OK, so you have your shiny new website, but what next? How do you get it performing? Here are 4 easy steps that literally only take a few hours a month but are a great way to get that online marketing plan off to a great start.
What is online marketing?
Marketing online is about getting your website to rank well in the SERPS (search engine results pages). If you are not on page 1 for at least one of your chosen keywords then that traffic never gets to your site. You need to be on page 1 before people will click on your link.
It is important to do some research before creating an online marketing plan as it is easy to waste time and money attempting to achieve top rankings using keywords that simply don’t target your audience.
OK, so now I know what online marketing is………..so how do I do it?
Keyword Research
This step is all about finding relevant keywords that are relevant to your product, service, or website.
For example, if you are a plumber then you might want to target the terms “Plumber”, “Emergency Plumber” and “24 Hour Plumber”. This would mean that when someone searches for these terms they will find your site in the search engines.
However, if you are a plumber and you decide to target the term “Website Design” then it’s unlikely that anyone looking for a plumber will end up on your site because they won’t find your link in the search engines for this keyword.
On-page SEO
- Use your chosen keyword as the page title
- Use your chosen keyword as the first paragraph of text
- Use other variations of your chosen keyword within 300 words
- Tag your images with alternate text using your chosen keyword
Website Structure: How many pages should my website have?
This is probably one of the most difficult questions to answer and can be different for every business. However, if you are just starting out then I would suggest that your website structure should include around 30+ pages of relevant content.
Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing covers many different areas of online marketing. It can be quite overwhelming when you are just starting out. Your Digital Marketing strategy should include email marketing, social media management, SEO and content creation. Get started with these top tips to make an impact on your new digital business!
1. Send an Email
Email marketing is one of most effective ways to market your business. Send an email update to your list on a consistent schedule and always include something valuable for your audience. Don’t just go for the hard sell.
Our top recommendations:
- Send the email on a consistent schedule. If you’re just starting out, we recommend monthly emails to give you time to build your content.
- Don’t include all the content in the email, link to your website to read the rest of the content, such as a blog post.
- Personalise the email by including the recipients name. All of the major email providers allow you to do this.
- Experiment with different subject lines to improve your open rate.
2. Write a Blog Post
Content is king and your website’s blog is the best place to produce this content.
A collection of useful articles on your blog is an asset to your business as it grows you website’s visibility in search engines, gives you a catalogue of articles you can point your customers to when they are looking for more information about a topic, and the content positions you as an expert within your niche.
Our top recommendations:
- Publish a new blog post at least monthly
- Use great images and photos in your blog to create engaging content
- Focus on creating ‘evergreen content’ that will always be useful to your audience
- If you’re just getting started, there is no need to have a ‘perfect’ post. Remember, something not perfect is better than nothing.
- You’ve got this great new website, but you need to understand where your target audience is looking for businesses like yours and create original content that enables them to find you there.
What are the best tips for writing blog content strategy? Keep it short and simple. Try to make your blog posts a minimum of around 500 words.
Write practical, useful content that you know your audience will be interested in reading about. It sounds obvious, but focus on what is going to benefit your audience.
3. Engage Within Social Media Marketing
Social media isn’t just about posting updates on what you’re eating or where you’re traveling, it’s about engagement.
Connect with your audience and grow a following by posting content that is useful to them. Show you care by asking questions, making connections and contributing to conversations.
Our top recommendations:
- Post new updates at least a few times per week
- Images perform much better than text so always include a photo with your post to increase engagement and reach
- Use hashtags to improve your reach and target a specific audience
- Use a social media management tool to schedule your posts, such as the built-in Facebook post scheduler, CoSchedule, Hootsuite, and Buffer.
4. Always Provide Value to Your Audience
When you are sharing content with your audience, always think of what they would want to read and what would provide them value.
Sure it’s great to talk about yourself and what’s going on in your business, but the best results come from useful, engaging and visual content that your audience is genuinely interested in.
When you’re not sure what to share, I suggest looking at others in your industry to see what is working for them. Check out your competitor’s posts on social networks – what are they posting? What posts are getting high levels of engagement?
Marketing Strategy
Our top recommendations:
Sharing images/videos/infographics has much higher engagement than writing text content alone. Use these multimedia types in your posts when possible.
Filter out the noise by sharing only relevant, useful, and engaging content related to your niche. You will create a better experience for your audience
Measure Your Performance By evaluating the performance of all of this work, you’ll be able to focus more time on what really works for growing traffic and sales for your website.
Search Engine Optimization
What you need to know is how to promote your website effectively and the best way to do this is SEO. If you can learn a few basic SEO skills, it will be a lot easier for people to find you online when they are looking for businesses like yours. Here are some basic steps that will get you started:
Optimize On-Page Factors
A significant part of optimizing your site for search engines is making sure your site loads quickly, has original relevant content, uses clean code so bots can crawl it easily, and follows general best practices in on-page factors. Keep in mind if your site is slow to load or doesn’t offer any real value, people won’t stick around long enough to know how great you are. Optimizing the code on your site for cleanliness and best practices will help you to improve the domain authority. This includes having a unique title, meta description, heading tags (H1-H6), and URL that accurately reflects the content of your page.
Promote Your Website Locally
Increasing local search engine optimization is very important if you’re running a local business – you should be optimizing every aspect of your website to increase visibility in local search results. Keywords related to location such as “near me” or “in my city” are extremely valuable when it comes to driving traffic from online searches.
Link Building: How to Build Backlinks
As mentioned above, good content is one way to attract visitors, but another way is through attracting backlinks; backlinks are incoming links from other websites on the web that link back to your main website. When people link their sites on the web or write about you online on their blog or on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter, they’re sharing information with their audience which means more traffic for you!
