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Web Security Can Compromise Your Company

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Why Is Web Security Important?

The more information you have, the more web security is important. It is crucial for your business to have security in place if you have customer’s credits cards on file in a server. If a hacker would get their hands on your customers credit cards, then you business could potentially run the risk of being sued.

Now, granted not many companies keep that kind of information. Most of the information you have on your site are documents of agreements, files made specifically for a client, etc. You wouldn’t feel good if you were the client of another business. Then one day that business got hacked and lost some of your information, and because of them, that information became public knowledge. Not something anyone wants happening.

How Can Web Security Affects Your Company?

A hacker can turn your website against you in minutes, getting your website blocked by common search engines like Google or Yahoo. Once your website is blocked by Google or Yahoo, it is a very long process and sometimes impossible to get it unblocked. A hacker can also send spam emails to all your clients, and potentially leak private client data, all without your knowledge of any of it happening.

Without some good security protecting your company’s website and computers, you could easily find yourself on the 5 o’clock news. There is a laundry list of things you can do to protect your company. Below are some of the basics to help you get started. This should not be the basis of your company’s security, merely a double check that everything is in place to keep you and your business safe.

Tips To Securing Your Website

  • Keep all software up to date. This may sound trivial, but you would be surprised at how many sites get hacked by an old security hole found long ago that was patched, and simply updating it would have fixed it.
  • Switch to HTTPS. An easy enough switch. Provides peace of mind to your customers knowing your secure and thanks to Google recently, you would also be increasing in search rankings.
  • Use strong passwords and change them regularly. This may sound like a simple change to make, but a site is only as strong as it’s weakest link. Making sure all passwords are strong boosts your security.

Tips To Securing Your Computers

  • Get an antivirus. Make sure you get an antivirus for your computer. It can be free or paid. If you pay for an antivirus, once the subscription runs out it is doing nothing for you. Anyone looking for an antivirus, Kaspersky is a good place to start.
  • Update your PC. Having all your software up to date will help make sure it is more secure.
  • Consider using a firewall. A firewall manages all files going to and from your computer. Usually, it notifies you of something that it does not recognize or it knows is malicious.

With these helpful tips, you will be keeping your computer and your website secure. This should not be your only security. Theses tips are only meant to help you get started. We are not responsible if your company gets a virus.

If you have any security questions ask away in the comments below or Contact Us today!

Giving Thanks to SEO

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Thanksgiving is a popular Holiday for many Americans. The abundance of delicious foods and the gathering of family and friends is certainly something to get excited about. Traditionally in most households, members are sitting around the table saying what they are thankful for in their lives. Here at DaBrian Marketing, we wanted to give thanks for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) by offering some tips to assure your website performs well.

Cover the Entire Table of Local Listings

When you think of Thanksgiving dinner, you imagine a table covered in food, right? The same is true for an effective SEO campaign in regards to local listings. Local listings are becoming an increasingly important ranking factor. People are frequently using search engines with local intent. In fact, a study by Google shows that 4 in 5 consumers use search engines to find local information such as a business’s address, hours, and products/services offered.

Imagine your listings as different dishes. Being listed on Google my Business, Bing Places, and Yahoo Local listings should be your top priority. This is the main dish, the turkey. But don’t forget about the side dishes either. Being listed on other platforms such as Yellow pages, Yelp, Foursquare, etc, help as well. These are your stuffing, your mashed potatoes, and your cranberry sauce. The more you have covered, the better your meal (website’s performance) will be.

When preparing your Thanksgiving feast, you want to make sure everything is perfect. Before you place the food on the table, you should give it a taste test just to make sure. Similarly to SEO, you need to make sure your listings are perfect as well. This means claiming and verifying your listings, as well as making sure the listings are completely filled out and are consistent with each other.

Know Your Audience: Invite Relevant Traffic to Dinner

Thanksgiving isn’t just about food, it’s also about spending time with those who matter the most. When planning your celebration, you invite the most important people in your life. The same is true for SEO. As a business owner, those who matter most to your business’s success are your customers. So how do you invite them to your site? Well, it all starts with your content. If you regularly develop great content that speaks to your audience’s interests, relevant traffic will increase.

Besides stuffing our faces at the dinner table, we also engage in conversations with our family and friends. They speak to us, and naturally, we respond back. This same formula should be followed for social media. As stated in my previous blog about SEO predictions for 2016, content marketing and SEO have merged. This means that businesses must be active on their social media accounts, providing great content frequently, and engaging with their followers. An effect social media strategy will help develop relationships with your followers, which typically leads to them sharing your information with others, increasing your brand’s awareness. All of this comes back full circle to an increase in customers and sales.

Stuffing? - Yes; Keyword Stuffing - NO!

Now we all know stuffing is a must have dish at Thanksgiving. However, for SEO, keyword stuffing is a must avoid. In April of 2012, Google released the algorithm change known as “Penguin” designed to penalize for keyword spamming. While there is technically no optimal percentage for keyword density (how often your keyword appears within your content), your content should sound natural. Here’s an example of what not to do:

“At DaBrian Marketing, we offer Pay Per Click services. Our Pay Per Click services help businesses drive traffic to their site. For more information on Pay Per Click, please contact our Pay Per Click consultant.”

The use of Pay Per Click is obviously being overused. Not only does it sound spammy to the user, but your site will be penalized by search engines. Here’s an example of how to adjust your content to avoid keyword stuffing:
“At DaBrian Marketing, we offer Pay Per Click (PPC) services that are proven to help businesses drive traffic to their site. For more information, please contact our PPC consultant.”

SEO Tips - keyword stuffing

Invite Your Guests Back and Tell Them to Bring a Friend

So the dinner went well and you and your guests had a great time. More than likely you are going to send invites to those guests again. The same mentality should be true for SEO. You should send follow up emails to users that request or fill out any information. This will give you an opportunity to give more information about your business and to set yourself apart from the competition. If done properly, these will more than likely lead to more conversions.

People usually do not wish to hear others critique their cooking, but as a business owner, you want reviews. Traditionally, business owners have cringed at the thought of their customers giving reviews out of fear that they’ll be negative. While a negative review may not shed the best light on your business, it offers you an opportunity to humanize your brand by listening to your customer’s concerns, which leads to trust being established. In fact, A study by Reevoo, a social commerce company, found that 68% of consumers trust reviews more when they see both positive and negative scores, while 30% suspect censorship or fake reviews when they don’t see anything negative at all. Reviews give business owners an opportunity to adjust their recipe and make things right through great customer service.

Conclusion:

An effective SEO campaign is something a business will be thankful for. Not only will it help a business’s site perform well in search engines, but it will also help increase traffic, as well as sales. From all of us here at DaBrian Marketing Group, we hope you and your loved ones have a Happy Thanksgiving!

For more advice or information about SEO, please Contact Us today or leave us a comment below!

By: David McDowell

Tips for Choosing Cloud-Based Project Management Software

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So You’re Moving to the Cloud--Now What?

You put in the time to research the idea of cloud-based project management solutions—you know they are secure, provide amazing accessibility, and give you the ability to work from home on snow days—so now what? As impatient as you may be to dive in head first, remember your first project management best practice – proactively plan – and follow these tips:

Determine Your Budget

Whether you have an annual budget to work with or you’re lucky enough for a special circumstances budget to move to the cloud, you have to know how much money you have to work with. All cloud services are not created equally, and you need to be prepared to field some standard questions:

1. Is it better for you to pay monthly by user or space limits?

2. Are you committed enough to pay annually to get the discount they’ll surely offer you?

3. Does your budget have any wiggle room or is it set in stone?

Determine Your Needs

Regardless of whether you’re managing a team of 10 or 100, there are suitable options for cloud-based software. Important questions to answer before reaching out to any company are:


1. How many users (team) do you need logins for?

2. Will your clients need access? If so, what all do they need to be able to do (file upload, communication streams, approval functionality, etc)?

3. Do you need integration with any other platforms (Google Apps, Salesforce, Quickbooks, Office, etc)?
The cloud is a competitive space—being up front and clear about your needs will ensure you get the best software to fit them.

Do the Demonstrations

Alright, you’ve narrowed it down to some potential companies to work with…I know, I know—you’re busy. But this part is super-important: make time available to do demos of the software you’re looking into. You’ll gain not only a better understanding of the company’s offerings, but also their company culture, and how responsive they’ll be to your needs. The ultimate factor in what led to me choosing Mavenlink as our cloud-based project management solution was not how great of a solution it is (which it is, and no, they’re not endorsing me) but how great they are—I felt confident starting a partnership with them based on how they held themselves during the demo (and of course the meetings after) I made time for.

Go Forth and Research!

Now that you’re armed with some useful tips to get the ball rolling, you’ll soon be able to tack a closed sign on your traditional project management software and officially change your address to the cloud. Determine your budget so you don’t get caught up in wanting something you can’t afford. Determine your needs so you have all your bases covered and hunker down for some software demos (you won’t regret it when you find the perfect solution). Just remember to let your team know you’re diving into Research Land and try to have some fun along the way!

Have a question on cloud-based project management or a tip we missed? Fire away in the comments!

3 Tips to Track Conversions More Effectively

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As analysts, we are taught and bred to have an insatiable desire to track as many aspects of our websites and marketing strategies as possible. We often go out of our way to tag everything with codes and scripts so we can sniff out trends and insights. This hard work usually pays off in the form of content performance and traffic source reports.

More often than not, we like to pay close attention to the conversion report. How many newsletter subscribers did we get last quarter? Did online sales increase or decrease from last year? How many visitors from my target market downloaded an application? Conversion tracking is clearly an important element of marketing as a whole, but how do you do it effectively? Here are 3 tips to help you get the most out of your Google Analytics conversion reports:

  • Assign a Conversion Value: Conversions are usually actions visitors can take that result in some sort of revenue, be it directly or indirectly. Whether the conversion is for a completed transaction or for downloading more information, an average value should be assigned. This is paramount to demonstrating ROI for any digital marketing initiative.
  • Identify & Use Funnels: It’s great to know how many online sales transactions there were or how many new member registrations took place over the past month, but there is a great deal more that can be studied about these conversions. Conversions like these often feature several steps (a checkout process for instance: Add to Cart, Checkout, Billing Information, etc.). Specifying a conversion funnel within Google Analytics for these processes can shine a great deal of light on problem areas where visitors and leads are dropping off and leaving the conversion process.
  • Pay Attention to 2nd and 3rd Degree Touch Points: The conversion process can often pan out beyond just the first visit. In the case of an online purchase, the sales process usually spans across several sessions, as the modern consumer researches your product or service, looks for reviews, and reassurance that this will be a wise purchase. With that being said, do not ignore the first touch point that the converting visitor made with the website! If they initially discovered your site via your company’s Facebook page but completed the sale after returning to the site directly three sessions later, your social media efforts might be paying off more than you think. In the case of paid campaigns on Google AdWords or Bing Ads, the destination URLs can be tagged with “utm_nooverride=1” to ensure the first touch point gets credit for the conversion. The latest version of Google Analytics also makes analysis of multiple conversion touch points easier with its new Multi-Channel Funnel reports.

Knowing how many conversions were triggered on your website is one thing. Having a deep understanding of how much revenue was generated from those conversions, where improvements can be made in the conversion process, and which of your marketing campaigns helped drive them can save your company time and money. Most of all, however, it can help you market more effectively and efficiently to ultimately increase conversions and ROI.

6 Tips to Consider Before Implementing Your Email Marketing Strategy

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Most businesses utilize email marketing as a marketing tactic to cross sell new business or for retention purposes.It is pretty rare for an organization to develop a comprehensive email marketing strategy to increase subscription, cross sell, etc that goes beyond email marketing and the basic email metrics.Some email marketing solutions even provide industry averages for those metrics.

The email marketing strategy should go well beyond simple open rates, click through rates, and industry averages.The content of the emails and promotional materials should have a consistent look and feel as well as being customer centric.By customizing the message to the different types of customers or service offerings, it should improve the overall effectiveness of email marketing campaign.

6 Tips to Consider Before Implementing Your Email Marketing Strategy:

  1. Segment Your Opt-in List by customer type or services offering
  2. Test Your Message & Layout by segments
  3. Integrate Email Solutions with Analytical Solutions
  4. Implement Social Media functionality
  5. Implement Triggers for Follow-ups and Tailored Materials
  6. Create Effective Landing Pages to Reinforce the Marketing Message