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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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 moredetail 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
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 犀利士 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.
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.
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
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:
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
How much are you charged for a click on your AdWords ad?
It seems like a simple question, right?
You have probably heard of the phrase “pay-per-click” (PPC advertising) and it makes sense for the most part, especially as a compliment to SEO services.
Your advertisement shows up on Google and you pay each time someone clicks on it.
But how does Google determine how much you spend each time someone clicks on your ad?
In today’s post, we’ll provide a simple explanation for how Google AdWords works.
By the end of this post, you’ll know how you’ll be charged for ads, the different factors that affect your budget, and insights you’ll need to create your own successful Google AdWords campaign.
Factors That Affect How Much You’re Charged for a Click on Your AdWords Ad
Before we dive into specifics on using the Google AdWords platform, let’s talk about some of the different factors Google uses – either directly or indirectly – to determine how much you’re charged when someone clicks on your ad.
In essence, Google AdWords is a “pay to play” platform. If you outspend your competition, your results will appear first. In some cases, it makes sense to spend premium amounts for a click:
If your product has a high price or has a high customer lifetime value (CLV)
The more competitive the service or product you want your website to appear for, the more it will cost.
What factors determine competition? Here are a few:
Commercial intent – Products or services people are searching for because they are ready to buy have “commercial intent.” These keywords (the phrase typed on Google related to the product or service) receive lots of attention from advertisers. Example: Red Men’s Nike Shoes Size 12
The number of advertisers – This relates to the first point, but the more advertisers who want to promote a similar product or service, the higher the cost per click (CPC) because the advertisers will try to outbid each other and drive up the price
The bids themselves – Google uses an auction system to display ads. The behavior of the group of advertisers who bid on keywords changes depending on the word, the industry, and other factors like personality
You can infer why some industries have a different average cost per click than others.
Lawyers and consumer services are at the top. Both make sense in their own way. Lawyers can spend more because the price of their service is high. While the consumer services industry has lower priced products and services, the commercial intent is higher.
Before you create an AdWords campaign, do your research on industry benchmarks.
Better yet, you can work with us to create aPPC strategyy from scratch:
Your Strategy
To further answer the question, “how much are you charged for a click on your google ads ad?” it’s important to talk about strategy. Your PPC strategy is one of the major factors for how much you’ll spend per click.
In Google AdWords, you can both set track different metrics like:
Max CPC – You can set a cost-per-click amount you aren’t willing to exceed
Total Budget – You can set an amount for the total amount you want to spend per day, per month, or for a longer period of time
Impressions – This is the number of people who see your ad
Click Through Rate -This is the percentage of people who see your ad and then also visit your site
When you put together an AdWords campaign, you have to keep the metrics in mind while creating your strategy and altering it.
We will walk through the details in a bit, but here are some potential scenarios to consider:
If your impressions and click through rate are low, you aren’t spending enough relative to your competitors
If your impressions are high but your click-through rate is low, your ad might not be persuasive enough
An ad with a high click-through rate, but a modest CPC and number of impressions could mean you can spend more because you have a winning ad that will convert when you increase your bid
If your ad has a high click-through rate, but people don’t engage with your website once they visit it, you may need some design or content upgrades to make your service or product more attractive
When it comes to answering the question – How much are you charged for a click on your AdWords Ad? There are a lot of factors to consider.
Your best bet, learn the basics and start a PPC campaign. Experience teaches you more than any blog post will.
Let’s talk about the basics. Then, let’s talk options. We can help you set up a custom PPC plan based on your businesses needs that will help you attract people who want your product or service.
The Basics Behind Creating a Successful Google AdWords Campaign
Keyword Research
When you create ads for Google, you need to research keywords.
What are keywords? Keywords are words or phrases people type into Google when they’re searching for stuff.
Google keeps track of important data about keywords:
Monthly Volume – This number tells you how many people search for a keyword every month
Competition – Google bases this number off of how aggressive the bidders are
Average CPC – This number shows the average amount of money you would need to spend to get a click
Google provides a tool called the Google Keyword Planner where you can see this data and make decisions about which keywords to use for your campaign:
You can use this tool along with good old-fashioned brainstorming to come up with potential keywords to use in your campaigns.
Creating Your PPC Ads
After doing your research, you’ll have a group of keywords you want to target during your campaign.
If your business has multiple services or products, you will want to separate the keywords you targeted into groups based on the different types of products or services you have.
These are called ad groups:
Each ad group will have its own individual set of keywords:
When you visit the campaign settings, you can set a daily budget and a bidding strategy:
The dashboard provides useful tips to help with your campaign. You can choose between manual options where you can set your own bid prices. You can also use Google’s ‘smart bidding options’ which allow you to choose your budget and leave it to Google to make the best use of your money.
For each Ad group, you can create different advertisements to display on the search engine. Make sure to use appealing media in your ads like pictures and logos. If you need a new logo, you can hire a logo maker at an affordable price.
Google uses a quality score measure to determine how likely your ads are to get click-throughs. It also uses your quality score to determine your placement. An ad with a high-quality score and a lower bid could show up higher than an Ad with a low-quality score, but a higher bid.
If you decide to work with a smart digital marketing agency like MLT Group, we will walk you through the process from start to finish using cutting-edge research and optimization techniques.
Conclusion
The concept of PPC advertising is simple. If you make more money than it costs to advertise, advertising makes sense.
As a business owner, you just want to get great results. Instead of learning all the industry jargon and creating a campaign for yourself, why not work with an agency who will partner with you.
Here’s your next step. Fill out this form below, we’ll give you a free audit of your website and marketing, then we’ll reach out to talk about a great campaign that works for your business.
“Web design best practices” isn’t just a buzz phrase.
In any profession or skill, understanding the best core methods can help you create the best results.
When it comes to creating custom websites, the final product is always different, but each site should have some traits in common.
These traits are important for user experience. They’re important for getting your website to appear on search engines. They’re even important for paid ads.
Together, they’re important for the growth and health of your business as a whole.
Some of these web design best practices are technical. Some are guiding philosophies to keep in mind. All of them will help your business have a website both you and your visitors love.
The #1 Web Design Best Practice
Each time we meet with a new client, we always ask this question:
“What purpose do you want your website to serve?”
Or this variation:
“Why do you need a new website?”
Sucess in business or life, in general, comes from understanding why you’re doing something in the first place. When you don’t answer the question beforehand, you don’t get the best results.
You’ve been to a website like this before. When you visit the site, it doesn’t make an impression on you. You’re not sure what to do next. The company’s mission isn’t clear.
It’s just a website.
If you have a website already, think about the impression it has on your current visitors. Is your purpose clear? 樂威壯 Do you have a unique selling proposition to share? Do they know what steps you want them to take?
When you work with a full-service marketing agency like MLT Group, we can help you answer those questions.
The answers can be simple things like:
Finding qualified employees
Getting more traffic and leads
Informing the customer about your product that requires research before purchasing
Demonstrating your expertise in the industry
Building your brand
The process doesn’t have to be complicated, but it has to occur.
While you’re thinking about the ‘why’ behind a website for your business, let’s dive into some specific best practices.
Google announced that it will shift to “mobile first-indexing.” This means that Google will first look at the mobile version of your website when it decides how high it wants to rank your website.
If your mobile website has a bad user experience, or, even worse, you don’t have a mobile website, you will lose out on website traffic, leads, and ultimately sales.
Also, not having a mobile-friendly website is just bad for business in 2019.
Without knowing you, I know you have a smartphone. Knowing how much you interact with the web through your phone should tell you everything you need to know.
This is where responsive design comes in. Responsive design goes a step above and beyond creating a mobile-friendly website.
With responsive design, we build websites that accommodate any screen size from phone to tablet to desktop.
Here’s the short version of how we do it:
Create unique designs for different screen sizes
Build different versions of the web site depending on size
Test all versions until the site displays seamlessly on any screen
Reponsive design is even better than building a mobile-friendly website because it’s more cohesive and uniform.
If your current website isn’t at least mobile friendly, we need to talk:
Create An Awesome User Experience
On each page of your website, you must consider the action you want your user to take and then create a design to accomplish that goal.
UX design, per the Interactive Design Foundation: “is the process of creating products that provide meaningful and relevant experiences to users. This involves the design of the entire process of acquiring and integrating the product, including aspects of branding, design, usability, and function.”
You can dive deep into the topic of UX and discuss different aspects, but the key is to figure out how to create a great user experience on every page of the website.
The elements on each page can vary, but include things like:
Header space
Content
Images
Buttons
Animation
Color
Taglines
When we work with clients, we discuss these elements in-depth, but they’re all results of the user experience you want to provide.
If you do the process backward and piece elements together without understanding what you want to achieve, you often achieve nothing.
The Homepage
Your homepage is the most critical page of your website because it’s the first thing people see.
Internet visitors are picky and will leave your site quickly if your design doesn’t entice them to view more. This is bad for multiple reasons. One, you don’t want visitors to leave your site right away because, duh. Second, if people visit your site and leave right away, it can have a negative impact on your search engine rankings. Each time a visitor comes to your site and leaves right away, you get a “bounce” which is something Google doesn’t like to see.
So how do you come up with an attractive design that makes people want to click through?
Here are some of our homepage design best practices.
Put Your Best Stuff Above the Fold
When someone comes to your homepage, they won’t necessarily see or scroll through all of it. Depending on their desktop screen size, they’ll see what’s “above the fold.”
Here’s an example:
For your website design, make sure you utilize the important areas of your homepage that appears above the fold.
Header and Banner Space
Your header and banner space is usually a wide horizontal space that goes across your entire screen. There are many different ways to design this space and add content, but you want to make sure to add your most important information in this area.
These elements can include:
Deals and discounts
Unique selling propositions
Call to actions
Tag-lines
Images
Video
Here’s an example of an e-commerce store that features a discount deal in their banner space:
Here’s another example of a company who shows their unique selling proposition with a call to action (CTA) to go to an important page on their website.
Some industries, like real estate and custom home building, utilize images to show off the quality of their work.
When you work with a design and digital marketing agency, you’ll go through a question and answer process to figure out the most important aspects of your business. Then, those aspects will be incorporated into the design and adworcontent.
Graphics and Buttons
Visual cues help people understand what to do next.
Graphics and buttons take the guesswork out of decision-making for your visitors and make your website look more professional and fun.
“Break out boxes” are a classic example of great use of graphics. Break out boxes are graphics that feature and link to important pages on your website.
Here’s a good example of them:
Always think of ways the content on your site could be represented with graphics and images instead of text alone.
Interior Page Designs
Your interior pages are all the other pages on your site besides the homepage.
The most common interior pages with unique designs are:
services pages
product pages
product category pages
content pages
unique individual pages
With each page, you should set an intention for the desired result you want to achieve.
There’s a theme here – always put your visitor in mind before you design a website page.
We work with our clients to create a strategy for each page on the website. We start with questions like:
What do you want visitors to do while on this page?
How do you want visitors to feel while on this page?
What impression do you want to provide when visitors land on this page?
Let’s take a look at some of our clients’ websites and break down the strategy behind their page designs.
On their services page, they wanted visitors to see their work in action. On the page, we used break-out boxes to highlight their primary services and make them easy to find:
The design on this page helps reflect professionalism, the quality of their work, and the idea they want the visitors to get the information they need quickly.
Each of their products — studs — has a wide variety of variables for each part. On the product page, we added a menu for the visitor to select the material, thread size, and length of their stud. Then, the product page automatically generates a part number to order the exact product:
Visitors can find the exact part they need. Other stud welding providers may ask to look through an entire table of numbers to find their part. This design strategy saves time and gives the user the impression they are working with a large company who can handle all their needs.
The sidebar menu also helps visitors find related products they might also need.
Product Category Page Design
Poppi Italian Leather sells custom handbags imported directly from Italy. Each handbag type is carefully selected and grouped into categories:
Each product photo uses high resolution, color balanced, and enhanced photos to make sure the custom quality comes across on the page.
Custom Individual Pages
Some pages are one-of-a-kind unique.
That’s exactly the type of design we created for 12 For Health — a health and wellness company.
They have a program called the 12 Habits of Health. For the 12 Habits page, we created a custom rotating gallery to feature snippets describing each habit:
The design also includes important statistics that show the importance of adopting healthy habits.
The color palette evokes positive emotions associated with a healthy life. The interactive style speaks to a sense of activity, which is a big part of a healthy lifestyle.
If you use a specific focus and intent on each page you create for your website, you’ll guide the user experience to help the visitor find what they need and achieve your desired outcome at the same time.
Aside from specifics for the homepage and interior pages of your website, there are some general web design best practices you should always follow.
Consider SEO and Content Marketing As a Web Design Best Practice
The way you design your website has an impact on how well it will rank in search engines for a number of reasons. That’s why it’s important to have a digital marketing plan in place to decide how the content will work within the frame of the website. There are also specific design techniques you can use or avoid to help your site’s SEO performance. When you work with a smart digital marketing agency, they’ll take a large number of factors into consideration. Here are some important elements to consider.
Content-Length
Often, the longer the content on your website, the better. The search engines want pages with as much information as possible. This has to be balanced with the design of your website. You don’t want readers to feel overwhelmed by your content. Fortunately, there are techniques you can use to weave the content into the design in a way both search engines and users will enjoy.
Use Subheadings
Subheadings (H1-H5) help break up the copy and give your reader a mental break between paragraphs.
Add Images
You can add images between content areas and even wrap them around the text of your website to enhance the way your content looks on the page.
Here’s a great example:
Create Panels for Different Topics
Let’s say you have a service page that has multiple sub-services underneath it. You can make each section of the service look unique by creating a panel for it.
Here’s an example below:
Take a look at this page. It has 500+ words of content, but it doesn’t feel like 500 words. From the user’s perspective, they’re seeing great information carefully woven into the design:
Build Your Website to Convert Visitors into Leads and Customers
Getting traffic to your website won’t make a difference unless you convert that traffic into a lead or a sale.
Your website design should have multiple areas with calls to action (CTAs).
CTAs come in many forms.
Contact/Request a Quote Forms
In addition to displaying your phone number on your website, you want users to be able to contact you by email.
You can create forms and place them in high-traffic areas of your website. This will give them the chance to reach out to you if they have questions or want more information.
Email Newsletter Sign Ups
Email marketing is still one of the top channels for communicating with customers and potential customers.
To get visitors to sign up, however, you have to go above and beyond adding a form to your sidebar that says “Sign up for our newsletter.”
They need a reason to sign up and they don’t want to feel like they’ll be receiving a newsletter — they want value.
How do you both provide and communicate that value?
Here are some tried and true techniques.
Offer Something Valuable for Free
You can offer visitors a valuable resource and ask them for the email address.
Examples can include:
Access to deals and discounts
Whitepapers
A free email course
Videos
Quiz with answers
Check out this example of a giveaway in exchange for an email:
Notice the following:
The headline and description for the give away are focused on the visitor
The signup form is prominent – not tucked away in the sidebar
Use of compelling copywriting to persuade the visitor
Give Them a Sneak Peek of What’s Inside
Notice the phrasing for this email signup form:
This copy answers the question “what’s in it for me?” up front
Strategically Place Your Sign Up Form
You want your email sign up form to appear where visitors are most likely to engage with it.
To some, this comes in the form of a pop up:
Although many people don’t like them, numbers show they work.
If you want to be less aggressive, you can create an “exit intent” pop up that only appears if the user is about to leave the website.
Often, you want to embed your signup form in an area that’s clear, visible, and obvious, like the banner space area of a page.
Phone Number
Many people still want to call your phone number directly.
You can use the header space of your website to display your phone number and add it in other relevant spots like your footer, contact-us page, and even at the end of your blog posts.
Conclusion
This is just a short list of the web design best practices you can use to create a website both users and search engines love.
A clear digital marketing plan from start to finish makes a world of difference when it comes to the success of your website.
Also, in today’s landscape of wary users who are worried about their privacy, failing to have a secure website causes people to have a negative view of your brand.
In today’s post, we’ll provide a quick and simple explanation on SSL certificates, give you specifics on why you need them, and provide the best options to resolve the issue asap.
So, What the Heck Is An SSL Certificate?
Think of an SSL like a padlock.
Your website is your home. Your visitors are the guests. The SSL locks the door to keep unwanted visitors from entering.
Your home — website — has many transactions, data, and information flowing back and forth.
SSL certificates were originally made for financial transactions, but they can also be used to create secure connections for other activities like exchanges of personal information, form submissions, and more.
We won’t bog you down with the details, but SSLs ‘encrypt’ — or block — important information from people and hackers with bad intentions.
At a minimum, it makes sense to have a secure website regardless of the specific reasons.
That was the thinking a while back — having an SSL is the sensible (but not required) thing to do.
Now it’s required — if you want your website to succeed that is.
Allow me to explain why.
The #1 End All Be All Reason to Have an SSL
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes for a minute.
Say they visit your website and glance at the top left corner of the window and see this:
Or, what if they click the top left corner to investigate further and see this:
Your site may or may not be secure.
Your sire may or may not be compromised.
Contrast this impression with another website in your nice that does have a secure website:
Safety, security, and a padlock icon vs. “the website might be secure, but visit at your own risk.”
Visitors are becoming savvier every day. Some even know what an SSL certificate is and won’t trust a site that doesn’t have one.
You need to have a secure website because the trust between you and your customers or potential customers is vital.
If your website isn’t secure right now, it’s likely you’ve lost at least one potential customer because they visited your site and saw it had security issues.
The sad part? Oftentimes the websites without certificates aren’t harmful or malicious in any way. They simply don’t have the right security measures installed. Either way, in the eyes of web browsers your site can be seen in the same category as a potentially malicious site.
You could stop here and decide to get an SSL installed for that reason alone.
Still, there are even more reasons why this security measure is vital.
Google Doesn’t Trust Websites Without SSLs (Anymore)
Did you know that not having a secure website can affect how well your website ranks on search engines?
How do we know this?
First, let’s start with a message from Google itself. Google is pretty cryptic when it comes to their methods. When they do make an announcement, it’s critical to listen to it.
Here’s their message regarding site security on Google Chrome:
They also shared an announcement back in 2014 stating the inclusion of SSL certificates is now part of their algorithm. Sites with HTTPS are secured with SSLs:
It’s been four years since this announcement. Think of how much more prevalent ideas like privacy and security have become. We’d wager it’s bigger than the “1 percent” of their algorithm they mentioned in the statement above.
Many of these factors involve the way visitors behave on your website.
Not having a secure website can affect some of these important metrics.
Bounce Rate
Your bounce rate measures the number of times someone visits your website and leaves right away.
This makes sense. If a lot of people come to your site and leave immediately, you might not have the right information or your site provides a bad user experience.
Imagine someone visits your site and sees a message saying “this site might not be secure.”
Not good.
Having a secure website can help decrease your bounce rate because visitors will trust it more.
Time on Site
Search engines figure the longer people spend on your website, the better and more useful the information.
Bounces have the negative effect of counting as a bounce, but also they decrease the average time spent on your website.
Number of Pages Visited
You’re starting to see the trend. Google and other search engines want to see people visiting your site, staying for a little while, and checking out different pages on the website.
Again, the initial bounce lowers other important metrics. When you get a bounce, you get credit for 1 page visited only, which lowers your average.
The Bottom Line: Security matters for a number of reasons. Fortunately, SSL certificates are affordable and can be installed quickly.
Your Best Security Option
Don’t get bogged down by words like “SSL” and “encryption.”
Your simplest and most effective route for securing your website is simple.
Send us an email or give us a call at 507-281-3490.
We can easily update your website with an SSL certificate at an affordable rate.
Just a click of a button or a dial of a number and you can put your security concerns to bed.
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