Blogging sounds easy. Pick a topic you’re passionate about, do your research and write something inspiring. But how do you make sure your blog gets found? The key is to make sure you’re using words or phrases that people are actually searching for.
Recently, we had a high-end Toronto custom home building company who was looking to gain quality business leads while avoiding the spam of small renovation projects. Due to the majority of keyword searches in their category being for smaller projects, it was determined that a social media strategy was the best option. Although they were already present on social media and were frequently posting, they were not getting any leads. They came to us in hopes of a total social revamp.
Social media platforms are constantly changing and updating their algorithms; Facebook is no exception. Recently Facebook has been favouring native video and ‘meaningful interactions’ between users. This means that businesses posting about products and services are not a priority. Unfortunately, as seen below, this also means that growing an organic audience on Facebook is becoming more difficult. So how do you, as a business, reach your audience? Ads. You need to pay-to-play.
As a digital marketing agency, we understand how competitive internet marketing can be. As online budgets increase and more money is being spent on PPC platforms like Google Adwords, we are seeing an increasing amount of accidental budget waste in our audits. Here’s the most common cause for inefficient ad budgets and how to identify if you have a problem.
How Do I Tell If There’s A Problem?
The most obvious way to tell if there’s an issue is to check if your campaign is providing leads at an affordable ROI. Outside of this, there are two easy methods to tell if you are accidentally wasting your money on purchasing irrelevant keyword phrases.
1. A Low Click-Through-Rate (CTR)
The click-through rate is a measure of how frequently an ad is clicked when it’s seen (clicks/impressions). In addition to reducing the cost-per-click over time, your click-through-rate is an important measurement for the relevance of targeting. If your ads are accidentally being served up for irrelevant phrases, they are less likely to be clicked, which would reduce the CTR. For reference, the industry average Google Search CTR is now in the 1-2% range, although we generally see campaigns in the 2-5% range.
2. Check The Search Terms Tab
Did you know that the Search Terms list is actually different than the keyword list? Depending on the match type that’s used, it’s possible for these lists to be completely different. For example, if I decide to purchase the keyword “storage”, I may accidentally purchase anything from “data storage”, “storage units” “bedroom storage”, and “cloud storage”.
Here at the Marketing Garage, we are believers that the secret to effective internet marketing is to always be learning, testing, and tuning. It’s important to build off of your success and to keep the best while fixing the rest.
Recently, we had a Toronto B2B client in the professional services industry that was looking into rebuilding their website. Although the site performance was positive, the overall look was beginning to feel dated and our client was ready to upgrade in hopes of driving more leads.
Site rebuilds can be risky. If not done properly, they can lead to a drop in Google rankings, losing all of your hard work. Instead of seeing a drop in the rankings, we were able to actually increase search traffic by 28% as well as increase the conversion rate by 50% and increase enquiries by 3x!
See how we did it here:
Read The Case Study
Facebook is consistently changing their algorithm to be more pay-to-play which is affecting how business’ Facebook posts perform. Toronto marketing companies have noticed that organic reach is on a steady decline, which means fewer people are seeing your posts unless you put money behind them. This is because Facebooks’ latest algorithm change favours native video and ‘meaningful interactions’ between users.
As a digital marketing agency, we understand having a mobile-friendly website is becoming more important than ever. In fact, in 2017 48% of consumers began their Google product searches using a smartphone. Google has even recently stated that their algorithm will favour mobile-optimized websites over non-mobile friendly websites in their rankings for mobile users. This means that your business can be ranking 2nd on a desktop or laptop computer but only 6th on a smartphone. Desktop and mobile ranking algorithms may be completely separate and businesses should ensure their websites are mobile-friendly in order to stay relevant and at the top of Google search results.
Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) can be one of the most valuable internet marketing tactics for any business. SEO is the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s unpaid results – also known as organic results. As a Toronto digital marketing agency, many of the websites we see receive as much as 50% of their site traffic through organic Google searches; yet SEO and its importance for showing up in Google is often downplayed or ignored.
Implementing your SEO should be treated like any other marketing strategy rather than just being seen as an optional marketing component. When it comes to SEO, a site can be partially optimized, it can be optimized for the wrong words, or it could follow no SEO best practices at all.
Below are two quick and easy tricks for you to tell if your website’s SEO sucks in as little as 5 seconds. But before we get into the details, let us explain title tags and keywords.
What Are Title Tags and Keywords?
The title tag is the headline of your business in a Google Search. It is the HTML element that specifies the title of your website and should be an accurate and concise description of what your website content is all about.
Keywords are ideas and topics that define what your site content is about. In terms of SEO, they’re the words and phrases that customers enter into search engines.
Now let’s get into the details of how to tell your SEO sucks:
Here at The Marketing Garage, we take pride in helping our clients improve their online marketing through a proven diagnostic approach. We identify what’s working and what isn’t and take what’s good and make it great.
A B2B manufacturer was running pay-per-click campaigns that seemed to be following best practices. Their ads were being engaged with and had high click-through-rates but were providing few quality leads resulting in zero direct sales from marketing.
After taking a look under the hood, The Marketing Garage was able to fix the key messages and propositions in the ads, the audience and keyword targeting, and the site content. This ultimately lead to an 81% increase in website leads!
See how we did it here:
Read The Case Study
Launching a new website? Worried about how your site transition will affect your rankings? Our internet marketing consultants highlight the main issues with site transitions and review how our internet marketing company got a clients site transition to actually increase rankings.
The Struggle With Site Transitions
Recently our digital marketing consultants wrote up a case study of how we rescued a client’s search engine rankings after a disastrous transition to a new site. The story details how our internet marketing company not only fixed the problem but took all of their 25+ locations back to page one and took them even higher up in the top 5 in organic and map rankings. Read this internet marketing case study.
As a digital marketing agency, we know site transitions often go dreadfully wrong. Our marketing consultants have said that your rankings after launching a new site are kind of like riding a new roller coaster; you know you’re going to go down, just not for how long or how soon you’re going back up.
