What is Digital Marketing Essentials?

For organizations without a website, all of our Digital Marketing Plans include it at no additional cost, Free websites are written and developed specifically for your business. The scope is limited to 3 pages, plus a page for a blog role. These pages include your Homepage, a Products/Services page and an About Us/Contact Us page. Additional pages and more complex functional requirements like online galleries, team listing or other needs can usually be accommodated for minimal additional cost.
If you already have a website, we will design and publish your new website based on any content you have currently. In some cases, there won't be a need to redesign your website, which allows us to begin SEO and other marketing efforts sooner. Our goal is to leverage what you have or add what is necessary to achieve top search engine rankings, as well as bolster a high conversion rate. We try to accommodate most existing websites without incurring additional costs. If your website is between 4 and 8 informational pages, and doesn’t require specialized programming, we can usually accommodate the transition as part of the plan. If your website is larger, or includes complex design or functional requirements, there may be additional costs that we will discuss before beginning work.
New websites will be limited in scope according to your plan, however there may be some flexibility, depending on the quality of images and copy you provide us prior to beginning work.
Whether you have a website currently or will be starting from scratch, we offer additional pages at a very reasonable additional cost. Our goal is always to keep your design and development costs to a minimum, so we can focus our resources on attracting new customers.

Our Essentials plans include research, selection & management of 20 keywords, organized into groups of 4 or 5 related phrases. We select them based on a combination of alignment with your products and/or services, search volume and relative ranking difficulty.
Each keyword group will include the following:

Organizing keywords (phrases) this way helps us track indexing progress as early as possible by including at least one search term that will be presumably easy to rank.
Typically, this keyword will be lower volume and relatively non-competitive. Its purpose is to signal crawl frequency and indexing speed, which will be critical to our efforts with more competitive phrases.
Long-tail keywords make up the bulk of each keyword group. These will have sufficient search volume and specificity to attract visitors and generate leads. Most often, we replace the “easy win” keyword with a long-tail phrase once our long-tail keywords begin to reach the top 30-50. Often, we’ll experience movement for the entire group, but not always. Organic traffic volume can be surprisingly variable as well.
Finally, we will include what we call a “unicorn.” This is a high-volume very competitive phrase that has the ability to generate a lot of traffic, but requires a lengthy, difficult and uncertain path to page one. We track these as long-term ranking goals, and to gauge traction relative to the larger scale market.

Formerly called, “Google My Business,” your Google Business Profile is critical to local search results, as well as Google Maps listings. It is particularly important for searchers using mobile devices, which makes up about 2/3 of global search volume.
Your Google Business Profile is displayed among Google Places listings. Often referred to as the Google “local pack,” or “map result,” a top listing here significantly increases visibility, and often drives direct conversions from users that may not even visit your website.
We will make sure your listing is complete, branded and kept active and up to date. Google often changes the fundamentals of how results are organized and displayed, so we also make sure your profile is adapted and optimized and changes occur. Benefits of a thriving Google Business Profile include:

Domain registration is the process of claiming your website domain by paying a registrar to establish the domain as yours. Some popular domain registrars are GoDaddy, Register.com, Network Solutions, NameCheap and Domain Discover, to name a few. There are literally thousands of domain registrars worldwide, including us. Prices vary (usually $15 - $20 per year), but they all accomplish the same thing.

Photos and other imagery like icons and branded elements are essential to making your business stand out in a competitive landscape. Of these, high quality, professional photography is, by far, the most effective way to make a lasting impression among consumers.
We will work with the images you provide. We will edit as appropriate, but keep in mind the better the images we have to start with, the better the quality will be when we publish them to your website.
If images are unavailable, one option is to utilize stock photography. Stock images are typically high quality and inexpensive, but often have a “generic,” over-polished look. Also, visitors to your website are there to learn about your business. Stock photos don’t serve that purpose as well as actual photography including your location, products, and staff.
Often, our best bet is to go onsite and shoot photos (and video) on location. We offer high-end photography and videography, including underwater and aerial imagery, worldwide. Since our primary goal is to promote your business over time, we work very hard to keep the cost to a minimum.

Structured data is a defined means of describing your website to make it easy for search engines to understand. How we do that is among the more technical components of our Essentials plans that include structured data. In short, we use a coded taxonomy programmed in JavaScript called Schema Markup to organize information describing each page of your website.
The “structured” part of structured data comes through standardization throughout hundreds of “entities.” An entity can be a lot of things—a local business, a hotel, an FAQ page, an article. There are seemingly countless entities defines in the Schema standard, and every one of them has dozens to hundreds of individual attributes that define it.
It’s complicated, but Schema can dramatically increase the visibility of your business. We take care of all of it, and go on to test and make regular updates like every other aspect of digital marketing.
Below is an example of a so called “rich result” in Google. Schema markup played a role in Google’s ability to include several elements:

This is just one example of how Schema Markup can bolster the visibility of your business as presented among competing websites in Google’s SERP (search engine results page). There are Schema entities defined for virtually anything you can think of. For example, recipes, activities, fact checks. FAQ, how-to guides, job posts, logos, math, movies, podcasts are just a few types of rich results that can be defined through structured data.

Our mission is to provide boutique agency, digital marketing and creative services without demanding 5 and 6 figure monthly marketing budgets. Our Digital Marketing Essentials plans are perfect for new businesses and any organization that needs a professional online presence. As your business grows, or your needs extend beyond our standard plans, we offer additional services packaged to be affordable and quick to implement. We also offer custom marketing services, but most often we can accommodate any need with one or more of the following.

Regardless of which Essentials plan your company chooses, opportunities arise where it makes sense to stretch beyond the basics. Depending on your business circumstance and goals, you might want to test email campaigns, run paid ads, or increase your social media efforts.
We make it easy, as well as cost effective to build on your marketing efforts, without changing your plan, or committing to a major additional expense. We offer our Essentials clients opportunities to 3-month campaigns for some of our most popular services. Internally, we call these “sprints.” They were created to help us do our best work, while keeping you in control.
Adding marketing efforts this way has several benefits.

• Facilitates testing of various marketing strategies
• Offers flexibility and the ability to change course if needed
• Supports seasonal variation
• Doesn’t affect the terms of your Essentials plan
• Additional services at discounted rates