Skybox Creative Blog

Yesterday was Valentine’s Day and the web was filled with website designs that incorporated hearts, flowers, candy, and sentimental content designed to pluck the heart strings and extract money from the purses and wallets of America’s love struck consumers. The sentiment behind the holiday is wonderful, the commercialization somewhat sickening, and the San Diego web design specific to that one day of the year may not be a great idea for you, though there are some positives to targeting holiday traffic. If you’re going to redesign to do it, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First off, simply redesigning the theme and color mix of your landing page is not targeting holiday shoppers. Your site can have hearts and teddy bears all over it, but if the content doesn’t mention the holiday you won’t get any traffic. Some companies change the design for a day as an enticement to regular customers, but if you’re not actually selling holiday items or trying to attract new customers, what’s the point? A change in the design could confuse your regular visitors, maybe even drive some away.

Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, July 4^th, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, these are all key holidays every year that have their fair share of artwork and website themes. Are you going to change your landing page design each time you celebrate a holiday? What if you offend someone? Not everyone celebrates Christmas, you know, and among those that do there’s an ongoing dispute about proper symbolism. For that matter, many are opposed to Valentine’s Day and Halloween. That cool San Diego website design for the holidays doesn’t sound so great anymore, does it?

Here’s our advice. Do it anyway, but do it right. If you want to theme your landing page for the holidays we think it’s a great idea, but don’t use the same landing page you use all year. We can create one that is holiday specific and switch to it for just that day, complete with keyword rich content that actually talks about the significance of the holiday to you, your business, and your customers. Do you run a holiday special on Valentine’s Day every year? Why not build a landing page that stays on site all year, but leave it in the background on other days? Google will see it and provide you better holiday search traffic because of it. That’s how you market for the holidays.

The members of our San Diego SEO team will tell you that marketing to the right holiday keywords is a lucrative endeavor. Any time you can narrow down a market by geographic, social, or temporal classification you have a better shot at getting the lion’s share of traffic for that niche. If you market paper products you might have a hard time getting to Google Page One for the keyword “paper products”. Getting there for “San Diego Valentines Day Paper Products” is much easier. You’ll need a new holiday specific landing page to pull that off. Contact us to learn more.

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Branding Agency with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

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Are you familiar with the term “Generation Y”? If you were born between 1977 and 1994, the moniker applies to you. You’re part of a demographic that encompasses 25% of the total population of the United States, one that has an annual spending power of $200 billion dollars. Also known as “Millennials”, you and your peers are expected to surpass the Baby Boomer generation for overall spending by the year 2017. Knowing this, we as a San Diego website design and SEO company are focusing our efforts on link building to sites where Generation Y is expected to be spending time – today and in the future.

Our team is not clairvoyant, but we do understand trends and user behavior patterns when it comes to internet marketing. The San Diego web design end of our business is the part that focuses on the now, attracting the prospects of today and converting them into regular paying customers. We create websites that are vivid and comprehensive; giving web shoppers the experience they’re looking for, the encounter that makes them want to come back for more. The images we use to capture the imaginations of these users are the snapshots and color packages that work today. Updates for the future will happen when they’re needed. Website design is all about getting results now.

SEO is different. Search Engine Optimization is a process. It takes time to get good links. The best ones have to go through an editorial and approval process, so when our San Diego SEO division starts linking we need to look to the future, not the present. Where will we be and who will we be trying to reach six months from now, a year from now, or in the year 2017? We know that we have a generation out there with $200 billion in purchase power now, and potential for much more in the future, so the decision about who to market to is easy.

Using Social Media to Reach Generation Y

Surveys of the shopping and purchasing behaviors of Generation Y show some interesting trends. According to eMarketer, 65% of users aged 18 to 24 review information shared on social media sites before making a purchase. Eight out of ten of these consumers say user generated content from people they don’t know influences their decision to buy. Surprisingly, over half of those surveyed said that the input from strangers was actually more important than what their family and friends had to say. Our San Diego social media marketing team has taken note of this and have incorporated it into our internet marketing strategies.

According to another source, eConsultancy, 2/3 of all consumers use search engines to look for the products and services they require. In the past decade, search engines and social media sites have become more closely aligned. If you go viral on Facebook you’ll end up on Google, page 1. Traffic is an important variable in the Google search algorithm because traffic brings more links and shows that your site is popular. To achieve success on the web you need a combination of SEO, social media marketing, and quality content, both provider and user generated. Contact Skybox Creative today to learn more about how we can provide these for you.

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Creative Agency with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

Your site looks great, so why isn’t it converting? You would be amazed at how the littlest changes can have a huge impact on your conversion rate. The position of your sign-up button, a video promoting your product or service, the color selection for your website, all of these elements affect the conversion rate. Part of our job as a San Diego website design firm is to keep track of all the changes and trends that could influence this all-important number for you. Visitors are great. Paying customers are even better.

The best way to ensure high conversion rates is by testing a number of different landing pages. Using A/B testing techniques and selective groups of potential consumers, internet marketing companies are able to determine exactly which landing page is going to bring you the best results. We document these results and incorporate the universally successful elements into our regular web design techniques. What have we learned from this process? The visual elements are important; the content is what sells.

The average consumer today who shops online is far more savvy and well-educated than those of five or ten years ago. Try running an Adwords campaign if you’re looking for evidence to support that statement. Web shoppers have become oblivious to those little blue words in the side bar or at the top of the page. Those same shoppers are also less likely to click the “sign-up” or “buy now” buttons that used to be so successful in San Diego web design. Today’s consumer needs more before they’ll commit.

One of the most effective web design techniques to capture the far more skeptical consumers of today is to remove the action button from the front page altogether. Give the visitor more content or an informational video before you ask for the purchase or sign up. It’s not like a physical retail location where too many people onsite will affect the level and quality of service they get. Increased time on site is good for an internet based business. Attaining it is one of the goals of our San Diego SEO people.

Adding a purchase page to a website instead of attempting to secure the purchase on the landing page has a twofold benefit. First, it adds value to your website, giving the consumer a sense of confidence in your product or service because you put useful information before an attempt to close a sale. Second, the additional page and extra time on site are both variables in the Google algorithm; the purchase page actually helps you secure a higher page rank and position. Those of us in the design world learn early on that simplicity sells. Removing the “buy now” button and adding a purchase page is a simple process, one that will translate into a higher conversion rate for you.

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Skybox Creative was proud to be one of the San Diego website design companies that participated in the internet blackout day January 18 to protest SOPA, but we’d like to remind everyone that the issue hasn’t been resolved yet. It’s been reported that Texas Republican Lamar Smith has supposedly “killed” the Stop Online Piracy Act, a bill he sponsored, but PIPA (Protect IP Act), the Senate counterpart of SOPA, has only been tabled for a vote later on. Both bills still have some powerful lobbying efforts pushing for them, namely the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).

Obviously, the MPAA and RIAA have a vested interest in stopping online privacy, so why are the rest of us opposed to this legislation? Last week’s protest was about killing the bills, but it was also an effort to help others become more informed about the how and why of the whole process. No one wants to see the misuse or theft of intellectual property, but the approach used by both of these bills is an infringement on some of the basic freedoms we hold dear in this country. In fact, if you read the wording, SOPA and PIPA actually penalize American businesses for acts committed by foreign websites.

The motivating force behind SOPA and PIPA is the presence of pirated film, scripts, and music on foreign sites before they are officially released. Since the US government doesn’t have any jurisdiction over the countries these sites are based in, the proposal is that any US sites linking to them should be court-ordered to remove those links – within five days of receiving the order from the attorney general. Who’s opposed to that? Google, Facebook, eBay and PayPal are four of the major names speaking out against it, and the primary organizers in last week’s blackout.

SOPA also included language that targeted “harmful” products such as foreign pharmaceuticals, but didn’t have any guidelines or regulatory agency responsibility for determining what was considered “harmful” and why. It would also give US companies the option of shutting off sites like WikiLeaks, a move that reeks of censorship and a dangerous precedent towards limiting the free speech we all hold dear. While some may feel that Julian Assange is an irresponsible journalist, if we cut him off, where does the censorship stop? Are our newspapers next?

The justification being used by those who support SOPA and PIPA may seem sound on the surface – an attempt to protect intellectual property rights – but the bills themselves are a violation of the First Amendment, which protects the right to freedom of expression from government interference. They also penalize legitimate businesses here in the United States for the actions of others in foreign countries. We here at Skybox Creative are opposed to both of those. Hopefully you are too.

Increase the visibility of your brand using San Diego Social Media. What exactly does that mean? Most business owners are under the false impression that social media is a strictly national or international medium. The truth is actually the opposite. If you attempt to take your small local brand national before you solidify your local customer base, you’ll get lost in a sea of internet obscurity. Remember that “Big Fish in a Little Pond” analogy? Target your marketing locally until you outgrow the pond, and then expand.

Take a look at Facebook as an example. Inexperienced marketers look at the shear volume of subscribers and seek ways to reach them all. Seasoned professionals understand that there are millions of other businesses trying to implement that same strategy. You need unlimited time, and bottomless pockets, to compete on that level. Try and you’ll be that little fish who gets devoured in the big ocean. Establishing and growing brand awareness is all about industry dominance, not wishful thinking.

As a San Diego Website Design firm, we specialize in creating unique websites that consumers and clients will remember and identify with the company they’re doing business with. The brands of yesteryear, like the McDonald’s arches for instance, have evolved into visual internet images that capture the web surfer’s attention. Getting today’s shoppers and service seekers to stop and read about what you have to offer, even for a few seconds, is a challenge. Here at Skybox Creative, we pride ourselves on being able to build the branded websites that consistently meet that challenge.

Of course, if there’s no traffic coming to your site, there are no captivated visitors and captured email addresses to prove that your new brand is working. Local social media marketing is an effective way to drive the traffic, one that you can use to test your new site. It can also lead to viral marketing that costs nothing and can give you that national or international presence by word of mouth, the best form of marketing there is. What’s the first thing you do when you’re looking for a product or service? You ask a friend.

Social media sites work the same way that search engines do. If you want local exposure, use local keywords. You’ll notice in this post that we have incorporated the keywords “San Diego Social Media” and “San Diego Website Design”. We could have skipped the city name, but we wouldn’t get the local search engine indexing that’s so valuable to us if we did. You can do the same thing with your business when marketing on your Facebook wall or other social media. Use local keywords that will capture local searchers. We’ll provide the branded website that will keep them onsite once they get there.