8 Search Engine Marketing Tips You Must Know

by HW@dmin | Oct 30, 2020 | Search Engine Optimization

If you want your business to appear in the first few pages of a Google search, you need search engine marketing (SEM). This is different than SEO.

SEM is one of the best ways to land new clients. You can have your business pop up on the first few pages of Google. This allows your business to stand out from your competitors.

The better ads you create, the more likely you’ll rank on Google. People will find answers to their questions when it’s about your product and your business.

But there’s more to SEM than you might think. You have to figure out what strategies to utilize that can help your business drive in more traffic. You need to know the best SEM tips.

Here are 8 search engine marketing tips that can give your business a boost.

1. Know Your Audience

One of the most important parts of your search engine marketing campaign is to know your audience. You need to know who they are and what kind of problems they have in order to effectively create ads.

The more you know about your target market and why your product can help them, the more you can create ads that appeal to them. You can create ads that offer a solution to their problems.

Knowing everything about your target market involves knowing where they live, what kind of problems they have, their interests, and how your product helps them solve a problem.

This information can help you write ads that appeal to your target market.

2. Make It Persuasive

Another part of search engine marketing is making sure the copy you write is persuasive.

You can’t expect consumers to visit your website just because you show your product in an ad. You have to make it appealing and persuasive. That means highlighting the features of your product.

Being specific about the product you designed can help people. You want to show it in your body copy when you write search engine marketing ads. That way, when someone does a Google search relating to your product and they see it on top of the Google search, they will click it because it appeals to them or answers their question.

3. Do Your Keyword Research

Keywords are critical if you want to have your ads be seen. You need to choose keywords that your market is using and (optimally) that your competitors aren’t using.

When you choose either short-tail or long-tail keywords and place them in your search engine marketing, Google will rank your ad higher. It’s more likely your ads or content will be seen by your market.

However, it’s important to remember that you don’t want to assume you know the keywords people are using. You should do keyword research and determine the volume and competitiveness of the keywords you need for your ads.

4. Consider Your Maximum Bid and Quality Score

Your maximum bid and the quality score of your ad will determine how it ranks on Google. In fact, Google looks at these two things to determine if your ad is better and more relevant to your target market beyond your competitors.

They look at these metrics to see if it’s more relevant for your target market.

5. Consider the Best Tools

When you embark on learning and mastering search engine marketing, you need to make sure you have the best tools with you.

For example, you want to make sure you have tools that can help with keyword research, how much traffic your website is receiving, and how difficult the keyword you want ranks.

You should also take a look at Google Trends, a free tool that helps you see what keyword is popular or unpopular.

6. Have a Consistent Strategy

A consistent strategy involves choosing an SEM strategy. You have to figure out if you are going to do organic or paid advertising.

When you figure it out, you need to be consistent. For example, if you write ads on Google, you need to be consistent and figure out what’s working and what doesn’t work.

You have to be willing to adjust in order to have the most success.

7. Take a Peek at Your Competition

You should always see what your competition is doing. See how they are ranking on Google. What are they doing differently?

When you have an idea of what your competition is doing, it gives you insight into your own marketing strategy. You can figure out a strategy that outperforms that on Google searches.

8. Provide Quality Content

Another part of search engine marketing and ranking high on Google is making sure you provide quality content.

This means writing content on your website that is informational and insightful for your target market. You want more valuable information than what your competitors have.

Writing quality content means you understand what your market is looking for. You know how their interests are changing based on the popularity of keywords.

When you understand your market and send them information that isn’t clickbait, but rather insightful and helpful, it will help you build a long-term relationship with your consumers.

Learn More About Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing can help your business attract more leads. With the perfect strategy, you can attract more website visitors and show people how you can help them.

With these tips, you can see how effective search engine marketing is for your business. The key is doing the research and seeing what works and what doesn’t work for you.

If you want help with your search engine marketing strategy, you can contact us here.

Photography [3 Considerations for Small Business]

by HW@dmin | Oct 22, 2020 | Photo & Video, Web Design

Commercial Photography Services [3 Considerations for Small Businesses]

Well-executed photography is a powerful tool in engaging your customers.

Taking time to plan and shoot commercial photography that highlights the emotional core of your product or service can create a response that resonates with your customer and earns you more business.

Photography can capture the attention of your potential clients or patients much faster than captions or website copy. Think about it, there’s likely been a time when you’ve double-tapped a dozen or more photos on Instagram before you even started to read the captions.

Beautiful images are easy to digest and tell a story without saying a word.

A picture truly is worth a thousand words and that is why custom photography can be so important to a small business’ marketing strategy.

Yet, as budgets ebb and flow, creative marketing services (like web design, photography, and videography) are among the first to feel the belt-tightening.

If you’ve found yourself asking “does my business need commercial photography services,” you’ve come to the right place!

Read on to learn about custom photography services and how you can begin using it to grow your small business marketing plan.

Custom Photography vs. Stock Photos

Many brands will spend countless hours fine-tuning their product/service offerings to differentiate themselves from the competition. Yet, when it comes time to choose a photo for a website or social media, many small businesses find themselves scraping at the bottom of the barrel to find a high-quality picture that accurately represents their brand and vision. Some may even be tempted to opt for stock photography.

Unfortunately, stock photography just won’t cut it anymore.

As the name implies, stock photos are readily available to anyone for purchase. While it can be a cheaper option in the short-term, you can run into some serious problems.

Despite the millions of stock photos that exist for purchase, the industries highlighted are fairly generic. This means your competition could just as easily be using the exact same photo as you. That quickly takes your brand from original to ordinary and destroys your ability to separate yourself from the crowd.

Custom photography, on the other hand, highlights your company’s products, office, staff, clients, etc. This makes custom photography services more personalized and customizable.

Ways to Use Custom Photo Services

Photos taken during a commercial shoot aren’t just for one time use. In fact, having an archive of images that your business can use on social media, in digital marketing campaigns, or for traditional print ads can greatly benefit your team for years to come. Let’s take a look at some benefits of using custom photos.

Across Your Website.

Engaging photos enable your business to grab the attention of both information seekers and casual browsers alike. In fact, hiring a photographer to shoot custom images of your product or service has been proven to significantly improve the user experience of websites.

As users browse your site, photos can go a long way in gaining buy-in for your brand. Some commercial photography — like office shots — is functional in that it gives customers a sense of what to expect when they arrive at your practice/office. Other types of photos, like professional headshots and product photos can help establish trust and openness, removing any feelings of uncertainty that a customer may have in advance.

On Social Media.

Because our brains are programmed to respond so quickly to pictures and color, in contrast to other types of information, an image is an almost invincible draw on social media.

If you want your small business to stand out from the crowd, it’s important to develop social media visuals that reflect the same quality offered by your products services.

In E-Newsletters.

Email marketing is all about getting your customers to respond to and engage with what you send. As you’ve probably guessed by now, images have the potential to make people stop and give your content a second look.

That said, using high-quality images in email marketing is a delicate balance. If your images are too large, they may cause loading errors while too many images in general (regardless of size) may cause your message to end up in your customer’s spam folders.

Planning Your Photoshoot

When it comes to scheduling a professional photography shoot, there are several considerations to be made to ensure the best outcome.

Choosing a Photographer

When it comes to choosing a photographer, you’ll have a wide array of options ranging from freelance photographers to full-scale creative agencies.

Generally speaking, freelance photographers are best to use on one-off-shoots, whereas, agencies are better suited to longer-term projects. If your business has plans to create/update a website with your photos, it would be most beneficial to hire an agency that can handle all of these projects (photos included) under one team. This gives you the most bang for your buck!

The other benefit of choosing an agency is that you can rest assured knowing they have the capacity to handle multiple clients at one time.

Scheduling Your Shoot

At Harris + Ward, our typical photoshoots are planned to last 4 to 6 hours. Though this may seem like a long time, it moves very quickly!

We will start by taking care of any schedules headshots for your staff or customers. Then, we’ll spend time gathering candid shots that show you/your team in your natural environment. For most business photoshoots, our goal is to capture the authenticity of your brand through normal day-to-day interactions.

Following Safety Protocols

As many businesses struggle to return to “normalcy” in the face of new health and safety protocols, we often get asked, “can I schedule a photoshoot during COVID?” The answer is yes!

“For us,” explains Harris + Ward Partner, Bradley Nolan, “it is important to document the changes brought about by COVID but we also want to continue to focus on your business’ interactions with clients.” Though this may look a bit different, with proper social distancing measurements you can still showcase your brand in creative ways.

“You can imagine everyone wearing masks in the photos makes that a bit more difficult to get,” Nolan notes, “but, we are working harder than ever to help our clients prepare for shoots by notifying patients, staff, and customers ahead of time.” This allows everyone to prepare for the shoot and make any necessary arrangements to ensure everyone is comfortable throughout the shoot.

Finding Custom Photography Services

If you have great photography that is on-brand and high quality, you’ll connect with your ideal clients in an instant. Photos of your business allow you to show your staff, work environment, services, and products in a way that cannot be achieved with stock options.

To schedule your own custom photoshoot or inquire about other creative marketing services, contact us today!

What Is the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

by HW@dmin | Oct 5, 2020 | Harris+Ward

Digital marketing has evolved so much in the past few years that the acronyms are seriously hard to keep up with. Who knew that SEO and SEM are actually two different things? Technically, they are two sides of the same coin, and they serve a similar goal of driving traffic to a website for more conversions.

They employ different approaches, though. Search Engine Optimization is all about getting long-term organic results, while Search Engine Marketing is more about getting fast results. The question is, what’s the real difference between SEO and SEM?

Which one should you invest in for your business to get explosive digital results? This guide employs the real difference between SEO and SEM, and by the end, we hope you’ll have a better understanding that will help you answer that question. The key may be in using both strategies at different times of your marketing campaign.

What Is Search Engine Optimization

What is SEO? Search engine optimization, better known as SEO is a digital marketing tactic used to drive organic traffic to a website. Organic traffic is important for a website because essentially, it’s free traffic since you don’t need to pay for it like paid ads and the like.

These are the results you get from search engine result pages, or SERPs naturally where users click on your website because it appeared on the first page of Google for your keywords. Every second or every day, Google gets over 85,000 searches, which makes it vital for your website to rank high on search engines, something SEO will help you achieve.

Case in point, these users are genuinely interested in your business and are more likely to become customers if you have what they need. For this reason, the quality of traffic is paramount in SEO, and once you achieve that, you can then start looking to increase the quantity of your traffic.

Techniques Used to Achieve Search Engine Optimization

The most important thing for your SEO strategy involves providing search engines like Google exactly what they need to give users an incredible user-experience. White-hat SEO techniques include technical SEO, on-page SEO, and Off-page SEO. Technical SEO is all about optimizing the elements of your website not related to content.

They include the structure of your site, site speed, indexing, responsiveness, user-experience, etcetera. On-page SEO is about optimizing web pages and targeting keywords that appeal to both search engines and customers. It involves dealing with content, keyword research, meta tags, image optimization, etcetera.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is geared towards building a website’s reputation and authority. It involves local listings, link building, forums, directory profiles, and the like. The most significant goal of these techniques is to show search engines like Google that your website is relevant, authoritative, and useful.

Google especially is very strict about user-experience, and they ensure users get the best of it. You’ll notice that fast, responsive, content-rich, and high-authority websites rank very high on SERPs. This is what customers need, hence Google gives it to them.

What Is Search Engine Marketing

So what is SEM, and what is the difference between SEO and SEM?

The major difference between the two is that SEM involves paid strategies and techniques to drive traffic to a website. Sometimes, SEO takes a long time before it can result in significant benefits as you could have too many competitors to even make a dent at first. SEM, however, can get you visibility and cinch sales for you a lot faster.

SEM starts with paid search advertising, and when users search for your target keywords, your ads appear at the top or bottom of the SERPs. The schemes highly depend on the type of paid advertising you invest in. Some of them include Pay Per Click, Cost Per Acquisition, Cost Per Click, and Cost Per Thousand Impressions.

There are also several search platforms, and you should consider your needs, goals, and budget before choosing the right one, or combining several of them together. Google Ads is the most popular, with over 37% of the market, and creating an account is free.

There are also Bing Ads, social networks, and other PPC ad options. Beyond that, understand that SEM is highly dependent on keywords, so to conquer SEM, it’s essential to master keyword research and bidding.

How Can SEO and SEM Work Together?

Now that you know the difference between SEO and SEM, you may want to understand how they complement each other.

If used right, search engine optimization and search engine marketing will get your brand on the first page of Google search results and get you in front of your target audience. They will drive more traffic to your website, and even though they will achieve that goal through different techniques, they both play a vital role in getting you the results you want.

For that reason, you should stop thinking about SEO vs SEM and think about how you can leverage both for more website conversions.

Is One Better for Business Than the Other?

This is one of those questions that get an “it depends” answer. It’s okay to choose one of them. Most businesses opt to use SEM first because it produces faster results, then switch to SEO later on once they establish a customer base.

Some choose to use SEO, while others feel it’s too much work and opt for SEM. Some of these decisions are sometimes based on a company’s marketing budget, objectives, among other things. However, if possible, implementing both tactics is usually better because they work exponentially well in tandem.

Expounding the Difference Between SEO and SEM

This is the difference between SEO and SEM, and we totally understand if you still find the whole concept overwhelming. We highly suggest you leave this to the gurus. Allow them to analyze your website, online presence, budget, competition, and ultimate goals.

Our experts will present you with a comprehensive audit that will outline the best strategies to meet those goals, and help you make an informed decision. Please get in touch with us today so we can discuss this further!