It doesn’t matter how fantastic your content or design is inside your email if no one even opens it. If you can’t get them to open it, then you have no idea whether or not your content is effective, and you’re just shooting in the dark. So how do you break through the noise of a full inbox? With a … Read More

The beautiful thing about the internet is the sheer wealth of information and knowledge that is available at your fingertips. Most people would be lost without it, but digital marketers would have an impossible job to do without the ability to share expertise and hot tips.  The Digital Strike team relies on a variety of digital marketing resources every day. … Read More

Remember dial-up? Watching a two-minute YouTube video took thirty minutes because it took so freaking long to load. Nowadays, 47% of people expect pages to load in just two seconds or less. Failure to meet that expectation?  Your conversions will tank. 40% of website visitors will abandon the page if it takes more than three seconds to load. We’re spoiled by high-speed internet. … Read More

Establishing credibility is essential no matter what industry you’re in or what kind of business you have. There is a limited amount of brands that don’t need to build credibility anymore because they are, well, huge. I’m talking about Nike, Apple, Target, etc.  People know those companies are legitimate already, so they can speak for themselves. But those of us … Read More

You’ve probably heard your marketing team talk about it all the time – The Customer Conversion Funnel. “It’s all about getting customers to go through the conversion funnel.” “This strategy is for ‘top of the funnel’ customers.” “We have to funnel customers through the customer conversion funnel.” We never shut up about the funnel, honestly. Which is why we thought … Read More

Writing for different platforms isn’t exactly easy. A professional writer might be able to transition between writing for social media to a blog post to email more easily, but if you’re a small business owner doing it all yourself, it’s difficult to know what to do for each platform. Let’s focus on writing for social media and email for now, … Read More

So you’ve decided to send out a newsletter or maybe we recommended you create one. But where do you begin? The key to any successful newsletter is the quality of your email list. Currently, you have zero subscribers, other than your current customer list and friends and family, but you’re looking for new opportunities. You could buy a list of … Read More

You know when you go to a website and it’s just…bad? You can’t find the navigation menu, the page isn’t loading correctly, or pop-ups are keeping you from seeing the page at all. That’s a bad user experience (UX). A user experience designer works to enhance user satisfaction with a website by improving the accessibility, usability, and pleasure provided in the … Read More

In the streaming mob of content that is consumed daily on the internet – from whatever people see at work to their social feeds – a lot gets missed. Your content is probably getting missed. Getting eyeballs and standing out is getting harder and harder but there are a few tactics you could try. You could pay for eyeballs through … Read More

You already know that good marketers LOVE data. No, not that kind of Data (unless you’re a Trekkie and a marketer).  More like data from Google Analytics: UTM parameters help segment out and give attribution to the appropriate channel in Google Analytics that the traffic is coming from.  First of all, what are UTM parameters? I’ll let Neil Patel take … Read More

Writing is hard. It doesn’t matter if you do it professionally or you have somehow become the main writer in the office without knowing how you got there. Some people make it look easy, and you’re baffled as to how they do that, but then you discover the existence of writing tools, designed by and for writers just like you. … Read More

You want your marketing dollars to generate new leads and engage current customers, but you also need that strategy to be cost-effective. Email marketing is the answer. And it’s metal AF. Don’t believe me? Just check out these email marketing stats that’ll melt your face off faster than Tool’s Lateralus album: Email is the third most influential source of information for … Read More

One of the greatest (and sometimes the most frustrating) aspects of social media is the fact that it is always changing. And we’re not just talking platform limitations or developments or new, weird interfaces (we’re looking at you, Snapchat)—it’s the fact that every single Instagram post, Twitter hashtag, and Facebook changes the landscape forever.     Although the majority of … Read More

Ready to crush your local SEO with a top-notch location page? Hold up, wait a minute. What is a location page? And what is local SEO? Okay, say you want to search for “best taco places in STL.” All of the results on that page are there because of local SEO. It’s SEO for local businesses are in the community … Read More

Landing page vs. homepage. They’re the same thing, right? Just different names for the same thing. Wrong! Well, you can technically land on a homepage, but that doesn’t make it a landing page by any means. And you shouldn’t refer to them as if they’re interchangeable.  The fundamental difference is that you design them for different purposes. When you know … Read More

What came first – the chicken or the links? Wait. No. That’s not right. The content or the links! It’s a question we get asked a lot and one we wrestle with fairly often. The trouble is, both content and links are very important for any SEO strategy. Links send readers to your site and a lot of good content … Read More

Creating unique content on your company’s website has benefits you haven’t considered yet. Do you want people to keep coming to your website? Are you working on an SEO strategy to grow your organic traffic? Do you want to create brand awareness so you can draw new customers? And you need content to post on social media, right? Yes. To … Read More

Is SEO opportunity actually shrinking? Organic search opportunity has always been a constantly changing field.  Algorithm changes send everyone into a tizzy a few times a year.  There are changes on the results pages making ads bigger and more subtly labeled. “Spot 0” – that answer box you often see if your query is easily answerable – takes away another … Read More

Once you know how to write headlines, you can pretty much rule the world. First impressions are crucial, right? If you make a bad impression in front of your girlfriend’s parents, they’ll probably hate you forever. And if you write a bad headline, no one is going to read your article. People may say “never judge a book by its … Read More

TL;DR: SEO results take more time than you think. Almost every SEO client we have asks us, How long does SEO take for my website to be #1 in Google?” And it’s a valid question! Sometimes it seems like websites come out of nowhere and are ranking at #1 on multiple keywords and are raking in the organic traffic. Our … Read More

Can’t quite put your finger on what’s happened to your previously successful paid search campaign? This client couldn’t either and tasked us with trying to help them solve where things are going wrong. Here’s how we approached solving the problem. THE CLIENT Client A is a nationwide telecommunications company. They provide TV, internet, and phone services to customers primarily in Arizona, … Read More

It’s a phrase knowledgeble SEO specialists say all the time – “canonical tag.” Or maybe they say “rel=canonical” and you’re sitting in the meeting like: Then they come back and say “301 redirect” and you’re still confused. We’re here to clear up that confusion. But first, we should explain why any of this matters. If search engine crawlers look through … Read More

Ah, the end of the year: a time to reflect on the previous 12 months and a time to look to the future. 2017 brought us changes like screenless SEO (thanks, Alexa) and augmented reality. Given how quickly the world changes, and especially the internet world, we probably shouldn’t be making predictions for what 2018 will bring. But damn, does … Read More

Just like any relationship you have, whether it be personal or otherwise, it’s extremely important to have a healthy relationship with your digital marketing agency. You hired them to make your life easier and to hopefully grow your business in ways you can’t do yourself. But sometimes the compatibility just isn’t there.  This might be a little odd coming from … Read More

In the digital marketing world, there are a lot of misconceptions and myths (myth-conceptions, if you will) about how organic and pay-per-click campaigns work together.  We’ve heard and seen it all. But we have years of experience doing both PPC and SEO campaigns and we can definitively answer this ever-present question: Is a pay-per-click campaign going to affect my organic … Read More

Are you going crazy trying to get all of the dots on the Yoast SEO plugin to turn green? Do you have nightmares every night of red and orange dots that you cannot turn green no matter how desperately you try?  First of all, take a deep breath. It’s going to be okay. Like with any tool that helps you … Read More

“Have you heard about inbound marketing?” This is how a recent client call started. Then, to make things worse, they proceeded to ask, “How is HubSpot different from SEO?” Let’s put this conversation into perspective: Imagine for a moment you’re a pianist. You’re playing a show when an audience member approaches you and asks if you’ve heard of sheet music. … Read More

Back in 2014, mobile searches surpassed desktop searches, and search engine optimization was never the same. What does this mean for your company? First and foremost, it means that if your website isn’t mobile friendly, you will fall behind your competition. In fact, it is expected that in the very near future, Google will switch to an entirely mobile-first index, … Read More

You might be wondering: “Why am I not ranking first in Google for [INSERT KEYWORD]?” It’s not a bad question—it shows you value your business’ position in search engine results pages (SERPs) and understand that organic—or unpaid—search traffic can give you a continual stream of targeted traffic, qualified leads and, eventually, paying clients. But if you, too, are asking this … Read More

You know the old saying, the cobbler’s children have no shoes? Well, for us it’s true. For a long time, we’ve been our own worst client. We’ve been solely focused on solving our clients’ problems and let our own brand development and digital strategy execution take a back seat. Our old website just wasn’t showcasing who we are as a … Read More

Just because you’re on the track doesn’t mean you’ll win the race. Maybe you bought the shoes and paid the entrance fee, but if you didn’t train, you’d eat the dust of your competitors. It’s the same with local SEO ranking factors. Sure, at one time clean citations and proper Google My Business (GMB) categorizations were enough to rank in the … Read More

Businesses come to us wondering why their phone isn’t ringing off the hook after optimizing their local listings. “Why am I not ranking #1 in the local pack? We optimized our Google My Business listing.” This is a question we get a lot.  And here’s the answer: citation building and local listing management is just the beginning of local SEO. … Read More

Jealous of a competitor’s new website? Annoyed with poor performance month over month? Many website owners encounter a point in their website’s life when they just want to start from scratch. You see your competitor’s website brings in more business and just…looks better. But your business is good too! You have a lot to offer, but the customers just aren’t … Read More

As a small business owner, you have a lot going on.  From sales, day-to-day operations, accounting, ordering, etc., there’s a lot on your plate. There are only so many hours in the day, and due to this near-constant time crunch, one aspect of the business is understandably pushed to the side. Marketing. Your time and brainpower are already in such high … Read More