How do you market your business in today’s digital environment?
What are the practical tips and tricks to improving your visibility using social media, or increasing your website traffic with Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?
This page serves as notes following an informal workshop with local business owners, focusing on how they have integrated their digital marketing into a specific approach to their marketplace.
Top Tips
- Write quality, original, engaging content
- Structure your content to help search engines
- Make sure it site looks good on mobile
- Follow your brand guidelines
- Keep your content up-to-date
Ranking Factors
- Trust & Authority
- Content
- Technical Structure
- Mobile Friendly
- Site speed and HTTPs
Content Is The Key
A search engines goal is to provide you with relevant links based on your search criteria, to do this is needs to understand the question, look through all the websites it knows about and decide which links to show you and in what order.
In the early days of search engines it was quite easy to load your website with keywords and know you’d appear in the search results. This keyword loading is now actively punished by search engines as they’ve been designed to actually understand the content you create and prevent people subverting the system.
Search for ‘Content Marketing’ to understand how investing in good content can yield better results than paid advertising.
Trust & Authority
Does the search engine recognised your site as leader in its field, area, business or in some other way?
There are multiple “authority” signals, the most powerful of which is “Who else is talking about your site”.
Being linked from the BBC adds more ‘authority’ to your website than being linked by a personal blog.
Content
As the search engine wants to provide relevant links it needs to look at the content. Writing original & clear and content helps the Artificial Intelligence used by modern search engines to understand your page.
The age of content on your website also plays a factor. If your visitors visit your ‘blog’ section and there have been no updates for a few months it’s s off-putting, the same is true of the search engine.
Make sure your links are in the correct place, see below for an example.
Structure
All the search engines suggest structuring your sites in a specific way. When you are editing your site you will see these fields being displayed.
Headings: Use H1 tags for main headings. use H2 tags to add context under that heading.
Images: Make sure you add ‘alt text’. This tells the search engine about the image.
Social: There are specific ‘social graph’ settings which tell Facebook and others how what preview images to show.
Good Linking Practices
You can learn more about our award winning sausages
Our new range was voted the best vegan sausage in Somerset
Bad Linking Practices
You can learn more about our award winning sausages here
Our new range was voted the best vegan sausage in Somerset
Applying this to Social Media
All of the above applies for your social media accounts as well. Having good, fresh content that is trusted by others (Likes and retweets) improves your social media presence with the ultimate aim of either getting a direct sale, or entering peoples consciousness.
- Post content appropriate for your brand and message
- Link to your website so people can take action on your posting
- Add images that match your business. Facebook is picky about having too much text on an image and will notify you if you try to ‘boost’ a post where the image has too much text
- Share your posts in comments when engaging on social media but only if its natural – don’t try to force it in as will clearly be a sales tactic rather than engaging and genuinely contributing with a topic
- Talk about your products or services with the same wording across all channels (social media, website) so people searching get a consistent message about you
Can you only have a Facebook page?
You can, it reaches a huge audience, is quick and easy to setup and maintain. Just over half the population has a Facebook account.
As your business develops evaluate the benefits of having your own website. Social Media only allows you to represent your business within their design. If you can get people onto your own website you have full control over what message you send and you can really sell your business without being confined to 140 letters.