Design & Promote Celebrates Its 10 Year Anniversary
Design & Promote Celebrates Its 10 Year Anniversary
Design & Promote, an award-winning Naperville internet marketing company, is celebrating its 10 year anniversary. Entrepreneur Bruce Jones and the team at Design & Promote, an award-winning Chicago search engine optimization (SEO) company and internet marketing firm, are celebrating 10 years of business in Naperville in an industry that has changed remarkably since they opened their doors in 2007.
“When I started the company, my vision was to provide websites that were not only well-designed, but would rank high in the search engines too,” Jones said. “Today we offer even more Naperville internet marketing services, and we’re always keeping up with the continually changing Google algorithms to get our clients ranked on the first page. It’s much harder than it used to be.”
Jones also said mobile responsive design is an area that has grown in importance in the past ten years. “Today people are searching on their phones and tablets so the website design has to instantly reconfigure to these different screens or people will go on to the next competitor,” he said. “Also, people’s attention spans are shorter so we have to communicate more succinctly via graphics and content.”
Jones got his start in internet marketing as the network/internet manager at Tradetec Skyline, an exhibit design firm, where his work in SEO helped grow the company from a $1 million to a $10 million dollar company. He also started helping exhibitors initiate their own search engine optimization campaigns on the side. He quickly noticed how his client’s poor website design, with lackluster images, poor content, bad headlines and confusing navigation would bounce good prospects off the site and basically undermine the SEO efforts.
He was convinced that graphic design and SEO needed to go hand in hand in website development. When the name “Design & Promote” came into his head while taking a shower one day, Jones knew he was ready to launch his Chicago SEO company. Design & Promote began in the basement of Bruce’s south Naperville home where he first gathered a team of talented creatives together, beginning with a graphic designer who remained with the company for the first nine years. The same motto they created in 2007, “our business is to get your business noticed”, is still with them today.
In the summer of 2012, the firm moved to their current Naperville location at 1952 McDowell Rd., Suite 100 to house their rapidly growing staff. Today, the staff of eight serves both business to business (B2B) and business to consumer (B2C) companies with web design, SEO and social media marketing to create a successful online presence.
In 2014, Design & Promote earned the Annual Award for Business Excellence (AABE) from the Daily Herald Business Ledger and the Small Business of the Year Award from the Naperville Chamber of Commerce. Bruce is very active in the chamber and currently serves on the organization’s Technology Advisory Group. He is also a frequent speaker and has lent his support to the nonprofit organization “Kids Matter” every year with sponsorship and internet marketing efforts.
In 2015, Design & Promote opened their second office in the CNA building in downtown Chicago at 333 S. Wabash St., Suite 2702 as part of the Signature Office Centers complex.
Beyond Our 10 Year Anniversary
“It’s been a good first 10 years,” said Jones. “In the next 10, we’re looking forward to offering even more businesses the most advanced and effective internet marketing programs to increase their brand awareness and lead generation.”
Design & Promote is in the process of planning an Open House event to commemorate their anniversary. For more information or to join their mailing list, visit www.designandpromote.com.
About Design & Promote
Design & Promote is a Chicago SEO company and internet marketing firm that provides web design, SEO and social media services from Naperville, IL with a second office in downtown Chicago. They employ web designers, SEO experts, and marketing consultants to help clients create an effective internet presence to convert customers and rank high with Google and other search engines. Design & Promote doesn’t just create websites; they create online lead generation portals complemented by SEO and social media campaigns to bring in the right targeted audience. For more information, contact Design & Promote at 630-995-7109.
Google’s New SERP Penalties For Pop-Ups On Mobile Affecting Internet Marketing
Although Google announced in August 2016 that it would be implementing a search engine result page (SERP) ranking penalty for websites that feature “intrusive interstitials” on mobile, it seems that many site owners didn’t appreciate the full impact of this change until it happened in January 2017. The penalty affects sites that cover any page’s main content with a pop-up, or display a stand-alone interstitial which the user has to dismiss before accessing the main content, or where the above-the-fold portion of the page’s content appears in a pop-up, and the user has to click through to get to the original content on the site page. In other words, the content on those pages you’ve indexed for mobile search has to be immediately available to mobile users when they click through to your site. This means we need to re-think how and when we’re using pop-ups for Internet marketing.
New Strategies For New Rules
This pop-up penalty is an addition to Google’s ranking signal of mobile friendliness; if your site obscures its content behind advertising pop-ups, it will no longer pass the mobile-friendliness test. Obviously, removing revenue-generating pop-up ads will be hard to swallow for many site owners, but if you’re using interstitials for your own marketing purposes, there are ways to turn the situation to your advantage. Google is a business, and it is making these new requirements in an effort to increase their perceived value (and ad rates) by ensuring that their users are directed to useful content that is readily accessible. Websites that try to fight this tide by continuing to use these pop-ups on their mobile content will eventually become flotsam, miles off the coast, unseen and alone.
Build A Surfboard For Your Website
The only realistic choice for successful business websites in the face of Google’s new wave of requirements is to build a surfboard and learn to ride the wave. Content marketing provides business websites a way to effectively stay on top of their SERP rankings by using Google’s quality requirements, including mobile-friendliness, to gain an advantage over their competitors, establish themselves as expert resources in their fields, create a sales funnel that actually works, and expand brand awareness and recognition as users share interesting, useful, and original content with their own contacts. Fresh and original content are also part of Google’s ranking signals, so including new content like blog posts, lists and round-up articles, guides, infographics and videos on your site regularly not only pulls visitor into your sales funnel, but also boosts your organic reach.
Internet Marketing Is Evolving
The Naperville Internet marketing firm, Design & Promote, helps companies in the Chicago area and nation-wide to develop websites and marketing plans that get serious results, even through major changes to how Internet marketing gets done. From branding to content marketing to social media, we’ll give your company and its website every advantage for successful sales and marketing.
Ask Your Naperville Web Developer: Do I Need Adaptive Or Responsive Website Design?
When Google implemented its 2015 ranking signal that rewards websites it considers “mobile-friendly,” site owners and web developers were faced with a big, important question: What’s the best way for a Naperville web developer to achieve a fully mobile-responsive website? Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and each solution comes with its own set of benefits and drawbacks.
There is a mobile-friendliness testing tool from Google, which you can use as a starting point in understanding whether or not your site is currently considered mobile-friendly, and why or why not. Once you understand your site’s strengths and weaknesses in terms of its performance on mobile devices, you’re in a better position to evaluate whether you would derive more benefit from responsive website design (RWD) or adaptive website design (AWD), and find the right web developer to create a website that helps your company grow.
Responsive Website Design – RWD is a popular choice for designing websites that are effectively mobile-friendly. They generally create easy navigation and consistent appearance across platforms, and are easier to build and maintain, and less costly to set up and maintain than an AWD design. The potentially significant drawback is that Google also counts site load time as a ranking signal and RWD sites load more slowly than AWD sites. The page load time can be improved by optimizing certain parts of the code, but it still works by scaling and shifting the elements of the desktop site, and it does not achieve the load speed of an AWD site, even under the best circumstances.
- Adaptive Website Design – AWD works differently, by having different versions of the site for each of six most common viewport widths. That means you can custom-design for each of the most likely screen sizes your customers might be using to view your site, which the server will automatically detect and deliver the right experience for the user’s device. When designed correctly, AWD offers faster page loading than RWD, and it can be used to “retrofit” an existing website that is not currently mobile-friendly. The downside is that you’ll need at least six versions of your site designed and maintained: Greater control and flexibility at a higher cost.
- How Are Your Customers Using Your Site? – A fact-based understanding of how your particular customers and prospects are accessing your site should inform your design decisions at every level. Start with your site analytics; don’t make assumptions based on generalizations if you already have a site and analytics are available to you. RWD actually shifts the page elements in order to fit various display sizes, so if your users are primarily accessing your site through mobile devices, it takes extra care to create a RWD site that gives the experience and functionality you intended to all of those users. On the other hand, if your site is mostly accessed by desktop users (as often happens in B2B situations), you may determine that AWD is overkill for your purposes.
Work With A Professional Naperville Web Developer
It’s true that platforms like WordPress and Joomla make it easier for people to build their own websites, but those DIY builds often miss important elements that could help your website attract more traffic and contribute more to your success. A working website is not necessarily an optimized website that takes advantage of the Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking boosts available, and avoids SERP ranking penalties. The Naperville web developers and designers at Design & Promote can help you analyze your web traffic and create a website that best supports your sales and marketing goals by giving customers and prospects an optimized web experience.
Why Should You Hire An SEO Company For Your Website?
Most business owners know at least some of what is involved in Search Engine Optimization for their company website, but few know enough to build and maintain a site that is fully compliant with all of the things search engines (primarily Google) want to see in order to give a website the best possible Search Engine Result Page (SERP) ranking. There is a complex set of factors called ranking signals, which can cause Google to penalize or boost your site’s ranking, and those factors change from time to time. Overall, search engines want to direct their users to safe and functional websites with content that has value to them, because that’s who their advertisers are paying to reach. SEO practices go well beyond adding keywords to your content, and even with a simple technique like using keywords, it’s easy to get carried away and gets your site penalized for appearing “spammy” to the search engines.
Streamlined Design – One common penalty business websites suffer comes from slow pages loads. Sometimes, this happens when a site has been updated for too long and it has junk code fragments causing delays and legacy plug-ins competing for bandwidth. Sometimes, it’s because there are a lot of graphics all trying to load at once. There are a lot of possible reasons for slow page loads, but whatever the cause, in order to improve your site’s SERP rankings, you need to have your site’s performance streamlined for fastest possible page loading.
- SSL Implementation – Having a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate for your business website is important, because Google now uses SSL as a ranking signal, meaning that sites without SSL get penalized in the SERPs. In addition, if your site has SSL, Google will display a padlock icon next to your URL in the Chrome browser, and if it doesn’t have SSL, users will see an exclamation point next to your URL, implying that they should think twice about navigating to your site. Unfortunately, when you implement SSL on an existing site, there are plenty of ways to go wrong, and Google will also penalize your site for incorrect implementation. Though there are a lot of studies using various criteria, most agree that somewhere around 90 percent of business sites with SSL are missing some critical factor of implementation, and most of those have to do with re-directs from the unsecured (old version) site to the secured one.
- Original, Optimized Content – Websites with fresh content are rewarded in Google SERPs. Websites with stale content or content that triggers their spam alert, or content that is published elsewhere on the web all get penalized in SERPs. Keeping a continual stream of new content on your site is important, having that content be fully original is critical, and producing quality content that readers find useful and not spammy helps build your SERP ranking and your reputation as an authoritative source.
Invest In SEO Success
Working with an SEO company like Design & Promote, Chicago companies can ensure that they’re getting the best possible return on their investment for a business website. Contact us to request a free consultation and website audit, and learn more about how Design & Promote can help your website achieve top SERP rankings for the searches most relevant to your business.
Website Design For Best Sales And Marketing Support
Designing an effective website for your business is about creating an interactive experience for you web visitors, which leads those visitors down a carefully laid-out path you want them to follow from landing page to clicking “buy now.” Your website should serve not only to get your name and branding out into the world, but also to generate leads for your sales team, and as a closing support for your sales team to use to make faster, more efficient sales. The role of a business website has evolved from being essentially an online brochure to that of a virtual member of your sales and marketing teams.
- Expand Brand Reach – By using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effectively, your business website can expand the reach of your brand message and sales influence far beyond that of your sales and marketing teams alone. Important considerations in improving your Search Engine Result Page (SERP) rankings include your site’s mobile response (does it automatically detect and adapt for correct display on mobile devices?), page load time, proper implementation of a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, as well as a continual stream of new content on your site. Fresh content that readers find valuable can generate free marketing in the form of sharing, and it can place your content and branding in front of people who may not have discovered you otherwise.
Lead Generation – With smart design and effective lead magnets, your website can capture warm leads for your sales team to follow up with and convert. Carefully planned campaigns involving lead magnets aimed specifically at qualified prospects, combined with an appropriate social medium – Facebook can be highly effective for consumer sales, while LinkedIn may be a better choice for B2B sales – help your sales team by getting the prospects to self-qualify and opt-in. Your sales team will be more successful when they’re not spending time on cold leads, and you’ll enjoy stronger profits and better retention among your sales force.
- Sales Funnel – A well-designed business website will include a sales funnel that takes the visitor from awareness to interest, through the buying decision process, and walks them through to the purchase. It can act as a stand-alone sales mechanism, when people come to your website and walk through the funnel, or it can serve as a companion to the efforts of your sales team. Your sales people should be able to pull prospects out of the funnel when they’re slowing down and may need human interaction to convert, and they should also be able to drop people into the sales funnel for ordering, once they’re confident in a buying decision.
SEO Website Design And Sales Funnel Planning
It takes research and experience to find the most effective SEO techniques, lead magnets, and sales funnel path for your specific business and prospects. Design & Promote will work with you to develop a website that visually represents the unique branding of your Naperville business and provides the powerful marketing and sales support you need to increase sales. Contact us to learn more about our web design and Internet marketing services, designed with you in mind.
Four Of The Top SEO Trends To Watch For In 2017
One of the most common difficulties in any industry is anticipating industry trends for the coming year. As the year 2017 approaches, we have spent a lot of time researching coming trends in search engine optimization in order to be on the forefront of any changes coming down the pipeline.
In the coming year, some of the most significant changes we will see in SEO are focused on user experience.
- Scannable Content
Relevant content is a phrase you hear repeatedly in SEO blogs. Providing relevant content means you are not stuffing your content full of SEO friendly phrases, but are actually providing content that your customers and prospects want to read. While this will continue to be an important tactic in SEO, creating scannable content is going to become critical.
While “TL/DR” is always going to be the case for some topics and for some readers, if you can convince your readers the content is worth reading after a quick scan, you’ll find not only are you getting additional hits on your page, but the amount of time readers are spending on the page will increase significantly.
- Mobile Friendly Content
Utilizing Accelerated Mobile Pages are imperative to creating SEO friendly web pages. As the use of mobile technology for web browsing rapidly replaces lap and desktops, creating content that loads quickly and can be read on a mobile device is the only way to stay at the top of the mobile search game.
Already, we are seeing search engines indicating AMPs for users in the search results, but it is only a matter of time before we see AMPs become the preferred sites for higher ranking on the mobile SERPs.
- Voice-Powered Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence is here to stay, and everyone is getting on board. “Digital assistants” are rapidly growing to be more sophisticated and artificial intelligence is designed to select the “best answer” based on a number of characteristics. Siri, Google Now, Alexa, Soundhound, Cortana, and Ozlo are just a few of the AI based, voice-powered virtual assistants already available to consumers, and more are coming to the market this year. Even Facebook is developing its own AI called “M” that will be a text-based assistant within their popular messenger app.
So what does this mean for SEO? When you ask Alexa a question, she will reply with, “According to [Source].” Becoming that source is the next big thing for SEO. To be referenced here as the answer is the key to becoming a major player in artificial intelligence based search.
- App Favoritism In Search Results
Could apps replace web pages? Possibly. In the coming year, we may see a move towards heavier reliance on apps and a favoritism in the major search engine results towards mobile apps that offer streaming without requiring users to download. This change could affect how users choose to view content online and that may result in a complete change in SEO as we know it.
Design & Promote Keeps Your Naperville Business’s SEO Tactics Current
Need help getting your business on the forefront of changes in the SEO world? Design & Promote is a web design and SEO company that works to ensure your business stands out amongst the rest.
Contact us at 630.995.7109 to discuss your SEO strategy for 2017.
