There are 33,185,550 small businesses in the US across all kinds of industries and specialties, from niche services to homemade products. According to one source, the average spending on SEO services for small businesses falls just under $500 for basic services, which can include local SEO, some content creation, and other optimization.

And while this is a decent budget—for now—to get you started, 53.3% of businesses are more likely to be ‘extremely satisfied’ when spending more.

Of course, it’s easy to wonder how accurate that observation really is, especially when coming from a well-reputed SEO service for small businesses like ours. But we’re just trying to help businesses like yours grow and thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape!

At Global-marketing Inc., you can expect to pay anywhere from $335 a month to $1800 a month, depending on the plan and packages you choose. These packages and plans can vary from annual to monthly services. They can comprise multiple services, from basic keyword search and content all the way to guest blogs, multimedia content, website optimization, link-building and more.

So essentially, for only $335 a month, you could be seeing an uptick in SEO performance and SERP rankings, conversions, and more—right? Well, almost.

Recommended Read: How Local SEO Works and Why It Matters

Should I Cheap Out When It Comes to SEO?

Many small businesses struggle to see the value of spending upwards of $300 a month for marketing that they could probably do themselves if they really tried. There’s a wealth of information, resources, and even AI generators now to help you build and boost your own marketing strategy.

You might even think that you don’t even need a professional marketing strategy—because you’re so small and local that it’s basically pointless. You may have a loyal clientele and get by fine on word of mouth.

But if in 2023 you’re still not investing in local SEO, at the very least, you’re missing out big time.

Think of SEO services as an investment in your business. You generate a little bit of money through your sales and service delivery, pay your team, get your own cut, and then put the rest back into the business, except now a small chunk of that money is dedicated toward SEO.

It’s definitely worth it when you consider the average ROI for SEO is between 700% and 900% for e-commerce businesses over time. So, you’re looking at thousands of dollars worth of returns on a few hundred dollars that you spend, making it one of the most rewarding decisions you can make for your small business.

In determining how much SEO costs for small businesses, you’ll want to look beyond numbers and figures, instead focusing more on what they represent and intangible factors like your satisfaction.

Recommended Read: SEO Services for E-commerce Websites: What You Should Know

Investing in Comprehensive SEO Services for Small Businesses

One of the more underrated factors in determining how much SEO costs businesses like yours is how much you trust the service provider or individual you hire for SEO services.

It’s not only trusting them about the quality and type of services they provide or how available they are to you but how much they offer you in return. It’s not a simple formula where money in = conversions out, but rather, a complex process of building and revamping your digital presence from the ground up.

Calculating your ROI is part of the services you receive when you choose Global-marketing Inc., as our experts will share regular reports about their pricing for SEO services—but that’s not where the real magic happens.

It’s when your SEO agency takes time out to explain to you exactly why they’re making the decisions they are, what the advantages of doing so entail, and how you will benefit from these decisions and actions that makes it worth it.

As compared to old-school, real-world advertising and paid marketing on social media and Google, SEO is a tad more complex, and it’s only normal for small businesses to feel hesitant about spending thousands of dollars a month on services they don’t quite understand.

Where ROI for PPC marketing is pretty high and almost instantaneous, SEO can take a lot longer to generate results. The average rate is 4–12 months before you see a significant turnaround and positive outcomes, which can seem like far too long for small businesses working with limited budgets.

But like with anything worth doing in life, consistency, patience, and pacing yourself are the major contributors to your success. It takes a while to see progress and achieve the goals you set for your campaign and efforts, but you eventually get there.

A key tip to remember when deciding on a service and estimating small business SEO costs is that SEO isn’t a product, it’s an investment. The lowest price does not guarantee affordability and can actually hurt you through sub-par efforts, spamming, stolen data and websites, and more.

Cutting corners to make easy money is not something any reputable SEO agency would do or condone. It can result in bans, penalties, and being blacklisted—effectively undoing years of existing marketing efforts.

Recommended Read: A Step-by-Step On-Page SEO Guide: Dominate Search Rankings in 2023

A Well-Rounded Approach to SEO for Small Business Owners

We understand that managing a successful business is time-consuming, and small business owners are pulled in multiple directions. You’re running operations, acting as a manager, possibly HR, accountant, marketer, customer relations rep, and more, which makes it impossible to add more to your plate.

You can spend time learning about the ins and outs of SEO and experimenting to see what works through trial and error, but it’s time-consuming, to say the least.

That’s where we come in, helping you streamline your SEO marketing efforts and minimize the amount you spend. As a full-service agency, we have the unique advantage of having dedicated teams to do everything you need and present their services to you in a comprehensive, multi-faceted, and well-rounded package.

Not only do we make ourselves available to address all your concerns and educate you on each aspect of our SEO strategy as we implement it, but we also share continual feedback and input on what works and what doesn’t. You pay a set monthly rate that you can budget for and increase as you see more progress.

Not convinced that our services are affordable and right for you as a small business? Let’s compare some average SEO costs for more perspective, breaking down different components of a solid strategy, and look at how much it can cost to either do it on your own, or set up an in-house SEO department:

Keyword Research

We perform extensive keyword research and audits to determine which phrases and words will help you rank and perform better before selecting them for your campaign. There are several free and paid keyword tools available on the market, but there are various types of keywords, including long-tail and broad-match keywords, which can be too much to deal with. Plus, more effective tools can cost $200–500 a month to access!

Content

Content is king—this is a saying that originates all the way back to Bill Gates’ 1996 essay under the same title. And 27 years later, this holds truer than ever, with content dominating everything we know.

From social media to your personal blog, content determines your success, public perception, and thus, customer reach more than possibly anything, and that is not changing any time soon.

The average salary of a copywriter in the US is just over $72,000 but can go up to $230,000 depending on their experience. Freelance copywriters, on the other hand, make about $35.71/hour and may spend several hours a month developing content for your brand.

The sheer cost of hiring an in-house content strategist or copywriter, or a freelancer is likely to exceed your annual SEO budget.

Recommended Read: SEO Content Writing Guide 2023: Best Practices for Higher Rankings

On-Page and Off-Page SEO

On-page or on-site SEO services involve elements of web design, optimization, improving the UI/UX, and more. They collaborate with your web developers, project managers, and your team to improve your website’s performance and optimize it to be SEO-friendly and geared toward results. The average pay of a UI/UX designer is around $82,796 a year.

Plus, you’ll more than likely need a web designer for the technical side of things, which can cost you $120,000 a year based on their experience. And we’ve already established that cheaper services hurt you more than you realize.

On the other hand, off-site SEO requires professionals who understand digital marketing like the back of their hands, can engage in public relations, strategize for you, and generate a comprehensive strategy.

Social Media

With 4.59 billion social media users worldwide, you need to leverage this incredible tool for your SEO strategy. While on the surface, advertising and marketing on social media seem pretty budget-friendly at a few hundred dollars a month on average, there’s more than meets the eye.

The annual worldwide spending on ads was $65.31 billion in 2022, but that doesn’t account for all the money spent on developing content for social media, generating unique shareable material, infographics, videos, and garnering partnerships and affiliate links. Not to mention, it also doesn’t factor in the average pay of an in-house social media manager, which is upwards of $57,000 a year.

Conversion Tracking

In addition to the above, you’d also need a CRO consultant or expert to design, track, and evaluate your ongoing SEO efforts. Without their unique skills and input, your strategy would not be fairly or accurately evaluated.

You can hire them in-house or bring them on for projects, consultancy roles, and freelance positions, which may seem like you’re saving more. However, the cost of CRO SEO freelancers would put a dent worth $100,000 per year in your pocket.

When you choose us, you get a dedicated content strategist and SEO specialist who will design your entire strategy and a dedicated team that will routinely track, measure, and share insights into how your work is progressing.

Add-On Features

Other features that our packages include are SEO audits that gauge and gather how your current strategy is performing, where your business has been mentioned, and what needs to be fixed, routine progress reports, market insights and competitor analyses that examine what others are doing, and link-building.

We also double down on local SEO and make sure your business is ranked for local keywords.

So, SEO for Small Businesses Costs HOW MUCH!?

If you haven’t already done the math, you’re looking at roughly $108,0296, just based on the figures above. It can be significantly lower or significantly higher—but one thing is for certain: there are several hidden costs that haven’t been accounted for yet—and it’s just not worth it.

You shouldn’t have to spend such abhorrent amounts—and, frankly, you can’t do that—as a small or even mid-sized business, considering the average salary of a small business owner is $63,560 a year. No ROI could even compete with that disparity.

You don’t have the time, money, manpower, or energy to run a business AND handle the demands of the diva that is SEO.

But we’ve got your back because we know why SEO is important for small businesses.

Our strategy can be personalized and customized based on your specific requirements, tailoring the amount of content you get, how often we post on social media, redesigning your website if needed—and so much more.

While we do have packages, we understand that it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach, and we can’t possibly deliver the exact same services to everyone regardless of their industry. We specialize in working with small businesses, and some of our biggest successes have been getting these clients recognized.

Discount Golf saw a 296% increase in the top 3 keywords, while 3ALPHA LLC saw a 1000% increase in organic keyword rankings. Through our dedicated SEO services for small businesses, you might be among those clients who see a 91% increase in online conversions.

It doesn’t matter what your small business’s goal is—with our help, you’re bound to achieve that while still saving significantly. When you look at the big picture, the cost of comprehensive, continual SEO services is definitely easier on you financially.

Various Pricing Models and Cost Structures for Small Business SEO

Overwhelmed by all the numbers and costs for SEO services? It’s not surprising.

SEO is a fast-growing field, with experience determining pay grades and making it increasingly more challenging for businesses to run in-house departments. In any case, your needs as a small business aren’t that extensive and don’t warrant having your own team.

You can, instead, choose one of our packages to help you save more and save smartly. We offer one-time services and additional services in addition to the following:

Annual SEO Services

Our annual services, as suggested by the name, are a year-long subscription. It helps you save 33% on the cost of SEO services for small businesses and features three main packages. The Basic package is $335/month and is ideal for new businesses and startups; the Standard package is $505/month, which is ideal for increasing conversions; and the Advanced package, which is the most impactful, is $670 a month.

Each package comprises content marketing, link building, dedicated Project Managers and other perks.

Quarterly SEO Services

These services help you save a whopping 25% on your services and also feature three main variations. You can choose the Basic plan for $375/month, Standard for $565/month, and Advanced for $750/month.

Quarterly services are great if you’ve had a bit of a taste of the SEO world and want to extend your usage and services to get more long-term results and outcomes. You can re-subscribe for an added quarter and eventually convert your partnership to a full year.

Monthly SEO Services

Monthly services are a great way to ease into SEO for your small business and may seem expensive at first, but eventually, you can renew for longer and save more. They help you save 10% overall, at $450/month for Basic services, $675/month for Standard services, and $900/month for Advanced services.

Our monthly services also include a few other packages, including a one-time on-page SEO service for $199.

There are more variations and details about the Pro and Premium packages for each category that you can find here, and explore which option works best for your budget.

Keeping a flexible budget and focusing on the long-term returns, benefits, and savings that comprehensive SEO services cost is the best approach. After all, the average cost of SEO for small businesses goes beyond these numbers.

You’re paying for a whole package and array of services that are smartly packaged to give you the best deal. No hiring, managing, paying, or tracking your own team—outsourcing SEO is the best financial decision for small businesses.

The Cost of SEO Services for Small Businesses

It’s easy to rationalize cutting corners on the cost of SEO services for your small business, but it’s only hurting your company in the long run.

Invest in high-quality services that help you achieve your SEO goals and objectives and get your business ranked and recognized on the SERPs. It’s an important investment in your future and helping your business grow.

You can work with Global-marketing Inc.’s team for a wide range of comprehensive, premium-quality SEO services that are catered to your needs. We offer detailed recommendations, services, and packages that help you get to your objectives.

If you want to know more about pricing for SEO services or you’re interested in learning more about our work, get in touch with us to set up a free consultation and get more personalized feedback and input from our SEO specialists.

The post How Much Does SEO Really Cost for Small Businesses? appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

After a long, hard battle, you’ve finally scaled the digital Mount Everest. As a small business owner, you’ve crafted an online presence that’s as dazzling as the Northern Lights. As your business glows across Google SERPs and social media platforms, you breathe a sigh of relief and prepare to descend. The toughest part of your expedition is over… or is it?

Scaling the peak of online visibility is only half the battle. The real test of endurance lies in the way you plant your flag to protect and maintain the lofty heights you’ve achieved.

If your online presence is off the charts, congratulations, you’ve reached the summit. In this blog, we’ll make sure you stay there by improving online visibility with small business SEO.

We’ll break everything down today. The mountains are calling… off we go!

1. Surf the Social Waves Like a Seasoned Pro

Social media can be a double-edged sword for small businesses.

On one hand, it’s a powerful tool that helps you connect with your audience and promote your brand. On the other hand, one poorly judged post or tweet can result in a PR nightmare.

Instead of using social media recklessly, use it cautiously and carefully. It’s all about mastering the art of digital diplomacy.

How?

For starters, think before you post.

Think of social media as a lively little town square where every post is like speaking into a megaphone. It’s heard by your customers, competitors, and even the high school friend you haven’t spoken to in years.

Before you post anything, pause for a moment and consider its potential impact.

Let’s say you own a seafood restaurant. On World Vegetarian Day, you decide to post a picture of your popular shrimp dish with the caption, “Who needs veggies when you have shrimp like these?”

What may sound witty and clever to you in the moment could end up causing serious damage. This caption could easily offend vegetarians and vegans, resulting in a negative image around your restaurant.

Over the years, hundreds of popular businesses have made such snafus. In 2018, H&M faced a PR disaster when the brand featured a Black child model wearing a hoodie with the text “coolest monkey in the jungle.”

H&M ended up apologizing and removing the product from their line. However, the damage had already been done. Within a few hours, celebrities had also taken notice. The campaign spread like wildfire and resulted in significant reputational and financial loss.

Had these brands taken some time to think the campaigns through and consulted with a racially diverse team, these ghastly mistakes wouldn’t have occurred in the first place. By thinking before you post, you’ll end up protecting your brand from a similar situation.

In addition to cautiously posting on social media, make sure you cautiously engage on social media. Engagement is a two-way street. Instead of getting worked up about negative comments, tackle them with grace and professionalism.

Engage, don’t enrage.

Let’s say a customer comments on your Facebook post complaining about a stale croissant they bought from your bakery. Instead of ignoring the comment or getting defensive, acknowledge their dissatisfaction, apologize, and offer a solution.

A possible reply could be, “We’re really sorry to hear about your experience. We take pride in our fresh croissants, and your feedback helps us improve. Please let us make it right; the next croissant is on us! And we’ll make sure it’s fresh, delicious, and hot.”

This kind of thoughtful response shows potential customers that you value feedback and are committed to ensuring they enjoy a great experience. It also helps defuse a potentially damaging situation.

If you play your cards wisely, you may even end up turning an irate customer into a loyal fan. Chick-fil-A is known for promptly responding to complaints on Twitter.

Thanks for sharing this and giving us an opportunity to improve, La Toya. We’re sorry we didn’t meet your expectations with this visit and we want to make sure we get this issue to the right people. Please fill out our online form here to share more: https://t.co/ldWtiZqpqb

— Chick-fil-A, Inc. (@ChickfilA) May 15, 2023

By making amends (and we mean sincerely making amends), you’ll end up retaining a big chunk of your audience. This is one of the most effective ways to maintain a pristine online presence over time.

When your audience realizes you consistently show up for them and fulfill your promise, they’ll keep buying from you. Customer loyalty? Check.

It’s also important to note that while public responses to complaints are important, the real magic happens in direct, one-on-one conversations. In these personal interactions, businesses have a golden opportunity to transform a negative experience into a positive one.

Here’s how you should go about this.

See what we mean?

This conversation is a masterclass in humanizing brand communication and taking small business branding to new heights.

Notice how Mark from Fashion Fusion ditched the corporate jargon and instead spoke in a language that Jane could resonate with. It’s as if Jane was talking to a friend who genuinely understood her frustration, not a faceless entity hiding behind corporate lingo!

The secret sauce of this exchange is empathy. Something like this will work wonders:

“Hey Jane, just checking to see if the dress arrived. Is everything looking good now? As soon as you inform us that the dress is with you, we’ll send you the coupon code. Hope you make it in time for the big event! Enjoy.”

This not only verifies that the issue was resolved but also shows Jane that the brand genuinely cares about her experience. When you use the right approach and keep at it, your online presence will stay on track in the long run.

If your in-house social media team isn’t cut out for robust, inventive, and power-packed small business marketing campaigns, turn to professional social media marketing experts instead. They’ll analyze your current social media standing, roll out an actionable plan, and give your business the visibility it deserves.

2. Monitor Your Online Presence

Let’s say you run a local bakery, “Sweet Delights”. A customer tags your business in an Instagram post featuring a customized cake you made for their anniversary.

The post is visually stunning, and the caption is as flattering as it gets. They rave about how beautiful and delicious the cake was. By monitoring your social media mentions, you can promptly like, comment on, and even share the post on your bakery’s store.

This is an excellent way to maintain a spectacular online presence for your small business.

Keeping a constant eye on your online presence is the first step in managing your reputation. Google Alerts is a free tool that allows you to track mentions across the web. Simply set up an alert with your business name. Google will notify you every time it pops up online!

This will help you monitor what’s being said about your business and respond appropriately.

Online reviews on platforms like Yelp, Google Reviews, and Trip Advisor can also significantly influence a potential customer’s decision to engage with your business. Closely and regularly monitor these platforms. This will help you thank customers for positive reviews and address negative ones promptly.

Social media is another critical area to monitor. If there’s any negative feedback/commentary around your business, make things right ASAP.

Amazon is a prime example of social media monitoring done right. Known for its customer-centric approach, the eCommerce platform closely monitors product reviews. If a customer leaves a negative review, Amazon’s customer service team responds promptly.

Whether you run an eCommerce business or a brick-and-mortar store, follow suit, and you’re good to go! It’s time to take control of your brand’s narrative. By harnessing the power small business reputation management, you can turn your customers into your biggest advocates.

3. Encourage Positive Reviews

When potential customers search for your business, they should see glowing reviews. This will significantly impact their decision to engage with you. A whopping 93% of web users make buying decisions after reading online reviews. If you bag a generous amount of stellar reviews, you’ve struck gold.

How can you encourage more of these golden nuggets? Let’s break it down.

Start by making it super easy for customers to leave reviews. Your business must be listed across popular platforms.

Never hesitate to ask for reviews if you’re not getting any. Add a gentle request for reviews to follow-up emails or on your website. In fact, you can even display QR codes or signage at your physical location to remind customers to share their experiences!

Follow this up by offering incentives for reviews, e.g., discounts or loyalty points. However, make sure you place incentives on the table in return for honest feedback, not just positive reviews. This will help maintain the integrity of your review process.

Let’s consider some examples to help you understand the right way to put this online marketing strategy into play.

1. A local restaurant may offer free dessert in exchange for customers leaving a review on Yelp or Google Reviews. This incentivizes customers to share their experiences and gives them a reason to return.
2. A fitness studio launches a contest on social media and encourages clients to post about their experiences with the studio for a chance to win a free month of classes. This drives engagement while promoting positive word of mouth.
3. An online fashion retailer may include a thank you note with each delivery, asking customers to share their shopping experience on Google Reviews. To sweeten the deal, they could offer a 10% discount code for their next purchase (if they leave a review, that is).
4. A local bookstore could host an author meet-and-greet or a book club meeting and encourage attendees to share their experiences on the store’s Facebook page. Attendees who leave a review could be entered into a drawing to win signed copies of the author’s book.
5. A software company could create a “Customer of the Month” feature on its website, highlighting different users and their experiences with the software. Customers who leave detailed, helpful, and insightful reviews on platforms like Capterra or G2 could be featured.

You get the gist of it. Think outside the box; the box is too boring and familiar for you to sit in. The more creative, innovative, exciting, and unique your approach is, the better.

Wow your audience with something they’re not expecting!

A lot of brands have successfully pulled this off. Starbucks’ mobile app allows customers to earn “stars” for every purchase, which can be redeemed for free drinks or food items. As part of their loyalty program, they often offer bonus stars for reviews.

Amazon has also added this feather to its cap. The eCommerce platform frequently invites trusted reviewers to post honest reviews in exchange for free products. These reviews are identified with a special “Vine Voice” badge.

This reputation management technique will help boost your small business online presence like a virtuoso. Avoid black hat review generation techniques, and you’re good to go.

4. Create High-Quality Content

If you want to improve your online presence, start releasing high-quality content that leaves a lasting impression on your audience.

We keep saying this time and time again: quality trumps quantity every single time. Whether you’re writing a blog, working on a social media post, crafting an e-letter, or designing an infographic, make sure it’s relevant, interesting, and useful to your target audience.

It’s better to publish one well-researched, engaging, and insightful piece than 50 pieces that fail to provide value.

Creating quality content is about more than just throwing together a few words and images. It’s about communicating value, sparking engagement, and building trust. It’s a way to show your audience that you understand their needs and have solutions to their problems.

• Get to Know Your Audience: It all starts here. Understand who your audience it, what they want, and the unique challenges they face. This will help you create content that resonates with them and fulfills their needs.
• Provide Value: Your content should provide value to your audience. Provide useful tips, share industry insights, and make them laugh. The key is providing content your audience will appreciate and find worthwhile.
• Be Consistent: When it comes to content creation, consistency is key. Never drop this ball. Post routinely and maintain a consistent voice, style, tone, and quality. Stop handing over critical content creation tasks to any Tom, Dick, or Harry. Hire SEO content writers and make them the face behind your content.
• Engage With Your Audience: Once your content is out there, encourage your audience to interact with it through likes, comments, and shares. Closely monitor these interactions and respond to them. This will help your audience feel “special” and show them you value their input. You’ll end up building a strong sense of community.
• Stay Current: Stay up-to-date with industry trends and current events. This shows your audience that you’re in the loop and capable of equipping them with the latest and most relevant content!

GoPro does an excellent job of creating engaging content by featuring video shots by their customers. This user-generated content showcases the capabilities of their products and counts as authentic content!

Whole Foods also stands out for its visually appealing and information-rich blog. The brand routinely shares recipes, cooking tips, and nutritional information. This aligns with their focus on healthy, clean, and organic food.

IKEA’s magazine, “Life at Home,” is another great example. It’s filled with design inspiration, DIY projects, behind-the-scenes clips, home organization tips, and so much more. Each piece is insightful, engaging, and relevant.

Creating quality content is like cooking a gourmet meal. Just as a meal is only as good as the number of people who get to taste it, your content’s effectiveness is determined by how many people it reaches.

You wouldn’t cook a feast and then eat it alone, would you? In the same vein, your content needs to be served to your audience on a silver platter, and that platter is Google search engine result pages (SERPs).

Master these ropes:

• Keywords, Keywords, Keywords: Think of keywords as the main ingredient of your content dish. These are the words and phrases your audience uses to find relevant content online. Perform comprehensive keyword research to get your hands on high-ranking keywords for your industry. Sprinkle them generously throughout your content but make sure you don’t overdo it. Google’s got a taste for natural language, not keyword-stuffed gibberish.
• Meta Tags and Descriptions: These are like the garnish on your gourmet dish. They won’t change the flavor, but they’ll make the dish look so much more appetizing. Meta tags and descriptions tell Google what your content is about so it can serve it to the right people. Optimize these components with keywords to reach your target audience.
• Link Building: This is like inviting friends over to your feast. The more high-quality sites that link to your content, the more Google thinks, “Hey, this must be a popular dish!” and pushes you up SERPs. Your content must satisfy Google’s E-E-A-T requirement. Make sure you demonstrate a high level of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. If you’re new to link building, read our comprehensive guide to cover the ropes.
• Mobile-Friendliness: In 2023, everyone’s feasting on the go. Your content must be digestible across all devices, especially mobile. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, Google will pass you over for one that is. Opt for responsive design, easy navigation, fast loading times, and readable text sizes. Think of it as tailoring your content to fit every screen. It’s the same material with a custom fit for different devices!

Master the art of writing and optimizing quality content. Once you’ve checked this box off the list, it’ll become much, much easier to maintain a swanky online presence.

Quality content writing and optimization cannot happen overnight. Take your time, do your research, and find small business content marketing experts who know exactly what they’re doing. The right team will help steer your small business in the right direction.

Let’s Get the Ball Rolling!

The digital landscape is never still. If you want to keep your business on the map, implement actionable, innovative, and power-packed strategies that’ll actually move the needle.

In this blog, we covered the importance of leveraging the power of social media, closely monitoring your online presence, letting positive online reviews do the trick, and creating high-quality content that captivates your audience.

Now that it’s time to raise the curtain and get your business ready for the spotlight, Global-marketing Inc. is at your beck and call!

Flex your entrepreneurial muscles, buckle up, and charge headfirst into the thrilling world of digital marketing success. Your small business deserves nothing less than a standing ovation in the online world.

Explore our SEO services to kick things off. We’ll start with a free consultation, identify areas for improvement, and get to work. It’s show time.

The post Conquer The Web: How Small Business Owners Can Maintain And Boost Their Online Presence appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

Table of Contents

4^th of July Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

Create Winning 4^th of July Content

You Can’t Go Wrong With a 4th of July Sale

Launch and Market 4^th of July-Themed Products/Services

Write a Value-Added 4^th of July-Themed Guest Blog

Create an Actionable 4^th of July Marketing Strategy With Global-marketing Inc.

With the 4^th of July right around the corner, most of us can’t contain our excitement. The thought of red, white, and blue décor, a serene poolside BBQ party at home, and weekend-long festivities is enough to make even the most lackadaisical person feel re-energized.

If you’re ready to have a fun and memorable 4^th of July weekend with your family, we’re right there with you!

Before you get started on those weekend plans, take a step back and ask yourself whether your business is equally geared up for the 4^th of July festivities.

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? How can your business benefit from the upcoming holiday?

According to research, the average American spends a whopping $76 on 4th of July food, beverages, and supplies. This figure can easily add up to over $300 for a family of four.

And that’s not all. Over the years, 4^th of July sales have become one of the year’s most anticipated events. From established brands to small businesses, marketers devise compelling and lucrative Independence Day sales that boost revenue and increase brand visibility on search engines.

If you’re struggling to get started, we’ve rounded up some of the most effective and whip-smart 4^th of July marketing strategies to help your small business get a much-needed boost this weekend!

4^th of July Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

Create Winning 4^th of July Content

If you’re new to digital marketing, you’ll probably hear the phrase “content is king” more than just a few times. But we’re here to make some changes: “content is king on a regular day and an undefeatable emperor on national holidays.”

Whether you write a value-additive, engaging blog, post a visually dynamic infographic, or win your audience over with a high-quality 4^th of July video, you’ll notice a boost in traffic that’s unlike what you see on regular days.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a spike in search volume for certain keywords during national holidays. And when it’s a holiday as hotly anticipated as the 4^th of July weekend, you’ve struck gold.

Here’s a glimpse of the search volume for the keyword “fourth of July” over the past thirty days in America (as retrieved from Google Trends):

Notice the increase in interest over time?

As a small business, it’s essential for you to leverage popular keywords and create content accordingly.

For instance, if you own a small beauty store in Miami, you could create a blog post titled “5 Swoon-Worthy Fourth of July Makeup Looks for Miami Beauties.”

Get the gist?

You can recommend your products/services in different sections of the blog, especially the CTA (call-to-action), to prompt a transaction. With many people searching for similar content, you’ll attract a lot of quality traffic.

Incorporating a local keyword (“Miami”) will further help you generate local leads that are more likely to invest in your products/services.

Here are some great examples of blogs by businesses that have leveraged the same strategy to attract quality traffic and boost sales during the 4^th of July holiday:

• Fourth of July Fashion You’ll Actually *Want* to Wearby Brit+Co
• 4th of July in Lockdown: Here’s How We’re Celebrating With Our Kidsby The Tot
• 20+ Delicious Recipes – My Favorite 4th of July Recipesby Inspired by Charm
• 25 4^thof July Activities for Kids by Playdough to Plato
• How to Celebrate Fourth of July at Home in Quarantineby Jetset Christina

Consult SEO keyword research specialists to find the right short-tail, long-tail, geo-targeting, and LSI keywords for your content.

We also suggest experimenting with different types of content—including blogs, articles, guest posts, infographics, and videos—to dominate search engines for industry-specific 4^th of July keywords this weekend!

You Can’t Go Wrong With a 4^th of July Sale

There’s a reason why businesses across the U.S. launch winning 4^th of July sales: they work, and they work well!

If you think it’s too late, you may want to think again.

Launching a 4^th of July sale 2–3 days before the holiday is a great way to create a sense of urgency, which is more likely to result in great sales. In fact, 24-hour sales on national holidays have proven to be extremely successful over the years.

With many states releasing stay-at-home orders, your sale is unlikely to go unnoticed.

We suggest using social media platforms (especially Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) to promote your sale.

Here are some great examples to help you get inspired:

Using the right keywords by opting for popular hashtags will help your post gain more visibility.

And that’s not all. You can gain even more traction by emailing your customers and informing them about the upcoming sale. If you have a specific list of loyal customers, reach out to them with personalized messages and product/service recommendations based on their shopping history.

A personal touch will go a long way in ensuring your sale is successful!

In addition, we recommend creating an eye-catching, modern, and engaging landing page for your upcoming 4^th of July sale. While you may have covered all bases, an off-putting and bleak landing page could easily turn potential customers away from your website.

The Company Store’s vibrant and gripping sales page is the perfect way to go about things:

Ensure the page has a fast loading time to reduce bounce rates and customer attrition (loss of customers).

According to research, 47% of visitors expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less. In fact, if a webpage takes more than 3 seconds to load, an astounding 40% of visitors abandon the website.

While focusing on web design is important, ensuring your website runs seamlessly is equally essential.

Here are some tips to help you optimize the page and maximize conversions:

• Keep the CTA straightforward and clickable
• Ensure mobile-friendliness
• Use the right keywords, title tag, meta description tag, header tags, and alt text
• Use an exit popup
• Include testimonials towards the end of the page
• Link relevant 4^thof July content (blogs, articles, infographics, etc.) on the page

Launch and Market 4^th of July-Themed Products/Services

Struggling to come up with innovative ideas? Depending on your industry, you can launch and market 4^th of July-themed products/services to truly wow your audience.

Over the years, many brands have thought outside the box and devised creative ways to tweak their products/services to fit the classic 4^th of July theme. Hollister’s red and blue clothing line, Ralph Lauren’s customized cardigans, BMW’s red and blue car exteriors, and Lush Cosmetics’ “American Cream” conditioner are the embodiment of 4^th of July-themed personalization done right!

But it doesn’t end there.

Without doing marketing justice, you can’t expect your products/services to disappear off the shelves in time.

Create compelling social media posts and write engaging content to promote your collection. If you run a local business, use local SEO strategies to help time-sensitive content and campaigns hit the ground running.

Use Google My Business and leverage popular online business directories to spread the word! And if it sounds like a case of “so much to do, so little time,” you don’t have to make the major statement like the aforementioned brands.

Write a Value-Added 4^th of July-Themed Guest Blog

Can’t do much? If you’re reading this post and thinking, “there’s no way I can implement these strategies this year,” this may be the one for you.

If your schedule can’t allow anything that requires too much brainstorming or time, turn to guest blogging.

A guest blog is written by the host (your content team) and published on third-party websites within the same industry.

How does this help? If the website has a high domain authority (great ranking on SERPs), you’ll receive an influx of high-quality traffic. As readers engage with the post and check out your website, they’re more likely to engage with your content and products/services.

We’re sure you’ve put two and two together! Not only will you attract quality traffic, but you’ll also get a much-needed boost in sales.

As one of the most effective link building strategies, guest blogs help small businesses become more visible across search engines. Over time, your website will climb SERPs. If done right, guest blogs can also boost your chances of breaking into the Google 3-Pack.

According to research, long-form content generates 10 times more leads than short-form content. In fact, it also receives more social media engagement.

Depending on your industry, pick a relevant and gripping title that can help you increase conversions. For instance, if you sell modern lighting fixtures, opt for a guest blog title that fuses the 4^th of July with your products, e.g., “5 Stunning Décor Ideas to Get Your Home Ready for Fourth of July.” Check the guest website’s domain authority by using the AHREFS website authority checker. The higher the score, the more credible and established the website!

Once you’ve found the right domain, run your content plan by them and wait for their approval. All systems go? Create and send your guest blog! Once it’s published, you’ll notice a gradual increase in high-quality traffic.

Leveraging the guest blogging strategy during national holidays is a great way to make the most of the organic increase in search volume.

As you receive quality backlinks, you’ll become an authoritative voice in the industry and help your business reach new milestones!

Create an Actionable 4^th of July Marketing Strategy With Global-marketing Inc.

Are you ready to get started? As the leading internet marketing agency across America, we help small businesses implement winning local SEO strategies and achieve target KPIs. Over the years, we’ve worked with countless small businesses in various industries!

If you’re struggling to devise and implement actionable 4^th of July marketing tips for your small business, we can help you kick things off.

We also offer content marketing, paid marketing, website design and development, and social media management services.

Call +1(833)405-1025  to get in touch with us, and we’ll take it from there!

The post 4th of July Marketing Tips and Ideas for Your Small Business appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

What Are Professional SEO Services?

1. Bringing Your Target Audience Closer to Your Business
2. Reeling in New Local Customers
3. Helping You Earn External Credibility
4. Beating Out the Competition
5. Sustaining Stellar Rankings

Wrapping Up!

Can you guess how many small businesses are scattered across the US? The answer may surprise you: 32.5 million.

These are numbers that our SEO team crunches on the daily. They give a lot away about the increasing competition and need for top-tier SEO services.

Think about it. Your local industry is saturated with hundreds of thousands of small businesses just like yours! If you fail to stand out among the competition, you’ll struggle to make impressive sales and get your business going.

So how should you stand out?

The answer is simple: local SEO.

Professional SEO services are designed to put you on the map, amplify your traffic, and skyrocket your sales.

Team Global-marketing Inc. has put together a comprehensive guide to local SEO in 2022. Let’s find out how professional SEO services can help your business rank higher and soar!

What Are Professional SEO Services?

Before we dig deeper into how SEO helps local businesses, let’s understand what professional SEO services entail.

Many local businesses prefer using in-house (read: not professional) SEO services.

If you delegate critical SEO tasks to your marketing team, they’ll fail to meet the mark.

Why?

SEO is a specialized service that’s most effective when offered by professionals who possess a) industry experience, b) the required expertise, and c) advanced SEO tools (software systems and programs).

It takes years and decades for SEO experts to become capable of offering top-tier services that yield excellent results.

In-house teams lack the knowledge and skills required to help small businesses dominate local SERPs.

If you want to get seen by your target audience, sign up for professional—albeit affordable—SEO services that significantly move the needle.

Let’s get back on track. Our SEO experts have broken down the benefits of SEO for small businesses. Take notes, and feel free to ask us questions towards the end.

Let’s dive into it!

1. Bringing Your Target Audience Closer to Your Business

As a small business, you should have numerous clear goals. One of these must be getting seen by your target audience.

The number of local businesses is increasing every day.

As new businesses enter the fold, older ones become more vulnerable to getting outranked by their competitors.

Local SEO services prevent this from happening.

At Global-marketing Inc., we use a set of competitive on-page strategies to put you on the map!

Here’s how we do this.

Our team runs a competitive Google My Business optimization strategy to help small businesses rank higher.

If you haven’t heard of Google My Business before, here’s what you need to remember. This is the most powerful and consistently effective local SEO tool out there.

Created and run by Google, Google My Business allows you to manage how you’re seen online.

Here’s an example.

If you search for “consulting services in New York,” this search pack will show up:

This is the Google Local 3-Pack. It directly fetches information from Google My Business.

So if you run a fully updated, optimized, and comprehensive Google My Business page, you’ll increase your chances of ranking in the coveted Local 3-Pack.

Why should you aim to do this?

Well, the Local 3-Pack earns the large majority of clicks from local Google searches.

It’s user-friendly and packed with information (business address, hours, experience, services, etc.).

Web users engage with the first result the most.

If you run a seamless listing and rank #1 on the Local 3-Pack, you’ve essentially won the lottery as a local business!

Excellent rankings = high traffic = impressive sales.

At Global-marketing Inc., our professional SEO services help you run a powerful Google My Business campaign.

We recently ran a campaign for Western Mass Auto Insurance, a local insurance business based in Massachusetts. We helped them become more discoverable on the web by implementing targeted strategies!

We also worked our magic for Tower Optical Corporation, a precision optics manufacturing business. Our local SEO plan helped them become the first search result for the most relevant industry keywords.

This is the power of a successful Google My Business campaign run by a professional SEO company. Using our experience and expertise, we help you get on top and stay on top!

2. Reeling in New Local Customers

Some SEO strategies increase online visibility to a limited extent.

Businesses end up reeling in the same ol’ clients, which prevents them from growing their business.

At Global-marketing Inc., we help you reach new local customers.

Our local SEO campaign includes region-specific keyword targeting techniques, which help us target new customers in nearby towns and neighborhoods.

This strategy yields impressive results.

You manage to widen your audience base as you reel in customers who are still within reach but weren’t a part of your initial plan.

The outcome? Better sales and long-term business growth.

We further fine-tune our local audience targeting plan by segmenting your audience based on geographics, demographics, psychographics, and behavior.

Here’s a closer look at our approach:

Based on our research, we create audience-specific content to increase your reach further.

Let’s say you offer legal support to clients living in Texas.

We’ll analyze your audience and create mini-campaigns for every city in Texas, focusing on the most popular cities like Austin, Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso.

Our team will use its research to create hyper-specific content that generates more clicks, resulting in a broader outreach.

For instance, we’ll create a blog on the penalties for DWI in Fort Worth to reach a niche audience. This would reel in a hyper-specific part of your audience that would otherwise remain unengaged if a generic SEO plan was employed.

This is one of the most notable benefits of SEO for small businesses. Professional services help companies reach the depths and crevices of their audience, becoming well-dispersed across the particular city or state they’re targeting.

3. Helping You Earn External Credibility

While building internal credibility is essential, it’s not enough.

If you run a local small business, you must gain reputability and trustworthiness in the eyes of third-party industry giants.

Here’s what we mean by this.

Sure, you could boost your reputation by writing high-quality press releases and running a reputation management campaign. These are ways of improving your online reputation through internal means.

While highly effective, these measures shouldn’t be your only course of action.

Make sure you also earn credibility from other businesses, stakeholders, and—most importantly—your customers.

A professional SEO plan helps small businesses combine internal reputation management efforts with external credibility strategies.

At Global-marketing Inc., we get to work right away.

Local link building is one of the best ways to get more people talking about your business.

It refers to earning local links (hyperlinked references) from high-DA websites.

These aren’t your competitors; they’re closely related businesses that have established themselves in the industry.

Recommended Read: What’s Domain Authority (DA)?

For example, if you’re an interior designer operating in New York, you should work towards earning a backlink from a platform like Architectural Digest.

If they include a hyperlink to your services/content, you’ll earn high-quality traffic, i.e., traffic that will most likely convert.

As a high-end architecture and design magazine, Architectural Digest attracts clients looking to get inspired by new trends and make a purchase.

The more high-quality backlinks you earn, the better your online credibility.

The best part?

Google’s hard-to-please algorithm loves good backlinks.

They help Google understand which brands are credible.

If a company like Forbes links to a small business, the latter is doing something right. Forbes wouldn’t just offer anyone a backlink!

When high-DA domains find low-DA domains credible, Google pays attention.

As a result, it boosts the low-ranking site’s authority, helping them enjoy more significant traffic and clicks on Google.

At Global-marketing Inc., we have a specialized local link building team for small businesses.

We use individualized plans to help small businesses dominate SERP rankings.

We help you earn quality backlinks from local industry experts using a professional plan.

Over time, Google will crawl, index, and rank your site better.

4. Beating Out the Competition

How can SEO help you rank?

One of SEO’s most impressive feats is its ability to beat the competition.

Once you start implementing your SEO strategy, you’ll become more visible on the web than your competitors.

At Global-marketing Inc., we use advanced strategies to help you get ahead and stay ahead.

As you outrank your competitors, you’ll start earning a steady stream of traffic and conversions.

Your competitors will relegate to lower ranks, further diminishing their reach.

The ranking gap between the top SEO performers and the weakest businesses gradually increases and cements.

After a certain point, poor performers cannot catch up unless they start implementing a power-packed SEO plan for several months without any breaks.

This is why local SEO is so important for small businesses!

5. Sustaining Stellar Rankings 

Professional SEO services don’t just improve rankings; they also sustain them.

As a small business, you can’t benefit from improved rankings alone. If you rank well for a handful of weeks but eventually revert to fair-to-middling rankings, your business growth will keep fluctuating.

That’s not the goal.

You should aim to achieve consistent, predictable, and high levels of growth, not piecemeal, stagnating, and low levels of growth.

Professional SEO plans are SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound).

They work efficiently, effectively, and consistently.

At Global-marketing Inc., we also leverage social media marketing to create even more buzz around your products, services, and brand identity.

When combined with on-page SEO, off-page SEO works exceptionally well in sustaining impressive rankings. It puts the word out and keeps businesses afloat.

Can you believe we are only 19 miles away from New York City? Call us today to find out what makes Modera New Rochelle the best and most convenient choice for your new home!#millcreekres #moderanewrochelle #newyorkcity #newrochelle pic.twitter.com/fOt1CtgmDW

— Modera New Rochelle (@ModeraNRochelle) February 3, 2022

Exciting, optimized with keywords, and direct, this Twitter post is an excellent example of using local off-page SEO to build your brand.

While social media activity doesn’t directly contribute to SEO rankings, it improves your position on SERPs in a roundabout way.

Your business will gain more traction, which will improve its visibility and reach, both online and offline.

The perfect on-page and off-page SEO strategy will ultimately help your small business enjoy stellar rankings that continually improve with time!

Wrapping Up!

In this blog, we offered a closer look at the importance of local SEO for small businesses.

We also helped you understand how SEO can help your business become one of the most sighted domains for local industry-specific search queries.

Ready to start putting these strategies to the test?

We’re here to help you get started!

If you want to hire local SEO experts, take a closer look at our local SEO services.

We fine-tune our plans based on each brand’s industry, target audience, business model, goals, and the specific cities, states, or countries they’re targeting.

Sign up today!

If you have any questions, feel free to chat with us or give us a call at +1(833)405-1025.

It’s time to get your business on track!

The post 6 Ways Professional SEO Services Can Help Your Local Business Rank on Google appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

The Importance of Understanding New York SEO

1. Create a Local Keyword Strategy
2. Get Your Business on the Map!
3. Create New York-Specific Content
4. Master the Art of Link Building for New York Businesses
5. Get Active on Social Media
6. Tweak Your Website

Wrapping Up!

As competition becomes increasingly fierce in New York, small businesses are stumped. As a brand that has yet to become established, how can you possibly get seen by your target audience?

This may sound like a task that’s almost impossible to check off.

Today, New York is saturated with hundreds of thousands of local businesses. While the number of competitors is an issue, the quality of competition is an even bigger brain teaser.

How can you possibly do better than thousands of competitors with top-tier digital marketing strategies, products, services, and customer support?

Well, you can. And it’s not as hard as it’s made out to be!

In this blog, we’ll help you understand how you can grow your small New York business online.

We’ll offer a systematic approach by talking you through the stages of small business growth. This incremental, strategic approach is more practical and effective. It increases the chances of achieving great results that can be easily sustained.

Let’s dive into it!

The Importance of Understanding SEO in New York

Before discussing individual strategies, let’s flip a few pages back and cover the basics real quick.

Small business growth in New York is contingent on one practice: search engine optimization (SEO). This refers to the process of optimizing your online and offline presence to attract more visitors, earn more impressions, get more clicks, and secure more conversions.

Sounds like a dream, right? Well, SEO is that powerful.

It’s your golden ticket to achieving impressive growth as an up-and-coming business. SEO comprises a set of three key activities: on-page optimization, off-page optimization, and technical optimization.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what these practices entail:

As a small business based in New York, you should target each of these three practices to grow your business. Effective, well-balanced, and thorough SEO will help your business get seen, get ahead, and get established!

1. Create a Local Keyword Strategy 

Keyword research and optimization are the bedrock of small business growth.

Let’s understand this a more. As a small business in New York, you target customers in New York. You may offer your services in NYC, Albany, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Long Beach, or perhaps throughout New York. Ultimately, you’re targeting people within the constraints of this state, not beyond.

Since your business is location-specific, your SEO strategy should also be location-friendly. Start with keywords. We recommend creating a robust keyword strategy that includes region-specific keywords.

Let’s say you offer tech support across New York. Now, if someone is looking for such services, their search entries will look something like this:

They may get more specific. If so, they’ll specify the service or location, which will refine the search terms even more. Here are some examples:

No matter which industry you operate in, your target audience will search for terms that follow this pattern.

If you run a food trucking company, your audience will search for “food truck New York,” etc.

If you’re a practicing attorney in Buffalo, your audience will search for “experienced lawyer in Buffalo” and the like.

These are keywords. Once they’re entered, Google’s search engine spiders will get to work and fetch similar webpages accordingly.

As a small business owner in New York, you want your webpages to show up.

If we search for “best interior designer in New York,” the following search results appear:

Why are these specific search results showing up? Well, because these companies have optimized their website using relevant keywords, including location-specific keywords.

This is exactly what you need to be doing to show up among the top search results!

If your keyword strategy is top-tier, you’ll also earn a spot in the coveted Google 3-Pack, the section with the map on the right. This often shows up as the first set of search results for local businesses.

It earns an extremely high number of clicks, so if you make it, you’ll guarantee a generous boost in traffic, clicks, and conversions!

At Global-marketing Inc., our keyword research experts work closely with small New York businesses and create an individualized strategy that helps them get to the top. We’ll give you a comprehensive keyword report for just $99. Once you put it into practice and start noticing the results, you’ll understand the importance of excellent keyword research. You can also do your own keyword research as a starting point. While it may not be as comprehensive and refined as a specialized report, it’ll give you an idea of how to get started!

Google Keyword Planner is an excellent tool. You can gain pretty accurate insights and create a great keyword research and implementation strategy as a beginner.

At Global-marketing Inc., we target a range of keywords, including primary, long-tail, LSI, broad match, phrase match, exact match, and geo keywords. We take a deep dive into your industry, goals, audience interests, and business model to structure a strategy that’s right for you. When used correctly, the right keywords will help you gain a power-packed boost in visibility.

2. Get Your Business on the Map!

We just covered the Google 3-Pack. In this section, we’ll take a deeper dive into it. Why?

Because it dictates:

1. a) Whether your brand is seen by your audience and
2. b) How your audience perceives your brand.

Creating a Google My Business profile is a great way to get your business on the map! As customers look for local products/services, there’s a greater chance of your business showing up if you have a comprehensive, accurate, and updated Google My Business page.

The best part? This is a completely free tool.

It allows you to share basic information about your New York business (business name, website, category (industry), business hours, address, phone number, description, FAQs, attributes, reviews, etc.

You can also share photos and videos to give people a slice of what your products, services, or business experience is like.

Your Google My Business profile will put you on Google Search and Maps. The better your profile, the higher your rankings!

For starters, set up your profile. Make sure you enter as much information as possible.

It must be completely authentic. If there are any inaccuracies, your listing could potentially be taken down. Take your time, double-check everything, and make sure your profile is on track.

We also recommend verifying and claiming your listing. This won’t take long.

By getting a green badge next to your profile, you’ll increase its legitimacy and credibility.

Once you’ve taken care of the basics, start optimizing your profile to improve its rankings and attract more clients.

Add high-quality images and videos to your listing.

On average, listings have between 10 and 12 images. If you can exceed this number while maintaining quality, you’re good to go! Make sure the pictures are appealing, clear, relevant, and helpful.

We also suggest setting up a comprehensive Q&A section. Here’s an example of a Q&A section from a restaurant in New York:

The more questions you include, the better. Additionally, answer questions that customers have already asked. Your profile should also include a generous amount of reviews. Now, this isn’t entirely in your control. While you can prompt your audience to send in reviews, you can’t control whether they’ll submit one and how flattering it’ll be.

Your top strategy should be offering high-quality products/services that compel your audience to leave a nice review. You can also request them to submit one by adding a review page to your website. This should redirect to your Google My Business profile, so all the reviews are collected there.

Let’s look at an example of a near-perfect Google My Business listing. This is the first result that appears when we enter “best interior designer New York” in the search bar:

This is what we’re talking about! Notice how every detail has been meticulously filled out. From the service options to the health and safety requirements to the Q&A section to the images, each detail is complete. The listing looks professional and appealing.

As you rework your profile, pay special attention to the grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax. As you start creating Google My Business posts, you must keep this in mind more than usual. These posts will show up when people search for specific information about your business. If the details aren’t accurate or the language is sloppy, people will get a bad impression of your business.

Google My Business does wonders when used correctly. Make sure you leverage it well!

Recommended Read: How to Optimize Google My Business Listing and Leverage It for More Sales

3. Create New York-Specific Content

Content is king. We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again! It also doesn’t require you to break the bank.

As a small business, you can create quality content and reach a wide audience while protecting your bottom line. You may be creating regular content right now (articles and blogs). However, it’s possible that you’re not optimizing it for location.

Let’s understand what we mean by this.

Take a look at this blog:

Written by Iles Formula, a haircare brand, it covers the best hairstyles from the New York Fashion Week (NYFW) 2019. Despite being an older blog, it still shows up among the top search results when you look for “hairstyles in New York”.

As a business owner, you must remember that your audience lives in New York. Whether they’re looking for products, services, or industry-specific trends, they’ll specify their location in the search bar.

If a web user living in Essex County is interested in hiking gear, they won’t care much about a hiking guide for Oakland. Keep this in mind as you start working on future content.

Try to write with your audience in mind. Cover local events, trending topics, and festivals in New York. If you offer legal support in NYC, write a blog on the penalties for DWI in NYC. If you run a coffee store in Syracuse, write about the most popular coffee blends to try in Syracuse.

Specify the location in at least one out of every five blogs/articles you write. This is a great way to target local customers and build your brand. We also recommend branching out into other types of content. Sure, blogs and articles are effective in increasing reach and revenue. However, they’re not enough. Over time, you should also equip your content arsenal with guest blogs, press releases, how-to guides, power blogs, infographics, listicles, and case studies.

Make sure your content is expertly optimized beyond the keywords. On-page content optimization includes title tags, meta descriptions, alt tags, and internal links. Pay special attention to these. If they’re not included and optimized, they can prevent well-researched and well-written content from ranking high.

If you’re looking for the latest trends in New York, give Google Trends a shot. This brilliant platform helps you understand what people are searching for in different parts of the world. It’s like Twitter but for digital marketing! You can keep up with the latest trends in New York and search topics to gauge whether they’re popular or not. This insight will go a long, long way in helping you write content that’s well-received by your target audience. You’ll manage to check off all the boxes that need to be checked off!

4. Master the Art of Link Building for New York Businesses

When it comes to putting the word out about your business, link building is one of the best strategies out there. It’s powerful, affordable, and sustainable. You won’t yield temporary results. When implemented correctly, it can help you enjoy a consistent stream of traffic in the long run.

Here’s the catch. Skip regular link building. Instead, focus on creating a location-specific link building strategy. Many local brands make the mistake of using a generalized link building strategy. While this works well for established businesses, it’s not the right strategy for up-and-coming brands.

As a small business, you should use a more focused, localized, and contextual link building strategy that helps you get leads in your area. Local link building has been gaining more traction in 2022, and it’s easy to see why. It works wonders and helps small businesses become more visible on the web.

Any time you’re building links, you should have a strong focus on quality. The last thing you want to do is build lots of low-quality links that generate little to no traffic. You’d much rather generate a few high-quality links that create a consistent stream of traffic.

Start writing value-added, engaging, and optimized guest blogs for high-DA local platforms. Improve content quality across the board so you can generate organic backlinks from local industry giants. Since the organic approach takes a little longer to yield results, many local businesses use a more direct approach when starting off.

Here’s how you can go about this. If you mention a local platform in your content, email and notify them. Let them know that you value their platform as a small business and included an external link in your content. Chances are that they’ll check out your content and perhaps offer a backlink in return! This is a great way to build partnerships using local outbound links.

We also suggest using the broken link building strategy for local content. A balanced, effective, and tailored link building strategy will help you enjoy better reach and sales in the long run. This is one of the things you must do to grow your small business!

5. Get Active on Social Media

When it comes to off-page SEO, social media marketing is the best strategy in the game. There’s no denying it! If you don’t have social media pages, set them up.

For starters, focus on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Moving forward, you can also branch out into LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, YouTube, and other relevant platforms based on your industry.

As a local New York business, you should create a local social media marketing plan. Focus on your local target audience. Work on new posts, stories, polls, giveaways, Q&As, and reels with your audience’s location and interests in mind. This is an excellent way to get more local traffic, i.e., qualified traffic.

If your business is exclusively based in Utica, there’s no point in targeting web users in different cities or even states. A local social media marketing strategy will help you reel in social media users who can shop your products/services and become long-term customers.

Make sure you optimize your posts using hashtags and keywords. Moreover, use high-quality, visually exciting, and industry-relevant images, videos, and infographics to keep your audience interested.

Start using chatbots! Your customer support team should be proactive, diligent, understanding, and courteous.

All in all, focus on providing a personalized experience to your audience. Your social media activity should appeal to them and offer something new that other local brands aren’t delivering.

This is an example of an excellent Twitter post:

Indulge in one of New York’s best burgers at Astor Court to celebrate #NationalHamburgerDay! #LiveExquisite pic.twitter.com/Qw9QboaDgx

— The St. Regis New York (@StRegisNewYork) May 28, 2019

The post is short and sweet, informing readers of exactly what they need to know without boring them. They’ve included “New York” as a keyword in the post. The hashtags are also relevant and perfectly placed towards the end. Lastly, the image is as appealing and eye-catching as it gets. This is how you curate the perfect local social media post to help your business get seen by your target audience!

6. Tweak Your Website

Every New York business must have a technically sound, aesthetically pleasing, and optimized website. When it comes to web design and development, make sure you check off all the boxes. If you don’t have a website, you’re leaving the bulk of your audience untargeted.

Following the pandemic, people are actively and consistently shopping online. Even after we achieve herd immunity, this trend is expected to continue. The internet is replete with active web users looking for local businesses in New York. Make sure you give them exactly what they want by showing up among the top Google search results. This can only happen when you have a website!

Set up a well-designed and well-developed site with technical SEO in mind. Focus on five key website performance metrics: page speed, DNS lookup speed, time to start render, browser caching, and hosting. As you focus on these areas, you’ll manage to launch a well-functioning site. The design should be user-friendly, appealing, clean, and modern. Keep the navigation simple and straightforward. Lastly, optimize your web copy for location. Use local keywords to attract the right segment of your audience. As you improve your website, you’ll make it more visible on the web.

The outcome? Better reach, engagement, and sales!

Wrapping Up!

In this blog, we covered six tips on how to grow your small New York business in 2022. Now that you have a good grasp of the basics, start putting them into practice!

At Global-marketing Inc., we provide professional New York SEO services to small businesses and startups across the state. If you want to hire SEO services in NY, we’re the right people to contact.

We’ve completed over 40,000 SEO projects, published over 150,000 content pieces, and created over 22,800 infographics and videos. Our track record proves our commitment to helping small businesses succeed!

If you have any questions, feel free to chat with us or give us a call at +1(833)405-1025. Let’s help your New York business hit the ground running!

The post How to Grow Your Small New York Business Online on a Budget appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

Up-and-coming businesses can no longer afford to also have a social media marketing strategy; it needs to be their bread and butter.

Whether you’re talking customer acquisition or retargeting old customers who’ve lapsed over time, a social media marketing plan allows you to do it all.

The big question is, where do you even begin with your social media strategy? We’re glad you asked! Here are 14 proven social media advertising strategies for small businesses that you need to take up.

Contents

Social Media Marketing Strategies That Work! An Essential Guide For Small And Up-And Coming Businesses

1. Set Social Goals For Your Small Business
2. Define and Own Your Brand’s Voice
3. Who’s Your Social Audience?
4. Looking At Competitors’ Past Content—The Proof is in the Pudding
5. Serve Up Some Value Additive Content
6. Be a Content Chameleon
7. Engage, Engage, Engage
8. It’s All in the Metrics—Review Social Analytics
   • Impressions
   • Engagement
   • Visits
   • Mentions
   • Followers
9. Get Platform Specific in Your Approach
10. Use Social Media As A New Frontier For Customer Service
11. Look For Trends
12. Find the Best #hashtags
13. Double Down on Social Media Optimizations
14. Get Social Media Experts on Board

Social Media Marketing Plans—The Key to Long-Term Success?

The Ultimate Social Media Marketing Strategy For Startups and Small Businesses—Wrapping Up

Social Media Marketing Strategies That Work! An Essential Guide For Small And Up-And Coming Businesses

1. Set Social Goals For Your Small Business

Here’s a question: can you spell out the impact your social marketing strategy a) has had, and b) aims to have? If you can’t answer in a heartbeat, we have a problem.

What we’re trying to say is, you need to have social media goals for your small business. And every interaction and success you have needs to be measured against these goals.

Walk yourself through the buyer’s journey for your product or service, and at each step, identify what your target is, what kind of social activity you’ll use to achieve that target, what the KPIs are for that activity, and the impact you want it to have. This sets up a nifty feedback loop that allows you to tweak your content to your heart’s content.

Here are a few examples of social media goals to get you started:

• Increase web traffic
• Increase how many people engage with your posts
• Make people aware of your brand
• Distribute informative content regarding a product/service
• Get more sign ups

2. Define and Own Your Brand’s Voice

Let’s dwell on this campaign from social media titan and clothing behemoth Nordstrom for a bit. Notice how they effortlessly weave in a service they’re offering into a campaign that’s also supposed to help save the planet. Associations like these stay in consumers’ minds, and are very powerful sales tools.

Alongside, the verdict is in—people don’t want to interact with businesses that sound like there’s no one behind them. They want a magical Oz-like character behind the curtains, orchestrating the company; someone who’s a real big personality. They also want this person to be the face of the company, so they’re talking to someone they can trust.

So, what does this mean for your small business’s social media marketing plan? For starters, if you’re the owner and fashion yourself to have even a little bit of charisma, try to put yourself front and center in all the video content you put out. Better yet, get the whole team on board by asking employees if being the public face of the company is something they’re interested in.

You could also go the behind-the-scenes route with your social media presence—this really humanizes your company.

3. Who’s Your Social Audience?

It’s marketing 101, but we’ll scream it from the rooftops anyway: you need to know your audience! And when we say know them, we mean really know them.

So, while you may have a general sense of the fact that 20 somethings who identify as women like your beauty products, you also need to know where they are, how engaged they are, and whether there’s additional consumers out there who augment your core audience. Your social media digital marketing strategy needs to account for all possible variables.

The answer, as always, lies in data. And the good news is that social media platforms give you bucketloads of it. Platforms like Twitter and Facebook already come with robust demographics analysis tools, but it doesn’t even stop there; you can complement these tools with some seriously heavy-hitting third party plugins.

All of this comes together to give you a pretty complete picture of who your audience is comprised of, allowing you to take decisions accordingly. Once you have your core demographic, all you have to do is research the kind of content they’re into, and you’re good to go!

4. Looking At Competitors’ Past Content—The Proof is in the Pudding

GoPro is the undisputed king of daily featured photos content; and it didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. All it did was take customers using their product in daring situations, and it put a new spin on an old format.

It’s not cheating if you make the content your own! Here’s the thing, there’s no such thing as completely novel content—it’s always a mishmash of what’s been done before, made new with your unique twist on it.

So when we say that the map to your success already exists, we mean it. All you need to do is look at what established competitors have been doing for a really long time—what worked, what didn’t, and what you can take and improve upon.

Remember, industries need to keep up with trends, and you want to be ahead of the curve too, not always catching up. That means you need to:

• Take competitors’ content and find a way to make it fresh
• Alongside, you need to innovate, so customers see you as the popular new kid around the block
• You can also mix and match competitors’ content to create new formats altogether

5. Serve Up Some Value Additive Content

Nothing gets your followers to leave en masse like you wasting their time. Here are some social actions that could make your brand a pariah on social media:

• Spamming your followers with promotional messages
• Posting way too much
• Not posting at all
• Coming up with posts that don’t solve any problems that your audience has

The takeaway? That every post you make needs to be worth your audience’s time. We’re not saying you need to be somber and informative either—casual tones work great, but the post still needs to tell potential customers something they want to hear.

Here’s an example of a social media post from social media staple Starbucks:

Notice how the post is beyond chill (pun intended), but it tells you a lot about the product. The featured image is super flattering and you know it’s a mix of salty and sweet that’ll help you beat the heat—it’s a winning combination, and just in a few words (Notice the effective use of the hashtag here too).

Once you strike the balance between the right tone and the right amount of information, every post will be a winner.

6. Be a Content Chameleon

In the age of digital media consumption, the worst thing you could be is unchanging. The type of content you serve to clients needs to be as varied as possible, taking full advantage of all the media and other features different social platforms give you.

See the image above from Mac Cosmetics’ Instagram page? Notice how at the same time, they have new social media posts, Highlights, and Stories for consumers to peruse. It’s an all-of-the-above approach that really seems to show that the brand is doing well.

Do you only post GIFs on your Buzzfeed-esque pop culture page? How about changing it up by posting compilation videos as well? Have an Instagram feed that your customers already love? Spice up engagement levels by leveraging Stories, IGTV, and Highlights. You get the picture.

Here’s the kicker, even conventional wisdom flies out the door if you’re only posting the same type of content. You know how people say that posts with images do better than just plain text? Well, it turns out, if you keep on posting images, eventually, they get stale, and people want out of your page.

The key is to keep on reinventing yourself for your audience, and to keep them guessing.

7. Engage, Engage, Engage

Starbucks didn’t have to reply to this customer’s question about using personal cups during the pandemic; but it did, because it’s super relevant to a lot of people these days, and makes the brand seem like it cares.

At the end of the day, customers just want to feel like you have their back. There’s nothing more frustrating than getting a product or signing up for a service, only to face a glaring problem with it. Actually, wait, there is—it’s experiencing radio silence when you reach out to the company for help.

Most brands are under the false belief that customers should come to them—but here’s a reality check, when you’re running a small business that still doesn’t have a ton of traction, you’re going to have to bite first.

The good news is, it’s not hard; in fact, we’ve broken it down into a neat list:

• Kill two birds with one stone by sharing content from someone in your core audience, and tag them for a mutually beneficial relationship (They’re also very likely to give you a shoutout for this!)
• When customers comment on your posts, reply to as many comments as you can, especially the ones asking for specific information. There’s nothing like making people feel heard.
• Another pro tip is to follow people who are following your competitor, as they’re sure to take notice when a brand takes the time out to give them a follow

8. It’s All in the Metrics—Review Social Analytics

Social media platforms thrive on data; it’s their great money-maker, after all. But data untapped serves no purposes, which is why platforms like Facebook and Instagram give you unprecedented insight into who your followers are, how much engagement they exhibit, and how they find your content.

But metrics can be deceptive; for instance, being bent on the number of likes and followers means nothing if your page isn’t getting the kind of targeted engagement that leads to someone taking a desired business action.

Wait, what does any of that mean? To simplify, if you’re running an up and coming residential repairs business and get a ton of likes on your blog posts, but not one of those leads actually calls you to step in, it’s a major problem.

That’s why it’s super important to identify what metrics are important to you, and then proceed to double down on them.

So, buckle up, because we’re taking a deep dive.

a. Impressions

Impressions is just a metric that tells you how many times a post showed up on people’s social timelines. So while you naturally want impressions to be high, if no one is interacting with your post as they see it, that’s really bad news.

b. Engagement

Engagement is the second piece of the puzzle; your impression to engagement ratio needs to be as close to 1 as possible. This is because engagement tells you how many people actually interacted with your post. This includes likes, shares, and comments, among a host of other actions, based on the platform.

c. Visits

Visits tells you how many people went from a post to your main profile. It’s a surprisingly important metric because it tells you how much interest your post drummed up for the larger brand.

d. Mentions

Mentions refers to when your brand gets a shoutout, or when someone else refers to your brand—either in passing or in the form of a review or a query. It’s a good indication of whether you’re part of the larger industry conversation.

e. Followers

This one’s pretty simple; it’s the number of people who are following you on your social media page, and indicates how fast your popularity is rising. It’s also a great metric for comparisons against direct competitors.

9. Get Platform Specific in Your Approach

We’re not going to beat around the bush; here’s what you need to do to be successful on some core social media platforms:

10. Use Social Media As A New Frontier For Customer Service

We’ve come a long way from the days of snail mail being used to bring up customer complaints. Follow up times were atrocious, and this meant that a lot of people just never reached out

The opposite is true these days. Customers expect near instant replies, and that includes having a responsive Facebook Messenger and Twitter presence.

The best part is that both of these platforms have different levels of automation features in place, so customers don’t have to wait around for the simplest queries to be answered.

But to really get them on board, try to personalize the online customer service experience as much as possible. Hire a team to reply to customers with questions and complaints, and make sure you steer clear of stock answers as you talk to them.

11. Look For Trends 

From the #ALSIceBucketChallenge to dabbing, and even the dark places the internet went to with the Tide pod challenge, online pop culture never stays put.

The key here is to take these trends and adopt them in a way that makes sense for your brand. For example, if it’s men’s health week or breast cancer awareness day, it makes sense to highlight employees who have dealt with these issues, and then talk about how your brand is trying to make a difference.

In a similar vein, if there’s a beauty YouTube trend going around, make your own video using your in-house products if your brand sells cosmetics. Remember, your audience is really honed into content that’s not true to your brand, and any missteps can lead to mistrust.

12. Find the Best #hashtags

Hashtags are more versatile than you’re giving them credit for! They’re equal parts research opportunity and discoverability tool, making them really important in your social media arsenal.

There really are so many ways to use them:

• Hop aboard trends and ask people to tag your brand in the official hashtag if it’s related to your core business.
• Host contests and ask all your followers to use the same hashtags, generating a ton of buzz around the event.
• Figure out what hashtags are doing super well for your competitors, and start using them to divert traffic to your website.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg! There are all kinds of tools out there that allow you to find the top ranking hashtag in a certain niche, as well as how hard it is to rank for them. So don’t hesitate, and jump on board the #bandwagon.

13. Double Down on Social Media Optimizations

While this can get a little technical—and is often best left to the social media marketing experts—it’s important to know that even social media content can’t escape our SEO overlords.

But wait, what’s so hard about throwing in a couple of hashtags, right? Well, here are a few questions in rebuttal:

• How many hashtags for each platform before they’re counted as spam?
• What size should the ideal Facebook featured image be?
• How do you maximize your returns from your YouTube titles and descriptions?

What we’re trying to say is, there’s a ton of platforms out there, and that means the number of variables when it comes to social media optimizations really is staggering.

But if you’re still going solo, here are a few time-honored social media tips:

• Only use hashtags that are industry specific and medium to high volume.
• Stick to three hashtags for Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as many as twenty on Instagram.
• Where there’s video content, make sure there’s also meta data to make it readable for search engines.

14. Get Social Media Experts on Board

To build upon the previous point, it really is in your best interests to hire social media marketing experts in the long-term. They can help you develop a long-term strategy that takes an omnichannel approach, while also optimizing for each platform keeping best practices in mind.

It’s a win-win scenario, because freeing up resources that would be otherwise spent on social media management will open you up to generating revenues using core business activities.

Social Media Marketing Plans—The Key to Long-Term Success?

Only a few businesses experience success as a flash in the pan; the rest of us have to put the work in! And when it comes to social media marketing plans, that means taking an all-of-the-above approach to your strategy.

These plans need to:

• Go in depth when it comes to social media platform specificities, such as when to post, how often to post, and more.
• Have an involved understanding of the target market, and whether there are other markets that can be broken into.
• Be aware of the resources available to execute said plan.
• Populate the social media business plan with all kinds of nuances that come with platforms and certain business niches coming together.

It’s a tall order, but with the right mix of expertise and some quick thinking, it’s more than achievable.

The Ultimate Social Media Marketing Strategy For Startups and Small Businesses—Wrapping Up

If your small business is feeling the heat and can’t afford to go undiscovered for a few more years, it’s time to take your social media marketing efforts up a notch!

Knowing how to promote your business on social media will take you a long way, but you really do stand to benefit by aligning yourself with one of the best digital marketing agencies in the U.S. We can completely manage every aspect of your social media presence, so you don’t have to worry about a thing!

For more information about our services, call +1(833)405-1025.

The post How to Create Winning Social Media Strategies for Small Businesses appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

As the COVID-19 pandemic pushes digital marketing to the forefront, small businesses and startups are increasingly focusing on establishing a killer online presence.

Why?

While sidelining digitalization may have allowed brands to get by in the past, it’s simply not a feasible option today. Brands that fail to adopt digitalization suffer with deteriorating metrics and revenue loss.

With over 293 million Americans spending approximately 6.5 hours online each day, establishing a strong online presence is imperative.

But that’s not simply it.

With the large majority of small businesses and startups establishing and maintaining a competitive online presence, standing out from the crowd has become more important than ever.

This is where SEO steps in. Optimizing your content goes a long way in attracting high-quality traffic that helps convert visitors into leads.

If you’re confused about how to rank higher on Google in 2020, we’ll walk you through some of the most effective SEO strategies that are bound to help you steer your business toward success.

While you may have engaged with our previous blog on improving search rankings in 2018, there have been several advancements in strategies and methods since. We suggest comparing the two blogs so you can track updates and make a note of unchanged techniques to tweak your SEO strategy accordingly.

Let’s dive in!

SEO Plan for Higher Search Rankings in 2020

1. Using the Right Keywords Is More Important Than Ever

If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, it’s easy to get confused and think you’re doing enough by simply producing content.

According to research, the first five search results on Google receive over 67.6% of all clicks.

Astonishing, right?

If you’re simply producing content, it’s very likely that your page is showing up on the sixth, seventh, or thirtieth SERP. And it should come as no surprise that a whopping 75% of people never scroll past the first page of SERPs.

If you want your content to show up on the first page of Google in 2020, you have to go the extra mile.

Using the right keywords is still one of the most effective ways to climb SERPs and attract quality traffic. Start off by diving into the deep end of keyword research. Use a reliable keyword research tool or consult SEO experts who can do the work for you.

We suggest incorporating the right mix of short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords, and geo-targeting keywords.

Use Google Trends to check the search volume trend of each keyword beforehand.

For instance, time-specific keywords like “Valentine’s day gifts” and “Christmas” peak around a very specific time period.

Remain cognizant of trending keywords and incorporate them into your content accordingly.

However, the insertion should be natural and seamless.

If you can manage to establish a strong and smooth connection between the keywords and your industry-specific content, go for it! If it seems forced, however, it’s better to abandon the idea than risk alienating readers.

Think outside the box and get your creative juices flowing to find unique ways to tailor your content in accordance with the selected keywords.

While branching out into new topics is a great idea, they should still fall within your niche.

For instance, if you run a hair salon, you can continue to produce blogs with time-specific keywords like “work from home.”

We also suggest optimizing your content by using keyword-friendly title tags, meta descriptions, meta keywords, and URLs. Optimize images by using alt tags and image tags.

Here’s a great example of a strong title tag and meta description for a blog on how to protect mental health while working from home:

The keyword placement, conciseness, and inviting conclusion draw the readers in.

It’s no surprise that this blog showed up on the first page of Google!

2. Produce Value-Added, Creative, and Engaging Content

If there’s one SEO strategy that has stood the test of time, it’s producing engaging, original, and compelling content.

While you may have optimized your content by incorporating the right keywords, you’re very likely to notice an increase in customer churn rate if your content is dull, unengaging, and lackluster.

Instead, focus on producing unique and creative titles, subheadings, and content. Strike the perfect balance between quality and quantity to ensure your audience continues to engage with your content in the long run.

Glassdoor’s engaging, relevant, and empathetic blog feed is a great example of how to get off on the right foot:

Their incorporation of culturally and racially relevant issues shows that they genuinely care about producing content that makes a difference.

Notice how their latest blog is centered on the recent incidents of police brutality against black people in the U.S. Instead of solely focusing on keywords, they’ve adopted a holistic approach that helps inform readers and invite action.

Taking a stand based on the contemporary social, cultural, racial, ethnic, political, and economic context will go a long way in helping you establish a strong brand identity and educate your audience on important issues.

In fact, it will also help you establish a high page and domain authority.

Here’s a glimpse of Glassdoor’s impressive domain rating of 91:

With over 1.6 million backlinks, the company has established a stellar reputation. And it should come as no surprise that its impactful blogs have played a big role in maintaining the immaculate reputability and authority.

3. Master the Art of Link Building to Improve Your Google Ranking in 2020

As one of the most effective SEO strategies, link building is a surefire way to increase quality traffic and rank higher on SERPs.

If your recent search entries on Google have included “how to rank on Google search” or “how to get on the first page of Google,” you may want to be all ears for this one!

In a nutshell, link building is the process of receiving high-quality backlinks from reputable websites with a high page and domain authority. As you receive quality backlinks, readers are redirected to your page. Not only does this increase traffic, but it increases quality traffic.

If you’re receiving a backlink from an established company like Forbes, Entrepreneur, Glassdoor, Architectural Digest, or Elle Décor, the chances are that the audience is genuinely interested in checking your content.

This helps weed out bad traffic and attract quality leads.

Instead of receiving visitors who don’t actually care about your products/services, you’ll attract leads that are interested in making a potential purchase. As your visitor-to-lead conversion rate increases in the long run, you’ll notice a visible boost in revenue.

Write engaging and optimized guest blogs, leverage the broken link building strategy, create visually compelling infographics, and use the right mix of internal and external links to master the art of link building.

We also suggest focusing on creating long-form content (i.e. content with over 1800 words) to increase the chances of receiving a quality backlink.

You’re probably wondering why you’re being asked to create long-form content when short, snappy, and engaging content has been taking over the digital landscape lately.

While that may be true, long-form content receives a whopping 77.2% more links than short-form content.

Of course, if you write a complex, monotonous, and uninspiring long-form blog, you’re very likely to ward off readers.

Instead, write informative—albeit engaging and fresh—long-form content to establish an air of authority in the eyes of industry giants. This will double or triple your chances of receiving quality backlinks.

We also suggest getting in touch with link building specialists who have extensive experience in helping small businesses and startups create winning link building strategies.

4. Leverage the Power of Video to Boost Audience Engagement and Retention

As the average human attention span drops from 12 to eight seconds, capturing and holding audience attention has become more challenging than ever.

According to research, video posts enjoy 135% more organic reach than image posts on Facebook. In fact, 82% of all internet traffic is expected to come from video streaming by 2022.

Simply put, people prefer engaging with video content over text and image content.

While the latter (text and image content) still matter, leveraging the former is imperative.

Create impactful, informative, optimized, and witty video content to wow your audience. With 75% of customers claiming they’d rather learn about a product/service via video as opposed to text or image, you’ll instantly increase your chances of engaging a wide audience.

We suggest creating a YouTube page and including the video feed on your website.

Optimize YouTube videos by incorporating keywords into the video file, video title, and video description. In addition, use popular video tags to ensure your videos reach a wide audience.

We also suggest including cards, in-video polls, and end screens to boost viewership.

5. Prioritize Local SEO to Increase Conversion Rate

According to research, over 46% of all search entries on Google are from people trying to find local information. This information generally includes local stores, addresses, phone numbers, and hours of operation.

If you’ve been focused on reaching an unnecessarily wide audience, you may be setting yourself up for failure. Trying to connect with customers across California when your business is based in Sacramento could end up proving to be futile.

Instead, narrow your focus to your local audience.

72% of people searching for local businesses online actually end up visiting the store.

Make the most of your local audience to ensure your business shows up among the Google 3-Pack. This displays the top three local results on the first page of Google.

For instance, if you search for “restaurants in Miami,” you’ll receive the following Google 3-Pack:

Unsurprisingly enough, over 44% of people who perform a local search end up clicking on one of the options included in the Google 3-Pack.

Here are some ways to increase local traffic and increase your chances of being included in the Google 3-Pack:

• Claim, optimize, and update your Google My Business listing
• Use location-friendly keywords in your URL, title tags, meta description, headers, and content
• Create and optimize local landing pages
• Ensure NAP (name, address, and phone number) consistency
• Make the most of online business directories like Yelp, Trip Advisor, MapQuest, etc.

Customizing your content and business accordingly will go a long way in building a wide local audience and boosting revenue.

6. Create a Mobile-Friendly, Optimized, and Visually Compelling Website

It takes approximately 0.05 seconds for users to visit your website and decide whether they’ll continue to browse or leave.

With over 38% of users refusing to engage with a poorly designed and unengaging website, ensuring aesthetic appeal is crucial.

Use your website as a canvas for your brand’s self-expression. In other words, your website should reflect your brand’s personality and style.

While ensuring your website looks the part is essential, it’s equally important to optimize it.

Use Google Speed Insights to determine whether your page is running slow. The powerful platform also offers suggestions to help speed things up and enhance user experience.

According to a recent survey, approximately 47% of users expect a website to load within two seconds.

Follow these strategies to speed up your website and reduce bounce rate:

• Minimize HTTP requests
• Compress images without affecting the quality
• Remove unnecessary plugins
• Choose the right host
• Enable caching
• Defer JavaScript loading
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)

We also suggest ensuring your website is mobile-friendly and user-friendly.

Making slight adjustments will go a long way in helping you attract and retain your target audience!

As the digital marketing landscape becomes more competitive each day, developing and adopting cutting-edge SEO strategies has become more important than ever. Complacency, stagnancy, and reliance on obsolete strategies is tantamount to digging a hole for your business.

If you’d rather stay out of the abyss and rank higher on Google in 2020, we can help you get started.

How Do You Get on the First Page of Google In 2020?

Our SEO experts have extensive experience in helping small businesses, startups, and large corporations establish a winning online presence. Whether you’re struggling to improve your Google ranking in 2020 or retain your audience, our SEO experts will assiduously analyze your current SEO strategy and make adjustments accordingly.

Our focus on increasing quality traffic and improving search rankings has enabled us to successfully complete over 30,000 SEO projects and write over 45,000 content pieces.

Call +1(833)405-1025 to make the most of our SEO and lead generation, PPC marketing, social media marketing, reputation management, web design and development, and link building services in New York, Orlando, Seattle, San Diego, and Washington DC.

We look forward to having you on board!

The post Get Ranked High in 2020: 6 Proven SEO Strategies for Small Businesses and Startups appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

As the COVID-19 lockdown continues, small businesses across the globe have been struggling to keep up with key performance metrics, engage their audience, and retain customers.

While these businesses previously relied on local offline marketing strategies rather than internet marketing for long-term growth, the new wave of lockdown-induced digitalization has made it increasingly difficult to engage with customers without using technology.

According to Forbes, over 30 million small businesses have suffered unprecedented customer attrition and revenue loss. With approximately 6.6 million U.S. workers losing their jobs each week, nationwide unemployment is rising at alarming rates.

The increasing use of social media and online browsing has necessitated the transition from offline marketing to strong online digital marketing that encompasses PPC marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, web design and development, and reputation management.

There is a dire need for innovation in marketing practices, especially for small businesses, and those who are innovating right now are indeed finding success.

Small businesses that leverage the best online marketing tips and tricks during 2021 in this ongoing period of uncertainty witness increases in conversion rates, brand growth, and revenue.

To help you discover the realm of digital marketing and how you can immediately use it to benefit your small business, we’ve rounded up our top eight Online and Digital Marketing tips.

Using these, you can not only climb out of the COVID-19 abyss but have your business sustain and thrive both during and following lockdown.

1. Create an Engaging, Interactive, and User-Friendly Website

The ongoing pandemic has increased internet use by a whopping 70%.

In fact, the surge in web browsing is expected to continue once the lockdown restrictions are eased.

Companies with a strong online presence have leveraged this boost in web traffic and have sustained revenues despite the nationwide lockdown.

However, many small businesses have been apprehensive about transitioning from tried-and-trusted offline marketing strategies to web marketing.

While the change may seem challenging at first, you’ll immediately notice a boost in audience engagement and retention.

According to research, over 92% of small business owners believe that having a user-friendly, engaging, and interactive website is the most powerful digital marketing strategy available to them.

The imperativeness of this has doubled over the past few months as the lockdown continues to boost web browsing.

Improve search rankings, local reach, and traffic by creating a comprehensive and fully-customized website. As more people gain easy access to your products and services, your business will expand organically.

Over time, you’ll manage to counteract the damage sustained during the initial months of the lockdown.

Now that you understand the importance of having a solidly engaging, interactive, and user-friendly website, you may be wondering how to go about accomplishing solid digital marketing for your small business’ website.

Here are some best practices for you to follow:

1. Keep your layout simple. Figure out what the absolute essentials of your website are and draw focus to that. This helps your website have a “clean” aesthetic that is also functional.

Having a clean and functional approach also helps to reduce your load times and make it easier for users to navigate on multiple devices.

2. Speaking of multiple devices, make absolutely sure that your website is designed to work in a mobile and tablet format as well as the traditional desktop format.

Not only does this make life far easier for a customer who wants to check out your site on their phone/tablet, but it also improves your search rankings.

This is because recently, Google has had a Mobilegeddon tweak to its search algorithm. Basically, if your website does not have a mobile-friendly interface, Google will punish your website by reducing your rankings.

So don’t forget mobile device compatibility because it can make or break your site’s rankings.

3. Make your site’s navigation features easy to follow.

As a business, your goal is to have a customer stay on your website.

The way that they stay is by clicking around.

Therefore, since you want them to stay on your site for longer periods, you need to make the navigation easy.

4. Make use of highlighted calls to action.

To do this effectively, you need to ask yourself what you want your customer to do when they are on your site. Do you want them to buy products, book a phone call, call your business…?

Figure out your calls to action and slap them on your site.

Highlight and design them in such a way that the user can’t miss them without being obnoxiously sales-y. Simple buttons work just fine for this.

In addition to your web pages and outside content, you can also use calls to action throughout your content when they become relevant.

5. Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of simple, good-looking, and easy-to-read font.

2. Leverage Social Media for Increased Customer Engagement and Retention

With a sleek and interactive website, you should take advantage of social media to engage customers and send them to your site.

This is because, according to research, the ongoing lockdown has increased social media use by 20%.

As people transition to working and studying from home, there has been a 15–40% increase in popular social media applications like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

While focusing on powerful web design and development is imperative, it’s equally important to leverage social media for increased customer engagement and retention.

Here’s what you can do to establish a strong social media presence:

1. Actively interact with customers. By doing so, you are building relationships with them. This is key because customers are far more likely to purchase from a brand they have had a positive social media interaction with.

Helpfulness, kindness, positivity, and a well-phrased joke can go a long way.

2. Optimize your content stream. What can help you immensely if you’ve already been doing social media for your business is to do an audit of your content.

Use this audit to see what is working, gaining traction, performing well, starting conversations, and building relationships with your customers.

Based on this audit, do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work well. Tweak what doesn’t work and execute new ideas.

3. Use rich images and videos. Especially during the pandemic, people’s online appetite for video has increased immensely.

You don’t have to break the bank to make videos and can very much do it yourself.

You can do so by making sure your video content is in line with your business goals/objectives, keeping it short, writing a script, optimizing messaging, and paying attention to your videos’ analytics.

We will delve deeper into video marketing later in this blog post.

4. Check out your competitors.

It’s definitely frowned upon to copy strategies, but there’s nothing wrong with looking through your competitor’s posts to see what their strategy is and take inspiration from it.

It might spark some awesome content ideas for your own business and, in turn, help you drive engagement.

5. Set goals and key objectives for your social media efforts.

A great framework for goal setting that is also applicable to goal setting outside of social media is the SMART framework.

In this, you define your goal by making it specific, measurable, achievable/realistic, relevant, and time-bound.

6. Take advantage of “social media listening.”

Suppose you run a bakery and you go to Twitter. If you look into conversations people are having about your bakery, you might come across some valuable feedback that you might have missed because the customers were saying it to each other as opposed to you directly.

This is social media listening.

You now have the opportunity to take the feedback, explore if others feel similarly on social media, and make adjustments to your products (e.g., cake moisture levels) accordingly.

You can do this effectively by monitoring social media platforms actively for mentions of your products, brand, competitors, and even keywords relevant to your business.

The first step to good communication is to listen carefully.

Not only will this help you redirect customers to your website, but you’ll also notice an increase in direct orders for your products/services.

Also known as social selling, social media selling helps small businesses boost revenue by doubling or even tripling online transactions. As your brand successfully taps into the digital realm, you’ll manage to generate more leads and expand your business.

3. Develop an Empathetic and Crisis-Friendly Digital Marketing Approach

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many brands have been called out for insensitive marketing campaigns. As small businesses transition to the digital landscape, it’s essential to tread with care and avoid developing an excessively promotional marketing strategy.

Instead, develop an empathetic and crisis-friendly approach to ensure customers feel comforted, motivated, and inspired during a time of global chaos and uncertainty.

Starbucks’ thoughtful and empowering posts are a great example of putting your customers first instead of capitalizing on a global pandemic:

Not only will empathetic messages help customers feel reassured, but they’ll also improve your brand reputation and identity. As you continue to engage with your audience in a supportive and encouraging manner, you’ll notice an increase in audience engagement, retention, and growth.

Here are some great examples by Chick-fil-A and Starbucks:

While we recommend using digital platforms to share your products/services, take strict measures to avoid blurring the lines between blatant promotion and crisis-friendly branding.

Demarcating each category will help you avoid overstepping, thereby connecting with your customers without overselling or capitalizing on the ongoing crisis.

4. Focus on Reputation Management

While you may feel compelled to manage your web presence and social media accounts yourself, asking for help is crucial.

As small business owners adopt digital marketing strategies, they’re largely unfamiliar with the subtleties of managing a strong digital reputation.

While increased web activity and social media use are extremely beneficial, it can also backfire in some instances.

Receiving negative feedback and false reviews is a common occurrence. However, leaving them unattended could harm your brand in the long run.

As potential customers interact with the negative content, they’re likely to change their minds and look for a competitor who offers similar products/services. In addition, you run the risk of losing unsatisfied customers by leaving their complaints unattended.

This is where reputation management experts step in.

They help brands detect and respond to negative feedback in an empathetic, polite, and remedial manner. Moreover, business reputation monitoring and management agents also help remove the factually incorrect information, cyber-attacks, and intentional public vitriol that could cost your brand in the long run.

5. Create Powerful Web Content

You may have accomplished the feat of creating a visually dynamic, informative, and immersive website.

But this doesn’t mean that you now get to drop the metaphorical mic and let your social media run itself.

It’s important to maintain this strong web presence (read: stay relevant) by continuing to share high-quality blogs, articles, press releases, infographics, and other promotional media because these methods maximize audience retention.

As preexisting customers engage with your content, they’ll be redirected to your products/services, thereby minimizing customer attrition and ensuring long-term brand growth. Sharing promotional web content also helps attract new audiences.

We recommend developing a crisis-sensitive approach to ensure customers feel acknowledged instead of overwhelmed. Include a powerful yet empathetic CTA to redirect them to your product/service pages and/or social media accounts.

6. Leverage Local SEO Strategies for Higher Rankings

Focusing on local SEO is a powerful way to target local audiences and receive higher rankings on SERPs. As people spend more time indoors, they’re actively seeking products/services that can be delivered to their doorstep.

As you optimize your website for local searches, you’ll successfully increase your local customer base.

Claim your free Google My Business listing to enhance visibility and relevance. We recommend updating the page and sharing posts to receive a higher ranking on Google. Maintain NAP (name, address, and phone number) consistency to improve credibility.

We also suggest optimizing web content—including web copy, blogs, articles, and press releases—based on region-specific keywords. This strategy will help your business climb SERPs and attract more customers.

Use title tags, meta description, header tags, and additional on-page SEO elements to give Google a clear idea of the regional availability of your products/services.

7. Leverage Video Marketing

As one of the most effective digital marketing tools, video marketing helps brands share their products/services with customers without losing their attention.

As the average human attention span drops to 8 seconds, keeping audiences engaged has become more challenging than ever. While text and image-based content is powerful in its own right, video content has proven to be more impactful.

According to research, 90% of customers admit that product/service videos play a big role in finalizing their buying decision. In addition, brands that use video content enjoy over 41% more web traffic than their competitors.

As video emerges at the forefront of marketing, creating engaging, entertaining, and empathetic video content has become more important than ever.

Whether you create an explainer video that educates your audience about your products/services or a company culture video that briefly outlines your work-from-home adaptation strategy, video marketing will help build a strong customer base.

We recommend posting the video content on your website and social media pages for better reach.

8. Keep Up With Your Competitors!

Monitor successful local competitors’ websites to develop an idea of different strategies that you could potentially try in the future. While you may have utilized powerful digital marketing tactics, there’s always room for improvement.

We also recommend keeping up with industry trends to stay on top of the competition and sneak in some much-needed inspiration when needed.

Browse through your competitors’ social media pages to review their engagement and customer response strategy. This will help you determine lapses in your audience engagement strategy and update tactics if needed.

Now you have learned everything you need to: optimize your social media approach for engagement, update your brand voice for crisis time, creating important and powerful content that helps and resonates with your audience, performing basic SEO practices, and keeping on top of your competitive research.

While this provides you with a strong foundation to help your small business stabilize and even thrive, remember that the work doesn’t end here, and researching best practices is an ongoing process that evolves just as the pandemic does.

Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone.

You can improve your brand visibility and growth by browsing through our expert digital marketing services for small businesses.

Our social media management, reputation management, content marketing, web design and development, and Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing services are tailored according to cutting-edge SEO trends to ensure better sales and traffic for clients.

As one of the leading award-winning SEO agencies in the U.S., we help small businesses get started at as little as $200.

Call us at +1(833)405-1025 to get started or request a quote.

The post 8 Digital Marketing Tips & Tricks for Small Businesses Struggling to Navigate COVID-19 appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

Contents

Create Brand Awareness & Enhance Online Exposure

Educational Content

Call to Action

Identify Potential Customers and Sales Opportunities

Expand Your Email List

Create an Environment of Engagement and External Feedback

Broaden Your Online Publication Network

Use Guest Posting to Boost Your SEO

Spread on Social Media

Improve Online Authority

Generate Qualified Leads

Shorten your Sales Cycle

In today’s tech-focused world, virtually all aspects of our lives are intimately connected with the internet. Businesses, both small and large, rely on the internet to reach out to a worldwide audience and market their products/services. In short, digital marketing has become the new norm.

Creating online blogs is a marketing technique that is popular among many small and large businesses—and this isn’t surprising. It’s an effective and efficient way to establish yourself as an authority in your industry and draw attention to your offerings. In fact, a survey conducted by HubSpot revealed that blogging is the top content marketing priority for 53% of marketers.

But, just like any other type of blog, it can be quite tricky to maintain a small business blog. It takes a lot of effort and a significant amount of research to draw and capture the attention of today’s highly impatient online consumers.

In order to create a successful blog, you need to have a firm understanding of your target audience, develop a robust blogging schedule, create fresh content that interests readers, and design a visually engaging, user-friendly, and interactive website.

The question on many business owner’s minds is: does Guest Blogging improve or have benefits for SEO?

While building authority by creating and maintaining a blog is all well and good, a small business (or any sized business really) also requires the support of its peers to succeed—and this is where guest blogging for SEO comes in.

You see, it’s not difficult to find websites with big audiences that are willing to help you grow your small business. Collaborating with them by publishing quality guest posts on their platform exposes your businesses to a large audience, and ultimately drives traffic to your website.

Here are five reasons why guest blogging is the key that opens the doors to brand development, customer acquisition, and small business growth.

Expand on Social Media

You can also grow your brand presence on social media as a result of guest blogging.

This is one of the biggest pros of Guest Blogging for small businesses and bloggers.

Social media shares definitely follow a domino effect once the sharing ball gets rolling on your content.

Therefore, if you are sending your guest post to a website that gets a fair amount of social media shares, it is likely that your post will get a lot of shares as well.

A hack to triple and even quadruple the number of shares you get through social media through a guest post and otherwise is to embed high-value sharable content within your blog.

This can look like a really helpful infographic.

The best kind of infographics are those that break down complex topics and content into easily digestible and understandable graphics or flow charts.

To get you started on your infographic, here is an awesome guide to help you create yours today.

The great thing about guest posts is that your page will be linked back to and tagged.

Guest blogging can, in this way, increase not only the social media shares of your content but also increase your follower count and your lead generating efforts.

By getting your work published on a blog that has authority, you are essentially upping your own authority as well because they are referring you as a credible source to their audience.

When you get to create your contributing profile, in order to maximize click-throughs to your social media, make sure to link to your accounts in your bio section.

This way, specific readers who take the time to check out your author bio will actually be able to connect with you or your business via social media, making your posts a regular part of their newsfeeds.

Since you now have them on your social feeds, you want to remind them why they followed you.

The way you do this is by regularly posting high caliber, helpful content for them to digest. Not only does this engage the followers you garnered from the guest blog you posted, but it also helps your organic reach on social media.

Content truly is king, so don’t forget to keep providing value to stay at the forefront of your audience’s minds.

Create Brand Awareness & Enhance Online Exposure

One of the most significant benefits of guest blogging for small business owners is increased online exposure and brand awareness.

Why do these matter?

Well, nobody will spend money on your business if they don’t know it exists, right?

Simply put, guest blogging gets your name out there and thus benefits your small business’s SEO.

Considering how intensely competitive the digital marketing environment is today, don’t you think it’s ideal to earn quality backlinks and climb SERPs?

Moreover, notable online marketing experts believe that it takes around 5 to 7 impressions before a consumer is able to remember your brand, which means that in order to make the greatest impact, it’s essential to write relevant guest blogs as frequently as possible.

But how exactly does guest blogging create brand awareness and increase exposure for your business? Well, let us explain through an example. Let’s assume that you have the opportunity to publish a guest blog on a site that has 100,000 followers, and 10,000 of them end up reading your blog. Even if the likelihood of getting redirected traffic from this post to your site is low, you still get the chance to introduce your businesses to thousands of potential consumers.

But how do you increase the chances of acquiring redirected traffic? Well, here’s what you need:

Improve your niche-wide authority

There’s a formula for transforming your guest content efforts into leads for your business.

Good, helpful content + high authority site within your niche = greater authority within your niche = greater trust among potential customers.

This greater trust comforts the followers of your work to convert from prospects to paying customers/clients.

Guest blogging in this way helps your target audience see you as a credible, reliable source of information to help them solve their pain-points.

Therefore, because of this initial trust, they are more open to the value propositions that you present to them.

A hot lead that trusts your authority will always convert faster than a cold one.

Increase your qualified leads

A qualified lead is essentially a lead that is further down the sales process.

They have already expressed interest in your value proposition and therefore need less convincing to convert as opposed to someone who is simply browsing.

To get these qualified leads, the key is to find websites to guest post on that already have a regular and reliable flow of traffic as well as relevancy in your niche.

It is unlikely that you will be able to guest post with a direct competitor but try to find a high authority, a well-respected site within your niche as a whole to post on.

When you post your links within your blog, there is a certain art and finesse to making sure people want to click that big call-to-action button, which leads to your website.

Otherwise, it can very well be perceived as a useless waste of space that took up the reader’s time without a pay-off rather than the highly converting benefit of Guest Blogging that it can be.

Unsurprisingly, this approach (or lack thereof) can result in very few click-throughs and leads from the guest post.

The key is to create unity between the CTA you post and the actual page that it leads to.

Make sure both of these are related to the overall content of the guest post you are writing.

This actionable step should read in the prospect’s mind as a reasonable next step from the guest blog they just read in order to solve their pain-point.

Use This Content Marketing Opportunity to Shorten Your Sales Cycle

The key here is that rather than waiting for potential customers to show up on your website, you get to help them discover your unique value proposition on a trusted third-party website.

In this way, you get to shorten your sales process for your services and products.

To capitalize on the match between your value proposition and the topic you write about, you need to be very strategic about what you blog about.

Think of yourself as a guest blogging ninja who is there to strike specific key pain-points that are relevant to the solutions you provide (i.e., your services and products).

Educational Content

Ensure that the content of your guest blog is engaging and educational.

Discuss trends and insights to become an authoritative voice in the industry and increase your chances of persuading readers to visit your website.

The reason that educational content performs so well is that bridging people’s gaps in their knowledge helps them to solve problems and understand their pain-points better so that they can tackle them more effectively.

Good educational content provides value.

Engaging and good educational content provides value and builds engagement.

Try to be the professor that enthralls and inspires his or her class to change the way that they think to solve their problems.

The root of most problems is, after all, a mindset difference.

This is a key advantage of Guest Blogging for startups who are still building their name and can exponentially speed up the process.

Empowered with the right knowledge presented to them in the right way, people act differently, and for that mindset shift, a prospect will be grateful.

Call to Action

What’s the point of investing your precious time and resources to create quality content and not get even a single email in return? Make sure you insert a call to action in the conclusion of each blog post.

Deciding the specifics of the call to action is up to you—you can either ask the readers to sign up for your newsletter, or simply urge them to leave feedback in the comments section.

Identify Potential Customers and Sales Opportunities

We’ve already mentioned that guest blogging exposes your brand to new audiences, but how exactly does it help generate more leads?

Well, when you offer solutions to readers’ problems through your guest blogs, they start considering you to be an expert in your particular industry or niche.

They will follow you, approach you, and visit your website to gain more information.

Of course, this will expose your products or services to new consumers, and the ones that are interested in your products will make inquiries.

In a nutshell, the higher the generated business leads, the higher the sales—and the higher the sales, the higher the profits.

Expand Your Email List

Emails have long established themselves as a reliable tool for business development and branding. The sheer power that enables you to reach the meticulously managed inbox can be life-altering. Utilize email marketing in an efficient manner and watch how fast your small business grows.

The biggest key to building your email list, which you can even discuss and link in your guest post, is to create an “opt-in incentive.”

This is some document, video, training, etc., that provides value to your prospective customer.

Some examples of this are a checklist, an ebook, an exclusive video or video series, etc. Whatever format you choose, the incentive you provide needs to be electrifying and value-adding enough that your prospect will want it to help them solve their problem.

In exchange for this amazing, value-adding piece of content you provide them with, your opt-in form will ask for their email address.

Once they’ve opted in, and your email marketing software has sent them their opt-in incentive, boom – you’ve got a new email subscriber, and your list is primed to grow in this way.

However, there’s one mistake that you should avoid at all costs: spamming.

Developing an email list can be quite a tricky undertaking, especially if you’re new on the block. Not every visitor of your website shares their email address or signs up for a newsletter. However, guest blogging can just be the growth catalyst you need to start building an email list.

However, it’s essential to make your readers believe that being on your mailing list will provide them with access to valuable information.

In order to achieve this, you need to work on the varied nuances of the blog post, and make sure that it’s the perfect blend of information, sales pitch, and call to action.

Another way of expanding your email list is to ask established bloggers to share their email lists. However, it’s not as simple as it sounds. You need to offer them something in return for this favor. This could be an engaging infographic or a well-written blog post.

Create an Environment of Engagement and External Feedback

An important aspect of devising great digital marketing strategies involves developing unique new ideas or modifying plans to fit current requirements. Another great benefit of guest blogging for small businesses is access to community insights, which can help fine tune those strategies.

Just pull up a well-written blog post on a popular website with high domain authority, and you’ll find the comment section filled with the readers’ opinions, experiences and ideas—and this is exactly what guest blogging gives you access to. It helps you to get constructive feedback from areas outside your own website.

Put it this way: you come across a person who has constructive, insightful suggestions to a blog post from a website belonging to someone else. This feedback may inspire you to do something that ends up accumulating quality traffic.

Broaden Your Online Publication Network

When it comes to developing a brand, networking is one of the most important components. Just as the adage goes, “It’s not all about what you know, but also who you know.” This statement is as relevant in today’s business landscape as it was 50 years ago.

The key to successful networking is collaborating with businesses that are capable of helping you build a recognizable brand across their own network. It’s like creating a web of awareness where all the involved parties can potentially help each other. As a matter of fact, this is the underlying idea behind the LinkedIn social media hub.

Publishing guest blogs on other websites allows the creation of networks between website owners and readers alike. Furthermore, these networks often lead to collaborations, which take business relationships to new heights.

Use Guest Posting to Boost Your SEO

Guest blogging is easily one of the most in-demand content marketing services right now. Unsurprisingly, companies are increasing hiring guest blog writers to work on their website. An increasing number of entrepreneurs, businesses, and companies are maximizing the unique benefits of hiring expert guest bloggers, which include generating quality backlinks, boosting authority, improving name recognition, increasing the chances of getting featured on high-traffic platforms, and gaining the trust of a large target audience.

If you’ve been struggling to use guest posting to boost your SEO, we can help you kick things off. As an award-winning digital marketing and small business SEO firm, we specialize in helping brands leverage guest blogging for SEO.

The post 5 Benefits of Guest Blogging for Small Businesses Owners appeared first on Global-marketing Inc..

In today’s digitized world, entrepreneurs and small business owners can’t get away with not knowing SEO strategies. In fact, e-commerce and SEO tools have become fundamental aspects of online marketing.

Research suggests that people prefer mobile browsing over laptop or desktop searches. This growing trend has created the need for online business owners to ensure that their website is optimized for mobile device viewing and has a user-friendly interface.

As simple as this may sound, many entrepreneurs struggle to implement SEO strategies effectively. The result is poor search engine rankings and foregone opportunities to make profits.

How to Optimize Your E-Commerce SEO?

You must strike when the iron is hot. Global events like Halloween, Christmas and Black Friday are prime days for e-commerce businesses to make profits and improve the visibility of their brand. However, you can’t yield the benefits of these events if you don’t even have an SEO strategy set up in the first place.

Everything from the content you post online to how your website is designed can play a crucial role in how well your business capitalizes on opportunities and converts them into a loyal customer base.

Nearly 35 percent of customers come from organic search engine results. This means that there’s a broad market you can tap into if you occupy any of the top search result ranks. So how do you rank better on Google?

At Global-marketing Inc., we’ve mastered the art of SEO marketing. We’ve been offering our award-winning digital SEO services to clients all over the world and can provide you with optimized tools to help your business thrive!

Here are some of our best tips on a mandatory SEO checklist for small business owners and entrepreneurs aiming to go big this year!

Part A: Website Architecture and Design

The architecture and design of your website refer to the overall structure of your site, including the hosting server and the plug-ins and applications installed in it. Your website’s structure makes a huge difference in terms of how big your e-commerce store is.

A six-page website will likely load and operate faster compared to a thousand-page one. Using a Content Management System, however, can take the burden off of you to take care of your website since the design and operations are already programmed.

Here are some things you can do to improve your website design.

1. Simplify your Website’s Structure

A complicated homepage structure can chase away even the most enthusiastic customers. Your website should always be UX and UI friendly. This means that your site visitors should be able to navigate their way to the product page under 3 clicks. Also, keep in mind that a responsive website design that’s adaptable to mobile device viewing will improve your chances of getting visitors to stay on your site. This is known as dwell time and it works wonderfully to improve your business’s SEO rankings.

2. Incorporate Breadcrumbs on Your Site

Breadcrumbs are a navigational aid that tells the visitor what part of the website they’re on.

This feature should also be beneficial for your business since the right breadcrumb tags can make you more searchable.

When you first read about breadcrumb navigation for your site, it can sound rather confusing and abstract so let’s break it down.

Basically, the term comes from the tale Hansel and Gretel, in which Hansel leaves bread crumbs behind him so that they can navigate the path that they have walked to get to where they are.

Subsequently, breadcrumb navigation on your website is specifically designed to help your website visitor understand what path they have followed on your website’s pages to wind up on the page that they currently are at.

It’s akin to having left a trail of breadcrumbs behind them to navigate their path.

Traditionally the breadcrumb navigation feature is placed at the top of the web page so that the user can easily see it.

It will look something like: Home > Blogs > Breadcrumb blog piece > Contact Us Page.

In this above case, the page that the user ended up on was the Contact Us page, and the breadcrumb tells them the story of how they navigated through the site to get there.

This ultimately helps the user understand your site structure and therefore navigate your site more easily to the pages that they want to access.

The key “secret sauce” which makes the breadcrumb navigation system work is that each “crumb” is linked so that the user can immediately skip back and forth to pages that they want to go to.

You may be wondering: how can this practice improve an Ecommerce site’s SEO for entrepreneurs and small business owners?

The answer is that Google actually uses breadcrumb navigation to crawl your website and place it into categories.

Therefore, if your site already has an effective breadcrumb navigation system in place, Google is much more likely to rank it on the first page.

3. Optimize Links to your Site

When it comes to organic searches, site links can help your visitors easily navigate the most important pages. These are usually the most frequently visited pages on your website.

It helps to add internal links to related products on your ecommerce site or even products that your other customers bought with the product in question.

This helps you up-scale your revenue and sales through up-selling your customers more products.

A smart way to include internal links is to use your keywords as the “call to action” rather than a generic phrase like “click over here.”

A key way to increase your authority as well as get some good internal links in is to create an About Us page.

This helps your target customer understand your company better, and if your mission is something they resonate with, they’re much more likely to regularly support you as a brand.

If you have specific product types that you specialize in, you can definitely link those pages in your About Us section.

Therefore, an About Us page is definitely something to add to your Ecommerce SEO checklist.

Part B: On-Page SEO Tactics

On-page SEO refers to the process of optimizing each page on your site, including the codes and content, to make them readable as search engine result pages. Small businesses that wish to boost their SEO rankings can and should definitely work on SEO page tactics.

Here’s what to focus on:

1. Keywords

Prepare a list of keywords you’d like to get ranked for.

Remember to own the keyword you choose; don’t spread your content so thinly that you don’t get ranked for anything.

Website crawlers are always on the lookout for content that features the right percentage of keyword-to-text ratio.

A keyword strategy that you should definitely take advantage of is to target long-tail keywords as much as possible.

This is because long-tail keywords are not only lower competition overall but also have a higher chance of bringing you conversions because of the sheer specificity with which a user is searching for something.

Find keywords that are relevant to your e-commerce store but don’t stuff them in meaningless prose. Search engines are a lot smarter than you think.

2. Increase Your Page Speed

We’ve talked about improving the loading speed of your website; now it’s time to talk about the operational speed of each page on your site.

Loading and buffering speeds are key indicators to Google’s algorithms on how to rank your page.

You can get in touch with Global-marketing Inc.’s website development department to help you with this feature.

Having slow loading speeds definitely does not do favors for your Ecommerce SEO as an entrepreneur.

3. Create Localized Landing Pages

E-commerce stores can benefit from creating specific pages that target a particular kind of promotion.

The holiday season is specifically useful for this endeavor, since there are more searches guaranteed for particular keywords around those dates.

Aside from holiday events, it can also be beneficial to your site to create category pages with specific keywords.

An example of this could be “Women’s Soccer Shoes” or “Men’s Date Night Shoes,” depending on your keyword research.

The biggest keywords should definitely have a category of their own under which you can place smaller keywords that fit into the larger category.

If your landing page features something exciting like a giveaway or a competition, your visitors are likely to share your page on social media—earning your authentic links that will boost your SEO rank.

You can optimize your localized landing pages by immediately showing your visitors your most popular and most bought items within that genre.

This can immediately get the proverbial sales ball rolling.

Sales start flowing in using this technique because it gets people interested fast.

4. Add Descriptions for Product Pages

Promote your products by adding small description texts to entice potential buyers. Feel free to write descriptions however you want them. Here are some tips to keep in mind while writing them:

– Keep your description in the 300 to 700 word range.

– Pepper your text with internal links to other pages on your site.

– Add a customer review section to your product pages. Anytime someone types ‘reviews’ in the search bar can get linked to your product description pages.

– Communicate any and all special offers or discounts on your products.

When you’re writing your product descriptions and titles, make sure to create a sense of urgency.

This applies even to crafting your meta descriptions for your organic search results on Google and other search engines.

A useful pro-tip for your Ecommerce SEO checklist for 2021 to create that sense of urgency is to use a countdown clock for specific deals and prices.

A bonus pro-tip that a lot of ad-copy writers use is to take full advantage of powerful words in your product descriptions and titles.

These specific words are timeless and have been tested to psychologically prime your visitors to invest in products.

While there are many power words out there for you to research, this should help you get started.

Part C: Off-Page SEO Strategies

No Ecommerce SEO checklist for entrepreneurs and small business owners is complete without off-page SEO Tactics.

A lot of the work that goes into improving your e-commerce business’s search engine ranking happens offline. Off-page SEO is slightly different from writing a blog or optimizing your web page.

Here, we deal with topics like offering sponsorships for certain events, partnering with local businesses within your industry and improving your outreach with white hat link building techniques. Let’s discuss each one of them in a little more detail.

1. Link Building Strategies

The simplest way to build authentic links is to promote a product, service or event.

Insert them into all of your content, but in ways that make them look like a natural fit and not a forced block of promotional text.

You can also embed links into the images you upload onto your website. Google’s algorithms will take that into consideration when they’re building your SEO rank.

One key strategy to find places that can link to your site is to see which sites are linking to your competitors.

You can easily build links on forums and directories that your competitors have built links on already.

A key place to also find an easy backlink is to get in touch with your manufacturer and ask them to link to you as a merchant for their product on their website.

If they aren’t forums or submission-based directories, you can also reach out to the websites linking to your competitors and ask for a link to your site.

If you ship your product internationally, it can also help you to check international competitors in the countries you can ship to.

Then repeat the same practice for the websites that are linking to your international competitors’ ecommerce websites.

2. Develop Industry Partnerships

This is perhaps the most important element of off-page SEO marketing. Get in touch with local industry e-commerce website owners and build a reciprocal promotional deal. Ask them to link your business on their content and offer them something in return.

You can even hire some already high-ranking online businesses to serve as licensed distributors for your products. From white hat link building to the chance to reach out to a larger consumer base, there are many benefits to expanding your industry partnerships.

3. Embrace the Sponsorship Culture

Getting your products sponsored by a third party website is actually easier than you think. There are many blogs that would happily promote your products. You can also opt to sponsor an event and request your partners to promote you on their website and on-ground activities. This should help put your e-commerce brand’s name on the SEO map.

4. Reach Out to Bloggers

Bloggers bring in loads of traffic and a loyal fan base with them. Get your small business’s name out there by having bloggers feature you on their blogs. You don’t even need to get anything major done for a promotion—simply ask them to link back to your home or product page and you’re surely going to have a lot of their traffic directed to your pages. Many bloggers would be willing to promote you for free; however, some will ask you for some compensation. The choice is yours.

5. Start Guest Posting

Backlinks are crucial for improving your SEO rank. You can use those and harness the power of online influencers to create a solid SEO marketing strategy for your small business to bloom. Ask popular blog owners or local industry groups to let you publish a guest post for them. You’ll be able to convince them better if you already have a few topics in mind. Try to work on something that benefits both of you. In most cases, your partner will agree to guest posting since the backlinks benefit their SEO rank as well.

Final Word

Memorize these e-commerce SEO marketing tips and strategies and maximize your gains during any major shopping season!

A simple, user-friendly and responsive website can help increase your visitor dwell time, while the right kinds of links and promotional pages can help boost activity on and off your page throughout the year.

While SEO tips for Ecommerce stores, startups, and entrepreneurs can be challenging to understand, you are already ahead of the game by taking the time to understand this blog’s points.

A good business person also knows when to delegate work so that they can focus on what matters most in their ecommerce business.

If you’re looking for professional website design, SEO marketing or content development strategies, feel free to get in touch with us today!

Global-marketing Inc. is one of the leading white hat SEO marketing agencies in the United States and offers some of the most affordable rates to get you started on your way to the top of search engine result pages!

Call us at +1(833)405-1025 to learn more about our packages!

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