Best marketing strategies for an accounting practice
Your Strategic SEO Checklist to Building a High Traffic Website
Everyone wants a website that sees a lot of traffic, high engagement and a high conversion rate. Unfortunately, with over 1.86 billion websites online, creating a highly engaging, competitive website that generates a lot of traffic is easier said than done. Fortunately for marketers, there are a range of tactics available to help build a search engine optimised website designed to outperform the competition.
Here’s your SEO checklist to strategically build an optimised website designed to draw traffic.Read more
Creating A Website Isn’t As Daunting As It Sounds – Here’s How To Start One
Whether you are looking to build a new start-up website or make your current site more effective, understand how and what to do when creating a website is important. While creating a website on the surface may seem complicated with the number of variables and choices available, it’s a relatively straightforward process. As society places increasing importance on being digital, creating a website is crucial for success as this is the central focus of all online marketing efforts. Did you know it takes 50 milliseconds for a potential customer to form an opinion about your website.
Top 8 SEO Tools for Monitoring Your Website in 2021
With new websites emerging and updates to Google’s search algorithm being implemented constantly, it can be very difficult to hold or improve your search ranking today. That is why it is imperative that businesses are utilizing the best and most up-to-date SEO tools available to help boost their website rank to the top of search engines.
No matter the size of your business, there are both paid and free tools that will allow you to constantly update your webpage with perfect keywords and monitor your SEO success.
One such example is our free site audit we can conduct for you here at Robotic Marketer, but there are many more out there for you to try today.
That is why we have created a list with a mix of the best marketing tools in the hopes that you can find the right fit for your business model.
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SEMrush – Free
SEMrush is popular for its features which allows you to complete an accurate keyword research whilst creating an easy-to-follow dashboard that constantly provides updates on the performance of one or multiple website domains.
Not only that, this tool can give you insights on your current search rankings and how to change them for the better, as you can opt to receive information on your competitor’s current advertising and search strategies.
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Moz’s Pro Tools – 30 Day Trial, paid plans from $99 a month
Although this is not a free tool, Moz’s 30-day free trial may be enough to hook you on their incredible SEO capabilities.
By utilizing multiple research tools, Moz allows users to identify many different SEO issues and potential opportunities by building in-depth reports with website performance metrics.
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Ahrefs – Plans from $99 a month
A popular choice for many, Ahrefs is one of the more advanced SEO tools available with various keyword research functions to be utilized.
There a large number of tools you can use within their different packages, such as Site Explorer, which reveals how specific pages within your website may be performing, or Keywords Explorer, which creates metrics for click-through rates on chosen keywords.
Although it is an advanced program, Ahrefs boasts a friendly user interface that can easily satisfy all of your SEO-based needs.
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HubSpot’s Website Grader – Free
One of the oldest tools around that has just received a fresh update, HubSpot’s Website Grader allows you to check performance, security, mobile usability and SEO, meaning it will likely cover all bases for your business.
Their Website Grader is so easy to use that within minutes of entering your website URL, you will receive a rating (out of 100) showing you your generalized performance in all 4 of the above areas. After which you can start a free course on how to improve your website immediately.
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Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider – One free option and one paid option for $160 a year
With multiple plan options, both versions of this tool are designed to do extensive SEO website analysis.
Perfect for website auditing, Screaming Frog detects missing tags, broken links, any errors and duplicate content that may appear.
This tool is the best time-saver for what would be very dry and time-consuming manual tasks, giving you actionable results much quicker than many other SEO tools.
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BuzzStream – 14-day trial, paid plans from $24 a month
BuzzStream is a great tool for checking the validity of your link profile, meaning you can more easily reach out to those who can provide your site with legitimate inbound links.
This tool will identify the most appropriate candidates for your business who best match your profile, which will in turn create more backlinks and ultimately increase your Google ranking.
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Linkody – Plans from $15 a month
Linkody tends to have a more specific focus on particular aspects of a website’s SEO performance rather than a more generalized approach like some of the other tools.
Although it is a paid tool, it is still relatively cheap compared to some of its other competitors like BuzzStream, as it enables you to track backlinks and create a more diverse profile for your website.
With the attraction of an easy-to-use interface, the program runs and updates your profile constantly, and will notify you when any links are broken or deleted.
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Google Search Central – Free
Although all the above tools can suit your needs just as easily, possibly the most popular and frequently used SEO tool is Google Search Central.
The point of these tools is to understand better how Google ranks our websites based on the content and keywords within our pages, therefore it stands to reason that Google’s SEO tool, formerly known as Google’s Webmaster Tools, is one of the best at explaining how we can improve.
It is extremely user-friendly, allowing you to see your URL as Google sees it, which can help you prevent website hacking, and alter your page to generate better SEO performance.
Google can be a tricky beast to understand, and the constant updates and alterations to their algorithm don’t help, but by using one of these tools we have outlined above, your website stands a much higher chance of becoming an SEO friendly powerhouse.
Any one of these tools will teach you the best practices and improve your performance analysis greatly so that you will be able to identify how you can efficiently improve your website with ease.
Top 10 Reasons Why Your Website Is Crucial To Your Digital Strategy
Websites have been a key aspect of digital strategy for many years now and despite the growth of social media, a well-designed website is still one of the most important aspects to ensuring success in the online space. If you’re skeptical as to how important a good website really is, read on to discover 10 reasons why your website is imperative for a successful strategy.
Your website helps you to…
1- Create a Good First Impression
Never underestimate the power of a good first impression. Your website is often the first touchpoint your customers have with your business, so a professional design and ease of use helps to ensure that it is not their last. Ensure that your website exemplifies your value with an appealing design, quick load times and strong branding so that they regard your business and offerings highly.
2- Establish your Credibility
A quality website design also enhances the legitimacy of your business. After all, anyone can create a website on a certain topic, so ensuring that your website is built in a professional manner, highlighting your work, key values and how to contact you is essential to building trust with potential clients from the get-go. This initial trust is critical to establishing a strong dialogue between you and your customers, ultimately resulting in improved sales over time.
3- Create Consistency
Your website is the perfect opportunity to make sure that your branding is consistent. This includes graphics, photos and even tone of voice within website copy. A consistent brand further builds on the credibility you have established with a well-designed website and makes your brand recognizable across different online platforms, including social media posts and paid ads.
4- Share Key Information with Customers
Your website is essentially a hub for information for your customers and should be a one-stop-shop for customers to come and learn about what you do as an organization and the value that you offer to your clients. This makes decision making easy for potential clients as they are able to assess whether your solutions are right for them. By clearly outlining what it is that you do and your key values, you are more likely to attract your target market for whom your services are specialized and grow your business.
5- Simplify Interaction with Your Business
A good website can also make it easier for customers to take action and further engage with your business. Website design nowadays incorporates data capturing forms and contact information, so that your customers know what their next steps are when they wish to engage with your offerings. The easier it is to get into contact with you or purchase your services, the less friction there is for sales, meaning that ease of contact should be a priority when designing your website.
6- Host All of Your Resources
As a home page for your business, your website can also host important resources. Blogs, podcasts and thought pieces can all be included within your website, further establishing your credibility in the market. Other important resources that should be included in your website are testimonials and case studies, which can be referenced by customers who want to know more about the nature of your offering or the level of satisfaction amongst past customers. Whatever the purpose of your resources, having them easily accessible within your website is a must to encourage potential clients to engage with them.
7- Make Your Business Easier to Find
Search Engine Optimisation is a necessary part of any digital strategy. By making your business as easy to find in search results as possible, you can reach more customers and grow your business. The role of your website is therefore critical. Incorporating keywords throughout your site and hosting SEO improving content are some of the steps to creating a SEO optimized site.
8- Improve your Following
Your website can also help bolster the growth of your social media channels. Including links to your social media platforms is a must for your website. This means that if customers are interested in your business but haven’t contacted you yet, they are able to follow your accounts on relevant platforms, allowing you to expand your reach amongst potential clients and encourage long term growth.
9- Streamline Lead Generation
Websites are the ideal place to include forms that can assist you with generating leads. Through these forms, you can construct databases of potential clients you can reach out to who have shown an interest in your offerings or resources. This assists with your CRM activities and is a set and forget the way of having a stream of potential clients filtering through your sales department.
10- Improves Customer Service
Finally, your website essentially provides self-service customer support to your clients. By having information about your work, contact details and services, clients are able to easily get information about your company and answer any questions they may have. To further enhance customer support, chatbots can be incorporated into your website to instantaneously answer questions or point them in the direction of appropriate resources. Even if it seems like a simple step, readily accessible contact details and additional information improves transparency and makes it easier for clients to work with you, further building trust and loyalty amongst your client base.
There are so many reasons why a website is critical to your digital strategy. By establishing an appealing, easy to navigate and information-rich website, you can improve trust between you and your potential clients. Additionally, ease of access to information empowers your clients to understand which of your offerings is most tailored to them, allowing you to best help them. All of these reasons highlighted contribute to higher levels of client satisfaction and greater lead generation potential, ultimately helping your business grow.
If you’re looking for assistance with developing a website and some of the more complicated aspects including SEO and embedding forms, Robotic Marketer’s marketing strategy workshops can assist you in building a website that will help grow your business.
Why You Are Likely To Succeed With A Marketing Strategy
As business owners move forward into 2021, many are considering the changes that need to be made to their marketing strategy for success in the New Year following the countless challenges of 2020.
As the core channel through which businesses communicate their value with potential customers and retain clients in the long-term, marketing should always be a key focus for businesses seeking to expand their operations.
Investing carefully in marketing to grow your business in the digital space is vital to maintain a competitive edge in the face of ever-changing digital marketing services and media platforms.
To facilitate this, a marketing strategy is critical to making sure that your marketing activities are as impactful as possible, acting as a guidebook to allow you to focus on the most powerful actions that you can take as a business.
As specialists in creating tailored, effective marketing strategies for small and medium businesses, here are some key reasons you are more likely to achieve success with a marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy allows you to cover your bases
Marketing strategies outline research-based methods of improving your digital presence and growing your reach. A tailored strategy explicitly outlines actions that will improve customer experience and make your business stand out from the competition.
Whether this be posting regularly on social media channels, having a well-designed website, or creating quality content for your audience, a strategy allows you to cover your bases and ensure that there are no gaps in your marketing efforts.
This means that marketing activities can be focused on tasks that will deliver the highest impact possible and also bring you up to speed with competitors.
A marketing strategy helps you achieve your business goals
A marketing strategy should not be a cookie-cutter approach, but rather a specific approach for your organization me i.e. it is closely aligned with your business goals.
Regardless of the nature of your business and your objectives, a smart marketing strategy will outline key steps to take to achieve them.
Whether you are looking to gain more long-term clients, expand internationally or launch a new product, a marketing strategy will help you to plan and execute marketing activities that will help you achieve your business goals.
A marketing strategy takes the guesswork out of marketing
As a business owner, you want everything that you do to actively contribute to your business whilst avoiding marketing activities that cost more than the benefit they deliver.
A tailored, research-based marketing strategy enables your business to only engage in impactful marketing activities.
By discussing with a marketing consultant and your internal marketing team in developing your strategy, you are being decisive about the activities that will and will not benefit your business, providing clarity in the actions you will take, allowing you to plan and budget more effectively for future periods. For this reason, a strategy takes the guesswork out of your marketing activities.
By clearly outlining what exactly you need to do, you can focus on maximizing the ROI on marketing, ensuring that your marketing activities are cost-effective and aligned with your objectives.
A well-defined strategy allows for better collaboration
When you have a clearly defined marketing strategy, it makes it easy for all members of your organization to familiarise themselves with your key branding, messaging, and image. This enhances the presence of your organization, since having consistent branding is crucial in a digital setting, but also has the added impact of making it easy for multiple team members to collaborate or share tasks with each other.
A strategy establishes a rule book for anyone working on marketing activities and ensures that all marketing efforts are consistent and of high quality. This means that team members do not need to reinvent the wheel when they work on marketing-related activities, but rather have a clear guide to make sure that their work is impactful and in line with the strategy and the goals of the organization.
It helps you with future strategies
Your marketing strategy should not be the same every year. Having a clear marketing strategy allows you to see what worked and what didn’t, allowing future strategies to be adapted around these observations.
If something hasn’t worked in a specific year, you can remove that from your strategy and if you have discovered a new, creative way to engage your target market, you have the freedom to implement this in future strategies.
All of your future marketing strategies will become iterations of past strategies, leveraging the experience and knowledge of your successes. This means that each strategy is more likely to have a significant impact on your business. Therefore, a marketing strategy can be viewed as a valuable asset in the long-term growth of your business.
By putting thought into your strategy now, and revising it in future periods, you can add valuable knowledge and insight into all future strategies, improving the impact of marketing activities and the strength of your brand in the long run.
With so many benefits to your business, a clear marketing strategy is a necessary ingredient to success. With a well-defined strategy, you are likely to gain clarity in the actions you need to take to have a maximum impact on your business and drive engagement and reach.
When planning your business strategy and goals in the new year, ensure that you focus on reviewing your past marketing strategies or implementing a clearer strategy if this is something that has not been done in past.
Investing time into your marketing strategy can lead to immense short- and long-term benefits, allowing you to help your business thrive.
How Robotic Marketer can help
If you need help developing or refining your marketing strategy, the experts at Robotic Marketer are here to help. Contact us today and allow us to help you create an impactful marketing strategy for 2021 that is centered around your unique needs and business goals.
5 Reasons Why A Website Is Important For A Small Business
A website is an essential component for any operating business, especially for a small business. Now more than ever, it is necessary for business owners to ask key questions such as, “where are my customers found?” “where is my competition engaging with my target audience?”.
The answer is easy, they are all online.
Therefore, it is only natural that you need to adapt. Whether you need it to establish your brand by raising awareness and engagement as an online presence or to create a steady flow of online traffic which could bring potential customers to your brand. Nonetheless, a website is a necessity.
Here are the five reasons why small businesses need a website:
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Credibility and legitimacy are interconnected with a website
In contemporary times, where the internet reigns supreme, there is an expectation that all businesses, whether big or small have a website. If at times you’ve come across a business that does not possess a website, the chances are you would most likely not associate with the business.
According to HubSpot, website launch and integration generates, on average, over 470,000 website visitors, 1,800 leads, and 300 new customers per month, for different organizations ranging in different sizes.
Overall, a website allows the capability to develop the brand from an online perspective, establishing legitimacy and appealing to possible customers.
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Enhanced accessibility and global outreach
As the online landscape continues to expand, so will the variety of different electronic devices and online channels.
As of 2020, mobile devices and tablets, generated about half of all website traffic globally. As a small business with a readied website, this allows you to reach an assortment of customers and prospects than ever before.
Furthermore, 51% of consumers make use of websites to evaluate and gage online purchases through the employment of mobile devices. “The sky’s the limit” is the best description on why small businesses need to utilize a website.
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The attraction of potential customers online
As a small business, you are always trying to appeal to potential customers.
Possibly you have been applying traditional marketing practices such as television & radio advertising and print promotion activities to gather new customers.
Nowadays, they are deemed to be inefficient and expensive for small businesses. Transitioning to an online focus, allows for a small business to find customers in a new way.
For the most part, your customers expect your business to have a digital presence. Individuals, groups and organizations are seeking and researching the value of your brand and more notably from whom to buy online.
If you do not have an online presence, especially through a website, you will be left behind.
- Access to data, feedback and response
Collecting data, feedback, and customer responsiveness can be difficult to gain if you do not have a website to direct those data forms which could help improve and enrich your small business.
Furthermore, a website can be considerably supportive, with a built-in online chat bar. This allows the customer to communicate while they are on your website instantly.
Also, a webpage dedicated for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) on your website, allows you to receive and answer feedback responses which fosters relationships with customers.
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Exhibiting your products and services to the online world
A website is the best way to highlight your products and services online. This offers an opportunity for your small business to show why customers should buy from you.
Look at this process as a narrative; emphasizing on how your small business supports the community, in turn fostering relationships and resolving challenges. The crucial component for a website is to be engaging and personalization.
If you are still conflicted in utilizing a website, I hope the reasons presented above can provide a solution to your online presence predicament. But most importantly, the website must represent the brand itself. It must represent the values of your small business.
How To Build An Awesome Lead Generating Website
Source: Marketing Eye
While many companies are now scrambling to fix their websites in light of the fact that Google is determining whether or not many companies get sales or not, it’s not all dooms-day. A good website from idea stage to website strategy, design and development, can all be finished in one week – if you have the right partner.
We have developed 100’s of branded, lead generation focused websites for our clients around the world and the one’s that have made sure that their website is up-to-date, relevant, customer experience focused and integrated into various technologies and platforms, are not struggling in an era where no-one knows what’s next.
Having a ‘place-setter’ is not an option and even when the business environment does spring back, the way buyers see your online presence will have changed.
Here are some ways in which you can get your online presence where it should be, and start generating real leads:
Have a website and digital marketing strategy in place
There is no point in putting up a website for the sake of having a website. What is the purpose? Who is the target audience? What experience do they expect to have when they visit your website? What are your key messages? What are the key phrases that Google and other search engines pick up? What are the keywords that need to be communicated throughout your website? What is the goal for your website? What is the call to action? All of these questions must be answered prior to a company developing or refreshing their website.
Your website architecture needs to show the customer journey
After the fact you can use Hotjar to understand your customers movements, but when you are developing a website or refreshing an existing one, you will need to sit in your customers shoes and go through the experience of navigating your website. If you have an existing website, check out your Google Analytics data and work out from there what your customer journey was, and where the bounce rate effected the customer experience.
Make sure your website is branded consistently with other marketing assets you have
This is very important because if your online brand is completely different to your offline one, then you are in trouble! Consistency is essential. Keep your brand light and use colours that resonate with the audience. Design is one of the biggest reasons people choose a brand over another. If your website is designed well and resonates with your buyer, then you are 80% closer to doing a deal.
Content is king
It’s true, people mostly read the headlines or the first paragraph. But website content is so much more than that, and it needs to be updated weekly at the bare minimum.
Be authentic
Whether it is in telling your brand story or writing a blog, be authentic to your brand and your customers will love you for it. Authentic websites rate much higher than one’s that are based on what people think you want to hear and see rather than reality.
Use metrics and data to fine tune
Set up Google Analytics and use a lead capture technology to understand your customers and their journey on your website. If they are not contacting you, then why? Data never lies. Adapt, adjust, play and use data to drive more leads to your sales teams.
If you are wondering what a WordPress Website should cost you right now, Marketing Eye Melbourne is doing websites:
- Website strategy and plan
- 2-hour consultation on website
- Design of 8-10 page websites
- Development of 8-10 page website
- Search Engine Optimisation
- Mobile friendly
- Go-live
Financial contribution is $4,950.
Right now many companies are re-thinking their websites and with good reason. If you would like to have a chat about your website, please feel free to contact our office. It would be our pleasure to walk you through it. Our offices in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne are all diverted to mobile phones right now due to remote working throughout Coronavirus, so please call. We would love to chat.
Source: Marketing Eye