LinkedIn – Are you connected?

LinkedIn is the most powerful social networking site for business, with just a few simple steps you can create a compelling profile that will help you start conversations and generate valuable business leads.

It’s not difficult to see why LinkedIn is a popular tool, with over 161 million professional users in its network it’s a must have social tool for business.

Some of the key reasons why you should use LinkedIn for business

1.) It’s a central hub for your brand – upload your company logo and some key facts about your company – an easy way to increase brand awareness.

2.) Enables you to grow followers and is an excellent tool for engagement. By using LinkedIn Groups you can  join groups within your industry which will increase your visibility. You will also be connecting and engaging with potential customers, this gives you the opportunity to show your expertise in your particular field.

3.) LinkedIn is a great source of analytics, you can check who has viewed your profile and see the industries, countries and interests of the people viewing your profile.

4.) Add a link to your company website on your LinkedIn profile to drive traffic to your website. You can also add a “Follow us on LinkedIn” button to your website. Include a link to your LinkedIn profile on customer communications such as emails and newsletters.

5.) LinkedIn is great for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). To optimise your profile for search you should add top keywords to your profile, for example in the headline or company summary.

6.) You can also use LinkedIn ads to find and target potential customers.

LinkedIn is a powerful tool, connect now and engage with your followers.

The Benefits of Blogging

Blogging is one online marketing tool that you can’t afford to miss out on, writing a blog will allow you to open lines of communication with your existing and potential customers. Blogging can be a powerful tool to build your online presence and to promote a new product or service, plus it’s quick, easy and inexpensive.

Some reasons why you should consider writing a blog

• To gain Authority and Credibility: Give your readers interesting, valuable content on a regular basis and they will come to view you as an expert in your field. If you create posts that show your enthusiasm for your products and services, customers will know you are striving to be the best.

• Improve Customer Service: A blog gives you the opportunity for a two-way conversation.  If your customers can see that your business is approachable and friendly, they are more likely to contact you if there is a problem. Finding out about a problem early on gives you the opportunity to fix it quickly.

• Better SEO results and increased traffic to your site: A blog is great for Search Engine Optimisation  (SEO) – see my earlier blog post on this. Search engines will rank new and fresh content highly and if you keep your blog updated regularly you will have a better chance of it appearing in the search engine results page. 

• Promote a new product or service: A blog is a quick and cost effective way to promote a new product to both your existing and potential customers. You can post an article on your own blog or offer to write a guest post about the product /service on someone else’s blog.

•  Promote a special event:  You can create a blog especially for a particular event, to create awareness of the event and inform readers about the details . If you are hosting a conference, you can ask speakers to contribute to your blog post. Promote each new entry on various social networks (Twitter, Facebook Google+), you can also post a description and link in relevant groups on LinkedIn.

SEO – 10 tips for getting found online

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of your website/webpage in search engines through the unpaid or ‘organic’ search results.

Why is SEO so important?

It is a fact that the majority of consumers use search engines such as Google to look for a product online before their purchase. If your website is not showing up on the first page of search engine results you will receive less visits to your site and less visits = less sales. With this in mind, if you cannot be found online then you need to change what you’re doing.

Research shows number one is best 

Researchers at Cornell University conducted an interesting  eye tracking experiment on how users interact with search engines. The main aim of the experiment was to see how users interact with the list of ranked results of search engines, if they read the abstracts sequentially from top to bottom  and how many of the results do users evaluate before clicking on a link.

Here is a summary of what they found:

You will see from the picture above,  that 56% of users clicked on the number one search result, compared with only 13% clicking on the second position. Despite spending nearly the same amount of time viewing the first and second results – reading the title and description, they still end up clicking on the first result. The study shows that the further you get down the page the fewer clicks you get. Additionally, if your site is not showing up on the first page of results it is more than likely getting very few, possibly no click throughs.

10 Easy Tips for better SEO results

SEO is not as complicated as you think, just a few simple steps will put you on the right track to getting to the top of the search engine results page.

1.)   Start a Company Blog: Start writing a company blog and do this regularly, around twice a week. This will increase the overall traffic to your website.

2.)   Delete Duplicate Content on Your Website: Check your website for duplicate content, keep content fresh and interesting, search engines look for recent content but you also need to think of the end user – what content will interest them?

3.)   Utilise Social Media: My earlier blog post discusses the benefits of using Social Media for Business, well social media also helps your SEO efforts by increasing awareness and driving people to your site. Be authentic and engage with your followers.

4.)   Link building – Inbound Marketing is a way of increasing the amount of links on other websites that link to your site. The more people linking to your site the better – ask yourself the following questions:

•  Are your suppliers linking to you?
• Are your partners linking to you?
• Will customers link to you?

If the answer to these is yes, then you’re on the right track.

5.)   Find websites with similar content to you: You need to find out who links to your competitors and who links to sites with similar content, you can use sites such as moreofit.com to find websites.

6.)   Update Your Company Profile in Online Directories:  Raise awareness of your site by adding it to various Online Directories. Ensure that company information such as website address, logo, SEO links etc are correct.

7.)   Create Well Structured Landing Pages: Landing pages should be engaging, keep text short, to the point and easy to read, people are busy and don’t want to spend too long reading lots of copy, customise the various landing pages based on the different audience segments, and offer critical information for targeted buyer personas.

8.)  Check your Analytics: Regularly monitor your data — comparing web pages, following site traffic, and evaluating customer engagement and keyword performance. Use tools such as Google analytics to find out where your visitors are coming from ,what pages they visit most frequently and check your bounce rate (bounce rate measures the percentage of people who come to your website and leave instantly). A bounce rate of approx 30% is recommended, if it is higher than 50% you will need to check your page content as there may be an issue.

9.)   Don’t forget about the Competition: Regularly check your competitor’s websites and use tools such as Seo Moz and Open Site Explorer to see how well they are performing, if they are performing well in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), ask what are they doing that you can mirror?

10.)   Don’t forget about your user! Know your user and what they are looking for, regardless of how good your SEO efforts are the main reason your website exists is for your customers, don’t forget about their needs.

These are just some of the tips for successful SEO to get you on your way, there’s lots of useful free resources online that can help you too. Some of my favourites are:

• SEO Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO
• Google SEO Starter Guide
• Open Site Explorer
• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Journal 

Thanks for visiting my blog and I hope you have enjoyed it! If you have any questions about SEO or any aspects of Digital Marketing please contact me on Twitter or Google+

Social Media – It’s the Business!

Are you using social media for your business but not yet convinced its worth the effort? Or maybe you haven’t started to use social media at all. Many people are still struggling to see the benefits of using social media for business, if you are one of these people then this blog might be worth reading.

Who is online?

Internet usage in Ireland is on the increase, within the 60 to 70-year-old age group, 21% say that they use the internet every day, compared with only 14% the previous year. Daily internet usage is obviously far greater amongst the younger age group with those aged 16 to 29, 77% are on the internet daily, compared with 64% of 30 to 44-year-olds. (stats from amas.ie) Taking a five-year view, there has been steady growth in internet use cross all the age groupings (see graph below).

But what does this mean for your business?

So, you are probably saying, ok so people are online, but how many of these are using social media? and how does this impact on my brand? Well the truth is Irish consumers like to write about brands on social media and other sites. 51% of Irish consumers write about products, compared with a global average of 47%, according to TNS Digital Life (www.tnsdigitallife.com).

Social Media – what’s all the fuss about?

Take a look at some of these interesting stats (source: socialmedia.ie)

• There’s 2.4 billion social media accounts worldwide
• Ireland has over 2million active Facebook users
• 92% of marketers are using Facebook
• There’s over 600,000 active Irish LinkedIn users
• 90% of people trust peer recommendations via social media compared to only 14% who trust advertising

It is clear to see that social media has become a huge factor in online marketing, more and more consumers are taking to social media sites for information on products and brands. Why would you want to miss out on this opportunity to reach out and engage with your existing and potential customers?  The fact is, social media is here to stay.  So the decision is yours – will you jump on the social media bandwagon?