If your small business isn't yet online and actively engaging in digital marketing then here is 7 reasons why you should be.

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What is SMO? Social Media Optimisation Explained - Simply

Social media optimisation (SMO) is the use of a number of social media outlets and communities to generate publicity to increase the awareness of a product, brand or event. (wikipedia)

SMO is married in with SEO in that what you do on social networks, whether that’s on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Forums or other sites, can and does have a direct effect on your website rankings in Google.

When employed effectively social media can be one of your greatest assets for improving your website’s organic search results. Through linking and connecting users in various online networks, you extend the reach of your business and brand which increases opportunities for people to link to your website’s products and services.  This contributes to what we in the SEO world call off-page SEO. 

Furthermore, social media optimisation helps connect all of your social media accounts in a cohesive, consistently branded network that points your potential customers to where you want them to go, whether that’s your website, another social channel, your blog etc.

As an SMO specialist we employ a strategic, multi-point process to build your successful SMO foundation, boost your SEO, and drive more potential customers to your site.

What does SMO involve?

SMO is an ever evolving and changing set of tasks and optimisations to be performed regularly and consistently. But here is a very basis list of some of the items that fall under SMO.

  • Optimising your social platforms to meet channel best practice.
  • Using relevant hashtags (for Instagram and Twitter) to improve your content discovery.
  • Creating content that is relevant to your target market and that encourages them to engage with (share, comment, watch, read and co-create).
  • Integrating and connecting all your social channels with your website and with each other.
  • Making it easier for users to share you content from your website.
  • Allowing users to socially comment on your products from your website.
  • Engaging with other people’s and organisations content to stay at the forefront of people’s attention.
  • Track your content performance.
  • Employ paid media to gain greater reach and engagement with your content.

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Should you be doing SEM?

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. (Wikipedia) 

This question can only really be answered by having a better understanding of your particular business, your marketing goals and where you are in your digital marketing plan.

There is no point in spending money to drive qualified traffic (clicks) to your website if…

1.     Your website looks like a dog’s breakfast and it’s unclear what your business is about and what users are to do when they get there.

2.     You don’t know what you are trying to achieve by using pay-per-click (PPC) marketing.

a.     Do you want to increase sales?

b.     Get email sign ups?

c.      Encourage video views or information downloads?

d.     Drive more customer leads?

It’s extremely important to get your foundations laid correctly first – that is that your website is following best practice website design, is mobile optimised, has a clear message that speaks to your target audience and is search engined optimised.

Once you have all these ducks in a row, then you may want to start driving more traffic to your web pages to achieve your desired goal.

Why would you engage in SEM if you’re already doing SEO?

To use a fire analogy SEO could be considered the logs and SEM (PPC) the flame that creates the heat. You need SEO as a foundation to ensure your website is working in its optimum.

SEO could be enough for you, if you’re already indexing well within the Google SERPs for all your top keywords. But more than likely it will take you quiet a bit of time to index on the first page of Google for many competitive and long-tail search terms and so you may want to launch a Google Adwords campaign with a lot of search terms (keywords) that are relevant to your business so you’re your website becomes visible within the top pages of Google almost instantly.

How much does SEM cost?

This is like asking the old age questions “how long is a piece of string?” The answer depends on a number of factors;

  • Your media budget?
  • The competitiveness of your chosen keywords
  • The size of your target market
  • Whether or not you are concerned with having 100% share of voiceor not. That is to say whether you want your ads to show 100% of the time that someone is searching for your keywords.
  • What the management fees are of the agency/ person running and managing your account, if you’re having someone else do it for you. You can see our prices here.

What is important to note is that you only paid Google (Adwords) when someone clicks on your ad, hence this type of marketing being referred to as pay-per-click (PPC).  It is for this reason that you want to make sure that they keywords that you have in your Adwords account are relevant to your business, brand, products and/ or services as you don’t want to be paying for clicks on irrelevant search terms.

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What should you know about SEO?

Search Engine Marketing (SEO) in a nutshell is about building, ‘optimising’, and updating your website and content in such a way that makes it easy for Search Engines (most notably Google – holds 89.16% global market share as of Oct 15) to read, index and catalog it so that they can later display it when someone searches for something that closely matches your business product and services and or the content on your site.

Why should you care about SEO?

81% of shoppers conduct online research before buying. 60% begin by using a search engine to find the products they want, and 61% will read product reviews before making any purchase. (Adweek.com Nov. 28, 2014)

What does SEO really involve?

I like to divevide SEO into 3 parts – technical and contextual (on and off-page).  Let’s have a quick look at each of these parts and how they can be digested in terms of website structure, website content and connectivity.

Website Structure(Technical)

This is the use of correct header tags (H1-H6), keywords, bolds, internal page linking, page titles, page URLs, file names, meta tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags etc. This could all be considered technical SEO, but when you start implementing it you’ll realise that it’s all very self explanatory and necessary in order for search engines to be able to read and understand your page.

If you’re unsure about what all these things mean and how to update/use then here is a simple explanation of the basic elements I’ve mentioned above.

Website Content (On-page)

This is everything on a website that is viewable and readable by a visitor or search engine. The arrangement of your content is part of the sites structure and is important in its own right, particularly when it comes to user friendliness and site performance.

But the structure of your content is what’s going to help you rank well in search engines. Therefore sites need to provide good quality information tailored to the reading habits of search engines and users.

  • Provide subject focused text repetition of keywords. Now don’t over load your page with your keywords. If you do, then google will no doubt penalise you for ‘keyword stuffing your page’. Instead naturally filter your keyword(s) throughout your content.
  • Use text-based links to other relevant pages on your website.
  • Use clear and descriptive headlines.
  • And more --- There is a mountain of information out there from research done as to what is the optimum word and character count of a page or blog title, use use this to help you when writing your content.

Website Connectivity (Off-Page)

This is where your social media strategy comes in. This area of SEO is concerned with how many links from other sites (blogs, forums, social networks, websites etc) are coming into your website. Natural links (we say this as in the past people have engaged in link farming, a link building strategy) from popular and authoritative sites help give you want Google refers to as ‘link juice’, which is like a vote of confidence that your content is relevant and of value to readers and so Google will reward your website accordingly when it comes to listing you in the search results for a particular search query.

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