Google Analytics provides you with valuable data on your visitors, but Google Tag Manager will take your conversion rate optimization
Learn with SiteCare
The internet waits for no one...
This is why the SiteCare team is here to give you the knowledge and tools you need to make the strongest moves toward digital success.
Our “Learn” project will walk you through everything you need to know about maintaining a WordPress website, growing your brand through inbound marketing efforts, and using marketing analytics to track and measure your performance and growth over time.
Unfamiliar with these concepts? Don’t worry — we’ve got you. We’ll demystify confusing marketing concepts and tackle your most pressing questions.
Who are we?
SiteCare is a world leader in WordPress support and lead generation solutions. With clients around the globe, our team of trustworthy and knowledgeable professionals empowers businesses to reach their digital goals through premium digital services, including WordPress maintenance, lead generation, site coaching, and more.
WordPress
WordPress is a popular content management system (CMS) and website builder that allows users to start their own blog, build and manage personal or professional websites, and even sell products online. It enables anyone, even those with limited to no coding and web design experience, to create feature-rich websites, blogs, or online stores for their unique purposes.
WordPress has come a long way since its first release in 2003. Created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, it was initially intended as a fork of b2 — WordPress’s precursor project estimated to have been installed on approximately 2,000 blogs by May 2003.
Learn more about WordPress.
WordPress
Hosting
Believe it or not, your web host can make or break the success of your WordPress site. From loading speed to SEO strength, your web host plays a critical role in how well your site runs, which is why choosing the right web hosting company from the start is crucial.
WordPress
Security
WordPress is the leading content management system and web builder, powering 40 percent of the web — including the official White House website and Microsoft’s blog.
That said, being number one comes with a price. Its open-source nature and its popularity mean that its various elements — the core software, themes, and plugins — are hot targets for hackers.
WordPress
Maintenance
WordPress’s offerings are fast-growing and expanding, with more features and functions being added and perfected almost daily. Relevant “housekeeping” will help ensure you keep pace and avoid any problems. Better yet, your website will be up-to-date and operating as the robust system your visitors and customers expect.
WordPress
Themes
The design of your website is important because it affects how your audience perceives your brand. Just as a powerful theme is an important element of a good screenplay, it’s also a crucial part of web design.
WordPress
Plugins
When you download and install your WordPress site, you automatically get the most important features right “out of the box.” It already comes with three default themes, built-in comments, SEO optimization, and importers.
Latest WordPress Insights
Inbound
Marketing
Inbound marketing is a business and sales methodology that focuses on drawing customers in (rather than reaching out to them) with high-quality, useful content that is tailored to be relevant to a specific audience.
With inbound marketing, brands attract prospects by creating valuable, relevant content and meaningful experiences that anticipate customer needs and pain points. This approach typically involves a combination of tactics, including search engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing.
Learn more about inbound marketing.
Lead generation
Lead generation involves marketing activities that attract online users to your website or app so you can further engage them in conversations around your products and services.
Once on your site, these users are encouraged to fulfill a desired action, such as making a purchase, subscribing to a newsletter, or contacting your sales team for more information about your offerings.
Learn more about Lead Generation.
Search Engine
Optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, helps you increase the quality and quantity of traffic coming to your site, which means it helps you target people who are genuinely interested in the products or services you offer.
Learn more about SEO.
On-Page SEO
On-page search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing pages on a website for a chosen topic or keyword to help the page gain better visibility on a search results page.
Learn more about On-Page SEO.
Off-Page SEO
Off-page search engine optimization (SEO) refers to all the tactics you can implement outside of (or beyond) your website to help you improve your search engine rankings.
Learn more about Off-Page SEO.
Paid Media
Advertising
Paid media advertising is a branch of digital marketing that enables brands to promote their products and services on popular online platforms using paid ads.
Learn more about Paid media advertising.
Latest inbound marketing insights
Marketing analytics
Marketing analytics is the collection and study of data from various online marketing campaigns and platforms.
In the earlier days of marketing, advertisements ran in newspapers and on radio channels, but there was no way to understand if the ads were working. We weren’t able to assess if the right audience saw an ad and how many people bought a product or service after seeing it.
The objective of marketing analytics is to assess the efficacy and performance of your marketing tactics so that informed business decisions can be made about the future direction of a particular strategy.
Learn more about marketing analytics.
Latest marketing analytics insights
There are various ways of tracking conversations – call tracking is one that helps measure the performance of your advertising
Google announced its plans to retire Universal Analytics, replacing it with Google Analytics 4 (GA4) by October 1, 2023. by
If you’re not tracking visitors with funnels yet, it’s time to start. Conversion rate optimization or CRO is not about
Forms are one of the most common and valuable conversion actions you can track. By tracking form submissions, you can
When you work to produce high-value assets such as white papers or infographics regularly, it is essential to track your
The Podcast
Whether you’re a business owner, seasoned marketing professional, or just starting out, the Smart Marketing podcast will help advance your knowledge by sharing the latest in SEO, paid advertising, email marketing, content marketing, social media, and conversion optimization.
Your hosts — Jason Bagley and Justin Lester — bring you regular, actionable digital marketing tips, tactics, and strategies that you can use to improve your marketing.
Jason Bagley is the VP of Digital Strategy for SiteCare and Justin Lester, the founder of Ruby Digital, a digital marketing agency from Cape Town, South Africa.
Your hosts — Jason Bagley and Justin Lester — bring you regular, actionable digital marketing tips, tactics, and strategies that you can use to improve your marketing.
Jason Bagley is the VP of Digital Strategy for SiteCare and Justin Lester, the founder of Ruby Digital, a digital marketing agency from Cape Town, South Africa.
Latest Podcasts
Frequently Asked Questions
WordPress FAQs
What is a CMS?
Short for “content management system,” a CMS is software designed to manage and publish online content on a website. Whether used for handling written content, photos, graphics, videos, music, or all of the above, a CMS is crucial for empowering non-developers to create and maintain a successful website or blog regardless of their technical experience and knowledge.
What are the most common WordPress security threats?
Brute-force login attempts, DDOS attacks, Backdoors, Pharma hacks, SQL injections, Malicious redirects, Cross-site scripting attacks.
Are some WordPress security updates automatic?
The WordPress Security Team resolves some security threats with automated security enhancements. These enhancements update and install automatically, with no action required from the site owner or administrator.
Where can I see WordPress security notifications?
When a new release becomes available, a notification will appear on your site dashboard to alert you to upgrade your WordPress software.
Where can I see what changes have been made to my version of WordPress?
After a manual upgrade, you will be redirected to the About WordPress screen for details of changes. You will receive an email after an automatic update has been completed detailing the changes.
What’s the difference between WordPress categories and tags?
If your website runs on WordPress, you may already be familiar with categories and tags, which are used to organize your content by topic. Establishing a logical taxonomy for your content is critical, but maintaining that taxonomy can sometimes go off the rails. If you aren’t sure if you are using WordPress categories and tags correctly, never fear. We can help you audit and reorganize your categories and tags.
SEO FAQs
Does link building still matter?
Google’s algorithm cleverly uses links to rank websites. A variety of variables are considered; however, some of the factors that are considered by the Algorithm are whether it is from a trusted and relevant source. The ideal link sends relevant, targeted traffic from one site to another.
Links are one of the top three ranking factors. To create a good SEO strategy, it is important to consider that it is not the quantity of the links that matter, but rather the quality. The ideal link-building strategy should aim to include as many quality links as possible.
What are the most commonly used search engines?
There are roughly seven search engines that are used today across the world. These range from sheer numbers to be the only search engine available. These are the most commonly used search engines:
1. Google
2. Bing
3. Baidu (Chinese search engine – This is due to the large population in China)
4. Yandex (Russia)
5. DuckDuckGo
6. Yahoo!
7. Contextual Web Search
Another to mention would be Yippy Search. This search engine is focused on uncovering or locating hard-to-find information typically located within the deep web.
Should I optimize only for Google?
No, it would be best if you focus your optimization efforts with humans in mind first.
Once you have created and optimized content for people, you can look at the search engines. Google is the most popular search engine but don’t forget about Bing or DuckDuckGo.
What are long-tail keywords?
Long-tail keywords are terms that contain three or more words. The intention is typically more transactional in nature.
How often should I update my blog?
The answer here is to focus on quality over quantity. Freshness is a factor that search engines consider, but the quality is far more important in the long run.
To better understand how often you should be publishing content, you need to review what your competitors are doing. How often are they publishing content, and can you match the same amount of posts per day or week? If not, ensure that you are creating valuable content as often as time allows you.
What is a good length for a post or article?
Again, review what your competitors are doing in terms of content length. Studies have shown that the top ten sites ranking on page one have an average word count of 1,447 words on average. However, this is not the rule. The more direct answer is how long it takes to answer the question as directly and concisely as possible. It’s also important to think about how much value you can add with a longer-form piece of content.
Where do I start my SEO strategy?
The starting point is understanding what people are searching for (keywords) and how you can solve their problems.
The next starting point would be to do an SEO audit on your website to gauge where there is room for improvement. Setting the foundation is critical to a successful SEO strategy.
Is SEO dead?
No, SEO is not dead. Tactics and methods within the search engine optimization field have changed, and new tactics are available, but as long as people use search engines, SEO is still going strong.
What’s the difference between WordPress categories and tags?
If your website runs on WordPress, you may already be familiar with categories and tags, which are used to organize your content by topic. Establishing a logical taxonomy for your content is critical, but maintaining that taxonomy can sometimes go off the rails. If you aren’t sure if you are using WordPress categories and tags correctly, never fear. We can help you audit and reorganize your categories and tags.
Can you help me fix negative SEO?
Yes. Negative SEO can hurt your website for years to come, but our team can help you fight back against these attacks by disavowing malicious backlinks, creating great content, and making sure you are employing white hat tactics going forward.
What is a good SEO ranking?
According to a study conducted by Ignite Visibility, the top three positions are good rankings according to the CTR. We have highlighted this below:
- Position one sees a CTR of 43.32%
- Position two sees a CTR of 37.36%
- Position 3 sees a CTR of 29.90%
While we often target the top three positions on a results page, we need to be ranking in these positions for the right keyword. It is pointless ranking in the top 3 for a set of keywords that do not target the right audience or search intent. Focus on the audience and search intent before rankings.
Email Lead Generation FAQs
Do you build prospect lists?
- We don’t build prospects lists due to the low response and conversion rates we see when sending emails to these lists. We know reaching out to a warm audience, yields 5 to 10 times better response rates. If you do require prospects lists to be built, we can introduce you to a few of our trusted partners who can build prospecting lists for you.
Do you use a third-party service to deliver emails?
- No, we send our emails through your email account. Because all emails we send are sent from your email address, you’ll even see them in your “Sent” folder.58
Why is it important to clean up my email list?
- Cleaning up your email list improves the deliverability rate of your emails and strengthens your domain’s reputation by decreasing bounce rates, increasing open and click rates, and reducing spam complaints. Purging your list of unengaged subscribers also empowers you with more accurate reporting data and can even save you money if your email marketing service charges you per subscriber.
How often should I clean up my email list?
- Generally, we recommend scrubbing your email list every year to get rid of any invalid email addresses and potentially remove email addresses that haven’t opened any of your emails in the past 6 months.
Do “out-of-office” replies count as replies or bounces in a cold email outreach campaign?
- An out-of-office reply is automated and can be sent for various reasons that wouldn’t count as a bounce or a reply. A bounce occurs when the email couldn’t be delivered for whatever reason – an out-of-office is actually a confirmation that someone has received the email; they just haven’t been able to read it.
- Keep tabs on these auto-replies and take note of when they occur most often. An out-of-office isn’t a stop sign, though! In fact, it would be a good idea to channel these replies into a follow-up flow, allowing you a second (and third) chance of reaching someone who hasn’t seen your email yet and is likely returning to an overflowing inbox after their mid-year break.
What happens when a prospect replies?
- When a prospect replies, we ask that you keep the reply in your inbox for 24 hours so that our software can pick up the reply and remove the prospect from the sequence, ensuring that they no longer receive any more emails. Clients can then take over the conversation and reply to the prospect like any other email. From here on, it is up to the client to foster the conversation with the prospect.
- If a prospect responds negatively, unfortunately, this is part and parcel of cold emailing. It will happen. We recommend just leaving the reply in your inbox for 24 hours so that our software can pick up the reply and remove the prospect from the sequence, ensuring that they no longer receive any more emails, and not responding. Once a prospect has responded, and the reply has been left in the inbox for 24 hours, that is the end of the campaign for them and they will no longer receive any communications
What is the difference between email drip campaigns and cold email campaigns?
Both types of campaigns have the same goal: getting the customer from their current point into a stage where they’re accepting your meeting request and using your service or product.
The key difference is that the email drip campaign customer opted into your subscriber list, while the cold email campaign audience consists of leads you seek out.
How does cold email marketing actually work?
We’ve put together a comprehensive guide to explain SiteCare’s process and everything you need to know about cold email marketing.