If you are not getting additional sales or leads from your website, it could be that your website is missing some key direct response components.

Direct response involves exactly that. You respond directly to the customer or visitor’s email inquiry. Visitors send emails for a wide variety of reasons. You may get emails praising your products or services, informing you of an issue, requesting more information about the product or service, expressing interest in bulk orders or combined services or requesting coupons.

Of course, you might also receive emails from other businesses or affiliates interested in partnering with your company. For all of these reasons and more, it is important to have a good direct response system in place.

In addition to emails, direct response can also be beneficial for gathering the email addresses of customers that have opted to receive regular contact from your website.

Countless Internet users sign up for newsletters, specials, updates and more every single day. Giving your visitors a way to opt in to these methods of contact allows you to then build a great email marketing campaign.

Email marketing campaigns may seem somewhat difficult to implement, but they are also the most rewarding. Building your email list is probably one of the toughest parts because people must voluntarily sign up to receive contact from you.

In addition, the tactics that worked last year may not work this year. However, once you’ve built your list and created unique and worthy content to share with your subscribers, your email marketing campaign has the potential to turn into your business’s most profitable marketing option.

Your web designer can be paramount in not only developing a phenomenal system for your direct response needs, but also in assisting you in the creation of your email marketing campaigns. For instance, if you plan to send out a monthly newsletter or weekly update, your web designer can often provide you with a customized template to use.

He or she may also be able to suggest a good service to handle your email marketing campaign. That said; don’t forget to discuss these aspects of your website with your web designer. The result will be a more functional, profitable site.

For this reason, countless businesses have established a presence on a variety of popular social media sites.

What social media sites are the most popular? Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Google+ and more are all very popular social media sites with millions of users.

In fact, as of 2011, Facebook had more than 640 million users. Twitter has more than 100 million people actively using the site to send out an average of 230 million daily tweets. If you choose only two social media sites for your business to use, these two should be the ones.

Even if you are not interested in taking advantage of social media now, you might find it beneficial and worthy of your time in the very near future. So is your website capable of social media integration? Will it or can it be? These are questions that you need to ask your web designer.

With more and more people using social media on a daily basis to communicate their likes, dislikes, interests and more, the benefits to businesses with an online presence is obvious. Social media matters.

Whether you realize it now or not, being able to link your social media sites to your website will give your business a bigger reach. It is also a fantastic way to save you money on advertising – especially if you handle your own social media posts.

With all of this said, it is imperative that you have the option to easily connect social media sites to your website. Yes, even if you don’t think that you have time for it right now.  Should you decide to jump on board the social media bandwagon in the future, you can do so immediately.

Search engine optimization is imperative if you want your site to be seen by potential online customers.

Search engine optimization is achieved by carefully determining your keywords and integrating them strategically into your content. In addition, you need to ensure that your site’s Meta tags and descriptions, title tags, images and video Alt tags are optimized as well.

Unfortunately, not a lot of people realize that there can be negative effects associated with poor SEO techniques. In fact, several people start websites every day and cram as many keywords as they possibly can into the content of their pages in an effort to be recognized by the search engines.

The result is often a spot at the very end of the search engine results.

SEO is an art. You can’t just cram keywords into the content of your pages without thought or purpose. The search engines are a lot smarter than that and there are harsh penalties associated with keyword stuffing and other “black hat” techniques.

For this reason, discussing search engine optimization with your web designer is important. Any aspect of your site that your designer handles that can be optimized, should be optimized.

If your web designer will also be handling the creation of your website content, then you need to stress search engine optimization and discuss the keywords that you would like integrated.

You need to make certain that your website’s SEO strategies meets the criteria to be picked up by the major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo.

If your web designer regularly performs SEO, then he or she should be aware of the favorable and unfavorable actions that these search engines focus on so that your site has the best chances to succeed possible.

Many will tell you that on page optimization is the key to a successful site, and that is partially true; however, more specifically, it is unique onsite optimization that the search engines love.

In addition, links coming into your site from other websites is another major contributor to overall SEO success.

If you’re like most people, you probably pull out your cell phone and browse the web.

In fact, in the United States, nearly ten percent of all web browsing is now performed from mobile or tablet devices – and here’s a statistic that might surprise you – over 25 percent of U.S. mobile Internet users ONLY access the web via their mobile device!

What’s more is that there are currently more than 5.3 billion people subscribed to mobile services worldwide.

That’s a huge number and one that has already increased significantly, but it is estimated that it will double throughout the next five years.

So, what does all of this mean? You absolutely must make sure that your website is mobile friendly or can be made mobile friendly.

With the growth that the mobile arena continues to see, it is more important than ever for your site to be accessible by mobile devices.

No business wants to lose a potential customer, but you could be doing just that if you don’t ensure that your site is accessible to everyone in your potential client base.

Your website’s mobile capability should be discussed with your web designer. You want to make sure that your web designer is not using Flash and other technologies that are not completely mobile friendly.

There is so much to gain by ensuring that your site is mobile friendly, so make sure that you are not essentially writing those customers off before they even have a chance to access your site.

You’ve tried to contact your web designer, but it’s been two days and you’ve gotten no response. Now you’re frustrated because your site isn’t working as promised and you have no idea when it will.

Believe it or not, lots of site owners have had issues similar to this – no response or a severe lack in response time. When you have a website for your business, it is your link to the online population.

It is important for your site to be available and in working order when your visitors arrive, which is why choosing a web designer that offers superior customer service is imperative.

For this reason, you should discuss customer service with your web designer prior to making a hiring decision. What is your web designer’s customer service policy?

When discussing customer service, you should determine how many hours your web designer will be available to you each month for questions or website updates and whether that availability comes at a cost.

You should also discuss turnaround time and inquire as to whether or not your web designer will offer a training tutorial to help you learn to use and manage your new website. For those new to website management, training is invaluable. Of course, even those who have other websites may not be familiar with the platform used for their new site, so tutorials are always a welcome addition.

After you’ve discussed all of these factors, do your research. Your website designer can promise you the sun, moon and stars, but if they have done the same to others and failed to come through, chances are that you’ll be able to find out with a few quick web searches.

You can also ask for references from previous clients whom you can call to inquire about customer service responsiveness – and do call.

The web designer you’ve chosen may have evaded most online negativity, but when you get someone on the phone, you often get the whole story and then some!

If a potential customer finds your site listed in the search engine results and clicks, but your site doesn’t come up, chances are that person won’t ever become a customer.

Believe it or not, website hosting is one of the biggest challenges that many website owners face. There are countless hosts available, and all promise great service – many at ridiculously cheap rates.

This often influences first time website owners to choose a host based on the prices offered instead of the host’s true capabilities…the result is often utter disappointment.

However, there are ways to prevent you from locking yourself into a year or more of poor hosting. Most of that starts with good research.

One option is to discuss web hosting with your designer, as many do offer hosting services. Your web designer might even offer you a special rate for your service simply because you will be combining services. If your web designer does offer hosting services, you should definitely inquire about website uptime and use a third party to verify that uptime claim.

For those unfamiliar with the term, uptime is the period that your website is available to visitors through the hosting server. Your goal should be to find a reliable hosting service that has an uptime exceeding 99%.

Obviously, when referring to uptime, the higher the percentage the better. You don’t want your visitors showing up to a site that they cannot access.

Of course, not all web designers offer hosting, but this does not mean that your web designer cannot refer you to a reliable hosting service. In fact, getting a recommendation from your web designer is often a great way to locate a hosting service that you may choose to remain with for the life of your site.

Why? Well, web designers are in the industry. They can often tell you which hosts offer the highest uptime, the best customer service, the most support options, the most disk space, the highest bandwidth, a good variety of programming options and more.

Price and other services like being able to purchase domains or content creation should factor in as well, but the prior factors mentioned should take the front seat in your decision-making process.

Price might be a major factor for you, but if choosing a cheap host means that you are losing customers, you are going to lose more than you gain in the long run.

Your website content should be written in a way that communicates who you are or what your business is to every visitor that views it.

Many consider their website and the functionality that it provides visitors to be the equivalent of a fancy designer suit. You see, a fancy suit can dress up any idiot, but it certainly won’t lend him or her one ounce of additional intelligence.

Likewise, your website can be sleek and stylish, and have all of the functionality you could possibly ask for, but it won’t mean a thing unless your content is top notch.

This is why website content is something that you should discuss with your website designer. You should ask your web design company whether or not they can provide you with specialized content for your site.

You should also discuss search engine optimization of your content to ensure that any content present is always working double time for you and your business. I’ll touch on this more later. For now, let’s focus on the content in general.

In case you were not aware, it is extremely important – and I stress “extremely” for good reason – that you ensure that all content present on your site is unique. Any content that has been scraped or borrowed from other websites can be considered duplicate content in the eyes of the search engines.

So what happens if you use duplicate content? Well, aside from not being recognized – or worse, punished – by the search engines, you may also face legal issues and a penalty from using someone else’s content.

Unique, high quality content that properly explains and sells your product or services is what you should always strive for.

Very few website designers can provide content development themselves, but some do. What’s more is that even those who cannot provide website content are often able to refer you to a spectacular copywriter that they have worked with in the past.

Of course, if you are a stellar writer, you may wish to handle the creation of your website content yourself. Just be sure to focus on the facts, eliminate the fluff and always keep search engine optimization in mind.

Web Project Overview:

Juston Marshall, owner of Sooner Bounce Inflatables, needed a website that would help him obtain leads for his brand new moonbounce rental company.

Our team went to work and built him a website focused on direct response. His customers can easily contact him from any page on the website to sign up for a rental. Below is a screenshot of the new website:

Search Engine Marketing Overview

Once the website project was complete, our focus turned to a SEO campaign for Sooner Bounce. Over the next few months, our team built links to the Sooner Bounce website for its primary keywords using white hat search engine optimization strategies.

Within a few months, Sooner Bounce was getting website visitors from Google and Bing for its primary keywords. See examples below:

Facebook Advertising Overview

The next online marketing component we implemented for Sooner Bounce was Facebook Advertising.

We created a series of advertisements and strategically placed them using Facebook’s amazing advertising platform. In just the first week, the ads for Sooner Bounce were seen by thousands of Oklahoma City area Facebook users that met Sooner Bounce’s primary demographics.

Although it is still early in this ad campaign, the early results look to be fantastic. Below is an example of the Facebook advertisement used in the Sooner Bounce campaign:

About Sooner Bounce Inflatables

Sooner Bounce is dedicated to providing fun for all. Whether you’re a kid or kid at heart, we all deserve to have a little fun every now and then.

Juston Marshall started this company because he’s just a big kid who likes to have fun. He said “why not work and have fun doing it”.

Web Project Overview

Today’s Therapy Solutions is a leading provider of speech, occupational and Autism therapy in the state of Oklahoma.

Recently, the owners of the company approached us requesting a website design and help with achieving search engine rankings for their primary keywords.

We researched the industry and provided them with a website that has consistently delivered new patients to their company.

The owners were very happy with the results and subsequently worked with us on additional Autism-related projects.

Search Engine Marketing Overview

We are also pleased to show the success we achieved with getting this company ranked in Google for its primary keywords. The website now consistently ranks on page one of search results for primary keywords. Take a look at the screenshots below as evidence:

Project Overview

Parker Brothers Roofing is a locally owned residential and commercial roofing company serving the state of Oklahoma.

We completed a redesign of the Parker Brothers Roofing website. One main feature the company wanted was the ability to easily collect leads from the website and pass the customer information in real-time to a sales representative for follow-up.

We were easily able accommodate this request and subsequently the company received a new lead the very day we made this feature live!

The ownership of this company was very pleased with the new design and plans to refer us additional business from their partners.

Website Marketing Overview

We also optimized Parker Brothers Roofing website to show up in Google for some of its primary keywords. As an example, look at the screenshot below and see how Parker Brothers currently ranks #1 in Google for one of it’s primary keywords “Oklahoma roofing contractor”: