Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

When it comes to moving upward on the search engines you need to be thinking of ways to improve after you launch your website. A bad website can be the prettiest one in the world that is not kept updated. Google implements thousands of algorithm updates each year. You wouldn't, or we hope you wouldn't, hire an employee, hand them the employee manual, and then never work with them. Your website is your employee. Help it grow and it will help you increase your leads and business profits.

In today's digital-first world, businesses rely heavily on data to make informed decisions, enhance customer experiences, and streamline operations. JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) has emerged as one of the most powerful formats for data interchange. It's lightweight, easy to use, and compatible with nearly every programming language, making it a cornerstone in modern business operations.

In the world of local search engine optimization (SEO), standing out in your geographic area is essential to driving traffic, leads, and ultimately, conversions. One powerful but often overlooked tactic is geo-tagging images and videos. Geo-tagging enhances your content by embedding geographic data, making it more relevant to local searches and improving your visibility in search results.

For businesses aiming to capture local audiences, the question of whether to create local geo-targeted landing pages or invest in broader SEO strategies often arises. The truth is, both approaches have merit, but which will give you the best return on investment (ROI) depends on your business goals, target audience, and resources. In this pillar post, we'll explore the benefits of local geo-targeted landing pages, compare them with alternative strategies, and help you determine what will give you the most bang for your buck.

In the competitive world of online visibility, keywords are one of the most critical tools in your digital marketing arsenal. They bridge the gap between what your potential customers are searching for and the solutions your business offers. In this post, we’ll explore the importance of using keywords effectively in your website content, why blogs are indispensable for keyword success, and the role of short-tail and long-tail keywords in achieving your SEO goals.

In today's digital age, having a polished, high-performance website is essential for any business looking to grow and attract new customers. WordPress has become a powerhouse platform, powering over 40% of all websites, and its newest version, WordPress 6.7, brings enhanced features that make it even more appealing for small businesses. For Cullman, Alabama businesses, partnering with a trusted, expert digital marketing firm is key to capitalizing on these advancements, and Fawkes Digital Marketing stands as the premier choice. Here's why we're the top WordPress experts in Cullman and how we can help your business thrive online.

In today's digital-first world, privacy concerns are at an all-time high. Consumers want to know that their data is safe, secure, and handled responsibly. For businesses, this means that a robust privacy statement isn't just good practice—it's essential for compliance, trust-building, and protecting both your business and customers.

Taking over a Google Ads account requires a deep understanding of the current setup, goals, and performance metrics. Here are key questions to ask and steps for analyzing whether the campaigns are working effectively.

Marketing is essential for business growth, but many companies overlook the potential tax benefits associated with their marketing expenditures. Partnering with a trusted marketing agency like Fawkes Digital Marketing not only elevates your business's visibility and engagement but can also provide significant tax savings. By understanding how to classify and leverage marketing expenses, companies can make their marketing investments work even harder. Here's a guide to using your marketing expenses with Fawkes Digital Marketing as tax write-offs to boost your financial efficiency and minimize your tax liability.

OpenAI's ChatGPT has recently integrated a search function, enabling it to access and provide real-time information from the web. To enhance the visibility of your website within ChatGPT's search results, consider the following strategies.

Email deliverability is affected by multiple factors, from the technical configuration of your email domain to reputation management. This guide covers everything you need to know, including essential protocols, authentication, security configurations, reputation management, and best practices for improving deliverability. By following this guide, you can optimize your email setup and improve the chances of reaching the inbox every time.

In the fast-paced and competitive world of the restaurant industry, finding effective ways to engage customers, fill seats, and increase sales can be challenging. With people constantly on their phones, SMS marketing has emerged as one of the most powerful tools for connecting with customers in real time. SMS allows you to reach your customers directly with timely offers, updates, and promotions that can drive them to your restaurant. Here's how SMS marketing can help your restaurant grow and why it's worth considering as part of your marketing strategy.

In today's competitive digital landscape, having a strong online presence is essential for any business looking to attract and retain customers. While there are countless ways to improve your visibility, some of the most impactful strategies are time-consuming and require specialized knowledge. That's where partnering with a marketing company like Fawkes Digital Marketing can make all the difference. By entrusting these tasks to professionals, you can focus on what you do best—running your business—while we handle the strategic marketing initiatives that will move the needle with search engines and drive qualified traffic to your website. Here are the top 10 marketing actions that can boost your business's online presence and why working with Fawkes Digital Marketing can help you achieve optimal results.

In today's digital landscape, website security is paramount. Cyber threats, data breaches, and malware attacks are on the rise, and businesses of all sizes are vulnerable. A single security incident can damage your reputation, compromise customer trust, and lead to financial losses. At Fawkes Digital Marketing, we understand the importance of security, and we have built comprehensive monthly maintenance programs that prioritize the safety and integrity of your website. Here's why website security is essential and how our maintenance programs keep your site protected.

When it comes to SEO (search engine optimization), optimizing images is often overlooked but can significantly impact search rankings, user experience, and page load speed. An important aspect of image optimization is naming images correctly, which can drive more traffic from search engines to your site. This guide will walk you through the essentials of naming images for SEO and outline key tips to help you get the most out of your visual content.

Becoming a Google Local Service Business (GLSB) offers numerous advantages for businesses that provide local services, helping them to stand out in search results, build trust with potential customers, and generate more qualified leads.

In today’s digital-first world, being easily found online is crucial for any business. Google Business Profile (GBP) is a powerful, free tool that gives businesses the opportunity to manage their online presence on Google Search and Maps. An optimized Google Business Profile can boost visibility, attract new customers, and help you maintain control over how your business appears in search results. Here’s an in-depth look at why having a Google Business Profile is essential for your business and the benefits it brings.

In the world of website hosting, you often get what you pay for. While cheap hosting options with thousands of users on one server might seem appealing due to their low prices, they can be a risky choice for businesses and serious website owners. Managed WordPress hosting, with fewer users per server and expert-level support, can provide substantial benefits in terms of speed, security, and reliability. Here’s why investing in a managed WordPress hosting solution is worth every penny.

In today’s digital landscape, your business reputation is a critical component of success. A strong, positive reputation not only builds customer trust but also directly impacts business growth and online visibility. Reputation management is about proactively managing how your business is perceived online, ensuring that your brand message aligns with customer experiences and expectations. Here’s why every business should prioritize reputation management—and how it can improve SEO as an added advantage.

Buying reviews, using AI-generated testimonials, and suppressing negative feedback are among the practices that could land you in hot water with the Feds.Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), announced on Monday that a new ban on fake online reviews and testimonials has now gone into effect. The rules are aimed at protecting consumers from unscrupulous reviews, which could misleadingly influence their decision to purchase a product.

When it comes to email security, YOU are the first line of defense to protect your customers and YOUR business's reputation. Phishing attacks account for one-third of all security violations in business today. Reducing your domain from being used in phishing attacks can be easily done, and we will cover everything you need to do. We'll do our best to make this non-technical while providing you with enough technical knowledge that you can speak with knowledge about the subject.

As Facebook makes its move toward groups having a higher presence we have upgraded our social media management to include a Facebook Group as part of our social experience. Facebook Groups though having high importance on Facebook is definitely not for all companies.

We're noticing a recurring issue with subject lines that lack impact, resulting in open rates of less than 10%. This situation often leads to the misconception that email marketing isn't effective. The key change needed is in crafting subject lines that resonate with your recipients, making your bulk emails more successful.

If you're like us, you've known you've received a Google review, and it has yet to show up. One client has had this issue and just signed one with missing reviews. How many more are there? With the techniques and information below, you will be able to fix your missing reviews.

You will hear from people that doing search engine optimization or SEO is hard. It's not. Okay, now that I've put myself out of a job and shut down the company because of it, why do SEO companies even exist? The simple answer is time, education, and knowledge.

Dreams come in many ways for each of us. We started over nine years ago with a desire to help businesses achieve their dream domain name. As of today, a dream we have now done is to help companies to gain their desired domain name four times. Let's look at all four as each was unique. We'll then explore how we announce it to each client and how you can work on getting your desired domain name if someone else owns it.

Recently I had to go back to organic search engine optimization or organic SEO learning and school/research. I always find it good to go back to your fundamentals to re-evaluate if you're missing something. I was told to rank a site for three keyword phrases. Out of the nine words (three words in each keyword phrase), only one of those words existed on the site. That word existed once out of around one million words on the site. Was I wrong in my logic? Had I become "complacent" in the daily SEO tasks that I missed this capability? Was I truly not as knowledgeable as I thought? This is the journey of my research.

We love coffee (and beer), but this article will be all about the coffee and checking on organic SEO results for our clients. We have some great software and team members who know SEO's ins and outs. Our software allows us to sit anywhere globally and get our clients ranked in the towns they want without ever setting foot in those cities and towns. For me, that is in Valparaiso. I always do real-world validation checks for quality control by physically driving to locations to test their organic SEO.

Valparaiso, Indiana, March 20, 2022 -- One of the most important things that contributes to people being successful and well-adjusted in life is ensuring that they have a home. One local web and graphic design and development company is making it their mission to help with those efforts. Each year, Fawkes Digital Marketing (FDM) donates to ValpoShelter.org to facilitate in the education of homelessness and provide resources for men, women, and families in need of assistance. This assistance goes deeper than just finding a home. Valpo Shelter helps with food, health, and religious support in the local communities of Indiana. Valpo Shelter is the largest and most complete shelter directory in the State of Indiana.

Another abbreviation from the land of SEO or Search Engine Optimization. The first place ot start is what does TF-IDF stand for. TF-IDF stands for "Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency". This is a technique that came out from Hans Peter Luhn in 1957 came up with the Term Frequency part. In 1972, Karen Spärck Jones, conceived the Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) portion. So, this is nothing new in regard to existence. What is new is how the search engines use this information to help in the calculation and rating of your website pages.

There are three ways to reply to reviews. We're going to cover the worst to the best way. I encourage you to read all as I explain why the bad ones are awful and hurting your business growth.

We started our series of organic search engine optimization or organic SEO techniques we're starting with when we wrote about "FREE Press Releases." That was indeed the start of what we're doing for each one of our social media management clients. I will discuss what we're doing for over 100 of our clients and over 1,500 pages of content, how it benefits you, and why the search engines will see a considerable boost with this change to help you grow your business.

We are bringing back a feature that we once had but was not taken advantage of by clients, so we killed it off. The original version required the business owner or those they designated to be involved. We thought this was the best approach, but in hindsight, it wasn't. Articles went months without being distributed. They didn't produce the results we wanted them to.

Yes, a name change. Let's start there. I (we) have grown in the last nine years and learned a lot. We started knowing nothing about running a business but a ton about marketing and technology. I now fully understand the basics of business and still learn daily. With the change noted below, nothing for your business changes. Your still price locked into the plan you are on.

As soon as I say, "organic SEO" or "organic search engine optimization," I always get a "deer in the headlights look." Many are aware of what paid advertising is or PPC, but what is this "organic" stuff. Let's look at what organic is and why it should be the foundational element of what you need for your online marketing strategy, even if you use paid advertising.

We have a client that was using HomeAdvisor and CraftJack. Both of these are owned by Angie's List (now Angi). The deal our client had was that they would get leads from both companies. That is where things got interesting for our client and we're going to tell the story from what they've told us. This aligned with what we had heard from other service-based companies that we felt we need to educate service-based businesses as a good portion of our work comes from them.

Microsoft Exchange is a great system that indeed requires IT support to manage it well. During 2021 we've pushed, tested, and built a system with the same core features as Microsoft Exchange but made specifically for small-to-mid-size businesses. With the latest build of our SmaterMail Exchange compatible email system, we can now match the core features of Microsoft Exchange, be faster, and charge less. Sounds good, but what do you get?

Building a business directory isn't anything new to us. Over the years, we've made several, including the largest local directory in Northwest Indiana, Region Adventures (www.regionadventures.com). Making one for men, women, and families that is 1/100th the size you would think would not only be a slam dunk but super easy. Well, this directory has pushed us to the limits and have opened new opportunities for us as a business. I will be writing as we continue to grow, but I thought covering the first hurdles would be a great place to start.

Let's start by saying no web host is perfect. GoDaddy was missing the security basics of encrypting passwords and user information. This is something that should ever happen. That is what happened with the last security breach at GoDaddy 18 months ago (May 5, 2020).

Imagine getting a call from a potential new client panicking that they are to launch on BLACK FRIDAY, and it's a week before that day. Well, that just happened. Let's cover how we are handling this type of phone call.

The history of Google My Business started as Google Places for Business back in 2010 and continues to be a virtual online directory for anyone using the Internet. Google, on November 4, 2021, chose to change the name to Google Business Profiles. We're going to look at the history of Google's business directory page and how the changes will help your business grow.

Imagine a low-cost showroom giving every customer and potential customer 24x7 access that educates and provides a consistent message generating revenue for you. That is what a well-designed business website will do for you.

As a web design company owner, I am biased toward career information being on the website. I feel that having your career page helps qualify your employees more than any other channel. If you are hiring for a critical position (e.g., CEO/CFO/Sales), I believe using an assessment test to qualify those positions further is key to long-term success.

This past labor day weekend, I searched the internet for a specific niche industry and came across a site with malware on it, as noted by the blog image. I started thinking of all the small businesses that aren't updated and could run into this and present the worst possible first impression. So we came up with a solution.

Website hosting only is just asking for your business to fail and not grow. As business owners, we all want our businesses to grow, thrive, and reach our expectations. Website hosting alone is a "Field of Dreams" where you build it and "Hope they come."

We hope you would never hire an employee, show them the ropes, and leave them all independently without continually mentoring and training them. Your website is an employee and often the first thing a new customer will see. Continual maintenance, or website employee training, allows you to keep everything humming along as efficiently as possible. Since WordPress has come out, it is averaging more than 27 updates per year and over 60 in the past five years. Plugins or add-ons are not even in this total and produce higher updates, often daily.

UTM codes stand for Urchin Tracking Monitor. The name comes from Urchin Tracker which was a web analytics software that served as the base for Google Analytics. These are often used with Google Ads (formally Google AdWords). Marketing in the old days you spent hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on newspaper ads. These ads you often didn’t know the results. Either due to you or your employees not asking how you heard of us or truly thinking the newspaper was making results (e.g. you guessed). Today with technology you often will spend less but demand to know whether the results are working for you. First, you should’ve been asking that question under old school methods but there really was no 100% way of knowing. With UTM codes you can have some pretty accurate methods of how people are reaching you. They also can be used beyond just paid ads if used correctly. We’re going to not only dig into what UTM codes are but how you can use them and how to create them (easily).