WP Engine is one of the leading web hosting providers for WordPress websites. As a managed web hosting company, WP Engine takes care of all the security needs for your site while providing enterprise-quality servers that are fast and reliable. At Neon Ambition, we advise clients to use WP Engine for WordPress website hosting because it provides the support, speed, consistency and features needed to maintain a quick and secure site that their customers will love.

Here are just a few of the reasons why we recommend (and love!) WP Engine:

No one needs an excuse to visit Vegas, but in our case, we have a great reason to head west: The National Association of Homebuilders International Builders’ Show. For six days, the Las Vegas Convention Center will be transformed into a showcase of the industry’s leading innovators, decision-makers and trailblazers — and Neon Ambition will be there to soak it all in.

After you’re done sampling all the entertainment Sin City has to offer, catch us at the conference for a little one-on-one time. Or grab a drink and chat with our founder, Jordan Slover, at The Official IBS House Party. We want to hear all about your latest projects, marketing goals and current strategies. We’ll even lend you a listening ear so you can discuss your challenges and pain points — and how you’re hoping to improve your current lead generation and branding campaigns. You might be surprised how much you can learn over one beer!

It’s that time again: the new year, when everyone is hurrying to crush their #fitnessgoals before that resolution gusto wears out. We’re all about making positive changes, but you deserve more than another gym membership you won’t use after March.

That’s why this year, we recommend turning your focus to another kind of fitness: the health of your company’s Google Ads account. Your ads are no different than your body; they need a little attention now and then if they’re going to perform at their best. Here are a few small exercises you can use to whip your Google Ads into shape.

Today’s marketers have plenty of sophisticated and innovative digital platforms at their disposal to spread their messages: social media, Google ads, landing pages, and more. Yet one of the most important channels isn’t that new at all — in fact, it’s been around since the seventies.

New marketing channels come and go, but email remains one of the most powerful tools in a marketer’s arsenal. Email is often considered more effective than social media, and usually boasts very high ROI as well. Email is typically cheaper than print media and easier to initiate than advertising campaigns. Other channels may be more valuable if you’re hoping to drive engagement or create buzz, but when it comes to reigniting interest or moving leads down the sales funnel, email is king.

If a sold home is the ultimate destination in the long buyer journey people take when buying a home, landing pages are often the vehicle that starts the journey. A landing page is an independent page on your website, void of any navigation or links to social media, that is devoted solely to capturing leads. It should quickly and clearly get across who you are and what you have to offer.

Keep in mind that visitors coming to you from Google Adwords or any other media might be learning about your brand for the very first time. The copy, imagery, CTAs, and forms on these pages should be chosen to provide enough information about your homes to make the visitor want to know more.

Here’s a quick exercise for you: can you draw the McDonald’s logo from memory? How about Apple's or Adidas's? Maybe you wouldn’t nail every element, but you’d probably get pretty close, right?

Are you an “Empty-nester Evelyn” or more of a “Young Professional Pete?” Chances are, you fit into one or more groups used by marketing teams to differentiate and segment messaging called “buyer personas.” We’re all for celebrating the unique in people, but when it comes to marketing, if your messaging is trying to speak to everyone, you’ll likely end up speaking directly to no one.

You need to research and define the similarities of your target audience to create distinct categories, then personify them so that your marketing department or agency can create messaging that resonates with each category.

Buyer personas are detailed sketches of your most likely and/or best customers that help unify messaging across different platforms. Personas illustrate what your target audience values, where they’re likely to be, and what kind of content they take in. They refine and polish your campaigns and branding, ensuring that your money is spent on the right platforms and messages.

Did you know you can actually rank better than #1? For certain queries, Google will show a “featured snippet” above the search results.

What’s a featured snippet?

A featured snippet is a section extracted from your web page enhanced to draw user attention on the Google results page. When Google recognizes that a query asks a question, it displays a top result as the featured snippet in the search results.

Featured snippets are not part of the traditional knowledge graph — they are a special way of displaying the information from a single site. The site that earns a featured snippet, based on Google’s assessment that it is the best answer for a question, whether explicit or implicit, gets to rank in “position 0” and have its content and URL displayed above the rest of the traditional organic search results.

What types of featured snippets are available?

There are a few different types, including:

• Paragraph
• List
• Table
• Chart or graph
• Image

The webpage’s title and URL can also be a featured snippet. The type of snippet that appears often depends on the nature of the question asked and the nature of the answer.

Most of us are addicted to Facebook and don't want to leave the app once we're in it, thanks to its brilliant UX. This can pose an issue for advertisers who are trying to collect leads.

Thankfully, Facebook created "lead ads" to solve that problem! Lead ads allow advertisers to collect information from prospects within the Facebook platform, instead of sending them to a landing page. If well executed, lead ads are a cost-effective and ROI-focused strategy to generate more potential leads.

We test Facebook lead ads on a regular basis, and here are 10 findings that, on average, measurably improve results.

Google has a new site testing tool that shows page speed in a different light.

New research from Google has shown that up to 50% of users can leave a site in the time it takes the home page to load. 

To drive this point home, Google has created a new mobile testing tool to give you an estimate of the number of users your website may be losing while the page loads.

They also give a benchmark of your site tested against other sites in your industry (though "industries" are very broadly defined). 

This tool is Google's way of reiterating how important it is to improve page speed. This affects SEO of course, but the primary concern should be overall usability and conversion rates. If users are bouncing from your website, they may be bouncing from your paid marketing efforts, causing you to waste money, lose leads and, more importantly, lose sales. 

As more and more online traffic shifts to mobile, Google is going to increasingly emphasize speed. All web developers and SEOs are going to have to become experts at making sites run faster.