Basics of digital marketing - Marketing through a functional website

What guarantees good internet sales and brand recognition? To be successful in digital marketing and have a good ROI, you should adapt to marketing, through your website. You should have a decent website, and focus your marketing strategy on the website alone.

It is no longer a novelty that we use search engines every day to search for any subject, product or service that we are interested in, is it not? According to recent surveys, 93% of successful purchases begin with an online search (http://bit.ly/3548WN7).

And the expectation is that this index will continue to grow. Therefore, having a good presence on the web is essential to attract the attention of the target audience, who are looking for information and feedback from other customers about a certain product or service.

After all, do you know how Digital Marketing can increase your company's visibility on the web so that it can be found by potential customers? Continue reading and learn about some strategies that can help your company grow, without having to waste your time with social media!

Planning is the beginning of everything

To have a strong presence on the web, it is not necessary to have a very high budget. Still, before making any decisions about how much you want to invest, you need to know who your target audience is and how you want to impact them. So, plan!

Roughly speaking, this planning consists of studying the behavior of potential customers and identifying what the best ways are, to reach them. With this information, it is possible to start a relationship with the target audience, presenting your brand and showing how your company can help solve a certain problem or meet a need.

That done, the time has come to decide what will be the ways of contacting the target audience and the budget for each strategy. And, as we have already said, it is not necessary to make a high investment - some strategies, in fact, can even be implemented for free.

The importance of a website (online presence)

Today, most companies already recognize the importance of having an online presence through a website. The internet is already part of the public's daily life, and can offer several features for your company: through the internet, it is possible, for example, to communicate with leads and customers, publicize your brand, build authority and accompany competitors.

However, it is clear that there is still resistance when it comes to spending money on online strategies. And companies that ignore the strength of the website are increasingly falling behind.

If your company still has that fear, it's past time to overcome it! To help you better understand the importance of having a good online presence by having a company website, here are some benefits that this can generate for your company.

Strengthening the brand

A good online presence mainly concerns the growth of the brand in the digital environment. That way, without a doubt, your company will be more recognized and valued by the public.

More authority in the area

By developing your online presence, whether from blogs or website pages, you will demonstrate that you understand the subject and that you can offer the best solution to your audience's problems.

In addition to strengthening the brand, this still generates authority, which makes people feel confident in buying the products you are offering them.

Better communication with customers

The internet offers several ways to communicate with the public. You can use chats, blogs, websites, forums etc. - everything to get closer to the customer and offer information in a very accessible way. And the best thing is that a well-attended customer ends up naturally becoming a defender of your brand. This is the only place social networks, make sense. Your organization could have accounts on popular networks, which are linked to your website and the customer will choose the network comfortable to them to communicate with you.

Attracting new customers

It all comes down to increasing your company's sales. After all, a stronger brand, which has authority in the niche and talks to a wide audience, has great chances of selling more and more.

Increase in reach

We know that the internet has no geographical barriers. This means that, if your company has a good website and maintains a stable online presence, it is possible to reach people from all over the world. That is, you will be able to expand your business without spending a lot of money. This achieved through optimizing your website for Google organic search.

We all know that Google is one of the most important internet search engines in the world, the undisputed leader in most Western countries and that it has only found real competition in China (Baidu) and Russia (Yandex).

The most curious, at times have entertained us, looking for facts and figures from the search engine giant. These are indicative (Google is very reluctant to give official figures) but perfectly valid to surprise us with the spectacular nature and magnitude of everything that has to do with this internet giant:
 

• It is estimated that more than 5.5 billion searches are performed on Google per day.
• In the world, 1.17 billion people use it almost daily to search.
• As for Google services, there are currently more than 1.5 billion active Gmail accounts.
• The search engine leader gains about 5% new users every year.
• Google drive has about 1 billion users.

You can verify these, on Google :)

This makes Google organic search far better than Social media, as Google search guarantees real time result, by helping you build a lead base, thereby making you enough profit.

SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the process of optimizing a website to appear in organic search engine results.

The discipline of SEO positioning is as old as the appearance of the first search engines on the Internet.

As long as there is a "ranking", a "top 10" or a "top 100", that is, as long as there is "an order" or a "placement", there will be techniques that try to make one result appear above another. As long as this exists, SEO will exist.

The characteristics of modern SEO are quite difficult to extrapolate to any other branch of online marketing in general, where the limits of "what works" and "what does not" are much more defined than in SEO positioning.

In other words, SEO is quite ambiguous in its own practical application. And that, what does it mean?

It means that the same SEO action, carried out on website A and then carried out on another website B, can have completely different results to the point of being able to have "opposite" results. Therefore, within the discipline of positioning, even trial and error itself are not guarantees. This is the reason you need the services of SEO experts to help with the SEO positioning and ranking of your website.

There are many things to know about SEO, but that’s not in the scope of this book. If you want to have a detailed knowledge of SEO, you can take your time to do a personal research on it.

How to understand web structure when doing SEO

Too easy; For example, you have a company that sells multiple products, such as women's, children's, and men's shoes. You cannot show all the products on the same page, much less create a page for each of the shoes. It is best to organize them by category and make brief descriptions of them. Although this seems like an SEO strategy to display content, it is also a good way to make a website more functional, navigable and that provides a pleasant user experience. Yes, all of this relates to the structure of the website. And you will also be providing extra details to your audience about the type of shoe, and not just limiting yourself to characteristics.

The ability to index pages in search engines is another aspect of SEO that is closely related to the functionality of the website.

When we connect the dots, we realize that a marketing campaign can never work if the website is not in line with the strategies implemented.

All your content should be the key piece to know if these three elements work in the same direction, and you will know it only if you can load new content easily; if it is indexed in the search engines correctly, if they are optimized and if the user can find without any problem. In conclusion, your page will be a magnet to attract potential customers and will increase your conversions in a systematic way.

If this does not happen, you have to start reviewing the elements of website and redo it in favor of digital marketing.

Before closing this point, I want you to keep in mind that you can create content in many ways, but you should always consider whether it affects the loading speed, because if so, you will make the typical mistake of many, who saturate their website with images and videos that take a long time to load and detract from the user experience. In this case, the content, far from helping you, will plunge you into the abyss of losing money.

Google ranks web pages, for a user based on innumerable factors and so far for 20+ years, it is the best way to get traffic to any website. Any website owner will never make a mistake by not paying for content because it will always have value. The easiest way to understand how Google works is that if you are running a good, proper business, without cheating people, Google will send you more traffic. A problem only arises when “smart” people try to hack a system. Very, very, very few “obnoxious” rules that Google and other search engines “may” follow;
 

1. The domain must be independent, no child domains nothing dependent on anything else; to rank higher.
2. Always have 1 index page.
3. The site should be xyz.com not www.xyz.com
4. JS, CSS, html should be minimized.
5. All pages should be interlinked to as many as possible.
6. Meta tag should be there for all pages.
7. Meta tags must not have more than 40 characters.
8. Keywords, Headings must be there for all pages.
9. Do not over use keywords on the page.
10. The Title must be there for all pages
11. Website should be compatible on all devices and on all browsers.
12. Sitemap should be uploaded frequently.
13. Content should be relevant for long time.
14. Comments on each page, keeping the content “fresh”.
15. Relevant social media links.
16. Internal links to all other pages.
17. Relevant local neighborhood links.
18. Do not buy links.
19. Do not place too many ads on the page. (Everything clean)
20. Ensure no 2 pages have the same content.
21. Ensure you do not copy content from other websites.
22. Do not use bold text.
23. Do not label random names for images.
24. Add new content, every day. (Publish industry relevant articles)
25. Preferably upload videos on YouTube (Website is hyperlinked!).
26. Do not hide text.
27. Do not hide links.
28. Ensure that there is as few broken links as possible.
29. Try to get all broken links redirected to a relevant page.
30. No dead links on any page.
31. Current Year in the footer.
32. Neat footer links.
33. Text in all caps is considered "shouting".
34. Same database for multiple sites, Google gives a negative rating.
35. An extended renewal date of the domain, as in old domain is good.
36. Long tail keywords are essential.
37. No URL Masking / Stealth Redirection / URL Hiding
38. E-mail marketing with backlinks does help.
39. Sub domains are much better than sub directories.
40. Every page title must begin with a common word/ phrase.
41. Create/ promote a live Google hangouts session
42. Blogging, articles, newsletter with relevant content.
43. Links coming from poor quality, "spammy" sites is bad.
44. Links from sites created purely for SEO link building is meaningless.
45. Use htaccess for exemptions.
46. Links coming from topically irrelevant sites/ Paid links/ Links with overly optimized anchor text, is stupidity.
47. Duplicate content/ Plagiarism/ Thin content/ User-generated spam/ Keyword stuffing will never help.
48. Poor user experience will have a negative effect of search.
49. Pirated content! (But, on YouTube, content creators will report!)
50. High volume of copyright infringement reports
51. Exact-match keyword targeting helps.
52. Poorly optimized pages do not help.
53. Improper setup of a, Google My Business page
54. Lack of citations in local directories (if relevant)
55. Lack of a mobile compatibility of the page
56. Illegible content is extremely bad.
57. Sharing a physical address with a similar business.
58. Competitors whose business address is closer to the searcher's location, are given priority
59. Google tracks user behavior....user going back from a website
60. If keywords are mentioned in the URL, it helps!
61. Clean URL’s help.
62. If users spend few seconds, compared to minutes.
63. If images are custom, you will get more visitors.

For amazing SEO, you can always hire an agency, which can be found from your friendly neighborhood search engine.

These are just the common ones. There may easily be 1,000 + such indicators that Google/ other search engines may use. Basically, you cannot get ahead online, or get customers, or walk-ins by paying 1$ for your website. When people offer webs services for ridiculous prices, walk away.

Brand visibility through the power of website

The first step for your brand to be found on the Internet is to have a website. In it, it is recommended that you have a blog, with articles related to the products or services offered by your company.

Here, it is worth mentioning that the objective of having a blog goes beyond informing readers about your company, products and services. In fact, it is the starting point for initiating a high and consistent engagement with followers and potential customers.

By publishing quality content, the chances of capturing more entries, generating shares and comments are much greater, which brings you closer to readers. And it is at this point that we entered into another strategy: email marketing.

With a list of contacts of your potential and current customers, you start to make this relationship closer, identifying opportunities and better knowing what the public needs are.

In addition, social networks are also a great strategy for companies that want to increase visibility and presence on the web. However, care must be taken when using these communication channels. In what way?

It's simple: delivering relevant content, frequently or with a minimum weekly frequency, and interacting with the followers' comments, always being available to answer questions or respond to criticisms and solve possible problems.

Are you still contemplating if you really need a website or not, for your business?

The phrase “if it's not on the Internet it doesn't exist" has become a reality for the contemporary business world. The exponential growth of electronic commerce and the massive number of smart mobile devices have completely changed the way in which people communicate, work and, above all, shop.

Especially now that the COVID-19 pandemic has kept a large part of the planet's population in confinement and, in places where progress is being made in overcoming quarantine, sanitary control measures to prevent coronavirus outbreaks involve little social interaction. This indicates that the trend for the remainder of the year, and for the next, is an increase in online services.

For this reason, it is not only necessary for your company to have a website, it is essential that your company's website is built to fully adapt to any device and screen size, for example; It must also have its own online store and other functionalities that make it attractive and interesting for the target audience of your company.

The website is the face of your company to the world and, a place where potential users and clients can navigate at any time and from anywhere. Do work with experts who have all the tools to create and develop an optimized site that can position your company in the digital world.