Since the outbreak of COVID-19 the staff at Insiteful Solutions has been busy helping our clients in Markham and across the GTA ramp up their e-commerce sites and update client websites with the latest news and information related to the virus. The past stressful weeks have taught us more than ever the need to be prepared; we were fortunate that the majority of our staff were already working remotely so we could change our operations seamlessly.
One of the areas we have been most busy is advising clients on their use of social media. In the early days of COVID-19, with everything happening so quickly, social media channels turned out to be the fastest way our clients could communicate effectively with their customers. To give you some idea of the reach of social media in Canada, it estimated that 64% of Canadians have a social media account and over 50% of Canadians are registered to one or more social media platforms. 70% of social media users said they logged on at least once a month.
The popularity of social media makes it a perfect medium to reach people in a crisis. With many provinces, including Ontario, ordering virtually all public activities to close suddenly to flatten the COVID-19 curve, businesses were left scrambling to figure out their new operations. Many businesses, such as restaurants and certain retailers, were able to transition to curb-side pick-up or delivery. Others were left not knowing how they were going to alter their operations to serve their customers. With all of this confusion it was a comfort for both business owners and their customers that they could keep in touch via social media. At Insiteful Solutions we help clients with all of their digital marketing needs; from building websites to their social media platforms, we make sure our clients are up today with the most recent trends and changes to the industry.
With the unprecedented times we are living in we have found the following to be helpful advice to our clients for their social media platforms. With the news changing almost daily it can be difficult for business owners to strike the right tone: hopeful or somber? Idealistic or realistic? While there is often no ‘right way’ to communicate with your customers via social media we have found that if you post content that is deemed insensitive it can negatively affect your brand. The following can hopefully serve as a guide or refresher on how to approach your clients on social media during a crisis.
Who you are in a Crisis?
Great brands and businesses are a result of great leadership and teamwork. The best businesses understand their customers and how to communicate with them. During a crisis is time to connect with your customers on a personal level; with something as serious as a global pandemic it’s crucial that you reach out and stay connected. The values that built your brand can also be on display. We advised our clients not to ‘sell’ anything to their clients with their early social media posts – no one wants to be sold to during a crisis. While some business people had the instinct to shutter their social media accounts we advised people to keep the lines of communication open. With people suddenly isolated and their worlds upended they need human contact, even if it’s over social media.
Know Your Audience
Many businesses post to their social media channels without fully knowing who their audience is. Fortunately companies like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have done the analytical work for you and you can easily tap into this data to learn more about who is viewing your social media platforms. Knowing your audience is always important, but especially so during a crisis. Are you catering to the healthcare industry and you have many followers that are frontline workers? Then you would tailor your message to this industry. You want to make sure your social media content is reflective of your audience, that way you can curate your content to grab their attention. During a crisis is a key time to connect with new and old customers.
Be Sensitive to the Times
In 2014 the clothing brand American Apparel created a social media faux pas that is still being talked about. On July 4 of that year a well-meaning person in their social media department posted a July 4 greeting on the company’s social media platforms. The greeting was accompanied by an image of a plume of white cloud against a blue sky. The staffer thought the image was fireworks exploding – it wasn’t. It was actually a photograph of the Challenger Space Shuttle exploding shortly after takeoff – a fatal incident that occurred in 1986. The American Apparel post has been used ever since on what not to do on social media. With the onset of COVID-19, many businesses began to struggle, while we advised clients to quickly improve their e-commerce offerings and switch to delivery or curbside pick-up we also advised them to understand the humanitarian aspect of these times and do what they could to assist others who may be struggling. Communicating the human side of your company during a crisis will let your customers know that your company cares.
Keep on Top of the Changing Landscape
COVID-19 has been challenging in more ways than one. It seems that daily the news about the virus changes and governments (and businesses!) are left scurrying to keep up. While most companies have a solid social media marketing calendar based on their business plan, times of crisis may have caused their plans to be paused or put on a complete hold. One industry especially hard hit by COVID-19 has been the restaurant and hospitality industry. With guidance from governments constantly updated restaurants have had to keep in touch with their customer. Being fluid in your planning and accurate with your information allows you to continue to control your brand messaging – even during a crisis.
Be Human
A distinct aspect of COVID-19 has been how it has affected everyone globally. While these times of crisis can be extraordinarily stressful it can also be a time to bring people together. While your customers will want to know the core information about your business and its operations, they will also appreciate a human touch to communications during this time. Don’t be afraid to communicate with customers on a more personal level.
At Insiteful Solutions we have worked for nearly 20 years with clients in Markham, the GTA and across Canada on all aspects of digital marketing campaigns including social media. Give us a call today to learn more about how we can help your business navigate this current crisis.
At Insiteful Solutions, we work with clients in Markham and across the GTA to improve their websites and their SEO rankings. Now it is more important than ever to focus on your business’s SEO and how to activate it for success. Our last blog delved into the world of SEO and provided lots of tips that you could employ. This blog will cover some of the remaining points to keep in mind when you are developing your website and the all-important SEO.
Your SEO will Help Your Ecommerce Efforts
Even before the current COVID-19 pandemic global e-commerce was exploding. It is estimated that by 2021 online purchases will reach $4.5 trillion and will account for 17.5% of all retail sales. If you are a business, whether you sell online or not, you need to invest the time and effort into improving your SEO as it is estimated that 81% of people research purchases online before they make a final decision of what to purchase. Incredibly it’s also been reported that 75% of mobile searches end up with people visiting the store they researched within 24 hours and subsequently 30% of these visits result in an in-store purchase.
Growth in Mobile Traffic and Local SEO
At Insiteful Solutions, we have been working with clients for over 15 years addressing all aspects of their online digital marketing campaigns. One of the most important aspects of SEO is the growth of mobile traffic because so many people are using their phones to search things on Google or other search engines, the local search is an integral part to the success of a small or medium-sized business. Local SEO focuses digital results for a specific geographic area, this helps people close to your place of business find you faster. Your brand can work on messaging to target customers based on what town, city or province you happen to be located. At Insiteful Solutions, we will optimize your website content to link it to local citations and other relevant links to the location and sector your business operates in. We will also draw focus to your reviews on Yelp and Google and any other user review sites related to your industry.
Focus on Metadata
At Insiteful Solutions, we also work on your metadata. When you design your company’s website each page contains a space between the <head> tags to insert information about the contents of your page – that’s the metadata. You can review and update your metadata, this is often overlooked by businesses who still with their original site for far too long. Along with your content, your metadata should be refreshed at regular intervals.
Metadata is also connected to the ever-important keyword phrases that you develop to match your brand. The title metadata, for example, is responsible for the titles you see displayed at the top of a browser window and provides the headline within search engine results. At Insiteful Solutions, we will also help you develop your description metadata and keyword metadata. Your description metadata is the text that a search engine may use in your page search – it should be a brief informative description of what your website contains. Keyword metadata can be a few phrases made up of one to four words that describe what your business sells.
Keyword Use for ‘Click Here’ Links
Many businesses make the mistake of wasting links embedded within the text of your website. Including banal ‘click here’ links is a wasted opportunity as they have no search engine value; it is more helpful to use keywords related to your business will improve your search engine rankings as well as the ranking of the page you are linking to.
Alt Tags for Visuals and Videos
It is also important to use alt tags on your website when describing visual elements and embedded videos. For people that use text-only browsers or screen readers, this is very helpful and allows them to understand what is on your website. It also allows search engines to locate your page.
Indexing 101
Remember to check your indexing. Search engine indexing is the way in which a search engine collects, sorts and stores data for later use. This data is what informs the results for search engine queries. It is important to check your indexing to make sure Google (or other search engines) is capturing your data correctly. There are two ways you can check your indexing. The first way is to go to Google and type “site.yourdomain.com”, using this way will let you know quickly how many pages Google thinks your site has. The second way is to go to your search console and choose “index status”. Ideally, if you use both ways the numbers should match. By checking how your site is indexing you will be able to take advantage of Google analytics.
Investing in Your SEO
One of the main questions we receive from both old and new clients is how much should they invest in SEO and a quick second question is how long will it take to see results from their investment. At Insiteful Solutions we advise clients to think of SEO work as a long-term project whose investment will pay off in a few months; this wait time between and investment and results can often be off-putting to the people in charge of the SEO budget. But skimping on your SEO will be detrimental to your business in the long run. By working with SEO experts like Insiteful Solutions you will be able to work efficiently and economically to achieve your SEO goals.
At Insiteful Solutions, we work with clients to create brand new websites or improve ones they may already have. Having been in business for over 15 years you can be confident that as the GTA’s leading SEO experts we can lead you through the process of improving your internet search rankings which will result in more clients and customers buying your service or product. Contact us today to get started on your improved SEO results.
SEO: What Is The Role of SEO In Digital Marketing?
The Important Role of SEO in Digital Marketing
Insiteful Solutions are SEO experts. For over a decade we have been helping companies in Toronto and the GTA and across Canada build websites and develop digital marketing campaigns that propel them to success. Every company should have knowledge of what an SEO is and why it is vital to your company’s success in reaching potential customers. At Insiteful Solutions, we have worked with hundreds of companies to improve their SEO ratings and are always excited to pass on the knowledge we have to others.
SEO is an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. It is the practice of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to websites by increasing the visibility of a website to gain spontaneous, un-paid, visitors to a website. It is vital for your company to invest in promoting your SEO efforts. At Insiteful Solutions we take the time to learn about your company, your desired customer and we analyze and implement unique strategies to make sure your company’s website ranking is as strong as possible.
You may not realize it but every time you do a Google search you are witnessing the power of the SEO. If you own, for example, a flower shop in Ottawa you will want your company to pop up on the first or second page of the Google search. If your company doesn’t appear until page 40 it is highly unlikely people would order from your shop. Investing in your SEO can’t be underestimated – if your customers can’t find you they can’t buy your product or service.
While Google isn’t the only internet search engine it is by far the most powerful. Recent estimates that there is a mind-boggling 3.5 billion global internet searches a day, and Google has a whopping 92% of this traffic. Dedicating resources to your SEO as part of your digital marketing strategy can also help search engines locate, crawl and index your website in their catalogue.
To increase your SEO you will most likely need to make certain changes to the design of your website and make sure the content you create is attractive to a search engine. With time and some effort, you can greatly increase your company’s chances of landing on the first or second Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP). Google (and other search engines such as Bing or Yahoo) want to provide the highest quality products to people who use their sites; if they produce search results for shoddy products people are less likely to use their search engine. This means that your website has to be one of quality and highly relevant to what an individual has searched for.
To make sure the people using their search engines find what they are looking for Google has devised a search algorithm that will scan (or crawl) different websites; from this, they are able to identify the most relevant websites that will be valuable for people. They also scan for related topics and keywords – this is how the search engine links up searches using related terms and keywords with websites. The search engine algorithm will also scan the site to figure out if it is user-friendly or not – the easier your website is to navigate the higher ranking you will receive on the search engine page.
There are numerous other factors that impact the success of your SEO:
One of the most important, yet often under-considered, factors in SEO success is the content of your site. Your website needs to contain up to date, relevant information about your business and the product or service you deliver. Beyond how this helps the Google algorithm identify your site as valuable, potential customers are more likely to spend time on your site if they see that it is constantly updated with quality material.
Before you start to create content for your site you will need to determine keywords and phrases related to your business. If you are, for example, a bakery in Toronto, you will want to include words related to a bakery: bake, bread, cupcakes, delicious, fresh etc. You will also want to include geographic parameters: Toronto, GTA, Ontario, Canada. Your keywords and phrases will help the search engine algorithms identify what you do and in turn inform people searching for, taking our example into consideration, bakeries in Toronto.
There are numerous ways you can create content for your website; its best to develop a variety of different forms of content. Everything you create should be well-written and most important, relevant to your company’s product or service. Here are some content ideas for your site:
Blog Posts
Blog Posts should be at least 1,000 words and be written in a clear, concise manner. The content of your blog post should focus on keywords and phrases related to your business.
How-To Guides
Creating and posting explanatory content can attract customers who wish to learn in-depth about your product. A How-To Guide is a way you can show potential customers how unique your offering is.
Articles
If there are informative articles published about your product you can repost them. People that look for the author’s name or topic will search and could find your site.
Videos
If you have videos of your product or service available embedding them into your website is a great way to increase visits to your site.
You also want to remember to include your keywords and phrases throughout your social media channels.
By investing time and energy into improving your SEO you can most definitely boost your search engine rankings and drive more business to your site. A proper SEO campaign can take weeks to months to actualize – so it’s important to get started today!
If you’re not happy with how your company is currently doing in your search engine ranking we recommend you give us a call today. At Insiteful Solutions, we apply our years of experience to each and every client and their SEO. We can help improve your ranking and drive business to your site.
Give us a call today (905-947-8235 x 102) or pop us an email so we can help your business grow.
