13 Ways Businesses Can Use SEO & Marketing to Combat Coronavirus Impact

You should, at this point, be taking the safety precautions recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO). Many federal governments are stepping up with policies to protect their workers from the certain economic impacts of widespread self-isolation.

In Italy, one of the hardest-hit areas to date, the government negotiated an accord with banks for the suspension of mortgage payments, for example. And in Canada, where I live, the waiting period for unemployment benefits has been eliminated.

There are quite a few reputable resources to help employers and employees prepare for COVID-19, like this WHO guide.

For self-employed individuals and small business owners, help can be harder to find.

How can your business survive the economic impact of a COVID-19 outbreak — or the social distancing required to prevent one?

Keep Calm & Optimize On.

This is not a time for panic.

I’m seeing some alarming accounts from marketing and SEO friends of clients pulling their contracts and shutting down marketing operations until further notice.

This knee-jerk reaction is setting your business up for a long-term, uphill struggle to recover.

Whether you are a landscaping business, a family-owned restaurant, a small retail shop, or some other privately-owned company, you may experience revenue losses in the coming months. Product or service business, ecommerce or brick-and-mortar, we are all bracing for a hit.

There is a lot of uncertainty around the potential economic impacts of COVID-19, and that is certainly scary.

But what is certain is that we will recover.

“Flattening the curve” works as a method of mitigating the damage of a pandemic by not only reducing the volume of cases and therefore the strain on social systems but also spreading the cases out over time, so they can be handled more effectively.

Organic search is a zero-sum game; your gains or losses are exactly balanced by the gains or losses of others in the SERPs.

We understand paid search and social as a live auction but tend not to think of organic this way.

It is very much a living, breathing, competitive space and if you’re not actively moving ahead, you’re falling behind.

Budgeting for Marketing & SEO During Coronavirus Pandemic

If you’re doing anywhere between $1 and $5 million in sales per year you should be spending 7–8% of gross revenue on advertising and marketing, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration.

I’ve worked with high-growth companies budgeting 10–12%, but for maintenance 7% is a bare minimum.

This means for every $100,000 in gross revenue, you should have at least $7,000 earmarked for advertising and marketing per year.

It is critical that you maintain at least this level of marketing investment throughout the Coronavirus pandemic.

If you cannot afford to grow right now, so be it.

If it makes sense to cut back on some paid advertising for the time being (say, for example, your employees can’t come in to serve customers so there’s no point right now in attracting them to your location), then that’s a logical decision to make.

SEO and inbound marketing are a long game, however.

You’ve invested in building your processes and workflow, ensuring data quality with consistent measurement, building an audience and customer base, and creating quality content that ranks.

What’s more, you can count on the fact that others are going to panic and underestimate the impact of an emotional decision on their 6- to 12-month business horizon.

As their engagement drops, their publishing cadence slows, perhaps their review volume or quality falls off, and they lose traction across channels, you have the opportunity to push ahead and come out on top.

This is the time to stay the course and tackle all of those potentially impactful SEO and marketing tasks you’ve had on your back burner.

Whether you’re working with an agency or handling marketing in-house, these are tasks you can get your team working on while they self-isolate and work remotely.

13 SEO & Marketing Tasks to Do NOW for a Faster Coronavirus Recovery

1. Interview Employees & Customers

Use Zoom or Google Hangouts to host and record video calls.

Interview your employees and customers about their unique experiences with and knowledge of your products, services, and culture.

Use Otter.ai for automated video transcription

In the coming months, these transcripts and videos will be a rich source of insider info for your blog posts, social content, media releases, and more.

2. Do a Mini-Audit of Your Content Assets

A full-blown content audit takes time and expertise, but there is much you can do during this slow period to improve your content performance with a mini-audit.

If you haven’t kept an inventory of your content assets to date, this is a great time to get started.

Create a new Google Sheet or Excel sheet and use one tab for each content type:

· Webpages.

· Emails.

· Blog posts.

· Whitepapers.

· Ebooks.

· Presentations.

· Videos.

· Infographics.

· Articles you’ve published externally.

Etc.

If you get really ambitious, you can track articles others have published about your business, too.

Now evaluate each piece with a critical eye.

· Which high-quality pieces and images can you repurpose for other channels?

· Which pieces got the most social shares? The most backlinks?

· Which ones get the most traffic on-site?

These may all be opportunities for:

· Updating with fresh content.

· Optimizing with new CTAs and keywords.

· Adding internal links to new products/services.

· Repromoting when business picks up again.

3. Plan Webinars

Want to answer frequently asked questions about your approach to small engine repair?

Introduce new team members, products, or features to your customer base?

Inspire seasonal bookings for later this year?

If you’re constantly tied up in the field and now freaking out in an empty office twiddling your thumbs, this is a great time to try out your webinar game.

This is an especially effective marketing tactic in B2B, as 91% of professionals say webinars are their favorite content format for learning.

4. Clean up Your Administrative Messes

“Here are some of the things I’m planning to do:

· Administrative work: clean up files, delete things I don’t need anymore, close open contracts that shouldn’t be open.

· Website: write some posts I’ve been meaning to get to that have evergreen advice, and do a long overdue SEO clean up.

· Webinars and Podcasts: research some that I can pitch to and work on some pitches and ideas for the future.

· Books: read that stack of marketing books I haven’t gotten to!” — Jenny Halasz

5. Take Aim at Different Types of SERPS

If you’re like a lot of small business owners, you haven’t had time to even think about getting any more sophisticated than having a presence in search and maybe trying to balance your organic and PPC efforts for good coverage.

Now that you may have a bit of time and space to dig deeper, you can plot your domination of position zero, video carousels, paragraph snippets, and more.

6. Get Recording Videos

Videos are great SEO fodder on their own, they can help you:

· Target long-tail keywords.

· Trigger featured snippets.

· Appear in relevant YouTube searches.

But they can also be the basis for all types of other content, too.

As mentioned above, Otter.ai is a low-cost way to transcribe video with AI (and if you have employees in need of at-home work, you can get them to watch the video and clean up the transcripts, as the tech isn’t perfect).

Embed the video in a blog post and include the transcript.

Take screenshots and use them as images in social.

Take 5–10 quotes from the video transcript and use them alongside images on Instagram in the coming months.

Reuse those quotes in media releases and upcoming blog posts.

7. Work on Your Online Reviews Strategy

The web is littered with online reviews companies haven’t answered.

You don’t have to go back to the dawn of Yelp time and answer each one, but this is a good time to make sure your more recent reviews have a thoughtful response.

Create a reviews policy and, if you have a good candidate, train an employee now to manage your online reviews going forward.

Write some template responses and go over your brand messaging with them.

Coach them on responding to negative reviews and escalating legit customer service issues to the right person.

Give them the tools they need to monitor reviews and get alerts.

Show them what you expect as far as measuring the value of reviews and monthly reporting.

8. Get Behind Digital in a Big Way

“Get your storefront online so that people can shift from personal shopping to parcel delivery. Get better at video. Loom just halved their rates. I got a 1-year Pro plan today for $48USD/year. It’s a massive tool for sharing information with clients and contacts. Evangelize telecommuting. Share the word about remote tools like Skype, Zoom, Google Docs, etc.” — Shawn DeWolfe

9. Update Your Google My Business Profile for Local Customers

Are you operating on special hours?

Taking special care to avoid the spread of COVID-19?

Google wants local businesses to use the tools available within the GMB dashboard to let customers know what’s changed.

Update your hours and business description, share Google Posts with updates and offers, and make sure your contact information is correct in case people are trying to reach you.

10. Show Your Website Some Love

“Fix your site. You know it’s not perfect, spend some time practicing what you preach and make your site the lead magnet it needs to be!” — Grant Simmons

11. Sniff out Unnatural Links

In her recent column, Anna Crowe shared a couple of pretty compelling stories about the importance of seeking and destroying unnatural backlinks.

In one case, a site had received a manual Google penalty but achieved a top 3 positioning within weeks of removing a disavow file and removing over 1,900 unnatural links.

In another, a site lost 82% of its traffic after building thousands of unnatural links.

There are a lot of different ways unnatural links can happen, and they’re not all intentional.

An unscrupulous SEO here, a shady competitor there and suddenly you can’t figure out why your SEO efforts aren’t paying off.

In How to Find Unnatural Links to Your Site & What to Do About Them, Crowe explains 11 types of unnatural links to watch out for and lays out a step-by-step process for sussing them out.

12. Consider an Outreach Strategy

Whether or not reaching out to your customers during a pandemic is appropriate depends entirely on your type of business, your existing relationship with customers, and the purpose of the communication.

Are customers used to hearing from you regularly by email, SMS messaging or social media?

Don’t let that relationship drop off.

Stay away from tacky disaster-related promotions (looking at you, American Apparel with your Hurricane Sandy Sale).

What you can do is get creative and think of how you can offer reassurance, social connection, or tangible assistance during COVID-19.

“Making the decision to cut your budget at this time is reactionary rather than strategic. SEO and online marketing are avenues to build connection and trust with people and how you do that during challenging times matters just as much as when you’re ready to serve or sell them directly.” — Marketing and SEO strategist Monisha Bajaj

“Making the decision to cut your budget at this time is reactionary rather than strategic,” explains marketing and SEO strategist Monisha Bajaj.

“SEO and online marketing are avenues to build connection and trust with people and how you do that during challenging times matters just as much as when you’re ready to serve or sell them directly.”

· Could you host an online video space once a week for people to check-in, have a light discussion on trends in your industry, and maybe trade tricks or tips relevant to your product or service?

· Can you be a local leader in distributing reputable information to your community about COVID-19 supports? Remember that a lot of places no longer have a local newspaper or radio station. If you have the time to gather information from local government and health agencies and make sure people know where they can get tested for Coronavirus, what steps they should take to report symptoms, etc., why not publish it in a blog or your email newsletter? Include a disclaimer that you are not giving medical advice, and always link back to the original source of the information so people can verify it for themselves.

· Let customers know how your business is changing or adapting to protect them and your employees. Encourage conversation and be forthcoming in answering questions or concerns they may have.

13. Get to Know Customers Better With a Deep Dive Into Your First-Party Data

“Go through your analytics and sales/lead data. What do you know about your customers? What do you know about prospects that didn’t pick you (or about people near your business that don’t shop with you)? What is in the analytics data that you have missed in the past — are they on iPhones, all visit from city X? Compare offline and online trends and determine what could you fix today that you have never had time to do.” — Dave Rohrer

And Remember, Put On Your Own Oxygen Mask First…

Supply chain interruptions, the need for social distancing, and impending economic uncertainty are all serious stressors for business owners.

You have responsibilities to employees, customers, and other stakeholders — but you need to take care of yourself so you’re in shape to take care of those others, first.

The WHO has released a document entitled Mental Health Considerations During COVID-19 Outbreak that I recommend as a resource for all of us struggling to come to terms with this fast-evolving threat.

Words matter. Perspective matters.

Focusing on the future and what we can do to prepare for recovery matters.

Do you have plans to tackle certain aspects of your business if you experience a slow-down? Share your tips for others in the comments.

SOURCE: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/seo-marketing-combat-coronavirus-impact/354780/

Marketing in Times of Uncertainty - Whiteboard Friday

Our work as marketers has transformed drastically in the space of a month. Everyone’s looking for an answer on how to do our jobs empathetically and effectively through one of the most difficult trials in modern memory.

We hope you’ve got a cozy seat in your home office, a hot mug of coffee from your own kitchen Keurig, and your cat in your lap as you join us for today.

Video Transcription

I think that now is the right time to talk about marketing in uncertain epochs like the one we’re living through. We obviously have a global crisis. It’s very serious. But most of you watch Whiteboard Friday. They want to help people through this crisis. And that means doing marketing. And I don’t think that now is the right time for us to stop our marketing activities. In fact, I think it’s time to probably crunch down and do some hard work.

So let’s talk about what’s going on. And then I’ll give some tactics that I hope will be helpful to you and your teams, your clients, your bosses, everyone at your organizations as we’re going through this together.

The Business World Is Experiencing Widespread Repercussions

First off, we are in this cycle of trying to prevent massive amounts of death, which is absolutely the right thing to do. But because of that, I think a lot of us in the business world, in the marketing world, are experiencing pain, particularly in certain industries. In some industries obviously demand is spiking, it’s skyrocketing for, you know, coronavirus-related reasons. And in other cases, demand is down. That’s because we sort of have this inability to go out.

We can’t go to bars and restaurants and movies and bowling alleys and go do all the things we would normally do. So, we don’t need fancy clothes to go do it and we don’t need haircuts — this is probably the last Whiteboard Friday I would want to record before needing a cut. And all of that spending, right, that consumer spending affects business-to-business spending as well.

Lower spending → cost-cutting → lower investment/layoffs → environment of fear…

It leads to cost cutting by businesses because they know there’s not as much demand. It leads to lower investment and oftentimes layoffs as we saw in the United States, where nearly 10 million workers are are out of work, according to the latest stats from the federal government. And that builds this environment of fear, right. None of us have faced anything like this. This is much bigger and worse, at least this spike of it is, than the Great Recession of 2008. And, of course, all of these things contribute to lower spending across the board.

However, what’s interesting about this moment in time is that it is a compressed moment. Right. It’s not a long-term fear of of what will happen. I think there’s fears about whether the recession will take a long time to recover from. But we know that eventually, sometime between 3 and 18 months from now, spending will resume and there will be this new normal. I think of now as a time when marketing needs to change its tone and attitude.

Businesses need to change their tone and attitude and in three ways. And that’s what I want to talk through.

Three Crucial Points

1. Cut with a scalpel, not with a chainsaw

First off, as you are looking to save money and if you’re an agency, if you’re a consultant, your clients are almost certainly saying, “Hey, where can we pull back and still get returns on investment?” And I think one of the important points is not to cut with a chainsaw. Right. Not to take a big whack to, “Oh, let’s just look at all of our Google and Facebook ad spending and cut it out entirely.” Or “Let’s look at all of our content marketing investments and drop them completely.” That’s not probably not the right way to go.

Instead, we should be looking to cut with a scalpel, and that means examining each channel and the individual contributors inside channels as individuals and looking at whether they are ROI-positive. I would urge against looking at a say, one-week, two-week, three-week trend. The last three weeks spending is very frozen and I believe that it will open up more again. I think most economists agree. You can see that’s why the the public stock markets have not crashed nearly as hard. We’ve had some bouncing around.

And I think that’s because people know that we will get to this point where people are ordering online. They are using businesses online. They are getting deliveries. They are doing activities through the Internet over the course of however long we’re quarantined or there is fear about going out and then it will return to a new normal.

And so because of that, you should probably be looking something like six to twelve weeks in the past and trying to sort out, OK, where are the trends, where are their lifelines and opportunities and points of light? And let’s look at those ROI-positive channels and not cut them too soon.

Likewise, you can look inside a channel. If you haven’t seen it already, I highly recommend Seer Interactive’s guide to cutting with a scalpel, not a sledgehammer, and they look at how you can analyze your Google Ads accounts to find keywords that are probably still sending you valuable traffic that you should not pull back on. I would also caution — I’ve talked to a bunch of folks recently who’s seen Facebook and Instagram and Twitter and YouTube and Google ad inventory at historically low prices. So if you have ROI-positive channels right now or your clients do, now is an awesome time to be to potentially be putting some dollars into that.

2. Invest now for the second & third waves in the future

Second thing, I would invest now for the second and third waves. I think that’s a really smart way to go. You can look at Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg and a bunch of folks have written about investing during times of recession, times of fear, and seeing how. Basically when we when we go through wave one, which I think will be still another two to six weeks, of sort of nothing but virus-related news, nothing but COVID-19, and get to a point where we’re transitioning to this life online. It’s becoming our new every day. And then getting to a post-crisis new normal, you know, after we have robust testing and quarantining has hopefully worked out well. The hospital systems aren’t overwhelmed and maybe a vaccine as is near development or done.

When those things start to come, we will want to have now messaging and content and keyword demands serving. Right. And ads and webinars. Anything that is in our marketing inventory that can be helpful to people, not just during this time, but over the course of these, because if we make these investments now, we will be better set up than our competitors who are pulling back to execute on this. And that is what that research shows, right, that essentially folks who invest in marketing, in sales during a recession tend to outperform and more quickly outperform their competition as markets resume. You don’t even have to wait for them to get good — just as they start to pick up.

3. Read the room

The third and possibly most important thing right now is, I think, to read the room. People are paying attention online like never before. And if you’re doing web marketing, they’re paying attention to your work. To our work. That means we need to be more empathetic than we have been historically, right? They are. Our audiences are not thinking about the same things they were weeks ago. They’re in a very new mindset. It doesn’t matter if they’re business-to-business or business-to-consumer. You are dealing with everyone on the planet basically obsessed with the conditions that we’re all in right now. That means assuming that everyone is thinking about this.

I really think the best type of content you create, the best type of marketing you can create right now across any channel, any platform is stuff that helps first. Helps other people. It could be in big ways. It could be in small ways.

The Getty Museum, I don’t know if you saw Avinash Kaushik’s great post about the Getty Museum. They did this fun thing where they took pictures from their museum, famous paintings and they put them online and said, “Hey, go around your home and try and recreate these and we’ll post them.” Is it helping health care workers get masks? No. But is it helping people at home with their kids, with their families, with their loved ones have a little fun, take their mind off the crisis, engage with art in a way that maybe they can’t because they can’t go to museums right now? Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s fine. It’s okay to help in little ways, too, but help first.

I also think it’s okay to talk about content or subjects that are not necessarily related to the virus. Look, web marketing right now is not directly related to the coronavirus. It’s not even directly related to some of the follow-on effects of that. But I’m hoping that it’s helpful. And I’m hoping that we can talk about it in empathetic and thoughtful ways. We’d just have to have to read the room.

It is okay to recognize that this crisis is affecting your customers and to talk about things that aren’t directly related but are still useful to them.

And if you can, I would try not to ignore this, right? Not to create things that are completely unrelated, that feel like, “Gosh, this could have been launched at any time in the last six months, sort of feels tone deaf.” I think everything that we do is viewed through the lens of what’s happening right now. And certainly I have that experience as I go through online content.

Do not dismiss the scenario. I think that that history will reflect very poorly. History is moving so fast right now that it is already reflecting poorly on people who are doing this.

Don’t exploit the crisis in a shameless way. I’ve seen a few marketing companies and agencies. I won’t point them out because I don’t think shaming is the right thing to do right now, but show how you’re helping. Don’t exploit by saying “It’s coronavirus times. We have a sale.” All right? Say, “Oh, we are offering a discount on our products because we know that money is tight right now and we are helping this crisis by donating 10 percent of whatever.” Or, “We are helping by offering you something that you can do at home with your family or something that will help you with remote work or something that will help you through whatever you’re going through,” whatever your customers are going through.

Don’t keep your tone and tactics the same right now. Oh, yes, I think that’s kind of madness as well. I would urge you, as you’re creating all this potentially good stuff, new stuff, stuff that plans for the future and that speaks to right now, go ahead and audit your marketing. Look at the e-mail newsletters you’re sending out. Look at the sequential emails that are in your site onboarding cycles. Look at the overlay messaging, look at your home page, look at your About page.

Make sure that you’re either not ignoring the crisis or speaking effectively to it. Right. I don’t think every page on a website needs to change right now. I don’t think every marketing message has to change. But I think that in many cases it’s the right thing to do to conduct an audit and to make sure that you are not being insensitive or perceived as insincere.

All right, everyone, I hope that you are staying safe, that you’re staying at home, that you’re washing your hands. And I promise you, together, we’re going to get through this.

SOURCE: https://moz.com/blog/marketing-in-times-of-uncertainty

Twitter Suggests Appropriate Ways for Brands to Tweet About COVID-19

Twitter is providing guidance to businesses on how to best tweet about corona virus as the situation becomes more serious with each passing day.

The company prefaces its advice by stating “this is not a marketing opportunity to capitalize on.” To that end, businesses are advised not to opportunistically link themselves to a health scare.

Currently, there is a COVID-19 related tweet every 45 milliseconds and #coronavirus is the second most used hashtag of 2020. Before joining in the discussion, Twitter suggests asking whether or not it’s appropriate for your specific brand.

“This is not about looking at what others are doing and copying. It’s about understanding the unique role your brand plays in people’s lives, how that has changed, and how your brand can help or be useful during this crisis.”

Should Your Business Tweet About Coronavirus?

Twitter identifies the situations in which businesses should tweet about COVID-19.

If COVID-19 is affecting your company

If you have important information that affects your company, or your employees (e.g. around transmission of the virus), Twitter says you should consider sharing that publicly.

If COVID-19 may affect your customers

If COVID-19 is directly affecting your business and your customers, Twitter suggests utilizing the platform to interact with your customers one on one.

Twitter gives the example of travel companies communicating changes to their booking policies:

If in doubt, ask yourself these questions

If you’re still questioning whether or not to tweet about coronavirus, ask yourself:

· Can my business share positive stories that might uplift people on Twitter?

· Does my business have positive initiatives that can be discussed?

· Can my business bring the community on Twitter together in a positive way?

Advice for Businesses Tweeting About Coronavirus

After reading the above section, and you feel it’s appropriate for your business to tweet about coronavirus, Twitter offers the following pieces of advice:

· Stay informed: Keep a close eye on the news and conversation — what might have felt like a good message yesterday might not be the right thing today.

· Use the right tone: Right now might not be the best time to be snarky or sarcastic — while empathy and understanding may go a long way.

· Anticipate customer changes: There’s expected to be an increased shift to e-commerce and a significant boom in live-streaming.

Source: Twitter

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-suggests-appropriate-ways-for-brands-to-tweet-about-covid-19/354550/#close

20 (Free) Things You NEED to Do After Launching Your E-Commerce Website

You finally did it.

After many sleepless nights, you’ve finally launched your website.

 It was a long and arduous journey, but it’s finally over! Except it isn’t. Not even close. Launching your website was a big step, but it’s only the first of many.

 Just because you have a website up and running, doesn’t mean anybody is actually going to come visit it.

The real work begins now!

Here are the top 20 things you should be doing right after you launch your e-commerce website.

1. Get Your Product Feeds Ready

Your ecommerce website is up, and it’s time to let the world know it!

By submitting a product data feed to shopping channels like Google Shopping and Amazon, you let them know exactly what you are selling. Note that I used the word “exactly.”

That’s because the more comprehensive and specific your product data feed is, the more likely it will show up for relevant searches.

Completing the product data feed might be boring and tedious work, but it will help you get the much-coveted buying-intent-filled traffic all ecommerce websites desire.

2. Install a Backup Plugin

Your new site is now up and running. You’ve put a lot of work into it, and you want to protect your investment. This is the perfect time to set up a backup plugin to make sure your hard work is protected. In a world full of server crashes and security breaches, a plugin that creates regular backups can give you some invaluable peace of mind that your site can easily be restored in case anything goes wrong.

It’s just the smart thing to do.

3. Set Up Your XML Sitemap File

Everybody publishing a website wants to be seen, and creating a sitemap.xml file will help to ensure that yours is. This file lists and organizes all the pages and URLs of your website, letting Google read and understand it much more effectively. Doing this will help Google index your entire site and rank it better. The best part is, if you’re using WordPress, it is really easy to do.

Simply install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, and you’ll have that sitemap.xml file ready before you can say “Hey Google, notice me!”

 4. Spread the Word on Social Media

If you’ve just launched a new website, you want to get as many visitors on it as you can. One of the simplest ways to do that is simply to promote your website on social media. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all boast users in the millions. Take advantage of that audience by promoting your site on these platforms as much as you can.

Let your Facebook friends and Twitter and Instagram followers know that you’ve got something new that they might find of value.

It just makes sense!

5. Set Up Your Website’s Social Media Accounts

It’s one thing to promote your website on your social media accounts – it’s an entirely different thing to create social media accounts for it.

A well-curated social media account can add legitimacy and authority to your website.

People are more likely to trust a website that is highly visible on social media than one with no social media presence at all.

After all, the more subscribers and followers you have, the more convincing you usually are.

That’s why it’s important to get started on your website’s social media accounts as soon as possible.

6. Create More Content

If you think that launching the website was the hard part, then you’ve got another thing coming. That was actually the easiest part of the journey. Now you’ve got to get to producing a steady stream of content to keep your site relevant and current. Nobody wants to visit a stale website. You can never have enough content. You’ve got to keep churning out new content or your launch is going to be the highlight of your website.

7. Configure Google Analytics

In all the excitement of your website launch, don’t forget to configure your website with Google Analytics. Doing this will let give you access to the data that you will find to be incredibly valuable if you want to grow your website.

This includes:

• The number of site visitors.
• How your keywords are doing.
• Where your website traffic is coming from.
• Who exactly your traffic is.
• And much more data.

All it takes is a little bit of Google code. If you’re serious about growing your website’s audience, then having Google Analytics is definitely a must.

8. Send Out A Press Release

Your new website is up, but chances are, nobody knows what it’s all about. That’s why sending out a press release can prove to be valuable. This serves as a first initial introduction to who you are and what your website is about. Your press release doesn’t have to be a long, either. A concise introduction is all you need to let me people know you’re in business.

9. Get Your Site SEO-Ready

Promoting your new website on social media and email may get you some good traffic, but nothing beats Google when it comes to reaching some serious numbers.

That’s why getting your site’s SEO right is such a big deal. More traffic means more potential sales and leads for your new ecommerce website. Now SEO is incredibly complicated, but you don’t need to be an expert on it. There are lots of SEO plugins out there like Yoast SEO that can make SEO simple, and really make a big difference in how Google ranks your website. It’s definitely something you have to set-up right away.

 10. Change Your Permalink Structure

Permalinks are permanent links that people (and maybe more importantly, Google) uses to recognize the individual pages of your website. WordPress’ default permalinks aren’t very SEO-friendly. After all, how does the permalink “yoursite.com/?p=101” add any value in Google’s eyes?

 Instead, setting the permalink to your post title would be much more useful for SEO purposes.

 As an added bonus, anybody reading “yoursite.com/post-title” can get a quick idea of what the page is all about at a glance.

 11. Set Up Google Search Console

Google Search Console (GSC) should be one of the very first things you set up on your new website.

GSC allows you to understand how Google sees your website. This is extremely valuable because if you can understand how Google sees your website, you can take specific steps to improve your ranking. It also shows you who is linking back to your website, as well as point out internal errors, if there are any. You can also see how your site appears in the search engine results, and let you know which keywords your site is showing up for.

 12. Beef Up Security

You’ve just launched your website and are probably feeling like a proud new parent right about now.

That pride is soon replaced by dread, as you realize there are terrible things out there looking to do your baby wrong: mainly malware, viruses, and hackers.

For peace of mind, look to install a firewall of some sort to protect your website from all these things.

There are tons of free security plugins out there, and you should take advantage.

13. Enable Caching

 

Your site may be brand spanking new, but if it loads like an old car from the junkyard, nobody is going to want to stay on it. Content is king, but speed is always a major factor when it comes to keeping visitors happy. Installing a free caching plugin will allow your site to reduce loading speeds significantly. There are lots of free caching services out there, so it doesn’t make sense not to take advantage.

 14. Take Advantage of Google Alert Mentions

This is by far the easiest way to keep your finger on the pulse. Setting Google Alert Mentions to your website name and specific keywords you’re tracking can let you know exactly what people are saying about your website and your specific keywords. This way, you will know what’s current and relevant about the things you are promoting/selling/writing about.

You’ll also know exactly what kind of content your competition might be coming out with.

Knowing these things as they happen will allow you to respond accordingly.

15. Set Up Email List Sign-Ups

Website traffic is great, but the main point of it is to get into their inboxes.

That’s where you can build relationships, promote ideas, and really sell products to the people.

That’s why it is of utmost importance that you set up a way for your website visitors to leave their emails with you.

Of course, having an email list signup form available is a completely different thing from getting your traffic to actually sign up for it.

Come up with creative incentives to convince your audience that joining your email list will be of value to them, such as offering a free e-book or access to gated content.

16. Take Advantage of HARO

Help A Reporter Out or HARO is a service that can get you some serious press for free.

Signing up will get you three emails a day with questions from journalists.

If you see any questions you can answer, send an in-depth response to the mystery journalist.

If your response piques their interest enough, they will reach out and most probably use you as an expert source for whatever they are writing.

They get an expert source of information and you get some free exposure.

Everybody’s happy!

17. Create A Press Page

This is where you can tell your website’s story.

It should talk about what your website is all about, how it came to be, and the key details that make it unique.

This press page is something you will be linking to whenever you are writing to people about your website, so you should take great care to make sure everything is perfect.

Make sure the story is clear, and that the copy is grammatically perfect.

18. Reach Out to Website Editors & Bloggers

It might seem like a strange idea to reach out to websites and blogs that are in the same field as you, but getting connected to more established people can really help with your new website’s credibility.

Start nurturing a relationship with these people and email them one-by-one to see if they would be willing to work with you.

If the content you have to offer is good, they’ll recognize the value that you bring and maybe even give you a valuable shout-out on their website.

 19. Build an Initial Link Foundation

E-commerce or not, every website looking to get higher in the rankings should look to generate inbound links.

Inclusion in free (and some paid) directories is an ideal option for businesses with a local footprint or a business without any existing backlinks.

There’s no shortage of entries and submissions, so it might take a while before you actually get on the site.

That’s why it makes sense to submit as soon you are launched.

It also doesn’t hurt your application to have a great website that offers a lot of quality content, is aesthetically pleasing, and just generally works really well.

20. Add More Products!

A new website usually has much less content on it than one that is more established.

That’s why it’s a good idea for e-commerce websites to add more products as soon as possible.

This adds valuable content that can help your site with its ranking for certain keywords.

A website with more product selection also looks a lot more legitimate than one that’s almost empty.

Implement These Strategies to Fuel Your Sales Machine

Launching an e-commerce website is no easy feat.

But it’s what you do after the launch that really determines your success.

Be sure to keep these tips in mind and watch your traffic – and more importantly, sales – shoot through the roof.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/after-launching-ecommerce-website/346778/#close

What Is PPC & How Paid Search Marketing Works

What is PPC? How does it work? And most importantly, how can you make it work for you?

Let’s kick things off with the basics.

What Is PPC?

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an advertising model that lets marketers place ads on an ad platform and pay the host of that platform every time their ad is clicked. The goal of a PPC ad is to lead the person viewing it to click through to the advertiser’s website or app, where that visitor can complete a valuable action, such as purchasing a product.

Search engines are incredibly popular advertising platforms. They allow you to display ads that are relevant to what users are searching for. Advertising services like Google Ads and Bing Ads operate with real-time bidding (RTB), where advertising inventory is sold in a private automated auction using real-time data.

How Paid Search Works

Every time there is an ad spot on a search engine results page (SERP), an instantaneous auction takes place for the keyword. A combination of multiple factors, including bid amount and the quality of the ad, decide the winner who will appear in the top spot of the SERP. These auctions are what keeps the gears of PPC moving. Auctions begin when someone searches for something on a search engine; if there are advertisers interested in showing ads related to a user’s search query, an auction is triggered based on keywords that are bid on by advertisers. The ads that win the auction then appear on the search engine results page. To get involved in these auctions, advertisers use accounts on platforms like Google Ads to set up their ads and determine where and when they would like those ads to appear. Accounts are split into campaigns for ease of management and reporting of different locations, product types, or another useful categorization.

Campaigns are further divided into ad groups which contain keywords and relevant ads.

Keywords

Keywords lie at the center of PPC, connecting advertisers to users’ search queries. Queries are the actual words that users type into the search box of a search engine in order to find results. Keywords, on the other hand, are what marketers use to target these users by matching their search queries. Keywords work as generalized abstractions of a wide range of search queries, which are prone to irregularities like misspellings.

Depending on the keyword match types they use, advertisers can match search queries with more or less precision. For example, advertisers can choose to match keywords with search queries exactly or to allow for variations such as different orderings of the words, different spellings, or the inclusion of other words. It is also possible to have negative keywords, which will prevent ads being triggered by search queries containing those keywords, in order to avoid irrelevant traffic.

Ads

Along with keywords, you need to prepare ads in your campaigns. These are nestled together within ad groups that target shared sets of keywords, and so are organized by common themes. Ads are what the users will see if the auction is won, so they’re very important to get right.

They typically contain a:

1.       Headline.

2.       URL.

3.       Description.

On a SERP they can show up on top of the results or at the bottom of the page. It’s good practice to test different versions of ad copy to see what performs best. Services like Google Ads and Bing Ads provide features called ad extensions that enhance the appearance of ads.

 Examples include:

1.       Sitelink extensions, which populate an ad with more links to different pages on a site.

2.       Call extensions, which add a phone number to the ad during business hours.

3.       Ad extensions are great as they increase the visibility of ads by making them more engaging to users while communicating more information.

Budgets & Bids

In order to participate in the auction, advertisers need to decide how much they’re willing to spend on a given keyword.

 This is done using:

• Budgets at the campaign level
• Bids at the Ad group or keyword level

Budgets are set at the campaign level and can be exceeded on a daily basis but will not be overspent on a monthly basis. Budgets should be set according to overall account strategy, but bids are a more precise way of controlling spending.

All ad groups must have bids, but keyword level bids override ad group level bids. Due to the RTB system, the actual amount paid by the advertiser is dependent on competitor activity and ad rank, not just the maximum bid.

Ad Rank

There’s more to winning the auction than having the highest bid.

Search engines look at other factors to determine which ads should be at the top and most valuable spot on the SERP. Search engines have their own particular ways of factoring in other elements to determine ad rank. Google, for example, considers:

•           Bid amount.
•        Ad relevance and quality.
•       The context of the search (such as the user’s device and time of day).
•  Format impact (whether it includes extensions that enhance the format of the ad).
• Quality Score is a metric that determines ad relevance.

The components of Quality Score are:   

•  Historical click-through rate (CTR).
•  Relevance of the keyword to the ad.
• Relevance of the keyword and ad to the search query.
•   Landing page quality.

Ad relevance is absolutely essential; the higher Quality Score is, the lower the CPC will be.

Search engines penalize advertisers who bid on keywords with low Quality Scores by rarely showing their ads, even if they have high bids. That’s why it’s very important to have engaging and relevant ad copy that includes high-volume keywords. But landing page quality shouldn’t be overlooked either; ads will show less often when they point to sites with poor user experience.

The webpage must be relevant to the user, load quickly and provide an overall smooth user experience on all devices.

Targeting

Choosing the right keywords is what allows advertisers to show ads to relevant audiences.

But there are other targeting options available to optimize campaigns, including:

•       Device.
•       Location.
•    Day and time.
•    Demographics.

This way, advertisers can target users who are on mobile in the evening or users who are under 25 and within a certain radius of a particular location, in order to optimize the performance of their ads.

These targeting options are incredibly valuable because different variations of ad copy, for example, might perform better for one group of users than for another. It can also be possible, using remarketing tools that allow for more specific ad copy messaging and adjusted budgets, to target or exclude past visitors to a website who do follow-up searches.

Bids can be automatically adjusted for keywords based on targeting options, giving advertisers more control over traffic and spend by bidding when customers are more valuable to the business.

Conversions

The point of all this hard work isn’t to just get clicks. The real end game is to obtain conversions. Conversions are the actions that advertisers want users to complete after clicking on an ad and depend on the type of business being advertised.

Common examples of conversions include:

·       1.   Purchasing a service.

·     2.   Signing up for a newsletter.

·      3. Placing a phone call.

It’s super important to track conversions in order to know whether a PPC campaign is doing well and how many conversions can be attributed to paid search rather than other marketing channels. Platforms like Google Ads can track conversions using a snippet of code that is placed into the source code of the conversion page (which is reached after conversion, like a thank you page) to collect conversion data. Conversion tracking can be a bit tricky, because conversion paths also have a tendency to be more complicated than a simple click on an ad and a direct purchase.

They often include multiple searches and website visits, or can lead to an email, phone call or in-store visit. Using an analytics service like Google Analytics can help to decide how credit for conversions is assigned in conversion paths.

Source: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ppc-guide/what-is-ppc-paid-search/#close