Digital marketing trends are constantly changing, and 2021 is no different. New marketing channels appear every day, forcing marketers to think about which one to use and which not. There are many online marketing tools these days that make it difficult to understand which one is right for your business needs. The right choice can help you grow your business, the wrong one can be a problem. Researching and experimenting with so many tools can be a lengthy and time-consuming process. That’s why I put together some of the best digital marketing tools that can make your life a lot easier. Here is a list of 10 digital marketing tools you should consider in 2021.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics has become a must-have tool for digital marketers working in 2021. This is the most popular tool every digital marketer should be aware of. At first glance, the tool may seem a little complicated, but after understanding its full capabilities, it can help you get a lot of ideas about your site. Online platforms provide many reports containing information about visitors to your site – where they come from and how they interact with your site. In addition, it helps you find out which marketing technique on your site is more effective in terms of potential customers, conversions, downloads, and sales, among other things. If you want to learn more about the program, join the Google Analytics Academy, which is a free course that will help you learn all its pros and cons.

2. SEMRush

SEMRush is a one-stop SEO tool that offers a complete SEO workflow. It provides a detailed list of keywords and also displays information about the volume of search, trends, level of competition, and much more. SEMRush generates a list of keywords for a predefined phase that you should consider when optimizing content – in social networks, articles, and on the website, as well as for pay-per-click advertising (PPC). Besides generating keywords, this is also useful if you want to: Reveal new competitors. Analyze competitor’s keywords and ads. Analyze backlinks.

3. Canva

In the past few years, visual marketing has become a very important strategy to attract visitors to your site. According to various statistics, consumers retain 80% of what they see and 20% of what they read. Therefore, for a business marketing strategy to be effective, it is crucial to integrate visual marketing. This is where Canva comes out very convenient. Canva is a great tool for creating professional-looking images. It helps you easily create high-quality images using customizable photo filters, manipulating text, stock photos, for your site, as well as for your profile on social networks. This is an ideal tool for people who do not want to use sophisticated design programs such as Photoshop or InDesign.

4. MobileMonkey

Facebook plays an important role in helping small and medium-sized companies get the message across to their target audience. Not only this but it also allows companies to help their customers contact them and provide feedback on various products and services. MobileMonkey is great for reinforcing the whole process. MobileMonkey is an intuitive Facebook Messenger Chabot tool that lets customers instantly receive answers to common queries. This tool is useful for marketing and customer service, as it helps companies find new customers, increase sales, and promote their content. The best thing about this Chatbot tool is that you don’t need any programming experience to set it up. And in case you have any problems, their free webinars will help you.

5. HubSpot

HubSpot is probably the best sales and service software that can help your growing business in minutes. It is an excellent marketing platform that provides many benefits for novice marketers. As a digital marker, you can use HubSpot for email marketing, social networks, blogging, and creating landing pages. With HubSpot CRM, you can organize, track, and build better customer relationships. You can also view important key performance indicators (KPIs). The marketing center, social center, and service center are excellent platforms that will help you increase your traffic, better understand prospects, and contact customers – all this helps to grow your business.

6. Buffer

Buffer has been on the list of digital marketers for many years, as it is one of the best social media management applications for business. This tool is an exception when it comes to the early planning of publications, analysis of work results, and management of various social network accounts from one place. Already more than 80,000 companies use Buffer to effectively operate their social networks. In addition, you can add several team members to buffer your account by giving them appropriate access levels. And now with the update, you can schedule your posts directly on Instagram.

7. Social Animal

If you are trying to amplify your content and social media marketing campaigns, Social Animal is your go-to tool. With Social Animal, you can analyze top-performing articles in your niche and get elaborately precise insights and analytical data. Curation is made easy when you have millions of articles to share. You can also monitor your competitors to look at their best content and Facebook strategies. The tool’s “Facebook search” feature lets you analyze millions of Facebook pages and posts for your Facebook marketing strategy. Also, you can expand your content reach by finding the best possible influencers for your brand.

8. Social Bee

Social Bee is an amazing universal social media tool for your business. This helps your business gain more customers with less effort. It provides various tools and services for publishing content, growing subscribers, participation, and more. With this tool, you can automate social media postings to focus on things that take longer. Social Bee offers the best services that will make your life easier when you are trying to implement an effective strategy on social networks. He provides great services such as a social media specialist, content curation, Twitter growth, Instagram growth, LinkedIn growth, and more.

9. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a smart digital marketing tool that lets you analyze what type of content is best for any topic. Since it helps you research and finds the most common content related to the keyword of your choice. This allows digital marketers to gain a deeper understanding of their footprints on social media and helps them develop smarter content strategies. In addition, it helps to provide maximum assistance to content marketing and SEO campaigns to work well in a niche or with an audience.

10. Dynamic Yield

A dynamic Yield is a personalization tool that helps you manage customer data from your CRM, API, ESP, and DMP. This is the only platform that will help you personalize all aspects of your customers’ travels. The AI-based customization channel has some great features, including data management, personalization and training, recommendations, behavioral messages, and more. The tool is trusted by digital marketers around the world and, of course, one of them that is worth considering this year.

Also Read: 4 ways to make money online in 2021

At the beginning of 2021, it seems that business competition is now tougher than ever before. Because of globalization, companies have to compete with competitors not only in the neighborhood but literally around the world.

In this regard, now more than ever it is important to develop an effective marketing strategy for the business. You need to try hard to stand out from the competition. Therefore, in 2021, it’s time to find a truly creative approach to marketing! Refuse using obsolete strategies that everyone else uses, this will help you attract more potential buyers and build a strong customer base. Your company will begin to grow at an unprecedented pace!

This article presents six creative business promotion strategies in 2021 that will help bring it to the next level.

1. BECOME A PARTNER OR SPONSOR OF OTHER COMPANIES

Sponsoring other companies or services has been practiced in the business world for many years. Many forms of advertising are now ineffective (at least, less effective than before). A good way to attract attention to your brand is to constantly catch the eye of potential customers.

However, it is very important to be creative in choosing partners. Try to find a prominent company whose ideas do not go against your business and at the same time are slightly different from yours.

Some sponsorship opportunities for brands and products are available year-round, and some only during certain events. Note that these opportunities are not only open to large corporations. Small companies also become sponsors, albeit on a smaller scale. While Coca Cola sponsors the Olympics, SMEs can sponsor a local event.

2. PARTICIPATE IN EXHIBITIONS

Exhibiting is a great way to announce your business. Now, this traditional way of promotion is often overlooked due to digital marketing. However, exhibitions remain an important part of the business world and continue to attract thousands of people. By visiting them, you can find a new audience and increase the popularity of your brand.

Exhibitions give you the opportunity to interact more closely with potential customers. You allow them to test products and ask questions, as a result of which they are more likely to purchase your product or service.

To attract the attention of visitors, you should have an interesting and noticeable stand. Find specialists who will create a unique stand for your company with which you can get the maximum benefit from the exhibitions.

3. HOLD CONTESTS ON SOCIAL NETWORKS

Almost all companies understand how important social networks are for marketing in the modern world. It is impossible to ignore the fact that about 70% of US residents regularly use social networks.

More than 90% of US companies have social media accounts, but many of them use outdated strategies and publish boring posts. A great way to chat with your subscribers and at the same time to attract attention is contested on social networks. There are a huge number of ways to conduct them. Organize photo contests, hashtag contests, contests for the best comments, ask to invite friends, and so on. If possible, hold contests on multiple social networks at once to increase your reach.

4. CREATE SHAREABLE CONTENT

Another way to be heard on social networks and stand out from competitors is to create content that users will want to share. It can be an inspirational, funny, or useful video, interesting infographics, or something completely different. All that matters is that your audience seeks to share this with their friends and relatives.

As content spreads across social networks, your company will catch the eye of hundreds or even thousands of users. You will significantly increase your reach compared to your regular audience. Do not forget to make sure that the content advertises your brand (for example, place the logo and the website of the company on the infographic) so that people can recognize you!

5. WORK WITH THE MEDIA

PR did not die at all in the era of digital marketing. On the contrary, he is more alive than all the living! Now you have twice as many chances to get into the media: either using traditional PR for print media or digital for online resources. A strong PR strategy is extremely effective in terms of promoting your brand, building audience trust, and, ultimately, increasing sales. For this way of advertising a business, it is very important to have a network of contacts. Form it to offer publications something interesting or valuable for publications!

6. SHARE YOUR KNOWLEDGE

In 2021, it is important to offer potential customers something of value to attract their attention. What could be more valuable than your expertise in a particular field? There are many ways to share them: free blogs, guides, e-books, videos, podcasts, and even live presentations. By doing this, you develop relationships with your potential customers, while demonstrating your experience. After that, they will happily hire you or buy your product.

Can you generate leads, establish trusting relationships with potential customers, and increase conversions without marketing automation? Of course, yes. So is marketing automation necessary? The final decision is always with the business owner. However, there are 8 signs that you should automate your marketing campaign tasks.

1. YOUR SITE IS NOT GENERATING LEADS

You just added a feedback form and are waiting for the leads to appear? People only interact with a business when they are almost ready to trust it. More often than not, a contact form becomes a target for spammers sending messages like “you have a good site, but you could have done better with Google products.”

Collect visitor information during the research phase by offering premium content in exchange for some contact information. This will be helped by a special program that automatically generates landing pages and calls to action.

2. LEADS DON’T TURN INTO CUSTOMERS

Are you already using the program to create landing pages and generate calls to action, but tracking new customers is difficult? Marketing Automation can help you create customized emails with lead-engaging content as follows:

• A new lead is generated after a visitor fills out a form to receive a content proposal.
• The new lead receives a thank you email with a link to download the content proposal.
• The lead receives a series of prepared emails (every 3-5 days) providing useful information related to the original content proposal.
• Lead is sent a letter with an offer to try a free trial version of the product, a demo version, or get a free consultation.
• You receive an email notifying you that the lead has been completed. The letter may contain data about the activity of the lead and his level of interest. Based on the information received, you make the final decision: to proceed with further actions or to add to the list for periodic monitoring in the future.

Thanks to the automation of marketing tasks, you perform all these actions within one software product.

3. YOU DON’T KNOW HOW YOUR LANDING PAGE WORKS OR YOU HAVE NO IDEA ABOUT THE CURRENT CONVERSION RATE

The number of content offers and landing pages created is unlimited. According to HubSpot, companies with 30 or more landing pages generate 7 times more customers than competitors with 10 or fewer landing pages. Are they delivering high conversions? This information is extremely important, as small changes in settings can lead to a sharp increase in conversion rates. For example, by slightly changing the items on the list, you can achieve an increase of 8% in just a day. This is easy to track with a marketing automation software that contains a detailed dashboard.

The same principle applies to your calls to action (CTA). After testing several CTAs, you will choose the call to action that performs the best.

4. YOU HAVE NOT ORGANIZED THE WORK WITH LEADS

You have built a large base of potential customers, but you don’t know about their interests. What content to send via email or Twitter? Smart listing and marketing automation software offers a huge set of criteria for grouping leads. Anytime you want to submit a new content proposal, a new blog post, and an upcoming webinar announcement, you can quickly build a list of interested leads.

With the social tracking tool, you can quickly build a customer group based on contact details and other information. For example, do you want to view tweets mentioning Pinterest by those who downloaded your eBook from this site? Marketing automation software will solve this problem.

5. YOU DO NOT HAVE THE ABILITY TO EFFECTIVELY MANAGE INCOMING LEADS

Throughout the day, you receive notifications about new leads. But you don’t have the time to do a detailed study of every potential customer. Instead, a numerical parameter is introduced that characterizes the actions of each lead. For example, a simple visit to a site is estimated at 2 points, loading your e-book – 10 points, opening an email – 3, following a link – 5. The property that determines the position of a potential client can take the value of 15 if you are dealing with a business owner or the CEO of the company. If a visitor collects a predetermined number of points, he will be placed on a smart list of so-called “hot leads”. The behavior of these particular leads requires more careful analysis.

Would you like to be notified on the fly about the actions of “hot leads” and other potential customers? Once set up, you will be notified of new visitors who belong to your targeted lead category.

6. YOU DON’T KNOW WHERE YOUR LEADS ARE COMING FROM

Is it worth investing a lot of money in AdWords, spending time on Facebook, VK, or blogging? Which of these options is the most effective for attracting visitors, contacts, and leads? Using a marketing automation system, you can differentiate between these traffic sources to find out which ones work to generate leads and which don’t.

7. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT ON YOUR BLOG

Choosing a good topic for a new article on your blog is a challenge that many face. By using the Keyword Suggestion Tool, you will open up new prospects for increasing your SERPs and find out which keywords you are already ranking well for. Probably just 1-2 blog posts will help you maintain your position.

Also Read: 7 Deadly Signs Of Digital Marketing

Your competitors have blogs that provide great ideas for new articles. You can track their activities using a special tool and compare the results. Watch who they link to, what makes them effective, and more to improve your own marketing strategy.

8. YOU USE TOO MANY MARKETING APPS

Nobody has unlimited time to set up a huge number of applications. Marketing automation software integrates their functions and offers other capabilities – everything you need to implement a successful inbound marketing strategy is in one place. Once logged in, you can quickly get a report or exchange important data with other team members.

What do you think of all this? Should you buy a marketing automation system? If you are already using such software, why did you decide to take this crucial step? We are waiting for your answers in the comments.

What’s the secret to a successful small business online? It’s simple (no): Build a solid foundation for your business and don’t neglect search engine optimization. SEO plays an important role in business development and helps to expand the audience of potential customers. A bad business website is comparable to a TV channel whose programs are broadcast exclusively at night. Not many people will see his ad, even if it looks quite creative. Likewise, you might have a terrific business idea, but your customers won’t find you if the search engines don’t show your site in search results.

With the right SEO strategy, you will achieve significant increases in website traffic, your brand awareness, and ultimately your bottom line. You are probably reading this article because you don’t know how to increase the number of leads and get them through the sales funnel. Below you will find 7 effective SEO strategies for small businesses 2021 that apply to any industry.

The higher the position of your site in the search results, the faster your business will develop. You cannot achieve everything overnight. But, putting into practice the 7 tips below, you can achieve significant results.

1. SIGN UP WITH GOOGLE MY BUSINESS

Have you already created your account in Google My Business and Yandex.Directory? If not, then what are you waiting for? Create an account now – it’s completely free!

According to a 2015 study by Think With Google, nearly a third of queries made from mobile devices are queries based on the user’s current location (for example, “coffee shop near me”). But this data refers to 2015. User behavior changes dynamically from time to time. The number of similar searches without the words “near me” has increased by 150% over the past two years. Google and Yandex prioritizes displayed search results based on user intent. For example, results based on the user’s current position are considered the most relevant. For this reason, having an account in Google My Business and Yandex.Directory is an integral part of a successful local SEO.

First of all, create a free profile and enter the data: your company’s phone number, address, opening and closing times (business hours), other information that may be useful to users. This data will appear in Google Map search results.

Also Read : How Does Seo Help Improve Your Brand Awarness?

One of the key benefits of Google My Business is the ability to share experiences (leave reviews) using a dedicated tool. Each new review will be notified by a letter to your e-mail. You can respond to any feedback, start a dialogue with the user. This is a great way to turn a “reviewer” into a regular customer.

The second important feature of Google My Business and Yandex.Directory is the presence of a section with questions and answers. According to research, most people do not want to call company representatives, preferring to conduct a dialogue using the messaging tools on the site.

After creating an account in the Yandex and Google help systems, add your business data to other local directories: Yelp, TripAdvisor, and others. Thus, you will further expand your audience of potential customers.

2. OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE

Search engine optimization of website pages (SEO) is much more than adding keywords, headline and main content. Your job is to create quality content that includes keywords, LSI words, and other related keywords. The increased concentration of key phrases is more likely to harm your site’s rankings than increase it. Optimize your target keyword phrase in the following sections:

• Title.
• Description.
• Main content.
• Images.

When optimizing your page for location-based searches, add specific terms and names that potential customers can use to find your business. For example, if a user is looking for a Digital Marketing course in Varanasi or the surrounding area, they are more likely to use the search phrase “Varanasi Digital Marketing course” than just “Digital Marketing Course.”

3. OPTIMIZE YOUR SITE’S PERFORMANCE AND MAKE IT MOBILE-COMPATIBLE

Use an original design, attractive fonts and a nice color scheme to make your site look amazing. But, if it loads slowly, you will lose some traffic and rating. Before starting your link building and content development campaigns, do everything you can to ensure that your site is performing at peak performance.

If the site has a good structure and its pages load quickly, search engine robots can quickly crawl and index its pages. Eliminate any technical issues you encounter, such as:

• Duplicate content.
• Duplicate title and description meta tags.
• Incorrect sitemap.
• Broken links.
• Unoptimized images.
• Incorrectly used canonical tags.
• Images are not in the correct format and resolution.

Check your site carefully for additional tools such as SEMRush and others.

4. USE MICRO-MARKUP TO STRUCTURE DATA

Local markup helps search engines to identify individual components of pages, for example:

• Company name.
• The local address of the company.
• Contact phone number.
• Rating of the quality of goods and services provided.
• Working hours and so on.

JSON-LD is the preferred micro-markup format for local SEO. All data is displayed as a substring in the search results. A handy tool that generates micro-markup code is located on the Schema.org website

5. PLACE INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR BUSINESS IN SPECIAL DIRECTORIES AND LOCAL PROFILES

The success of a local business is largely due to the accuracy of the contact information you provide, such as company name, address, phone number. It is imperative to ensure the accuracy and consistency of contact information in all quotes, as they represent online mentions of your business, making it easier to find it. Correct quotes contribute not only to an increase in the rating of your company directories, but also to an increase in the rating of your site as a whole. The best way to create quality quotes is to use a dedicated tool to spread the word about your company.

6. OPTIMIZE YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT

According to Bill Gates, content comes first, and that’s the truth. Content marketing is the best way to grow your company’s potential customer audience. However, not all small business owners have the resources to launch truly effective content marketing campaigns. Therefore, we bring to your attention two important tips for content marketing:

• Give priority to video content. It takes less time to create and promote videos than running a text blog. According to numerous studies, the majority of Internet users prefer video content. By betting on video content, you will satisfy the needs of the majority of your audience.
• Use social media and other popular content distribution channels. If you focus on a single channel of information dissemination, you are unlikely to achieve great success in content marketing and will not be able to significantly expand your audience of users. Use all social platforms to distribute content. By choosing the right channel for disseminating information, you will increase your target audience.

7. GET LINKS FROM REPUTABLE LOCAL ONLINE RESOURCES

Links from reputable web resources can significantly increase your site’s search engine rankings. However, many small business owners neglect this strategy.

For links, look at local bloggers, newspaper sites, event pages, and other resources that contain content relevant to your business.

To collect links, you need to figure out where your competitors are getting them from. Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs will help you with this.

CONCLUSIONS

Organic traffic is the best way to generate conversions and sales. Use the strategies listed above to boost your site’s search engine rankings and the results won’t be long in coming.

Do you want to increase the number of impressions, expand your audience, and turn the maximum number of visitors into real customers? Start by optimizing your website speed. This recommendation is based on reliable data: a delay in loading pages of a site by just 1 second reduces user satisfaction by 15% or more. 79% of potential customers will consider making a purchase through another resource if your website pages or checkout form load slowly.

To assess the performance of sites, the Google PageSpeed ​​Insights tool is used, which contains a scale with green, yellow, and red sections that reflect the overall performance of an Internet resource. What if the tool doesn’t display the best results for your site?

If you are unsure how to optimize your site’s performance, we have prepared 17 strategies to reduce your page load time, which will ultimately increase your user satisfaction.

1. CONDUCT AN AUDIT OF YOUR SITE

Before making any changes that affect the speed of loading and processing content, evaluate the current performance of your site. You can do this with the PageSpeed ​​Insights tool mentioned above, but you can’t neglect the real experience of the site: navigate from different devices and evaluate the speed of loading pages and content. The more information you have about your site’s performance, the easier it is to identify the underlying problems and fix them.

2. IDENTIFY THE PROBLEMS YOU NEED TO FIX FIRST

Once you spot the performance problems of your site, you will be tempted to fix them all at once. This will be your fault. Determine what aspects of your site are most important to your users in order to prioritize correctly. For example, if a website takes too long to load when navigating to it, focus on server-side issues: DNS, hosting provider. Even if the content of the pages itself loads fairly quickly, users still won’t want to wait if the loading speed of the site itself is depressing.

Also Read : WordPress Optimization, 2020 Simple Tips.

3. RATE THE QUALITY OF YOUR HOSTING PROVIDER’S SERVICES

As stated above, your hosting provider could be the culprit for poor website performance. There are several factors that affect the website loading speed: the geographical location of the servers, their capacity, the bandwidth of the network equipment. In addition, site performance depends on the type of web hosting used: virtual, VPS, or dedicated server.

Although in most cases shared hosting is the best option in terms of financial costs, its resources are distributed among several sites, and therefore performance decreases. A virtual dedicated server (VPS) distributes the resources of a physical server between several virtual ones to increase the performance of sites. But if the load on the server is too high, the page loading speed may drop. A dedicated physical server is significantly more expensive than shared hosting or VPS, but it provides the best website speed.

4. EVALUATE CDN PERFORMANCE

If all of the data required to fully load your site is stored on a single server, it negatively affects its initial loading speed and overall performance. A network infrastructure (CDN) contains multiple servers to store your content in multiple locations at once. When a user visits your site, the CDN selects the closest server to the user’s physical location to speed up the content delivery process. Please note that CDNs differ from each other, so you should consider multiple providers to choose the best one.

5. OPTIMIZE IMAGES

High-quality images increase the appeal of your site to end-users, but can negatively impact its performance (especially if you are using high-resolution images). Compress images before uploading to your site to save valuable time for your potential customers. Many image editors include a standard “save for web” feature that optimizes images for websites. There are also online services for compressing images of common formats: “.jpg”, “.png”, “.tiff” and others.

6. REDUCE THE TOTAL NUMBER OF REDIRECTS

Redirects are used to redirect a user from the page they visited a new page. They allow you to associate highly visited ranking pages with new content. What’s the problem with redirects? The more redirects a site has, the longer it takes to load, which ultimately worsens the user experience of your site.

Redirects are useful for getting consistently high views of new content. But, once your pageview target has been met, remove old redirects to shorten your site’s load time.

7. LIMIT THE NUMBER OF HTTP REQUESTS

Any HTTP request to download images, stylesheets, scripts, and fonts increase the overall load time of your site. As your site grows, the number of such requests increases. Ultimately, there is a significant delay between clicking on a link and actually navigating to a new page.

Some services built into the browser, such as Google Developer Tools, identify all HTTP requests made by a site. You can define obsolete or overly complex queries that can be eliminated or combined with other features to optimize loading speed.

8. COMPRESS CONTENT

By reducing the size of your files without sacrificing quality, you will improve the performance of your site. There are several powerful and reliable compression frameworks (like Gzip) that reduce file sizes without degrading the quality of the content. Find out what compression methods your hosting provider uses. If he neglects them, choose another.

9. USE DATA CACHING

The caching mechanism allows the browser to preload some of your site’s content to improve page loading speed. Some content management systems (CMS) use mechanisms to automatically cache the latest versions of sites and offer configurable options. If your site contains content that isn’t updated regularly, you can increase the caching time to improve performance.

10. TRACK 404 PAGE NOT FOUND ERRORS

Users receive messages with an error “404 – page not found” in two cases: if the requested page was deleted by you or moved (assigned a different address). Faced with this error, most likely the user will want to leave your site (and you will lose a potential client). You can eliminate errors using free tools that identify non-existent pages and remove “dead” links.

11. FOCUS ON MOBILITY

Fast mobile sites have become a necessity as the number of users browsing and shopping on mobile devices is skyrocketing. The easiest way is to leave the desktop version of the site and hope for the best. But the regular version of the Internet resource takes longer to load and is inconvenient to use on mobile devices. It is better to immediately invest in the development of a good mobile site or a responsive version with the maximum page load speed and the minimum response time to user actions.

12. OPTIMIZE YOUR CMS

A good content management system can improve site performance by optimizing content search and site performance as a whole. There are many free and paid CMS out there. Examine each one to determine which one works best for your site.

13. COMBINE KEY FILES

If you have experience as a web developer, you can combine JavaScript and CSS files to reduce the number of files read during site load. Whether you are a web developer or are using a good CMS, you should consider combining script files and stylesheets to improve the performance of your site anyway.

14. DETERMINE THE SPEED OF THE DNS SERVER

The longer it takes to receive a response from the DNS server, the longer the time delay between sending the request and receiving the first byte of information. You can determine the performance of a DNS server using special online tools. Please note that some hosting providers may also provide DNS services.

15. USE ASYNCHRONOUS LOADING

Many files and scripts on your site are loaded synchronously. That is, the loading of each subsequent element begins only when the previous one has been completely loaded. Ultimately, this increases the loading time of the website pages. New CMS tools and plugins contain the functionality of asynchronous loading of CSS elements and JavaScript scripts, ensuring their parallel (simultaneous) loading.

16. REDUCE THE NUMBER OF FONTS USED

Unique fonts are used to grab the attention of users. On the other hand, they have a negative impact on performance (especially fancy fonts that contain unique character sets). Reduce the number of fonts you use to speed up page loading and choose themes that are optimized for new browsers.

17. IDENTIFY PROBLEMATIC PLUGINS

Find plugins that are slowing down your site’s performance. Many plugins contain useful functionality and simplify site management. But they can degrade performance, especially if they consume a lot of resources or perform complex database queries. When working with plugins, stick to two simple rules: leave only those plugins that you really need, and install the most recent version, optimized for performance.

THE FASTER THE BETTER

The faster the site and its content load, and the faster it reacts to user actions, the lower the bounce rate and higher conversion rates. While a slow website won’t speed up significantly in a few minutes, you need to constantly work to optimize its performance, and any of the 17 strategies above will help you with this.

When creating a brand, you need to think about three things: a creative logo, bright design, and a catchy slogan. But the most important thing is to create a strong brand that can compete in the market. Keep in mind that everything that happens in your business affects the perception of your brand. Building a strong and respected brand takes effort and creativity. This article is a guide for those looking to create just such a brand.

1. DETERMINE HOW YOU LOOK IN THE EYES OF PEOPLE

A brand is not how you present your business, but how others see it. At the beginning of the journey, you should find out what potential customers think of your brand. Find your business on Google or read reviews about it, ask loved ones how they feel about your company. You can hire business experts to conduct audience analysis.

2. IMPROVE YOUR BRAND PERSONALITY

Think of your brand as someone who has certain traits. Make sure that all aspects of your business do not affect their personality. Brand personality – strict adherence to business values, fulfilling promises, following the main mission, maintaining the vision. The personality of the brand is reflected in the design, logo, color palette, and the company’s attitude towards customers. If any aspect of your business does not fit your brand, it must be redesigned to maintain the brand identity.

3. INVEST IN ONLINE PLATFORMS

There are several platforms (Facebook, VKontakte, Twitter, blogs, websites, and others) to help you reach your target audience. Take the time to choose platforms that are compatible with your business and drive customer engagement. These platforms will provide an opportunity to sell goods and services based on your brand, simplify the process of customer interaction with your business, and help express the purpose and mission of your business. Choose your content and the way you interact with your target audience carefully to emphasize your brand’s authenticity.

4. MAKE YOUR BRAND CONSISTENT AND FLEXIBLE

Most brands that have won loyalty from their customers are consistent in everything they do. But consistency in brand development is not enough. Brand flexibility is essential to drive new ideas to grow your business. This will allow you to change your business tactics to eliminate aspects that do not fit your brand. Check all changes made for operability and effectiveness. Look at your brand through the eyes of customers, employees, and suppliers to make sure it makes the right impression. Ensure brand prosperity, showcase its strengths while eliminating weaknesses.

5. BUILD YOUR BRAND AWARENESS

When working on brand building within your own business, use a non-standard approach to increase brand awareness. This helps to strengthen his position. For example, you can use “entertainment marketing” that uses pop culture to grow your brand: movies, music tracks, celebrity ads, product demos, and more. You should go beyond typical marketing methods and do your best to build your brand awareness among your target audience.

6. MAINTAIN BRAND VALUE

To build a strong brand, you need to take certain steps that will help you stay ahead of your competition. Create a unique offering that reflects the value of your product or the way you interact with customers. Make sure the quality of your products and services is as stated. Prospects shouldn’t have any misconceptions about your product. In addition, the cost of goods and services should not be overstated. The price of a product or service must fully correspond to the level of quality.

7. ASSOCIATE YOUR BRAND WITH EXISTING STRONG BRANDS

According to Sham Haider, founder and CEO of Marketing Zen, engagement with another brand can both strengthen and weaken your brand. To strengthen your brand’s position, you must associate it with another strong brand. You can associate your brand with others through an authoritative blog. Create quality business blogs and publish content on reputable sites. Thanks to the high traffic of these sites, you will be able to increase your brand awareness among your potential audience.

Also Read: How to create a brand: 5 steps for beginners

CONCLUSION

To build a strong brand, you need to be committed and do your best. Make sure your products or services highlight your brand identity. Be consistent in what you do, maintain the value of your product, and associate it with strong brands. All of these will contribute to the development of your brand.

Creating really high-quality content is not an easy task, especially if the goal is to write texts that are well received by search engines. As the volume of content grows, so does the level of competition. Only high-quality, optimized content brings maximum benefit. How to make the process of its creation painless? We have compiled a list of recommendations for content optimization, affecting technical and other aspects.

1. FINDING THE RIGHT KEYWORDS FOR TARGETING

Let’s take our article as an example. Why are we writing about content optimization? This topic is relevant to a wide audience of users. It has a high potential for attracting customers, contains a key phrase for which you can rank highly.

Ahrefs, a keyword reviewer, reported the following results: 300 searches per month for “content optimization” in the US. The potential traffic is even higher as there are many related keyword phrases and there are countries other than the US. The service also gave this keyword a 7 on a difficulty scale. It is based on the average number of links to articles included in the TOP 10 search results.

Note: The maximum difficulty score is 100 points. 7 points mean there are links to 8 sites. If the score were 70 out of 100, this would indicate there are hundreds of links.

Provided that good content is created, the author of the article will receive at least 8 good links, providing a good chance of high positions in the search results. It’s not difficult to compete for a specific keyword with sites with similar authority indicators. The situation changes dramatically if the competitor is a super-authoritative resource. Domain name authority is an important attribute of successful project promotion. With the right approach, it can be created in about 90 days.

2. OPTIMIZATION FOR SEO

Search engines are using ever smarter content analysis algorithms. Therefore, the presence of key phrases in the direct entry in the meta-titles, description, URL is not a prerequisite for a successful promotion. If the site is new and has a low ranking, it is better to use direct keyword matches in all of the listed places.

Not sure if all your published content is SEO optimized? You can find out using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider tool. It analyzes the site, identify various problems: duplicate titles, long or missing descriptions, missing alt attributes, etc. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is capable of finding broken links.

By eliminating the problems of search engine optimization on the pages, you can achieve higher positions in the search results.

3. OPTIMIZING CONTENT FOR SHARING

Are you working hard to create quality content and want it to stand out from the crowd every time someone shares it on social media? To accomplish this, you need to “tell” social networks (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) what information to display when a link to your site is posted.

Content optimization on Facebook is done using the Open Graph protocol. In fact, Facebook gets snippets of code for interpretation later:

• Title (title) tag tells Facebook what your page is about and how it should appear in the Social Graph.
• The description tag provides information about your page and encourages people to click through.
• The image tag is for hosting the URL of the image that represents your page on the Social Graph.

All of these tools will help you optimize your content for posting on Facebook, but in the case of Twitter, there is more work to be done. Twitter Cards can help you with this. These are summary cards containing the title, description, and page thumbnail that are displayed every time someone shares your content on Twitter.

All this takes time and effort. If your site is built on the WordPress platform, the Yoast SEO plugin can help simplify things with built-in parameters for defining Open Graph and Twitter Card tags. You need to go to SEO> Social Networks in the WordPress dashboard and select the appropriate tab (Facebook, Twitter, or another social network).

After enabling the Open Graph metadata for Facebook, the plugin will automatically fill in most of the tags. For pages without images, you can choose a default image. In the case of Twitter, you need to enable card metadata, then select the default card template.

At the end of all the settings, it will not be superfluous to check the correctness of content optimization. The special tool Knowem.com will help with this.

4. OPTIMIZATION FOR READING

Many webmasters put so much effort into optimizing content for SEO that they sometimes forget to structure it to be readable. Structured content is better and easier for site visitors. You can improve the readability of texts in the following ways:

• Write in short sentences and divide the text into paragraphs. Many readers scan the text in search of a quick solution to the problem. Therefore, you should write in essence, paragraphs should consist of a maximum of four sentences, contain a complete thought.
• Make subheadings to break down text blocks. If the reader likes the subheadings, they will most likely read the entire article.
• Use copywriting techniques. There are techniques and tricks to grab and hold the reader’s attention.

5. IMAGE OPTIMIZATION

High-quality, relevant images draw the audience’s attention to your content. You need to make sure your images are optimized for search engines. Google is unable to view images. In order for the search engine to understand the meaning of the posted images, you need to add “alt” attributes corresponding to the page content. The image is also given a name that is displayed when the mouse is hovering over the image.

To load images correctly, you need to make sure that they are of the correct size (resolution). Overly high-quality images take up a lot of disk space and take a long time to load, ruining the overall impression of your content. For fast loading, the image compression mechanism is used.

Tinypng is one of the best image compression tools out there. Able to reduce the amount of memory (occupied by an image) by 30% or more, it does not degrade image quality.

6. PLACEMENT OF RELEVANT LINKS

Relinking is important from a CEO’s point of view. It also improves your overall site experience by making it easier to find relevant content on your site or third-party resources. For example, this article contains a link to a similar article published on the same site.

Internal links have a big impact on SEO by helping to distribute link power across all pages on your site. It will not be superfluous to post links to articles published on other authoritative resources.

7. OUTREACH TO ATTRACT EVEN MORE TRAFFIC

Once you have posted links to relevant articles on other sites, you should request backlinks. The bottom line is that the more authoritative domains link to your site, the higher the chances of getting into the top of search results. Links from popular sites have a lot of authority and attract the most relevant traffic to your site. The search for links is performed as follows:

• Connect and configure Brand24, a tool for tracking mentions of key phrases your content is targeting.
• Get notified of new posts with these keywords.
• Make a list of sites and find contact emails using special services.
• Use Zerobounce to validate email addresses.
• Build link building with email outreach tools.

The content for each site or contractor must be personalized. This contributes to more effective outreach.

8. SPEED ​​OPTIMIZATION

While website load speed optimization may not be directly related to content optimization, it does have a huge impact on the overall user experience of your website. If the site is loading for more than 2 seconds, the user is likely to leave it without waiting for the content to load. In addition, search engines also factor in page load speed in their search rankings.

Also Read: 5 Simple Ideas On How To Use Interactive Content

Download speed is an important parameter that is controlled by GTMetrix and other online services. If the site is loading slowly, this problem needs to be fixed.

There are many factors that affect the page speed of a website. GTMetrix will demonstrate the loading speed of each item. Speed ​​optimization is to speed up the loading of all items that are loading too slowly.

The main reason for “slow pages” is too large image files. You need to go through all the image files and compress them if needed. If your site is powered by WordPress, you can use the EWWW Image Optimizer or other plugins that scan site images and compress their size to improve site performance.

9. OPTIMIZATION FOR MAILING LISTS

Content marketers always strive to get the user’s email address – this is the most important target action for them. The bottom line is that email allows them to return leads, direct them through the sales funnel. First of all, you need to learn how to request an email address. The most effective way is to upgrade the content.  

Content Upgrades are offers to familiarize yourself with a particular content posted on blog article pages, which also include a subscription offer at the top and bottom of the article. You can offer any upgrades in exchange for an email address. The main thing is that these upgrades (checklists, reports, manuals) are closely related to the topic of the article on the page where they are posted. Getresponse Autofunnel is one of the best tools for getting your email subscriber into your sales funnel.

The subscriber enters an effective sales funnel containing a product page, an order form, a webinar (if required). The tool allows you to track analytics at every stage of the sales funnel.

10. ADDING STRUCTURED DATA AND MICRO-MARKUP

Micro-markup not only contributes to the growth of a site’s ranking in your search engine but also increases the degree of its user-friendliness. What is micro-markup?

In simple terms, micro-markup is a way to help a search engine understand the context of a page on your site using specific attributes. It also helps to increase the relevance of search results.

The micro-markup of the site is checked using the Structured Data Testing Tool. To check, you need to enter the site URL or paste a code snippet into a special field. Adding structured data markup to WordPress sites is done using the Schema plugin.

CONCLUSION

This list of items to optimize seems overwhelming at first glance. Once you start optimizing each piece of content before publishing it, you quickly get used to it. Optimizing content is an integral part of the creation process, not a side task or routine that you do from time to time.

The time someone spends on your site directly affects your page rank in search engines. The bounce rate on the site displays the percentage of visitors who left immediately after the first visit. In theory, with this kind of customer behavior, the quality of the content is questionable. Therefore, it’s always important to look for ways to reduce your site’s bounce rate.

Follow the 8-second rule

Sadly, the average duration of a person’s interest is no more than 8 seconds. After 8 seconds, the brain of your visitors is already focused on something else. Therefore, website owners need to consider how design can affect visitor attention span.

Before making changes, study how the website looks from the outside and is perceived by a potential buyer. Interview “real” customers, but try to carefully review the pages yourself. Keep this 8-second rule in mind as you ask yourself two questions:

• How much time do I spend looking for something?
• How much time do I spend getting what I want if I know where it is?

In both cases, if the answer is “more than eight seconds,” your site is in trouble.

Use infinite scrolling in your design

Legacy website designs generally assume that visitors will click on buttons and links to view new pages and content. This concept once worked well for many online businesses, but today’s consumers are becoming more impatient and easily distracted. Endless scrolling solves this problem by eliminating the need for mouse clicks. When you scroll down the screen, the website intuitively suggests the next page.

With endless scrolling, it’s important to decide how to present the pages. For example, Time magazine’s site presents a series of top news stories, while NBC News prefers to submit more feature articles. What you present to your customers is as important as how you present it, but endless scrolling can dramatically lower your bounce rate. Since this feature was added to the site, the bounce rate on Time.com has dropped by 15%.

Increase the number of objects of interaction

Marketers like to call website features “interaction objects,” but these tools and tricks are really just different ways of displaying content.

To overcome the 8 second attention span, there is one simple trick – display information in different ways. Common (and popular) objects of interaction include:

• Embedded videos. Everyone loves watching a cat climb onto a sleeping owner, right?
• Pictures and images. Boring information can easily come to life by presenting statistics and other data in pretty pictures.
• Polls. Most internet users want to give their opinion, and surveys can also help collect real-time feedback on content.

Interaction objects work well on any website. Each type of business can present content in different ways, and it’s always helpful to be mindful of the benefits a video or survey can bring.

Speed ​​up

The bounce rate is greatly influenced by page load time. Your visitors are quite impatient, and if your content isn’t available almost immediately, chances are you’ll lose it. If the site is loading “fast enough” – this is just not enough. As a business website owner, you simply shouldn’t ignore pages that aren’t optimized for high performance.

You need to find out how the pages are working now. You can use various online tools, one of them is Google PageSpeed ​​Insights. A score of 85 or higher indicates that the page is performing well. The tool also highlights areas that need improvement.

Server configuration, HTML structure, and external resources (such as media and JavaScript) can severely impact page load times. Take the time to diagnose the problem and then do your best to fix it, otherwise, visitors will quickly go elsewhere.

Focus on quality

While some web trends have come and gone, quality remains the focus of developers. If something pushes visitors away from your pages, quality issues are almost certainly the number one issue.

Visitors want to see evidence on your pages that they are being given time, care, and attention. Moreover, today’s consumers are extremely critical of this. A single mistake can immediately scare away sophisticated 21st century Internet users with high demands. To make life difficult, search engines now actively seek out and punish substandard websites. Of course, they will not necessarily publish the full list of criteria that they use in their selection, however, penalties from Google and Yandex can seriously reduce traffic to your site.

Common mistakes customers (and search engines) hate:

• internal error 404;
• broken external links:
• errors 302 (related to temporarily moved content).

These (and other) technical issues aside, site quality is about more than making the pages work. It’s also important to check the content on your pages and remove anything that isn’t quality content. Check the pages from the customer’s point of view as often as possible.

Also Read: 10 Digital Marketing Tools You Should Consider In 2020

Ask yourself simple questions: Is the information accurate and current? Is this content helpful? Am I posting original content and new ideas? Does the visitor think I am an expert in my field? If you are unable to provide positive answers to these questions, remove, edit, and re-publish the content.

Bounce rate is just one metric that allows search engines to rank pages, but it is a simple and useful indicator to help gauge the performance of your site. Work tirelessly to research your bounce rate, and most importantly, continually take action to lower it.

According to experts, by 2040, 95% of all purchases will be made through e-commerce services. Because of this, many small and medium-sized enterprises are already moving their business to the online segment.

Companies hire SEO professionals to get quality content and improve their website’s online visibility. For the effective design of interfaces without errors, it is recommended to contact the best experts in the field of optimization.

WHY IS SEO IMPORTANT?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps to increase traffic. Effective techniques can improve the user experience and usability of your website.

SEO helps to build the trust of your website visitors. When people search for some information and notice an address at the top of the SERP (in the search engine results), they have a feeling of reliability. This is what prompts a person to buy on the site.

WHAT IS SEO AUDIT?

SEO audit is an assessment of various factors that determine the performance of a website. The analysis makes it possible to figure out why your site has a low rating or why it does not fall into the search ranking. In short: you get solutions to improve the functionality of the web resource and increase traffic.

SEO audit is extremely important for understanding the market position. In any online business, this analysis should be done at the project launch stage or at the beginning of a new quarter. Basically, you are figuring out which areas should be improved. All found deficiencies can be eliminated within a certain time.

Let’s take a closer look at what is included in an SEO audit.

TECHNICAL SEO MISTAKES

The first thing to identify is possible technical problems. The technical analysis determines why a resource is down. This is an opportunity to assess two main aspects: availability and indexability.

Accessibility: If a web resource cannot be found by Google and other search engines, you will never attract a large audience of visitors. This indirectly affects the availability of a potential client. Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is working hard to regularly update its content to attract as much traffic as possible.

Accessibility, convenience for guests, and competent search are all equally important.

Indexability: it is necessary to make sure that the pages fall into the search of search robots and are visible to the end-user. To make it easier for Google, Yandex, and other search engines to find your site, work on its accessibility and indexing functions. Web resources that do not meet these features are subject to sanctions. If there are too many pages, the rating drops. Scanners and robots may not even display them.

As a result, you may receive a notification about the reasons for the sanctions in your Webmaster tool account. All you need to do is identify the deficiency, correct, and create a revision request. Any technical mistakes can be easily eliminated by ordering services from the best SEO specialists.

Layout issues

About 61.72% of the population use Chrome as their primary web browser. Another 15.23% use Safari to surf the net, and the rest use Internet Explorer or Opera. The structure of the site layout plays a key role for it to display correctly in these browsers. If the download time exceeds 0.80 seconds, then the probability of bounce increases by 85%.

Bad or outdated visual design, lack of high-quality images and logical structure, hidden details – all this negatively affects the ranking process.

On-page flaws and keyword difficulties

The content of the website must correspond to the products and services offered. Inconsistency between data and text, as well as visual content, will interfere with ranking. Some companies hire bloggers to write copy, but most of the information is just copied. This duplication has a negative impact on ranking statistics.

Also Read: Six Creative Business Promotion Strategies For 2020

Such keywords from different sources knockdown algorithms, and then Google and Yandex recognize only the strongest sources as top-ranked. As a result, SEO suffers greatly for the rest, and impressions to potential users are deteriorating.

Off-page issues

Off-page ranking factors determine how accessible it is, how often people link to your URL in their articles, and whether it’s trustworthy. Both Google and Yandex use several algorithms to learn which URL is linked more and how often it appears in searches.

In 2020, YouTube and Wikipedia appear most frequently in search. So, to join these leaders and ensure consistency in the online marketplace, you should stick to the webmaster guidelines.

You also need to supplement your website or blog with fresh and relevant content to stay popular with readers and bloggers. The growth of interest among users will help to maintain higher positions in the search results.

To test how well your site is performing and whether it helps to increase sales, consider the possibility of an SEO audit today.