Sep 7, 2018 | Traditional Marketing
Is traditional marketing dead?
Marketers have been predicting the demise of traditional marketing since the late 90s. But turn on your TV or listen to your car radio. Companies still pay for tv commercials and radio ads.
The same is true for print advertising. Newspapers and magazines haven’t gone the way of Betamax. Flyers, posters, brochures, and so on are still alive and kicking.
So why do some marketers insist that digital marketing is the only way to go? Let’s talk about the whole traditional vs digital marketing thing in detail. This way, you can choose which is better for your business.
Traditional Marketing Pros and Cons
One of the advantages of traditional marketing is how easy it is to understand. That comes from years and years of exposure.
Everyone has seen a commercial or a mailbox flyer. That includes millennials who can’t seem to figure out rotary phones.
For your marketing goals, it means two things. Using traditional modes of marketing means it’s a sure way to reach your local audience. It also offers tangibility.
There’s nothing like a good business card your customers can keep with them. It’s a good reminder of your brand – something they can look at and not mindlessly scroll through.
Of course, it’s not without disadvantages. The costs alone will make you think twice about print or radio advertisements. Print advertising costs can add up when you pay people to distribute your materials.
Another thing you have to worry about is tracking results. Did your flyers make the right impression? It’s not so transparent compared to the number of likes or website visits.
Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing
The great thing about digital marketing is it’s accessible. It doesn’t matter how big or little your marketing budget is. There’s a digital marketing strategy that will work for you.
With TV ads, for example, you’ll have to set aside a huge chunk of your budget. Otherwise, TV stations won’t air your ad. That’s not a problem for Google or Facebook ads.
You set your budget and get real-time results on how your campaigns are doing. If your ads aren’t doing well, pause or stop them. Come out with new ads and try again.
Also, nothing beats social media marketing for sharing your message as fast as you want it. It’s as quick as a click of a button. You can’t get the same results with brochures or billboards.
Online, it’s an even playing level field. All you need is a solid digital marketing strategy.
Traditional vs Digital Marketing: Who Wins?
The truth is no business can afford to not be online. You’ll be losing a huge chunk of potential customers if you don’t have a website. A strong social media presence is a must, too.
But if there are traditional means of marketing that work for your business, keep using them. Just make sure you don’t use up all your money for your traditional marketing materials.
Bottom line: don’t think of it as traditional vs digital marketing. If you want the most bang for your buck, think digital first. When you have more money to spend, experiment with traditional forms of advertising.
But don’t forget to track your results. If you need help with digital marketing, don’t hesitate to contact us.
Sep 7, 2018 | Technical SEO
As most small businesses are set to spend around $75,000 on digital marketing this year, they need to make every dollar count in that budget. Using search engine optimization is a way to pivot your page to be found by search engines, which is as good as free promotion. Search engine optimization, notably technical SEO is important in making yourself known to users.
Here are five elements of technical SEO that you need to implement.
1. Page Speed is a Major Factor
When you’re using mobile, the speed of your page gets weighed into how good your site is as a match for users. It lets search engines know that it’s optimized, updated, and you’ve tried to streamline the code base.
If you’re thinking about user experience, page speed matters as well. When users rank how well a site works for them, they will factor in load time. If it doesn’t load within three seconds, they’ll consider it a bad match that doesn’t give them what they want. Isn’t that the ultimate aim of user experience?
2. Bot Instructions Are Case Sensitive
If you’re giving robots instructions for your site, you need to ensure that you take case into consideration. Instructions in your robots.txt file need to be all lowercase.
If you play with case, you change the way the information is going to be processed.
Web crawlers, the tool that search engines use to index every site on the internet, look for files on your main directory. If you hide them somewhere else, they may never get read.
3. You Need Infinite Scroll
You want your site to be designed in such a way as to load content as your user scrolls. When they’re going down your website’s pages, you don’t want the content to stop.
Paginated pages combined with a very long scroll will help users to keep reading and staying productive on your site. If new content is constantly available, you’ll rank much higher than your competitor’s site.
4. Sitemap is What You Want
While Google needs sitemaps to be in an XML format, that’s pretty much the only stipulation to worry about when setting up your sitemap. Your hierarchy or your structure can look however you want it to look.
When you choose a sitemap that works for you and makes sense, you make it easier for search engines to scroll through your site. As long as there’s simple logic, you can structure it however you please.
5. Your Homepage Matter
Your homepage needs to have everything that you want search engines to find out about you. Because search engines look at that page first, you want your site to be ranked fairly.
You can have other sites ranked as well so long as you include a link from your front page.
Understanding Technical SEO is an Advantage
If you want to have a strong advantage on your competition, you need to take advantage of what technical SEO has to offer. When you optimize your site for crawling and indexing, you make yourself that much easier to find by your potential clients.
If you want to audit your SEO ranking, check out our guide
or chat with Sandy today. Call 775-870-0488.
Aug 25, 2018 | SEO near me, SEO SIte Audit
Google is the top search engine in the world. With millions of searches happening each hour across the globe, how are you to get your companies website in front of as many searchers as possible?
SEO or search engine optimization is constantly evolving. Google updates twice a day on average. They are updating their algorithm and website to keep them as the top search engine. With those many changes, comes great opportunity for small and large businesses to reach the growing numbers of website searchers in Google.com.
Ranking a page from your website high in search results is the ultimate goal of most SEO companies, but we take it a step further and secure top sections of the first page of this popular search engine with SERP elements that have been proven to gain the most views online.
Some SERP elements include:
source: https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2018/01/seo-marketing-strategy/
- AdWords – up to four at the top with optional extensions can make each ad deeper
- Knowledge Graph – boxes that include data ranging from companies to celebrities on the right of search results page
- Sitelinks – multiple links to subpages within the website result visible below the primary website
- Local packs – several local listings appear together (often under a map marking the location of each one)
- Carousel listings – interactive visual display of results for things like movies, songs, and restaurants
- Reviews with star ratings (make some organic results deeper)
- Image packs – often a single row of images appearing on the results page
- Video
- In-depth articles
- Twitter content
Most of our SEO clients rank #1 for their most profitable keywords. They also rank multiple times on the first page of Google using the above strategies, gaining most of eye balls or views within a Google search result.
Contact Sandy Rowley today to learn how she can help your company gain the lion share of views for your keywords today. Call 775-870-0488.
Voted best SEO expert, Sandy Rowley is a leading small business SEO coach and mentor.
Aug 25, 2018 | What is SEO?
What is SEO and how can it help grow my business?
SEO stands for search engine optimization. What is a search engine? Google, Yahoo, Bing and other online databases allow users to search to find products and services, usually for free. (Learn more about my SEO coaching sessions here.)
See the example below. If you go to Google and search for ‘Reno Marketing’ you will see a list of marketing companies in our local area. Our company, ranks at the top of the search results, on the first page for this popular keyword. This is a perfect example of what SEO is and how it can help grow your business. Most Google searchers are either in research mode or they are ready to buy. No need to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on billboard, radio or newspaper that targets everyone. Only spend a fraction of the cost with SEO or other digital marketing strategies to reach your best customers online.
Google is by far the most popular search engine being used today.
Your business and/or charity needs to do SEO or search engine optimization in order to position your website within these online databases and / or search engines.
How do you do SEO?
There are over 200 items that need to be considered when optimization your website for the top search engines. Some of the most important website ranking factors are:
- Is your website mobile ready?
- Do you have useful and relevant content on your website?
- How fast does your website load?
- Join our free local marketing group on Meetup.com by clicking here.
Google is always improving their search engine algorithms in order to weed out any websites that could be malicious, slow loading, poor content or just overall a bad user experience for their millions of searchers.
Join us each month as local SEO Marketing Expert, Sandy Rowley, shares simple yet effective digital marketing strategies that help grow your business online.
Shopify, an online e commerce platform, shares more information on SEO and how this digital marketing strategy can help increase sales for online stores.
SEO is one of the most easiest ways to reach customers who are ready to buy online. Social media marketing is great for branding and awareness, but it has a longer period of time needed in order to close a sale. PPC or pay-per-click marketing has a shorter life cycle, but could be used to raise brand awareness and trust over time as well as position your company high in Google search.
Aug 25, 2018 | Mobile Web Design
Do people really use computers anymore?
It seems that all we ever do is browse the internet on our smartphones and tablets.
As people increasingly access the internet through mobile devices, websites have to adapt to keep up with the changes in behavior.
That’s why you need to make sure you optimize your website as a mobile-friendly website. But what does mobile friendly mean? Let’s go!
What Does Mobile Friendly Mean?
A mobile-friendly website is simply a website that displays correctly on any mobile device. It also features the following:
- Fast-loading speed
- Easy-to-read
- Easy-to-navigate
- Does not require Flash
It’s really important that you make sure your website is mobile friendly. Let’s check out why this matters so much.
1. Increased Mobile Use
Did you know that the number of Google searches via a mobile device has now overtaken searches on desktop computers?
Around 77 percent of Americans report having a smartphone. Furthermore, the average American spends over 5 hours every day on their smartphone. That’s a lot of browsing the internet on mobile devices.
If your website cannot be accessed easily via a mobile device, you’re almost certainly going to lose traffic and sales to your competition.
2. SEO-Optimization
Since 2015, Google boosted mobile-friendly websites and penalized websites that aren’t responsive to mobile use. That’s why you need to make sure your website is SEO optimized.
If you don’t think your ranking on Google matters, you should seriously consider. Over three-quarters of searches on the internet are on Google. If you’re not on Google, you’re potentially missing out on a high number of customers.
However, it also matters how highly you’re ranked on Google. While 33 percent of traffic comes from the top spot on Google search rankings, around 92 percent of traffic is generated from the first page.
3. Get Ahead of the Competition
Despite the multiple benefits of optimizing your website for mobile devices, around 60 percent of websites are still not mobile friendly.
You can get ahead of the competition by preparing your website for the future of mobile-friendly websites.
4. People Want Mobile Friendly Websites
You would be mistaken if you thought that mobile device users are simply the same as desktop computer users. The two groups behave completely different.
Almost 75 percent of users want to be able to access mobile-friendly websites. That means when you design your website and produce content, make sure that it’s easy to access with a smartphone or tablet.
5. Mobile Users Spend Money
It’s really common for people to browse products and services on their mobile device before switching to a desktop computer.
However, the number of people shopping on a mobile device is on the rise. Plus, not all mobile device users are the same either. Tablet users are more likely to spend money than smartphone users.
But unless you have a mobile friendly website, they’re not buying anything.
Why You Need a Mobile Friendly Website
Now you know the answer to what does mobile friendly mean and why it’s important, you can prepare for the mobile future.
As mobile device use continues to increase, you can’t afford to ignore the need to adapt your website.
If you’re looking for a new website design, get in touch with us today!
