Two SEO Tips For Maximum Impact
One common oversight that B2B marketing departments make is the importance of SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing). The thinking that leads to this mistake is that search volumes for business related products and services is lower than for consumer goods, and therefore not worthwhile. The legacy of printed marketing collateral as a tried and tested way of selling into businesses also influences the decision to channel marketing budgets into these traditional channels. Times have changed, and now B2B marketers can't afford to rely on low search volumes and the proven use of brochures and sales visits as an excuse for not diving into digital marketing.
It's a big topic, and this can be off-putting for business owners who are thinking about investing more time and budget into their search marketing, so we've picked two really important things that you can do straight away for maximum impact. When you see the results of these easy digital marketing tactics you'll feel much more secure about diverting more time and money to this way of generating sales.
The first, and most important tip, is to get the technical aspect right, and for this you need a professional. The world of search engine marketing and optimisation is changing rapidly, so what worked six months ago might not be the right strategy today. Keeping abreast of every development is a full-time job in itself, so as a business owner you should be investing in a marketing team like us that has their fingers on the pulse.
You could have great content, a perfect product and a beautiful website, but if the search engines can't read it you'll have wasted that effort.HTML and Meta tags are vital for communicating with search engine crawlers which seek out this information not solely from the actual text on your website, but from this hidden content. This is where you need to ensure that your keywords and phrases are included for full visibility to search engines. Unique page URLs are also used by search engines to determine relevance, so if you're using abbreviations in your URLs, you need to stop this practice and put your keywords in there instead.
Backlinks to other sites help improve your reputation, but be careful about going down the route of link farming, as this can end up hurting your page rank. Make sure links are high quality and relevant to make this strategy as fruitful as possible. The design and ease of use of your website are vital, not just from the point of view of keeping website visitors in your site, but because the algorithms that search engines use are becoming more and more sophisticated all the time, and now they are able to tell how easy your site is to navigate. You can use your analytics insights to give you an idea of how user-friendly your site is – low figures in the visit/page view duration metrics can indicate that people are leaving your site before they've read all the content on the page because of other factors such as accessibility, layout and ease of navigation.
A technique you can employ to get quick results from search engine marketing is to approach the sales funnel from the bottom. At the top of the funnel you have all your prospective customers, a group that gets smaller as they make their way through the decision making process.At the bottom of the funnel are the leads you have contacted and worked with to make a sale and this can be an involved, time-consuming process that doesn't always result in a sale.
Instead of targeting your customers solely at the top of the funnel to push them through, you can target the people who are itching to purchase by creating content aimed at them. The people who have done their research, compared products and have their credit card in their hands are searching for terms such as [keyword/industry] best products, [keyword/industry] alternatives and [keyword/industry/company] reviews, so if you create content that speaks directly to these ready-to-buy customers you'll get them at the crucial point of the purchase decision without having to put in the legwork to get them through the funnel.
These are just two techniques that can be employed quickly and without a huge investment, that will generate results in a time-frame that is so short you'll be surprised at the speed. There are many more SEO and SEM techniques a business can use to generate online leads, and at Parua we're poised to break into action and help get you to the top.
