Category: Blog

  • Change your brand—without derailing your web traffic

    Change your brand—without derailing your web traffic

    What happens to your web traffic when you change your company name?

    The decision to change your brand should never be taken lightly. Underestimating how it can affect your online traffic—can be devastating.

    Brand Narrative: Why change your name?

    SpectorSoft, a security software firm, underwent a huge shift from the consumer market to business customers. Their decision to change their name signified a change in their focus toward B2B, corporate and enterprise clients. That’s a great reason to change your brand.

    While we can expect excitement over a new name, we have to consider the implications, the Pros and Cons.

    What’s in a Name?

    SpectorSoft has been in business for over 20 years. There’s something to be said for longevity. They developed a serious trust—in a space that requires serious trust.

    For them, cutting ties to the consumer client in favor of a booming corporate business made sense.

    They felt their old name, “Spector” tied them to black ops and ghosts in the machine. In the consumer world there can be a negative connotation, especially if you’re on the receiving end of computer surveillance.

    Spyware is a controversial marketplace, and “Spector” brings to mind the image of an oppressive Federal agency or Big Brother is watching.

    Their new brand however, would change that perception, and their corporate image.

    Can you explain the new brand?

    What message does the new brand convey? Their new name, Veriato, is fresh and sounds like a modern tech startup. It comes from the Latin, veritas, meaning truth. In common Italian parlance, often adding -ato at the end of a word, denotes a place. Veriato can be loosely understood to mean a “Place of, or for, Truth”.

    That’s noble intentions and a strong narrative for their new name.

    Media bombards us with daily revelations about information leaks and a growing cast of characters from Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Wikileaks and Anonymous—to former FBI Director James Comey and fears of the “deep state”.

    Scandal drives the news cycle—and fear powers the security market.

    The New Narrative

    In this environment, Veriato sees themselves as guardians. Their role is to protect the corporation from intrusion and internal leaks. They safeguard sensitive information and a company’s intellectual property—its IP.

    Their software increases productivity among employees and keeps them moving in the right direction. And, their new product, RansomSafe, provides detection, backup and recovery—to shield their clients from Ransomware, a booming threat on the horizon.

    While a staffer who likes to browse YouTube during work hours might not appreciate their employee monitoring software, the C Suite and management surely does.

    In the business space, Veriato certainly provides a needed service, and allows each company to set their own limits. You decide what constitutes bad behavior, and you manage your company’s own culture.

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    Cause and Effect

    Changing your name should be a great opportunity for positive change and generate some media buzz in the process. But, could there be unseen consequences?

    Digital Impact

    As we looked at analytics data, we immediately saw a huge problem. If most of SpectorSoft’s search traffic and recognition came from their name, then what would happen when they changed their domain? The lion’s share of their traffic, which is considerable, was branded.

    Google divides keywords in their Paid Search and Quality Scoring as branded and non-branded. If you’re Tesla, the keywords, “Tesla Model X”, is a branded phrase. While “electric luxury car” is non-branded.

    What that meant for SpectorSoft was—that changing to their new brand name would (not could) seriously diminish traffic to their site, for the short term. For a software company, digital drives sales—and had they proceeded, it would have hurt.

    Problem identified, we worked with Veriato on a strategy to minimize the hit their traffic was about to take.

    How do you transition?

    To address the issue, we performed a deep audit of their site. We created a big picture view of who visits, what pages, and how often. Keywords and phrases, managing tags, and an in-depth look at campaigns all played a major role. And knowing historic sales patterns, we wanted to know the best time to make the switch.

    Veriato-formerly-known-as-SpectorSoft

    To lessen the blow, we slowed down their roll-out and began a communications campaign. We spoke to their customers first to let them know we were in the process of changing our name. Then we helped craft press releases and news articles for the site to distribute to partners and media.

    Because “SpectorSoft” was part of our branded keywords, we added the old name to our content. When we announced the change was coming, we mentioned “Veriato, formerly SpectorSoft” prominently, creating a temporary bridge to connect both names. And then we worked to replace it with the new brand. When the switch was made, customers knew it was coming. As we slowed the transition, we gave search engines time to process and understand that both sites were ours, and that we were moving from old to new.

    All said and done, Veriato slowed their pace for their name change, yet communicated it to their customers and prospects. Understanding the impact of changes to your digital properties can be a life saver. Instead of a six-month battle to regain lost market share and sales—we helped communicate the change and saved the day for this amazing software company.

    Veriato, formerly known as SpectorSoft, is a software company that develops and sells user behavior analytics and employee monitoring software. They are based in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

    Visit Veriato at https://www.veriato.com/solutions

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  • Do-it-yourself Marketing in a Noisy Marketplace

    Do-it-yourself Marketing in a Noisy Marketplace

    The word advertising means something different to everyone. We understand one common theme—if you’re in business, you’re in advertising. People who own, run, and manage small business in America are the ones who drive advertising.

    I’m not talking Super Bowl ads, I mean Mom and Pops, Small Business, people like you and me who deal with one question every day:
    How do I grow my business?

    National corporations are targeting local leads. You need to compete online.

    Advertising is Critical to Growing your Business

    We’ve seen a growing trend in our market. Large national and international businesses are advertising in our local market. Sure, this has always been the case, with TV and radio, but the trend is happening online. Local is the new target. For service professionals, this is reason for concern.

    In many industries, we’re seeing that it’s getting harder and harder to rank, in search for our clients. The cause, we put forth, is digital marketing. Many local businesses have been slow to adopt digital marketing. Sure, you have a website, but I’d bet you that it’s no longer effective in driving new business to you.

    The reason? Big companies are using digital marketing to attack your local market. What is their target? Leads.

    Networking has long been the local’s edge. We join a local chamber, we’re part of a local club, we belong to a local group of faith and we spend time working in the local community. Digital marketing is threatening this traditional source of leads. Building relationships is the key to any business. But as national brands advertise in our local market, they’re bypassing the old ways of doing business.


    crowded marketplace
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    Example: Attorneys

    Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer make it simple to get a service that your local attorney used to provide; a Living Will, or Power of Attorney, for instance.

    It’s a simple service, so you don’t notice or miss the business, but it’s the leads they’re after. It’s the leads you’re missing. And it’s the leads, that grow a small client into a bigger client.

    Service professionals earn the trust of their clients with the little things. And before you know it, the next generation trusts these companies, instead of building a relationship with your practice.

    It’s the same story for Accountants, Finance, Mortgage Brokers, even technical ones, like IT Providers. People are actively trying to disrupt your business model.


    Competing Digitally

    The problem isn’t that there are corporations who want your market share, it’s that you are not competing digitally.

    Here’s a great exercise, to see where you stand.
    Google (search) what you do.

    If you’re an immigration attorney for instance, search for “immigration attorney near me”. What shows up in search will reveal your competition—and whether or not you rank against them online.

    This simple exercise is a quick test for your business. If you’re not on the first page of search results, you need to be. Check your pulse.

    Do-it-yourself advertising is dead

    I’ve seen many trends over my 20 year career in advertising and marketing. As we climb out of recession, I still see so many business owners who still try to do everything themselves. I call it, the age of “do-it-yourself” advertising. Modern tool sets have become so advanced, that we can all pick up an app and build a website. We can make our own logo, send our own bulk email, build newsletters and get business cards printed.

    Your time is limited. At what point does quality and efficiency come into play?

    We rely on specialists because every task is nuanced. A pro, who specializes in digital can save you money on every ad buy. When you go straight to Google or a local magazine publisher, you pay retail. Organic search changes every week. Think you’re up on the latest trends in content marketing? I could go on.

    A Noisy Marketplace

    Most important—while it seems the need for people to help us promote our business is no longer an issue… what we don’t see, is that every market is flooded with noise. Everyone is yelling for attention. And we have trained ourselves to ignore it all. So how do you make advertising work for you?

    New specialties arise. You need SEO, inbound marketing, outbound campaigns and expensive tool sets to manage it all or even automate.

    Now the noise is automated.

    When times were harder, we rightly struggled for every advantage. We saved on every task and expense. Yet, as we come out of poor economic times—each and every business is confronted with more competition, all vying for the consumer’s dollar.

    And still, we’re bombarded with pitches, offers, and promises that seem so easy. We know they’re too good to be true, but still waste time and resources on a quick fix. One low monthly price and business magically rolls in the door. Does this sound familiar?

    Longbow can help you build your business and grow leads, digitally. We’re members of your community, vested in mutual success.

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  • Is your WordPress being hacked—right now?

    Is your WordPress being hacked—right now?

    Protect and Manage your sites

    Increasing attacks on the much loved Internet CMS requires we take action. Each of us likely has a WordPress site—or helps a client with one. To manage any open source web platform requires maintenance. The rise and rapid escalation of hacks and intrusion on the platform requires that we take measures to keep our sites current and free from intrusion.

    There has been an enormous increase in attacks that compromise WordPress, the leading open-source platform, from thousands of attempts to gain access via your login, to malicious code being injected, to losing customer data and confidence.

    The scale of these assaults demand better oversight and web management.

    If you build sites for clients and do not have a contingency plan to deal with security and maintenance, then your agency is setting yourself up for failure.

    Longbow helps you shore up your sites. In the past, we’ve shown live attacks on several sites, discuss the problems we all face and then offer several things that can be done to protect a WordPress website. If you’ve never thought about disaster recovery,  “what do I do when my site’s been hijacked,” then this message is a wake-up call.

    Eric Needle, Longbow’s founder, has been designing and building the World Wide Web since 1994—and developing sites with WordPress for since 2004. Contact us if you need help securing and protecting your Internet properties.

    Manage and Protect your WordPress

    Protect your WordPress

    We’ve identified three basic areas to be concerned with, from the Admin side of the platform, to keep your sites functioning. They include tasks you perform for prevention, keeping WordPress and it’s plugins current, and robust backup and recovery. This assumes that your hosting platform is secure—something we should not take for granted.


    Prevention

    The first critical step is hardening your site to create as little opportunity for hacking or unwanted intrusion. There are several guides and plugins that help you accomplish this and we’ve been running several to test overall effectiveness.

    We run several sites that serve as test beds and with WordPress Security on our minds, the role of many of these sites have shifted from SEO and marketing exercise to canaries in the coal mine.

    For starters, here is a great primer, and evolving source of info.
    codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress

    There are several plug-ins, all available from the Admin. One’s we like include Sucuri, WordFence, and iThemes Security. As new tools become available, we suggest you become familiar with this rapidly changing side of the web world.

    The basic concept is to manage file permissions, so we don’t leave the door open to attack. Several of the above mentioned plugins include checklists that explain each procedure and it’s value.


    Keeping Current

    Step two is the continual updating of both the WordPress platform and all the plugins you are running. While this seems a simple task, the frequency of updates has been increasing dramatically. When the core team discovers an exploit, they rush to patch the issue and correct it.

    These updates often have to be performed manually—and we always perform a database export (backup) before we click, update. Not to be taken lightly, I’ve had updates break functionality, resulting in more work for our team.

    We’ve been building sites with a new focus on plugins. If we can provide the feature without a plugin, we will. Minimize how many you run, as each is a weak link that could provide a way into your site.


    SSL Certificates

    Experts recommend using SSL certificates on your sites, especially if you use forms, download files, sell stuff—or basically run a WordPress. What do you get for the effort? Security. And you now operate your site, safely able to accept credit cards and sends email. In addition, we get a little lock icon in the address bar and better Google ranking.


    Backup and Recovery

    Last, but not least, we came to the conclusion that it is not possible to protect from every attack, you need to ask the question “how do we recover after an attack?” The answer, is to backup and restore your site. Setting up backups are critical. Often hacks go undetected for months, so it’s good practice to create many restore points. Being able to restore from a previous backup allows us to quickly set things right.


    We have been freaking out over the past several years from these threats to our sites. Our response is to perform these three core actions for every site. Even as I write this we are building a new server system, with a host that is more current than our current one. To deliver web services, we as developers and designers have to take on this added role, else our clients find others who will.

    If anyone needs help, just contact us for more information. We provide white labeled hosting to our partners and incredible TLC for our clients.

    And if you Ad Fed club is looking for a speaker on this topic, Eric and team are available to speak. Our talk includes watching our test sites suffer brute force attacks in real time. Something all too common.

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