When we go into a business, the biggest cost that is not being managed properly is online marketing simply because they do not know how it works. Business owners tend to rely on marketing companies to not only come up with content, but also to tell the company what they need. The only problem with that is you become susceptible to paying for things that do nothing for your company in terms of attracting your customers. For instance, not every company needs a strong presence on Facebook. Sometimes Facebook is not the platform where your customers are looking for you. Marketing is most simply explained by being where your customers are at the moment that they need to find you. Which leads to the question, how do we do that? We have two main areas to focus on: internet searches on google and social media. Social media will be discussed in a later post, and for now we will focus on internet searches.
First, you want to start with researching what keywords are your customers using in the Google search bar. When you work in a particular industry, you will use industry specific terms to describe your business, but that does not always correlate to what customers outside of the industry think of when searching for your business. You can use the free Google keyword tool to search for keywords that you think people are searching for to find you. This tool will also give you other keywords that are related to your initial search. You will be able to see how many people are searching that keyword in a range of minimum to maximum searches each month over the span of a year. The location being searched automatically defaults to The United States, but you can easily change that to your particular state or city. You can also add keywords with your area attached as the keyword because people do still use that in their google searches when looking for local services.
Once you find the keywords, then you can start using your website more efficiently by blogging. You need to tell Google that you are an authority on a particular keyword with data. How do we give give Google data? Google crawls all websites for information. Your website should include metadata that allows Google to easily read your website. Metadata includes headers, keyword tags, etc. With wordpress, you can easily add an SEO plugin to speak directly with Google. I suggest you pick three to five keywords to start with, get good at those first, then start adding more keywords.
We can also tell google how much we know about a particular topic with blog posts. Google wants to know that we are constantly giving people new information about a specific keyword, and we are staying current on our knowledge as things change. Google also wants to know that we have so much knowledge about a keyword that we need multiple pages to educate readers. The blog allows your website to follow the requirements of google. Google wants multiple pages, and each blog post is a separate page.
Backlinks and internal links are required for Google’s standards of search engine optimization (SEO). Internal links can be accomplished with a call-to-action (CTO); for example, end the blog post with a link to the contact page. You can also write a blog post about a previous topic with updated information, and link the two blog posts so the reader can get more information about that particular topic. Backlinks are links to your website from somewhere else. How do we do that? By posting a link to your website on your business facebook page is a perfect place to start. Social media sites are ranked high with Google as far as infrastructure. Because you do not want to be redundant with only posting a link to your home page. By utilizing the blog, you can create as many backlinks as you have blog posts. When others share that facebook post, you now have two backlinks to that particular post that was shared. Current power partners, i.e. referral partners, are also a great way to get backlinks. You promote your partner on your website, and your partner promotes you on their website and social media.
Posting to social media, more than just your blog posts, also helps your website. As long as your website has a direct link to your facebook page and you are posting regularly throughout the week, Google recognizes the company as staying current with their customers. Because social media only requires snippets of information, it is easier to stay up-to-date with social media than it is for blog posts. However, do not forget that you can schedule when your blog posts is published, just like social media sites. Pick one day a month, and write a few articles that are scheduled to post periodically throughout the month.
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