By now, most people have heard of SEO regardless of their industry, department or company size. But what is the actual marketing impact of SEO and how can you use it as a tool to promote and grow your business? Let’s take a look at what SEO stands for and how marketers around the world use it to promote their clients.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is the process of driving traffic to your website with the help of all of your organic online content (blogs, articles, social media content etc.). However, be aware that it is not just any content that will increase your website’s traffic; it is crucial that it is optimised specifically for SEO in order to maximise results. SEO entails optimising all of your digital assets, such as your website, your social media, website content, etc. for search engines. 

Okay, but do you REALLY need it?

Why can’t I just run paid advertising campaigns to increase conversions? Well, you can choose to split your marketing budget in any way you want and feel free to experiment with different marketing strategies until you find the sweet spot. However, the reason that SEO might be a better choice is that, with SEO, individuals have already shown an interest in a particular product or service. With online advertising campaigns, you are targeting people based on different strategies such as retargeting or lookalike audiences with the goal of persuading them to purchase your product. But you don’t need to do that with SEO because people are already looking for a specific product or service – you just need to make sure that yours comes first on the search engine results. 

Becoming increasingly popular by the year, SEO is a very effective way to fulfil your marketing goals, whether that is brand awareness or conversions as it’s been found that most people will never look further than the first page on Google. Imagine you are an organic tea brand in London. What if every time someone typed in “organic tea London” into Google, your brand would pop up first? That would have a dramatic impact on your sales, as well as your brand awareness. Even better, this could help you tremendously with your online advertising campaigns too. You now have an audience that you know have enquired about your product or are likely to recognise your brand in the online environment. It will give you an advantage when it comes to targeting different audiences and increase your chances of generating sales. 

Where do you start?

The two main types of SEO that you will be introduced to are On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. When thinking about search engine optimisation, most of us think of link building and complicated keywords strategies. While all of these elements are, of course, crucial to SEO, On-Page SEO serves only as a foundation for everything else that you implement later as part of your optimisation strategy. As most content will be published on your website, it makes a lot of sense to start with the website itself. Your On-Page SEO is a primer of the Off-Page SEO activities and you want to get it right. So, is your website optimised? 

On-Page SEO 

URLs 

Your URL structure is important not only for SEO but also for tracking purposes. Ensuring you have a clearly defined and segmented URL structure will give you a better understanding of what performs well and what is not working so well on your website. 

From an SEO standpoint, you want to keep your URLs short and concise for best results and remember to include relevant keywords wherever applicable. 

Sitemap

Another important On-Page element that you need to consider when performing On-Page SEO activities is your sitemap. This is (quite literally) a map or a blueprint of your website. Why would this be relevant for SEO? Well, it helps Google or other search engines to find, index or crawl your website’s content. By letting the search engines know which pages of your website are the most important, it will help to optimise your website and prime it for Off-Page activities. 

Title Tags 

While we’ve learned in recent years that your website content must include keywords and be SEO-friendly, placing these keywords in the titles of your website is probably still one of the most impactful positions. 

“The length of a title tag that Google will show will vary (it’s based on pixels, not character counts) but in general 55-60 characters is a good rule of thumb here.” (Demers T., 2020) 

Meta Descriptions 

Although you might be unsure what a meta description is, I guarantee that you see meta descriptions every time you search the web. 

The meta description is, put simply, a 160 character snippet of your website’s content. It’s used by search engines to let viewers know a bit about what they are going to find on a certain link before they actually visit the website. Seeing as many of us read the meta description before we enter a website, this is a crucial element for optimising your website. 

Alt Text 

It is highly likely that you have images on your website, whether they are in your blog posts, the home page, product or service pages, price lists, etc. Believe it or not, all of the images on your website are relevant for SEO. Since these are recognised as content by search engines, it’s essential to tag these pictures with relevant keywords in order to make it easier for Google or other search engines to find and push your website higher in the search results. 

“For example, if you have pictures of a customized Superman water bottle on your article, then save the alt-text for the image as ‘customized superman water bottle’, and then that picture will pop up whenever that keyword is searched for.

60% of consumers are more likely to contact a business or visit a site when a relative image shows up in their search results.” (Patel A., 2020) 

HTTP vs HTTPS

“A protocol is that “http” or “https” preceding your domain name. Google recommends that all websites have a secure protocol (the “s” in “https” stands for “secure”). To ensure that your URLs are using the https:// protocol instead of http://, you must obtain an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate. SSL certificates are used to encrypt data.” (Muller B., Moz) 

Keep in mind that there are other elements that you should always check before starting Off-Page SEO activities, such as page speed, header response, redirects, fixing broken links, and even duplicate content as these are all key factors in your website’s health and they eventually will have an impact on your SEO efforts. 

Once your On-Page optimisation is complete, it’s time for you to develop your Off-Page SEO strategy and find out the perfect recipe for your brand in order to get more traffic to your website, rank higher in the search results and ultimately, grow your business. Next time, we are going to discuss everything you need to know about Off-Page SEO so make sure you come back to find out how you can start performing SEO tasks that will help you achieve your business goals. 

Are you thinking about investing some of your marketing budgets in SEO but you’re not sure where to start? Luckily for you, this is exactly what we do! As a digital marketing agency, we can help you with that, all you need to do is get in touch with us today at hello@socialgamma.com.

Blogging is a great marketing channel that can provide your business with both online visibility and credibility within your field. It’s likely that there are other companies out there offering a similar product or service to you. Creating a blog is a great way to set you apart from your competitors. It gives your business a personality and the chance to share information and insights that will make you stand out. But sometimes, it’s hard to know what to write about. Finding the right balance of entertainment, interest and information can be tricky. So, we’ve put together a few tips to help you create killer content that your users are going to love.

The following diagram illustrates the perfect choice of a blog post. The topics you choose should sit in the middle of the three circles – they should have the potential to drive high volumes of traffic to your site, they should be highly relevant to your offering and for the greatest success, the subject matter should be a novel topic with relatively little content already available.

Share information about your product or service

One of the main reasons people visit your site is to learn more about your product or service. So, your blog is a great place to share what really sets your offering apart. Maybe you follow an innovative process, source materials from sustainable suppliers around the world or have a unique and exciting way to welcome new customers. This is your chance to shout about it and let readers know why your product or service is so great. Make sure your posts are clear and concise, avoid any technical jargon and include appealing visuals that illustrate the points you’re making.   

Incorporate a human element

Humans love learning about fellow humans. Be sure to balance out the product-focused posts with those with a more human touch. You could share the story of the origins of your company, focusing on where the idea came from, the challenges you faced and any key milestones along the way. This will allow readers to feel a connection to you as a person, and not just see your business as a soulless entity. Alternatively, focusing on the people who make up your business is another great way to incorporate human interest into your blog. You could do a Q+A session with some of your team members or share details of what they get up to behind the scenes. Anything that keeps your blog friendly and relatable is likely to build trust with your readers.

Give advice

As a business with a successful product or service in your industry, people will look up to you for advice on achieving their own goals. Compile posts with handy tips, step-by-step instructions or some useful insights into the knowledge you’ve gained during your career. If your post is filled with helpful and practical advice, readers may even bookmark it to refer back to when they need a reminder, which is great for keeping your brand at the front of people’s minds. Incorporating well-designed infographics that readers can easily share will also help increase your reach and establish your blog as a useful and knowledgeable resource.

Share industry updates

If someone has an interest in your product or service, it’s likely they’re also interested in the industry in general. Keep up to date with current news and trends and share this on your blog alongside your own opinions and, of course, how this relates to your business and why it might be relevant for your customers. By showing readers that you’re on top of the latest developments in the industry, you’ll gain authority in the field and your blog may even become a place people visit to keep themselves informed, which will drive lots of traffic to your site. This kind of post is likely to get shared on social media too, which is another great way to build awareness of your brand.

Be inspiring

People are much more likely to read your blog if it makes them feel good. Keep your tone upbeat and make sure you leave your readers feeling positive, even empowered. If you’re giving tips, ensure they’re easy to follow. If you highlight an issue, make sure you emphasise how to solve it – even better if your product or service is the perfect solution! Remind your readers of the values that your company believes in, and inspire them to instil similar positive values in their own lives. Just remember, those reading your blog are already a captive audience so always ensure you give them enough reason to come back!

While blogging can bring many benefits to your business, it can also take a significant amount of time which is something many teams don’t have a lot of. If you’d like support from an agency in creating engaging and well-informed content for your blog, please get in touch with us at hello@socialgamma.com or visit our website at www.socialgamma.com – we’d love to help!

You may not have heard of Pinterest if you are not an avid fan of arts and crafts. Pinterest is a hub of quirk and interest, an online visual search engine that allows its users to discover, pin (aka collect on a page/profile) and share pictures and videos relating to their interests. They pin these items on “Boards” – different pages they label as subcategories like Fashion, Craft, House Inspo and so on.

Pinterest is a huge hit amongst the public as a personal tool, but what benefits can it provide to your business? Like all social networks, it can be used carefully and cleverly as a marketing tool to do 5 key things.

Grow Your Audience

The more frequently you use the site, the more likely your content is to be pinned. When this happens, your content and services are exposed to new groups of people, with massive global potential.

Grow Brand Awareness

With all these potential people seeing your content, it’s a great opportunity to reinforce your brand values and personality by selecting content that fits. As you are more active and engaging, the audience learn more about you and this helps to build brand awareness and loyalty.

Improve your SEO

Using the correct keywords across Pinterest can help to improve not just Pinterest Search Rankings, but also Google Search Rankings for your business.

Increase Website Traffic

Creating content to pin allows you to include a direct link to your website, product or service! This means that every single piece of content you are sharing can have a direct call-to-action with potentially great results.

Place Ads

Like other platforms, Pinterest even allows you to turn your content into ads and will place them across the network. These appear to a person looking like normal pins – almost. They have a small text indication that the piece of content is an advertisement. They have an easy to use ad manager that allows you to define audience characteristics including Age, Gender, Interests, Location, Language and Device. You can even use business analytics so you can see how your ad is doing.

This is all great! But how do you know if Pinterest is for you? Have a look at what your business is promoting and compare it carefully to the type of content and consumers on Pinterest. If you are a finance business, then it might not be the right move. However, if you are a fashion, beauty, furnishings or even craft brand then Pinterest could be a roaring success for you. All you need then is content that can make you stand out from the crowd.

Having done a lot of reflecting on our beliefs and our ethos at Social Gamma, we are embarking on a new chapter in our company story: Social Good.

Social Good is a mission, a way for us to apply our individual and collective beliefs to our work every single day. The most fulfilling projects and clients we have taken on are the ones trying to make a positive change in the world, and we want to build them up to something greater than ever before. We’ve made the decision to make a change and a difference.

We’re focusing in on just a few key industries:

• Health, Wellness and Nutrition
• Non-Profit
• Sustainability
• Education

Having worked with many clients in these industries so far, we’ve come to love not just what they do, but what we can do for them. For our health, wellness and nutrition clients we have carried out a variety of web and app development services, as well as investor and lead generation digital ads. We have helped our clients gain key investors, find leads and even maintain and develop their online presence to ensure their continued success. Our non-profit and sustainability clients have benefitted form our social media expertise. We’re proud of the achievements we have made on their channels, both in engagement and follower retention. We have also helped them to achieve fundraising goals and launch successful events and projects. Our education clients found new leads and an increased following through paid lead generation and social media ads.

And this is not just a side project. The team has always had a passion for giving back, from their university days to now. One of our Account Managers, Ana, has volunteered at a special school, helping children from the ages of 8-14 with learning difficulties and autism. She also worked with toddlers in foster care. Our Lead Creative, Rebecca, was a Team Leader for breast cancer awareness charity “CoppaFeel!”, promoting the cause, educating young people on campus and raising funds. The team won a fundraising award and ranked 3^rd on the UK CoppaFeel! University Fundraising Leader board the year she graduated. Our Managing Director and Founder, Ria, led a group called Remedy Through Music, who visited children’s hospitals every week to sing to the patients. We are inspired to this day by the people we worked with and the plans we helped carry out.

So now, our mission is clear. We will use our skills and know-how to spread the positive waves out into the world! If you are in the health, wellness and nutrition, sustainability, non-profit or education industries and you’re looking for a Digital Marketing Team who share an affinity with your values and passions, then give Social Gamma a call. We look forward to doing Social Good with you!