise. Different companies in different sectors depict this in their own way. Posting fun, yet professionally taken pictures of the staff, reviews of customers, and having a culture page are the commonly used tactics by the firms to portray their professionalism.

Conclusion

The term ‘customer experience‘ has become the new buzzword in the modern day digital world. A top notch designed site is one of the most integral parts of the customer’s experience when viewing a business’s website.

Your company’s website is an essential element that customers base their first impression on. It is extremely important for any business to have a quality, compelling and user friendly website.

To learn more about our web design and SEO services, please feel free to contact us today!

There are few ways you can tailor your customers’ digital experience to really give them exactly what they are looking for.

Websites that provide a customized experience are highly likely to have increased user engagement, better customer satisfaction levels, and increased conversions!

Related article: 15 TACTICS TO OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE FOR HIGHER SEO RANKINGS FOR 2019

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