The Right and Wrong Way to Grow Your Digital Presence

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Digital Presence|The Right and Wrong Way to Grow Your Digital PresenceFocusing on your digital presence is a sure-fire way to grow your business, but there are a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding it. For instance, many people read outdated articles about how important advertising is, but the reality is that as the internet evolves the strategies we need to use have to change as well. So in order to demystify these problems and give you a better chance at growing your business, here are some tips on the right and wrong way to grow your digital presence.

Wrong: Focusing solely on advertising

Advertising is a great way to improve your digital presence, but there’s a single problem that makes it a terrible idea for most startups and SMEs; competition. While you could probably advertise on a similar level to larger companies, they’ll ultimately have a lot more money to spend, a larger marketing budget and ultimately more power than you. You simply don’t win when it comes down to who has more marketing power.

Right: Changing the approach depending on your budget

That’s why it’s incredibly important to change your approach depending on your budget. Smaller companies with less capital can focus on social media-based approaches. This involves joining communities, getting to know your audience and paying more attention to their needs as you try to meet them.

Wrong: Doing everything yourself to save money

There are far too many entrepreneurs and SMEs that would rather use their employees or even their own skills to try and grow their digital presence. This could include learning to design your own website, trying to use free SEO tools to get noticed on Google or even trying to manage your social media accounts alone. This is a poor approach because it takes a lot of your time and you simply don’t have the knowledge or skills required.

Right: Investing into services wisely

That’s why it’s important to partner yourself with an SEO agency, web design company or even a community manager. The idea is to always rely on specialists when possible because they’ll be capable of handling the tasks you’ve set while you can focus on striking more deals, developing new products and ultimately scaling your company. You can leave the design and technical work to specialists instead.

Wrong: Automating everything that you can

There are far too many services and tools that can help you automate tasks that really shouldn’t be automated. For instance, there are tools that will automatically update your social media pages with random bits of content, there are email templates and services that will spam emails to various accounts and there are tools to automate lead followup. This might work for larger businesses, but if you value customer interaction then there’s another option.

Right: Personalizing your content

Personalizing all of your content makes you more human and thus approachable. If you’re going to grow your digital presence then you absolutely need to write and send your own emails, curate content that you wish to display to the public and follow up on leads in person.

Easy Ways for you to Boost your Overall Website Traffic

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Traffic|Easy Ways for you to Boost your Overall Website TrafficIf you have a site then you will know how important it is for you to keep your incoming traffic as high as possible. After all, the more traffic you have, the more likely you are to get customers and this can be one of the defining parameters of a successful site.

Focus on Advertising

Paid search and even social media advertising are brilliant ways for you to attract more visitors. They give you the chance to build your brand and you can also get your site out there in front of more people. Every paid channel that you use will come with its own pros and cons, so understanding and defining your strategy is crucial here. If you are hopeful that getting more traffic will boost your sales, then one thing that you need to do is target popular commercial keywords. This can be expensive, but the results are well worth it.

Get on Social Media

In this day and age, producing great content is just not enough. You need to be proactive and you also need to get your site out there in front of the right audience. Social media is a fantastic way for you to do this. If you want to get some additional help, then Twitter is ideal for posts that are short and snappy. Google+ promotions however are more suited to B2B niches.

Mix things Up

Unfortunately, there is no magic formula when it comes to marketing. If you want to get the best result out of your efforts, then you need to make your content seem appealing to as many people as possible. Try and post longer articles, shorter ones and even video content too. When you do this, you will be fulfilling a plethora of search criteria and you will also be able to hit a lot of different target demographics too.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Website Traffic|Easy Ways for you to Boost your Overall Website TrafficWrite Brilliant Headlines

Headlines are quite possibly the most important part of any search criteria. If you do not have compelling headlines then there is a high chance that your blogs will never get read. In order to help yourself, come up with several headlines and then ask people’s opinions on them. You can also play around by using different buzz words too. When you do this, you will soon find that getting traffic is easier than ever before.

On-Page SEO

SEO is so important. If your content is not optimised for search engines, then there is a high chance that your customers will never see it. Think about it, are you using your alt text to your advantage? Are you adding metadata properly? What about internal links? By taking all of this into account, you can be sure to really rocket the traffic that your site gets while boosting your overall company professionalism too. If you are stuck as to what types of meta tags to use then there are plenty of guides out there that can help.

Long-Tail Keywords

If you have your high-intent keywords covered, it’s then time for you to work on your long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords really do account for a huge number of internet searches. If you are not using them as part of your paid search, then you are missing out.

Consider Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is now more prevalent than ever. Securing a guest post on just one reputable site can work wonders for your traffic and it can also help you to build your brand too. Be warned though, because some of the regulations for guest blogging have changed over the last few years and if you use spammy tactics then this can result in a penalty.

Invite Others

Guest blogging is a somewhat two-way street. When you post content to other blogs, you then invite people to try and post on yours. If you are able to do this, then they may even bring new readers to your site and this can be the start of a fruitful relationship. When you are creating your posts, you have to make sure that you post high quality and original content. If you don’t then Google will find out and your site, and even the other person’s site will be penalised as a result.

Referral Traffic

If you want other people to link to you then this is great. You shouldn’t be spending most of your time trying to persuade them to do this however. The main reason for this is because it is a time-consuming process and the outcome might not be as successful as you’d like. So how do you get around this? One thing that you need to do is try and create content that begs to be linked to. You need to write posts that people can’t resist sharing and ones that people would be proud to post to their site. When you do this, you will soon find that it is easier than ever for you to get more traffic.

Post to LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become much more powerful over the last few years. If you want to make the most out of your traffic, then you need to post regular content on there. This will help you to boost your site traffic and it will also help you to increase your overall profile. If you have a B2B business then this will certainly help you out because LinkedIn is one of the main sites for this type of marketing.

Microdata

Implementing microdata won’t boost the traffic to your site on its own. It will however make it much easier for search engine bots to find and even index your pages. You should also consider having a site map on your page. When you do this, you will make it much easier for the search engines to crawl your site and you may even find that you can boost your website traffic as a result. This is free to do as well, so if you are on a budget then it is well worth checking out this method.

3 Marketing Processes Your Business Should be Automating Right Now

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Marketing Automation| 3 Marketing Processes Your Business Should be Automating Right NowThere isn’t enough time to do everything, yet most small business owners try. When it comes to marketing your business, there are things you can do to automate some of these processes. Automation helps you make sure everything is done, ensures everything is done at the right time, and helps give you more time to focus on tasks that can’t be automated. If you haven’t started automating some of your marketing processes yet, give these three a try first.

Lead Generation and Tracking

There’s a “contact us” button on the website, but just getting potential customers to contact the business is the first step for lead generation. Emails should be responded to immediately. Even a 30-minute delay can decrease the chance of the email leading to a qualified lead. Instead, start automating lead generation, so emails are responded to immediately. These are form responses, but there are ways to make it sound more personal for the customer, so they know they’re important to the business.

Along with automating these responses to generate more leads, use automation to track the leads. It’s possible to use white label reporting software to generate CRM and other reports automatically and have them sent to your email address. The lead management software tracks everything, then sends a PDF with the information neatly arranged, so it’s easy to keep an eye on lead generation for the business and how effective the current marketing processes are.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is used by just about everyone today, so it’s an excellent way to generate new leads for a business. However, to get the most from social media, it’s a good idea to post every few hours. This ensures posts are seen, but it can be difficult for someone to do all of this by hand. Content needs to be created or curated, then posted on social media websites at just the right time to have the biggest impact.

Instead of spending a couple of hours every day just curating and posting on social media, automate some of this. Automating software can find content that your potential customers might be interested in and automatically share it at set times. It’s still a good idea to post original content periodically, but this makes it easy to post more and to keep the business in the view of potential customers.

Email Marketing

Automation is great for sending emails as soon as a customer reaches out, but there’s more that can be done here. Email marketing campaigns, when done right, can be highly effective. Use automation to make sure an email campaign is more effective by sending out emails at exactly the right time. Evaluate your current email marketing plan to see how it can change and improve with the use of automation and find out how much time you can save. When emails can be written at any time, even months ahead, and sent out at the perfect time to grab a potential customer’s attention, they can lead to a lot more conversions.

There’s no need to try to do everything on your own. Instead, try implementing these automation techniques to reduce your workflow, make your marketing processes more effective, and to bring in more leads for your business. Automating the right tasks can make a huge difference in how much time you spend on marketing and can leave you with more time to work on tasks that just can’t be automated.

Keyword Research for Small Business

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Keyword Research|Keyword Research for Small BusinessAs digital is taking over the lives of pretty much everyone, SEO and SEM are becoming a more competitive and intricate industry. As everyone is competing for the same ‘prize’ with many different approaches to going about winning. One of the biggest advantages to SEO and SEM is that the size of a business doesn’t determine how well it ranks in organic rankings. This is decided by its relevance, content and the trust Google has that the site provides a near perfect answer for the search term.

For those building the digital face of their business having decided to take on the challenge alone, here is some information from a SEO marketing agency that should help make this feel a lot easier.

What is a keyword research and why should you do it?

A keyword research is the term used for undertaking research in finding out what words and phrases people use most often when searching in Google and looking for specific items/services/pages etc. Understanding these keywords will give those trying to rank higher and reach more customers a better idea of which words are being used by their target audience, how often these words are being used and how hard it will be to rank highly for these words. Combining this knowledge with a solid strategy will enable you to compete for those selected keywords in the organic search results.

What do I need to run a keyword research?

Apart from time and an enthusiastic approach to hard work, you will need a tool that will help provide you with the details to understand each keyword. Moz, one of the most trusted sources in this industry, has their own tool called Keyword Explorer that will enable you to get a good initial idea of you websites keyword needs. There are plenty of other tools out there that with paid subscriptions can provide you with detail that you could spend an eternity looking at.

Where do I start?

All keyword research projects begin with a single word/idea/experience. If you have worked in your industry for a long time and frequently answer the same questions, look for a word that continually pops-up in these conversations. From this individual word you can begin to evolve your search around it finding similar combinations and variations of this search word. Do this for however many individual key terms you come across until you feel you have a good “seed” list. From here you will use your selected tool to find out how popular a term is, the perceived difficulty to rank for this and other similar keywords that might provide better results.

1. Run a keyword research for your website

By running a keyword research for you site you will find an idea of your strengths and weaknesses in terms of rankings. Be sure to know that your website meets the needs of potential customers. Furthermore, think about splitting the keyword you find between where a customer is in their journey, are they just finding out about a product, are they doing further research, or are they now looking specifically for you or a provider of this product. Use tools similar to keyword explorer, such as SEMrush, to understand their volume, your positioning etc.

2. Identify your competitors

Who your competitors are online may differ greatly to those offline. You are suddenly competing on a larger scale with business across the county, region and country. You can find these competitors by simply searching for the keyword terms you are ranking for and those you want to be ranking for. Your competitors are all those in the top 20. To understand more than simply keywords about a competitor it is useful to look at the ‘strength’ of their domain. This agency believes Trust Flow is the best metric and provides a better understanding of a website than DA can provide. If you need to know more, this article explaining Trust Flow is fairly thorough.

Beyond these other measures, of which there are a few, you’ll need to decide whether you have the capacity or budget to invest in going after these top ranking spots or will be happy with appearing between 10-20

3. Compare competitors to find keyword gaps

Thankfully there are tools for this task, as there seems to be for everything, that allows you to find keywords that your competitors aren’t ranking for that could be fruitful for you. After these tools provide a list there is still a fair bit of analysis to be done by you.

4. Decide on the keywords you want to focus on

Taking your potentially long list of good potential keywords, you now need to cut it down to those you will be able to focus on. You need to understand if you are able to rank for each individual keyword through website strength, content building and backlinks.

As mentioned above, cutting these groups into categories based on the users journey will help you cut down your list. Once this list is in place, create a content strategy that covers these keywords and their topics completely. Once again, Moz has a very good guide on keyword clustering that should help.

5. Start ranking for the chosen keywords

It sounds much simpler than it really is, but if the right steps have been taken you’ll begin to see vast improvements in your rankings, and even if the improvements are small you know you have begun to do something right and that you are able to start positive change in your digital business.

Tips for Creating Successful Small Business Websites

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Websites for Small Businesses|Tips for Creating Successful Small Business WebsitesThe trick to making a great website is sound planning. This is the case for small personal sites and the websites of large businesses that see hundreds of thousands of visitors per day. Your small business’ website should be set up on the same ethos – with your visibility, find-ability, and navigability in the forefront of your mind as you develop your own corner of the world wide web.

This article features some crucial tips to help you make the most of the opportunities for small businesses brought about by hosting your own site on the global and open-access internet.

Select a Host

First thing’s first; your host will determine the success of your website by providing cheap, reliable and efficient hosting for you and your company’s website. Partnering with reliable hosts means you’re able to focus on the day-to-day of business without worrying about how your site will be appearing on the internet. Use Hosting Foundry to compare and select the hosts that’ll be best-suited to your needs.

Create a Site Map

Your site map is the blueprint of your website. It’s a kind of bird’s eye view that oversees all the pages that you will create, and how they’ll be linked together. Ordinarily, websites will have a set of the following pages, as standard:

  • A home page
  • An about page
  • A contact page
  • A products page
  • A staff/hiring page
  • A press/PR page

Of course, you might find that you require more pages or less, depending on the nature of your website. However, it’s important to remember that website visitors are used to receiving a certain set of information from the sites they browse, meaning your site will feel abnormal if it doesn’t provide this vital information. It might discourage sales if your website isn’t uniform with the high standards of business sites across the web.

Partner with Software

Possibly the most important tip to help you make the most out of your experimentation with web design and site hosting as a small business – software partnerships can truly be the difference between a successful website and an unsuccessful one. Here, you’ll be able to explore a very busy and impressive marketplace of selling solutions to benefit any business, with especially product hosting options for you to promote your goods or payment software that’ll help you process the wide variety of payments that your company will receive.

Modern Design Trends

The world of graphic design and web design is ever-changing, with innovations and creativity making older styles obsolete and boring to the web users who’re frequently browsing hundreds of different websites per week. To be eye-catching and bold, as well as reliable and trustworthy to your consumer, it’s important to strike the right balance here between striking design and ergonomic design. You’ll no doubt be helped in making design-based decisions by the individual or agency you choose to partner with when creating your site; they’ll be able to throw around ideas in a sandbox with you to see what sticks.

Creating a site can be a long journey, but it’s a vital asset in the digital age of commerce. Your small business site can benefit from the tips outlined above, in order to draw traffic and sales into its own online entity.