First Call Digital

When did you last use your own website the way a customer would? If it is more than a year old, you would be surprised what has stopped working. In a recent review we found dead contact forms, broken links, outdated tracking, even a wrong phone number, all on sites the owners thought were fine. Things break as a site ages, and you only notice when the leads dry up. Grab a coffee, open your site on your phone, and try to contact yourself. What you hit is exactly what your customers are hitting too.

Three marketing moves for Billings businesses that cost you nothing but a bit of time.

First, get listed everywhere you can, Google, Bing, Yelp, every directory. If you are not listed, you are invisible.

Second, build a habit of asking happy customers for reviews on those platforms. Nothing moves your local visibility faster.

Third, get active on social, even without a big following. It helps your search visibility and shows people what your business is like. None of these need a budget. They just need doing.

Another local business woke up to a hacked website this week, the kind where visitors get a warning to ignore any emails from them. It is happening far more now that AI has made finding weak sites easy. Almost every break-in comes down to three gaps: themes and plugins that never get updated, no recent backup to restore from, and nobody watching the site for changes. If none of those are covered, it is not a question of if but when.

A quick check now is a lot cheaper than a rebuild later.

Part two: the specific things that can put your website in violation of that California privacy law. The most common culprit is cookie consent set up wrong, so your analytics starts tracking before anyone agrees to it. Two more to check: whether your privacy policy clearly states what you collect, and whether visitors can ask you to delete their data.

None of it is dramatic, and all of it is fixable. If you would rather we check it for you, the free MarketingStack Challenge tells you exactly where you stand and what to fix.

📍 Several Montana businesses have come to us recently after getting a legal notice over a California privacy law.

Here is what catches people off guard: even if you are based entirely in Montana, you can be on the hook the moment you serve someone physically in California.

Think hospitality, healthcare, or travel: a guest, a patient, or a traveler searching you from back home. One thing to check today: your site should ask for cookie consent before anything starts tracking.

Part two drops next, follow along so you catch it.

Almost every ad account we take over has the same problem: every click going straight to the homepage. The ads are fine. The destination is the whole problem. Your homepage is a great overview of your business, which is exactly why it does not convert someone who clicked a targeted ad. Point that traffic at a page answering the specific thing they searched for, and you get better results for less spend.

If your ads feel busy but your phone stays quiet, this is usually the reason. Grab a free MarketingStack Challenge and we will take a look, link in the first comment.

We took on a client whose website looked great, right up until we tried to use it. We filled out the contact form, hit submit, and nothing happened. The button was broken.

Picture typing out why you need help and then being unable to send it. You do not call after that, you head to a competitor whose form works. We call these marketing leaks, and they are rarely dramatic. A clunky form, a slow page, a late reply. Small things quietly losing you people you already paid to reach. Want us to find yours? Link in the comments.