Why is content marketing important?

Marketing activities fall into two broad categories – paid and unpaid. If your business is to be prominent in the results of searches made on search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and others then it is important to have content on your website that encourages those search engines to include your website in the results of searches that are relevant.

If, for example, you are in the business of making, or selling, safety footwear then you want to feature in the results whenever someone searches for safety footwear related topics. If the search engines don’t know that your business is relevant to the person making the search then your site will not be featured in the results. Content marketing is important therefore in order to inform search engines that you are involved in whatever you are involved in so that they can add that content to their indexes and show your URL and site details to those carrying out a relevant search.

In fact, one of the single most important items of content that you can spend time and effort on is what is called the “Meta Description” of your pages. Each page has its own unique meta description and this forms the small snippet of text that appears below your URL in the search results and tells the view in around 150 characters, what you do and why they should visit your site.

Content most often takes the form of text but that is changing. Text does not have to be the only format you use. Video content is becoming more and more important and is much easier to produce now due to the many apps available and the high quality of footage that can be produced with a smartphone. Add audio into the mix alongside visual content marketing by recording useful podcasts for your clients and potential clients – a podcast is an audio blog, sometimes carried out in the format of an interview and are very popular because people can listen to them whilst doing something else, for example driving to or from their place of work.

Content converts. Websites that contain a good selection of content that is relevant to their product or service will find that more people are likely to visit their website and stay on it for longer. If good quality content is available to help them to understand or learn about the topic in question then they are more likely to purchase the product or service from you. It follows therefore that a good way to increase conversions is to give potential buyers the information that they need in order to make a buying decision.

Is Content Marketing Effective?

The short answer to this is yes – if it is good content and if it is published in the right place where search engines can find and index it so that it can be included in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

Websites that do the minimum possible usually end up losing traffic to those that give the website visitor more to explore. Google even has a term for this – “Bounce Rate”. This metric is an indicator of how many people visit a website and then leave it again within a few seconds and without interacting with the site, e.g. by clicking on a link to visit another page. If your site’s Bounce Rate is high, (it is a percentage) then that means that people visiting the site are not finding what they need and leaving. One of the best ways to counteract this is to provide lots of information about whatever it is that the site is about. This usually takes the form of articles but, as previously mentioned, videos as well as podcasts (audio presentations), quizzes and so on, all have a part to play.

When building a website it is a good idea to avoid the temptation to put everything on one page – this is a trend that has surfaced in recent years as web designers think it looks cool but, in the eyes of a search engine, it is difficult to work out what the site focuses on and the visitor doesn’t need to click onto a different page thereby making it more likely that their visit will be counted as a bounce.

Sites with a high bounce rate are treated less favourably by search engines so put plenty of content on the site in order to minimise this.

Another way in which content marketing is effective is to improve brand reputation. It is a good idea to try and publish your content on special interest websites as well as on your own. If you have video content then a YouTube channel is another option when it comes to spreading the word about your product or service. It is free to setup a YouTube channel and, if you do it properly, your (video) content will be found in Google’s search results with a link to the video. Once someone is taken to your YouTube channel to view the video they will also see your other content – you can include a link to your website from the description placed underneath the video.

How To Get Started With Content Marketing.

The way most people tackle this is to set up a blog on their website. Most website building platforms, such as WordPress, have excellent blogging facilities and there is usually no cost involved unless you choose to outsource your article writing requirements.

Blog posts should be at least 1500 words in length and should focus on a small number of keywords. For example, if writing about vegetable gardening then focus on the main keyword, in this case, “vegetable gardening”. Make sure that the term “vegetable gardening” is in the page’s “Meta Title” as this is usually the first thing a search engine will read when crawling your website and it forms the bold part of the listing when shown in search results.

If you try to focus on too many keywords the search engines will struggle to identify what the focus of the piece is and often they can end up indexing it for those terms that are of lesser importance.

The main keywords should appear several times in the body of the text and in the titles and subtitles – known as H Tags – throughout the piece. Do not be tempted to overdo it through – this is regarded as “keyword stuffing” and is frowned upon by search engines. A density of around 2-3% is ideal, i.e. the keyword or phrase should represent no more than 3% of the total word count.

Many businesses find that they do not have the necessary resources in house to write articles, social media posts and blog posts themselves and find it necessary to use the services of a third party author or copywriter. This is a common practice and enables you, the business owner or manager, to concentrate on what you do best.

Always ensure that the content you acquire is original, i.e. not copied from other sites, as this is not acceptable to web search engines and they can penalise you for it. It is OK to quote short passages however, so long as you cite the source.

Try to write ephemeral content whenever possible, i.e. content which does not age quickly. If your content is outdated quickly then you will need to update or replace it frequently. Of course, if you are publishing, for example, a newsletter, then this type of content, by its very nature, will age quickly so alongside the news try to include some ephemeral content as well.

How To Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketers usually plan their content production according to the needs of the business in terms of lead generation, brand building, product launches, special promotions, and so on.

This planning process takes into account seasonal trends and online search trends that indicate interest levels over time. You can easily check on the interest levels for a subject by referring to Google’s “Trends” facility which gives you an indication of how much search activity there has been for a particular term or topic. You can find this tool here: https://trends.google.com/trends/?geo=US

Another factor that plays an important part in devising your content marketing strategy is the activity of your competitors. An easy way to check this is to do a Google search for a keyword or phrase that is important to you. When the results are shown, ignore the paid ads and look at the first few “natural” results – which websites are featuring highest in the results for a particular search term? Make a note of the top 3 or 4 and visit the sites, taking a good look at the content they have and then start planning to produce similar, (but not the same), content yourself.

While Google’s “Trends” tool will help to tell you when to publish your content, the other factor you should consider is where to publish it. Obviously, your own website will be high on the list but it should not be the only place that your content sees the light of day. It is likely that there will be other websites, blogs, social media pages and similar properties where your material could be seen by interested parties.

When looking for suitable websites on which to publish your material you should, of course, avoid competitor sites. Instead, look for sites which publish material about the subjects that your product or service address. For example, a golf professional wanting to gain traffic might consider writing and submitting material to a website about golf. Very often, website publishers find it difficult to produce enough content for their sites and welcome “guest posts” to help lighten the load of writing all the content themselves without the need to pay for it to be written. This is known as “guest blogging”.

As well as guest blogging there are also many sites where material can be published and has a chance of being seen by interested parties. Sites like Reddit provide a platform where you can submit articles and posts about almost any subject and they will be seen, (but not necessarily read), by people interested in the subject that you are addressing in the article.

One of the most accessible platforms where you can publish material is the social media site. If you are addressing a profession, “B2B” (Business to Business) audience then LinkedIn may be worth considering. You can publish an article free of charge on your LinkedIn page and, if you have enough followers, it will be seen, and possibly read, by a substantial number of people. Facebook offers a similar opportunity with the option to “boost” your post for a small fee and have it shown to a larger audience of interested parties.

Once you have identified the social Media sites that you want to publish your content on you can make the task easier by using a tool such as HootSuite, which enables you to schedule your posts and submits them automatically for you saving a great deal of time and effort.

5 Advantages Of Content Marketing

Content Marketing can improve brand reputation.

By writing about your brand and the products or services that it provides, in a way that gives the reader information which is useful to him/her, you are adding value to the readers experience and building “authority” for yourself or your business as a source of information about that subject. This works particularly well if you write articles that address a particular problem that the reader might have, e.g. “How to improve your golf swing”.

Content marketing helps bring in new leads.

Almost every business needs an ongoing supply of fresh leads or enquiries. By publishing your content in places where it can be seen by people who are likely to need your product or service at some point you are making your business accessible to those people at the time that they may be considering making a purchase. Most platforms that you can publish on, other than your own website of course, will let you include your URL (website address) to the article so that it can be clicked on by the reader.

This is called a “backlink” and not only enables the reader to go to your site but also strengthens your website in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Search engines like Google place great value in measuring how well your website is linked to by other quality websites. I cannot stress enough however that these links should occur naturally, usually from websites that are relevant to your own. Google and others will soon spot if you are procuring links from sites that have no relevance to your own or, worse still, if you are buying links from providers that do this as part of their business. This used to work a few years ago but it doesn’t work now. If you get caught, and you will, then you could find yourself being penalised by the search engines and your website falling in the rankings.

Content marketing can help to increase conversions.

The more a potential customer for your product or service knows about you, your business and your products or services, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

By providing information on your website and elsewhere about what you do, you are building the customer’s confidence in you and your business. This is why you see many e-commerce sites back up their online shop listings with libraries of information about how to use those products, e.g. a DIY store that sells tools and also providing short guides about how those tools could be used. This is a good example of where a video might also be used – just check out YouTube next time you want to learn how to do something and consider that others will be doing the same thing. Make sure it is your video they see and not someone else’s.

Content marketing helps improve SEO.

Anything you can do to lift the level of visibility your website has online will help towards optimising it’s online visibility. We have already mentioned the advantage of gaining backlinks to your site by publishing your content in places where it can be seen by potential customers and where you will be likely to be able to include a link to your website from within the article or blog that you publish. This is a known factor in improving the overall SEO of your website and should be done wherever and whenever possible as long as the target site is of good quality and repute – poor quality links can have a detrimental effect.

By including plenty of content on your own website you will increase the chances of the visitor staying on the site for longer and exploring the content you have provided there. If you are an e-commerce site then this is important – people often need a bit more detail than can be provided in a simple product listing before they make up their mind to buy.

Content Marketing Improves Customer Relationships.

By providing your existing customers with a source of news, updates, user guides and reviews about your product or service you are helping them to get more from their association with you as an existing or potential supplier. In the longer term this will do far more to build and strengthen the customer relationship than just sending them purely sales-related emails and other promotional activity can do.

As you may have gathered, content marketing is a term which covers many different activities and not all of them will be relevant to you and your business. Try as many as you can and monitor the results so that you can work out what you should concentrate on in the future.

TRON Media can help with all your digital marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in digital marketing, content marketing, web design, SEO, PPC, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing strategy perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency ln Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to help you reach your audience. Get in touch today to find out about our latest email marketing and web design services, and what a creative digital agency can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call on: 020 7870 9041 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

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What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

Before I answer that question it is important to be aware of the various ways in which business can come to you via online channels. The available channels vary according to how your business operates and the fundamental difference between those businesses which operate locally and those which are national or international in nature.

The reason for this distinction is the way in which search engines treat enquiries that are made by people who are looking for a product or service and who are likely to have an intention to buy that product or service either straight away or at some point in the future.

Google and Bing both analyse the searches which are made and try to establish whether it is a local search or not. These two types of search are treated very differently by these major search engines and this is why your digital marketing strategy should be tailored according to the type of business model that you operate.

For locally based businesses the most important aspect of your digital marketing strategy should be to be prominent on the Google maps listings when appropriate searches are made. This involves being accurately setup using a free of charge application from Google which is known as “Google My Business.”

If you own or work in a locally based business then you should certainly consider your presence in Google My Business and, if nothing else, make sure that your business is registered and verified on that platform – you will find everything you need on this link:

For those businesses who operate nationally, or even internationally, the approach is different. These businesses do not depend on local traffic and therefore need to concentrate on their visibility across a much wider audience.

For national, international and global businesses, the focus should be on building authority for their website and ensuring a prominent position in search engine results when someone in their targeted geographical area carried out a search for a product, service or topic which is relevant to them. The fact that someone has carried out such a search would normally signify that they are looking to buy or find out about that product, service or subject.

The digital marketing strategy for these businesses therefore is to gain visibility across all of the platforms where their potential customers, subscribers and so on, are likely to be looking for whatever it is that they make, sell or do.

How Do You Create a Digital Marketing Strategy?

First of all it is important to have a good idea of what you are up against. Even if you have a really good website, full of interesting content and, if you sell a product or service, really good, competitive pricing, you will still underperform if your online competitors have even better websites, better pricing and so on.

In other words, you are only as good as your competitors allow you to be.

Therefore, the first thing to do is to make an assessment of your competition. Marketers call this a “competitor landscape” or something similar.

The typical contents of a competitor landscape would be:

• A list of competitors against whom you are competing for online traffic.
• A list of key search terms which potential customers, clients, subscribers etc are likely to use if they are looking for your product or service.
• An assessment of the key metrics which tell you how well each of the above competitors is doing, relative to each other.

A quick “snapshot” metric is produced by MOZ and is known as “Domain Authority” and can be discovered, free of charge by opening a free account at: https://moz.com/free-seo-tools. DA is a metric measured out of 100, i.e. a percentage, and will give you a rough idea as to how your website, and your competitor’s websites, are performing in search engine results pages, (known as SERPs).

Whether or not your competitors are using ads to enhance their website’s visibility for certain search terms or keywords. You can do this by carrying out relevant searches and noticing whether the competitor appears in the ads which appear on Google or Bing’s search results pages.

Once you know who your competitors are, you can start to try and understand why they are performing better, (or worse), that your own site is currently performing. The free MOZ tool linked to above will tell you much more about your competitors but, at this stage, the main thing it will do for you is tell you who your top search competitors are. These are the competitors that compete for the same keywords in searches as the domain that you type in, (which can be your own or a competitor’s), ranked by visibility.

Other factors you can try to establish about how your competitors websites are performing, compared to your own, include:

• Which keywords or search terms they are most visible for, compared to your own site – this can be found by entering their web address into the MOZ free tool as described above. Please be aware that there are other platforms offering a similar service, the best known of which is SEMrush, but we are concentrating on MOZ here because they compile the Domain Authority metric.

• Whether or not they are using PPC (Pay Per Click) ads to boost their visibility for certain search terms. PPC is offered by Google, Bing, Yahoo, Facebook, Linkedin and many other platforms. You will need to enlist expert help when setting up PPC campaigns since mistakes can be very costly in terms of wasted clicks which cost money.

• How much use they make of Social Media. Do they have a Facebook page for their business? How many followers do they have? how often do they post content onto that page? and so on.

A website that has a healthy and active presence on Facebook, (and other social Media Platforms), will generally do better than one which does not. For those websites which target a B2B, (Business to business) audience, LinkedIn may be a better fit.

Important note – your online competition is not necessarily the same as your offline competition. Online, the “currency” is not expressed simply in financial terms but in terms of website traffic. Generally speaking, a website with high levels of relevant traffic will outperform one with a lower level of traffic, even if their product is of lower quality or higher in price.

Why Is a Digital Marketing Strategy Important?

The internet is a crowded place. Visibility is important to any business or organisation that needs to stand out from the crowd and be found online. Every business needs a strategy to ensure that their website is visible to those who are searching for its products or services and this visibility can be achieved in a number of ways, including:

Building up the “authority” of your website to ensure that people will visit it and find it easily in search results. This is usually achieved by publishing a lot of good quality content on the website and making sure that it gets indexed by all major search engines so that it can be found by those who are searching for it. This process is known as content marketing.

By having a strong presence on major Social Media platforms and posting fresh content regularly that followers can easily engage with.

Many businesses find to their cost that simply posing numerous posts will not, in itself, help them to be more visible – the posts have to be engaging for the viewer and encourage them to interact with it.

Ensuring that your website is technically sound – all content setup in a way that search engines will recognise and include in their index. This means checking that all elements of your website and its pages are correctly setup.

Ensuring that your website’s content marketing strategy is varied and includes more than just text – videos are popular and enable you to be included in search results for searches where you may have missed out if your content were text only. A YouTube channel is very important in this respect and you can set one up for free. There are many ways to produce effective videos for your business without having to pay an expensive video production company. A good selection of videos on your site and/or linked to your YouTube channel will improve your visibility quickly and effectively.

Making use of PPC ads on platforms where your target audience is likely to be searching for your product or service.

Whilst all of the above could lead to your website getting more traffic and converting some of those visits into customers or clients, to simply carry out those activities in isolation, without a structure, could easily lead to your marketing budget being wasted.

Try to identify which approach is likely to give you the best returns and set a budget with clearly identified targets such as number of enquiries received during a given period and as a result of a specified number of website visits. All of this information can be identified using Google’s free-of-charge Analytics platform which you are strongly advised to install if you haven’t already done so – ask your website developer to be sure to install the Google Analytics tracking code onto all of your website pages.

What Are The Most Effective Digital Marketing Strategies?

Different business types and sizes will require different digital marketing approaches. As I’ve already mentioned, a business with a relatively small local clientele, such as a restaurant, hair salon, driving school, or auto repair shop, will need to tackle the issue differently than one with a larger clientele.

Gain Local Visibility

Gaining presence on Google, Bing, Apple, and other comparable services’ map listing systems should be a top priority for locally focused businesses. These postings are highly useful and cost-free.

Content Marketing and Authority

Those targeting a wider audience will benefit from putting more emphasis on optimising their website content for the search terms that are really important to them. The more content your website has, the better, as long as it is original and of good quality. Content should be varied and include text, video, possibly audio (podcasts) and other content such as quizzes, surveys and forums related to your product or service where your customers and potential customers can participate. Never copy content from other sites, this will result in unfavourable treatment by search engines.

As well as placing content on your own site it is well worth considering trying to get your articles and other content published on other relevant sites – a process often referred to as “guest blogging”. This is valuable on several levels, firstly it means that more people will see your content thus increasing your “authority” in that subject but it also means that, usually, the publisher of the target website will allow you to link back from their site to your own.

Backlinks

Such “backlinks” are very useful in increasing your websites Domain authority and are well worth spending some time in acquiring. A word of caution through – don’t ever be tempted to pay for such backlinks – Google hates this and will come down upon you like the proverbial ton of bricks if you do it.

lists

Use a platform like Listly to publish lists relevant to your product or service, e.g. “Top Ten Upgrades for your Home Cinema System” etc. These lists, when published on a platform like Listly, can link back to your website and give your rankings a significant boost.

Paid Ads

Both local and nationally/internationally focused websites could benefit from PPC and other types of paid ads however these should be handled carefully in order to avoid wasting budget on “vclicks” that are unlikely to result in a conversion.

Ad types and targeting will be different for these business types with a local focus who are advised to concentrate on reaching a prominent position in the local listings that accompany all map results – known as the “Map pack” on Google, rather than trying to dominate the top of the search results on the national or international platforms of Google, Bing and others where competition is likely to be strong and well-funded.

As well as placing ads on search engines like Google, which are designed to target those who are probably already somewhere on the buying cycle and will progress towards making a commitment or purchasing a product or service, they may also be placed on relevant third party websites using Google’s “Display Network”.

This can be very effective if done properly but care must be taken to ensure that the placements are relevant. Google will try to do it automatically if you let it but frequently gets it wrong – always select your target sites manually after careful research as to their audience demographics which can be found in the Google Ads system.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media is often suggested as being an effective platform for marketing a business website. It isn’t necessarily the case however. Many businesses of my acquaintance have spent hours and hours posting content onto their social media pages without achieving any real, or noticeable, results. The reason can be summed up in one word – “engagement”. Not only do people have to see your social media posts, they have to read them and, critically, take some action as a result of having seen them, even if it is only to “like” them. Ideally, such posts should have some kind of call to action which will result in a measurable result, e.g. a visit to your website, request for a report, viewing a video etc.

Social Media is also a place where paid ads can effectively be placed. Since there are no keywords in Social Media ad systems the type of marketing carried out there is generally demographically targeted – social media sites like Facebook and LinkedIn hold huge amounts of data about their members including age, gender, education, interests etc and this can be used to accurately target those who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.

YouTube & Video Marketing

YouTube is also becoming increasingly popular as a place to run ads alongside videos that are relevant to your product or service. These ads can be placed via the Google Ads system, (previously known as AdWords), and are still reasonably priced. Many people are deterred from YouTube advertising because they think that they will need to have videos made but that is not the case – you can advertise on YouTube without the need to have videos although it may well be worth getting some made and we suggest setting up a (free) YouTube channel for your business as this can be a significant boost for your website in search results on Google and YouTube.

Shopping Ads

If you run an online shop, (e-commerce), then Google’s Shopping Ads could be just the thing for you. These ads are automatically generated by Google, (Bing has a comparable service), from a product feed that you provide – most online shopping platforms like Shopify, Woo Commerce etc will generate these feeds automatically so the process is really quite straightforward. You will need an image for each of the products you wish to include.

Use Remarketing and Email Marketing to catch the ones that get away

Make sure you remarket – “Remarketing” (AKA Retargeting), is the process of anonymously gathering lists of people who have visited your website, noting what they seemed to be interested in, and then showing them reminder and progressing ads until they finally convert into a customer. If you can build a list of customers and prospective customers you can remarket to them by sending regular promotional emails – this method is widely used and can be very effective if done properly however there are strict regulatory controls in place to prevent abuse so be sure to take professional advice.

5 Digital Marketing Trends for 2020

Voice Search

As more people use voice search on devices such as Alexa and on search engines like Google it is now the time to start planning how you should tailor your website to benefit from this. In order to appear in voice searches the content on your website needs to be formatted in a way that such technology can recognise. There are many aspects to this but in essence it means writing the website content in a way that fits in with Google’s search result display techniques. The most common way to achieve this is to ask your website developer to incorporate “Schema” coding snippets into the website’s content so that search engines can recognise it and place it into voice search results as well as “knowledge panels” and other search engine result elements. This requires planning and careful preparation but is well worth the effort – voice search is set to boom as devices become more affordable and widely available.

Brand Management and User Participation

The trend towards involving clients/customers and users in the development of a brand and its overall reputation moves forward, powered by and increasing number of available platforms and review sites. It is now almost compulsory to have a business or product page on Facebook, LinkedIn and elsewhere and user groups comprising existing users of your products or services are a useful way to involve people and benefit from their feedback – they can also be a useful source of referral business as well. Once again we encourage you to setup a Google My business account for your business as this will open up the availability of Google Reviews which are taken into account when assessing your ranking in local and national search results. It is important to monitor reviews and comments closely and to respond to everything that is said – good or bad – in order to prevent adverse reviews escalating into unpleasant situations.

Video content

We have already mentioned the importance of including video content onto your website. This is because Google and other search engines are ranking sites higher if their content is more varied and includes at least some video. Facebook and other Social Media sites are becoming more and more focused on video content and this is showing signs of ramping up fast during 2020.

Micro-Moments

The concept of “Micro moments” recognises the fact that the buying public are less and less concerned with a lengthy buying process and more likely to gravitate towards solutions that give them what they want quickly, or even better, instantly. The main driver for this has been the availability and widespread usage fo mobile devices such as smartphones.

However, to position your product or services in such a way that it is readily to hand when someone has such a micro moment and makes the decision to buy, almost without warning, can be tricky. It involves reassessing your website’s content and ensuring that it is highly optimised for the triggers that are likely to result from such a micro moment. For many website owners this is a major rethink and should be carried out with expert help if required.

Interactive Content

As I said earlier, just cramming your website and/or social media page(s) with passive content is no longer enough. Try to involve your audience by giving them something to interact with, such as a quiz or competition or maybe a quick survey. Offer them a useful free download such as a checklist or “beginners guide to…..” – anything to make them feel part of the community that likes, uses or recommends your products.

As you can see, the marketing of a website can be achieved in many ways and there are many factors involved that are not always apparent at the start of the process. This is why it is important to do the initial research into the market you are operating in, know the competition and how they work so that you can work better and win the business.

Constant monitoring, using Analytics and other monitoring tools, is also vital – what works one day might not work the next so always keep your finger on the pulse of your site and act upon the data that you are getting.

There is no single solution to achieving online visibility and there is no wisdom in relying on a single marketing approach. Try to be seen as often as possible by those who are likely to be looking for you or your products and services and give them as many opportunities as possible to find you and become one of your clients, customers, subscribers, members, or whatever it is that your business needs in order to thrive.

All of your needs for digital marketing can be met by TRON Media. We can work with you to develop your ideas and create a digital marketing strategy that is ideal for your company because we have a highly qualified team of specialists in digital marketing, content marketing, site design, SEO, PPC, and digital strategy.

TRON Media is a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Brighton. Get in touch today to discover more about our services and learn what a creative digital agency can do for your business. Contact us using our Contact Form, call us on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post Why Do You Need a Digital Marketing Strategy in 2020? appeared first on TronMedia.

A Global Digital Ad Trends study for 2019 concluded that “Digital advertising almost single-handedly drove the expansion in total media ad spend around the globe this year”, and certainly it’s true that there are now endless opportunities to reach out to new prospects – but there is also more competition. Content ranging from blogs and videos to infographics, published by the million every day, make it harder to put your message in front of your potential customer.

That’s where PPC comes in. PPC give you access to a targeted audience, chosen according to their location, interests, age and so on, and makes sure that your message is getting to the right people.

But pay-per-click management will become more essential as the options for maximising returns increase.

So what PPC trends can we expect to see in 2020, and how will PPC advertising continue to be effective in the face of competing methods of digital marketing?

10 PPC Advertising Trends You Should Expect In 2020

1.How PPC Automation Will Be Effective

2.How Responsive Search Ads Will Work in 2020

3.Why There Will Be Less Organic Search Results In Internet Searches

4.How Artificial Intelligence Will Be Used Within PPC Advertising

5.Why There Will Be An Increase In The Amount Of Video Ads/a>

6.How Voice Searches Will Increase In 2020

7.Which Different Advertising Platforms Will Become More Popular in 2020

8.Why Remarketing Will Still Be Effective in 2020

9.How There Will Be An Advanced Segmentation Of Audiences

10.How Virtual Reality Will Become More Popular Within PPC

1. How PPC Automation Will Be Effective

One of the most significant PPC trends in 2020 will be PPC automation. PPC advertising using Google Adwords can be a time-consuming, manual business, particularly if you are interested in top performing keywords or particular timeslots. But with PPC automation, you can leave the hard work to software. For instance, Opteo continuously monitors AdWords accounts for statistically significant patterns. When something important comes up, Opteo suggests an improvement backed up by real data. Opteo also includes a set of tools to help you manage accounts, monitor performance, browse segments, track budgets, and get alerts when important changes happen.

Pay per click management tools like Opteo allow you to view all key performance metrics in one location, and to get additional metrics not available in AdWords, including QS Components, AdRank and more. You can manage accounts in one unified table, drill down to view adgroups, keywords, and other components, and get complete control over bids and campaign budgets.

An adgroup contains one or more ads that share similar targets, and each of your campaigns is made up of one or more ad groups. You can use adgroups to organise your ads by a common theme, for example you could try separating ad groups into the different types of product or service you offer.

PPC automation of this kind frees you up to plan and refine your PPC strategy to reach your target audience rather than having to manage time-consuming manual management, and if you need advice on how to set it up, a digital marketing agency can help.

Search Engine Journal suggests that it’s also important to integrate your PPC and SEO. Using PPC data to inform SEO of the most viable and profitable keywords to target for organic ranking boosts, using SEO ranking data alongside PPC bidding to identify which keywords you should be paying for, and using PPC copy data to help identify the best messaging to use for meta data in SEO, you should be able to use PPC advertising alongside SEO organic listings to make your brand more prominent on SERPs.

For bidding purposes, Conversion XL suggests that it’s important to find new keywords and put them into SKAGs (single-keyword ad groups). It’s argued that once campaigns are up and running, you will be able to identify which ones are converting, and when you find search terms that are converting and have a substantial amount of impressions, it’s worth breaking them out into their own SKAGs.

If the search terms that convert most consistently are part of a broader keyword with a lower bid, “you may not be reaching the full potential of that exact search” says Conversion XL. “By extracting the high-converting search terms into their own SKAG, you’re able to bid more aggressively and maximize Impression Share.” There are even automated tools to break high-converting search terms into their own SKAGs.

Another point to remember about AdWords is that ad extensions can now be used to deliver extra snippets of relevant information about your business to your AdWords text ads, and this will become more popular in 2020. Ad extensions can include the location of your business, its phone number, business ratings, and more. There are two categories of Ad Extensions: Automatic and Manual Ad Extensions. Manual Extensions are much more powerful because of their customizability and reporting simplicity.

APIs – Application Programming Interfaces – will also have an increased role to play in PPC management. An Application Program Interface acts as a ‘middleman’ between two applications so they can communicate with each other. The API, often just a small piece of code, eases the burden of repetitive processes which otherwise would have to be done manually. The Google Ads Application Program Interface for instance allows apps to interact directly with the Google Ads platform, and can do a lot of what the Google Ads Editor and user interface can do, but automatically. The AdWords Application Program Interface can help with creating new ads, ad groups, and campaigns, and could, for instance, pause a campaign when inventory is low.

Speaking on Search Engine Journal, Puneet Vaghela of Adzooma said: “Attribution measurement will be your KPI in 2020… Make sure to use Google Analytics or other analytics tools to measure the direct and indirect effect of your target keywords on your overall business…the most important metrics will be interaction with the website, buttons that have been clicked, form engagement and completion, and telephone calls and call interaction. These are all metrics you can find within Google Ads and through Google Analytics, and import them into your Google Ads account to set up automated bidding… Set up goals within Google Analytics to track how people interact with your site (e.g. for a form), set up goals for each step of the form process. Link your Google Analytics with your Google Ads, and import your goals into Google Ads as a conversion type. You can then start using automated bidding or CPA bidding based on these metrics to understand which keywords are driving the more engagement, and then push more budget into these areas.”

2. How Responsive Search Ads Will Work in 2020

One of Google’s most significant new introductions is Responsive Search Ads. Unlike traditional search ads, where you write your headlines and descriptions together to create static ad text, Responsive Search Ads allow you to write up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions.

These headlines and descriptions can be arranged in 43,680 different permutations, so the possibilities for ad testing are extensive. Google can automatically test these different combinations of headlines and descriptions and learn which perform best or your target audience. In time, Responsive Search Ads will learn to serve the most effective ad text to different searchers depending on the search keyword, type of device, past browsing behaviour, and other data.

A Responsive Search Ad can show up to three 30-character headlines, a display URL with two 15-character path fields, and up to two 90-character description fields. With up to 300 characters of total text, that twice the length of an Expanded Search Ad, and is the largest type of ad text you will find on search engine results pages (SERPs).

But Josh Colbeck of marketing agency Blueclaw says that in tests, initially at least “Responsive ads were significantly outperformed by existing expanded ad text ad formats in terms of CTR [click-through rate] and CVR [conversion ratio]” – he suspects the main reason being the need for responsive ads to always have headlines tailored to the user’s search term.

However, Michelle Morgan of digital marketing agency Clix says that responsive ads have helped increase CTR for Google Display Network ads, an improvement arguably good for advertisers and Google alike.

Certainly it’s true that there’s a limit to how many impressions you can ‘buy’ with PPC. As Brian Carter explains on Search Engine Journal, a client whose goal is to dominate the market and get as much profit as possible by spending as much as possible soon runs into the problem of limited PPC impressions. “Just maximizing spend does not get you all the impressions in the world” he explains. “We’ve seen accounts only receive 20 percent of available impressions for their favoured keywords despite an unlimited budget.” He suggests other ways to maximise your impressions, including improving a quality and selecting Accelerated Ad Delivery in your campaign settings.

There are other tricks to improve your CTR, such as using ad extensions, site links and extended headlines, but remember that improved CTR does not necessarily translate into additional conversions. Pay per click management services can advise you on this and other crucial PPC techniques for 2020.

3. Why There Will Be Less Organic Search Results In Internet Searches

Data shows that in 2019 Google is delivering less organic search results traffic than in 2018. According to Merkle’s digital marketing report for Q2 2019, Google’s organic search results visits are down 8 percent – the effect is even more marked with Bing and Yahoo, with decreases of 26 percent and 11 percent respectively.

Although organic search results produced 23 percent of all site visits in Q2 2019, total visits produced by organic search fell 6 percent year-by-year in Q2 2019, which is down even further from a 2 percent decline in Q1 2019.

Organic search results visits were down particularly on mobile phones, where visit growth dropped from 13 percent in Q1 2019 to 5 percent in Q2 2019.

So what’s going on? It seems that paid search visits on phones could be cutting into organic visits. Phones and tablets produced 59 percent of organic search visits in Q2 2019, compared to 65 percent of paid search visits. So the biggest share gainers in Q2 2019 were paid search, and direct site visits.

This is one of the PPC trends which digital marketers will have to be aware of in 2020 when setting their campaign budget – though certainly searchers previously exposed to a particular brand through paid search may be more likely to click and engage on organic content in the future.

Google made a change to the way ad position is determined in September 2019. Ad position is the order of your ad in the auction results as compared to other ads. But an ad position of “1” doesn’t necessarily describe the location of your ad on the search results page – your ad position may not be above the organic search results. It can be your ad position if there are no ads above the search results, and your ad is the first ad shown beneath the organic search results. Google now determines the which ads to show and how they’re positioned by calculating Ad Rank for every ad in the auction through its ad auction process.

Ad Rank is a value used to determine your ad position, or whether your ads will show at all. To calculate Ad Rank, Google takes your bid amount, ad quality, search context, device and so on, as well as the expected impact of extensions and other ad formats. Your Ad Rank is recalculated each time your ad is eligible to appear and competes in an auction, which is why ad position can fluctuate depending on the amount and quality of competition and other factors.

Want To Find The Best SEO Trends For 2020? Read our 10 SEO Trends For 2020 That You Need To Know Blog Post Today…

4. How Artificial Intelligence Will Be Used Within PPC Advertising

Artificial Intelligence in PPC advertising has two main applications; in increasing the effectiveness of your PPC ads, and in reducing the amount of time you have to spend on managing them.

For instance, AI can learn from data such as users’ purchase behaviour and history, device type, demographics, and web browsing activity, and can understand the connection between keywords and campaigns. In this way AI can determine which web searches are most likely to lead to your target audience and conversions.

AI can also be an aid to budget management, discovering new keyword opportunities and optimising bids. You don’t necessarily need to build or pay for specialised tools to do this, as many free AI tools already exist on Google, Bing and Amazon.

In Google Ads, for instance, you have a choice of Enhanced CPC (an enhanced form of manual bidding allows the Google Ads algorithms to adjustm the manually set keyword bid), or a selection of fully automated strategies including Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Clicks, and vCPM (viewable cost per thousand impressions), and more.

All these AI tools have value, but none of them should be treated as ‘set and forget’ – you still need to monitor their results to make sure that they are achieving your particular digital marketing goals.

At the end of the day your CPC – Cost Per Click – is the performance metric you should use to measure the effectiveness of your PPC campaign. CPC is a simple calculation – if you pay £100 for your ad and it receives 100 clicks, you’re spending £1 per ad click. As you score more clicks, your CPC becomes lower, and this is often used as an indicator of a successful campaign. Of course CPC is useful in other types of media channel besides PPC – and remember that it’s sometimes worth increasing your CPC if it leads to a better qualified audience.

AI can also be helpful when calculating bid adjustments. Bid adjustments are a way of controlling your advertising spend to improve your ROI. Performance metrics from Google Ads will show which keywords, locations, times, and devices perform best for you, and Google Ads then allows you to set ‘base bids’ and ‘modifier bids’ setting different levels according to time of day, best content, targeting method, remarketing lists and so on. Bid adjustments allows you to raise or lower your bids to manage the visibility of your ads, as an alternative to Google’s automatic bidding.

While the use of AI is clearly one of the PPC trends to watch for 2020, we’re some way away from AI systems being able to have dynamic conversations with consumers and to assess their emotional state, though a recent report from Invoca and Adobe suggests that over half of consumers believe the future should entail a combination of human and automated interactions.

AI could also help you manage your daily budget, defined as the amount that you set for each ad campaign to specify how much, on average, you would like to spend each day. You can set an average daily budget for each Google Ads campaign, and on days when your ad is more popular, Google Ads will allow up to twice your average daily budget, so you won’t miss out on valuable clicks. But using AI, Google can make sure that you don’t exceed your average daily budget spread out over a month (though for campaigns where you pay for conversions, your daily spend may exceed your average daily budget by more than twice).

5. Why There Will Be An Increase In The Amount Of Video Ads

Search Engine Journal suggests that video advertising “is becoming the dominant force in the digital marketing universe.”

The argument is that consumer attention spans are dwindling as fewer people are willing to read large amounts of text, and more spend time looking at video advertising on screens, mainly on portable devices.

Biteable explains that  video trends set in 2019 will continue into 2020. It quotes Hubspot statistics stating that 81 percent of businesses use video as a marketing tool, up from 63 percent the previous year, and that 78 percent of people watch online videos every week, and 55 percent every day. Hubspot also claims that 72 percent of customers would rather learn about a product or service by way of video, and Google stats suggest that 6 out of 10 people would rather watch online videos than television.

According to Insivia, mobile video consumption rises by 100 percent every year, and Ciso estimates that by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic.

The vast majority of these video plays, according to eMarketer, are on mobile devices – 75 percent in fact.

So in terms of sheer consumption, video is the format of the future. But in terms of marketing, video also has advantages in that according to Insivia, viewers retain 95 percent of a message when they watch it in a video, compared to 10 percent when they read it as text.

More social media platforms are following Facebook’s lead by prioritising video content, perhaps because according to Wordstream social video gets shared 1200 percent more than text and images combined.

eMarketer concludes that mobile video ad spend is expected to be around 72 percent of the total digital ad spend in 2019, and Insivia says that a website is 53 times more likely to reach the front page of Google if it includes video.

PPC trends in 2020 will certainly include a move towards more video advertising material, and ROI will come to depend a good deal on the quality of visual content. This applies as much to social media such as Snapchat and Instagram, news platforms including Buzzfeed, entertainment channels such as YouTube and company websites, and to all types of material from video advertising to educational content, reports and entertainment.

Technological advances such as 5G make video advertising much more practical, and video offers advertisers a chance to deliver a deeper message to consumers, whether it’s a short ‘micro-video’ as the start of a purchasing journey, a traditional 30-second format ad, or an ‘outstream’ video which autoplays when the user scrolls near it.

According to a Cisco estimate, 80 percent of all internet traffic in 2019 will be video content, and video traffic globally will increase by 300 percent from 2016 to 2021. This is in line with the increasing dominance of social media such as Facebook, which is ideal for delivering video content to a target audience and which offers improved targeting through demographic and other data.

In conclusion, Cisco says that video is expected to make up 82 percent of all internet traffic by 2021, so you should join the 93 percent of marketers estimated by Singlegrain to use video – so long as you remember some basic points. For instance, Marketing Land says that 82 percent of viewers hate video that autoplay, and Ad Age says that 33 percent of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds, so keep it short…

6. How Voice Searches Will Increase In 2020

Voice search might not be coming along as fast as some predictions suggested – it was supposed to be the ‘big thing’ in 2018 and 2019 – but let’s examine developments in the market.

• Strategy Analytics shows that shipments of smart speaker devices, mainly from Amazon and Google, grew nearly 200 percent year-on-year in Q3 2018.
• Globally, sales of smart speakers are expected to surpass $30 billion by 2024, with smart speakers becoming among the top-selling consumer electronic products (Source: Global Market Insights).
• 55 percent of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022 (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants).

Demographic data suggests that younger users make more use of voice search, with 61 percent of 25-64 year olds saying they’ll use their voice devices more in the future (Source: PwC).

A Price Waterhouse Coopers report says “There’s no denying that voice is the future. The technology will continue to drive and shift consumer behaviour, and companies need to prepare and adjust accordingly. Search, advertising, content, and commerce are being impacted industry-wide as consumers transform the way they interact with brands as the result of voice technology… general awareness of voice technology is high, only 10 percent of surveyed respondents were not familiar with voice-enabled products and devices. Of the 90 percent who were, the majority have used a voice assistant (72 percent). Adoption is being driven by younger consumers, households with children, and households with an income of >$100k.”

However, there’s still a tendency for voice assistants to be used at home rather than on mobile devices – PwC says “Despite being accessible everywhere, three out of every four consumers (74 percent) are using their mobile voice assistants at home. The majority of focus group participants were quick to say that they prefer privacy when speaking to their voice assistant and that using it in public ‘just looks weird’. This could explain why 18-24-year olds are using their voice assistants less, as this age group tends to spend more time outside the home.”

There’s one problem with voice search – Google estimates that its bounce rate is 9.56 percent  higher than desktop. Bounce rate – defined as a visit to your website which doesn’t get further than the landing page before clicking back to search – is notoriously difficult to interpret as it can have a number of causes. But a common one is when a mobile user comes across a site which is not properly optimised for mobile use. If you plan to optimise for voice search, use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to see if your website passes muster, or your bounce rate will inevitably shoot up.

7. Which Different Advertising Platforms Will Become More Popular in 2020

It’s unlikely that there will be any major changes in the popularity of the most prominent platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for B2C, and LinkedIn for B2B, so that is where most of the typical campaign budget will continue to be spent.

Facebook ads represent a big investment but remain among the top platforms. This PPC offering is in many ways similar to Google AdWords, but Facebook ads obviously cater for an audience of heavy users of social media. Facebook allows you to create your own PPC ads within the Facebook Ads Manager, and these can be of several types including standard images, video ads, or carousel ads carrying a selection of different links. Facebook ads can be used in a variety of positions on Facebook including the sidebar, desktop or mobile newsfeed, and audience network, and can also be displayed on Instagram.

Instagram ads have their own advantages. Because of their integration with Facebook you get all the benefit of campaign customisation, choice of formatting and targeting abilities, combined with Instagram’s wide reach of over 600m users. Instagram ads have an engagement ten times higher than Facebook, 54 times higher than Pinterest and 84 times higher than Twitter.

But it is getting harder for brands to achieve good levels of organic reach on these platforms. AdEspresso admits for instance that Instagram ads have the problem that the “sheer volume of posts being uploaded daily can drown out your content, even if your target audience is excited to see it.” There’s a sense that user fatigue is setting in – particularly with Facebook which is mired in controversy and often the subject of ‘digital detoxing’.

Young users particularly are leaving Facebook for other platforms, and Twitter has plateaued in terms of new membership. The increasing ‘pay-to-play’ nature of these two means that it is becoming harder to guarantee a good ROI using them.

New social media platforms such as TikTok, which carries short-form user-generated videos, are increasingly popular – TikTok now has around 500 million monthly active users, and has been installed more than 1.1 billion times. The problem with platforms like this is that they are of little value to B2B advertisers for PPC advertising – 41 percent of users of TikTok are aged between 16 and 24, so it is only of real use for the B2C market. Another problem is that platforms like TikTok seem to come and go unpredictably – witness the demise of Vine and Kik Messenger.

Pinterest, though, seems to be a better long-term bet. Ideal for promoting products since it is image-based, Pinterest plays well with prospective customers – in fact according to the brand’s own attitude and usage study in 2018 “75 percent of Pinterest users say they are “very interested” in new products, compared to just 55 percent of people on other social media platforms”.

Marketers also reportedly think that Pinterest now resembles Instagram when the latter emerged, with no obtrusive ads, a user-friendly search engine, and no fake influencers.

Amazon Advertising, previously Amazon Marketing Services, or AMS, was launched as a search advertising solution for Amazon vendors in 2018. Amazon Advertising is similar to pay-per-click ads on Google, in that sellers only pay when shoppers click on ads. According to Amazon, “76 percent of Amazon shoppers use the search bar to find an item, and search advertising is a way for brands to stand out among the competition”, so while Amazon market share is less than that of Google and Facebook, Amazon Advertising will expand to the point where it may break the long-standing advertising duopoly of Google and Facebook.

For B2B users, LinkedIn ads represent an alternative to consumer social media. LinkedIn ads are intended to reach an audience of professionals looking for employment opportunities and networking. LinkedIn ads allow you to post both visual and text content to 590m users. There are two paid options, LinkedIn Ads and Sponsored Content. Both are more expensive than Facebook Ads or Google Ads, but offer a better quality of leads. Though LinkedIn ads appear quite small and low-profile, they offer powerful targeting criteria by location, industry, company size, title and so on; but they may be less effective than the more expensive LinkedIn Sponsored Content.

Still, if you are no longer getting good ROI from Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, or want to engage with an audience which is not using these platforms, there are alternatives worth considering for 2020.

Still Unsure On What Advertising Platform To Use? Get In Touch With Us and Speak To One Of Our PPC Specialists today…

8. Why Remarketing Will Still Be Effective in 2020

In 2018, Larry Kim, CEO of MobileMonkey, was quoted as saying that he was exclusively focusing on remarketing in 2019, “Because they have much higher CTRs [click-through rates] and conversion rates.” He went on to say that he was combining remarketing with Facebook’s Click to Message ad format – “Combining these two tactics yields ROI that I haven’t seen since 2013 when ad prices were much lower,” he said. But will this continue to be true in 2020?

Davit Aleksanyan of Directive Consulting says that remarketing continues to be important as long as it can lead to an improvement in conversion rates. A remarketing strategy can bring back audience who left your website without converting, and improve your overall conversion rate.

Aleksanyan concentrates on Google Ads and YouTube remarketing, pointing out that successful remarketing should aim at people who visited your pages through paid efforts and did not convert. “You can target anyone who visited organically or through direct channels. However, you may lose some control over the quality of trackable traffic” he says.

A successful search campaign should translate well into your remarketing campaign, and can even become hyper-targeted if you create a custom remarketing strategy for each of your search campaigns.

As remarketing techniques follow your users through the Google Display Network (GDN), you should make sure to  exclude any topic and content types you don’t want your ad to appear next to. This can be done using content exclusions in the main settings of your display campaign.

Another area for increased attention will be the Google Merchant Center. If you run an ecommerce site, rather than using PPC to position ads under the search bar, you might be more interested in the Google Shopping ads to the right of it. These list only physical, tangible goods, but account for over half of Google ad spend in the USA.

Google Merchant Center is where you tell Google you have a product to sell, supply the information necessary for Google to create an ad for you, and share additional information so Google knows which customers are best served by your product. Google Merchant Center doesn’t manage your shopping ad bidding strategy, create your advertising campaigns or track the performance of individual ads – these tasks are handled through Google Ads and Analytics. But Google Merchant Center will handle details such as product ID, price, image, universal product identifier, and a link to the product on your webpage.

9. How There Will Be An Advanced Segmentation Of Audiences

Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal says that segmentation of audiences will be one of the top trends for PPC in 2020.  He explains that Audience Segmentation is based on taking people who have interacted with you online, either by visiting your website of social media channels, or from your CRM database, and sorting them according to parameters such as which parts of your website they’ve visited, whether they completed a purchase, what videos they have watched and so on.

They are then placed into ‘buckets’ which serve specific ads based on their previous interactions. You can then increase or decrease your PPC bids to adjust your prominence to your audiences based on what value they have to your business.

Baker argues that in 2020, this audience segmentation will become even more in-depth, as the increasing amount of data gathered on audiences makes it possible to personalise messages according to audience interests, age gender, demographic group, device type, use of keywords, and even emotional state, powered by AI evaluation.

By including these specific data sets, as well as the inferred emotional data, you should be able to target your ads with extreme precision, identifying exactly where you want to spend your resources to increase your business.

10. How Virtual Reality Will Become More Popular Within PPC

If there’s one subject which divides opinion, it’s the usefulness of Virtual Reality in digital marketing and in PPC particularly. While everyone seems to think that Virtual Reality could be the Next Big Thing, it’s not entirely clear that the public is embracing the new technology. After all, it demands a financial commitment – Oculus costs from around £200, and HTC Vive from around £500 – and a real enthusiasm for consuming Virtual Reality material.

While Virtual Reality offers an advertising opportunity which is part of an entertainment experience, there’s very little data to suggest how VR users will react to different types of virtual ad campaigns. VR ad platforms like Immersv and VirtualSky (slogan: “More than viewability. Engulfability.”) offer formats from short pre-roll ads that play before an app loads, to longer form videos that play between levels of a VR game.

While VR has some exciting potential – such as the ability to track users’ eye movements to record what parts of the screen they are looking at – it’s a long way from proving that it offers higher forms of user engagement or interactivity.

TRON Media can help with all your PPC and digital marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in PPC, website design services, SEO, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a PPC campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading PPC and digital marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that PPC works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest PPC strategy planning, web design services, email marketing services, and what a PPC agency can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post 10 PPC Advertising Trends You Should Expect In 2020 appeared first on TronMedia.

But SEO is not a single skill or strategy – is involves a whole raft of techniques dedicated to making your website maintain a high profile online, and these techniques are changing all the time as the algorithms used by search engines to determine page ranking change and evolve. This guide to the latest SEO trends will keep your digital marketing strategy fresh, and make sure that the time and money you spend on SEO is not wasted.

Our SEO Trends 2020 guide will explain why yesterday’s SEO techniques will not necessarily work today or tomorrow, and how you can use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to find the right keywords for search in your market, improve your search engine rank and domain authority, and reach your target audience.

If you’re a user of the free version of Google Analytics, and if you have a free Google Analytics property collecting hits exclusively from the Google Analytics Services SDK (Android or iOS), bear in mind that Google is starting the process of deprecating the “legacy” Google Analytics for Mobile Apps, and will be replacing it with Firebase Analytics as the new paradigm for Google’s mobile app analytics.

Voice Search

Voice search is on the rise with the increasing popularity of devices such as Alexa and Siri. It’s quicker to search by voice than by text, and it’s cool too – so one of the top SEO trends for 2020 is to make your digital marketing plan voice search compatible.

There’s no downside to making your traditional SEO campaign compatible with voice search – you are certain to gain rather than lose. Both types of search rely on keywords, the only difference is that voice search tends to use longer, more conversational phrases to compile its search results. Voice search also tends to evolve quicker – so you have to be on top of current trends and make sure that you are always adding new voice search keywords.

The key to voice search is the well-known ‘5W1H’ formula – most voices searches start with the words ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ ‘where’ ‘why’ or ‘how.’ Many voice searches are for local businesses, so they often end with a phrase such as ‘near me’, or near a specific location in their search results.

Keyword suggestions tools such as AnswerThePublic, Wordstream and Google’s People Also Ask are now becoming more clued-in to voice search, so they will suggest closely related questions when you look for popular voice search phrases.

Voice search will be particularly important in local SEO. Around 46 percent of searches on Google already have local intent, and by 2020, the figure will be around 50 percent. The increase in voice search will make long-tail keywords more important in local SEO, which will become tougher as more businesses try to make it to the top of the ranking in search results. Positive reviews and user engagement will become key in local SEO, and hyperlocal searches will also become a more important part of local SEO.

If you have a local business, it will become essential to register with Google My Business, claim your Google My Business page, and make sure that your business is registered in the correct category (as well as in the invisible categories allowed on Google My Business).

Omni-channel marketing

The next in our list of the latest SEO trends 2020 is omni-channel marketing, a term describing the principle Adobe calls “getting your channels in sync”.

Adobe Campaign offers a single, easy-to-use interface for campaign orchestration, so your online channels, such as email, web, mobile and social, match your off-line channels, including direct mail, call centres, the in-store experience and so on. The idea is to give your customers a consistent experience in both digital and traditional channels, so everything from YouTube videos to podcasts to marketing emails adds to the customer experience.

Aaron Agius on Hubspot explains: “All omni-channel experiences will use multiple channels, but not all multi-channel experiences are omni-channel. Remember that. You can have amazing mobile marketing, engaging social media campaigns, and a well-designed website. But if they don’t work together, it’s not omni-channel. An omni-channel experience… accounts for each platform and device a customer will use to interact with the company. That knowledge is then used to deliver them an integrated experience. Companies using this technique align their messaging, goals, objectives, and design across each channel and device.”

The end aim of omni-channel marketing is to deliver a better customer experience – to do that you will need to co-ordinate your product, marketing, sales and customer support departments.

User Experience

User Experience, known as UX, is defined as the overall experience of a person using a digital product such as a website or computer application, particularly in terms of how easy or pleasing it is to use. The terms is said to have been coined by Don Norman of Apple, who argued that everything from how well a product package fits into your car to how good your in-store service is can be part of a user experience which can be profitably improved.

UX is not the website or product itself, it is how the user experiences it; and that has a direct connection with SEO. Stoney deGuyter writes on Search Engine Journal: “I’m ashamed to admit it, but in my very earliest days, my optimization practices constituted getting the keyword on the page as many times as possible without ruining the visitor’s on-page experience. It’s heartening to know that I, and the industry at large, have come a long, long way since then.

“The typical SEO professional doesn’t have to be a full-fledged UX expert. However, they should have an understanding of many of the basic website UX principles. UX optimization is nothing more than focusing on the visitor. Everything we do in the sphere of web marketing has to have the visitor in mind. Yes, we do certain things for search engines, but search engines (almost always) require those things because they have learned it’s what their users (searchers) want.”

deGuyter cites the following as some of the essentials of UX:

• Language – keywords give us valuable insight into how searchers think about products and services – sometimes they don’t use the language of professionals, so we must be aware of user intent, and understand the problems and solutions they are looking for.
• Clickthroughs – your website doesn’t have to be top of the SERPS if you capture the visitor’s attention with enticing language and title tags
• URLS, Breadcrumbs and Meta Descriptions – these follow your title tag, and should give additional information to the searcher regarding the relevance of the result
• Keep the scent – once the searcher has clicked through to your website, you have to keep them on the scent by quickly confirming that you have what they came looking for, and encouraging them to continue engaging with your site until they get a resolution
• Site ID – identifications such as a company logo should be big, obvious and uncluttered, and header tags should confirm the information the user is there for
• Navigation – if you have many products or services, don’t hide them all under one menu entry – group them into relevant headings in your navigation
• Content optimisation – this is the real meat of your website and must fulfil the user’s requirements. Each page should be focused on a single topic and have a single goal expressed in a call to action
• Page load speed – nothing puts off potential customers more than a site which responds slowly. Google Page Speed Insights is an essential tool in analysing problems. Page load speed can be improved by technical SEO, and is likely to become a more important aspect of site ranking, particularly for mobile applications. If your page load speed is longer for mobile than it is or desktop, you need to pay particular attention as Google is starting to rank websites on a ‘mobile first’ basis.
• WordPress plug-ins such as Yoast can be very helpful in optimising the user experience of your website. Yoast can automatically optimise just about every aspect of a website, going far beyond checking relevant keywords, to testing every aspect from meta description, title tag, URLs, site structure and many other elements. Yoast is free and very powerful, but you may well need the help of a digital marketing agency to manage the fine points of UX, as it requires a grip on web design, content creation and distribution channels which are often beyond the resources of a small or medium business.

Artificial Intelligence

One of the most significant SEO Trends 2020 will be AI – Artificial Intelligence. While AI is becoming more familiar through its use in smart assistants, self-driving vehicles, navigation, smart home security and other applications, it also has many functions in the worlds of marketing and SEO.

So far as digital marketing is concerned, the main impact of AI is that it is used to determine how Google’s search algorithms decide how to rank pages. Search engines use AI to detect tricks such as keyword stuffing and irrelevant backlinks, so it’s necessary to know how these machine learning system work to keep up with the way the affect page ranking. AI can also be used to analyse customer data, for instance in matching brands to relevant influencers, and in personalisation of marketing messages. A good example is the way Starbucks collected information from loyalty cards and mobile apps, and used it to push menu recommendations to smartphones as customers approach stores.

AI also has a role to play in voice search, and Google is constantly refining Google Assistant to understand natural conversation better.

Aim To Rank In Google’s Featured Snippet

Though everyone would like their website to rank number one on SERPS, that can be very difficult to achieve, particularly if your competitors have a big budget. But one of the latest SEO trends is a way to leap-frog to victory, and that is to rank as Google’s featured snippet. This isn’t easy either, but it can be done without a huge budget.

The ‘featured snippet’ shows up in ‘position zero’ right above the first organic search results, as a block containing the exact answer to the user’s query. Most of the time it also contains an image.

There are three main types of featured snippet which could appear in position zero – paragraphs of text, bullet-pointed lists and tables. But how do you optimise for featured snippets?

Keyword research is the first basic technique. In your keyword research, aim for question-type searches, and make sure that your website answers questions that most of your target audience will ask.

You should still try to rank on the first page of Google results, as nearly all featured snippets in position zero are found on the first page. Improving your organic search rankings remains valuable.

Think about user intent in searching, rather than just keywords. User intent, the goal or intention a user has when entering a search term into a search engine, is now regarded as more important than individual keywords as a ranking factor. User intent is normally categorised in one of three ways: informational, where the user intent is to find out more about a subject; transactional, where the aim is to buy something; or navigational, where the user intent is to be led to a certain site.

Write content in the ‘inverted pyramid’ style taught to journalists; make sure the essential information is in the opening line, then expand with more details in the remainder of your content. Use words that are likely to generate featured snippets in position zero, such as ‘when’, ‘mean’, ‘define’ and ‘become’ – avoid those that don’t, such as ‘best’, ‘free’, ‘diagram’ and ‘guide’.

Format your content to suit the sort of featured snippet you would like to see – for instance as a paragraph, a table or a series of bullet points.

Q&A pages often show up in snippets, so it’s worth including one on your website, but remember that most featured snippets are between 40 and 58 words in length.

If you need help researching keywords, there are many free and paid-for keyword tools to help you. Brian Dean of Backlinko recommends these keyword tools, among others:

• Soovle

Scrapes suggested keywords from Google, YouTube, Bing, Amazon and more

• Jaaxy

Suggests thousands of keywords in seconds, together with data on competition, search volume and potential traffic

• Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Provides very in-depth information on each keyword such as a breakdown of first page competition and how many searchers actually click on a result

• SECockpit

Very powerful keyword research tool with in-depth data on search trends, organic competition and traffic estimates

• Google Keyword Planner

Not the most feature-heavy keyword tool, but benefits from coming straight from Google’s database

PPC (Pay Per Click) marketing never stands still, and John Bowman on TheeDigital blog suggests among others these developments:

• PPC Automation

Although PPC automation isn’t perfect and an effective PPC campaign still requires some hands-on management, if you set up accurate and effective conversion tracking and write good ad copy with properly identified target audiences and keywords, you can pass a lot of work to Google’s algorithms.

• Smart Bidding

Use a machine learning-controlled automated bidding system which optimises conversions and conversion values in auctions. Some examples include Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Target Cost-Per-Aquisition (CPA), and Target Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS).

• Amazon PPC

Amazon is beginning to compete with Google and Facebook in the PPC market, and displays ads both on and off of Amazon, which has improved its popularity with online retailers. It also has advantages over Google and Facebook in terms of buyer intent.

• Social Media PPC

Around 70 percent of people no check at least one social media platform a month, so the growing use pf PPC in social media shouldn’t be ignored.

Focus On Building a Brand

Digital marketing guru Neil Patel says that SEO should be at the heart of building your brand – “Because SEO is all about improving user experience — that’s why Google cares about a site’s speed, web design, high quality content marketing, mobile-friendliness and so on.”

Your brand image, Patel explains, is a reflection of how your users feel about you, and is the sum of their experiences of your website and other marketing tools. For that reason, your brand should focus on being:

• Credible: Your brand must prompt trust and show signs of authority.
• Findable: Your content should be easy to find and search
• Useable: Your website should be easy to navigate
• Desirable: The design of your website should be appealing
• Useful: The content of your website should be useful, relevant and of high quality
• Accessible: Your site should be useable by people with disabilities

All these attributes, Patel says, should be built into your brand awareness, and add up to an ideal user experience. He argues that as part of your policy for building SEO into your branding, you should pay attention to the following tips:

1. First offer value

Google’s search algorithms penalise sites that have marketing material above the fold, so make sure the value material is presented first and your users don’t have to scroll down to find it.

2. Keep keywords in text

Text embedded in images can’t be read by search engines, so it doesn’t add anything to your SEO. Make sure your keyword-rich content is kept in text, not hidden in images.

3. Build your sitemap

There are many tools you can use to build your sitemap, and as this helps both your users and search engines, you should do it as soon as you start developing your brand.

Create High Quality Content

It’s become clear that Google’s search algorithm is concentrating more and more on the quality, depth and breadth of a website’s content, so it’s increasingly important to make sure that the content of your site is of a high standard. Simply posting repetitive or low-value content is no longer sufficient to keep Google happy – if it isn’t good enough to acquire links, it won’t enhance your rank on SERPS.

The issue with low quality content, says digital marketing consultant Alexandra Tachalova, “is that it isn’t good enough to acquire links, so there’s a slim chance that it’ll rank on Google. Think twice about publishing such posts, since they won’t pay off. It’s better to do one post that is properly distributed every few months than doing several per month that will only receive a few visits.”

So you should ask yourself when you create a post whether it will answer a question for your customers, make a sale, generate a lead or improve your domain authority or reputation.

Remember the mantra E-A-T – for Expertise, Authority and Trustworthiness.

Analysis of the way that Google’s algorithms decide page rank seems to indicate that websites containing content on health, nutrition, medicine, law, finance, government and safety are particularly affected by changes made in 2018.

If you are in this area, Lola Michaels of State of Digital makes the following suggestions to improve your EAT status:

1. Check website security

Make sure you have the correct SSL certificate, use complex passwords and invest in security solutions

2. Emphasis user engagement

Invite user reviews to build your popularity and authority

3. Consult experts

Ask in-house and external experts and journalists to contribute to your blog and resources and give them each their own bio page to position them as thought leaders

4. Display your credentials

Include any industry awards, certificates and memberships in your web design to win your visitors’ trust

5. Conduct research

User survey results, anonymised customer data and qualitative research to present authoritative data. Make sure any use of customer data is GDPR compliant.

6. Provide contacts

Make sure there’s an easy way for your customers to contact a human service assistant

Podcasts are likely to become more important in SEO in 2020. Google started displaying podcasts in search results in 2019, and Google certainly has the technology to transcribe podcasts, so in 2020 it will probably start returning podcast audio clips in search results.

Create Video Content

While text remains the most common form of content on websites, one of the top SEO trends 2020 is a growing use of video. According to Wordstream, video drives a 157 percent increase in organic traffic from SERPs.

Wordstream’s analysis also suggests that a third of online activity consists of watching video, and that marketers who use video grow revenue 49 percent faster than those who don’t – not surprising as 54 percent of users say they want to see video, and regard it as the most interesting and engaging form of brand content.

YouTube, for instance, has over 1b users and draws more of the 18-49 audience than any TV network. People watch over 1b hours of video on YouTube every day, and 90 percent of users say they have learned about a new brand or company on YouTube.

So what do you have to do to make your video SEO friendly? The main requirement is to add a description of your video content with SEO keywords. Then make sure you have an accompanying text post for your video. Finally, but a call to action directing users to your video content, and watch the engagements pile up.

Actually making engaging video content isn’t as difficult as it used to be; you can use a studio, presenters, lights, video and sound recording equipment, an editing suite and so on; but you can also use readymade templates from websites such as Biteable, just inserting your own images and product details where required.

Optimise Your Website For Conversions

One of the latest SEO trends, Conversion Optimization (or Conversion Rate Optimisation, CRO) is about getting a user to perform a desired action on a website, usually buying a product, clicking a link or signing up for something such as a newsletter.

While conversion optimisation can be very data-driven, it can be valuable to think of it from the point of view of the user – ask yourself what drives them to you website, what can make them leave before converting, and how you can hook them to convert.

Typical conversion optimisation rate, calculated by dividing the number of conversions by the total number of visitors to the site and multiplying the result by 100 to get a percentage, can be depressingly low – maybe around 1 to 4 percent. But as everyone’s conversion goals are different, it doesn’t do to worry too much about whether your conversion rate matches up.

There are some time-worn best practices for conversion optimisation – such as placing CTAs above the fold, using strong colours for CTA buttons, reducing the number of fields on forms, making time-limited offers, and so on – but you can pretty much assume that your competitors are all doing this.

Hotjar says that one of the best SEO trends 2020 is to take a more customer-centric view of CRO, emphasizing the following points:

• Listen to what your users have to say about your product/service
• Immerse yourself in the market
• Watch how people use your service
• Talk to whoever designed and built the product
• Speak to the staff that sell and support it
• Draw connections between different sources of feedback

Quantitative tools such as Google Analytics, website heat maps, sales funnel tools and form analysis tools will help you to track website traffic and measure customer satisfaction, and A/B testing tools will help you to test different variations of a page to find the best performers.

But as Ben Jesson, CEO of Conversion Rate Experts puts it: ”People are always asking us about best practices for conversion. You know the kind of thing: magic buttons that convert, “killer” copywriting words, winning layouts, etc. Unfortunately, that little box of tricks doesn’t take you very far. In fact, it sometimes takes you nowhere. The real best practice isn’t a particular type of page element at all. It’s a well-defined, systematic approach to CRO… when it comes to improving your website, don’t guess what the blockages are. Find out. The key question is ‘Why aren’t visitors converting?’ The answer typically comes from research in the following core areas: understanding different visitor types and intentions, identifying user-experience problems, and gathering and understanding visitors’ objections.”

One area in which Moz claims to be expert is on-page optimisation. On-page optimisation is the practice of optimising individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page optimisation refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

Invest In Technical SEO

Investing in technical SEO is one area where you will almost certainly need the help of a digital marketing agency. A comprehensive SEO strategy will incorporate both on-page optimization and the behind-the-scenes technical SEO which makes your website web crawler-friendly. The easier you make it for search engine web spiders to index site, the better your SERP ranking will be. This isn’t one of the latest SEO trends – it’s always been good practice – but it will become more important as fine degrees of website performance become crucial.

The technical tricks of SEO change all the time as Google algorithms evolve, so simple tricks are no longer necessarily effective. But here are some of the basic requirements of technical SEO.

1. Speed Up Your Website

By optimising image sizes, enabling browser caching and compression, reducing server response time and using a content delivery system, you can increase your site’s page response speed and avoid being penalised by Google

2. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

You’ll be severely penalised by Google is your website is not adaptable to mobile devices. Use tools such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test, HubSpot’s Website Grader and Bing’s Mobile Friendliness Test Tool to check. Use Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), which get highlighted in SERPs.

3. Optimise your internal links

Though internal links don’t have the same impact on rankings as external links, it’s still worth checking, for instance, that you use descriptive keywords in anchor text so you give a sense of the keywords he source page is targeting.

4. Choose your URL

Having a single canonical URL can avoid duplicate content issues

5. Check your certificates

Make sure your site’s SSL certificates are up to date

6. Use Google Search Console

You can check and fix crawl errors by analysing your site using Google Search Console

7. Use structured data markup

Many websites are generated from data stored in databases and formatted into HTML code. This can be difficult for web crawlers to interpret. Use structured data markup to enable search engines to better understand the information on your business’s web page, and your search results will improve. For instance, structured data markup makes it easier for web crawlers to determine company basics, such as NAP (name, address, place) data. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a useful free tool to help with this task.

Backlinks will continue to be an important factor in SEO in 2020; before about 2012, backlinks may have played a role of about 45 to 60 percent in site ranking. That has dropped now to more like 50 percent, but backlinks still represent the third biggest factor behind content and user experience.

2020 may also see questions raised about Moz and the way it ranks Domain Authority. Julie Joyce says on Search Engine Journal: “Domain Authority (DA) is Moz’s way of telling us how well a website should rank, using a 0 to 100 scale. The higher the Domain Authority, the better chance it has to rank, theoretically… please please please don’t confuse it as being an actual Google metric… Moz even specifically states that Domain Authority is not used by Google… You simply cannot judge a site by its Domain Authority, or by its Domain Rating, or by its anything else that’s just one metric…Domain Authority is not a metric used by Google in determining search rankings and has no effect on the SERPs.”

Our SEO Trends 2020 guide will give you a taste of the exciting new developments in the field, but get in touch with a digital marketing agency for all the latest on the latest SEO trends.

TRON Media can help with all your digital marketing and SEO requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in SEO, digital marketing, PPC, website design services, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading SEO marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that SEO works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest SEO and digital marketing management services, web design services, email marketing services, and what an SEO campaign can do for your Google ranking.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

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The fact is that (despite the natural resistance to ‘spam’ emails), people actually enjoy getting e-mail from brands they trust, and having your customers and potential customers on an e-mail list makes it easy for you to deliver your marketing message directly to them, leading to more conversions. In fact one advantage of email marketing solutions is that when someone signs up to your email list it’s a sign that they are interested in your brand and product – all you have to do is reel them in, and our email marketing tips will explain how to do it.

Remember that according to Radicati, over half the people on the planet use email – that’s around 3.9b users, expected to grow to 4.3b by 2023. Almost 3b emails are sent every day (around 50 percent of them spam), and the average user receives 30 emails per day. Around 85 percent of users check their emails on a smartphone, while mobile platforms account for almost half of the emails opened.

The most important figure, though, is that 50 percent of users prefer to communicate with brands via email, more than for direct mail (20 percent), social media (seven percent) and phone (also seven percent).

So email marketing is certainly a valuable marketing tool, and is likely to become more and not less relevant as the number of users worldwide expands.

What Is Email Marketing?

So what exactly is email marketing? Simply enough, it’s a form of direct marketing replacing postal ‘snail mail’ with electronic mail – it’s a fast, cost-effective, measurable, environmentally friendly way to build trust with your customers, keep them informed about new promotions, products and services, and turn sales prospects into conversions.

One of the major advantages of email marketing is that because your customers have to opt in to be on your email list, you know that they are interested in your products and services. Another is that by using email marketing software such as Mailchimp to track analytics such as open rates, click through rates and bounce rates, you can measure the effectiveness of your email marketing and amend your campaign to suit with minor effort.

Particularly for a small business, email marketing tends to be a preferred method of marketing, because it’s very easy to track your ROI, and you don’t have to put money behind it to get it to the correct audience. Though SMS marketing operates in similar ways, email marketing solutions have the advantage that they reach desktop users as well, and can be the preferred method for smartphone  users too.

Email lead generation is the most effective online tactic according to Ascend2’s report, Lead Generation Strategy Trends. Shane Barker of Content Solutions says: “A good email lead generation strategy is highly targeted and involves a specific plan to generate and convert fresh leads… typically, email lead generation campaigns involve the following steps:

• Create quality content to promote your business on social media, and guest blog to generate site traffic.
• Impress your site visitors with insightful content and entice them to give you their email addresses.
• Incentivize them with a lead magnet to convert them into paying customers.
• Interact with your prospects on a regular basis, and send them relevant emails.”

B2B email marketing opens up other possibilities. The options for email personalisation, email segmentation and curation make B2B email marketing a uniquely powerful selling tool. Emails have a longer lifespan than social media posts, and offers ways to encourage re-engagement (making passive subscribers become active again).

B2B email marketing is ideal for distributing new product announcements, and news of events, personnel changes, awards or policy developments. And B2b email marketing certainly offers a good ROI – in fact B2BMarketing.net says that B2B email marketing has an ROI of over 3,000 percent, and that this is still rising.

Another variation, direct email marketing, is when direct email marketing a standalone advertisements made to look like a web-based ad rather than a typical email messages is sent to your targeted list of recipients. The messages can consist of text, HTML, or rich media. The trick is to avoid making your direct email marketing messages look like spam. To do this you can use email segmentation to make sure the message is appropriate for the group of recipients. Direct email marketing also normally uses personalisation so the recipient is addressed as an individual.

Why Is Email Marketing Important?

There are all sorts of reasons why email marketing is increasingly important, the main one being that the world is increasingly mobile, and as people are constantly checking their mobile devices, you have a readymade way to present your marketing message to them repeatedly.

Email marketing can be more efficient than social media marketing and organic search for customer acquisition and improving sales, and it remains more cost effective than either. For small businesses, it’s certainly a better choice than traditional channels such as TV, radio or direct mail, all of which have a degree of built-in wastefulness. Email generates the highest ROI for marketers, as has none of the costs associated with printing, postage and so on, while still delivering the same promotional messages and images and leading to more reliable conversions.

But email marketing solutions have the additional benefit that once a user has signed up to your mailing list, you can improve the relationship with follow-ups. It’s a win-win situation in which you get both improved ROI and higher response rates. Furthermore, if you consult email marketing services about the best way to handle your lists, you can get advice on aspect such as creating segmented lists.

Because email segmentation allows you to divide your audience into email lists, it’s also possible to tailor messages for different groups. This not only allows you to appeal to different audiences, it also means you can A/B test email campaigns, sending different messages or details of different promotions to different groups and measuring the responses. Email segmentation is one of the most efficient ways of improving open rate.

You can also address your customers individually by name, and according to research from Campaign Monitor, emails with subject lines including the recipient’s name are 26 percent more likely to be opened.

Another reason email marketing is important is that people are already used to the idea of having to respond to an email, so whether it’s to click through to your website, sign up for a list, respond to an offer or just go ahead and buy, email invites them to start a transaction which will benefit your business.

And because it’s easy to get a measure of how your email campaigns are performing, you can make constant adjustments to improve your effectiveness without any additional cost.

Five Benefits Of Email Marketing

Email marketing has many benefits, but to suggest just the top five:

1. Instant Impact

Whether you want your message to get out to 10 people or 10 million, email arrives instantly, and because it can be scheduled, you can get it to your customers’ mailbox at just the right time of day, and with a strong CTS in your message you can get an immediate response

2. Easy To Measure

The effectiveness of email marketing can be measured by its open rate, bounce rate and response rate; software tools to do this also make it easy to segment your mailing list so you can A/B test the effectiveness of different campaigns

3. Reach An Already Engaged Audience

Because users have to sign up to get on your mailing list, you know when you message them that they are interested in your company or products, and that you are not wasting time on poor prospects. Using list segmentation you can appeal to more clearly defined groups, and by giving users the option to unsubscribe from your list if they are no longer interested, you can get poor prospects to weed themselves out

4. Low Costs

Without the costs associated with radio, TV, print, direct mail, or paid-for online marketing, email marketing solutions prove themselves over and over again to offer the best ROI of any form of marketing

5. Build Strong Customer Relationships

Because e-mail can be personalised, it can be used to build a sense of trust with your customers, and to react to their concerns and enquiries

How To Set Up a Successful Email Marketing Campaign

Although it is possible to set up an email marketing campaign yourself, to make it really effective and to make use of all the data analytics tools available you may need the help of an email marketing agency. Email marketing services don’t end with compiling a mailing list; testing and refining that list and making it work for your overall marketing goals can be time-consuming, and might be best left in the hands of experts from an email marketing agency.

Here are the some email marketing tips for setting up and running a successful email marketing campaign.

1. Define Your Audience

The first task in setting up an email marketing campaign is to define your audience. No-one appreciates unwanted spam in their inbox, and no marketer wants to waste time pitching to people who aren’t interested in his products. So your first task is to decide who you want on your list. For instance, if you run a local business, you probably only want local people; if you sell women’s clothes, you probably only want women. If you run a toy shop, you may think you want to target kids – but it’s more likely you will want to reach their parents or grandparents, the ones who actually spend the money.

2. Build a Successful Email List

When you’re starting from zero, building an email list can be a daunting task. One solution is to buy one, but increasingly any decent email marketing agency would tell you that this is regarded as a bad idea – the quality and accuracy of the list is unlikely to be high, with a percentage of outdated or inaccurate addresses, your mailings are likely to be regarded as spam, you risk issues of legality, and email service providers may refuse to serve your lists.

So how do you start building your own list? The best way is through your website and social media. Use opt-in forms on your homepage, target your audience through Facebook, and collect email addresses at trade shows and public events. We’ll also talk later about the uses of a lead magnet. These processes will take longer than buying a list, but it will work out better in the end.

3. Create Segments and Groups

Mailchimp reports that segmented email campaigns had open rates that were 14.37 percent  higher, clicks that were 64.78 percent higher, and 8.98 percent lower unsubscribe rates than non-segmented campaigns by the same users.

Having made sure that your email  service provider allows you to segment your lists, there are many ways to do it – by demographics, purchase history, open rates, type of purchase, amount of purchase, job title and so on. If you want to segment your lists from the word go, you’ll need a software tool with page-level targeting, such as Optin Monster, so you can create targeted email opt-in forms for specific visitors to your website visitors. Finally, you have to create ‘lead magnets’ to allow your website visitors to identify themselves as belonging to one of your defined segments.

4. Select The Right Campaign

Before you start firing off random emails, you need a good idea of the form of your campaign. You should ask yourself what is your current situation, where do you want to be, and what do you need to get there; well-known forms of internal and external analysis use the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) or PESTEL (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal) models to develop new marketing ideas. Look closely at your current email marketing campaigns, analysing key metrics such as open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rate and return on investment. Not until you have done that should you start creating content for your email marketing campaign.

5. Decide What Content To Write

Writing your email marketing copy can be the hardest part of the process. A whole book could be devoted to the art, but here are some content email marketing tips:

• Keep your copy short. No-one wants to read a long essay in an e-mail.
• Get a hook in early, but don’t pitch your offer straight away.
• Address your subscribers by name.
• Make it personal. A human interest story helps you make an emotional connection with your customers.
• Offer something valuable. A piece of content, a resource or an offer
• Hook them with a poll, survey, image or video.
• Make sure your call to action (CTA) is included several times, ideally at the beginning, in the middle and at the end.
• Consider design. Make your emails look good and remember to make them readable on mobile devices.

6. Establish Your Goals

Like all other forms of marketing, email marketing isn’t an end in itself, it must have a set goal. Because email marketing is a particularly measurable form, it’s relatively easy to set goals and check whether they have been reached. For instance, you may simply want to increase the numbers of subscribers on your email list – in which case your email software can tell you if you have hit your target. More likely, you want to improve your open rate, your click-through rate or your conversion rate – or a combination of two or more of these. Whatever your email marketing goals, they should be dependent on your overall marketing strategy and your brand aims.

7. Create a Schedule

Before going live with your email marketing campaign, your last task is to set a schedule. Email marketing is particularly easy to schedule because the process can be almost entirely automated.

It’s important to schedule your emails marketing campaigns because:

• You may want to run several campaigns at once without them clashing
• Scheduling helps to avoid human errors
• There will be an ideal time to send emails to your customers, but it won’t necessarily be in your working hours
• You can prepare for special events such as Christmas, New Year, Cyber Monday or Black Friday well in advance, and you can schedule emails to your customers on their birthdays or on important anniversaries

Don’t forget that another advantage of e-mail marketing is that it allows you to set up ‘autoresponders’ which mean that your customers always get an answer the moment they send you a message. Autoresponders can also be set to send follow-ups at preset time intervals. Autoresponders are normally divided into two categories – the outsourced ASP model which operate on the provider’s infrastructure, configured via a web-based control panel, and are paid for by a monthly usage fee – and server side autoresponders which reside on the user’s own server, but which require technical skills to install.

It’s important to understand that while it’s a legal requirement that users should have to opt-in before you add them to your email marketing lists, you are also legally required to give them the option to opt-out, or unsubscribe. Users choose to opt-out for a number of reasons – they subscribed accidentally in the first place, their interests have changed, or perhaps they feel you are sending them too much e-mail – but whatever the reason you must make it easy for them to opt-out.

There are of course ways to reduce your opt-out rate, such as list segmentation, allowing users to set their preferred e-mail frequency, and offering alternative communications channels such as SMA or social media.

Legally, all forms of electronic communication containing your company’s details are defined as EDM marketing (Electronic Direct Marketing), and must conform to local laws. Emails, PDF brochures, infographics, promotional information, games, coupons, and practically anything else you can send by email can be defined as EDM marketing, and can only be sent if the receiver has voluntarily agreed to it in advance.

So if you see the term EDM marketing being used, be aware that it can refer to more than just email marketing; but it will certainly be a method used to build customer relationships, generate leads, and increase sales.

What is a Lead Magnet?

One of the most vital elements of building your email subscribers list is the lead magnet – not something you include in an email itself, rather a lead generation technique for building your email list in the first place, and then expanding it. Good examples of a lead magnet include getting customers to sign up to download a PDF leaflet, white paper or infographic.

A lead magnet is effectively an incentive for someone to sign up to your email list. The more attractive the incentive, the more likely you are to get people signing up. For instance, rather than just inviting people to sign up for your mailing list for news, you can offer them a downloadable PDF case study or market analysis which will make them feel they are getting something in return for signing up.

So what is a good way to put together a lead magnet, and what types are most likely to work for you?

How To Create a Lead Magnet That Works

In creating a lead magnet it’s important to understand what appeals to your email subscribers. I general a led magnet will work best if it offers some instant result for users, and demonstrates your unique value proposition in the market.

Your lead magnet should be short and specific rather than long and general it must be possible to digest quickly and must give a quick result. First identify what your customers need, then work out how to give it to them immediately.

Here are some good ideas for the contents of a lead magnet:

• A recipe. If you are in the food business, it’s surprising how appealing a recipe can be to your customers.
• A ‘cheat sheet’ or checklist. A simple step-by-step list which makes some process easier to navigate – perhaps a can maintenance job or a DIY technique
• A report – a collection of data or statistics relevant to your industry
• A webinar – a live internet lecture always has a high perceived value. Later you can offer a video or audio version based on the webinar.
• A quiz. Always popular and easy to put together using tools like Qzzr.
• A survey. Both gives you valuable market research material, and acts as an inducement for people to sign up to your mailing list.
• Free catalogues. For people on the bottom of your ‘sales funnel’, a free catalogue is a no-brainer.

All these and many more types of lead magnet can be used to induce people to sign up for your mailing list, and are among the very best ways to increase subscriptions to your mailing list at minimal cost.

What Is an Opt-in form?

When you are compiling an email marketing list it’s essential to get consent to add people to the list of email subscribers. The ‘opt-in’ is a form of consent acknowledging interest in a product or service and authorising you as a third party to contact them with further information such as newsletters and brochures.

You can present an opt-in form in many ways – as a pop-up form, a dedicated page, or a button on a webpage – but according to the new GDPR regulations governing data protection in Europe, there are also ways you are not allowed to collect email data, such as presenting a pre-ticked form that assumes consent. The new regulation requires that brands collect affirmative consent that is “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous” to be compliant.

How To Create a Successful Opt-in Form

According to Marketo.com, 95 percent of visitors to your website are not ready to buy from it the first time – in fact it takes on average three to four visits for prospects to turn into sales. That’s why it’s essential to capture their email data and add it to your list by submitting an opt-in form.

There are a few key skills to creating a successful opt-in form. First, it has to be visually appealing – you may have as little as 15 seconds to grab the attention of your website visitor, so your form needs to stand out. Use directional design cues to point to the Call to Action button, and don’t forget to emphasise your lead magnet.

Keep the number of form fields to a minimum, concentrating on qualifying data, and validate fields once they are completed. Add help text to explain why each piece of information is being collected, and example ‘ghost text’ to show the format each form should be filled in.

Make sure your opt-in form is placed above the fold on the page, and make your CTA button stand out in colour.

If you have problems designing your opt-in form, WordPress plugins like OptinForms can help.

How Do You Create Email Marketing Content?

The main trick to writing email marketing content that will appeal to your email subscribers is to make it look like something your users want to read, not like unwanted spam. With that in mind there are a few email marketing tips to remember:

1. The subject line is crucial .

Nothing kills your email open rate quicker than a poor subject line. The trick is to make it short, compelling, direct, and different. Address the reader directly, include action words, and ideally include their name in the subject line. Keep the subject line related to the copy, and make sure it’s relevant to your reader and to your marketing aims.

2. Write in the second person.

The second person voice – for example ‘To make soup you need a large pot and a blender’ – works much better than first person, for instance ‘I make soup using a large pot and a blender’. The second person voice makes it clear that the message is aimed at the reader.

3. Keep your message short.

You will lose your readers’ interest if the message is too long, and there’s the risk that you will stray off-topic. Don’t send out an email just for the sake of it – make sure you have a good reason otherwise it may be regarded as spam and you risk readers unsubscribing.

4. Explain the benefits of your product.

Rather than listing its features, explain the benefits first. This makes it easier for your readers to understand why it is unique and special – once they understand this, then they will be interested in reading about the features.

5. Don’t be afraid to display your personality.

You can differentiate yourself from your competitors by showing personality in your marketing emails. Keep it professional, but don’t hold back from showing why you are different.

How Do You Create an Effective Promotional Email?

An effective promotional email is one that readers receive, open, read, respond to the CTA, and which eventually converts into a sale. But how can you guarantee all these steps?

We’ve dealt with the importance of compiling an effective mailing list and of segmenting it. So let’s assume your message has got to the people you want it to. Now how do get them to open it? The first barrier may not be the subject line – it may be your email address. If your sender name is unclear or looks spammy, according to Convince & Convert, up to 43 percent of recipients may delete it immediately. So make sure your sender address is your company name, or maybe that and your own name.

The next barrier to opening is the subject line. We’ve discussed some ways to optimise this; try to keep it between six and 10 words (particularly important for mobile devices where the whole subject line may not be visible); personalise it; and avoid spammy phrases such as ‘Savings’, ‘Clearance”, “Deals” or “Exclusive”. These may be filtered out by ISP and so may never make it to your recipient’s inbox.

Keep your copy short and compelling, and edit it ruthlessly – once you’re written it, go through it carefully and eliminate anything unnecessary.

Above all try to make your content sell without being too salesy; Enchanting Marketing says “Dirty sales tactics are designed for selling to strangers. Treat your buyers like friends. Be genuine. Be helpful. Be lovable. Make their life better.”

Another form of email marketing is ‘drip marketing’. Drip marketing is a communication strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to customers or prospects over time. Though drip marketing principles can also be applied to social media, normally the medium used is email. In email drip marketing, the messages are automated and timed according to specific behaviours of the recipient. Email drip marketing is often used in conjunction with a webform to create an autoresponder.

What Is An Email Marketing Software?

Email marketing software solutions such as Mailchimp help you to plan and execute and email marketing campaign, the monitor its results and modify the campaign accordingly. Though some have free trials, most work on a paid subscription basis. Ask some email marketing services which they think would work best for your business.

Email marketing software functions can include email building, scheduling, automation, reporting and analytics. Email marketing software will automate the exhausting manual processes of list preparation, creation of segregated subgroups, sending the actual emails, and creating feedback reports.

One of the most valuable functions of email marketing software is that it helps you to split-test campaigns, sending different versions to separate list groups and reporting (in real time I you need) on responses, maximising your return on investment.

Software will also analyse your click-through rate (CTR). Once you have got users to open your emails, the next worry is your CTR, the percentage who actually click on a link in your email, usually to go to your website. According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), email CTR is the most important email marketing metric for 70 percent of marketers, and the most popular way for them to measure the success of their email marketing campaigns.

Some of the various functions of email marketing software include WYSIWYG email builders, mailing list management tools, A/B testing tools, merge tagging (which lets you replace elements in your email with data from a list, for instance to insert your customer’s name in the message), autoresponders, which can be set to send targeted content to your mailing groups based on activity, CRM (Customer Relationship Management) integration, and social media integration.

For instance, Campaign Monitor is an effective e-mail marketing platform with functions including an e-mail builder, analytics including subscriber activity, and acquisition trend analysis. Campaign Monitor offers a range of price plans from $9 per month, depending on the number of users and messages per month you have. Campaign Monitor also has a premium option adding an email design consultant, online training and onboarding, and dedicated customer support, which includes priority phone and email. But, as they say, other email marketing platforms are available, so apart from Campaign Monitor what are some of the most popular email marketing software tools?

One of the most useful applications for software tools is in CRM email marketing. CRM email marketing integrates your marketing tools with your customer relationship management, so for instance you can query your contact database to quickly create targeted email campaigns to segmented groups. CRM email marketing also helps you to grow your contacts base through response form on your website.

10 Best Email Marketing Tools and Software

1. ActiveCampaign

An email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation, and CRM software platform for small-to-mid-sized businesses. ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing and sales automation software with features for email marketing, lead scoring and web analytics, a CRM platform, and a live chat messaging platform called Conversations.

2. Constant Contact

A comprehensive suite of email marketing tools including a drag-and-drop editor, mobile-optimised templates, automatic welcome emails, subject line testing, and content segmentation based on clicks.

3. MailChimp

A popular marketing automation platform and email marketing service moving towards becoming a full marketing platform aimed at smaller organisations.

4. GetResponse

An email marketing and online campaign management platform for building targeted subscriber lists and sending newsletters, video emails, and follow-up campaigns. It offers marketing automation, responsive email design, email templates, a landing page creator, and useful statistical analysis tools.

5. SendInBlue

A web-based ‘software as a service’ (SaaS) solution for relationship marketing, featuring  email marketing, transactional email, marketing automation, customer-relationship management, landing pages, Facebook ads, retargeting ads, SMS marketing, and more.

6. ConvertKit

An automation marketing platform featuring advanced email marketing functionality, tag-based list segmentation, visual automation flows, opt-in forms and detailed reporting , aimed at the small business owner and digital creatives such as bloggers.

7. Hubspot

HubSpot provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics, landing pages, customer support and search engine optimization, and has integration features for salesforce.com, SugarCRM, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and others.

8. Ontraport

Offers customer relations management services that help with content management, such as creating and hosting webpages; lead tracking, e-mail, SMS, social media, and direct mail; managing online payments, including automated billing; and workflow automation, such as for recruiting

9. Aweber

Comparable to Getresponse, a tool for hosting your mailing list, creating attractive email templates, sending e-newsletters out to subscribers and automating your communications to subscribers via ‘autoresponders’.

10. Drip

A CRM designed for e-commerce including custom opt-in pop-ups, automated lead magnet delivery, Facebook Lead Ads, visual emails, automated workflows, and personalization functions

TRON Media can help with all your email marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in emal marketing, SEO, PPC, website design services, website security, social media marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing and digital strategy, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build an email marketing campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading email marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that email marketing works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest email marketing services, web design services, social media marketing services, and what an email marketing campaign can do for your brand awareness and ROI.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post A Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing appeared first on TronMedia.

Certainly social media is a very cost-effective way to differentiate yourself from your competitors, and when used properly it is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing and should help you to maximise conversions at a low cost compared to other techniques. Use of social networking sites to communicate with followers is growing fast so they can only be of greater importance in the digital marketing field.

But what exactly is social media marketing, and what goals can social media marketing services help you achieve?

What Is Social Media Marketing?

Social media services and websites were not initially created with marketing in mind – they were designed to make it easier for people to have conversations with each other online. But once these networks became established, it became easy for a social media marketing strategy to  be put in place to market products, services and brand names to the users of the various channels.

Of the social media sites, the best known and biggest with around 2.4b users is Facebook. Despite its size and international reach, Facebook is particularly valuable for marketing local businesses such as restaurants, hotels, entertainment outlets, beauticians, and healthcare outlets.

Facebook makes it very easy for you to set up an online Store for your business – using an ecommerce platform such as BigCommerce, you can sync your product catalogue, manage your sales and inventory, communicate with customers and handle orders in one place. Having a Facebook store helps you to sell directly to your customers, at the same time as building your social media community. This form of social media advertising is probably the most popular and effective, so despite its origins Facebook is an excellent example of social media for business purposes

With over a billion users, Instagram appeals to a younger audience than Facebook, and uses mainly visual images. Instagram relies heavily on user-generated content, but is particularly popular with companies in the fashion and design industries, where high quality photographic images can help to establish your brand.

Twitter has around 126 million daily users, and unlike the other platforms serves both consumer and business audiences, so it gives you a channel for both B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business-to-consumer marketing.

LinkedIn, which has around 500m members, is largely used as a networking platform for business professionals, so its main use is for sharing ideas and resources and getting in touch with other people working in your industry.

There are many other social media channels, such as WhatsApp, Tumblr, Pinterest, Reddit, Flickr, TikTok, Foursquare, Snapchat, and of course YouTube, some designed mainly for sharing images and video, others for sharing local interests. Some of them have a large following, but this is no guarantee they will be around forever – for instance Kik is closing its messaging service which was launched in 2010.

Using competitive benchmarking it’s possible to measure how effective your social media marketing is compared that that of your competitors – so it is not only an inexpensive way of promoting your business, it is also a means of getting information about your rivals.

How Social Media Marketing Works

In these days of sophisticated social media marketing services, it’s no longer enough just to post an image and some information about your products on your website. To be competitive, your social network marketing has to engage with your potential customer base, and encourage a sense of community – social media marketing is about conversations rather than just being a one-way street..

You must set yourself goals, develop strategies, measure results, and adjust your social media advertising plans to suit. Social media channels are a good way to meet all these requirements.

There are several aims you might want to achieve using social networking sites.

A straightforward one is to increase your number of engagements; this is extremely measurable using social media through the number of likes, shares, clicks, comments, and mentions of your products and brand online.

Another target could be to increase your reach – that is to say the number of followers you have for your social media pages, and the amount of traffic and impressions you get for your website via social media services.

Social media also has benefits in terms of lowering your costs per lead, resolving customer issues, and adding value to your followers’ experience.

Ultimately, of course, the aim of using social media marketing is to increase conversions, and to improve your sales revenue, so social media for business remains an essential tool for marketing.

It’s important to realise that while social media services are normally free to use, it’s also wise to invest money in the growing area of paid social. With paid social on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, advertisers can target specific individuals based on their likes, gender, age and interests.

Unlike paid search, which normally serves only text ads, paid social advertising can deliver visual ads which vastly help improve the click rate and interaction from users. There is also the option to allow users to comment on and like the ads, which makes paid social a valuable channel for interaction and less intrusive for the customer.

Social media also gives you useful information allowing you to improve your CTR (click through rate). The factors affecting your CTR can include the keywords you use in your posts, the images, the positioning of ads and the effectiveness of your call-to-action copy. CTR compares the number of impressions you ad gets (the number of times it is viewed) with the actual number of clicks you get, so CTR is one of the most important social media metrics. You can do the calculations yourself, but there are tools such as Sprout Social which will calculate your CTR for you.

Reach and impressions are of course different metrics; reach tells you how many people see your content, while impressions measures how many times the content is displayed – one person added to your reach could have had multiple impressions of your post, possibly from different sources.

If you have a Facebook ‘Fan Page’ (a business rather than a personal profile, which is open to anyone), you can use Facebook Insights to track user interaction. Facebook Insights can be accessed by administrators of your Fan Page, and helps you track the activities of users. Using Facebook Insights you can work out what type of content is the most popular, and the days and times its’s best to post. The Facebook Insights tool is constantly updated, so it repays regular checking.

It’s also possible to make sponsored posts on Facebook, paying to ‘boost’ them to a wider audience. Sponsored posts look exactly the same as an ordinary post in a user’s newsfeed, except that they are labelled as sponsored posts. As the organic reach on Facebook is only about 1.2 percent, unless you make sponsored posts, you will not be reaching a very wide audience; sponsored posts from a Facebook business page can either be created specially, or you can choose to sponsor an existing post.

Hashtags can also be used in social media to generate exposure and engage with relevant audiences. While they serve to label your content and make it discoverable, hashtags also encourage audience engagement if used right. It’s a mistake to overuse hashtags – Instagram has a limit of 30 per post, but it’s much better to stick to a smaller selection, making sure to avoid very obvious hashtags which attract spammers and ‘me too’ followers. Using very generic hashtags will just result in your post being lost among thousands of others – look for relevant trending hashtags instead.

How Social Media Marketing Helps Businesses

The main ways in which social media marketing helps business are that it refines the audience you are connecting to, and enables two-way conversations. Social media marketing services help you to find your customers, to understand them, and to find out what they are interested in. For instance, using social media marketing it’s relatively easy to establish facts about your customers such as their age, gender, educational level, occupation, location, and hobbies, all useful in a marketing strategy.

Another valuable aspect of social media advertising is that it can be used to identify your competitors, and to make use of their ideas. Everything from the timing of their Twitter posts to the numbers of followers they have tells you something about how well their campaigns are working, and how they are better than yours – you need to differentiate your marketing, while at the same time learning what works for your competitors. Keeping an eye on your competitors’ social media channels is almost as important as maintaining your own.

This form of competitive benchmarking can be done using online software tools such as Quintly. All you have to do is to add the pages or profiles you want to track and compare, and Quintly imports all the public data available and allows you to use its inbuilt metrics or define your own with its dashboard. Competitive benchmarking of social media gives you a better idea of whether your interaction rate is typical for your industry.

To manage your social media marketing, you may want to use a software tool such as Hootsuite. Hootsuite is a social media KPI reporting tool has features which allow you schedule your social media posts (useful for working in different timezones), to manage content, track and improve ROI, and find and filter social media conversation by hashtags and keywords. Hootsuite is available for a free 30-day trial, and costs from £25 a month for up to 10 social profiles and one user. Hootsuite is also available in Team, Business and Enterprise forms for heavier users. Other social media KPI tools include Socialbakers, Zoho Social, Buffer, Agorapulse and Coosto.

Five Benefits Of Social Media Marketing

There are many benefits to social media marketing, and no real downsides, so it makes sense for businesses of all types and sizes to try it. But what are the essential benefits of this increasing popular form of digital marketing?

1. Improved Brand Awareness and Visibility

As the most cost-effective method of getting your company’s brand publicised, social media marketing will improve your visibility without unreasonable expense. It’s easy to set up a social media presence, perhaps with the help of social media marketing services, and you can gather an early selection of ‘likes’ and followers from your own employees, sponsors and business partners.

Sharing content through social media services widens your network and increases your customer base, all contributing to improved brand awareness.

2. SEO Win and Increased Traffic

You social media presence improves your search engine rankings, driving traffic to your website and increasing engagement and conversions. The impact of social media signals such as likes, reviews, shares, pins and links to SEO is not direct, but is definite; social media certainly improves your local SEO, and will affect online visibility, brand recognition and content lifespan.

High quality content such as blogs, infographics and videos featuring your targeted keywords will help create a social media community and build links to industry influencers, all of which will improve search engine rankings.

3. Customer Satisfaction and Improved Brand Loyalty

Using social media to manage conversations with your customers gives your company a human face. By responding personally to messages on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn rather than through an automated message, you can show that you respond to your customers’ needs and requests, and that you want them to have a good experience of dealing with your company. Through social network marketing you can turn problems into opportunities by demonstrating through your social media marketing that you care about your customers’ satisfaction and will respond to their enquiries.

4. Increased Brand Authority and Free Advertising

The more you post on social media the more credible your company appears to be, and as your brand loyalty grows, your customers will start to post about you too – providing you with free endorsements and building your brand authority. Social media marketing services will be able to advise you on the sort of content and channels you need to use to exploit this opportunity.

5. Obtain Marketplace Insights

By talking to your customers directly you can obtain market insights which you would otherwise have to pay to research. Apart from direct interaction, you can also use software tools to analyse your followers’ activities, helping you to segment your content syndication lists, measure conversions based on posts, and tailor your marketing campaigns to generate the maximum revenue.

Why Social Media Marketing Is Important For Small Businesses

In some ways, small businesses are at an advantage over their larger rivals when using social media marketing, because success in social media marketing does not boil down to how many followers you have, but to how effectively you engage with your customers. It’s easier to do this when your business is small enough to be able to interact with its customers via social media.

As well as engaging with current customers, social media is a good way for small businesses to attract new customers.

A study as long ago as 2016 showed that 90 percent of marketers said social media was important to their business, and 82 percent of the survey participants worked in small businesses, that is with less than 100 employees.

By focussing on the community and the individual through social media marketing, small businesses can enjoy the local advantage, and in the same way they may be able to partner with other local businesses on joint marketing campaigns.

Using Google Analytics, it’s easy to combine data from your website with social media data, giving you the tools to drive traffic to your website. Google Analytics shows you what sort of content your audience responds to, and which social media sites they are using. A social media agency will show you how this data can result in increased leads and prove the ROI of social media.

Google Analytics helps you to track vital social media KPIs easily, so even a small business can gather useful data such as which websites your leads come from, whether your followers are using mobile or desktop platforms, their location and so on.

By responding quickly to customers’ queries, and encouraging them to post comment and pictures on your company’s social media, your social network marketing can cultivate current and potential customers or your business, and do it without the expense of a conventional marketing campaign.

What Is A Social Media Marketing Strategy?

Social media marketing (SMM) is similar to any other kind of marketing, except that it uses social media platforms, networks and applications to promote brand awareness for your company, or to publicise specific products, services or events.

The first step in a social media marketing strategy is to establish a presence on the major platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, and to add links from your main website.

By creating shareable content and advertorial materials, you then start to add followers who post their own feedback. You can promote this behaviour using competitions, surveys and so on.

A social media marketing strategy is by definition targeted, because you know it is reaching customers who are interested in your products or services. It also gives an immediate connection between company and customer, with added value because the campaigns are usually discovered through trusted sources.

Data derived from a social media marketing campaign is particularly valuable because it can be used to target messages to very specific audiences, providing an excellent return on investment.

While it’s straightforward to set up your own social media presence, a social media agency will explain some of the more tricky aspects of managing social media sites.

It’s important to realise that social media metrics are one of the most valuable aspects of SMM. Your social media metrics will help you determine the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and their ROI. Tracking the right KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is the important part of this technique. There are basic KPIs, such as numbers of followers and likes, but beyond that are equally valuable KPIs such as new traffic to your website, better lead generation, and more brand awareness. The KPIs for social media will tell you whether you are reaching and engaging with qualified people, and whether you are turning enquiries into sales.

Social media marketing will tell you if you have a large reach but poor engagement, a sign that your message is wrong. It will also give you valuable feedback on the effectiveness of your content – for instance as your content receives more interactions, Facebook will filter it out to more users, and Twitter will present it in larger font sizes.

It’s important to understand that there is always an argument for both organic social media and paid social content as part of your digital marketing mix. Organic social media helps to build loyalty in customers, and to turn them into advocates or your brand, while paid social media advertising is necessary to maintain your competitiveness with rivals. Effectively, paid social efforts help potential customers to find you, while organic social media helps them to get to know your brand. Of course organic social media is not completely without cost – it takes time and probably money to create content – but organic social media is certainly cost-effective.

How To Create A Social Media Marketing Strategy?

There are five main steps in developing a social media marketing strategy.

• Define your goals

What are you aiming to do? – to build brand awareness, increase sales, or just to drive more customers to your bricks-and-mortar store? Set your definitions of a successful campaign – for instance a 50 percent increase in traffic, an  increase in sales of £100,000, or an added 10,000 followers on Instagram. Make sure that these aims for your social media marketing tie in with the other aspects of your marketing operation.

• Plan

In this stage you need to research your customers and competitors, finding out what campaigns have worked well in the past, and just as importantly, what have not.

• Assign resources

Decide the budget, personnel and contributors you will need for your social media marketing campaign. At this stage you want to take on a social media marketing agency, which can advise you on all aspects of your campaign.

• Promote your campaign

Depending on the size of your business, you may need to promote your campaign outside your existing social media platforms. You might consider adding an e-mail marketing element to your campaign, using social media influencers to promote it, or sharing the campaign with your business partners.

• Analyse

Once the campaign is over, it’s essential to analyse the results to determine its effectiveness, and measure its success against previously established targets, such as

• Website traffic
• Increased sales or profits
• Improved reach

Social media marketing services can help you to plan this process, then implement a strategy and analyse and report on the results.

It’s important to coordinate your web and social media campaigns so you can benefit from processes such as retargeting. Retargeting is defined as connecting you with shoppers who have already visited your social media channels while they are browsing elsewhere on the web. Retargeting reaches out to potential customer you already know are interested in your products, and luring them back, perhaps with an offer or discount. Both Facebook and Instagram support retargeting with a variety of options starting by dropping a cookie when the customer visits your social media platform.

Why Social Media Marketing Is Effective

There are many reasons why marketing through social media is effective, not the least being that you can be pretty sure your customers are using social media – there are around 42m Facebook users in the UK alone, and by 2021 the worldwide number of social media users is expected to reach about 3.1 billion. Many of these users check social media every day, so it’s the ideal way to reach them.

What’s more, customers like being reached out to via social media – they use the platforms for fun and entertainment, so if you offer them enjoyable content, they will respond to your marketing campaign. Social media for business has the advantage that it needn’t look overtly commercial.

You can encourage this behaviour by running competitions, offering deals, providing information and giving your customer a way to learn more about your company.

These provide authentic connections with your leads and customers, rather than just delivering direct marketing messages. This is something that consumers are generally more responsive to.

While marketing through social media is effective at increasing brand recognition, it will also increase inbound traffic to your website, resulting in increased conversions and sales. Encouraging this with regular, high quality content postings brings you new customers at much less cost than other forms of marketing.

By using different social media platforms for different types of customer, you can target your audience according to your overall marketing strategy. The data you collect through social media will help you to plan this and will increase your chance of conversions. Facebook, for instance, allows you to serve your advertising content to users who show the same sort of behaviour your target audience does.

One of the major advantages of social media marketing is that it has minimal costs other than those of creating content. It’s also not very time intensive – HubSpot reported that 84 percent of marketers found they could increase their traffic with as little as six hours per week of effort spent on their social media.

By using unpublished or ‘dark posts’ (ads on social media which show as sponsored content in the feeds of targeted users, but which don’t appear on your timeline or on your followers’ feeds), you can target marketing messages at a specific audience. Dark posts can be used to target users based on the same variables as regular targeted ads, or using specific keywords such as job titles. In this way, dark posts can be customised to each audience segment, with them only seeing the ads designed for them. Dark posts open up major opportunities for A/B testing, by analysing which get the most engagements, clicks, or conversions.

One of the hottest trends in social media marketing at the moment is ephemeral data. This is any content, usually pictures or video, which disappears after a short time. Instagram is the natural home of ephemeral data – it usually disappears after 24 hours. The advantage of using ephemeral data is that it creates FOMO – Fear Of Missing Out. Users will keep looking at your social media page because they are afraid they will miss something. Even Instagram’s logo (a stylised ghost) emphasises the importance of ephemeral data.

Social media marketing is also ideal for geotargeting (delivering content only to users in a specific geographical location or locations). Geotargeting, (and its related technique geofencing, which delivers ads when a user physically approaches a given location), can work through search engines or banner ads, for instance, but is equally applicable to social media. Social media geotargeting is ideal for local businesses, which can identify users by their interests, then aim location specific ads at them.

And as a final bonus, your social media marketing will improve your search engine rankings. In fact your social media profiles may well show up on the first page of Google, so it’s important to keep them updated, relevant and engaging.

What Does a Social Media Marketing Agency Do?

The prime activity of a social media marketing agency is to create and organise content, then schedule and post it on appropriate channels.

But the secondary activity, and the one which really gives social media marketing its value, is to analyse and report on the responses to those social media posts.

In other words, a social media marketing agency works to collect data which is useful in the broader marketing campaign, allowing its client to direct resources accordingly.

A social media marketing agency can report on simple data, such as the number of followers a company has on its social media pages, and it can give valuable insights into actual revenue generated via social media.

A good social media marketing agency will understand that the value of social media is the repeating of “positive micro-interactions” on a large scale, and that your social media content is only as good as what you have to say – you need an exciting point of view and a relevant product for your social media to have any value.

The services of a social media marketing agency can include content creation and publishing, responding to customer messages, contacting influencers, creating partnerships with other businesses, and managing website retargeting.

Other functions can include growing accounts through active engagement, running chatbots, building mailing lists, and of course reacting to changes and innovations in social media.

A social media agency would advise you on which social networking sites to target, which are the best types of social media for business, how to add followers, and how to contact influencers.

By getting to know your brand, developing a social media strategy based on its goals and reporting on the results of that strategy, a social media marketing agency can become an essential part of your overall marketing plan.

TRON Media can help with all your social media marketing requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in social media marketing, SEO, PPC, website design services, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing and digital strategy, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading social media marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that social media marketing works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest social media marketing services, web design services, email marketing services, and what a social media marketing campaign can do for your brand awareness and Google ranking.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post The Ultimate Guide To Social Media Marketing appeared first on TronMedia.

If the secret of how to rank higher on Google was a simple one, everyone would be doing it – the fact is that it’s not a matter of one simple technique, such as search engine optimisation or paid traffic. Obviously the benefits of SEO are huge, but Google’s algorithms are not always entirely obvious; many websites have put enormous effort into SEO only to find that some change in the way their Google ranking is calculated puts them at the bottom of the SERPs. 

The algorithms determining search engine ranking sometimes change in large, obvious ways, such as when Google announced that websites with links to social media, local SEO, or sites configured for mobile use would be ranked higher; sometimes the changes are more subtle and only a good deal of work using Google Analytics and other tools will give an insight into what has changed.    

So, there isn’t a single answer on how to get higher on Google search, but in fact a whole raft of techniques to improve your search engine ranking. Let’s take a look at the most valuable ones that might be recommended by an SEO agency.

How To Rank Higher On Google in 10 Simple Steps

1. Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the art and science of improving your Google ranking by using keywords appropriate to the market and customers your website is appealing to. The first step in doing this is keyword research, using tools such as Soovle, Moz and Google Search Console.

Each of these tools is designed to find keywords which work for your market. The way SEO works means that popular keywords are often unavailable because they are bought up by large companies with big marketing budgets. This way of generating paid traffic can be an expensive solution to the problem of how to get higher on Google Search, so smaller companies use keyword search to find less popular but still useful keywords. 

Keyword search tools each tend to have a unique selling point; Google Search Console, for instance, has particularly good performance report functions, listing the pages on your site that get the most clicks from Google and the and the exact keywords that brought them there.

The Moz Keyword Explorer is very good at finding “lateral” keyword ideas, and will also estimate the number of clicks you will receive if your website features in the top 10 on the SERPs. The downside with Moz Keyword Explorer is that it is part of a whole suite of paid-for keyword tools.

2. Produce High Quality, Engaging, and Relevant Content

Content is king so far as SEO is concerned – when Google’s web crawlers find your page, they check many aspects such as page site speed, backlinks and technical SEO (title tag, meta description, domain name and so on) – but the most important aspect in terms of how to get higher on Google search is content quality.

Content quality is harder to measure than conventional content metrics such as page views, unique views, and social media traction. These will tell you size of audience, distribution strategy effectiveness, and SEO spend, but don’t necessarily reveal the impact of content quality on audience engagement.

Content scoring, the process of assessing and quantifying the true potential of content by tracking how individual content pieces perform in generating and converting leads, is the objective method of assessment for writing.

Content scoring using tools such as Hubspot and Atomic AI measure aspects such as consistency, tone of voice and even emotional intensity, and can help you to choose successful topics and generate headlines.

Yoast SEO, one of the most popular tools for optimising your site and its pages for search engines, is a plugin for WordPress. Yoast SEO helps you to optimize your content as you’re writing it  – features include a Block Editor, where you can

insert the word or phrase you want to optimize the page for – the “focus keyphrase” – and see a readability analysis. The checks in this tab help you write better copy. Yoast SEO has ‘freemium’ and ‘premium’ versions and is in use on over 5m WordPress websites.

3. Create Relevant Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

Creating relevant title tags and meta descriptions is one of the most essential elements of technical SEO. The title tag, an HTML tag that sits in the head section of each webpage, provides the initial information as to the subject of the page, and features prominently in the search engine results pages (typically used as the clickable link), as well as in the browser window. It isn’t otherwise visible to the user, but is a crucial aspect so far as Google’s search engine ranking is concerned. When you are optimising your title tags, remember where the page fits in the overall hierarchy of the website, becoming more specific as you get deeper into the website. When several pages have the same tag, those tags are of no use to the search engine.

One useful search engine optimisation technique is to put a call to action in your title tag; as this is what shows on the SERPs, the message featured here can impact on the searcher’s decision whether or not to click through to your site.

The HTML meta description tag is a 160-character snippet used to summarize a web page’s content. Search engines can use these snippets in search results to tell visitors what a page is about before they click on it, so while meta description tags are not important to search engine rankings, they can be extremely important in gaining user click-through from SERPs. The short met description is the webmaster’s chance to advertise content to searchers, and tell them exactly what they can expect to find on the page.

4. Take Advantage Of Google Analytics and Google Search Console

There are lots of good reasons to take advantage of Google Analytics, and not just because it’s free (big companies can pay $150,000 a year to use pro version Google 360, but the standard free version is plenty for most of us).

Google Analytics can track, record, and report your website’s key metrics, so at the very least you can check how much traffic your website is getting, find out where your users are coming from, and measure how they interact with your website. As part of your quest to improve your search engine ranking, Google Analytics is an essential tool.

Google Search Console is equally essential in helping you to maintain and optimise your website. Google Search Console helps you understand and improve how Google sees your site, confirming that Google can find and crawl it, fixing indexing problems and requesting re-indexing of new or updated content, displaying Google Search traffic data, and delivering alerts when there are indexing, spam, or other issues on your site. Google Search Console also shows you which sites link to your website, and troubleshoots issues for AMP (accelerated mobile pages), mobile usability, and other search engine ranking features.

5. Optimize Your Website For Mobile

On which subject, another essential for how to rank higher on Google is optimising your website for mobile use.

Since the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, the trend towards mobile search has been inescapable, and in 2016 mobile website views surpassed desktop views for the first time. Now Google actually penalizes websites that don’t feature a mobile-optimized version, so supporting mobile browsers is no longer just best practice, it’s a vital element in how to rank higher on Google.

If you have a WordPress site, there are plenty of functions such as the plug-in Jetpakk and WPTouch designed to make your site function well on mobile devices.

There is a choice of approaches available – you can either create a mobile-only site which functions only on mobile devices, or a responsive site which switches themes according to the device used, changing text sizes, image sizes, layout and so on to optimise the user experience according to device used.

6. Improve Your Page Load Speed

Another essential for how to rank higher on Google is to improve your page load speed. Research by Yottaa shows that one additional second of load time reduces conversions by seven percent. Improving page load speed resulted in 62 percent  more conversions for US Xpress, and Bidu grew leads 30 percent by reducing average full page load times from 13 seconds to 2.3 seconds. The average time it takes to fully load a mobile landing page is 22 seconds, but 53 percent of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load.

There are many ways to improve your search engine ranking by speeding up your page load time, many of them extremely technical. This is where the help of an SEO agency may be necessary.

Among the techniques they can try are:

• Minimizing HTTP requests – around 80 percent of a web page’s load time is sent downloading elements such as images, stylesheets and scripts, so the more on-page components, the longer it takes for the page to render. Use Google Developer Tools to figure out how many requests your site makes, and work on combining and minifying your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files.
• Defer Javascript loading until after other elements of the page have loaded, and set files to load asynchronously (simultaneously) so they aren’t queuing to load.
• Minimize ‘time to first byte’ (TTFB) by looking at network issues and web server configuration and enabling caching.
• Reduce server response time by checking the speed of your DNS provider, and consider paying more for faster VPS hosting or dedicated hosting rather than cheaper shared hosting.
• Run a compression audit to make sure your files are as small as possible – particularly image files.
• Use external hosting platforms for large files such as videos.

7. Create Videos

On the subject of videos, another solution to the question of how to get higher on Google search is to include compelling video material on your website. The Red Website Design blog gives the following reasons why:

• The art of selling is about storytelling, and videos are the best way to share a story
• Videos keep people engaged with your website longer and involve them more with your content
• Videos give you the opportunity to engage person to person
• No matter what your product or service is, videos keep your audience interested,
• Videos are a fast and convenient way to deliver information
• According to research, 85 percent of people are more likely to buy a product once they see an accompanying explainer video

So far as search engine optimisation is concerned, your Google ranking will be improved by using videos because Google now displays video in their search results, boosting your chances of being found for certain keywords. Google ranking is influenced by the freshness and relevance of content, so sites which are test-heavy and rarely updated will rank lower than well-designed ones with regular new content including videos.

8. Optimize For Voice Search

As with mobile search, voice search using products such as Alexa, Siri and Google Assistant is becoming more popular – Andrew Ng of Baidu claimed that by 2019, 50 percent of searches would be made by voice or image. While smart speakers aren’t taking off quite as quickly as he predicted, speech recognition is improving, and Google introduced the concept of more speech-based searches in it Hummingbird update in 2013. But voice search still has limited applications – for instance it is more likely to be used when the searcher is driving or watching TV, or looking for a local business. Ask yourself whether voice search is relevant to your business and your customers, and don’t emphasise it over the basics of SEO.

9. Create High-Quality Backlinks

SEO expert Matthew Barby finds that “On average, the higher up page 1 the result is, the greater the number of linking domains that the webpage has. Webpages ranking #1 had an average of 168 percent more linking domains than those ranking #5.” In other words, backlinks – links to your website from other websites – really matter to your Google ranking.

Building backlinks from authoritative websites can be difficult – if no-one knows who you are, why should they link to you? Link building is an art in itself – Matthew Barby suggests starting by using a tool like Ahrefs to analyse your ratio of backlinks to linking domains. “If you find that your backlinks are mainly coming from a small pool of domains, look at a way to diversify your backlink strategy to get links from a greater variety of domains” he says. “Work on acquiring backlinks that have your keyword present within the anchor text of the link” is another essential piece of advice – and because high ranking webpages in Google tend to have shorter URLs, he suggests you “Pull a list of all the URLs and page titles from your website using a tool like Screaming Frog SEO Spider – export the data into Excel and then calculate the length of each one using a simple LEN() query. Quickly identify any page titles and shorten them down to ensure they’re as succinct as possible.”

Screaming Frog, a website crawler, allows you to crawl websites’ URLs and fetch key elements to analyse and audit technical and onsite SEO. Screaming Frog can be downloaded free, and there’s a paid-for version with advanced features such as unlimited crawls, Google Analytics integration and free technical support. Other web crawlers include Octoparse, WebCopy and HTTrack.

10. Optimize For Local SEO

Our last tip on how to get higher on Google search is to optimize for local SEO. Because Google understands that many searches (particularly mobile ones) are looking for local bricks-and-mortar businesses, it favours relevant websites containing local information. Search results using Google Maps or Google My Business are driven by three factors; proximity (taking into account the searcher’s geolocation), prominence (the number of links your website has, reviews on other sites, social media links and so on) and finally relevance (having well-structured content using correct categories). Some of the ways local SEO works can seem a little unfair – for instance having keywords for your market sector in your company name will give you an advantage.

All these techniques qualify as what is known as ‘white hat SEO’ – in other words, ethical search engine optimization strategies. White hat SEO focuses on its human audience rather than search engines, and conforms to search engine rules and policies. The opposite of white hat SEO, known as black hat SEO, involves unethical techniques such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and using private link networks. Black hat SEO techniques can result in your website being penalised by Google, and so are not advisable.

How Long Does It Take To Rank On Google?

The answer to this one is ‘longer than you might think’. You may assume that with the aid of an SEO agency and all our advice about search engine optimisation, keywords, backlinks, social media, content marketing, paid traffic and link building, you would get immediate results from and SEO campaign – certainly quicker than by relying on organic search.

In fact, your website is unlikely to feature high on SERPs for some time, even with all these techniques in play.

Organic search, otherwise known as natural search, refers to search results which are unpaid, in contrast to paid search results from pay-per-click advertising, which are generated via an auction system. Organic search results are based purely on relevance to the user’s search query, links and domain authority and other organic search ranking factors.

But relying on organic search results while your competitors use other methods such as PPC is extremely challenging.

Brent Gleeson on Forbes.com gives these estimates for the time taken to improve Google ranking by different methods:

• Pay Per Click Campaign: 90 days. “This is an average estimate, but with Pay Per Click campaigns, the bidding needs to be optimized and the copy needs to be constantly A/B tested to find the right messaging so that the client’s goals can be met. This doesn’t happen overnight. As changes are made, they need time to mature and gain traction.”
• Search Engine Optimization: 90-180 days. “SEO is one of the most mysterious aspects of digital marketing because Google holds all the cards and they are constantly changing the rules of the game. Therefore, we try to set attainable goals and manage expectations for potential success. To be frank, 90 days is being generous. 180 days is usually more realistic, and it all depends on the keywords you are trying to rank for and how competitive they are.”
• Social Media: 30 days. “You should be engaged in social listening, researching your competitors and planning your content calendar in advance. Social Media has become data-driven and needs to be tracked just like any other marketing channel. The days of posting impromptu snippets about your company like “Great time at the company breakfast this morning, ate way too much bacon…” are over. These posts need to be well thought out and targeted towards engaging in your specific audience. Social media will also play a major role in any content marketing strategies.”

Gleeson states that unrealistic expectations often cause companies to change their digital marketing campaigns before they have been given time to work. He also argues that being unable or unwilling to modify a campaign as it matures can work against it. “Even if you have hired an agency or invested in in-house staff, how do you know they are qualified or performing at optimal standards?” he says. “Key stakeholders must be aware and take ownership of critical data points. For example, if you are running PPC campaigns, you should know how to log into Adwords and check the account history and be able to follow the modifications being made to the account. This should be the same with any aspects of digital. Know the terms, the KPI’s and best practices. If you don’t have the time then you should find someone who does – hire a consultant to run audits every month and help weed out unqualified work.”

How Do I Increase My Visibility On Google?

Jia Wertz, CEO of ethical fashion brand Studio 15, gives the following tips for how to rank higher on Google:

1. Create A Link Building Strategy

Think of backlinks as a ‘vote of recommendation’ for your site. Start your link-building strategy as early as possible, because it could take months for Google to update your ranking and for you to get the benefits of your link-building efforts.

2. Increase Your Site Speed

Slow loading websites have very poor bounce rates, the number of visitors who come to the landing page then click right off it. Test your page site speed and optimise it and you will get immediate benefits in a lower bounce rate and improved engagement.

3. Update Your Site Frequently

Google likes fresh material and will penalise your website if it does not have new content posted regularly. A blog is the most obvious way to do this, giving your customers a reason to return to your site regularly and improving your search ranking.

4. Optimize For Long-Tail Keywords

While it’s often difficult for new websites to compete for top keywords, long-tail keywords (phrases with three words or more) popular can be easier to rank for.

There are other important techniques – such as content marketing, guest-blogging on other websites, developing social media campaigns and encouraging customers to leave online reviews – all of which will help you to gain the benefits of SEO and ultimately improve your website visibility and ROI.

Four Tips To Help You improve Your Business’s Ranking On Google

The first step in improving your businesses ranking on Google is to use Google’s own free tools to review your current search ranking. Bear  in mind that if you search for your own website, you won’t necessarily get the same results as anyone else – your searches are personalised and are affected by your search history. Sign out of your Google account, change your location setting and open a new tab for each keyword term search.

Once you have done this, create a technical SEO audit using tools such as Moz to check bounce rates, content quality, keyword relevance and freshness, and to eliminate red flag items such as keyword stuffing, outdated themes, malware, slow loading, missing certificates, lack of a sitemap, use of Flash, over-large image files and so on. 

As we’ve said previously, you should frequently update old and outdated content – Yoast advises the following principles:

• Update old content that is still valid – if it’s ‘evergreen’ content but needs updating with new terms or policies now and again, refresh it, or perhaps merge old posts together and redirect the old post URLs to the new post, using a 301 Redirect.
• Delete irrelevant posts or pages, such as for a discontinued product or defunct supplier, or just a page with thin content – tell Google to forget about these old posts or pages or give the URL another purpose.
• “301 Redirect” an old post to a related one if the URL still holds some value such as quality links.
• Tell search engines the content is intentionally gone – if there isn’t a relevant page on your site you can redirect to, it’s best to tell Google to forget the old post entirely using a 410 Deleted notice, to avoid Google returning a 404 Not Found status.

Another important aspect is to work on your ‘domain authority’. Domain authority is a search engine ranking score developed by the SEO software company Moz, which predicts a website’s ability to rank on search engine results pages. Domain authority rating ranges from a score of 1 to 100 – the higher your score, the better your website will rank. Moz accounts for over 40 factors such as root domains and number of inbound links to calculate domain authority – websites with a large amount of high-quality inbound links have the highest domain authority, while new websites with little or no inbound links typically have a domain authority of one.

(Moz has also developed a scoring system for ‘page authority’. Rather like domain authority, page authority is scored out of 100, using data from the Mozscape web index. Moz’s page authority checker is comparative, showing you how your PA is building, so there’s no such thing as a ‘good’ or ‘bad‘ score. Both your website and individual pages can have authority conferred by links from other websites, with domain authority and page authority gained according to similar criteria.)

Finally, improve your on-page optimisation using techniques such as optimising your page titles and location information, cleaning your URLs to keep them short, simple and understandable, assigning relevant file names with keywords and alt tags to images, including title tags and met a descriptions using relevant keywords, and creating internal links.

What Are Keywords In SEO? 

Keywords are the basis of search engine optimisation, the elements which help an internet search engine to direct relevant searches to your site. Implementing keyword SEO help your site to rank above your competitors on search engine result pages. Developing a list of relevant keywords is one of the first steps in any search engine optimization initiative – the two are directly connected.

How Do I Choose The Best Keywords For SEO?

Keyword research can be a long and repetitive process, but it’s simple in principle, and is aided by the large number of free and paid-for keyword research tools available. A basic policy is that very popular keywords are likely to be too competitive for your website to benefit from using them – particularly if you are up against using paid search techniques to get their websites to the top of SERPs. In general, the best advice for keyword research is:

• Don’t do it only once. Keyword research should be a continuous process of refinement.
• Keep expanding your SEO keyword list, without targeting keywords which are too popular and competitive
• Reevaluate old keywords periodically. High-volume, competitive keywords (or “head” keywords, as opposed to long-tailed keywords) can often be replaced or augmented with longer, more specific phrases designed to bring in exactly the right visitors.
• Diversify in your use of keywords. You won’t stand out if you use the same ones as your competitors.

How Can a Digital Marketing Agency Help With SEO?

Using a digital marketing agency can bring a wealth of experience and knowledge to your campaign. While it might be easy for you to use free tools and online tutorials to make a start in launching a campaign and improving your Google ranking, you may be spending a lot of your valuable time re-inventing the wheel, or making mistakes which an agency would avoid.

Some of the things a digital marketing agency can do for you include:

• Analysing customer behaviour. You may have an understanding of your market, but do you know how a customer will navigate through the ‘sales funnel’ of your website, from landing page to checkout? A digital marketing agency will help you to plan this journey.
• Creating a story. A digital marketing agency can help you to produce quality content which will create a brand image, engage with your customers and build repeat business.
• Gathering tools. While there are many basic free software SEO tools available, others are more complicated or costly, and a digital marketing agency will have access to them and the experience to use them. Whether for e-mail marketing tools such as MailChimp or Drip, analytics tools like Google Analytics or KISSmetrics, or communication tools like Slack, these tools will help you accomplish your key tasks and will come as part of the digital marketing package.

What Do Digital Marketing Agencies Do?

The essential role of a digital marketing agency is to take on the technical, maintenance and monitoring side of your website design and administration, while working with you on the design, branding and marketing elements of your campaign. 

Unless you have the time, staff and resources to learn everything you need to know, your best route is to hire an agency which will take on the time and cost involved in setting up your own digital marketing department. While you concentrate on building your business, the digital marketing agency will take care of the nuts and bolts of your online campaigns, so you will gain the benefits of SEO and improve your Google ranking without having to put in all the hard work yourself.

A good digital marketing agency will know the difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO, and will not promote black hat SEO techniques which may be of short-term benefit, but which will result in your website being penalised by Google in the long term. 

While this sort of service isn’t free, it will being you expert input from a team of specialists at a fraction of the cost of setting up your own team. You won’t have to worry about the tiny details, so long as you find a digital marketing agency which is in sync with your ideas and understands what you are trying to achieve for your business.

TRON Media can help with all your digital marketing and Google ranking requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in SEO, digital marketing, PPC, website design services, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a digital marketing campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading digital marketing agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that digital marketing works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest digital marketing management services, web design services, email marketing services, and what a digital marketing campaign can do for your Google ranking.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post The Ultimate Guide on How To Rank Higher On Google In 2019 appeared first on TronMedia.

Pay Per Click, or PPC, marketing can do well for even a small company – but how does Pay Per Click work? PPC marketing done right can be an excellent return on investment, but done wrong, it could bankrupt you – there’s no guarantee unless you understand exactly how a PPC campaign should work.

This PPC For Beginners guide will tell you all you need to know about PPC advertising, including the secrets of Google Ads, how to start a PPC campaign,  understanding keywords and search engines, and how to make your landing page work for PPC.

Before you venture a penny on Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords), Bing PPC, or any other similar PPC campaign, do a pre-launch analysis of your likely return on investment. PPC marketing using Google AdWords is the most popular means of paid advertising on the internet, so you will be facing competition from rivals who may have deeper pockets than you.

For some types of business, mobile-only search works well – for instance restaurant businesses where customers are likely to look for outlets only near them. PPC using Google Ads can also work well compared to traditional magazine ads. But it’s certainly possible to lose money on a paid advertising campaign if you don’t know how to do PPC properly.

What Is PPC?

So how does Pay Per Click work, and is there any more to it than keywords and a nice landing page? The first question any PPC guide should ask you is when building a paid advertising campaign is what you want to get out of it. Perhaps you are after higher ranking in search results, increased numbers of visitors to your website, more orders, or a higher profile for your brand. You have to ask yourself how you will measure the success of your PPC advertising, whether it’s in increased traffic from search engines to your landing page, or an increase in revenue from sales. PPC management is part of

Essentially, Pay Per Click is exactly what it says – every time someone clicks on your link on a search engine result page, you pay. So to make it work, you must make sure that each click takes your customer to a relevant part of your website – this may be the landing page, or it may be a sales page, a special offers page or a feedback page, depending on your requirements.

Stuart Draper of PPC consultancy Get Found First says: “Put yourself in the shoes of the potential customer getting ready to search for what you sell. What keywords and phrases might they search? Before doing anything else, do a few of those searches yourself. What do you find? Who is advertising? What is their value proposition? What calls to action are they using?”

A Google Adwords agency will be able to advise you on how to do PPC, but it’s worth understanding some of the basic terms and jargon before you start on your PPC campaign.

How To Understand PPC Terms?

This PPC guide will help you to plan your Pay Per Click campaign, but it will be useful if you first have some understanding of the jargon of the business. PPC for beginners can be a challenge because it is ever-evolving, but here are some of the terms you will need to know.

Ad Delivery – The Google Ads setting which affects how quickly Google will use your budget each day. This can affect the time of day your ads are likely to show, particularly if your campaigns are limited by your budget.

Ad Rank – The value used to determine your ad position, calculated from your bid amount and your Quality Score.

AdSense – A Google PPC marketing product that pays websites for showing Display Network ads.

Automatic Bidding – A system which allows you to make your keyword bidding automatic, and set an upper limit, with the aim of getting the most possible clicks for the budget you have allowed.

Bid – The amount that you are willing to pay for each search keyword click.

Bounce Rate – The percentage of visitors to your site who leave without clicking through to another page.

Campaign – A set of ads, keywords, and bids sharing a budget, location targeting, or other settings. You can have many AdWords campaigns running on your account simultaneously.

CPC (Cost Per Click) – The amount an advertiser pays a search engine for each click on its advertisement that brings a visitor to its website.

DKI (Dynamic Keyword Insertion) – A feature which allows a user to customise an ad so it includes the keywords contained in users’ search queries.

Geotargeting – Also known as Location Targeting, this form of campaign allows advertisers to specify the geographical regions where their ads will be seen.

Impressions – The number of people who see your Pay-Per-Click ad.

Keyword – A word or phrase used by PPC advertisers to target and display their ads in the sponsored section of a search engine results page for relevant searches

Landing Page – The first page your customer see when they click on your ad to visit your website. The quality of the Landing Page is an important factor in determining the Quality Score of your website.

Long-tail Keyword – A phrase consisting of two or more words which is used to target customers more specifically, reducing search competition and cost per click.

Negative Keywords – A way of controlling the clicks to your website more effectively by stopping your ads from displaying when a customer search contains specific words

PPC Management – A service provided by a PPC agency intended to help a business achieve its online marketing goals.

Quality Score – A formula used by Google and other search engines using click-through rate and other factors to determine whether your keywords are relevant to your ads and landing page. Together with other factors this is used to calculate your Ad Rank.

Remarketing – The practice of showing your ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse other sites

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) – The process of increasing organic traffic from search engine results pages to your website, based on what the search engines considers most useful to the customer.

SERP (Search Engine Results Page) – The page which shows users the results of their search, typically with a section of organic results and one of paid or sponsored ads.

Traffic Estimator – A free tool from AdWords which can be used to predict how well a keyword could perform, also useful as a research tool for prices and ad positions.

View-Through Conversion – A measurement of the number of online conversions that took place within 30 days after a user saw a Google ad, but converted by another route.

Of course this is nothing like a complete list, but as a basic jargon-buster for PPC advertising it should give you a solid start in PPC for beginners.

How Do You Utilise PPC?

Google AdWords customers have two choices – they can use the Search Network, or the Display Network. The search network uses a bidding system where keywords relevant to a business are used to display relevant advertisements to search users. The other option, the Display Network, offers the choice of placing visual advertisements (‘banner ads’) on websites that are part of the Display network, which reaches around 90 percent of global internet users.

Though both are managed via Google AdWords, a Google AdWords Agency would refer to the search network as AdWords and the Display network by its own name.

To use AdWords as part of your PPC marketing strategy you need to set up an account, specifying some basics such as your location, time zone and billing details. The structure of your AdWords account depends on how many separate campaigns you want to manage, each with its own ad groups, keywords, text and landing pages.

The basic building block of an AdWords account is the keyword. Keywords are used in Google or any other search engine when users are looking for information on product or service, and AdWords allows advertisers to bid on keywords relevant to their business, so users see their ads on search result pages. A PPC agency can give you advice on this essential element of your marketing strategy.

Advertisers don’t buy a keyword outright, otherwise the highest bidders would always get the choice keywords; but this does throw up some odd possibilities, such as rival companies bidding for your brand names, or the option to automatically bid higher than a specified competitor’s domain name.

What Results Can You Hope For From Using PPC?

The great thing about PPC for beginners is that Pay Per Click has a good number of advantages over traditional forms of marketing, though it can take some time to get it right for your business. Based on the advice of a leading Google AdWords agency, here are a few of the benefits if you do PPC properly:

1. Instant results. As soon as your ads go live you should start getting visitors to your website. PPC give much quicker results than organic search, social media and offline advertising, but it’s then up to you to turn the visits to you website into conversions.
2. It’s highly measurable, so you tell very quickly whether you are getting a good return on investment, and use PPC management tools to refine your campaign.
3. By monitoring which ads and keywords give the best ROI and boosting them accordingly you can quickly respond to changes in the market.
4. You pay only for the visitors who come to your website, so you don’t have any setup or advance costs.
5. It’s easy to set your budget using the controls in AdWords – you can spend as much or as little as you like, and can suspend an campaign at any time.
6. PPC is not wasteful – you can target your advertising very precisely at your likely customers, so PPC advertising reaches only people you know will be in the market for your products or services.
7. If you have set up a campaign on Google Ads, you can transfer it to Bing Ads without having to repeat the setup process. Clicks on BingAds can cost less than those on Google Ads.
8. PPC is a quick way to increase brand awareness by positioning your ad at the top of the search engine results page.

The next step in our PPC guide is to look at how to do PPC by building a campaign through keyword research.

Tips For An Effective PPC Campaign

The essential element of any PPC advertising campaign is keyword research. The WordStream keywords tool will help you to do this by generating lists of keywords related to an original, giving data for the search frequency of the keywords, and information on subjects such as search volume and price competitiveness. You can also get help on niche keywords, new keyword ideas, negative keywords to exclude from your campaign and so on. Your text-based ads should make compelling use of these keywords. Here are ten more tips towards an effective strategy for PPC for beginners.

• Choose Your Strategy

Decide on your bid strategy depending on whether you are looking to increase website traffic, boost brand awareness, encourage particular customer actions or maximise conversions. AdWords offers a choice of different bidding strategies based on these targets.

• Set Your Timing

Set your ad schedule to target your customers – for instance B2B ads work best in 9-5 office hours, while consumer ads are harder to target – you can start with more expensive 24/7 schedules then refine timings according to effectiveness.

• Create Ad Rotation

AdWords allows you to rotate your ads according to a set pattern, the number of clicks, the number of conversions, and so on.

• Choose your Locations

Use target locations carefully – there’s no point advertising beyond your geographical reach, though at some stage it may be worth experimenting to see if you can open up new markets.

• Prioritise Mobile Marketing

Searches are increasingly done on mobile devices. Make sure your landing page is mobile friendly and you will reduce your bounce rate.

• Use Single Keyword Ad Groups

It’s worth creating an ad relevant to each individual keyword in your ad group. You may have 10 or 20, but try to come up with a good relevant ad for each. It sounds a challenge, but in many ways it’s easier than creating a single ad relevant to all your different keywords. This way your quality score will improve and you will lower your cost per click.

• Try Ad Extensions

Ad extensions offer additional information about your business, such as phone number, address, and links to landing pages. They tend to add more visibility on search engine landing pages, and will be displayed automatically if your ad rank meets certain criteria and the extensions provide value.

• Evaluate using t A/B Testing

You should constantly be optimising your PPC ads, changing and evaluating aspects such as headline, body copy, links and keywords on the ad display. Testing will help you to improve click-through rate build the effectiveness of your keywords. Try different offers such as promo codes, percentage discounts, free gifts with purchase, free shipping and so on, to see which adds more to your conversions.

• Choose Keywords for Each Stage Of The User Journey

You may not be able to successfully bid on the broad, common keywords within your market, so be prepared to aim for more niche terms. Remember to cater for each step of the customer’s journey, from initial research to narrowing down options from a selection and making a final decision on a purchase.

• Don’t Get Hung Up

Certain keywords can start off being successful, but then fall out of popularity. Don’t get hung up on particular keywords, keep testing them against alternatives, and be prepared to pause them or ditch them altogether if they are not providing a good CTR.

What Settings Should You Choose For Your Ads?

When setting up your Pay Per Click campaign in AdWords, there are a lot of options which help improve your CPC. For instance, if you have a local business, there’s little point advertising to customers who are too far away from you. The geotargeting options in AdWords let you tailor your campaign to reach local customers only.

Geotargeting options are in the Locations and Languages section of AdWords, and start with a Search tab for your location. From there you can specify country, region, city, postcode, ‘reach’ (how many people could potentially see your ads if you select that location), and radius around your location.

You can specify multiple locations, and AdWords will give you information such as clicks, impressions, average cost-per-click (CPC), and average position, as applied to each location you specify. You can also specify locations to exclude, and whether to exclude searches from outside your location that use its name in a search.

Other options in AdWords settings include device type (all devices, desktop and laptop computers only, or just iPhones and other mobile devices with full Internet browsers); Manual Bidding, Automatic Bidding or Conversion Optimizer (only for campaigns with at least 15 conversions in the last 30 days); positioning on the search results page, scheduling, frequency, ad rotation, and so on. It’s important to experiment with all these settings, but also to be aware that some of (such as page positioning) could cause you to lose conversions, as they could make your ad less visible.

We hope this guide to PPC for beginners has but you on the right course to mastering this valuable marketing tool of paid advertising. If you are still asking yourself “how does Pay Per Click work?”, or need the help of a PPC Agency, get in touch with us below.

TRON Media can help with all your PPC and web development requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in PPC, website design services, SEO, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a PPC campaign perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading PPC agency located in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that PPC works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest PPC management services, web design services, email marketing services, and what a PPC advertising campaign can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post A Simple Beginner’s Guide to PPC appeared first on TronMedia.

It only takes a few seconds for your potential customer to form an impression of your business from your website and its graphics. If its page load speed is slow, the web page design confusing or old-fashioned, or the logo and graphics unappealing, visitors will form a negative impression of your business and you will lose custom to your competitors on the internet.

Good web design should keep your potential customers on your website, form a good impression and turn your leads into sales.

Of course, bespoke websites aren’t easy to create, and unless you understand the complexities of HTML coding, CMS, CSS and graphic design, creating a good website design may be a challenge. This is where a web development agency can give you useful guidance on responsive web design and other factors. Even if you are using the free web design and development software WordPress (and 34 percent of the internet does), a web design agency will be able to help you out.

The Importance Of Having a Good Web Design

Another factor in the importance of good website design is that it helps your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) strategy.

When search engines crawl the internet and index your website, many elements of the website design influence the way your website is indexed. If your SEO results are poor, it doesn’t matter how good your marketing or your website design is, it will not feature in search engine rankings, so your potential customers will not find it.

So your web developer needs to use site code which is search engine friendly, in addition to producing a good website design. A web design agency will be able to advise you on HTML Coding, CMS, CSS, good WordPress practice and other aspects of optimising your website design for improved SEO results.

Your web designer will help you to decide whether you need a static webpage, where the server is only needed to serve static content, or a dynamic website, where server-side technology is used to generate webpages on the fly.

Five Reasons Why To Invest in Website Design

It’s certainly worth investing your time in website design, but there are good arguments for employing a web design agency to take on the more complex elements of building bespoke websites. Subjects such as HTML coding, CMS, CSS, server configuration and responsive design are probably things you could learn, but is it worth your investment of time when a web design company will already be familiar with these technicalities?  A web developer will not only make it easier for you to create the creative websites you want, but will also be able to take off your hands the time-consuming task of learning techniques such as HTML coding and maintaining the websites they design. So what are the five top reasons for investing in website design?

1. Customer Service

Think of your website as your most important customer service representative. An attractive, up-to-date and friendly design looks as if you care about your customers and want them to enjoy interacting with you; an old-fashioned, unattractive or hard to navigate site signals lack of interest in your customers. What’s more, a good web design builds trust with your audience, while a poorly designed website suggests that your business is untrustworthy or unreliable. A web designer working with a web development agency will be able to help you with elements of responsive web design, graphic design, page load speed, social media and other ways in which you can encourage visitors to stay on your site longer, creating more opportunities for you to capture business.

2. Competition

Your competitors will almost certainly be using web design to capture potential customers. If you want to outrank them on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) you have to stand out with a well-designed website. From your logo to your use of graphics, your web page design is an opportunity for you to make your business stand out. You may have many competitors with the same products and similar pricing – website design is your chance to stand out from the pack and showcase your unique features.

3. Consistency

Building a brand is one of the most important aspects of growing your business, and your web design is a big part of that. Website design services will explain the importance of maintaining consistent use of colours, fonts, layouts and styles across your web page design. A poorly designed website with inconsistent pages will make it harder to navigate your site and to establish brand recognition.

4. Calls to action

A web developer will explain the importance of Call-to-Action buttons. Once you have a potential customer on your site, the next task is to convert their visit into a sale (whether yours is an ecommerce website or a bricks-and-mortar business). A CTA button is the best way to do this, but the design elements are important. A well-designed CTA button will stand out on the page without disrupting the design, using colour contrast, sizing, animation, placement and white space.

5. Copy

Another good reason to invest in web design is that a digital marketing specialist will be able to help you produce compelling copy. Though good website design will attract potential customers to your site, good copy makes them stay. If you are supplying your customers with readable, informative, high-quality copy, they will return to your site and you are more likely to make a sale. The content on your site is just as important as the overall design, so you have to give your customers the information they are looking for.

Why Does Your Website Need a Good Design?

In most cases a visitor to a website is looking for information on a specific subject, so having a good website design is essential in helping them to find what they are looking for. An essential part of any digital marketing strategy is to convert website visits into sales, and website design is an essential part of this process. Web design and development should aim to improve navigation and access information as quickly as possible, as visitors’ attention spans are short.

An essential aspect particularly for an ecommerce website is responsive design. Your website must be able to adapt itself to use on a mobile device, particularly for local searches, which are predominantly done on mobile devices. Responsive web design means that rather than presenting the same design to every device – smartphone, tablet or desktop – the website adapts its layout according to what sort of device is being used. Responsive web design isn’t just about page size, it can also require changes to layout, fonts sizes and so on – a web development agency will be able to help you with responsive design and with other aspects such as page load speed and social media.

Benefits Of Having a Good Website Design

The main benefits of having good website design are that it drives conversions, builds brand awareness, and creates customer trust. So what are the best methods for improving website design?

1. Create a style guide

To promote consistency throughout your website, have your web design agency create a style guide and stick to it on every page of your website. The style guide should specify colours, fonts, layout, formatting and graphics. Every member of your team or any website design services you use should conform to this style guide. A consistent style tied in with your wider marketing campaign will increase engagement, build brand recognition and improve SEO.

2. Establish a visual hierarchy

Make sure that the most important features of your website are the most visually engaging. Use bolder fonts, larger text sizes, and brighter colours to create a visual hierarchy, showing your website visitors through the use of these clear visual cues what parts of the site are the most important, and guiding them through the customer journey.

3. Use video

Customers are ten times more likely to react to video elements rather than text, so your use of video as part of your web design and development is crucial. From your company logo to graphic design, make sure your visuals are relevant, serve a purpose and are used in balance with text. Though you shouldn’t create a cluttered website by using visuals for the sake of it, there’s no reason why a text section shouldn’t be accompanied by a video explaining the same ideas in a more watchable form.

4. Improve page speed

Loading pages quickly makes sure that your visitors don’t get bored waiting for something to happen, and click off somewhere else. Ask a web design company to help you with the technical aspects of design including HTML, CSS, how to optimise WordPress, and techniques such as reducing image file sizes, removing unwanted plug-ins and minimising HTML, JavaScript or CSS code. Google PageSpeed Insights is a useful tool to see how quickly your site loads and where improvements can be made.

Can Website Design Affect SEO?

As Google updates its search engine algorithms, design and user experience become ever more important in SEO. Google wants to provide the best possible results in SERPs, but no longer relies entirely on keywords and content to gauge the value of a website. Other factors taken into account include bounce rate (how often a visitor hits the back button after seeing your landing page), time spent on site, and value, rated by number of links to social media, blogs or rating sites.

So here are a few web design topics to think about when creating your bespoke websites in order to improve your SEO:

• What are the first things you see on the landing page?
• How many tasks are there for the visitor to choose from?
• What could be taken out without loss?
• What elements serve no useful purpose?
• Does the page support the website’s goals?

Removing anything that impedes the user’s experience improves your bounce rates, time on site, and backlinks, all of which will enhance your SEO.

Can Improving Your Website Design Help You Gain More Traffic?

Creative websites can gain traffic as part of your digital marketing strategy by providing content which is attractive to potential customers and offers something unique to your company.

Crowdspring contributor Katie Lundin suggests the following ways to improve website design to gain traffic and ultimately boost sales:

1. Optimize your website loading speeds.

A Kissmetrics study shows that a website will lose 25 percent of its potential viewers after four seconds of loading time – overcoming this aspect of website design is the first essential. “If your eCommerce website hosts data-intensive graphics and photos, it takes much longer to load than a sleek, cleanly designed website with minimal graphics,” says Lundin. “The takeaway here is not that you should eliminate photos and graphic elements from your eCommerce website design. The lesson is to use design elements smartly for maximum impact and quicker load speeds. Make sure that you minimize your photo file sizes as much as possible while still maintaining good quality.”

2. Optimize your eCommerce business for mobile access.

Mobile devices have been the most popular way to access the Internet since 2016, particularly with younger customers, so when you build an ecommerce site, it must be optimised for mobile users. Responsive design is key, and a web design company will help you to visually adjust to the size/shape screen wherever it appears.

3. Eliminate distractions on your landing page.

Ecommerce sites can benefit particularly from having a sharply focussed landing page devoted to a single call to action. “Feature each marketing offer and product with a unique landing page on your website” says Katie Lundin. “You may even consider creating landing pages for specific target audiences. This way, people who search for your product online will be taken to a webpage that specifically caters to their needs and perspectives.”

4. Streamline your checkout process

A confusing, buggy or multi-stage checkout process will lead to  abandoned shopping carts and lost sales. Review your checkout process and have your web designer redesign it to eliminate any friction points. Reduce the amount your customers have to do and make things as transparent as possible.

5. Design for interaction

Leave space in your website for customer interaction in the form of testimonials and comments. Place testimonials in prominent spots, use a different but easy-to-read font, and include pictures of customers if you can get their permission. Another good tip, says Katie Lundin, is to design a ‘Best-Sellers’ page – “Not everyone browsing your site will know exactly what they’re looking for,” she says. “If your company sells a wide range of products, it can be overwhelming, especially for a new customer. When someone stumbles upon your site, they should be drawn to products that are most popular. The best-sellers section must be easy to find and navigate — as well as visually integrated with your overall web design.”

TRON Media can help with all your web design and development requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in website design services, SEO, website security, email marketing, WordPress, HTML coding, CMS, paid search marketing, PPC, Google Ads, content marketing, digital strategy and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a website security protocol perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading web design agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that SEO works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest web design services, email marketing services, pay per click services, and what a web design agency can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call Simon on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

The post Why Is Website Design So Important? appeared first on TronMedia.

This guide is going to give you an insight on what to do terms of SEO in 2019 and discover why services like Google Analytics, Google My Business, and Google Keyword Planner are essential to successful SEO, how you can master quality content, and the importance of the difference between ‘black hat’ and ‘white hat’ SEO…

What Is SEO?

It’s a harsh truth that unless your business has good visibility on the Internet, you probably will not be competitive. According to Hubspot’s 2019 digital marketing statistics, 81 percent of online shoppers and 89 percent of B2B buyers turn to Google first to look for products, services, and ideas. (Other search engines are available! – but for our purposes, everything we tell you about Google pretty much applies to them too).

So your business needs The Ultimate Guide to SEO – Search Engine Optimisation – to make sure it appears high in search results when a potential customer does a Google search for products or services in your market. This Ultimate Guide to SEO will give you everything you need to know to improve the effectiveness of your digital marketing – it’s not a mystic art, but SEO is complex and ever-changing.

Why Does Your Website Need SEO?

SEO strategy serves simply to deliver Ranking and Visibility in search results – but these aren’t an end in themselves. The end point is to turn searches into digital traffic to your website, and then convert this into a sale. The likelihood of that happening depends very much on the freshness and quality of your website content, a subject we’ll return to.

Ranking is a process used by search engines to determine where your website appears on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) – while Visibility describes how prominent it is.

A 2017 survey by DemandGen found that 61 percent of B2B buyers start the buying process with a broad web search, rather than going directly to a vendor’s website. Any guide to SEO in 2019 must take into account that this behaviour is likely to increase.

Search engines such as Google are designed to do only one thing – to provide users with the information or links they find most relevant.

Search engines use two main criteria to compile their search results – Keywords, and Authority. Keywords simply match the words used in the search to those on your website, while Authority is rated according to how popular your website is, and therefore presumably how helpful or valuable it is.

As part of your digital marketing strategy, your organic, or natural (i.e. unpaid for) SEO strategy should be designed to work with the search engine algorithms to improve your rankings and search visibility.

There are three main ways to do this; high quality website content, technical setup, and links. Before we get on to those, let’s consider why SEO is still worth it in 2019.

Is SEO Worth It In 2019?

No guide to SEO in 2019 would be helpful without explaining why Search Engine Optimisation is still crucial. It’s sometimes argued that ‘SEO is dead’, that it’s no longer effective in comparison to paid search; but the organic, unpaid traffic from SEO can be cheaper and lead to more conversions that traffic from PPC (pay per click). Admittedly, organic Search Engine Optimisation is slower than paid search, as it takes time to build.

In the early days of the Internet, there were ways to get around this problem – it was quite simple to improve search ranking by stuffing your website with keywords, and the quality of the content wasn’t really taken into account. This practice pretty much came to an end in 2011 when Google introduced an algorithm called Panda, which was designed to downgrade low-quality websites.

In its Webmaster Guidelines, Google says that the job of a webmaster is to

* Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines
* Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings, such as hidden text or links
* Avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web
* Not use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check rankings, etc
* Provide unique and relevant content that gives users a reason to visit your site first

But it is certainly possible to build website traffic using Search Engine Optimisation, while at the same time making no more profit from your website; you could for instance be adding search traffic from overseas territories which would be of no real use to a local business. This SEO guide will teach you how to avoid that pitfall.

The rule is, you can tell if your Search Engine Optimisation is being done properly if your business is growing at the same rate as your visitor numbers; if not, you’re just generating irrelevant website traffic. Perhaps they are looking for information, but aren’t likely to buy from you; or perhaps they’re not genuine visitors, but bots crawling your site.

Check your Google Analytics under Acquisition/Referrals to find out where your website visitors are coming from. If you find they are from spammy websites, you’re doing SEO wrong! This Ultimate Guide to SEO will set you on the right course.

Below is a video from SEO expert Neil Patel, this Youtube video explains what SEO skills will and won’t work in 2019.

So Search Engine Optimisation is worth the time and effort, but only if you understand how it works and are using it to generate valuable leads and conversions. One of the best ways to ensure this is keyword research.

What Is Keyword Research?

Example of Keyword Reseach on Google Ads. 

Keyword research is the process of finding out which keywords are related to your website, and analysing which ones would yield the best response to web searches (or, if you are using paid-for search, the highest return on your investment).

There are three major steps in keyword research. The first is to discover the keywords relating to your website – online tools will help you to check their relative search popularity.

The next step in keyword research is to find the most valuable keywords for your website. The most generic keywords are the most commonly searched for, but they are also the most competitive in terms of organic or paid-for searches, so using them may give mediocre return on investment (ROI). You need to find phrases that most accurately describe the specific qualities of your site to yield the highest ROI.

The last step in keyword research is to analyse the strength of your competitors for potential keywords. Factors in competitiveness include how much attention sites pay to optimization, and the number of relevant inbound links they receive.

A marketing agency will tell you that there are many keyword research tools, the main one being Google AdWords Keyword Planner. This free utility helps you search for relevant keywords, get historical statistics and traffic forecasts, use statistics like Search Volume to help you decide which keywords to use for a new or existing campaign, and make forecasts like predicted clicks and estimated conversions, giving you an idea of how a list of keywords might perform for a given bid and budget.

Another useful free tool for Search Engine Optimisation, Google Correlate, uncovers keywords with similar time-based or regional search patterns to the data series or search query you provide. In other words, instead of keywords producing patterns, the patterns point to keywords. It’s certainly useful for digital SEO marketing purposes, but also has applications for anthropologists, economists, and many others to study and predict human behaviour.

To help you generate a list of ‘long-tail’ keywords, the free utility Ubersuggest takes whatever keyword you enter and lists all the suggested searches for that keyword from Google. It can produce hundreds of suggestions in seconds. Using phrases such as ‘How to’ or ‘Best for’, Ubersuggest will come up with useful suggestions for blog posts subjects which should attract traffic. Ubersuggest can also calculate scores to determine search volume, SEO difficulty, paid difficulty, and cost per click, each derived from separate data sources to provide the most accurate results.

Finally Wordtracker Scout, a free Chrome browser extension, “turns the web into a huge keyword generator” – just choose a successful webpage that’s attractive to your target audience, and Wordtracker Scout can uncover the high-performing keywords you need to attract targeted, profitable traffic to your site. Using big keyword data from Wordtracker’s huge database of real search terms, Wordtracker Scout has a cool graphical interface, and can deliver keyword performance metrics organised by age elements and tags at a glance.

Is Keyword Research Important For SEO?

Arguably, Keyword Research is the most important factor in SEO, with link building and content marketing following behind. Essentially, the difference between a website that gets a lot of organic searches and one that doesn’t is the quality of its keywords. The sheer size of the internet means that whatever market you operate in, you probably have tens, hundreds, or even thousands of competitors online; if your Search Engine Optimisation is inefficient, you will not compete, and keyword research is crucial to that process.

Really effective keyword research tools help you to settle on a profitable niche, find related markets, rank well in search engines for specific topics, drive traffic to your site, and enhance your marketing effectiveness in promoting your products or services. Using keyword research to find out what people are actually searching for puts you in a better position to help them and to help yourself.

So the vital questions to ask yourself when doing keyword research are:

• Do my keywords target what people are actually searching for?
• Will searchers who are using these keywords find my site useful?
• Will their traffic improve my ROI?

One of the most essential aspects of keyword research is that it helps you to identify not just obvious, generic keywords, but also long-tail phrases which might bring back a lower number of searches, but which are more likely to be close to what the searcher was looking for. Keyword research helps you to eliminate traffic which isn’t interested in your website content, improve your ranking against rival sites not optimised for those keywords, and find out whether your keywords will rank well in the search engines. But there’s more to a complete guide to SEO than learning about keywords.

What Is Black Hat and White Hat SEO?

Derived from old cowboy movies, the phrases ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ (or even ‘grey hat’ for something in between) describe whether a hacker or SEO expert uses ethical, legal, approved methods, or is willing to break the rules to get what they want. Any good SEO guide will steer you away from ‘black hat’ techniques which might quickly damage your website’s reputation.

Black Hat SEO refers to techniques and strategies used to get higher search rankings, by breaking search engine rules. It’s typically used to get a quick return on a site, rather than as a long-term investment because it can have terminal consequences – using black hat SEO techniques can result in a site being banned and de-indexed.

Some of the common techniques used in Black Hat SEO include:

Keyword Stuffing, where the webpage is loaded with keywords or numbers, often in a list or group, or out of context, in an attempt to manipulate the site’s ranking in Google search results.

Link farming, where a group of websites all hyperlink to each other to boost their search engine rankings.

Hidden texts and links, using techniques such as white text on a white background, locating text behind an image, positioning text off-screen, setting the font size to zero, or hiding a link by linking only one small character.

Blog content spamming, filling your website or blog with a constant stream of low-quality content

In contrast, White Hat SEO refers to the use of legitimate techniques and strategies, such as the use of keywords and keyword analysis, posting quality content, rewriting meta-tags to make them more relevant, backlinking, and legitimate link-building. All these techniques are relevant to a website which is expected to make a long-term return on investment.

What Are Backlinks?

Example number of backlinks using MOZ’s Link explorer. 

An essential subject for any SEO guide, Backlinks are a vital part of Search Engine Optimisation, and if used properly a legitimate ‘white hat’ technique for improving your SEO rating.

Backlinks, or Inbound Links (IBL’s), are links that are directed towards your website, and can be the building blocks to good Search Engine Optimization. Search engines like Google give more credit to websites that have a larger number of quality backlinks, and will rate these websites as more relevant in a search query.

Of course, it’s not enough just to have a large number of backlinks; they need to be relevant, quality links connected to the subject of your website. Reciprocal linking between websites is acceptable if they are relevant, but if not it will decrease the relevancy score of your website.

‘Black hat’ techniques such as hidden links, or automatically generated pages the purpose of which is to generate inbound links to other web pages (so-called “link farms”) could be harmful to your site.

Tools such as Domain Stats and Backlink Builder will help you to keep track of your backlinks, as well as giving you information about your website such as how many pages have been indexed, your listings in the Open Directory, and Alexa traffic rank.

What Is On Page Optimization?

On-page SEO is the technique of optimizing each individual web page on your site in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. This can be done using both the content of the page, and its HTML source code.

Originally, On-Page Optimisation consisted of little more than keyword placement, making sure that search engines found keywords in certain locations of the HTML code to help indicate a page’s relevance for each query. But search engine algorithms are now much more complex, and far more tied in with reading times, links and social media content sharing.

SEO expert Rand Fishkin says “Personally, I’m happy to sacrifice “perfect” keyword placement in the title element or a URL for better user experience, a higher chance of having my content shared on social networks, or a better click-through rate in the search results.”

What is Off Page Optimization?

Off Page Optimisation, or Off-Site SEO, refers to techniques used outside your own website to impact your rankings within search engine results pages (SERPs).

The main Off Page Optimisation technique is to get other reputable places on the Internet (quality blogs, websites, social media influencers and so on) to link to or promote your website, effectively vouching for the quality of your content.

The value of Off-Site SEO is that while search algorithms and ranking factors will change over time, Off-Site SEO is pretty much of consistent value in improving search engine and user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority, and so improving a page’s ability to rank.

How Important Is Content In SEO?

If you learn anything from this Ultimate Guide to SEO, it should be that there’s now nothing more important than content quality for SEO – search engines have developed in such a way that they now use content quality as the most important factor in determining search rankings. In effect, any guide to SEO in 2019 is incomplete without an explanation of the importance of content marketing.

Writing quality content for SEO involves a few basic techniques.

1. Do your keyword research to determine what words and phrases your customers will search for.
2. Ask yourself what is the quality, relevance and value of your content. If you are not giving the readers and search engines what they want, your content serves no purpose.
3. Promote your content through social media and encourage backlinks.

Quality content which delivers value to customers encourages backlinks and engagement through social media. This appears to Google as validation and makes it rank your links higher. Don’t forget that Google will also rank image and video content, not just text.

Although it’s not entirely clear how it is used, it’s also known that Google ranks web content according to its ‘freshness’. Not all web pages are ranked for freshness, but certainly those involving recent events, regularly recurring events or frequently updated reports are; for instance, news reports, business results, new product reviews and so on. Google may rank freshness by monitoring search volume, news and blog coverage, and social media trends. So while not all content needs to be ranked by freshness, it is important to update your posts, create new pages and add links from other sites rated highly for freshness. Cyrus Shepard, SEO, and founder of Zyppy, says the mantra for freshness best practice is: “Be fresh. Be relevant. Most important, be useful.”

Have a detailed SEO Strategy

There’s a good deal more to SEO strategy than simply choosing the right keywords. Keywords should be the starting point of an SEO strategy aimed at improving your ranking in SERPs, but content quality, technical factors and backlinking all play a part.

1.Content that ranks

A web page optimised around topics first, then keywords within that topic, makes your site look more expert to a search engine and improves your ranking for long-tail keywords related to your topic. Choose keywords that your potential customers will actually be searching for, target words with lower competition, and include a combination of local keywords, long tail keywords and short tail keywords. A Schema Markup code on your website can help the search engines to return more informative results for users, such as a list of events at a venue.

2.Technical Factors

An SEO audit and regular site crawls will tell you whether your site is user-friendly, easy to navigate, and reliable, will identify faulty links and issues causing it to load slowly, and will help you to measure the effectiveness of changes.

Use an SEO-friendly URL which is clear, doesn’t have any random letters or numbers, and if possible incorporates some of your keywords.

Make sure your site is mobile-friendly – increasing numbers of searches (particularly local ones) are done on smartphones, so your site will lose business if it does not work well with portable devices.

3.Profitable Backlinks

One of the best ways to improve your SERP ranking is by using backlinks to sources regarded as reliable by search engine algorithms. Add links from your website to credible outside sources relevant to your content, and reach out to authoritative sites, working together to create mutually beneficial backlinks. This will drive additional traffic to your site and help to build your business.

4.Track Your Progress

No SEO strategy will be effective if you don’t track and assess your progress. Apart from Google Analytics, useful tools such as Monitor Backlinks, Dead Link Checker, Cognitive SEO Dashboard and Majestic.com will help you to follow the improvement of your search engine ranking for various keywords, see how web traffic increases and decreases, check whether your web presence compares to that of the competition, and show what content types perform best, so you can continue to follow your content strategy.

New SEO tools and techniques are being developed all the time, so SEO is not a one-time-and-it’s-done process. But as a regular part of your overall marketing efforts, a detailed SEO strategy is essential for boosting your website’s digital presence.

How Do You Write Content That Ranks In Search Engines?

Writing good content is one of the most effective SEO tools, and in many ways the easiest. Great content can improve your search rank, generate leads, build your brand, and create long-term connections with your customers. Here are a few good tips for writing quality content which is guaranteed to improve your SEO:

1. Conduct Keyword Research Before You Start Writing

You should work this way rather than writing content then trying to shoehorn keywords into it.

2. Use Keywords Consistently Throughout Your Content

Use keywords in the title of the web page or blog post then strategically throughout the content. Also use alternative phrases known as Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords which are related to your main keywords. This gives you an alternative if you are over-using your main keywords.

3. Create In-Depth, Interesting And Useful Content

To be valuable, original and actionable, the content has to be relevant to your audience. Presumably, you know about the market covered on your website, and understand what your customers are looking for in the way or information, products, and services. If you don’t, be prepared to pay a specialist writer of a digital marketing agency to help with your content. Quality content doesn’t have to be text-only; it can come in the form of visual content like an infographic, a video, a meme, a podcast or a short report.

4. Create Accurate And Informative Title Tags And Meta Descriptions

• and don’t forget to use your keywords as anchor text when you are linking to other web pages and blogs on your site.

5. Add Internal Links To Your Content

When a search engine such as Google crawls a website, it follows links, internal and external, starting from the homepage. This helps to determine the structure of the website and the way different pages are related. Google will divide link value between all links on a web page, often assigning the homepage the greatest link value because it has the highest number of backlinks. Your newest blog posts will be found quicker and will get the most link value if you link to them from the homepage, not just from a category page.

Essential SEO Tips For Better Rankings

In this Ultimate Guide to SEO, we’ve discussed how you can optimize search traffic using tools to improve and monitor your website’s SEO performance. Now we’re going to give you a definitive list of SEO tips for better rankings. 

• Optimize Your Website For Mobile

At least 50 percent of web searches are now from a mobile device, and the figure is growing. In some regions, desktop use was barely established before mobile took over. If your website is not designed to be ‘mobile first’, you are likely to experience a high bounce rate, where the visitor leaves the site after viewing only one page.

• Improve Your Website’s Page Load Speed

Example of a website’s page load speed score on GTmetrix. 

You can evaluate your page load time with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. As page speed and site speed are among the factors Google uses to rank pages, you can’t afford to have any delaying factors on your website. There are many techniques you can use to speed up your website, such as compressing CSS, HTML and JavaScript files, reducing the size of image files,

optimizing code by removing unnecessary characters and comments, reducing redirects, removing render-blocking JavaScript, using browser caching and improving your server response time by eliminating bottlenecks in database queries, routing, or low memory.

• Optimize Your Website For Voice Search

Marketing analytics company comScore estimates that by 2020, 50 percent of all Internet searches will be done via voice. Like mobile search, voice search is on an upward trend with the use of services such as Alexa and Siri. Since voice searches tend to have longer word counts than text searches, it has been suggested that using long-tail keywords is one way to change the way you optimize so you get results to show up on page one of the SERPs for voice searches.

• Build Profitable Backlinks

Backlinks function as votes from other websites telling search engines that your website is valuable, useful and credible, so the more of these votes you have, the better your website will rank. Backlinks are certainly in Google’s top three most important search engine ranking factors, but you must develop quality backlinks from sites with good domain authority, which haven’t linked to your site before, which are topically related to your site, and ideally using your target keyword in the link’s anchor text.

• Ensure Your Website Is Optimized For Local SEO

Example of a Google My Business listing for TRON Media. 

Over 50 percent of searches are now from mobile devices, and Google’s search algorithms now assume that any search from a mobile device is looking or a local result. Local SEO is a search engine optimization tactic that helps you to reach customers based on location. Implemented properly, it can help small local companies outrank larger competitors, but it can also be of use to online businesses.

Local search marketing demands that you provide accurate, consistent NAPU (name, address, phone number, URL) to the most important directories, so that search engines know where your business is located and what you do. If there is any inaccuracy or inconsistency, Google will give you website a lower search ranking, and your local competitors will benefit.

So or effective local search results you should always have a consistent name, address and telephone number information in the footers of your website pages so Google gets a consistent idea of your location. The free tool Google My Business lets you enter information which appears when people are searching for your business or businesses like yours on Google Search or Maps.

• Add Visual Content

While long-form text posts, around 3,000 words, usually outperform shorter articles in search rankings, traffic and engagement, such huge chunks of text are likely to put off all but the most avid readers. The solution is to break them up with visuals. Social Media Examiner’s 2018 report concluded that 51 percent of B2B marketers prioritise creating visual assets as part of their content marketing strategy. Good advice is to embed a visual every 400 words or so.

Still images are the obvious go-to source of visual variation; keep image sizes under 1Mb and use JPG compression. For screenshots, charts, vector graphics, and infographics, PNG format gives clearer results. You can also jazz up a pull-quote with a graphical background.

Where relevant, you can embed a social media post, GIF or meme – this can add an element of humour, but make sure your references are up to date.

A Hubspot survey showed that 54 percent of people want to see more video content in marketing material – original video content is best, but if making it is beyond your abilities, there’s nothing wrong with embedding relevant content from other sources.

The final essential type of visual content is the CTA (Call To Action) button – and this has the added value that it takes interested viewers through to other pages on your site, boosting engagement, click-through rates, and conversions.

• Submit a Sitemap and Robots.txt file

Example of a submitted sitemap on Google Search Console. 

Creating a sitemap, a simple directory or guide that holds information on the pages on your site, helps search engines to find all the information applicable to a specific search query. The pages in the site map appear in a logical hierarchical order, with the most relevant at the top and least relevant pages towards the bottom. The two main forms of sitemap are XML, which works directly with search engines, and HTML which is more attuned to the end user. The sitemap can be submitted to Google via the Search Console.

A Robots.txt file, which tells search engines to ignore duplicate pages and sensitive documents, should be placed in your website’s main directory to avoid search engines penalising you for duplicating data.

A canonical tag (also known as a “rel canonical”) is used to tell search engines that a specific URL represents the master copy of a page. When you use the canonical tag, it avoids problems which can be caused by identical or “duplicate” content appearing on multiple URLs. The canonical tag tells search engines which version of a URL you want to appear in search results, and avoids you being penalised for duplication.

• Create Engaging Videos

Shooting and editing digital videos are easier now than ever before, with affordable Digital SLR video cameras, smartphones, LED lighting and free editing apps making it straightforward for anyone without any great videomaking experience to produce a watchable product.

Here are our SEO Guide top tips for videomaking:

• Create a script and a storyboard first. Even rough sketches will help you to plan your shots and time your piece.
• Prep your presenters – make sure they know what’s expected of them, don’t give them too many lines to memorise, and get autocue software to help them polish their performance.
• Shoot plenty of B-roll. This is background material you can edit into the main sequence when you want to cut away from the presenters. Stock B-roll is available for anything too ambitious for you to shoot yourself.
• Frame the shots. Learn the ‘Rule of thirds’, the basic law of composition, and stick to it.
• Control lighting. Light evenly, don’t mix natural and artificial light sources, and set the colour balance of your camera manually.
• Control sound. Make sure there’s no distracting echo or boom where you’re recording, and check for background noises such as traffic or roadworks.
• Choose music carefully. Select something in keeping with the subject, and don’t violate anyone’s copyright. Public domain and royalty free music is available online.

Once you have a superb video, you need to optimise it for SEO, which is a skill in itself. Here are a few tips for making the most of your video SEO:

• Choose the right hosting platform. The obvious move might be to host your videos on YouTube or Vimeo, but there’s a danger that they might cannibalise traffic from your website. Consider less obvious options like Wistia.
• Add transcript text to your video. This makes it more searchable by bots.
• Create an engaging thumbnail. If the first frame of your video is black, that won’t attract much attention as a thumbnail.
• Apply keyword research to your video description and metadata
• Embed the video you want to be ranked first on the page – Google typically only indexes one video per page. Make sure it appears above the fold to guarantee higher play rates.

How Web Design Can Affect SEO

It might not be intuitively obvious, but one of the foundations of great SEO is web design. Users are likely to exit slow or outdated sites quickly, but the same may apply to unnecessarily ‘busy’ or modern-looking sites. If a visitor reverts back to the SERP after seeing the landing page of your site (‘bouncing’ or ‘pogo-sticking’), Google RankBrain will pick up on it and reduce your ranking. Readability should be the priority and navigation made as easy as possible. Google Optimise is a useful testing tool.

Make your website design reflect your brand, and apply the design consistently throughout the site. Don’t clutter pages, and leave some (not too much) white space.

Make sure your fonts are clear and readable – WebpageFX has a useful readability tool.

Don’t open with a large image on the landing page which pushes text ‘below the fold’.

Optimize and compress your images for faster loading, and make sure they are relevant to the website and are properly titled and captioned.

Minimise the use of pop-ups and certainly don’t present them as soon as someone lands on your site.

Provide shareable links to social media, and optimize your website design so users can find what they need, and they will be sure to return. Remember, search engines respond to good design and clear navigation too!

The Best SEO Resources and Tools For Beginners

One of the good things about applying SEO techniques to your website is that there are plenty of tools, free and paid for, to help you optimize it. Let’s have a look at some of the front-runners.

• Google Analytics

This is the big one – if you’re not using Google Analytics, you’re missing out on a lot. Google Analytics is free if your website has under 5m impressions per month, and is easy to install. The free version will report on data such as whether a visitor to your website is a repeat visitor or new, the language of their browser, type of device and screen resolution, which pages they view and for how long, and so on. The paid-for version of Google Analytics, which costs $150,000 per year, adds direct support, account management, greater data processing abilities and more. While Google Analytics can be complex to use, there are plug-ins available which will present its reports in more manageable forms.

• Google Trends

This free search terms comparison site shows how frequently a given search term is entered into Google’s search engine, relative to the site’s total searches over a given period of time. You can use Google Trends for comparative keyword research, and to discover event-triggered spikes or cycles in keyword search volume. For instance, if you run a gardening business, you would be able to find out what times of year search terms relevant to your business are trending, and adjust your AdWords spend accordingly.

• Google Search Console

Another free website, Google Search Console helps you to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. Among other things, it can confirm that Google can find and crawl your site; fix indexing problems and request re-indexing of new or updated content; display Google Search traffic data for your site; show how often your site appears in Google Search, which search queries show your site, how often searchers click through for those queries, and more. Google Search Console can also show alerts when Google encounters indexing, spam, or other issues on your site, show you other sites which link to yours, and troubleshoot issues for mobile pages and other search features.

• AHREFS Backlink Checker

This website ‘helps you learn why your competitors rank so high and what you need to do to outrank them’. Though it’s best known as a backlink checker, showing you what outside websites link to yours, it actually offers several tools including Competitive Analysis, Keyword Research, Backlink Research, Content Research, Rank Tracking, and Web Monitoring. There’s a free 7-day trial for $7, monthly subscriptions start at $99/month (personal) and $999/month (agency), and annual subscriptions start at $82/month (personal) and $832/month (agency).

• AHREFS SEO Toolbar

Like the Backlink Checker, AHREFS SEO Toolbar is an excellent time-saver for SEO professionals; it’s a free add-on to the Chrome and Firefox browsers which gives a real-time display of SEO metrics and backlink counts, with immediate access to both Page and Domain metrics such as AHREFS Domain Rating, AHREFS URL Rating, AHREFS Rank, number of backlinks, number of referring domains, estimated organic search traffic and number of ranking keywords. It can give instant keyword metrics including cost-per-click, and a SERP overlay shows instant SEO metrics for the top ranking pages in the SERPs.

• MOZ Link Explorer

Formerly Open Link Explorer, this website helps you to find successful content on the web, analyse its ranking keywords, show inbound and linking domains, show anchor text in backlinks, and thereby ‘reverse engineer’ your competitors’ marketing campaigns. Moz offers a free 30-day trial, while a full subscription costs from $79 per month to $599 per month, depending on the number of campaigns managed, and the number of pages and backlinks crawled per week.

• Google Keyword Planner

Another free Google website, Keyword is like a workshop for building new Search Network campaigns. You can use it to search for keywords based on terms that are relevant to your product or service, website or landing page and see how a list of them might perform, choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns, get historical statistics and traffic forecasts, and use statistics such as search volume to help you decide which keywords to use for a new or existing campaign. There are also forecasting functions for predicted clicks and estimated conversions which will give you an idea of how a list of keywords might perform for a given bid and budget.

• Google In an Incognito Window

Google Chrome has an ‘incognito’ mode, activated by CTRL-SHIFT-N on a PC, CMD-SHIFT-N on a Mac, or, on iPhone, go into the Chrome app settings and choose Open Incognito Tab.

Using Incognito mode, Chrome will not remember your browsing history, cookies and site data, and information entered in forms. But your ISP and the websites you visit will have access to some of this data, so for most people its only real application is to keep websites out of your browsing history, or to log into a single website on multiple accounts in the same web browser. But if you want to check your own Google ranking, Incognito mode can be useful because it stops Google from adjusting its results according to what it knows about you, such as your location and the type of device you are using.

• SEO Web Page Analyzer

The free SEO Web Page Analyzer website (also available as an iPhone app) takes a snapshot of a page to see how it can be improved, breaking down the structure and content of your web page and assessing the build quality and content quality from an accessibility, usability and search engine point of view. Where appropriate, a pass (green tick) or fail (red cross) icon will be displayed for each section of the report, with question marks indicating areas that cannot be scored and need further human interaction.

• Bing Webmaster Tools

Though we talk mainly about Google in this blog, other search engines are of course available, one of them being Microsoft’s Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools (previously the Bing Webmaster Center) is a free service as part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine which allows webmasters to add their websites to the Bing index crawler. The service also offers tools for webmasters to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of their website, Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools, website statistics, consolidation of content submission, and new content and community resources. You don’t have to sign up for BWT to be included in the Bing search index, but the toolset will provide insights on your website’s visibility so you can optimize it to improve rankings, engage with customers, drive sales and generate leads on Bing.

• Bright Local Google Mobile-Friendly Test

In an attempt to make more sites mobile-friendly, Google announced a couple of years ago that it would start prioritising websites in rankings based on suitability for use on mobile devices, whether the results are appearing on mobile devices or not. Ultimately, this means that sites that aren’t delivering the same content on mobile and desktop will suffer (not the same layout of course, but the same content).

Google has its own free website to rate your site’s mobile-friendliness at https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly, but the Bright Local Google Mobile-Friendly Test, also free, gives advice on text spacing, fonts, regular testing and more.

• Google PageSpeed Insights

Google PageSpeed is a family of tools designed to help a website’s performance optimizations. There are four main components of PageSpeed family tools: PageSpeed Module, PageSpeed Service, the PageSpeed Chrome DevTools extension and PageSpeed Insights. All of these components are built to identify faults in a website’s compliance with Google’s Web Performance Best Practices, as well as automate the adjustment process, while PageSpeed Insights provides suggestions on a webpage’s optimizations, and suggests overall ideas of how to make a website faster. This free tool can be accessed directly in any browser, and grades webpage performance on a scale from 1 to 100, providing a report on suggested optimizations, divided into categories of high, medium, and low priorities.

• GTmetrix

This free tool tells you a lot about your website performance including Google PageSpeed and Yahoo! YSlow scores and recommendations, Page Load Details (time, size, number of requests), various analysis options, waterfall, video and report history. Its reports give you the full picture on how your site loads and helps you detect where bottlenecks are. PRO Bronze, Silver and Gold users paying from $14.95 to $149.95 per month get access to the Developer Toolkit, which provides even more advanced analysis options including device simulation, screen resolution testing and Adding a custom domain name for testing.

• OnCrawl

OnCrawl is designed to do daily SEO audits, detecting orphan pages, identifying pages that are not linked to your structure to optimize internal popularity, monitoring crawlability and indexing, understanding how search engines are visiting your website and if strategic pages are correctly indexed, spotting near duplicates, and optimising for mobile-first. Its intention is to ‘support your entire search engine optimization process with accurate and comprehensive data’. There’s a 14-day free trial option, with Pro options costing from $49 to €5,990 per month.

Thanks for reading this Ultimate Guide to SEO. You should now be able to tell your Backlinks from your Bounce Rate, your Black Hat from your White Hat and your Local Search from your Keyword Research. But if it’s all been too much to take in, you could always ask for the help of a Digital Marketing Agency. For a complete guide to SEO strategy, advice on the difference between ‘white hat’ and ‘black hat’ SEO techniques, guidance on how to optimise your ranking in search results, and information on how to make the most of backlinks, how to decrease your bounce rate and how to use services such as Google My Business, a Digital Marketing Agency is the place to go for a complete guide to SEO.

TRON Media can help with all your SEO requirements. TRON Media has a highly qualified team of trained specialists in SEO, website security, email marketing, paid search marketing, PPC, Google Ads, content marketing, web design, digital strategy, and social media, and can work with you to develop your ideas and build a website security protocol perfect for your business.

TRON Media is a leading SEO agency in Brighton, offering the easiest and most cost-effective way to guarantee that SEO works for you. Get in touch today to find out about our latest Search Engine Optimisation services, email marketing services, pay per click services, web design services, and what an SEO agency can do for your business.

Contact us using our Contact Form, call us on 020 3006 6889 or email us at: info@tronmedia.co.uk.

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