For small businesses and fledgling companies, being able to get the best out of your website at the earliest possible opportunity will strongest possible position for rapid growth. You have your website built, you’ve filled it with content and optimised the pages. That means your work is done, right? Unfortunately it isn’t as easy as that otherwise we’d all be rich. Once you have your site up and running, you need monitor it to find out where you stand within your industry and make regular tweaks to iron out any flaws which are contributing to the failing of your website.

“But how do I find out whether or not my website is working and how do I make it 100% efficient?” I might hear you say. The answer is simple; use the free tools that are around you. They will show you where your site is excelling, where it is failing and will likewise do the same for your competitors. Getting an extra-detailed analysis of the market you’re working in and the big players within it will help you to devise your plan of attack once you decide to create your own foothold within it.

Here we’ve put together a list of 8 helpful tools when combined together will give you all the information you need to run an effective website for your business. The takeaway from using these tools should leave you with a pretty comprehensive plan on paper of what you need to do to begin the ascent to the top of the SERPs.

#1 Keyword Optimisation

Finding keywords to match your products is easy and there isn’t actually much thought needed to brainstorm them; if you’re experts within the industry like you claim to be then the keywords should come naturally. Likewise, finding words that are popular within the industry is easy also. The trick however is to find words that your competitors aren’t using but can still match the products you sell. Effective keyword optimisation is arguably the most important on-page optimisation technique a website can use. Google Adwords shows you the search volumes of a particular query. You can query as many keywords and phrases as you like; not only does it show you the local and global search volumes for each but it also suggests similar words and phrases that may produce larger searches that may be lesser competition.

#2 Page Rank

Page rank is a mythical number designed for ego boosting. It doesn’t have any ranking factors in the eyes of the search engines, however if you have a higher page rank, then the chances are you are doing things right in terms of SEO. Page ranks exist for every indexed page and range from 1-10 with 10 being the strongest. We suggest that if you have a page rank of at least 3 then you’re doing most of the things correctly. A page rank of 6 and above are extremely strong pages. If your website or any of it’s pages are a page rank of 6 or above then you’re obviously a force to be reckoned with within the industry and are more than likely influencing a huge proportion of the market already. A great tool to check page rank can be found at www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank. Alternatively, there are extensions available that you can add straight to your toolbar so whenever you visit a page, the page rank is shown immediately in the toolbar.

#3 Link Building

Link building is one of the most influential ranking factors in 2012 and refers to the amount and the authority strength of links pointing to your pages. A link from an authoritative website is basically an appreciation of your page from a reputable source; a thumbs-up. Google recognises the amount of acknowledgements a site is receiving from third party sites and will rank them higher if there are numerous links and those links are strong; from sites with higher page ranks. OpenSiteExplorer is a great free tool which will show you the amount of links pointing to a specific page. You can check your own pages and even your competitors to get an idea of where you are within the industry at the moment and how far away/infront you are in relation to your compatitors. It also shows you the page authority, domain authority and the linking root domains. All of which are ranking factors for search.

#4 Search Engine Saturation

Search engine saturation (SES) is the name given to the number of indexed pages you have on your site throughout the search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. The more pages indexed, the more potential reach you have as each page will be targetting different keywords enabling you to potentially rank in a number of various search queries. The key to improving your search engine saturation is content. The main way in which companies create more pages is by incorporating a blog within their website. Consistently pumping out news and information will give you better SES and, at the same time, will get more eyes viewing your content. The more eyes you have looking at your blog and it’s content the more inclined visitors will be to browse your products. More browsers naturally equates to increased sales. It’s up to you to increase your saturation, however if you find yourself struggling for time, it is advised that you outsource your copywriting so your site doesn’t look ‘idle’. If you was wondering what your SES is, there’s a free tool at SEOBook that will scrape the information for you. You can also use this tool to compare your saturation with competitors’.

#5 Search Positions

Appearing higher in the search engines is a major factor which defines successful, lucrative websites from mediocre/’stale’ websites. A website which has reach to high volumes of searchers is more likely to convert those searches into sales. Searching a query on Google and then laboriously wading through each results page to find out where your page is ranked would be a thankless task with no guarantee that you will even be ranking in the top 5,000,000 reults. Fortunately in the digital era there are tools that will do the wading for you. There is a great blog post by Yoav Ezer offering free downloads of a Microsoft Excel tool designed to scrape results, visualise your search positions and monitor your rankings. Knowing where you currently rank for specific keywords will give you a better understanding of which pages you need to be optimising further with back links etc.

#6 Site Maps

Sitemaps are designed to organise your website. They offer search engine spiders – who crawl the pages – easier routes to your individual pages meaning they’re able to index them quickly and efficiently. Google are placing extra emphasis on site speeds as a ranking factor in recent times therefore will de-value a site and it’s pages if it is difficult to navigate. www.xml-sitemaps.com is a good resource to quickly create sitemaps for your site in XML and HTML format, meaning that not only do the search engine spiders get easier navigation of your site, but human visitors will also find it easier to navigate. Usability is arguably the most important ranking factor for 2012, so having an easily navigate-able site will definitely set you apart from your competitors.

#7 Meta Data

There is a lot more to on-page optimisation than simply incorporating a few relevant keywords here and there within your page. Areas of the page such as the meta tags, titles, images and meta descriptions to name a few, are all opportunities to optimise your page further. How can you tell if your page is optimised enough though? Google Rankings ultimate SEO tool is a fantastic free service which offers an SEO analysis of all your meta data, titles, images and content and gives you a comprehensive review of all your pages. It’s a great way to find the places you missed that could be better optimised for search. CMS plugins such as Yoast’s WordPress plugin are great time saving tools as well as they can check your on-page optimisation while you’re typing your content.

#8 Site Analytics

I thought I’d save the best until last in terms of analysing your website’s efficiency. In order to ensure your website is working at 100% efficiency, you need to delve deep into it’s stats and facts. Google Analytics is a free web-based tool created by Google to help websites spot where they may be going wrong and helps them improve. It tracks the traffic visiting your site and offers detailed information about these visitors. It is the most popular analytic software on the market and has the ability to visualise your websites information and have a good nosey at the numbers. You can find out things like traffic visiting the site, the time on site and time spent on pages, conversion rates, where your visitors came from and what search terms they used to get there. The advantage you have over your competition by knowing fine details like these will enable you to emphasise the areas that are working the best for you and implement them quickly whilst your competitors still use trial and error techniques.

So, in a nutshell… For any start-up company, beginner marketer or small business. The benefits you can get from utilising these free tools around you will put you ahead of the game and will have you motoring up the search rankings quickly. After all, the big players in the industry only got to where they are by using these tools so why shouldn’t you? Blow away the competition immediately around you and aim for higher ground. There’s no point in treading water or looking behind you when the only place you should be concentrating on is straight ahead!

Had enough on-page optimisation? Check out our post about more advanced off-page techniques.

Join in the conversation to add some free tools that I may have missed. The aim is to help young businesses as much as we can so the more tools at their disposal the merrier.

Right now we stand as a company of 5 employees and although as a business we’re still very much in our youth I would like to think we’re making great waves and I for one am very proud of where we stand now.

I have made every effort to build Tone as a smart agency driven by strategy, process and a love for what we do. Indeed, our official internal motto of “An open, collaborative strategy will enable us all to make better day-to-day decisions to realise our vision” is testament to that.

In saying all of this, I also understand that sometimes it takes personalities and great people to grow a company not just a set of skills. To that end we have a policy for investing in talent not just experience.

Earlier in the post I eluded to a pride I felt for the company right now, this pride was embodied by this post I saw the other week. This post covers the career switch from Tone employee Anthony Mcloughlin (@anthony_mac85), who joined the company in November. Anthony is now an integral part of our digital marketing output. The successful switch by Anthony shows that a bit of determination and enthusiasm are assets transferable to any occupation.

In addition to offering Anthony a complete switch of career we also have welcomed a school leaver as Web Designer on the Apprenticeship scheme Brandon Ingham (@brandoningham). I feel as though this diverse range of experience gives us the depth we need to really succeed. This isn’t to say we don’t know what we’re doing – we also have a backbone of ex larger agency staff giving us the rounded knowledge that is helping the company right now.

What am I getting at?

If I am being 100% honest I have penned this post with no real ‘moral of the story’ defined I just felt as though I needed to give some public praise to the new guys on the block and to give some insight as to how we do things at Tone. Furthermore, we have two openings in as a Web Designer and Web Developer so I hope this post gives you a little background as to how we do things here.

Join an ambitious team of individuals

Alas! There is a point to all of this afterall, this post is a semi-formal introduction of our new Careers page. Right now there are two positions on there, so hit the button below and see if you fit the bill to join us!

Before embarking on your SEO campaign, the first and arguably most important thing to consider is your keyword research. Taking the time to build a list of well researched and relevant keywords for the target market you’re aiming at will create a healthy ROI in terms of viewing impressions on the SERPs, traffic visiting the site, enquiry forms filled out and ultimately sales.

Failing to correctly implement keyword research, like too many small businesses do, could result in customers being unable to find your site and it’s products. You could sell the best products in the industry but if they are unable to be found then they aren’t going to sell. An epic failure in business terms if you ask me!

It will not only be economical in the near future to carry out a successful keyword research campaign but doing it as soon as possible and doing it right will bring a wide customer base and continued custom throughout your time at the top of the SERPs. The repeat custom percentage will increase and consumers will be happy with their industry leading product, therefore will continue to buy from you – and as a knock-on effect of this, Google will recognise the loyalty from customers and the increase in popularity of your products so will continue to allow you to dominate the top spots of the search engines; ensuring the cycle keeps revolving in favour of you and your business.

If you want to stay competitive and rank above your competition, you need to implement a thorough keyword campaign that will not only target the keywords with the most search volume but will also target phrases with the least competition and the ones with the highest conversion rate. All this equates to effective keywords that will target what it is your customers are really searching for.

A few do’s and don’ts…

• DO see keyword research as THE most important on-page SEO strategy on your site.


• DO take your time to ensure you get it right. You will see a rapid increase in sales when done correctly.


• DO enter the mind of the consumer. Target relevant keywords that customers will be searching for.

• DON’T assume you know what keywords you should be targeting before writing the content for your pages.


• DON’T look for volume only. Often the most searched terms are the most irrelevant to your business.


• DON’T try to get in amongst the big players of the industry immediately. Start smaller and target long-tail keywords.

#1 Brainstorm keyword categories

The thought of actually sitting down and putting together a huge list of potential keywords can be very unnerving to say the least. However, this is the most important part of keyword research. Here you simply take note of everything you think that potential customers/clientele will type into the search engines in order to bring them to a product that you’re selling. The trick here is to start with your most lucrative/important products first and do research for that particular product only. This will create relevant keywords for one product which will either have one page for the category of the keyword or have it’s own individual page in your site with it’s own relevant content containing the keyword/s which you research. Either way is well documented however we advise you create fewer pages with each ‘category’ page targeting numerous keywords. This way you will get more internal links pointing at the same page rather than the links being diluted to each individual ‘product’ page.

• BONUS TIP:

It would be beneficial here to understand all the sub-categories that come with each individual product i.e. if you was selling mattresses and beds, you would include targeted keywords which really zone-in on the product you’re trying to sell. Things like ‘memory foam double mattress’ or ‘cheap four poster wooden bed’ should be included to create a really broad yet targeted number of keywords for each specific ‘category’ page.

Try to think of and include every possible variation of the keywords and phrases to ensure you have a solid, all-round list of potential keywords for your products. The more the merrier here. It could be beneficial to ask people who aren’t familiar with your products or the industry to throw a few ideas together as these people often have the ‘average Joe’ way of thinking which could be deemed as the way of thinking for the average person – or in other words; the majority of people searching for your products.

#2 Find out the volume of searches

So you have a list of potential keywords and phrases. The next step is to put them into some sort of research tool. Keyword research tools allow you to get an instant evaluation of the keywords you’ve put together and will filter out the bad ones whilst letting you know which of the list will be the most appropriate to use in terms of search volume. There are a number of tools available to find out keyword volume:

Wordtracker is a good one for researching about certain phrases and checking their popularity amongst your competitors.

WordStream is another site which offers results in PPC marketing and SEO. It can help with keyword organisation and profitability.

Google Suggest is a tool that can find relevant synonyms and broad matches for your initial keywords. Good for finding terms you may have missed.

Microsoft’s AdCentre tool is excellent for finding out other things like the average click-through-rate over time or the average cost of a PPC campaign per click etc. It allows you to fully understand which specific keywords/phrases are going to be of best value for your business.

The tool of choice by us and the majority of the more savvy SEO campaigners is the Google AdWord’s Tool. Google AdWords is a free piece of technology designed to combine all the characteristics of the other suggested tools and bring them together into one easy interface which is simple to use and highly accurate. So when searching for the keyword volume, Google AdWords should be the tool of choice.

#3 Find out the competition

Google AdWords allows you to collect together the most suitable keywords and phrases from the list and compare them to the keywords being used by your competitors. Taking a double approach to researching keywords will essentially give you the information you need to take what your competitors are using and adapt it to bolster yourself within the ranks.

In order to find out the individual competition that each keyword possesses and to find out how difficult it will be to rank, you need to check out the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty Tool. The name is pretty self-explanitory; the tool shows you how difficult it is for a specific keyword to rank.

#4 How “strong” are your competitors?

Another added benefit of the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool is it’s ability to assess your competitors. It’s as simple as typing in the URL of your most relevant competitors and it gives you a hugely detailed analysis of where they’re excelling, where they’re not putting as much emphasis and everything in-between. Knowing how your competitors tick will ensure you stay in the lead and ensure they remain in your shadow.

#5 Know what makes a great keyword

The secret formula for the “perfect keyword/phrase” can be found within these 3 main principles:

High Search Volume - Well, I say high volume but what I mean is highest volume. And what I mean by that is medium-small volume. The reason I say this is because the high volume searches are the most competitive. Google AdWords is the best for this purpose. The trick is to find the highest volume of searches twinned with the lowest competition. This way you’re giving yourself a chance to rank in a competitive yet achievable market which allows access to significant amounts of traffic as a result.

Low Competition - This is where the SEOmoz keyword difficulty tool is at it’s best. Finding out the keywords which have the least competition will ensure that you appear higher within the searches and will result in the majority of impressions which converts to higher click-through rates from the SERPs. A higher percentage of low volume searches is definitely better than no percentage of high volume searches.

High Conversion Rate - Google Analytics is a good piece of software which allows you to run PPC campaigns. You can test your keywords to see if the click-through rate is worth pursuing for your content. The ones that lead to conversions are the best ones and should be the phrases that you go for. PPC campaigns can give you a good idea about leads and conversions and they allow you to target multiple keyword groups and gives you the opportunity to set up goals.

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A good way to judge what keywords or phrases are going to have a high click-through rate and ultimately conversion rate is by looking at the cost per click (CPC). As a guide, the higher the CPC, the more competitive the keyword. However for a more accurate campaign we advise you create a PPC campaign and test it yourself but this is just a quick tip that may be beneficial to businesses operating on a tighter budget.

#6 Put your research to good use

So now you have a good list of maybe 10 or 20 strong keywords that are less competitive and have a good search volume. They should be phrases that you would query if you was the customer with no knowledge of the industry and if done correctly, you should notice that you may already have some of the phrases scattered around your existing copy already as these are the terms that industry voices are echoing already.

You need to put your keywords into categories that all point towards a similar product. e.g. So ‘cheap football boots’ and ‘women’s Adidas football boots’ and ‘men’s black studded football boots’ should all be in the same category titled ‘Football Boots’. It is recommended that you relate three or four keywords to each category page for the best effects.

This should simply be a case of amending your current content by changing a few words to incorporate the new keywords you’ve researched. If you haven’t created your content yet and were simply doing research to find out the topics to write about then your topics are your keywords. Your copywriting shouldn’t be loaded with the keywords as ‘keyword stuffing’ is frowned upon and the search engines and users alike will see this as a spammy tactic and degrade your site and it’s pages accordingly. Instead you should seamlessly incorporate the words into the text to keep it readable to the human visitors who are ultimately the people you are aiming your content at first and foremost.

• BONUS TIP:

You’ll need to incorporate keywords into other areas of your site other than your copywriting to gain maximum effect. You can add keywords to your page titles, permalinks, meta titles, meta descriptions, alt text and anchor text. Front loading the keywords in the titles i.e. “KEYWORD Can Help To Change Your Life” has been proven to make a bigger impact than putting the keyword anywhere else within the title.

There’s a great post (it’s a little dated now but is still extremely useful) by SEOmoz‘s CEO and co-founder Rand Fishkin about the perfectly optimised page. In the post he explains how keyword density is so important, why keyword prominence should not be overlooked and explains everything you need to know about ways of improving your on-page optimisation. It’s well worth a read!

EXTRA BONUS TIP:

One thing to note is that algorithms, websites and customer’s needs are constantly evolving. Keep up to date with your keyword research to stay ahead of the competition and cement your place at the top of the search engines.

EXTRA EXTRA BONUS TIP:

I saved this vital piece of information for last as I feel it’s the most important! It is just a simple piece of information that you should keep in the back of your mind and should stop you from cutting corners when carrying out your keyword research. In the search results, ranking #1 gets more traffic than ranking #2, #3 and #4 combined!

Congratulations, you’re now ready to put your newly created/amended content live! Now it’s time to sit back and analyse what’s working and what’s not and act accordingly.

What has worked for you? Leave a comment below, I’d be happy to carry on the conversation.

Adam.

Facebook and Twitter are dead. Of course they’re not really, but for your average small to medium sized business they might as well be.

To be honest it’s less shortage of breath and more shortage of time that leads SME’s to that morbid diagnosis and it’s easy to understand why. You wake up with a great idea – people want your offering, you can supply it to them and make a margin and all of a sudden the house in the country doesn’t look so far away. Unfortunately the inevitable daily detritus then starts to erode your enthusiasm. Accounts, extra staff, more hardware, software upgrades and new marketing efforts are all humps to scale and then….you get your 5th call of the day asking for the name of the person that deals with your website. It’s 10.35am.

“OK great – hi. We can help you with the Google and the Facebook by tweaking the left phalangy and aligning that with position 1 Googles and before you know it you’re in the Caribbean as a multi millionaire. Special offer today only £500 per month. For the next decade. Thank you please.”

I’m no digital pioneer, but I’ve worked in web sales for long enough to know that whilst poetic licence has been used in abundance for my yarn, there’s more than a grain of truth contained therein. Business owners are bombarded with next to useless pitches on “doing the Facebook” when really what’s missing is a sensible understanding of what it takes to get the social media to contribute to the business goals – be that more sales, downloads or whatever.

Loads of businesses are exploiting the web successfully, but many more aren’t – either because they’ve been burnt by the black hatters or in fact have just been encouraged to put their limited resource into inefficient areas – even by well intended firms.

It’s these guys I want to bring back into the fold. I’m so passionate about the revolutionary impact that a well executed digital strategy can have on a business that I urge the cheated / disillusioned / unknowing to embrace as one our #tonecommonsense.

Common Sense Marketing

Now you can call it whatever you like – lead gen, more sales, extra enquiries, uplift in inbound communications – but what I’m selling is getting your phone to ring more and this all starts with building a great website.

Think of your website as the sales generating repository into which you want all your prospects to be placed. So no matter where they’ve seen you, heard you or read you, the website is where they’ll end up.

So #tonecommonsense dictates therefore that your first foot forward is to create an environment capable of converting this footfall into something meaningful – the afore-mentioned phone call is a good example.

This means providing an engaging home page to ensure you hook first time visitors and offering easy access to those all important deeper pages of the site. Along the way, keep reminding people of how you can help – solve problems, understand your customers’ issues and give free advice. Think about your own browsing and buying habits – what works and what doesn’t? Too many companies are constructing their sites with vanity in mind. It’s not about you – it’s about your customer. #tonecommonsense

Let’s imagine then that you’ve got all this nailed. Site looks good – it supports and helps your customers rather than shouts at them. Next is traffic acquisition and this is where the waters muddy as a result of our “doing the Googles for £99 per month” friends.

The customers we’re hypothesising over here are successful businesses that are losing faith with the web because of bad / immoral / downright inaccurate advice so we’re going to keep it real simple – find out where your customers congregate and get in front of them. This is the root of most marketers pitch, but it’s so often wrapped up in tech babble that the message gets diluted.

Are people looking for what you offer on Google et al? If so, how competitive is it and what would it take to get amongst those businesses occupying the loftier positions?

These questions, and more, answered next time in your friendly episode of #tonecommonsense.

Dave.

Contrary to popular belief, you and your business don’t need to be at the pinnacle of your industry to be able to send out your message to the masses. There are numerous ways in which to enhance your social presence and by simply being a part of every social network, you’re increasing your reach in the social media realm.

Big businesses have the social marketing channels nailed and are gaining brand awareness, regular income and repeated sales as a result. Small businesses tend to have a smaller, overloaded workforce therefore may struggle to have the resource (time) to deploy these marketing tactics. For those who are toying with the idea of social media marketing (SMM), here is a brief run through the benefits of each social network and tips about how to promote yourself better online via the social spectrum.

There are too many individual social networks to do an analysis on them all, so here I have listed the most important ones which you should be registering with before starting out on your social media marketing campaign.

Facebook

Main Benefits

• Use ‘like’ gates - Like gates block entry to your page without first ‘liking’ it. This ensures a solid number of subscribers to your page.


• Lead generation - Targeted marketing can generate leads by promoting your business online to members of your page who already ‘like’ it.


• Audience numbers - Facebook is the most popular of the social networks and finding people to like and follow your company will be an easy task.

Facebook has around 800 million users worldwide and is the king of social media in terms of numbers. The average person has around 1,000 friends, which would be impossible in the real world, but it shows the power of reach that connecting with these people provides. Every time you or your business publishes a post on Facebook, every one of your friends will be able see it. That means more eyes to view your advert/product, and it only takes one of those 1,000 friends to post it on their page and then their 1,000 friends also see it and so on. Meaning that potentially – for arguments sake we’ll say that everyone has 1,000 friends – whenever you make a post public you are showing it to 1,000 friends who have 1,000 friends; which equates to 1 million users over two friend reach scope levels. If those million users showed it to all their friends then that would mean that every single user on facebook will have seen your post, and if your post was an innovative product, we can only speculate as to how profitable that would be for business. This would rarely happen, but to know that you have the potential to show your products and services to over 800 million people over only three friend levels. This should be incentive enough to join the revolution and start promoting your services to your potential customers.

Twitter

Main Benefits

• Regular news - News tends to break on Twitter before any other platform. Be the first to show industry trends and watch your followers list sky rocket


• Blog promotion - Twitter is excellent for letting the world know about your latest blog post. Keep eyes focussed on your products.


• Build a community - Tactical Tweets/re-Tweets can gain following from influential people within the industry. Get a Tweet from them and their avid followers will trust their instinct and add you to their followers list.

Twitter, with it’s excellent usability and easy ‘follow’ features has become one of the leading players in the social media spectrum. Advertisers and marketers have seen this platform as a gold mine and are utilising it’s features in a tactical way to enhance SEO on their websites. Gaining popularity on Twitter is ultimately about usage. If you are a regular reader and commenter on blog posts, Tweet about it! Create your own content and Tweet about it. If someone Tweets about an article which you like, re-Tweet it or reply to the Tweet. Regular engagement in the Twitter sphere will see your followers list grow and grow. You’ll find that you gain more traffic to your website as a result and more traffic means more subscribers and sales. By tallying up numerous subscribers, you can offer them discounts on products for being a valued member or offer giveaways to gain their trust. Gaining trust will ensure that whenever they decide to buy a product similar to what you’re offering, it will be your site where they purchase as they trust it because of your social media interactions.

Google+

Main Benefits

• Manipulate search - Google’s emphasis on social signals means that regular interaction with your Google+ account will equate to a stronger ranking for your business website.


• Multiple circles - You can target particular posts to be viewed by certain circles; keeping your private posts private and your work posts profitable.


• Get in early - While Google+ is in it’s infancy, it is advisable to act now to promote your business so that it is in a prime position for when the rest of the world catches on.

The social media benefits available from the mother of search are incredible: Google+ is the fastest growing social network that has ever existed. It grew from 0 to 50 million users in only 88 days! It took the masters of social, Facebook, 1325 days to achieve the same number of users from zero. Google+ is growing 15 times faster than Facebook did in it’s infancy which just shows the potential that this network possesses with regards to social reach. Currently there are around 90 million users of Google+ and with estimates set to be well over 150 million by the end of the year, there’s no surprise that marketers are creating their very own strategies to positively utilise the Google+ phenomenon. With Google’s new integration of search and Google+ to create Search Plus Your World, there are new techniques that need to be deployed to rank on the new searches. With added areas to promote, the need to rank on the new serps has become a frenzy of activity in the Google+ world. The time to act is now to anchor yourself within the new prime spots within searches. Building up a strong profile for your business while the platform is in it’s primary stage will work wonders for your reach when the rest of the social users decide to move over to Google+ alongside the other social giants.

LinkedIn

Main Benefits

• Business to business - LinkedIn is a social network for business therefore from a business point of view, it is one of, if not THE network of choice for marketing.


• Appear in search - The strength that LinkedIn possesses in search is huge. Type in a search query for any contact you might know and you can guarantee that if they have a LinkedIn profile, it will appear on the first page of Google.


• Join the industry - Become a member of the group for your industry and recognise yourself as an expert resource on topics that customers need help with to gain trust.

With around 140 million users worldwide, LinkedIn offers small businesses the chance to rub shoulders with the bigger industry businesses. Industrial social groups make it easy for small businesses to interact and build friendships within their local area, industry and businesses around their own size. Being able to connect with a vast array of businesses ensures that your own business can build partnerships and gain reputation for itself. Users who connect to LinkedIn are often looking for work that needs to be completed. It is essentially an online business directory, but rather than seeing a biased advertisement from your company, potential clientele get to see businesses on a level playing field and can make their own judgement of who to employ through the social interaction and friendliness that each company offer. By regularly offering advice with solutions to industry problems, you will be gaining trust around the company brand and in turn will generate more enquiries which will turn into sales. LinkedIn is an essential source of records and offers connections that should not be disregarded.

YouTube

Main Benefits

• Brand your channel - Creating a YouTube channel is free and you can personalise it to portray the brand image you want your business to perceive.


• Offer helpful advice - Create videos that answer industry questions. Prove that you’re an expert source and gain trust along the way.


• Build reputation - We all know how viral a YouTube video can get. It’s not all about dancing cats etc. A concisely executed tutorial for instance can be viewed by hundreds of thousands even millions.

YouTube in my opinion is the most overlooked social network of them all. Too many businesses rely solely on written content to market their business. As part of your SEO strategy, you should be creating and publishing YouTube videos designed to teach and help the industry you’re aiming at. After all, who’s going to sit there and read a thousand words of text when they can watch a simple 4 minute video? Videos allow you to bridge the gap between business and customer to bring a friendlier, more helpful service to clients via the video screen. Once you have recorded your video, you can edit it to get it optimised for the specific point you’re looking to promote. You can add visual imagery in the form of graphs etc. to illustrate your point yet further. The opportunities are endless for video promotion and one good video that goes viral can boost your revenue in ways you could hardly imagine.

Social media benefits in a nutshell…

This is only a small list of the posssible social media platforms available, but with any social campaign, the key to it’s success is content. This might seem a bit surreal, but creating regular content will mean that you’ll never be struggling for something to post or Tweet about. Small businesses don’t know too much about this but bigger businesses have in-house content creators or out-source the content to companies who offer a copywriting service. Big businesses are regularly creating and adding videos via YouTube, blogs, commenting on posts and offering competitions etc. Even making your own images and posting them to Flickr is a way to increase your social presence.

The equation you need to swim with the big fish…

Regularly pushing out content ensures for regular updates at social level which will create more page views and essentially generate more leads: creating Goals!

It’s free to set up your social profiles!!

Marketing is renowned for being one of the most expensive campaigns a business can undertake. By making your marketing strategy a social one, you cut out the costs of creating these campaigns. The only cost is time! But the ROI you can achieve for your time is well worth the effort. If you struggle to find the time, we strongly advise you outsource the work to professionals who can manage your blog and keep you socially active. The more content you push out, the more exposure you will gain via your social channels and in return will gain trust and recognition. A formula for success.

Want to spend a bit more? Advertise and analyse.

Most of these social networks have space for advertisements. Q) Where else can a small business advertise their products to millions of users at a relatively low cost? A) Nowhere!

Platforms like the Facebook advertising for instance offer specialised advert targeting. Twinned with Facebook’s steady stream of users, this equates to advertising gold! You can fine-tune your campaign to target individuals and show your adverts only to people from a certain area; at a certain time; of a certain age and a particular gender. This is the only possible way (to date) where you can zone-in so much on particular clientele and advertise your services to such a small-knit community – which will actually have a lot of members considering the detailed targeting.

Analytics can be the deciding factor as to whether your campaign was deemed a success or a failure.

Analysing your advertising campaigns gives you the flexibilty to change what might not be working and to focus on the areas that are and it allows you to pull the plug whenever you like. The analytics system for Facebook’s advertising is brilliant as you use data to target your preferred audience, can set-up a PPC campaign, you have no minimum spend per day like some sites do, you can easily pay via PayPal, you can check the click-through rate over time and can alter your campaign to react to that.

Taking advantage of the social spectrum has never been so important for small businesses. Ensure you’re not left in the cold as your competitors explore these avenues. Stay ahead of the game by creating content to enhance your social presence and turn that presence into profit!

Join in the conversation and let us know where your social campaign is taking you…

Adam.

These days, blogs can still be seen as one persons viewpoint on a particular topic however, more recently, blogs have become much more of a marketing technique and the realisation that these blogs can gain epic amounts of subscribers/followers etc. These followers, subscribers and readers can potentially turn into customers, thus blogging has become one of the focal points of business strategy in recent times. The benefits of blogging for business are huge and the potential to monetise from them is an incentive in itself to incorporate one within your business website. Whether you are a marketing professional looking to set-up an in-house blog that can help your company to grow from a small presence online to a large one, or you already have a blog but are fed up of spending hours creating engaging content to no avail in the form of increased traffic and sales, then carry on reading to find out why it is vital for your business to include a blog and to show why your efforts may be going unnoticed at the moment, but given time, you will start to reap the benefits of blogging for business.

Why do I need a business blog?

An effective blog is a major form of traffic generation to your website. If done correctly, a blog has the power to turn any small business into a thriving metropolis of sales and can boost a company that may be chugging along slowly into a serious player within the industry. There are lots of examples of businesses building industry-wide reputation on the strength of published content

If you see yourself as this ‘chugging’ company and you haven’t got a blog on your website or you do have one but you’re struggling to maintain it and keep it up-to-date, we strongly advise you take the advice from this blog and either set up a blog yourself or outsource the work so somebody else can maintain and update your blog.

Here at Tone, we offer content marketing services that can maintain and update your websites blog with new and engaging content that will increase the flow of traffic visiting your site which, in turn, will positively boost your online sales.

The Benefits of Blogging for Business

It’s all good and well knowing that you need to introduce a blog or maintain your current blog section, but understanding the benefits of doing so is the part that will give you an ‘extra spring in your word’. Knowing that you’re positively affecting business sales and growing a trusting community of followers within the industry should be incentive enough to spend time and resources blogging, but if this still fails to win you over, I’ve created a list of the main benefits of blogging for business to show you why a business blog should be the central driving force for your search engine strategy:

• Show Your Expertise - By offering readers of your blog expert advice to solve their problems within the industry, you’re subconsciously gaining trust from them so that next time they’re struggling with an issue, it will be you who they come to for advice. Keeping potential customers visiting the site will build your reputation within the industry and improve your position on the search engine results pages.


• Stand Out From The Crowd - Differentiate yourself from the competition by keeping clientele up to date with industry trends and new products that will be beneficial to them. By offering a superior service to your customers, your company will be viewed as superior as will the products you sell which will push you into the driving seat within the industry as well as increasing sales.


• Improve Your Search Rankings - Updating your blog and regularly publishing posts increases the frequency that the search engine spiders crawl your site. Keeping the bots returning regularly shows a ‘freshness’ of the site that in this day-and-age is a hugely influential ranking factor. Higher search rankings improves your visibility. Visibililty increases readers. The more people reading your site will mean more sales.


• Build a Community - By targetting your content to certain clients via social media platforms, you increase the chances of your blog post being shared. If an influential person within the industry re-Tweets your post to their 5,000 followers, it means more eyes are viewing your site and the more people viewing, the stronger you become within the industry. It starts with exceptional, engaging content.


• Effective Link Building - Creating good content that gets shared around will mean that more people and stronger sites within the industry are linking to your site. A link from a site is like an approval of your site from theirs. The more approvals and the more relevant they are, the stronger your site will look to the search engine robots which in turn will rank your site higher than your competition should they not have any links.


• Portray Your Brand - A blog offers you the chance to show who you really are as a company. You have the opportunity to step away from the professional status and become a member of the community at grass-roots level. Slacken off the boardroom tie and engage your audience with conversational content that is relevant to the problems they’re facing in the industry. Come up with friendly solutions and the ‘trust’ factor will sky rocket. The more trust worthy you are as a brand, the liklier you are to convert those leads into sales.


• Educate the industry - By having a community of followers, you can listen to their problems and offer them sensible solutions in the form of products. By gaining the trust and offering products in a problem-solving way, the customer will feel more obliged to buy it and give it a go as opposed to a salesman pushing to sell the product by any means neccessary.

If done correctly, a blog can carry the power needed to influence the marketplace where-by rather than having to go out and chase business and leads, the business will come to you. This can only happen if you build up trust and reputation within the industry and the best way to achieve this is by creating a blog for your business and using it as the central element of your marketing strategy.

Incorporate a blog into your website at all costs, the ROI that you will gain will ultimately be worth it. If you’re struggling for time to maintain the blog or need help incorporating one into your site, then we advise that you get professional help.

Don’t limit what you’re able to achieve!

Let us know if you have any blog related questions and I’ll be happy to have a conversation/debate about them.

Adam.