Online Marketing & Web Design in Orange County with Sean Sloan of Open Interactive

Well, you guys are pretty well aware of the fact that I do web development and things related to web development. I wanted to go over a few things that, I don’t want to repeat myself, I want to get into some more interesting and current things.

We’re in the midst of revamping our website. We’re doing what would be described as a soft launch so there is a new website in place, but additional content is going to be added to it gradually over the coming weeks. But unlike what has been there in the past, we have more of a portfolio of sites that we’ve done recently showing a bunch of businesses that you guys probably weren’t aware of us having done work for before in the past.

We have two record labels, both of which are ecommerce sites that do a substantial amount of online business. One of them is local here in Southern California called Ubiquity Records. The other one is back east. It’s a company called Daptone Records. It’s the home of Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings who are kind of like a retro soul sort of act and fairly popular.

So it shows perhaps a little bit more artistic side of website design. These things are often designed around their album covers for their most recent release, and they are a little bit less business-like. We did a website for a band called Middle Class Rut. You can see their latest video in there. It’s pretty entertaining.

So in addition to the web development portfolio, there’s also a section on video, where we have some video examples. Not all of the video examples were working. That’s one of the areas we’re going to be expanding. But it shows some of the very high quality, high production value video that we can do, and that we would love to do for you. This video can include tutorials, testimonials or, what are in essence, short commercials for your business. The web is getting more videocentric all the time. I think that the mobile revolution, a lot of people are watching videos on their cellphones and tablets because it’s easier to digest than reading a lot of text.

Another section that we have on there now that was not previously on there, is sound design. Sound design is the ability to take or write music and add in sound effects for the purpose of conveying a story it’s generally done in television commercials. We have a gentleman on our staff, some of whom you may have interacted with. His name is John Garnier. He’s a native of France and he came to us from a sound design background. He is an imminently talented person, and it’s worth going on there and seeing some of the very, very high quality stuff that he’s done for very large companies. He has an excellent background in education, and France has an excellent school system, and he’s again, very talented.

I had the pleasure of taking part in a webinar this week with some of the top people in the industry. There’s a new company that’s an off-shoot of an existing company that I’ve done business with in the past, and very highly respect the founders of. The company was called SEO Slingshot. Their new company is called Digital Relevance, and they’re going away from the technical SEO terminology and the technical SEO practices as a social media. And the social proof that comes with the sharing of information through social media starts to have a larger and larger influence on search engine ranking and having your site be found.

So it was, like, about a 50 minute long discussion of that and the process by which search engines are now beginning to find people. They are getting very, very sophisticated with the ability of search engines to recognize language. And this is the language that, of course, is found in web pages. And so it’s machine learning and it is artificial intelligence that is being applied to huge swathes of the internet, and theoretically all your personal websites are included in there. So the focus is becoming less and less on raw ranking, but more and more on deriving traffic from a broader spectrum of keyword terms.

So, what in the past has been described as the long tail keywords, these very precise descriptions or combinations of words and phrases that describe your service area, or your specialty, these things can comprise up to 70 percent of your overall web traffic, where your one main keyword term for your industry might drive five or six percent of your overall viewer traffic. So the emphasis is kind of shifting towards being found more places by more people as opposed to banging your head against the ranking of being found by your very central keyword term for your industry.

I’ve talked a little bit about this in the past and I want to encourage all of you guys to think about these ideas. Again, they are personas. The personas are of your clients, potential and existing, and actually developing these things so that all of your marketing is reaching out to these people and addressing their needs and concerns. You really need to think about your sales process so you can communicate it to someone like me or I can help you with your sales process.

There’s usually initial phase of discovery and then of addressing people’s buying considerations, and then turning them into a contact or a customer. All of that is the kind of stuff we help companies with all the time. Determining their unique value proposition for all of their different areas of specialty and crafting those messages into their site so that when a searcher does reach their site they are convinced of the authority of this person and they make the move to contact them.

So there are a lot of interesting challenges in doing this kind of work. It is time consuming and thoughtful work. It requires research and learning new tools all the time.

I recently had a client, that actually came tangentially through Marc Winger, through a recommendation he gave to me to join another networking group. It’s called Advanced Planning for Doctors and this lead came through there.

But these are people that specialize in compliance for the Affordable Care Act. And so they’ve started a business, specifically around this very rarefied niche, that the problem is, is that the acronym, ACA, and ACA compliance is also a financial term. So ranking for ACA compliance, when it is a completely different animal, only gets you so far. Ranking for Affordable Care Act compliance is their sweet spot and exactly where they want to be, and thankfully their new site ranks for that for the geographic area of Orange County in which they want to be found.

This is a situation that we get into a lot with people. They say we just want a website. Down and dirty, cheap. It’s like, ‘I only need a website. What are you talking to me about all this crazy crap?’ It involves convincing people, sometimes it’s a little generational, where they honestly don’t conceive of the power of the internet to bring them in new people that they do not already know, or haven’t contacted through their phone sales force.

So it takes a little bit of client education. Thankfully that happened and they ended up very happy with what we have done for them, and they’re going to hire us to do another site for them as a result. This is the kind of thing that we thrive on and enjoy. Nothing makes me happier than to hear that you’ve gotten new business through your website. That is seriously one of the most gratifying things.

If I had some watch words that people need to think about going forward, if you’re going to write something for your website, think about sharable content. Something that people would be comfortable in sharing with their friends and family, pushing out something of value that they would share.

Thank you very much. I appreciate your time.

Check out my website, open-interactive.com, for samples of my work or give me a call at 949.722.6119.

sean@open-interactive.com