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Why investment in organic search can help in a crisis period

06/21/202108/16/2020 by scmarketing

Increasing your online presence in organic search should be the top of any business inbound marketing strategy. If it wasn’t prior to 2020, then now more than ever it should be. As more people are relying on online search to shop, search for services and communicate, a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is vital, especially to small businesses and start-ups, to help your website be seen in the noise.

With marketing budgets for print advertising taking a hit due to COVID, many marketers shifted to organic search.

The reason businesses opted for SEO is that it helps a business be seen online and helped maintain presence during the crisis. As many companies had to change business model, such as restaurants turning to takeaway services, if the online world wasn’t already important it became essential compared to a poster in an establishments window. The footfall had moved online therefore SEO provided the capability of helping businesses stand out.

Local search rankings

With three in five (59%) consumers saying they have used more local services during lockdown, the importance of visibility online is crucial. The Deloitte report goes on to say one in three (32%) used new brands, products or services that they hadn’t heard of during the lockdown.

Therefore, it’s clear that having presence online opens up new opportunities with prospects and increased brand awareness. By ensuring content on your website includes relevant local information ensures that you are targeted and can help you improve in local search engine rankings.

Organic search and your website

When people search Google, SEO or local search is a way for businesses being seen by local potential customers. This is where companies that invested in organic search at early lockdown reaped the benefits as an SEO strategy is long-term as you need to keep up refreshing your site with mew, original content and keywords to maintain and increase your rankings in search engine results.

This is because search engines look for triggers such as content on a website that is tailored for the area you’re targeting.

Backlinks from referring domains including your Google My Business listing and your social media networks, help to identify your business as quality and trustworthy for the search engines to return in results pages.

Search Engine Optimisation for increased online presence

The crisis period may have subsided for the moment as businesses are opening and services resuming for most sectors, but now is not the time to draw back from your online presence.

Continued investment in organic search is a cost-effective digital marketing tactic ideal for SME’s to continue to grow their online market share even in these unprecedented times.

Digital marketing and SEO company in Croydon

As an inbound marketing agency, we provide digital and inbound marketing for accountants and local businesses.

Marketing is all about building awareness of your products and services. With approximately 7 touch points needed for a sale or sign up to a service, it’s important to constantly get your message out there to increase brand awareness. That’s where digital marketing can help. From local SEO to blog page and social media engagement, there’s a mix of tactics to get your business out there – you just need to be targeted.

We work closely with local businesses in Croydon providing SEO services. Get in touch for a free consultation to see what digital marketing services are best for your business and how an SEO campaign could prove beneficial for your business.

Improve local SEO by creating local content

05/26/202005/21/2020 by scmarketing

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

Man working on laptop using marketing automation

Digital marketing tips to help your business during coronavirus

04/28/2020 by scmarketing

Regardless of whether your business was already embracing the virtual world, or you were just starting out in the digital world, one this is for certain, these times have highlighted the need for online presence and maintaining it.

So, we’ve gathered a few tips for you to action now to optimise your website to help improve your search engine rankings and online visibility.

If you need a hand with any digital marketing activity just drop us a line as we offer free consultations and free website reviews. These can really highlight areas specific for you to implement.

Website review

Once a website is built, you’ve got to maintain it with up to date content. The hospitality industry has already had to change the way they do business quickly to offer takeaway and delivery services. Whatever your business, you and your customers are being impacted. So, take a few moments to see that you are offering the right advice on your website. Makes sure you’re being informative and a thought leader. Add a simple message to the homepage of your website about your opening hours, how to contact your team and ‘business as usual’ even though working remotely.

Check your content details are up to date. The last thing you want is clients unable to get through to you when it may just mean a simple update of an out of office contact number. For most businesses, the use of VOIP phones mean no disruption when remote working. But it could be a simple overlook of not checking your website that could prevent business coming your way.

Also make sure you have ease of navigation across your side. Internal link building can help the flow for a visitor. So, see where you can add links to other web pages on your site so that it’s easier to move from one page to another by just clicking a link.

Specific content marketing plan

Review your content marketing plan, from blogs through to social media posts and offers. Make sure you’re answering your target audience’s specific challenges during this time.

Think of the challenges and draw up a specific marketing plan for the next couple of months, if you haven’t already. Schedule planned content on specific themes to help your clients and prospects. With constant change in our everyday, revisit your plan regularly and adjust creating content accordingly. During these times you may find a ‘news jack’ offers timely advice as well as links to great resources.

Search Engine Optimisation

This is at the core of your content marketing plan and website updates. A Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategy is about getting your website seen. Now more than ever, you should make sure that you implement a few processes to continue moving forward.

Get your technical backend SEO sorted and up to date. This includes Meta Descriptions, Alt Tags, Meta title tag (H1 and H2 headers). Do this now and continue to do so. This helps your website in search engine rankings and is particularly good for local search.

Create at least a couple of blogs a month, if not more, to help with adding fresh content to your website. All the time think about what you want to be found for – those are your keywords you want to weave into your content. This keyword research will help with where you appear in the search engine result pages.

Social media marketing

Keep on sharing posts on your social channels throughout this time. Keep communicating with your followers letting know any business changes, how you can help them.

Take a moment to review of your channels. LinkedIn is great for networking but so often we’ve found that business profiles aren’t updated as best as they could. Add as much detail as you can about your business. Start following relevant hashtags and join groups. Start engaging. We’ve certainly noticed that engagement has increased as more and more people are reaching out as they find that the business world they were used to has changed.

Be thoughtful of your content. Share articles you found interesting. And, use imagery to help your posts stand out.

Video and webinars

Talk directly to your audience. You can make videos efficiently, simply and at no extra cost on your mobile phone.

Repurpose content from your blogs and make short and snappy videos to accompany them to bring your social posts to life and your web pages.

Read our blog on using video for business for tips on setting up videos for your business for some useful dos and don’ts.

Seek out local networking groups and see if you can create beneficial webinars for fellow members which can be hosted via channels such as Zoom.

We’re a member of London Chamber and will soon, be hosting a webinar on How to grow your business through online lead generation on 20^th May at 12:45. We’ll post details of how to register to join in due course.

Free resources

We’re a digital marketing agency in Croydon and we have the following resources you can draw on during this time. Get in touch with us today to talk through your requirements.

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.

8 tips on how to build an inbound marketing strategy

12/08/202001/21/2020 by scmarketing

At the core of your digital marketing campaign is the product or service that you want to sell or promote. Your offer should not only be something that your industry wants but also offering a point of difference. Truly understanding what you core offer is will help you to develop an inbound marketing strategy that will ‘wow’ your prospects.

Here’s some tips to help you structure and create your inbound digital marketing plan.

Understand your brand identity – it’s key for business growth: One way to start building and understanding your brand identity is by thinking about your business as a person. What characteristics does it have? Is this person professional, an expert in their field, knowledgeable, creative – you get the idea. Start to jot down your thoughts and you’ll start to build a profile for your business. This will need to be translated to your website design and blog posts.
Review the collateral you already have so you know your starting point: Here’s a few questions to consider – Do you have a company logo or brand guidelines? What are your company values and vision? What are the strengths of your team and what hidden strengths can they bring to the table? Having this background information to hand will help you form a well targeted marketing plan as messaging will be aligned to your values and visions.
Create a persona of your target audience: For small businesses especially focus on the target audience, no matter how micro that niche is, and you will fly. Try to grab the whole market and you will end up getting nothing or, at best, poor fitting clients. Your knowledge in your niche will grow and will position you as the expert and the go to person. Think about the goals or challenges of your target audience and create a persona. If you start with their job role, imagine their personal goals such as business growth, saving the business money or a future promotion. Then imagine what challenges they face and start to note solutions for these. So, already you can begin to see a personality form in front of you. Then think about how your service or product can help them.
Research your competition: Before setting out on your inbound marketing campaign, draw up a list of key competitors and the services and products they offer. This can help you make your offers and services stand out.
Develop keywords and phrases for your business: Think about what key term you would like to be found for. The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by search engines and improve you search engine optimisation. This means your website will make its way up the organic results pages. Find keywords that work with your business goals and target the areas you’re looking to promote. But finding out which keywords have the most traffic or competition isn’t widely available, this is where working with a digital marketing agency can help.
Create a content plan with these overarching keywords at the core: Content marketing is a key focus for a successful inbound strategy. Create and align your content plan with any new product launches, service updates or industry report launches. You’ll then begin to get a picture of when to plot campaigns throughout the year and through what channels to be most effective. Develop specific content for your website to incorporate key phrases if you haven’t got relevant pages already. If you do, then they are likely to need updating. Also use backlinks to key pages on your website to help lower bounce rate.
Tell search engines you exist: One of the first things you need to do when you’ve created your website, or if you’re 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. It’s FREE to do. 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 also allows you to upload blog content, images and videos, therefore another place that you can be found online to help SEO and your company to rise in the search rankings.
Review results: With all the technology in the world at your fingertips, this alone is not going to be effective in getting a return on investment. Become data driven and review results of your campaigns will help you tailor, target and be relevant to the audience you want to reach. Through social media insights, PPC results or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, there’s tools at your fingertips to help you really tweak your campaign for the best results.

If you’re looking for more quality clients, become a lead generation magnet with a targeted inbound marketing strategy. Get in touch with us today or find out more in our handy resources. We are also a digital agency for accountants so check out our marketing services for accounting firms.