website outline document on table with laptop

Is Your Website Up to Date?

November 6, 2019

How long has it been since you’ve updated your website? The branding, design and flow, and content of a website need periodic updates to give visitors accurate information and good user experience. With this checklist, you can diagnose some of the common problems seen on sites in need of updates.

This FREE checklist covers the following:

Causes of slow sites
Branding consistency
Site structure and flow
Relevant and useful content
And much more!

Is it Time to Refresh Your Staffing and Recruiting Website?

October 9, 2019

As a staffing and recruiting firm owner, you’re always grappling with major business decisions. From growing your firm through business development to finding the best tools and technologies to help your recruiters fill searches and job orders, there is no shortage of critical issues that require your attention.

For many owners, dealing with all of these pressing issues forces them to put their marketing, and in particular, their website, on the back burner. As a digital marketing agency that specializes in tackling digital transformation for staffing and recruiting firms, we see this critical misstep time and time again. If you want to grow your firm, it’s a misstep you can’t afford to commit.

But how do firms know when their website is due for a refresh? We recently hosted a webinar and published an eBook on this very topic. Here are some of the highlights.

Does the Look of Your Site Feel Old?

In the staffing and recruiting world, a first impression carries a ton of weight. They are plenty of firms out there who can solve the hiring challenges that employers are struggling with, and a bad first impression can send a lead directly to your competition. You should think of the look and feel of your website as the first impression your firm has with a visitor.

So ask yourself, what will a new visitor to your site think of your website? Will they have a positive first experience? Will they be turned off by an outdated, unoriginal, or boring design? If you can’t answer with confidence that a new lead will find the design of your website appealing, it’s time to refresh your site

How Quickly Does Your Website Load?

In today’s on-the-go, instant-satisfaction world, potential leads will not patiently wait for your website to load. If pages on your site take more than three seconds to load, you have some performance issues that require attention.

Your staffing and recruiting website does not need to be a super-charged sports car with light-speed load times, but if your site is performing like a Vespa, it’s time to refresh your site.

What Does Your Website Say About Your Firm?

Today’s buyer conducts a lot of research before they deem a vendor worthy of their engagement. That means that they’ll be hopping all-around your website to see if your firm is credible enough to solve their business challenges. Is the content on your site going to accurately demonstrate your firm’s reputation? Or will your content fall flat and send them seeking out another firm?

The content on your site must convince visitors that your firm not only understands their unique pain points but has the ability to solve them. If your content is not focused, aligned with your current business initiatives, and engaging, it’s time to overhaul it and create new, compelling content.

Is Your Website Holding You Back?

August 6, 2019

About the Webinar

For most staffing and recruiting firm owners, the question is not if they need a new website, but when? Discovering when the time is right for a website tune up is a multi-faceted process that requires thorough exploration. New websites require a significant investment of time and resources, so you’ll naturally want to be certain that your website in need.

Here at Parqa Marketing, we deliver digital marketing solutions that are custom-built to serve the modern needs of staffing and recruiting firms—including website design, development, and management.

To help your firm determine when to pull the trigger on a new site, we’re hosting a webinar to comprehensively discuss the topic. Hosted by our Vice President Karen Feder, we will show you how to diagnose the current state of your site’s design, functionality, and content.

Some of the elements of your website that this webinar will cover include:

Responsiveness
Site speed
The performance and quality of your content
The user experience of your visitors
Technical SEO
And more!

Who Should Watch This Webinar?

Staffing and Recruiting leaders looking to leverage their website as a sales tool
Teams without internal website development resources
Sales leaders who think their website could be doing more for their team
Staffing and Recruiting firms ready to kick-start their online presence

Presenter:

Karen Feder

VICE PRESIDENT, PARQA

Karen brings nearly a decade of tactical and strategic marketing experience to the Parqa digital marketing team. As the VP, Karen acts as an idea hub within the agency to provide clients with innovative digital approaches and solutions for their websites and marketing campaigns.

Rank Higher: The Biggest Factors on Your Website That Influence SEO

July 16, 2019

CONTENT… CONTENT… CONTENT

Content is still king, and quality beats quantity every-time. Your content has to provide real value to your visitors and should capture your visitor’s attention with images and graphics to complement the written content.

Not only is it critical to publish relevant content but it’s also important to update the content regularly.

seo-results-image

TIP: When optimizing your content for your website or blog you can utilize Google’s semantic search to get ideas for similar keyword phrases others are associating with that topic – (See Figure 1).

How to Create Content that Sticks ➢

Content Marketing: Your 3-Step Recipe for Lead Generation ➢

EXTERNAL LINKS

An external link is more valuable if it links to popular and relevant pages that are highly ranked and related to the content on your web page.

Getting external links to your site is the single most important objective for attaining high rankings. This stems from the idea that external links are one of the hardest metrics to manipulate, and therefore one of the better and easier ways for Google and other search engines to determine the validity and popularity of a particular website/web page.

figure-2 Below are some of the metrics search engines use to help determine the value of external links:

Trustworthiness/ domain authority of the linking domain
Popularity/ page authority of the linking page
Relevancy of the content between the target page and the source page
Anchor text
AND MORE

Adding high quality, trustworthy and informative external links to your pages will help improve the credibility of your website, while adding poor-quality links will hurt your site’s reputation.

MOBILE FIRST WEBSITE DESIGN

52% of all website traffic generated in 2018 came from mobile devices

Mobile first website design is where the website is designed from a mobile perspective before anything else. From there, it’s then transformed into a design that fits all screen sizes.

“In the past, many responsive website development companies considered mobile design to be secondary, starting with a desktop design and slimming it down to fit smaller screens, known as graceful degradation.” – Lisa Lerman

Why is this important?

It all comes down to providing your visitors with a better user experience while they’re on your website, which in turn, drastically improves your SEO score. In #5, we’ll discuss more why UX plays a crucial role in your websites organic rankings.

9 Stats That Prove the Importance of Website Design ➢

STRUCTURED DATA/ SCHEMA MARK-UP

Structured Data, a.k.a. Schema markup, is code that you put on your website to help the search engines return more informative results for users.

With the increased emphasis on local SEO, structured data is becoming more important and beneficial for small and local businesses.

Most Popular Types of Structured Data Mark-Up:

Article/ Blog Post
Job Posting
Product
Local Business Information
- Logo
- Social Profile(s)
- Organizational Info

SEO is going local, so this is becoming a huge factor in helping small businesses rank higher on Google.

USER EXPERIENCE

As Google’s algorithm continues to get more advanced, UX is going to continue playing a larger and larger role in websites organic Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) rankings. While it’s difficult to know how exactly to measure UX, as it “varies by industry and demographic, studies do show a strong correlation between an accurate UI/UX and good placements on the SERP.” – Doron Wolffberg

Your Website’s User Experience: Why It’s Important ➢

There is no one thing that will single-handedly improve your websites organic rankings or online visibility. It’s true that there are certain things that can have a greater impact on helping improve your websites SEO & organic keyword rankings. But if you focus on only one thing without the other, one of two things will happen: 1. You may see a small improvement in your website’s SEO performance, but it will be short lived; or 2. You won’t see any impact.

It takes a combination of the above in order to see the SEO results you want on your website.

Mobile Friendly vs. Mobile Optimization: What’s the Difference?

May 31, 2018

All mobile–optimized websites are mobile–friendly, but not all mobile–friendly websites are mobile–optimized.

The reality is: We have all been inundated with reasons and stats about why a mobile website is so important for the continued success of businesses. However, with all that information comes a lot of mobile-related terminology. But what does all that terminology mean and how does it impact your website? Terms such as mobile-ready, mobile-responsive, mobile-friendly, mobile-first, mobile-optimized, and more! Let’s take a look at each term one at a time.

Mobile-Friendly vs. Mobile Optimized

Mobile Friendly – Mobile-friendly is the bare minimum mobile design strategy you should have to engage your mobile visitors. While mobile-friendly websites will work for mobile users, these websites were designed for desktop users and are typically slimmed-down format of the desktop version.

A smaller version of your desktop website may fit in a smartphone screen and can be functional, but it’s not designed to maximize user experience, improve your rankings on Google, or convert mobile traffic into leads or purchases.

Mobile Optimized – A mobile-optimized website is designed and built using a mobile-first approach and will reformat itself for mobile users.

Mobile users navigate, read, and act differently on your website than users viewing the desktop version. So why wouldn’t you provide them with a different and mobile-optimized version of the site?

The goal of a mobile-optimized website is to make the website as frictionless as possible for the mobile user.

Mobile users are seeking the quickest, most efficient way to answer their questions. (i.e. do you sell x product? how much does it cost? Do you offer y service? Where are you located? Etc.)

Why do I need a Mobile Optimized Site?

The stats: Almost half of U.S. smartphone users are spending 5 hours per day on mobile devices, according to new data released by analytics firm Flurry. And “browsing the internet is amongst the most popular activities on smartphones”, according to Counterpoint a Technology Market Research Firm.

The frequency of mobile usage emphasizes the importance of mobile websites for businesses. For any business to be successful in today’s online (and predominately mobile) market, it’s vital to have a website that responds effortlessly on mobile devices and provides a seamless user experience.

It’s all about Google: Last October (2017), Google started rolling out its mobile-first index. This update means that Google will serve users different results on mobile than it does on desktop for the exact same search. Additionally, the update factors how a website performs on mobile devices before determining a websites placement within the search results.

In a nutshell, for businesses/organizations to continue prospering in the digital age, and for them to show up in search results, they need to have websites that maximize the mobile experience for users. Thus, building a website with a mobile-first approach is becoming more and more vital.

What can I do to Optimize my site for Mobile?

Design features of a mobile-optimized website can include:

Single column layout
Easy, simple navigation (that is “thumb” friendly with large touchpoints) especially for critical contact information
Reduced graphics that don’t interrupt the quest for critical information
Formatted content for maximum readability
Fewer number of features overall (minimalist, uncluttered design) (i.e. CTAs)

What about my Small Businesses Mobile Website?

As a small – mid-sized business should my company/ organization discuss a mobile optimized version of our website? Will investing in a mobile optimized website bring a measurable return?

These are excellent questions only you, or someone with access to your Google Analytics can provide. What percentage of your site visitors are on mobile devices? This should be one of the first things you look at, and can give you unparalleled insight as to whether or not you need a mobile optimized site.

If you’d like to learn more about your websites current performance and how you can improve the performance/ traffic coming to your site…feel free to reach out to us online!

Free Mobile Optimization Tools

To see how the mobile version of your website performs or to get ideas of how you can improve the performance of your mobile site, check out one of the FREE mobile website optimization tools below.

Mobile-Friendly Test: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Website Test: https://testmysite.withgoogle.com
Make the Web Faster: https://developers.google.com/speed
AMP Pages: https://search.google.com/test/amp
Mobile Optimization Guide: https://varvy.com/mobile

Website Optimization