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"Online Presence" for Dummies - A non-technical approach.
Don’t waste your money on the quick fix to digitally market your business. Until you build a solid foundation, everything else is wasted expense.
Need a little direction without all the intricate details? Then this article is for you!
Rocky Mountain Media Services specializes in building and marketing small businesses online. We will help you establish the basic cornerstones of your online foundation to effectively begin to market your business.
Cornerstone #1 – Establish a mobile friendly website.
Currently, Google rewards the search rank of mobile-friendly sites and penalizes those sites that are not mobile friendly.
What does “mobile friendly” even mean?
According to Google, it means that your site:
- Does not use software not commonly found on phones (aka Flash)
- Uses text that can be read without having to zoom in.
- Auto adjusts website content so users don’t have to rotate their screen or zoom.
- Places links an adequate distance apart so it is easy to click on the correct one.
How do you know if your site is mobile friendly?
- Check it out for yourself here - https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
Cornerstone #2 – SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Why have a website if no one can find it?
What is SEO?
SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid) search engine results. There are many aspects to SEO, from the words on your page to the way other sites link to you on the web. SEO is simply a matter of making sure your site is structured in a way that search engines understand. It ranges from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that generate traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site. If you are confused about this stuff, you are not alone, and we're here to help.
4 Key elements:
- Keyword research & selection - Select the words or phrases that are not only relevant to your industry but also relevant to your website’s content. The keywords to be optimized are the words you want to be found through organic searches by potential customers or clients.
- Blogs & articles. - You should have a section on your website for blogs/articles that you, as the expert, author. These should have plenty of references to your keyword selection. Proper optimization of this goes a long way in Google’s eyes.
- Videos , portfolios & images - The presence of video itself affects the most important SEO ranking factor: CONTENT... It is expected that search engines will continue to increase the ranking factor of including video as consumers demand video in search results. So having video on your site will boost page rank. Images optimization is one of the great building blocks of on page optimization.
- Fresh content - The more frequently you update your website with articles, downloads, and new web pages, the more frequently a search engine will stop by to visit your website. When search engines look at your site more frequently, you have the opportunity to achieve higher rankings based on the content you provide.
Cornerstone #3 – SMO (Social Media Optimization)
A robust social media campaign directly impacts your SEO. If you increase your brand visibility on social media, people will start searching for your brand on Google. When this happens, it enhances your SEO.
Select the social media platforms that are relevant to your industry. Facebook is almost always the first to be considered along with Google+. Other platforms that may be relevant depending on your business are Twitter, Yelp, Instagram, and Pinterest.
NOW
Once you have these cornerstones in place and running efficiently, THEN you can entertain a multitude of digital marketing venues.
Examples:
- Email marketing
- SMS Text marketing
- Paid Facebook Campaigns
- PPC Options - Google AdWords
- GeoFencing
All efforts from these venues should be designed to drive traffic/leads right back to your mobile friendly website. These should NOT be used as general branding. Use them to create a call to action that will capture information, create a lead, or sell a product or service.
Call Rocky Mountain Media Services for more information or to schedule an interview to explore your options. We’ll make it easy for you!
