2013 Year in Review

2013 is coming to a close, and seems a good time to reflect on what I accomplished professionally this year.

After seeing many other web industry leaders tabulate their last 365 days, I thought it might be fun to do likewise.

I will be doing this every year around the end of December, or the beginning of January, for as long as I’m running the business.

Note from John (2019): I was doing some client work in summer 2012, but didn’t become a full-time web designer until November of 2012. That may be why I didn’t do a Year in Review until 2013 wrapped up.

Writing Stats

527,000 is the number of times people read an article I wrote in 2013.

I wrote a total of 56 articles for 6 websites this year.

15,628 is the number of page views I had on this website in 2013. almost a quarter of that in December alone.

I wrote 21 articles for this website in 2013. in 2014, my goal is to write 365.

Community Stats

I attended 5 Meetups and 1 major web conference this year. I’d like to make this number higher in the coming year.

I gave 1 short talk this year, at a local Meetup. It wasn’t the greatest, but sometimes that’s the point—you have to not worry about how good you are, and just practice getting better.

I started a YouTube channel to accompany this website. I like video because it’s a good way to reach people quickly and make a specific point. I’ll be watching to see how many people engage with this channel in 2014.

Work Stats

I built and launched seven brand new sites in 2013, participated in the redesign of six others, and have two more set to launch in early 2014.

Highlights of the Past Year

I was able to survive my first full year working for myself as a web designer.

I got to help numerous small businesses grow, and I was able to meet some of the amazing people behind those businesses.

Looking Ahead

This past year was a great start, but I’m always looking forward. I’ll be sure to check back with you in a year and give you an even better recap of what transpired.

Differentiating Your Business From The Competition

No matter what service or product you offer, there are a substantial number of competitors that offer something similar. If you were a customer, what would make them choose your business over the myriad of others out there?

This is one of the first things I like to know about the clients that I collaborate with, and something that I have pondered incessantly with my own services. Establishing the ways that you are differentiating your business from the competition is critical; it is the beginning of brand strategy.

Things to Consider

Defining who your service is intended for is part of the process. A common mistake is to target too broad of a market. The business that states, “We want to reach everyone!” is focused on being all things to all people. When you try to appeal to everyone, you end up appealing to no one. The business that states (for example) that they are targeting homeowners who earn at least 50K a year within a 25 mile radius of their location is doing a better job of refining who their service is for. “Common sense” says limiting your target audience will reduce the number of conversions, because the base number is much smaller. In reality, you will have a better conversion rate on the audience that you are targeting, because your message and efforts are tailored for your ideal clients.

A business should target a specific audience because the service they provide fits the needs of that audience. The efficient business understands what their ideal customer base is looking for, addresses the pain points their customers deal with, and offers a solution.

Here’s an example: While plain old white bread is good enough for many people in the populace, it offers nothing special. The basic formula can be replicated very easily and sold very cheaply. This type of service or product is a commodity.

There is little difference between the generic version and the name brand version. It doesn’t matter who produces it, it doesn’t matter who buys it, it’s just something to make a sandwich with, nothing more.


Now consider a product like Dave’s Killer Bread. It is made from healthy, premium ingredients. It is aimed towards people who choose organic food, if given a choice. It is difficult to replicate inexpensively. And look, there’s a logo of a long-haired guy playing an electric guitar. Is that something I can relate to? Why yes it is.

You can apply this same principle to any product or service. You can target a very broad audience, have little differentiation, and try to compete on something such as price—(I’ll why I do not like that strategy in a minute). On the other hand, you can very narrowly define what your service does, who it is for, and why it is the perfect fit for your target customers. By taking the narrower path, you will establish yourself as being vastly different from everyone else in your market, and you will be able to cultivate customers who are not apathetic, but instead, enthusiastic about your business.

All Marketing Is Storytelling

Establishing how your business is different is step one. Determining who your business serves best is step two. Telling a great story that describes why your service is amazing to the people you are trying to reach are steps three, four, and five. Creating content that sells your service and tells a compelling story is possible when you clearly define your points of differentiation. I will use the example from above once more. Consider this video:

Dave’s Killer Bread not only does a great job of telling a story of quality product, but now they have made it a story of redemption and second chances. The video shows them giving back to the community and transforming lives. Even other companies that put out high quality organic bread are going to have a difficult time making their product seem extraordinary after this. Why? Because the DKB brand sold themselves as being different from all of their competitors.

Now, not every business is going to have a story this dramatic, but every business has a good story to tell. The story that your business tells must also be different in some fundamental way from your competition down the street.

Incomplete Methods of Differentiating Your Business

I mentioned before that I do not like differentiating on price. It is next to impossible to beat all your competitors on price, and it leads to an unsustainable business model. Competing primarily on price dictates that you must work for less and less as time goes on. It also tells people there is nothing else noteworthy to set you apart.

Competing on quality is better, but defining the ways in which your quality is superior is crucial to making this succeed. The fact is that many services make a similar claim. Finding ways in which your business has superior craftsmanship, that is hard for others to reproduce, is a good strategy. Finding a niche audience that few people are targeting is also a good path to choose.

Conclusion

If you haven’t given much thought to how your business is strikingly different from every one else in your space, now is a good time to start. Standing for something specific will help you stand out from the crowd.

Are Directories Still Good For SEO?

In the early days of SEO, getting links in directories was a common practice. Up until the last few years, search engines saw links as “votes” for sites, and context was not as important. In a post-Panda and post-Penguin world, are directories still relevant, or are they a waste of time for link-building efforts?

Human curated directories such as Joe Ant, BOTW, and the Yahoo directory are still used for seeding search engines. At one time, Yahoo let you submit your site for free, but now it cost $299 annually, if your listing is approved.

DMOZ is a free directory that has been around since the early days of the web, but is difficult to get into. Part of the challenge is the fact that DMOZ editors are all volunteers, and many categories do not have an editor. Many of these older local directory listings in these DMOZ and Yahoo seem to be from the initial seeding of categories years ago, so the high local rankings for many sites could also be attributed to a combination of domain age and site authority.

Note: DMOZ is shutting down as of March 14th, 2017.

Company.com, BOTW, Scrub the Web, and Joe Ant are other human curated paid directories. Joe Ant has a one time submission fee of $40, BOTW.org has a one time fee of either $149 or $199, and Business.com carries a price tag of $299 a year, like Yahoo. Given Google’s policy on paid links, these may diminish in importance over time. For the time being, they don’t appear to hurt. A Yahoo directory listing might be a good investment for a business that is doing well financially, but it’s not something to lose sleep over if you don’t have it.

Another possible route to a high relevance link is to join your local Chamber of Commerce, but make sure you aren’t joining just for the backlink.

On Free Directories

If you’re seeking to build links in free directories, I would concentrate on local directories that do well in local search. Many free directories are not curated and are likely to be seen as poor quality links. Look at the context of each category page, and decide for yourself on a case-by-case basis if a link is worth pursuing.

Increase Search Engine Visibility In One Step

Every business wants to increase search engine visibility for their website.

What is search engine visibility?

There are many ways to measure search engine visibility, but in a general sense, it is a metric of how prominent your web pages are in search results. In other words, how likely are people to find your website for a certain search phrase.

Let’s say that we’re looking at the top twenty results in Google for our search visibility metric. If your site ranks at position #1 for a given search phrase, that would be 20/20, or 100%. Position #2 would be 95%, position #3 would be 90%, and so on down the line.

We already know that SEO is a long-term process. And while everyone wants great SEO, not everyone is ready to do the hard work.

That’s what I want to talk to you about today.

You see, there is something that you can do to increase the odds of being found for your keywords.

It is not an easy step. It requires discipline and sustained effort.

The secret to increasing your site’s search engine visibility isn’t a secret at all.

In order to increase your online search visibility, you need to publish more information that your customers are already looking for.

A Few Words on Search Engine Visibilty

Google looks not only at the information on the page itself, but hundreds of other factors, including how fresh the content is. Since Google’s Hummingbird update, search results are becoming more conversational—search engines are learning what pages best answer questions that people are typing into Google.

Long Tail Search Visibility

Claiming the #1 position in Google for a search phrase that’s one or two words long is difficult. The more specific the keyword phrase, the less competition you will have for that top spot.

This is why you should leverage long tail keywords. Long tail search phrases are three to six words long, but they can be longer if necessary. Long tail keywords occur when customers are asking specific questions that they need answers to. Google said in 2016 that 20% of customer searches on mobile were voice search. Long tail searches are going to continue to increase as time goes on.

How does this affect your SEO strategy? If your marketing department has a plan for creating content that answers specific questions that your customers are asking, the more likely it is
that you will be found for those searches.

The Work of Search Engine Visibility Begins

Take this to heart: the more content you publish on your site, the better chance you will have at getting traffic to your website.

Think of creating website content like buying raffle tickets. The more you create, the better chance you will have at getting one of those pages to rank.

Continuing the raffle ticket analogy, just because you buy a bunch of tickets doesn’t mean that you’ll win all the prizes. But you’ll have a better shot than the person who only buys one or two tickets.

This is the truth about building brand authority around a given topic — if you don’t publish anything, you won’t establish any thought leadership.

If your competitors have hundreds, or even thousands of pages published on a given subject, you won’t outrank them if you only have five to ten pages on your site. Sorry, but that’s the truth.

The only way you can compete with the big dogs in your field is to go toe to toe with them on publishing content that serves your customer base.

I don’t know about you, but I’m buying as many raffle tickets as I can.

Fresh Content as a Search Visibility Factor

Another big factor in Google’s ranking algorithm is how often you publish fresh content. When a site publishes quality content on a regular basis—over time, it gains authority. Continually publishing great content is how you can gain ground on your competitors.

I’ve looked at other folks that published quality articles on a schedule. Sean McCabe built a small empire on publishing continually on his site, YouTube, and his podcast. Chris Lema got 1 million pageviews in eighteen months by blogging daily.

Granted, you have to be delivering value to your target customers. You can’t expect them to show up just because you created a company blog.

But a funny thing happens when you continue creating content. You start developing a business voice. You get better at writing, podcasting, or whatever it is you choose to do. People start to find you more and more. Remember, that the more tickets you buy, the more chances you get at winning. The more pieces of quality content you create, the greater chance some of those will resonate with your customers, or be the definitive answer to their question.

My advice to businesses is to publish more quality content that provides information, shows expertise, or solves a problem for their customers. Don’t over think it. Just get in the habit of publishing. If you have content that doesn’t produce traffic, you can always prune or improve that site content later.

What Should You Write About?

When your current customers are asking the same questions over and over, write a blog post (or make a video) that addresses those questions.

If you can think of fifty questions that your target customers always ask, great! Write about those fifty things first.

Think about it from your customer’s perspective. What would they be typing into Google if they needed your services?

Now, go to Google and begin typing those search phrases in. As you begin to type, see what phrases are coming up in the auto-complete section. Use some of the longer search phrases to find a subject for your next blog post.

Quick Questions About Search Engine Visibility and Publishing

Q: How often should you publish?
A: As often as you can, on a consistent basis. Daily if possible; more often than all of your direct competitors are, for certain.

Q: What do I do if I don’t time to write, create videos, or create content?
A: If you could improve your business enough to where you could hire someone to help you in your business, would it be worth the time investment? If you feel it is worth it, you can schedule the time in your day.

Q: How long will I have to keep producing content until my site traffic improves?
A: It depends on where your site is starting from now, how fierce the competition is in your field, and how many people are willing to socially share your content. It could be a few months, it could be close to a year. Content-driven traffic is like a snowball — it takes a while to get going, but then takes off. Consistency is the biggest key to success.

Conclusion

Keep in mind, the biggest benefit to all of this isn’t being found in search, but being able to show customers your expertise. Each page you publish is a chance for others to see how you think and work, and how well you understand your field. Becoming a trusted source of knowledge in your field builds community trust in you, and leads people to want to do business with you.

Why Responsive Design Matters

Responsive web design is a skill set and methodology that has been increasingly in demand.

The phrase was coined in a 2010 article by Ethan Marcotte, and since then it has become a bit of a buzzword. Many web designers still mobile design as something you add later to a desktop site design. Conversely, practical web designers are embracing a “mobile first” web design methodology.

While responsive design began with mobile phones, and later tablets, the reality is the web has only just begun to mature, and there will be more devices to come. Responsive design matters not because it’s the future, but because it’s growing exponentially in the present. We can no longer classify responsive design as a subset of web design. For responsible and ethical web designers, responsive web design and “regular” web design are synonymous.

The Game Has Changed

In the formative years of the web, the desktop computer was the only way to access websites. Although an unstyled web page is responsive by nature, up until recently web designers sought pixel perfect control over the screen. The recent rise of smartphones and tablets led web designers to create specific layouts for specific devices. While that worked for a little while, designing for every device today would be a Sisyphean task. Now our websites have to be optimized for desktop, mobile, tablet, big screen TVs, console browsers, wearables (like Google Glass and smartwatches), and devices that fit somewhere in between.

Responsive Content Patterns

When the mobile web was new, web designers assumed that mobile use meant that users must be on the go, and therefore only needed information relevant to someone traveling around town. A few years later, the web industry realized that many people on the mobile web were at home, and just didn’t want to get up from the couch in order to go online. Attempting to predict user intent by device alone is inaccurate. Users of every device should be able to access the most pertinent information from a website.

This has led to another industry realization, that content strategy and responsive design are joined at the hip. Planning the hierarchy of content has to occur before responsive design can be effective. Larger organizations in particular struggle with this—while there is room on a desktop site to cram all sorts of information, the same is not true of a smartphone. Organizations with many departments competing for screen space have to decide what information is the most important. The slashing of what is not absolutely needed on a smaller screen helps create better design, because it forces content prioritization — what’s most important?

Responsive Design Is Also About Performance

At the same time, the average web page weight of the top 1 million sites in the world rose 50% to well over 1 MB from 2012 to 2013. At a time when web designers should be decreasing the weight of pages and making their sites faster, the industry seems to be heading in exactly the opposite direction.

This trend baffles me.

There is a direct correlation between page speed and customer conversions. Page load speed is also a factor in search engine ranking. One solution to this is to adopt a mobile first strategy: load a baseline version of the site for mobile users, and conditionally load a richer experience for desktop browsers.

Responsive Design Matters to Your Customers

Websites that get a responsive redesign increase transactions, have better conversion rates, increase time on site and pages per visit, increase customer loyalty, and have more goal conversions.

Mobile design also matters to SEO. In fact, Google has said that non-responsive sites will on average rank lower than sites that are mobile friendly.

In 2014, mobile reached the tipping point, and became the #1 way people access the web. In other parts of the world, the percentage of mobile users is even higher. To me, it no longer feels like responsive design should be an option, it should be part of the package by default. For Lockedown SEO, responsive design is regular web design.

Conclusion

Does designing for multiple devices take a bit longer than designing just for desktop? Of course it does, but it’s not 2001 anymore—you have to go where your customers are, or someone else will. The number of web devices on the market is not going to get smaller, it’s only going to get larger. Bringing value and service to your customers in a way that they expect and will appreciate is a good thing to do.

Why Your Website is Important

Your website is one of the biggest keys to your success and your #1 marketing tool.

It is how potential customers will find you and judge your business.

If you do not have a professional looking website, customers will presume your business is not professional.

Investing in your website is something that you have to do to continue to grow and elevate your business.

Reasons Why Your Website Is Important

Some businesses do not have a website yet, or even worse, one that drives customers away because it looks shabby or outdated. The quality of your website will reflect how customers perceive the quality of your business. Not having a website at all sends off warning signals to people searching for your business. Why doesn’t this business have a website? Are they even legitimate? Having a site that looks outdated also makes your business lose credibility with customers. Business is all about trust, and customers who trust you are more likely to do business with you.

Does this mean you should settle for a website made quickly and without regard to what your business offers? There will always be people willing to build you a website for next to nothing. The problem with hiring a code mercenary is that no research or planning goes into building your site. Hiring your nephew or niece to build your site might save a few dollars up front, but the result is lost sales down the line. A professional web designer will always research your business goals, your competition, and your unique offerings before ever touching a line of code. A quality site looks modern, communicates a cohesive message, and inspires the customer to take action.

A website is a business cost that should be planned for, but one that can pay for itself quickly in the form of increased revenue and profit.

Targeted messages + professional appearance + search visibility = More Sales.

Why Facebook Pages Are An Inadequate Solution

I see many local businesses that rely only on a Facebook Page for traffic. Depending on a social network to be your de facto website is building on shaky ground. Social media platforms should be a complement to your website, not the main platform. The reason I say this is Facebook constantly adjusts your Page visibility to your followers. Only a small percentage of your Facebook Page fans see what you post (unless you pay for Facebook Ads). Facebook also owns everything you post there; they consider it their property. Anything that you post on your website is your own copyrighted material, and each page on your site has the potential to rank high in Google and be found by potential customers.

Anecdotal

I sometimes talk to business owners who do not have a website, or who have a very unprofessional looking one. When I ask them why they do not have a site, every single time the answer is that they get all of their business from referrals or that they have too much business to handle. Sorry, but this does not ring true to me. I cannot comprehend a well-informed businessperson who says no making more money or growing their business. I also know that I and most consumers think less of a company or business if they have either no website or a very neglected looking site. If a business is making money, and they cannot be bothered to have a website that looks decent (or one at all), I begin to question all the other aspects of how they do business and wonder if they neglect those areas as well.

In Conclusion

Your website is the face of your business. People will judge you by it and spend their time and money accordingly. Once you have a site built and deployed, you should budget to have it refreshed every few years. Many things change as time goes on, such as coding best practices, design conventions, social media platforms, and the needs of a business as it grows. Investing in your web presence is investing in the infrastructure of your business. It is a necessary cost, because your website is important to the survival and growth of your business.