Currently we are searching for a top-notch, smart Jr. Marketing Analyst/Intern to join the Voxxy team.

The Opportunity: Digital Marketing Industry + Voxxy:

While working at Voxxy you will have the opportunity to dive first-hand into the world of online marketing. While online marketing is a fairly new career field, there is a growing need for people in the industry.

Average starting salaries vary greatly – anywhere from $35K to $75K, and most of the variation comes from the fact that most college graduates do not have the skills necessary to be successful in the industry and must be taught on the job.

With this internship, our goal is to help you gain the skills needed so that we want to hire you, and so that you can go out into the field ahead of your peers.  Voxxy interns:

• Do not file paperwork.
• Do not do pointless busy work – everything you do will have an impact on our clients
• Learn and Apply the principles of SEO, Content marketing, and many other aspects of online marketing to help clients grow
• Work on real client accounts

Structure / Pay:

There are two stages to the Voxxy internship:

• Stage 1 – Online Marketing Course

We have curated a 25 lesson online marketing course that must be studied and passed off.  At 10 hrs per week, we expect this course to last 2-3 months (depending on your ability to understand the concepts and materials).

Throughout this course you will receive 1-on-1 training and review from both employees and partners of Voxxy to make sure you are learning the material and will be able to apply your education in part 2 of the internship.

• Stage 2 – Jr. Marketing Analyst

As a Jr. Marketing Analyst you will start at $10/hr, with the expectation of 10-20 hrs/week. You will be assigned specific clients to manage and will work directly with our marketing team as one of the team members.  Additional pay increases are available for successful interns.

During both of these stages you will be able to earn up to six(6) elective school credits and will be expected to work hard, learn a lot, and add value to our clients.

Who Should Apply:

We are very selective in who we choose to award our internship to.  If you are someone who exhibits the traits below AND are interested in marketing, business, and helping companies grow then we want to talk to you.  The traits that make a successful intern are:

• Hard working
• Smart working
• Intelligent and able to think strategically and tactically
• Able to analyze and implement solid business strategy
• Interested in understanding how online marketing works
• Realizes the potential and need for online marketing and is interested in a career

Who is Voxxy:

Voxxy is an online marketing and web development agency that specializes in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Content Marketing, and Web Design & Development.  We help both national and local companies across the United States, and work with companies such as NordicTrack, intelliBED, ProForm, Printerlogic, DailyBread/Food Insurance, BOSCH|NutriMill.

At Voxxy, our goal is simple – help our clients’ business grow!  We accomplish this goal through:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Content Marketing
• Business Review Optimization
• PPC (Pay-per-click) and other paid marketing opportunities
• Affiliate marketing
• Website Design and Development
• Brand Management

Digital marketing is the future of marketing.  If you want to be successful in any type of marketing job in the future you will need to develop these skills.

To Apply:

Email your resume, with a short introduction as to why you are interested in the internship to: justin@voxxynetworks.com

We are looking for a super smart content manager.  As the content manager for Voxxy, you will have the following responsibilities:

• Manage our writing team.
• Review / Edit articles submitted to ensure quality before being sent for publication online
• Work with our marketing team to ensure smooth content flow (i.e. make sure they have the quality articles they are trying to get published online)
• Manage payments to writers
• Vet and hire new writers as the need arises

Pay: $10 – $12/hr, DOE

Internship Credit: Yes (potential)

Pay begins at $10-$12/hr, with potential pay advances for interns who become full-time employees of the company.

Who Should Apply:

We are very selective in who we choose to award our internship to.  If you are someone who exhibits the traits below AND are wanting to learn more about what creative opportunities are available in the digital marketing industry, then we want to talk with you:

• Hard working
• Smart working
• Exceptional written and verbal skills
• Understands, or can quickly learn, how to write effectively online
• Intelligent
• Able to manage several writers
• Superb grasp of the English language
• Ability to tell good content from bad content
• Ability to work with writers to create content that is high quality, explains the topic, and reads very well

Please note: We are not only looking for English majors.  We are more concerned with skills and ability to work hard and learn quickly.

Internship Details:

We are committed to helping students at Dixie State gain real-world experience in the field of online marketing.  This internship is paid from day 1 at the rates mentioned above.

In addition, depending on your current program at the school we may be able to work with you and your career counselor to help you earn school credit for the skills you are learning and developing while working with Voxxy.

Who is Voxxy:

Voxxy is an online marketing and web development agency that specializes in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Content Marketing, and Web Design & Development.  We help both national and local companies across the United States, and work with companies such as NordicTrack, intelliBED, ProForm, Printerlogic, DailyBread/Food Insurance, BOSCH|NutriMill.

At Voxxy, our goal is simple – help our clients’ business grow!  We accomplish this goal through:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Content Marketing
• Business Review Optimization
• PPC (Pay-per-click) and other paid marketing opportunities
• Affiliate marketing
• Website Design and Development
• Brand Management

To Apply:

Email your resume, with a short introduction as to why you are interested in the internship to: justin@voxxynetworks.com

DOES YOURS????

Honestly, sit back and ask yourself:

1. Does my website look good (and not just in my mind, but do my customers tell me that my site looks good)? Is it fully responsive, is the design fresh and fitting for the niche I’m in?
2. Is my main message clear? Too often design gets in the way of message and clutters things. The goal of your website should be first and foremost to convey a specific message clearly, simply, and effectively to the first time visitor. People need to know exactly what you do when they first land on your website. You don’t want them to have to guess what your do or spend time figuring out what your an expert in.
3. Is my website set up to convert? If I’m a local dentist, is there a very easy way for people to call my office,schedule an appointment, or find directions to my office? If I’m an auto mechanic, does my site drive people to call me and do they see clearly that I run an experienced, honest shop? (I could go on with examples for a while, but I think you get my point)

To help you answer these questions, let’s go through what I will call “The Anatomy of a Perfect Website”. These items below are in no specific order, as I consider all of them to be very important and essential to creating the perfect website (which should be your goal if you are paying someone to create a website for you).

• Keep it Simple Stupid (KISS). I don’t know how many different ways I have heard this analogy applied, but it definitely applies here. When it comes to design and layout, it’s actually much more difficult to create something that is as simple as possible and still looks good. A perfect example of a company that has done this extremely well is Apple under the direction of Steve Jobs. Jobs was a FANATIC about this aspect of design, and it is reflected in every Apple product you buy.

  In terms of your website, this means that a reader is able to:

  • See and understand your main message in less than 3 seconds. If a first time visitor doesn’t know what you do within 3 seconds, chances are they are going to click the back button very quickly and move onto your competitor.
  • Navigate your website easily. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to call a company, find out more about them, or learn about a product and not be able to. Your site’s navigation needs to be simple to use, easy to see, and very intuitive.

  By striving to keep your design simple (yet still attractive) you reduce what is called Cognitive Load – which is the amount of mental capacity a visitor needs to read through and understand your site. If a site takes all of my brainpower to figure out how to check out from their shopping cart or learn more about their services, chances are I will click the back button and move onto a competitors website.

• Make Sure Google Can Read your Website. Remember, when Google sends a spider to crawl and index your website they are sending a robot, and a robot reads through the code – it cannot ‘see’ your website in the way that you or I do. As such, you need to make sure you have the elements properly set up for Google to read them. These elements include:
  • title tag of each page on your site
  • header tags (this includes h1, h2, h3, etc. tags)
  • meta tags and descriptions
  • img alt tags
  • etc…

  All of this code needs to be weaved throughout your content properly so Google can understand very clearly who you are and what you do so they can correctly classify you in their ranking algorithm.

• Is Fully Responsive. More and more search is happening on phones, tablets, and phablets, making responsiveness of your website that much more important.

  “48% of users say that if they arrive on a business site that isn’t working well on mobile, they take it as an indication of the business simply not caring”

  If your website is not fully responsive and does not look good on a phone then you are losing business, period.

• Remove All Barriers. When someone visits your site they don’t want to have to jump through four different hoops just to get your phone number. When designing your website make sure to identify the main goals of the site, and remove as many barriers as possible to ensure the most amount of visitors accomplish these goals.

  For example, let’s say you are a local dentist and your goals are below (listed in order of importance):

  1. To have someone call your office to schedule an appointment
  2. Have a patient find the address of your office
  3. Make it easy for current patients to download patient forms
  4. Capture email addresses of site visitors so you can email marketing them with the great content you continually produce

  To accomplish these goals you are going to need to ensure your phone number and address are both at the top of the website and at the bottom of the website. Yes, you will still have a ‘Contact Us’ page, but you don’t want to force visitors to have to click from the homepage to the contact us page just to get your phone number or address.

  You will also need to make sure the navigation to the customer forms is simple and easy to use and understand, and that it is on every page of your website so visitors can get there in 1 click and not 2 or 3.

  Finally (and this one is the most difficult), you need a design that allows you to capture people’s email without being too intrusive so you don’t make it hard to accomplish goals 1 and 2.

• Design for Elegance AND Conversion. Obviously you want your site to look good so people are impressed when they land on your site. You don’t want your logo and brand associated with something that is subpar. However, this does not mean you should design without conversion in mind. Winning the beauty pageant is great, but worthless if you don’t bring in any new business. Here are a few things to think about in designing a good converting website:
  • Focus Visitors Attention on What’s Most Important. Oftentimes we have clients who want to showcase a really cool picture or other element that distracts users from the main goals. Good design will focus attention to the main goals.
  • Lead Capture. Almost every website should have some type of lead capture included in the design. However, it’s extremely important to not overdo this while still having a lead capture. While we recommend sometimes for business owners to be very aggressive with their lead capture (think really annoying pop-ups, pop-ins, etc.), many times this aggressive approach can reduce the amount of quality leads. Balance is key.
  • Design for What Visitors Expect. A dental website needs to look different than a realtors website. While this may seem obvious, you need to be extra careful with this if you are opting for a template-based website and not a fully customized one.
  • Follow the F-Pattern and Use Bold Words Properly. Remember that most people don’t read websites – they scan them. If you study how people’s eyes look at websites you will see over and over a literal ‘F’ pattern emerge. This is a heatmap of what this looks like:

    

    What you can see is that people read the title of pages, from left to right. Then they start to skim as they go down, still reading from left to right but not always going all the way to the end of the page on the right.

    What you learn from this is that readers are looking for:

    1. Catchy, Descriptive Titles (just don’t be over-the-top cheesy or obvious)
    2. Engaging Sub-titles
    3. Bold and Highlighted Words
    4. Lists

    All of these elements make it easy for readers to skim your website and still understand the message you are trying to convey

  • Let Users See All the Functions Quickly and Easily
• Trust Signals. If you have successfully driven someone to your website for the first time you need to earn their trust. One way to do this is through displaying trust signals on your website. Trust signals include elements such as:
  • Customer Reviews
  • Testimonials
  • Case Studies
  • Logos such as ‘Visa’ and other industry groups such as the Better Business Bureau (BBB) that you are a member of and which show you are a legitimate, trusted business
• Track and Test Performance through Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools. A good website is one that works. Without analytics software installed there is no way to know if the website is performing like it should. I like to compare websites without analytics to traditional Billboards – sure, people may be seeing them….but are they actually doing anything for you? It’s hard to tell.

Remember, your website is both a tool used to help bring in business and an extension of your brand and image. As such, take the time to analyze your current site and see if any changes are needed to represent your business properly.

If you are looking for help with your website or marketing, call Voxxy today @ (435) 574-9320.

If you find yourself in this situation, I feel terrible for you. You spent good money and ended up with a penalized site because of poor marketing tactics – and now you have to spend money again to try to climb out of the hole I like to call Google HELL. It’s not cheap and it can take a ton of time.

*Google HELL is a term I used for sites that are not ranking anymore due to a penalty from Google. I call it HELL because it’s a place you don’t want to ever be and can be very difficult to escape.

If you are a business owner looking to grow your online presence and hire an SEO firm, please, please, please take 10 minutes right now to read this post. You don’t want to end up with a penalized website, and the only way you can make sure that doesn’t happen is to know what your SEO company is doing for you when it comes to link building.

The reason why I’m talking about the tactics below is because these are SEO “tactics” that were employed by many companies before Google’s Penguin update in April, 2011 and are still employed by many companies today. These ‘tactics’ are all employed to game and manipulate Google’s rankings and not truly earn a good ranking. Because Google does not like to be manipulated, if you see a company using any of these tactics listed below while they describe the link building they will be doing – run away. If you are already paying a firm that is using any of the tactics, then stop paying ASAP.

SEO Tactics to Stay Away From:

• Article Marketing
  

  
  Article marketing is where someone takes a single article and uses a distribution service to send that article to hundreds of websites. Sounds great, right? You only have to write one article, and get hundreds of links pointing back to your website.

  Wrong. Remember, these articles are not coming from the Associated Press. Most of the time they are low quality and are only posted on low quality websites that will take anything. These sites are like tiger sharks that will eat any piece of trash that comes their way and are extremely deadly to your website. Real, quality websites have real editors that quality-control each piece of content that is published and will only accept high quality content..

  

• Link Wheels / Link Wheeling
  

  Link Wheels are designed to create a ton of low quality links on free sites that do not have editorial gatekeepers. , They use these websites to spam and trick Google into thinking that your website is getting a lot of good links.

  How a link wheel works is you create webpages online (most often using free webpage builders and write a piece of content for each page. You then link site A to site B, site B to site C, site C to site D, etc. And you have all those sites (A-Z) link directly to your website. The best way to describe a link wheel is visually (the arrows below represent links pointing to a site):

  

  The problem with link wheels, like most of these other tactics, is that they exist solely to game Google. They are not real marketing – you aren’t creating epic content that people want to read and share. You are creating content solely for Google, and in 2011 Google said very clearly that they will penalize you for this type of link scheme.

• Content Networks / Link Networks
  

  Anytime you hear something like “we have a network”, walk away. These are groups of sites owned by individuals that exist solely for the purpose of building links to manipulate your site’s rankings. The sites are always low quality (even if the owners say otherwise), and even I can spot a link network in less than 2 minutes….and if I can spot them you can bet Google and their massive team of extremely smart PHD’s can.

  Link networks used to work like magic. Trust me, I experimented with them on my own websites. They worked. And now they do a great job of getting you penalized once you get caught, and trust me you will get caught.

• Blog Commenting
  

  This one’s a little more tricky, as there are some cases where it makes sense to comment on blogs. The problems arise when you are commenting solely to get a link and not to build a relationship with a blogger or editor. Let me give you two examples so you can see the difference:

  Example 1 – Spam blog commenting to get links:

  

  This was posted on a marketing post. Obviously, the ‘comment’ isn’t a real comment but is pure spam for someone trying to rank for the keyword ‘Cialis Canadian Drugs’ online. If you want, I can get you about 10,000 of these ‘links’ in about 5 minutes….oh and I’ll penalize you in the process.

  Example 2 – real comment to connect with a blogger:

  

  This is a real comment from a real reader on a post about morning sickness. The reason why most companies won’t do this quality level of blog commenting is that most times it won’t get you a link, and it takes a long time to read through a post, then leave an intelligent comment about it.

  Generally speaking, if a company is advertising blog commenting as a link building tactic you should be weary.

• Press Release Marketing
  

  Press release marketing is NOT the same thing as having a PR or good SEO professional write and send out a press release. This kind of PR marketing is really just another form of article marketing in which a company writes a quick “press release” then auto submits it to lower quality press release sites in order to get backlinks.

  So how do you tell if this is real PR or fake-and-going-to-penalize-you PR? Ask the company these questions:

  1. What’s the purpose of the press release. If the answer is links first, then pass. Press releases are used to get news out, tell about a product launch, etc. Yes, you can get some links, but this is not their primary goal.
  2. What does the PR cost? You won’t find a good press release service for less than $200/release.

  If the press release is cheap and serves mainly for links, don’t do it.

So What Does This All Mean?

The point of this article is to help you understand what your SEO Firm should NOT be doing. Ask them what they do, and if they mention any of these tactics then you can take that as a sign that they simply don’t do real online marketing
, and they will not help you. In the short run you may see some success, but you will almost be guaranteed to be penalized at some point.

What Do I Do If I’m Currently Using a Firm That Uses These Link Schemes?

The answer to this is simple: stop using them, period. If you are stuck in a contract I personally believe you can get out of it – I’m sure they mentioned the goal was to help your website, not hurt it, and it’s probably in the contract somewhere. If they are using tactics that will hurt your site you should not be held to that contract. However, even if you can’t get out of the contract you would be better off continuing to pay them and have them do nothing. If they continue building low quality links you will only have to pay more to remove them later, but keep in mind that some firms charge more than $20 per link to remove…and some article marketing schemes can get you hundreds of links or more per month.

If you find yourself in this situation, or in a situation where you want to make sure the SEO you are paying for is going to help instead of hurt you, feel free to give Voxxy a call. We can provide a free SEO analysis that will help you know what is going on with your online marketing.

• 61% of global internet users research products online
• 44% of online shoppers start by using a search engine
• There are 12 billion online searches PER MONTH in the USA
• 50% of all mobile searches are conducted in hopes of finding a local result, and 61% of those searches result in a purchase.
• 48% of users say that if they arrive on a business site that isn’t working well on mobile, they take it as an indication of the business simply not caring.

As you can see, if you run a business then being online is extremely important.

To further show this point, let me walk you through an experience I had this last week in looking for the menu to a good Mexican restaurant in my local town of St. George, UT. They make some killer asada and kick’n salsa, but because I couldn’t find a menu (and it wasn’t for lack of trying – I scoured their site, Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and everywhere else I could possibly find them) we ended up going to a competitor just down the road. The competitor had a website, I could see their menu, and they even offered an online coupon for a free $2.50 dessert – so I ended up spending my $60 their instead of the Mexican restaurant I had already wanted to go to.

You know the saddest part of this? I was already sold! I knew where I wanted to go eat, but because they didn’t have their menu on their website I went somewhere else.

Now, just for fun, go to Google and search a restaurant name in your local town. Before you hit ‘enter’, pay attention to the Google autosuggest terms that come up. You will invariably find the 1st or 2nd suggestion is going to be ‘ menu’. In order to get into Google auto suggest, there has to be search traffic for that keyword. In other words, tons of people are simply searching for a menu online. I’d wager that people HAVE to search for a menu because a good % of the time the restaurant doesn’t have one online.

So what can we learn from this, and how can you make sure you’re not losing business like this restaurant is?

1. Make sure you have a website, and that it looks good. Remember, looking good includes making sure your website is fully responsive (i.e. it looks good on a mobile phone) – otherwise searchers will think you don’t care, and most likely go somewhere else. In other words – having a bad website (or no website at all) drives people who should be your customers to your competitors.
2. Set up your website to CONVERT. Once you invest in a website you want to make sure it does what it is suppose to – bring in new business. Remember that simple $2.50 coupon? It got me to spend $60 and choose them over their competitor. In addition, the coupon got me to try one of their desserts I would not have tried without the coupon. I have now gone back 3 times just to get that dessert. That is a very well spent $2.50.

   While the coupon worked, the restaurant could have even done more than simply offer the coupon – they could have required that I sign up for their email marketing list and routinely send me out coupons and other offers aimed at bringing me back into their restaurant.

3. Make sure you are found when people search your brand name. There are many times when businesses don’t rank #1 for their brand simply because their site is not set up to communicate properly to Google what their brand and products are. This can dramatically hurt a business, as we have found many times that for businesses, brand traffic is greater than keyword search traffic. For example, one of our clients is a jewelry store in a very competitive market. They rank #1 for a vast majority of the industry keywords, but still over 50% of their search impressions and clicks comes from people searching for their business name.

   Do yourself a favor. Right now go to Google.com and type in your business brand name and see what comes up. If your website is not #1, then you have an issue that needs to be taken care of ASAP. Also, pay attention to what else is coming up below your site – hopefully you see your social profiles and other business listings and that they accurately depict your brand (i.e. positive reviews, correct name, address, and phone number, etc.)

If you are business owner and want to increase your online presence or build a website that helps you grow, contact Voxxy today. Our experience in both online marketing and development helps ensure your website is built with the end goal in mind – to help grow your business.