Category: Web Marketing

With 2017 on its way out and 2018 very nearly upon us, it is a fresh start for many businesses who are looking to make 2018 their year for success. Don’t wait until January to work on your marketing plan which will probably not be enforced until February or March. Take this down time to reflect and hit the ground running in January before your competition get the chance to.

Content is King and when it comes to websites you really do need to have quality content on there to stand a chance. Quality content is crucial to dominate SEO rankings and to maintain consumer engagement, so why not pick a few key topics and start creating relevant content around those keywords / phrases to add to your website.

You may need to rethink where you are spending your marketing budget. In the past bill boards, radio and email marketing was the way forward but with social media and many companies offering all you need on their website, inbound marketing has to be top of the list. Move some of your marketing budget over to your SEO and online marketing to ensure that you have enough time and resources to achieve the goals you want to.

Responsive websites are extremely important as they need to be built to adapt to the device in which it is being view on. With many people now using phones and tablets, it is vital that your website displays and functions correctly on a number of different screen sizes.

If you already have a website and it is not responsive then you may be able to get a programmer to alter it for you, but this may be costly as its not always an easy change and may require many elements changing to get it all to work. If your site uses a theme from somewhere such as WordPress or Drupal then you can often find responsive themes which can be uploaded to the server. You can then swap your website over to use the new theme, but you still may need to do a few changes to get it to look as it should.

Google has actually started to use this as part of their algorithm (along with a number of other items) and is favouring responsive sites over non responsive ones to allow them to give the visitor the best possibly experience.

Many businesses make the mistake of focusing entirely on getting traffic (in other words, visitors) to their website and do not stop to consider if the website is designed in such a way that it will convert visitors in to enquiries or sales. There really is little point in having thousands of visitors if your products or services are not competitive or if your website does not offer the information they need.

If you have an ecommerce website then ideally you want your visitors to make a purchase on the site, with other types, such as brochure sites, you may be wanting the visitor to call or email you enquiring about a product or service you offer. Whatever type of site you have, it is all about the conversions.

When looking at what should be on your website, have a look at a few competitor’s sites. See what they offer, how they detail the information and if possible what prices they charge. This will give you an idea of the level of competition that you are up against. You can then tailor this information to your business and check that firstly you are competitive and secondly that you are giving the correct information to your visitors in order for them to complete the purchase or enquiry etc.

There are many things you should be doing to your website in order to improve and maintain search engine rankings on the search engines such as Google and Bing. One of the items that they look for is that your website is updated regularly with relevant and fresh content. This content cannot just be taken from another site and uploaded on to yours, it needs to be different.

Many businesses struggle to think how they can add new content to the site without cluttering up the main pages. There are a few ways in doing so but the most popular is to add a blog or a news section.

Adding a blog will not only allow you an easy way to add new content but may build up your returning visitor count as people will come back to read new articles that you have added since they last visited. It is often quite easy to add a blog to your site especially if your site using a content management system such as WordPress.

A news section is also a good way to get new content on you site. You could have a news section for news about the business or you could have an industry news section or maybe even both as long as you have time to update them.

If you have been speaking to a marketing company recently about your website marketing strategy then you may have heard the terms on page and off page marketing or optimisation. This can often be confusing at first but our easy guide below gives you an over view of what you need to know for both.

On page optimisation is essentially that. It is changes that you make on a page within your site or by adding new content to your site. It may be that you add a blog or that you optimisation the content on a page in include more keywords. On page optimisation also includes adding internal links to other pages and improving or adding meta data, adding XML site maps and robots.txt files. This is just a few examples.

Off page or off site optimisation is marketing that you do off your website that is aimed at improving the traffic to your site and your rankings on the search engines. This may be building up external links to your site, creating blogs and comments on other sites, social media interaction, uploading videos to sites such as YouTube and PPC campaigns. These can all influenced your website success whist being controlled away from your website.

When you start a new business there are so many marketing options available to you that it’s easy to feel swamped by it all and confused about where to start.

First you’ll need to identify which marketing media is suitable for your brand/business as there is no point in wasting advertising in places that just aren’t relevant.

Next prioritise your marketing in order of cost and importance, you’ll need to weigh up the costing options as sometimes it’s not wise to just go with the lowest cost. It’s all about being cost effective and spending smart.

Next you’ll need to set a marketing budget to decide how much marketing you will use and how regularly.

Once you have established these thing you can then look around for a suitable marketing company to carry out your wishes and help to bring recognition and gravitas to your brand.

Always take your time to explain exactly what you want to your marketing team so that they can help you to achieve your desired outcome and you can get the most for your money.

There is also a lot of essentially free forms of marketing to explore, particularly on social media that can be just as effective as paid for marketing.