Top five SEO tips for your online marketing plan

Your marketing plan should have a section relating to online marketing – if it hasn’t yet, start with a list of key online marketing channels as a starting point. 

Main areas should include:

• Your website
• Email marketing
• Online advertising (Google Adwords, advertising on others’ websites)
• Social media (including blogs, YouTube and other popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Pinterest)
• Online PR

And last but definitely not least, search engine optimisation (SEO).

Your website is top of my list for a good reason; all of the other marketing activity you do online leads visitors and search engines back to your website.  Making sure that your website is both visitor and search engine friendly should be a marketing priority.

But you already know this!  So what would I recommend today as the top five SEO tips for your website?
 
1. Define your best keywords.  Whilst SEO constantly evolves, some of the basics remain the same and this is one of them.  You should know which words your customers/potential customers are likely to use to find your products or services.  Start with these then use the Google keyword tool  to see what the volume of search is and view suggested synonyms.  Well worth doing and will help to formulate your content plan.
2. Content, content and more content.  Not just creating website pages once but updating copy regularly, blogging, providing added value information and content on your website.  Give other websites a reason to link to you.
3. If you’re a location-based business, make sure you’ve got a listing on Google Places (now also appearing in Google+ but at the moment you have to continue to manage a Google Places account separately.) www.google.co.uk/places/.  Doing this means you can appear at the top of search results for local search terms:



4. Social media.  Even if you’re B2B social media has a place, think about your target audience and where they might engage with your business.  LinkedIn is a must for most of us, but Facebook brand pages, YouTube and Pinterest can work really well.  Google is beginning to look at social media activity and remember those valuable links back to your website.
5. Measure and test.  Use Google Analytics to see which keywords bring traffic to your site, where your traffic comes from (referrals and sources) and seriously consider Google content experiments, used to be Google website optimiser (now in Google Analytics.)  This means testing different pages and seeing what the results are.

If I had to pick one of these as the absolute essential for today, it would be content, that’s the one to give some serious thought to you in your marketing plan.


Karen McNulty

Marketing lessons as BusinessPlanWiz launches in the UK

It's taken far longer than we expected - 2 and half years longer to be precise, but we're relieved to say that BusinessPlanWiz.com is now live. When we began with the concept of being able to create business plans and marketing plans online, it seemed quite straightforward. It still is really, certainly for the user, but developing software to do what's in your head is not for the faint hearted!

I shan't dwell on that one, because our website team (Edward Robertson) did work hard and the end result demonstrates their commitment to the project.

Anyway, as a marketer, and co-owner of a small business, it's been a fascinating journey and the new website has included all of the things we learned from launching MarketingPlanWiz 3 years ago. Internet marketing has steamed ahead during this time and this dictated the look and feel of the front end of the website, also our insistence that we could content manage as much as possible. These are a few of the more significant marketing approaches that we adopted:

• BusinessPlanWiz Video - you'll see it on our home page. We know now that Google loves video and the benefit of doing something on YouTube and embedding it means that it's found in 2 places - YouTube and on your website. I have to say that it was one of the hardest things we've done - have you tried talking to a camera about your business?! We could do this ourselves, making it a very cost effective medium. We used Camtasia to edit the video with screen shots and slides. Here are some good tips from UTalkMarketing about using video to optimise your website.
• Blogging is an integral part of the website. This time we had a business blog built into the site so that we could update blog type content quickly and easily, with links to articles on the home page making it nice and easy to find. Blog content is still excellent content for SEO as search engines like the fact that they're updated regularly.
  
• Making it easier to buy. We spent a lot of time with MarketingPlanWiz providing all of the reasons that buying was a good idea. With BusinessPlanWiz we let the product speak for itself. By making it free to try, it naturally makes the decision easier for users, so we removed extra pages that prevented people from getting to the buying page. From an e-commerce perspective, we learnt that this works more effectively.
• Google Analytics - we now set up goals so that we can quickly and easily measure specific activities on the website (such as buying) without having to work it out, as it reports automatically. Google's help for setting up goals in analytics is quite good.
• PR - definitely practicing what we preach here. We're working with a PR and marketing agency (Media Matters in Peterborough) which specialises in online PR and search engine content. Apart from saving us enormous amounts of time, their experience and media connections are excellent.

So we begin now with persuading people to link to us, another good thing for search engine optimisation, and because it really is a useful website!

Karen McNulty
www.MarketingPlanWiz.co.uk

Welcome back to our marketing blog! 

This week I've been thinking about SEO - having just been learning more about it.  It's absolutely fascinating because there are so many basics that you have to get right before your website can get even a chance of being picked up by search engines such as  Google.  Did you know for example that your "Title Tag" (the heading that appears at the top of your browser once your website has loaded) is absolutely critical, but so many of us forget about it!  This is where you get the chance in a sentence to say exactly what your website does... so if you sell flower pots and your company is called Smith and Co., don't have "Smith and Co. as your Title tag - say something like "Flower pots, all sizes and made to order" then search engines can immediately see what you do.  Of course if you're like me and haven't a clue how to make your website do that, you need to ask your lovely website designer to add it for you.  It's apparently not difficult - but that's easy for me to say...

The other thing I discovered is a website (www.ranks.nl) that tells you if you've got your "keyword density" right (sounds uncomfortable).  This is getting just the right number of keyword phrases on any page of your website.   Too few and the search engines won't be able to match you to relevant searches, too many and you've "over-egged" it.  The golden rule is 3 - 5% of your text should contain keyword phrases.  So if you had 100 words on a page, there should be no more than 5 mentions.

See, simple really! 

Karen McNulty

MarketingPlanWiz