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Website and Logo Graphic Design Questionaire

When starting out creating a new dental practice or orthodontic practice, it is a great idea to use a Graphic Design Questionnaire. This allows the client to clarify for himself what he is looking for, and to the pass that information to you. These are the questions we normally ask when we start out with a new client to help with that clarification process.  
 
What is the name of your business?
 
Does your business have a tagline (eg “Johnson Orthodontics, Making People Smile” or something of this nature.)
 
Please describe what you feel are the important attributes of your business (eg friendly, competent, modern, or whatever you feel encapsulates your core business foundation).
 
Do you have a company slogan or mantra?
 
What is the overall message you wish to portray with your brand? What should people feel when they see or think of your brand?
Now summarize your above answer into 5 descriptive keywords. eg. competent, professional, warm, considerate etc.
Do you have any color preferences, or any existing colors you’d like to use?
 
What is your personal favorite color?
 
This is a very important question– Do you like any existing logos/websites, and if so, why? (Please provide link to logos/websites). If you have seen a logo or website you like and you can give us a link to view and explain why you like it, this is probably more important that anything else. This is especially true if you find a logo or website that you really love. Give us some links and tell us what you like and what you dislike about each logo or website. That allows us to see through your eyes.
 
Here are some words that can describe a logo. Pick any words that you feel should describe your logo:  
traditional or modern.?
simple or ornate? 
Sterile?
Professional?
Bright?
Alive? 
Earthy?
Grounded?
Or any other words that might capture what you are looking for.
 
Who is your demographic types? Eg low income mothers with children or whatever it might be.  Try to give us an understanding of who will see this logo and respond to it.
 
Who are your competitors and how do they position themselves. (Please link to anyone you feel is an important competitor).
 
How do you differ from your main competitors

If you have any specific graphic icons. symbol or image that you would like to associate with your brand, please also list them or attach them.
 
Anything else you want to say?

Website Starting SEO

max pulse websiteWe recently created a new website for a medical device called a Max Pulse.

This website does not have a design as yet, but rather has carefully structured content in an effort to give the website a good starting foundation. The website is currently being indexed by Google and once it is in the index we will be working with an SEO partner in Austin to ensure that the website gains excellent ranking. However when a website is first built, it is important to make sure that is has good SEO bones. As such we tried to make sure that there were cornerstone pages for the important searches that the Max Pulse website is trying to attract. The site is supposed to attract searches for “Max Pulse” and also for “Max Pulse Training” and “Max Pulse Test”

Creating original content that reflects the device and its product offering is very important. The content must be original and the content must be interesting and engaging. In this case the Max Pulse is a device of interest to doctors, so the content can be more technical in nature, but even so, content that is too technical is no longer engaging and even members of the medical profession would prefer simple and easy to digest information.

Add A Manager to Your Google Plus Page or Google My Business Page

Simple and Easy to Follow Instructions:
When You Need to Add a Manager to Your Google Plus or Google My Business Page.

Google supposedly gives the instructions on how to do this here: Add and remove page managers – Google My Business Help. 

But Google packs a ton of stuff into their pages and navigation is not that intuitive.  In fact, its downright hard to follow.

If you are having trouble, try these step by step instructions on how to add someone to help you manage your Google plus or Google My Business Page.

Step 1. Log in to your Account.

Your gmail account allows you access to many Google products. So lets get started, log in to your GMAIL account.

Step 2: Navigate to Google Plus (click the image for enlargement)

Access-Your-Google-Plus-Page

 

Step 3: Access the Google Plus Menu.

Google-Plus-Menu

You will see Google + Home in the upper left. Click there for the full menu. You are looking for PAGES.

Google-Plus-Pages

Step 4: Go to Pages and Select the Google Plus Page you Want To Manage

There will be a MANAGE button on each page that you have in your account. 

Click the manage button and finally you are at the place you need to be to grant access to another person. 

Step 5: You Are On Your Google Plus Page, Click Settings

Google-plus-settings

This will take you to your settings page.

Step 6: Now You Still Have To Navigate to Google Plus Managers.

You are on settings but these are just the generic settings. There is another menu there that allows you to select Managers for your Google Plus page,

Google-Plus-Managers

Step 7: Finally You Can Grant Access To Your Account – Google Plus and Google Business Page is the same thing in this case.

Now the interface becomes intuitive. You can click on Add Manager and just enter the email address of anyone who you need to assist you in managing your page. They will get an invite to manage your page with you.

Congrats!

Google Sends a Warning – Go Mobile or Go Down

google-mobile-warning-header

Google Warns Website Owners

Google is systematically working its way through the hundreds of millions of websites on the internet and evaluating their performance on mobile phones.

When the performance is poor – they are sending out a warning. The key line in the warning is this:

These pages will not be seen as mobile-friendly by Google Search, and will therefore be displayed and ranked appropriately for smartphone users.

Texas Dental Website Testing Shows 61% Are Mobile Phone Visitors

Using a group of 67,805 internet visits to Texas dental offices, an astonishing 60% of all visitors came from mobile phones.

Mobile Phone Visitors:  41,254  61%
Desktop Computer Visitors 17,345  25.5%
>Tablet Visitors   9,206  13.5%
Total Visits 67,805 

Find Out if Your Website Is At Risk

Click To Enlarge
Click To Enlarge

The software that Google uses to evaluate websites is publically available.

It is part of the Google Developer Tools, but open to anyone. Click on this link to use the tool – it is called Google PageSpeed Insights. 

Once you are there you need to look at the bottom of the report. The tool is primarily for testing the speed that your website loads but it also tests how your website responds to a mobile phone acessing it. This test, which is at the bottom of the report will show a warning if your website is not properly configured for mobile.

The warning looks like this:

This page may not pass Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test.

If you see this warning, then your website is in danger of getting demoted in 61% of all searches. True to it’s sphinx-like reputation, Google has not exactly stated how much this penalty will affect your website. However pundits are saying that Google is going to put mobile optimized websites at the front of the results for any mobile phone users. 

Take the test. Know your risk. 

This is what your website test should look like:

100 / 100  User Experience

Congratulations! No issues found.

Google Pigeon Smacks Down the Little Guy In Local Rankings

google pigeon update

Google Pigeon released about 1 week ago now, so we have to assume that the Google engineers have settled down any initial bugs and what we are seeing now is more or less what we are getting. The update has sparked a storm of comment across the biggest SEO sites in the world- with MOZ describing it as the month that Google shook the SERPs.

Many people commented on their particular areas of interest, noting huge shifts in local search results in industries all the way from real estate and hotels to ice-cream. The fact is that Pigeon is another huge shift for SEO consultants – one of a series that has hit this summer.

Google Pigeon Showing Fewer Local Results

One of the most noted effects of Google pigeon was smaller map packs. Instead of getting 7 results of businesses close to you- suddenly we are now getting only 3 or none. In the So-Lo-Mo world (Social-Local-Mobile) the google local results are a mainstay, so dropping these results way down makes little sense. But while that has been getting most of the attention, I am seeing another, much more damaging change.

The Google Pigeon Poops

I follow a particular tight niche and I can’t comment on the world-wide effect of the Google pigeon update. What I can say is that in my niche, the small business owner got a real slap down.

I do SEO work mostly with dentists, and mostly in Central Texas. In San Antonio, Google really smacked down the local dentist with the pigeon update.

In the past, if you were in zip code 78148 and you searched the work “dentist” or “dental” with no other modifier, the map pack would show you a list of dentists that were in your immediate geographical area.  The geolocation was very tight and would center on your zip code. This was also true even if you searched for “san antonio dentist”. What Google would show you was appropriate matches in as close as possible to your location. 

What I am seeing is a massive broadening of the geographical search area to encompass a much larger “local” area. I did not see it in all my searches, but I saw it in a great many of them.  I tested this in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio.  What this means is that no matter where you are in any of these huge metro areas, you see the same 8 or 10 top dental offices. Because the “local” area is so wide, google is picking up the ” most important results” – the offices that are perhaps a 40 minute drive from where I am, but they have great SEO.  And lets face it, for a great many local choices, distance is the key – not how well they SEO’ed their site. The super-wide “local” results that I am seeing make them pretty much worthless.

Google Pigeon Hands Local Results to the Big Chains

Another really unpleasant side effect of these large geographical bite is that a chain might have two or three offices in a large city. What then happens is that you might search “dentist” and google maps shows you half of a city as the “local results”. Because the BigBoy Chain has three locations in the area and because they have an overall excellent SEO ranking ALL THREE of their locations show up in the map pack.

This is the antithesis of “local” results. This is Google pushing you to the people who are paying them the big advertising fees. This is squeezing down the small guy. This is the complete opposite of the stated Google objective which is to bring more accurate and more usable local search results.

While the “pigeon” moniker came from SearchEngineLand, not Google, I think it’s time for Google to create a “Scarecrow” update and get rid of all the recent changes. They had a great alogarithm, it worked well. Now they have a real mess.

Please Google, don’t go all Bing on us.

By San Antonio SEO Consultant Wayne Baumgarten