Tag Archive for: online marketing

Your website is your opportunity to communicate directly with customers, clients, suppliers and partners. The visual appearance of the site and the content that it contains are the most direct way that you can speak to anyone interested in working with your company. It is also the foundation for your marketing and your brand presence online.

If your website doesn’t show off your business in a positive light, it is not only going to make it challenging for you to gain new customers, it can also leave your team feeling underappreciated.

Focusing on a more personal element to your website is the right way to move forward, and moving away from that more impersonal ‘corporate’ style site can do wonders for your business. But how exactly do you implement this practically? Here we take a look at some of the best strategies that your company can use to humanize your website.

Avoid stock photos at all costs

One of the major issues causing company websites to look cold and corporate is the overuse of stock images. Stock photos might look more professional than those you can take on your camera phone and they can lend credence to a small business that is just starting out. But, having these images lingering on sites can leave it feeling corporate, less personal and unrealistic.

It’s a much better idea to take your own images. This is clearly a good option for companies producing products, but it can also be effective for service-based businesses too.

There are still many businesses that are put off providing their own product or incidental photography because of the perceived high cost of camera equipment. Yet this isn’t the right way to think about it. Of course there are some initial outlays to investing in high quality in-house images, but they have so many advantages compared to stock photos it is really worth doing.

It should be pointed out that equipment costs don’t have to be as expensive as they used to be. It is now possible to spread out payments from more costly equipment by using services which utilize so-called ‘buy now, pay later’ companies, such as Klarna and Affirm. For businesses keen to follow the sustainability route, another option is trading in used equipment to get money off a new purchase – many camera specialists offer this.

Speak like a human

It is still extremely common for small businesses to have websites that use a very corporate writing style. Being formal and professional can be appropriate in some settings, but it is no longer the case that all companies need to present themselves in this manner, especially if it does not necessarily suit the target market and industry.

Of course, it won’t suit every business to be extremely conversational and loaded up with jargon and many professional writers prefer to think in terms of ‘business casual’ as the standard preferred style. However, again this will depend on the specifics of the business and what works with your audience.

Focus on community

One of the most fundamental ways to humanize your website is to install a sense of community with your customers. The benefits of building a community amongst your customers are well established.

“As a part of your community, members feel more emotionally connected to your brand,” says Rachel Burns, writing for Podia “and when people feel connected, they’re more likely to recommend your brand and products to others.”

Companies are still regularly using social media platforms for their community building, but actually it can be beneficial to do a lot of that work yourself to optimize the business success of a site. This can be done by making use of user-generated content.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the essential marketing tactics for any business, large or small, local or online, and across just about every sector. In an industry that’s constantly changing, where even the most established players are continually looking to stay ahead of the curve, SEO is an absolute must to ensure your business shows up when someone searches for it.

SEO isn’t just about getting your website ranked high on search engines; it’s about creating a strategic, ongoing plan that’s tailor-made to meet the needs of your business. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at everything you need to know about SEO so that you can optimize your site and get the most out of your digital marketing efforts moving forward.

Measurable goals

When thinking about SEO, the first thing you should do is figure out your goals. What are you trying to accomplish with your site? Do you want people to find your site easily? Do you want them to stay on the site for a specific time? Are you trying to increase conversions or make more sales through your online store?

Once you have established what you’re trying to achieve, it’s time to start planning how best to reach those goals.

Video content

Video content is a crucial way to reach your audience. As it turns out, video is the most popular form of content on social media, with 82 percent of people viewing videos daily. But it isn’t just about how many people are viewing videos; it’s about how much attention people pay to these videos.

When you create a video for SEO purposes, you want to ensure it’s grabbing viewers’ attention from the start and maintaining it throughout the video. Use a thumbnail that grabs people’s attention—like one showcasing your product or service—to draw attention to your video. This means that while they might not be watching your video all the way through, they will at least be clicking on it when they see the thumbnail in their news feed.

For social media, aim for short snappy viral content that is sharable. Work with experts for high-quality animated video production to share your brand with the world and use within marketing campaigns to support your SEO efforts.

Site speed

Search engines, like Google, don’t just look at what you publish. They also consider how fast your site loads when someone visits it. These days page loading speed can affect a website’s rank on Google.

When you have a slow website, it is more likely that people will get discouraged and click off before they even see what you have to offer. This can cause your conversion rates to drop significantly.

Many site owners are unaware of how much time their website takes to load; it’s essential to monitor your site speed with a tool like Google Page Insights and GTMetrix. If you don’t know how long your site takes to load, there’s no way to optimize the issue and rank your site higher on search engines.

Website loading speed is not easy to improve in-house (even though it’s something you should be targeting). For this reason, many businesses outsource their SEO efforts to specialists who are more familiar with the tools necessary to ensure your site runs as smoothly as possible.

Mobile responsiveness

Websites need to be built with mobile responsiveness in mind. As more and more people use their phones for internet browsing, over 90% of the world’s population access the internet via mobile phone devices, your site needs to be fast and look good when scaled down to fit on a smartphone screen. This is especially true for ecommerce sites as “m-commerce” (shopping via a smartphone) continues to grow in popularity.

Keyword research

There are many great tools out there for keyword research. Some of the best include Google AdWords, SEMrush, and Keyword Tool. These tools will help you determine the more popular keywords in your industry to use throughout your SEO campaign. It’s also a good idea to keep an eye on what other websites are ranking for keywords you want to rank for to see what kind of content they’re creating.

Long-tail keywords are becoming more common as SEO changes, meaning no longer should you aim for one or two words, but phrases and standard search terms, for example; instead of using”optimize SEO,” you should use a longer phrase “top ways to optimize SEO” “how best to optimize SEO for restaurants.”

Once you know the keywords you want to be using, you should make sure these are constantly reinforced throughout your website and the additional content you publish on other sites. Use your keywords in product descriptions, titles, meta descriptions, images, and more without stuffing them, which can have the opposite effect.