Do any of these comments or phrases ring a bell?
- I work on referrals only
- I know everyone in my marketplace
- We don’t need a website to market our products
- My target market does not corporate the Internet
- Internet Marketing doesn’t work
- We already know everyone in our marketing area
- We don’t have time to build a website
- We have all the customers we need
- Our clients and prospects won’t find us on the Internet.
First, let me just agree with you for a second. I believed the same things until almost six years ago a friend who sold his business to Google opened up my eyes and simply dispelled each of the mindsets that many are still stuck in today’s management environment.
What I quickly learned is a website is a means to an end – a sales and marketing tool for customer support and lead generation. The days of website development as “brochure-ware” are over. Here’s what I learned and how it helped not just our company growth, but also how we as a company help market our insurance clients’ products and services to dominate their target market.
On Page SEO
The fundamentals of On Page SEO happen to be one of the first places to start. Google and other search engines want users to be happy when they visit your website. They know users are happy when they’re engaged. So, while it’s important to create the content of each page to speak to the bots and indexing tools of Google’s search engines, you better make sure you’re offering up relevant and solution-oriented content to your clients and prospects.
On Page SEO is all about presenting your content and design so users can find what they’re looking for immediately. So, what does it mean when one says “optimizing” your site? It means taking care of the following:
- Speed: Load time is critical.
- Title Tags: This defines your web page.
- Meta Tags: How search engines gauge what topic you’re writing about and the exact audience to send to that page.
- Ongoing Content Creation for relevancy and value: Optimized for high-volume keyword.
Off Page SEO
Off Page SEO is about optimization techniques you don’t do on your site – this involves what’s done on third-party sites which point links back to your website or blog. Off Page SEO will help make your website popular on the Internet so you can get more visibility. With the on-page techniques we can get visibility in search engines. But only Off Page SEO techniques will help improve your website’s position in SERP (search engine results page). Here are eleven important Off Page SEO techniques to consider:
- Social Media Engagement
- Top Social Networking Sites
- Popular and High PR Bookmarking Websites
- List of High PR Forum Submission Sites
- Blog Directory Submission Sites
- Article Submission Sites
- Q&A Websites
- Video Submission Sites
- Image Submission Sites
- Infographics Submission Sites
- Document Sharing Sites
Local SEO
Local SEO is critical for businesses to grow when implementing a digital marketing strategy. It involves creating local pages on major search engines, optimizing and properly categorizing web pages. Based on the rules of engagement, the only thing you can count on when it comes to local search is change. This is why the increase in Local SEO correlates to increases in mobile searches today. About 88% of mobile users use the web to search for local content, 4% higher than desktop users. For mobile searches, a large portion of this figure performs local searches while on-the-go. Thus, location-specific searches are more likely to increase since mobile devices drive more geographically relevant search engine results as compared to desktop searches. The bottom line: Local SEO will help provide better positioning in search engine results. It can help you take advantage of mobile growth for local optimization, which can increase traffic, build brand authority and boost company reputation.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media is a standard channel of communication when creating a digital marketing strategy. The top social networks for B2B marketers are: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. Growing and investing in your social network is a long-term play. Here are a couple of concepts to get under your belt before you dive into social media marketing:
Remember the saying most of our parents used with us: “If you’re not expecting the praise you’ll never be disappointed when you don’t receive it”. You can’t expect others to share your content and talk about you if you don’t do the same for them. So, set aside some time to spend on sharing social media and talking about content published by others. Look up Reciprocity and live by it, as it will bring back 10 times the investment you’ll make in sharing other’s content.
Social media and content marketing success will not happen instantaneously. So, try not to dive in with one foot on the dock and one foot in the boat, it’s far more likely that you’ll need to commit to the long haul to accomplish results.
Blogs
Blogging gives you the platform to provide unique content value. It’s a great way to continuously offer fresh, relevant content on your website. Google loves new content to index so take advantage of a blog and focus on the following:
- Try to use the keyword in the Post Title at the beginning
- Use long tail keywords (use up to 65 characters in Post title)
- If writing in an evergreen niche, remove dates from the posts. (Use Date Exclusion SEO plugin)
- Content length: The longer the length of the content, the better it is. However, don’t try to uselessly increase the content size. Relevancy is important.
- At the end of blog post, ask users to take action.
At the end of the day, driving traffic to your website is one of the goals you want to achieve each time you post a blog article. It also means more indexed pages on your site, which ultimately leads to more opportunities to help you show up in search and gain more qualified traffic. Blogging can help Google and other search engines know that your website is active. It also helps you get discovered when you share and distribute the content on social media networks. Even better, blogs establish authority and your expertise within your marketplace and convert traffic into leads.
Google is Still King
Google is the #1 search engine on the web. Its goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for – and fast! Google does this by improving how it finds, ranks and returns relevant results.
Mobile is On Top of the World
In April 2015, Google announced a key update, telling us mobile rankings now count! The search engine giant moved mobile from the back-seat to becoming a front-seat driver. In boosting mobile-friendly sites, Google wants sites that load quickly on devices and are responsive in design – meaning they work across all devices. In fact, sites that are not mobile-friendly can lose ranking in search.
Responsive Website Design is essentially a copy of your website. It’s a website design programmed to automatically adjust to device screen size – large or small, portrait or landscape. You keep your own domain, and your company’s link equity is preserved. Its use of forward-thinking technology allows for easy adoption in future devices.
In October 2015, Google announced a new initiative to make the web even faster on mobile, an open source project called Accelerated Mobile Pages. This is a new open framework built entirely out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build lightweight web pages. The issue is you probably need to maintain two different code bases to manage it properly. But Google has wide support from Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn.
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Responsive Web Design (RWD) both use the same basic building blocks for creating a mobile page: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So, how are they different? Let’s take a look at AMP versus a responsive mobile website.
How does AMP differ from RWD?
Accelerated Mobile Pages and Responsive Website Design will both work on a mobile phone, but they have differing goals.
Responsive Web Design is a method of organizing and designing a website so that it works on any device, from a desktop computer to a mobile phone. It could be said that RWD is focused on flexibility.
The AMP Project is a web framework designed for delivering content to mobile users instantly. AMP is focused on speed. Malte Ubl, Google’s Tech Lead for the AMP Project, wrote a great summary of why AMP is fast.
Get Better ROI
Leverage your Internet marketing efforts by using a combination of digital and traditional marketing techniques to spread your company’s message across many different channels and effectively achieve your sales goals. The marketing mix includes:
- Branding
- Print Collateral
- Internet Marketing
- Insurance Directories
- Telemarketing
- Radio
- Billboards
- Conventions
- Direct Mail
- Print Ads
All of this helps your overall marketing strategy while you climb to dominating page one is at work. So, yes I’m now a true believer in implementing digital strategies.
