Best of Utah Companies

July 6, 2010 – 11:48 am

The following companies are some of Utah’s finest. Each stands out for being among the best in their respective industry.

Highland Cove is one of the best Utah assisted living center. This senior citizen community is located conveniently in Salt Lake City on 14 acres of land, giving it a calm and serene environment. The beautiful lawn contains two miles of walking paths to provide a great opportunity for exercise for the residents. With Highland Cove’s full staff, they provide many different services to meet the needs of the residents, including physical therapy, housekeeping, award winning meals, church, and a beauty and barber shop. This Salt Lake City retirement home stays active with many fun activities like bingo, bridge, and trips. Tours are offered daily so that you can visit the grounds, facilities, community, and staff for yourself.

Adaptivity Pro is ready to meet your web design and internet marketing needs. This Utah web design company is always attentive to detail and delivers great results quickly. They can design and develop your website within 2 weeks. If you already have a website but need help getting it noticed, they excel in search engine optimization, making your site appear higher on Google and other search engines, increasing your site visitors and revenue. In addition to web development and SEO, Adaptivity Pro provides a variety of services – PPC, conversion improvement, social media marketing, comparison shopping engines, e-commerce sites, and more.

All States Landscaping has been one of the top Utah landscaping companies since they started in 1985. They are ready to make your landscaping dreams come true with their superior quality. All States Landscaping can complete a wide variety of landscaping projects to make your lawn look its best. Whatever your project, they can do it all – residential golf courses, waterfalls, rock walls, sprinklers, decks, fire pits, and more. All States approaches all projects with great creativity, meaning your lawn will be transformed into a unique creation.

When you’re suffering from back pain or are unsatisfied with your current medical treatment, make an appointment with Salt Lake City chiropractor, Dr. Bob Seiler. More than just a chiropractor, Dr. Seiler uses a holistic approach to chiropractics and wellness, meaning he focuses on your overall health. By focusing on your total health rather than a few isolated symptoms, Dr. Bob Seiler can better treat your ailments. Utah chiropractor Dr. Seiler also uses a natural approach to medicine by suggesting and incorporating herbal remedies.

A Act of Love Adoptions is the leading adoption agency in Utah. The agency was founded in 1993 by Kathy Kunkel. Kathy and her husband have adopted 8 of their 10 children, so they understand the process of adoption from personal experience and can easily related to the struggles and emotions of those they work with. A Act of Love specializes in domestic infant adoptions and helps over 100 children find their forever homes every year.

Spackman Drywall is ready to complete any drywall and painting job across the state of Utah. The company is fully licensed and insured and comes with solid references and referrals. Spackman Drywall focuses on high quality work and ensures that all customers are completely satisfied with their work. This Salt Lake City Utah drywall company offers competitive prices and always delivers very high quality work.

Avalon Hills is the top Utah eating disorder treatment center. With only 12 patients per building, Avalon Hills’ staff can give each patient the time and attention they need to battle and overcome their struggles with an eating disorder. The staff tailors treatment to the needs of each individual patient and uses both scientific and holistic approaches. Avalon Hills is a Salt Lake City eating disorder treatment center for anyone struggling with bulimia or anorexia – man, woman, adult, or teenager.

Irontown Homes are the best Utah modular home builders. No project is too large or small – they will do a small home for a couple or a multi-million dollar modular home. Irontown Homes can customize the home to fit your needs and budget. One way costs can be cut down is by having the home built in a factory. Irontown Homes is concerned for the environment and can build green homes that help you reduce your carbon footprint.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Six Web Analytics Metrics

February 26, 2010 – 10:13 pm

Knowing what web metrics to monitor can be a daunting task sometimes.  There are some basic ones you should keep track of while you have SEO, PPC, or other online marketing strategies running.  If I had to choose six web metrics for you to track these would be what they are:

1. Conversions – I would track the conversion ratio of people filling out your online request or completing a website sale.  Although this excludes people viewing your contact page and calling you on the phone it does narrow down to a specific demographic of people taking a definitive action to learn more about your products or services. It  captures those people requesting more information.

2. Visitors – This metric is fairly obvious as to why it is important – to see how many people are coming to your website.  This will encompass overall marketing efforts (search engine optimization, pay-per-click, online marketing, tradeshows, events, offline marketing, etc.) and if they are bringing more eyes to your website or not.

3. Bounce Rate – This metric shows how many web visitors came to your website and immediately left.  This is a good analytic to monitor to see if the quality of traffic is good or not.  If web visitors are searching for a product/service you do not offer or if you do offer what they are looking for but your website does not do a good job of portraying that you offer that service/product users will immediately leave.  The lower this number becomes the better.

4. Time on Site – This is a good metric to watch as it shows the interest level of web visitors and if they are finding the information they are looking for.  If they are staying on your website for a long time they are most likely digesting useful information.  Although in some cases the opposite is true (users may be on the website for a long time because they are searching for information they can not find).  In general this is not the case as internet users have a very short attention span and generally leave a website if they can not find what they are looking for.

5. Top Web Content – This report is useful in determining characteristics of your target audience (at least the ones making it to your website). You can find out what information they are looking for the most, where they are spending the most time reading, what webpages are more likely to encourage someone to contact you in the end, etc.

6. Keywords – This report is more in-depth than the above reports but is useful because it will show you the top keywords people are finding your website on.  It will help you learn more about your web visitors by learning what keyword phrases they are using, what they are looking for, , and how they reference your products & services.  You can also filter out your company name from the keyword list to find a better list of terms of people who are looking for what you offer but do not necessarily know about you yet.  You can also filter between paid and non-paid keywords.

*I would always compare these to the last month so you can see the difference and how things are improving or becoming worse, what areas need help, etc.  There are tons of reports and metrics in Google Analytics which you could waste all day mulling over.   If you want a quick snapshot of what is going on, making positive strategic decisions based off of these, and learning more about your target audience every month these are the metrics I would focus on if I were you.  If you need help putting together your first month analysis I would be more than happy to help you understand what to look for and how to gain useful insight from it.  Contact me anytime if you want assistance.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Good Examples of E-commerce Usability

February 11, 2010 – 10:29 pm

Notes from my day – Here are a few examples of sites that have best practices in
place for conversion improvement/persuasion architecture:

1.  http://www.ice.com/ – they do a good job on the homepage mixing
promotions and products together well.  On the homepage some key
elements are the contest, why shop ice, search dropdowns on left,
newsletter subscription, ‘features’ categories on left, etc.  Their
product pages have good photos, some even have videos, customer
ratings, (small add-to-cart button is bad, it should be bigger),
product details, and live chat (price should be more noticeable too)

2.  http://www.shoeline.com/ – on the homepage they do a good job of
categorizing shoes into every possible category but keeping it easy to
find what you are looking for at the same time.  Brand is important to
them so they list those well too.  The product pages have nice big add
to cart buttons, price is easy to see/view.  The ‘return history’ is
something that really helped them out, the product descriptions are
shorter than I would like but very descriptive and use bullet points.

3.  http://mycacties.com/ – this one is a magento store.  They do an
excellent job on the product pages of keeping it simple yet giving the
information required in order to make a decision to purchase or not.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Utah Internet Marketing & Web Design

January 18, 2010 – 9:06 pm

If you are looking for a utah web design company that focuses on long-term internet marketing you have come to the right place, if that is not what you are seeking let us know and we may be able to refer you to the correct company.

Our philosophy is basically centered under the idea of “if no one goes to your web site what good is it???” We help our clients use the internet as an effective marketing and sales tool; we make web sites that people can find.

We do web design that is focused on getting you business, one that should attract customers through internet marketing and help increase your revenue. Our services are best suited for start-up businesses or small business’ that need a web site to help their company grow.

We accomplish this through internet marketing methods such as search engine marketing and pay per click advertising. We will setup your web site so that people searching in the major search engines for keywords related to your business will find your website. For example if you sell picture frames someone may go to yahoo or google and type in ‘picture frames’ and your site would come up as on of the first selections they have to choose from.

We focus on web design and internet marketing and are located in Utah but can work with any client nationwide.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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5 Internet Marketing Tips

January 18, 2010 – 8:59 pm

1. Don’t try to trick the search engines

This mistake is so common that it is impossible to fix. Although I admit sometimes it will work it usually does not; for two reasons: First, search engines don’t like to be tricked, and while a shady web site marketing technique may work for a while eventually Google/Yahoo/etc. will find out and your site could be banned from teh search engine forever. Second, and even more important, many web designer get so involved in getting high rankings in search engines they forget about their customer. They end up with a website that comes up #1 in their keywords, but people click on it and leave after 2 seconds. Why is this? Because all the effort has been put into marketing and none into quality content/information and layout. You can have all the traffic you want but if they do not take an action on your website it is all in vain.

2. Develop Quality Web Content

Quality Content is far too often under-valued. The effects of quality content go beyond search engines into the realm of real internet marketing strategies. This is also a very difficult internet marketing strategy to master. You really need to delve into the minds of your customers or clients and discover what they are REALLY looking for. Usually what a company owner or web designer thinks a customer wants is far from the truth. A simple example would be a car dealership; the car dealership puts out pictures of available cars and features, however the customers are really looking for a price on cars and financing options. If you find the right information to publish online you will be light years ahead of your competition.

3. Be Proffesional

A customer’s first impression is often the company’s website. You need to make a landing impression the first time they visit, be professional. I am sure there are some of you out there who have went to a website and thought it was fabulous just to find out the company was a little hole in the wall in a slum area of town, or the opposite can be true as well (a poor-looking website for a outstanding corporation). Remember to match your website with your organization as well. Customers will already have an idea of what your company should be like from your website, and if this doesnt fall true they may decide to abandon you.

4. Use other forms of advertising

Of all things; please don’t rely on internet marketing and internet advertising as your sole source of your marketing efforts. You need to combine your efforts and have them coordinate with each other. Does this mean having an expensive television commercial campaign? No, it means just mixing things up a bit. You could send out a newsletter to your customers, try direct mail, cold calling, networking, handing out business cards when you have the chance, etc. Just dont get too caught up in internet marketing or you may be ignoring other gold mine marketing opportunities.

5. Use Online Promotions

Just like any other form of marketing online advertising may require a little ‘boost’ to get your customer to take the finally dive into deciding to use your company for their needs. Promotions are the ideal way to fill this gap online. You can use such methods as discounts, specials, online-only prices, bonus add-ons, limited-time offers, etc.

Popularity: 3% [?]

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