Running a business doesn’t necessarily mean you know the ins and outs of marketing. If you own and run a business, it doesn’t mean that you excel at everything related to running a company. It means that you had an idea, you marketed it to a base of customers and hopefully, they responded. If they didn’t, marketing is probably the least of your worries.
Of course, you might be under the impression that you excel in marketing and be completely mistaken. For instance, you might think you know the meaning of link building. Link building, that’s all about putting links in your articles…right? Wrong, link building is the process of building relationships with clients. And, by creating and establishing these relationships, you can then get their company linked to yours. In doing so, you can make sure that you generate fresh leads and increase the possibilities of growth for your business. So, it’s not quite as simple as just putting links into your content, and we hope you can see that now. There are plenty of other misconceptions you might have about marketing too. Let’s look at a few of them and make sure you’re on the right track. After all, if your marketing isn’t on point, your business will fail.
SEO
SEO is often simplified to the point where it no longer makes any sense in the modern digital world. For instance, a lot of business owners think that SEO is just keywords and links. Worse still, they believe that for SEO to be successful, you just need to add as many links and keywords to content as possible. Somewhere a content marketer just shuddered because if that’s your understanding of SEO, you will fail. Not only will you fail, you’ll pick up a Google penalty as well. This is almost always going to lead to blackhat SEO practices, and that can get you in a lot of trouble online.
To avoid this, we need to understand that SEO is an umbrella term that could essentially include everything that you do related to your business online. So, you might post on your Twitter account. That could be enough to shift your SEO performance if that tweet is retweeted multiple times and if it links back to your site. Or perhaps, you have added a piece of content to your website. It doesn’t matter whether that content has tons of keywords or links. If it’s shared a lot online, you can bet it’s going to improve your SEO.
As you can see then, SEO isn’t just keywords and links in content. It can be a lot more than that, and this is why you should consider hiring an SEO expert for your business. They understand how SEO has evolved over the last few years and will ensure that your business stays on top of things.
Don’t forget that what we’ve just mentioned is only organic SEO. There is also the type of SEO that you pay for too. With that SEO, you can make your business rank without even trying. All you need to do is use services like PPC to bid on keywords, and hopefully, with a little luck, you’ll rank.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another widely misunderstood term in the business world. The biggest blunder is thinking that it doesn’t matter what quality the content is as long as you fill your site with it to the point where it is overflowing with information. However, again, this could lead to a Google penalty. It’s possible that you might slip under the radar of the Google SEO spiders, but even if you do, you still won’t see any ranking improvement. Instead, your business site will remain stagnant online.
What you need to be focusing on is quality pieces of content that have the potential to go viral or gain interest for customers. If you do this, even ten pieces of content on your site could have more of an impact than one hundred. It all depends on whether the writing is at a high quality level and whether it provides information that users want or need.
Another misconception about marketing is that pieces should be short and to the point. This isn’t true at all, and actually, Google responds better to longer pieces of content. For instance, a two thousand word article is likely to have a great impact than one that’s only 500 words long. Of course, there is a catch, and that’s the density. If that article is sparse of relevant information and filled with waffle, it will not be effective, no matter how long it might be.
Backlinking
Backlinking is the process of adding links to content on your site or in other areas of your business profile online. It’s worth pointing out though that not all links are equal. This means that you can add fifty links to your content and a) you might gain a Google penalty as well as b) you may see very little effect. It all depends on the domain authority of your links. Ideally, you want a high domain authority to ensure the sites that are linked to yours have a positive profile online. The last thing you want is for your site to be linked to scam web pages.
You need to think about where you put the links as well. In the past, links could be added anywhere on your site. These days, it’s best to put them directly into the content, and they should seem completely natural. Do this, and they may well increase your search ranking significantly. This is ultimately the overall goal of marketing online.
CRO
Finally, you might not even have heard of CRO, but conversion rate optimization is in many ways just as important as SEO. SEO gets customers to your site, CRO ensures that they stick around for the purchase. This is why you constantly need to be updating your site and running tests to ensure that it’s still functioning effectively. Otherwise, there is the distinct possibility that while lots of customers check the site out very few actually commit to the sale.
