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Why a call to action is important for digital marketing

It is love at first sight in the digital marketing world! A call to action is a persuasive tool to engage potential customers to take action on your call, to know more read this blog! https://www.devdigital.com/blog/detail/love-at-first-sight-why-a-call-to-action-is-important-for-digital-marketing

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Nashville SEO Company | Dev Digital

We are Nashville's leading search engine optimization firm, providing the best SEO services around. Call us now on (615) 857-3868 To know more

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How to Prevent Malicious Activity

One of the great disasters that can befall a software development project is to have an angry developer hijack your code by refusing to turn it over. This rare but potentially disastrous event can be handled in a couple of ways, in theory. The best coping strategy is to prevent a situation where your software project could be ruined by an angry programmer. If code gets hijacked or sabotaged, it might just be possible to recover it too.

Prevention Measures

Whenever the code you are paying for is under one person’s control there is a risk of loss. Your IT department can implement several measures to reduce the risk of having a development effort ruined by hijacking or sabotage:  

Control the source code - The single most important prevention step you can take is probably to make sure all that code resides in a repository that you control.  

Use your own app store account – If you control access to the app store, you avoid a situation where a key person just walks away without sharing their account information.  

Control hosting and testing accounts – Don’t let the only copy of your code ends up a disgruntled programmer’s Azure or AWS account. Avoid this by insisting that all development and testing take place on a company-controlled account.  

Domain names need to be in your name – If someone else controls your domain name they can hold it hostage.  

Limit Account Access – Never, ever give developers unrestricted access to your hosting, data warehouse, and so on.

Be quick to remove access – If your relationship with a developer goes sour, they need to be cut off from access to everything concerned with development or hosting.  

Assuming you’ve vetted your development hires and created a professional working environment, your risk of loss can be minimized by one key strategy: Make sure you maintain control of the code, databases, APIs, app store accounts, and anything else needed for the software to work.  

Sometimes, a developer or hacker injects malicious code into a Website. These hacking attacks expose your login information, financial records, and other data to third parties. If this happens, cleaning up your site can take a good deal of scanning, debugging, and editing to secure the site and repair any damage. Again, there are security measures available to reduce this sort of hijacking risk. As with protecting yourself from a disgruntled developer, prevention is better than treatment.  

What Can Happen When Prevention Fails

Without getting too technical, sometimes your developers can recover all or most of the code, and sometimes they can’t. The code that runs many Web pages and Web apps, for example, is easy to get. While this is a labor-intensive job, you can rip most of the source code off a website. There’s more work involved but that’s the basic idea.  

Some programming gets broken down into zeros and ones. Skilled programmers can turn that binary code back into a recognizable computer language, maybe. DevDigital CTO Michael Hunt says this is a long shot in real life though. You might come out ahead by simply paying to recreate the software.  

Software development can be fraught with challenges. You can get avoid or overcome those challenges by simply working with the experts at DevDigital. We have completed over 2000 projects including mobile apps, Websites, and custom enterprise-level software. Get in touch today so we can discuss your software development plans.

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Essential Technical SEO Tricks That Make Your Site Easier to Find

Being found online takes sustained effort in several areas. Much of the important work falls under the category of technical SEO (search engine optimization). Technical SEO is about the website and its content. Off-site SEO is about driving traffic to the site. Good keyword research is essential to both, but technical SEO focuses more on coding.

Essentials of Technical SEO

Many of these tips apply regardless of whether you offer goods or services and whether you sell to businesses or consumers. In no particular order, here are 13 technical SEO tricks to implement on your site.

1 – Make it mobile-friendly.

Google loves responsive design, meaning sites that look great on desktops and mobile devices. Not only is responsive design great for Google, but mobile device users also get turned off by sites that aren’t easy to use on their smartphones.

2 – Create and submit an XML Sitemap.

You can create a sitemap in several ways. Google has a sitemap creator. WordPress offers Yoast and Google XML Sitemap plug-ins. You can also use Google Search Console to submit the sitemap.

3 – Put keywords in image tags.

Keyword text helps search engines identify the topic of a page, so using words versus alphanumeric labels can help your rankings.

4 – Do a site audit.

You can find software that will crawl your website and find things that hurt your potential rankings. These issues include missing meta-descriptions, duplicate pages, and missing alt tags for images. Fix as many of those issues as you can.

5 – Install an SSL certificate.

Google is serious about data security, and not just their data. A site that implements SSL encryption (indicated by the “HTTPS” prefix in a URL) may rank a little bit higher because of this.

6 – Find ways to speed up your site.

Slow page loading can hurt your site’s ranking. Do what you can to reduce the size of each page by reducing the size of images

7 – Optimize your internal site links.

Generic hyperlink text such as “buy now” or “the best price” should be avoided in favor of things like “shop for a factory reconditioned laptop” or “browse deals on laptops.”

8 – Find and fix broken links.

Pages that produce 404 and similar messages give a bad impression and can hurt your search engine rankings. The bigger your site, the more likely it is some links will go bad over time.

9 – Create canonical URLs.

The word ‘canonical’ indicates a preferred link for that specific content. You want to create one link that supersedes all others on your site so Google doesn’t penalize you for having too much duplicate content.

10 – Use structured data markup language.

Search engines like Google use microdata to better understand the content of your site and create rich snippets in search results. Rich snippets tend to bring a higher click-through rate than standard search results.  

11—Use a robots.txt file

When search engines crawl a website, they typically first access a site's robots.txt file. Among other things, this file tells the search engine what pages to index and what pages to ignore. You don’t want any customer-facing pages to be skipped.

12—Optimize your titles.

Each page should have a meta tag that serves as a page title. A concise, descriptive title tag that accurately reflects your page's topic is important for ranking well in search engine.

13- Optimize meta descriptions

Meta descriptions provide a short snippet that describes a web page. Accurate and interesting descriptions can help increase both your search rankings and a user's likelihood of clicking through to your page.

Technical SEO is an Ongoing Activity

Like off-site SEO, the technical work on your site has to continue. Keywords that were easy to rank for become much harder, new long-tail keywords become relevant, links break, images change but alt text does not change. Regular site audits are important for those reasons. The technical SEO experts at DevDigital have helped hundreds of clients improve their rankings and get found by more customers.

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What Should You Know before hiring Software Development Firm?

If you plan to create custom software, whether a cloud-based enterprise app or a simple mobile game, projects have lots of moving parts. You can try to save money by hiring freelance developers, but then you still have to consider testing, hosting, and support. Later, you have to hire someone to continue maintaining and enhancing the platform. Hiring a software development firm with experience in your industry is a smarter move for several reasons.  

Advantages of Full-Service Software Development 

Hiring a custom software development firm can save money over time and simplify the process. You also gain the advantage of having a strategic partner familiar with your custom software.  

Access to a diverse set of technical skills – Your team may need new skills to complete a project or to maintain the finished product, or both.  

Cost savings associated with outsourcing expensive technical work – Experienced programmers and UI/UX designers can become expensive. Ramping up and then slimming down internal employees to meet the company’s business needs will also produce more work for HR and staff.  

Expertise in turning your business requirements into software streamlines the process and reduces the risk. The vendor also does the project management and quality assurance work. 

You get a project manager who mitigates risks and manages resources during the project to keep the project on track. After the project that person can serve as a resource through a product’s lifecycle.  

The payoff in terms of money saved and risks avoided will make outsourcing to a company the logical choice for many firms. How do you select the right software development company?  

What to Look for in a Custom Software Developer 

The things to look for can be boiled down to experience, technical skill, and industry expertise.  

Ask for referrals and read reviews. Try to speak with previous clients about their experience with that company. Would they recommend the company to others? Some of your contacts in the business community may be able to recommend the company they used for a recent software project. Read online reviews. 

Review their past custom software projects. Look for experience in your industry and with your type of project. Deep experience with mobile apps doesn’t necessarily translate to skill in creating cloud-based software. Experience in your industry translates to experience with common business requirements, risks, and more.  

Look for experience specifically in UX/UI design. You need to ensure your product has a user-friendly interface so potential users won’t be turned off by confusing menus and needless complexity.  

Find out about their software testing process. The company should routinely do regression testing and unit testing. You should expect to be involved in user acceptance testing, beyond just being asked to check and make sure everything works as intended.  

Consider the future need for patches, updates, and hosting. If they have a track record in the business, they are more likely to be around to support your software when it needs to be patched or upgraded.  

Ask about their project management processes. You want to know how they manage risks, costs, and time. You also want to know how they communicate when something goes wrong.  

See if developers or technology managers are active in developer communities. Employees who are actively learning about, talking about, and using the best new tools and methods are likely to deliver better work.  

Outsourcing your custom software development will pay off in money saved, time saved, and risks avoided. A company with a track record of success in your industry with projects like yours will be much better equipped to deliver a successful product. DevDigital has completed over 2,000 custom software projects in a variety of industries, so we know our team can deliver for your company as well. 

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Employee Spotlight | Manoj Ginoya - Deputy Director of IT

People are the key to our success as a website design company. DevDigital has completed over 2,000 projects. Deputy Director of IT at our Vadodara, India office, Manoj Ginoya, has been involved in most of those projects at some level in his over 12 years with the company.  

Follow us as we get to know Manoj a little better.

How long have you worked for DevDigital? 

"I have been working with DevDigital for more than 12 Years."  

What was your first position at DevDigital? 

"I was a software engineer when I joined DevDigital in August 2009." 

What did you study in college? Why did you choose that subject? 

"I completed my bachelor's degree in computer engineering in 2005. I love to write programs for computer software and am curious to gain knowledge about things related to computers. Also, I have done little study and analysis in various engineering fields and I found computer engineering most valuable for me. These are the reasons I chose this subject." 

Can you describe your Deputy Director role? What is a typical day at work like? 

"This role includes the responsibility to ensure smooth operations of activities of management and technical personnel of the organization. I closely work with heads of all departments to ensure consistency of goals, processes, policies, standards, and technical procedures with help and guidance from Michael Hunt (DevDigital’s Chief Technology Officer) and Sanjay Vyas (Administrative Director of the Vadodara office). I work with them on handling critical project tasks, clearing blockers on projects, managing daily operations, and communicating with the heads of different departments or their team leads. I ensure that teams are following all relevant standards, procedures, and policies.  

I also listen to questions/problems from employees and provide suitable answers/solutions. If I cannot for any reason, I take them to upper management for resolution."

What is your proudest accomplishment to date at DevDigital? 

"I have performed various roles and responsibilities during my journey with DevDigital to date. Staring from Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead, Head of the web development team, and now as Deputy Director of IT. I believe in adding value to people, helping people, and more people you can add to help/value is a key to success for anyone. This is what I have tried my best throughout my journey with DevDigital and I can say this is my proudest accomplishment at DevDigital." 

Where do you see yourself in five years? 

"I would not mention a specific milestone for this. Rather, as I said in my proudest accomplishment, keep adding value to people, help more people, as many people you can add to value/help, your team will be so strong and successful, and hence you will be successful. If your organization is successful, management will take note of your achievement and it will be a stepping stone for me toward my career growth. I am confident that I can handle any responsibilities that will be given to me during my journey with DevDigital." 

How do you like to spend your time when you are not working? 

"I like to spend time with my family, playing with the kids, and going out with them for outdoor games. I love to watch movies in theaters with my family. I read and learn new things on the internet which are not related to my job or computers/software." 

What is your key to success? 

"Adding value to people, helping people, and more people you can add to help/value is a key to success for anyone. If you lift your people or team member up, it is your success too." 

Through Manoj's expertise and leadership ability, DevDigital has been able to complete over 1.6 million development hours all while overseeing a team of over 133 experts. We are very grateful to have Manoj at the helm of our Vadodara office making sure that all projects hit their budgeted timeline. His efforts are key to our client retention making sure that clients continue to use DevDigital for all of their website and software or app development needs.

Having a team of experienced developers and project managers ready to partner with your company is crucial to your long-term success. Contact us today to find out how Manoj and our team can help make your digital project a success. 

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Journey Mapping: A Step-by-Step Guide

Before you launch a new marketing strategy or review and revise an older strategy, you should invest some time in journey mapping for your customers. This map helps you understand your target customer’s challenges as they search for a solution to some problem that your business can solve. Different marketing experts outline the customer journey in different ways, but they all tend to include these five steps.

Step 1 – Select a Goal

Review your goals and select one to focus on. Make sure this is a concrete goal that can be quantified. Don’t try to grow your presence in the online tutoring space. Instead, think of an X% increase in Y months. If you intend to grow your client base by 20% in a year, you can work backward to select marketing tactics and construct a realistic budget.

Step 2 – Create a Buyer Persona

Study your target customer to create a buyer persona. This is a fictional individual that represents a customer segment. Perhaps a buyer persona for that tutoring business is a mother who homeschools and wants extra math help for her child. People like her tend to have specific motivations and needs you can speak to in advertising. She may be relatively sensitive to price, while another buyer persona may not be.

Step 3 – Consider Different Parts of the Journey

This might be the most important step in journey mapping. Map your customer’s journey from awareness, through consideration, to a decision. At the awareness stage, your prospect may not be aware of how much one-on-one math tutoring can help their child. At the consideration stage, she may be weighing a couple of tutoring options against purchasing some study guides. At the decision stage, she is ready to hire an online math tutor. Know that your customer could find your company at any of those stages, so you need to have marketing messages that suit each stage.

Step 4 – Consider Pain Points

What problem motivates them to seek a product or service? Talk to customers and sales reps. Find out what potential customers are talking about online. Know how to position your product or service as the way to deal with each of those pain points. Any company has the potential to discover new customer pain points and use them.

Step 5 – Take Action and Evaluate

Once you have a customer journey mapped out, you need to take the insights you gained and convert them into marketing tactics. Those tactics could include anything from paid ads to blogging to running radio ads. The point is to take action and track your results using numbers. Tracking things like click-through rates and email inquiries will help you to adjust your tactics.

Partner with Online Marketing and Technology Experts

From designing a new site to search engine optimization and site updates, DevDigital offers a full range of strategy, design, and digital marketing services to help ensure you get the best results from your customer journey mapping. Feel free to contact us to learn more about our website development and marketing services.

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Ways an API Can Help Your Business

Almost all large organizations have software they rely on, software that an application programming interface (API) can leverage in several ways. These interfaces help developers, or even non-techies, connect software like a human resource application and website to automate processes. Using these tools to connect important applications can save money, save time, and improve the user experience for customers. Survey your enterprise architecture and look for opportunities to gain one or more of those benefits.  

A complex enterprise might have dozens of pieces of software running in the background. That collection of software would include tools many business people recognize like SharePoint and SAP but also applications for reporting, cybersecurity, data collection, communication between programs, and email. Some of those many applications can only share information through custom interfaces.  

Any large organization probably has at least one report, web view, or dashboard object that someone has to manually generate, update, or create. Whatever the software behind that view, object or report, someone probably created an API that can automate some of the work. Instead of “integrating” data from different sources by manual processes, a developer could design a custom process that extracts and shares the relevant data. A cloud-based data repository can pull updated information from another app and feed it to a third app via API, to cite one more example.  

Instead of creating an app, your development team could use APIs to perform some of the functions of a 100% custom app for your employees. Streamlining steps in that way should save some development time that you can allocate to other tasks.

Anything that makes it easier to extract, combine, or present user data is potentially helpful for marketing. Data on website visitors and their behaviors can help senior management make decisions on marketing tactics and strategies. They can get the information they need anyway, but the point is to make it faster and easier.  

The backend of any large online business likely has dozens of applications running on local machines, on employees’ mobile devices, and the company’s networked devices. The larger or more IT-dependent your company is, the more likely you have the potential to benefit from improving connectivity.  

If you have custom enterprise software, make sure it can be connected to other key pieces of software via an API. Custom software for a company might not need an API because you can use existing tools to send or receive commands and data. If you want to integrate your custom software with Asana or SAP, they will have an API that your technical team can use.  

This focus on automated connections is not just for larger organizations. If you are self-employed or you work with a remote team, you might want to take advantage of APIs for some of your software. Sharing work, submitting invoices, and uploading or downloading work might be easier. In some scenarios, your ability to work seamlessly with enterprise apps might help win some business.  

DevDigital has completed hundreds of software development and app development projects for clients in numerous industries. We also create enterprise software and develop learning management systems. These are two areas where full API utilization can yield substantial benefits in terms of productivity and client satisfaction. 

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12 SEO Techniques That Can Boost Traffic to Any eCommerce Site

Everyone running an online business knows that being found through search engines is crucial to your success. Most people use a search engine to learn about products before they buy them. Many who shop online use mobile devices at least some of the time. That is an important point to keep in mind. While search engine optimization (SEO) might seem like an arcane topic, it really isn’t.  

Lots of the most important things you can do to help customers find your products involve some basic Google skills and some editing. Other techniques take some technical expertise and time. Good SEO work begins with knowing what words and phrases to use on your site.  

1 - Focus on Targeted Keywords, not Generic Keywords

No one shops for running shoes. Runners look for specific models and sizes either for men or for women. Ranking for “women’s trail running shoes” is much easier than getting on page one for “running shoes.” The logic is much the same for any product or service.

2 – Focus on Search Intent When Choosing Keywords

This tip flows logically from the first one. Some people search the Web for information, while others are looking for things to buy. Your store should emphasize terms that reflect an intent to buy unless you are specifically choosing to promote a piece of informational content.  

3 – Use Keywords in Headings

The H1 and H2 headings should contain the primary or secondary keyword for the product. Don’t use the same keyword in every heading though, as this could look like keyword spamming.  

4 – Use Keywords to Describe Images

Search engines will crawl the image and file names. If they describe a “water-resistant trail running shoe for men” versus “men’s shoe,” it will help.  

5 – Use Rich Snippets

A rich snippet is a Google search result enhanced by a bit of extra information, often a photo or a rating.  You will have to be familiar with schema markups to implement this suggestion.  

6 – Fill Out Your Pages

Pages that contain little content beyond a title and a picture of a shoe don’t look good to search engines or people. Add some details to every product page, at least the bare minimum a human shopper would need.  

7 – Make Sure Your Pages Have Unique Content

You don’t need seven pages for a shirt that comes in seven colors, or for shoes that come in seven sizes. Consolidate these products on one page so that Google won’t penalize you for having low-quality content on your site.  

8 – Make Sure All Relevant Pages Can Be Indexed

Your site’s robots.txt file might exclude pages from being crawled by search engines. If the “excluded” list includes products, you want those pages removed so they can be indexed.  

9 – Use Responsive Design

In 2021, Google launched Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) this year. Implementing this update for a site is a complex technical task, but you will have an easier way to make your site play well with mobile devices. Look for an eCommerce platform that promises to deliver responsive design, which is what it means to have a site designed for computers and mobile devices.  

10 – Find and Resolve 4xx Errors

Missing or never-published pages can drag down your rankings. Update your site map to include those pages, resolve the server errors behind the messages, and replace pages. Verify that internal links go to pages that still exist.

11. – Describe Every Page

This is basic SEO but quite a few pages have bad descriptions or no descriptions. This tip is about the meta-description that tells web searchers what they will find. Every page should have a description written in plain English that includes the relevant keyword.  

12 – Give Each Page a Title

Make sure all of your pages have title tags that include a primary keyword, a secondary keyword, and a brand name. This information helps search engines identify the content and helps web searchers see at a glance whether the content might be valuable.

Implement some of these steps as soon as you can. Improving search rankings is an ongoing process that takes time to produce results. Include these SEO tips in the design of new pages.  

If you need a custom website or eCommerce solution, the DevDigital team can help. Beyond just creating your solution, our SEO team can accomplish this entire tip list and more! Do you have an eCommerce site that needs optimization? Click here to get connected with one of our SEO specialists.

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Client Spotlight Vinnin Liquors

Vinnin Liquors is a Boston-area liquor distributor that also sells beer, wine, and spirits at a physical store in addition to delivering orders. This family-owned business has been serving the North Shore of Massachusetts from their 8,500-square-foot store for over 45 years.  They deliver to Boston, Beverly, Lynn, Marblehead, Saugus, and Swampscott.

The Challenge

Things weren’t working out between Vinnin and their former web development firm so Angela, the owner, went looking for a new company that could provide a “full-service experience” versus just creating and handing over a site.  

As an eCommerce company, a do-it-yourself approach was out of the question. A customized template would never work either. Not only did Angela need a custom site, but she also needed a hosting and development partner. As Vinnin Liquors grew and changed, she needed a company that could be flexible in doing design work and more.  

The owner, Angela, interviewed several web development firms that she found online, before selecting DevDigital. She initially worked with Grant Owens (now a Senior Sales Consultant) on the new site. She liked how we could do anything she needed done, at a reasonable cost. Angela told DevDigital that Grant has been easy to work with and highly responsive early on. She liked how he stayed in the loop even after a new Project Manager (Andy Simmons) took over.

Any software development project will face some challenges. The Vinnin site was no exception. Angela liked the company’s ability to respond at once and sort out the development challenges.  

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced Vinnin to adjust their business model. They started to focus on alcohol deliveries in and around Swampscott. DevDigital’s SEO team helped them rank highly for “alcohol delivery” and “alcohol delivery near Boston,” which caused their sales to skyrocket when they might have plummeted.  

The DevDigital Difference

The one thing she really liked was how DevDigital offered her the ability to do anything she wanted. Her web development plans weren’t restricted by a certain technology or by the limits of a website template.  

In addition to that design flexibility, she liked the search engine optimization (SEO) work and the reporting that DevDigital offered. Search engine optimization is a process of making a website easier to find. In practice, this involves using some keyword research and site design to help a business earn higher rankings in search engine results. Most of this work happens on a website, with things like page titles, page descriptions, and page content.  

Angela likes having a full-service partner who was growing with her company. Our fully customized web development service offers the flexibility she needed to take on constant change in her business environment. She’s been pleased with the ongoing SEO work that DevDigital has delivered. The regular reporting on her SEO has been most helpful too.  

More Than Web Design and Hosting

Our relationship with Vinnin began with web development work and moved on to additional SEO services this year. In October, we started writing blog posts and publishing them. These blogs share information while pointing users to specific pages on the Vinnin Liquors website. Links from quality sites are a factor in search engine ranking, so these posts help to keep Vinnin higher up in search engine results.  

The other marketing tactic we’ve used to help Vinnin is posting to Google My Business. This service allows a business owner to publish short blurbs about their products or events at their business. These posts can also include a link to whatever page is most relevant to the text.  

DevDigital has completed over 2,500 technology development projects across a wide range of industries, helping customers tackle numerous design and technology challenges. If you need custom website development work, please contact us to learn more about our process.

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Why Does SEO Take so Long and What You Can Do to Prepare for 2022?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of digital marketing. Like other aspects of digital marketing, SEO work takes time. Money, competition, algorithm changes, and testing all explain why it can take a long time, months at least, to see a substantial return on an SEO campaign. Two of the most important ranking factors simply take time to develop. Planning for 2022 with these things in mind will raise the odds of getting satisfactory results.

Time to Build Trust and Authority

The longer your site has been around, the more likely the content is to be considered valuable, or authoritative. A study by Ahrefs found that 60% of pages in the top ten on Google were at least two years old. If nothing else, being around for a couple of years gives you plenty of time to develop other measures of your content’s value to web surfers.

Domain authority is a technical name for the perceived value of your content. The nature of your content plus outside indicators of page quality, like inbound links and shares on social media, count for quite a lot, according to Moz. You can speed up the process of getting those shares and links, but aggressive networking can only do so much. It takes time to build quality links and trust. You might want to schedule more time for networking online in the next 12 months.

Algorithm Changes Can Hurt

No matter how well this link building works, algorithm changes can still hurt your ranking. A ranking factor might drop in importance while another one becomes a little more important. If you invested lots of time and effort on something that just became less important, then some of your pages can drop off page one. This can translate to a substantial drop in traffic because few web surfers go past page one of the search results. Algorithms can and might change in 2022.

The Cost of Search Engine Marketing

Ranking for keywords technically doesn’t cost any money but everyone getting significant traffic is investing money in SEO work. They either have in-house SEO people or they contract out their work. Keyword research is a potentially time-consuming or expensive undertaking, depending on how big your site is and how many keywords you want to compete over.

Content costs money as well. Posting several pieces of useful content will also raise your domain authority and build links. Other sites often link to non-competing sites that offer great information. This is a key lesson to learn about SEO – keyword usage isn’t everything.

Competition Always Exists

Competing businesses are also using various SEO tactics to get their pages as high up as possible. This means your efforts to compete on a given keyword might not pay off. You might find yourself on page one this week and down on page four of five in a month thanks to a determined effort by a couple of competing firms.

Finally, the sheer volume of competition can be daunting. If you want to raise money for homeless people or sell accounting services, expect stiff competition for rankings. Many companies will be investing in higher-value keywords like “tax accounting” and “business tax accounting” so edging out the page one and two players will be tough.

Targeting the obvious keywords is necessary, but not sufficient. You need to have a strategy for the not-so-popular “long tail” keywords that people who use your service or product might type into a search engine. Take some time to conduct some research and re-evaluate your keyword usage.

To have a shot at winning the SEO game for 2022 you need to design and implement a comprehensive strategy that includes quality backlinks, great content, and the right keywords. If your business or nonprofit needs SEO help, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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Questions to Ask When Hiring an SEO Agency

When many business owners want to make their site easier to find they often turn to an SEO agency. Search engine optimization (SEO) can be a big investment, so if you want to outsource this marketing work, you must do some research. Ask plenty of questions about methods, experience, and processes before selecting an agency to use.

Questions to Ask When Evaluating an SEO Agency

Before choosing an agency to work with, you want to collect some information on each agency’s strategies, processes, experience level, and results. A complete SEO effort should cover links, web copy, web page attributes, and content marketing. Links from quality sites help, but so does fresh content that targets relevant keywords.

Regarding strategies, any SEO agency worth hiring will be able to implement a variety of strategies to bring qualified customers to your site. Many SEO agencies offer additional consulting or marketing services. You’ll want to know if they offer expertise in another area of marketing strategy or online marketing that would be valuable to your business. Find out if the SEO agency also at least offers content marketing help. Starting a blog, guest posting on other sites, and adding new content can all help with your search rankings while also enhancing your reputation with potential customers.

You want to see team members who have experience doing SEO work for your industry or writing about your industry if content writing is part of the SEO package. You also want to know if they’ve gotten good results for past clients in your industry.

Use these questions as a guide when doing online research and when discussing your SEO needs with a potential hire.

1. What SEO strategies do you implement?

2. What services do you offer, in addition to search engine optimization?

3. Can you share case studies?

4. How much experience do you have with businesses like mine?

5. What tools do you use?

6. How do you measure success?

7. Who will I be communicating with during the contract period?

8. How many years of SEO experience do you have?

9. What kind of progress can I realistically expect to see?

10. What link-building tactics do you use?

11. How do you find placement opportunities for links or guest blogs?

12. How will you and your team be communicating with us?

13. How much input will you need from my people?

14. Who will be doing the SEO work for my account?

15. Can you write new content relevant to my site?

16. Do you offer different service levels, and what does each one include?

Those questions provide a framework for gathering information, but they can’t help you decide if you are ready to hire someone for your search engine optimization work.

Before Searching for an SEO Agency

Remember that search engine optimization is just one part of an overarching strategy. If you aren’t investing in other forms of marketing, an SEO campaign might deliver disappointing results. However, if you are already investing in things like paid search and Facebook ads, outsourcing your search engine optimization may also be helpful. Make sure you are financially prepared to invest in optimization work for a few months before seeing measurable results.

Rely on SEO Agency Experts Whenever Possible

Optimizing your visibility online is a process that requires both technical expertise and regular attention to create a decent return on investment. If your business needs more visibility online, learn more about our in-house SEO agency and contact us for a free SEO site audit.

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Remote DevDigital Employees Experience Nashville

DevDigital is based in Nashville, TN but we have several employees located around the world. Two of our remote workers, project managers Ritesh Pancholi and Blake Conover came to Nashville earlier this month to meet some clients, share knowledge with the Nashville team, and engage in some team-building activities.

Ritesh Pancholi is a project manager based out of Toronto, Ontario who has been with DevDigital for nine years. He is from India and worked for us in our Vadodara, India office before moving to Saskatchewan and then to Ontario. While in Nashville, he met with some clients and took care of his normal project management work.

Ritesh loved the live music and the mild weather. Toronto got a little bit of snow just before he left for Nashville. He also tried out The Escape Game and found their room a challenge for two people. Ritesh was also surprised to find some great Indian food in the Music City. He enjoyed South Broadway as well.

Here was what Ritesh enjoyed most about his visit: "Visiting Nashville (again) was on my list for a long time! It was so great to meet all the colleagues in person and spend time to know everyone personally. I am so grateful for this visit. It allowed me to have the in-person experience to work from the DevDigital office! Nothing could be so exciting for me to be there in person for almost 2 weeks. Other than that, Nashville is a beautiful city, and hanging out with my colleagues come friends made a dream come true for me!"

Blake Conover is one of our SEO (search engine optimization) project managers. Her work focuses on preparing and executing search strategies that help customers find clients’ websites. Blake found time to meet with a few DevDigital SEO clients while taking care of some project management work.

Blake loved the diversity of people and cultures she encountered during her visit. After hours, the SEO team had a meeting and the November 11th Fall Open House. Blake and various team members also spent some time on South Broadway and over in East Nashville.

Blake was born in Las Vegas but now lives in the picturesque Idaho town of Post Falls, which is near Couer d’Alene. She has been with DevDigital for almost five months. If you need a website or if your site isn’t getting as much traffic as you want, contact us to see how we can help.

For Blake this experience was crucial to building relationships within the company. She had this to say about her experience: "It was such a privilege to be able to come to Nashville. To see the city and meet our clients face-to-face gave me a better perspective and a deeper understanding of why we do what we do. My favorite thing about Nashville, though, was spending time with my DevDigital teammates. Getting to really feel the heartbeat of the company, which is much more like a family, has made me feel so infused with the team and has elevated my passion and gratitude for being able to be part of something so special."

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DevDigital's Expertise Has Delivered Over 2500 Projects for Over 100 Clients

On all but the simplest of development projects, relationship management is at least as important as the technical aspects of project management. The best software development firms have a great model for relationship management to go along with their development and testing expertise.

Following an in-depth discussion of what you want to achieve, we create a design and present it. Plenty of design firms can take some notes from a client and create a site that meets your technical needs. However, sometimes you may need a development firm with people who know how to do user research, conduct stakeholder interviews, and create a suitable design.

That mockup may be accepted as-is or revised. On approval, we create a static demo of the site to review with the client. Backend development is next. This is where hardcore programming and detailed project management happen. Most customers don’t care about development methodologies, so we mostly talk about relationship management with clients. We assume you care more about the work being done than whether an Agile PM approach was the right one.

Once the site is done and working from our perspective we submit it for review to what techies call User Acceptance Testing. These tests usually reveal a few minor issues, which we run through and fix. This is a bit like running through the punch list on a new home. Then we launch the site and turn over control to the client.

When your site goes live, you obviously can’t leave it alone. Software needs to be patched. New content needs to be added. Images need to be changed. No matter how good the site or development team is, something will inevitably break. It could be a page that goes offline, a video that suddenly won’t play, or a shopping cart that stops taking credit card information. You need to align yourself with a development team that will answer those calls when the time comes.

A good design and great content will only go so far. You also need to make your pages easy for search engines to find. This is where our SEO team goes to work, first by creating a strategy based on each client’s budget and goals. Once the strategy is approved, the team begins researching keywords, creating alt-tags, writing meta-descriptions, and more. Our project management team can provide ongoing support for both technical work, like site updates, and marketing work. Our SEO team can create a strategy for Google My Business and guest blogging to drive traffic to your site.

Our process for managing a business relationship works across all industries and development methodologies and project types. We have created custom learning management systems, Android and iOS applications, complex websites, and custom software. Our recent clients have been in healthcare, education, entertainment, hospitality, retail, and construction. We’ve also worked for some nonprofits.

DevDigital has delivered over 2,500 projects for over 100 clients, including small businesses, nonprofits, and large enterprises. We have taken on simple website redesigns, massive content migration, and enterprise software development efforts lasting for years. DevDigital is the tech partner who can help you bring your vision to impact!