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Bite-Sized SEO for a Limited Budget

March 21, 2024

Since Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn’t a one-and-done process, it can easily overwhelm an organization’s resources. SEO is so much more than keyword research and content generation, and there are bite-sized efforts anyone can take to enhance their organic search results. Here is what the experts on our team recommend:

1. Focus on Local SEO

Local SEO is one of the higher-impact, lower-cost items. If you have a brick-and-mortar location and set business hours, this is a must. At its most basic, this step involves reviewing Google’s guidelines for local SEO and making sure your Google Business Profile, as well as Meta, Bing, and other platforms where your listing appears, are accurate, complete, and kept up to date. Consistency is important, so this is a place where you might consider paying the small monthly fee for a service that monitors and manages your listings to ensure your company information matches across all directories. Read one of our previous blogs in this SEO series to learn more about putting your business on the map with Google Business Profile and other tips on implementing a local SEO strategy.

2. Reframe Your Approach to Content

Quality content is important for SEO rankings and creating an engaged user experience. Focus on leveraging your team for ideas. Encourage them to track questions that clients and customers ask, as those can become topics for future content pieces. For those with the resources to generate relevant content themselves, 5 Horizons offers site reviews, competitor gap analysis, keyword research, and creative brief development to inform your content creation. Tip: If you don’t have the resources to write new content yourself or hire somebody to do it, try featuring your social feed on your website. This may require some up-front development work, but as long as your social channels are updated frequently, this can provide fresh content to encourage audience engagement.

3. Monitor Technical SEO and Website Performance

It’s vital for you to continuously look at and promptly adjust your website’s technical performance. Technical SEO can be monitored in Google Search Console, which will give you insights into major technical issues, such as broken links (404 pages). Page Speed Insights is a great resource that looks at Core Web Vitals, which are important web page performance metrics that can help you identify problems such as slow loading speeds and poor mobile performance. These services don’t cost anything and can help you significantly optimize your website.

Even when resources are limited, SEO is an important part of your web presence. Applying even a few additional steps to your existing SEO efforts could increase your search engine rankings and help you connect with your target audience. At 5 Horizons, we work with different SEO budgets and customize our approach for each client. Contact us to discuss how we can help your business grow, and read other blogs in our Demystifying SEO series.

Exploring New Features at Adobe MAX

March 20, 2024

Starstruck by Adobe MAX 2023 and Excited for the 2024 Conference

Last fall, our design team had the incredible opportunity to attend the Adobe MAX conference in sunny Los Angeles. Aside from the selfie-worthy expo hall and talented list of speakers, Adobe MAX also showcased an impressive number of innovative systems and programs.

With a new conference to look forward to in November, the design team shared their highlights, their favorite sessions, and the new tech that’s on the horizon:

1. Game-Changers for the Creative Industry

Some of the most exciting parts of Adobe MAX 2023 were the generative AI technologies shared during the keynote sessions. These updates offer the potential to revolutionize the way designers work, unleashing imaginations and simplifying complex tasks. A few of those impressive updates included:

Adobe Express

An all-in-one web app for print creation and social content, Adobe Express is a time-saving tool with simple animation capabilities. Another bonus is that it works seamlessly with other Adobe programs.

After the conference, our team started using Adobe Express as a stepping stone for creating some of our design work. Files can be locked and shared easily with other teammates to review in and out of the agency. Our team also shares design templates across departments, so project managers and strategists can quickly make text or image adjustments on projects with tight deadlines.

Adobe Firefly

Adobe’s AI program possesses the ability to generate images in a specific style, which can be fine-tuned utilizing examples or selected from existing references. Firefly can be used to add, remove, blend, or expand content in images. It is designed to be safe for commercial use and requires clever prompt writing to guide the bots to produce the best images, vectors, or patterns.

Our design team is still determining how they want to integrate Adobe Firefly into their work. It has limitations with generating faces and hands, perfecting realistic lighting, and relying solely on user input. This has huge potential to be used for expanding images to fit horizontal or vertical placements.

2. Sessions that Stood Out

The conference gave our design team a platform to connect with other creative professionals and exchange ideas and experiences. They attended various sessions, collected information, and shared their findings with each other. Here were their favorite sessions:

Laryssa’s Pick

“Powerful Personal Branding: Unmask Your True Identity” by Chris Do, Founder and CEO of The Futur

Chris Do delved into the captivating world of comics, pop culture, psychology, and storytelling to uncover powerful personal branding strategies. He spoke about assembling a team of collaborators who will help you achieve your mission.

Do explained the importance of creating a striking visual identity and how to remain consistent and authentic across all channels. He encouraged designers to identify three key points to focus on when developing their personal brand:

Identify your allies, sidekicks, archnemesis, rogues gallery of villains
Craft a compelling origin story, and discover your hidden superpower
Design an eye-catching visual identity and find your two-word brand

Melissa’s Pick

“For Type Lovers: A Guide to Animating Typography” by Zipeng Zhu, Founder of Dazzle Studio

“How do you go about making every day a razzle-dazzle musical?”

During their inspiring session, Zipeng Zhu, a queer immigrant artist, shared their story of an evolution of self, and how that manifested in their work. When they first immigrated to NYC from China, they aimed to blend in instead of standing out, but quickly realized their strength lay in the colorful exuberance in life and their creative work.

“We were all that kid that stayed up late making a poster, or making a zine — when did that become not fun?”

Showing off a mesmerizing collection of animation work, Zhu reminded us why we get up in the morning to create—whether it’s for a client or simply for the fun of making something for ourselves.

3. A Peek into the Future

Adobe MAX 2023 has given us a tantalizing peek into the future of creative technology, and we’re excited to see how these innovations will shape the world of design and creativity in the years to come:

Project Stardust revolutionizes image editing through object-aware AI. It automates complex image-editing tasks, making it accessible to users of all skill levels. The user will be able to edit objects instead of layers, developing natural, photo-realistic results.
Project Fast Fill brings Firefly’s generative AI to video to ease the addition, removal, or expansion of content in images with text prompts. It also offers an initial look at what human-prompted generative AI could enable inside Adobe video editing tools including Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Project Dub Dub Dub uses generative AI to auto-dub content in more than 70 languages and over 140 dialects, making content accessible to a broader audience. It can translate and match the speaker’s voice, tone, cadence, and acoustics of the original video. This instantaneous update saves a labor- and cost-intensive process and can be done in mere minutes.

Our design team absorbed as much information as they could at Adobe MAX 2023 and are very excited to see what Adobe MAX 2024 brings.

Education is at the heart of everything we do. If you are looking for a partner who is constantly exploring and learning new technology, we are ready to share our knowledge with you and solve your digital marketing problems. Let’s connect!

Advertising on LinkedIn in 2024

February 12, 2024

LinkedIn is one of the most efficient social media channels for advertising placements when it comes to reaching professional audiences. Whether you’re targeting prospective clients, students, or team members, LinkedIn offers a variety of ad types, helping you achieve specific goals and conversions. But with so many ad types to choose from, how do you know which one is the best for your objectives?

At 5 Horizons, we are no strangers to LinkedIn ads and can guide you through the different routes you can take when advertising on this social platform.

Types of LinkedIn Ads

Text and Dynamic Ads

Text and dynamic ads are other personalized formats that speak directly to your audience. Except this time, instead of appearing as a new message in their inbox, they pop up in a member’s feed, specifically on the LinkedIn right rail.

Text ads are only compatible with desktops and consist of a small image, a short headline, and a description. Dynamic ads look very similar, except they are tailored to members based on their LinkedIn profile data and also feature a call-to-action button. Dynamic ads can be implemented in three different formats:

Spotlight Ads—used to highlight a specific product, service, or event.
Follower Ads—aim to increase your page’s follower count.
Job Ads—hold the objective of driving quality candidates to your open positions.

All these formats act as “bite-sized” advertising avenues. With minimal copy and visuals, they’re intended to grab a person’s attention and entice them into learning more about your offerings.

Bottom Line

The variety of advertising opportunities on LinkedIn can be overwhelming, but a well-developed strategy can help narrow down the right ad format for you and your goals. As experts in social media advertising, 5 Horizons works with clients from various industries, using LinkedIn to tailor ads to their unique audiences. Contact us to learn more about how advertising on LinkedIn can help meet your objectives.

Unlocking SEO Potential at MozCon

January 25, 2024

A Look Back at MozCon 2023 as We Prepare for the 2024 Conference

In August 2023, our technology team attended MozCon 2023 in Seattle and spent two full days learning, talking, and exploring innovative ways to implement Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and all of the facets that surround best SEO practices.

Our team arrived back on the east coast ready to share all of their ideas with the full company and begin implementing everything they learned. After spending some time putting their new education into practice, they have highlighted the greatest takeaways from last year’s conference.

Here are the top three topics that our team highlighted as most important after MozCon 2023:

1. Google is a Digital Ecosystem

Google is only one search engine among many, but it stands out from all the rest because of its broad expanse of offerings. Google is now a social network, a business directory, a place to shop, a place to image search, an aggregator, and a personal assistant––all rolled into one.

Thinking of Google as a digital ecosystem encouraged our team to incorporate all Google had to offer into our strategy and web presence going forward. SEO is equally interconnected and needs to be woven into all layers of content, campaigns, websites, and ads from start to finish. Google is currently the expert on users’ motivations for search and data collection, making Google the key to connecting with targeted audiences.

How our team is using Google differently in 2024:

Not thinking of Google solely as a search engine
Not getting sucked into the algorithm-thinking SEO practices
Using Google’s offerings to find and retain target audiences
Exploring content beyond just web pages––especially indexed YouTube video
Focusing on identifying local link opportunities in addition to traditional backlinks

2. GA4 Offers Privacy Conscious User Data

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is a customizable tool our technology team uses to measure traffic and engagement across the websites that we create, optimize, monitor traffic, and study user behavior. In order to address privacy concerns, Google moved away from Universal Analytics (UA) and implemented the GA4 data structure to collect, store, and use data in a way that is compliant with privacy regulations in different countries/states while focusing on events rather than sessions. It uses modeling to estimate conversion data that can’t be observed directly without identifying users. GA4 aims to collect user web and app data in a privacy conscious manner while preparing for a cookieless browsing future.

How our team is leveraging GA4 in 2024:

We are using GA4 to track user behavior and sources of traffic
We are using the funnel report builder to analyze flows and track conversions
We are customizing our team’s navigation for easy access to useful reports
We are building custom audiences and using them for remarketing in Google Ads
We are using GA4 to measure the impact of our paid media efforts
We are using GA4 to create custom reports to extract key insights for decision making

3. AI and the Rise of Large Language Models

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new, but universal accessibility to it is. Like many, our team regards AI with equal parts skepticism and curiosity. While at MozCon our team approached new information about AI with an open mind and challenged their own beliefs to embrace experimentation.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing tool developed by OpenAI to generate human-like text based on input. OpenAI trained ChapGPT on a massive amount of text data from the internet, using a machine learning model known as a large language model (LLM). ChapGPT “learns” by identifying patterns in the data and uses them to make predictions.

After Open AI launched ChatGPT, many companies such as Microsoft and Google started to integrate ChatGPT into their search engines or created their own LLMs, such as LaMDA/Bard and Bing Chat.

How our team is leveraging AI in 2024:

Increasing efficiency as a digital partner and personal assistant
Solving problems and expanding research
Learning better skills for prompting AI
Integrating ChatGPT functionality into other applications
Increasing transparency when using AI and sharing it’s benefits with each other
Continuing to explore all that AI has to offer our company workflow

Our technology team was thrilled to learn all they could from MozCon in 2023 and are very excited to gain even more exposure to new technologies at MozCon in 2024.

Celebrating Our 2023 Wins + Planning for Our 2024 Successes

January 12, 2024

2023 brought 12 months of growth for our team. We welcomed four new employees and five new clients, putting in hundreds of hours building up our offerings.

As always, education and professional development are at the forefront of our company culture. Our team attended three conferences and exhibited at two, networking with new connections and expanding our skills in design and technology.

2023 was a website heavy year––our team built over 43 websites, spending over 1,000 hours writing, designing, constructing, and testing. We created nearly 500 digital ads and worked on 228 unique projects of varying complexities. Our data and tech team completed three extensive SEO audits and got the ball rolling on six more. We also launched two new Marketing Automation systems in Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud.

As we move into 2024, we are excited for the new opportunities on the horizon––including clients, design techniques, and innovative strategic methods––all delivered with the same quality and care we’ve prioritized for the last 11 years.

Visit our website for fresh ideas and upcoming trends on our Insights page, and take a look behind the curtain under Projects to see how we handled different client challenges. Follow us on social media for day-to-day updates or reach out through our contact form to chat with us directly.

At 5 Horizons we solve problems using creativity, technology, and data to help our partners grow. We look forward to being your partner in 2024.

– Pat Riley & Ben Sandman

Co-Founders, 5 Horizons

How to Increase Return Site Visitors

January 4, 2024

As we mentioned in the previous blog, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) isn’t one and done and needs to be frequently updated to maintain your website’s credibility and ranking. Search engines view repeat site visitors as a sign that your site provides valuable, trustworthy information. So, how do you increase return visitors to your website?

Identify Why People Should Come to Your Website

Answering the question of why people should come back to your site will help you pinpoint the site’s features you can enhance or move directly to your home page for easier navigation. At 5 Horizons, we work with clients from a variety of industries but want to provide a few examples for some of our most prominent ones.

Senior Living

People visiting the websites of senior living communities are most likely interested in the services and resources the community provides, as well as interacting with chatbots, reviewing the updated activities and events schedule, and searching for contact information.

Higher Education

Similarly, visitors tend to go to higher education websites to find resources for current, future, or returning students, look for upcoming events and contact information for various departments and offices.

Other

As the examples above indicate, the visitors’ intent is frequently similar throughout various industries. Some other reasons why people might visit your website include making a purchase, leaving a review, and using features such as a customer portal or an FAQ page.

Four Ways to Increase Return Site Visitors

With the reasons people come to your website in mind, consider implementing the following four steps into your online presence.

1. Optimize Your Visitors’ Favorite Landing Pages

This includes improving the user experience by putting the most important information on each page front and center, making the page layout intuitive and efficient, and the content easy to follow and understand. Optimizing your entire website’s navigation can also increase visits—utilize your menu bar to funnel visitors to the most important areas of your site.

2. Start an Email Newsletter

Email is a great way of engaging with your audience and connecting them to more of your content. The newsletter can link to website blogs and social media content, allowing you to repurpose the already existing content into micro-content shared across platforms.

3. Create a Customer Loyalty Program

Customer Loyalty Programs are a great way of encouraging loyal visitors to return to your website again and again. By offering an incentive in the form of discounts or other perks, you make people feel appreciated and motivate them to not only come back to your site but also to spread the word about your services.

4. Retargeting Ads

Running retargeting ads can help remind the people who previously interacted with your website to visit it again. This type of advertising also works by displaying ads to someone who engaged with your social media pages, watched a video, or connected with your brand at some point in time. You can place these ads through Google or Facebook, using them as reminders for your visitors.

There are more strategies for increasing your site visitors out there, but these four offer a solid starting point for any community, school, or business.

Follow our Demystifying SEO series to learn how SEO is more than just content, how it requires a thorough strategy and involves intent-focused keyword research. Or contact us to discuss conducting an SEO audit to help your business thrive.

Why SEO Isn’t One-and-Done

December 12, 2023

There isn’t a single person in marketing who hasn’t heard of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) or taken steps to implement an SEO strategy into their organization’s or business’ efforts. However, most people get stuck thinking that SEO is an item you can check off your to-do list. Instead, SEO is an ongoing process––a strategy that requires continuous attention, tweaking, and improvement.

What Makes SEO an Ongoing Process?

Changes in User Behavior

In the past, it was challenging to keep up with the most popular keywords or keyword phrases. Now, that task is made even harder by Google, which is not just looking for keywords anymore—it is also reviewing the intent behind the search by compiling a user profile. Understanding the “why” behind your audience’s search is a long process but one that will tremendously help your SEO results.

Evolving Marketplace

New technology, products, media, trends, etc. are constantly entering the marketplace, shifting the trajectory of the audience’s interests, hobbies, and likes. Anticipating these changes is difficult, but you can learn to adapt, pivot, or enhance your strategy and language in accordance with the market demands.

Algorithm Updates

To avoid search engine results page (SERP) manipulation, search engines frequently update the way they evaluate and rank websites when it comes to search results. These updates can have an immediate effect on your strategy’s performance, heightening the importance of promptly incorporating the current best SEO practices into your efforts.

How to Keep Up with SEO Over Time

Generate High-Quality Content

Populating your website with content that is relevant to your audience requires constant content generation. Uploading a few blogs to your site when implementing an SEO strategy and never writing another one again will make you rank lower on the SERP and prevent people from engaging with your website. That’s why it’s necessary to keep creating content that your prospective customers, clients, or students would want to interact with on a regular basis.

Maintain Your Website

On-page SEO is easy to keep in mind when you start optimizing your website. But as time goes by and you create new pages, you might forget to write meta titles and descriptions, making it harder for search engines to index your content. Continuously keeping your site organized will help your page rank higher.

Monitor Trends and Competition

Staying in the know of the new approaches search engines and your competitors take when it comes to SEO will help you adjust your own strategy if needed. Learning from the victories and mistakes of others is just as important as learning from your own, and it will help you stay afloat when search engines inevitably release updates that can affect your rankings.

It is vital to keep your SEO fluid and flexible to help your operations thrive and gather as many viable leads as possible. At 5 Horizons, we offer continuous SEO services that ensure your organization, business, or school reaches your target audience. Contact us today to learn more and follow along on our Demystifying SEO journey.

The Benefits of Focusing Your Strategy on Local SEO

Local SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps increase search result visibility for local businesses. If you rely on local customers, have a physical location, and serve a specific geographic area, local SEO is a strategy worth implementing to optimize your reach.

Benefits of Local SEO

1. More new and returning customers

With modern life being so fast-paced, people tend to add “near me” to their search engine inquiries or look for local businesses directly in Google Maps and other map apps. With successful local SEO, your business will appear in the top three results, increasing the chances of customers selecting it among your competitors.

2. Increased website traffic conversions

You can include the link to your website in directories such as Google My Business, which will result in highly qualified traffic. Site visits that come from local searches are from customers in the area who are ready to engage with the products or services your business offers.

3. Improved brand awareness

Having your business appear in global or local trustworthy publications and review sites (such as Yelp) can help generate more feedback, helping you take control of your reputation. Also, through high-quality link building, search engines and customers alike will feel more confident about your products or services, amplifying your business opportunities.

How to Implement Local SEO

Your strategy for implementing local SEO for your business stems directly from what you hope to achieve. Taking the above local SEO benefits as a guideline, here are some things you can do to rank higher in Google search, get noticed by more customers, receive better leads and targeted website traffic, and manage your reputation for increased brand awareness.

1. Perform a website SEO audit

Keeping local SEO in mind, check how well your website is performing. Does your website feature SEO elements that help ranking? Do you mention the specific geographic locations you want to target? Are your URL, meta titles and descriptions, and headers optimized? Do you have a location page on your website? Do you offer local content that could attract a local audience? These are just a few of the questions worth asking when performing an SEO audit.

2. Optimize your online presence

Create a Google My Business page and encourage your customers to share authentic reviews. Keeping this page active and updated will help your business rank higher in search results. But your online presence doesn’t stop with Google My Business. You have to make sure the content about your business continues to appear in online directories and citations. Reach out to local online publications to feature your business and link to it, which will help your website gain credibility for search engines and prospective customers alike.

3. Stay consistent

It is your responsibility to make it easy for people to contact you and find out where your business is located. Ensure your name, address, and phone number are the same everywhere online, and optimize your website for mobile to guarantee website traffic conversions for people who are on the go.

By implementing a local SEO strategy, you’ll increase your business recognition and gain more customers. Though the benefits of this approach are undeniable, building a successful local SEO strategy takes time. To streamline your journey, contact us to discuss conducting an SEO audit and other steps we can take to help your business thrive. You can also learn more about SEO by reading other blogs in our Demystifying SEO series.

Demystifying SEO

November 22, 2023

A new blog series for understanding the ins and outs of SEO.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process and strategy of increasing search result visibility for businesses. With technology changing and evolving every day, SEO strategies are constantly in flux.

In our new series Demystifying SEO, our team is doing a deep dive into the complexities of SEO and how you can begin implementing best practices into your own marketing plan.

The Basics

In the first section of the series, we’ll cover the basics:

How We Implement SEO

In the second section of the series, we’ll address the challenges surrounding SEO:

Where is SEO Going Next?

And in the third section of the series, we’ll cover where we think SEO is headed next:

Follow our Demystifying SEO series to learn how SEO is more than just content, how it requires a thorough strategy and involves intent-focused keyword research. Or contact us to discuss conducting an SEO audit to help your business thrive.

Content Marketing is Modern Marketing Evolved

November 10, 2023

Our Greatest Takeaways from Content Marketing World 2023

Content Marketing World (CMW) is a must-attend event for the writers on our creative team. From keynote speakers and breakout sessions to workshops and networking events, CMW provides insight on a diverse range of topics and new technology.

CMW 2023 took place in Washington, D.C. and delivered multiple days’ worth of professional development. The hottest topics fell into three distinct categories:

1. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

From day one, AI dominated the conversation, with panelists asking and answering poignant questions related to the emerging medium. Ann Handley, the Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, delivered a keynote address alongside Andrew Davis, professional keynote speaker and best-selling author, who boldly declared that AI is not a tool, but is instead a partner.

Handley claimed that AI will never be enough on its own and companies will always need exceptional writers to command the AI and finesse the output. Davis further emphasized Handley’s point in his session on AI, describing the technology as a cognitive collaborator for content creators.

Davis also introduced the concept of digital doppelgangers: content created at the crossroads of humans and AI. Davis suggested learning, training, and implementing AI practices that are ethical and transparent to create your own digital doppelganger. By improving your prompting skills, you can train AI to write like you––in your voice, for your audiences. Treating AI content like your rough draft (because it will be rough) can speed up your process and allow you to edit, rearrange, and expand the content until you develop your final draft.

AI is here to stay, but the industry of content creation is still identifying the boundaries of how and when AI should be used. Best practices should include being transparent about the use of your digital doppelganger. Honesty and transparency are key to integrating AI into your work with an ethical perspective.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was the second hottest topic at CMW 2023. With the expansion of AI comes the evolution of traditional SEO. A variety of speakers spoke to the importance of audience intent when searching for information.

Google is not just looking for your keywords anymore—it is reviewing the intent behind the search by compiling a user profile. Understanding why your audience is looking for your product or service will help your SEO ranking rise.

For a long time, SEO and blogs have been tied together tightly, but the speakers at CMW talked heavily about evidence-based SEO. SEO needs to be more comprehensive than just content, link building, and technical optimization; SEO needs to be evidence-based and fluid, able to pivot and change with every Google algorithm or technical update. At its core, SEO needs to be in tune with the motivations of the audience you’re trying to reach.

3. Video Content

Perhaps in response to the popularity of video-heavy social media apps such as TikTok and Instagram (Reels), video content was a popular topic at CMW.

Video content has long been known as a medium that can inspire and captivate. Ann Handley and Andrew Davis both declared video as content that can fit anywhere in the customer journey, though the beginning of the journey is an ever-important placement. Video is about emotion, but it is also a great opportunity to show your audience who you are as a company or organization.

However, one speaker warned of the pitfalls of a “video page” on your website. In a humorous presentation, Tony Gnau, the founder and chief storytelling officer of T60 Health, claimed, “A video tab on your website is the Florida of videos. That’s where your good videos go to retire.” Instead, he encouraged the attendees of his session to spread video content throughout their website without oversaturating one area, and use videos as a supportive tool for delivering complex or dry information in an attractive and digestible format.

Our writers enjoyed attending Content Marketing World 2023 and came back inspired to try new techniques and implement new practices into their workflow. Our team attends conferences such as CMW all year long to stay up to date on the latest trends because education is at the heart of everything we do.

If you’re looking for a partner who lives and breathes modern marketing, we are ready to share our knowledge with you and continue the discussion. Let’s connect!