IF IT WERE ME: 12 TIPS FOR YOUNG TALENT
THE UNION GUIDE TO SEO AND PPC
You’ve established your business with a visually appealing brand identity, great products or services and a brand new website full of useful information and a real showcase for your company. So where are your customers?
It’s a fair question, after all you’ve put a lot of hard work in so far, surely you deserve the attentions of your target market... The trouble is, your new customers may simply not know you are there, which is where Union’s online marketing services come in.
Think about it - if you open a shop in a town centre that’s down a side street, it can have the most beautiful shop front, best products and fantastic customer service, but the majority of shoppers just don’t see you unless they stumble upon you. The solution? Point people in the right direction. You may put some signs up at the end of the street, advertise in local media or prepare some fliers to help promote the shop. It is no different online - you need to put out those signs, those adverts etc, any visual aids that drive that traffic to your website.
Site speed testing and optimisation
The first step is important, not to drive traffic to your site, but to ensure a good user experience when visitors do come. We trawl through your website making tweaks to optimise site speed for both desktop and handheld devices.
Key demographic research
Who are your potential customers? We'll work with you to outline the age groups, gender and lifestyles of your potential customer base so that we can ensure any marketing activities are targeted to the right people.
Keyword research/analysis
We are often asked how a client can get their site to the top of google. We always respond with ‘for what keywords and phrases?’, Keywords and key phrases are the search terms potential customers enter in to a search engine such as Bing or Google.
We take a thorough look at your services/products, your competitors and similar businesses, and build a range of words and phrases that are most likely to gain a high click-through rate and deliver your potential customers to relevant areas of your website.
Keyword/site content optimisation
With the above keywords and phrases in mind, we revisit your website, and revise the content of each page to ensure that it is relevant and engaging, with a good keyword density and use of synonyms and structured data. The aim is to ensure that someone clicking on an ad based on any given keyword is taken directly to content that relates to the ad.
Meta tag check and image check
Again, for each page of your website, we will work through all of the hidden attributes ensuring image tags, headers, meta data all represents your established keywords correctly. (Note - META data was once a key influencer in site ranking - whilst not as prevalent in search algorithms today, it is still used to some extent and we prefer to cover all bases!)
Site link check/generation
Google search results are populated and ranked in a number of ways. Essentially ‘spiders’ (search engine robots) trawl the internet, and for each site they discover, they work through checking content for relevance, and following any links to and from your site pages, again checking relevance. Based on relevance of content, your site will then be ranked against other similar sites.
Site map generation
A site map is essentially a digital map of your website, which, when submitted to the search engines, allows the spiders to find their way around your site faster and therefore get your new site ranked faster.
Webmaster tools setup
Webmaster tools allows us as developers to control the way search engines display your website, allowing us advanced control over what appears where and to check all of our activities are functioning correctly and to highlight any potential errors or inconsistencies in the website
Google analytics setup
Analytics is our method of monitoring the success of your online campaigns and finding out who is visiting your website, when, how long for, and also their behaviour when they hit the site. We can see for any given period which pages are working best, whether visitors are following any calls to action, what they searched for to get there and much more.
Google business setup
You may have seen in search engines when a business name is typed in, a map is displayed along with opening hours, and basic business details. This is accomplished through Google Business, which controls how your business is displayed on Google Maps and in turn on the search listings.
Google Adwords campaign/management
At a basic level, there are two ways your website can appear in search engines - organic (natural) search listings and paid listings. It can take a long time for your site to even begin appearing in the search listings, let alone on page one for your specific search terms - and other than good SEO practices as detailed above, there is not much you can do to speed things up. That doesn’t, however, mean it’s impossible to get to page one quickly - it just requires a budget and some time using PPC (pay per click).
We create well thought out advertising campaigns through Google adwords and then ‘bid’ on keywords relevant to those ads. When a searcher clicks on your advert, you pay Google for the click that has driven traffic to your site. The cost per click varies greatly and depends very much on the popularity of that key word and how many other companies are bidding on it.
We have the ability to target ads to specific demographics, locations and interests, again helping to avoid wasted budget.
We monitor your campaigns regularly to ensure you are getting the most out of your adwords budget, and that the ads we have generated are performing well - tied in with the aforementioned analytics to ensure once people have clicked and ad they are finding the information they require when they get to your site, and hopefully following the calls to action to buy/contact from you.
Analysis and reporting
As you can imagine, there is a lot going on and keep an eye on to avoid wasted budget and make the most of any campaign. We use various reporting tools to provide you with an overview of what’s going on, and ultimately to be able to show you what is working, what is not and to help us plan out future campaigns.
Your online marketing will also be greatly helped by Social Media - using highly targeted ads and boosted posts in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest etc to drive traffic to your website.
Any questions? Feel free to contact us via email or call 01905 780890
