How to Market Online with Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find you online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. Irrespective of whatsoever you are marketing online, be it a tangible good/product or even if you are offering a service, you need a good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. By doing so, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links.

 

Every search engine may have its own proprietary algorithm but most tend to follow the one developed by Google since Google appears to be the largest search engine at the moment judging from the high percentage of searches attributable to it. Even though the exact components of the Google algorithm and the weighting factors assigned to each component may not be very well known to marketers, SEO experts spend a lot of time and effort conducting experiments to try to determine what these factors are and how they affect the weightings/rankings. What is well known is that links showing up on the first page of the search results on SERPs tend to garner most of the clicks especially those among the top three results. That really counts for something in SEO marketing. Web searchers click on these links first and the beneficiary websites get more organic traffic. Marketers must therefore place more emphasis on SEO with a very keen eye on what SEO experts believe are some of the most impactful factors/activities that determine website ranking. These are:

1. Website security through HTTPS protocols.

2. Gaining backlinks and linking to authoritative online sources, which act as a validation of your content.

3. Mobile-friendliness.

4. Site speed.

5. Providing a positive user experience.

6. Domain age.

7. Social signals, such as clicks from social and other forms of engagement.

8. Producing valuable content on a consistent basis for your website.

Besides these, there are other technical activities which play a role in getting found online. These activities have to do with the choice of and use of specific keywords throughout your website. A key SEO requirement is that the keywords you choose to represent your content must also match closely with user intent as reflected by the words used and the query. These are huge technical matters which may best be handled by SEO experts.

Because of the huge technical challenges in SEO, most business owners/marketers do hire the services of SEO experts to help them out. If however as a business owner you have the education, experience, the right SEO software and the knowhow to do it yourself, all well and good. This option may be less expensive and more effective to meet your business needs. If you do not know how to handle SEO for your website, you are best advised to approach professional agencies or individual SEO experts to help handle it for you. A good SEO on your website is very important and may even be indispensable to the success of your overall online marketing strategy.

10 Digital Marketing Tips to Redefine Your Marketing Strategies

No matter how effective your digital marketing strategies are, they can go off course once in a while. This is as a result of the nuances of the internet and even the marketing strategies. Every digital marketer wants results, so, it is imperative to redefine and redirect their marketing strategies often enough for increased results. This at times necessitates their having to alter their ad campaigns and messaging channels. What really matters is good marketing results and what marketers do to get these results varies from marketer to marketer. That is where their individual marketing strategies come to the fore.

If you are an ambitious marketer, these 10 tips are very handy to redefine your existing marketing strategy for better results.

1. Utilize Live Features on Social Media: Yes, marketing on social media is a very good idea. If you are on social media, you can take the advantage of the real-time updates on the platforms to get connected with your audience.

2. Shift in Media Consumption Behavior: Marketing with video content is becoming very important to marketers because audiences are viewing more video content via streaming services. Video content helps to reach a larger audience with better messaging and consequently better results. However, mobile and in-transit channels are seeing reduced audience sizes. This calls for a marketing shift.

3. Pay Special Attention to Your Local Listings: Yes because every business now appears local. Consumers now habitually search online for businesses “near me.”  For new reviews or questions, local listings make it possible for quick responses and faster business connections.

4. Regularly Review Your Paid Media Campaigns: This is hugely important because if your media campaigns do not align with the changes in your business strategies, you get very poor results. It is smart marketing therefore to always align your paid media campaigns with any changes in your business strategies or objectives and messaging. You can always review your text, image, audio and video ads as the situation demands to get better results. That allows you to update what is necessary, pause or completely remove ads that are no longer getting the expected results.

5. Reposition Landing Pages: Make sure your landing pages have a lead capture feature and call-to-action, CTA features. For best results, be sure your lead capture and CTA features are properly aligned with your current prospect or customer journey.

6. Utilize Google My Business Posts Feature: Every business benefits from trending and current information. GMB posts feature regularly features current information and updates with the public. Your business can benefit from this.

7. Ensure Your Customer Support Info is Current: This is important to avoid sending consumers on a wild goose chase. Pay special attention to all support services of your business, like phone support and live chat staff support. These support services must at all times have all the current information about your business. Even if you are you are using Artificial Intelligence, AI chatbots, they must be fully programmed with the current information.

8. Regularly Review Your Website Activities: Your website is your business window on the internet. That is where potential customers first make contact with your business and it is where customers return to do business with you. So, you must ensure your website is user-friendly and it does well what it is meant to do. You can always review how visitors are searching for your site, how they get to it, what they do in it, how long they stay in it and how they generally interact with your website.  

9. Obey Community Rules of Various Marketing Platforms: These rules as related to language and visuals in ads vary from platform to platform. You risk sanctions including outright ban if you contravene any of these rules.
 
10. Review Your Geographic Targeting Settings: This is necessary from time to time depending on the restrictions on your business and the general global outlook and proposed expansions. Anytime you have ads campaigns with broader geographic targeting, when there are restrictions such as the current global pandemic restrictions, you must take steps to reduce your geographic targeting in tandem with your business restrictions.