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Content – the foundation of search

08/19/202209/14/2021 by scmarketing

Just like a bricks and mortar shop you need to build a website on good foundations. There are numerous frameworks that allow website owners to maintain and add content. These are called Content Management Systems (CMS) such as WordPress. The beauty of a CMS website is that it allows the user to easily update content especially blogs.

Hubspot says that: “Text will always be the foundation of search so making sure the text around your website’s assets is descriptive will help them rank well in search.”

In a nutshell, this means that the content you add to your website is a key element in generating leads via search engines. This is because if you have relevant content in relation to what someone types into search to find you’re making the search engines job in finding your business and returning you in the results page a lot easier. With this in mind, here’s some tips to consider to help improve the content on your website for search engine optimisation (SEO).

Great content

To get your message across to your target audience, and Google, keep content relevant and to the point. This is essential to help you be found in search engine results pages and it helps to position you as a thought leader in your field of expertise.

Potential clients and search engines need to see you as an expert. This is where a blog helps as you can add fresh content regularly. Your blog should have tips and advice that answer your target audience’s pain points and issues.

If you are writing the blog posts yourself and struggle to think of new content every week it’s worth noting that 51% of companies say that updating their old content has proven a great tactic for creating blogs (Source: SEMrush, 2019 via Hubspot).

There are more tips about writing engaging content in our recent blog which covers creating offers, developing case studies and topics of interest.

Keywords

When you embark on writing a blog or creating a new website it’s worth thinking about what you want to be found for in search. This will help define what is on your list of keywords or phrases to include in your content moving forward.

Working with a digital marketing agency or using a tool such as Semrush can help you identify the volume of searches associated with a particular keyword as well as its difficulty to get ranked for. This can help you hone the list of keywords further so that you have a good balance of words and phrases.

Understanding that 49% of users say they use Google to discover or find a new item or product, being found in search engine results pages should be a key part of your SEO strategy. (Source: Think with Google, 2019 via Hubspot )

A picture tells a great story

Don’t just think of content as the written word. Sometimes less on a webpage is more and breaking a page up with relevant images will help make the page easier to read, builds your brand and helps visitors get a feel for who you are.

Make sure your images are optimised for use on websites. You may need to resize them before you upload as large images can impact site speed. The first five seconds of page-load time is crucial as it can impact on conversion rates. Website conversion rates drop by an average of 4.42% with each additional second of load time (Source: Portent, 2019). Also remember to complete your image alt tag on the backend. This is good for SEO.

Can website visitors easily move from webpage to webpage?

Make sure your website menu is easy to read and navigate. Ideally a webpage should be no more than 2 clicks – preferably 1 click – from the homepage.

Create bold and clear call to actions with directional text so visitors know what to do. Make it easy for them. Add a call to action near the top of a blog as well as the end to help with engagement. Phrases to encourage action include:

Download our ebook
Book a meeting
Contact us for more information, email us on…
Get involved by registering at….
If you want to attend the networking session, contact…
Free website review

Internal links throughout content especially in blogs also helps guide visitors back to services and products where you mention them on the site.

Digital marketing Croydon

We are a Croydon based digital marketing agency offering SEO services including blog writing, keyword research, local SEO, Google Ad campaigns to help improve your online presence and visibility online as your SEO experts.

5 tips for your website

08/19/202207/12/2021 by scmarketing

Your website should be the focus of your digital marketing strategy. It is where links from your social media channels, email campaigns, and Pay per Click (PPC) advertising should lead to. Therefore, it is critical that your web design is easy to navigate, engaging, informative and attractive. Here, Smart Cow Marketing offers some tips for your website.

1. Relevant content

Be creative in what you have to say yet keep it simple. Work out the main message on each page and focus on the best way to get this across to your target audience. Keep it clear, concise, and interesting.

2. Keep in mind your target audience

You should design your website with a target audience in mind. Are you building a business for young professionals? Or experts in a specific industry? We recommend creating an online persona, an example of your stereotypical customer. This will help you create content for your website so that you have the right tone of voice for your audience and keywords that will help with search engine optimisation (SEO).

3. Ease of use and navigation

Before making your website public make sure it is easy to navigate and works across different devices. Perhaps get friends and colleagues to test it out and get their feedback. It’s also a great exercise to do if you’ve had a website for a number of years. You might be familiar with it, but overtime perhaps things aren’t as slick as they once were. So always keep an eye on webpage navigation and get those bold call-to-action buttons in a prominent place.

4. Use images

Images help tell a story across your website, it is often the first thing the visitor will notice. Images and the overall visual design can be the difference between someone reading your webpage or your visitor quickly moving away from your website. Images can also help to boost SEO so make sure things like your alt descriptions are completed on the backend.

5. Website backup

The most important thing is to keep a backup. Hackers and robots scour the internet for websites with weaknesses.

Web design Croydon

At Smart Cow Marketing we offer a free website review. We can analyse your website’s performance and develop a plan to boost your website’s potential. We also focus on other aspect of digital marketing such as social media, SEO, PPC, and email marketing.

We are a marketing agency based in South London and work with small businesses, as well as those in accountancy and the construction sector. Drop us an email at Saymoo@smart-cow.com or give us a call on 020 3137 1826.

Beginner’s Guide to SEO

08/19/202203/09/2021 by scmarketing

With over 4.6 billion internet users worldwide, and over 7 billion searches on Google a day, making sure your website is noticed is a must. Which is why it’s important to consider using a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign to improve your online presence and make your website visible.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimising your content to improve its ranking on search engines results pages (SERPs), increasing your website traffic.

Search engines use bots to ‘crawl’ pages to gather information and place these pages in an index, where various factors are analysed to determine where they rank on search engines.

As a business, it’s important that you have a clear outline of what your objectives are before implementing an SEO strategy. Having an idea of what you’re striving towards will help formulate an SEO plan and the steps you’ll take to reach those goals.

If you’re unsure as to what your SEO objectives may be, think about what your business objectives are and how implementing an SEO campaign can help you reach those objectives.

Target audience

Your target audience are the people looking for your business’s services online.

Understanding your target audience is crucial to SEO, as you’re essentially tailoring your website to reach this audience.

A great way to better understand your target audience is to create an online persona. Think of your ideal customer and create a character based on that person – this will become your online persona that helps you tailor your marketing material including website content to target that person.

A few tips to help you create this persona include reflecting on the person’s goals and the challenges they may face trying to achieve them. Think of how your products and services may be the solution for those obstacles. These steps work together to help form a personality that gives you a better understanding of how your audience thinks and how you can market to them.

Our blog has further information to help you create an online persona.

Keywords

Once you have your target audience agreed and in mind, you can start to think of content for your website which will include keywords which will form a vital part of your SEO strategy.

Keywords are words and phrases that search engines use to determine what is on your website. When used properly, keywords can help boost how your website ranks on search engines, driving more traffic to your website.

With keywords it’s all about being specific to your business. With 53% of website visitors coming from organic search, thinking about what your target audience would type in the search engine function is a great place to start to help you create a list of the keywords for your audience.

However, a word of caution, excessive keyword use on a webpage can have an adverse effect on your rankings – this is known as keyword stuffing. So, high quality content should be fresh, unique and relevant to your target audience. Use your researched keywords within your web page which will help search engines understand what is on that page. Using the relevant keywords will ensure that visitors are getting the content they came for and not leaving too soon.

There are a number of keyword research tools online to help you work out what your keywords are, such as the Wordstream and Moz keyword research tools, and our how to improve onsite SEO with keywords blog also provides further insight on keywords.

Meta-descriptions

Another great SEO tip is to improve the quality of your meta-descriptions. The meta-description is a small snippet of text that appears under your webpage on search engines, to act as a summary of what the audience will find on your page and help boost click through rate (CTR) on SERPs. On search engines such as Google, the meta-description appears as a short paragraph below the web page title.

Good meta-descriptions are up to 160 characters and include targeted keywords.

Image optimisation

The optimisation of images on a website is also important and can be done in different ways. One way you can do this is by ensuring that every image has alt text – a written version of what the image contains. This helps:

When the image fails to show up for any unknown reason, as the alt text will be used as a substitute,
Screen readers as they read out the alt text to help the visually impaired better understand the page
Allowing search engines to crawl and rank your website

You should always try to include targeted keywords in your alt text as they’re another indication to search engines that your page is relevant to that search.

Optimising your images also includes making sure that they’re not too large, as the larger an image is the longer it may take to load. This may slow the load speed of your website and increase the bounce rate, the percentage of visitors that visit a page and leave instead of visiting other pages too. Research carried out by Google has shown that 53% of mobile users leave a website that takes longer than three seconds to load, further proof that you need to manage image size and load speed.

Link building

Link building is the process of having internal and external links throughout your website content.

Internal links to other pages on your website help by:

Easing navigation around your website
Enabling search engines to crawl your website more easily
Guiding traffic to specific pages
Improving engagement and time spent on your website

While internal link building focuses on connecting pages on your website, external link building is all about your website URL being on other websites which then direct back to your website – also known as a referring domain.

Search engines look at the quality of the links and the quantity to help give you a domain authority score. The domain authority is a report of how relevant your website is in any specific area or market. Websites with a high domain authority score will be seen as a more trusted source and rank higher than those with lower scores, so it’s important to increase your score where possible.

The best way of getting your website on another domain is through online directories and Google My Business is perhaps the most important online directory for you to be on. For more details on Google My Business, visit our Setting up Google My Business blog.

We’ve also listed some alternative directories to help you grow your list of online directories to be featured on.

Web design

How your website is designed has a larger impact on your SEO than you may think. Search engine bots emulate the behaviour of visitors, so if they see that users are leaving your page quickly due to bad user experience, your page will get ranked down. The opposite also applies if visitors have a good user experience your website ranking will increase.

That’s why having a well-designed website can be a strong contributing factor in your SEO strategy. The best websites:

Are easy to navigate
Have fast load speed
Create brand consistency
Are responsive

A responsive website is a website that adjusts its appearance according to the device it’s being viewed on. Websites are not only being viewed on desktop devices, mobile devices account for half of website traffic. This makes it clear that having a responsive website is crucial, as you can’t guarantee what device your website is going to be viewed on. Also, responsive websites load much faster, this improves user experience and helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages – Google certainly favours websites with faster load times.

As a digital marketing agency, we offer web design services tailoring a website to the needs of the business.

Landing pages

An SEO landing page is a specific page on your website used to convert visitors into leads. Landing pages usually have the following:

Succinct content with keywords relevant to your target audience
Bold calls to action (CTA)
Forms – for lead generation
Thank you pages – to continue the conversation and market something else to your leads

Landing pages are a great way to gather data whilst also generating leads. When creating landing pages, it’s important to pay attention to how visitors interact with the web page. For example, if you see that your page has a lot of visits, but the conversions aren’t matching this could mean that the layout of your page needs to be reworked. We would always recommend creating a specific landing page if you progress with a Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising campaign.

SEO agency Croydon

There’s a lot to consider but we hope this guide has given you a good overview of the type of activity you can implement to kick start an SEO campaign for your business.

By incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy, you can enhance brand perception and online presence as it helps your business rank better in search engines. This can help generate a better rate of enquiries due to improved visibility.

If you feel you need support in getting your website optimised, then get in touch with Smart Cow Marketing to discuss your SEO needs further.

8 ways to refresh your website

03/11/202103/05/2021 by scmarketing

Online presence is vital today more than ever and your website should be at the heart of all that you do online. Whether you create social media posts, distribute email marketing or run a PPC campaign, all these digital marketing tactics should lead to one place, your website.

The more links back will help you in search engine results pages. However, you need to take stock and check whether your website is as up to date as you think it should be?

Here’s our tips and quick fixes for an effective website refresh to help engage with visitors and keep them on your website for longer.

1. Is your website easy to navigate?

Check your menu and whether it is easy to navigate. Since you created your website you may have introduced new services and products so does your menu reflect this?

Take a step back and look at your website through the eyes of your target audience, If you find that you reach a few dead ends when you move from page to page now is the time to think about adding in more internal links, calls to action and updating your menu.

2. Review your content, contact details and links

It may sound obvious but is your website content up to date? Does it truly reflect your service offering to your target audience? If you’ve streamlined or added services or products then you need to update your website.

Make sure that all your contact details including social media handles are up to date.

Check that any links you have on your website are working.

3. Add content to a blog

If you already have a blog then great. But when was the last time you added content? A blog or news web page is a great way to add fresh content to your website – which search engines love!

Creating fresh, unique and relevant content for your target audience is a key tactic in any long-term search engine optimisation (SEO) strategy. So, get creating!

It may seem a little daunting at first so stick with what you know and talk about how your products and services can solve a challenge for your target audience. Read more on how to write a blog to help you with your content.

If you don’t already have a blog page you should easily be able to create a new page especially if you have a content managed system (CMS) website.

4. Add new images

Are your images a little dated and impacting on your brand? A simple change of banner images is a quick way to inject colour for a visual refresh. And, adding video content can really help with engagement.

You can purchase stock imagery which is a cost-effective solution and ensures that you adhere to copyright rules (do not use Google images as your source, any images online will all carry copyright and you could incur penalties).

5. Backend updates

A website redesign or refresh is all about attracting potential customers to your website and keeping them on your site for longer. So, your SEO strategy is important to help your business be seen online. With that in mind, make sure that you have completed your meta descriptions, H/H2 headers and alt tags to help with website optimisation.

6. Mobile optimised

If you created your website sometime ago, check that it is mobile optimised. View your website on your smart phone and see how it looks. Is the menu visible and contact forms easy to fill out? A website must be mobile friendly as that’s where a lot of web traffic originates so if your site isn’t mobile friendly it could impact your results in organic search.

7. Update and add calls to action

A bold call to action stands out on your page. It guides a prospect in what to do, whether that’s ‘call’, ‘complete our form’, ‘book a meeting’, ‘sign up to our newsletter’, ‘download our eBook’. All these actions not only aid navigation but encourage website users to engage further by taking action.

8. Free website review

Take advantage of Smart Cow Marketing’s free website review to help you on your road to refreshing your website. If you need a hand fixing any issues talk to us and we can provide a quote for a web refresh or discuss options for a new website design.

Web design Croydon

We provide website design services for local businesses in Croydon and across Greater London helping to create high quality responsive websites as well as online marketing services for lead generation.

We create responsive, optimised, Content Managed System (CMS) websites. This gives a lot of flexibility for future blog uploads through to landing page creations for new products or services.