Strange title but I will explain in-depth why search engine optimisation for industries that are considered “ugly” or “boring” is the most effective marketing strategy and why all business owners should invest as must as possible into marketing their site on the search engines. Although SEO is the most effective long term, there is nothing wrong with using PPC for shorter term gains. I personally recommend to clients to do both, utilise ads and the organic results and you can get even more traffic, once you rank 1st or in the top 3 for your pre-selected keywords you can reduce the amount of ads you run to increase your profit margins! It’s easy except it takes a lot of money and time.

I recently finished a digital marketing campaign for garage shelving UK, as you can guess this was a site that sold garage racking, shelving, pallet racking and all of that stuff. The competition was crazy high, Amazon, B&Q, Homebase, Argos, Tufferman all on page 1. We were currently on page 2. Trying to outrank these guys was going to take some funds and some smart SEO. We knew links and great on-page would do it (like anything else) so we went to work.

The reason SEO is so much more important for boring industries, such as the garage shelving one (Yawn.) Is that people don’t bother shopping around. There is not really many styles of shelving and as long as you set-up your site well and its easy to purchase and your prices are what people “expect” to pay, they will just buy from you without really looking around for a better deal or a different product. This is the same for local industries as well, people would rather save time than money when it comes to generic or less interesting products. And as a result ranking in the top 3 results for competitive keywords, means this traffic converts extremely well!! I’m talking 10% range.

For our example we had around 10,000 per month across 4-5 primary keywords. Ranking 1st for all of these keywords would lead to around 4,000 organic searchers a month. At a 10% conversion rate that’s 400 sales a month and at an average customer check-out value of £200, that’s 400 x 200 = £80,000 a month in sales. The company was currently only doing around £5,000 in sales from some longer tail keywords and PPC and social media ads.

I explained the situation to them, that the conversion rate for this search engine traffic is worth more than what you are spending on social. As a result we completely scraped the social media campaign which opened up around £500 / month for seo. He also introduced another £500 a month for SEO. Which meant we had £1,000 per month for 6 months to work with. Although we aren’t ranking 1st (or anywhere near) at the moment, we are onto page 1 and the conversion rates are still holding around 8%. 1st would likely lead to £80k of sales!

It seems every year we hear about some huge Google change that is going to rock the SEO and digital marketing community. But people forget that even the massive Penguin updates affected about 3% of the web. That’s a very low propotion of websites, even if you were a black hat SEO, the chances are you didn’t get affected as long as you weren’t trying to game the system “too hard” as it were.

In 2016 and beyond though the emphasis is definately on content and content distribution. Creating truly awesome content is what you should be looking to do from now on, but distributing that content is equally, if not more important. For example the infographic below (on the same subject digital marketing in 2016) by Bulldog Social Media is an example of great content distributed well!

Once they’d created the infographic the company decided that simply posting it on the site would result it not a lot of traffic or social traction, so instead of simply posting it, they created a tailored blog post, optimised with some relevant keywords and got going.

Once live the team utilised their social following on twitter, Facebook and Linkedin as well as reaching out to industry experts to see if they liked it and would like to share, this is manually creating the “viral” effect, which in business industries is pretty much impossible to do automatically.

This lead to hundreds of retweets, some great traction on Facebook and a number of people embedding the infographic on their website (such as here.) All in all the post gained a huge amount of traffic and some high quality natural backlinks as a result, this is the future of digital marketing and SEO!

LOCAL SEO: All you need to know

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization or SEO means to make the most out of a website to have a rank in an industry at a certain area. For example if a business only has a single location then that certain business will only want to have customers in the area where it is located. There is no point in nationally campaigning for your SEO because the highest possible return of investment would only be ranking high in locational keywords.

Local keywords have a general format which is “industry location” or to search for a local service in your area. An example of this format would be “real estate London”. There are different varieties for these keywords but since search volumes usually tend to be low for the local industries, getting the highest possible rank for this kind of keyword format is a primary target.

You need to be careful when you choose your keywords. In any SEO campaign, keyword research is among the important parts. Why? These keywords have the ability to make a campaign or break it even before it has begun. If you aim too high you might end up losing your money and investment. But if you aim too low, you might get no traffic even if you have managed to rank for all of your keywords since no one is searching for them.

Instead of aiming to rank with easy keywords, go for ones that will be most profitable for your industry and location. This will make a bigger ROI when you increase your rank. SEO has gone beyond being just a knowledge or time game. If you do not have any budget for your SEO campaign, then you will end up working a lot of hours trying to achieve the rankings that you want otherwise, you will not get any rank at all. Wisely calculate your ROI and create a money and time budget before you start campaigning.

Ranking Factors for Local SEO

• Business signals refer to information that is typically in your website like type of business and location.
• External location signals refer to name, address and phone number.
• On-page signal refers to the text and code on the website.
• Link signals are backlinks that point to your website and the relevance and quality of the sites they are from.
• Review signals are important. The review that you get from the Google business page will determine a small part of the rankings.
• Social signals are only a small percentage of the ranking, but it is still important to have accounts on social media sites.
• Mob or Beh signals refer to the click through rate of the website that you have and its mobile optimization. Make sure that you have a site that is optimised for mobile use. It is also good to have titles and a description that can get one’s attention. If you do, people are more likely to choose your site over your competitors even if you are not listed as number one.
• Search results that are personalised.

5 Really Easy tips and Tricks you can implement on any website to improve its ranking in the search engines

1.) Images

Optimise your images correctly. This is so simply but I see so many people do it wrong that its physically painful! There is a few quick things you should do with your images. 1.) write titles for them, including your primary keyword. For example if my keyword was SEO tips for this article I’d have an image below with the title seo tips 2. have a longer explanation in the image alt tags on what the image is, include relevant keywords here too. And third if you want to have a caption, include a personal phrase and less optimisation here, go for user experience over anything in the caption

2.) Titles, URLs and H1 tags

These are the 3 biggest ranking factors and in my opinion if these 3 are correctly optimised it accounts for 80% of on-page SEO! Yes I did just say 80%! Crazy I know but its true if you ask me! Use the 2 out of 3 rule that Jerry West is always banging on about (Hi Jerry!) But don’t over optimise (I use to do that.)

3.) Relevancy in linking

Don’t about the nofollow/dofollow tag, just get relevant links when you are starting up. I’m a very big advocate of relevancy over everything else! And a huge huge huge advocate of relevancy FIRST, before authority! That’s how it would work in the natural world and this is what we are trying to do with our SEO anyway.

4.) Authority links

Once you begin to rank, usually page one for the majority of your local terms, its time to get the big guns out. However you are planning on generating your links, whether you are a full white hate nazi or you are more of a in the middle guy like myself, go for authority now and you will begin to explode your rankings.

5.) Co-citations and other links

Linking out is something that’s forgotten quite a lot nowadays there are a few boxes that I recommend ticking. Linking out to governmental and educational sites. These can be Universities in your local area and maybe your local Government. As well as these links you want to link where RELEVANT to other sources. If I quoted a phrase by someone or used an image I would link back to their site, or if I think its relevant to a piece of content I’m writing and I believe that my readers would find it beneficially then that’s what I will do.

On a personal note (SEO related still) so I’m still gonna mention it here. I’ve moved to Cardiff UK and started working pretty closely with Tom Buckland over at Ghost Marketing. So I’m throwing him a link as he’s a top bloke and given me a lot of advice, I’ll sure you will get a notification, you deserve it.

Hope you liked the article!

 

5 quick hints to remember when you are doing a print marketing campaign.

 

1. Design is everything – Don’t be cheap on your design as it will cost you more in long term. Go with a custom freelance designer or a branding agency with a strong emphasis on good design. There are many “digital marketing” and “web design” agencies that offer a brand graphic creation for your print marketing campaigns but these are absolutely terrible. Ensure you find someone with good reviews and emphasis on conversions.
2. Link your print – To your other marketing campaigns. Tom did a good campaign on linking print to seo, you can also link it pretty easily to social too.
3. Distribute correctly – Don’t try and “JUST send” your leaflets. Ensure you have a strong research campaign so you can find the most targeted leads and areas for your campaign. Research prospects carefully and use the saved money on DESIGN!
4. Target – Target your audience correctly. This includes the design: colours, simplicity vs information and also your distribution which includes time of delivery, how it is delivered, presentation and who it is aimed at. Personalised print (outside of the food industry) gets only a 1% response rate on average, whereas semi-personalised prints get nearly 5%, obviously this is more expensive and takes more time but the conversion rate increases must make this useful!?
5. Calculate profitability – Always use your research and optimisation to calculate the ROI and how profitable a campaign with be. Conversions are everything if you spend £10,000 but expect a ROI of 200%, this is a successful campaign. But if your predicted conversions we wrong, you will end up losing money that could have been used in other marketing material.