Business growth

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9 tips for optimising your website

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When businesses come to us to embark on an inbound marketing strategy, it’s usually about getting a business seen and getting leads. By optimising your website, you’re improving visibility of your services to your target audience which means a better rate of enquiries. 

Website optimisation involves looking at how your website is built. This means the keywords within content as well as understanding your target audience and their search behaviour.

Armed with this background knowledge, you can build a strategy to improve your rankings in the organic (non-ads based, natural) search results.

Top tips for SEO

Here, we look at tips for optimising your website for inbound marketing.

  1. Review your website: Is the content relevant to the audience you want to target? Note what amendments you may need to make to your website content or call to action buttons to help make it engaging to this audience. Conducting this initial research will stand you in good stead for website optimisation. Read on for more of our top tips for optimising your site.
  2. Technical SEO: SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is not just about what visitors will read on the website, it’s also about being aware of the backend. Make sure simple actions are completed on each page of your website. This includes META tag description, ALT tags and H1 and H2 headings completed.
  3. Keywords and phrases: What do you want to be found for? Work up a list to help get key phrases agreed. Review your competitors to see how they are performing and what marketing activity they are producing. All this will help you start to formulate a plan and strategy.
  4. Time to set up a blog page: If there’s one change you make, we highly recommend that you add a blog or news page to your website. This helps keep content fresh which is something that search engines look for. But, make sure that what you post is relevant to your target audience. This not only positions you as a thought leader, but also will entice visitors to read the whole article, stay longer on the website and be a prospect to nurture with future communication.
  5. Links: Internal links can ease navigation around the website. While incoming links to your website provide an indication of how useful your content is to others, less links will have an impact upon where you return in a search result for a given term.
  6. What do you want your website visitors to do? Make sure your ‘Call to Actions’ are visible, look good and help ease of navigation. 
  7. White space: What does your website look like? Too cluttered and your visitors will not stay long. Why not try adding white space around text with smaller paragraphs and imagery – images are a must. 
  8. Images: A picture says a thousand words! You can also add the Alt tag on the backend which helps SEO. But it’s not just about pictures, incorporate video into your content marketing plan. Placed at the top of a page it can provide engaging content for your website. But also, more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day (Buffer via Wordstream)
  9. Marketing automation: Is it time to consider looking at tools to make your business more efficient? Considering a chatbot on your website provides a friendly, warm welcome to your page, helps visitors navigate and pre-set answers can help free up your time.

Quick SEO tip

One of the first things to do when your website is live and to help it be seen in search is to fill out as much as you can on about your company on Google My Business. It’s FREE to set this up! Our blog on completing a Google My Business page gives you the lowdown on what to do.

If you need help with your inbound marketing strategy get in touch today.

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6 digital marketing video tips

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With studies showing that people have the ability to recall 65% of the visual content they see almost three days later (HubSpot, 2017), we highly recommend business owners everywhere take the time to get to grips with the visual side of content marketing.

Consumers watching a branded video are 28% more likely to buy (Hootsuite), so video content will really enhance your inbound marketing strategy.

6 tips for great video

Here’s a few tips to help you create great video and ways of sharing video that helps increase views and helps Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

  1. A simple way to record a video is through a social media app and share from that for your social media marketing. You can also live-stream via Twitter and other channels such as Facebook and Instagram, which have a story function for live feeds. With 100 million hours of video content watched on Facebook daily (Facebook, 2016), using video makes sense.
  2. To make sure you utilise video across social media channels or on your website, use the video function on your phone for simple and effective images. You’ll find recording on your phone easy for short soundbites to offer your target audience tips and advice. This can even include email marketing campaigns.
  3. Remember that content is king. It’s not about posting any video, it’s important that your video content is also targeted to your audience, with a relevant script, tagline and a clear call to action for more lead generation.
  4. If you have a blog on your website with a relevant video, post it at the top of the page as it helps to keep the visitor on your website for longer. This reduces bounce rate and helps SEO.
  5. Host your video content on YouTube. With over 1.8 billion users on YouTube every month, the business opportunities for using this channel shouldn’t be overlooked.
  6. Be authentic so that your brand resonates with your target audience.

Get in touch

Talk to us about your digital marketing needs. Our marketing team will help grow your business through online marketing, web design, social media management and more.

We will advise of the best combination of channels and tactics to utilise to make you stand out from the crowd. A digital marketing agency in Croydon, Smart Cow will be glad to answer any questions on the inbound marketing strategy best for you.

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Have you told search engines you exist?

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Grow your business with Google

To help your business grow, you need to tell people that you exist. These days your shop window is a virtual one – it’s your website. However, just like a bricks and mortar premises your website needs to be found, it’s just that these days that means via a search engine. Just as you would have a sign on your window advertising your products and services you need to let people know where you are.

One of the first things you need to do when you have created your website, or if you are embarking on a digital marketing campaign to grow your business, is to make sure you’ve told search engines that you exist. The most popular way to do this is initially is by populating Google My Business with your company details.

About 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 after all, so you may as well let them know about you by filling out as much about your company as you can.

The very basics to complete are your website URL, opening times, address, contact numbers and email addresses and a short paragraph about your company. But it is worth exploring what else you can complete as this will all help Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and your company being seen in search, further optimising your website.

For example, you can add ‘posts’ to your Google My Business page. This allows you to add offers and event details with clear call to action buttons. It’s worth noting here that you don’t need to create fresh content for this you can just edit one of your blogs or offer from your website and repurpose for Google My Business as part of your routine SEO work.

Images say a thousand words and you have the ability to add imagery to your Google My Business page too.

A regular look at your ‘insights’ on this page will reveal the most popular search queries for your business by unique users. These insights can also assist you in keeping the keywords and phrases you use up to date.

Reviews

These business pages are also a great way for you to ask customers to leave reviews. When people look for a product or service they are comforted by reviews from people and this could be the difference between whether someone clicks on your link or the person with a populated Google My Business page. 

Book a Practice Growth Session

Google My Business is just one of the tactics we recommend that our clients implement. If you would like to find out more, our Practice Growth Sessions are tailored for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. As an inbound marketing agency in London, arming you with the fundamental details for you to be able to implement a campaign to help you grow is well within our abilities. You can book a session with us for £95.

Keep an eye on our blog for more tips on growing your business with a well targeted digital marketing campaign.

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Tools to help you grow your business

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Unlock business growth

As part of our Practice Growth Sessions, we work with clients to unlock the tools at their disposal to help them lay the groundwork to grow their business. If you’ve been following our series of blogs about these sessions, you’ll see that we’ve already covered quite a few pointers to help you build your digital marketing campaign. In this blog, we focus on brand collateral that you have. It’s about delving into the tools at your disposal to grow your business, so you have a clear picture of what gaps you may need to plug.

What do you have in place?

Here’s a checklist to help you discover what you already have:

  • What processes and guidelines do you have in place?
  • Do you have a company logo or brand guidelines?
  • What are your company values and vision?
  • What are the strengths of your team? What hidden strengths can they bring to the table?

Having this background to hand will help you form a well targeted marketing plan as messaging will be aligned to your values and visions. It will also shed light on whether you need to relook at your branding to ensure it has the right look and feel to reflect your vision, services and target audience.

Investing in marketing

Once you’ve made these notes, think about your annual turnover and your current and potential marketing investment. The reason being is that if you wish to grow your business you will need to commit to investing in marketing. This is generally 10% of a targeted revenue.

Book a Practice Growth Session

You can use our blog series to help formulate your marketing plan as we run through all aspects of what you should do to prep a digital marketing campaign from understanding who your target audience is to listing keywords you want to be found for. If you would like some help with this then we’re running Practice Growth Sessions where we can help navigate you through these steps and tailor your digital marketing campaign. As digital marketers in Croydon, we are more than happy to lend you a hand in helping you grow your business.

Our sessions are for businesses keen to grow and ready to invest in a digital marketing campaign to achieve their goals. It will arm you with the fundamental details for you to be able to implement a campaign to help you grow.

Keep an eye on our blog for more tips on how to grow your business.

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