The marketing industry is constantly changing, with new tools, channels, and strategies emerging regularly. Among the most influential additions to the marketing toolkit is artificial intelligence. AI is transforming how businesses develop their marketing strategies, enabling them to create content, manage social media, execute advertising campaigns, and perform SEO tasks more efficiently. Understand why you need to integrate AI-generated content into your digital marketing plans to stay competitive and enhance your online presence.

What is AI-Generated Content?

AI-generated content is created by using an artificial intelligence tool such as ChatGPT to produce text, images or other media. This technology utilizes algorithms and vast amounts of data to mimic human creativity and language, generating articles, social media posts, reports and images. The goal is to create high-quality content that’s engaging and relevant to the target audience.

The Benefits of AI-Generated Content

Streamlines Content Generation Process

Using AI to help you generate content can save time and streamline your content marketing. It’s especially useful for repetitive tasks, creating content outlines, overcoming writer’s block or producing large volumes of content quickly. Traditional content creation can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. With AI, you can generate blog posts, social media updates, video scripts, email campaigns, and more in a fraction of the time it would take a human. However, you still need to review and fact-check the content to ensure accuracy, relevance, and quality.

Maintains Consistency

Maintaining a consistent voice and style across all your marketing channels can be challenging, especially as your business grows. AI-generated content ensures that your messaging remains consistent, no matter how much content you need. Plus, it allows you to scale your content production to meet increasing demands without sacrificing quality.

Is Cost-Effective

AI-generated content is cost-effective because it significantly reduces the time and resources required for content creation. Instead of hiring multiple writers or spending hours crafting content, businesses can use AI tools to quickly generate high-quality text, images or videos. This automation allows companies to produce more content in less time, freeing up employees to focus on strategic tasks. By streamlining the content creation process, AI helps your business save money while still delivering engaging and relevant material to their audiences.

Eliminates Writer’s Block

Many small business owners avoid writing content because getting started is the hardest part. Staring at a blank screen can make anyone just close the window and move on. Using an AI content generator, you can add the topic you want to write about and get a first draft quickly. For many busy people, editing existing content is faster and more effective than starting from scratch.

The Downside of AI-Generated Content

AI-generated content, while efficient and cost-effective, comes with several cons.

Does Not Align with Google’s E-E-A-T Standard

Google’s E-E-A-T Standard is how Google determines if the search results are providing helpful, relevant information based on your search intent. E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness. When producing content that humans value, it needs to project your expertise while also showing your experience with the topic.

AI-generated content may sound good but could lack the creativity and unique perspective that human writers bring. AI tools can struggle to fully understand context (or intent), leading to inaccuracies or misinterpretations that can affect its quality and reliability. Content that is generic or uninspiring does not help the human because it lacks the personal touch and emotional connection that resonates with them.

Still Requires Human Oversite

AI tools can create a great first draft of your content. But the quality of AI-generated content heavily depends on the data it is trained on. Poor-quality input data can result in poor-quality output. You need to review and fine-tune the content to ensure it is accurate, relevant, and high-quality.

So although using AI can streamline your content creation process, you still need resources to review, fact-check and ensure your content is written in your voice and not misleading, biased, or plagiarized. This can offset some of the time and cost savings.

Impact on SEO Performance

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cornerstone of digital marketing. AI-generated content can have a significant impact on SEO by enhancing the quantity and quality of your content. When used strategically, AI-generated content can boost SEO efforts, driving more traffic and improving online visibility.

AI tools can quickly produce keyword-rich articles, blog posts and web pages that improve a site’s search engine rankings. It can help identify the most relevant keywords, optimize content for search engines, and even generate SEO-friendly meta descriptions and titles. This means better search engine rankings and more visibility for your business.

However, it is important that you review and edit your content so that it is unique and valuable, as search engines prioritize original, high-quality material. Over-reliance on AI without human oversight can lead to generic or repetitive content, keyword stuffing or low-quality backlinks. All of these can harm SEO performance. Plus with the ease of content production, there’s a risk of over-saturating the market with similar types of content, making it harder for any single piece to stand out.

The Future of AI in Digital Marketing

As AI technology continues to advance, its role in digital marketing will only grow. We can expect even more sophisticated AI content creation tools, improved personalization capabilities, and seamless integration with other marketing technologies. Businesses that embrace AI as a content creation tool now will be well-positioned to stay ahead of the competition and meet the ever-changing demands of their customers.

Conclusion

AI-generated content is not just a buzzword. It is a major tool for small business owners to use to produce better content faster. By enhancing efficiency, consistency, personalization, and cost-effectiveness, AI is transforming how businesses create and distribute content. As you plan your future marketing activities, consider how AI-generated content can fit into your marketing strategy and help you achieve your business goals.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. How AI-Generated Content is Changing Digital Marketing is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

One of the hardest exercises for small business owners is to figure out where they should focus to grow their business. Business owners are sometimes afraid to focus for fear of leaving money on the table. But to try to be everything to everybody, you confuse your audience and never achieve your true purpose. It prevents you from loving what you do and working with those who appreciate your expertise.

In order to focus on the important areas however, you also need to abandon those things that get in the way of you achieving your goal. As business owners, we tend to often get distracted by other people’s urgent “opportunities” and have a hard time saying no. And saying no may be a more important habit for us to learn than anything else.

Things you can do to focus more within your business include: 

• Setting one outcome goal that drives all activities
• Create a system to achieve your goal
• Narrowing your ideal target market
• Streamlining your service offerings
• Focusing your marketing activities
• Adopting the two week sprint
• Eliminating and outsourcing tasks that don’t drive revenue
• Stop planning and start acting

The more you can streamline and work on the right things that make a difference in your business, the more successful you will be.

Set your outcome goal and stick with it

Trying to achieve too many goals sets you up to achieve none. You should have one outcome goal and it should be revenue or new clients. All other things that seem to be “goals” really aren’t. Building a new website, launching a new marketing campaign, growing your email list are all projects that should be tied to performance. These projects should be selected to help you achieve your outcome goal.

So, if you are launching a new marketing campaign, make sure the campaign has a deadline and a target result. For example:

Create and promote a new lead magnet by September 1 so that it grows my email list by 500 subscribers per month. 

Now your project has meaning. You’ve specified the what, when and why of the project. Increasing subscribers to your email list should help you achieve your outcome goal.

Create a system to achieve your goal

A system is a documented repeatable process for creating visibility and generating quality leads. Once you know what you need to do to effectively market your business, divide the tasks into daily, weekly or monthly activities and schedule them into your calendar.

You need to figure out a way to make these tasks a habit. Creating daily habits that you schedule in your calendar can help you take your marketing from an overwhelming task to a completely achievable system.

For example, if you are using content marketing to attract qualified leads, you may want to:

• Publish new content on Mondays
• Promote your content on social media on Tuesdays
• Create a Facebook sponsored post with a call to action on Thursdays to drive people to your website to get your offer and sign up for your list.

If you repeat this process regularly, you will find yourself doing them more consistently, which in turn should produce better results.

Further reading

Marketing System vs Marketing Plan: Essential Tools for Success

Narrowly focus your target audience

For your marketing to fall into place, you truly have to understand your target audience. We may be able to work with many different types of businesses, but doing so just complicates your business. Trying to manage different audiences with similar but slightly different products can break your business if you’re not careful.

Ideally, you should pick one target market niche or “starter market”. Choose those from your best clients. When you narrow your focus to this audience, create the right product offerings and deliver, serving them becomes a system. This makes your business more consistent. 

For example, if your market is service-based businesses like health and wellness professionals, home service providers (like plumbers and electricians) or coaches and consultants, choose one of these to begin with.

• Build your product offering just for them.
• Craft your messages that speak to them in their words
• Create a customer experience that is better than your competition

Now you have a narrowly focused service offering that you can deliver without any complexity. 

Once you have that market working well, feel free to add your next market. Adapting what you offer your initial market will be easier than starting from scratch.

Further reading

Finding Your Niche through an Effective Target Market Strategy

Develop your service offerings specifically for your target

When you are considering what products you will offer your narrow target audience, think about what they will value. Don’t over-complicate them. Once you begin working with a client, you can always offer them more. Doing it this way will also let you test your services to be sure they are getting value, and you are getting paid for your expertise.

Once you have data to prove your offerings fit your target, then you can create value-added packages that can be marketed more consistently. Value-added packages makes it easy for prospects to select what they need, simplifying your sales process. 

Further reading

7 Key Advantages of Service Bundling for Small Businesses

Focus your marketing activities to gain visibility

Choosing the right marketing activities for your business can be the difference between gaining visibility and wasting time and money. 

If you are a small, local service business, focus on:

• Building a powerful web presence and optimizing it for local search
• Creating a robust Google My Business profile
• Asking for reviews and testimonials from your best customers

Trying to do more while servicing your clients can put a strain on you and your business. Choose your marketing activities wisely and be sure they lead you towards your outcome goal.

Further reading

Best Marketing Strategies for Small Business that Deliver Results

Plan your work in two week sprints

Trying to plan out your work for longer than two weeks leads to procrastination. By focusing on a shorter time frame and reviewing your results every two weeks, you can track your progress and see what works. Planning your work for only two weeks at a time encourages you to be very particular about what you will add to your to-do list. 

This also provides a feedback loop that helps you quickly learn about what isn’t working in order to make changes before you can’t recover. When you wait for weeks to review what is happening, you miss opportunities to adjust your plan to accommodate changes in the market.

Eliminate or outsource things that aren’t aligned with your goal

One of the real challenges of a small business is all of the noise that appears to be important but really only gets in the way of results. The two week sprints help you make decisions on what you should be working on. Keeping your outcome goal as the focus, you can choose the right things to work on. With everything else, you can decide whether to stop doing them totally or, if important to the business, outsource the tasks to experts.

Stop planning and start acting

I didn’t say don’t plan. I recommend a 90 day marketing action plan that helps you focus your activities on short term goals that benefit your business growth. Focusing on important projects help you make decisions on what you should be doing and what you can let go.

But without action, your marketing plan is just words. Nothing will be accomplished to help your business thrive. Schedule time to fully develop and execute your marketing campaigns. Create an action plan that breaks the effort down into smaller tasks that can be scheduled to help you achieve small wins that lead to your ultimate accomplishment.

Further reading

Marketing Execution: Plan, Execute, Track, and Measure

Implement a system that helps your business focus

A system helps you make decisions on what you should be working on and what you can eliminate. As a certified partner in the 90 Day Year Peak Performance System, I help you incorporate this focus into your business that will help you work on the right things to keep you moving forward. When you focus on the right things and eliminate the noise from your daily schedule, you will be more productive and will keep moving closer to your goals. 

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Improve Small Business Success: The Power of Business Focus is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Your website is the virtual front door to your business and the foundation to all of your digital marketing efforts. This business tool has powerful effects on your business and in many cases, it is the first experience people have with your brand. It can help you increase sales, build brand awareness and educate visitors on how you can help them. If your current website isn’t attracting and retaining visitors that take action, redesign your website to improve its user experience.

How does your website look to a visitor?

Look at your website from the perspective of a customer and ask yourself the following questions:

• What type of first impression does it make?
• Is your site welcoming and professional?
• Can visitors quickly find what they are looking for?
• Does it make your visitor feel as if you understand their needs?

In order to create a website that drives inbound leads, you must first understand your target audience.

• Why they are searching for a solution?
• What do they need?
• How can you help them?

A well-developed, professional web presence is a requirement for gaining new customers and establishing credibility. Your website should introduce your business to your target visitor in a way that relates to them and encourages them to dig deeper into what you have to offer. When scanning your content, the visitor is subconsciously asking “what’s in it for me”? If your website doesn’t answer that question or convince them that you understand their needs, they will look elsewhere.

What is website user experience?

Website user experience, or UX, is the impression left on a person who has visited your website. Did they easily find what they were looking for and left feeling like you helped them out? Or did they leave quickly because your site is unorganized, slow or annoying with too many moving parts?

The goal of creating a quality user experience is to ensure your website lives up to their expectations and that users find value in what you are providing to them. You want to make the time your visitor spends on your website as meaningful and valuable as possible.

According to Usability.gov, for there to be a meaningful and valuable user experience, information on your website must be:

• Useful: Is your content relevant and useful to your visitor?
• Usable: Does your website make it simple for users to access what they need?
• Desirable: Does your website consistently project your brand and appeal to your visitor?
• Findable: Can your visitors easily find what they came looking for? Can search engines access content that can be indexed to make it easier for those searching to find?
• Accessible: Does your website work for people with disabilities?
• Credible: Does your website instill trust in your brand?

Although each of these are important on their own, together they create a website that can satisfy the needs of a broad community of people.

Tips to create a quality user experience

Keep it simple

Start with a quality design that is simple to use and focused on your goals. There are many areas where simplification can go a long way.

• Be sure your layout is clean with minimal widgets, pop-ups or unnecessary movement.
• Remove unnecessary distractions that prevent your visitor from finding what they need.
• Reduce your forms to ask for only necessary information. Many people visit from their mobile device. Having too many non-essential fields will deter them from taking action.
• Choose typography that is easy to read and understand for any user. Increase the size and line height of text to make it easy to read.
• Use your brand consistently across the website, including colors, fonts and page layout.

Ensure your website is mobile-friendly

According to Google research, mobile has become the dominant platform for searches. And in June 2024, 62.16% of all web traffic is through mobile devices. Just because your website may look great on a desktop device, it may not look right on various mobile devices. In fact, 74% of people are more likely to return to your site if it’s mobile-friendly.

Check your analytics for what percentage of visitors are using a mobile device. You may be surprised at the number. Mobile should not be an afterthought. Don’t just look at your homepage on your mobile device and call it a day. Every page on your website has to look great. Just because something looks great on the desktop, it might not work so well on a smartphone.

For the best user experience you can provide, be sure to test your website on all devices. There are Chrome and Firefox developer tools that turn your desktop into a mobile viewport so you can see how your site looks on different mobile devices.

Besides the human user experience, how your website performs on a mobile device will affect whether you appear in the search engine results. Google indexes all websites using its mobile first index. Your website design should start with the mobile experience and expand to the desktop, not the other way around. To simplify the website on a mobile device:

• Remove unnecessary elements
• Simplify the menu
• Make buttons large and links easy to click
• Offer simple forms

Further reading:

Importance of Mobile First Design

Tips to Improve Your Mobile Content Marketing

Make your navigation intuitive

Your website navigation acts as a table of contents for your website. Organizing your content properly can help you create a simple and intuitive navigation that helps guide your visitor towards what you want them to do. But navigation is more than just the menu system. Usually your menu navigation concentrates on the pages of your website, helping visitors find information about your products and services. But there are other types of navigation on your website such as post navigation and category archives.

• Avoid having a navigation that goes more than 2 levels deep and minimize the options to avoid overwhelm.
• Keep all pages at the top level and only use child pages in rare occasions.
• Don’t make it difficult to know what a page is in the navigation. Use common titles for pages like About, Contact or Service Area. The navigation headings can be different from the actual page titles.
• Make your navigation sticky for desktop users so they don’t need to keep scrolling to the top.
• Create strategic categories for your blog posts so that visitors can drill down into a specific topic.
• Make sure category archives are easy to find when reading the blog. Include post navigation at the end of each post.

Keep your webpage layout consistent

Plan your website design elements and page layout ahead of time and stick to them. Inconsistent fonts, colors and page layouts can be distracting. Other design elements like hyperlinks, buttons and social icons also need consistency. If your visitor is spending more time wondering why the pages keep changing or whether bold text is a link, they will feel confused and frustrated. Stay true to your brand identity.

Create excellent, easy to consume content

People don’t read entire web pages anymore. They will scan, looking for headlines that catch their attention. You could have a wonderful website design, but if your content is boring and hard to read, you will lose your visitors pretty quickly. Therefore, writing your content so that visitors can scan it for important items will help them:

• Get the information they need
• Stay on your website longer
• Gain a better impression of you.

Making your content scannable is easy.

• Shorten your paragraphs and use simpler words.
• Add more white space to make your website look modern, open and inviting. It draws your visitor’s attention to the most important content while also making your content more legible.
• Use bullets to draw your eye to the content to help users scan quickly. Using bullets also forces you to organize your thoughts more clearly.
• Use headlines to structure your content hierarchy using the proper headings in your content rather than just bold plain text. WordPress makes it easy for you to select the heading block with multiple choices (h1, h2, h3, etc.).
• Highlight important text using bold or italics to make it easier to find.

Make longer copy look less intimidating will enable people to skim the content faster.

Organize your content for easy consumption

Content organization is critical to keeping people on your website. Businesses that have a wealth of content struggle with presenting it in a way that is clear and easy to understand. Remember that people don’t understand your business as well as you do and visitors want access to information quickly without spending unnecessary time searching for it. Organize your content to be clear and educational while demonstrating that you are an expert in your field.

Audit your content and decide what is important to the main body of the website and what could be used as blog posts. Keep the content in your main pages simple, defining your products and services in terms people understand and how it benefits them. Stay away from your industry jargon.

Further reading:

5 Simple Steps to Perform a Comprehensive Website Content Audit

Include a call-to-action (CTA)

A call to action is a crucial element of your website. Visitors to your website rarely know what you want them to do. Provide a specific call-to-action (CTA) that is clear and focused on what you want them to do. People don’t want to think – they want to be guided. Too many choices and your visitor won’t take any action. Remember that the more options people have, the longer it takes to make a decision (Hick’s Law in practice).

Understand the buying process of your target audience. Then provide them the right call-to-action at the right stage in the process. If someone is just starting their research on a potential solution, asking them to buy is premature. However, giving them an educational piece may be just what they are looking for.

Further reading:

Craft An Effective Website Call to Action for Higher Conversions

Use high-quality images

Images are an important element of your website design. Sometimes it’s not possible to have original images so stock images will have to do. Pick images that relate to the content and brand them consistently for your business.

Take the time to search for unique, quality images for your website or take your own. If you purchase stock photography, buy the right size and resolution to ensure the image is clear and not distorted.

Use images with people and faces as they can project an emotional response towards your product, service, or call-to-action. Human faces can also show people where to look. Use an image of someone looking towards your headline or call to action. This can subliminally direct your visitors to look at that same element.

And don’t forget to optimize your images!

Further reading:

Enhancing SEO with Effective Image Optimization Strategies

Build trust

Give people a reason to trust your business. Remember your website maybe the first impression you give to a new visitor. Add social proof to help them easily see that you are an expert in your field. Social proof includes:

• Testimonials and reviews
• Case studies and success stories
• Logos of companies you have worked with

Create an About page that tells your story. Be real about who you are and why you do what you do.

Improve the website performance

The speed of your website impacts the user experience and ultimately, your conversion rate. If your website loads slowly, most visitors will leave before the page fully loads. They won’t give you a chance to let them know who you are and how you can help. And you may never get that chance again.

Inexperienced website designers or developers sometimes build what’s pretty, not what performs well and helps grow your business. Plus if you use a WordPress theme that includes features you don’t need, it can dramatically slow down your website. Use a lightweight framework like GeneratePress for your theme and add only the features you need.

Some things to look out for that could be affecting your page speed include:

• Images that are not resized or compressed. Many people upload images directly from their mobile devices. These can be several MB in size and will take a lot of resources to load.
• Embedded videos. Sometimes you need to embed a video, but try to upload to a video platform and embed from there.
• Poorly coded or unnecessary plugins. Plugins are a wonderful thing but like everything, you don’t want too much of a good thing. Minimize your use of plugins to those you absolutely need.
• Pop-ups, overlays or too many ads. You want your calls-to-action to stand out, but remember that pop-ups can get your site penalized on mobile devices. If you need to embed ads to monetize your website, be sensible with how many you embed, especially above the fold.
• An inadequate web hosting server. Purchase a hosting account from a company that understands the needs of WordPress.

Users expect websites to load quickly. When it doesn’t, they usually bounce from the site and onto your competition.

Further reading:

Optimize Website Speed for More Visibility and Traffic

Audit your website for broken links

Although your website isn’t penalized by having broken links and 404 errors, visitors will get frustrated when a page is missing or links are broken. When a user clicks through a link, they expect to find the information they are looking for. Getting a generic 404 error page will cause them to leave.

Broken links happen. Run a website audit or use Google Search Console to find and fix them regularly. Also modify your 404 page to at least provide a list of blog posts or page sitemap. They may just find something else that interests them.

Simplify your message

You can do all of the above updates to your site and still present a less than valuable user experience. Your message should clearly and simply tell your audience what you do and how you can help them.

Spend time working on your message. Then make sure your homepage delivers that message to your visitor. You want to make them feel like you totally understand them and their needs. If you get their interest, they will go to the about page to find out more about you.

Further reading:

Crafting an Effective Marketing Message for Maximum Impact

Website Design Mistakes to Avoid

To make your website attract, educate and encourage visitors to learn more, avoid the following website design mistakes that keep your visitors from connecting with your business.

Your homepage is all about you

People need to quickly figure out what your business is about, what you have to offer and whether your business can help them. A clear headline that speaks to your visitor’s challenges can stop them from hitting the back button and encourage them to find out more.

But writing in terms that your target audience understands and associates with is not easy. As business owners, we are often too close to our businesses to objectively view what makes our clients appreciate what we do so the content ends up focusing on your company without relating it to what problem you solve and why you are the best option for them.

Tip: If you struggle writing about the problems you solve, have someone interview you about your business, what you do and how you help people. A fresh ear can pick out those nuggets that will help form your most compelling message.

Text is too much or too little

There’s a fine line between too much and too little content on your web pages. Many believe all you just need a couple of messages with images and you are all set. They see Apple and Nike and want to copy their minimalist look. Unfortunately for most small businesses, we’re not instantly recognized so we need content to explain what we do, for whom and what benefits we provide. Otherwise visitors will go elsewhere to find the information they need.

On the other hand, a text heavy page makes finding the right information difficult. Many businesses try to cover everything they do on the homepage and end up with clutter. It’s important to present your information in an engaging and simple way to ensure you keep the attention of your visitors.

Tip: Work on making your messages clear and concise. People need to land on your website and quickly determine if you are the right solution for them. You can use bullets and headlines to get your message across. For every sentence you write, ask the question “so what?” If there’s no answer or the answer doesn’t add to the value you provide, eliminate it.

Visitors have to search for your contact information

A contact page is a must but don’t make your visitor search for it. Put your phone number where it is clearly visible and make it click to call for mobile visitors. Use simple web forms to help people contact you via email.

Tip: Use simple forms that are clearly targeted at what the person may want. Title the forms appropriately so people know what to use them for. Want more information? Need an estimate? These forms help people take action and make your call to action clear.

You wait for perfection before launching your website

Don’t wait for perfection! Take action, stop procrastinating, publish the website and get your message out to your target audience. Keep working your message and offers until they produce the results you want.

Just to be clear, I am not saying that it’s OK to use bad grammar or publish content with many typos. It’s also not OK to publish content that is not targeted, doesn’t include a call to action and leaves the reader confused. You still need to project an intelligent, professional image.

But waiting has a cost:

• Lost opportunities – The longer you wait, you miss opportunities to be found. Search engines need time to index and move your pages up in the rankings. By waiting, search engines can’t index your website. You let your competitors beat you by getting there first and getting higher rankings.
• Lost revenue – When you get found, you have better opportunity for people to hire you for your products and services. It is better to put publish your website and capture revenue opportunities from those who connect with your content. Get feedback and update your content regularly, adding images and elements to the page to have a visual attraction.

Make a good impression from the start

Making a good first impression is important when a new user visits your site. Your website should impress them with the speed, content and design. They should immediately know what you are about and that you will be able to satisfy their interests and needs.

If you are contemplating a website update to help improve user experience, make sure you determine what your audience wants or needs. Understand your audience and give them that fast, rewarding and seamless user experience that will keep them coming back.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Website Design Tips to Improve User Experience is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Technical SEO is one of the areas of search engine optimization that a small business may not implement. This is partly because they may be creating their website themselves and only focus on the design and content. Technical optimization is complicated and can frustrate even the more experienced web developers. But without a focus on the technical aspects of SEO, all your on-page optimization efforts could be wasted.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the optimization of the technical elements of your website to improve its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Technical SEO can seem overwhelming, especially for a small business with limited resources. However, implementing technical SEO best practices can improve your online presence and help you compete with larger competitors.

Why technical SEO matters for small businesses

Technical SEO is important for small businesses for several reasons:

• Improves search engine visibility. This makes it easier for potential customers to find you online.
• Enhances user experience. By optimizing website speed, mobile-friendliness, and site architecture, you improve your website user experience that keeps visitors on your website longer.
• Provides a competitive advantage. Having a powerful web presence with a well-performing website levels the playing field for small businesses. This enables you to compete with larger companies for higher rankings.

Further Reading

Website Design Tips to Improve User Experience

Technical SEO tips

Review your site architecture

Technical SEO involves organizing website content in a logical and structured manner to help search engines understand the hierarchy of the pages and content. Having a well-organized structure to your content also helps search engines better understand the relationships between pages. A well-designed website architecture makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index the website.

Adding an XML sitemap provides search engines with a roadmap of the pages and content. That can be easily accomplished by using a WordPress plugin that can create and update the XML sitemap when you add or update content.

Ensure your website supports mobile first

Google wants to provide a quality experience for users regardless of the device they are using. In fact, since most people are now searching using a mobile device, Google is taking steps to index content based on the mobile version of the website’s content. This is called mobile-first indexing. That’s why it is important that your site looks good and performs well on a mobile device.

Google recommends that you use a responsive design for your website because it serves the same URL for a piece of content to all users regardless of the device they are on. This saves resources for your website and for Google’s crawlers.

Most of the modern WordPress theme frameworks all support responsive design features. It is a matter of implementing them properly to garner the best results.

Ensure your website is secure

Google Chrome now classifies all websites without SSL encryption as unsafe and indicates as such with more visual cues. And although not a big ranking signal, having an SSL certificate does help with your website’s visibility.

There are benefits of installing an SSL certificate that go beyond search engine results:

• Increases your website’s security and protects sensitive data being entered through contact forms
• Builds trust between you and your visitors in general and especially if you have a membership or eCommerce website
• Makes your website and your business look more professional.

Having the padlock symbol in the browser sends a message that you are concerned about your visitor’s security.

Test for website speed

Page speed is critical to your digital marketing success. It impacts your:

• Rank in organic search 
• User experience and how long visitors stay on your website
• Cost-per-click (CPC) if you are doing paid advertising
• Inbound marketing campaign performance

The reason page speed is crucial to your rank is that Google continuously aims to provide a good user experience. This includes the quality of the search results themselves and the quality of the resource that they provide in the search results. 

A slow-loading website will hurt your visibility in the search engine results. The search engines want a quality experience for users and a slow website is not that.

Run speed tests using any of the page speed tools:

• Google Page Speed Insights – good for checking core web vitals for both mobile and desktop.
• Pingdom – provides load time, how you stack up against other sites and physical file size. Good to see where you need to focus.
• GTmetrix – similar to Pingdom, provides load time, page size and number of requests.

If you want more traffic, leads and ultimately, customers, pay attention to the technical aspects of website performance. 

Avoid duplicate content

There are many ways duplicate content can be created, not all of them intentionally. Search engines are trying to serve original, authoritative content. Duplicate content refers to content that appears in more than one place on the internet, which can confuse search engines when trying to determine which version of the content to index and rank in search results.

• Unintentional duplicate content – WordPress allows you to create date, category, author or tag archives. The only archives that make sense are category and author. But leaving the category prefix in the URL makes it look like your posts are duplicate. For example, https://yourdomain.com/post-title and https://yourdomain.com/category/post-title could be construed as duplicate content.
• Intentional duplicate content – Sometimes SEO companies create hundreds of pages where the only difference is the URL, title and heading. They use them to try to get a business ranked in multiple towns or cities and found by those searching for a service in that city or town.

Duplicate content issues can negatively impact SEO. Small businesses can prevent duplicate content issues by setting up canonical tags to ensure that the search engine only indexes the preferred version of the content.

A canonical tag is an HTML tag that is used to indicate the preferred version of a web page or piece of content. The canonical tag tells search engines which version of the content should be considered the primary version, and any other versions of the content should be considered duplicates or secondary versions. By using a canonical tag, search engines can identify the preferred version of the content and avoid indexing duplicate content.

Conclusion

Implementing an SEO strategy without including the technical SEO aspects could jeopardize your online visibility. Optimize website speed, mobile-friendliness, site architecture, XML sitemap, canonicalization and ensuring your website is secure helps your small business to improve search engine visibility, user experience and competitive advantage. If you can’t implement these important components, this may be where hiring someone who can get this done will be best.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. The Importance of Technical SEO for Small Business Websites is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

How is your marketing working for you? Did it help you increase visibility, generate more leads or find new lucrative clients? Even if you feel your marketing was successful, conducting a simple marketing review every 90 days enables you to measure and track your marketing effectiveness.

A quarterly marketing review is important for the following reasons:

• It helps you determine which marketing activities are working and what are not
• You quickly see what you should continue doing and what you should eliminate before they cost you time and money
• The right activities help you continue to move towards your outcome goal

But why so often you ask? There are many reasons to do your planning in short, 90 day segments. The following are just a few examples:

• The market for your products and services can change. Reviewing every 90 days ensures you notice the changes before it’s too late
• Marketing changes rapidly. What worked yesterday may not work today.
• Your channels to reach your target audience may have changed. The faster you notice where your audience has moved can help you adjust.
• Activities you are spending time and resources on aren’t aligned with your vision or aren’t getting you closer to your outcome goals. 

If you wait a year to review your marketing, you can waste a lot of money and time on things that aren’t working or you may miss opportunities that can positively affect your business.

Difference between marketing review and marketing audit

The words audit and review can be used interchangeably. However, for our purposes, there is a distinct difference:

• A marketing review is a simplified assessment of your activities and how they are helping you achieve your goals.
• A marketing audit takes a deep-dive look at all of your existing marketing assets and activities to determine how well they are serving your business.

Those marketing activities that are working stay the course. Those that aren’t, you may be able to adjust the campaign and test for another quarter. Or you can eliminate those completely and add something else that may work better.

So on a quarterly basis, you should do the simplified marketing review to make sure your effort is paying off in new leads and new customers.

What to look for while conducting your review

When you conduct this simple review of your marketing activities and results, what should you be looking for? What are the signs that things aren’t going in the right direction?

First look at whether your marketing activities are driving inbound leads and sales. If not, then we need to determine why.

Tracking your results helps you understand how each marketing activity is contributing to your success. You can make informed decisions about whether to continue with what you are doing or try something else. For each marketing activity, answer the following questions:

• Does the activity help your business achieve its goals?
• Has the activity resulted in new leads, brand visibility or sales?
• How much did the campaign cost in terms of dollars or resources?
• Was the return on your investment worth the effort?

For those that are working, great. Keep doing what you are doing.

For those activities that aren’t working, we need to figure out why.

Reasons why your marketing isn’t working

Your target market has changed

Have you noticed a difference in the type of clients you now attract? As your business grows and matures, your ideal client will naturally evolve. As you get a clearer perspective on your business, you begin to attract an audience that:

• Values what you have to offer
• Enjoys working with you 
• Is willing to pay more for your expertise.

Not only do you thrive working with this client, these clients truly benefit from working with you.

Maybe it’s time to focus and cater your services to this new, more lucrative market. These changes will require you to adjust your messages, content, service offerings and marketing activities. But by focusing on a particular niche, you can be clear on exactly what you offer and how it helps them.

Further reading:

Finding Your Niche through an Effective Target Market Strategy

Your messages miss your intended target

Getting noticed in a crowded market is difficult. How do you create a message that cuts through the media clutter and captures the attention of your target audience? When you can be this clear about how you serve your audience, visitors to your website will see that “this person really understands what I need”.

Customers want solutions to their problems. Your core message needs to demonstrate how you solve their biggest challenge. It should make them understand why they should trust you and choose your business over the competition. Talk about the experiences your ideal customers will have and how they will benefit from working with you.

Further reading:

Crafting an Effective Marketing Message for Maximum Impact

Your products and services are not relevant to your target market

Correctly pricing and packaging your products and services for your target audience is one of the more powerful marketing activities that you can do. Are your products and services:

• Created to help your ideal client overcome some critical need?
• Packaged such that they highlight your unique skills aimed at your ideal client?
• Priced to fit their budget while maximizing your revenue?

Value packaging your services to align with their needs reduces their perceived risk of working with you and makes their purchase decision much easier.

Further reading:

7 Key Advantages of Service Bundling for Small Businesses

Your brand is inconsistent across all your web properties.

Your brand is everything you do and say, not just the visual image your business projects.

• Do you project the same image and message across all web properties?
• Does your website accurately reflect who you work with and what you offer?
• Is what you say on your social profiles consistent with what is on your website?

If your marketing tools are inconsistent, you confuse your prospects which reflects poorly on your brand. It is important that your brand be consistent every place your business has a profile so that no matter where someone finds your business, they are left with a compelling, lasting impression.

Further reading:

Key Benefits of a Strong Brand Identity for Small Businesses

Your website needs a face lift.

In addition to an inconsistent brand, is your website fresh and does it properly project your expertise? If not, it’s time for a website makeover. Without a well developed, quality website, your visibility is compromised.

Creating a compelling website and investing in search engine optimization helps you establish a strong web presence. As the hub of your web presence and the central focal point of your inbound marketing strategy, your website is where you can regularly develop and promote relevant, brand-related content that can drive more inbound leads and increase your revenue.

Further reading:

Website Design Tips to Improve User Experience

5 Steps to a Simple Marketing Review

1. Review your marketing goals

All of your marketing should help you achieve your goals. Your goals should have a measurable outcome such as number of leads generated. Organize your marketing activities around each goal so that you can see if each is contributing to the outcome.

Some of your marketing may be used to create visibility and awareness in order to create brand value. These activities are a bit harder to measure but you could use search engine visibility as a metric. Make sure you balance both so that you have the revenue you need to stay in business while developing your reputation or brand.

2. Determine which marketing activities resulted in revenue

When prospects contact you, you should ask them how they found your business. When you collect this information, you now have some data to track your results.

Make sure your website asks the question on the contact form. Train whoever answers the phone to ask the question, “How did you hear about us?”. Most people will tell you and you may just be surprised by their answers. By asking this question, you get a better understanding of where your clients look for your types of services.

3. Calculate how much you spent on each activity

There are some marketing dollars that you just need to invest. You absolutely need a web presence, therefore your website and any money you spend on setting up and maintaining your social media profiles and citations are something you truly can’t eliminate.

For the different types of marketing strategies that you may want to execute, you need to determine the cost to implement and the revenue derived from each. Types of marketing activities that you could implement include:

• Inbound marketing
• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization
• Social media marketing
• Direct marketing (both email and direct mail)
• Online paid advertising (Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads)
• Traditional paid advertising
• Networking and referrals (memberships in BNI / Chamber of Commerce / Better Business Bureau)
• Events (seminars, webinars)

You should be able to measure each of these activities with respect to the goal it supports. If you aren’t tracking results, it is difficult to determine whether to continue the activity or not.

4. Determine which ones gave you the highest return

Depending on the goal it supports, you may want to determine the ratio of revenue to expense. For example, if you are running a Google Ads campaign, it should support a revenue goal. You have tools to determine how the campaign is converting and whether you are increasing your top line revenue from that campaign.

Ideally you want at least a 3 times return or better or the campaign may not be worth your time and effort. In addition, you may want to use the money on something else.

If you are running more inbound marketing campaigns, you need a way to track how many leads are generated and whether those leads are converting into customers.

If you don’t have the data, make it a goal to start collecting information for each marketing activity you run. This is data can help you determine why your campaign isn’t working and whether there is anything you can do about it. This is where you may need to bring in someone who can determine may be missing that is preventing you from executing a successful marketing campaign.

5. Analyze the data

Now that you have a good idea about how your marketing has performed, you can determine what marketing you will continue to invest in. Look at each activity and ask the following questions:

• Which activities were the most successful?
• Do they make sense to continue?
• Which activities were marginal? Do you know why? Could they be improved?
• Should I invest the money somewhere else?
• What new activities should I look at?

Just remember that some marketing campaigns like inbound marketing, will take a little time for them to begin generating revenue. But watch your website analytics for increased traffic, leads and hopefully in a couple of quarters, you will begin to see the fruits of your labor.

Now create your next 90 day marketing action plan

Once you set up the marketing review process, you can conduct this each quarter looking at how your marketing has helped your business grow. Your simple marketing review has given you the valuable information you need to adjust your marketing action plan for the next 90 days. Keep doing what has worked and reassign resources (money or time) to new activities that may produce better results.

Need help with a marketing plan? Sign up for my email list and receive your FREE Masterful Marketing® Create Your Small Business Marketing Plan eBook!

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Revitalize Your Marketing with a Simple Quarterly Review is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

We live in an impatient society. We want immediate response to our requests and get frustrated when we have to wait for anything, especially for websites to load. If your website fails to meet visitors’ expectations for speed, they’re quick to hit the back button, signaling to Google that your site lacks the quality user experience it demands. That behavior over time could negatively impact your search engine ranking. However, if you optimize your website speed, you can prevent those premature exits, increasing customer satisfaction and confidence.

Why is website speed important?

There are two major reasons to care about improving your website performance across all devices.

User experience

How long do you wait for a page to load? And if it doesn’t load within your patience criteria, do you click the back button? Of course you do.

The faster the page load time, the better the user experience. An improved user experience translates into higher conversions and more revenue.

People want and need a fast online user experience. According to Neil Patel, loading time affects your bottom line. Some specifics:

• 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again
• Around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online
• 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load
• And a 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions.

In other words, a bad user experience negatively affects your sales.

Organic rankings

Google has long considered website speed a factor in search engine rankings since 2010 for desktop and 2018 for mobile devices. The reason they include page speed as a ranking signal is because slow sites negatively affect user experience.

Core Web Vitals (CWV) was introduced in May 2020. It measures and evaluates the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of websites. All three of these contribute to how a user perceives the experience of your webpage. Google now says CWV is used in ranking so optimizing your website to perform well can help your visibility.

Therefore, it is important that you optimize website speed across all devices. Pages with long load times will cause visitors to hit the back button quickly. This can send a signal to Google that the page is not worthy of ranking.

The bottom line is that a well-optimized and fast-loading page will help deliver better rankings and give your site an advantage over your slower loading competitors.

How to test your website speed

Assessing the page load speed of your website is something that may sound difficult. But there are plenty of tools available to help you assess how your site performs.

Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights that measures website page speed and provides detailed information on how you can improve your load time. PageSpeed Insights gives you a report on how well your site performs and suggestions for improvement. There are separate reports for mobile and desktop.

GTmetrix also provides a page speed report. Once you run the report, you can download a PDF file of the details. GTmetrix also provides a WordPress optimization guide to help you with your performance optimizations.

The goal of these tools is to evaluate your web page based on a set of rules and provide recommendations that you can use to improve the page load speed of your website.

How to optimize your WordPress website speed

WordPress a wonderful content management system that gives us many options and puts us in control of our web presence. But all this control and flexibility can affect how well our websites perform for our businesses. You put a lot of work into your inbound marketing efforts by creating quality content that is optimized to attract the right visitor. But if your visitors come and leave frustrated, you’ve lost an opportunity.

So what can you do to optimize your website performance?

Create a lightweight foundation

• Choose your WordPress theme wisely – Some of the more popular premium themes add a lot of overhead by including features that you don’t need for your website. Pick a theme framework that is lightweight, highly customizable, responsive and powerful, reducing the need for custom development like GeneratePress.
• Get rid of your page builder – There is nothing wrong with page builders, but they can add overhead as well. Since switching from a page builder to the WordPress block editor using GenerateBlocks for page layout and design, all of the sites we build pass the page speed tests. GenerateBlocks provides additional features to the WordPress block editor. Ultimate Blocks, Spectra and Kadence are also plugins that extend the editing capabilities of the block editor.
• Minimize your plugin usage – Many useful features can be implemented using a plugin. However, ensure the plugins you use are not only needed and add value to your website, but are created by reputable developers. Too many plugins will affect the performance of your site. The more you install and activate, the more likely your website will load slower.

Size and compress your images correctly

Many users don’t realize that images from your smartphone are a high resolution files, maybe 2 megabytes or more. If used in its original format, loading that file or even its thumbnail can slow down your page speed.

To create a quality image, size your image at 72 PPI (pixels per inch) and make the image about 9 x 12 inches. Find a photo editor that works for you. There are some free online editors such as Canva. Plus there are some options you can install on your PC or Mac.

Photo editing tools allow you to save for the web and reduce the size of the image. Saving your images at 30% quality or less does not affect the clarity of the images on a browser.

Even reducing the size of your images manually may still not be enough. There are many plugins that optimize images as you upload them. WP-Optimize will compress your images and it will also create a WebP version.

Further reading

Enhancing SEO with Effective Image Optimization Strategies

Implement caching and minify CSS, JavaScript and HTML

WordPress creates pages dynamically as they are requested by pulling the content from the database and applying the theme template. A caching plugin saves pages when they are retrieved so that future requests for the same page can be delivered faster.

Minify is the processes of removing unnecessary characters in your website’s CSS, HTML, and JavaScript files. These characters include whitespaces, line breaks, comments, and block delimiters which are useful for humans but unnecessary for machines. When you minify the files of a website containing CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code, your web browser can read them faster.

There are several quality caching plugins available that also provide minification. Some hosting companies are now installing their own caching plugins on hosting accounts. The following plugins all provide caching, minification and image compression:

• WP-Optimize
• Litespeed Cache (works well on A2hosting)
• SiteGround Optimizer (for sites hosted on Siteground)

Reduce your database size

The WordPress database can grow very quickly, resulting in your website loading slowly.

When you are writing or editing a page or post, WordPress has an auto-save feature that frequently saves revisions. This is a great feature that enables you to recover a previous version. Just remember each revision increases the size of your database which slows down your website. 

Spam comments, trashed posts and pages and plugins that didn’t clean up their database tables when deleted or unused images can also increase the size of your database. WP-Optimize is an effective tool for automatically cleaning your WordPress database to reduce its size and ensure your valuable content gets retrieved more quickly.

Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) Service

A CDN delivers your site content to different networks so users can download your content from the closest server. This can increase load speed. There are several high performance CDN services and if you are running an eCommerce site, they are worth the fees. In addition, if you have a lot of traffic to your site, you may want to try CloudFlare, a free CDN that speeds up sites and provides protection against many security threats.

There are also two plugins by WP Speed Matters that are worth trying – Flying Scripts and Flying Images. Flying Scripts downloads and executes JavaScript on user interaction. Flying Images offers a free CDN and compresses and converts images on the fly. These have made a big difference in performance on all of our websites.

Transfer to a new hosting environment

Your hosting company is a major player when it comes to optimizing website speed.

Most of our websites run just fine in a shared hosting environment. Siteground and A2hosting are quality hosting providers that are affordable. But if you implement all the above and you still have a slow website, you may want to consider:

• Virtual Private Server – You still share the CPU with other virtual machines but have guaranteed dedicated access to the resources you purchase from the hosting company (memory, disk storage, transfer rate, etc.)
• Dedicated Server – You have full control of the physical server, and complete access to all its resources.
• Managed WordPress Hosting – Because of the popularity of WordPress, there are hosting companies that specialize in creating an optimized WordPress environment with specialized support for WordPress, themes, and plugins. These managed WordPress hosting providers are something to consider if you don’t have time to keep your site updated and backed up.

WordPress puts control into the hands of marketers and small business owners. But with that power, you need to make smart decisions when it comes to “feature rich” verses “website speed”. Optimize your website speed by balancing the two for a quality user experience that keeps visitors coming back for more.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Optimize Website Speed for More Visibility and Traffic is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Business assets are the valuable resources or items that are owned by a company. Businesses have many assets that are worth protecting. Items like cash, accounts receivable, inventory, equipment and buildings are all examples of business assets. A brick and mortar business owner would never think of turning the keys of their store over to their suppliers without proper vetting and protections in place. But what about your digital marketing assets? How valuable are these to your business?

Unfortunately many small business owners do turn over their digital marketing assets to their services providers. But if you think about it, your web presence is very much a digital marketing asset. In many cases, if you were to try and sell your business, the potential buyer would want to acquire the digital assets of the business as part of the sale.

What are digital marketing assets?

In the online world, your digital marketing assets are anything that creates visibility online and helps people find and do business with you. They include:

• Domain
• Website
• Email accounts
• Social media profiles and online advertising accounts
• Google

The following are the risks businesses take with their digital marketing assets and what can happen if you trust these valuable resources with the wrong service provider.

Domain registration

The most important digital marketing asset for your business is your domain name. It’s your online business address. You spend hours finding that perfect domain name that aligns with your business but then you have someone else register the domain on your behalf. When this happens, chances are the person associated with the domain is them, not you.

To have anyone else hold that name in their possession is a disaster waiting to happen. What happens if your relationship with that person changes? What if you no longer want to work with that person and wish to move on?

If they are in control of your domain, they could hold you hostage. Or worse, they could let your domain expire without notice causing you to have to deal with trying to recover the domain. The domain registrars usually send a notice to those listed on the registration in advance of the domain expiring. If you aren’t listed on the domain registration, you won’t be warned.

If your domain expires and your website is unreachable, it doesn’t take long for Google to notice and remove your website from the search results. 

Recommendation:

• Pick your favorite domain registrar, create an account and purchase the domain yourself. This ensures it is registered to you.
• Make sure the domain is set to automatically renew and keep a valid credit card on file.
• Don’t use an email on the domain as your recover for the account. If you lose your domain, you won’t be able to get the email to recover.
• When you do get those notifications that the domain is about to renew, check to make sure it actually does. Sometimes the auto-renew doesn’t happen. For one of my clients, luckily I was able to log in and renew the domain before the grace period ended.
• If your domain is registered through someone other than you, create an account on a domain registrar and initiate the transfer to your account.

Remember that your domain is the key to your online castle and you need to own and protect it.

Website Content

Although not as critical as your domain, you need to be careful about who builds your website, where it is hosted and your content.

Website structure

There are two parts to the website: the hosting account and the website itself.

You website hosting is a rented property that houses your website. Many web developers resell hosting services as part of their business model. But it is your choice as to whether you want to host with them or get an end user hosting account.

If you believe you will have a long-term relationship with the developer, then by all means host with them. Just be sure you have access to both the hosting account and the WordPress website as an administrator. If anything happens to your relationship with the hosting provider, you will want to move your website and you will need access as an administrator to do so.

Many times the web development firm will not give you access to the website until you have paid for the work in full. That’s perfectly fine when all is well. 

But if you have a dispute with the firm because they aren’t delivering what they promised or their work is not what you had expected, you will have trouble gaining access to the website in order to move it or fix it.

Website content

When it comes to the content of your website, you also need to have a backup in case anything happens. Website content includes your design, content management system and the content you create.

Your website is the foundation of your web presence. If you lost access to it tomorrow, would you be able to rebuild the site on another hosting account?

If you have a backup of your content and you find yourself without access to your website hosting or WordPress account, you can always have a new website created on a different hosting account. When the site is ready to go live, you can point the domain to the new website (hence why the domain is the critical piece).

Recommendation:

• Purchase your own hosting account at a reputable host such as Siteground. There are others but do your homework and select one that has the performance you need at the price you want to pay.
• When you decide to hire someone to build your website, make sure they are fine working with a hosting account that you control.
• Keep a backup of your website using the All in One WordPress Migration plugin or some other backup application. Just make sure you have the backups stored locally on your computer. In the event you need to move the site to a new hosting provider, you can restore the backup on the new host.
• If your hosting provider won’t allow you to use this plugin, keep a backup of your WordPress content and media library. Export all the content into an .XML file. Worst case, you can install WordPress and a new theme and import your content. You would have to upload your media into the media library. Your content is a critical piece of your overall marketing plan as it is what attracts people to your business. Trying to recreate the content from scratch would be a major project.

Email accounts

As a business, you should always use a branded email address. A branded email address is one that originates from your domain. Most hosting companies offer webmail that will give you this option, but using webmail really isn’t ideal.

There are challenges with using the free email addresses:

• Webmail clients are browser-based and not very modern.
• If you want to move your website, moving your email is a process. 
• You have introduced a single point of failure. If your website goes down, most likely so will your email.
• Your email may not be accessible on all devices.

Recommendation:

• Invest in either Google Workspace or Office 365 for email. At $6 per user per month for either solution, it’s worth separating your email from your hosting environment. Having your email hosted elsewhere means you can still get your email even if something happens to your website.
• If paying for email is not in your budget, set up your branded email on your hosting account and then use a personal Gmail account as a client. Setting up Gmail as a client allows you to pull all emails from the server so you have them available across all of your devices. Gmail can also send emails using your branded email address if it is set up to send through the hosted server. This way, if you do have to move your website, you have all of your email stored in your Gmail account.
• Note: This is a good solution for you as the business owner. But keep in mind that if you have an employee or 1099 using a branded email pulling company email into a personal Gmail account, you may have an issue if they become disgruntled and decide to leave. When you have employees, it is best to invest in Google Workspace or Office 365 so you stay in control of your company data.

Social Media and Online Advertising

Technology companies understand the importance of security. When you create your profiles, you should not provide your personal login information to anyone.

When it comes to your Facebook business page, LinkedIn company page or other social media platforms that provide company specific accounts, most allow you to add people as administrators without turning over your password.

The same holds true for your advertising accounts. Regardless of the platform, all these digital marketing assets have (or should have) the capability of adding account managers to your profiles.

Recommendation

• Keep your social media and advertising accounts secure with a strong password.
• Give access to those who you are currently working with.
• Remove access to those no longer working with you.

Google Accounts

When you set up a Gmail account, you gain access to a wealth of tools from that one login. Access to your Google Business Profile, Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google Analytics or Google Tag Manager is easy to grant to your marketing service provider. Every one of these tools have the ability to add users at various levels in order to access the information.

Do not let others signup for these accounts on your behalf using their Google accounts. I’ve seen many agencies insist that your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts be under their agency account.

If you let them take control of your Google accounts, you might need to start over if you decide you no longer want to work with them. They normally won’t be able to change ownership on the accounts.

Recommendation

• Sign up for any Google service that you need using your Google account.
• Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile under your Google account.
• Provide access to these accounts to those who need them.
• Never give people access to your Google login information. Just don’t do it.

Better Safe than Sorry

When you want to hire an external resource to help you with your online marketing, just remember to think through what happens if you decide to discontinue working with them.

• Do you still have access to your accounts?
• Can you take over the management of your ad campaigns?
• Will remnants of their effort to control your online presence remain long after your relationship with these agencies end? One such example (which I’ve seen many times) are phone numbers you don’t own showing up associated with your business in the search results.
• Will your online presence remain visible on the Internet or will you need to start over?

Businesses need to take precautions when providing access to your digital marketing assets. Take inventory of all of your online assets and determine who has ownership. It only takes one disgruntled vendor to sabotage your web presence. Starting from scratch is not something you want to have to do.

So choose wisely when you want or need to work with someone on building your visibility online. Work with someone who understands marketing and business to help you through the process. And never take chances on someone else being in control of your digital marketing assets.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Best Practices to Safeguard Your Digital Marketing Assets is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Inbound marketing is something that most small business owners have heard of but few implement. For those who add inbound marketing to their marketing plan, they experience a more cost effective and successful form of lead generation. To be successful with inbound marketing, you need to plan your strategy around search, content and social media specifically for your business. In this post, let’s get into more detail about how you can use inbound marketing to improve lead generation for your business.

What is inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is a better way to do lead generation. It is comprised of three specific marketing strategies: search, social media and content marketing. Using these three strategies, you can generate more quality leads for your business by:

• Creating quality, educational content targeted at a specific need
• Optimizing that content for search
• Promoting the content and your brand through your social media channels

Unlike traditional outbound marketing where you push yourself on potential customers, inbound marketing is better aligned with today’s buyers who research solutions before they decide which brand to select. Using inbound marketing enables you to build rapport and trust with those who want to purchase your products and services.

What are the benefits of inbound marketing?

Buying decisions, both consumer and business, have evolved where they begin with an online search. When a prospective customer finds your business via search, the useful information you provide helps them determine whether you understand their needs, making your business more attractive to them. Inbound marketing has other benefits as listed below.

• Cost-effective – Inbound marketing is still more cost-effective than traditional outbound marketing tactics. Implementing effective SEO, content creation and promotional strategies can get you long-term visibility, but the skills needed to implement them properly have increased.
• Creates brand loyalty – If someone is spending time reading your blog, downloading your white papers and joining your email list, they are making a commitment to your brand. This helps build brand loyalty. Warm prospects are more likely to contact you when they are ready to buy.
• Builds trust – Useful information that solves a problem and answers questions with no strings attached develops a more personal relationship that helps them decide whether to do business with you.
• Expands your universe – For many small businesses, reaching a broad audience was difficult due to the cost. Attracting potential customers to your website with quality content can help small businesses reach a broader, more geographically dispersed audience. If you can service customers nationally or internationally, inbound marketing is a must.
• Projects your expertise – Don’t underestimate the value of inbound marketing, especially for local businesses such as home improvement and major renovation contractors. Adding content that educates your customer makes them more likely to hire you when they have a project.

Now that you understand what inbound marketing is and how it can help your small business, it’s time to plan your inbound marketing strategy and create your inbound marketing action plan.

Review your marketing plan

Your marketing plan sets the direction for all of your product and marketing-related activities. It defines the target audience, differentiators, core messages and other aspects for your business. Within the marketing plan, you define at a high level, which marketing strategies you should use to grow your business.

But each of these marketing strategies need a plan to define what is needed to be successful. Every marketing strategy will have its own course of action but will dovetail off of your overall marketing plan.

Make sure you create a marketing plan for your business first. You will need to review your marketing plan to get the information you need to develop your inbound marketing strategy. By reviewing your marketing plan, you will ensure that what you do for inbound marketing will align with your overall business and marketing strategy. Having this information will make it easier to plan for each specific strategy.

Further Reading:

Crafting a Simple Marketing Plan for a Small Business

Define your inbound marketing strategy

Your inbound marketing strategy needs a brief plan that outlines the following areas. The purpose of this plan is identify all the pieces that need to come together to ensure your investment pays off.

Audience needs

If you have defined your target audience in your marketing plan, you should be all set. Determine the needs of that audience so you can provide the content they may be looking for. You also may want to narrow your audience even further depending on the product or service you will be promoting with inbound marketing.

Being focused on one particular market enables you to make better choices for your content and channels. This saves you time and money on activities that don’t make sense for your business and the clients you serve.

Further Reading:

Finding Your Niche through an Effective Target Market Strategy

Inbound marketing goals

Goals should define what you are trying to accomplish with inbound marketing. Define the measurable outcomes that you want to accomplish over the next 90 days or so.

Measurable outcomes can be number of leads generated, leads converted into customers or revenue. By setting marketing goals, you can then organize your marketing activities around each goal to see if each is contributing to the outcome.

Further Reading:

Marketing Goals – Your Pathway to Success

Content marketing strategy

Content marketing is creating, publishing and promoting quality, educational content that moves your prospects through the buyer’s journey. This offers value to the buyer and establishes you as a business that has expertise, experience, authority and trust (E-E-A-T).

A solid content marketing strategy defines:

• The type of content you will create for the various stages of the buyers journey
• Who will develop this content and share it
• Your content distribution strategy

The types of content you should consider include blog posts, case studies, eBooks and whitepapers. Not all content needs to be text and you should try to include some audio and video depending on your business and your distribution strategy.

Further Reading:

Crafting a Winning Content Marketing Strategy

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey for Content Marketing Success

Create an Effective SEO Content Strategy

Search marketing strategy

Search marketing is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on what happens when someone searches. The goal of search marketing is to help your website rank higher in search results for searches related to your business.

Your search marketing strategy defines what areas of search marketing you will implement. You need to:

• Identify the most relevant and valuable keywords for a website based on what people are actually search for and how often. 
• Improve your website content and structure to increase its visibility in the SERPs. 
• Acquire inbound authoritative links to your website to improve your website’s visibility and rank in the SERPs. 
• Decide if you want to use paid advertising on search engines to reach potential customers. 

Further Reading:

Search Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Social media channel strategy

No small business needs to be active on all social media channels. Your choice of social media platforms will be different based on where you need to reach your target audience. Be smart about where you spend your time so that you don’t spread yourself too thin.

With the many ways to engage with your audience on social media, you do need a strategy. Each platform has its “rules of engagement”. Organic reach has deteriorated and pay to play is now required if you want to reach your audience. Other options for engaging with your audience now include private groups, live streaming and content syndication.

The three major players, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, all offer small businesses a distribution channel for your content. If you are a visual business, Pinterest and Instagram are also a good choice. And don’t forget YouTube and Rumble for posting and optimizing your videos. Depending on the brand, TikTok and Instagram may be a good choice for short-form videos.

Create and implement an action plan

Now that you know your audience, goals, content, search and social media plans, now you need to implement your strategy. Use the following guidelines to help you create an action plan so you can be consistent with your inbound marketing activities.

Prepare an editorial calendar

A robust editorial calendar can simplify content marketing. It enables you to map your content to the needs of the customer, answering questions your ideal clients have so they can make an informed purchase decision. It also provides a realistic schedule for you to create new content.

Your editorial calendar includes:

• What content you plan to create
• What format you will use – blog post, podcast, YouTube videos, presentations and webinars
• Who will create it
• The style to be used across all media channels to project a consistent brand image
• Your schedule for sharing your content across all of your social media channels.

Don’t worry about the exact dates for each piece of content. Create the list and arrange as you go, selecting those pieces that you feel compelled to work on.

Also see if you can repurpose the content into other types of media. For example, if you are giving a presentation or webinar, record it. Post snippets of the video on YouTube, embed them into a blog post and summarize the presentation. Send out a replay of the webinar as a lead magnet to get more subscribers. Transcribe the Q&A and turn the answers into another blog post or an FAQ.

Most businesses have a lot of content available to them, they just don’t realize it. Work with someone who can help you see the value of the information you have and how it can be turned into content for your inbound marketing strategy.

Need help with a marketing plan? Sign up for my email list and receive your FREE Masterful Marketing® Create Your Small Business Marketing Plan eBook, marketing plan campaign template with editorial calendar!

Analyze and optimize your web presence

If you haven’t searched for your business to see what is there, you could have some negative surprises waiting for you. Take some time to discover how your business is seen in search by conducting a brief web presence analysis. This exercise helps you determine how your business is viewed when someone searches for your products and services. In many cases, small businesses don’t know what is on the Internet about them or if they can be found at all.

Your web presence is made up of your website, social media profiles and business directory listings. You should be in control of them all and they should consistently project your brand. Don’t take short cuts in this important area as first impressions count. If you haven’t developed your powerful web presence, do that before you launch your inbound marketing campaigns.

Further Reading:

Web Presence Analysis: How Visible is Your Business?

Maximize Your Online Impact: Create a Successful Web Presence

Clean up your website

All marketing activities should drive people to your website. No matter what type of business you are in, people will go to your website to check you out. It must project your best image on all devices to make your business look current and professional.

Your website needs to tell the visitor why you are the right choice for them. Make your website design clean and easy to navigate. Write the homepage content so that it clearly speaks to your ideal client. This will help them understand how you can help them solve their biggest challenge.

Further Reading:

Importance of Mobile First Design

Website Audit Checklist: Improve Visibility and Lead Generation

Website Design Tips to Improve User Experience

Define and create your lead magnet

First time visitors won’t buy from you because they are still researching a solution. Plus giving you something of value – their contact information – isn’t going to happen for free. But in order to grow a quality email list and nurture these prospects, you need to offer them something of value to encourage people to give you their contact information.

A lead magnet is a free incentive to get people to give you their contact information. Your lead magnet needs to be something that your target audience values that ties into the products or services you provide. They don’t have to be lengthy, complex or time-intensive to create. They do, however, need to be useful.

Lead magnets come in many forms: checklists, templates, tools, infographics, presentations, guides, coupons, free estimates, webinar replays, quizzes or surveys.

Further Reading:

Lead Magnets: Compelling Offers to Attract Quality Leads

Create the right lead generation landing pages and forms

Once people are ready to pursue an engagement with your business, how do people contact you? Many people conduct searches for products and services at night, after dinner and after their children have gone to bed. If you don’t have a form that makes it easy for them to contact you when it is convenient for them, you are missing an opportunity to get qualified leads.

A well-placed lead conversion form with a compelling offer is an important component of your website. Keep the form short and only ask for as much information as you really need. Respond to an inbound lead as quickly as possible. If you wait, the lead may go to your competitor instead.

In addition to standard website contact and lead conversion forms, be sure to create effective landing pages that help convert visitors into leads. Use landing pages when you are sending people for a specific purpose. Landing pages should always be used for paid ads, specific campaigns or other tactics where you want your visitor to focus on the offer.

Further Reading:

Landing Page Optimization Tips

Build and nurture your email list

Now that you are generating leads, nurture your list by sending valuable content that helps them learn more about your expertise. Nurturing is letting your subscribers get to know you and your brand through communication that offers value, not a sales pitch. Send them your blog posts, a personalized newsletter, a tutorial, an infographic or other useful content that supports the reason they subscribed to your list in the first place.

Segment your list to deliver information that is relevant to the subscriber. Segmenting your list helps you get better open and click rates. If you only collect email addresses, you have fewer options but you can still segment based on signup date or subscriber activity. If you do have more information available, you can choose other ways to segment.

One segment you absolutely should have is your customers! This is the “delight” phase of inbound marketing. Those who already do business with you should be one of your prime focus areas. Offer them special deals. Provide awesome customer service and quick responses to their questions so they can only brag about how wonderful you are. Happy and satisfied customers who understand the value you offer will not hesitate to refer new customers to you.

Further Reading:

Lead Nurturing – Build Relationships with Future Clients

Create your content

Quality, educational content that moves your prospects through the buyer’s journey establishes your expertise, experience, authority and trust (E-E-A-T).

Now start writing your content. It needs to be well-written, authoritative and cover the topic in depth. That doesn’t mean length or complexity. The content should cover the topic in a complete and comprehensive manner.

Not a great writer? Search for freelance writers who are familiar with your topic and can do the writing. Or have someone interview and record your conversation and then transcribe it into a blog post. All you have to do is edit, optimize, add an image and publish.

Further Reading:

How to Write SEO Friendly Content

Make use of the right tools

You don’t have to create all the content that you share. Find content that would be of interest to your audience and share it on your social media profiles. This helps you become the go-to expert in your industry.

To collect ideas and content to share, you can either use Evernote or the OneTab extension.

Evernote can be used to save content ideas and posts to share. Install the Evernote Clipper extension to make it easy to clip content and save it in specific notebooks.

OneTab extension to Chrome and Firefox can also be used to save content to read and share later. If I open the post and see that it is worth reading and sharing later, I save it using OneTab and organize it into a group.

Either of these will enable you to save content to read and schedule for posting at a later time. This way you can set aside some time every week to fill the posting schedule using one of the following products so you remain visible.

Buffer, Publer.io or VistaSocial makes it very easy to schedule posts to Facebook Business pages, LinkedIn (both personal and company profiles), Twitter, Google Business Profile, Instagram and Pinterest. The products offer a free limited version that gives you 3 social media channels for 1 user. Start with the free version to decide which one you like best.

Be Social

Once you have chosen your social media platforms and created an account, now you need to get social. Engage with your audience and develop relationships. Before people will do business with you, they need to get to know, like and trust you.

• Spend time on your most important social sites
• Provide interesting content (manually or automated)
• Ask questions of your audience
• Respond to comments or questions from followers
• Review, find and follow interesting people

Project your personality into your social media activity. Be authentic. Be yourself.

Analyze and measure

Measuring your marketing is key to seeing what works and what doesn’t. By looking at the data, you can determine if what you are doing is actually delivering results. Then you can keep doing what you’re doing or make adjustments.

• How will you determine if your efforts are successful?
• What will you measure?
• What are the key metrics you will use to determine success?

Further Reading:

Marketing Execution: Plan, Execute, Track, and Measure

Lead generation using inbound marketing is a process that allows your business to gain visibility and establish relationships with customers. By projecting your expertise and industry knowledge through your content, you can naturally attract and engage with customers.

But remember it only only works when all the pieces come together to deliver a clear, compelling message. With a well-defined and practical plan built knowing your budget and resources, inbound marketing can increase your web presence and grow your top-line sales revenue.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Masterful Inbound Marketing for Powerful Lead Generation is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

When you start an online search, you usually have some specific reason to do so. Your goal may be to find educational information for something you are working on. Or you are researching and comparing products to ultimately make a purchase. You could also just want a quick answer to a question or directions to a store or restaurant. In all cases, your search has a particular intent.

But when you enter your search query and you get back the results, do they help you? Are the answers aligned with the meaning behind your search? Or are the results giving you answers to something other than what you are looking for?

As a content creator, it is important that we understand our audience needs, why they are searching and then create and optimize our content to satisfy their query.

What is search intent?

Search intent is the underlying purpose or motivation behind an online search query. It goes beyond the words entered into a search engine and focuses on understanding what the user hopes to achieve with their search. If we want our content to rank for a particular keyword phrase, we need to understand the intent of the search and provide the best answer to their query.

Google defines four types of search intent that align with the user’s reason for conducting the search.

Informational – I want to know

Informational search is when you search to find information. You are in research mode and want to learn about a particular topic, complete a task or try something new. At this point in the buyer’s journey, you are not ready to make a purchase. The keyword intent behind informational search queries is to get more knowledge about a subject.

Navigational – I want to go

Navigational search is where you are looking for a local business, and online business or want to visit a nearby store. The keyword intent behind navigational search queries is to get location information. You have already made the decision about what you want and just need to know where to find it.

Commercial Investigation- I need to decide

Commercial search intent is when you are researching a service or product before you are ready to make a transaction. You are getting close to buying, but you want more information to determine which product or service you will choose. You may be comparing products, looking for reviews, checking out pricing and terms of service or understanding which product has the features you need.

Transactional – I want to buy

Transactional search is where you are ready to make a purchase but are looking for help on where to buy. For products, you may want to buy directly from the manufacturer or you may want to find a better deal. Having this content on your website helps you convince them to purchase your products or services. What they are looking for now is the value you provide verses another business that has the same or similar offering.

How to determine user intent for a keyword

You might be wondering how you go about understanding intent. For some searches, the search query may be obvious. For example, if the search query starts with “how”, most likely the search is going to be informational – i.e. how to increase website traffic. If the search uses the phrase “near me”, the search is most likely to be navigational.

But what if the search is more generic? How do you figure out what the intent of the search is?

Let’s look at an example.

I did a search for the keyword “golf clubs” to see what comes up. The results assumed I was interested in buying new golf clubs. My search results contained brands and businesses that sold them, both online and offline, that I could visit to purchase. However I also noticed some “People also ask” questions:

And a little further down in the results, I saw a buying guide.

In other words, even Google isn’t sure about my intent of the search and therefore, provided a few options.

Then I searched for “best golf clubs for beginners“. The results were much more focused being comprised of buyer’s guides and articles that discussed the topic. There were still ads to buy golf clubs, but the organic results would help me determine the best club for a beginner.

Then I searched for “golf clubs near me“. That resulted in a list of golf courses in my area. But it also provided places I could shop for golf clubs at retail stores. Again, the intent of the search was a bit unclear.

As a content creator, have a plan to provide content for each of the keywords that are relevant to what you offer based on intent. You need to understand what your audience is looking for and create the appropriate content to satisfy their questions. If you sell golf clubs, have content on different brands you offer. Also, provide educational content to help the searcher decide which set of golf clubs are best for them.

Optimize content for search intent

Now that you understand the concept of search intent, here are the steps you need to optimize new and existing content.

Review your keyword research

If you have already done keyword research, review what you have to ensure you understand the intent of each keyword that is important to you. If you have not done keyword research for your business, take the time to do it. Knowing what your audience wants and why they want it will help you create the content that attracts them to you.

Analyze the search results

As we showed in the example above, when you want to write or update existing content, start with a search of your keyword phrase. The first page of the search results will give you examples of the type of content that is associated with that query. You will know if your keyword phrase is aligned with what you think is the intent. If not, find long-tail keywords that better describe the purpose of the search and rewrite and optimize the content around that phrase.

Review your content

Start with content you already have and conduct a content audit. Update and optimize your content to reflect the value your audience is looking for. Since Google’s helpful content update, you may gain more visibility faster if you update what you have. Then work on new content that you need to fill the gaps in your content strategy.

Choose the right content type

Make sure your content aligns with the intent and contains the information that people are expecting. If someone is looking for “how to” do anything, they are usually looking for a step by step process to help them complete a task.

For each of these specific types of search intent, having the right content to satisfy the search is important.

• Informational – Types of content that work for this type of search are blog posts, how to articles, educational videos, tutorials, and podcasts. Creating an FAQ with answers to common questions about your business can help meet user informational search needs as well.
• Navigational – Types of content that work for this type of search are citations, reviews, directions or information in your Google Business Profile. It’s not necessarily content you create, but listings you need to claim and ensure they are accurate.
• Commercial – Types of content that help you in this moment are product comparisons, white papers, detailed product and service pages, case studies, eBooks, buyer’s guides, pricing information and a product or service FAQ.
• Transactional – Content such as a complimentary assessment, testimonials, estimates, pricing, discounts, demos or free trials can encourage the user to lean more towards your offering.

Conclusion

Understanding the motives behind search queries, whether driven by wanting to know something, wanting to do something or wanting to buy something, encourages us to tailor our content to our target audience’s needs. This will help us offer more value to our audience while also improving the chances of ranking higher in the search results.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Search Intent: Optimizing Content to Satisfy Customer Goals is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Small businesses are looking for ways to get noticed but many underestimate the importance of producing quality content. Content marketing in conjunction with SEO is a powerful small business marketing strategy. By writing, publishing, and distributing content that displays your expertise, you build credibility, authority and trust before trying to sell anything to those you wish to work with.

Small businesses should invest in content marketing. When you create and publish content that has value, you stand out from your competition. Your business becomes a resource for quality, educational information that will help potential customers make a purchase decision.

If you don’t believe in the importance of content marketing to your business, take a look at these statistics:

• 70% of people would rather learn about a company through content rather than advertising
• 82% of consumers feel more positive about a company after reading custom content
• 60% of people are inspired to seek out a product after reading content about it

Given all of these positive aspects of including content marketing into your marketing efforts, only 50% of small businesses with 20 or fewer employees report doing any content marketing.

What does this mean? There is ample opportunity for your businesses to get ahead of the competition with an investment in content marketing.

Benefits of Content Marketing

1. Increases your digital footprint

Adding more quality content to your website helps to create a larger digital footprint. Every page that you create for your website gives the search engine one more page to index and serve to your potential customers. The more quality content you have that helps them, the more likely they will choose your business when they wish to buy.

2. Generates leads more cost-effectively

One of the most important content marketing benefits is generating inbound leads by attracting your ideal buyers. Content marketing costs about 62% less than traditional marketing tactics but it generates about 3 times as many leads.

If you understand what your audience needs, your content will attract potential customers when it is presented during a search. When a visitor finds your content, they will take action if the content provided was captivating enough that they would like to see more.

Even though it can be time-consuming, content marketing is one of the best investments you can make in your business.

3. Builds trust and awareness

Sharing your expertise also builds the trust of your audience. Your content should provide advice, education and useful solutions freely and without a sales pitch. When you create and share high-quality content, you are seen as an authority in your niche. You are now the expert that can help them solve whatever problem they have. Relationships built on trust are more likely to move beyond free advice into a profitable relationship for your business.

Display your expertise in your field and write useful content that can help people overcome a problem or challenge. You will build your E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness), one of the guidelines Google uses to assess whether your content is valuable to readers.

4. Provides the foundation for SEO

Without content, there is nothing to optimize. In order to rise in the search engine results, you need to create content that offers value and shares helpful information with your ideal customer. When your content satisfies the intent of the search so it answers their questions, your content will attract them to you.

Ranking on the first page further strengthens the trust relationship between your audience and your brand. But generating traffic through organic SEO requires that you keep your content relevant, informative and up to date.

5. Increases your social media following

As your content gets promoted and shared, you can connect with people who have shared your content or commented on your post. This gives you an opportunity to answer other questions and become a trusted source for helpful information. When the need arises, you become the go-to business to help solve their biggest problem

Posting your content on your social media channels will provide customers a way to interact with your business. Your audience will want to like, comment and share content they find interesting. And they are more likely to like your page or subscribe to your channel if you are consistently giving them quality information.

6. Delivers a high ROI

With an effective content marketing strategy, there are many ways you will see a positive return on your investment. Your business will enjoy increased leads, higher brand visibility, better brand reputation and increased inbound traffic.

7. Provides long-term visibility

Unlike paid ads, content marketing is in it for the long-haul. When you run a PPC campaign, once you turn it off, your visibility goes with it. When your business ranks in the organic search engine results, it is there for a longer period of time. Your position in the search results is not predicated on your ad budget. But you do need to keep the content up-to-date so it remains relevant.

8. Delivers value with no strings attached

Giver’s gain is the concept of helping people grow their business without an ulterior motive. Content marketing takes the giver’s gain concept of networking to a higher level. You help people freely without expecting anything in return. This makes your business approachable and the one most people will feel more comfortable with when they do decide to choose a vendor.

What are the content marketing challenges?

Small business owners are very busy so I’d be remiss if I didn’t also spell out the challenges of content marketing. But keep in mind that there are ways to get help rather than go it alone.

1. Defining your goals for content marketing

What do you want to achieve with your content marketing activity? Do you want to drive more leads, increase traffic to your website, gain more visibility or build trust and awareness of your brand? Your answer will drive the type of content you will need to produce.

2. Narrowing your target audience

In order to succeed in content marketing, you have to focus on a specific target audience in order to create the right content at the right time to help them make a buying decision. If you can intimately understand your audience’s challenges, you can be found when they most need you.

3. Having enough time and resources to produce the content

Creating quality content takes time. But if this is important to you, carve out the time in your schedule or find someone who can do the initial writing for you. Then all you will need to do is review the content for publication.

4. Creating a content plan

A content plan provides the road map for what type of content to produce and when. Laying out the content with details such as publish date and media type to align with your ideal client helps you keep on track. This is one area you just can’t wing it and hope for the best.

5. Writing content with focus and clarity

If you create posts around a single or narrow topic, you will find that you can create more focused content that is easy to consume. Even though the trend is to write long-form content, shorter posts can still work to get you more visibility. Then you can develop some evergreen content that will provide long-term visibility for your particular expertise.

6. Knowing where to promote your content

You can create the best content, but if you don’t promote it, it will stay hidden. But where to promote it is the question. A local business can promote content on its Google Business Profile. Other options are promoting it on your Facebook page or on your LinkedIn profile or company page. Knowing where your target will most likely see your content helps you determine where to post. 

7. Producing content consistently

Consistency in publishing is probably the hardest thing to do. Set realistic expectations around your content delivery. Creating content once or twice a month that excites and informs your audience is a good schedule for most small businesses. Look for other opportunities to share your expertise through interviews or guest posts. They also help you gain precious backlinks.

8. Measuring the effectiveness of your content

Measuring any marketing activity is always hard. But there are ways to do it. Using Google Analytics or Google Search Console, you can get information on what content is being seen. Both provide data that can help you see if your website is gaining more visitors, what pages and posts on your website are most trafficked and which channels are referring visitors to your website.

Seeing the effects of content marketing on your business takes time but you should notice if there are positive outcomes from having done the work.

Is it worth it for your business?

Content marketing benefits definitely outweigh the challenges. Proving your expertise through the content you produce is an investment you should make. Don’t wait to get started on this effective marketing strategy. Work with someone who can help you get clarity, overcome the challenges and help your business become more visible and valuable to your target customers.

© Masterful Marketing®. All Rights Reserved. Why Content Marketing is Important for Small Business Growth is an original post from: Masterful Marketing. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to follow Masterful Marketing on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.