How to Build a Strong Online Presence: Tips from Sunlight Media

Today, we bring you an interview with Angelo Frisina, who founded Sunlight Media to help businesses establish their online presence and achieve their goals. He shares his expertise on Sunlight Media’s core services, the latest trends in web development, the crucial role of SEO, and the future of digital marketing. Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, Angelo’s advice and perspectives offer valuable guidance for navigating the digital landscape.

Check this company out on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and Google Business for Santa Monica and LA.

Core Services

SBS – Can you describe your company’s core services and how they benefit businesses?

Angelo – We provide a series of digital marketing services, ranging from web design, app development, SEO, pay-per-click campaigns, social media marketing, and email marketing. They help businesses generate leads and traffic, improve the overall revenue, and expose the business online.

Project Approach

SBS – How do you approach each new project?

Angelo – We specialize in custom projects, so we need to get an understanding of our client’s business models and their goals and expectations for the particular campaign we’re working on. We look at the scope of work, the goals, and what we have to work with, and then we come up with a plan to execute that project to the best of our ability — whether that’s designing a new website or building out an SEO campaign. We look at all the parameters, provide a proposal and scope of work, and engage with the client when they’re ready to move forward.

Trends in Web Development

SBS – What trends in web development are you currently excited about, and how do you stay updated with them? 

Angelo – Typically, my developers look at trends. I run the company, and I don’t focus too much on trends. I let each employee do their job. Typically, it’s what types of layouts are more common, what color schemes work well, and what different buttons and stuff like that do for interactivity. Making sure everything works on all the various screens, tablets, and computer layouts is very important. However, that’s not my area of expertise.

SEO is an important aspect of our lead generation, so I look at trends to improve our overall SEO strategy. I subscribe to several different newsletters, like from Matt Diggity, who specializes in SEO. I follow him on YouTube as well.

I also follow a lot of AI news because it’s high in demand and a very popular topic right now. I regularly watch videos from Matt Wolfe on YouTube. I also experiment with various AI tools to see what they can do and how they can be potentially implemented into our workflow. I constantly research new sales ideas and techniques that we could possibly implement as well.

The Importance of SEO

SBS – How big of a role does SEO play in your projects, and why do you believe it’s important for any business? 

Angelo – These days, people searching for a product or service typically open their web browser or phone, go to Google, and do a search. Maybe there’s a voice search, but typically, it’s data coming from Google.

If you’re trying to generate leads and increase your revenue, you must be discovered on Google. Otherwise, you’re going to struggle. In my opinion, the best or warmest leads generally come from inbound sales and organic SEO. We also do PPC, and I have a PPC campaign running. But from my experience, those leads are generally not as good as SEO. I don’t know why. I haven’t really figured that out yet. If you’re generating leads from organic SEO, they generally convert better than ones from social media or a pay-per-click campaign.

SBS – When you talk about organic SEO, do you mean local SEO or keywords? 

Angelo – We dominate Google Maps search for web design-related services within a four- to five-mile radius of our office location. There’s also organic SEO in the search results based on keyword targeting. We get a lot of traffic to our blog because we write about many different topics ranging from digital marketing to trends and AI. Sometimes, those blog posts can generate leads and interest as well. The more traffic or interest those blog posts generate, the better our overall SEO is because people link to those blog posts, share them, or post them on social media, increasing our overall domain authority.

Digital Marketing Strategy

SBS – What key considerations are essential when choosing a digital marketing strategy for a business?

Angelo – It depends on the strategy. If it’s an SEO campaign, we need to look at the content, the current health of the company’s SEO and the website, their goals and expectations, what the landing pages look like, etc. There are a lot of parameters that go into analyzing an SEO campaign.

If it’s a website, we look at the goals and expectations of that website, the sitemap, and what type of features and functions it needs.

If it’s an email campaign, we look at the targeted demographic audience and what they’re trying to generate from the email campaign, whether it’s leads, subscribers, or just general exposure. Digital marketing is very broad, so we have to tackle each aspect individually and look at the individual parameters of each project to determine the best strategy. 

Project Challenges

SBS – What common challenges do you encounter during project development, and how do you overcome them?

Angelo – Challenges generally related to web design projects include obtaining content from clients. Sometimes, even getting a copy of their logo can be a challenge. Typically, they get the content ready, so we need to ensure they have the pictures they want with the right written content. We can provide written content as a service, but we prefer clients to do it because they know their business model better than us. Also, any resources or data they want to share on the site can be challenging. Sometimes, we have to kind of hold their hand, implement stock photography, or generate content for them.

In terms of running an SEO campaign, again, challenges are content-related, the site map is out of place, or they have an incorrect page structure, or a low-quality hosting provider. Sometimes, it’s a challenge for us to persuade them to go with another host, switch out the layouts of their landing pages, or accept our help with content. It can be challenging sometimes to persuade them to make certain changes that they’re not comfortable with, but typically, it hinders the overall success of the campaign. If they don’t follow our recommendations, it’s challenging for us to get the results we want from that campaign.

Professional vs. DIY

SBS – What are some advantages of hiring a professional web design agency like yours over using do-it-yourself solutions? 

Angelo – Like I mentioned at the start, we specialize in custom builds. We don’t use templates, cookie-cutter themes, or do-it-yourself builders. Do-it-yourself builders are there for a reason, right? To do it yourself. Don’t come to us if you’re using Squarespace or Wix or anything like that. If the client wants something that’s customized and tailored to their business, offers unlimited design revisions, and guarantees that they’re going to get a site looking exactly the way they want, then they come to us because that’s what we specialize in.

Advice for Entrepreneurs

SBS – What advice would you give new entrepreneurs looking to build their first website? 

Angelo – Look at competitors and what they’re doing in terms of content, design, layout, features, and functions, and come up with a sitemap, a plan, and a strategy of what your clients want and their goals and expectations. It’s important to provide us, or any design team, with as much information as possible. Then, we can sit down, analyze everything, and determine what we should and shouldn’t do and whether or not their ideas are good or bad. We can then steer them in the right direction and inform them that we recommend going down this road. The more information a client can provide us, the easier our job becomes. Your clients need to do their research, do their diligence, look at their competitors, determine what aspects of their business are most important to them, and what’s going to generate the most type of revenue so that we can focus most of our attention onto those types of products or services.

Future Outlook

SBS – How do you see the future of digital marketing and web development in the next couple of years? 

Angelo – It’s hard to determine with the current state of AI. That’ll play an integral role, mostly in content creation. In terms of web building, I don’t think it will take over per se. I certainly know that there are a lot of AI web builders, but primarily, they’re template-based. They may appear to be generated by AI, but they’re just a bunch of templates that people can somewhat customize on the back end. It’s going to evolve constantly.

The way people discover businesses is also going to constantly evolve. Many digital marketing agencies will have to stay current with those trends and pivot as they go, but it’s difficult to determine. Eventually, people will get tired of AI and want to focus on human-generated content again. It’s going to be an interesting couple of years to see how things evolve, but there are a lot of moving parts, and it will be challenging to determine how that will play out.