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Why UX Is Essential for your Website

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Why UX Is Essential for your Website

There are so many aspects that go into a successful website, but the user experience is undoubtedly one of the most important. When we’re looking to rank our websites, it’s easy to pay attention to what we think the search engines want and forget that it’s real-life humans who are actually going to be using our website.

Poor user experience can impact your website in many different ways. We’ve all been on a terrible website, which makes the simplest things so difficult, and it can be seriously irritating. However, frustrating your users is only one example of the many problems a poor user experience can cause.

Whether it’s conversion rates, ability to rank, or advertising costs, a poor UX can have serious consequences for your website. To find out if you need a UX revamp, get an audit from someone who offers affordable SEO services.

Ability to Rank

The reason so many people keep going to Google to get their information is because they trust it to give them the best results to answer their queries. If Google suddenly started sending you to websites with a poor UX, then it wouldn’t be long before you tried out a different search engine.

Consequently, Google does all it can to not send its users to websites with poor UX. There are many aspects that enter into Google’s algorithms, and some of them correlate closely with user experience.

For example, if your website doesn’t load properly, then people are going to leave your page without interacting with it, increasing your bounce rate. A high bounce rate signals to Google that users don’t find your page useful, and as a result, you’re less likely to rank well.

Conversion Rates

So, the chances are, you’re already getting less organic traffic because of a poor UX, but the problems don’t stop there.

Converting your website visitors into customers is about building a relationship, and if you have bad UX, this relationship is going to get off on the wrong foot. If you can’t put together a website that works for your users, why would they expect that your products can?

UX problems vary in size, but whether they’re having a small effect on your conversion rates or a big one, that’s money that you’re losing out on. Earning a sale is hard enough, so don’t let a UX problem make it even more difficult.

Advertising Costs

Whichever way you look at it, UX problems are going to make your advertising more expensive. If you’re judging it by cost per conversion, then you’re still going to be paying for the same amount of clicks, but as previously mentioned, you’re less likely to convert those clicks, bringing your cost up.

It’s possible a poor user experience can also mean you pay more for every click you get. Search engines use a quality score to judge how relevant your advert is, and a poor UX can lead to a lower quality score. This means Google is less likely to show your ad, and you can end up paying more when they do.

Whichever way you look at it, user experience is something you want to keep a close eye on, because it can make a huge difference to your website.

 

How Digital Marketing Impacts Business Growth

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There were an estimated 3.9 billion Internet users in 2017, according to data compiled by Statista. Indeed, the vast majority of people no longer get their information from traditional media, but instead search for information on the Internet using various devices, including desktop computers, tablets, and mobile devices.

If your business isn’t implementing the latest and most cutting-edge digital marketing methods (such as search engine optimization, content marketing, influencer marketing, and social media marketing), then you’ll lose out to business competitors who’re more adept at adopting — and harnessing — the best practices.

Listed below are some of the reasons why your company should adopt some of the latest digital marketing practices to stay ahead of the competition.

4 Reasons Why Your Business Needs a Dynamic Digital Marketing Strategy

Google Search is the way of the future

Google’s search engine now represents 90.46% of the global search engine market, and the site receives over 63,000 searches each second on any given day. Even if your company has an official website, if it isn’t showing up on Google’s search results, you will be losing out in terms of revenue, customer acquisition, and business growth.

Coupled with the fact that Google’s search algorithm is getting better at understanding the nuances, intent, and context of its users’ searches means that it’s getting better at serving accurate and relevant results to its users.

But how do these developments impact your business? Well, for starters, if your site lacks the information that users are searching for, then Google is highly unlikely to rank your web pages in its search results. And even if your site is updated with the right business information and contains great content, if it isn’t optimized correctly, it’s not going to attain the rankings and traffic that will positively impact your business growth.

SEO helps drive traffic and conversions to your site

Now more than ever, a dynamic and cohesive SEO strategy is needed to keep your website positioned strategically on Google’s unpaid (or organic) search results. But what exactly is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. The discipline consists of multiple strategies, best practices, and actions that are utilized with the end goal of improving your website’s position on the search engine results pages (also known as SERPs). There are two types of SEO: on-page and off-page. The former consists of elements you can control on your site to improve your position on the SERPs, while the latter consists of actions done on other websites to boost your site’s position on the SERPs and overall authority.

If your business lacks the expertise to devise and implement a viable SEO strategy, then you’ll need to hire a great SEO specialist or outsource the task to a reputable digital marketing firm.

Content marketing drives profitable customer action

According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing “is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

The practices and objectives of content marketing are closely aligned with inbound marketing, which is a business methodology that aims to attract customers to products and services by serving them useful and actionable content at every stage of their journey to becoming loyal customers.

Great content comes in the form of blog posts, white papers, downloadable reports, videos, and other types of consumer media that prospective customers will need to educate themselves to make informed decisions—one of which is opting to become loyal customers and advocates of your brand.

An effective content marketing strategy will require the expertise of seasoned editors, writers, and content strategists. And these professionals will need to align their goals with those of SEO specialists to drive targeted traffic to your site and web assets. As with SEO, if your organization lacks the expertise or bandwidth to accommodate a content marketing strategy, then it’s best to hire specialists or outsource to the right digital marketing firm.

Social media marketing strengthens your brand

Billions of people around the world now use social media platforms to connect with others, reach out to brands, and consume media. Facebook—the world’s largest social media website—now attracts 2.41 billion monthly active users as of the second quarter of 2019, according to Statista. Facebook users harness this platform not just to connect with others in their circle, but also to discover and engage with brands and companies, and consume entertainment and other media.

Instagram, another popular social media site that deals with pictorial and video content sharing, has one billion monthly active users, making it the third most popular social media site after Facebook and YouTube. Considering the sheer number of eyeballs that can be found on these platforms, your brand or company cannot afford to remain anonymous on them.

A strong and engaging presence on social media can help your company achieve the following:

  • Boosted brand awareness
  • More inbound traffic
  • Improved conversion rates
  • Increased brand loyalty and authority
  • Improved search engine rankings

The immense rewards aside, social media marketing requires great ingenuity, creativity, and dedication to drive results. You’ll need to hire the right specialists or outsource the work to an awesome digital marketing or social media management company if you want this done right.

Other Business Benefits of Digital Marketing

Improves Lead Generation

A cohesive and dynamic digital marketing strategy that utilizes the right methodology and marketing methods will result in improved lead generation for your business. What’s more, most digital marketing methods are far cheaper than more traditional marketing outlets, such as buying ads in magazines or booking TV airtime for commercials. The rewards, on the other hand, are considerable, as you could potentially reach a global audience of thousands or even millions.

Improved Conversion Rates

If you’re using digital marketing to successfully guide your leads down the conversion funnel, the end result should be improved conversion rates. Another great thing about digital marketing is that you can use data and analytics tools — such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Kissmetrics — to better understand your website users. By objectively analyzing your traffic information, you can make adjustments to your conversion funnel and better understand what makes your target audience tick.

Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Should You Hire a Digital Marketing Agency?

Digital marketing is a vital component of any modern business’ strategy for growth and development. But while many businesses recognize the importance of digital marketing, many of them are still trying to keep their costs down by doing it all themselves. Unfortunately for them, this is a recipe for disaster.

Hiring an outside digital marketing agency might seem like a more expensive option, but it offers a number of advantages.

Access the Skills You Need

Putting together a digital marketing team in-house might seem like a more cost-effective option, but this isn’t true for most businesses. In fact, for the majority of businesses, opening your own digital marketing department is going to be significantly more expensive than hiring a Digital Marketing Agency.

Not only is it difficult and expensive to bring onboard people with the specific skills that you need, these people probably won’t be needed on a continual basis. It is worth having some permanent members of your team who can monitor the progress of any current campaigns and can help you to work on your general marketing strategies. But you should bring in the heavy hitters when you really need them.

Maximize Your ROI

ROI is one of the most important things to consider whenever your business is spending money. It doesn’t matter if you are spending a couple of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars, you should always be making sure that money is being spent as wisely as possible and is bringing tangible benefits to your business.

Digital marketing agencies are run and staged by talented and experienced marketers; the people who are best positioned to ensure your campaign is as effective and efficient as it can possibly be. Not only this, but digital marketing agencies will know how to best allocate your available budget for maximum returns.

Gain Insight and Perspective

Any team that you assemble in-house is going to be necessarily limited by the skills and experience they possess. A digital marketing agency will be able to pull in individuals from a variety of backgrounds to ensure that they are bringing everything to the table that your business needs to make a success of your next digital marketing campaign.

Meet Your Deadlines

When you are responsible for your own marketing, there is always a temptation to give yourself a bit more time or a bit more money to achieve your goals. This means that campaigns end up being less disciplined and valuable lessons are never learned.

By contrast, a digital marketing agency will always work to the parameters that you set for them. If you tell them that you need a campaign produced within a certain budget or timeframe, they will work to your specifications.

Hiring a dedicated outside marketing agency will ensure that your business has access to all the skills, knowledge, and resources that it needs to pull off a successful campaign. Don’t be put off by the costs involved; if you want to maximize your ROI from your digital marketing campaigns, an outside agency is a much safer bet than trying to do it all in-house.

The Need of SEO in the 21st Century

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The term Search Engine Optimisation is quite a head-turner. It is something that dominates the market scene of the 21st century. If one were to put things into perspective, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO, was always there since the advent of the Internet; just not in a way and scale as it is today. You cannot think of a business venture that still puts its faith in medieval methods of marketing and branding. It does not work anymore. New age requires newer and fresher solutions to every marketing woe. This is exactly where SEO steps in. Its revolutionary approach to notch up the branding and marketing game few notches up has become a game-changer in the arena of digital marketing. There is no way one can hope to thrive and scale businesses without seeking refuge in SEO.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Need of SEO in the 21st Century
 
The article discusses the importance of SEO in the 21st century, how it has led to a tectonic shift in the world of digital marketing and how enterprises can keep benefitting from it in the days that shall follow. But first, we are going to run through the basic concepts.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Simply put, Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is a technique which helps in putting your business website on a suitable spot in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and thus, enhances its ranking. Ranking on search engines is of paramount importance in this century since that is the only way a business endeavour can hope to gain the required attention to its products and services. You might have the best products or services in a certain niche. But if you cannot get them to your target audience, all your efforts into making the best for public and making money hands over fists will end up in smoke. You must first be able to convince your target group about what you have to offer and how they differ from the rest of the products in the market, before you can do something to convert them into your loyal customers. Search Engine Optimisation helps you take your business out there in the world by acquiring good ranks on the results page and by grabbing the eyeballs of your target group.

How Does It Work?

We have discussed quite a few points on SEO and how it works in this day and age, in the previous section. But we now need to see how exactly it contributes towards scaling a business. So, we talked about how SEO helps in tweaking the rank of your website on the SERPs. But why do you think that is even important? It is tremendously important for visibility, yes. But that is not all. It is crucial because the right techniques of SEO draw more and more potential clients and customers to your website and help them make an informed decision regarding your service.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | The Need of SEO in the 21st Century
 
The technical jargon of this world would be, drawing optimum ‘traffic’ to your site. Once your website keeps drawing organic traffic to itself, it will definitely succeed in converting customers, and thus, help in enhancing the conversion rate. Therefore, it is quite clear why Search Engine Optimisation has such importance in today’s world.

Coming up with the right SEO hacks is not very simple and we have excellent analysts and agencies who handle this part of digital marketing for almost every business venture. They look into what kind of websites are drawing traffic, study their on-site and off-site elements, research on Google’s metrics and then come up with ways that conform to Google’s standards of ranking. Google is the smartest search engine ever devised, and that is why it is not easy to fool it with reverse engineering hacks. But smart SEO analysts and experts know just the right ways to do that. Google keeps upgrading its metrics for ranking to enhance user experience. Therefore, if you want to outrank other websites from their topmost ranks on the Search Engine Results Page, you have to up your SEO game and look for ways in which you can conform to Google’s ever-evolving needs.

Conclusion:

Search Engine Optimisation is an institution in itself, one that cannot be understood in one article. It has several techniques and methods associated with it, and not even one carefully structured course could deal with all the details. It requires years and years of experience and maybe only then, one can hope to understand what this entire world of SEO actually is. However, for starters, know that SEO is an integral part of digital marketing, and no business can climb its zenith of success without asking for its help. Therefore, if you have been in two minds about the SEO and whether you should rope in an agency or an expert to cater to its needs, brush any dilemma off your mind. The 21st century calls for SEO to be involved in every venture and marketing tactics, and you should do the same.

3 Ways To Harm Your Online Marketing Campaign Before It Gets Going

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article | 3 Ways To Harm Your Online Marketing Campaign Before It Gets GoingIt’s often seen that social media marketing opens up a massive amount of marketing potential. That is true to an extent. Now customers potentially hold your miniature-billboard in their pockets, and throughout many social media timelines may see the product you are offering. However, while this sounds easy, it’s important to understand what you are now competing against.

You are competing against other notifications and ‘skip ad after five seconds’ video options. You are competing against consumers are effective at ignoring marketing due to being bombarded with it day and night, at least in most countries around the world. You are also at the whim of simply being too boring, not engaging enough, or not as clear as you could be regarding your business messaging.

This means that without care, you could harm your online marketing campaign before it even gets going. That’s unlikely to be a scenario anyone wants. So, let us help you subvert that with the following advice. We only hope it can help you reach the business heights you have been dreaming of:

Fail To Find A Clear Message

You might have some art-school ambitions in you, but it’s not up to the audience to try and figure out what product you are selling or what the point of your entire messaging was. Even vague, suspense-building campaigns, such as Orange, one of the UK’s most famous telecom firms in the mid-2000s, announced its launch by placing Orange squares on billboards allowing people to question what that meant. However, pretty soon they revealed their intent, and allowed people to see what their presentation was, until there was no doubt in the mind of those who had previously questioned this approach. Isolate your message, because when distilled, it can have the most impact.

Fail To Care About Sudden Trends

Social media moves at a staggering pace these days, and is also one of the most lucrative means of marketing your business. We would recommend utilizing expert social media analytics to stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to focus on your approach with dedication and care. Staying relevant and able to keep on top of data points, of building a picture regarding your audience and also keeping forecasts of activity in mind can help you truly become the business that catches the early worm.

Fail To Incentivize

It might be that you are happy to offer a 10% off code to those using your services for the first time. This is a solid incentive. But instead of factoring that into the price and not mentioning it, mention it as you should. Show that Twitter users have their own code if they follow your link, or perhaps even more concessions made to those who have tried to learn more about your business. This can help you reward those who engage with your firm, slowly investing them and heightening the chance that they will return.

With this in mind, we hope you can solidify your online marketing campaign, and avoid issues before they happen.