With increases in online business and ecommerce, marketing your business online has become not just an effective advertising tool, but a required one. Currently in Australia 48% of small businesses and 79% of large business are registered online.
Marketing costs are split up into a number of different options including website design, pay-per-click advertising, social media and SEO. These strategies though can have high individual costs and are not guaranteed to yield you any results.
Hiring a professional can be expensive but will give you a competitive edge over those with outdated or broken websites. However there are a few cost effective strategies for business looking to make an impact online.
There is no one strategy to successfully market your business online. Rather utilising an array of different options will diversify your marketing portfolio and return a positive result.
New technologies are constantly arising and investing too many resources in one online marketing option may see you fail. Some platforms never generate a big audience and Google is always updating its search criteria.
Staying up-to-date is critical in beating the competition. You may not have to spend a lot of money online if you are willing to put in the time.
Create Interesting Content And Blogging
Content has been highlighted as a key factor for business online this year. Websites without engaging or useful content will be neglected for those that offer a positive user experience.
Sharing industry news or offering insights are some easy ideas for content you can add to your website. These can come from free sources but offering the customer information they can’t get anywhere will bring them back to your site.
Blogging is just as importantly offering you another chance to share engaging content and build your online space. Blogging is a free exercise although their cost-effective services available online.
When done correctly, blogging directs users to your site and helps people find what they’re looking for. If you’re writing blogs yourself to save money or because of your knowledge on a topic, set aside a generous amount of time.
Great ideas for first time bloggers are subjects you’re interested in or know a lot about. Stay within your area of expertise as bad content is damaging to your site.
Create An Email List Using Twitter
Twitter Cards are a tool utilised by online marketers in an effort to build their email lists. The first step is to set up a free Twitter Ads account. Next create a card and insert an image that is preset for social media.
Ask them to subscribe to your newsletter, it is important to offer the subscriber something in return to make them engage with you. Creating interesting content and blogging are both examples of this.
If a user subscribes to your Twitter Card a URL link is provided for them to click through. A good page to redirect this too is your landing or newsletter page on your site. Use Google URL builder to create a URL to provide attribution from Twitter and give you more accurate tracking.
[cta id=”2091″ vid=”0″]
Simple Checks For Organic Search
Organic search rankings are a great way for you to direct traffic to your website without paying for ads. Optimising your sites content and structure will increase a search engine’s ability to crawl your site.
Content
A good first step is to check whether each of your sites page has enough content. Ensuring there are at least 300 words of text and no more than 2500 is essential.
Linking
Linking is another great source of increasing your SERP ranking. Easy types of linking you can do are internal linking, external linking, inserting YouTube videos and fixing broken links.
Inserting these links properly is essential, use online tools such as Moz Open Site Explorer or SEOquake. For external authority linking, check that they have a domain ranking over 80 and at least 25 links.
Linking involves finding content that warrants an external source, providing more information on a topic. This could come from a page on your website, another online information source or a YouTube demonstration.
Linking a YouTube video is a great way to optimise for SEO as Google seeks rich content. Video is linked to quality content and it’s presence is seen by search engines.
Fixing broken links is just as essential and is another great free way of enhancing SEO. Screaming Frog’s Broken Link Checker is a great free tool for this. Dead links make your site less appealing and in a worst case scenario you should have a helpful 404 page ready.
Images
Images on your site should have a correct title, description, caption and most importantly alt text. Google’s search engine reads the alt text on your sites images and factors them into your site rankings.
It is essential to include your a page’s keyword in the alt text of at least one image on the page. A good guide to how many image you need per page is the amount of content:
- 300 – 500 words – 1 image
- 500 – 1000 words – 2 images
- 1000+ words – 3 images
Titles
Any titles on your page should be formatted correctly and contain the keywords you’re trying to rank the page for. Titles must be distinguishable from body texts and must be formatted under the right tags, H1, H2, H3, etc.
Site Structure
Having too many pages on your website or poor website architecture makes it difficult for link juice to flow through your site. Start by viewing your site map and see the flow of your website.
Things to avoid are burying important pages too deep in your website. Having each page on your website accessible by three clicks is optimal and will improve crawling and the user experience.
Keywords
Keywords are the terms user looking for your website type into search engines. Creating a list will give you a database of high volume search terms you can easily insert into your sites content.
Online platforms are the most popular tools for this exercise. There is an abundance of free tools and will suffice for keyword research on your own site.
Free online keyword building tools include:
- Google Adwords
- SEMRush
- Ahrefs
- Moz
- Ubersuggest
Great sources to start keyword research:
- Organic keywords from search terms
- Competitor websites
- Google’s related searches
Get Online Reviews
Online reviews aren’t just for customers rating your business, they are a great free SEO tool. Consumers like reading reviews and therefore search engines seek to display this kind of content.
Choosing your review platforms carefully is essential as different industries use different sites. If you’re trying to rank your business locally then here a good few sites to register with:
- Yelp
- True Local
- Google+ Local
- Yellow Pages
The key to this strategy is having an incentive for your customer to leave a review. Give the customer a deal for leaving a review, some online review sites will offer customers coupons for or exclusive information.
These tips provided form a strategic marketing plan for any individual looking to increase their online marketing efforts for free. If you’re already using these strategies, focus on how you can improve them. If you can’t seem to improve your marketing impact for free then consider using paid online advertising or seek professional help.
[cta id=”2091″ vid=”0″]
