We are headquartered in Bradenton, Florida and opened a satellite office in St. Petersburg, Florida in 2014. While the core of our clientele is in the greater Tampa area, we provide professional Internet marketing solutions for clients all over the world. Our headquarters is conveniently located just minutes from I-75 in downtown Bradenton, and our St. Pete office is located in the heart of the Grand Central District. We are active members of the Manatee Chamber of Commerce, Manatee Better Business Council, Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, Anna Maria Island Chamber of Commerce, Venice Chamber of Commerce, St. Pete Chamber of Commerce, Tampa Bay Beaches Chamber, Grand Central District, and Lakewood Ranch Business Alliance. We sit on the Manatee Chamber of Commerce Technology Committee, the Advisory Board for the Manatee Technical Institute Website Design Department, and judge the annual state SkillsUSA competition in the Web Design category. We also sit on the Board for Junior Leadership Manatee, which is designed to engage youth in our community and foster leadership skills for high school Juniors.

Email is still the number one method to stay in communication with current, potential, and past clients.
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If your website is poorly developed from a technical standpoint it will not be search engine friendly, which means it will not rank well in the search engines. But developing a successful website isn’t just a technical endeavor. While technology is certainly an important part of the equation, it’s just the beginning of the story. You need to make sure when potential customers do arrive on your website they follow through and contact your company.

Professional web designers are trained how to use color, layout and hierarchy to evoke emotion, create demand, and shape the behavior of potential customers when they visit your website. You want website visitors to do something as a result of visiting your website: Call Now; Email Us; Buy Today. There is an art to shaping customer behavior and that is where the Web Design Team at Webtivity Marketing & Design excels.

Do-It-Yourself website management sounds great but then comes the real world of customers, employees, suppliers, accounting, etc. We can give you a CMS and support it when you can’t.

Many do not realize website text is one of the most influential factors for the success of a website. Your website copy is one of the most important determining factors on how well your website ranks in the search engines.

What is ADA? ADA stands for the Americans with Disabilities Act. It became law in 1990 with a stated goal to stop discrimination against individuals with disabilities in all areas of public life. The ADA has five main components, known as Titles.

For our purposes, Title III of the ADA deals with public accommodations and commercial facilities that include websites. Title III is enforced as a strict liability law by the U.S. Department of Justice. That means there are little to no excuses to be uncompliant.

Web accessibility is an evolving set of requirements with no formal agreed-upon set of standards. Although not legally sourced, courts have referenced WCAG 2.0 in cases involving the ADA.

Some in our industry have done a great disservice to business owners by trying to convince them they can design their own website and have a resulting effective solution. What many business owners don’t understand is that those do-it-yourself solutions are often clunky, time-consuming and not search engine friendly. That means a business owner spends inordinate amounts of their valuable time trying to build and maintain a website instead of focusing on using their expertise to grow their business. What is your time worth?

Sorry, but if you have a brand new website, it will take a while before the search engines will trust you. The longer your website has been around, and the more you pay attention to the following items, the faster you will rise in the search engines, and the stronger you will hold at the top once you get there.

How can you launch an SEO campaign if you don’t know what your competitors are doing, and how well they’re doing it? How can your SEO company develop an intelligent SEO strategy for you unless they analyze your competitors? Chances are your competitors have holes in their SEO strategy, which leaves great opportunities for you to exploit. It also paints a picture of how aggressive a campaign will need to be developed to get you ranked above them. Before engaging an SEO company you should request this type of information. If they cannot provide this type of information they will not be able to help you.

The first important step is to have a website developed using modern, search engine friendly technology. Many people don’t realize there can be errors in your HTML code that are only visible by the search engines. Your website may function perfectly, but the search engines will notice these errors, and it can impact your ranking potential. If your web design company is not up to date on the latest SEO trends (or are just plain sloppy) you are harming the potential of your website to rank before you ever put it online. Taking a shortcut by having a cheap website built will only cause you to spend more money in the long-term to fix all the problems with the foundation of your website, plus all the lost potential business because you can’t get your website ranked.

Simply put, this is keeping your website up to date. Not only will your human visitors find your website more valuable if you keep it up to date, the search engines will as well. Search engines treat new information as better information. So by routinely rewriting the text on your website, or routinely adding new information to your website, you are benefiting your search engine potential. It is extremely important to understand that the search engines will know if you copy text from another website and place it on your website—and it will hurt your search engine optimization campaign.

There are many factors you can control on your website once you have a solid foundation developed by your professional web development company. While the role Meta tags play in your overall rankings has decreased significantly it is still best practice to optimize your Metas. There are other HTML tags that can be optimized to help the search engines understand what you are trying to emphasize on your website. Page naming conventions, linking structure, file size optimization, and keyword relevance are just some of the items that must be considered by your SEO company as part of your campaign.

This is the most difficult and laborious facet of any SEO campaign, which is why Google heavily relies upon this aspect of a website’s profile when deciding where to rank you. If a website links to your website, Google treats that link as a “vote.” So the more websites that link to you the more votes you get, and the more valuable your website becomes to Google.

To take it a step further, if the websites linking to you are highly trusted by Google, the fact that they are linking to you helps you even more. So in other words, if CNN.com (one of the most highly ranked and trusted websites on the Internet) links to your website because they are doing a story about your company, that link will help your rankings much more than a link from joeschmo.com. Alternatively, if a website links to you that Google considers to be a “bad” website, it can potentially harm your website rankings.

Usually at this point in the discussion a potential client asks the question: “So how do I get people to link to my website?” The first way is to hire an SEO company to help build those links into your website from trusted directories and websites. You have to be very careful here, because as mentioned above, if your SEO company links you on “bad” websites, it can hurt you. The second way is to develop unique, engaging content for your website that people consider to be a resource. People who find your website useful or helpful will link to you and promote you as a resource to their audience. This is the most “organic” way of having links built to your website.

A social media campaign is also a great way to build links into your website and generate interest and links into your website from outside sources.

Ever view a product or website then start seeing related ads on other websites or social media. It is like it is following you all around the internet. This is remarketing. The website puts “cookies” on your computer which causing their ads to show on other website or social media.

Video is the new king. Users with short attention spans expect content from your brand to be delivered to them in short bursts of interactive videos via YouTube.
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Not all social media channels are created the same. Depending on your brand a more focused social media platform might be a more viable option for you to reach your audience. LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Reddit are just a few of the most popular niche social media forums that might be more fruitful for your company. 

Before developing a strategy for your campaign, we first must work with you to understand your target audience and what type of campaign they may respond. We must provide engaging content and offers so they open and read your emails.

Types of Emails

• Blog posts
• Special Announcements
• Sales or Offers
• Newsletters
• Holiday Greetings
• Combination of above

Many people walk into it thinking they have to write a dissertation every week and include “Grandma’s Super Secret Cookie Recipe” in their email blast. The truth is, the longer your email, the more people are just going to delete it. Or worse, unsubscribe. If you keep the content on your Blog and use your email blast as a vehicle to get traffic to your content, you are going to be much more successful.

As part of your email campaign you will receive the following:

• A WordPress Blog (various levels of customization available)
• Integration of an email blast signup into your website, Blog and social media sites
• Custom email blast template designed to match your branding
• Coordination of email blasts to your subscriber list

The following components can be measured using the tools provided by your email blasting program to determine campaign effectiveness and measure campaign goals.

• Number of opens
• Number of unsubscribes
• Number of bounces
• Number of click-throughs

There are many internet sites that have the capability of your clients to leave reviews. Many of these listings are automatically populated with your basic information. It is important that you claim the listing, correct misinformation, add missing information and monitor the reviews.

Here are some of the major sites with review capabilities:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• Yelp
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• Industry specific sites like Trip Advisor, Healthgrades, Vitals, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, etc.

It’s important to listen to what’s being said about your business. Listen through social media, listen online, and listen to your business reviews. Today word of mouth spreads like wildfire! All it takes is a quick Google search and anyone can see what is being said about your business. You don’t want to be driving potential customers to the competitor.

Promptly respond to all reviews, but be sure to apologize when responding to negative reviews. Do this publicly, then take it offline and come to a resolution. By being transparent with your apology, it can help to bring the situation to a close. Be sure that the apology is authentic, consumers can see right through nonsense. With the amount of  competition out there, they will be quick to take their business elsewhere.

Whatever you do, don’t get into an argument with customers online. It only makes your business look bad. Like mentioned above, take it offline. Ask them to call you, or send you a direct message. You’ve still shown that you’re addressing the problem. Showing your professionalism is more important than proving you’re right.

Focus on customer service. Customers will notice how you treat them and that is key to building a great reputation. They will be more apt to forgive a bad review or two if they see you value the feedback and are willing to make a bad situation right.

Ask your customers for reviews. You can also leave signs at your counter, leave links at the bottom of emails or receipts, or send emails specifically asking for a review. Not only do the number of quality reviews matter when potential customers are looking to do business with you, but it matters how current the reviews are. This is why it is important to keep a steady stream of reviews coming in.

The majority of consumers use reviews to make purchasing or hiring decisions. This is why it is not only important have a good number of reviews but also promote these reviews. Post your good reviews on your website and distribute them on social media and your email marketing campaigns. 

Webtivity Marketing & Design can manage your online reputation from start to finish. We can solicit reviews from your clients. Monitor and respond to the reviews. Promote the good reviews on your website, social media, or email marketing campaigns. You won’t have to worry about monitoring multiple reviews sites and risk missing the opportunity to respond good and bad reviews. Remember an unanswered bad review looks like you don’t care about your customer’s satisfaction and that will lose you new customers.

You’re making an investment in a website, and that means you should own it and have the flexibility to move it to another provider if you become dissatisfied with our services. Many web companies try to lock you into proprietary software so you can’t leave them. We prefer to keep our customers happy so they don’t want to leave. And just like we want you to be a loyal Webtivity customer, you want people to find your company online and become a loyal customer. A website alone is usually not enough to accomplish those goals. That is why Webtivity Marketing & Design offers everything you need for your Internet marketing campaign.

Think about some of your favorite brands. What is it about them that sticks in your mind? Perhaps their logo? Tagline? Company colors? Companies go to great lengths to consistently advertise their brand in all advertising mediums and it is critical to their success. You are no different. Our Web Design Team will infuse your branding into your website design, print collateral, digital signage and all other aspects of your campaign. It is the only way you will make a lasting impression on your customers.

It is most helpful for the Webtivity team to have your website content (text and pictures) prior to beginning design/development of your website. Design decisions are made based on the amount and type of content you supply, and therefore we can be much more effective for you if these materials are procured at the beginning of the process.

Webtivity Marketing & Design utilizes a web-based Customer Support System so our customers can transmit materials and requests directly to our team throughout our relationship. The system is utilized for your initial project and also after launch so you can communicate requests and changes using the monthly support time you receive bundled with your Support Plan. And of course if you need to call us, we also answer our phones, which is definitely not the norm in our industry.

Many clients who have engaged Webtivity Marketing & Design to develop a CMS website, eventually also engage us for a Website Support Plan because they quickly learn other responsibilities such as hiring, payroll, and sales take priority over the website. The website then falls off the radar and becomes stale, which is bad for your audience and search engine optimization reasons. Clients also learn when they try to make changes to the website, they often harm the design integrity of the website because they aren’t designers. Once you harm the design of your website, your business starts looking amateurish and you lose the ability to convert visitors into customers.

WordPress began as a Blogging platform that was released in 2003 and has evolved over the years and has been used by many as a Content Management System in recent years.  WordPress powers over 35% of all websites on the internet! 

The core WordPress installation is a stable and secure product. It is important to note that if you require more advanced functionality from your website you will require additional plug-ins to be installed to add that functionality. Plugins can introduce security vulnerabilities to your WordPress installation. If your project requires plugins for functionality, we generally recommend paid plugins over free ones.