What do you need to know about Digital Marketing for your business?

Do you want to understand what SEO is? Are you looking to get started with SEO and know more about it? Confused with a lot of information and not sure what SEO is and where to start? Will SEO help your business grow? These could be a few questions that must be hovering in your mind. which may be the very reason you have landed on this blog. Your search ends here…as with this article we will help you understand what is SEO and how it can help small businesses like yours. Search Engine Optimization is educating search engines to know the existence of your website and its contents. Once a search engine records your website’s existence and its contents, all the details are stored in their unique database. So whenever your customers search for any service that you provide, the system searches in the database and displays the search results. This happens in a fraction of seconds as you can see in the screenshot. There are close to 1.74 billion websites across the world. Every website has content on it. And search engines typically crawl only those websites which are recorded in its database. When it comes to search engine optimization, most of the focus is only on Google Search Engine as it dominates the search traffic. There are other search engines like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, AOL, Naver, Yandex, Baidu, Ecosia, Sogou, and Shenma etc, whose market share is represented below. It which clearly shows that Google is not just the most used, but it dominates the search. Google became the king of search engines, as it keeps itself updated with people and their search behavior. Hence it is very essential to keep your website updated as per Google search engine needs.

Why is SEO important?

Well, we come across this question from most of our prospects who are just entering the digital world and launching their first website. And here is the answer. SEO not only helps you to rank on Google but helps you create global visibility, improves sales and builds trust. When your customers find you on Google, they are highly likely to reach you for your products and services. Hence SEO becomes the most important step right after you have your website on the internet.

What is SERP in SEO?

There are a humongous number of websites on the internet, waiting to be displayed in the search results. Search engines need a measure based on which they decide which websites should be displayed first. And there should be a reason or a measure of why a website is displayed first. That is where Google introduced the concept of Search Engine Result Pages on its search engine. SERP basically indicates the position of a website in Google’s search results. Here are a few things you must know to rank your website on Google: STEP 1: Keep Google educated about your products and services through your website. “How do I keep my website updated every time, so Google knows it?” This is a general question that we at KloudPortal answer for most of our clients. Developing a website, doesn’t mean Google will know that the website exists. Many of our customers initially thought this was the case. We at Kloudportal educated them that there are a set of tasks that are to be done, which invite the Google bots to crawl the pages of the website and record their existence. Typically these tasks come under On-Page SEO.

What is On-Page SEO?

For a website to be crawled by the Google search engine bots, the website should follow a few basic guidelines. Here are the top 10 guidelines to be followed:

• A website should have unique content
• Optimize the speed of the website. Make sure it loads in less than 3 seconds. Make sure to work with a reliable server provider like OVH, Bigrock, Hostgator etc., to ensure your website is never facing any downtime.
• Ensure the website has accelerated mobile pages. This is a recent parameter that was introduced by Google.
• Add content regularly to your website. Update blogs every week and add valuable content for your subscribers and website visitors.
• Update your sitemap.xml
• Canonicalization of URLs
• Javascript Minifications
• Robots.txt file update
• Keywords, Meta Titles and Descriptions on each of the pages
• Image optimization

There are close to 25 steps other than the top ten stated above, for on-page SEO to be completed. Setting up your on-page SEO helps Google in indexing your website pages. However, this alone isn’t sufficient to rank your website on Google. Google’s PageSpeed Insights is the best place to get a picture of how your website is performing. You have completed step 1? Searched yourself on Google with the keywords? And your website doesn’t show up? Wondering why it still doesn’t show up? You are too early assessing the power of search engine, my friend. Here is the next step: STEP 2: Educate Google by putting your website in other visible places. Didn’t get it? Never mind! Marketing is all about telling the World “I exist”. It is not at one place that you should say you exist, but it should be at different places as well. For example, if I own a store and I keep hoarding in front of my store, that itself isn’t enough to drive the people to come to my store. My store should be visible to my prospects and customers where they are searching and also where they may not be searching. So pamphlets, hoardings etc., play an important role. The same applies to digital marketing and SEO. So the technique of educating Google about your existence through various other places is called Off-Page SEO.

What do we do in off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO is all about submissions, backlinks and driving traffic to your website. How do we do that? Here are a few technical steps we follow:

• Identify the right keywords for your website. We do this with the help of Google Keyword Planner tool or Uber Suggest.
• Identify the right bookmarking sites.
• Submit our websites in Classified websites, Directory submissions, Create PPTs, White Papers etc., and submit them regularly.

Another important step to generating backlinks is through content marketing. I shall be covering that in the next step in detail. SEO is all about consistency, persistence and quality. “How long does it take to have my website visible on Google Search Results?” This is another question that we hear from our customers. And trust me there is no single answer for this question. It depends on many factors. However the key is to be consistently producing the content and keep submitting to the authority websites.

Step 3: Content Marketing

Content writing is the key to content marketing. Writing the right content that your customer could be searching for, is always a challenge. We at KloudPortal mostly work with doctors and healthcare professionals for their digital marketing needs. After thorough research and analyzing the SERPs we understood that a search on Google uses the very basic terms and not the medical jargon. Doctors were amazed by the results when we showed them how the customers were searching for their services. Presenting the content in the most readable and understandable manner is important to produce effective content. Here are a few best practices for effective content writing:

• Keep the sentences short, simple and meaningful.
• Adopt a conversational style rather than an informational style of writing.
• Back your content with the right statistics.
• Make your content Voice SEO friendly.
• Make sure to add relevant keywords and have them in the right proportions. Over-optimization with keywords is not a good practice.
• Most importantly, don’t forget that your E-mail is also a content marketing tool. Content not always needs to be text or Images, videos also play a vital role in marketing nowadays. Video marketing, especially self-made videos, is gaining traction.

Step 4: Social Media Marketing:

Social media is a marketing messiah. The way social media attracts and glues up the audience, itself makes it great leverage for businesses. While Facebook, Instagram and Youtube engage the masses, professional networks like LinkedIn and Opportunity have more B2B audiences. While Facebook, Insta, LinkedIn, Pinterest give a platform for social engagement of the audience, we cannot forget the discussion platforms like Quora, which engages few more.. We at KloudPortal suggest our clients with the appropriate Social Media Channels for their Digital Marketing engagements. We sincerely believe in narrowing down the target audience and then suggest the marketing plan. We follow a structured process and a strategic approach. Most of our marketing plans are equipped with mitigation steps. This keeps the risk under the client’s control and ensures effective spend on marketing activities.

STEP 5: Press Releases

Occasional Press Releases about your latest activities help drive traffic to your website. Typically press releases every 6 months will not only help in building the traffic to the website but also get you the necessary backlinks you may need to build the domain authority for your website. Domain authority is one of the key ranking parameters in SEO. Press Releases could be for the company or for your CEO, who can build a brand and drive traffic to the websites. When it comes to PR, we consider the strategic placement of resources out there, so maximum leverage can be applied. Our Digital personal PR plans, Corporate marketing strategies and brand building activities have helped businesses to gain very good visibility in the market. If you would like to know more about us and our services, please don’t hesitate to fill the form. We shall be glad to get in touch with you!