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Why URL name and structure is important to website success

12/22/202405/22/2013 by scmarketing

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 development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.

An inbound marketing overview for SMEs

06/14/202104/12/2013 by scmarketing

Inbound marketing should be at the cornerstone of any business that has an online presence. This is where you can build your reputation and authority by placing content and building links into your site.

Gone are the days where having a website alone would be good enough for your business no matter how small. Search engines such as Google are always working to provide the best content for their search results. So, if you look at it logically and imagine yourself as a search engine how high would you rank your site against your competitors?

Does your site have useful and informative content that directly relates to your products and services and will make you stand out from your competitors? If your site is regularly updated with content the search engines will recognise this and will reward you accordingly with a high-ranking.

This is of course based on the content being relevant original and interesting. The search engine algorithms such as Panda, a highly intelligent tool, and can tell how spammy your content may be. If you overload it with keywords this will be noticed, also if the content is poorly written without authority this too will be noticed. The search engines are able to tell whether or not you use industry related terminology in your content so sites can rank highly even if the keywords are not often used the related and relevant ones are.

The other way to see if the content is relevant and has authority is how well it has been received by readers. Visitors view the page and then bounce straight back out it will be noticed and recorded by the search engines and markdown appropriately. However, if a page is visited and then promoted through social media channels or links from their own blogs this will be seen as a sign of authority and will be ranked accordingly.

In summary, never try to trick the search engines, just be true to yourself and your business and post good relevant content on the Internet. If you try to trick the search engines then sooner or later you will be found out and pay for it.

Use your personality and your expertise to promote your business and you will reap the rewards.

Inbound marketing agency in Surrey

For more inbound marketing tips, browse our website or contact us today.

We hope you found this useful and if you want to leave a comment please do.

Business need to knows about inbound and outbound marketing

06/14/202104/10/2013 by scmarketing

As previously addressed in the Smart Cow blog we’ve mentioned there are two main types of online marketing. These are inbound marketing and outbound marketing.

Outbound Marketing

Starting first with outbound marketing this is seen as the more conventional way to market. Through the more traditional ways of paid adverts and email marketing, this reflects very much old school marketing prior to the Internet, where people would place ads in magazines and drop leaflets through letter boxes.

These are really useful if you have a new product, new website or are in a very competitive market and currently are unable to get good organic results for your keywords. Outbound marketing can be targeted by precisely to your potential clients through data that you or your media channel has acquired. You may have an email list for your email campaign or you may rely on demographic information collected by social media channels to manage your pay per click campaigns.

Inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is a much better long-term strategy to promote your business. As we all get very savvy about magazine adverts, and leaflets posted through our front door the same is said for some email campaigns and online advertising. Most of us these days are very media savvy and can quite easily filter out unwanted marketing material. Reflecting back into the real world, a lot of what you will buy will be through recommendation, whether this is a product or service if one of your friends has recommended it you are quite likely to do the same. This is where inbound marketing holds the key, if you have people promoting your products through you to their social media channels, online blogs, forums or any other method you are more likely to pay attention and if you had seen an advert embedded in a website.

But to build this trust and authority that will get many people to recommend you, your services or products takes a lot of time to invest. Think of being original and using your own personality within your content you place on the web as well as making sure it is appropriate for your target personas you have created.

Summary

Look at where your business is now online and where you would like it to go plan your marketing campaign now. If you’d like more help and advice on how to do this do get in touch, we would be more than happy to help.

As an inbound marketing agency in Surrey, we specialise in digital marketing for accountants as well as providing digital marketing services and web design for local businesses within Croydon.

All the very best from the cowshed we hope you found this useful.

Stick men indicating link building for SEO

Creating personas

12/22/202404/10/2013 by scmarketing

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 development, SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media management through to CRM and marketing automation.