Social Media experts will expound upon the virtues of Twitter in terms of your online marketing strategy. There is no doubt that Twitter can help expose your product or service to thousands of new prospects if you use it right. The question is, will you use it at all?
Let’s discuss the advantages of Twitter to your online marketing efforts and then we’ll talk about reasons NOT to use Twitter.
Most articles on social media marketing start with a discussion of FaceBook and Twitter, however, I’m going to start with LinkedIn because I think it’s an often underestimated contributor to social traffic. For many small businesses, if you have a good LinkedIn strategy, it can generate as much traffic as FaceBook. Here’s how…
Unfortunately, some SEO consultants are scammers or even worse, flat out liars. Search engine ranking can be so important to a business that some consultants have gone to great lengths, including doing things that are unethical, to get good rankings. A good example of this is using a competitor’s brand name as a target keyword in your site. Others advertise their services by making claims they simply can not back up. As a result, you need to be a savvy consumer when it comes to purchasing SEO services. What is the biggest lie in SEO?
The next step in the Basic SEO Plan is to optimize the rest of the pages in your site. Utilizing your target keywords, you want to sprinkle them liberally around your site so that every page in your site contributes SEO value. These are very basic suggestions that virtually all SEO consultants will tell you to do.
There are endless details and nuances to Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but here is a basic plan that is easy to follow and WILL produce good results. With SEO, no single trick will guarantee results over time because the landscape is always changing – more pages are constantly being added to Google’s index and Google is regularly tweaking the algorithm they use to rank those pages. Therefore if someone guarantees to get you to #1 in Google, you should be very suspicious. Instead, you should think of SEO like any marketing effort – the more you put into it, the more you will get out of it and you need to do it consistently and over time, not just once. Here’s the outline of the plan…
SEO is the art and science of getting your site ranked higher on search engines such as Google. I say “art and science” because while there is a lot of technical know-how to doing good SEO (science), there is also a lot that is unknown and a little creativity (art) is often required. SEO experts know a lot about how and why Google ranks sites the way they do, but no one except Google knows all the rules they use to rank one site higher than another.
Volumes have been written on the topic of SEO. This is by no means meant to be a technical SEO guide. Rather, I want to give an overview of SEO for marketers and business owners who need a better grasp of the basics.
Once you have a good converting site live – one that utilizes all the strategies that we’ve discussed so far – it’s time to start driving traffic to it. The primary ways of driving traffic are:
Virtually anything on your site can potentially affect your conversion rates. Different headlines, pictures, calls-to-action, etc., can all affect your conversion rates positively or negatively.
You have to start with your best guess for each of these but after that, you can be very scientific in discovering the most effective combination. Google Website Optimizer let’s you test any number of combinations of ANYTHING on a web page. You load the various elements into Optimizer and each time someone hits the page, Optimizer serves up a different combination of elements.
In order to measure conversion rates, you need a type of conversion that is measurable online. Contact forms, email list sign-ups, and online sales are good examples of conversions that can easily be measured online because you can count the number of responses or sales you get. The other thing you need is a good site analytics program. Google Analytics is the most popular and it’s free, though there are many others, some of which provide functionality that Google Analytics does not.
To get users to take action from your site, you first need to be very clear WHAT action you want them to take. Do you want to generate more calls? Or does your sales team get too many calls from people that aren’t good prospects and you would actually like to filter the number of people who call you? Do you want to generate email list sign-ups, webinar registrations or more ecommerce sales? Most sites want some combination of the above. While you can have multiple calls to action (CTAs), having more than two CTAs can just lead to confusion. Therefore you need to prioritize…
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