There are so many ways to increase your online presence, but if you don’t know what you’re doing you could cause damage to your rankings and reputation instead of improving it. It’s a full time job to keep up with all the changes, new strategies and constant challenges of practical digital marketing solutions.
If you’re new to this concept, you’ve noticed that the monster of internet marketing isn’t as easy as taking one bite at a time. You can’t see the end of the tunnel due to the massive amounts of information that is available, confusing every pathway to the light. Besides, who do you believe? Who can you trust to make sure you’re doing what you need to make sure you are visible online, showing up for your top key phrases, getting great reviews, while having an SEO optimized website that brings in the best possible ROI. How much money do you need to spend? How aggressive do you really need to be? What do you really want to accomplish with your current digital presence?
Most of my customers are trying to either use their online presence to generate new leads and bring in new customers and more revenue or they are creating an online presence, so that when consumers are looking for their company, they show up and find what they need.
If you’ve already looked into digital marketing, you know that hiring a digital marketing firm to take care of all the many ways you need to market your company on the internet isn’t cheap. That’s because it isn’t easy, as it takes a lot of time. The constant training and updating required along with the slew of digital tools to see analytics and do backend optimizations are all necessary so you can make sure everything you are doing is actually working. However, there are a few things that you can do on your own that will help, especially if you are in a small town with not many competitors. Keep in mind that if you’re looking to rank and aggressively be at the top of Google, you’ll need to hire outside help.
I’ve spoken to a lot of business owners who have reported trying to figure out how to rank on their own, spending hours and hours a day for months, even years, but not getting any results. At this point, these business owners gave up, knowing that not having good online representation reduced their incoming calls, hurting their business revenue and in some cases, even having to close their company and go bankrupt.
There are numerous online articles, videos and websites that can help a business create an effective online marketing strategy, but one wrong move and you could be blacklisted by Google. If that happens, good luck. Without a professional that is constantly training and learning all the new updates online, you’ll not be able to get off that list and all of your efforts will all be for not. You might as well higher a professional in the first place. This way you can concentrate on your company, making money and providing the best products and services out there. Your marketing company can concentrate on bringing you new leads, new customers and better visibility overall.
Bring in New Leads on Your Own
It is possible to create a website on your own that can bring you new customers. There are so many options available, but the website platform I like the most is WordPress. It’s pretty easy, has a lot of design options, widgets and graphics to choose from and is used by nearly 1/3 of all professional website designers. There is a bit of a learning curve, especially if you’ve never created a website before, but all the answers are in the help section or you can find pretty much any informational video you need on YouTube.
When you are creating content for your website try to come up with something unique, don’t just copy and paste from a competitors site as you can get into trouble with plagiarism. You can get ideas, but be sure to re-write them into your own thoughts and add some additional facts or personalize it to your own company. Write about what makes you different or sets you apart from others, why consumers would want to pick you over a different company, how many years of service you have and what products and services that you specialize in that shows that you are a expert in your field. You need to show value to your potential website viewers, so they stay on your site to read more about you, creating an emotional response which entices them to buy with you instead of your competitors.
Blogging
Blogging takes a lot of time and effort, but is one of the most essential parts of higher rankings on Google. With continued updates on your website with new blogs, it shows that you are an expert in your field and that your website is relevant and should be served up as a result for a key-phrase search. This increases your digital footprint and brings more new consumers to your website, resulting in more new customer leads. If you don’t have time to sit down, write good professional content, valid and relevant to your field at least once a week, Hire Someone!
Reviews are Essential
84% of people trust online reviews as much as their friends and family. Consumers read an average of 10 reviews before feeling able to trust a business. 57% of consumers will only buy from a business with 4 or more stars. 89% of consumers also take into account the business responses to the reviews that were left.
You can get reviews by waiting for someone to place one for you, but you’ll most likely end up with more negative ones than positive. Don’t get me wrong, you probably are awesome at your business, provide excellent customer service and work hard to make sure your customers are happy and satisfied. However, you know as well as I, that you simply can not make everyone happy. Happy customers complete their business with you and smile, you receive no review. Unhappy customers will seek you out online and leave you a negative review, no matter how hard you tried to please them. Ask for reviews! Every customer that walks away with a smile ask them if they will go on Google, Yelp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and write you a review. Don’t forget to make sure all of your profiles are claimed and properly updated with good content, keywords and lots of photos. If you need help with all of these profiles, let me know.
Don’t Forget About Social Media
Many business owners feel that social media is just a waste of time. However, you are missing out on 30% more possible new leads by not being active on trusted social media sites. Social media is a great way to answer queries, interact with your customers and post new keyword relevant content, which will increase your visibility and show that you are an authority in your industry. With that much content being constantly updated, this will help you show closer to the top of a search engine, such as Google and bring in more new customers.
Google has an average of 6 algorithm changes per day, some of these are huge changes and can really affect your rankings. Taking preventative steps with a good website, SEO and social media will help you avoid a big loss of customers during the transition times of these updates. Usually you really don’t have to worry much, but better be safe and get those social media profiles claimed, created, updated and posted to.
There are 100’s of social media profiles that you can create, but for now, just concentrate on the top used sites. This will take a lot of time, so you need to determine if your hourly rate is worth taking that time for. Would it be smarter to have you pay a company to do all of this professionally? How much do you make per hour? If you run the numbers, take care of your social media marketing can break down to about $1 per hour, depending on how aggressive you need to be. To know how strong of a program you might need or how many hours you need to put into your digital marketing will depend on these four things; the physical location of your company, the number of competitors that you are competing against, how optimized your website is, and how integrated your social media profiles are.
Create an SEO Optimized Website
Just having a website isn’t good enough, you must create a website that is SEO optimized, has good long-tail key-phrases about your products and services, have an appealing look with an easy-to-use design, has a good analytics tool in the HTML coding, includes good link strategy for on-site links and off-site backlinks and has professionally written relevant content, as well as so many other technical things that are needed for a good website. Most business owners just don’t have the knowledge to create a website that will advertise your company effectively, nor do they have the time to sit all day creating one. The best option here is to find a competent company that hosts and creates websites and let them take that monster out of your hands.
I was just talking to an HVAC company yesterday, he didn’t understand this concept and needed me to explain it a bit more simply. I mentioned that I could never install an air conditioning system because I don’t have near enough knowledge to take on that task. It’s the same thing, he doesn’t have the knowledge to create an optimized effective website, but we do. I’ll need to hire him to fix my furnace, just like he needs to take advantage of my knowledge in digital marketing and hire me. Makes sense right? He is a smart man.
Backlinks are #1
Don’t forget about backlinks! Backlinks are one of the most significant needed parts of a good website and good digital marketing. SEO isn’t enough, a website isn’t enough, social media isn’t enough, if you don’t have backlinks. Unfortunately, backlinks are the most difficult part to achieve in a good marketing strategy.
Backlinks are the links on a different website that direct back to one of your specific pages. It shows that you are relevant and an authority to new customers and more importantly to Google. With the algorithms in place, Google determines who is the best possible company to serve up on a keyword search and decides which of those results would be the best option to put at the top. Without backlinks, it would be extremely difficult to achieve first page results with your digital marketing strategies. Make sure you are only getting quality backlinks, as Google can tell if they are not relevant and will blacklist your company, resulting in a loss of business and money.
I’ve been in the digital marketing world for over 15 years now. Oh, the stories I could tell about people giving so much time and effort to do their own online marketing. If you put enough constant effort into your marketing, you can succeed, but most business owners that I have worked with simply does not have the time, as they are working hard, making clients happy and usually putting in an average of 12 hour days just to bring in the bacon.
Research online, find a good company with great 5 star reviews.. Then go for it.
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