Resources
Small to Medium sized businesses account for 48% of the United States economy. They are the literal lifeblood of our country.
These businesses are constantly targeted by marketing companies of all shapes and sizes.
Every marketing company is looking for their share of the market. This alone has given marketing companies a bad reputation, but is this the real reason. No.
The are two main reasons why marketing companies have bad reputations:
Is this because all marketing companies are bad? Are they just after money? Do they really know what they are doing?
No, not all marketing companies are bad. The vast majority are not after money. Most of them have some knowledge of the subject.
In this day and age, immediate results are expected. If you watch social media then I am sure all of you have run across people that became overnight successes. They went from making less than 100K a year to millionaires.
People see this and expect it for everything. Truth be told, these people are less than 0.5% of the population and most of them spent years getting to where they are now.
Marketing isn’t overnight. Marketing is built over time through consistent actions to correct audiences that generate engagement and finally customers.
So here is what happens. Marketing companies know that search engine optimization works and they know it will help a company if they just do it. Most of them also know that it takes many months (over 6) if not years to get major results. Depending on the competitiveness of the industry.
So marketing companies over promise the results and the timing. They get the client and then 6 months down the road little or no results are gotten. Upsets are created and the marketing company loses a client and gets a bad reputation.
Paid advertising. This service is used by millions of businesses each and every day. But here’s the rub. On every search engine results page there are only 8 paid advertising spots per page. That means in every industry there are only 8 different companies that can occupy these spots on page 1. There are other spots on different pages, but businesses don’t want those spots, as 95% of the internet will never go to page 2. On top of that, 87% of the internet bypass paid ads all together and go directly to the local or organic results.
If the above wasn’t bad enough, paid ads occur on a bidding system. Meaning, whoever bids the most amount of money and is the most relevant for a keyword will always take the top spot. Meaning bigger companies with more financial resources will always be able to pay more money for the ads, leaving local and smaller businesses will have less chance of succeeding with paid advertising.
So what happens? Marketing companies know that paid advertising can work, and can have the possibility of getting immediate results. So they pitch a client on a specific budget that will allow them to compete on necessary keywords. Client sees the budget and bulks, but is willing to pay half the ad spend budget. The Marketing company accepts clients on a lower budget that can’t compete, doesn’t get any results and ends up with an upset client and a bad reputation.
We could list out almost every single aspect of marketing and give an understanding of why marketing companies have a bad reputation, but we think you get the point.
Marketing works. You can see the success of it on a daily basis with companies like Nike, Coke, Apple, etc, but guess what. They have had decades or marketing and spent billions to accomplish the results they currently have.
At Evolved we speak with local and small businesses on a daily basis and the overall consensus is that they know that they have to do marketing, but so far it hasn’t worked for them and they have spent thousands and thousands of dollars with no results.
Browser Caching
A cache is a secondary memory storage space on a computer.
Meaning browsers will store specific files on your local computer from different website pages.
Website Pages share many different resource files and when these are cached on your computer it helps to load some website pages faster.
If you can leverage browser caches, this can help you to speed up loading time.
Images
The larger the size of images on your website, the longer it will take to load your website. Period.
The best file types to use for a website is WebP. They compress the best. We highly recommend that you use this for your photos.
HTML, CSS & JavaScript
Websites in their simplicity are composed of code. And whether you realize it or not, there can be unnecessary code that is not needed for execution.
If you don’t know coding, we highly suggest that you hire a web developer to get this done. It doesn’t have to be a lot of work, but very necessary.
Server Response
Every website on the internet is located on a server somewhere in the world. If that server has a slow response to request from a browser, it can significantly slow down loading time.
A server should respond to a request from a browser in under 200 milliseconds. There are many different reasons for slow response – slow application logic, slow database queries, slow routing, frameworks, libraries, resource CPU starvation or memory starvation.
These need to be inspected and handled as necessary to speed up server response.
Landing Page Redirects
Having too many redirects to a landing page can create a redirect loop that takes time to get through and to the actual page.
Just have one actual URL address for your landing pages.
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How does Evolved help these clients:
For the industry to clean up its reputation, it needs to start giving clients real expectations and until such time as it does, it will continue to have a bad reputation.
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