Website letters

Why URL name and structure is important to website success

Smart Cow top tips

There are many tactics in search engine optimisation. Some people read posts in hundreds of blogs about building optimised URL and they keep tweaking until getting it just correct. After a few months, they find that they are sitting on many layers of 301- type redirects; you didn’t make any link building for your website, neither created any content.

I know that it is not what the motivational search engine optimisation speakers want you to hear, but in reality, these changes carry a big risk. Even if you made a perfect change for executing site-wide URLs with 301-redirects – is going to take long time for search engines to process. During this long time, your rankings will bounce up and down. And you may get some kind of errors. If the scheme of your new URL is not better than your old one, some pages may lose their rankings permanently.

From a search engine optimisation point of view, the URL structure of website should be:-

• Straight forward: URLs with copied contents should have canonical URLs set for them because there shouldn’t be any confusing redirects on the website

• Meaningful: URL names should have correct keywords in them, not gibbering punctuation marks or numbers.

With emphasis on the right URLs: URLs in any website don’t have equal importance in general. Actually, it is very important to check that all the pages that you need to submit to search engines are tested for being 100% working hence search engines can crawl your website and index your pages fast.

We hope that this article is of use, feel free to forward it to whoever may find it useful.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and developmentSEOPay Per Click (PPC)social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Creating personas

We have talked before when starting an online marketing campaign about the importance of creating a buyer persona. This provides you or your marketing team with a representation of who your target audience is. This is based on either data you have acquired or through creating a fictitious character of your ideal client(s).

These personas bring to life an individual that you are marketing to and so can make the campaigns more personal and realistic as opposed to just using marketing jargon that is inappropriate and not targeted. Just as much as you will use different language in talking to friends and relatives, business partners, people in authority, new clients, existing clients etc. You will need to adapt your marketing campaign appropriately.

You may feel that you get the majority of your business by going through personal assistance (gatekeepers) rather than going direct to the managing director, therefore you should think about their goals and motivators and words your marketing campaign appropriately.

Goals

For your fictional persona identify a couple of goals they may have personally such as growing the business, getting a promotion, looking good in front of the boss.

Challenges

Now imagine what challenges they may present you that your product or service may be able to assist them with, also looking at the challenges such as budget and timescales. With these identified you can then create a list of ways that you may be able to help your potential client.

Where possible, collect real quotes from clients that most resemble this made up persona that relates to your product and service which helps build a conversation in your own mind is how best to promote your services to them. Look at what their common objections may be and write these down, capturing these now will allow you to present a case that compels them to use your product.

Marketing message

Once you have built this personality and can picture them in your mind you’re ready to build your marketing message. Just a few words of what you can do to help your potential client.

Elevator pitch

Then expand on this and create the so-called elevator pitch. Create one or two sentences that would sell your services to client as if you were stuck in an elevator from the first to the 10th floor and this is your only opportunity to sell yourself to them. By the time you get to the 10th floor they must have enough information to say yes.

Summary

Create a persona, or many personas to bring to life your potential clients. As awkward as this may seem the first couple of times it is key to ensure that you have a personal message that will be warmly accepted as opposed to a cold marketing message that will be ignored.

Digital marketing agency Surrey

If you need a helping hand with your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us at Smart Cow Digital Marketing for expert advice on how to conduct an effective digital marketing campaign!

Services we offer include web design and developmentSEOPay Per Click (PPC)social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.