A recent webinar conducted by Farm Equipment featured Dean Barke and Casey Mizenberger from Fastline Marketing Group to help equipment dealers optimize their websites for success. The informative session, “The Power of Your Website: Build It, Maintain It, Profit From It,” was focused on the message that a business’ website is more than just a digital storefront — it’s the foundation of a company’s online success. Together they presented a digital marketing toolkit with specific tips, from which dealers can generate measurable results and gain a competitive advantage for growth.
The presenters offered detailed steps on how smart website optimization and digital marketing strategies can boost traffic, generate leads, and drive real results for businesses. Vital in today’s competitive market, the actionable insights zeroed in on key focus areas to ensure a company’s website becomes its most valuable digital asset. Specifically, the program shared 5 key factors, which included expertise on the following: How to keep the website in good standing with Google to improve visibility and attract more visitors; strategic steps to optimize Google and search rankings to generate more leads; ways to turn visitors into customers, focusing on the user experience; best practices for website maintenance, performance monitoring and security to keep the site running smoothly; and the importance of mobile optimization which the presenters noted is critical for engagement and sales.
For his part, Barke has nearly 20 years of experience in the agriculture, food, and beverage industries. Under his leadership, Fastline Marketing Group has expanded its offerings to encompass comprehensive digital marketing solutions and equipment auctions, empowering dealer businesses to thrive in an increasingly digital world.
Casey Mizenberger is a seasoned digital marketing expert with over a decade of experience driving online success. As a Google Ads Certified professional, Casey has mastered optimizing websites to attract traffic, generate leads, and boost conversions. His innovative strategies, such as launching new digital products and improving campaign performance, have consistently delivered measurable results.
“The website is your cornerstone of your digital business, and it is the absolute key to your success,” says Barke, adding, “A slow-moving site can damage your business, and damage results. A difficult site to navigate will absolutely frustrate users, and they will ultimately bounce off of your site. They're going to tell you real quick whether they like it, or not, and by that I mean within a half-second quick, which is how long research says it takes for someone to form an impression of the site.”
He cited several interesting statistics:
- 87% of U.S. consumers research products on a search engine before making a purchase.
- 72% of U.S. website traffic is on mobile.
- Over 92% of all consumers are going to come to your website, and check out your product line before they make a purchase.
Casey Mizenberger’s segment of the webinar focused on helpful tools, do’s and don'ts on how to make sure that your website's set up for success that will drive leads and sales for your business. He notes that they operate a lot of digital campaigns for their clients and while a key goal is to drive traffic to the site, it’s critical to ensure the website drives sales, as well.
Actionable tips to optimize websites and convert traffic to sales were presented by Fastline Marketing's Casey Mizenberger. Photo by: Fastline Marketing Group
Essential Components for Website Success
“The point of the webinar is to try to get you thinking more about your website as just another storefront, and how you can get that traffic converted into sales,” says Mizenberger. He adds, “But it's also following Google's rules — over 200 factors, essentially, to get your site listed at the top of SEO listings.” He urged business owners, dealer staff who run the sites to realize that it is also staying on top of future changes that Google makes as to what factors they're listing, what factors they're taking into consideration to boost listings to the top of organic searchers.
“Your website is a cornerstone of your business model, and every bit as important as the appearance of your storefront,” according to Mizenberger. He urged people to think of having a business with a physical location and knowing the importance of maintaining that site. “Do you take care of your building? Are there obstacles in the way when people come into your location? Probably not. It's clean when people come in, they can navigate freely, they understand what they see. It's a good user experience. The same thing should happen with your website. A slow, difficult to navigate, unappealing site could harm your business.”
Mizenberger added additional statistics, noting that 87% of U.S. consumers research products through a search engine before buying, and that 72% of U.S. website traffic is on mobile. He reported that the number of SEO factors that Google uses for ranking websites are more than 200, more than most people might expect.
Google is taking into consideration over 200 factors when they put your website listing at the top, when people are running searches. So, those are things that you have to stay on top of. Notably, 92% of users use Google versus any other search engine,” he adds.
The Importance of Understanding Google Gemini
Google Gemini is Google's artificial intelligence (AI)- powered system that will influence how websites rank, and search results. He reported that now Google is focusing on user intent rather than just keywords and that it’s vital users understand the impact of this.
Actionable tips for website owners or operators to use include optimizing content, avoiding technical jargon, and using natural conversational language.
“You need to optimize content to answer real user questions on your site. To do this, on your website, you need to use natural language, and conversational tone,” offered Minzinger. He continued, “Try to avoid technical jargon like marketing jargon, unless your audience responds to that tone. Use language and wording that is natural, and conversational, include high quality, helpful content. This includes accurate, original, and easy to understand, or read content. This is just going to allow Gemini when it scans your website, it's going to pick up on these phrases that people are naturally searching for.
Why does Google care about user intent? Basically, he explains, because it leads to a better user experience, UX. He reports that Google can provide more accurate, and relevant search results that match what the user is looking for, even if the exact keywords don't match, and, in doing so, offers an improved user experience.
“If Google shows users results that closely match their intent, rather than just matching keywords, the user is more likely to find what they need quickly improving their experience on the search engine. The number one goal right now in this webinar is appeal to Gemini, and Google will reward you with higher organic listings,” says Mizenberger.
How does Google Gemini affect your website? So, semantic searches, Gemini focuses on context, and intent. Relevant content. Your website needs to answer user queries in a clear, and relevant way.
Actionable Steps for Improved Performance
The Fastline Marketing Group offered a range of actionable tips to improve the user experience. First, create detailed FAQ sections.
“Maybe you have a service department, parts department, or maybe you have a sales team, and they're always fielding certain questions in the field. Start writing down all those questions that you're getting asked, as surely there are some questions that come up regularly.” He notes that these are questions that can be addressed on the website. “Not only is it going to help an individual user that pops on your website, and has a question, but now that data is being indexed by Gemini, and people on the internet that have the same questions can now be funneled in through your site — and ultimately will be led to your products. It's work upfront, but it's going to pay off later. Same with news articles, how-to articles, how-to videos, blogs,” explains Mizenberger.
Another actionable tip is to add news articles and blogs and How To sections, as well as structured data to website content for better indexing. These all improve the site and your visibility. Regarding structured data, he offered that with a product page, structured data could be used to specify details of your product — the product name, price, availability, reviews, brand. Referencing the in-store shopping experience analogy, he urged people to think about everything they want to see when they’re shopping for an item.
Maximizing Website Performance
A key factor in optimizing a business website is paying attention to important details, especially website speed.
“A slow website can drive visitors away, as Google uses speed as a ranking factor. Considering the 200+ ranking factors that Google looks at when deciding where to place you in SEO, speed is definitely one of them.” He detailed how to ensure optimal performance, noting that anyone can check their website speed at pagespeed.web.dev. Once the domain name is typed in, they system is going to report whether it passes or fails.
“It's going to just give you a pass or fail grade, and then it's going to start giving you data,” reports Mizenberger. “It's going to give you your tips for improvement, and then you can take those tips and then pass those along to your dev team, web team, and then they can start making changes to your site to try to boost that speed.” Additionally, he urged business website managers to run tests for both mobile and desktop, identify the issues and work on improving them.
“This is very important, since it only takes a half second for people to establish an opinion on your site, keep in mind that if that half second is spent loading, then they've already established an opinion, so you need to make sure that your site's running quickly,” Mizenberger adds.
Role of UX and How to Optimize the User Experience
The role of User Experience (UX) is crucial for retaining visitors according to the Fastline Marketing team. In keeping with the analogy of the website being your storefront online, the presenters noted that since you don't have obstacles at your storefront, you should not have obstacles on your website either.
“Make it just as user friendly as possible,” says Mizenberger. “A positive user experience improves engagement, lowers bounce rates and leads to higher conversions, and conversions are what you're wanting because you're looking for leads and ultimately sales. An actionable tip related to this is to conduct user testing regularly to find friction points on your site.”
Using heat maps to track where users click and scroll is very helpful. He urged the use of Install Microsoft Clarity, which is a free tool, on the website for more visibility, and explained it this way: “You basically sign up for it, it's going to give you a pixel. You'll get your web team or whoever's in charge of that to install the pixel on your website. From this point, you can log in to Microsoft Clarity and you can see heat maps.” He added that the website manager or site team can also look at recordings and to monitor and see where people are leaving your site, which could be helpful.
“If people are leaving at a certain point, then maybe you need to improve that area of your site to figure out why they're dropping off at that point, so it's a good tool,” he advises.
With website navigation, the presenters recommend keeping it simple. Clear navigation improves user experience and reduces bounce rate. Actionable tips toward this: use easy to understand categories and search functions. Test your website's navigation on multiple devices, so definitely test it on desktop, mobile. Make sure that with clickable buttons, they're large enough on mobile when tapped, since if they're too small on a mobile device, they're going to be hard for people to see. Avoid unnecessary images, banners, or words that might crowd the navigation or make it confusing.
Mizenberger explained that he has seen websites that are visually appealing, but then for some reason there's an image that's placed right in the middle of their navigation that doesn't really help the end user. He cautions dealers running their websites to be aware of that.
“This is really easy to avoid — just make them simple, simple navigation. Google has reported that they were going to start crawling mobile sites first, so they came out with Google's mobile first indexing. In the past, Google's crawlers would crawl the desktop versions of your website, now they crawl mobile and put it as a priority. They'll still crawl desktop, but mobile's prioritized.”
Fastline’s team reinforced the importance of ensuring the business website is responsive and adapts to any screen. They urge people to check the mobile speed using the page insights tip by going to pagespeed.web.dev to make sure that it's running smoothly there.
Best Practices
Effective search engine optimization (SEO) involves actively managing your SEO from within your website, the confines on your website.
“On-page SEO is crucial for improving your website's visibility and search engine results because it directly influences how search engines understand index and rank your content,” offers Mizenberger. “Simply put, it helps search engines determine what your website is about, how relevant it is to a particular query and how well it answers the user's needs, so user intent.”
Actionable tips for optimal SEO include using keyword research to find what your audience is searching for. One free tool for that is Google Keyword Planner which can be found in Google Ads. Google Ads is where you're running paid advertising. If you have a Google Ads account, you can find Google Keyword Planner. If not, you can set up a Google Ads account which is free, or you can also use a service called Ahrefs or SEM Rush.
Additional steps businesses can take with their websites to support SEO include optimizing headings, meta tags and image alt text. This involves incorporating keywords in your headings, and then using headings in logical hierarchy — H1s up top, your H2s, and then your H3s. This all helps Gemini read your site better, is helpful on blogs, helpful on listing pages as well, he noted. These are good practices to optimize meta tags, title tags. Meta descriptions are a brief description of the page content that also appears in search engine results. Some optimization tips include keeping it between 150, 160 characters, which allows you to make a description of that particular page without it actually being content on the page but it's something for Google to crawl and index.
Image alt text is important as well. Mizenberger explained it this way: “You upload images of your products you're selling, make sure you're including that alt text, which is just text that accompanies the image. You can find that in WordPress or usually any CMS you're using as well, but this gets overlooked a lot. So for example, for an image of a garden with organic fertilizer, you might say organic fertilizer spread over garden beds. That's your example of the image you just loaded. So you just always want to include that text. So it says an alt text is a description added to an image tag to help search engines understand the content of an image. It's also important for accessibility, helping visually impaired users understand what the image is about. It's important but it gets overlooked a lot. Also, if you upload video, you can include that alt text also.”
Link building for better SEO is another tactic to boost visibility, he offered, explaining that a backlink is a hyperlink that points from one website to another.
“Building quality backlinks is crucial for search rankings,” says Mizenberger. “Backlinks, one of the 200+ Google ranking factors, are key. Gemini considers backlinks as a ranking factor, but with a greater emphasis on their quality and relevance rather than just quantity. He adds, “In the past they were looking at quantity. Now they're looking at quality, and this basically means high quality backlinks from authoritative websites will likely hold more weight than a large number of low quality links. So if you're trying to get your website listed on high traffic, higher quality, authoritative sites, versus a bunch of little no name sites, that makes sense. You want to do your best to get your website on someone else's site that leads back to your site.”
To achieve this, Fastline Marketing’s experts offered more actionable tips, including the value of collaborating with relevant blogs, influencers, or industry websites. Share high value content that others want to link to, they advise, so if you're pushing out high quality articles and somebody else wants to link to that article or those how-to videos, then that's good and will benefit your site.
Why Website Maintenance is Critical
Another important component to strong websites is regular maintenance and updates. Websites need continuous updates to stay fresh and relevant. Actionable tips here are to regularly update content, stay current, fix broken links, update outdated content, and check for technical issues. Ensure your site team is working to stay on top of Google ranking factors.
When this is not done, many businesses find that 4-6 months after tweaking and improving the site and seeing a gradual increase in traffic, the organic traffic begins to dip. What's probably happened, says Mizenberger, is that Google Gemini has released 3-4 other updates and you haven't stayed on top of the site. So it's important to continuously monitor these updates that Google Gemini sends out because in today’s digital focused world, these updates are constant and the ranking factors are constantly being pushed out.
“It is critical for businesses to be sure someone is constantly updating on the site, that it’s staying relevant, and that it’s being maintained with those action tips mentioned,” said Minzelberger. He adds, “Be sure someone is staying on top of things because you don't want to check on it several months down the road and figure it out that you've lost a large amount of organic traffic, as then you’ve lost opportunities and are forced to play catch-up.”
One final way to ensure the business’ website is set for success is optimizing for local searches. This is especially important for local ag equipment dealerships. If your business is locally focused, local SEO is essential, he notes. Dealers and their teams will want to set up and optimize their Google Business Profile, which used to be called Google My Business.
“You're definitely going to want to get into Google Business Profile if you haven't done that already. To do that, you need to go in and claim your business, then to log and manage the directory. You'll be able to include local keywords and your address on relevant pages, like your hours, and also manage your reviews,” he recommended.
Secrets to Converting Traffic to Sales
The second priority goal of the Fastline Marketing Group webinar was making sure a business’ website is built to convert traffic to sales. Once the initial To Do list items have been tended to on an ongoing basis, the business will start leveraging Google Gemini and seeing more traffic to its site. Next up is ensuring the site is converting on that traffic to positively impact the bottom line.
An actionable tip is designing for conversion, and focusing on calls to action (CTAs) by ensuring they are placed on the top third of the website, or above the fold. Content should be informative, engaging, and aligned with the user intent. The Fastline experts reinforced the ways blog posts, videos, guides to educate visitors help convert sales and urge businesses to make sure the content answers common questions and provides value to visitors.
“Make sure that you're providing value to the people that come to your site,” said Mizenberger.
Additional value comes from adding video to the website as a great way to improve user engagement. It boosts its ranking and search engines, and allows visitors to see the people behind the scenes. In that way, they offer, it builds that trust — and trust leads to conversions.
Videos keep visitors on your site longer, which can lower bounce rates. Including keywords and video titles, descriptions and tags, helps search engines understand the content and context of videos, so this helps offer value in those videos.
Leveraging other trust factors, such as reviews and testimonials can help to build credibility and helps convert sales from website traffic. “You want to showcase customer testimonials and reviews prominently. You have clients out there that appreciate your product, who value what you do, and may be willing to make a video about it. So, highlight them on your site,” said Mizenberger.
Another smart step is to use secure payment gateways if selling products. Also, display product reviews whenever you can, as your goal is you're building trust with your site visitors.
Improving the Website with Google Analytics
Ensuring that the website team is using some sort of analytics on the site. Google Analytics is free and one of the most common. It provides valuable insights into user behavior so you can monitor engagement rates, page views, time per session, allowing the dealer business to see where traffic is coming from. This also allows one to look at average engagement time per session, which could be important, as well as traffic trends month over month, and other valuable insights.
Testing and monitoring is a continuous effort, and the Fastline Marketing team continued to reinforce the need to constantly test and tweak the website for improvement.
“Constantly make changes, make sure you're staying on top of Google ranking factors,” urges Mizenberger. It's also a good idea to test pages to make sure you see which ones are converting better. So, use A/B testing to compare two versions of a page to see which one performs better, which one draws in more conversions. For monitoring, keep an eye on Google Search Console, which is also free. This allows you to look at crawler errors and indexing issues. This way, if there are crawl errors from Google when crawling your page, you can go into Google Search Console and see what kind of problems are being had there.”
He described the Google Search Console as a crucial tool for understanding a site's performance, optimizing its technical health and improving your search visibility. It's especially important for staying up to date with changes to a site's indexation and performance in Google search and considering that, a very good tool to have, noted Mizenberger. He noted that Fastline conducts digital assessments (https://fastlinemarketinggroup.com/checkmysite/) to help prospective clients better understand the challenges and opportunities for strong websites.
Key takeaways, according to the Fastline Marketing experts: A well-maintained website not only attracts traffic, but converts that traffic into leads and sales. Speed matters. User experience, or UX, is everything. Google Gemini values relevant, user-focused content, not just keywords. Keywords are important, but it’s optimal to actually write content that makes sense, that's relevant to your audience.
The bottom line: monitor the website constantly, and website optimization is essential for success.
