This is often a tough call for clients. Websites should be built to last a while, but there are some tell-tale signs that indicate that it is time to make an investment by upgrading to a new platform.

When it makes sense to stick with what you have:

• You already have a content management system (CMS) and a site designed with styles sheets and templates. This allows you to make design refreshes at a relatively low cost.
• Your site is five years old or less. Most sites in this range are relatively current in look and feel, as well as functionality.
• You need minimal functionality changes. If your site is relatively simple, it will last longer.
• No need for new navigation or layouts. Again, a simple site without dramatic changes in content or navigation can last longer.

When it makes sense to reinvest:

If any of the following apply, it's time to think about your options. If more than one apply, it's time to think seriously about your five-year web plan.

• You have a static, HTML website. Making changes to these sites often requires someone with HTML experience. Current technology empowers clients to do a lot themselves effectively and affordably.
• Site is more than five years old. There have been significant improvements in web technology in the past five years, and the cost has gone down. You can gain significant improvements with an investment now.
• Older site (5+ years). These sites are not optimized for new screen sizes and will appear very dated, which can hamper credibility.
• If you have new product lines or want to invest in some significant new functionality. First review the current platform to see if upgrades are possible, and at what cost. 
• Your business model has changed and the web is more important. If the website is playing a more significant role in your business, you need to make sure it's scalable for the inevitable improvements in the coming years.
• Significant navigation changes or additional content are needed. When changes like these are significant, it's a good time to revisit – new best practices may be incorporated at a modest price.

Is this something you have been thinking about fior your business? What other considerations do you have to share?

If you own business, you may ask why you should pay for PPC campaign management? Anyone can start their own PPC campaign with Google AdWords and/or Bing AdCenter, choose keywords, write ads, and then let it run. You could choose a wide variety of keyword phrases to target and chose the board targeting feature to reach as many people as possible. If you have deep pockets, this may not be a bad approach, but most businesses have a limited marketing budget and need to make the most of their advertising dollars.

Pay per click campaigns allow one to measure and experiment with the results. By combining the PPC campaign tools with an analytics program, one can constantly evaluate the effectiveness of the targeted keywords into converting into leads or sales through your website. New keywords phrases, ads, and landing pages can be tested to find the best combinations for your website's goals. Even if you cannot directly measure sales through your website, one can compare the engagement levels of PPC visitors to organic visitors, or better yet, measure conversions for leads (email newsletter sign up, brochure request, and/or submitted forms for more information).

A search engine marketer will constantly be in a testing and optimizing mode; consistently working on improving the effectiveness of a PPC campaign. Depending on the reach and scope of a campaign, a PPC manager may be trying to get you the most visitors for the lowest cost, or carefully targeting the keywords that most often turn into leads or sales.

The search engines continue to offer new publisher or content markets and devices to target. Sometimes, they may "opt in" your campaign without notifying you. Often, when a campaign is opted in by default, the search engine benefits by getting more clicks and increasing your costs. However, the new device or market opportunity may not be a good match for your campaign. A professional PPC campaign manager will stay on top of the latest trends and give you recommendations on targeting a new market for your PPC campaign.

As the options for PPC marketing increase, it's often best to break down campaigns by market and/or device. Content or publisher networks, mobile devices, tablets, and click to call options are often best set up as their own campaigns, targeted specifically to those users. Organizing your campaigns into specific markets or devices allows you to test new opportunities, and constantly test the best ways to reach your audience.

Whether you keep management of your PPC campaign in-house or choose to hire a search engine marketing company, PPC campaigns allow you to constantly test, measure, and optimize as you use paid search to reach website visitors.

Google rolled out a new algorithm this past week.  Local results and organic results are now blended together. 

Here's an example of a search for "lodge fairbanks, ak"  As you can see Pikes Waterfront Lodge comes up first - it looks like a local business listing with the corresponding pin/map  and place page link on the right. 

However the title tag is used not the business name listed in the local business listing (Google Places).  There is also the addition of review site info included right there with the listing.



Three phone calls have come in to our office from Google in the past few weeks asking about the Apokrisis Google Places listing. And this is from a company where you can never find a phone number! Obviously, local business information and how it is listed is a big initiative in the search market, and the implication for mobile is huge.

Have you optimized your local business information? Check out our recent article in our monthly newsletter, The Apokrisis Report with some tips on what to do.

I came across this great article this morning about SEO and Web Redesigns and it made me think about the redesign projects we have been involved with over the past few years. The article is about the importance of communicating with your online marketing team and making sure they are involved in any redesign process.

Why? It seems like you are including more people, which can slow down the project, you might think. But many companies we work with have invested time and resources into developing strong organic search traffic with SEO, and it is so very easy to lose this asset very quickly when a new site goes up without SEO considered.

Some tips for any company considering a site redesign who has good organic search rankings:

• Ask your design company about any impact on search. If they seem blase about this or else do not give you a list of specific things they are going to do to maintain organic search, then consider this a red flag.
• If you work with an SEO provider or online marketing firm, be sure to communicate with them early in the process and keep them involved. They will be an invaluable resource to make sure that all aspects of the redesign are search friendly.
• Consider a redesign an opportunity, not a threat. In most cases we find that, as long as SEO is made a priority, organic search traffic will grow from a redesign, not shrink.

We consider the following items the minimum required actions during a redesign to maintain organic search traffic:

• Will you have new pages names? Make sure search-friendly redirects are made from the old URLs to the new ones. Not only is it possible that people may have bookmarked those old URLs, but they will also be listed in search engines for a while. Without doing this, your listings in search engines will point to an error page.
• Have you invested time or money in solid meta tag writing? Make sure those meta tags are ported over into the new pages by the design team. if you have a database-driven site, this can be done in a bulk action very quickly by your design team instead of manually.
• In your new structure, are there areas of the site you do not want to have crawled? Be sure to update your robots.txt file.
• Are you completely rewriting your content or carrying a lot of it over? make sure you review and make any updates if your target keywords have changed.

Taking these simple steps will ensure success in maintaining your search traffic with your new site. This is not only a good thing from a traffic standpoint, but from a business standpoint - it ensures that the previous investments you have made for good search exposure are maintained.

Not doing so would be like throwing money away.