yis, Author at MLT Group

January 22, 2019

Why Your Content Marketing Strategy Isn’t Working (and How to Fix That)

Is your content marketing strategy failing?

If I had a dollar for every time I heard “content is king,” I could retire.

Content marketing works, but it doesn’t work for everyone. The same can be said for SEO, pay per click advertising, and social media marketing.

Marketing channels work, but you have to make them work. It’s easy to throw money at something like PPC ads, but it’s hard to figure out how to get ROI from them.

Marketing isn’t a magic potion. It’s a tool to help you grow your business.

The good news? You can always fix your content marketing strategy and sometimes it doesn’t take an overhaul — a few simple changes can make all the difference.

Let’s dive into the tips.

The #1 Content Marketing Strategy Mistake 99 Percent of Business Owners Make

Here’s what will happen when you start a content marketing campaign (or hire someone to do it).

You’ll get excited to see all the new content published on your blog.

You’ll anxiously check your analytics and Google the keywords you targeted with your content.

A little time will pass without any major movement. No worries, things will pick up soon. But they don’t.

You’re a few weeks (or months) in and your rankings haven’t budged.

Your traffic is stagnant.

Then you start to worry.

You spent a ton of time working on the content.

Or you spent a lot of money for an agency to do it.

Either way, you’re worried about your return on investment.

Do you wait it out and give your strategy time to work, or do you bail?

The answer to that question makes or breaks your content marketing strategy.

Google is slow 🙁

It can take months, a year, or even multiple years for your strategy to truly take off:

Source: Ahrefs

You have to think like an investor.

Content Marketing Creates Exponential Results

Investors know compound interest will make their money grow faster over time.

If you think like an investor and use a lot of resources up front, you’ll reap rewards later.

This means:

At first, your traffic and rankings won’t move much, but after time, they’ll rise up the rankings. Higher rankings mean more traffic and more authority for your website.

When some of your pages start to rank high, they’ll attract backlinks and gain authority on their own.

Why? Because people often Google information to use in their own content and tend to cite results that show up on page 1.

If you write evergreen, in-depth, and useful content, people will link to you naturally, which gives your entire site more authority.

When a single page ranks for one keyword, it will start to rank for other related keywords — these are called LSI keywords.

A single page can rank for dozens, hundreds, or thousands of keywords.

You can go back in and sprinkle these LSI keywords into your content, which will help it rank better overall.

Stop Doing This Immediately

Marketing experts are aplenty in 2019.

They’re all giving the same advice.

People who take that advice give the same advice so on and so forth.

This becomes a content marketing pyramid scheme.

Everyone copies each other, meaning no one is original or has anything truly useful to share.

Did you develop a strategy based on copying your competitors? It’s time to rethink that.

How? Figure out ways to differentiate yourself from the competition.

One Strategy No One Can Copy

Ayetkin Tank, founder of Jotform, writes a blog on Medium.com

What separates him from other people in the space? He tells personal stories. Look at the story he used to open a blog post about the taste of customers:

You can’t replicate someone else’s personal experience. Stories shape the world and humans love learning through stories.

Try to think of ways to inject more narrative into your content strategy.

Do you have unique testimonials and case studies from people who’ve bought your products or services? Use them.

Do you have industry insights you gained from unique experiences? Sprinkle these stories into your content.

Zig When They Zag

Is everyone in your niche writing blog posts? Do more videos.

Are all your competitors on Facebook? Try LinkedIn.

An innovator is simply someone who has tried something other people haven’t.

Always think…what’s the opposite of what your competition is doing. Do that.

It won’t always work, but it helps you think outside the box. With so many businesses creating content, creativity is at a premium.

Kill the Sacred Cows

Fun fact: a lot of conventional wisdom is completely wrong.

People just repeat mantras over and over again until they become accepted.

If you can discredit the “sacred cows” in your industry and provide better solutions, you’ll stand out.

Nat Eliason is a great example of this. In his post about the Wiki Strategy — which includes creating a ton of content with a heavy internal link structure like Wikipedia –, he called out the sacred cow.

He said backlinks and typical SEO optimization aren’t all that important.

According to Nat, as long as you write the best content possible and cite credible sources, you can rank your posts without any backlinks.

Not only does this fly in the face of typical SEO advice. It’s useful and it works.

You Chose the Wrong Partner

You can work with an agency who can create content for you.

Here’s the problem, though: some of them just aren’t that good.

The marketing waters are…murky to say the least.

Some agencies have good intentions but can’t execute.

Some are flat out incompetent.

Agencies who can help you create stellar content are the exception, not the rule.

Business owners know this, as many of them have been burned by shoddy SEO and content marketing companies.

Fortunately, there are a few simple ways to find out if you’re working with the right agency.

Check Their Own Content Marketing Skills

We kid you not, there are some content marketing companies who don’t do it very well, or often, for themselves.

Would you take workout advice from someone who is out of shape?

Here are a few tells the agency you’re working with isn’t cut out for the job:

Thin content – content length is a ranking factor. If the company you want to work with doesn’t write 1800+ word long guides and posts, run.
Unoriginal content – read and analyze the style and voice of the content on agency websites. If theirs is dry and drab, why would yours be different?
No proof – if you don’t see reviews, testimonials, and case studies, there’s a good chance there aren’t any

Choosing an agency to help with content marketing is a big decision, don’t make it lightly.

Want to ‘feel us out’? Fill out the form below and get one of our marketing proposals, 100% free:

Your Content Marketing Strategy is Off Target

Everything in your content campaign should strive toward an ultimate goal.

This could be traffic.

Or leads.

Or sales.

Figure out the metrics that make sense and measure the success of your campaign by them.

If you notice the strategy is working, consider this: you’re targeting the wrong people, writing the wrong content, or sending out content at the wrong time.

Targeting the Wrong People

We’re an SEO company.

Naturally, we’d love to rank on the first page of Google for the phrase “SEO.”

But if we did, would it be worth the effort to get there?

Someone searching the phrase “SEO” could be doing so for a number of reasons, many of which have nothing to do with becoming a lead or a sale for you (not that this always matters, but still).

Instead of trying to rank for broad keywords with many different types of search intent, we focus on keywords that complement broader topics like SEO and content marketing.

Long-tail keywords are more targeted and have a narrower audience, meaning you can create content that better matches what searchers are looking for.

Writing the Wrong Content

Each industry has its own standards for content marketing.

If you’re running a Pizza shop in Boise Idaho, you don’t need to write a 3,000-word treatise on pizza toppings to rank well.

If you’re in a competitive and information heavy industry like we are, you’ll have to write 10x content to rank.

Either way – the lesson is the same. See what content is already doing well, emulate what works, and add more to make yours stand out.

Sending Out Content at the Wrong Time

An awareness funnel shows the process people go through before they trust you enough to become a lead or buy your product/service:

If you sent the right content at the wrong stage, it won’t have the effect you want it to have.

This is why it’s important to create a digital marketing strategy from start to finish before you start creating content.

You need each stage of the funnel ready to go when the time comes with the right content for each stage.

Your 1 Track Mind Gets You in Trouble

Creating more content isn’t the solution to all your woes.

Some people think creating a bunch of content will magically make their site explode with traffic and get more sales and customers.

This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Content marketing isn’t just about writing content. It’s about experimenting with different strategies and iterating over time.

Too many marketers and business owners are running on the content treadmill.

It’s time to step away and analyze your results.

Here are some useful tips.

Use This Technique Improve Your Rankings Fast

The easiest way to get more out of your content marketing strategy?

Improve the content you already have.

If you’ve been creating content for a while, odds are you have pages that are ranking well.

Why not just make those pages better?

“Because marketers keep yelling at me to create more content!”

Ok, don’t listen to them. Listen to me.

Make Your Content Visually Stunning and 10x Your UX

Design and user experience play a huge role in SEO and content marketing.

Make sure your website loads lighting fast, has interesting media and use different techniques to make your content appealing.

Look at this example by Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You to be Rich.

His personal finance ultimate guide goes from bland and boring to exciting, not just with content, but design:

Notice the unique way he breaks up with words with design and adds calls to actions:

If you can think of ways to go above and beyond with design, you can outshine the competition.

Harness the Power of LSI Keywords

Remember earlier when we told you that your blog posts and content pages can rank for more than one keyword at once?

You can take those secondary – LSI Keywords – and add them back into your content.

If you use a tool like Ahrefs, the process is simple.

Enter the URL for a piece of content into the Ahrefs dashboard and click on organic keywords:

Then, find the keywords ranking from positions 4-20 for that keyword (keywords on page 1 and 2 excluding the top 3 positions):

Use the keywords you see and:

Add them to your body content
Add them to headings
Create entire new sections based off of LSI keywords

Remix, Rematch, Combine, Create

You can get a lot more mileage from your content by simply…being more creative.

Content marketing is frustrating when you continue to use the same tired strategies and content over and over again.

The good news? There are plenty of ways to reinvent your content marketing strategy, techniques, and the content itself.

Combine Content

Often, you have too many pieces of content competing for attention because they’re too similar.

Better to just combine them. Nathan Gotch with Gotch SEO calls this The Cake Technique:

Find similar content assets
Choose the most authoritative one
Combine the content and 301 redirect the old URLs to the new, monster-sized content asset

Recycle Content

There’s no rule saying you only have to publish content on your own website.

There are other websites who will let you republish your work on their platform.

Medium is an example of this. It has an important tool that lets you publish your content on Medium without suffering a duplicate content penalty.

The import feature automatically adds a “rel canonical” tag to the republished version of your post, which lets the search engines know which piece of content to rank.

Remix Content

A single blog post can be turned into…

A video:

Several visuals for social media:

An infographic:

And more.

You can use one single piece of content in a variety of ways.

Conclusion

Content marketing is a long game.

You need patience, skills, and lots effort to succeed.

But it can be done. Make these fixes to your content and watch the ranking and traffic roll in over time.

What is your biggest challenge when it comes to creating content for your business?

January 7, 2019

How to Promote Your Business in 2020 (with 15 Tips and Examples)

If you’re a business owner, you want to know how to promote your business the right way.

You’re learning more about marketing — especially online marketing — because you know promoting your business online is necessary in 2020.

The problem? There are a million different ways to promote your business and a million different “experts” giving you advice on how to do it.

How do you know which way is the right way?

Before we dive into specifics, let’s talk about the truth you need to understand to promote your business the right way.

Online Promotion in 2020 Means Adding Value for Your Customer

Whatever content you put on the web has to genuinely engage your target customers.

Inform them. Entertain them. Teach them.

Simply putting your customers first relates to SEO in a lot of ways.

When you build a well-designed and user-friendly website because you want your visitors to have a great experience, you get “SEO-credit” in the form of “dwell time” and a low “bounce-rate.”

When you create content people want to share and link to, your site builds authority naturally.

The better your product itself, the easier it is to get positive engagement both online and word of mouth, which helps boost the “engagement signals” Google uses to rank websites.

All of our tips on how to promote your business revolve around putting your customers first.

…But Your Product Has to Follow Through

Here is an aspect of business promotion that goes overlooked — improving your product or service.

Have you been going the extra mile with customer service?
Are you actively listening to customer discussion and feedback?
When was the last time you did a deep analysis of product development?

When you start to hear back from customers online, listen to them. Engage with them.

Take their experiences to heart when they discuss your product, for good or bad.

And when you do improve your product or service, promote the heck out of it. Get that message out. Let the customers know you listened and you acted.

Nothing compares to the reputation of a business that’s sincerely tuned into its customer base. That good sentiment is invaluable in a market that increasingly rewards companies with transparent operations.

Smart digital marketing will take that sentiment, amplify it, and share it with as many potential customers as possible.

#1 – Invest in Your Website

When it comes to promoting your business online, all roads should lead to your website.

Why?

Your website is the one piece of the internet you totally control. You own it.*

Social media can drive engagement with your business, but you’ll never have 100% control of those spaces.

When you invest in your website, you build equity for the long-term. You develop an asset that never stops working for you. You build a home base for your customers.

Build a beautiful, easy-to-use website, and fill it with content that’s useful for your customers.

*(Or you should own it. All too often we’ve seen small businesses pay a monthly fee to a web development company for a custom website. NEVER do this! If you decide to engage an agency for a custom web site, make sure you 100% own it.)

#2 – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

This is an example from one of our clients, demonstrating about a 3x increase in organic traffic. Organic SEO will still work well in 2020, but it’s going to get harder as Google (likely) exerts more influence on its results.

SEO continues to be relevant in 2020, and you should still (mostly) care about Google, whose sites receive over 90% of search queries.

It’s true that the SEO game is changing. One SEO expert notes that June, 2019, was the first time when fewer than half of all Google searches resulted in no clicks.

What does that really mean?

Many people nowadays use Google search and then find their answer without actually visiting a website.

Google continues to grow as an answer service rather than as a simple (but massive) index.

Still, organic SEO drives traffic to your site—but your SEO has to be smart. You must be able to identify relevant keyphrases with strong click-through rates.

Organic SEO will build equity in your site, keeping it working for you in the long-haul. That’s why we recommend organic SEO over pay-per-click ads in many cases.

A couple of factors to keep in mind:

Your market – what keywords do your customers use when searching for services or products you offer?
Competition – Who else is ranking high for your best keywords?
ROI – Some industries have searches with more “buyer intent” than others, meaning people use search to make purchasing decisions more in some industries than others

Organic SEO is STILL a great way to promote your business online, but it’s getting harder in 2020 and will continue to do so.

#3 – Reviews

Google and other search engines use online reviews as a ranking signal.

You should seek reviews on these platforms from your customers.

Also, reviews are a basic kind of social proof, demonstrating your quality.

To get those reviews, you have to have an awesome product or service.

Here are some quick tips for improving your product/service to get more reviews:

Actively seek feedback from your customers and use it to improve your product/service
Make sure to ask for reviews after your service has been performed or product delivered
Follow up with customers regularly (for long-term customers)
Aim to have the best customer service possible (this is not a trivial insight)

#4 – Brand-Building

Marketing expert Neil Patel wrote an article about the future of SEO. In it, he mentioned brand building as one of the top ways to promote your business.

Why is brand building important?

Google trusts established brands.

If you have an established brand, your website has a better chance to rank.

If you create a product or service people rave about, more people will search for your business online by name.

The more searches your business gets by name, the more brand credibility it has.

Focus on putting yourself on the map in your industry with both product/service quality and digital marketing.

#5 – Content Marketing

“Content marketing” means producing content (blogs, videos, graphics, memes, etc.) that resonates with your customer base.

Content marketing is NOT writing a blog post about the 10 reasons someone should buy your product. That’s an advertisement (and a bad one, too).

Content marketing is the long game. Imagine it like you’re building a fanbase for your business. You’re building a following of people who are interested in what you say and do.

You build that fanbase using consistent, engaging content.

And remember: “engaging” is determined by your audience!

Content marketing from a CNC manufacturer might mean white papers and case studies. Something a purchasing manager at an OEM would like.

Content marketing for a B2C company like Casper, who sells mattresses and sleep products, looks like this:

An instructional “how-to” video like this is useful content that adds value for your customer. It’s not a straight-up advertisement. It makes your business look good, establishes authority, and keeps customers tuned in.

Content marketing has mixed results for different companies.

This excerpt from Smart Blogger highlights why:

You need to plan your content around your business as a whole.

You need to keep the following in mind when creating your content:

How familiar is the visitor with you when interacting with a certain piece of content?
What type of content is needed to build more awareness so visitors know, like, and trust your company?
What are the goals of your campaign – building an email list, increasing brand awareness, increasing conversions for a particular service or product?
What problems, pain points, aspirations, and desires are your content addressing?
Who does your content need to target (this changes based on the stages of awareness)?

Content marketing is a topic worthy of an ultimate guide of its own.

The bottom line – content marketing is a tool that works for any business when done the right way.Top of Form

Next we’ll look at some specific forms of content – especially what will be most relevant in 2020.

#6 – Optimized Blog

Blogs will continue to be a relevant way to promote your business in 2020.

An optimized, consistent blog is the backbone of your website’s organic SEO.

A solid blog takes time and a regular commitment to research, writing, and revising successful posts.

Here’s what an optimized blog can do to promote your business online:

Generate traffic. Blog posts should target keywords that relate to your business and that are frequently searched. Blog posts can be great ways to target longtail keywords.
Build an email list for email marketing (see more below). Write engaging and useful content for your audience, and they’ll be more willing to sign up for email communications.
Drive conversions. Blog posts cannot simply be advertisements for your business. However, they can drive good traffic to the parts of your website that are designed to convert visitors.

#7 – Video

There are two great frontiers in digital marketing in 2020: video and podcasts. Let’s talk video first.

Look at these video marketing statistics:

The 25-34 (millennial) age group watches the most online videos and men spend 40% more time watching videos on the internet than women. (Wordsteam)
Cisco has projected that more than 80% of all Internet traffic will be video by 2021. (Impact)
45% of people watch an hour or more of video per day (Hubspot)

There are many different ways to promote through video.

You can add a humorous twist and make creative commercials like Dollar Shave Club:

You can make “how-to” videos for using your product:

Or, you can leverage video in paid ads to grab people’s attention:

#8 – Podcasts

Podcasts are becoming the next big frontier in online promotion.

The audience for podcasting is growing significantly.

Check out these key stats from this 2019 Edison Research study:

32% of Americans over 12 listened to a podcast monthly
41% of Americans say they’re listening to podcasts more than they did last year
Americans averaged SEVEN podcasts per week during the period studied

What does this tell us?

There is surging demand for podcast content.

Podcasts are becoming the new radio – but much cheaper, easier, and with far greater reach.

If your company can pull it off, a regular podcast can be the center of your content marketing strategy. A good podcast will build an audience and establish your brand’s authority.

Don’t have the resources to do a good podcast regularly?

Few do.

However, you can still promote your business with podcast advertisements.

Many podcasters include advertisements in their regular shows.

If you can identify niche podcasters with audiences relevant to your business, they can be a goldmine for targeted advertising.

#9 – Infographics

Infographics are another engaging medium. Here’s an example from a demo version of our employee referral tool – Referral Factory Pro:

Like all your content, a good infographic should add value for your audience. Teach them something. Show them something useful. Don’t simply advertise your business with an infographic.

Share a good infographic through your online channels – blogs, social media – to engage with your audience and link back to your website.

The bottom line – the more relevant and engaging media you can use the better.

Each of these content marketing channels should lead back to your home base, your website.

Not only is it informative and entertaining for your visitors, but it helps improve important SEO metrics like:

Dwell time
Bounce rate
Total time spent on site

#10 – Email Marketing

If you don’t already do it, you might not think about emails when you think of how to promote your business.

But why should you do it?

For the same reason you should invest in your website:

When you invest in building email lists, you create a long-lasting asset for your business.

According to Hubspot:

“More than 50 percent of U.S. respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day, and it is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.”
“59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.”
“>59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI.”

These stats are HUGE—and only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to email promotion.

Just about everyone today has an email and pays attention to it.

If you can get them to trust and value your brand, they’ll be more than willing to share their email address.

Implement smart (read: not annoying spam emails) marketing, and this list can generate leads and repeat sales.

To build this list, you need compelling, useful content. You need to demonstrate to your audience that you’re worth listening to.

The takeaway: email marketing is one of the best ways to promote your business. It’s not going away anytime soon. Invest in it–though it’ll take time to create an email list, it’ll be worth it.

#11 – Social Media Marketing (duh)

Yeah, of course social media plays a big part in promoting your business online.

It IS useful, but don’t come to wholly rely on it and expect it to do all the heavy lifting.

Again, invest in your website first — the piece of the internet you do own.

You can spend a lot of money on social media channels, but you’re not building a long-term asset like you would for a website.

That said….

Instagram is top-notch for visual marketing, so make-up would look great there.

For B2B companies, LinkedIn is your place to be.

You’ve probably said to yourself “I need to promote my business on social media more.”

But which platforms are right for you?

Each comes with its own pros and cons.

Let’s take a look.

#12 – Facebook

Facebook has excellent audience targeting features for paid advertisements.

Facebook’s organic reach – traffic you can get for free – is not so great for businesses.

It’s still wise to have a Facebook page for your business to get likes and reviews, which count as a ranking signal for Google.

Bottom line: You should probably have an active Facebook page for your business.

The best organic activities on Facebook are:

Sharing content and media – blog posts, videos, and other forms of content should be shared on Facebook
Reviews – encourage people to leave reviews on Facebook and respond to them
Engagement – if you have a community based-product, e.g., an education business for parents and children, answering questions and interacting with users works well on the platform

Facebook does tout one of the top social media paid advertising platforms.

Here are some excellent articles on creating Facebook ads the right way:

#13 – Instagram

Instagram works well for products and services you want to show.

Custom home builders, health and nutrition companies, and landscape design companies are all examples of businesses who should leverage Instagram.

Also, if your target audience is in a younger demographic (<50), odds are they use Instagram.

If you can create quick, punchy, and entertaining/informative videos about your brand, Instagram is a great cross-promotion channel, too.

You can run Facebook ads to both Facebook and Instagram, too, since Facebook owns the company.

#14 – LinkedIn

If you have a B2B business, you should be promoting it on LinkedIn.

Over the years, LinkedIn has improved its features in both paid advertisements and organic reach.

The trend shows LinkedIn is gearing up to become a much more user-friendly and community-oriented platform, shifting away from its old identity as a dry B2b social media company.

While companies like Facebook and Instagram had explosive growth, LinkedIn has played the long game.

LinkedIn has been steadily building its userbase and functionality for years. It’s getting more solid as time goes on. That makes LinkedIn more than worthwhile to continue using in 2020.

Marketing expert, Neil Patel, has been doing a ton of videos on LinkedIn. Always pay attention to the early adopters in marketing trends:

Notice the engagement on a simple and short video.

If you can create bite-sized content:

Short videos
Short excerpts of posts
Shared posts with insights

You can reap the rewards of LinkedIn’s algorithms.

Look at the insane amount of reach from one shared article:

All B2B brands should utilize sharing, curating, and storytelling to promote their business on LinkedIn in 2019.

#15 – Twitter

Twitter engagement varies from industry to industry.

In the content marketing and SEO space, Twitter is a great tool for promoting content about marketing because users engage with it.

Businesses with a heavy focus on media do well on Twitter:

Online magazines, public figures, marketing companies, authors, news outlets, and personal finance experts are all examples of businesses who can benefit from Twitter.

Local carpet cleaning companies? Not so much.

If your business uses content marketing as the main tool, Twitter is a great place to promote your work.

Think Long-Term

If you can’t think long-term, digital marketing won’t work for you.

Neither will marketing in general.

Digital marketing isn’t a cookie cutter solution.

You have to learn what works — and what doesn’t — after a long period of time.

How long, you ask?

Well, when we work with companies, we tell them SEO and Content marketing takes 12 months before the campaign fully kicks in.

It can take even longer to build a stellar brand and reputation that stands out above all the competition.

It’s counterintuitive. Some of the most important aspects of marketing have nothing to do with the marketing tactics.

They have everything to with your vision, outlook, tenacity, persistence, and willingness to collaborate with other smart companies like digital marketing agencies.

That’s why we call ourselves “strategic partners” to our clients.

It takes more than tactics to succeed online. It takes a level of dedication and patience that doesn’t come easily for everyone.

This also makes digital marketing easy, in the sense that most companies aren’t willing to invest the right time and resources into their marketing.

If you differentiate yourself, you can win in 2019.

Commit to Promoting Your Business in 2019

Above all else, you need to commit to promoting your business online to succeed in 2019.

The biggest marketing secret isn’t a secret at all.

Either on your own or with the help of a smart digital marketing agency like MLT Group, make this your year to invest more in marketing than any year previous.

December 17, 2018

Real Estate SEO: How to Compete With Big Brands in Your Area (updated and expanded)

Real estate SEO presents a unique challenge.

If you are in a competitive niche, like real estate, it is going to be difficult to rank highly and get traffic for the common and competitive search terms in your niche (unless you run PPC ads). You can get around this, however, with useful tools and the right real estate SEO strategy.

Allow us to explain how this ties into SEO for real estate.

Google uses a variety of factors to rank website pages and there are a few key factors they use that make it hard for smaller businesses to rank for competitive search terms as part of the realtor SEO process.

Some of those factors are:

Authority – SEO authority is measured by many factors including backlinks, citations, content, site architecture, and much more. Big brands check the boxes across the board.
Brand recognition – Google shows preferences for businesses and websites with high brand recognition
Service and product type – Certain types of services and businesses make it difficult for small businesses to rank because of the way they choose to display listings on the search engines results page (SERP)

Let’s take a look at each factor one by one.

Authority

While Google doesn’t share its ranking recipe with us, many smart SEOs have created useful metrics. Moz uses domain authority and page authority to help show which sites have more authority than others.

Domain authority – This measure calculates the authority of your domain name (your website as a whole.) They use the number of inbound links, otherwise known as backlinks, the age of your domain name, your internal linking profile, and more to create this score.
Page authority – This measure calculates the authority of a single page on your website. They use the same factors above to calculate your score, but on a page by page basis.

Let’s take a look at the DA and PA of some of the websites that rank well for competitive search terms like “Homes for sale in Minneapolis” and “Homes for sale in Minnesota.”

These are very valuable terms, as they receive a combined total of 15,000 searches per month.

Here is a screenshot from the Moz analysis tool that shows the DA and PA for a website page that ranks highly for these terms:

Domain Authority and Page Authority

The website example has a high domain authority score.

Scores of 90 and above are reserved for major brands like the companies above, CNN, Facebook, Twitter, and Google itself.

Page authority scores of 50 and above are also very difficult to achieve

The odds of a smaller real estate company achieving those scores are slim to none.

Linking Domains

The website page example shows hundreds of different linking domains to the page. The more sites that link to an individual page, the better. Big brand website pages have no problem receiving links from various domains because they’re well known and established.

The website also has a high number of individual links pointing to each page.

In our example, we’ll use a score pulled from a realtor website in the area (that doesn’t have proper SEO yet):

This score is typical for an individual realtor website and it’s no match for the big brands who rank for these terms.

In fact, the entire first page of the search engine results page for these terms feature big brand companies with very high scores:

According to most SEO data, if you’re not in the top 3 results on a SERP, you won’t receive much traffic:

Via – Smart Insights

While ranking on page one for these terms would help you gain a large amount of traffic, you’d need to spend the same amount of money, time, and resources as these big brands and it would take a very, very long time to do so. These brands have been established on Google and other search engines for decades.

Real estate SEO requires you to find unique opportunities to rank in search through long-tail keywords, which we’ll discuss later on in the post.

Other search engine results page factors

By looking at these results page examples, you’ll notice the following:

Brand recognition – For competitive terms, big brands get special treatment. Why? Because they know they can trust the credibility of big brands. Oftentimes, their name recognition alone will push them to the top of search results, even if they’re not actively using the type of real estate SEO techniques we’ll show you.
Service and product type – Google also knows people searching for homes in large metro areas want to browse lots of listings. Industries that exhibit this behavior from searches, like real estate, will always show preference to aggregates like these.

Fortunately, there are techniques to help you rank highly for a number of medium and lower competition phrases.

For small businesses in competitive industries, targeting a large number of medium and low competition phrases gives you a better chance of gaining more traffic as a whole.

A real estate SEO expert realizes a little extra thinking is needed and the right techniques can help any real estate website get the traffic it needs to grow their business.

Let’s take a look at some of our best real estate SEO hacks.

Realtor SEO Step 1 – Find Long Tail Key Phrases

The question is, if you can’t rank for the phrases you think are best suited to your business, what do you try to rank for?

If you think outside the box, you can find dozens, hundreds, and even thousands of keywords with decent traffic volume.

First, you want to find key phrases related to your business based on the main topic, but not directly targeting it.

Here are some low to medium competition real estate SEO keywords we found based on the topic “Homes for sale in Minneapolis”

Twin Cities real estate (220 searches per month)
Central MN homes for sale (220 searches per month)
Minneapolis lots for sale (800 searches per month)
Northern mn lake homes for sale (170 searches per month)
Lake homes for sale MN (4400 searches per month)
Lake homes for sale southern MN (170 searches per month)
Lakefront homes for sale MN (320 searches per month)
Lake property MN (320 searches per month)
Houses for sale south Minneapolis (480 searches per month)
Lake cabins for sale in Minneapolis (1000 searches per month)
Mansions for sale in MN (480 searches per month)
Minnesota lake homes (880 searches per month)

These are a selection of hundreds of terms we found by using just one search in a suggested keyword research tool.

Step 2 – Google Each Term and Test Viability

Notice how each term listed above didn’t attempt to compete for direct variations of the main term “homes for sale in Minneapolis,” like “homes for sale in Eagan, MN”

Why? Because these variations [competitive keyword] + [suburb] are all dominated in real estate SEO by the same big brands above. They have an infinite number of listings and variables to create pages that rank.

What you’re looking for are terms that feature individual small business on page one.

Type each researched phrase into Google. If you see an individual small business appear, you have a shot at ranking.

Notice the insights from our research. The low to medium competition phrases we found didn’t mention the main phrase head on, but rather niche topics surrounding the phrases like:

Home types
Regions of the state instead of the exact city names
Nicknames in the industry/state people are familiar with like Twin Cities

The big brands usually focus on competitive terms only, because they can. They dump tons of data onto their websites and, voila, they rank.

The lower to medium competition phrases contain topics as opposed to overt key phrases.

Bonus SEO Techniques

If you get even more outside the box and double down on your research, you can find tons of awesome related topics people are searching for on Google.

Think outside the box. What are some topics people might search that aren’t competitive keywords?

Look at more of our research findings:

Best neighborhoods in Minneapolis (880 searches per month)
Best schools in Minnesota (880 searches per month)
Best neighborhoods in St. Paul (140 searches per month)
Best places to live in Minnesota (1300 searches per month)
Cost of living in Minnesota (1300 searches per month)

Benefits of Using Long Tail Real Estate SEO ‘Topics’ over High Competition Keywords

When you create content around long-tail topics instead of high competition keywords, you stand a much higher chance of getting traffic from search engines.

Also, you are getting a much more targeted and qualified searcher.

Think of someone looking for “homes for sale in Minneapolis.”

They could be ready to buy a home or they could just be casually browsing. They’re also reaching results pages with tons of results, which can be too overwhelming for some.

Now, imagine you’re the person searching for phrases like “Minnesota lake homes” “best neighborhoods in Minnesota,” and “best schools in Minnesota”

Someone who performs all these searches might be seriously thinking about buying a home in the area.

If your website pages rank for these topics, you’re giving the searcher exactly what they want.

They don’t have to sift through mountains of data and content to get the answer they’re looking for.

These topics also signal a very valuable factor — search intent. Search intent is the reason behind the user’s search. Targeted searches mean a higher level of search intent, which means you’re getting a more qualified lead.

Imagine this same user not only searching for multiple topics but continuing to find your business at the top of the results pages for each topic.

Supply them with very targeted, informative, and useful content and your business will be top of mind.

Even if they don’t engage with you right away, where do you think they’ll visit when they’re really ready to buy?

The big, bland, uninformative aggregate which may or may not have a Minnesota lake home in a great neighborhood with a good school — where even if they do find this perfect home it will be a needle in a haystack — or your website that’s already proven to give them the exact answers they were looking for?

Step 3 – Create Content that’s 10x Better than the Competition

Long tail key phrases, or topics, aren’t anything new.

Hundreds of SEO’s, marketers, and agencies talk about using them.

Many people do try ranking for long tail key phrases, but they stop short of what they need to do to reach the top of the results.

Here’s what a typical marketer would do:

Find a long tail key phrase
Create a piece of content around that key phrase
Wait for the rankings to skyrocket and traffic to roll in

A real estate SEO expert would take it further. These techniques might work for non-competitive industries, but to do well in competitive industries, you need to do more.

This is where the power of content marketing comes in.

Content marketing is the process of creating content to engage, educate, and persuade readers..

The rules for success are the same in content marketing as they are for … anything else.

You have to work harder than your competition and provide more value. The idea of content marketing sounds nice, but when it comes to doing it well, most won’t put in the required effort.

This is why this real estate SEO technique works so well. Most people aren’t willing to do it. The competition for low-hanging fruit — results anyone can get — is ten times higher than the competition for results that require effort.

This is the most counterintuitive aspect of content marketing, the higher you aim, the easier it is to compete.

At MLT Group, we provide realtor SEO services and can create a real estate SEO strategy just like this. If you’re curious to learn more, send us a note.

Here are the steps you can take to create ‘10x’ content to blow your competition out of the water.

Visit your competitors’ pages and analyze them

Let’s look at the top result for “Lake Homes in Minnesota.”

It has strong authority scores, but these can be overcome:

Here’s a screenshot of the top ranking web page:

Let’s analyze what it does well:

Focus – you can tell the entire site is focused on one subject
Search filter – while they list thousands of results, they provide an easy to use search feature
Authority factors – as stated above, the site is pretty authoritative

To outdo this result, do everything it does well and then add to it. Fill in the gaps and do what your competition isn’t doing.

Some ideas for this are:

Homepage results – This result is a homepage. As it stands, many home pages still rank well, but topic-focused pages with great content marketing are trending up
No content – Google uses content length as a ranking factor
Lack of related topics – This website mostly shows listings. It doesn’t contain much of the useful and informative topic information we discussed earlier

In the next step, we’ll show you how to create a page that Google loves to compete with this result.

Create 10x Content With Tons of Rankings Signals

Let’s say we’re creating a page for “Minnesota Lake Homes.”

How can we create a page Google loves?

Increase Content Length

Studies show Google prefers long-form content. One study showed the average page one results have 1,800 + words of content.

One way to outrank your competitors is to simply double or triple the amount of content they have on their page.

You don’t just want to create content that rambles on. You want to make it both useful and relevant to the search engines. The next step will show you how to do just that.

Find Related Phrases

Take the main topic you’re creating the page on and type it into Google. Scroll to the bottom of the results page to the ‘people also searched for’ section:

These related searches are known as LSI keywords. If you add these keywords to your content, it helps Google better understand what the page is about.

Bonus tip: take each of these LSI keywords and put them into a keyword suggestion tool like Ubersuggest to find even more related keywords to your related keywords. Then, you can map out the LSI keywords as topic headings and use their related keywords for the content within those headings.

Create a Page With Solid SEO Structure

The main topic of your page is “Lake homes in Minnesota.” You’ll want to mention this phrase a few times in your content.

Then, you can use the LSI keywords to create an outline for your 10x content page. Here’s an example of how we might do it.

Page Title – Lake Homes in Minnesota

In the opening section, you can create an introduction for the entire page. Make sure to use the main target keyword in the first sentence of the page because it is a ranking factor for Google.

Add heading – Lake Homes by Region

In this section, you can mention that you service regions across the state of Minnesota. Then, you can add subheadings for each major region.

Examples:

Lake Homes in North Central MN
Lake Homes in the Twin Cities
Lake Homes in Southern MN

Each of these regional sections could include featured listings from the are and a brief introduction for each region discussing what’s awesome about living there.

Then, for each regional listing, you can display all the individual cities within the region. You can add links to each city that takes users to a page displaying listings narrowed down to each city.

Example:

Lake homes in Wayzata
Lake homes in Minnetonka
Lake homes in Wabasha

Bonus tip: when users click on each individual city, what should they find? Another page with awesome content, featured listings and sub-topics. In the future, when your site is more authoritative, each page could rank for a long tail keyword.

Add heading – Lake Homes by Type

In this section, you can write a paragraph about the different types of lake homes you provide. You can show a featured listings section with one home of each type to explore

Also, you can create sub-topics based on your research, list them, and link them to pages with full listings for each type of lake home. Again, these pages will feature their own detailed, informative, and useful content.

You can repeat this process for every variable of region or type based on “lake homes in Minnesota.” Also, you can create headings around other useful and relevant topics like “best Minnesota neighborhoods” “best Minnesota schools” and “cost of living in Minnesota.” Each of these sections will have content tailored to areas near Lake homes.

Doing this will create a ‘resource hub.’

See this video from Moz for an explanation:

Google likes pages that layout information neatly and tell users exactly where they need to go for more detailed information.

Also, Google’s robots ‘crawl’, or scan, the pages of their website. If your content and link structure is too confusing, Google will stop crawling your pages, meaning your results won’t get indexed and rank on Google.

You can create these ‘resource hub’ pages for medium competition topics like “Lake Homes in Minnesota.”

Double Down

Over time, you can add unique individual pages for each LSI keyword and subtopic, giving you many opportunities to rank.

Here’s an example of a niche page a realtor created that ranks #1 for “Historic homes for sale mn” and “Victorian homes for sale mn” – http://www.minneapolisrealestate.com/historic-homes-for-sale.php

Again, even for these little niche pages, you want to 10x the content on those pages compared to your competition.

Underneath each of these niche topics, you can repeat the process and add more useful content, e.g., writing unique blog posts and linking to them from your niche page.

Here are some examples of real estate blog topics you could write about:

Best neighborhoods in the area
Top school districts
Tips on moving to a new city

This entire process will help your website cover a broad range of topics.

The cool part? The more you do this, the more opportunity each page of your website has to rank for dozens or even hundreds of keywords.

For real estate SEO, creating topic-based pages and subpages works much better than trying to rank for competitive terms. And, it creates a multiplier effect. Once Google crawls your page enough times, it’ll realize you’re a go-to resource, and it will start giving you preference over other websites.

Instead of wishing you could capture a share of the 15,000 searches for “homes in Minnesota,” you can get double the traffic by avoiding the strategy altogether.

Optimize Your Content on Each Page

After you’ve created your ‘resource hub’ page, make sure you still follow the basic on-site optimization steps:

Use your target keyword in the content
Use your target keyword in the meta description
Use your target keyword in headings
Save all images you add to the page under names that have keywords in them (Google can’t read images)
Link to other credible resources from your page, e.g., local newspapers, trusted local bloggers, Wikipedia, .gov and .edu websites.

Bonus Tips

You can use media, tools, and content structure to make your pages more useful and entertaining. This serves a major benefit.

These strategies keep users on your site longer and Google tracks time spent on your site as a factor.

It also helps you avoid a ‘bounce’ – when a user visits your site and leaves quickly – which is a negative ranking factor.

Use the following strategies:

Write short sentences
Use headings and bullet points to make your content easier to follow
If your page is very long, create a hyperlinked menu so users can pick and choose which sections to read without having to read
Add Google maps to your page
Add videos from your Youtube channel to your page (Google owns Youtube and prefers sites who display Youtube Videos)
Add visuals like images and infographics

Step 4 – Promote Your Content

This is the last leg of the race.

If you want to guarantee your pages will rank high, you want to promote your content and build relevant links from high-quality sources back to your pages.

Although backlinking isn’t the only SEO strategy you need in 2018, it’s still important

If you want high-quality links, you have to reach out to other websites and ask for them.

There are a few ways to find quality links.

Get Links from Your Competitors

You can enter your competitors’ website URLs into backlink research tools from companies like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEM rush. Find the websites who link to your competitors’ websites and present them your new, improved, 10x better version of content on the same subject.

A few of the sites you reach out to will link back to you.

You can repeat the process for each of the pages that rank on the first page.

Source Local Bloggers

You can reach out to local bloggers in the area and reach out to them.

Some good examples of types of local blogs you could reach out to:

mom blogs
tourist blogs
teaching blogs

You can reach out to each blog and attempt to get links in the following ways:

Find a related blog post and suggest one of your pages to link to as a bonus resource
Offer to write a guest post that relates to their blog topic and link it back to your website
Offer to pay for a sponsored post by the blogger themselves for a link back to your website

Use Google Alerts to Find Easy Linking Opportunities

Google Alerts is a tool you can use to get notifications whenever a site mentions a certain phrase.

You want to set Google alerts for your business time to get a link whenever someone mentions your business.

Also, you can enter some of your topics and related phrases. Whenever someone mentions the topics as part of their content, you can reach out with your useful resource to link to.

Promote Your Work On Social Media and Forums

You’ll want to share each piece of content you create on all your social media platforms. You can also use tools like Buffer to schedule multiple posts at once and share them repeatedly.

Find relevant forums surrounding your topic and post your content there as well.

Use Retargeting Facebook Ads to Follow Up With Visitors

If you install a tracking code on each of your ‘resource hub’ pages, individual topic pages, and blog posts, you can send them retargeting ads to bring them back to the site.

Step 5 – Wash, Rinse, Repeat

If you perform this process repeatedly you can start to rank for many topics and keywords in a matter of a few months.

If you continue to do it, your site will start to become more authoritative as a whole, making it possible for you to start ranking for competitive key phrases.

This strategy takes a lot of work. As a real estate business owner, you might not have the time to do it yourself.

That’s where our digital marketing agency comes in. We can implement the entire strategy we just showed you to help you dominate real estate SEO and SEM in your market and location.

Call us at 507-281-3490 or fill out this form and we’ll get back to you right away.

December 4, 2018March 9, 2022

5 Deadly Online Marketing Mistakes Your Business Might be Making (and How to Fix them)

You’re in a tough spot.

You want to invest in online marketing, but you also want to make sure to invest wisely. Online marketing is just one portion of your operations.

There’s employees, equipment, supplies, utilities, rent and a long list of moving parts you have to account for.

You’ll invest in online marketing — SEO, PPC, and Content Marketing – if you believe it’ll provide a return on that investment.

We understand your concerns, but let us ask this…

Have you considered that you’re looking at the cost of online marketing the wrong way?

The Right Way to Think About Online Marketing

You run or manage a business.

We can use fancy words like search engine optimization, pay per click advertising, digital marketing, responsive design, analytics tracking and more, but your main concern is the bottom line.

Instead of thinking of how much online marketing costs, think of how much it’s costing you not to market your business effectively online. Even if you have a steady client base, good service, or healthy revenue, chances are you’re leaving money on the table if you don’t get the most out of your web presence.

Here’s something we can agree on…

We live in a digital world. Keeping up with the trends in the marketplace won’t be optional much longer. Deep down, you know this, but we have some facts and data to back our findings.

Are you making one of these 5 online marketing mistakes?

Online Marketing Mistake # 1 – Not Having and Search Engine Optimized Website

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a second.

He or she is looking for a product or service you offer.

What do they do next?

Do they grab the nearest phone book? Look in the newspaper?

No. Either on their desktop or phone, they go to searching for information online.

They go to google and enter the service or product you buy into the search box — both paid and organic.. When they see the results, do they find your business?

This is someone with either the curiosity or intent to buy your product or service.

From a logical standpoint, it seems like a no-brainer to display your business in front of people who are already looking for what you have to offer, right?

If the idea of putting your products and services in front of people who are actively searching for them isn’t enough, consider some startling pieces of data:

How many leads and customers are you missing out on by not having an optimized site?

For example:

Let’s say you sell a product that costs $100. Let’s also say an average of 500 people searches for that product in your area.

The number one result receives 33 percent of all traffic to a results page. If you were the number one spot, you’d have 165 leads coming in every month. If you converted 10 percent of those leads into sales, you’re looking at $1,650/month and roughly $20k /year of extra sales and that’s from an optimized page for one product. Think of numbers like those with multiple products and/or services.

This example illustrates what we’ve been able to do for clients in various industries. Do the math. Think about how putting your business in front of hundreds or thousands of people will do for your revenue.

Online Marketing Mistake # 2 – Not Blogging

If you thought the search engine optimization statistics were startling, take a look at the data behind the magic powers of blogging:

Why does blogging matter?

First, search engines want to know you’re regularly updating the content on your website. Search engines use this as a ranking factor because they want help users to find businesses who are proactive about keeping their site information up to date.

Second, people want to know you’re proactive about keeping your site information up to date. If they visit your blog to find you haven’t posted anything new since 2012, what will they think about your business?

We know what you’re thinking. You don’t have time to write a new blog post once a week or once a month.

That’s where MLT Group comes in. We provide blogging and other content marketing services to help you work on your business instead of in your business.

Online Marketing Mistake # 3 – Having a Slow Website

Did you know your website loading speed directly affects where your website ranks on Google and other search engines?

Think about it.

Doesn’t it annoy you when a site loads slowly? Haven’t you clicked away from a slow loading site to find a faster one?

Google uses certain measures as clues to how fast your site loads including:

Bounce rate – A bounce means someone visits your site and leaves quickly. Slow loading websites cause bounces. Google penalizes your site for having a high bounce rate.
Time spent on site – Google and the other engines also monitor how long people stay on your website. The longer they stay the better. Having too many bounces reduces the average time spent on your site.

According to a study analyzing 143,827 different websites, there is a significant drop off in site loading speed after the top five ranking results. What does this mean? To compete with other businesses trying to rank highly in Google, your site must be coded for fast loading speeds.

You can use this test to measure your site speed.

Wait a minute? This post is supposed to be about online marketing. Isn’t site speed more of a technical issue?

Your website is a marketing tool. If your marketing tool is running inefficiently, you have a marketing issue.

At MLT group, we use proven hosting technology and code all of our websites to load quickly. This creates a positive user experience and a site Google goes gaga for.

Online Marketing Mistake # 4 – Treating Your Site Content As An Afterthought

Words are so prevalent they almost go unnoticed.

You see them in emails, ads, on websites, and seemingly everywhere you turn.

What if we told you the words you used on your site could mean the difference between a sale and a customer clicking away from your site?

Far too often, business owners treat website content as an afterthought instead of a core piece of their marketing. This is a mistake because words have power.

The lead generation company Sumome cites over 400 ‘power words’ you can use to increase conversions.

Does our team use a few of these remarkably effective and authoritative psychological content techniques? Maybe 😉

The point is this — unless you’ve dove deeply into the untapped power of content marketing, you have no idea how powerful it can be for your business.

Think about it.

While your competitors use the same old cliches and buzzwords to describe their business — words every business uses — like quality, efficiency, and customer service, you can shock and awe your site visitors with stellar content.

Maybe you’re no Hemingway. No worries. We employ a tightly knit group of a few dozen copywriters with expert digital marketing knowledge who can help your business attract and engage customers.

Here’s how it works. You sit down with our head editor. She interviews you. We take your answers and spin them into content gold.

Noticing a trend here? Working with a smart digital marketing company fills the gap between the results you want and the methods needed to achieve them.

Online Marketing Mistake # 5 – Ignoring Design and Multi-Media

Maybe you have a website, but it’s — to put it nicely — outdated.

If you think you can just get around to redesigning your site, think again.

Remember those two important metrics we mentioned earlier — bounce rate and time on site? Your website design affects both metrics in various ways.

If your design isn’t appealing, some visitors will visit it and leave creating a bounce. If on the other hand, you have an attractive website, visitors will stay longer and increase your average time on site statistics.

In addition to having an appealing design, you can incorporate other multi-media elements to keep your visitors’ eyes glued to your website:

Video – From commercials to product tutorials, video helps inform your users and gives them another option to learn more about your business aside from reading
Infographics – Infographics provide an effective way to display your companies benefits. For example, sharing an infographic about the benefits of working for your company can increase employee referrals
Images – Images on pages, in blog posts, and in photo galleries add another visually appealing element and can also show your product or services benefits. For example, you can display before and after pictures of a service you provide for homes.

The Bottom Line

Online marketing matters.

Investing in online marketing will provide the return you’re looking for as long as you do it the right way.

You have to work with a company you can trust. One who has intimate knowledge of the space.

How can you know who to trust? Take a look at the companies’ own online marketing.

In our case, we only have 500 + blog posts providing information on how to help businesses stand out on the web.

In fact, we’ve provided so much information you could use it on your own. Why give away the secret sauce?

Well, knowing what to do isn’t that hard. Doing it well is an entirely different story.

You’ve made it to the end of the post, which means you’re at least curious about how we can help.

Here’s what you do next…

Pick up the phone, like right now. Call 507-281-3490 and talk to us about custom web design, SEO, and more.

We’ll lay everything out for you so you know exactly where your money goes and what our services will do for you.

It’s that simple.

December 3, 2018March 10, 2021

Video SEO and Video Content Marketing 101 (2018-2019 updated)

Have you heard of Video SEO?

What about Video Content Marketing?

You can use video production to drive traffic to your website and create better content.

Doing both is important because you have to stay ahead of the curve for your business to succeed online.

Just ask the companies who failed to create mobile websites and lost their rankings after mobilegeddon.

Ask those who lost traffic because they didn’t improve their content after Google’s Panda update.

Google introduces new updates like these all the time like Google penguin and recently Google Rank Brain.

With each update, business owners like you must alter your strategies to keep getting traffic, leads, and sales to your website through Google.

What’s the SEO focus in 2018? Google wants quality content and not just written content, either. Video and multimedia are now cornerstones of both SEO, paid marketing, and content marketing. Just take a look at the numbers.

Video SEO and Content Marketing by the Numbers

There are also compelling statistics behind the wave of multimedia in SEO and content marketing:

59% of those surveyed in this study agree that if both text and video are available on the same topic, they are more likely to choose video.
Social video generates 1200% more shares than written content and images combined.
Video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80% or more.
Landing pages with videos are 53% more likely to show up on page 1 of the SERP.
Blog posts with videos receive triple the number of backlinks as blog posts without video.

Are you missing out on web visits and leads if you’re not using video? The numbers say ‘yes’ emphatically.

You can use Video in two different ways — as an SEO tool or as part of your content marketing.

How to Use Video SEO to Drive Traffic to Your Website

You’d have to be living under a rock to ignore the fact that ranking highly on Google can send visitors to your website.

What many business owners don’t know, however, is that Youtube – a company owned by Google – has its own unique ecosystem and search function with comparable power to send new leads to your website.

Imagine the following scenario. You’re an e-commerce store selling uniquely branded makeup. The makeup industry is one where video search makes a huge impact. Just look at these results for the query ‘makeup tutorial’:

The top search results for this query have millions of views. If your company creates makeup tutorials, ranks them highly, and siphons some traffic from your videos to your e-commerce store, you have the potential to dramatically increase your sales.

Even better videos for certain subjects — mainly how to material — ranks at the top of search results themselves:

Here’s an example of video potential for a healthy snack company:

video-content-marekting — 1 million views for top results

And one for a fish and tackle company:

The bottom line is this — if you have creative videos to share, you can use them to drive traffic with video SEO.

Some key points to understand about Video SEO using Youtube are:

Videos can be optimized – Videos on Youtube utilize titles, descriptions, and tags for SEO purposes. The same methods of keyword research and use of key phrase rich content derived from website SEO apply to Video SEO.
Youtube uses similar ranking factors – Google uses time spent on page as a ranking factor for websites. Youtube uses time spent watching videos as a ranking factor. Google measures click-through rates of search engine results pages as a ranking factor. Youtube does the same. Google measures engagement as a ranking factor and experts say social sharing matters. Youtube ranks videos using similar metrics like comments per video.
Content is king – When it comes to ranking highly on Google, nothing is more important than the quality of the content itself, especially with new Google updates like Rank Brain suggesting depth and quality of content will soon become the top ranking factor. Conversely, your videos must also provide content that informs your audience about the topic you optimize your videos for. Yes, Youtube can track the content of your videos just like Google tracks keywords in your content.

The steps to building a traffic engine using Youtube and Video SEO are:

Do your research – In search engine optimization, keyword research is the cornerstone of a successful SEO campaign. You must know how many people are searching for certain terms to decide how to optimize the pages on your site. For Video SEO, follow tried and true methods like brainstorming, using the Google keyword planner and following suggested results on Google search engine results pages. After you have your list of words, take them to Youtube and test your results by typing the researched phrases into Youtube search box. Youtube has a different results page and the words you research won’t have the exact number of viewers as they do searches on Google. Using the results strategy helps you see if there are viable numbers of viewers for your topic.
Leverage existing videos – If you have company videos available that match researched topics, use them! Make sure the video title, descriptions, and tags include an optimized keyword. For each video, you’re allowed to enter a URL in the description – this is where you want to add your site’s URL. You can also add calls to action within the video itself. You can find a guide for doing that here.
Create new videos – If after doing your research you discover a huge potential for site traffic and views, consider shooting new professional quality videos. Using a video production company like MLT group will help your videos rank higher on both Google and Youtube because high-quality videos increase viewer engagement and retention.
Promote your videos – Share your videos on social media repeatedly, send them to your email list if you have one, and embed them into the content on your website. Speaking of the last point, there are more benefits to video than ranking on Youtube and Google.

How Video Has Become a Content Marketing and SEO Staple

We’re long past the days of newspapers. Even “newer” methods of content creation like blogging are seeing rapid changes. Video has become a major part of the content marketing conversation and will only grow from here.

Let’s just take a look at a few of the goals of content marketing and SEO:

Engage your target audience – You want your target audience to know, like, and trust you. What better way to build a relationship with them than provide your content in a medium that’s both easy to digest and fun to use?
Keep visitors on your website – You want visitors to stay on your website for long periods because Google uses this as a ranking factor. Users have been known to visit sites and leave quickly. If however, while reading your content a user discovers a video in the middle of the page, they may find themselves staying on your site well past the industry standard two to three-minute mark for effective SEO.
Give the people want they want – The easiest way to turn off site visitors is to give them content in a way they don’t want to receive it – think providing a written manual where a video could be much more informative. Some people simply don’t enjoy reading, so video provides all-inclusive option to attract new visitors, leads, and customers.

You don’t have to create videos for SEO purposes only. You can create them with the intent to provide a fun and unique way to market your business.

Blendtec provides a great example of video content marketing.

How do you market something as simple as a blender?

Blendtec thought outside the box and created a video of their blender shredding different items like iPhones. The campaign went viral.

When you think of marketing your business, don’t look for the obvious only. Be creative with your marketing because it’s more fun for customers and ‘Mother Google’ wants you to as well.

Let MLT Group Take Your Digital Marketing to the Next Level

If this post made you interested in the power of video production, let’s talk about creating amazing video together.

Thinking of putting together a cool campaign to build buzz for your business? We offer full marketing strategy, social media management, and an entire suite of services to draw eyeballs to your business.

Does the thought of keyword research and SEO make your head spin a little? No worries, that’s what the pros are for. From start to finish, we can help you achieve results that help you grow your business.

When you’re looking for a digital marketing company to work with, check their digital marketing strategy.

With literally thousands of pieces of content, we aim to prove we’re the cutting edge and go to option in Rochester, Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, and across the U.S.

You’ve made it to the end of this post, which means you’re interested. If you’re interested, what you do next is simple. Pick up the phone, call 507-281-3490 and learn how to skyrocket your business’s marketing.

November 26, 2018

Organic SEO Explained: 5 Steps for Improving Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic SEO — also known as organic search engine optimization (SEO) has become an important factor in your business website marketing.

The process can be complex, but there are a few simple steps you must follow.

In today’s post, we’ll walk through each step and provide tips and insights you can use for your business right away.

Organic SEO Step 1: Keyword Research – What are people searching for?

If you’re like most people you get excited about a project and jump into it before doing all of the prep-work necessary to make it a success. The same rule applies to organic SEO. You need to do the right prep work before optimizing your website.

You need to first determine if:

people are actually searching for the phrase
how much competition you have for that chosen phrase.

Thankfully there are many tools to help you find great keyword information.

Say you are a website design company in Minneapolis, you probably want to people to find your website by searching “Minneapolis website design.”

Putting this phrase into Google AdWords returns some interesting data. The competition for that phrase is stated as “High” with around 5,000 searches a month. Competing for this phrase directly will take a considerable amount of time (and money).

What to Look For

Most businesses should look at the keyword ideas section and find keyword phrases that are either “Medium” or “Low” in the competition column. You can also take phrases from the keyword ideas section and add a geographic location to them, such as “corporate website design Minneapolis”. You can see that the competition drops considerably, however so does the number of searches. This is something in which you’ll have to weigh the return on investment.

These long-tail niche phrases can drive a considerable amount of traffic compared to the high-level key phrases and can be much easier to rank well with.

Before committing to a list of keywords for your website you should do some first-hand research and run the searches through Google to see who you are competing with online. Review their websites to see what they are doing in terms of keyword targeting, website structure, and on-site optimization to achieve the rankings.

After determining a list of phrases that fit your business you need to figure out how you want to work these keywords into your website content.

Each page of your website should cover a specific topic or keyword / key-phrase. Use natural language and sprinkle in the keyword. There’s no need to overdo it because Google wants you to write content for people, not search engines.

To recap, before optimizing your website you need to do some prep-work. Research your target keywords to see what the competition is and if people are actually searching for that phrase. Remember to be patient with your search engine results as they can take time to increase.

Organic SEO Step 2: Improve Your Website Structure

If you are starting with a brand new website, making sure you build your website with a friendly organic SEO structure. Make sure your code is clean and concise.

Google, just like people, will read and follow your thehttps://www.mltgroup.com/local-seo-services.php information on your website more often if the content is laid out in a straightforward manner.

An SEO friendly site structure follows a logical path and organization. From the main pages to sub-topics, and more, the site should be easy to navigate:

Your website should validate at W3C (http://validator.w3.org/) although this is not completely necessary for good rankings, it does help with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance and ensuring your code is well formatted.

Give Your Webmaster These Guidelines

Keep this note in handy if you work with a developer. Often, developers tend to overlook the website “head” (<head>…</head>). The head tags often contain Javascript, CSS and META tags for the page. Since the data in these tags doesn’t show up on the actual display of the website this area tends to get ignored and can become unnecessarily large. All CSS and Javascript code should be referencing external files. This not only speeds up the load time of the website (which is becoming more important to Google’s algorithms) it also makes editing the code later easier.

Finally, we come to the meat of the website, the body tag <body>…</body>. Between these two tags is what your visitors will see on screen. This is also where the majority of your on-site SEO will take place. In keeping with an organic SEO friendly architecture, your site should make proper use of the HTML tags.

Don’t build your website with tables. Instead, use div tags modified with CSS (CSS based layouts). Although tables can produce a similar result on screen as a CSS based layout, the code to create the same functionality with a table can be 3-4 times as large. Remember: the more code a page has the longer it will take to load, affecting its results in the search engines.

Organic SEO Step 3: Your On-Site Optimization

On-site optimization is still crucial to help search engines and people find your products and services. Think of it this way: if you don’t put the right information on your website how will the search engines know what you do?

Your on-site website optimization goes hand-in-hand with a search engine friendly website architecture. If your site has a poor architecture, your on-page efforts won’t work as well. There are a few HTML tags to optimize properly that is a must for every page on your website, they include the “title” tag, “meta description” tag and “h1” tag.I’ll go into detail about each one below.

Title Tags

Search engines use your title tag to understand what that specific page is about. The title tag shows up at the very top of your browser window. Having a well-written title tag should be common sense if you are wanting your page to come up for that keyword, however many people overlook this and leave the default “Untitled Page” text in it.

This is great if you want to rank for “untitled page” however I doubt that is what you want.

Here are a few title tag rules to follow:

First: Be Concise. You only have 70 characters that the search engines will respond to, so make them count.
Second: Include Your Keyword. I can’t stress this enough: if you want to come up for “blue rolling widgets”, by all means, put “blue rolling widgets” in your title tag.
Third: Include Synonyms. If people search for “blue rolling widgets” you can also try variations on those words such as “rolling widgets” “blue widgets” etc. Each of those is words that your potential customers may search for.
Fourth: Be Local. Local business should include their location. Most people that are searching for a local service or product will put in the region they want to find it in. Adding a local identifier to your title tag greatly increases your chances of getting found locally.
Fifth: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible never duplicate a title tag on your website. This confuses the search engines when serving up searches to your website.

Meta Description Tag

You can find this tag in the head of the website. This tag doesn’t directly affect your page ranking, but you want to have a compelling title tag to get people to click through to your website.

Here are some good guidelines for writing meta descriptions:

First: Be Concise. Again you have a limited amount of characters to use, about 150 for the description tag.
Second: Be Informational. Be sure to describe what someone would see on the page. For our blue widget example above our meta description tag could look something like this: “Buy blue widgets from ABC company, a provider of blue widgets to Anytown USA since 1988”.
Third: Don’t Duplicate. If at all possible write a unique description tag for every page on your website. This helps to tell Google what each page is about and gives them the ability to offer your customers the correct information.

Organic SEO Headings

Think of the H1 tag like a chapter heading in a book. It tells you what the entire section is about. H2 – H6 tags are for sub-headings and breaking up content logically on the page. The H1 tag has similar power as the title tag in the ranking algorithms of Google and other search engines.

Check out our rules for writing great headings:

First: Only One Time. Each page on your site must contain only one H1 tag. Use sub-headings to give directions for sub-topics
Second: Be Concise. The H1 doesn’t have a limit, but people should easily be able to tell what the page is about by reading it
Third: Include Your Keyword
Fourth: Don’t Duplicate. This actually is important for two reasons, you don’t want to have the same H1 tag across multiple pages and you don’t want to just copy your web page title tag. The H1 tag should compliment your title tag.

So to recap, your on-site website optimization is a critical step in making sure you are well optimized. Having well-written title, description and H1 tags give Google a good understanding of what your website is about, making it easier for them to give your users the correct page on your website.

Organic SEO Step 4: Off-site Optimization

On-site optimization is done at the front-end of an SEO campaign. Off-site optimization moves you up the ranks.

While the off-site optimization can be the most difficult and tricky part of the search engine optimization campaign, I will help you through some of the most common issues.

Let’s discuss some techniques and tips on the best (and worst) off-site organic SEO tactics.

Link Exchanges

Most people think that a link exchange (where I put a link on my website to yours and you put a link on your website to mine) works well for improving SEO authority. They can be helpful if you’re getting a link from a well-respected site (ex: technorati.com).

However if both sites have a low page rank this can actually hurt as your links will “bleed page-rank”, basically meaning that you are passing page-rank from your site to someone else and canceling out the effect.

You want one-way incoming links to your website. These are much more effective because they tell Google “I am a good quality resource on this topic. Others have linked to me because of it.” The more one-way incoming links you can get to your site the better.

Poor Quality Links to Avoid

If you have been researching how to generate links back to your website you may have seen links or ads directory submission services. While you can get a ton of back-links to your site quickly, they are generally of lower quality and Google won’t pay as much attention to them.

If your link profile (the break down of links on your site) skews heavily towards the low-quality sites it will take considerably more links to compete with someone who has a better link profile.

Good Quality Back-links

A good quality back-link can be priceless to a search engine campaign. These high-quality back-links require work on your end to foster a relationship with the website owner. These types of links can come from industry-specific journals or blogs, distributors or educational resources. You generally cannot simply ask the website owner to link to you (unless you are a well-known company), you will need to become an active member on their website. Show that you are an expert in a field and you may receive a link.

Write GREAT Content

This goes without saying for anything you do online. Writing good quality content helps you gain links to your website. If you have a blog, people may put a link to it naturally on their site as your information explains a subject they reference. You can become a guest contributor on authority websites to build your influence and link back to your website. These websites are usually looking for great content and having an experts view on the topics they cover can give you a lot of exposure.

Be Social

Social media and social networking is here to stay. Be sure that you fully utilize your online profiles. Be sure that what you are posting to these places is interesting and informative, not a sales pitch. Your social followers are much more fickle than the general website searcher as they are inviting you into their profile. Be respectful and don’t bombard them with posts. Unless your company has a lot of news, posting once a week or so would be ideal. You want to keep your users aware of your business but not get annoyed with you.

Press Releases and Articles

Both press releases and articles have their place in a well-rounded organic search engine optimization campaign. You can describe your company, services, and offerings all you want in them, just make sure it is newsworthy. Most press release services will charge a fee for submitting your release but for this fee, your press release is getting submitted to actual news organizations such as the AP, large market newspapers and high profile bloggers.

So to recap, your off-site optimization should be done on a consistent basis. Gathering a ton of back-links at once and then never looking at it again will give you a short boost but you won’t maintain your rankings. Always write good content. Be a good online neighbor and social friend. Link to people who you feel do a good job and you will tend to receive the same. As for social media don’t over post. You don’t want to be de-friended.

Organic SEO Step 5: Analytics (Measuring your results)

After you have made your website live the first thing you should to do is install Google Analytics www.google.com/analytics (or a similar program). I like Google Analytics for a few reasons. First, it’s completely free and second, you can gather a ton a data on the traffic to your website.

When you log into Google Analytics you’ll see a graph showing the traffic for each day. This is great to get a brief overview of how much traffic your website is receiving, but doesn’t give you a ton of data as to where people are coming from or what they are viewing.

Click on the Visitor’s Tab

This tab provides more detail about your viewers on the site including the number of unique visitors, bounce rate, time on site and new visits. Each of these sections can be clicked on to get additional data.

Next, look at the Traffic Sources tab.

This tab gives me a quick overview of where people are coming to my site from, whether it be search engines, direct traffic or referring sites. As with the visitor’s tab you can click on each of the sections to gather more detail about each site or search engine. If you drill down into a specific website you can see how many visits came to your site for a particular day.

Last, let’s review the Content tab.

This section shows you the amount of traffic that each specific page on the site is driving. If you are using a landing page for an advertising campaign you can see from this section if your ads are working.

You can also see if people are not following to a certain point on your site, such as a check-out page. If your customers are not flowing to where you want them you may need to revise your on-site content to help drive them to the correct locations.

As you can see Google Analytics can supply a ton of information about your website. Even just scratching the surface you can gather powerful information about your company’s website and find places to make improvements. Google Analytics has a great help section as well if you have additional questions on what you are looking at.

Conclusion

You’ve learned the basic steps of creating a successful organic SEO campaign.

Now you have two choices.

One, try it out for yourself.

Two, work with an expert to get “done for you” results. If you want to try the latter, fill out the form below to get a free marketing proposal.

November 21, 2018August 27, 2020

What is Inbound Marketing? Learn More About Inbound Marketing With Our Step by Step Guide

What is inbound marketing?

If you’re a business owner or marketing employee at your company, you’ve heard the term before.

You get the gist of it from the name — inbound marketing is the process of attracting people to engage with your business.

It sounds great in theory, but you’re curious about how it works in practice.

It’d be great to not have sales making cold-calls and scouring LinkedIn for leads.

We’re sure you’d love it if your phone was ringing off the hook or your inbox was filled with requests for your product or service.

In the back of your mind, however, you’re wondering if inbound marketing can work for your business.

You want to make sure you’re getting a return on investment for your marketing.

You’d be willing to invest if you were sure there were tangible results you could expect from an inbound marketing campaign.

In today’s post, not only will we answer the question, “What is inbound marketing?” but we will give you a full understanding of the process from A to Z.

How Inbound Marketing Works

Have you ever read a blog post about a topic, service, or product you’re interested in? Especially one you found through Google search?

Have you ever signed up for an email list where you receive something free in exchange for providing your email address?

Then, later on, you might see advertisements from the same company on Facebook.

Since you’ve seen the company before or are familiar with the brand, you might click through to the website through that ad.

At some point, you’ve purchased a product or service from a brand you first experienced online by watching or reading their content.

That’s inbound marketing in a nutshell.

It’s the exact opposite of the old form of marketing where businesses spent as much money as possible on advertisements to blast their message to consumers as many times as possible.

Why the shift from outbound to inbound.

Here’s what the numbers say:

90% of searchers haven’t made their mind up about a brand before starting their search (Source: Hub Spot)
Content marketing gets three times more leads than paid search advertising (Source: Content Marketing Institute)
96% of B2B buyers want content with more input from industry thought leaders (Source: 2018 Demand Gen Report)
47% of buyers viewed 3-5 pieces of content before engaging with a sales rep (Source: 2016 Demand Gen Report)

We live in a world of a massive number of choices. We have stronger filters to ignore ads from companies trying to force their message on us.

Instead, we search for the products and services we truly want. And we search for them on our time. We’ve become more shrewd with our buying behavior — reading reviews, buying from companies who educate and entertain us first, and using the internet to make more informed buying decisions.

There’s still room for advertising, but at some point, you’ll have to market yourself well on the internet.

So how do you create this inbound marketing strategy?

Here’s the step by step process.

Step 1 – Understand Your Audience

Quick question for you — what’s your target audience?

Do you know their hopes, fears, and desires?

Do you know their demographics?

Have you been keeping an eye on the channels they use to interact with businesses in your industry?

Before you move into the next steps of the process like keyword research, content marketing, SEO, social media, email marketing, and more, you want to have a great idea of who your target audience is so you can create the right campaign.

Here are some great customer research tips you can use to define your target audience.

Use What You Know

If you’ve been in business some time you know some facts about your target audience.

Brainstorm the following and get the answers to these questions on paper:

What are the current demographics of your target audience (here’s a great article on finding them if you don’t know)?
What are the pain points and problems your product can solve for them?
Can you name some of the goals and aspirations your product can provide them?
How does a member of your target audience see themselves?

Using this brainstorming technique can give you some raw information to make a more detailed customer profile or avatar.

Go Straight to the Source

Sometimes the best method for discovering the needs of your target audience is asking your current customers about your product or service.

If you have an email-list with contacts for current clients, send out a survey with questions related to why they bought your product or service and how it can be improved.

Get on the phone with your current customers and ask them about their needs.

Track every review for your business and comment on your social media profiles and engage with those customers to get deeper insights.

Keep an Eye on Your Industry

There are many ways to keep tabs on the pulse of customers in your industry.

You can go to these sources to find out what customers like and dislike about the products or services in your industry.

Quora

Quora is a question and answer social media website.

You can search for terms based on your industry and get great information about what people in your target audience want and need:

Amazon

Amazon isn’t just one of the biggest retailers in the world, it’s one of the largest qualitative research resources you can find.

Search for products similar to yours on Amazon (if you have a service based business you can find books about the industry).

Read the reviews, especially the 3-star ones. Why? Because 3-star reviews strike the perfect balance — they’re not overly negative or positive. Someone who leaves a 3-star review has honest insights to share.

Forums and Facebook Groups

Forums and Facebook groups provide unfiltered insights you can use to understand your customers.

This is great for industries that require a lot of technical knowledge like welding supplies. In that example, you could search for metal working forums and find out which processes and parts are working well (or not) and why.

Often when searching across the industry landscape, you can find useful information. You can even go as far as swiping the actual words people use to describe your product or service and add it to your marketing messages

Create a Customer Avatar

After you’ve done your due diligence, you can compile all your customer research into a profile you can use for your marketing.

A customer avatar is a detailed description of a member of your target audience. You create a description of the person including information like their interest, job, age, gender, etc

Creating this profile crystallizes who you’ll be talking to in your messaging. You need to have a clear picture of your target audience before you create content for them and know which channels to place and promote your content to attract the right type of visitor.

Here’s a great guide on creating a detailed customer avatar.

Step 2 – Research for Content Marketing and SEO

We recommend content marketing and SEO for each business we work with.

You can use other marketing channels, but these two are core elements of any successful inbound campaign.

Content marketing is the process of creating content to attract people in your target audience to your website. Blogging and page content are the main channels used for content marketing through SEO, but the term covers a broader range.

Search Engine Optimization goes hand in hand with content marketing. SEO is the process of adding relevant information about your product or service to your website to rank its pages on Google.

Both activities combined can increase the organic traffic to your website.

If you can convert some of that traffic into leads, content marketing, and SEO starts to work as an ‘automated salesman’ that draws people to your site and through the awareness stages of an inbound marketing campaign.

Source: Hubspot

After you have a great idea of the wants, needs, and interests of your target audience, you can research the phrases they type into Google. This helps you create content that will rank in search engines for terms people use to find your product or service.

Keyword Research

How do you find the right keywords?

There are many different processes and tools, but some core strategies when looking for keywords are:

Relevance – You want to find keywords relevant to your business. Keywords that sound good and get a lot of traffic are worthless without the right intent.
Volume – Keywords have a monthly volume – or an average number of searches. If a keyword sounds good to you, but the data says the volume isn’t there, try a different keyword.
Competitiveness – Keywords with higher search volume are usually more competitive, meaning you’ll need better content and more backlinks to rank for those words.

Keeping these items in mind, you can use a combination of brainstorming and competitor research to find keywords to use.

Brainstorm Using Keyword Research Tools

There are tools that help you find important keyword information.

These include the Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Uber Suggest, and more.

Take all of your different product or service offerings and brainstorm potential topics and put them into a keyword research tool.

These tools will often provide recommendations and suggestions based on your input.

Here are some great deep dive guides on keyword research:

Competitor Keyword Research

One of the simplest ways to find out which keywords work well is finding the terms your competitors already rank for.

Then, you can create better content and promote it more, which can help you leapfrog them on search engine results.

You can plug your competitor’s websites into these tools and find great keyword information.

Here are some great competitor research guides:

At the end of the process, you should have keywords based on the main topics, products, and services of your business.

You also want to have keywords based on sub-topics and variations of your main ones to use for landing pages and blog posts.

The structure you’ll use for your sitemap should look something like this:

You will want to have a complete sitemap for the main pages and other landing pages you want to create for your site.

You’ll assign keywords to each of those pages.

Then, the rest of your keywords can be used as part of your blogging strategy.

This Sounds Like a Lot of Work Doesn’t It?

We want to provide useful information regardless of whether or not you work with us.

That being said, content marketing and SEO can be an arduous process.

If the process we’re showing you looks promising, but you want a helping hand, fill out the form below for a site audit and marketing proposal:

Step #3 – Put the Channels and Tools in Place for Your Inbound Marketing Campaign

Once you have the research done for content marketing and SEO, you need the right tools to implement the campaign and decide if you’re going to use other channels to market your business.

Let’s start with the bedrock tools and channels you need for content marketing and SEO.

A Technically Sound, Responsive, and Built to Convert Website

You need to have a high-performing website because search engines use user-experience as part of their algorithm

This means your site needs to meet these standards

Fast loading speed – If your site is slow, users will leave quickly and search engines track this behavior with a metric called bounce rate
Mobile responsive – Your website needs to look appealing on a mobile phone.
No broken pages – Broken pages disrupt the flow of your website, which causes users to leave as well
Site architecture – Your website pages need a clear and logical structure

Also, your website should be built to covert, meaning you have multiple areas of your site to turn casual browsers into e-mail list sign-ups or get them to contact you.

You can use embedded forms:

Via- Shopify

Pop-ups:

Via- Optin Monster

Strategically placed calls to action:

There’s no use having tons of traffic coming to your site if you can’t convert it.

Here are some great in-depth guides on conversion optimization

Each page of your site should have an intention behind it. Consider the behavior you want visitors to take on each page when creating design and content for them.

Tracking and Reporting

You need data to make informed decisions for your inbound marketing campaign.

There are tons of tracking tools out there, but here are some metrics you need to track and best-known tools to use.

Traffic

Your website needs to track information about the traffic coming to it. Google analytics is the go-to software for this.

It comes with lots of useful information you can use to guide your campaign.

Some great guides on understanding Google Analytics are:

You can also use Google Search Console for additional analytics insights including impressions, click through rates and some keyword ranking data.

Check out these guides on getting the most out of Google search console:

Keywords

You want to track how well your keywords are ranking over time.

This helps you spot which terms are doing well and which ones need some TLC to improve their rankings.

These companies provide the gold-standard in keyword tracking:

Other Tools

If you focused on just the tools above, you’d know the bulk of the information you need to optimize your campaign over time.

There are a plenty of others you can use, however, and smart SEOs have put together some great curated resources:

A System to Nurture Visitors and Leads

Once you attract visitors to your site with content marketing, SEO, and other inbound marketing channels. You want a system in place to nurture those leads, engage them, and turn them into sales.

The most common lead capturing and nurturing system is email marketing software. Companies like MailChimp, Convertkit, and Aweber work well. You can also use more advanced tools like infusion soft, click funnels, and Ontraport that collect emails but also handle payment processing and other sales features.

You can also create a system where you entice visitors to request to learn more about your service, set up a demo, or a free strategy session.

Either way, you are drawing visitors into a marketing funnel.

The goal of a marketing funnel is to engage with people further after their first visit.

You want to capture their information and continue the conversation.

Here are some great guides on creating marketing funnels:

These are the basic tools and systems you need to get your inbound marketing campaign started.

There are a bunch of other channels you can use to pour ‘gasoline on the fire’ and get additional traffic.

However, the bottom line – Your business will usually get the most long-term benefit from a content marketing and SEO campaign.

Other Inbound Marketing Channels and Platforms

There are other channels and platforms you can use for inbound marketing.

Let’s walk through each and talk about how they work and whether or not they can work for your business.

Paid Advertisements

Paid advertisements can work well when combined with content marketing and SEO.

You want to use paid advertisements to catch people’s attention in a way that’s not intrusive.

Nobody is going to respond to your ad if it’s nothing more than a half-hearted attempt where you basically shout out “buy my product!”

Smart advertisers use paid advertisements to capture attention based on the context of the user’s experience.

What do we mean?

If someone is searching for something on Google, this means they have the intent to either learn more or buy your product.

In this context, it makes sense to send them to a landing page with an offer for your product or service with a paid ad.

If someone’s on social media or browsing websites that display banner ads, they aren’t necessarily in the mood to buy right then and there, especially if they aren’t familiar with your brand.

In this context, you want to use ads to provide value and get people familiar with your brand.

Let’s say someone has visited your website and now you want to remarket them with an ad. You could be more aggressive here since they’ve already shown some interest.

Let’s look at the platforms and the best context to use them in.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a pay per click platform where you can display ads based on keyword data.

Here are some in-depth articles on using Google Adwords:

Google Ads is best for products and services that users show buyer intent for. This means you should only run Adwords campaigns based on phrases for people who seem more ready to buy.

Someone searching for “Size 12 Blue Nikes” is a great example.

Google Ads works well for business owners who want to get a pretty accurate direct ROI number. It’s also great if you are looking to get results a bit sooner as SEO and content marketing take months to start showing great results.

Google Display Network

The Google Display Network allows you to show banner ads on other people’s websites who participate in the Google Adsense program.

If you see a banner ad like the one above, the business is using display network ads.

The only problem with these types of ads is…nobody pays any attention to them.

So why use these type of ads at all?

These ads only work if you have something valuable to give away or useful information that might pique casual browsers interested like a free white paper

Direct advertisement of products doesn’t work well for banner ads.

Facebook/Instagram Ads

Facebook ads can work quite well if you do them right. Since Facebook owns Instagram, you can post ads to both platforms at once.

With Facebook ads, you want to provide value up front to build awareness for your brand and get people to engage with you.

This is why a lot of companies offer something free in exchange for an email address. This gets casual browsers into their funnel so these companies can further educate and persuade them.

Video works well on both platforms as well because people are used to seeing videos pop up on their feed and it’s an “easy to digest” form of communication.

Here are some excellent guides on Facebook Ads:

These platforms have another great feature you can use to directly sell to customers – remarketing ads.

Remarketing ads show advertisements to people who’ve interacted with your brand already.

You can create remarketing ads for people who have:

visited your website
watched one of your videos
liked your page
interacted with your posts

You can get advanced with remarketing and create all sorts of ads based on what the user has already done, e.g., creating a specific ad for people who read a single blog post on your site.

Here are some great guides on remarketing advertisements:

Other Advertising Platforms

Google and Facebook are the two major players when it comes to paid advertisements.

You can expand your advertising efforts across these platforms too.

LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads are best for B2b Sales.

Useful guides:

Youtube Ads

If you’re handy with a camera or have access/budget for studio time, you can create amazing ads for Youtube

Useful guides:

Twitter Ads

Again, you’d want to provide useful and entertaining info on this platform as people on Twitter don’t have buyer intent.

Useful guides:

Organic Social Media

Organic social media means social media promotion without the use of paid advertisements.

There are many different methods you can use for social media marketing.

Before we get into those, here’s our #1 tip – be social on social media.

Social media isn’t a megaphone for your products or services.

It’s not just about likes, comments, and shares.

It’s about engagement.

The best marketers use social media to actually talk to other human beings with the primary purpose of connecting with them.

We cover social media marketing in a bit more depth here, but you can use social media in lots of cool ways like:

Running contests
Repurposing blog content – photos, infographics, video
Creating groups based on the industry
Creating polls and quizzes
Hosting live sessions to answer followers questions
Promoting blog content and interacting with commenters

This is just a short list of the infinite ways you can use social media.

Remember, the tactics aren’t as important as the goal – engage, engage, engage.

Email Marketing

Email marketing helps move casual browsers through the stages of awareness.

You get someone to sign up to your email list and then create messaging that informs and entertains them. The messaging should become more promotional over time.

The bottom line – you want people to know, like, and trust you to get them to buy from you.

The time cycle for how long this takes depends on the business, industry, and audience, but you have to get the person on the other side of the screen ready to take the next step.

There are different stages to the email marketing process to be aware of.

List-Building

For your e-mail list to be successful, you need to get people on it.

In short, you want to generate traffic to pages on your website with e-mail sign up forms.

You can do this in a number of ways.

Here are some guides that go in-depth about the process:

List-Nurturing and Copywriting

Once someone signs up to your list, you need to create the right messaging to compel them to take the desired action.

This usually starts with creating an engaging “welcome email” and sending messages with smart copywriting that persuades them with each message you send.

Check out these guides on messaging and copywriting:

Making the Offer

Eventually, you’re going to need to make the offer to sell your product or service and get people to buy.

There are many ways to lead to the ultimate sale.

These guides can point you in the right direction:

Tying it All Together

The tools, channels, techniques, tips, and tricks you can use for inbound marketing are endless.

They do, however, all move people through a similar process.

These are called the stages of awareness

Each stage has different goals and you need to know which of your resources works best for each stage.

We broke down the actual tools and techniques you need to use in each of these stages because we felt too much of the opposite occurs — people tell you the stages, but not the tools.

With this overview understanding and the insights and resources we provided, you should have everything you need to start putting together your inbound marketing campaign.

What questions do you have about inbound marketing? Let us know in the comments.

November 15, 2018

SEO VS SEM – What’s the Difference?

SEO companies throw a lot of terms at you.

SEO, SEM, PPC, Adwords, Display Network, CPC, CTR.

My goodness, that can be a lot to take in.

MLT Group is different. We write content for business owners and employees at companies who need marketing help.

We don’t want to bog you down in jargon. Instead, we want to show you which strategies can make the most sense for your business.

In today’s post, we’re going to break down some of these terms – mainly SEO vs SEM – so you have the type of understand you need to make a smart decision.

SEO VS SEM – What’s the Difference?

SEO and SEM and marketing channels.

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps your business appear on organic search results. Organic search results are results that you don’t pay for (directly at least).

We’ll describe the techniques in a bit more depth soon, but SEO is the process of making changes to your website that make it more appealing to search engines. Also, it involves techniques used outside of your website to achieve the same goal.

Search engine marketing (SEM) includes SEO, but it encompasses other forms of marketing, most of which involve paying directly for website traffic.

There are many guides on SEM Vs SEO on the internet. Why did we decide to write one? We checked the results for the topic and noticed one key element missing.

Most companies don’t talk about the psychology of using these channels.

We understand business owners are human beings who want to see results. Not only should you know the difference between SEO and SEM, but you should also understand the type of mindset you’re going to need to have when using each channel. One favors patience. The other favors instant (but also more costly) rewards. Both work, but each has a different level of value depending on the industry and business owner.

Let’s dive into each type. By the end, you’ll know which route is best for you.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO helps your site rank well on organic search results, like these:

How can you create a website Google loves?

You use the following techniques.

On Site SEO

On site SEO involves doing things on your website to help the search engine understand what it is about.

The first step involves researching the type of words people type into Google when looking for your product or service. This process can get complicated, but in short, it’s a combination of brainstorming and using tools that tell you how many people search for certain phrases each month,

Once you understand how people search for your type of business online, you can use that information to optimize your website.

You can optimize your website in the following ways:

Content – When you use the words people type into Google for your product or service — keywords — it lets the search engine know your page is about that topic.
Tags – There are sections in your website’s code where you can add these keywords to help the search engines get an even better understanding of your page
Links – Linking to a relevant source on another page of your website or another website is valuable because search engines use links as a vote of confidence to what you reference

These are just the basics, but they’re good to know for understanding the on-site process.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO helps your site perform better.

See, the search engines don’t just want to see that your site has great information. They want to know you provide a good user experience.

Why? Because search engines care most about providing great results for real human beings.

If your site loads slowly, has sloppy code, broken links, isn’t secure, and is missing important data, search engines are much less likely to rank your website.

Technical SEO can get very in-depth, but here are the cliff notes:

Error pages – Error pages can pop up when you delete pages without redirecting them — telling the code that people who visit the deleted page should be forwarded to a new one. This happens often and can harm your SEO
Broken links – Broken links – links on your site that point to broken pages – can occur for the same reasons
Redirect chains – We won’t get in-depth on this topic, but you want to make sure to properly forward links of broken pages to other relevant ones
Load speed – You don’t want a slow website, period. It harms your chances of ranking well. If your site loads slowly, work with a webmaster to fix those issues

Again, there are many more technical SEO issues we can cover, but these are the core ones to know. Once your site is optimized and performing well, you can use off-site techniques to improve your chances of ranking even more.

Off Site SEO

You need to use off site SEO techniques to increase your site’s authority.

What does authority mean?

Search engines use links to your business’s website as a ‘vote’ for it’s quality. This makes sense. If many other websites link to yours you must have useful information on it.

They also use mentions of your business that aren’t linked. These are called citations.

Combined, getting both will help your website become more authoritative. The more authoritative your website and its individual pages, the higher — on average — you will rank on search engines.

Link-Building

You could write an entire book on link-building. There are an endless amount of tactics you can use to get links to your website. For your purposes, here’s what it’s important to know.

You want to get the right links. What are the right links? The right links are links from other authoritative websites that are related to your business.

Example, getting a link from a less authoritative but related website can and often will count more than getting a link from a more authoritative yet less related one.

We help our clients get back links by reaching out to related websites and telling them why our client’s website content makes sense to link to. That’s a simple way to explain a sometimes complex process we use.

Citations

A citation is anytime someone mentions your business online.

Someone posts a Facebook status about your company? It’s a citation.

You fill our your Yelp profile. It’s a citation

You become a member of your local chamber of commerce. You get it.

We help our clients build citations by finding relevant directories in their niche and submitting their sites for consideration.

The last two words are important.

When it comes to link building and citations, we reach out to other websites to consider linking to or citing your site. Getting the links or citations isn’t guaranteed. This is important because it’s the only way search engines can serve up good and honest results. If everyone was guaranteed these links and citations they would have no value.

This is the very small gist of the SEO process. For deeper insights you can check out these articles:

The ins and outs of SEO aren’t as important as the mindset you need to have a successful campaign.

SEO is a Long-Term Strategy

If someone promises you page one rankings in a short amount of time, run for the hills.

SEO takes time.

You can start to see good results in 4 to 6 months, but you have to be able to handle the wait.

Google is slow.

If you’re not the type of person who can delay their gratification, SEO might not be the right strategy for you.

If, however, you’re a forward thinking business owner who understands quality results take time, SEO could be a good fit for you.

Organic Search Accounts for Most of the Traffic

There’s a reason why it pays to be patient and rank your website using SEO.

Organic search results – ones you don’t pay directly for – get the majority of clicks through to websites.

Here’s some data to check out:

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SEO Has a High Long-Term ROI

Once you start to rank your website for a number of different key phrases, you’ll notice your traffic can increase in leaps and bounds.

As time goes on and your site increases its authority, it reaps even more rewards.

The “rich get richer” phenomenon is present in SEO.

Imagine you get your website page to rank #1 for one keyword.

It can start to rank for a bunch of other keywords too.

This means you can have traffic coming to your site for a variety of different phrases based off one one page. That’s the power of a successful SEO campaign run over the long term.

Now that you have an understanding of SEO, let’s talk about SEM.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing includes SEO, but uses other techniques, mainly paid advertising.

Google and other search engines have platforms you can use to pay directly for advertising in a few different ways.

Here’s a breakdown of each relevant platform.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is a platform you can use to pay for listings on search engines.

Here are some paid listings for reference:

We go into a bit more depth about PPC advertising in this guide.

Here’s the short version:

You use similar research to find key phrases you think your target audience uses to search for your product or service
You create pay per click campaigns where you set budgets for how much you’re willing to spend if someone clicks one of your ads
The search engine grants placements for website pages based on two factors — how much they spend and the quality of the ads and website pages themselves

Either by yourself or working with a smart digital marketing agency, you can monitor the campaign and pretty much discover the direct ROI of your results:

You spend a certain amount on clicks
A certain number of those clicks become real leads
You close a certain number of those leads
If the profit you make from those leads is more than you spend, you’re happy

On top of Adwords, there are some other search engine marketing platforms you can use to spread your reach.

Google Display Network

The big difference between normal pay per click ads and display network ads is that display network ads appear not on search engine results pages, but other websites.

You might know them as “banner ads.”

Websites can participate in displaying these ads on their site through Google Adsense.

Other site owners participate in increasing the ads themselves through the display network.

Display network ads tend to have pretty low click-throughs (do you click on them?) but they can be useful if you’re creative with them and use them to share valuable information as opposed to trying to sell with them.

Here’s a great guide on doing just that.

Now, why would you want to create ads on the display network for any other reason but to sell your product or service?

You can use them to build awareness about your business so people will know, like, and trust it. This can lead to them becoming customers down the road.

This is important to remember – marketing isn’t just about selling right away.

Think of display network ads like digital billboards.

We could go in-depth about all the various forms of SEM but we aren’t going to.

The purpose here is to help you understand why and how these marketing channels work so you can choose one or both.

SEM Provides Instant Results

With SEM, you can “pay to play.”

If you want to get results now and you don’t like waiting, SEM might be your best bet.

Keep in mind, however, these instant results come with a cost.

The more competitive your industry, the more you will have to spend.

SEM Provides Great ROI Metrics

The best part of SEM is the fact that you can pretty much verify the ROI you are receiving from the money you spend. For pragmatic business owners, this could be the right route.

There’s a saying that goes, “you can’t go broke making a profit.”

If your ads are profitable and have a great margin, you can spend more money without much worry because you can rely on your money making money for you.

Of course, this is no easy task or exact science either. SEM is anything but a “set it and forget it” strategy, which is why working with an expert often makes sense.

Conclusion

Both channels work. Both channels make sense.

It’s up to you to decide which one is best for you.

Our recommendation? Use SEM to kick off your campaign and SEO over the long haul to get consistent results.

An even better recommendation? Talk to us and figure out the best strategy. Fill out the form below

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November 6, 2018March 3, 2023

How to Get SEO Results Fast

If you’re a business owner, you want fast SEO results. Who wouldn’t?

Better SEO results lead to more traffic, leads, and sales.

Time is an important asset in business and you want to make sure you’re spending it well. How can you create an SEO campaign that gets you the results you need? What should you look for if you want to work with an agency to get the job done?

In today’s posts, we’ll cover everything you need to know about getting the fastest SEO results possible for your business.

The #1 Method for Getting Fast SEO Results Isn’t What You Might Think

If you’re familiar with SEO, you’ve probably heard the following advice:

Create (lots of) excellent content
Get links from other websites pointing to yours
Optimize your website for search engines by using keywords in your tags, metadata, and content

All of these techniques contribute to a successful SEO campaign, but they’ll work much faster if you take these steps first.

Google wants to display the best search results possible.

While based on an algorithm, the search engine first and foremost caters to people.

Many of the new updates to Google’s algorithm have everything to do with the way people interact with your website. Before you work on any fancy SEO techniques, cover the bases regarding your websites performance and impression on visitors first.

Optimize For Load Speed

Have you ever visited a slow website before?

How did it make you feel?

Did it make you feel like you wanted to engage with the company or do business?

No. It made you feel frustrated and annoyed. You likely left.

Google treats load speed as a factor for ranking websites because of the way it affects visitors. If your site isn’t up to par, you won’t get the fast SEO results you’re looking for.

Google provides a tool you can use to test the speed of your website and provides insights on how to improve it. Other tools like Pingdom do an excellent job as well.

Factors that affect load speed are:

Image size and compression
Website coding techniques
Whether or not you are using a content delivery network (CDN)
Your website’s host server

This is a short list of items. You can work with an agency or developer to remedy speed issues which will help your website climb up the rankings.

Mobile Optimize Your Website

If your website isn’t built to display well on mobile phones, you are going to suffer on search engines.

The company itself has basically said so:

Since Google now bases its rankings on the mobile version of your site (or lack thereof) having a mobile-optimized site isn’t a choice anymore.

Your site needs to be mobile-optimized yesterday. Even better, you should build your site to be responsive. This means the design of your site will adjust to look great on any sized screen.

Curious about making the needed coding changes to make Google love your website? Enter your details below:

Focus on User Experience

There are basic SEO techniques, tips, and tricks. But the best strategy you can use involves focusing on your visitors.

If you simply focused on creating a website with content that served the needs of your target audience, you’d get those fast SEO results you’re looking for.

Here’s an example:

Content length is a key factor in search engine rankings. The longer your content the better according to many experts:

But what if you’re a local pizza shop? Do you need to write a 3,000-word guide on different types of toppings? No.

The best SEOs know that matching the search intent of site visitors matters most.

If your service or product needs explanation, then long-form content will work for you.

If you sell a product that’s visual, providing more images (as well as optimizing your images) would make sense.

This is where working with an agency can come in handy. At MLT Group, we sit down with each individual business owner.

Instead of talking about the tactics that get the fastest SEO results, we talk about their target audience and the goals and vision for their business first. This dictates the strategy.

SEO isn’t just about creating content with keywords. It’s a philosophy that affects every single aspect of your website.

Do a Deep Technical Analysis of Your Website

SEM rush released a guide with 40 technical SEO issues to take note of.

You should always begin your campaign by making your website as healthy as possible by fixing things like:

Broken links
301 redirects
404 errors
Duplicate content
Missing tags

Don’t get bogged down with the lingo. You can use tools like Ahrefs site auditor to discover issues and get solutions. You can then work with your webmaster to fix these issues.

If you don’t have one, you can work with an agency to help fix these problems on a recurring basis.

Once you’ve covered the basics of Technical SEO, UX, and other performance issues, you can work on the nuts and bolts of your SEO campaign to start seeing the results you’re looking for.

The SEO Process Explained

You know that SEO is the process of getting your website to rank on search engines, but what does that process actually look like?

Here are the steps required for creating a campaign.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of finding out what words people type into Google to look for your product or service.

When you know the right keywords to use, you can use them in your content to let the search engines know what your website and business are about.

When we work with clients, we start the process by talking to them about their target audience. We don’t dive right into the tools.

Understanding your audience and market is crucial to doing the right research.

After discussing the details of your target audience’s goals, dreams, hopes, fears, desires, and everything in between, you can go to the tools and fight the words that match those emotions.

Good keyword research combines the following techniques:

Good old fashioned brainstorming
Competitor research – Neil Patel has a great guide on this topic
Use of tools like the Google Keyword Planner

Once you have a great list of words to use in your site content, you can optimize your site for SEO

Optimize Your Website

There are many factors that go into optimizing your website for SEO.Keeping things simple, some important techniques are:

Using keywords in page title, headings, photo alt tags, and content of each page of your rite
Using SEO friendly coding to create a great navigation and site structure
Linking between related pages
Having a sufficient amount of content on each page of your site
Adding multi-media to different pages of your site

Once your site is optimized, you can use content marketing and link-building to increase the speed of your SEO results. Perhaps you can even sprinkle in a bit of PPC to spice things up.

Use Content Marketing to Increase Search Engine Rankings

Content marketing and SEO work together. SEO involves using the right researched keywords in your content and content marketing is the process of creating content that meets your users needs.

The better your website uses content marketing the faster SEO results you will achieve.

Here are some in-depth guides on the topic:

The Advanced Guide to Content Marketing

How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy

When done right, content marketing can dramatically increase the speed of your SEO results.

Of course, if you don’t want to go through the trouble of creating an entire content marketing campaign on your own, you can put your website’s traffic generation in the hands of capable experts.

Who would we suggest you work with?

Hm…we wonder 😉

Conclusion

Anyone who promises instantaneous SEO results isn’t telling you the truth.

Even the best SEO campaigns take time to kick in.

You can start to see results as soon as a few weeks to months, however, and using the right strategies or working with the right team can help you get the results you’re looking for.

If you’re curious about how an agency can help, let’s talk. Just fill out the form below and we will send you a free marketing proposal.

October 30, 2018

Social Media Marketing for Small Business: 9 Social Media Marketing Tips All Business Owners Should Know

If you’re a business owner in the year 2019, someone has told you the importance of social media marketing.

You know it’s important, but you need to know if it’s important enough for your business to spend time, money, and effort on. After all, it doesn’t have clear ROI metrics like paid marketing.

The short answer? Yes, social media marketing is important and you should focus on it.

But telling you it’s important isn’t enough.

You need insights, advice, and strategy.

In today’s guide, we’ll cover 9 social media marketing tips to help you grow your business and we’ll talk about the time, money, and effort you should put into them.

Run a Contest or Giveaway

A contest or a giveaway is a great way to catch peoples attention on social media.

You can also use them to generate leads for your business.

In the short term, giving away your product or services for free will cost time and money, but you can reap rewards in the future if you do it right.

Here’s how the process works:

Choose the product or service you want to give away
Create a Facebook ad campaign targeting people in your audience
Allow people to enter the contest by giving you their email address
Run the campaign for a set period of time (1-2 weeks)
Announce the winner through your email list first with the subject line “Contest winner announced”
Announce the winner through social media
Create a special offer/deal/discount and promote it to all the people who didn’t win

This simple social media marketing tip works well for businesses in all different niches.

Harness the Power of Video

Video is a great medium to use because people can watch them passively.

You don’t have to focus to watch a video like you do when you read.

You can use video to build your brand by sharing informative, entertaining, and useful information your target audience wants to watch.

Or you can use video as a creative twist for advertisements.

We’ve discussed how businesses have used video to spark viral campaigns that helped them grow their business.

While you may not go viral with your videos, they will be a sharable asset you can use to spread awareness about your brand and business.

Be creative.

If you’re a carpet cleaning company, show a before and after video of your cleaning.

Real estate agent? Provide cool virtual tours of your awesome homes and share them online.

Even if you’re in an industry that’s you considered unexciting, you can create videos that educate your target audience.

Not sure what videos to create? That’s where working with an expert comes in.

Give Your Brand a Personality

All too often, businesses try to use social media as a loudspeaker to blast ads out to the masses. Or, they use it to build awareness about their brand, but they do it in a stiff and corporate way.

It’s okay to use humor, inject personality, and have a little fun when it comes to marketing your business on social media.

Go back to our example above with Dollar Shave Club. They use humor to sell their product. They are even a little brash and inappropriate.

Contrast this with most other businesses who are afraid to go outside the box from time to time.

It’s refreshing to see a company who doesn’t take themselves seriously 100 percent of the time.

Participate on Your Platforms

If someone writes a review for your business on Yelp or Facebook, you should reply.

If someone leaves a comment on one of your posts, you should reply.

Any time someone engages with your brand on social media in any way, you should engage back.

Scour the landscape of business social media profiles and you will mostly see infrequent posting and little to no interaction with potential customers on their platforms.

These are people who took time out of their day to try and connect with you. Imagine you are a potential customer who leaves a comment on the businesses’s facebook page.

You get a reply back almost right away.

You feel like the business actually cares about your opinion, wants, and needs.

Aren’t you more likely to buy from that brand?

Of course.

Most of the social media game is a matter of activity, but there’s another even more important factor.

Be Consistent and Master Your Platforms

It’s better to do really well on one platform than it is to be inconsistent on multiple platforms.

Find one platform, use it frequently, master it, then move on to another one if that makes sense.

Different platforms work better for different industries. Choose the one that suits you best.

If you are a business with a visual product like custom homes or makeup, Instagram may be your best bet.

Youtube also would work well for the aforementioned businesses.

Keep it simple and start with social media’s gold standard platform – Facebook.

Whichever platform you choose, you can win the social media marketing game by simply being more consistent than the competition in your niche.

Schedule Your Posts Ahead of Time

This speaks to the point above about being consistent.

Instead of constantly spending time posting on social media each day, you can carve out time to work on a week to a month’s worth of posts and monitor the replies as they come.

If you don’t have time to do it yourself, you can work with a social media manager or digital marketing company to do it for you.

Having a well oiled social media marketing machine working for you helps you spend more time working on your business instead of working in it.

Take Advantage of Social Media Advertisement Platforms

Social media marketing expert Gary Vaynerchuk says now is the best time to invest in paid social media marketing on platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Members of MLT Group attended an event he spoke at his he reiterated this statement.

In the talk, he likened the current advertising platforms to the early days of Google Adwords.

If you use the right strategy, the clicks on your ads can range from affordable to even cheap.

The caveat is that you need to use the right strategy.

Here are some great beginners guides on starting your on paid social media marketing campaign:

Running a great campaign takes patience and effort.

Which is another great reason why working with a smart company can help.

Use Remarketing to Connect With ‘Warm’ Prospects

It’s easier to sell and persuade someone who’s already familiar with your brand.

Remarketing is a great way to market to ‘warm’ prospects who are more likely to buy your product or service.

After you’ve spent time building awareness about your brand through social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing, etc, you can use remarketing ads to share an offer with people who’ve already visited your website or interacted with your brand in some way.

If you have a product for sale, you can create a special discount offer.

If you have a service, you can offer a free trial or consult as a way to build trust and show them how your services can benefit.

You can also send an offer without a discount or free trial of any kind.

Play the Long Game on Social Media

When it comes to social media marketing tips, the best tip is to use the platforms consistently for a long period of time

This isn’t the sexy answer, but most of the effective strategies in business and life are simple.

Digital marketing isn’t going anywhere.

Neither is social media.

If you can think in terms of years and decades instead of weeks and months, you will succeed.

If not, you won’t.