1. Welcome and Onboarding

Welcome and Onboarding: First impressions matter, and push notifications can play a vital role in welcoming new users to your app. By sending a personalized welcome message or a series of onboarding tips, you can guide users through the initial setup process and showcase the key features of your app. This approach to improving the UX/UI of the app helps users understand the value your app provides, right from the start.

2. Important Updates and Reminders

Push notifications are ideal for delivering timely updates and reminders. Whether it’s informing users about new features, bug fixes, or important news related to your app, push notifications can ensure that users stay informed and engaged with the latest developments.

3. Personalized Recommendations

Leverage the power of user data to send personalized recommendations through push notifications. By analyzing user preferences and behavior, you can suggest relevant content, products, or services that align with their interests. This personalized touch enhances user experience and fosters a stronger connection with your app.

4. Abandoned Carts

For e-commerce apps, push notifications can be a game-changer when it comes to recovering abandoned carts.  By sending gentle reminders, exclusive discounts, or limited-time offers, you can nudge users towards completing their purchases and drive revenue for your business.  This idea also works well for internal enterprise apps, where push notes can be used to remind someone to complete a process they had started, but not completed, within the app.  Submitting forms or completing checklist through an app would be an example of this.

5. User Engagement and Retention

Engagement and retention are key metrics for the success of any mobile app. Push notifications can be used to re-engage users who haven’t been active for a while. By sending personalized messages, incentives, or exclusive content, you can reignite their interest and encourage them to revisit your app.

6. Event Notifications and Updates

If your app involves events or time-sensitive activities, push notifications become an indispensable tool. Inform users about upcoming events, provide event reminders, and update them on any changes or cancellations. This ensures users stay well-informed and actively participate in your app’s events.

7. Gamification and Rewards

Gamification elements, such as badges, achievements, or points systems, can significantly enhance user engagement. Utilize push notifications to notify users about their progress, congratulate them on their achievements, or offer rewards for reaching certain milestones. This approach keeps users motivated and hooked to your app.

8. Location-Based Notifications

Leverage location-based push notifications to provide users with contextually relevant information. For instance, if your app is a food delivery service, send notifications about nearby restaurants, special deals, or discount coupons based on the user’s location. This targeted approach adds value to your users’ experience.

9. User Feedback and Surveys

Push notifications can serve as a powerful tool for collecting user feedback. By sending short surveys or requesting reviews, you can gather valuable insights to improve your app. Users appreciate being heard, and incorporating their feedback strengthens their trust and loyalty towards your company and brand.

10. User Segmentation and Personalization

Last but not least, segmenting your user base and delivering personalized push notifications can yield impressive results. By dividing users into specific groups based on demographics, behavior, or preferences, you can send tailored notifications that resonate with each segment. This level of personalization enhances user satisfaction and boosts engagement.

Conclusion: Push notifications have the potential to transform the way you connect with your mobile app users. By utilizing these ten common notification strategies, you will ramp up your app’s engagement levels and user-satisfaction.

First off, what is on-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO)?

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO relates to optimizing all of those SEO elements which you have control over, and which you can adjust on your own website.  Below we’ll briefly explain what we feel are the top 5 factors to improving your on-page SEO.  

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO, by contrast, relates to the references and links that point to your website from outside sources such as social media, third-party blog posts, influencers, and other forms of backlinks to your site.  Off-page is harder for you to control, but is still a key component to increasing your site’s “Domain Authority” This is also fundamental to improving your site’s search engine ranking.

In this post, we focus on the SEO element which you have the most control over: On-Page SEO.  A business should always focus first on their on-page SEO before spending time on off-page SEO.

Since you have control over adjusting and improving your website’s on-page SEO, which in theory costs you very little or nothing at all, this form of marketing can be thought of as having the single highest return on investment (ROI) of any website marketing effort that you will initiate.   

Here is a brief overview of the top 5 factors to improve your website’s on-page SEO.

1. Keywords — Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and Headings

Title tags are the main description of what your website is about.  It’s what users see displayed underneath your main domain on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).  It’s the most important single clue used by search engines to present your webpage to users that query to find a company that does what you do.   To a user seeing it on a results page, it’s the first clue as to what your website, and therefore your company, is about.   

Using less than 60 characters (best practice), you will include one or two primary keywords related to what users search on the internet to find a company like yours.   For a software development company located in Denver, a Title tag might appear in search results as Epic Apps | Denver Mobile App & Website Developers

Meta Descriptions are very similar to the Title Tag, but they are slightly more lengthy descriptions which describe each of the other main pages of your website, besides the home page.  It’s like a blurb about the page and should describe the page contents with at least one search keyword (just like the Title Tag) but using between 120 – 160 characters, if possible.  Sometimes it can also be very effective to add a call-to-action in the meta description. See more on that below. Written correctly, a meta description will be far more likely to entice a user to click on that page from the search results. 

Headings, especially “H1” headings, are usually the largest words on each webpage — think big bold font — which best describes the content listed directly under that H1 heading.  When applicable, it’s important to try and use key search terms for those H1 headings.

If you did just one thing related to SEO before launching your website, make sure you have conversations with your website designer, or your marketing person, that address the keyword considerations on your website! There are reams of blog articles on the Internet about Title Tags, Meta Descriptions and H1 Headings and it’s worthwhile to take a much deeper dive outside this blog post’s cursory overview of those Keyword considerations.

2. Mobile Friendliness

How easy is it for a visitor to view various sections of content, and to seamlessly navigate between the different pages of your website on a mobile device?  This is a fairly intuitive exercise that you and your own internal team can often conduct by yourself, before even considering bringing in expensive SEO professionals.   

Make sure that no matter what type of mobile device someone views your website on (iPad, iPhone, Android, all in their various screen sizes), and no matter which type of browser they are utilizing (Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, etc.), that they will see text that is highly readable, and that all buttons, drop downs and links are well placed and easy to click. 

All media, from images to videos, should also be optimized on the screens across all mobile device types.   Every time you make even the slightest update to your company’s website, always first test for mobile friendliness across all distribution channels in the mobile sphere; before you ever push those changes live!  We’ve seen the smallest of updates, that you’d never think could affect mobile optimization, completely wreak havoc on a live site.

3. Content Relevance

The relevance of the content you lay out in your website is a key factor in customer / client prospects finding your website through an organic search on the Internet.  The nature of the content you display, and its usefulness to a site visitor that is looking for a company like yours, will help the perfect prospects find you, even without the need of paying for web or social media advertising.

Insert keywords into all the key areas of content you write.  Blogs are a great way to have both keywords, and highly useful information, both of which organically build traffic to your site, where you can hopefully convert them into a customer or client. 

4. Page Load Speeds

Whether on mobile or desktop, how quickly your content opens for a site visitor is a major factor in Google’s search engine algorithms. There are free sites that can analyze your page load speeds.  The best of those is Google Analytics.  Here’s how to use GA for page speed analytics

5. Call to Action

A Call to Action (CTA) is a prompt or brief instruction that tells the user to take some specified action.  CTA’s that relate to internet traffic conversions are critical to generating qualified lead prospects to your company.   Here are just a few examples of a CTA:

– A clickable button like, ‘Get in Touch’, which opens a simple Contact form to request someone at your company to contact them.   

– A link to sign up for an email newsletter.

– A downloadable PDF report, or how-to manual, often which first requires the user to fill out their contact information to receive.

– A sign-up button that offers a free trial to use your service, or a discount code to purchase your company’s products or services.

At least one key CTA should be on each of the main pages of your website.  It can be the same CTA for all pages, like a contact form, or it could vary depending on the nature of the page content where it resides.  Without a CTA, it can be very difficult to convert your website traffic into qualified sales leads.

For more helpful information like this, please check out other articles we’ve written.

Tuning up your business’s website should be an ongoing project, not one that you ignore and completely redesign once a decade.  So as you think about the health of your website today, even if you don’t currently have time to get into the finer details, we’d like to posit what we feel are the most important three website considerations to continually monitor and address. 

If you don’t have these three meat and potato elements dialed in, it’s pointless to discuss the more nuanced, User Experience and User Interface (UX/UI) design considerations.  Which, by the way, we’ll still tackle in another blog post in the future. 

While Google doesn’t reveal much about the elements in their search algorithm which determine your site’s internet search ranking, they have made clear that the following three items are extremely important factors in their algorithm.  Here they are; and for now, we focus on discussing just the ‘down and dirty’ basics of each.

Security

The first and easiest security consideration is to make sure your site has an encrypted connection using an SSL certificate. If you haven’t added one yet, add it immediately.  Make sure all of your domains and sub-domains are protected by your cert(s).  And if your cert(s) don’t automatically renew, make sure you don’t forget to renew every year.  Paying the nominal costs to a hosting provider to automatically renew and manage your SSL is money well spent.   Your search ranking will suffer badly without an SSL cert, and many potential visitors won’t even be able to open any page on your site. 

Make sure you have basic firewall, malware and spam protection.  Whether its free security plugin for a WordPress website like Wordfence, or protections in the code and server levels for custom websites, like many of those that we build using React frontends with Ruby on Rails backends.  If malware takes over your site, it could start spamming your contacts and/or spoofing your domain, among a host of other issues that could quickly spiral out of control. Subsequently, your domain could take a huge and immediate SEO hit.     

Mobile Responsive Design

Mobile device website traffic worldwide is now consistently over 50% of all searches .  Despite this, many small and medium size businesses still have websites that quickly ‘turn off’ any user the second that they land on their website from a mobile device. 

There are many benefits to having a responsive web design, but the most important one is that your internet search ranking will be MUCH greater with a responsive site!  In addition, visitors to your site will be more likely to stay longer on your site, and more likely to convert to being a ‘buyer’ of what you are selling (known as lower bounce rates and higher conversion rates, respectively). 

In a future blog we will take a deep dive into what the key design elements are which make a great mobile responsive website

Speed

Having a website that loads quickly is another huge factor in your search ranking.   There are several free, quick, and easy speed test tools out there.  The most used is probably Google PageSpeed Insights .   

To improve your website load speeds, there are a few main avenues to explore first.  Minimize large video and image files on your website, especially if they all have to load at one time, like on your home page.  Enable a Content Delivery Network (CDN).  Upgrade your website hosting server, including moving to a virtual private server.  Fix all broken links and redirects. 

For a very in-depth discussion about ways to improve website loading speeds check out this article on Hubspot.


A periodic website health check should always begin with these primary three considerations outlined above.  Dial these in, and you’ll have a huge head start on your competitors, before even spending much time on the design and SEO elements.

Imagine a restaurant at 5 p.m. on a Friday looking out the window at the start of a heavy snowstorm. In the old days, you’d send home half of your employees, and prepare to put a complete loss on the books for that night. Now, just send a push note out that says “2 for 1 entrees for app members from 5-7 p.m. tonight!” to folks in the neighborhood, and you’re good to go.

How are those Push Notes Received by your Customers?

Well, unlike text messaging, with push notes, a large percentage of smartphone users have their devices set to receive a push note on silent mode, so it doesn’t interrupt them if they are in the middle of something important. Whereas a text message often pops up under an unknown 5-digit short code, with none of your company branding, the push note lands on your customers home screen in a way that clearly reveals your brand and concisely states your deal or announcement.

A simple tap on the incoming push note, and your customer is brought directly into a fully optimized page view within your app that gives them all the additional details they might need. The push note could also have a link that opens directly to a page on an external website, to a specific tab within the app itself, or to a custom graphic that you can create. And if it’s something like an event you are announcing in the push note, then your customer can just tap to add the event date within the app, and it will automatically give them a reminder on the day of the event.

How to grab the User’s ‘Opt in’

Just put yourself in their shoes, and ask, “What would entice me to ‘opt in’”? An example might be announcing deals and limited offers first or even exclusively through your mobile app. Or announce important events, alerts, new products, special guests, etc. And of course, customers always love ‘free stuff’ (e.g., “The first 10 app users who come in receive xyz …”

When writing your push note (remember you only have 128 characters by FCC law) be creative, succinct, bold, humorous … whatever speaks to your customer demographics. But most important, be consistent! Sending out a weekly push note is much better than sending out just one monthly push note, even if that one push note is a really great offer or discount.

Always remember, the push note is a subtle, quick and easy way to stay consistently on your customer’s radar so they don’t stray to your competitors. So what are you waiting for? Get pushin!