Make Sure You Have A Clear Purpose

In 2020, marketing online simply means working with digital platforms to promote your product or service.

However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, marketing online has taken on a whole new meaning. Brands and businesses that can help to provide solutions, support, and/or engage with the public during these times will become incredibly valuable – especially in the long term.

Create Value For The Customer

Traditional marketing, which mostly relies on radio spots, print ads, and billboards, simply doesn’t work in today’s world.

The best marketing online strategies generate interest, build trust, and ultimately drive sales. When done right, customers will come back for more and tell others about their experience.

To create value for the customer, your business should consider using free tools, such as Facebook’s free advertising platform, Google’s free ads platform, and LinkedIn’s free advertising platform. These free tools make it easy for potential customers to find and engage with your brand.

Diversify Your Audience

In previous years, marketers only needed to worry about one type of market – typically age group or gender focused.

However, in today’s digital world, marketers need to worry about many different types of audiences, including gender, age, income, interests, hobbies, and location. To ensure your marketing efforts are reaching the right audience, you should consider using platforms that can capture and segment individuals based on their interests and behaviors. Interest-based segmentation allows you to target individuals most likely to be interested in your product or service.

To determine the right audience for your marketing efforts, you can use free tools, such as Google’s Interest Graph and Facebook’s Audience Targeting.

Additionally, many platforms, such as HubSpot, allow you to create personas and trigger reactions based on the actions and behaviors of specific types of people. This type of analysis makes it easy to pinpoint the type of content individuals need to consume. For example, if you notice your personas are signing up for your email list but are not engaging with your social platforms, you might want to consider creating a new blog post or revising an existing one to spark more interest.

Measure The Effect Of Your Marketing

Every marketer (whether they admit it or not) wants to improve their marketing results. However, without the proper measurements, it’s difficult to say if your efforts are actually having an impact.

Fortunately, there are plenty of free tools available that can help measurement experts gain valuable insights into the effectiveness of their marketing strategies.

Two popular tools that can help are Google Analytics and Hootsuite. Google Analytics can track the traffic coming to your website from different countries, regions, and cities around the world. With this information, you can determine the strengths and weaknesses of your online marketing efforts and take the necessary steps to improve.

Similarly, Hootsuite can provide you with a clear picture of the content your followers are engaging with. You can use this information to determine the strength of your content and whether or not you should continue publishing.

Make Sure Your Website Is Secure

When people visit a website, the first thing they typically think about is security. After all, you wouldn’t want your personal information to be stolen or damaged due to a corrupted website.

Unfortunately, not all websites are created equal. Some websites are riddled with threats, including security holes, that could allow hackers to steal your personal information. These threats could end up costing you customers if they’re not addressed immediately.

To ensure your website is secure and doesn’t contain any hidden threats, you should use a reputable security company to scan it for you. Doing so can reveal any weaknesses and provide you with insights into how and where you can fix them. Some companies that specialize in this kind of service are SentinelOne and Rapid 7.

Use Relevant Metadata

When search engines such as Google and Bing crawl websites and uncover hidden metadata, they can significantly impact how well your site ranks in search results.

In the past, search engines would simply index the content on your site and return relevant results based on what people were searching for.

However, in today’s world, with the development of advanced search features, search engines can now analyze the structure, language, and substance of your site in order to determine its relevance to a given topic.

For example, if you’re creating content relating to web hosting, search engines can look at the language you’ve used throughout your site and the number and quality of your links to determine how trustworthy and valuable your website is.

To ensure your site ranks high in relevant searches, you should work to incorporate these types of factors into your content and link building strategies. You can use free tools, such as Google’s Search Console, to easily track the progress of your SEO efforts and determine their effectiveness. If you’re looking to hire an SEO company, consider their portfolio and review their past work to get an idea of how they’ll likely perform for your business.

Avoid These SEO Pitfalls

Just because your website has been scanned by a reputable security company and is considered to be secure, that doesn’t mean you can rest assured it won’t suffer from any minor SEO flaws.

In 2019, Google cracked down on small businesses that were overconfident in thinking they could manipulate search engines to rank them highly simply for having a website. The takeaway from this is that even small SEO mistakes can have devastating consequences.

Although it’s not always possible to avoid all SEO pitfalls, you can be smart about how you navigate these situations. If you make little or no changes to your SEO strategy after getting penalized, you’ll simply repeat the process of getting penalized because your site won’t rank as high as it should.

To keep your site healthy, you should avoid the following SEO pitfalls:

• Over-optimization – Trying to trick the search engine algorithms by using too many keywords or stuffing your articles with unnecessary and duplicate content
• Link-building – Trying to get all your friends and family to leave a link to your website once they’ve learned about your product or service
• SEO Spam – Creating multiple websites for the purpose of getting traffic and building links
• Fake Backlinks – Getting paid or trading a like for a like in order to artificially boost your website’s rankings
• Black Hat SEO – Using deceptive practices to trick search engines

If your site falls into any of these categories, you’re risking your SEO efforts. To avoid this, be honest about your intentions and conduct your business in a way that promotes trust and integrity.

Build Links To Enhance Your Rankings

Once you’ve established your website, you should begin to think about ways to expand its reach and gain more credibility in the eyes of the search engines.

You can’t directly control how much weight the search engines give your website, but you can definitely influence the way they see you. One way to do this is to link your website to reputable resources, blogs, and websites that are already highly ranked.

For example, if you’re creating a blog post about web hosting, you can link your blog to reputable websites that are already extensively covered in the industry. Doing so will hopefully earn you a few backlinks and help your website climb the ranks faster than before.

When your customers or potential customers discover your website, the first thing they will do is check to see if other websites have linked to it. For this reason, taking the time to build quality links is crucial if you want to achieve high search rankings.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

In today’s world, more people are using mobile devices to access the internet than they are using desktop computers. This means your website will need to be mobile-friendly if you want to reach your target audience.

To make sure your website is mobile-friendly, you should use a reputable testing tool, such as Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool, to scan your site and identify any issues. In addition, you should consider using a mobile-friendly domain name, such as http://www.ibm.com, which is easily accessed via a mobile device. Once you’ve made these changes, you should try and access your website via a mobile device to see if it looks the same as it does on a computer screen.