Author: admin

One of the best things about the internet, and conducting your business’s trade through it, is the incredible potential for growth it offers your business. While a brick and mortar business is more limited by their geographical location, so long as your business deals with things that don’t depend entirely upon a local consumer market, the chances are that you will have a much easier road to growth online than off. Even so, growing your company through the variety of online avenues does require time and expertise to get it right.

One of our goals here is to inform you about a wide range of ways in which you can help build your business to increasing levels of profitability. To do this online requires efficiently spending your marketing funds while also diversifying where your traffic is coming from and increasing the size of each of these streams of traffic too.

When you set out to accomplish these goals, it is important that you understand, as a primary goal, how you can build your reputation online. To do this will require that you build connections with other industry actors and try to build up a dialogue between you and your customers. For the latter you will have the basics such as having reviews and testimonies on your website, but, getting more advanced here, you will also need to create a solid footprint for all of the same qualifiers on other websites too.

For this process, you will have a number of review websites and forums, some which are industry specific and others that are a bit more generic. Social media is also key for this too, as they are the most populated “forums” around. You can use them to communicate with customers in a way that keeps them feeling comfortable with their environment while simultaneously establishing your authority on industry matters, which could in turn help sway people who are wavering about whether to purchase products and services from you or not.

To build your connections with other important authorities in your field basically means to try and establish reciprocal partnerships with them. An example of how you can do this is to establish a dialogue between yourself and a popular blog or informational site in your field, perhaps offering to share some of your expertise with the readers in return for promotional opportunities.

It is important to note that a reputation that is built on hot air can quickly cool out and deflate, so it is important that you provide people with substance. Artificially increasing the amount of authority your business and your website has can only go so far; to truly have a lasting impact, your efforts will need to be accompanied by a revitalisation of your website’s content. Building a database of all of the facts about your products and services on your website is one part of this, but you also need to make sure that all of these provide real quality and leave your customers feeling confident in coming back as repeat customers.

Using SEO in order to gain exposure is pretty much an essential part of modern day business. Most businesses rely upon the internet heavily in order to sell their products and services, but depending upon the breadth and scale of what you’re targeting, the cost of investing in SEO and other online marketing techniques can quickly skyrocket.

The ways in which an online E-commerce business can scale upwards essentially comes down to two different areas; increasing the number of products and services being offered, or increasing the locations to which you offer them. For each of these expansions, an accompanying increase in cost for SEO is sure to follow. As content will need to be created for each of these changes and then the content will have to be optimised, and advertised both on-site and off-site, the price of such an expansion can be massive.

Choosing your Geographical Location

For new businesses, it is generally preferred that you target your own local area. You get a lot of advantages from this option, particularly if you deal in services. As it reduces travel time and only necessitates one trading location, it can save a lot of money for you business. For SEO, it means that you can target a smaller, less competitive location. Less competition means that it will be a lot cheaper to achieve good rankings, and as it will be very relevant to your business, your conversion rate should be higher too.

As your business grows, a natural part of this is that you will begin to expand to other locations. The best way to do this from the viewpoint of SEO is to create whole new sections of your website that you can then optimise for the new locations. This makes sure that your content is still highly relevant to location settings in search engines and in queries. You may also need to increase your amount of off-site outreach to increase your prevalence, as adding new content can risk diluting the success of your previously successful content.

Expanding your Products and Services

The issues with expanding to new geographical locations and expanding your products are pretty similar, as each require new content to be created, and an investment in outreach. Without that outreach, you risk damaging your chances at success in your new product line as well as your old one. If this makes little sense to you; if you imagine your ability to succeed in SERP’s as being directly related towards your website’s authority, and that authority being a currency that is spread throughout your website, adding more content to your website can spread that authority further and reduce its impact on all of the content.

In the realms of online marketing, optimising content is tricky business. As content needs to serve the dual purposes of being appealing to machines (Googlebot etc.) and humans, trying to improve the optimisation for one or the other could potentially mean sacrificing the optimisation for one or the other. While this complicates matters significantly, with a highly strategic approach to content, you can still achieve great success in both areas.

While there is still a long way to go for this situation to resolve itself, the changes which have been made to search engines like Google over the last 10 years, have reduced the barrier between optimisation for human interaction and bots. It used to be the case that SEO’s would stuff keywords into content ad nauseam, until Google made it so this behaviour was penalised, and then other search engines quickly followed suit. Even so, a balance still needs to be struck.

To come up with strategy for developing and optimising content, you have a number of tools at your disposal. Assuming that you can instantly implement a winning recipe for content is a bit misguided, as from industry to industry and website to website, a recipe that works for one website might not work for the next. Therefore, using tools like Google Analytics, heatmaps, ranking monitoring tools, which are some of the favourites of the SEO community, that can give you essential data on how people interact with your content and how search engines are reacting to it, becomes necessary.

Fresh content can tell search engines and visitor alike that you’re active, up to speed and ready for business. Of course, content should be well researched, written in good English and presented nicely if you wan to generate leads.

A blog or news section on your website can be ideal for adding fresh content, however, many websites now also include Twitter and Facebook feeds too. The more engaging content there is on your website, the better, and if it’s added regularly and designed to interest your target audience, then it can generate leads, and help you perform better on search engines.

If you want to go into further detail on a product, explain a new service, congratulate an employee or simply share your business’s option, then create a news item or a blog post and improve the overall performance of your website.

One of the most important parts about marketing your website is getting fresh content on your websites, and blogs are great at doing this. The  question of this post isn’t answered quite so easily though, as managing a blog once you have it while ensuring the quality of the content you’re producing remains high.

A lot of things need to be considered when you put a blog on your website, like whether or not you’ll have the time to generate engaging content which people will actually want to read; including things like featured images, studies of the industry you’re working in, and case studies of the work you’ve done. It also massively reduces the value of the blog to your marketing campaigns if you start putting a lot of irrelevant content onto your website.

If you want a blog, but you think you won’t be able to provide at least one engaging blogpost a month, then it is probably not worth doing it at all.

If you have some very strong positions in search engines and you’re attracting a good amount of traffic, it’s important to make sure you’re converting these visitors; otherwise your SEO campaign could be pointless.

Without engaging content on your website and an element of ‘lead nurturing’ you’re not going to be able to make visitors become customers. If you have a good idea on who your target audience is and you know what they want from you, then give it to them on a plate, and you could eventually see them become loyal, returning customers.

Some websites with decent rankings fail to take the visitor to the next level, and this is something you’re going to need to do if you want to convert them. Small features like call to actions, infographics, enquiry forms and email signup forms can be nice touches, and you’ll begin to understand your audience even more along the way.

Social media may be largely recognised for its ability to connect with potential customers, allowing businesses to share engaging content and reach out to new customers. You can also boost website traffic using social media, and many businesses will regularly update their social media accounts with posts that contain links back to their business’s website.

You will need to have a large following to reap the rewards, while these posts should not be sent out too often, otherwise you can come across as too ‘pushy’, meaning people unfollow or unsubscribe from your account.

In most cases, it’s important to find the best time to include a link, whilst it should also be relevant to do so. You have to give followers interesting information, but social media updates should vary, so try to link back to the site when you can but don’t force it too much.

Web marketing is basically a form of online marketing which can include use of affiliate marketing, email marketing, social marketing among others. Many online businesses hire web marketers in order to drive more traffic to their sites to buy their products. For web marketing in Northants or any other UK town, to be successful it requires hard work.

To do an effective web marketing you need learn about search engine optimisation. Search engine optimisation (often abbreviated as SEO) basically entails making a blog or a website more accessible to search-engine users, that is you make the site much easier to find. In a nutshell, SEO is the process whereby you make a website more visible and relevant to both web users and search engines. The major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo have results where the webpages and other content like videos, ranked based-on what the search-engine considers most relevant to the web user.

SEO Techniques:

• Make sure your web marketing-strategy matches your target audience. Understand your target audience, this plays a major role in a successful search-engine optimisation strategy. Pin-point what type of users you’ll be marketing the products and services to, and then write your web content accordingly.

• Make sure your website has search engine friendly keywords and phrases. Keywords are the targeted words which determine what category your website will be listed-under in search engines. You need to create article titles and content which contain relevant keywords and phrases. The important keywords or phrases for your content should be present in both the content’s URL and the HTML title-tag.

Optimise your title tags. Major search engines normally index content of the title-tag, and they actually make it a key factor when ranking.

• Engage in social-bookmarking. Allow visitors and users to recommend your blog or website on social sites like Digg, Google+, Facebook and Twitter. A recommendation from a visitor may bring more visitors to your site. Search engines can also use these recommendations to determine your site’s position on search engine-results. For-example, Bing places sites much higher on the result pages if they’ve been recommended by Facebook friends.

• Write good and compelling content. Good content on your blog or website is essential to good search engine result ranking. There are many other factors which search engine-spiders look for when indexing a blog or website, but good content is a great foundation on which high page rankings are built.

• Start building your link-partners. Find blogs and websites which have high-page rankings and are ready to exchange-links with you. Ask the website’s web-master to use your key words when they are linking to your site. Search engines treat incoming-links to your site as votes. The more votes you get the better your ranking will be. Google’s “Page-Rank” algorithm normally determines your website’s authority by the-number of sites that are linked to it.

Add meta-description and keyword-tags to your content. Your description-tag should have an overview of the article’s content, and should have less than 200-characters. Google displays only the first 156-characters of the page’s-description in search engine results. The keyword-tag should have a list of the key words and key word phrases that are relevant to the article.

The fundamentals of schema markup, at the side of 3 compelling reasons to begin using it in your website today.

A temporary description of must read books that focus on running a business in today’s dynamic world.