End-to-End

The frequent readers among you are no doubt already familiar with UpBuild’s core company values. Today, we’re announcing a new initiative that will strengthen our commitment to three of those values in particular — purpose, betterment, and transparency — by making our collective expertise available to you, when you need it, absolutely free of charge. We’re calling it the UpBuild Help Desk.

[Read more…] about Introducing the UpBuild Help Desk

We’ve all said it. I’m not aiming to denigrate it. But here’s the thing: we can do better than merely chiming in with ‘from an SEO perspective…’ Sure, as the SEO expert with a seat at the marketing table, it’s our job to be the SEO voice of reason, piping up when somebody proposes implementing a significant SEO roadblock, e.g., “from an SEO perspective, folks, adding a robots noindex tag across all of our product pages is no bueno”.

[Read more…] about “From an SEO Perspective” – An SEO’s Perspective

In order for a business to have a long-term, successful online presence, it’s important to have a robust overall digital strategy that includes search engine optimization and social media optimization (among other things). While none of us at UpBuild are experts in social media, we do see the impact and support social media provides to SEO on a daily basis.

[Read more…] about 3 Easy Ways to Level Up Your Social Media

A small business with a small website can usually have all of their digital marketing needs met by a freelancer or an agency — there’s rarely enough work to make a full-time digital marketing hire worthwhile, and even a full-fledged ongoing agency relationship may be overkill for the amount of recurring SEO work that will need to be done.

At a large enterprise-level or ecommerce business, the website’s needs (and budget) are complex enough that there’s usually a whole team of marketers (SEO and PPC experts, copywriters, developers, PR specialists, etc.) seeing to the site’s marketing. A large business may choose to outsource this team in the form of an ongoing agency retainer or two, but the need for a multi-person team is usually pretty clear.

However, if you’re a mid-sized business — or a large business with a mid-sized website — your digital marketing needs might be right on the cusp. When addressing digital marketing strategy, many such businesses struggle with whether they should be looking to make a full-time, in-house hire, or vetting digital marketing agencies for an ongoing relationship. Having been on both sides of the equation (working in-house and at agencies) over the years, I’ve pulled together some pros and cons for each strategy.

[Read more…] about Should You Hire an SEO Agency or an In-House SEO?

With every deliverable UpBuild sends to a client, our primary goal is to ensure the end user can understand the document as thoroughly as possible without needing to ask us additional questions. We don’t mind questions, of course (we love them actually!), but we realize our client’s time is limited. Our time is limited. We don’t want to waste the time we do have discussing something that could have been avoided had we taken the extra step to answer it in the deliverable already.

To achieve this goal, we spend time making sure everything we send out looks a certain way, follows specific guidelines, and ultimately successfully educates the reader on the issue, what the next step should be, and who is responsible for it. 

Before sending anything to a client we always ask ourselves, “will this make someone’s day better?”

In this post, I’ll go over some ways UpBuild builds its deliverables so that they provide the maximum value to the client.

[Read more…] about Optimizing Deliverables for Maximum Usefulness