Now that the ‘Zuck has returned back west of I-81 (really west), having left Senators mulling the concept of ad-supported online businesses in his wake, we can all get back to business in 2018. At KME.digital, our business clients and business communities are – across the board – seeing upticks in opportunity, confidence and actual sales as 2018 moves quickly from Spring to Summer in DC.
Our business clients are asking the top 3 SEO questions:
- Is SEO still important?
- Where should I spend my online ad budget?
- What else can I do to find customers, partners and employees online?
In this blog, we provide some insights into these common questions:
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) continues to be important, critical to the presence of your website and digital message online. Fundamental tactics are still very relevant, like web page metatags, keyword use and inbound-linkbuilding. Adopting a strategy that understands your audience might be looking for your services wherever and whenever Internet connectivity is available is really important right now. At the office, in the car, talking to Alexa – they may be discussing over the Internet topics you’re targeting, browsing related products, attending nearby events, connecting with local experts and exploring their work. Every digital interaction they make with your keywords needs to spark a sales path back to you, spark the “customer journey”. So, yes, SEO is important – but so are strategies like “digital engagement” and “customer journey” that use SEO. This is becoming a more complex marketing challenge for small businesses, with so many more tools to use – but we’re here to help.
With the rapid pickup in local business spending and investment, ad spending should remain and possibly increase as a part of your marketing and outreach budget–but again with an eye towards the customer journey, and not blindly to “typical” outlets or publications. Also, it’s much easier now to ask, receive and analyze for yourself whether the ad spend is actually working – based on real-time and data trend analysis. Note, too the hyper-partisan nature of some publications and websites – though if that’s your audience, go for it. Google adwords is still a big bang for the buck, high ROI, generally easy to understand and quickly update. There are some new, local magazines, blogs and online groups – some you really shouldn’t miss out on, some however offer no data to back up their high “traditional” ad rates. Email and other direct marketing is still quite strong, and actually becoming more “trusted” than some online content advertising.
What else can be done, to find, engage and convert online customers? On the one hand, there’s a proliferation of all kinds of tools and services (chatbots, AI, influencer analytics, Snapchat geofilters, LinkedIn Engage, retargeting, etc.) to help you – that you probably don’t really have time to evaluate, understand, test. We can help with that – it’s what we spend all day doing. On the other hand, this is a very good time for a classic web presence renovation, to ride the economic wave. No matter your marketing needs, we can get your business where it needs to go, with website redesign/SEO update, brand refresh, mobile optimization, web performance and analytics tuning, social reset, ad buy rebalancing, email list and autoresponder cleanup.
Contact us today to get started – we’re the local, accessible experts around here, in the DMV.