Wesley Bates

Quality content on a blog post or website is key to attracting prospective clients. At Sage Lion Media, every email we send, blog post we write, social media post we create, a call-to-action is included. In our blog today, let’s review what a call-to-action is and some best practices when creating an effective call-to-action. WHAT IS A CALL-TO-ACTION? So what is a call-to-action? A call-to-action (CTA) is “an image or line of text that prompts your visitors, leads, and customers to take action,” according to Hubspot. It’s important to encourage prospects to contact your office or sign up for an event after reading a blog post or email. If they don’t, what’s the point of creating engaging content? CTAs take prospective clients to a higher valued page on your website. If the call-to-action says, “Read more…” in the meta description on Google, this gets your prospect to your site. The page you direct that prospect to on your site should include another CTA which takes them further down th...

Search engines are not humans. Although they try to understand the information they receive, a simple keyword search is the result of millions of pages crawled. Despite constant updates to the search query algorithm, there remains solid  on-page SEO strategies   you can use to help search engines like Google understand your site. So what is the best way to translate a page for a search engine while remaining true to your visitors? A good place to start is with keywords. Relevant Keywords Keywords are the foundation of optimizing on-page content. Keywords inserted among titles, headers, image alt attributes and the written text itself is an essential way to shout to search engines, “RELEVANCE, I’m right here!”  This calculates the significance of a keyword by measuring the number of times a keyword appears. But a simple strategy like this becomes abused and misused. Thanks to spammers, keyword density can easily turn into keyword stuffing. Use only a sufficient amount to i...

Digital marketing is an around-the-clock endeavour. Here we bring you the top 7 benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency to do the hard work for you. Digital marketing can no longer be regarded as a passing trend but a proven marketing technique that countless businesses are adopting – and with tremendous results along the way. But businesses have got their hands full as it is managing day-to-day operations, which means it makes more sense to hire a marketing agency! Below, we bring you 7 top benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency to do the hard work for you… 1. Marketing expertise from an entire team One of the greatest benefits of hiring a creative agency is that you gain the benefit of an entire team of strategists, designers, writers and SEO experts who possess a diverse range of skills, knowledge and experience. This makes far more sense than either attempting to do it yourself or hiring a single marketer. 2. It’s cost effective Research has found that businesses relyi...

Attracting traffic to your website is essential in increasing business. What are the 3 secrets to attracting more traffic to your website? Read on to find out A beautifully designed website is the first step towards attracting more traffic to your website. Without an exquisite, carefully crafted web design that’s interesting, relevant and easy to browse through, you stand little to no chance of attracting a decent amount of traffic to your website.  So what are the other secrets to attracting more traffic to your website? Read on to find out… SEO-Optimised The first most crucial factor is to be completely SEO-optimised, whether on a local or international level. This is because, when people are performing a search on the internet for goods or services that you offer, your website needs to show up when they perform a relevant search. For this reason, it’s critical that your website is easy to find in search engine searches. Fully responsive Ten years ago, hardly anyone was brow...

Design trends are reactions to technological and cultural changes. Product creators follow design trends for a reason — incorporating newer design trends into a product’s design can make the product look fresh and desirable to the target audience, and this creates a substantial competitive advantage. But the problem with design trends is that they come and go, and it can be hard to know which trend to follow.  An incorrect decision can cause a lot of problems. Just imagine that you’ve put a lot of time and effort into incorporating a particular style into your brand guidelines, only to discover that this style is now obsolete. Now, when it’s almost the end of the year, it’s time to make an educated guess on what we will see in 2020. In this article, I’ve summarized the top 12 most powerful design trends that will dominate in 2020 and beyond. 1. Gradients 2.0 Ultra minimalism dominated product design for a long time. Designers strived to reduce all visual properties and leave only e...

  While the broad ecosystem of web development has something in store for every individual, it can be really hard to keep track of the ever-changing technologies. And not only that, but there are also more questions for you to answer: Where do I want to work and with who? Do I want to become a full stack developer? Do I want to work in a permanent role or go for contracting? How can I develop myself and acquire new skills? I’ve put my knowledge and experience into these 32 tips that might help you in your career as a web developer in 2020. Whether you’re just starting or already have some experience, these tips will help you. This list is by no means complete and certainly not every single point will be a perfect fit, but I hope you can pick some of them for inspiration or guidance. Tips to Help Web Developers in 2020 1. Try to understand Git concepts Knowing the basic commands is good, but try to also understand the underlying concepts. 2. Learn the concepts of clean c...

Search Engine Optimization is all about organically ranking a website over time in search engines; on the other hand, User Experience (UX) design is about designing and developing a website that is all about the searcher. How could these two notions both interlap and NEED to work together?  What is SEO Search Engine Optimization is the strategy of organically ranking a website overtime using keywords and phrases specifically targeted based on a number of ranking factors. The goal is to increase the volume of organic traffic driven to the website and to increase the quality of this traffic.  What would matter to the decision-makers, board members and C-Suite executives in a company? The amount of website traffic and the QUALITY of this website traffic. A website that has 1,000 visitors per month, but only has one or two leads might not be garnering the best quality of traffic. On the other hand, a website that gets 300 visitors a month but has 10 or more leads is garnering the ...

Off-page technical search engine optimization (SEO) sounds a bit like secret SEO magic, but in reality, it is just a long, manual process that never ends!  This is not something that any company or business owner should handle on their own for the simple fact that it is not for the faint heart. Off-page SEO which involves link building is hard.  Now, we may not be even remotely qualified to be on the Great British Baking Show, but we do know we are qualified to handle and speak about off-page SEO strategies like link building. To find a  SEO Specialist , it is important to understand that not all   SEOs handle the process the same , offer the same solutions and do not always have your best interest in mind.  When it comes to SEO, the importance of link-building often pops up. Does it really matter? Does it really affect your search engine rankings? It all matters and affects your ranking at the end of the day.  What is link building? Link building , backlin...

  The past week, WordPress released WordPress 5.0, and along with it a brand new editor that will dramatically change WordPress. This will effect every existing and new website. Most existing websites will require some kind of retrofit so that they do not break when these changes go into effect. What Is Gutenberg? Gutenberg is a new editor, to replace the current “Classic Editor”. This new editor includes a myriad of features that have never been a part of WordPress’s out of box solution. Up to now, if you wanted to add columns, or overlay text on an image, add a background color, you needed external plugins or a global stylesheet to do so. Now you can do it right from the WordPress backend. This is big news for WordPress! Now let’s break down what this means for all of you. Gutenberg: the Pros I’ve had the chance to test out the editor and I have to say that I really like it. It’s sleek and pretty; intuitive and easy to use. The ability to add rows, blocks and basi...

Website design isn’t something you should take lightly. It doesn’t matter how small or large your business is, every company needs a professional website. This is an investment you must make. One of the biggest problems in internet marketing today is that small business owners don’t realize the importance of having a quality, professionally-built website. The functionality and appearance of your site can make or break you. Here are 8 reasons why it’s worth having a professional design your website: 1. You get a site that is compatible with all of the latest mobile technologies. Not every so-called “web design” firm or provider has the knowledge or skill set required to create a website that not only runs smoothly on computers, but on tablets and smart phones as well. A site should also be built for adaptability with new and upcoming devices. With a professional designer, your entire website will be future-proof as new ways to browse the internet emerge. 2. You can expect a bet...