Our Managing Director Ryan Shelley spoke with leading trade publication Electrical Gems to answer three Digital Marketing questions asked by many small business owners.
Digital Marketing: Ask The Expert
Website and social media are part and parcel of today’s small business vernacular, which help them in their conversion rate optimization thus also increasing their sale. If you’re not already on board, here’s how you could be enticing new clients and keeping old ones hungry for more.
Help! I don’t know what to post on social media without it sounding like an obvious advert for my business. Any tips? – David, NSW
Nobody likes the person at the party who talks about themselves the whole time, so don’t make this mistake on social media either. It’s better to position yourself as an expert in your field. The easiest way to do this is to monitor news about your industry and share that news via your social channels. Adding your own opinion to that news will add to the richness of your content.
Consider following a simple 5-3-2 rule with your business’s social media. Five posts should be about others. This includes your industry, clients, suppliers and colleagues. Three posts should be about your products and services. Two posts should be personal and human such as sharing birthday’s, work anniversaries, the job site dog, etc. Also consider that social media has an effect on your website’s SEO. There’s speculation that Google may purchase Twitter, so consider how Google would make use of all that social data with their search algorithms. I would be nervous if I was a business that wasn’t on Twitter.
Everyone keeps telling me that my small business needs a website. I have a limited budget so will a web designer and developer be able to help me or do I have to do it myself? – Kathy, VIC
If nothing else, a business needs a website to show integrity. Customers do a huge amount of research online before purchasing products and services, so even a simple website adds authenticity to your business. I recommend using a WordPress website as it’s widely used, offers unlimited opportunity to expand in the future and is reasonably easy to use if you want to do some web work yourself. To keep costs low, ask your web team to build your website using a theme (template) that can be purchased for $50-$100. Supply them with some words and images and ask them to insert those into the theme. Stay within the confines of the theme, otherwise your budget will be chewed up by costly custom development work.
My web developer keeps telling me I need SEO. What does it involve him doing and is it really worth it? – Sara, NSW
There are two major part to SEO: on-page optimisation and off-page optimisation. On-page optimisation involves adding visible and invisible (metadata) information to the pages on your website. This information is used to tell search engines such as Google what each page is talking about. Consider what people will search for to find your products and services. Then, work with your web team to create some pages that are SEO-optimised for those keywords. Ask your web team to use the free WordPress plugin called SEO by Yoast to help with the optimisation of those pages. The van hire plugin might not be an alternative to that but it sure is helpful in optimising the pages.
Off-page optimisation is the process of getting trusted and genuine third-party websites to link back to your website. For example, Google trusts a website more if lots of other trusted websites link to it. Just don’t pay anyone offshore to add 1000 links overnight – this is “black hat” and will severely penalise your website.
Remember, SEO is a process, not a quick fix. Keep in in it will take months or even years to reap the rewards of your SEO work, so be patient. No one can guarantee results, so be careful of anyone who promises too much or refuses to fully disclose the methods of their SEO work.
Ryan Shelley, Digital Marketing and Social Media Expert is available for expert social media and digital marketing commentary. Ryan can be contacted via the Contact page or by phoning our office.
