Do you have an idea for a mobile application you believe can take off? You aren’t the only one.

It seems like everyone wants to be in the mobile market these days. When 1.2 billion people in the world have a smartphone, you have a huge market available to download your app.

Having an idea for a mobile app is one thing. It’s another thing to find someone who can build it.

Are you trying to figure out how to hire a mobile app developer? Follow the five steps below to hire a developer to build your mobile application.

1. Look for Mobile Specialists

There are a lot of tools in the software development world. Not all of them will work for mobile.

If you spend your money who doesn’t have the experience or tools to create mobile apps, then you are paying for someone to learn on the job. You have to bet that they won’t screw up.

Make sure the freelancer or business you hire has built mobile apps before.

2. Don’t Pick Your Developer Based on Price

If you’re looking to hire someone to do basic data entry or easy jobs, then the cost isn’t much of a concern. Things change when you hire someone to build a complicated application.

When you hire someone at below market value, you run the risk of hiring someone who will rush your job and give you an application full of bugs. Don’t be afraid to spend a little more with a reputable company so you can get a well-built product as a result.

3. Figure out How the Developer Communicates

Communication is key when working on a long and complicated project. You need to make sure your developers communicate well and respond when you need to know something.

You don’t want to wait days or weeks to get a reply to an email. You want to be able to get answers as soon as possible.

4. Make Sure You Get a Design Too

Being able to code doesn’t mean that a developer knows how to put together good looking designs. These are typically two separate roles at companies.

If you’re working with a freelancer, then make sure they have the skills to make your app look good. If not, you’ll need to find someone to build the user interface too.

5. Check for References

If this is your first venture into app development, you probably don’t want to work with someone that’s brand new. You can verify that a business or freelancer has a long-standing history by asking for references.

You can learn what it’s really like to work with someone when speaking with past customers. They can fill you in on the details you may not think to ask.

Now You Know How to Hire a Mobile App Developer

Finding the right person to build your mobile app is the most crucial step you’re going to take. Now that you know how to hire a mobile app developer, you can make the right choice. Make sure you vet your candidates thoroughly so you pick someone that can do the job.

Once you build your app, you need to advertise it to the world. Keep browsing our blog for tips that can help.

Hoping to hire SEO expert consultants? Every business should – never take search engine optimization lightly! It requires skill and experience to pull off right.

But how do you know which team to hire? How do you know you’re getting your money’s worth? You don’t want to end up wasting limited resources on an SEO company that might do you wrong.

We’ve got you covered! Check out our guide below for ten crucial tips to help you find the right SEO expert.

1. Proof of Experience

Can you get lucky hiring a newcomer to the scene and get an amazing SEO campaign? Yes, but the chances are low. Experience and skill go hand-in-hand, which means you’ll want to hire SEO expert consultants that have been in the field for years.

That said, don’t simply take their word.

If the SEO consultant says they’ve been around for five years, ask for evidence of this. Request for the URL of a few websites they worked on before and run a quick test. Check if those websites gain traffic, how high they rank when you run a Google query, and look for things like fast loading speeds or a mobile-friendly design.

More importantly, conduct a portfolio check. Let’s discuss that a bit more in-depth below.

2. Portfolio Check

When hiring SEO expert consultants, make it a habit to ask about their previous clients. You’ll need to check how thick their portfolio is. The more clients they worked with before, the more experienced and skillful they are.

After all, most companies wouldn’t hire them if they didn’t showcase their expertise.

If they do provide a list of previous clients, look for big names. Look for companies you know. The more big-name companies there are, the more reliable the SEO consultant is.

Don’t forget to check when they last worked for a client. Even if they have a good history, the SEO team you’re looking at might not have updated tools or techniques if their last big job was five years ago. Always prioritize hiring SEO expert consultants that stay in the loop, especially since Google updates its algorithm often.

This might seem like a small detail but check for spelling and grammar in their portfolio presentation. It’s little details like this that hint at how meticulous they can get with their work. A fancy presentation helps too!

3. Ownership of Content

Most businesses forget to ask about content ownership. Don’t make this mistake because it could leave your site dead and dry!

Say, for example, you hired the folks at SEO Explode. They offer great deals but don’t settle with the promises of outstanding SEO work. Make sure to ask if the content they made for you belongs to your business now or if they keep ownership.

If the content belongs to them, they have every right to take down all the blog posts and links they provided. It might not happen immediately, but they could, one day, remove all the stuff you paid for. It’s impossible to avoid this since some SEO experts want a backup plan in case they financially go under, but it’s safer to hire an SEO professional who gives you full ownership.

Ownership guarantees you never need to worry about that traffic-boosting content going away. It’s yours and how you use it now falls into your hands. The SEO team simply provides it for the money you pay, and they’ll leave it to you when they go and the contract’s up.

Some companies offer limited exclusivity, which means you get to keep the content but only for a few years. Once you reach the deadline, say five years, you need to let go of the content they made for you. This is still fine since you have time to replace it with newer content.

4. Which KPIs Do They Track?

Key Performance Indicators help you monitor whether your SEO campaign is going to be successful or not. The numbers showcase whether your new posts, chosen keywords, and link building efforts can achieve your goals. That said, not every KPI is essential to your success and focusing too much on the wrong ones can lead to wasted time and effort.

You don’t want to hire an SEO consultant who focuses too much on mentions and page shares. Sure, those are important because they measure the total reach of your brand, but they don’t correlate directly to ROI. You need to prioritize KPIs that affect immediate profit and conversions like landing page performance, cost-per-acquisition, bounce rates, and page speed.

Knowing which KPIs they track can tell you a lot about their SEO skills. Separating KPIs that focus on revenue and expenditure instead of vanity numbers – such as social media shares – highlight their know-how and priorities.

At the end of the day, your SEO campaign should focus on helping your business earn. Things like brand mentions are great but they’re not the cornerstone of your investment.

5. Ending the Contract

Don’t forget to ask about terminating the deal. What’s the process of ending the contract and how do you proceed once your relationship with the SEO team ends?

First, ask about termination fees. Make sure you know about any charges in case you need to end the deal before the appointed date. If they do, don’t forget to look at the details in the contract to verify if it’s there.

You also need to ask about expiration issues. What happens if the contract expires but the SEO consultant didn’t finish the job? Will you need to cancel the current contract, renew it, or have the SEO team continue to work without pay?

If you must terminate the contract early, ask about the remaining fees for any unfinished work. You also need to ask about ownership – which we discussed above – because the SEO expert might have claim over content until the contract ends. Clear out any ambiguity before you part ways.

Did you finish the contract and part ways with the SEO team on good terms? That’s great, but make sure you can still contact them afterward. You’ll still need their advice in the future, especially when it comes to updates and fixes for the content they made.

6. What Do You Expect to Achieve?

Make it a habit to ask the SEO expert about their expectations. Try to keep things grounded in reality. Hoping to hit the top spot on Google SERP and amassing hundreds of thousands of new site visits per day sound great but also unlikely, especially in only a few months.

Ask for specific goals.

Do they aim to shoot for page 1 SERP results? Can they aim for a lower bounce rate or higher landing page performance? Do they hope to top local search results or will they prioritize national SEO instead?

Understanding their expectations helps you determine if the SEO team has a grasp on the task at hand. Some might promise rank zero (referring to snippets) or a guaranteed number of leads per day. Others might promise thousands of traffic per day.

Those are the teams to avoid because you can never quantify exact results when it comes to SEO. The rules change all the time and Google keeps on updating. Even if the status quo remained the same, you can never expect visitor behavior so steer clear of companies that promise exact results.

Speaking of companies to avoid, let’s dive into the warning signs you should look out for:

7. Warning Signs

Did the SEO expert guarantee success? That’s a red flag right there! No matter how good the SEO team is, they can never assure success due to the nature of the Internet.

If you can look at their portfolio, take closer inspection and see how they provided backlinks for their previous client. Did they go through the effort of guest blogging, creating evergreen content, and maintaining fulfilling engagement with the target audience? If they did that’s great but what if they bought backlinks instead?

Buying backlinks is a quick route to an online grave. Search engines no longer allow this. If the SEO expert conducts this kind of tactic for your business, you might see your ranking plummet and it’ll be difficult to pick yourself back up.

Take time to look at the blog posts they provided too. Run them on tools like Copyscape and double-check for hints of duplication or plagiarism. Google doesn’t necessarily punish sites for plagiarism or duplication.

However, the search engine will only prioritize content that appears relevant and comes from a recognized authority. It’s more likely to show content from a well-known site instead of yours, even if your post is the same. It’ll be more obvious to your visitors that you copied something, making your site look inferior in the process.

Using apps to spam content or spin blogs is another warning sign to look out for. Spamming links on Twitter or Yelp reviews can easily get your pages penalized. These acts only hurt your site so avoid SEO consultants that still resort to these outdated tactics.

In short: avoid companies that resort to black hat tactics!

8. Exact Terms of Payment and Fees

Did you go through the previous seven concerns and found a company that checks all the marks? That’s great, but you’re done yet. You still need to ask three more things and the next bit is about money.

Get an exact amount for their services. Do they charge $200 for four highly optimized blog posts and some backlinking opportunities? Do they charge extra for on-page optimization and a site audit?

Don’t settle for a quick answer. Get a detailed list of all their fees and the services they charge. You don’t want to hire them and get surprised down the road by a series of unexpected fees.

If you can, get in touch with previous clients. Ask about hidden fees. Some companies hide things like processing fees, transaction fees, and miscellaneous fees and then surprise their clients with a higher bill.

Always make sure that the price they tell you in the beginning matches the price they charge you before parting ways. Also, don’t settle for a flat “one fee covers everything” presentation. Push for a breakdown of every penny spent.

9. Do We See Every Penny Spent?

When you paid the SEO consultant, did that include the fees to use certain tools or negotiate guest blogging opportunities? Make sure you see where each penny went. Get a full breakdown so you can compute how much went into keyword research, how much went into improving the website design, and how much went into optimizing content or building backlinks.

Why is this important?

Doing this can help you determine if you’re earning or not. A full breakdown can help determine if you are overspending for lead generation and if your sales funnel isn’t supporting your SEO campaign.

10. Where and How Often Do They Communicate?

Last, but certainly not least, is to ask the SEO consultant about communication. SEO is a difficult job to pull off and you need to make sure you and the SEO team are always on the same page. This requires steady and consistent communication.

Do they offer a dedicated channel on Skype, Slack, or other messaging apps to maintain communication? Do they give weekly reports to keep you updated on current tasks and progress? Do they offer a forum thread for your team and theirs to stay in the loop regarding important announcements?

Maintaining steady communication is also important to prevent small issues from growing. You don’t want the SEO team to hide problems because these could snowball into insurmountable hurdles down the line. It’s important to keep in touch so you can address these problems early and change strategy if needed.

Hire SEO Expert Consultants Today!

Don’t hire SEO expert consultants without considering these ten tips first! These tips will help you determine if the experts you’re talking to are the right fit for the job. You can avoid failure, scams, and financial troubles by hiring the right team and this list will help you get there.

That said, hiring an SEO expert is only the beginning. You still need to formulate the right plan. Feel free to read our other guides today and discover more tips and tricks to help you forge a strong SEO strategy!

Did you know that Facebook continues to be the most cost-effective advertising investment you can make?

It is cheaper than almost every other source of advertising.

Plus, the targeting options are more precise than the rest.

But just as with every other form of advertising, there are certain dos and don’ts with which you should familiarize yourself before taking this smart step.

The Dos and Don’ts for Better Facebook Ads

Nothing challenges your credibility quite like a shoddy ad.

Obviously, you want to drive traffic to your site and not away.

So when you’re developing your Facebook ad, keep in mind a few simple actions to take (and NOT to take):

DO Include a Clear Call-to-Action

What is the purpose of your message? And what do you want your audience to do?

You need to know the answers to these two questions if you’re going to develop a concise call-to-action.

Furthermore, be sure that the overall concept and message of your ad is developed with your audience in mind. You should have a clear understanding of who your target audience is so your call-to-action will be desirable and relatable to them.

Otherwise, you probably won’t get many clicks.

DO Proofread, Then Proofread Again 

One set of eyes is never enough.

In fact, when it comes to proofreading, there can really never be too many cooks in the kitchen.

Your Facebook audience consists of hundreds, if not thousands or even millions, of viewers. So it’s absolutely crucial that you check your ad for typos, proper capitalization, grammatical/punctuation errors, and any other mistakes.

So it’s clear that incorporating a clear CTA and proofreading are two relatively basic actions to take to build the foundation of your Facebook ad.

But what are a couple of things you should avoid?

DO NOT Overstuff with Info

You don’t have the luxury of your viewer’s time.

Your Facebook ad’s message and call-to-action must be simple enough for a viewer to comprehend within seconds. You need to put it right out there.

Keep it simple. Be sure that your headline includes the name of your business and what you’re offering. Then any accompanying message needs to be consistent with your headline.

And don’t forget to add an image. Speaking of which…

DO NOT Grab Just Any Image

It should go without saying that your image must be relevant. But make it a point to select images that will catch the viewer’s eye too. Remember, you only have seconds to work with here.

Find a way to incorporate your brand through colors, or by cleverly integrating your logo.

Having the perfect image is also really helpful if you’re planning to use Facebook dynamic ads –  which are targeted Facebook ads that show one or more of your relevant products to people who have visited your website.

And finally, when it comes to choosing your ad’s image, you want something clear and with high resolution. There should also be no more than 20% text.

Boost Your Sales

We hope that this article about the dos and don’ts of Facebook ads helps you on your journey toward generating more revenue.

And for more inspiring articles about all things marketing, keep checking back with our regularly updated blog!

You’re a business owner. And like any business owner occupying the year 2019, you know that your website is a vital part of your business success. 

Here’s the problem: there are a lot of websites on the world wide web. It’s hard to get an exact estimate because most sites have a short lifespan and new sites go up all the time, but as of February 2019, one estimate says there are more than 1.51 billion websites currently active. 

The point is, if you want to stand out from the crowd, your site needs to be something special. The best place to start? The right website best practices. Here are three you can’t live without. 

Need for Speed

Let’s be blunt: your website needs to be faster. 

According to one study, we now have a shorter attention span than a goldfish. You can despair about what this means for the future of civilization, but in business terms, it means your customers are impatient. 

We see this happen in real-time. The average mobile landing page, for example, takes about 22 seconds to load. Here’s the problem: almost half of all web users will ditch a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. 

If you want to keep your visitors, you’re going to have to do better than 22 seconds. 

Not sure how fast your site is? A good place to start is Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool (it’s free!)

Show, Don’t Tell

Let’s say you’re trying to build a new website for a law firm. And let’s say you’re tragically inexperienced in this whole web thing. 

If you’re like many novices, your first instinct is probably to fill those web pages with words, words, and more words. After all, it’s a law firm’s website. You’re going to have to explain things left and right. 

You are going to have to explain things, but filling your pages with walls of text won’t help you. 

Obviously, you’re going to need words if you’re writing a blog post, but when it comes to web pages, your visitors will thank you for creativity.

Be concise. Use infographics. Tell a story in the most efficient manner possible. 

For the Love of Google, Optimize It!

Finally, for the love of the almighty Google, optimize your website. 

Search engines are answer machines. Google, which has most of the search engine market share, gets 63,000 searches per second, or 3.78 million searches per minute. 

Not all of these searches are questions, per se, but when users open a search engine, they’re searching for an answer in some form or another. 

Here’s the problem. 

Search engines are based on code and algorithms. And given the breathtaking volume of data and websites floating around the internet, search engines have to be smart about how they categorize information. 

To do this, they use a number of tools, including web crawlers, to create a search index (like the index at the back of a book). Web crawlers use key identifiers to determine how pages should be categorized and how much authority they have. 

SEO is basically the art and science of making your site readable to search engines. And if search engines can read your site, they can figure out how to rank it. If you do it right, they might even rank you well. 

Building Website Best Practices

Building a website can be a bit like raising a child –if that child was a nebulous entity made of computer code designed to promote your business on an equally nebulous entity of computer code. 

It’s an undertaking, and it takes a village. And even the best website best practices take…well, practice. 

So, it’s time to do your homework. Make sure to check out our blog for more useful tips to keep your site ahead of the curve.