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    Tag: search engine optimization strategy

    3 creative ideas for your holiday marketing campaigns

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Halloween is long over, Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Cyber Monday are upon us, and the holiday season is coming up quickly! Now is the perfect time to revamp your holiday marketing campaigns to get customers excited about your brand and give them a reason to shop. It goes without saying that incorporating some holiday spirit into your digital marketing campaigns acts as the best method to grab their attention, but since every other business will be doing the same, listed below are three creative ideas that can help to separate you from the rest. 

    Send out festive emails

    Whether you’re planning to offer a holiday discount code that can be used during a sale’s event or you’ve simply restocked some top-selling products and want your customers to know, to achieve optimal engagement with your email-based holiday marketing campaigns, be sure to put some added time into making them festive. This could include simple elements like a red, green, and white colour scheme and cheery, jovial imagery like presents, garlands, holidays lights, and snowman. This will ensure that you’re mindful of your audience and the fact that they may celebrate different holidays. However, if your demographics align, feel free to throw in a Christmas or Santa to appeal to the masses! 

    Since the holiday season is the perfect time of year to let your customers know that they’re valued, we recommend offering some sort of incentive to be considered as an online vendor for their shopping lists. 

    Launch a holiday-themed ad

    Google Ads is a great place to launch holiday-themed advertisements and promotions. That said, e-commerce businesses need to remember to research and utilize relevant keywords, such as “holiday”, “Christmas”, or “seasonal sale”. While the Google Ads platform is a great start, don’t shy away from promoting your products and services on social media sites like Facebook or Instagram if these platforms are places where your target audience can be reached and your holiday marketing campaigns thrive. 

    While there aren’t many weeks left before the holiday season, you can spend time now optimizing your website for technical SEO to achieve higher search engine rankings in the future. SEO is a great way to increase organic presence and creating high-quality content is still one of the best ways to get noticed online. 

    Advertise a contest or giveaway

    During the holiday season, it’s certainly a struggle to gain attention from your audience, especially with so many competitors looking to do the same. However, by promoting contests or giveaways that encourage people to participate, many brands can expand their reach, which grows their following! The trick to hosting a contest is to do so on social media. Ask users to follow your account, tag friends for more entries, share on their stories for added entries, and remain following to take part in future contests. While you will need to giveaway a prize with a certain value, access to new, interested consumers is far more rewarding. 

    What other ways do you prepare for the holiday season? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.

    4 Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Whether you’re a new entrepreneur or a seasoned e-commerce business owner, there’s no denying that digital marketing is an important investment for anyone who runs a small business. Since digital approaches to reaching target customers aren’t going anywhere, you should know a lot about the tools at your disposal to ensure that you’re working towards building a strong strategy. Below we will share some digital tips on improving your search engine optimization (SEO), building an audience on social media (SMM), and some best practices for utilizing email. 

    Don’t put all your efforts into one area

    While there are many ways a company can market their potential offline—promotion through relevant events and conferences, business cards and/or flyers, or wrap your car with your business information—digital marketing is a more powerful way to promote a small business. Efforts like SEO, SMM, and email marketing are digital channels that allow you to connect and interact with your target audience with sales and conversions in mind. Since all of these digital marketing strategies provide something different for your small business, be sure to spread the budget around and slowly build up each online strategy over time.

    Be smart with data

    There are many insights that can be found within your business metrics if you know where to look. With everything from Facebook reach to website bounce rates and everything in between. That said, the best way to move forward is to focus on a particular metric and see how it has changed over time, then you can add it to your list of upcoming marketing efforts to get you closer to your overall goals. For example, if you’re trying to grow your audience using existing email subscribers, you might want to track the number of clicks a paid ad earns to attract brand-new customers outside your current audience. If you have three new subscribers, your data should let you know with confidence where those emails came from. 

    Interact with your audience in a meaningful way

    You don’t need to only focus on social media when looking to connect with your target audience. Other elements like creating new content pages or sending out polls by email are also great ways to directly access your customer base and train them to rely on your platforms for meaningful, engaging messages. 

    Heavily invest in your SEO strategy

    Copywriting takes new heights when it’s sprinkled with snazzy, industry-relevant keywords that are highly sought after on search engines. While it’s important to retain information to ensure your copy speaks to customers in a language that they understand, possessing the right keywords will ensure your digital marketing efforts for your small business don’t go unnoticed, as search engines will point visitors towards your site. Aside from content curation, savvy SEO services should include time spent on securing backlinks, reorganizing page layouts, and ensuring best practices for headers, URLs, and meta tags to keep up your presence in ongoing searches.

    Keep Track Of Your Competitors

    Whether you own a large or small business, keeping track of your competitor’s marketing efforts should be automatic as it is one of the best ways to gauge how you are doing in the market. This is also your chance to find your edge amongst other small businesses in your niche, therefore getting more pieces of the pie or market share. This strategy will save you tons of marketing budget and time as you can see what’s working and what’s not. Trial and error are expected, especially in digital marketing, but finding ways to gather data without taking risks efficiently is a huge plus.

    Keep Trying New Things

    What’s cool about digital marketing is the avenue and broad stream of opportunities to gather your online presence. Sure, you have to be consistent in your marketing campaigns, but you shouldn’t be afraid to do things differently from time to time. When the market is bombarded with the same marketing strategies all day long, trying to get the same attention, adding a slightly different touch to your marketing efforts makes all the difference. If you’ve been doing well in SMM for a while, try spending some time on Email Marketing and try your luck. You might be surprised by how many opportunities you leave on the table. 

    Know Your Audience

    Before you make any digital marketing efforts, it is crucial to find out who you are trying to target. As you dabble around market segmentation, you’ll find it easier to know where they are and what type of marketing strategies should be best to get their attention. This increases the accuracy of your marketing efforts, saves you tons of budgets, and allows you to spend your focus where it’s needed. Small Businesses will benefit from this strategy as they tend to have a more focused niche than larger companies. Use this advantage to penetrate those untapped markets.

    Add Visuals to Your Content

    Most of you might agree that content remains the king when marketing. However, the types of content today are pretty different compared to previous years. You may notice that a lot of visual content is the ones that are taking giant leaps, whether in video format or simply adding related images in blogs. Statistics show that including visuals in your content increases more than 80% of the engagement and 20% or more clicks. Creating content with images makes it more shareable than just plain texts. Think of images as icing on top after writing a very insightful and exciting copy.

    Be Consistent With Your Brand

    Being consistent with your brand and what you’re brand is standing for is an excellent way to gain and keep loyal customers. Flexibility is essential in Digital Marketing, but your small business’s mission and vision should remain consistent as it grows with your followers. Always look at the bigger picture and create marketing efforts that you think will last the test of time and stay relevant for years to come.

    Good Customer Feedback for Social Proof

    Have you ever bought a product before without even thinking twice just because your friend bought the same thing? Most of you can probably relate to this. This is the power of feedback. Say you successfully led your potential buyers to your landing page. One of the first things they’ll look for is the reviews. Making efforts to get as many good quality reviews as possible is one of the best ways to grow your business.

    Do you have any questions about our digital marketing tips for your small business? Drop a comment below for a prompt response. 

    4 ways to boost your SEO with the season

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    There are a variety of ways that shoppers find new businesses to purchase from. While some utilize referrals from loved ones, most leverage the power of the wide web as an effective way to discover new storefronts. Whether those shoppers make their purchases online or simply use the power of search engines to lookup places near them, people are searching for products and services online every day and your business must harness search engine optimization (SEO) to successfully capture these leads. Below are some of the best ways to boost your SEO for the weeks of fall ahead. 

    Create vibrant seasonal content

    A great way to continuously engage with your audience is by using seasonal content to boost your SEO. Start by doing a little research into what keywords are trending, find a way to relate them to your business, and create vibrant content around them. Whether you plan on hosting a seasonal sale to get rid of older inventory or you’re launching a new product, be sure to find a way to connect with autumn by appealing to the colours of the season. If black, orange, red, yellow, and brown aren’t popular colours for your business, instead customize your messages to include words that match the season instead. 

    Utilize internal links

    Lack of internal thinks in your website content is a missed SEO opportunity. When you want your products or services to be found, highlight those keywords in your relevant content and link them to specific pages or even back to your blog. This lets search engines know that you have something valuable to offer that contains the specified key phrases that will allow your pages to crawl up higher organically in the list of search queries. It’s not only a great way to build your SEO, but also a strategic way to connect with new customers that are on the hunt for your products. 

    Internal linking is a part of Trek Marketing’s local search engine optimization service. This on-site task helps to drive additional traffic to your website and ensures that best practices are followed. 

    Compete for relevant keywords

    While keyword research can be time-consuming, it’s an essential part of your SEO strategy. Needless to say, you do have the option to tag along with trending searches and compete with other businesses for those keywords. Although you will always find more success in building up your content, so be sure to take the time to learn what your customers are searching for this season. 

    Update and add new products and services

    Many businesses have the luxury of attaining new products which with updated content, can starting pulling search engine interest. Needless to say, there are e-commerce companies out there that are constantly remarketing the same products and services, making it challenging to reinvent your content time and time again. Trek Marketing’s local search engine optimization service works on tasks like page layout, page speed, meta tags, and content creation, so even if your brand falls under the second umbrella, you will still have fresh content. 

    Which example will you be starting with to boost your SEO? Drop a comment below to share with us.

    Digital marketing techniques that hold the most value for business owners

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Your online presence is essential, regardless of whether you’re starting a new e-commerce business or simply taking over from a previous owner. While the 2020 year has brought about a lot of changes, the only change to online shopping is that it has become more important than ever before, as more customers are flocking to the web to make their essential purchases. We’re in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s your job to keep on top of your digital marketing efforts to ensure that you prosper in the years to come. Here are some techniques that we recommend. 

    Understanding your audience

    As a growing, e-commerce business owner, one of the most important aspects of operation resides in knowing who your customers are. An engaged audience is key, regardless of whether you’re a startup business or you’ve been in the industry for years. For those who are hoping to better relate to your audience, this would require narrowing your content to meet the needs of that demographic, which as a result, will allow you to cater your digital marketing efforts towards campaigns that understand their pains, problems, and priorities. It could be as simple as communicating a compelling message that encourages a prospecting customer to purchase your product. However, it often involves digging a little deeper into the shopping habits of your target audience. 

    If you’re looking for professional digital marketing services that satisfy the above objectives, have a word with a member of the Trek Marketing team to get started. 

    Email marketing is booming

    One of the most cost-efficient, professional digital marketing services available is email marketing. Why is this? It’s because this type of digital service bridges the gap between generations. Pretty much everyone nowadays has an email, aside from using them to communicate with loved ones, most enjoy receiving special discounts from the online businesses they subscribe to. After all, who doesn’t love a good deal? However, the best part about email marketing is a quicker return-on-investment (ROI). While many professional digital marketing services take time to generate revenue, business owners can see the money that’s being made from a good email right away! Emails also help to create brand awareness, which translates to more valuable traffic leads down the road.

    Search engine optimization helps to increase your ranking

    Even if you have the most aesthetically-pleasing website, if you aren’t able to increase your search ranking, shoppers will have a hard time finding your online business. So, while there are many e-commerce entrepreneurs that don’t understand SEO, most invest in this content creating, link-building service! Since SEO involves a variety of crucial tactics, such as an initial audit, ongoing research, on-page optimization, and link building, it’s far easier to hire a professional to help you achieve your search result goals! 

    Don’t forget to be socially involved

    Social media marketing has become an integral part of professional digital marketing strategies for businesses. Its importance is huge in helping e-commerce companies expand their following, as many small businesses start gaining traction through positive reviews and customer word-of-mouth. Needless to say, building your brand involves consistency and relevance in the quality of content you publish. That’s why many e-commerce business owners seek professional digital marketing to help utilize tools that are available on social platforms, create a vibrant posting schedule, and cross-share their content. 

    Blogging adds value too 

    While many e-commerce business owners often overlook blogging, we believe that it holds great value in the expansion of your reach to potential customers. Blogging allows you to establish credibility for your business, inputting regular entries that offer insightful information, as well as take a sales-based approach. Keeping in mind that it’s essential that you create a regular posting schedule (once a week is ideal), unless you’re full of industry ideas, many look to professional resources to create ongoing website content.  

    Can you think of other digital marketing techniques that have added major value to your online business? Drop a comment below to share. 

    How often should business owners update their blogs?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    If you’re looking for an answer to the question, “how often should business owners update their blogs?” we’re here to tell you that there’s no right answer. This is a contentious issue for e-commerce businesses everywhere and unfortunately, even as an experienced digital marketing company that handles professional copywriting, we can only provide you with feedback that has worked so far with our current clients. It’s to your companies’ advantage that you post at least once per week, however, the following things need to be considered for your submission to get noticed on the wide web.   

    Consistency is an important part of any blogging strategy

    Consistency is defined as the conformance in the application of something for the sake of logic, accuracy, and fairness. So, in terms of developing professional blogging content for your e-commerce website, it’s important for you to consider the publication of consistent blogs — same day/time each week — to show your readers and followers that you’re committed to your brand. Not only can your schedule content so that it automatically appears on your website, but you can take it one step further by sharing your blogs on social media. This is also something that should be consistent, for example, blogs are published Tuesdays and shared through social on Wednesdays. 

    Also, consistent blog updates allow visitors to see that your business is operating as usual, and in these uncertain times where many companies are struggling, you can continue to show potential customers that they’re good hands when they shop your collection of products and services. That being said, since leaving a long time frame between posting shows that your website is neglected, consider hiring a professional to handle the copywriting tasks for you. This will enable you to better organize your time for other tasks, while also ensuring that you always have fresh content that’s available to the consumer. 

    Short updates don’t serve a purpose on your blog

    Many business owners use blogs to provide customers with brief company updates and will write fewer than 100-word submissions to explain. What they don’t know is that short blog submissions lack the use of keywords, which is devaluing your website, leaving behind a layer of thin content that hinders search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and lowers the organic ranking. That being said, the best place for these types of updates is through your social media platforms, where short, punchy copy is always shared. Another way to ensure that your audience sees updates is by simply adding them to the bottom of long-form content as a way to increase your word count with something that provides value to your business. Keep in mind that while there’s no definitive word count for blogs, readers benefit most from submissions that avoid filler language and are 500 quality words or more.

    Relevance and quality are key 

    Whether you’re attempting to write your own submissions from scratch or have opted to hire a professional to handle all of your copywriting tasks, two of the most crucial factors to consider in your blogging posts are relevance and quality. Publishing content every day that’s irrelevant to your industry and riddled with typos and poorly constructed sentences are not beneficial to your website. In fact, low-quality blog content makes your site appear spammy to search engine algorithms. That’s why it’s worth investing time and money into the efforts that are needed to produce good quality content! 

    Is your business ready to develop a professional copywriting strategy? Get in touch with a member of the Trek Marketing team to get started. 

    What other elements need to be considered as part of a business blogging strategy? Drop a comment below to start a conversation.

    How Black Friday and Cyber Monday will change amid coronavirus pandemic

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    While shopping holidays like Black Friday/Cyber Monday may look a little different this year, it doesn’t mean that you can’t utilize the months leading up to the infamous weekend to properly prepare your business to meet the demands of consumers during the pandemic. After all, this new normal has been great e-commerce business traffic and online conversions!

    What impact has COVID-19 had on businesses? 

    At the start of the shutdown, many small to large-scale businesses were forced to conduct mass layoffs and dig deep into their pockets due to their financial fragility. Since then, the economic impact of COVID-19 has only grown, leading to company closures as the take-up rates and fear of contracting the virus have kept consumers out of their stores and saving for a future rainy day. This major economic shock, even with the help of government aid, has devastated the retail sector, alongside arts and entertainment, personal services, food services, and hospitality. While it has been a few months since, remaining businesses are still feeling the aftermath amid this global crisis, and the uncertainty of when or if their operations will be able to return to the normalcy of pre-coronavirus is still unknown.  

    What are the consumer’s expectations? 

    While the famous saying, “business as usual”, is merely a form of marketing designed to assure customers that operations will be conducted the same as they always have, amid the pandemic, this marketing phrase has undergone some re-thinking to not strike the wrong tone with consumers. 

    Right now, while purchasing products and services for personal use or gifting is still shoppers want, they also want a company that aligns with their current values. This means that prospective customers and returning shoppers expect you to regularly update your business procedures for upkeeping provincial/state regulations and maintain your communication with them by providing comforting words to encourage them that shopping can be continued safely. 

    Are you doing your part but need the help of a professional digital marketing agency to do more? 

    Here are some suggestions on what they can assist you with to meet your consumer’s expectations:

    • Educate the public using brand authority. 
    • Highlight more sales and ways to obtain discounted products. 
    • Bring people together on your social channels to help bridge the gap that has been imposed through physical distancing. 

    More shopping will be done online

    Some big-box retailers like Wal-Mart, Kohls, and Target have already decided that they will remain closed this year during the annual shopping weekend with many more to follow as the greenlight for high-traffic, in-store shopping remains on hold. However, while you can’t bank on brick and mortar shops to shop the deals of Black Friday/Cyber Monday, you can be sure that online retailers will be stepping up their game to make this year’s shopping experience one to remember. 

    If you’re the owner of an e-commerce business, here are some ways that you can reap the rewards of Black Friday and Cyber Monday amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

    • Start building a cohesive search engine optimization strategy (SEO) to improve your search rankings. 
    • Attract buyers by hyping up your sales event using company social channels.
    • Run pay-per-click ads based on messaging that proved high-performance and appealed to your target audience in the past. 
    • Send out a vibrant email to your subscription list to ensure that they know what type of promotion you will have and which item(s) and service(s) will be on sale. 

    For those who need assistance getting off the ground and running or simply prefer the expertise for such an important e-commerce shopping weekend, it’s worth hiring a professional digital marketing agency to handle your online affairs and set the groundwork for some successful conversions. 

    How does your brand plan to keep up with the new normal? Drop a comment below to share with other entrepreneurs.

    What is a search engine optimization audit and how can it help your business?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    If you’re a business owner who’s serious about expanding your outreach, an SEO audit should be something that you carry out frequently. Unlike a traditional audit, this one is performed solely for marketing purposes and will give you a better insight into your website’s individual pages and the overall traffic that’s coming in. It’s also a great opportunity for you to improve your site’s performance, allowing you to rank better in your SERPs and determine how well your business page will appear on Google results. 

    At Trek Marketing, we believe that an SEO audit should be completed at the beginning of a new project, and at the beginning of each new quarter, to better understand how well your website is performing and to highlight any changes that need to be made. Therefore, our SEO professionals will concentrate on your personal stats, analyze any drops or spikes in web traffic, and discover the roots of further efficiency problems. 

    What steps are taken during the audit process? 

    Before getting started, you will speak with an industry specialist to create a viable strategy that will help establish your business goals, then, the following critical components will be evaluated during your SEO audit.

    • Competitor research: Your professional audit will kick things off with a good look at the competition. How are your competitors attracting organic traffic? Which keywords do you need to target? A competitive analysis consists of an estimate of monthly search traffic, page-one keywords, inbound links, domain authority, linking root domains, and the estimated search traffic value. 
    • Crawling and indexing: The term “crawling” refers to how your site is being read by Google, whereas the term “indexing” is adding your web pages to Google’s search results. 
    • Accessibility: Slow page load speeds, 404 errors or long server response times are all accessibility issues that get in the way of visitors gaining entry to your webpage. 
    • Link analysis: Poor linking does not rank well in Google’s search algorithm, so your internal and external links should be analyzed to determine how and where your data is linked. 
    • Keyword analysis: High-value search traffic is brought in through the use of high-ranking keywords. So, why not start reeling in the traffic and turning those visitors into conversions? 
    • Content evaluation: Did you know that your content affects your business? Whether it be funneled in through your blogging or landing pages, you will need to use target keywords to bring the right inbound traffic. 
    • On-page Optimization: This type of optimization process welcomes both organic and search engine website visitors. So, since some page elements, such as header tags and URL lengths help to bring in traffic, you will want to optimize these elements across your website.
    • Architecture and design: This is the part of the SEO audit where your user experience and behaviours are evaluated. Is your website secure? Is it mobile friendly? All the above elements determine if your site is providing an enjoyable shopping experience for users. 
    • Business strategy and online branding: This is the stage where your SEO specialist will analyze the challenges that are holding your business back and create a plan that will help you to look ahead and maximize your SEO. 

    If you’re ready to take action and follow through on our industry recommendations, it’s time that you focused your efforts to improve your business visibility online. Contact Trek Marketing to find out more information about our SEO audit service. 

    Which of the above examples would you want to prioritize as part of your SEO audit service? Drop a comment below to share with our readers. 

    Do outbound links affect SEO?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    The internet is full of diverse websites that are connected and linked via their commonality. However, depending on the type of e-commerce business you run, there’s a chance that relevant outbound links could affect the performance of your search engine optimization strategy. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the definition of outbound links, how they should be used to impact your SEO efforts. 

    What are outbound links?

    Outbound links, also referred to as external links, are clickable, content sections that send visitors to other pages on your website, or in most cases, other applicable websites. For example, if another website links to your e-commerce page in their content, it’s considered an outbound link. At the same time, if you link to another website in your content, it’s also considered an outbound link. 

    Typically, an external link can pass on more value than internal links because search engines believe that what other people say about you is more important than you simply crediting yourself. Essentially, when other online companies link to your website, you will appear as a more credible source. 

    What type of outbound links are there?

    There are two types of outbound links, dofollow and nofollow. Do follow links pass on ranking power from your website to the target page, while nofollow links aren’t able to do this. In other words, nofollow links tell search engines not to follow the links provided. 

    That being said, all links are automatically dofollow links by default, so to create a nofollow link, you would need to add a “nofollow” tag inside your code. 

    Why are outbound links an important part of your search engine optimization strategy? 

    There are several reasons that Trek Marketing suggests that you include outbound links on your website:

    Heightens popularity: Search engines show searchers the most relevant results, and external links determine the popularity of a given page by boosting the page’s rank. 

    Increases relevance: Outbound links are extremely helpful when it comes to giving users the information they’re looking for. The anchor text that’s used in the link is a good way to target your page and provide helpful hints about the relevancy of your page. Linking to relevant content is always beneficial when relying on search engines for traffic. 

    Improves reputation: Outbound links improve the reputation of your business because it allows you to develop an avenue towards resourceful content. Linking to spammy sites will reflect negatively on you as a business owner, so remember to link to studies and informative content as it holds the most authority. 

    Boosts value: It doesn’t matter if you dedicate all your time to developing informative content, chances are that you will never have enough relevant writing. This is why linking can increase the value of your website and make your visitors experience more rewarding. While you’re asserting yourself as an industry expert, you’re also accounting for the information that you’re not as knowledgeable about. 

    Encouraging backlinks: Linking out to other credible sources on the web means that these other websites may even be willing to link back to your site. As the web’s natural linking environment, not only are you increasing your engagement, but you’re also giving other business owners to interact and link to products associated with yours. 

    Are there any other ways that outbound links can affect your search engine optimization strategy? Drop your thoughts below to share with our readers.