4 Ways to Improve your Marketing Efforts This Year

4 Ways to Improve your Marketing Efforts This Year

Now that it’s 2017, it’s a great time to push past your competitors and into the limelight of organic search engines. With some of the recent algorithm changes from Google & Bing, we want to show how to improve your marketing efforts and general visibility. Let’s get you on the right path for long-term success, and bring some potential customers to your local business.

Keyword Research & Content Writing

Remember back when you would type something into a search engine and you would get absolutely nothing close to what you were looking for? You might still get a few searches like that every now and then but if you want to relive that moment or are too young to experience it, try using a search engine like Dogpile for local search and let me know how it goes.

What does this all mean? Well, content and keywords aren’t anything new to the SEO world. But Google and other search engines are getting smarter in their algorithm to help serve that best possible intent to a user the first time. And now just keyword stuffing or making broad content to rank isn’t going to cut it.

Recently Google released RankBrain, an artificial intelligence program which groups keywords into clusters. So if you wrote an article about top lobster restaurants in Seattle, you could actually not even have the keyword “lobster” anywhere in the article. Even a step further, Google bolds “seafood” as it correlates a lobster as a group member of seafood.

So when doing keyword research in your business, it’s time to group your keywords and write content that readers are going to enjoy and find the answers to their queries quickly.

Local Reviews

According to a 2015 study, 70% of americans now will check for online reviews before using a service or making a purchase. If you are business in Seattle or anywhere in the world, you now need an online presence. On top of that, you now need to have your ducks in a row and show trust and credibility.

Now let’s say you’re looking for seafood restaurants in the downtown Seattle area. Of course, as Seattle is known for their freshness of seafood, there must be some epic places to dine-in. As the searches show, 2,400 people are craving “seafood near them” everyday around downtown Seattle. That’s 77 potential people a day coming to your restaurant if you are ranked well enough.

So who is the top and why did they make it? Well, if you zoom around your maps you will get different results and this is due to factors like:

• Restaurant’s radius
• Amount of reviews
• CTR
• Citations
• Backlinks

As you can see below, Elliott’s Oyster House is the top listing for “seafood near me” – it’s well deserved due to them getting their ducks in a row. This can be accomplished from achieving more of the factors above.

Check out your own local business and see if you are ranking for generic keywords in your area. If not, then it’s time to start trying to capture your online presence.

Get Mobile Optimized in Seattle or Miss 60%

Planes, trains, and automobiles – or just walking around. People are searching non-stop. They are looking for how tall the Smith Tower is, what the best restaurants in Seattle are, or the closest park near me. And in 2016, more than 60% of people are doing this on a mobile device. If your business isn’t mobile optimized, you aren’t appeasing the search engines and you will suffer in the rankings due to a higher bounce rate and lower engagement.

Creating a site audit is your first step to see where you stand and then proceeding in a restructure if needed. Some websites need a complete framework while others just need to fix errors and optimize code to perform better on a mobile device.

You can use a simple scoring tool like Google PageSpeed or Pingdom to see where you stand. This will give you good insight of how well your website is loading and what could possibly need to be fixed. These are just generic audit tools and if you want to be optimize closer to the 100%, you will need to use more in-depth audit tools and strategies.

Google Map Ads (Promoted Pins)

Speaking of people walking around, when was the last time you saw a person with a map? Actually, you see them everyday. But in the era of technology, we have replaced our paper maps with digital ones on our phones. People are searching more than ever before to find places through their phones and using Google Maps to start their search. This means instead of going to a informational page, they already have the intention of what they want and now are just looking for the location. So, without further ado, I introduce you to promoted pins.

When competition becomes too hard to handle or you are looking to test a market for SEO purposes, this is where pay per click really shines. It can bring direct traffic to your doorstep and put you above all the local organic searches. In this case, you have a shiny purple pin in the red sea (pun intended) that sticks out like one of those people that just photobombed you.

Need help getting your website seen in search results or want to take advantage of pay per click ads? N2Q can help. Drop us a line and we’ll talk about your pain points and how we can boost your marketing efforts.