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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.

Why you should work on your content marketing strategy

05/06/202106/05/2020 by scmarketing

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.

3. Fix broken links on your website

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.

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.

8 website updates for accounting firms

05/01/2020 by scmarketing

With all the change and uncertainty right now, as an accountancy practice your main concern is servicing your existing clients offering the most-timely advice as and when updates are announced by government that could assist your client base.

Importantly it’s also the key time to maintain your presence online to continue building that groundwork that is the necessity of any lead generation strategy. In time, when circumstances change, and businesses start to grow, it’s the firms and suppliers that have provided helpful advice that will be remembered and be seen as the go to company for new business.

So, what can you as an accounting firm do to optimise your website to help maintain your position in search rankings? Here’s our top website tips to help you kick start a great Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) campaign for your business to get your website seen.

1. Is your website easy to navigate?

Check that your accounting services are clearly visible in the menu so that there is an easy path for visitors who reach your homepage. Show your key services on your homepage and a call to action to read more, download information or get in touch.

2. Do you have enough internal links on your website?

This is another navigation tactic. Make sure that you are making it even easier for visitors to find information on your website. Embed links into keyword phrases.

3. Complete your H1, H2 headers

This helps search engines work out the theme of the page to return the right answers to the searcher.

4. Complete your meta descriptions

This neat little paragraph is what you read when you search online. Keep to under 160 characters and make sure it’s relevant to the content on that web page.

5. Be image-led on your website

Help create stand-out with good photography and video content. But, make sure images are the right size and you have completed the alt tag on the backend as this will help site speed and prevent visitors leaving your site.

6. Create a content plan

A solid basis for any website optimisation strategy is to develop a content marketing plan. This should include a regular schedule of information such as blogs that can be drafted and uploaded onto your website. Search engines love fresh content. It helps position you as an authority in your sector.

However, ensure that you are using good keywords within your content. By this, we mean phrases that you want to be found for when people search for you. If you include these important phrases in content, in particular headings, then it helps you to be found when people search. Such as ‘Annual Accounts for construction firms’ or ‘Tax returns for a sole trader’. Think of who your target audience is and write content for them.

This has only touched the surface, so if you want to delve a little deeper into SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy then do get in touch for a free consultation via Zoom.

7. Calls to action

Calls to action (CTA) should form a key part of your content marketing strategy. These are best placed above the fold, the space before the visitor has to scroll down. Make sure you have a bold CTA so that it stands out and use design to make it clear that it’s a clickable link.  

8. Get a free website review

With so many factors affecting whether and where your website will be found on google search, complete our form to get a free website audit. This free review provided by Smart Cow Marketing will provide you with some interesting results to help with your inbound marketing.

Navigating your digital marketing journey

If you want the task of fixing these issues taken off your hands, then we’d be happy to assist you further with your digital marketing. Just get in touch about what your digital marketing requirements for your accountancy practice.

Smart Cow marketing specialises in digital marketing for accountants helping firms improve online visibility to attract potential clients through online marketing.

Digital marketing resources

Lights, camera, action! Using video for business

05/26/202204/15/2020 by scmarketing

With lots of people now working from home, many of us are getting to grips with video conferencing to hold our regular update meetings. But not only that, video is a great way to spread the word of your products and services, a tactic often used in digital marketing campaigns.

Video is great for content marketing and sharing on social media, but don’t just take our word for it, just look at some of these staggering statistics:

Well, it certainly makes sense to be in the mix when you see how popular video is.

So, if you’re embarking on creating some short video tips for your clients and prospects or perhaps you’re looking to host a webinar, here’s our top tips for working on video.

Tips for your delivery on camera

Look at the lens.
Keep hands away from your face.
Don’t fidget – Don’t hold anything (if possible) as you’ll have a tendency to fidget with it.
Avoid looking at notes when you’re talking. It doesn’t need to be word perfect. You want it to come across as natural.
Smile or make sure your face is animated. Be expressive, much more than normal.
Keep the message concise.
Speak slowly. This helps make the piece authoritative, easier to understand and easier to edit.
Practice, practice, practice.
Above all – be natural.

Tips for video set up

Appearance: Check your appearance, hair, collar, background should be as clear as possible.
Lighting: Nice soft light to the face, also a light to the wall behind works well, if possible.
Sound: Make sure there is as minimal background sound as possible. Reduce the hum of your PC, fans, air conditioning, switch of the ringtone of mobiles, and your messages on PC/Laptop etc.
Check your sound recording is good.

Relevant content for Search Engine Optimisation

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 increased engagement.

If you haven’t already, then develop keywords and phrases for your business. This is simply about what key term you would like to be found for when people search online. The more content you produce using keywords the more your website is recognised by search engines and improves your search engine optimisation (SEO). This is relevant to video, not just written content. You can add captions to videos so that people don’t have to switch volume on.

We’d recommend having accounts on channels such as Vidyard, Vimeo and YouTube. This all helps 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 SEO within the YouTube channel. Don’t forget this is another search engine.

Video for your website

It’s not just about sharing your videos on social media and adding to video channels such as YouTube. Remember that you should be adding the video to your website. Ideally you want to push social media posts back to your website to view the video. Remember that placing the video higher up the page is much better for engagement with website visitors.

Smart Cow is a digital marketing agency in Croydon. If you’d like a free website review to look at how your website is performing in search to find out how an SEO campaign can help local search results, complete our form and we’ll take a look for you.