How to Increase Your Sales Faster
A successful sales campaign requires a great deal of effort. Today’s digital marketing offers innovative methods for your company to sell more through effective strategies. Given that most consumers hunt for the services they require online, your brand’s online presence needs to go beyond e-commerce or digital storefront. If you’re looking to increase sales, here are some essential tips to consider.
1. Social Media
Social media plays an important part in your promotional strategy. Creating a content calendar that highlights your services and products will allow you to showcase your company’s edge against the competition. Here’s what you need to know to start your social content calendar.
- Audience to target
- Products or services
- Platform qualities and user activity
Additionally, your social media content must be easy to understand. Brief, informative content with shorter paragraphs, videos and images capture the audience’s attention.
2. Modern Website
As everything is more digitized now, having your own custom website can be beneficial for business by giving a good, lasting impression to new and returning customers, establishing credibility, and making it easier for potential clients to connect.
It also helps to develop a dynamic, digital catalog for your company. Make a database to cover every product and/or service you offer, and provide valuable information about each one. This will help customers navigate your website by category with ease. This can also be a beneficial tool for sales staff when they work with clientele.
3. Search Engine Optimization
In digital marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical. This influences your site’s ranking as a result of the quality and integrity of content on your website. Performing a site audit, competitor analysis, and targeting the right set of keywords are some ways to start exploring how to reach a wider audience with stronger SEO-supporting search queries related to your service offerings.
The higher your site ranks in search engine results pages (SERPs), the more visitors you will have exploring your website. Hence, increasing brand awareness can lead to a stronger ROI.
4. Email Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most effective techniques for driving revenue. This permits small and large businesses to connect with potential clients at any time by delivering helpful information straight to your customers’ inbox. For a successful email marketing campaign, it is critical to personalize content strategy catered to your target audience.
Additionally, email marketing can help with tracking metrics, presenting deals, and sending emails to returning clients. Email marketing may help with retaining customers, as well as enticing new ones.
5. PPC Advertising
With a wide range of competition, properly advertising your company is the best way to sell more, faster. Today, millions of consumers use Google for instant access to desired answers. Hence, PPC advertising can help with micro-targeting a specific audience.
Anytime a user looks for information, Google will display your ad against all other advertisers based on the relevance of your ad, landing page, keyword bid, and click-through rate.
Digital marketing is essential for modern businesses to drive more sales and widen market potential. From customizing websites to social media management, Impact Digital Marketing has you covered. Interested? Talk to us today to see how our services can benefit your business.
Here’s How a Modern Website Helps Boost Sales
Do you aspire to make your company more successful this year? Several factors help a service-based business thrive, including having a modern website design.
Many ways exist to advertise services online. However, developing a modern website comes with a challenge to ensure it can continuously drive business growth.
Modern Web Design
As you consider redesigning your website, you may wonder about its importance, including the impact on your business and clients.
1. SEO Strategy
Several practices and web design elements influence how to publish content online, affecting search engine activity. If your on-page SEO basics are not up to par, you will be battling for visibility with competitors. An effective way to improve search engine visibility is to partner with professional and reliable web design agencies who specialize in strengthening your SEO foundationally.
2. First Impression
Audiences give their first impression the moment they visit your website. They judge it in less than a few seconds. So, these first moments must make a lasting, positive impact.
Your website should be appealing and updated to avoid negative impressions, as it can discourage visitors from staying on your page. Also, it can cause you to miss out on leads as they leave your page for a competitor’s website.
3. Establish Trust
People do not trust poorly designed websites in 2022. So, if they see outdated information and poor design elements, they won’t find your site reliable or trustworthy.
Think about customers looking for a construction company to trust with long-term building and infrastructure services. They will invest greatly, which means if your website does not convey trust, they will look for another business to fulfill their needs.
What’s more, professional sites signal trust with audiences, making them feel more comfortable to explore service offerings further.
4. Building Consistency
Website design is important to help form consistency on and beyond your page. So, if you are trying to gain new leads, you should build up your brand by familiarizing the audience so they know to choose you when they are ready to invest.
You’ll need to have consistent style and structural integrity on every page, or it will appear clunky and unprofessional. Also, these inconsistencies can make your brand difficult to recognize as customers won’t understand what to associate with your brand.
5. Customer Service
An outdated website can convey that you don’t put much work, effort or care into it, making your audience assume this is the same level of carelessness they will receive.
Your website should be as welcoming as a customer service representative. It should be modern, bright and inviting. This gives the impression that you can and will work well to readily accommodate the needs of your customers.
Now that you have learned the importance of modern web design, it’s time to start investing to improve yours. A professional website brings value to your business. Websites are service-based businesses’ online headquarters to encourage customers to gather information and seek trusted services.
Reach out to us at Impact Digital Marketing for more information about our website design recommendations to help boost sales. We will be glad to advise you on best practices and offer suggestions specific to our service offerings.
Building An Effective Landing Page For Your Business
An effective landing page is essential for a successful online marketing campaign. Even if you provide amazing offers and customize your PPC ads to perfection, without a good landing page, it would be much more difficult to effectively grow your business.
By definition, a landing page is the display that users will first see to get an impression of the brand or business. If it is done well, users are more likely to go ahead and pursue more from your business. In this guide, you will find five critical landing page practices to follow for a far higher chance to capture new leads and generate more sales.
Visually Appealing Design
First and foremost, your web design should be visually appealing for visitors. Factors such as maintaining a minimalist design, white space, and a clear call to action are some important elements to consider while creating your web design. It is good to work with an expert if you want to make your landing page stand out in the sea of them.
Pre-Plan Design
Before building your landing page, take time to plan and form a page that will serve its purpose. Consider what the page should present, your target goals, and what you aim to achieve. A well-planned landing page design should support the call to action, or CTA, and clearly showcase your products or services. Planning is important when creating landing pages. It makes designing easier and more successful.
Make It Responsive
Today it’s very important to make sure landing pages are easily accessed and navigated on different devices. Responsive web design and mobile-friendly sites significantly help double your conversion. Work with your team to improve fast loading, navigating, and ultra-clickable features for each of your landing pages.
Tailor Landing Pages for Specific Audiences
If you have been promoting your business quite well, you are likely to get traffic from different sources. A user that visits your landing page through a Facebook post will be different from those users that visit your landing page through a link or PPC ad. Try to customize each landing page to suit different audiences.
Let Visuals Speak
While content is an important aspect of landing pages, visual media can help display the intentions more vividly. Make sure to use video and images synchronized with the content in the landing pages to make your messages more clean and captivating.
New goals and challenges may arise at every stage of your business venture. Regardless of your goals, it is important to take continuous steps to enhance the landing pages. Consider these aforementioned tips to boost landing page conversions.
If you are looking for professional landing page designing services, contact IMPACT Digital Marketing. Our team is dedicated to helping our clients create stunning landing pages for their websites that are interactive, SEO-friendly, and user-friendly. This will also help grow website traffic, business sales, and profits. Feel free to contact us and talk with our team. We are happy to help develop your landing page design and more.
Five Things to Consider in Your 2022 Marketing Plans
As Q4 creeps closer to a new calendar year, we are preparing for new changes in ever-evolving marketing trends and COVID-centric consumer shopping habits. Marketers need to know how to best align strategies to these changes to make your new year marketing footprint one that’s foolproof and action-packed. From retail customers to B2B clients, online shoppers, and service-based buyers, every solid marketing plan is tailored to treat its target audience with a unique customer experience. Consider these five suggestions for your 2022 marketing plan as intended to best serve your audience.
1. Reevaluate the Needs of Your Target Audience
Marketing may seem rather effortless when we think we already know all there is to know about our target audience. However, let’s not forget how they are humans who are much like ourselves. Just as we tend to change with time, age, and various life circumstances, our target audience will continue to grow and evolve regularly, too.
Because of this constant, often emotional evolution, we must actively work to refresh our knowledge base as we redefine our audience’s interests, hobbies, goals, and preferences to best serve their new needs. We realign our marketing efforts with their latest changes to remain relevant to their renewed needs and wants. This is how we ensure products and services stay needed and wanted for businesses to continue profiting in congruence with the growth and expansion of our target audience.
The world is changing rapidly as more people make the bold choice to move away from a traditional office space and structure and to also work from home. Entrepreneurship is booming as hard workers seek new ways to flourish for themselves. Demand is climbing higher as desires increase and magnify, along with new leveled-up goals and more preferred lifestyles.
For example, if your client was living a traditional nine-to-five structured lifestyle with children in school prior to COVID, things have inevitably flipped all kinds of ways from work-life to balancing kids’ virtual school and managing household tasks like grocery shopping and keeping the house clean. We’ve experienced new shortages on essential items like the lack of toilet paper, paper towels, and bottled water. We’ve learned how to entertain ourselves at home much better than we ever could or had to before entering this new COVID era. All of these small yet meaningful notes of day-to-day lifestyle nuances snowball into significant change all around. From the way, we now order takeout through a choice of automatic delivery apps to virtual grocery shopping via click-list on our laptop, tablet, or smartphone. There is not much that has not changed when you look back at pre-COVID versus now.
As these things continue to grow and change into 2022, our marketing efforts and strategies must accurately reflect the societal shift we are all experiencing together in real-time. In order to stay connected and remain afloat, it’s pertinent to realize how people prefer to purchase from brands that truly know them, their personality quirks, and their unique needs as they continue to grow and change with time, age, and various life circumstances.
2. Consulting Customer Experience
Consulting customer experience when it comes to marketing strategy efforts is a guaranteed, regular recommendation. However, it’s become an undeniably integral component of marketing plans in 2022. As we recently crossed the 19-month mark of an all-new COVID era, we’ve grown newly accustomed to pandemic-induced norms and unpredictable shifts in habitual tendencies.
From the fresh concept of curbside pickup spreading from grocery to takeout, and pet store purchases, to widespread delivery apps for everything under the sun and rapid arrivals driving last-minute online shopper agendas, we are starting to see which new trends are here to stay. As people slowly start returning to pre-COVID shopping options, many are now sold on this evolved way of e-shopping. What’s easy, convenient, and cost-effective wins the day. This is not new and has always been how we nudge forward in all things momentous. When it comes to marketing, we must continue to adapt, rising to each occasion above standard-setting expectations to stay lightyears ahead of any potential competition.
Customer experience has been revolutionized in the wake of COVID with heightened attention for all things sanitary and hygiene-centric, specific to health-conscious precautions. Hand sanitizer, wipes, and masks will never be looked at the same again, having seen the integral role they continue to play in this global pandemic that is still panning out in new and unfamiliar ways. It seems that the light at the end of the tunnel may be trying to start to shine. However, we are not quite out of the woods just yet, and it’s still a bit dark and unclear just ahead.
As we all continue to do our best to wade through these new waters of life together, it’s important to note the significant role we as marketers play in helping our clients and customers alike rest assured with safety protocols in place for their direct benefit, comfort, and continued good health. What’s most important here is how we choose to actively pursue the best ways to display our care for clients and customers. This is an opportune time to shine light upon healthy practices as we market our products and services in the new year.
3. Funnel of Thought
The deeper into the funnel we take our marketing strategy plans for 2022, the more fruitful the results. At the top of the funnel, buyers are busy gathering pre-purchase information. Not yet ready to buy, they are researching and reading about the possibility. When they move along to the middle of the funnel, the buyer starts to interact with brands online, as well as in stores. This involves talking to people who have purchased from the brand to learn about previous customer experiences.
The bottom of the funnel is where buyers are ready to purchase or begin a service. For your 2022 marketing plan to work, the messaging needs to be specific to each stage of the funnel. For example, at the top of the funnel, we need to provide customers with their preferred options for resources. This helps the buyer better understand and identify with confidence that this is the right decision for them. In order to do so, we must be prepared to educate them on what they can expect and anticipate. The middle of the funnel may involve access to documented testimonials with target messaging specific to the buyer’s demographics, industry, or browsing history. Finally, the bottom of the funnel includes hot, time-sensitive offers like a promising promotion, temporary flash sale alert, or notifications reminding them to return to their cart for the final checkout of their previously chosen items.
Some things we need to make a note of now that we may not have had to ever before in a business sense include mindful, precautionary measures, such as social distancing and sensitivity to pandemic-related propaganda. Many of our clients and customers have dealt with tragic losses resulting from COVID, be it beloved family, childhood friends, lifelong careers, homes, and dreams. It’s been a time of great loss, but with it comes a time of great hope. We can contribute to the revitalized spirit with our funnel-specific messaging. Mindfulness and sensitivity are prominent here as what we say may be taken to heart more than it would have before. People are having a hard time adjusting to the new sense of what’s normal now, and we can do our best to help them as we continue to cater our message to their new needs and wants.
4. Clarify Your Message
Clarifying your message can make or break the intended outcome of your 2022 marketing plan. Statistics don’t lie; people are not willing to spend much time waiting on a website to load regardless of what they’re looking for. What’s more, if they don’t see exactly what they seek in that blip of an allotted, three-second time frame, they will leave your site for another that serves them faster and clearer, hence the significance of clarity in your messaging. It must be upfront, centric, and clearly displayed so buyers can see exactly what you offer without question or room for doubt. It should not be difficult to figure out the intended purpose of your landing page. The more you actively work on clarifying your message, the better the target audience will identify with buying what you are selling.
For example, whether your end-goal is to sell the shiny, electric vehicle to a new, high-profile client, or it is to seal the deal on a major service-based contract with a national corporation, the client must be the center of your message and serve as the hero to their own story, not your brand. As you learn more about their problem and how your solution can serve as a tool to help them solve it, you present that information to them strategically. Watch as they can put the pieces of the puzzle together on their own with your professional, well-intended guidance, ultimately deciding for themselves that this purchase is in their best interest, solving their own problems.
5. Be Real
When building out your 2022 marketing plan, it’s best to remember people can read between the lines of a calculated sales pitch as well as they can sense honest, well-meaning genuineness. Be a real brand that showcases who you are candidly. People appreciate authenticity and transparency, and it speaks volumes when identified in messaging.
At the same time, people disconnect when it comes to industry-specific corporate language and have difficulty comprehending it. Think about how you feel at the doctor’s office when the physician starts to speak in medical jargon that you might not be as privy to in the professional, textbook sense. It sounds like a bunch of mumbo jumbos, doesn’t it?
You don’t want your target audience to read your messaging as mumbo jumbo, yet they will do just that if it is not crafted in a natural, well-meaning, authentic method of communication articulated to match how they prefer to receive new information without feeling like they lack the knowledge necessary to understand truly. The more real you can be with your messaging, the better you will serve your target audience.
Wondering what’s next and where to begin? Let’s continue this conversation. You are invited to learn more about how to best align your 2022 marketing plan with messaging that meets your customers right where they are. Get started with a free consultation with our team, here.
Tip-Top Design Elements for Your Brand’s Website
Web design is a key part of providing a positive and satisfactory online experience. Websites are ever-changing, and modern web design has so much to offer your brand development, awareness, and growth.
While some factors, such as the need for relevant, engaging, and timely content, remain important elements in website design, there are other useful aspects a web designer can integrate into your website to boost its performance.
Below are the top elements that every great website should contain with designer recommendations for enhancing website user interface, design, and functionality.
Clean and Bold Typography
For a website design to be distinctive, it must feature clean, clear, and bold typography. Good typography helps balance the structure of your website design between the visual imagery and the editorial copy.
Understanding the different typographic elements and skillfully applying them to your web design will enhance user accessibility and readability to further ensure an excellent user experience for your site visitors to keep coming back for more.
Simple Navigation
The success of your website performance and online presence significantly depends on creating a good user experience. One way to do that is to create a careful user interface design to ensure your visitors don’t get lost while going through your website.
Creating a straightforward web structure with a simple, prominent navigation bar will help to keep your customers coming back to your website for more offerings.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
All websites are not built to be automatically compatible with all devices and web browsers. Your customers will be accessing your site from a variety of devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, and PC, and browsers like Google, Chrome, Safari or DuckDuckGo. Make sure each design element coded into your website can be displayed to function properly on every device and web browser used to view your site.
Accelerated Optimization
In the age of gratification, your website is expected to load and run immediately. If it does not meet the speed requirement of your audience, it will likely be abandoned. Thus, it is critical to optimize all website elements for speed in order to reduce the time between click and content. This means you also need to optimize all images and videos to balance quality with file size for optimal speed.
Navigation Menu
You will find most websites share a menu of features and listed options. While this may provide navigation for users to choose the option they want, it can take up a large part of screen space, especially if the list has many options. This can limit proper accessibility for users with smaller screen devices.
The menu can quickly solve this issue. The menu or icon is the button that opens up into a broader side menu, drop-down, or navigation drawer. This helps save screen space and keep the interface clean while still providing navigational ease for visitors.
White Space
White space is a popular element of minimalist design considered a critical feature of effective website frameworks. Balancing white space and content such as text, videos and redirect links can help your website look clean, organized, and easy to navigate.
While there are many important components to a good website design, integrating these six key elements into your website can make a big difference. If you are looking for an experienced web designer in Michigan to help you, IMPACT Digital Marketing offers elite web design best practices and techniques. Contact us today to get started on sprucing up your company’s web design strategy.
How to Manage a Marketing Budget for a Small Business
If you are running a business, digital marketing strategies and techniques can help you sell more of your products or services with ease. Building a strategic marketing budget will help as you reach more customers and build your ROI.
For marketing companies in Michigan or elsewhere, a strategic marketing budget is crucial to determine how much to allocate for advertising and design, marketing communications, and many more aspects. Failing to strategically fund marketing campaigns can result in a lack of results from insufficient reach.
Strategic marketing budgets are essential for business longevity. The best way to ensure that your money is being well spent is to develop a strategic marketing budget to then formulate a reliable marketing plan. Below we’ll discuss the four important factors to consider in order to build and manage a marketing budget for your small business.
1. Developing Your Marketing Strategy
Before you set your marketing budget, take the time to first align your marketing goals with your business goals and aim for future growth. This will help you gain more satisfactory results. In case you plan to grow your business value by 25%, but only invest very little in marketing just enough to get new business cards for your team, you probably won’t see much growth from this small investment.
Set Specific Goals
Your goals are essential components that help make up a successful marketing strategy. Of course, the end goal is to increase sales, however, you want to be more specific at this point. Decide whether your marketing goal is to increase engagement with the audience on social media platforms or to drive traffic to your website, or both. Being more specific with your goals will help you create the right marketing strategy.
Focus More On Your Customers
As a small business owner, it’s important to understand the channels that work best for your business to reach potential customers before setting a marketing budget. To determine the best channels for your business, in-depth research on your target audience is required.
Most marketing companies in Michigan start by learning about the basic demographics like general age group, income level, geographical area, types of brands they gravitate toward, and other information that can be useful to create a marketing strategy tailored to your target audience.
Once you get an idea of the needs and requirements of your potential customers, it will get easier for you to figure out the best channels to better guide your audience through the strategic sales funnel.
2. Setting Your Marketing Budget
Once you have set your marketing goals, your next step is to identify the budget you want to invest into marketing. Setting a marketing budget will allow you to develop a comprehensive marketing plan that can support your marketing strategy. Here are a few methods most marketing companies in Michigan use to calculate the marketing budget.
Revenue
You can determine your budget for marketing purposes by reviewing your annual revenue reports. Some companies will usually invest between 6.5% to 8.5% into marketing. Newer businesses often go for a higher percentage to boost starting sales.
Competition
You could do a little research before you decide on the budget for your investment depending on how much your competitors are spending. Remember to also investigate the results of the competition’s efforts in addition to the budget for the purpose of ROI.
Goals
Determine your management expenses and marketing goals, and then you can set a budget that will prepare you to achieve those goals.
3. Creating Your Marketing Plan
Once you have your marketing goals and budget, now you can move on to developing a tactical marketing plan to achieve your goals. The marketing budget you have set will determine the complexity of your marketing plan. In addition to the plans in mind, consider adding components related to social media, SEO, paid advertising, and email marketing for more support.
4. Banking On Your Marketing Budget
Once you have a plan in hand that supports the marketing goals for your company, the next step is to implement the budget. Here you will need a team of qualified designers, marketers, and technical experts to ensure the successful implementation of your plan.
Keep in mind you can always come up with innovative ideas to market your business without spending extra money, too. There are countless channels, platforms, and marketing techniques you can try on for size. Don’t be afraid to dabble.
If you’re not sure what to try, start with your marketing goals and remember to focus on fulfilling the needs of your audience and accentuating how you can solve their problems.
If you are ready to dive into creating a more professional, strategic marketing budget, IMPACT Digital Marketing is one of the top marketing companies in Michigan. We have the expertise and knowledge to prepare a marketing budget that supports and works for your unique business needs and goals. With us, you will get services from top-notch marketing experts and the chance to work with a team of talented individuals that strives to succeed and prove the value of its services. Contact us today to talk about building a strategic marketing budget for your business.
Important Digital Marketing Terminology
Digital marketing is a brand building technique that has been used for at least a decade. It has constantly evolved with the rise of social networks and now plays a major role for online or even physical businesses. But whether you’re a layman or an expert, it’s always good to get a refresher. The online world is constantly evolving, and it’s hard to keep up with the terminology. Or even in the first place to fully understand all the ins and outs of the terms used. So here’s a quick guide to help you familiarize yourself with the main ideas and terms of this discipline.
Conversion tracking: Conversion tracking is used to monitor and analyze how many conversions have occurred during a certain period and through which ads the conversions have come about.
Cookie: A cookie tracks the movement of visitors on a website and allows conclusions to be drawn about the visitor’s behavior and preferences. If someone visits a website more than once, the website operator’s computer recognizes this and can use the information to optimize its offer for the visitor.
Copy: The text in an advertisement, or text that is written so that it can be output acoustically.
Cost per Acquisition: The cost of a campaign divided by the number of customers acquired.
Cost-per-Click (CPC): The cost of a campaign by the number of clicks generated.
Cost per Lead (CPL): The cost of a campaign by the number of leads generated.
Cross-device targeting: Enables cross-device targeting of the website visitor, regardless of whether it is his or her tablet, desktop, or smartphone.
Demand-Side Platform (DSP): A system that enables advertisers to bid and buy across multiple ad exchanges through the same interface.
Direct Response: This is the name given to campaigns and ads designed to encourage audiences to respond directly.
Email Advertising: Clickable banner ads and links in emails and newsletters.
Expandable banner: Banners that get bigger when a user moves their mouse over them (mouse over).
Frequency Capping. Limiting the frequency with which an ad is displayed to a user within a given time period.
Geographic targeting: Selecting the campaign target group based on geographic information.
In-stream video ads: Video ads that play before, during, or after video content. You’ve probably seen these on YouTube.
Landing Page: The landing page is the page to which an ad links. Here the visitor receives a specific offer.
Lead: Basically, a potential customer. In a campaign, the one who not only clicks on an ad, but also follows further call-to-actions. This can be, for example, signing up for the newsletter or entering personal data in forms on your landing page.
Lookalike Audience: Literally translated: similar audience. Based on your existing customers, you target your marketing based on demographic or behavioral criteria. The likelihood is that customers who have similar means or think and act similarly will find their way to the same buying decisions. The more specific you are in creating individual person profiles here, the closer you are already to creating buyer personas.
Native Advertising: paid advertising that is indistinguishable in terms of the channel used to present it.
Overlay: in response to the increasing use of ad blocking software, many sites now use overlays because they cannot be blocked. The advertising “floats” above the web page that is being viewed.
Pay-per-click (PPC): Pricing model in which advertisers are charged providers per click on an ad placed.
Reach or coverage: The total number of people who see your advertising message. A visitor who sees your ad four times and clicks on it once generates a reach of 1, 4 impressions and a click-through rate of 25%.
Retargeting / Remarketing: Refers to displaying ads to website visitors who have already visited your website for a repeat visit.
Rich Media: Interactive media such as quizzes, games, and ads with video and special effects.
Search Engine Advertising: The paid placement of your site or ad on search engine results pages.
Social Advertising: Paid ads on social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Xing, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
As mentioned at the beginning, such a series can never be complete. However, we hope that we have been able to make a few basic terms of Digital Marketing more understandable to you. Which terms have concrete meaning for you depends, of course, on your digital marketing strategy. If you want to know more about the topic discussed, you can visit our website https://impactdms.com/ and we will be happy to advise you on this.
Digital Marketing Terms You Should Care About
Digital marketing continues to dominate the business world. Gone are the days when the radio and word of mouth were the only available advertising methods. People have shifted to the internet, and if you want to capture attention and increase sales, you have to be present online. The digital marketing field is broad, and it involves attracting customers through strategies involving content marketing, email campaigns, and social media platforms.
Discover the terms used in digital marketing for you to be on top of the game. This article will discuss the basic digital terms and help you know where to use each of them.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization, commonly called SEO, involves the concentrated use of strategic keywords or phrases that will ensure you appear on top of the search results. It’s a way to attract traffic and improve the quality of website content. Here are some terms that are commonly used in SEO.
Anchor Text: This is an SEO term for hyperlinked text which anchors the link. Anchor text can help with enhancing the rankings. Anchor text can be internally optimized, but it is usually good to keep them natural in press releases or articles.
301 Direct: This is a status code sent to a browser from a server. It shows a permanent redirect of an old page and ensures that users don’t land on deleted pages. In addition, this status code redirects the domain to the new one. It also shows a permanent movement of a page from one place to another.
Bounce Rate: This is the total percentage of visitors that leave a webpage. These visitors leave without liking, clicking, filling a form, or buying your products or services. Bounce rates are significant because they reflect the conversion rate.
Advertising
Advertising aims to bring in more sales. There are some terms used in digital marketing specific to advertising.
Caching: This involves storing data in a cache temporarily. It gives easy and efficient access to items. There are several uses of a cache that benefit advertising efforts.
Behavioral Targeting: This is a method used mainly by advertisers. It involves using the previous behavior of a web user to customize the ads they receive. This technique makes your advertising campaigns more effective.
Advertainment: Have you ever seen a video that advertises a product and at the same time entertains you? It keeps potential customers connected to the content effectively.
Social Media
Social media has a lot of benefits as it helps your brand become more recognized, and you can offer customer care services. Social media makes it easy to engage with present and potential customers. There are many terms used specific to social media.
Impressions: This is the number of times users have seen a social media post. For instance, if ten people have seen your post, it means that your post has ten impressions.
Engagement: The term engagement in social media means any action taken by social media users on your page. Engagement can be in the form of likes, comments, shares, or reactions.
Tags: Tags are used when someone mentions another name on a published social media post. It could be they thought the post was essential for you to follow. Also, people use tags when they want to take part in a significant ongoing conversation. By tagging someone, you give them a heads-up that they need to check the post out.
Digital marketing is diverse, and one should not underestimate the potential of a proficient digital marketing strategy. If you are looking for digital marketing services to help your business prosper, consider a consultation with Impact Digital Marketing today.
Google Rolls Out New Spam Algorithm
Time again for a core update on Google. When the June 2021 Core Algorithm Update was announced around a month ago, the search engine company announced that it would be following with another update in July 2021. This should make outstanding adjustments to the algorithm at Google – which could lead to further significant fluctuations in ranking. The roll-out has now officially started.
The big spam update for search is now completely rolled out at Google. These are the types of spam you should avoid at all costs.
When Google announced the big Search Spam Update in June, it joined an eventful summer at the search engine. On the one hand, the roll-out for the ranking signals of the Page Experience Update began in June. On the other hand, Google launched a Core Algorithm Update in the same month – which will even advance to a double pack through the July Core Update 2021. Now the search engine company announced on Twitter that the second part of the Spam Update has been rolled out and completed. Webmasters should refrain from certain content – even independently of this update.
Google is continuing the fight against spam as AI delivers more and more potential with Google’s blog post addressing the search engine’s fight against spam, which states:
‘’We’ve been fighting spam since Google Search has been around, but recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) offer unprecedented potential to completely transform our approach.’’
For example, Google’s own AI effectively detects spam and new corresponding trends. The company has been able to reduce “the number of websites with automatically generated and copied content by over 80 percent compared to a few years ago.” Every day, the search engine identifies and removes around 40 billion spam pages – so they don’t reach users in the first place. In order for webmasters to know exactly which content Google clearly recognizes as spam, the company provides an overview on the Google Search Central website. There, Google lists the methods to be avoided:
- Automatically generated content
- Participation in link exchange programs
- Creation of pages with no or only little unique content
- Cloaking
- Misleading redirects
- Hidden text/hidden links
- Bridge pages
- Copied content
- Participation in affiliate programs without sufficient added value
- Loading pages with irrelevant keywords
- Creating pages with malicious features that, for example, attempt phishing or install viruses, Trojans, or other badware
- Abusing markup for structured data
- Sending automated queries to Google
In addition, website owners should pay attention to the best practices of identifying and removing hacked content on the site, as well as avoiding and quickly removing user-generated spam. After all, Google’s big update is likely to detect even more spam in the future. And if it is related to your website, it will have a negative impact on your ranking.
If you are facing changes with your website and do not know what is wrong or how to go about them, consider contacting Impact Digital Marketing, the trusted search engine optimization company in Michigan. As one of the leading webmasters specializing in SEO services and web creation, we can help resolve all Google update problems your website might be facing, as well as help you prevent such problems in the future.
Understanding and Preparing for Google’s Core Web Vitals
The Google Page Experience update goes into effect in May 2021. Here’s how this new Google update will impact your SEO.
Google first announced its “Google Page Experience” update in May 2020. It is now imminent, as it is scheduled for May 2021. So, what should you expect from this refresh of the Mountain View giant’s algorithms? What impact will it have on your SEO?
Before answering these questions, let’s first talk about the Google Page Experience.
What is the Google Page Experience?
Google describes the Page Experience update as, “a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its purely informational value.” Simply put, Google will add a set of new signals to its algorithm. This will result in better rankings for websites that are fast, easy to use, and well-designed.
- The new update also builds on Google’s existing user experience signals. These signals are essentially: mobile friendliness, secure browsing, HTTPS, and pages that load fast.
- Google even mentioned the addition of new “visual indicators” in its search results (SERPs). These indicators will be used to highlight pages with an excellent page experience score.
- Metrics around loading speed and usability will also be refined. These new metrics are called “Core Web Vitals.”
Understanding the Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals or Essential Web Signals are Google’s new metrics for determining whether a page’s experience is good or not. The Core Web Vitals include three criteria:
- LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): LCP, or loading performance, refers to the largest visible image or block of text on a page. It determines when the main part of the page was displayed on the screen. Google recommends that sites have an LCP that occurs within 2.5 seconds from the start of the page load.
- FID (First Input Delay): FID is used to measure interactivity. Google measures the time between a person interacting with your site (clicking a button, scrolling, etc.) and the time the site begins to respond. This latency can be the result of the browser working on other tasks, such as loading other parts of a web page. To provide a good page experience, sites should strive for a score of less than 100 milliseconds.
- CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): CLS, or visual stability, measures how much the window elements move as the page loads. For example, if your visitor tries to click on a link and it moves. CLS tells you whether or not users can interact with the page properly. To have a good page experience, you should aim for a SLC score below 0.1.
What Doesn’t Change with Google Page Experience?
Before Google Page Experience, web pages were already ranked based on scores for:
Mobile Friendliness:
Whether the website and its landing pages work well on cell phones. Google’s Mobile-First index now penalizes sites that are not mobile-friendly.
Secure Browsing:
Whether the site does not use deceptive practices or malware. The site should also not allow security holes that hackers could exploit at the expense of visitors.
HTTPS:
If the site uses the HTTPS protocol.
Site Loading Time:
Whether the site does not use pop-ups or other types of content that slow down the loading of content expected by the visitor.
The addition of the Core Web Vitals means that when Google Page Experience is deployed in May 2021, we will have 7 key signals to monitor for SEO.
How Big Will the Google Page Experience Be?
Google’s Panda update affected about 12% of search queries. The BERT update affected about 10% of all search queries. What will be the impact of Google Page Experience on search engine results? It’s hard to say at this stage, but we can rightly think that it will be significant.
Google officials have already stated that this update is not designed to target pages that already have great content. Instead, sites with high-quality content should rank even higher in the SERPs once the update is rolled out.
Regardless, the rule still applies: the more quality content you produce, the better you’ll rank. Content is still king and will continue to play a central role in search engine rankings, and that’s regardless of the updates Google makes to its algorithm.
Need to do an SEO audit of your site to make sure you are up to Google Page Experience standards? Contact Impact Digital Marketing in Michigan for more information about how we can help.
