PSPINC Official Company Blog

What is a Customer Journey?

May

3

If you’ve ever worked in sales or marketing, you've probably used or at least heard of a customer journey. While it sounds self-explanatory, fully building a customer journey out will help to create a stronger strategy moving forward. And from a business perspective, continually improving the customer’s experience will lead to not only an increase in sales but also in loyal customers. A customer journey outlines the steps a customer takes when encountering a company, including where they could potentially drop off.

A customer journey typically has five stages: awareness, consideration, acquisition, purchase, and loyalty. The awareness stage consists of how a customer hears about you. This can be through non-digital mediums like word-of-mouth or newspapers. But nowadays they probably found your company somewhere online like through a Google search or on social media. Then, there’s the consideration stage, where customers decide if they want to learn more about your company, your product, and/or your service. If they’re interested, they’ll move forward to the acquisition stage, where they’ll actively explore your company’s content and see how your competition compares.

The Acquisition Stage

a man sitting at a small cafe table with a laptop, notebooks, and phone on the table while the man's holding a to-go coffee cup in one hand and the other hand on his hand

The acquisition stage is arguably the most important step of the journey. At this point, your customer knows who you are, what you’re selling, and how you stack up against your competitors. But whether they purchase or not depends on multiple factors. From the company’s perspective, you want to make sure your brand and what you’re selling is as presentable as possible, the customer’s experience is smooth and simple, and your prices are at the same level as your competitors.

If your products and/or services are too expensive, the customer will just buy them elsewhere. If you’re not the cheapest option, you need to at least tell your customers why. For example, if your product is better because of the material or usability, make sure your customers know that. Because while price is an important factor, many will be willing to pay extra if they think it’s worth it.

Getting Customers to the Purchasing Stage

a woman holding multiple shopping bags while wearing sunglasses and looking at her phone

Once they decide they want to purchase, they enter the purchase stage, hence the name. This could be physically paying for it in a physical store or going through the payment portal on your site. After that is the post-purchase stage. In a brick-and-mortar store, this includes everything the customer encounters after paying. For example, they could see poster ads hung around the store. For digital consumers, this could be a “Your order is placed” page with their order number and details or a follow-up email encouraging customers to follow them on socials and shop from them again.

If your customer is frustrated or overwhelmed at any point in the process, they’ll probably end the journey there. As a business, that’s the last thing you want. You want your customer to go through the entire journey. Actually, what you really want is for customers to come back repeatedly. Beyond that, you want loyal customers to start recommending your products to convert even more people into customers. Or more loyal customers, preferably.

How Loyal Customers Play a Role

a woman holding a bag with a small flower bouquet inside as she leaves a store

For people who are actively loyal to your company to the point of recommending your products, they are what’s called brand evangelists. Regarding the customer journey, repeat customers no longer start from the beginning. Instead, they skip forward to the acquisition stage or straight to purchasing your product.

From a business perspective, it’s important to know how customers interact with your brand. The best way to figure that out is by creating a customer journey. With it, you can identify the steps potential customers make both before and after they purchase from you. Or more importantly, where you need to improve to prevent people from leaving before they get to the purchase stage. After all, you can’t fix a problem if you don’t where to start.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#acquisition #advertising #awareness #branding #business #businesstips #consideration #customerjourney #customers #customerservice #digitalmarketing #google #loyalty #marketing #marketingdigital #purchase #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tech #web

How You Can Improve Your Site's SEO Through Content

Mar

22

For anyone who’s ever helped develop a website, search engine optimization (SEO) is very important. Optimizing your site for SEO helps better position your website and its pages in organic search results. For people who use website builders, many of those plans include an SEO tool. The best one, in our opinion, is the Yoast SEO plugin from WordPress, but there are many others out there. And it’s partly why PSPINC offers an easy WordPress install with both our Dreamersi, YourHost Neo, and Parcom web hosting plans. However, users can only use those tools with paid plans. So, here’s some SEO advice you should keep in mind when building and creating content for your site.

Adding Effective Keywords

people sitting together at a conference table, some of which are on laptops as they all work together

When you think about SEO, you might think about keywords first. Keywords are just words and phrases that users will enter into their search engines. So, choose your focus keyword wisely. You want it to be a word you know you’ll use a lot because it’ll be what you want a page to rank for most. But you also want to make sure it’s one that people will search for. An easy way to figure this out is to make a quick Google search with the keyword you want to use and see how many results come up. If it comes back with thousands or even millions of search results, you’re on the right track.

The same process goes with your keyphrase, which is like your focus keyword. The only difference is that it’s a phrase instead of just one word. To better optimize your content for SEO, try to use your keyphrase in your subheadings whenever possible. When you repeatedly use your focus keyword and keyphrase within your web content, it tells Google that you’re using relevant keywords. Google then rewards you by pushing your page higher up in the organic search results.

Improving Readability

a woman typing a document on a laptop while she sits on the couch

This should go without saying, but if your content isn’t written well, people won’t want to read it. Besides the obvious revisions in capitalization, grammar, and overall syntax, there are a few other things to be wary of when creating written content for online users. For starters, try to avoid using passive voice. Instead, use active voice. Passive voice happens when the subject of the sentence is acted upon whereas, in active voice, the subject completes an action. For example, instead of saying “The speech will be made by the mayor tomorrow”, say “The mayor will make a speech tomorrow”. If it’s a situation that can’t be avoided, use the passive voice. Just try to keep it to a minimum.

Additionally, avoid consecutive sentences (starting sentences with the same word) and limit your sentence and paragraph length. Sentences shouldn’t have more than 20 words each while paragraphs shouldn’t exceed 200 words. Between paragraphs, you should also distribute some subheadings and perhaps some images to break up blocks of text. Because no one wants to read paragraph upon paragraph without a break. At least not when they’re reading something online. Also, make sure to link some of your text to other pages on your website as well as other websites.

So, when you’re building and creating content for a website, there are two things to keep in mind in terms of SEO. Firstly, you’ll want to make sure you’re using effective keywords so your web pages will rank higher in Google’s organic search results. While Google Ads guarantees a top spot in the search results, using the right keywords will be vital in determining where on the list your site lands after that. Lastly, your content needs to be well-written, keeping in mind that it’ll be seen by internet users. The language should be conversational but still grammatically correct. Do all that and your site will be in pretty good shape for SEO. And as helpful as paid tools like Yoast SEO are, they’re unnecessary if you already know what to look out for.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#blog #digitalmarketing #dreamersi #google #googlesearch #keywords #marketing #marketingdigital #organicsearchresults #parcom #searchengineoptimization #searchengineresultspage #searchresults #seo #serp #webhosting #wordpress #yoastseo

What is the Metaverse?

Feb

22

By definition, the metaverse is a virtual reality space where users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users. Culturally, it’s becoming a much bigger buzz word. Especially now that every big tech company is announcing that they too are joining the metaverse. But what is the metaverse really?

In the most simplistic terms, it’s a virtual world that includes a mix of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). Before this past year, the metaverse felt like some sci-fi term that could someday become our future. But when huge companies like Meta (previously Facebook), Microsoft, and Roblox start talking about how they’re investing in “metaverse economies” and creating virtual reality internet, you know it must be a big deal. And for other large tech companies that seemed to miss the metaverse boat, most of them are just trying to scramble up whatever they can to catch up with everyone else.

How Tech Companies are Building Out the Metaverse

employees sitting in a meeting with papers and two laptops on the desk

As of right now, users can play video games, socialize, and take part in a digital economy. However, as exciting as all this sounds, it all sounds a lot like what you can do with a lot of video games already. Namely, Fortnite. Epic Games (the Fortnite creator) is definitely building parts of the metaverse in a big way but now tech giants like Meta (formerly Facebook), Microsoft, Roblox, Nvidia, and many more are starting to do the same.

Eventually, they want the metaverse to become an entirely virtual world in itself. For example, Meta posted a video about where they wanted to see the metaverse go. In the video, a woman goes from seeing a snippet of a concert on her Instagram feed to virtually joining the crowd, despite the fact that the concert was occurring on the other side of the world. Mark Zuckerberg even goes on to say that the metaverse will eventually include the capability of interacting with digital objects in the physical world, which will “respond and react realistically”. More than that, they’re actively working on it with the help of Spark AR.

The Potential Pitfalls of the Metaverse

a man wearing a vr headset while also holding two controllers in his hands

While it all sounds great and exciting, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t come with its drawbacks. While the inventor of PlayStation, Ken Kutaragi, completely dismisses the idea of the metaverse, he does bring up a very good point. There’s one very big issue with the metaverse. One that tech giants have largely avoided: VR headsets.

They’re somewhat clunky, uncomfortable to wear for long periods of time, and can even cause pain to users. Or as Kutaragi puts it, “annoying”. Especially those who get motion sickness easily. In Meta’s video, they don’t show how users entered the metaverse. And they may have done that on purpose. Many users in the video were shown wearing glasses, but AR glasses have certain limitations that simply wouldn’t work for the metaverse.

But realistically, the metaverse continues to build into an all-encompassing virtual world, it will continue to excite the tech industry worldwide. As long as they can figure out their headset problem and figure out how to price it all at an affordable price. It’s already got companies like Meta, Google, Apple, Microsoft, and many more fighting to gain relevance in the future that will be the metaverse. Someday soon, we may just see the metaverse as the new internet.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#apple #ar #arglasses #augmentedreality #digitaleconomy #epicgames #facebook #fortnite #gaming #google #internet #kenkutaragi #markzuckerberg #meta #metaverse #microsoft #nvidia #playstation #roblox #tech #technolgy #virtualreality #vr #vrheadset

PSPINC What's New Newsletter Vol. 100 "Attracting Customers with your Website"

Jan

27

I want to attract people to my website. There are many ways to do that like advertising online or optimizing the site for search engine optimization (SEO), but have you thought about something more basic? Before you think about how to better attract people towards you site, have you ever thought about why you go to a website? What website acts as your homepage and what pages do you visit the most often?

In 2021, the most visited websites were:

someone on their phone open to the TikTok app

TikTok

Google

Facebook

Microsoft

Apple

Amazon

Netflix

YouTube

Twitter

WhatsApp

As you can see, these sites are designed to attract people. Their content is updated every hour, every minute, and every second of every day. However, you’re focused on getting users to come to your company’s website, more specifically, your homepage. Moreover, your goal is to get traffic that is comparable to these sites.

a look at website traffico n a tablet

Even if the amount of website traffic towards your site is small, you need to update the content on your site frequently if you want to see that number increase. It’s important to give your customers a reason to come back to your site time and time again. And you can do that by regularly posting new information that is important to them.

Next, it’s also important to promote your site through mediums other than your own website. This includes eliciting reviews of your products and/or services and publicizing your activities on social media. A website that’s left unwritten won’t attract people. If you want more people to see your website, it goes without saying that you need to provide them a reason to see it.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#amazon #apple #business #businesstips #content #facebook #google #homepage #microsoft #netflix #smallbusiness #socialmedia #tiktok #twitter #upates #webcontent #webdevelopment #website #websitecontent #websitedevelopment #whatsapp #youtube

Useful Google Chrome extensions for building a website

Nov

30

Every day we surf the Internet we rely on web browsers to serve us content both reliably and quickly. Like all things involving technology, they are constantly evolving and improving. The question is, are you getting the most out of your web browser? If you are not using browser extensions (sometimes referred to as add-ons) you may not be.

What are browser extensions?

A browser extension is a software module that runs within the web browser that customizes that instance of the web browser specifically for you.

Useful extensions for building a website

Today we are going to talk about extensions for Google Chrome, as it is “king of the mountain” when it comes to global market share. However, all major web browsers offer extensions to make your browsing experience easier, more efficient and customized to your needs.

Below is a list of just a few of the useful browser extensions that will help you as you look to build your website. These are helpful not only to Web Development professionals but to savvy business owners that want to go the DIY route (we have a tool for that).

GoFullPage - Full Page Screen Capture
When it comes to building your website, sometimes you may want to capture screenshots of your progress to send to other internal stakeholders. This plugin adds a simple camera icon to your browser. Click the icon once and it will capture the entire page (what you see and what you can’t). From there you can download it in .png, .jpg, or .pdf formats.

Grammarly for Chrome
When it comes to preparing content for your website, it is important you provide professional and well-written content. The Grammarly plugin will look at the text you have written within the browser and point out misspellings and offer grammar suggestions.

Fun fact: We use Grammarly every week when it comes to proofing and editing this blog.

Resolution Test
When it comes to testing your website it’s important you consider your users. People will view your website on all types of devices with different screen resolutions. With this add-on, you can click a button and choose various screen resolutions. It will open a unique browser window for each resolution, allowing you to see how your site looks to those users.

—

These are just a few browser extensions available through Chrome. There are thousands of extensions for all purposes available in the Chrome Web Store. When it comes to choosing between similar extensions we recommend looking at their rating and how frequently they update to ensure you are using the best of the best.

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc.

1404 140th Place N.E., Bellevue, WA 98007

PSPINC Creates Tools For Your Business

Pacific Software Publishing, Inc. is headquartered in Bellevue, Washington and provides domain, web, and email hosting to more than 40,000 companies of all sizes around the world. We design and develop our own software and are committed to helping businesses of all sizes grow and thrive online. For more information you can contact us at 800-232-3989, by email at info@pspinc.com or visit us online at https://www.pspinc.com.

#BrowserExtensions #Chrome #Google #GoogleChrome #WebBrowser #WebDevelopment #Website

Find out How your Website is Performing

Sep

12

image source: pixabay.com

Google Analytics is a good way to see how your website is performing. You can see how many people visited and how they behaved (did they exit right away vs. staying on the site to browse?) and even better, you can learn where they’re coming from, what language they speak, and other demographic information. You can also use Google Webmaster Tools to evaluate your web performance. Both are free tools provided by Google:

Analytics:
https://analytics.google.com/analytics/

Webmaster Tools:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/

Webmaster Tools require you to embed HTML into your site. This HTML file is provided once you setup your website on Google Webmaster Tools. You will need to have access to your web server via FTP and place it on the website root directory. Basically, Google needs to “crawl” your site to take advantage of this tool.

Google Webmaster Tools work great in conjunction with Analytics because Webmaster Tools can provide you more detailed information on how people are finding you. It can also point you to issues and problems with your site, such as any broken links or missing pages called “404 Not Found” errors.

The biggest advantage of using Google Webmaster Tools for business is seeing how customers find you online. It provides data on the number of ad impressions or page views generated from search engines. You can also see the click through rates (CTR) from Google to your site.

In short, Google Webmaster Tools gives you the data you need to analyze how people are finding you and what’s driving traffic to your website, while Google Analytics can give you the data on who the visitors are and how they behave once they arrive on your site.

This kind of knowledge is powerful for your business and we encourage taking advantage of these free tools.

#Analytics #Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #Google #GoogleAnalytics #GoogleWebmasterTools #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology

Making Sense of Google AdSense and AdWords

Sep

5

Sometimes we “techies” choose names for our products and services that don’t make a lot of sense and often warrants further explanation. When you first see a service like Google AdWords or Google AdSense, we don’t blame if you if you’re puzzled, and we’re here to help make AdSense make more sense to you.

Let’s cover some basics. Google makes money by selling ads on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis, which has become the industry standard for online advertising. Via Google AdWords, A business can create an ad which gets displayed on Google. If a user clicks on that ad during a search, Google charges the business an agreed upon price for that click.

PPC ads are available in different forms: text ads and display ads.

Text ads show up on Google search results based on the keywords and phrases you choose. They are marked “Ad” if you take a closer look and they tend to show up before the organic results.

Display ads can show up on other websites based on your searches browsing history. For example, if you have shopped cars online, Google might display an ad for cars while you browse the morning news on your regular news site. That’s because your news website has contracted with Google to display these ads via a platform called Google AdSense. In return, they will receive payments from Google based on the PPC performance of the display ads.

In short, AdWords is for businesses seeking to advertise. AdSense is for websites or blog owners seeking to monetize their space by allowing AdWords ads to appear next to their content.

#AdSense #AdWords #Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #Google #PSPinc #PayPerClick #SmallBusiness #Technology

Local SEO is Key in Geomarketing

Aug

13

image source: pixabay.com

We’ve been discussing how geomarketing and local SEO are critical to a company’s online success. Let’s review the key components of local SEO so you can strengthen your geomarketing efforts.

Local SEO is a way to optimize your online presence in a specific location (or multiple areas). There are a few critical components in local SEO:

Business Location

Your business loses credibility when location information isn’t obvious online. Everyone is cautious of fake sites these days; location information legitimizes your business. Search engines also try to provide end users more relevant information, therefore not having your business address or location weakens your online presence in search results. Search engines will look at who you are and where you are to provide accurate local search results to users. So be sure you list your address and the locations you serve within your web content.

Google My Business

One of the most important tools for local SEO is Google My Business. Those who have not yet claimed your business on Google, you really need to take immediate action and do so. Same is true for Yahoo or Bing if you care for them as well. Claiming your business is easy, just go to https://www.google.com/business/ and follow instructions on the screen.

For Geomarketing purposes, it’s important to make sure your business address is claimed and confirmed via a postcard with Google. Google does not like fake claims to business, therefore they use good old-fashioned means to verify your address by sending you a postcard with a code.

Other benefits include the ability to get customer reviews and get a pin on Google maps.

Citations

Aside from search engines, be sure to check any relevant business listings on Yelp and Facebook. You really need to be on top of these popular sites because you want to make sure your information is consistent and accurate across platforms (checking your hours and contact info too). If you don’t claim your business, you leave it open for someone else to hijack your business online.

Remember, search engines are trying to provide relevant information to end users. If you are not in control of your information online, you will lose the chance to earn that local publicity and the leads it could bring in.

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #GeoMarketing #Google #LocalSEO #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology

Tune up your Geomarketing Campaigns

Aug

8

image source: pexels.com

Geomarketing is a powerful tool where we business owners can use people’s smartphone location information to our advertising advantage. There are over 250 million smartphone users in the U.S., which means about 3 out of 4 people has a smartphone. It’s not too far off to state that just about everyone except babies and small kids have a device of their own!

Not everyone has location information enabled on their device, but it’s safe to say enough of us have it turned on. Many large SNS and online services capture this location information and we, as small business owners, can take advantage of such knowledge in order to be more effective and efficient in our efforts to reach our targeted audience.

Google likes to show “relevant” information by providing local search information near you. This means you have a better chance to get engaged with potential customers near you. In general, customers are more likely to choose companies near them. Which means if your business doesn’t have a local presence on the search engines, you’re missing a huge marketing opportunity.

But you must make sure your web content is also optimized for local marketing. What does that mean?

First, you need to make sure you insert local keywords into your content, such as cities and states. If you’re outside of a city limit, you really need to put some effort into using location names and service area zip code information within your content. Content is king but you have to add in keywords naturally. Overdoing it will make your content feel like a scam to both visitors of your site and search engine crawlers.

Consider creating a web page optimized for a specific city or area so people land on information that’s relevant to them. Or consider paid ad campaigns targeting people in a specific city, town or zip code. By limiting the areas in which you advertise online, you can control your campaign cost at the same time. You can use your geotargeted landing page in your paid ads to get better conversions.

There are many ways to use geomarketing for your business but have a goal in mind and a tracking method in place such as Google Analytics. There is more than one way to find success online, but it takes time and effort to tune up your campaigns.

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #GeoMarketing #Google #LocalSEO #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology

What is Geomarketing?

Aug

6

image source: pexels.com

“Geomarketing” is a relatively new term combining two words: geography and marketing. It’s the practice of using geographic location information in our marketing activities. With today’s technology, even companies that lack the large marketing budgets can find ways to access demographic information about their customers, allowing them to really target a specific audience when it comes to marketing.

Defining what “geo” means as it pertains to technology can help you understand the opportunities and limitations of geomarketing, so let’s dig deeper.

The word “geo” means “relating to the earth,” and when it comes to technology, “geo” means any form of location intelligence. For example, when your cell phone tracks your location to the point it knows what store you’re at, what map location you’re looking for, or it can reference the location tags in your social media posts.

The opposite end of geotargeting is geofencing, which acts as a boundary of sorts and limits the geographical area in which you can advertise. Companies that use geotargeting tools can really pinpoint the potential customers in their target area, helping them advertise more efficiently and effectively.

We will cover some examples in the following articles so you can take advantage of today’s geomarketing technology to better advertise your business online.

#Blog #BusinessTips #ENnews #GeoFencing #GeoMarketing #Google #LocalSEO #PSPinc #SmallBusiness #Technology

PSPINC Official Company Blog

freespace

What is a Customer Journey?

The Acquisition Stage

Getting Customers to the Purchasing Stage

How Loyal Customers Play a Role

How You Can Improve Your Site's SEO Through Content

Adding Effective Keywords

Improving Readability

What is the Metaverse?

How Tech Companies are Building Out the Metaverse

The Potential Pitfalls of the Metaverse