Digital Essentials Marketing Plans

Bare Essentials | $399/mo

Our Bare Essentials plan is perfect for new businesses and small organizations in need of a website and critical marketing fundamentals.

Choose between SEO and Social Media Marketing options.

Essentials | $799/mo

This is our most popular Essentials plan. It covers a wide range of marketing needs including SEO and Social Media Management or Structured Data.

Choose between Social Media Marketing and Structured Data options.

Premium Plan | $999/mo

This plan includes your website, SEO, social media marketing, structured data and more. For many organizations, our Premium Plan covers all of the most critical marketing needs.

Includes:

Structured Data
SERP Analysis & Competitive Research
Feature Opportunity Assessment
Structured Data Entity Selection
Define Variables Based on Entity Type
JSON-LD Coding
Publish Encoded HTML
Structured Data Testing & Validation
Verify Results & Update as Appropriate

Google Business Profile
Fully Populate Business Profile
Write & Optimize Business description.
Define & Update Business Hours
Select & Configure Business Categories
Select All Applicable Attributes
Verify Business Location

Managed Hosting
SSL Certificate
Software Updates
Security Updates
Backups
Disaster Recovery
Bandwidth Optimization

Essentials Services Explained

Website

Our goal for your website is to make your online footprint as visible, polished and engaging as possible. Your website serves two fundamental purposes. The first is to attract visitors that have an interest in what your business offers. Naturally, this varies a lot from one business the next. We take time to understand your business, market and key motivators among your target audience.

Second, your website should establish you as the best choice among your competitors. Your website visitors judge your business based on their online experience. They’ll decide very quickly whether to continue exploring, or move on.

Images

Photos and other imagery like icons and branded elements are essential to making your business stand out in a competitive landscape. Of these, high quality, professional photography is, by far, the most effective way to make a lasting impression among consumers.

We will work with the images you provide. We will edit as appropriate, but keep in mind the better the images we have to start with, the better the quality will be when we publish them to your website.

If images are unavailable, one option is to utilize stock photography. Stock images are typically high quality and inexpensive, but often have a “generic,” over-polished look. Also, visitors to your website are there to learn about your business. Stock photos don’t serve that purpose as well as actual photography including your location, products and staff.

Often, our best bet is to go onsite and shoot photos (and video) on location. We offer high-end photography and videography, including underwater and aerial imagery, worldwide. Since our primary goal is to promote your business over time, we work very hard to keep the cost to a minimum.

Branding

We will use your current branding for website elements, as well as throughout any marketing efforts included in your plan. As part of the planning process, we will confirm exact color values, as well as typestyles, if appropriate. If necessary, we will clean your logo files and convert them to vector artwork to ensure your brand looks great for any use, whether online or offline.

Lead Generation

As the primary purpose for your website, we will provide potential customers as many ways as possible to contact you. Most often, these include providing direct contact information in the website’s header and footer, plus a contact form located on a dedicated About Us/Contact Us page. Many visitors prefer filling out forms to writing emails when requesting general information—especially if they aren’t sure what to ask.

For those that prefer to call or need information that doesn’t lend itself to online forms, your address and phone number will be available from anywhere within your website. Additionally, we will include access to any social platforms that you use.

Pages

We will design and publish your website based on any website content you have currently. Our goal is to leverage what you have, but optimize existing copy to achieve top search engine rankings, as well as bolster a high conversion rate. We try to accommodate most existing websites without incurring additional costs. Regardless of which plan you choose, if your website is between 6 and 10 informational pages, and doesn’t require specialized programming, we can usually accommodate the transition as part of the plan.

New websites will be limited in scope according to your plan, however there may be some flexibility, depending on the quality of images and copy your provide us prior to beginning work.

Whether you have a website currently or will be starting from scratch, we offer additional pages at a very reasonable additional cost. Our goal is always to keep your design and development costs to a minimum, so we can focus our resources on attracting new customers.

SEO

All of our Essentials marketing plans include Search Engine Optimization as a core element. This is because online search is the most cost-effective means for attracting consumers to your business and your brand. SEO is the process of curating and structuring your website’s content to ensure that your website is the most relevant for a given search phrase.

Search engines display webpage listings in order based on what they determine to be the most relevant to a particular keyword. A “keyword” could more accurately be termed, “key-phrase,” since most online searches are for groups of words. Often, searchers ask questions or search using complete sentences. As a result, the nature of SEO has changed significantly over the last several years. As such, SEO is a cat and mouse game, whereby search engines keep carefully guarded secrets that marketers (like us) work constantly to decode and use to our client’s advantage.

Contrary to popular belief, SEO isn’t wizardry, and aside from a few specialized areas like Schema/Structured Data, SEO isn’t all that technical. Most significantly, SEO starts with consistently publishing content that’s relevant, timely and helpful to its intended audience.

Updates, Pages & Posts

As part of our SEO efforts, we will produce new content and publish it to your website. Depending on the need or ranking goal, this might be new pages, blog posts, or sections and updates to existing pages. In some instances, we may write a significant volume of new material. At times, we may ask you to outline topics so that we can write the most effective possible piece. If you are a writer, we’ll happily guide you in producing search engine friendly copy yourself.

Keep in mind, pages and posts written or updated to support search engine objectives are handled differently than requests you might make for some other business reason.

Keywords

Our Essentials plans include research, selection & management of 20 keywords, organized into groups of 4 or 5 related phrases. We select them based on a combination of alignment with your products and/or services, search volume and relative ranking difficulty.

Each keyword group will include the following:
1 “easy win” to establish indexing speed and build momentum
2-3 long-tail phrases that real-world customers are likely to use
1 high volume “unicorn”

Organizing keywords (phrases) this way helps us track indexing progress as early as possible by including at least one search term that will be presumably easy to rank. Typically, this keyword will be lower volume and relatively non-competitive. Its purpose is to signal crawl frequency and indexing speed, which will be critical to our efforts with more competitive phrases.

Long-tail keywords make up the bulk of each keyword group. These will have sufficient search volume and specificity to attract visitors and generate leads. Most often, we replace the “easy win” keyword with a long-tail phrase once our long-tail keywords begin to reach the top 30-50. Often, we’ll experience movement for the entire group, but not always. Organic traffic volume can be surprisingly variable as well.

Finally, we will include what we call a “unicorn.” This is a high-volume very competitive phrase that has the ability to generate a lot of traffic, but requires a lengthy, difficult and uncertain path to page one. We track these as long-term ranking goals, and to gauge traction relative to the larger scale market.

Google Business Profile

Formerly called, “Google My Business,” your Google Business Profile is critical to local search results, as well as Google Maps listings. It is particularly important for searchers using mobile devices, which makes up about 2/3 of global search volume.

Your Google Business Profile is displayed among Google Places listings. Often referred to as the Google “local pack,” or “map result,” a top listing here significantly increases visibility, and often drives direct conversions from users that may not even visit your website.

We will make sure your listing is complete, branded and kept active and up to date. Google often changes the fundamentals of how results are organized and displayed, so we also make sure your profile is adapted and optimized and changes occur. Benefits of a thriving Google Business Profile include:

• Increased organic traffic
• Increased local traffic
• More phone calls
• Higher organic search positions
• Increased mobile traffic
• Geo-specific ranking signals

Managed Hosting

Fast, Secure, Reliable

It doesn’t matter what we do if your website gets hacked or goes down. Most people are surprised to learn the average website is attacked hundreds to several thousand times every day. In addition to fending off hackers, your website host has just milliseconds to perform hundreds of tasks simultaneously, without fail, 24/7.

Cybersecurity is a major concern for business. Big-business data breaches make the news all the time, but hacking poses a significant threat to small businesses as well. There are countless reasons hackers hack, but here are the most common ones.

• Inject Malicious Content
• Spread Viruses
• Steal Visitors’ Personal Information
• Steal Business’ Private Information
• Host Phishing Pages from Your Server
• Host “Legit” Pages from Your Server
• Overload Your Web Server
• Steal Server Bandwidth
• Vandalize Your Website

Hacking attempts have increased in frequency at an alarming rate. A few years ago, a typical website on our network would experience a few dozen hacking attempts daily. It’s several hundred today, but the rate is increasing. Think for a moment. That’s your website fending off potentially thousands of attackers every single day.

Our engineering team works constantly to stay ahead of online assailants, but it is a cat and mouse game that the host doesn’t always win. Our ability to respond is as critical is minimizing the possibility of a breach happening in the first place.

As part of every Essentials plan, we provide fully managed hosting, free. Managed hosting means we actively monitor your website for uptime and security, make critical updates and run backups—lots and lots of backups.

Managed Hosting Includes:

• Bandwidth to support daily traffic, plus temporary bursts in traffic
• SSL Certificate and CA-signed certificate renewals
• Server-side security updates
• Server performance enhancements
• Nightly backups, plus incremental backups
• Website restoration if necessary
• Disaster recovery
• Updates to website CMS software and plugins
• Uptime monitoring
• Security monitoring

Social Media Management*

Next to having a website, social media is an essential marketing beachhead. Your customers expect you to be social. They’ll share your story, ask questions and even amplify your message if you engage on a personal level through social media. We like to say, “don’t do social—be social.” It’s a nice idea that, like most nice ideas, takes time, and a personality. Most business owners have one.

It’s not unusual for a business’ social media efforts to be set aside for other urgent needs. In business, daily operations come first. Your customers won’t wait while you research influencers or dream up that next witty meme. When you’re busy running a business, social media can feel like more of burden than an opportunity.

We’ll handle it for you. It is our job to make time for social media, and we make a pretty good stand in for your glowing personality. Together, we’ll decide which social media channels are most important to your customers and your industry.

Your social media posts will be purposeful, engaging and designed to resonate with your most important target consumer groups.
Essentials plans that include social media include the following:

• Research & goal setting
• Platform selection (2 channels)
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Establish posting schedule
• Engagement & social listening
• Tracking & metrics

Structured Data**

Structured data is a defined means of describing your website to make it easy for search engines to understand. How we do that is among the more technical components of our Essentials plans that include structured data**. In short, we use a coded taxonomy programmed in JavaScript called Schema Markup to organize information describing each page of your website.

The “structured” part of structured data comes through standardization throughout hundreds of “entities.” An entity can be a lot of things—a local business, a hotel, an FAQ page, an article. There are seemingly countless entities defines in the Schema standard, and every one of them has dozens to hundreds of individual attributes that define it.

It’s complicated, but Schema can dramatically increase the visibility of your business. We take care of all of it, and go on to test and make regular updates like every other aspect of digital marketing.
Below is an example of a so called “rich result” in Google. Schema markup played a role in Google’s ability to include several elements:

• Star rating – including the number of votes and time stamp
• Featured image – The hamburger pic to the right of the listing
• Sitelinks – Website links located across the bottom of the listing

This is just one example of how Schema Markup can bolster the visibility of your business as presented among competing websites in Google’s SERP (search engine results page). There are Schema entities defined for virtually anything you can think of. For example, recipes, activities, fact checks. FAQ, how-to guides, job posts, logos, math, movies, podcasts are just a few types of rich results that can be defined through structured data.

*Included in Essentials Social & Essential Premium Plans
**Included in Essentials Schema & Essential Premium Plans

Contact Us Today!

We look forward to hearing from you and helping your business grow.