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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Refresh any out of date content throughout your website.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.

Magnet symbolising inbound marketing

What is lead generation marketing?

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A lead is a person who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. As a lead, you’d hear from a business or organisation with which you’ve already opened communication from, instead of getting a random cold call from someone who purchased your contact information.

The lead generation process starts with a visitor discovering your business through one of your marketing channels, such as your website, blog, Ad or social media page.

That visitor then clicks on your call-to-action (CTA) taking them through to a landing page on your website that’s designed to capture lead information in exchange for an offer.

What’s key to your lead generation marketing is the different channels that you can utilise to help start the lead generation process. Remember the information you provide is about providing your target audience – your ideal customers – with helpful tips, insight, a course or a template that will help with their business.  Here’s an overview of what inbound marketing includes to help with lead generation.

Content Marketing

Content is a great way to guide users to a landing page. Typically, you create content to offer visitors useful, free information. You can include CTAs anywhere in your content. At the bottom of a post, in the hero image, or even on the side panel. The more interested a visitor is with your content, the more likely they are to click your CTA and move onto your landing page with specific instructions to ‘download an ebook’; ‘book a course’; ‘sign up to a newsletter’.

Blog

The great thing about using your blog posts to promote an offer is that you can tailor the entire piece to the end goal. So, if your offer is an instructional video on setting up Zoom video conferencing, then you can write a blog post to accompany that with background as to the benefits and step by step points.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms make it easy to guide your followers to take action, from the swipe up option on Instagram stories to Facebook bio links. You can also promote your offerings on your social posts and include a call to-action in your caption.

Email marketing

Email is a great place to reach the people who already know your brand and product or service. It’s much easier to ask them to take an action since they’ve previously subscribed to your list. Emails tend to be a bit cluttered, so use CTAs that have compelling copy.

Ads and Remarketing

The sole purpose of a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad such as Google Adwords is to get people to take action. Otherwise, why spend the money? If you want people to convert, be sure that your landing page and offer match exactly what is promised in the ad, and that the action you want users to take is clear. Read more about the benefits of PPC.

Creating a marketing plan can help you run a coordinated campaign. Our Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing has loads more details for effective lead generation, download our free ebook.

Read more about inbound marketing strategy for your business.

Ebooks

Download The Beginner’s Guide to Inbound Marketing.

SEO croydon

What SEO agencies should offer London firms

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For many professional services firms in London, having a marketing strategy in place will be key to growth. But, what’s one of the core digital marketing tactics that’s vital to stand out in this crowded marketplace?

Three simple letters – SEO! That’s Search Engine Optimisation. SEO is about implementing certain processes that make it better for a website to be found through search engines so that you rank higher in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

So, if you’re looking to grow your business then partnering with an SEO agency could be the answer. But what are some of the main points to consider when choosing your agency? Here’s some of key things that an SEO agency should be offering.

Optimise your content with keywords

Know who your website is targeted at: Before you start optimising, you need to understand your target audience. Your content should be tailored so that you are answering questions for that stereotypical client. The SEO agency should help you develop an online persona which incorporates goals and challenges of your target audience.

Create pillar pages: An important starting point for optimising your website is understanding what your pillar pages are. Know what your keywords are (usually phrases or longtail keywords, not just one word!), then ensure that you have relevant pages on your website. What we’ve found working with clients existing websites is that with small tweaks to the heading you already have the start of a pillar page. However, what’s key is that the URL is also the same as the heading so this may mean you have to change that which may lead to broken links. So, watch out for that.

Create a blog page: If you haven’t got a blog already then create one. Most people expect to see a blog on a website these days for interesting industry insight. For each blog post it is important to perform keyword research to ensure your accountant business is recognised in SEO. This is especially important for professional services such as an accounting firm as there’s always plenty of new updates to be shared with changes from HMRC for example. The reason it’s so good for optimisation is that by posting regularly each month you’re providing fresh content, which includes keywords, and this helps the search engine find you.

Don’t stuff it: But don’t cram your blog full of keywords. Search engines are very sophisticated and can decipher synonyms and longtail phrases. Ultimately the content needs to be quality, insightful and relevant to the reader.

Internal links: Adding relevant links within pages or blogs to other relevant pages on your website really helps navigation and engagement with visitors. Basically, you’re giving visitors tips on useful resources and similar topics.

Technical know how

A key part of optimising your accountant website is ensuring that you’ve completed as much as you can on the backend. This also has an impact on how search engines find you. Here’s some of our top pointers to implement that can really help kick start your technical SEO campaign:

Meta descriptions: This is the short paragraph that sits beneath the company name when you conduct a search online. By completing the meta description when you upload a post or page, you can create a short descriptive paragraph which includes keywords to help search engines and potential visitors. Meta descriptions are a website’s way of telling Google and other search engines exactly what each of your pages are about, what to display and how to display it in the results.

Alt tags: Complete the description of your image in the ‘Alt Tag’ box when you upload it to your website. You can be descriptive about what’s in the image but also relate back to a relevant keyword if you can.

Headings: Keywords should be incorporated into your pillar pages which talk about your services. But, can you add keywords to your blog title? If you can, then absolutely add keywords to your headings and subheadings. The h1 tag should contain information about the content of the page. Search engines check the keyword consistency between the header tag and the content on the rest of the page.

Is your website mobile friendly? Your website should already be built on CMS (Content Managed System), but that doesn’t mean it’s automatically mobile friendly. You may need to make some tweaks which an SEO agency should be able to action for you by installing plugins.

Site speed: This is another key area because people are likely to leave a website within 3-5 seconds if they can’t find what they’re looking for. Or, if the page doesn’t load fast enough. Again, an SEO agency can help you with this.

Link building

What you’re doing with your website design is building your domain authority by gaining trust and being a thought leader. As part of the ranking process, search engines consider the quality of links, awarding scores based on relevance. Less links will have an impact upon where you return in a search result for a given term.

Links can be from social media posts, or articles linking back to your website. Having information on a third-party directory with a link back to your website can also really boost your SEO campaign – think Yell, Bing, 192.com or Yelp.

But perhaps the finest example of a directory is Google My Business. So, if an agency has just created your website or you’re looking to improve your SEO on your current website, ask your SEO agency about creating this for you.

Populate Google My Business: This is a free tool to use and well worth the time and effort to complete. Google is one of the most popular search engines, so fill out as much about your company as you can. The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact number and email as well as a short paragraph about your company.

Google analytics: Setting up Google analytics will allow you to understand the demographics of visitors to your site and how long they stay. You can set this up yourself or work with an SEO digital marketing agency to help you.

Looking to grow your business?

Optimising your website will help create stand out and help you be found for your services. We are looking to improve SEO for accountants in London and provide SEO services for companies in Croydon. If you feel you need some support in getting your website Search Engine Optimised, then get in touch with us today and book a free consultation.

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