Profitability is the primary objective of any business (off line or online). Online marketing initiatives can increase a business’s profitability by yielding a strong ROI.

Here are a few effective online marketing strategies:

Try to improve the quality of your website

Online marketing experts always focus on building links, but they never focus on improving the quality and relevance of the website, which is of prime importance.

Tips -

• Improve the quality of content,  page authority as well as trustworthiness of the website.
•  Improve users’ experience.
•  Focus on keywords, topics, and query intent and anchor text.
• The speed of your website (see- http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/07/velocity-making-your-site-fast.html)
• Use http://www.webpagetest.org/.(Website Performance and Optimisation tool)

Use smart SEO tools 

If you want to stay ahead of competition, you need to use high quality and robust SEO tools.

For better yields, use -

• Raven Tools – Use it to find and fix technical SEO problems. It helps you to perform keyword and competitor research, manage link building and report on your progress.
• Majestic – It is a powerful link intelligence tool. It shows trust flow, inbound links, link profile, historical data and  more.
• Analytics SEO – It is an automated suite of online SEO tools. Use it to handle and manage big and multiple SEO campaigns.

Focus on fundamental things

To cope up with the pace of competition, it is important to focus on certain fundamental elements to strengthen the base of a website. Here are a few things to do -

• Try to improve local link-building efforts.
• Create local business directory listings.
• Use Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Merchant Circle, etc.
• Optimise a separate mobile site.
• Create social profiles on Google+ and Facebook.
• Analyse ROI report from Google analytics 360.

Never ignore content audit

“The purpose of a content audit for SEO is to improve the perceived trust and quality of a domain, while optimising crawl budget and the flow of PageRank (PR) and other ranking signals throughout the site.” – Moz.

Tips -

• Analyse every single aspect such as – page theme, title, description, content, facts and statistics.
• Identify broken internal and external links.
• Keep your content updated.
• Frequently include case studies and more examples.
• Wisely syndicate content. (Content syndication is the process of pushing your blog, site, or video content out into third-party sites, either as a full article, snippet, link, or thumbnail. – Searchenginewatch)
• Use Screaming Frog to crawl all URLs.

So, include the above given dimensions before formulating an online marketing strategy.

A bold online presence is essential for budding businesses in today’s competitive climate. But the question is how to make a great online presence. Answer is – through online marketing tactics.

Here are a few things to consider:

Go social

Today, being social means having a great network and contacts of people through online platforms. If you are a marketer, you need to keep your social media accounts updated and ensure you engage users with the help of fresh and helpful content as well as images, videos and quotes.

In fact, it makes sense to join a new channel, initiate discussion and set a goal to get “likes” or “followers.” All these things help businesses to build and popularise their social media profile. Also it is vital to use social media profile strategically to gain trust and confidence of your audiences.

Take advantage of Responsive Web Design

Do you know mobile browsing is on the rise? So, you need to check if your website/blog responsive? If not, it’s time to make it responsive. It is one of the best ways to provide a quality browsing experience to your users. All you need to do is to make sure that content and design looks natural and are mobile friendly.

Use Brand Monitoring tools

Traffic and rankings are only the one side of the story; you also need to focus on business’s reputation when it comes to online marketing. Of course, brand reputation is not a simple task; it needs time, effort and resources.

Today, one of the best ways to keep track of brand reputation is to use quality brand monitoring tools. Modern brand monitoring tools are easy to use. You also need to analyse competitors.

Always use Best Practices of Content Marketing

Some marketers believe that content writing and marketing is only about spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc., it is more than that. It involves thorough market research, analysis, planning and exploring various creative options for more plausible outcomes.

For maximum yields, you need to have closer look at the most successful players in your niche. It will widen your thinking, inspire you, spark your creativity, and allow you to write specific and relevant content for your audiences.

Believe in yourself and use the above mentioned tactics to perform better, create a winning strategy, and of course, shine online…

Online marketing should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Here are a few actionable online marketing strategies:

Choose suitable keywords for higher ROI

Keywords are the backbone of any online marketing campaign. That’s why, it is important to choose them carefully. Here are a few ways to fine-tune your keywords research strategy:

• Always get and study the “Cost per Click” data.
• Focus on high search volume, and the keywords your site is not ranked.
• Always categorise keywords for better website optimisation.

Stick to the basics of SEO

Whether you have a large website or a small, you should always stick to the basics of SEO. Here are a few basic things to consider:

• Validate your markup with tools.
• Keep track of your sitemap status in Console.
• Monitor clicks and impressions for your listings.
• Use reCAPTCHA on websites to streamline user’s experience.
• Always write relevant and good meta descriptions for users.
• Make sure that “structured data markup” meet quality standards.
• Identify and fix issues like soft error pages and hacked pages.
• Stay up-to-date on releases, algo updates and announcements.

Get your website ready for mobile-first indexing

As we all know that Google uses the mobile version of the website for indexing and ranking, it is important to keep the mobile website ready to deliver results. Here are a few steps to consider:

• Make sure the mobile version of the website includes text, images and videos as well.
• Make sure the mobile version has Metadata.
• Manually check individual pages.
• Never use a free premium theme/plugin because they could be disastrous.
• Make sure the mobile version is secure because security is the major concern for Google and users.
• Use Mobile-Friendly test to determine areas where you can improve your website’s performance on different devices.

Carefully use email marketing

Whether you have an e-commerce site or a small blog; use email marketing.  Here are a few good email marketing practices:

• Smartly craft your subject lines to stand out.
• Send email only in standard business hours.
• Always study email analytics.
• Share insights and experiences through emails.
• Never commit grammatical mistakes.
• Succinctly explain your things.
• Focus on Click-through percentages and change your strategies accordingly.

So, use the above mentioned online marketing strategies to boost productivity.

Right SEO strategies can help online business to deliver the best. Here are a few SEO strategies to use:

Strengthen design elements

Many business owners still believe that website’s design elements can’t improve traffic, which is wrong.  In fact, design plays an important role in improving the overall:

• rankings
• traffic
• conversion

As a business owner,  you should focus on a user-friendly website. Certain small tweaks in the elements can make a huge difference. For better results:

• Avoid unnecessary plugins and tools.
• Never ignore breadcrumbs.
• Choose responsive, clean and modern website template.
• Focus on both looks and functionality.

Build solid backlinks

Today, marketers are using a wide variety of backlink building techniques. However, when it comes to backlink building along with establishing relationship enhancing, you must create SlideShare presentations.

Tips:

• Create useful and original presentations.
• Use both text and images.
• Carefully optimise your presentations.
• Use Canva to create better designs and graphics.

Don’t ignore voice search

Many marketers still believe that voice search is in its incipient stage, but reality is something different. According to a report, 20% of searches on mobile app and on Android devices are voice searches.

Tips:

• Keep your content simple and scanable.
• Create and optimise your Google My Business listing.
• Study – http://searchengineland.com/optimize-voice-search-273849
• Use long-tail keywords.
• Create and optimise FAQ page.

Automate content

Consumers have the power to shape or break a business. Hence, it is prudent to empower them with the right content. Of course, it takes time and efforts to create original content.

Tip:

• Use Pardot, Buffer, Tailwind, Searchmetrics, etc.

Advantages of using content automation tools:

• Ease of creating content.
• Automating content publishing
• Simplifying content update
• Enabling businesses to deliver personalised content

Bonus tips:

• Use all sorts of channels – email, social channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn.
• Write, optimise and publish press releases to increase brand awareness.
• Include reviews on your site to create positive perceptions.

So, use SEO to improve the quality of online marketing.

Whether you are a small business owner or hold a big firm, you should use Online marketing techniques to build your brand and improve ROI.

Here are a few online marketing techniques to use:

Content marketing

According to Sonja Jefferson, marketing with valuable content really works.

Tips -

• Use data and analytics to improve the impact of content marketing
• Create a mission statement and stick to it
• Develop KPI
• Measure your efforts against your goals
• Focus on UX and customer experience
• Always publish strategic content across the web
• Create and support content culture (https://bloomfire.com/blog/what-is-a-culture-of-content/)
• Measure bounce rate, retention rate and total number of followers

Social media

Today, marketers find it quite challenging to build their brand through social media. There are numerous channels, which make it even more difficult for them to choose a channel and gain success.

Tips -

• Get yourself familiar with the social media platforms
• Understand your business and choose the most suitable platform
• Devise a strategy and precisely target your audience
• Create and measure buzz
• Adhere to the communication protocols of the platform
• Build a loyal community
• Deliver useful content and listen to your users/community
• Build trust because loyalty and trust go hand in hand
• Identify different types of advertising options available
• Engage more and more people

Start a PPC campaign

Most business owners believe that PPC is the most expensive technique to create brand awareness; however, in reality, they are wrong. It is a cost-effective and efficient method of advertising. It has its own advantages and can provide instant results. (PPC is 100% measurable – Ahrefs)

Tips -

• Focus on creating high quality ads
• Ensure that the headline matches the copy of the ad
• Use split testing method
• Refine and fine tune your landing pages
• Add social sharing icons to your landing pages
• Select more than one PPC channel (Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads)
• Optimise conversion funnel
• Use better call-to-action
• Study – https://ahrefs.com/blog/how-to-find-ppc-ads-of-competitors/

Bonus tips -

• Use email marketing to engage contacts.
• Streamline your web design because customers are quite judgemental when it comes to web design – Brandwatch.
• Create a Google+ profile account to build backlinks.
• Use a perfect landing page generator to capture leads.
• Understand and use HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps.

Use the above mentioned online marketing techniques to rule the roost.

SEO is advancing, that is why it is important for marketers to keep themselves updated with the latest algorithm updates.

Here are a few SEO techniques and strategies that can help marketers to stay ahead of the competition:

Check website speed

A website that loads slow can’t rank high and may lose traction over a period of time. That is why it is important to test and accelerate website speed at regular intervals.

Tips:

• Use a CDN (A content delivery network is a system that uses distributed servers to deliver websites and other web content depending on user’s location, and website’s content – Monitis)
• Minimise redirects
• Minify java script codes
• Try to reduce image size (According to the HTTP Archive, 61 percent of a website’s page weight on a desktop computer is images. Ensure that your website images are appropriately sized.)
• Study – https://moz.com/blog/15-tips-to-speed-up-your-website

Focus on click-through rate of a website

It is a known fact that high organic CTR can improve the overall rankings as well as traffic of a website. However, it is also true that increasing CTR is one of the most difficult tasks.

Here are a few ways to improve CTR of a website/blog:

• Create creative titles.
• Identify and optimise low performing pages.
• Use lists and bullet points in your content.
• Spend time in writing engaging snippets.
• Optimise descriptions.
• Write specific and relevant content.
• Improve page load speed.
• Take advantage of Google Analytics and take actions.
• Try to reduce bounce rate.
• Improve site’s usability.
• Use images and statistics in your content.

Use Webmaster Tools

It is one of the most helpful resources for marketers. It is designed to identify a site’s issues, errors as well as spot penalties.

Tips:

• Always start with the verification process.
• Pay special attention to the dashboard.
• Set the preferred domain.
• Always study the total number of pages indexed by Google.
• Use “fetch as Google” to index important pages of your website.
• Identify and fix broken links.
• Use this tool to improve your site’s titles and descriptions.

Focus on content audit

Content audit improves the overall visibility of a website. Unfortunately content audit is still the most underutilised part of SEO.

Tips:

• Focus on content’s title and descriptions as well as their lengths.
• Update your content at regular intervals.
• Optimise content with long-tail keywords.
• Remove duplicate and thin content.
• Remove/replace broken links.
• Use quality content audit tools, like Dyno Mapper.

If you are out of action, it is likely that your revenues will go down. So, use the above mentioned SEO techniques and strategies to outrank your competitors.

Here are a few SEO techniques for small businesses:

Create a mobile-friendly website

According to Addthis, a mobile-friendly site is a website that is designed to be displayed on hand-held (mobile) devices such as smartphones or tablets. As a business owner, you must invest in creating a mobile friendly website to capture wider audiences.

Tips:

• Try to include a viewport meta tag
• Use YouTube videos on your site
• Always use high-resolution images

Perform extensive keyword research

Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field – Moz.

Tips -

• Conduct keyword research on the basis of business, industry, competitive landscape and your website.
• Generate extensive keyword ideas to pick the most suitable one.
• Keep an eye on Search Analytics.
• Research your industry.
• Never ignore keyword impressions and clicks.
• Use https://ubersuggest.io/, Google Trends and http://answerthepublic.com/.
• Study search volume, clicks, clicks per search, cost per click, etc.

Understand your online audience

First and foremost, understand the interest and behaviour of your customers. It will help you to maximise the chance of your success.

Tips -

• Use Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Manager and Twitter Audience Insights.
• Conduct market research.
• Study social networks.
• Aberdeen Research reported that marketers who use personas achieve 73% higher conversions.

Use PPC (paid advertising)

Pay-per-click (PPC), also known as cost per click (CPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites – Wikipedia. As a marketer, if you want to accelerate your site’s traffic as well as conversions, you need to mix PPC with your online marketing strategy.

(According to a report, top 3 paid ad spots on a Google results page get 41% of the clicks on the page)

Tips -

• Strategically use PPC
• Set your budget according to your business goals
• Create high quality landing pages
• Focus on headlines and descriptions
• Include long-tail keywords
• Optimise landing pages
• Wisely use CTAs
• Measure ROI at regular intervals

Check your website for onsite issues

If you want to gain success, check your entire website for possible errors and issues.

Tips -

• Find duplicate content.
• Create an XML sitemap.
• Use check: validator.w3.org, and brokenlinkcheck.com
• Analyse and adjust website speed.
• Fix hreflang mistakes.
• Identify and remove error pages.

So, use the above mentioned SEO techniques to transform your online business.

According to HBS (Harvard Business School Publishing), social media audit is a systematic examination of social data to help marketers discover, categorise, and evaluate all the social talk about a brand. This approach captures what consumers are saying about a brand, what competitors are doing on social media, and what the brand itself is doing.

Here are a few steps to perform social media audit:

• Find out all profiles on social media channels – As a marketer, you need to find out lesser-known social media profiles to optimise them and make them popular. You should check as well as optimise business profiles on various networks like Google Plus, LinkedIn, Yelp, Tumblr, etc. For maximum impact, optimise business profiles on the top employment websites such as Indeed.com, etc.

• Record data - Record the platform of each business profile, its URL, total number of fans and followers, rate of engagement, communities your business has joined and other matrices. Of course, it will take time, but it will improve your overall understanding of your target market.

• Complete each profile – It is a time consuming task; however, it is important. Go through each profile and make sure that it is 100% complete. For better yields, add website’s URL, biography, picture, hours of operation, location, etc. It will also help websites to improve their rankings.

• Check for consistency – For businesses, it is important to consistently improve its brand image across the web, which can be achieved by sharing the same business profile, logo, ads across all social media profiles. Your businesses’ images, videos and graphics should relate to your company’s image. Make sure that your content is consistent and support your overall marketing strategy.

• Consider the market – Every platform is unique; so, create business profiles accordingly. It will help you to have a vibrant presence on the web. You also need to check the tone of customers to adjust yours.

• Set realistic goals - Once you have combed through your social media profiles for consistency, it’s time to go ahead to set realistic goals. Goals could be anything, from increasing the total number of followers, visitors, views, shares, comments to rate of engagement.  Remember – it is equally important to remove unnecessary and unauthorised profiles.

So, make your social media marketing strong and effective through social media audit.

It’s no secret that websites having solid architecture, good designs, solid backlinks, internal links, etc. rank high on search engines. However, it is not possible to attain all these things immediately. It needs time, consistent efforts, knowledge and skills to make a website search engine friendly.

Here are a few techniques to make a website search engine friendly:

XML sitemaps

XML sitemaps are helpful for the robots. So they can find and index all URLs present on a website/blog.  For better results, keep your XML sitemaps updated.

Tips:

• Upload error free sitemap.
• Use Rel Alternate in Sitemaps for Mobile URLs.
• Use hreflang in Sitemaps for multi-language pages.
•  Test your XML sitemaps in Webmaster tool.
• Crawl sitemaps using Screaming Frog.
• Try to use a sitemap generator.

Optimise your website for voice search  

Voice search has been around since 2014; now the question arises what marketers should do to make their website voice search and SEO friendly. Answer is, create content based on questions asked by users.

Tips:

• Use long-tail keywords.
• Understand users’ intent.
• Categorise and explain your content in detail.

Crawl errors

Marketers often fail to understand the difference among site errors, crawl errors and DNS errors, which makes the problem even worse. First of all, marketers need to focus on resolving server errors, which often occur when search engines fail to access the website’s URL. The reason could be anything,  URLs being blocked or URLs taking too much time to respond.

Tips:

• Always keep the URL parameters short.
• Change hosting server if it is slow.
• Check any issue of accidental URL blocking.
• Try to control search engine crawling and indexing.
• Always check reason for request timeout, truncated headers, and connection resets.
• Always make sure the server is connected to internet.
• Try to resolve HTTP error code like 404 or 500.
• Keep your sitemap updated.

Focus on On-page optimisation

Keywords are everything; they make a website successful. Hence, use keywords across the website.

Tips:

• Optimise images.
• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Focus on outbound links specially nofollow and dofollow.
• Use sensible anchor text throughout the website.
• Fix technical issues.
• Never overlook the title and description tag.

Bonus tips:

• Use robust HTTPS security certificates.
• Keep the hierarchy of the website simple and intuitive.

So, follow the above mentioned techniques to make a website search engine friendly.

SEO is the watchword of this generation. In fact, it is the future of marketing. It not only helps to bring improvements in business practices, but also improves bottom lines. It involves optimisation, analysis and measurement. This makes it a powerful and profound tool for insightful marketing.

Here are a few SEO techniques to shift gears:

Make use of XML sitemaps

XML sitemaps are used by search engines to crawl through webpages. It is often placed in the root directory. It contains all the URLs and information about the webpages. (Make sure that the maximum file size of the sitemap should not be more than 50 MB.)

Advantages of using XML sitemaps:

• Enhances the ranking of a website.
• Helps to keep a website organised.
• Helps search engines to efficiently crawl a website.
• XML sitemaps are easy to create and update.

Tips -

• Make sure that the sitemap added is valid.
• Use sitemap validation tools such as http://tools.seochat.com/tools/site-validator/, http://ipullrank.com/tools/map-broker/, etc.

Write clear Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions can influence rankings; hence they are important. A clean, clear, relevant and actionable meta description helps to increase click-through as well as conversions.

Tips -

• Keep your descriptions persuasive.
• Keep it short and simple.

Focus on URLs

URLs can directly affect your site’s rankings. That is why, it is essential to integrate keywords into your URLs. It will help you to improve your site’s visibility. (A URL is human-readable text that was designed to replace the numbers (IP addresses) that computers use to communicate with servers.- Moz)

Tips -

• Create URLs that are descriptive and have keywords.
• Keeping URLs as simple, relevant, and accurate as possible.
• Study – https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls
• Always use hyphens to separate words.

Focus on Conversion rate optimisation

It is a well known fact that conversion rate optimisation happens after a visitor is converted into customers. For that, you need to identify keywords driving traffic to your website.

Tips -

• Identify what customers are looking for.
• Know who your customers are (specially their age, demographic, and interest).
• Use Qualaroo to survey visitors.
• Test different versions of a web page at regular intervals.
• Add a professionally shot video on the home page of your website.
• Optimise navigation.
• Use Facebook Connect to increase traffic and user engagement. (https://blog.kissmetrics.com/facebook-connect/)
• Never use unclear category structure on your website.

Fix duplicate content issue

Brands often face the challenge of creating fresh and relevant content.  Today, most companies use duplicate content; however, it creates problem when it comes to search engines. (According to a study, up to 29% of the web is actually duplicate content!)

Tips -

• Always focus on HTTP vs. HTTPS or WWW vs. non-WWW pages.
• Write fresh and relevant product information.
• Use 301 redirection.
• Use Rel=”canonical” attribute.
• Perform a content audit.
• Use content auditing tools.

So, make sure that you use all the above given SEO techniques to transform your business.