Your first impression as a business rarely happens through a handshake or a phone call anymore. In this digital age, it begins when someone Googles your business, clicks on your website, or scrolls past your posts on social media. Today 90% of customers research a business online before making a decision. That’s where online presence management (OPM) comes in.

In today’s digital-first world, having a strong online presence is critical—especially for restaurants. While third-party apps and social media platforms can drive traffic and visibility, nothing beats the power and control of having your own restaurant website. Whether you run a local café, a fine dining experience, or a fast-casual spot, your website is your digital front door—and it can make or break your success.

My brother and I launched The Digital Shore in 2015, and whenever we launched, we set out with the hope to make as much creative media as possible. We loved videography and graphic design, so we leaned heavily into those skills. We found ourselves quickly partnering with churches, and even found ourselves in the wedding business. It was all exciting, as anyone who has started a business and desperately hoped for clients can attest. We’ve made tiny changes here and there throughout the years, but as we neared the tenth anniversary of our company, we had to evaluate how the world had changed in those ten years. With AI on the rise and different clientele entering our world, it only made sense for us to reevaluate who we are now, what we’ve learned over the past decade, and adjust our course accordingly. 

This year on the blog we have been focused a good bit on web design, and in April, we pivoted briefly to some elements to include for successful social media videos. We really want to keep talking about short-form video content because a good portion of the big announcements we have coming soon revolve around short-form videos. Video content in general is such a huge part of social media these days, and it is likely to only grow. So, let’s discuss the specifics of short-form video content, the popularity of this kind of content, and how you can utilize it to your own advantage. 

With the launch of Harbor, perhaps it’s not surprising that we want to heavily focus on church social media strategy for the month. Social media can be a daunting task for anyone with its constantly changing algorithms and time-consuming functions. It takes a lot of work not just to plan and create content but to keep consistently engaging and analyzing what does and doesn’t work. Of course, this is why having a social media strategy is vital.

Since we recently launched a service specifically focused on social media for churches, it only made sense to continue this topic on the blog. Last month we launched our Harbor services as well as a blog post explaining a little more about how the process worked. Earlier this month we followed it up by discussing church social media strategy. We broke down the broad sequence for developing such a strategy, which means that today we want to talk about some specific tips that we think might be helpful for churches looking to engage more on social media. 

It’s time to switch gears on the blog! We’ve been heavily focused on social media over the past couple of months, especially in regards to churches and ministries. We announced the launch of our Harbor service, which you can find more information about here. We discussed how to form a social media strategy as well as some practical tips for planning and posting. However, it’s time to go back to the topic of websites and ALL the areas that relate to it. SEO is one of those such areas, so let’s dive into SEO, what it means, its impact on your website, and why it should be on your radar. 

Just as it sounds, technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of your website to improve its rankings on search engines. Just like with on-page optimization, it’s about helping search engines find, crawl, and index all the pages of your website easily. Now, we could really go into the weeds here with these technical factors because that is the world of programmers and coders, but we’re going to try to keep it as simple as possible. 

Lately we have been focused on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on the blog. We started out by looking at what SEO is and its importance. We also touched on the different pieces of it and the different ways to optimize your website for search engines. However, on our last blog, we pivoted to focus specifically on improving SEO strategy. Last time we focused on keyword research, and today we’re going to move forward to on-page optimization. 

Earlier this month, we began diving into Search Engine Optimization or SEO. In our last blog post we talked about what SEO meant as well as why it’s important. We also touched on the different pieces of SEO and the different ways to optimize your website for search engines. Today we’re going to stay somewhat on topic but focus on SEO Strategy. So, an SEO strategy is merely a plan to create, optimize, and promote content in order to improve its visibility in search engines. In other words, it’s a process to try to follow to increase your organic web traffic. So, let’s get into one of SEO’s most recognizable buzzwords: keywords.