How to Enhance Your SEO with Keywords

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If you don’t understand how to use keywords for search engine optimization (SEO), you’re losing business. Follow these suggestions and watch your website rise the ranks to the top of search-engine results. 

Keywords are words and phrases typed into search engines like google, to find information on a certain topic. Keywords are known as SEO keywords, keyphrases and search queries. While they may have different names, they all do the same thing. If you want to enhance your SEO, keywords are the way to go.

Here is what you need to know about keywords and how to use them in order to get your content ranking at the top of Google’s results.

What Are Keywords Known For?

Keywords are essentially the foundation of SEO and pay-for-click (PPC) in marketing campaigns. If you want to enhance your SEO, then ranking at the top of Google should be your number one priority. Having targets for a keyword can bring you quality website traffic that will generate into leads, and hopefully new clients.

If your marketing budget allows, invest in some pay-per-click ads to get your website organic results. With Google Ads, advertisers bid to appear at the top of search results for specific keywords. Keywords that signal someone is ready to buy could be good choices for a paid search campaign.

A good example would running an ad for a home appliances business. In that case, the keyword “washer for sale in Chicago” is a term that someone close to buying would search for. On the other hand, running a search like “best washers” is for someone just beginning their search on the buying cycle. Overall, it would be better to use an SEO keyword that would optimize a blog post around. 

How to Find Keywords for SEO

The keywords you choose can either improve your SEO or do the opposite. If you use keywords that are too competitive, you will have a hard time getting a good ranking in Google. If you optimize your website around keywords that your target audience does not search for you will end up with traffic that won’t generate the leads you want. If your business is new, you want to shift your focus to long-tail keywords. These are simply specific search terms with low search volume.

The benefits of using long-tail keywords is that it tends to convert at a much higher rate than high search volume terms do. This is due to people using long-tail keywords to buy something specific. Another good example of this would be using a keyword like, “Volkswagen Dealership in Chicago.” Its a specific keyword with a specific location.

Qualities of a Keyword

When doing keyword research, what are some of the things you pay attention to? These qualities say a lot about how your keywords will perform. The overall main qualities of a keyword should include the following:

  • Search Volume
  • Competition
  • Cost-per-click
  • Word Count

These 4 qualities all do different things for you in terms of keyword searches. Let’s break down what each one mean and how they can benefit your SEO strategy. 

  1. Search volume relates to the number of times a keyword is search in google each month. This helps you estimate how much traffic you can get if you rank keywords in Google.
  2. Competition relates to the more sought-after keywords that are likely used on many websites but you’re competing to be at the top, both organically and paid. A great way to take on this quality is by having keyword difficulty and competitive density. Keyword Difficulty helps you manage your SEO campaign, and Competitive Density helps you prioritize your advertising campaign.
  3. Cost-per-click shows you how much it costs an adversiter every time someone clicks on their ad after doing a keyword search. If you are planning an ad campaign, evaluating cost-per-click of your target keywords is essential when you’re trying to estimate how much the campaign will cost you.
  4. Word Count is the number of words that make up 1 keyword. If we go back to the example of “Volkswagen dealership in Chicago” that keyword would have the word count of four. Word count is a helpful way to narrow your research. The higher the word count, the more specific the search.

Last Thoughts

Keywords are extremely beneficial to anyone’s SEO strategy when used correctly. By following the steps above, you are putting yourself in a great position to outrank your competitors.

Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Marketing Metrics Businesses Should Be Tracking

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Marketing metrics matter because smart marketing is built on the foundations of solid data. That is why any business with a digital marketing strategy should be closely monitoring the following 4 metrics. Let’s hop right in! 

In today’s digital marketing landscape, there are a number of data points to measure. Some of these will help businesses with consumer insights and others with direct response. This can be tricky as trying to measure both consumer behavior as well as whether specific marketing activities have led directly to sales. After all, aren’t you ultimately in the game to book more meetings?

A business is only as good as the data it collects. Data reveals the most critical questions to help a business grow faster. Here’s a look at digital marketing performance indicators, along with best practices on how to evaluate the data they provide.

Traffic Sources

Knowing where your future prospects are coming from is important. Did they visit your website after google searching your company? Or did they find you through social media? There are so many places where your clientele can stem from, and its valuable knowing how they found you.

By having access to these insights, it will help you prioritize and optimize those channels. Once that has been done you can easily make simple improvements to other channels that are underperforming.

Tracking Engagement

When someone visits your website, it’s always best practice to know how long they’re browsing. This metric reveals how interested visitors are in your content and if you are attracting additional visitors.

If you see that visitors are only browsing on your website for a few seconds, it could be an indicator that they either didn’t end up on the site they were looking for or quickly realized they’re disinterested in what you’re offering. On the other hand, if you see that your visitors are on your website for an extended period of time, it can signal that you have content the market is interested in.

Everytime you post on social media, send out an email campaign or put out display ads you should be measuring your engagement rates. A great example of this is seeing how many likes an instagram post gets. At times one post may have more likes than another post. Knowing how your audience engages with your content will help you cater and craft future content for them.

CAC & CLV

CAC stands for customer acquisition cost, CLV stands for customer lifetime value. Both of these are crucial to your marketing metric strategy. With customer acquisition cost, there is a cost associated with every customer. Businesses need to measure how much it costs to acquire customers throughout their buying journey.

With customer lifetime value, you’re measuring how much the average customer will spend on your brand during their lifetime. This metric indicates the total financial value a customer brings. Ultimately, this metric will help you decide where to invest the most.

Brand Equity

Lastly, become an expert on your audience. Know how they view you and your products. Household name brands such as Nike and Coca-Cola are all names you recognize, even if you don’t buy their goods. A great example of this would be referring to the product as the brand name. Most people purchase disinfecting wipes and refer to them as “Clorox Wipes,” whether or not they’re purchasing that specific brand.

Analyzing your brand strength will help you know how strong you are in the market and if customers prefer your brand over competitors. It will also be a relevant factor in whether or not customers are willing to pay more for your products since they find your brand valuable.

Last Thoughts

When it comes to business, every company is different, and as such, will need to rely on their own unique set of KPIs and metrics to track their performance. Even the digital marketing metrics that are relevant to your business will vary greatly, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

We hope you have learned a little bit more about the importance of metrics and how beneficial it can be to your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we regognize the unique and individual nature of every client, and work with your business to help develop a custom strategy that is designed to bring you the highest success possible. Digital Decisions driven by Data is our mantra. Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities is what we do best.

Got questions about tracking and measuring your business performance? Contact us here today to start the conversation.

4 Tips for SEO Content Strategy

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Want to create your best SEO content this year? Try these four data-driven content strategies to get more traffic and leads.

There have never been more new and exciting opportunities to master your content and reach a wider audience than right now.

An SEO content strategy isn’t just a document with instructions and requirements. The best SEO strategies come from an in-depth conversation, whether it’s between a writer and an editor, or a marketing team and the people who actually write the content.  In order to create a strategy, you’ll need access to how your content is performing. If you want to scale SEO, you need to prioritize it.

In this post, we’ll discuss how to make SEO a priority in your content strategy, and how this impacts scaling SEO.

Tip 1: Include SEO as part of the writing process

Incorporating SEO into the writing process is a great way to ensure that your content is optimized as it’s being created. If this doesn’t happen, there’s a chance that optimizations will be made after the content has been completed. This leaves out the opportunity for writers to include relevant keywords that have search volume while they are crafting the piece.

Tip 2: Provide Keyword searches for content topics

Keyword research is a crucial part of the content creation process. This is an opportunity to provide writers with relevant keywords so they can write holistic SEO copy. It allows them to pick and choose the keywords they want to write about to ensure content is in line with SEO strategy.

This can also prevent keywords from product pages from being the focus keyword of the copy. This is done to prevent two or more pages from competing for the same keyword in Google’s search engine results. Finally, it ensures relevant keywords with search volume and user intent are used.

Tip 3: Provide Keyword research for omnichannel campaigns

When you’re creating omni channel campaigns, it can be a challenge to find relevant keywords with any search volume. It’s important to ensure that your keyword research is accurate, because if the keywords you use aren’t relevant, then your campaign will not perform well on search engines. Here are some tips for finding the right keywords:

1. Try to include additional longer-form content with keywords that address users’ pain points and that have search volume. For example, instead of writing “Find out where we deliver in San Francisco,” write “Find out where we deliver in San Francisco, California!”

2. We recommend internally linking these assets into the campaign content to overcome organizational created language. For example, if the user searches “find out where we deliver in San Francisco, California!” and clicks on your ad, you can provide a link directly to your landing page with more information about delivery in San Francisco so it won’t feel like an interruption when they click through from Google Search Ads (GSA).

3. Map out your content by topics and keywords in a spreadsheet so that you can better internally link your content to the user’s journey

Tip 4: Content and keywords should be aligned

Keywords are important—they help Google and users find your site, after all—and they should be considered throughout the entire lifecycle of a buyer, from when they first start searching for information about your product to when they actually make that purchase.

If you’re not careful, you could end up with a disconnect between your keyword intent and the copy on your site. This can confuse both Google and your users, which means fewer people will see and click on your content.

To avoid this issue, make sure there is no disconnect between the keywords associated with copy and different stages of the buyer’s journey. Don’t confuse your users and Google!

Final Thoughts

SEO is a must for anyone who wants to scale their content marketing and create a profitable business model. If you want to learn more about SEO from someone you can trust, we would love to have the opportunity to speak with you.

In the end, Onimod Global is more than in tune with all things SEO, Content marketing and social media, so it doesn’t hurt to drop us a line and ask questions. We are always happy to chat about the latest trends in digital marketing or help you develop a custom digital marketing strategy for 2022. Contact us here today.

Google Analytics – What Does It Do?

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If you manage a website, you need a deep understanding of how users find your site and how your content appears on Google’s search results.  If you’ve been looking  for a program that captures how your customers are interacting with your posts and website, read on.

Google Analytics is an extremely helpful tool when it comes to tracking your marketing efforts. As Google Partners, Onimod Global can assist you with the training, support and resources to help your business succeed and help your company grow and stand out in the industry. Whether its content for social media, or launching your new email campaign, Google analytics can maximize your marketing efforts.

Web Analytics

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, and analysis of web data. Web analytics tools provide useful information about website traffic. This feature is incredibly handy because it shows you how a user interacts with the site, and what content they engage with the most.  If you didn’t need more convincing as to why you should be utilizing Google analytics, we came up with a list of the three most important reasons why you should use analytics:

  1. Helps you take data-led decisions – You can see first-hand the way your website and social channels are performing.
  2. Makes Reporting Easier – Having the data readily available to you is a big plus. You can easily share with others how your campaigns are performing.  You can do this by measuring and acting on the data trends you observe using web analytics software.
  3. Helps you find the story behind the data – Web analytics helps you understand who your customers are, where they’re coming from, and what their interests are. You can use all this information to improve the experience on your site for the consumer and to optimize the channels that consumers use to visit your website.

Google Analytics Tools

There are many analytics tools on the market. While some of them are free, most of them require a paid subscription. Paid analytics products and free products vary greatly in terms of functionality, features, and support. Google Analytics is the most popular analytics program on the market. It also comes with a free version for those who want to test out the product before they pay for the subscription.

The paid version is known as Google Analytics 360. Google 360 offers additional functionality in terms of report validity and sample sizes. This is mainly for websites that receive millions of page views a month. If your website isn’t receiving that much traffic, it might be beneficial to use the free version of Google Analytics.

Google Analytics can track the user or consumer journey, providing rich data around channels used, locations, and devices. These journeys can then be tracked through to on-site activity, goals achieved, and exit point, as well as returning visitors, which indicates loyalty. Here’s a look at some of the benefits of Google Analytics:

  • Easy to install and use.
  • User-friendly interface.
  • Customizable reports, dashboards and data collection.
  • Seamless integration with other Google products.
  • Extensive and valuable insights into web behavior.

One of the biggest advantages of using google is that you can seamlessly connect other google products. The main tools available to link to are Google Ads, Google Search Console, and Search Ads 360, formerly known as DoubleClick by Google. To link these additional tools, you need to access the product linking section within the Property settings. Each of the available tools for linking are listed there and you simply follow the instructions to link the tools.

Taking Your Analytics to the Next Level

The expert digital marketers at Onimod Global develop custom dynamic digital dashboards with Google Studio for all of our clients. The large selection of graphs and charts gives us the opportunity to completely customize your reports making data the most transparent and easy to interpret for you and your company.

If you are thinking about adding an analytics tool to your marketing strategy, Google Analytics should be at the top of your list to try. As Google Partners, Onimod Global has over a decade of experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, social media advertising, content marketing and paid search. Got questions about Google strategies or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

How To Effectively Use Hashtags on Social Media

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Promoting your brand on Social Media is paramount nowadays. And hashtags are an extremely effective tool when used correctly. Let’s delve a little deeper into the world of the previous pound sign (#) and how it can captivate audiences in 2022.

Hashtags can be one of the best way to make your content available in other realms of the social media world. The history of hashtags and their origin stem from Twitter and slowly began to grow across the board on other social media outlets.

Here’s a look at how to properly use hashtags to help people find your topics and expand your audience.

What are Hashtags?

By definition a hashtag is a keyword phrase or word preceded by a hash symbol (#). It’s used all over social media nowadays within the body of a post. The purpose of the hashtag is to bring attention to your posts in order to create interaction with new potential followers. When using a phrase as a hashtag, you spell it without spaces i.g. #onimodglobal.

Hashtags can include numbers but it cannot use symbols or punctuations. Beginning middle, or end you can place a hashtag in the body of your social media post or within the comment section. When you utilize this strategy it can help people who don’t follow you to find your content.

Why are Hashtags Important?

Hashtags are important for the sole purpose of your content being found by the right people. By using hashtags that are relevant to your business or the services you provide it can help drive your content to the right people. When this happens, you will have traffic to your content that will in turn boost your views, likes, and shares.

However, using them only makes a difference in your social media strategy when it’s done the right way. Here are some hashtag tips:

  1. Don’t get carried away with hashtags – The number of hashtags you can use depends on which platform you are using. Twitter would be a great example where one to three hashtags will have more of an impact opposed to using lot of them.
  2. Keep hashtags short and memorable – It’s in best hashtag practice that you don’t use a lot of words within a tag. A great example of this would be hashtag activism campaigns. The summer of 2020 was huge for the #BlackLivesMatter movement in America, and is still widely used within social media today.
  3. Don’t choose hashtags that are too obscure – If you choose a tag that no one is going to search for, it won’t benefit your marketing efforts.

Create your Own Hashtag Strategy

Anyone can create their own hashtag strategy. While there are many ways you can go about this, the best way is to choose specific hashtags whenever possible. The more specific you can get, the more likely you are to attract a targeted audience. Another strategy is using capital letters at the front of each word. This clarifies what you are trying to communicate.

Your competition is more than likely already using hashtags within their social media strategy. How successful are they at engaging your mutual audience? Pay attention to how much or how little they use hashtags and what the response is.

A successful hashtag strategy starts with knowing your audience and taking the time to become familiar with what works on each platform. With that knowledge in hand, you will continue to learn what works and what doesn’t, by using hashtags as part of your social media strategy and analyzing your results.

Overall, hashtags are a great tool for communicating with your followers as well as increasing engagement and attracting new customers.

Last Thoughts

Whether you’re new to social media or have been around it for a while, you can greatly benefit from learning a trick or two about hashtags. From Facebook to Instagram and Twitter, you will understand how to drive engagement and extend reach.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. If you’re looking for assistance with your content marketing or any other areas of digital marketing, contact us today!

How To Increase Your Online Visibility Through Social Media

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Social media plays a vital role in today’s society. It can help you generate buzz around your products and your brand by having users share your content. But social networks are incredibly busy and filled with stimuli. With so much going on, how do you make sure that users will find your content throughout all this mess? Read on to find out more…

Social media is a great resource when it comes to increasing your online visibility. There are so many ways that an organization’s pages can be optimized in order to do so.

We’ll take a look at how you can bring a couple of strategies together to generate more searches for your business—and from this, achieve a greater online presence.

Does Social Media Posting Help With Online Visibility?

While social media cannot directly impact your rankings, you can create a more holistic approach to online marketing. However, social media activity can raise your company’s profile and increase the clicks on their website. What are you aiming to achieve by linking social media activity with online visibility? Here’s a couple things you can do to get started:

  • Getting clicks on your organization’s website
  • Having an increase in online searches for the company
  • Social shares for a wider post reach and increased audience
  • Sharing information to help analyze social engagement

All of the things above have one thing in common and that is that they all increase the possibilities for lead opportunities. The way you can achieve lead opportunities above is by having and creating quality content. Often times quality content gets overlooked, its truly one of the best ways you can leverage and boost your online presence.

Which Social Media Platforms Are the Best for SEO?

Which platforms do you currently use? Most social media platforms can help with online visibility. A lot of people have that mindset, but you should honestly be thinking about  using the platforms that will help you reach your target audience. Each social media platform works slightly differently when it comes to encouraging clicks and shares.

It goes without saying most brands have a Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Google My Business accounts. But many businesses also utilize Youtube, Tiktok and Pinterest. But which performs best? Facebook continues to be powerful all over the world. With more than 1.71 billion monthly users, the social media platform is ripe for SEO. Be attentive with your company page and find and nourish your best promoters on the platform. Facebook is a great lead generator, so always stay on brand and use targeted keywords in your posts. Make sure to cross-post videos you produce and publish on your YouTube account as well.

Although Meta owns both Facebook and Instagram, they perform differently for different organizations’ offerings.

Also, any social platform a company uses has to be “on brand” for them, otherwise it will defeat the purpose of boosting your SEO. At the end of the day, a great website should have all the key elements of an effective inbound marketing strategy:

  • An active blog.
  • Responsive design.
  • Intuitive navigation.
  • Effective conversion strategy with calls to action.

What Are the Best Ways to Optimize Social Media for Better Online Visibility?

How can you make the most of your brand’s social media platforms? Here are a couple of techniques that you can use to improve your websites online visibility. 

LinkedIn & Facebook

Most people breeze by “SEO-ing” their About us/Summary section. It’s one of the easiest ways to put the information you want out there for leads to easily access. Filling out as much as you can in the About section is a great start.

  • The “About” summary section gives you the capacity to use 2,600 characters (on LinkedIn, Facebook gives you 50,000!) to explain what you do. Use keywords that your clients are using to find your products and services.
  • Use keywords that describe your products and services in your headline.
  • The “Experience” section also gives you 2,000 characters to show case your expertise. Make sure you include a few paragraphs that talk about what your company provides from a product/services perspective.

How do You know if your Social Media Strategy is Improving SEO?

All social media platforms have some sort of analytics feature that you can use to measure the attention your socials are getting. You can also look into social media engagement tools, which you can download and use to generate tables and graphs. You can compare the social media and website stats to see the effect the former has on the latter. Lastly, you can see the organic changes in your Google Analytics account.

Last Thoughts

Social media is a crucial part of your marketing strategy. It can help you generate buzz around your products and your brand by having users share your content.

As trusted Google experts, our team is here to help with holistic digital marketing strategies including optimizing your Google Business Profile listing and ensuring you have the highest rank possible. Whether you’re looking for SEO tips, social media marketing ideas, or paid media strategies, our goal is to make your business more successful. Get a free audit and see how you can improve your digital presence with us here.

Skills Every Digital Marketing Agency Should Excel in

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A great digital marketing agency should have the ability to learn your brand quickly and be ready to act as your in-house digital experts.  Since the digital industry is so diverse, how do you know if a digital marketing agency is really as great as they claim to be?  

Looking for a new digital marketing agency but have no clue where to begin? Working with a good digital agency that specializes in quality marketing strategies is an obvious starting line. Knowing how to choose a digital marketing agency is essential in your search to find the right agency fit for your brand.

Spending money on digital marketing is a big deal, and you want to find an agency that makes the most of your money and works with your business goals. If you’re tired of being burned by agencies that make big promises but deliver no results, check out our three must-have skills (and top red flags) to watch out for. 

1. SEO & SEM

Across the board, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important skills you can have in this field. Knowing how SEO and content optimization work is essential for running a successful campaign. A good marketing agency should have an up-to-date website. If they’re practicing their SEO successfully you can easily find them doing a simple google search. 

Both SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) form your entire digital strategy on a data and content level. At the end of the day, a great website should have all the key elements of an effective inbound marketing strategy:

  • An active blog.
  • Responsive design.
  • Intuitive navigation.
  • Effective conversion strategy with calls to action.

2. A Solid Team

A great agency should have a team that is equipped with versatility and expertise. Building a team that has experts in their respective fields i.e. design, development, SEO, content strategy, social media and brand development, will only make your agency more sought after and stronger as a whole.

Content is perhaps the core of digital marketing. Content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. After you’ve created your all-star team you should then be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for various channels. By understanding how to create an effective content strategy you’ll be able to easily engage and convert to various audiences.

Things can be a little challenging when it comes to creating different content formats. From video to social media, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, and white papers, it can be tough to create content that translates to these different formats. Working together as a team is the best way to face the beast that is, content marketing.

3. Tools and How to Utilize Them

Due to the marketing industry being so technology-driven, you need a good grasp on technology as well as be able to learn it quickly. It is immensely beneficial for a marketing agency to have a solid understanding of marketing tools as well as the technical skills that go along with them. For example, a CMS like WordPress – used by a third of websites – can be tweaked to boost SEO. 

Project management tools are important and its always good to ask what platform your desired marketing agency is using.  Nowadays there are many tools you can use to get the job done, for example Google Analytics, Hubspot, Salesforce, the list goes on. The bottom line is, any agency should be comfortable and familiar with all of these tools.

Now that we’ve covered the 3 top things to have as an agency, lets discuss the 3 Red Flags to watch out for.

Red Flag #1 – You Don’t have an Account Manager

A solid agency will pair you with a marketing strategist or account manager who oversees your business’s marketing success.

Something to look out for is talking to a new person every time you call. When you’re looking for an agency, make sure to ask who will handle your account. If it’s one person, that’s great. If they’re running a call center, look elsewhere.

Red Flag #2 – You Can’t Access Your Marketing Data

If the agency refuses to give you access to analytics, you should find an agency that will let you track your marketing success with them. There’s no reason for a digital marketing provider to be dishonest or hoard a business’s data.

The right digital marketing agency will allow you to see your data, and they’ll talk to you about the analytics as they work to improve your marketing performance.

Red Flag #3 – False Promises

If an agency is promising you that your business will be at the top of search results by working with them in a matter of weeks – it’s a bad sign. It’s always important to ask how if they’re promising you things they cant keep. If they’re talking about paid advertising, then rest assured you have nothing to worry about.

Its always best to find an agency that has realistic goals for you to improve your local search results.

Last Thoughts

Digital marketing is fast-paced and demanding. Understanding an agencies top 3 must haves and top 3 red flags to look out for will have you off to the races. At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

From SEO to social media, content marketing and strategy, We can help you gain up-to-date and relevant knowledge that will help you become an awesome digital marketer. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Social Media Strategies That Boost Awareness and ROI

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Social media marketing is absolutely necessary for brands and businesses in order for them to stay relevant. By having a social media strategy in place, it helps businesses engage and influence their target audience. 

There are so many campaigns across social media that have gone viral by simply having a strategy in place.

The average amount of time that people spend on social media is 2.27 hours. Considering the increase in popularity with apps like TikTok it has people spending more time scrolling throughout the day. Here’s a look at the benefits of having a social media strategy in place that can drive both brand awareness and ROI.

Benefits of Having A Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them and metrics tracked to measure performance. A strategy doesn’t need to be over-thought and difficult. The best way you can go about creating a strategy is by having a simple yet specific plan with meaningful measurable. 

This will help you clearly identify whether or not the tactics you’re implementing are successful or not. Ultimately, your social media strategy should drive brand awareness and engagement across social media channels for your target audience/s. 

One of the hardest things about social media marketing is consistency. It can be tough to try and recreate a campaign and hope for the same results. By having a social media strategy you can provide your business with the following benefits:

  • Increase Your Brand Awareness
  • Increase Your Web Traffic
  • Generate Quality Leads
  • Quality Data you can analyze and measure

There are so many benefits to social media and having a strategy in place will only strengthen your ability to achieve your business goals.

Steps to Building a Successful Social Media Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of a social media strategy, let’s get into a couple specific steps you can take to create one. Here’s a couple tips on how you can implement a successful social media strategy:

Set Goals for Your Business

Spending some time in this step will help you understand and define what your social media goals are. This will ultimately determine the rest of your strategy.

Think about what your business wants to achieve from social media and understand that marketing and business goals are different. For example, are you trying to draw brand awareness in the marketplace, or expand your following or generate more leads? You may want to achieve these goals, but it’s crucial to note each one of them as they will involve different tactics on social media.

When you set your goals, define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand which social media metrics are important. To be successful on social media, set metrics for each channel you use. Over and above basic metrics you can dig deeper and track audience growth rate. There are many metrics you can use to track success, so narrow them down to what matters to your business.

Research Your Audience & Your Competitors 

Your audience and your competitors go hand in hand. In order to create personalized messaging and content, you need to understand who your audience is and what they want. The best way to achieve that is to do market research. You can do this through online surveys, interviews with your customers or by setting up a focus group.

Once you’ve done this, you will get a better look at your buyer personas which in turn help you create a better understanding of what your ideal customer is. Then you can begin catering to that demographic.

Competitor research helps you understand what your competitors are doing online such as what platforms they use and campaigns they run. You can also see what their messaging is like, as well as their content and how frequently they post. By understanding how they engage with customers and the success of that engagement you can either emulate it or take another direction to capture customers’ attention.

Social Media Platforms

Choosing the best channels for your business can be confusing at the beginning. There are a lot of platforms out there to choose from. Depending on the type of business you are, you may be making a mistake by not being present on all of the platforms. 

Facebook: Is one of the biggest social media platforms and the oldest around. Facebook offers a targeted way to engage with prospects and customers. 

Instagram: Is a great visual platform. Instagram continues to be one of the most popular amongst younger audiences and has seen huge growth over the past few years. It’s a great platform to showcase products and connect with influencers to grow your customer base. Plus with in-app shopping coming to Instagram soon through shoppable posts, customers will be able to purchase on the platform. 

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B businesses and provides opportunities for B2C too. It provides businesses with a way to connect in the B2B space both organically and through paid advertising. Content that works well on this platform are blogs, white-papers, eBooks, and industry-related content. 

Twitter: Twitter is a real-time platform which means your content should be timely and relevant. It can be a great customer service channel for brands as it allows quick replies and its hashtags help discover new and trending content. 

TikTok: As one of the fastest-growing social media channels, TikTok is a great place for video content. Known for its short-form and quirky videos, it’s developing rapidly as a platform and can be used effectively for marketing. TikTok is a great place for influencer collaborations. 

Planning Your Content

When you plan your content, you’re creating a tone for your pages. It’s a way for you to figure out if you engage with your audience in a formal or informal voice. It’s how you showcase your brand’s personality. The best way to plan your content is by creating a content calendar. That way you can create posts and schedule them regularly on social networks.

You can measure your posts by monitoring their performance, tracking your KPIs, and lastly, testing out new content to see which keywords resonate with your audience.

Final Thoughts

Doing content marketing without a content strategy is a disaster waiting to happen.

The more you know about how social media works, the better your strategy will be. It’s important to understand the fundamentals of social media marketing along with the intricacies of each platform so you can target the right audience.  

At Onimod Global, our data-driven content strategies align your content marketing efforts to real business results. Our content strategy services make it easy to understand your audience’s needs, where your competition is winning, and areas where you have an opportunity to lead your industry.

As a Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, we are your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. 

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

4 Ways to Boost Your WordPress SEO

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Yes WordPress is SEO-friendly, but simply launching a WordPress website isn’t enough to rank at the top of the search engines.

WordPress has been around since 2003, and has certainly come a long way to help define itself as a powerful marketing tool. Over a third of all websites are using WordPress, simply for its publishing platform and well-designed SEO.

However, if you want your site to rank higher than your competitors’ sites, you still need to do some work yourself. Here’s a couple ways Onimod Global can help you improve your WordPress site’s SEO.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Without keyword research, you are not going to know which search terms you should be optimizing your site’s content for. Keyword research should come at the start of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.

You can use our Keyword Overview tool to identify the keywords you should be using and optimizing for. Whether you are starting to optimize your site from scratch or are creating new content, knowing the keywords you are trying to rank the page for is essential.

Craft Unique Optimized Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Your page’s title tag tells users and search engines what your page is about and is commonly regarded as being an important ranking factor. It is what feeds the clickable page title you see on Google search results.

Yoast automatically sets your page’s title tag using your page heading. What’s nice about Yoast is that you also have the ability to overwrite this and improve it in order to work in variations of keywords that you might not include in your page’s heading. Here are a couple things you can do to optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions:

  • You can either use snippet variables, add custom text as your title tag, or use a mix of both.
  • Meta descriptions indirectly impact your site’s organic performance due to Click-through- rate. It is worth spending time to write enticing descriptions. 

Use Internal Linking

You need to use internal linking within your content to help establish topical relevance between different pages on your site, to pass authority earned from external links, and to help users efficiently navigate.

Adding in internal links to other pages in WordPress is really simple. All you need to do is highlight the text which you want to link (this will be your link’s anchor text) and click the ‘link’ button on the toolbar, which will then allow you to either paste a URL or search for pages within your site.

Mark Up Your Pages with Schema

Schema markup can help to enhance your SEO efforts by adding context to your content and data. It helps Google to understand your content, present it in different and useful ways, which enhances a searcher’s experience.

By adding context to your pages, you are making it more likely that you not only rank higher but also get clicks when your page receives impressions. Since Yoast 11.0, a full structured data graph is built for every post or page on your site, but there are instances where you will want to mark up specific blocks within WordPress.  

Last Thoughts

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ out there, and that is one of the reasons why it is so popular. It is user-friendly and easy to implement a whole host of SEO tactics using just a small number of fantastic plugins. By following the steps above, you are putting yourself in a great position to outrank your competitors.

Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

3 Simple Small Business SEO Hacks

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In this digital age of rivalry, every person that’s in business, especially small business companies, are eager to develop their effective SEO strategies to get your business off on the right foot with your digital presence business’s presence. With the changing trends in shopping and constant Google algorithm updates, an online presence is crucial to your success. In this article, I’ll provide suggestions from experts in marketing to develop a small-scale SEO strategy.

Is your small business just starting up and you’re looking for any way to kick start your SEO? Fear not, Onimod Global experts are here to help you with 3 simple small business SEO hacks.

1. Discover emerging search trends

Onimod Global experts advise all businesses, especially small businesses just starting out, to focus on optimization around certain topic groups with long tail keywords at each stage of their customer’s journey to reach specific customers. Google will continue to refine its algorithm, and they even do updates over 100 times a year. They have the ability to determine what content searchers are really after.

Small businesses should look for keyword opportunities and content gaps where they can add value by answering specific questions that their customers have.

2. Optimize your site for mobile

This is a non-negotiable for websites nowadays. Optimizing your website for mobile devices is essential to generally ensure you have aneffective SEO. Particularly, it’s more crucial for local SEO.

And the reason for this? Google’s data reveals that about 1/3 of mobile searches are based on location. This means for your small business, that most people looking for your service within your region are doing it while they are on the go with a smartphone. If your website isn’t functioning well on any mobile phones or other devices, there’s a good chance you’ll lose many potential customers.

Bryan Clayton, CEO of GreenPal, tells DreamHost blog, “Right out of the gate, there were major problems,” he says. “We assumed that the majority of our users would shop for a lawn care service from their desktop or laptop computer. But it became very clear, very quickly that more people were accessing the website from their mobile phones and tablets than from a desktop or laptop computer — 4-to-1.”

3. Share the stories of your customers

Onimod Global experts recommend for small businesses just beginning to start recording daily interactions with customers at any stage of their business, from inquiry and product comparison to actual sales or after-sales.

Make it easy for customers by including reminders and links to your Google Business Profile, Facebook, or other relevant review pages. Your Google Business Profile is actually even more important for generating leads than your website will be.

Think of what sparks your eye when you see a Google Business profile and all the details that are added. Ensure it’s completely filled out with accurate information. Make sure you’re using keywords in your business descriptions, and don’t be afraid to ask for reviews.

More from Onimod Global

More information on small business SEO hacks and other digital marketing tips can always be found on the Onimod Global blog. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.