SEO

Maximise your SME’s online potential with cutting-edge SEO strategies from Croydon’s leading Web Design and Digital Marketing experts. Discover tailored insights that propel business growth.

Email marketing on laptop

Why you should work on your content marketing strategy

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In the last couple of months, we’ve placed a focus on the importance of maintaining presence online during this time of uncertainty and change. The reason being is as we move into the easing of lockdown and ongoing gentle reintroduction of getting back to ‘normal’, firms that have maintained visibility from the start will have kept their existing clients informed, helped to build awareness with prospects and potentially gained warm leads.

But, if you haven’t been able to keep up your marketing activity whether social media marketing or regular blogs, distributing email marketing or running a google ads campaign, it’s not too late to start. But, now is the crucial time to work on your content marketing plan.

Ramp up marketing activity

With the easing of lockdown gradually taking place, more people are returning to work as non-essential shops will begin to open, sports will start to return (albeit behind closed doors), people are beginning to step out of hibernation so to speak. But throughout this time, potential customers have been looking and listening to what’s out there, ready to jump at opportunities that they have put on hold.

For those of you who have continued digital marketing for your business, carry on and ramp it up. Perhaps explore other avenues to extend reach further such as creating an ebook of your core products or services with tips and advice, or send out that email that you’ve put on hold and create that video to share on social media.

Content marketing tips with SEO at the core

If you fall into the camp of not being able to do any content marketing during this time, then pick up your digital marketing plan now, it’s not too late.

Here’s our top SEO tips on what you could do as part of your online marketing strategy to help give your visibility in search engine rankings a boost. But note this is a long-term strategy so once you start, you need to continue working on SEO to reap the benefits when we truly are back to ‘normal’.

1. Be targeted

Review your website, especially your homepage. Are you telling your target audience exactly what they want to hear about when they reach your website? A little market research can help you hone your messaging.

2. Be relevant

Refresh any out of date content throughout your website. In the back of your mind always think about what your target audience searches for online and make sure you include those keywords in content. But make sure it fits. Search engines know when you’ve just added words for the sake of it.

This can impact your search rankings so make sure all links are working. And, add more where necessary to help ease of navigation.

4. Calls to action

Add eye catching buttons with calls to action that will encourage engagement and ‘action’.

5. Now write some blogs!

Regularly uploading content relevant to your target audience is a great way to keep content on your website fresh and search engines interested! Search engines want to return the best results to someone searching, so it has to be relevant.

6. Share on social media

If you already have social channels but have stopped posting, now is the time to get back to it. Tell people you’ve just added a new blog to your website. Remind people of your core services and products. There’s a lot of activity out there so you need to be in the mix to start to be heard.

This is just a quick summary for those who need to pick up on marketing activity. If you start implementing this now, it will help place you in much better position than waiting until life is ‘back to normal’.

Free resources

We’re a digital marketing and content marketing agency in Croydon and we have the following resources you can draw on if you need any help.

Free website review

Find out how to improve your website’s performance.

Free digital marketing consultation

Our Free Consultation should be between 15 and 30 minutes. The goal is to provide you with thoughts on how to start an effective marketing campaign and for us both to see if it would benefit your firm. No obligation at all, we just want the best for you.

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Attract the right online enquiry to convert leads

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Maintaining good quality leads through your website is key to business growth. For a professional services firm, such as accounting, this is vital to continue business through the current COVID-19 situation and ongoing service to your existing clients.

But to get quality leads to your sales funnel in the first place is the trick. So, here we give a little overview of some of the digital marketing tactics you can employ to help with online lead generation. 

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing to help you create your inbound marketing strategy to attract quality leads. Read on for a quick summary to get you started.

Quality content 

You’ll be hearing quality quite a lot from us. If you want quality leads then you need to attract clients with quality, tailored content.  

During this time of uncertainty, your content needs to be offering advice to your clients. Keep them informed of legislation, company changes and support through your blog, email marketing, social media channels and webinars.  

Email marketing  

Whilst you may feel that new business is not happening right now, maintaining presence is vital to be certain you will be remembered in the coming weeks when society picks up its pace to the next stage of ‘normal’. 

So, if you don’t already have a newsletter sign up box on the homepage of your website then add that. Capture email addresses and keep in touch with these people who have opted in with regular email marketing campaigns. They clearly want to hear from you so make the most of it.  

Just remember to be GDPR compliant and ensure that you tell people what they are signing up to and make it easy for them to opt out of communication.   

Get quality leads in your sales funnel  

But what should you do to attract the right type of enquiry? 

Make sure you have created a positioning statement about your company, your goals and target audience.  

Create an online persona of your target audience. This simple document will give background to a typical client of yours and provide answers to their challenges.  

Through targeted and relevant content you attract your audience to your website through blogs, optimised website (SEO), social media marketing and Pay Per Click (PPC) ads. It’s worth noting that 89% of online consumers use search engines when making a purchase decision. 

Once a visitor reaches your website, it’s about engaging with your target audience. From the initial landing page with bold calls to action or forms to download ebooks. To close the deal, it’s again about relevant emails and nurturing contacts through a well-managed CRM system.  

Reviews 

Once you have secured a contract with your new client, asking for a testimonial to add to your website or to your Google My Business page can help with gaining further quality leads. With 88% of consumers having read reviews to determine the quality of a local business, it makes sense to add this action into your marketing plan. 

Smart Cow is a digital marketing agency in Croydon. Whether you’re looking for a complete digital marketing strategy or standalone PPC campaign with Google adwords management book a free consultation and we can discuss our marketing services with you.

Digital marketing Croydon resources 

SEO Agency

Improve local SEO by creating local content

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Improving your search rankings by creating local content may sound obvious but you’d be surprised how many businesses relying on local search haven’t optimised their website for such eventuality.

As an SEO company in Croydon, here’s a brief overview of what to consider for improving local SEO by creating relevant and targeted content to help improve local search rankings.

Local search

Firstly, a little background on local search. Four out of five consumers use search to find local information. That’s a lot of potential business and prospects you could be letting miss your sales funnel. When people search Google, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or local search is a way for businesses to promote their services to local potential customers and clients.

Search engines look for triggers such as content on a website that is tailored for the area you’re targeting that will showcase local business. Social media pages, external links and a Google My Business page, all help to add to your authenticity of serving a local area and it will help your business appear higher up in the search engines which strive to provide the most relevant results.  

Content marketing strategy

When you create a content marketing plan, make sure you include a continuous focus on content for a local audience.

If you’re an accounting firm, you may want to target new businesses that have just arrived in the area. By creating content that would be relevant to them about the area such as useful resources for businesses to tap into from networking groups to social activities can help with search engines locating your website over others in the prize for better ranking in search results.

Don’t forget to revisit your contact details on your website and any other external site where you may have details such as industry bodies or your social channels. In addition, your Google My Business page is a great source for local information. Make sure you constantly add updates to it.

Discover the benefits of SEO for your business

SEO is a long term digital marketing strategy. If you’re looking to improve your local ranking factor, we can help. We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon serving businesses across London. If you would like to explore SEO for your website, why not get in touch and we can chat about the ways that we can help improve your results in search to generate high quality leads.

Or please take us up on a free website review as this can also highlight areas that need attention that you can implement yourself.

Local SEO resources

Search Engine optimisation keyboard

6 SEO tips to improve search ranking

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the key digital marketing tactic working invisibly and effectively in the background to help improve your visibility in search engines.  

Incorporating SEO into your overall marketing strategy is important right now especially as we’re reliant on the virtual world to shout about our business attributes. What’s key is about generating leads. You don’t want just anyone visiting your site, it’s about quality leads.

To help you achieve this, we’ve gathered together our top tips to kick start your SEO campaign and some refreshers for those businesses who need to revisit this.  

1. Review website navigation 

To have any success in Google search your website needs to be easy to navigate. This is not just about your menu, it’s the internal links that you include on web pages to help the search engine crawlers to use links and understand the content of your page. Conduct a review of your website to see if you have good quality links directing visitors around your site.  

2. Fix broken links  

Make sure the internal links on your website work. Think of a search engine as your visitor, it doesn’t want to be sent to a ‘404’ page as much as an actual visitor. It won’t be marked well for you. We can conduct a FREE Website review which will indicate errors such as broken links that you can then fix.  

3. Keywords 

If you don’t already have a list of words that you want to be found for, then now is a time to conduct keyword research. Spend some time really thinking about what your target audience is searching for to find you. What’s your business offering? How are your services solving a problem for your customers? These types of questions can help you get to those keywords and phrases (longtail keywords) that you then use to create content to optimise your web pages.  

When you review your current content against this new list of keywords, there’s a few tips and tricks to implement that will help you stand out in search engines. Use the keyword in the title of your page and if possible, the URL – however this may be too difficult if you have a lot of backlinks already to the pages so you may not want to change them. We would usually aim to place a keyword within the first paragraph.  

It’s also key to have your meta description completed and with keyword included. This is the short phrase that you see below the website URL in search results.  

4. Review web page URL  

Don’t be clever with the name of pages on your website. The URL of your pages should in effect ‘do what it says on the tin’. If you’re an accounting firm and one of your pages is about tax advice, then that should be the URL. It’s the keyword you want to be found for. 

5. Link building  

You may have articles or comments on other websites which include a link back to your website – in other words a ‘backlink’. Google monitors links reviewing quantity and quality. This helps build a websites’ authority. However, be careful, you don’t want links placed on any website, the emphasis is on quality and relevance to your website.  

6. Local SEO

Local SEO can help you target local clients and prospects. Create content that includes information about the specific geographical areas you’re targeting. Also complete your Google My Business page. It helps Google verify your business.   

Digital marketing agency  

This is just a short overview of just some of the search engine marketing tips you can conduct for website optimisation. If you need help from a digital marketing agency to kick start your SEO strategy and improve your online presence then get in touch with us for your free consultation.  

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