The success and survival of your business depend on the number of customers and the number of sales. Making sales, whether it is eCommerce or Retail, is always challenging. It is a business that constantly changes, and it is not easy. Direct contact with customers never is. Today, we will talk about various ways to increase sales using SEO. Let’s see how website optimization can help grow your revenue.
Use keyword planning tools
Keywords are the most important element of SEO. When customers search your product online, they will use various keywords to find it.
Keyword planning tools like Google AdWord are the perfect place to start. However, figuring out what keywords to use is not easy. The competitor companies are using the same keywords as you. With that in mind, it is always a good idea to try and link the keywords you use with your company’s name or with something that makes your business unique.
The most important element of SEO is keywords.
Furthermore, where you implement keywords is also essential. They should be present in:
all web pages;
your content;
URLs;
in the emails you send;
if you are running a blog, in the headings, image descriptions, page titles, and metadata;
The final rule to remember is that stuffing keywords everywhere in large numbers is not good for your business. It will seem unnatural, and Google does not like it. You need to find balance. A good idea is to research advanced SEO techniques for small businesses. You will find a lot of valuable pieces of advice on creating and using keywords.
Content is still the king
The keywords will lead people to your website. But, if the content is not good, they will not convert to customers. Your sales directly depend on the quality of your content.
If a potential customer is looking to purchase, let’s say, a car, they will have a bunch of questions. Especially if this is the first car they are buying, and they don’t know anything about cars. Each piece of content they see on your website should give them an answer and bring them one step closer to understanding what they need.
Content may come in many forms, like blog and vlog posts, animations, podcasts, infographics, e-books, guides, product reviews and product descriptions, and so on. All of the content your produce and publish needs to be a part of a bigger picture.
Tracking website visitors
When you start creating quality content and bringing visitors to your website with the help of keywords, it is crucial to begin tracking website visits. First, you want to see if the changes actually make a difference. The number of visits should go up. You can also track your users’ actions, what pages they are visiting, what they are clicking on, etc. The idea is to collect valuable data about your leads and use that information to further improve their experience on your website.
SEO changes all the time. That is why you want to know how your customers interact with the website. You can also do polls and ask clients how they found your website. This is another excellent example of how to track their activities.
Using social media
If you are struggling with getting customers to your website, you should use social media to boost the traffic. This is one of the easiest ways to increase organic traffic and advertise your business. Social media helps your brand stand out and spreads awareness about what you do.
Linking social media profiles to your website will give your business valuable exposure.
On-page SEO
On-page SEO is one of the most critical factors that affect the conversion rate of your clients. Convert More professionals state that improving SEO elements on your website may increase your conversion by more than 20% in the next few months.
On-page optimization refers to optimizing any element located directly on your website. We already covered some of these elements when we talked about keywords. But, there are other elements, like website loading speed, linking content with other content on your website, improving website structure, backend code optimization, etc.
All of these elements help make your website easy to use. It is crucial to create a seamless experience for your clients.
Purchase an SSL certificate
An SSL certificate helps protect the safety of your clients. If you are running an online store, this step is a must. All professional websites have this form of certification. It is a sign of online safety.
There are a lot of scams happening online every day. Customers will not put their trust in your hands unless they can be sure that your website is a safe environment for them to shop.
Website safety is a crucial element of online sales.
Doing website audits
Working on SEO every day is crucial. You need website audits to improve the performance of SEO and fix any errors that come up. Furthermore, you need to follow the changes to Google’s algorithm. They constantly change the game, and if you don’t keep up with their updates, your website will start to lose its rating.
Website audits also help with testing if your SEO works. Making a few minor changes and observing the traffic will tell you how efficient your SEO actually is. Do a lot of A/B testing until you are satisfied with the results.
Increase sales using SEO to grow your business
We covered a lot of different ways to increase sales using SEO. Keep in mind that you need to use a mix of strategies to get the best results for your business. You also need a lot of patience and dedication. This is not a process that happens overnight. With that in mind, take your time. Best of luck!
The use of social media platforms for business purposes has many advantages. However, it is also crucial to find the right platform. Not all social media apps have the same reach and features. Let’s analyze the best strategy for choosing the right social media platform for your business.
Follow your audience
Everyone that has a mobile phone likely uses social media. That is around 5.13 billion potential customers. However, not everyone fits into your target audience. For example, if you are in the moving industry, you will only be interested in those customers who need relocation services. And, if you wish to promote your local business online, you need to do it on the same social media platforms they use.
Since we know that people mostly use a couple of different social media apps, it is a smart move to do a little survey and find out what platform is used the most.
Understand your audience
Knowing where your audience is is one thing. Understanding who they are and what their interests are is a whole other story.
To define your audience, you need to consider their age, gender, interests, and many other factors. Another smart move is to do another survey to find out why they like the social media platforms they use.
For example, if your clients like Instagram, you need to tailor the content to match that format. The share button for social media plays a crucial role because it allows your followers to share content for you. However, posting links to your website is useless because Instagram posts do not allow links. Alternatively, you can use your profile bio to provide all the important information.
Understand the social media platforms and their benefits
Using a social media platform for your business without understanding its capabilities and features will not bring any results. Since you are planning to advertise your business, you need to approach the entire process professionally. The goal is to build credibility in your industry, and it is essential to know what you are doing. Otherwise, you will spend too much time and money only to achieve mediocre results.
With that in mind, let’s analyze various social media platforms to find the best match for your business.
LinkedIn
Everyone knows that LinkedIn is the best social media platform for building business connections. It helps you find employees for your company, but LinkedIn also connects you with potential customers. It is truly a fantastic platform to showcase your business.
If you are looking to form B2B partnerships or find B2B clients, this is the app to use.
Facebook
With the current change from Facebook to Meta, we can expect great things for the future of this platform. Facebook is one of the oldest and most famous social media platforms still in use today. It offers many options, both for business and personal use.
Since the company is reshaping at the moment, we can expect new changes in both fields. One of the reasons why you should consider Facebook is because the majority of people using social media apps have an account there. It helps build loyalty and credibility.
YouTube
Probably the most liked social media platform today, YouTube is a great source of fun. People use it to listen to music, watch fun videos, find tutorials about anything they need, and many other things. Having a platform to host video content for free is a true luxury in the online world.
Your company needs a business YouTube account. First, you will reduce the use of hosting space on your website. Embedding URLs is cheaper than uploading videos directly to your pages. Secondly, everyone knows about YouTube. It is safe, and it always delivers. If you wish to create employee manuals, product commercials, marketing campaign content, or anything you can think of, YouTube will be the best platform to use.
Twitter
Twitter is such a powerful social media app because it allows you to directly track everything happening in the world today. Tweets happen in real-time, and that is the best way to stay informed. All viral events usually happen on Twitter first. We can look at it as the modern social media platform that shares the latest news from all over the world.
Instagram
Out of all the social media platforms today, Instagram is the platform that is growing the fastest. It has such a strong user base, and it definitely has many business uses. A lot of companies even make sales via Instagram, which only shows how powerful this platform is.
TikTok
The latest sensation, TikTok, focuses on short videos. While you can find pretty much everything there, it is obvious that it gives birth to many social media trends.
While it is not the first choice for a business social media platform, TikTok is the place where you will find the youngest audience. This is important to know if you want to target Gen Z customers.
Using software with social media platforms
Integrating software and social media platforms is a crucial move. One of the most important pieces of software for any business is customer relationship management software. It allows you to track purchases and keep a database of customer information. When choosing a social media platform, make sure that the combination of CRM and social media is possible. You want the best of both worlds together.
How to find the best CRM?
While there are many CRM platforms to choose from, you need to consider your industry first. Some platforms are built for specific needs. If we look at our previous example of running a moving company, MoversTech CRM would be the best, most specialized choice. This is mostly because the software focuses on the specific needs of relocation companies.
In that manner, you need to understand your industry goals. Look for a CRM platform that delivers exactly what your business requires.
Choosing the right social media platform for your business explained
As you can see, it is crucial to follow a few steps to determine the best social media platform:
define your audience and know where they are;
understand your business and set company goals;
learn about different social media platforms and their benefits;
combine social media with useful software to boost your business.
Choosing the right social media platform for your business will take time, but be patient. Do not rush through this process, and remember to focus on one platform at a time. Once you master one, you can start working on the others.
Social media is becoming more
popular every day. As it turns out, it has become a powerful platform for
sharing your experience, thoughts, and why not – your business ideas. This
is a great place where you can draw attention to yourself. And if you do
not do social media marketing, it can still be a channel through which your
brand’s future customers can get to you. We will talk about that a little
bit later. Communicating with your audience has never been easier and you
should know how to use this situation to your advantage. How do you do that?
The answer is simple – by integrating the social media share buttons into
your content.
Nowadays, informal communication
is more valued by customers than formal. You would probably agree that professional website design cannot be imagined without social media share buttons. That
also goes to prove that social media is the place where you should be. Here is
why the social media share buttons are so important.
In
time, you will gain more and more organic traffic
You might be asking yourself – How can social media help me do that? It is actually very easy. If your content is meaningful and provides some value to your readers, they will share it with their friends and followers by using social media share buttons. Since they are sharing your links with friends, such links are recognized by search engines as natural ones. Consequently, they are valued differently than paid advertisements. That means that they generate organic traffic for your pages.
Social media share buttons can be very useful
You
will improve your customer experience
By improving your new website, you will improve your UX too. Your customer experience
should be your number one priority. If you manage to succeed in keeping them
satisfied, there is no need for you to worry about your sales. Your brand
will be recognized and your sales will automatically increase. However,
that might take a little bit more effort from your part. For instance, you will
have to invest more effort in creating some high-quality content that is
worthy of sharing on social networks. But, don’t you worry, it will pay off! When
you offer your readers an easy way to share your blogs or pages, they will do
it more often. And once again, you will do that by integrating social media
share buttons.
You
will increase your brand exposure after adding social media share buttons
When somebody shares some of your
content on their social network profile, that content becomes visible to their
group of friends (or followers) or all of them. Naturally, not all of them are
familiar with what you are doing. Some will be interested in what your viewer
posted, some won’t, and that is fine. After seeing their friend’s post, some
viewers will visit your website out of curiosity. After that, they may or may
not become your customers, but you have reached your goal here – more people
are aware of your brand’s existence.
You
will improve reach to the market that you like to be a part of
Making interesting content for your pages and blogs is a good way to start, but it is far from enough. Now, your job is to present your work and your brand to your target audience. That is an entirely different thing. Luckily, there is an easy way to reach your prospective customers. You’ve guessed it – after you integrate social media buttons with ease you will attract new customers in no time. There is one more advantage to this type of finding new clients. It is cost-effective!
Social media is becoming word-of-mouth
When your viewers see something that
they think their friend would like, they have two options. The first one is to
share it with all of their friends and followers. The second one is to share
it with that friend only. The studies show that direct messaging is still
something that people do more online than social networking. That is where
social media share buttons come useful.
It
takes less than a second for content to be shared when social media share
buttons are integrated
Before social media share buttons
were introduced, the viewers had to take the following steps in order to share
the content they had liked or found useful:
the first step was to copy the URL,
the second one was logging in to their account on the social media platform of their choice,
the third step was pasting the URL,
and the final, fourth step was clicking on the share button. You would probably agree with us that social media share buttons are a much convenient option. And it is by all means more user-friendly than going through the four steps mentioned.
All the main social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, Pinterest, etc.) have their own share buttons. You should bear in mind that this way of social sharing is going to influence the loading time for your page or a blog. But, you know that it is worth it.
All the main platforms have their own buttons
You
can choose where to put the buttons
Since social media share buttons do
affect your loading times, you must be practical when installing them.
There is no doubt that they will bring you more than they take away, so don’t hesitate
to set them up. Still, there are places you can put them to achieve the best
score. If you are uncertain whether you should put a social media share button on
top or at the bottom of your page, why not do both? That is
beneficial to you and your user at the same time.
If you are worried that social media
share buttons will be a burden to your loading time, you do not have to put
them everywhere. We suggest that you put them on your blogs, while your
static pages can do without.
Online brand building is crucial for the success of every business, make sure you do it correctly!
A brand represents a name and a product behind a highly organized team of skillful individuals. It is a symbol that is recognized by the sole mention of a word, or by seeing a well-known logo. In today’s business, one of the most complex tasks is to create a successful brand that will stand the test of time. The competition on the market is fierce! The goal of every startup business is to try and create a product that stands out in its uniqueness and usability. Something that will make your customers go crazy over it. However, the road to success is not easy, and it is full of hiccups and serious challenges. One of the essentials of creating a successful product is online brand building. That is a very popular way of promoting your services and reaching out to the customers.
What is online brand building?
Online brand building, also known as online branding, is a way to reach to your clients via online marketing. It is the best way to popularize your product! Make your brand stand out on social media and attract as many customers as possible. However, if you wish to build authority around your product, you must apply the best practices on the market.
5 best practices for online brand building
You’ve probably heard the well-known phrase that, when doing something that’s been proven in practice many times, you shouldn’t try to invent the wheel all over again. You should always follow the best practices since that is the way to success. However, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be creative. With that in mind, let’s see what the best 5 practices for online brand building are and how to implement them. Furthermore, let’s see how to go a step further and be creative when it comes to building your brand!
Put your customer first!
The most crucial realization of every business is to understand that the customer comes first. Everything else comes second. Even if you have a good product, without customers, you’ll have no sales. Empowering your customers and giving them the front seat is the best way to build a network of loyal clients.
Listen to what they want, and give it to them! You must go beyond the basics of providing service, and overcome their expectations. The added value of a product goes a long way.
No matter what your business goals are, the customer is always in the middle of everything!
If we look at some of the most successful brands in the world, we must ask ourselves “what is the key to their success?” It is the customer, who keeps coming back for more! With that in mind, implement online loyalty and referral programs, reward your customers for staying loyal to you. Word-of-mouth recommendation is the best way to become known, and the way to accomplish that is to build long-lasting relationships with your clients.
Work on your brand visuals
When I say brand visuals, I am not talking only about the aesthetic part of your company. It is how you present yourself in public. As with everything else, the first impression is usually the most important one. With the level of competition today, you won’t have a second chance, the business world is cruel and harsh.
Your brand must have a name that stands out. It should help your customers connect with the product you offer from the very beginning. Be clear when sending out your goals and objectives to the outside world, you must be transparent when it comes to the service you provide.
Furthermore, one of the most essential visuals of your brand is the logo. Statistically speaking, the first thing that any customer recognizes is the logo of a brand, so put everything you have into creating a good one. It should be easily recognizable and memorable.
It is not possible to build a brand without online customer support
Finally, you must have a website that clearly paints a picture. It should be innovative and informational. While you have plenty of platforms that offer website templates, hiring professionals to make your website from scratch is the best option. They can personalize it to suit your needs and purpose.
Be a part of a social cause
One of the vital parts of every brand is the social cause it represents. Today, people are more concerned with the ethical and moral points of what they do. With that in mind, they will look for a company that shares their beliefs. Your brand must contribute to the community you live in. If you are not making our world a better place, chances are you will not succeed. And remember, a bad impression spreads online like wildfire. If you wish to preserve the reputation of your company, you must be careful with what you stand for. And that leads us to our next step of online brand building.
Social media community
Communicating via the internet opens many possibilities, not only in personal life but in business as well. Companies have the option of presenting their services all around the globe, to various countries. The ever-growing popularity of social media is one of the strongest ways of presenting your brand to others. It is a way to create and maintain connections.
Nowadays, some of the most popular social platforms are Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, there are plenty more in the sea for you to discover and use to build your brand. Adding videos, articles, and posts to your website will jumpstart your brand, and make sure that it’s well presented to the public.
Online customer support
As a person who has spent most of their career working with people as customer support, I can tell you that it plays a very crucial part in online brand building. Being there for your customers when they need your assistance is even more important than being there to sell your product. If you make them feel safe and help them understand that customer support is there 24/7 to address and resolve their issues as soon as possible, you will build a loyal clientele. The best option is to have a direct customer support phone line, or a live chat option 24 hours per day. Learn to listen to your customers! Hopefully, these 5 best practices will help you easily build a brand that will be remembered!
The healthcare industry is ever evolving, as is the way its customers look for information and providers. To be at the top of the game, healthcare providers must target patients online, which is where a good marketing plan comes into place.
Organic Traffic Optimisation
Reaching patients via search engines is vital to any healthcare practice. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a form of marketing which helps you to rank better on the search engine results pages, making your practice more visible to potential patients. For example, if you were a supplements company, when a patient types ‘high strength fish oil’ into the search engine, optimizing your website would ensure that it would appear high in the results. This is done through many different methods, including making changes to website content and layout. This is a long process but is well worth the wait.
Content Marketing
The world of healthcare can be confusing to those who aren’t in the loop, but luckily you can kill two birds with one stone here and use content marketing. It involves creating relevant content such as guest posts or blogs about medical issues, industry news, complex conditions or simply helping patients to make the right choice. It offers interesting and useful content. You will need to make use of keywords and phrases that your patients are searching, and the more content you can have on your website that contains lots of these relevant keywords, the likelihood of your website ranking well increases.
Social Media
Using sites such as Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook, as well as all the other social media sites, is not restricted purely to consumer products. Many healthcare companies use social media as a means of reaching potential customers and increasing their engagement. By using a range of different platforms, you can get people talking about your practice and reach new patients. You could advertise things that stand out about your service, such as low waiting times or exceptional service. Putting links on your social media back to your website gives potential patients a path to your site. It will not only introduce you to a new group of patients but also help to retain existing ones.
Email Marketing
Directly sending your patients engaging emails is one of the best ways to ensure you are at the top of their minds. You can utilise it to send newsletters, appointments reminders and more. It is a very personal method of marketing, and it will allow you to build relationships with customers. These targeted emails will be sure to resonate with your customers.
Have a Professional Website
Most of the marketing strategies suggested here all lead back to one place… your website. You’ve worked so hard to get people to the website, so once you have, make sure its a place they want to stay. Make a great first impression by having a website that is easy to navigate and gives clear information. Create engaging content to provide potential patients with any questions they might have. Your website will also be reflective of your practice, so make it sleek looking without being too busy, and use just the right amount of colour to make it look appealing without being overbearing.
If you’re a social media marketer, you need to keep up with Social Media News and Trends and two things are almost certain: You spend a lot of time on your mobile phone, and you spend even more time teaching your friends and colleagues how to use the latest apps and features because you’re at the forefront of it all.
Social media is constantly evolving. For example, Snapchat’s parent company, Snap Inc., unveiled nine huge new features in 2016 alone. This makes marketers beg the question: How do I keep track of everything that’s changing — and still have time to do my job?
We feel your pain, and we’re here to help. We’ve rounded up our tips and tricks for keeping up with social media news that we use every day here at HubSpot. And once you have a system down, keep track of what you’re sharing on social media this month with these tools for managing your social media calendar.
10 Tips for Keeping Up With Social Media News & Trends
1) Create a stream on Twitter with popular hashtags.
The best place to find out the most recent news about social is — you guessed it — on social media. Start by creating a stream on Twitter with popular social media hashtags. You can use terms like #socialmedia, #smchat, or #inboundmarketing — if you need more ideas, check out Hashtags.org. Avoid searching for a term that’s too general (like #marketing) because you’ll quickly see a swarm of tweets flooding into your stream.
HubSpot customers can create a stream using HubSpot Social Inbox. First, start by typing your hashtag into the search box at the top of the screen.
Then, check out your results. You will see a list of people and tweets matching your search term.
If you like the sampling of results that you see, you can create a stream with that hashtag.
If you’re not a HubSpot customer, you can save searches directly on Twitter in a very similar manner. First, search for the term you’re interested in using the search bar in the top-right corner of the Twitter homepage:
Then, when you reach the results page of your Twitter search, tap the gear icon and select “Save this search.”
Then, the next time you head to the Twitter search bar, your saved search will appear for you to easily click and start reading:
2) Make a Twitter list of influencers in the industry.
The beauty of social media is that the experts often hang out there, too. Whenever there is a new announcement or update in the social media world, you’ll find influencers discussing it on Twitter.
Use the hashtags that you gathered in the previous example and pick out some of the most active people tweeting on them. Make a Twitter list based on your findings and spend some time each day running through the list to see what they have to say. And don’t be shy to ask them questions yourself. After all, that’s what social media is all about.
If you want some help getting started, here’s a list of social media experts and influencers that we admire at HubSpot. It’s a public list, so you can follow it, too.
Now that you have a list of influencers and hashtags that you can follow on social media, you can set up a Google Alert for some of them. That way, you’ll get regular updates when they post content or are interviewed about social media.
Pick your top three favorite influencers or topics and set up Google Alerts for them. This will help you stay up to date on any breaking news in the industry. We recommend getting these alerts once a day so your inbox isn’t completely clogged.
All you have to do is type in your search term, select your frequency, and you are ready to go.
You can also choose to do this for certain social media terms or trends. The specificity of your search term will determine how many alerts you receive. For example, the term “social media” is written about every day, but “social media trends in North America” will generate more targeted alerts.
4) See what’s trending on Instagram’s Explore tab.
Instagram’s Explore tab lets users search for terms and hashtags to see what content people are sharing on the platform that day. It also serves users with related searches to see what else people are talking about. You could search for terms like “social media” or #socialmediamarketing to see what’s going on:
5) Join Groups on LinkedIn.
Discussions on LinkedIn about social media for business are extremely lively. Whether there’s an update to Facebook, a new social network that’s making traction, or a new theory on the future of social media, you are sure to find it in LinkedIn groups. Even better, you will meet a lot of other social media enthusiasts with whom you can network and ask questions.
As bloggers ourselves, we’re going to suggest that you subscribe to a few blogs that post content about social media so you don’t miss anything. If there’s a new feature or trend, it will definitely be written about in detail on these blogs.
However, more important than subscribing to these blogs is making sure you set aside time each week to read through your content. Block off as much time as you need to go through the content — that could be anywhere from 15 minutes a day or 15 minutes a week.
Here are a few blogs to get you started that cover social media:
Take the time to go to a social media conference. This will be a great opportunity to hear from social media experts in the industry and be able to ask the burning questions you may have. You will get the most up-to-date advice about running a social media campaign and what you should know when using social media.
However, it isn’t realistic for all of us to pack up and go to every single conference that talks about social media. If you are unable to attend the conference in person, you should follow along via — you guessed it — social media. Every conference or event will have a corresponding hashtag that you can follow during the conference on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Social media posts are often quotes from speakers at the event, so you’ll still get access to the content being shared.
For example, each year, INBOUND covers top social media trends, among a variety of other topics. The following stream shows people who are tweeting about INBOUND 2016 using the hashtag #INBOUND16.
8) Listen to podcasts.
An easy way to learn about what’s changed in the social media space is to listen to the news on social media marketing podcasts. Podcasts vary in length and provide lots of valuable information from social media experts and influencers in the form of interviews, case studies, and rundowns of the latest news. You can listen to episodes during your commute, at home, or just when you need a break from your computer screen.
We rounded up some of our favorite podcast episodes to learn about what’s new with social media, including:
Marketing Smarts: How ‘Dolphin Tale’ Brought 800,000 Visitors a Year to Clearwater Marine Aquarium
The Growth Show: Episode 100: Guy Kawasaki’s Unconventional Advice on Growth
9) Set up an IFTTT.
IFTTT (“If this, then that”) sets up connections between apps and services you already use for content discovery and sharing. When you set up an IFTTT with a Recipe, you can save time by automatically having social media news and updates served up to you according to your content consumption preferences. Here are a few we recommend setting up to keep track of social media news:
10) Set up a news aggregator on Feedly.
There are various free news aggregation RSS feeds that you can customize and subscribe to to centralize news from a variety of different sources all on one page. I use Feedly, and after subscribing to different marketing and technology publications, I set Feedly as my homepage. That way, I have to glance at the big headlines before starting work each morning.
You can easily search for topics and names of publications to add to your Feedly to keep your knowledge as current as possible.
What’s Trending?
Try out some of our suggestions and let us know if they help you keep track of the latest social media news. We’ve made some predictions about how social media will evolve in the future, so keep an eye out for more news and trends — they’re right around the corner.
What are your strategies for keeping up with social media news and updates? Share with us in the comments below.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in July 2014 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.
