Every small business wants to have their business rank on the first page of the search engine results. It’s pretty common knowledge that being ranked on page one increases traffic to your website and, ultimately having new customers find you. But that doesn’t happen without implementing SEO best practices.
Most small businesses offer their products and services to a specific geographic market. Being found quickly when someone is in need of your local services is critical to your success. Incorporating local SEO strategies into your marketing activities that complement your other online marketing is important to your business.
The term “cornerstone content” has been talked and written about a lot recently although the concept is really not that new. Brian Clark, founder of Copyblogger, wrote a guide about how to create cornerstone content that Google loves 11 years ago this month.
Every small business can benefit from having a verified Google My Business (GMB) listing. It is an important step in your local SEO strategy because a complete, verified and optimized Google My Business listing increases your chances of being found. When you optimize Google My Business, you make it more likely that your target audience will see your business rather than your competition.
Everyone knows that your blog post needs eye-catching images to help capture the interest of the reader. Using the right images can keep visitors on your page longer and generate more traffic. Unfortunately most authors simply upload images without thought to proper image optimization.
WordPress powers 30 percent of the web. Small businesses are taking advantage of the simplicity and power of this content management platform. WordPress allows you to take control of your website, making it easy to keep it updated with fresh, relevant content. But all that great content is useless if it can’t be readily found by those searching. To optimize WordPress effectively, you need to pay attention to both content and website performance.
Conducting a web presence analysis for your business is the first step in developing a powerful web presence. By searching for your business as if you were a potential client in search of a product or service, you will experience the first impression others experience when they click on one of your links. Since first impressions matter both online and offline, having this important information can help shape your digital marketing strategy.
Keyword research is one of the most important and valuable activities in marketing, not just search engine marketing, but marketing in general and should be the starting point of your marketing plan. Consider keyword research as a component of market research that helps us better understand what our target markets are interested in and what terms they use to find what they need.
On-page SEO is a simple task that helps search engines better understand the content and context of your web pages. Optimizing a web page properly can also drive more relevant traffic to your website. Although simple to implement, many still take the lazy road and omit this piece of the process from their content marketing activities.
I get many calls from clients asking me about various companies claiming they can optimize their websites and guarantee first page placement on Google. After doing my usual research on these companies, I find reviews by unhappy customers who felt they paid a lot of money for less than stellar results.
There are advertising opportunities across all the major social media platforms to drive demand for your products and services that are well in the reach of many small business budgets. Whether you choose to advertise on Facebook, focus on Google AdWords or branch out into Twitter or LinkedIn, your ad needs to click through to a landing page created specifically for that campaign and designed to convert visitors into leads and ultimately into customers.
Having an inbound marketing strategy is the core to your online marketing efforts. Inbound marketing is the art of attracting our customers to us by providing valuable information, rather than pushing our products and services on them. Creating and sharing useful content helps the buyer move through the purchase process and makes your business more credible, trustworthy, and visible in the process.
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