Reading a blog

The importance of blogging for your SEO strategy

You may be sceptical of having a “blog” page as you think it’s something for ‘influencers’ and not really anything to do with your business. However, it’s perhaps one of the most important webpages on your site to help you be seen in search engine results pages.

First things first, you don’t need to name it blog! This particular page is all about adding current, relevant and regular content to your website so you can call it what you like – News, What’s New, What’s On, Latest updates and so on. But it’s worth remembering that ‘blog’ is synonymous with people being able to find out more about your business, your opinions, statistics and tips and advice, so don’t think too much outside the box – you don’t have to.

Reasons to have a blog

  • Drive traffic to your website
  • Increase your SEO/ SERP
  • Position your brand as an industry leader
  • Develop better customer relationships

Drive traffic to your website

Your blog gives you the opportunity to create regular and relevant content to help attract new business leads. You can use the articles as a way to drive traffic back to your website. Make the blog on your website the foundation for all of your social media platforms. Post links – with relevant visuals – of your blog articles on your social channels and give your social followers a reason to click through to your website. 

Additionally, post inbound links directly in your blog articles, to drive traffic to specific landing pages of your website. 

Increase your SEO/ SERP

Blogs increase your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Fresh content is still key to beating your competitors in the search engine results page (SERP). 

Use keywords in your articles. List out the keywords, topics, and categories you want your business to be found for in search engine results pages. Use these words, and related expressions when writing your articles/blogs.  

Keywords and topics on your website are a significant way in which Google (and other search engines) find your website for these searched words.

Position your brand as an industry leader

Well written articles position your company as a thought leader. By sharing topics which resonate with your market and show your knowledge, you are marketing your skills for your business, service or product. 

You are building trust, too. The more you can show that you are well-versed in your field, the more likely your customers and prospects will trust you to supply what they need. 

Digital marketing agency

Content marketing is all part of the digital marketing mix that we can help you with. Talk to us about your marketing needs and we’ll ensure that the best combination of tactics is utilised to make you stand out from the crowd.

SEO Tips To Get Your Website Seen

Watch: SEO tips to get your website seen

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO is about increasing traffic to your website through improving its ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Keywords are an important aspect of SEO, the reason being is that when you type something into a search engine such as Google, it’s usually words associated with what is being looked for rather than a website name.

SEO is about using the relevant keywords throughout content on webpages to help improve your position in the search engine results pages.

SEO is also about original, relevant and consistent content as search engines will prioritise this in its search results.

The quality of links; links both to other relevant pages on your website, or links to external websites are also important as it helps with ease of navigation for both people and search engines. Plus external links help indicate your websites authority.

Completing some technical SEO on the backend also helps such as meta descriptions and optimised images.

SEO is a long-term strategy. At Smart Cow Marketing we provide a free consultation to review your website and suggest what digital marketing strategies will work for you.

Video content strategy that will help with your inbound marketing

Watch: How video can help with SEO

Creating relevant video content for your brand isn’t just about social media and making your channel stand out. Video should be part of your marketing plan to help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

Watch our video – Can video help with SEO – to find out more about how video content can help your boost SEO.

Here’s a summary of some of our tips for creating video for your business:

  • Accounts on channels such as Vidyard, Vimeo and YouTube all help with your rankings in search.
  • Think about the name of your video file and its title when you upload to the video channels as it should contain keywords. 
  • On YouTube you can add an SRT file to enable you to add subtitles and closed captions rather than burn them onto the video file. This can help with long term Search Engine Optimisation or SEOwithin the YouTube channel.
  • Create videos efficiently, simply and at no extra cost all on your mobile phone. 
  • If you are shooting the video yourself it is useful to write a script so that you incorporate your keywords which are important for SEO.
  • Repurpose content from your blogs and make short and snappy videos upload these to your website as this is known to engage well with visitors.

Ultimately, video is another way to help get your business seen online. It’s not to be scared of, just think of it as content, it just happens to be in a very visual form rather than that of a blog It creates stand out on social media channels and the potential for more shares to extend reach. If you have a business listing on Google My Business, add your video there too as well as to a YouTube channel, Video, also keeps website visitors engaged. All of this helps support long term SEO.

SEO Croydon

As a digital marketing agency in Croydon, we offer local businesses digital marketing services and online marketing advice on SEO Services and content marketing to help increase presence in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Talk to us about your business goals and how a tailored SEO campaign can help your marketing strategy.

Leads

How to generate more leads from your website

You want your business to grow but you need more leads to nurture. So, we’ve gathered our tips to help you generate more leads from your website.

1. Have you identified your target market?

The first thing to do is make sure that the people who are visiting your website are coming back to it intentionally, rather than by accident or through a referral from an online search engine. The more targeted the visitors are, the more leads you will generate. The easiest way to achieve this for local businesses is to use Google Analytics.

Start by analysing your traffic using the website analytics tool built into Google Analytics. You can extract all kinds of useful information about your visitors, including their demographics and the types of pages they are spending time on most. This will help you to identify your target market, both in terms of who they are and what kind of information they are interested in.

Depending on the industry you are operating in, this might be highly specific or more general.

2. Get your message across in the headline

The headline on any page of content is very important, but it’s even more important when you are trying to encourage people to complete a form or download an asset from your website. The headline needs to be engaging and, most importantly, it needs to give people a reason to take action and part with their contact details.

3. Optimise your website for Google's search engine

Once you have identified your target market and created some content that is targeted towards your audience, you will want this information to appear as high up in the search results as possible, giving more opportunity that your website will be clicked through from the search engine.

In order for this to happen, your website needs to be search engine optimised. This is a process whereby you change the coding on certain parts of your website so that it meets Google’s criteria for including in its index and returning in results when people search for information related to your industry.

Some things you can do include:

  • Completing H1 and H2 titles on pages
  • Completing the meta title and description
  • Adding Alt descriptions to images
  • Naming URLs with keywords so it’s really clear for a search engine to know what’s on the webpage

Add internal links throughout your website to ease navigation.

4. Integrate your website with social media

Once you have created the content on your website, you are going to need people to see it. A great way of achieving this is by integrating different social media platforms into your website design. This includes links to Facebook pages or YouTube videos that allow customers to get more information on a particular subject, or to share a piece of content with their friends and followers.

5. Make it easy for customers to find what they need

Your website should be an information resource for your target market, not just a place where people sign up to download assets from you. In order for this to happen, you need to make sure that your website is easy to navigate.

Your homepage should have a clear hierarchy that makes it easy for people to find the information they want – even if they don’t use search engines to navigate from page to page, instead clicking from one part of the website to another.

6. Use imagery to bring your website to life

Finally – we’ve made sure that our content is targeted towards the right people. We now need to make it engaging and interesting. A great way of achieving this is by adding eye-catching imagery to the design of your website, creating a holistic look and feel enhances your brand identity. Your website should make people feel excited about engaging with you, which is why high quality imagery is so important.

Web design Croydon

We create professionally designed websites that offer visitors a simple way of finding out more about your business and how you can help them. 

Find out more about our web design services in Croydon