Digital Marketing
Tips

By this, I mean make sure your website and landing pages are visually appealing, load quickly, and look good on mobile devices. If you are going to design the site yourself, you can either use easy website building tools such as WIX and SquareSpace.

If you want more control and features, use WordPress.org. There are popular and easy-to-use website builders like DIVI from Elegant Themes, Elementor, and many others. You can also find many good child themes that are already professionally designed and easy to customize. Another digital marketing tip is to use an easy landing page design service such as Unbounce.

Google loves sites that load quickly. Slow load time can hurt your results both from an SEO perspective and in your PPC campaigns. You can test how fast your site loads by using tools such as Google’s page speed insights, Pingdom website speed test, and GT Metrix. If you are using a WordPress site, you can size images correctly for their container, compress images using a service like Smush Pro or EWWW image optimizer. You can also use a good caching program like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache.

If you are using WordPress, good hosting is really important. Here’s a list of the hosting companies WordPress currently recommends.

By this, I mean make sure that your site has an SSL certificate installed. You can get this from your hosting company and they should be able to install it for you.

A a CDN (content delivery network) like Cloudflare can help improve a website’s load time and improve security.

Images are important as is the layout of your site, both on a desktop and mobile view. It’s really important that every page on your site looks good on a cell phone. If you are not good at web design, then either a) hire a professional web designer b) use an easy web design builder program, like WIX, SquareSpace, etc.

Some hosting companies have their own website builder programs that are what you see is what you get conceptually. Easy to use, easy to learn. Nice looking, pre-designed templates that you can easily customize (change pictures, working/text, and more. c) Learn WordPress and design your own site. This gives you the most control and flexibility. As I mentioned earlier in this list of digital marketing tips, WordPress themes like Divi (my favorite) Elementor, Beaver Builder and others make it easy to build a nice WordPress website (WordPress is simply an open-source concept.)

The nice thing about this is builders like Divi and Elementor have lots of options that have been made by third-party designers, to help make your site look great. You can see examples at Elegant Themes marketplace (Divi).

The old days of a brochure-style website are done. No longer do users want to just read the typical blah, blah, blah about a company. Aside from information about your company, you also want to provide some informative, helpful content (verbiage) that would be of interest to your readers.

You may want to have a mix of product pages and sales pages. So some of your pages would be sales pages, focusing on increasing conversions and sales. Those pages would focus on why a user should contact you and do business with your company. Why your service is better, your confidence factors (why do business with your company) client testimonials, special offers/incentives, etc. And of course, easy ways to contact your company (easy to find phone numbers, email address, and contact forms, etc)

The product pages would be more informative in focus and fewer sales focused. You can also use these pages more for an SEO focus, as you have more freedom to write more in-depth, informative quality content as opposed to a sales page. You can use SEO-friendly tools like Yoast which will help you when writing content for your pages.

Sometimes users get lost when going to a website and even when going to a landing page, especially if they haven’t been designed for pay-per-click advertising, like Google Ads. By designing and testing landing pages that are conversion-focused, you can improve your results and hopefully increase conversions. Here’s a good article on landing page best practices.

This is especially critical if you are a local business (your business is located in or near an area and your market your services in these areas.) Even if you are not focused locally, it’s important to sign up (it’s free).

Make sure you fill out all of your information completely and accurately. Include your companies logo, hours, address, and anything else you can, including photos of your business, employees, and anything else that would be helpful. Google offers a free tutorial on how to set up your Google My Business listing.

Google loves good fresh content on a website. It tells them that your site is not static and that the site is being updated regularly. A blog is a good way to do this, as you can write about current events or share information and ideas. Google also loves sites that are authoritative and informative. The current buzzword is E-A-T, which stands for Expertise, Authoritative, and Trustworthiness. If you want your website to rank high in the natural/paid results and lots of free traffic, focus on this concept. It’s an ongoing effort, not a set-and-forget concept.

PPC advertising (pay per click) is an easy and fast way to get your ads on the first page of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. PPC advertising is fast, flexible, and measurable. It can be turned on or off (so you are not locked into anything) you can change your budget, change your focus, measure results including user impressions, clicks, phone calls, conversions, and more. It’s probably the best way to market your business, services, and products on the internet. Especially since so many people use Google and so many people have smartphones (iPhones, Android phones, etc).

While it may at first appear simple, Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) can be complex and intricate. And Google is good at spending your money, so be careful. You can also waste your time and money if you don’t know what you’re doing. At the least, review the guide to Google Ads or hire an experienced PPC management service.

Advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, etc is just that…advertising. There’s no guarantee is advertising, and internet marketing is competitive and can be expensive.

That’s why Google and Facebook have so much money, and their owners have huge homes on private islands, etc. Google makes @ 90% of their money on those little search ads you see when you do a search on Google. And it’s very competitive now because so many businesses realize they need to be marketing their business on the internet, where most people are searching.

My point is don’t jump into the advertising game too quickly, and don’t spend more than you can afford to lose. It may take some time to figure things out.

Focus your internet marketing efforts on the things your business does best, and keywords and phrases that have search volume. You can use research tools like Google Trends and the Google Ads keyword planner to do more research on this.

Get your business name, products, and services out there. Let people know about your business and why they should do business with you. Social media is a great way to do this. You can get the word both with paid ads and also by your own posts and networking. Sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok have huge numbers of users that spend lots of time on their sites. Some businesses owe a large part of their success to their social media marketing efforts.

By this, I mean don’t sign any long-term contracts or umbrella services where they handle everything. In most cases, there’s no reason to have a longer-term contract. If their service is so good, it should be on a month-to-month basis, especially in the world of internet marketing. That’s why Google Ads is so good because it’s totally flexible and measurable. Also, stay away from agencies that handle everything and you pay them for services. Why should you let someone markup your paid advertising costs? You should own your paid search accounts (Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising accounts). That way you pay for the advertising (no markups) and you own the account and all of the account history.

One of our biggest digital marketing tips is to measure your results and make adjustments based on the data. With pay-per-click advertising (Google Ads) you can measure almost anything including impressions, clicks, click-thru rate, the average cost per click, phone calls, conversions, and more. With Google Analytics you can track your website traffic and get a better understanding of what users are doing on your site and more.

It’s not like the old days of print advertising, where you finalized an ad and it was done. Digital marketing and internet advertising is a fluid process and things are always changing. You either need to learn some of this or hire someone that can help you with your internet marketing efforts. It’s way too important to avoid.