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Internet 101: Tips and tricks for online marketing

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5th Feb 2014
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Rachael Power uncovers some useful tips from an Internet 101 tutorial series to that appeared on our sister site, BusinessZone.co.uk, in association with .co.uk, the number one domain for British business.

During the past couple of months, BusinessZone has published a series of practical articles focusing on marketing and e-commerce for small to medium sized firms and businesses. 

These "Internet 101" articles collected advice from the series sponsor, the company behind the .co.uk business domain and included comments and suggestions from members of UK Business Forums (UKBF). This overview highlights some quick wins from each article, and points you to the full text on each of the topics:

Article 1. Guide to SEO and PPC 

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the technique many organisations use to increase the visibility of their websites in search engines' un-paid results." BusinessZone contributor Lucie Mitchell explains that without investing in SEO, a website is unlikely to appear high up in internet search results. This could be a crucial oversight for any accountancy firm looking to compete with other accountants in their local area.

Top tips for effective SEO include:

  • Do your research - spend time understanding where your clients and prospects 'hang out' online and work out how rival firms are targeting. Find out why, if they are, higher up in Google rankings than you
  • Consider your domain name and which top level domain you use for your site - i.e .co.uk
  • Content is king when it comes to good SEO - provide  your readership with good quality articles and blog posts that give them some value. Don't make them spammy or self promotional
  • Provide useful resources with relevant keywords that reflect your expertise - i.e. a download on the latest VAT guidance, or top tips on cashflow 
  • Ask if you can publish high quality guest content on websites with high domain authority 
  • Utilise social media - this is playing an increasingly key role in SEO and provides a great channel for you to share your content. You need to first work out which ones are right for your firm, depending on your sector and demographic of clients you want to target
  • Constantly measure your audience and how many people view your site - use free facilities to do this such as Google Analytics and Webmaster tools

Pay per click (PPC)?

With PPC advertisers select keywords they think their target audience will use when searching for a product or service - for accountants, this may be 'tax', 'hmrc' or 'management accounts'. When users click on a PPC ad, the advertiser pays the search engine. Most popular PPC services include Google Ad Words and Microsoft Bing Ads.

You don't need to spend loads to be successful with PPC - but you do need to measure the results closely.  One UKBF member suggests those with a small budget to focus on SEO for now and adding PPC later on to gain more traffic. 

Article 2. How to build a great website 

Some accountants may be considering building a website for the first time, or redesigning or updating an existing one. Below are a few tips for what to include and how to improve: 

  • Hosting - To get up and running online, you first need a web hosting service, which will provide you with web space. This may also provide  you additional services such as domain name registration, email provision and technical support. You can get your site online using a web hosts either yourself or with the help of a web developer. There are many different kinds of web hosts so it’ll depend what you want to get out of it - ie what kind of site you need and how big you think you’ll get.
  • SEO - As the first article explained, ensuring the right people find your site is an ongoing, continuous task, writes Mitchell, so it is worth spending a great deal of time researching and getting to grips with SEO. UKBF member 'Experienced IT guy’' recommends using this guide to free SEO tools.
  • Blogging - If you've got something to say about your specialist area - blog about it either on your own site or create a separate blog on a free host such as Wordpress, Tumblr or Blogspot. When blogging, be honest, not self-promotional, blog about three times per week on a niche topic, link to relevant websites and make sure titles are related to content. Don't drown your blog in Google Ads or publish a lot of duplicate content.
  • Health check your site  - If it's been a while since you paid any attention to the look and feel of your site,  give it a regular health check to ensure you’re not losing out on valuable visitors and clients. There are many services that do this on a paid-for basis, but you can always do it yourself. Look at layout, design, content and navigation as well as issues such as SEO, meta data, accessibility for users and other tech trends.
  • Mobile responsive - Clients may be accessing the net from a range of devices and not just laptops or PCs, so it's worth ensuring your site is mobile responsive. All this means, is that the site will fit to the size of the screen on the user’s device. So if a user is looking at your site on their smartphone, they will be able to navigate your site seamlessly. They're more likely to linger longer and come back again if using your site is a pleasant experience.

Article 3. Ways to use social media to grow your business

All accountants should know by now that social media can be useful for checking up on competitors, connecting with clients and generating new new business leads. BusinessZone editor and social media champion Dan Martin offers the following advice:

  • Be strategic - To get the most out of social media, don’t join all available social media platforms and start posting randomly. You need to be strategic about it. Consider why you are using social media. Don’t just do it because you think you should or because everyone else is. How you use social media should depend on how you want it to support your overall business ambitions. Be specific about the audiences you want to reach and chose the platforms that fit best. For example, if you provide services to clients in the creative industries, check out Twitter, Facebook and even niche platforms such as Etsy and Reddit.
  • Content is king - To maximise returns from social media, post great content. There's no point in just talking about yourself - offer something useful to the client. As a UKBF member puts it: “Constantly shouting at everyone to buy your products and not interacting goes down as well as it would at a dinner party.” Provide relevant, useful information for the clients you're targeting. If your specialism is in VAT, for example, write about recent legal developments or quirky VAT features, such as the Jaffa Cake biscuit Vs cake debate. 
  • Be easy to find - Make yourself easy to find on social media - promote your profiles in your email signatures, on business cards and on your website. Joining Google Plus can improve your ranking in in Google’s search results and if you link your Google Plus page to the content you’ve written, it will stand out the search results. Google Adwords can link to Google Plus too.
  • Service your customers - Social media is a great way to deal with customer service issues - or in accountants’ case, client queries or comments.  Social media is a great way to get real-time feedback and deal with any service issues raised. Using a tool such as Tweetdeck to track how often clients mention you and what they say is a good way of keeping tabs on what clients think of you.
  • Paid advertising - Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter offer paid-for advertising either by Tweet or by post. It might be worth spending a small amount of money on this first of all and track the results and which message works best. You can then adopt - or reject - it accordingly.
  • Integration - While its vital that you have a presence on social media, that doesn’t mean you should stop focusing on your own website. You should drive traffic between your social media profiles and website as much as possible. 
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