Are you neglecting your online audience?
Then you are neglecting business!
You cannot – I repeat – you can NOT – have a static website anymore. You cannot ignore social media. You cannot ignore Google. You cannot ignore how it should all work harmoniously to sing a cohesive message to your audience.
If you are neglecting your online audience you are 100% neglecting business. You won’t know how effective cohesive online marketing efforts can be until you get the guns blazing and try. We’ve listed the most important things you need to pay attention to now.
Mobile friendliness and user experience
Is your website responsive yet? You are neglecting your online audience in one of most significant ways possible because we know that around 60% of Internet users are on mobile devices. If your website is not responsive, stop reading here – go away and organise to have it made responsive and then re-visit this article.
Love a cluttered website design – bells, whistles, pop-ups? As tempting as it is to fly towards the bright lights, don’t. The truth is, most small business owners don’t understand online user experience. Most of what you think to be true is actually the opposite of what is true – sorry. If you have a good developer let go and trust them – they get it.
Every page and menu placement on every website we build has a purpose – nothing is just there for ‘fun’. It has to work.
Creative and engaging content
You write blogs and put them on your site each month like clockwork. But they’re not really working. Nothing seems to be happening as a result of your blogging dedication.
That’s because something is not better than nothing. Dedication to the cause means nothing if Google deems the content thin, irrelevant or keyword-stuffed. Focus on providing real-life value for your customers instead of just trying to rank better in Google and you should start to see better numbers in terms of traffic and conversion.
Become ubiquitous on the web – but be cohesive
Target your audience everywhere they are! But tell a unified story. Publish a blog post? Send a newsletter about it. Post the blog link to your Facebook page. Share it on Google+ (more for the SEO benefit than for social reasons, we all know now Google+ is a dead social platform), have a Twitter conversation about it. Tell a story and tell it everywhere. You’ll do it slightly differently depending on the tool, but push out a cohesive message.
SEO is no longer just about keywords
SEO used to be mostly about keywords. Now it’s so much more than that. Not only will keyword-stuffing not work to boost your website’s visibility in Google, it can set you back. Google wants the best answers to people’s questions, not the most keywords.
And remember, even though you will feel like every action you take is to please Google, Google wants to please people. So if Google likes you, it’s because you’re giving its people what they want – relevant answers and information to solve their questions and problems.
We now know that SEO stretches as far to encompass your activity on social media, which harks back to the point about being cohesive with your approach. Google can’t connect the dots between five different stories being told on five different platforms. Tell one story well across the five platforms and Google is more likely to absorb your message.
Put simply, SEO is really how your business presents and interacts across the web. So be relevant and interact in a meaningful way.
Learn from the big guns
Don’t for a minute let a small or non-existent marketing budget hold you back. Think you can’t afford to spend time or money marketing your business online? Trust us, you can’t afford not to. Look to big brands with big budgets for ideas too – particularly when it comes to branding, consistency, how they respond to reviews (good and bad), the quality of the images they post and more. You don’t have to have a six-figure marketing budget to pick up a few best practice principles!
Online marketing and SEO doesn’t have to be too hard. You just need a plan, talk to us about how we can help develop a strategy for your business.