Web Design And Investment For Small Business

Why can't we look at search marketing from the perspective of encouragement? So many industry blog posts focus on the negative (e.g., "10 things You're Doing Wrong With Your Link Building" or "The 5 Worst SEO Mistakes You Can Make."

We need to take a step back and pat ourselves on the back for all of the great things we do every day. Let's approach being better from the positive side of the spectrum and reward ourselves for making the rightchoice when it comes to your marketing strategy

1. We're Using Analytics to Make Informed Decisions

Good work! Using analytics is probably one of the easiest ways to ensure we're making decisions based on fact instead of making them based on gut, or speculation.

We left our homepage alone because we knewit was our top converting page and has the lowest bounce rate of any page on your site. Instead, we concentrated on refining a product or service landing page that has a higher than average bounce rate and doesn’t lead to very many conversions.

Need some help in this area? Try these to get started:


A Guide to Getting Started With Analytics
How to Configure & Track Google Analytics Goals for SEO
Reduce Bounce Rate: 20 Things to Consider
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2. We Chose the Right Kind of Social Media

Social media isn’t just about having a profile, it's about engaging with your audience and providing the answer to questions they may have regarding your products or services. We believe every brand should claim their name in the top social media outlets – Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.

We don’t believe that all of these outlets are going to be cash cows for every brand. We find the outlets where our demographics live, and work to position our brand as the expert that audience turns to when they need answers.

Need some help in this area? Try these to get started:

Creating a Social Engagement Plan in 4 Steps
Small Business Social Media: 3 Tips to Get Started
Make the Most of Your Social Media Interactions: 9 Tips

3. We Have a Great Team That’s Creating Compelling, Top-Shelf Content

Creating content that your customers want to read is one of the most important things you can do to grow your website. Everyone on the team has a mission statement with regards to content.

We're determined to write the compelling answers to questions the customers ask every day. We're directly plugged into the customer service team and create content based on the needs of the customer.

The team that does this wrong writes boring content with keywords stuffed throughout with no expectation that anyone but a search engine is going to read it all. This isn’t our team; it's someone else's, because we do this right – right?

Need some help in this area? Try these to get started:

Visual Storytelling: The Key Weapon to Content Marketing
46 Ways to Kill It With Content
88 Content Creation Ideas for Better Business Blog Posts, Images, or Videos

4. The Competition is Chasing Us Because We're Aware of Them

Keeping track of the tactics and positioning of our competitors helps us make informed and logical decisions about where to increase, change, or redirect our marketing efforts.

They chase us around the organic rankings because we're definitely not worried about what they're doing, we're aware of what they're doing.

Need some help in this area? Try these to get started:

Competitive Analysis: How to Become an SEO Hero in 4 Steps
Getting Ahead Of The Competition - An 8 Step Approach Using Share Of Voice
3 Pillars of SEO Competitive Analysis
Competitive SEO Analysis: Data, Creativity & Understanding the Competitive Landscape

5. We Implement Structured Data According to Schema.org Protocols

We've already set up authorship and publisher validation, good job! We have a plan to mark up products, offers, service areas, addresses, areas, videos and whatever else we can think of, because we're determined that the user and the search engines are going to understand and appreciate every word we've written for the website.

We've investigated the Schema markup on the competitions' websites and looked for opportunities to create a rich snippet in the search results where they might not be capitalizing – increasing our share of a finite amount of sales.

Need some help in this area? Try these to get started:

Structured Data First Steps: Adding Schema Location Markup to Your Website
How to Add Reviews to Your Site Using Schema Structured Data Markup
How to Implement Video Microdata for Google & Schema.org

6. We Regularly Use Google and Bing Webmaster Tools

Are you ensuring there are no technical issues with how the search engines find and understand our website? Good job!

A technical issue can absolutely drown our site in the search engine results – but we don't have to worry about that because we review webmaster tools' accounts regularly to keep track of how our site is indexed, what urls are in our XML sitemap, and we always make sure we're not losing traffic to 404 pages or from broken links. We use Webmaster Tools to show Google our new content on a regular basis and we review linking opportunities and strategies in Bing webmaster tools when necessary.

Need some help in this area? Try these to get started:

Google Webmaster Tools: An Overview
Bing Webmaster Tools: An Overview