Your Business And The Digital Marketing Strategy – Part 1 (SEO AND LOCAL LISTING)

You must understand the importance of SEO as an integral part of marketing strategy. It is essential for your better search ranking results.

Businesses are reopening gradually but biggest question remains,  “How to get things going to achieve sustainable growth?” Have you ever heard of SEO, Online marketing or local online listing? These are the some of the best digital marketing strategies. And these strategies will help you to grow.

Still Stuck With The Traditional Way?

You have got to think about it again if you are doing business in traditional ways.

Because ever since the pandemic started, there has been 100% shift towards using online platforms. Althogh physical workplaces are open, people do search online for different reasons. Most of the businesses are embedding new strategies and switching to online businesses to fit in the digital world .

So rethink your business strategy and find out main pain points. Implement a well planned digital marketing strategy to overcome those pain points and get your business back on track. Otherwise you will only be left with more challenges and less hopes.

Well Planned Digital Strategy =Sustainable Growth

Main Pain Points or Challenges

• Finding right marketplace and people to run business

• Lack of enough physical workspace

• Building trust and establishing your brand

• Reaching out to a larger customer base to expand business

• Getting more leads to increase sales

• Standing out in tough competition

• How to market yourself for overall growth.

The Digital Transformation And Marketing Blueprint

When you are in a completely new territory and don’t know where to move, follow the footsteps of some successful online crusaders.

Facebook, Amazon are among very popular and successful online names. How did they build their online entrepreneurship? What are the main digital marketing tools they used? Learn about it. You will find many more encouraging online success stories as you will search around the web. Then you will realize that this is the digital age and that is the way ahead.

So build an online presence for your business and implement appropriate digital marketing strategies described here.

Related :How To Create Online Presence

Local online directories 

Google My Business,  Bing, Yellow Pages , Facebook, Just dial etc.This is a very basic yet effective way of online marketing. Useful in targeting customers within particular regions

• Increases online visibility and helps in SEO(Search Engine Optimization).
• Makes easy for customers to find what they are looking for.
• Almost all directories offer free registration.
• As you become popular, get higher ranking in search results for a particular service or product.
• You can use their paid advertising service to get displayed on first page of the web page. You can use relevant keywords in your ads to rank higher in search results.
• Mention your business address, contact details, location on map and detailed descriptions of your products with some good images. That will help them to make buying decisions.
• If you have a website or if you are present on other online platforms then do add that information also. This way you can divert more traffic to your website and improve organic SEO.
• You can engage more with them to build trust. And offer some additional services like home delivery.

Imagine someone who is at a nearby place to your business location and requires a product or service that you are offering. First thing that person will do is search on the web using a smartphone. And if your business lists out in that search result, there is a possibility that he/she might jump on to your doorstep.People are using internet all the time for different things and this is how you can benefit by registering on different online business directories.

SEO AND SEM

SEO – Stands for search engine optimization

You all use search engines(e.g. Google, Bing, Yahoo). When you type something in the search bar, a list of different websites appears on the screen. That is search result. And how do you get your website displayed in the search results?!!!! By optimizing your website for online search. That is search engine optimization(SEO).

It helps you to reach out to wider audience. You are taking your business to a broader spectrum. But evidently there will be thousands of websites present. So how do you stand out from this complex network!

How do search engines work?

I will put it in a very simple way. When you type something in the search bar,  the search engine instantly visits entire  web looking for sites with most relevant contents related to keywords you typed.

Search engines have their own algorithm to determine which website or web page should be ranked to show up in the search result, in order to provide users best search experience.

So there are somethings you can do during development process of a website to improve your chances to rank higher in search results.

Key Points To Consider

Keywords Selection

• keywords are what your customers are typing to search for their requirements. Search engines will look for relevant keywords on different places of a website. Your website URL, page titles, headings, contents inside pages, images titles etc.

• So to identify those relevant keywords you have to think like your customers. What would they type to find things you are selling.

• There are keywords research tools like Google Keyword Planner, Moz, Wordtracker, Ahref etc. You can track keywords performance using these tools. You will learn about better insights and techniques for relevant keywords.

• Don’t over stuff keywords to rank higher, otherwise it will create a negative impression with search engine, resulting in poor ranking results.

On Page SEO – Off Page SEO

• On page seo means optimizing your website pages for seo.
• Create relevant, useful and high quality content. Good content helps customers to understand about your product and also helps search engines in order to improve your website visibility.
• Page titles, Headers, HTML codes, Image Alt Text, Markup structure, Meta text all things need to be taken care of.
• Internal linking of pages.
• Website speed and Mobile responsiveness is important.
• Off page seo means getting traction from outside towards your website.
• Getting relevant back links from other websites, social media accounts, blogs etc. Bacl links should be earned not bought. It is not possible to cheat search engines. Instead buying back links will harm your performance.
• Reviews from industry expert and social media likes are also part of optimizing off page seo.

     

SEM – Stands for search engine marketing.

Good SEO brings organic traffic to your websites. While SEM is paid search advertising using PPC(Pay per click) method which helps in terms of increase in conversion rates and sales.

There is some cost attached to it as you have to pay a particular amount of money for every click (CPC-cost per click) on your website through search ads.

• Paid ads are usually displayed on top of the search engine result page(SERP). So improves chances of your visibility.
• There are 3.5 million searches every day on Google only.
• There is possibility of 50% more sales compared to organic search.
• Ads are created by targeting relevant keywords to get better results. You need to bid for those targeted keywords in PPC ads. The highest bidder gets to display his ad on search result page.
• There are PPC tools like Google Keyword Planner, Google Ads, Bing, WordStream Ads Editor, SEMRush, Ahref etc. to create optimized ads. And you can track performance of your ads with these tools.
• These tools perform lot of automated task involved in creating a good ad easily. So saves your time and gives optimized performance in order to achieve better sales rate.
• Employ well analyzed and planned SEM Strategy to get best possible search result. And increase sales with better conversion rate.

What next?

There will be more marketing strategies explained in following BLOGS. Till then you can go through these skills and learn more about them using internet.

Remember the very basic elements for a successful business are

• Find your niche and make a decision on what you want to do.
• Set a goal
• Define your potential customers
• Set up and launch a campaign according to your customer’s needs
• Start growing.

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