This not only applies to offline businesses or your core business strategy, but also your online endeavours. One of the first steps of Search Engine Optimization is analyzing similar websites and looking at who is ranking in the search results. This involves direct competitors (for example if you sell sports shoes, then other sports shoe sellers) but also websites that rank for terms like "sports shoes" even if they aren’t selling them.

Expert SEO companies can help you gather and make sense of this data, but in general it involves looking at the competition’s content, which keywords they are targeting and how, and where they’re getting their backlinks from. A reasonable prediction can then be made about how successful you can be by targeting the same or similar keywords. There are many tools that can help with this process.

You can also get valuable information about the latest trends in your niche by monitoring how customers interact with your competition’s social media profiles. Is a particular product hot right now, with a lot of discussion and hashtags on Twitter? Is everyone tagging their friends in a certain post on Facebook? How can you replicate this or tap in to the existing buzz?

More broadly you can learn about trends by using tools like Google Trends. While this is not strictly a business tool it lets you know the most popular topics in specific countries around the world based on how many people are searching about them. If you see anything related to your products or niche you should be able to tap in to this with social media or blog postings.

You can also enter a specific keyword to learn about its historic popularity, as well as related search terms and demographics. This can be very useful when compiling a list of keywords to target with your site.

Google Alerts can also be used to monitor the competition as well as keywords or topics. All you have to do is enter a phrase and you will be sent an alert whenever that phrase is used online. If using it to keep tabs on competitors it is a great way to get insight in to what customers and others are saying about them. You may even want to use this for your own name or business/website name.

There’s also a tendency to underestimate the knowledge, skill and time it takes to run a successful internet marketing campaign, because there is so much information freely available. Unfortunately reading a few blog posts about internet marketing and SEO, does not make you an expert, just like reading a college book on business doesn’t make you a businessman.

All business owners recognize that delegating and outsourcing is important for success, and that includes internet marketing. It is therefore important to keep an open mind when using the services of an internet marketing company and to respect their expertise.

Here are some other reasons why.

Do You Have An Alternative?

It’s one thing to reject the proposals of an internet marketing firm, but do you have a better alternative? Do you have a detailed plan and strategy to grow your online presence, and the expertise to accomplish it? If not perhaps you should listen to them more closely?

Internet Marketing Is Always Evolving

Even if you understand the basics of internet marketing, unless you are living it 24/7 you are not going to be on top of the latest trends, techniques and search engine algorithm changes. It was once popular to stuff pages with keywords and buy irrelevant backlinks. Today the likes of Google consider this spam.

A professional internet marketing company is able to evolve with the times, while business owners who only know a bit about the process may have outdated ideas. These ideas could cause more harm than good.

Remember, you go to an optician to fix your eyesight not a dentist, so go to an internet marketing company to handle your internet marketing.

The Data Speaks For Itself

If you are concerned or skeptical about a proposed internet marketing strategy, let the numbers do the talking. All reputable companies closely monitor their online ads, social media accounts and web traffic, and can track exactly what is working and not working. Of course part of this process is trial and error, it will take a little while to perfect the strategy. However if the results are not there over time, then you have reason to confront them.

Saves Time

Allowing the internet marketing company to get on and do its job without interference will save you time in the long run. While they focus on promoting your business effectively online, you can focus on providing the best products and/or service as possible.

You Can’t Afford Not To

If you are spending your time second guessing the experts and failing to take their advice, you may be putting yourself at a disadvantage against the competition who have fully embraced internet marketing. Simply put, you cannot afford to be close minded about the online side of your business, because falling behind the competition is going to cost you market share and money.

Content is Likely Outdated

One of the first concerns if you’re scheduling all of your posts days in advance, is that things you reference might be outdated. This is especially true if you’re commenting on current events. Furthermore if you’re in a newsworthy niche or one with a lot of online social chatter, you may miss out on a topic with a lot of buzz.

For example perhaps you sell sportswear and want to engage with the sporting community, but because you’ve scheduled posts you might miss the chance to comment on a big news story involving a sports star that day.

Can’t Predict the Future

Likewise you can’t predict the future. Something you’ve scheduled to post in a week might not be as viable then as it is now. In some high profile instances brands have even made themselves look insensitive or stupid because they weren’t aware of certain events.

For example the day after a deadly tsunami you probably don’t want to be tweeting: "You never know when bad weather might strike, save yourself today and buy our waterproof coat."

Can’t Take Advantage of Viral Success

There’s no better feeling than seeing one of your posts go viral, but in order to capitalize you need to be online. You could have added a link or special offer to the post, or made several new posts branching off from the original idea. By time you’re back to schedule your next round of posts the buzz may have completely died down.

Won’t be Able to Respond to Data

Similarly if you only schedule your posts in advance you won’t be paying close attention to the statistics and data they produce. If you’re there in the moment you might learn something valuable about how your audience responds to certain posts and then tweak them accordingly. You might even notice a mistake such as bad image sizing. But if you’re away you will miss this opportunity, or repeat the same mistake again and again if you schedule many posts at once.

Aren’t Interacting with Users

Perhaps one of the biggest downsides of scheduling posts days in advance and then not coming back until the next scheduling session is that you aren’t going to be there to interact with your audience. Half of social media is about engaging with your followers and fans, responding to questions, conversing, and building trust.

The worst thing you can do is ignore them and make them feel like there’s no way to contact you.

One of the main pitfalls is paying for quantity instead of quality. Some random "marketer" on a forum may be able to send your site 5,000 hits for $2, but that doesn’t mean those hits will convert into sales. Traffic is only worthwhile when the users are genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

Here are some other things to look out for:

Bulk Email Lists

Email marketing is one of the oldest methods of internet marketing, and it’s also one of the most abused. The issue of spam emails has gotten so severe that most email providers now have stringent spam detection systems that weed out 90% of unsolicited marketing. In short anyone claiming to be able to send your press release to 50,000 addresses is most likely misleading you, as the majority of those emails will go straight to spam folders, and a lot of the addresses will be inactive or irrelevant to your target demographic. 10 personally written emails sent to potential clients who have shown an interest in your business will be much more effective than 50,000 cookie cutter spam emails.

Backlinks

When researching Search Engine Optimization one of the first techniques you will come across is building backlinks – the process of getting links from other websites to your site. This gives the nod to Google that your content is valuable and others are giving it a proverbial thumbs up, which in turn boosts your search rankings.

While back in the day you could spam blog comments, forums and other public systems with your link and have success, today search engine algorithms are advanced enough to realize that these kinds of links are poor quality. Their effect on SEO is therefore negligible and if you go overboard they could actually get you penalized.

So if somebody is offering a service to get you thousands of backlinks, be warned that they’re most likely poor quality and unrelated to your site’s niche.

The best method of building links is to provide high quality content that people actually want to share.

Black Hat SEO

Just because there are thousands of different SEO techniques out there doesn’t mean you should use them. Black Hat SEO for example are SEO techniques that Google doesn’t allow, and will cause you to be penalized if caught using them. Anyone using the "latest" Black Hat method is essentially in a race against time and will ultimately be found out and dropped from the search engines. Black Hat techniques are simply not worth the risk of losing your entire business just to get a temporary advantage.

Stick with white hat techniques, good clean mobile friendly pages, with well organized and high quality content, and genuine backlinks from relevant sites.

Social Media Followers

While there’s some truth to the idea that the more followers or likes you have the more successful you will appear to potential customers, buying social media followers could prevent you from actually reaching them. Facebook for example uses an algorithm to determine what posts users see in their feed, and this is partly determined by the popularity of each post. If your page is liked by mostly fake users, they will not be interacting with the post and therefore it may not be shown to real users because it won’t be deemed popular.

There is no shortcut to online success and any reputable internet marketing company will focus on quality over quantity; formulating a long term strategy for organic success, rather than spam, non-converting traffic and black hat techniques.

Designers are Not Marketers

Web design and internet marketing are completely different jobs and skills. In fact sometimes they are at odds. What might look good visually on a website may not translate well for search engine optimization and other marketing methods. Web designers often ignore a lot of backend SEO principles such as meta tags, duplicate content, and may choose visuals over written content that can be crawled and ranked.

A web designer’s main concern is to create a user friendly and visually appealing website. An internet marketer’s main concern is tweaking that website to be Google-friendly so it appears in the search results, while promoting it through social media and advertising campaigns.

They Don’t Do Content

Most web designers build you a website as a template that you must then fill with your own content. If you yourself are not experienced in internet marketing, this could be disastrous. Do you or the web designer know how to formulate an effective landing page? Do you know what keywords you should be targeting and how to include them on the page so it doesn’t look spammy? If not then an internet marketing company is what you really need.

Internet Marketers are Full Time Marketers

An internet marketing company by its very nature is immersed in internet marketing every day. So while some web designers and design companies may offer some basic marketing services, chances are they do not have the experience or dedication of the professionals. Do they really have time to monitor your traffic and ad campaigns, refining them daily and working towards a long term goal?

Why pay for half a job, when you can hire somebody who will go above and beyond to make your site a success?

Web Designers Have Outdated Knowledge

An internet marketing company will be at the forefront of the marketing industry with all the latest tools and techniques. They’ll know when Google’s algorithm has changed, the latest trends in social media, and how to use the latest analysis software.

A web designer however may only know the basics and might even have outdated information that could ruin your marketing effort and get you penalized by the search engines.

Web Designers Don’t Stick Around

Unless you hire them as a webmaster to manage the day to day running of your website, a web designer is not usually going to stick around. Their job is to make the site, and when that job is done they’ll be on to the next client. This is terrible for internet marketing as promoting a site is an ongoing project that never ends. You can’t market the site for a month and then forget about it. Especially when SEO, social media and other marketing channels are constantly changing.

Of course most business owners today will be aware of this, but applying it to your day to day operation is not as straight forward as it might seem.

So you have a website, but how do you get people to visit it? You’ve been posting away on Twitter, but how do you keep your followers engaged? You have a budget to pay for online advertising, but how do you get the ads up and running?

If you’ve asked some of these questions and others, then you may want to keep reading. Internet marketing can be broken up in to 5 key elements, which combined with the help of a professional internet marketing company, will ensure you’ll reach the audience you desire.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you want your website to show up in search engines like Google when people search for terms related to your business, then you’re going to have to speak its language. SEO is a combination of different webpage tweaks and principles that help Google interpret the content and rank it against all of the other websites with similar content. Traffic sent by search engines is known as "organic" and is one of the most valuable sources of traffic you can get. Why? Because if done correctly it means the user is actively seeking the information or product that you provide. This means an increase in sales!

To be ranked well in search engines you need high quality and informative content, coded with all of the appropriate tags, as well as backlinks from other sites so Google knows that others also value the content.

This is very much the lifeblood of most websites. If you aren’t getting hits from Google, the website is essentially useless at generating customers.

A professional internet marketing company can help you apply the basic principles and formulate a long term strategy for bringing in consistent organic search traffic.

Search Engine Marketing (PPC)

PPC is short for Pay Per Click, which is a commercial form of advertising that runs alongside the organic search results. While SEO can take time to bring success (though when it does it is usually recurring), PPC can bring instant success because there is no crawling and ranking of your pages. Your ad is live almost right away, regardless of whether Google’s algorithm thinks it is a great page or not at the time.

You are charged for every click that the ad generates, and ads are based on the search terms you bid on. So if you’re selling phone cases you may choose the search term "Buy Smart Phone Case," and whenever somebody searches this term and they click your ad beside the regular results you will pay a fee. This is determined by your own budget, though if many other marketers are paying for the same term, the cost will be higher. You’ll need to ensure that your ad is genuine and engaging, so that you can make a profit.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion Rate Optimization can relate to PPC or any form of internet marketing in general. The conversion rate is the percentage of people that click on your link or ad that actually buy a product or complete the desired action you want them to (sign up to your site, use your service, redeem a coupon etc).

Optimization is the process of getting this rate as close to 100% as possible. With ads you pay directly for like PPC it is clear why you would want high conversion rate. What’s great about platforms like Google Ads is that you can easily track ads that are the most successful so you can refine the process. For example you may notice a high conversion rate for "Buy Smart Phone Cases" but not "Buy Cell Phone Covers," so you may choose to drop it altogether or change the wording of the ad.

This can be a very experimental process, however monitoring the data will allow you to learn what’s working over time. Internet marketers from an expert team will have the experience to keep things running smoothly.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing was one of the first forms of internet marketing and is still one that brings results today. However because it has been heavily abused over the years by spammers and scammers, you should never just buy a list of email addresses or find them yourself by Googling. In most cases paid for lists are out of date or even fake, and most email clients will now recognize unsolicited spam and send it directly to the spam folder.

Email marketing should be a secondary process where you can follow up with an existing customer. If they sign up to buy something encourage them "opt in" with their email address. Or you can promote a "newsletter" through your site as well.

Following this route allows you to build a list of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, which in turn makes email blasts with offers and other information that much more worthwhile and successful.

There are many professional tools available to manage email lists and newsletter/marketing content.

Social Media Marketing

When internet users are not actively searching for information on search engines or checking emails, they’re probably on social media chatting with friends or following pages and people related to their interests. While they might not be in "buy mode", this is still a prime place to remind them of your existence and build brand awareness. Think of it as a more efficient form of the roadside billboard or shop window notice, with the ability for the information to be shared to thousands of people in minutes.

From a straight shooting product launch announcement, to a quirky take on something in the news, to handling customer feedback – social media allows you to stay connected with your audience, building trust over time.

There’s no one single method for approaching social media and each platform is different, so it’s important to learn the ins and outs of each one.

My Customers Don’t Use Social Media

One of the gravest mistakes some business owners make is assuming their customers are not active on social media. No matter how obscure your business, and no matter the age of your target demographic, today a large percentage of them will be accessing social media on a daily basis. Failure to fill this online space to remind them you exist, will simply allow the competition to get there first.

I Can Do it Myself

While anyone with some basic internet knowledge can sign up to the leading social media platforms and begin posting content, that certainly doesn’t mean they will be successful in driving traffic to their website and generating sales. Many people confuse the accessibility of Facebook, Twitter etc, with the presumption that they’re easy to use.

Ask yourself this, if you were given cameras and the ability to shoot a TV commercial, would you know what to do?

That’s not to say you can’t learn along the way, but hiring a professional internet marketing company that knows various techniques for engagement and traffic generation, not only ensures success from the beginning but gives you the spare time to continue focussing on the core aspects of your business.

It’s Just About Posting Content

When starting out on social media many people fall in to the trap of posting anything, with no real direction or plan, or posting the same kind of content over and over again. To be truly successful you need to post a wide variety of content, from direct links to your site, to personal opinions, to images and video. What you do post however always needs to be considered for relevance and purpose, and should be part of an overarching plan or strategy. Will the customer find the information useful and engaging? Will it show your business in a positive light? Is the brand clearly being represented in the display image and bio?

It will Expose My Clientele to Competitors

One fear that business owners have on social media is that they might overexpose themselves and their customers to competitors who may be snooping on them. What if they mine the data and steal my ideas and customers away from me?

Fortunately this fear is not just an internet based fear, it has been around since the dawn of trade and service.

Ultimately if you’re providing the best possible service or product you can, at the best prices, with the best customer engagement, your customers won’t want to go to the competition. If you recognize that they are leaving you, then it’s time to up your game and win them back.

It’s All about the Numbers

A common trap that is easy to fall in to when using social media is believing that success is defined by your number of fans, followers etc. In fact some people take this idea so far they actually pay people to follow them, which often turn out to be fake or inactive accounts. This is a terrible mindset to fall in to, because you could have 10 million people connected to your social media profile, and only 10 people that actually actively engage with it.

The whole point of social media marketing is to find real potential customers and engage with them, so they trust your brand and spend money. It’s not about the overall numbers, it’s about how many people legitimately care.

Having this all down on paper (including the steps you need to take to reach your goals) is a smart way to ensure you stay focussed on growing your business. While there is no set format for a marketing strategy, it should at the very least involve a bullet point list of the marketing methods you plan to use and things you hope to achieve.

It is also important to remember that marketing is only half the battle. You need a well thought out strategy, backed up with solid research, in order for that marketing to be effective. There’s nothing worse than burning through an advertising and marketing budget, only to find that sales have not increased.

Here are some key reasons to follow a marketing strategy:

Maintains Focus

Without at least a basic list of things to focus on, your time is going to be scattered and unproductive. You will already need to spend time on your basic day to day business responsibilities, but couple that with the wide variety of marketing methods and tools out there, you’re quickly going to become overwhelmed without a strategy to keep you focussed. Hiring a professional internet marketing company to manage your online marketing is the perfect way to save time so you can focus on other areas of your business.

Helps You Achieve Goals

If you haven’t formalized your goals you’re not going to feel rewarded when you achieve them. And without a strategy you’re not going to achieve them at all. The goals outlined in your marketing strategy will set you down the path to success and allow you to monitor progress as you go.

Invaluable Insights

Marketing is not just what you put out, it’s what you get back from the customer. Collecting this data helps you learn what they like and dislike, which types of marketing are effective, and in turn allows you to create an even more efficient strategy that pinpoints only the methods that work and the customers willing to spend.

Internet marketing in particular allows you to track users across your advertising campaigns, social media accounts, and website, in order to closely analyze their responses and behaviour.

Saves Money

Whether you’re hiring an internet marketing company or paying for advertising in a local newspaper, unless you do proper research that money might be wasted. A proper strategy will help you target the right audience, which in turn will bring you more conversions, and make your marketing budget go further.

Convey Your Brand

Developing a detailed marketing strategy will also put you in a better position to convey your brand in the way that you want. Or in other words the way you want your customers to see you. Is this professional or laid back? Family friendly or appealing to single males? Without thinking things through you may end up sending mixed signals to your customers, which is not good for your brand image.

So What Are You Waiting For?

You wouldn’t go on a long journey without taking a map or using a sat-nav. Your marketing strategy is that sat-nav for your business. It’s the guide that will help you measure your success and stay on track for meeting your objectives. And if you haven’t developed one already, now’s the time to start!

Despite the changes in marketing over the past 10 years, especially with the increasing use of the internet, there is still one core business principle that remains… the service:

The Service

No amount of marketing is going to pay off in the long run if your service or product is simply not that good. Word of mouth is still one of the most powerful tools at your disposal, and the only way to get people talking positively about your business is to make sure your current customers have the best possible experience.

In the online realm this involves promptly answering email or social media queries, following up to see if the customer is still satisfied, offering continued support and perhaps even coupons and discounts for being loyal. The rest is just common sense… meet deadlines, dispatch products quickly, have a simple returns or refund policy etc.

Here are 4 other methods to attract customers to your business.

Less Hard Sell

Today the one thing the public can’t stand is being sold something. So where does this leave small businesses? The truth is people still want to buy products and use services, they just want to be reassured that a real person is behind the business and are being honest. This means you should cut down on your sales-speak and engage your customers/potential customers like a community. This is especially true on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The difference between somebody buying from you or the competition may come down to whether they like your personality in a post.

Be Active Online

Some people think that signing up to all of the big social media platforms and making a few posts is enough to attract customers. However to attract customers consistently you need to post regularly, keep your site updated, and share information not even directly related to your business but that your customers will find interesting. One of the reasons many people get lazy with their online presence is because they already have day to day commitments in other areas of the business. A good way to get over this hurdle is to hire a professional internet marketing company to handle all of your accounts.

Search Engine Optimization

Whether your business is online-only or you have a site that serves as a marketing tool itself, the only way it will take off is if people can find it. One of the primary drivers of online traffic is search engines, so it is important to optimize your site for relevant keywords so it will show up high in search results. It also needs to have quality content that real people would want to read and will find valuable.

Special Offers

One method that has been attracting customers since the dawn of business is the special offer. Call it a psychological trick or a thank you, but temporarily knocking down your prices, offering an extra gift, or running a rewards program, is always a good way to get people to take notice. In the age of social media you can also think outside the box.

How about the following idea?

"Tweet an image of yourself inside our store and get 10% off your purchase"

The customer gets a discount and promotes your business at the same time. What other unique promotional methods can you think of?

However throwing all of your budget at the first form of advertising that comes along is a quick way to waste money. A successful advertising campaign is one that is able to make a measurable return on the investment. In other words the amount you spend on the campaign is made back through the sales it generates.

Getting the maximum return on your advertising budget is not a perfected science, but there are a number of ways to ensure you’re on the right track.

Gather Data

If you’re going to measure and analyse your return you have to have some data to work with. For example if you took out a traditional print ad in a newspaper or magazine you should be made aware of the publication’s circulation (amount of readers). If you include a unique coupon or some other offer with your ad, you will be able to directly measure the number of responses and therefore track the revenue generated.

This process is much easier with online advertising because you can track the referrer of every visit to your site, whether that be from Google search, a link from another site, or an online advertisement.

Target Your Audience

An advertising budget is wasted if you aren’t targeting the people that will most likely want your product or use your service. Before the internet this was often a difficult task. The closest option to true targeting was to take out ads in a trade journal or cross promote with a related business. Sometimes it was just luck, target locally and hope somebody takes an interest.

With platforms like Google Ads targeting your audience couldn’t be easier. Your ad is shown alongside Google search results only when somebody searches for the keywords you designate. This means if you’re selling Custom T-Shirts you can make sure that only people searching for "Buy Custom T-Shirts" see your ad. This makes it more likely that they’ll click through and you’ll make a sale, and your budget is not wasted.

Test and Refine

If you’ve targeted your audience and gathered the data, it’s now time to analyze the results and see where you can improve. Using Google Ads as an example, testing several different keywords and keeping the ones that convert the best is a great way to get the maximum return on your budget. To do this efficiently you’ll also need to track conversions, which means monitoring whether a user sent via an ad actually makes a purchase.

Variety

Using one source of advertising even if it works will only take you so far. It’s important to use a combination of offline and online methods, the latter of which might include Search Engine Optimization, social media, as well as advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

Hire a Professional

Using some of your advertising budget to hire a professional internet marketing company to handle your online advertising will ensure that your campaigns run smoothly and all of the technical details are taken care of. You will know your general target audience, what you want to promote, and some keyword ideas, but they’ll have the experience to put it all in to action and refine your campaigns for continual success.

Here are 5 things all business owners should know in order to use platforms like Facebook and Twitter to market their brand effectively:

Regular Activity

You can’t just open a few accounts and expect the traffic to your website to skyrocket. Social media success is all about actively engaging your current and future customers. While there’s no hard rule about how often you should make new social media posts, you should never leave your followers wondering where you are. If you’re not active on social media they’ll either think your business is also no longer active, or that you don’t care about them. Posting regularly lets your followers know you mean business and will directly increase your chances of making a sale. Activity is also the way to build more followers. Everybody starts at zero and if you barely post it’s going to stay at zero.

Maintain Brand Identity

One of the key elements of building a successful brand is consistency. You don’t see Coca Cola use one logo for Twitter, another Facebook, and then another on their product labels. Everything about them is instantly recognizable. No matter how small your business you need to follow a similar approach. Your profile pictures and avatars, and your overall message should be consistent across all of your social media accounts.

Always Engage with Users

If you don’t interact with your fans/followers you’re not doing social media marketing the right way. One of the core reasons to use such platforms is to build a relationship and start a dialogue. That means promptly answering their questions and being friendly when they respond to posts. The fact that they want to interact shows that they’re interested in your business, so shutting the door in their face by not responding is the worst thing you can do. This is especially important when it comes to customer service questions, and could mean the difference between making a sale and losing a customer to the competition.

Not all Social Media is the Same

A common mistake made by those new to social media is to copy the exact same post across every single different platform. While this may work in some instances, each service has their own way of doing things. For example Instagram is all about images, the captions are secondary. Whereas Twitter is more about what you write. You may write the same things on Twitter and Facebook, but sometimes hash tags just don’t suit a Facebook status update and can even turn users off who can see that you’re using a tool. Learn the strengths and weaknesses of each platform and use them to your advantage.

Act Like a Real Human

Some of the most successful business driven social media accounts are the ones that replace the corporate spiel with friendly human dialogue. Today consumers are tired of suits and ties, jargon, and companies trying to hard sell. Sure let them know about new offers, your latest products, and other business information, but in-between you also need to be witty, entertaining, and up to speed with popular culture. There’s no reason why you can’t chime in on a popular sports game or the latest celebrity controversy. If you can wrap your business information in to something entertaining then you can’t fail.

What constitutes good content will vary from site to site, but it needs to be informative, truthful, engaging, and detailed enough for its purpose. If you were selling shoes for example nobody is going to get any value from a generic article about shoes, or a blank sales page. But if you had a detailed analysis of what makes a good running shoe, examining the different brands and features, why some are better than others, and you backed up your claims with citations – real people and Google are going to be glad they found the page.

However in today’s online world, simply having good content is not going to make your website a success. You need to know how to optimize the content and market it effectively. This is where a professional internet marketing company can help.

They will have all of the technical knowledge required to get your content visible to search engines, to effectively market it to your audience via social media, and to manage ad campaigns so that your budget is never wasted.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You may have the single greatest article on the internet but unless Google is aware, it’s not going to matter. An expert will know how to fine tune your content for targetable keywords, how to code the page with technical elements like headings and image tags, and various other methods so it has the best possible chance at ranking high in Google search and bringing you more traffic.

Social Media Marketing

Likewise you may have a great product or page that’s worth promoting, but simply pasting a link on social media is not going to entice people to click it. There are certain methods and techniques to make content stand out. You also need to engage with followers and build trust, instead of going directly for the hard sell. This takes time and skill regardless of how good the content is.

PPC Campaigns

Online ad campaigns can be very effective (like Google Ads), especially when you have good quality content on the landing page. But you need to understand the technical side of these platforms, which are often overwhelming for beginners. You need to know how to target users, how to build a good Quality Score, and how to interpret the data and alter the campaigns accordingly every day. This can only be achieved through experience.

Conclusion

High quality unique content is fundamental in building your brand and achieving your goals. However hiring a professional internet marketing company ensures that you’re making the most out of that content, by utilizing their years of technical online experience.

In Sri Lanka sending out unsolicited emails in bulk has traditionally been a common marketing method. The marketer would gather a list of addresses, or worse purchase a whole database, and then blast out poorly worded proposals and offers.

While this method is still used today, there are a number of reasons why it’s inefficient and smart businesses have moved on to other strategies.

It Can be a Scam

You should never blindly trust somebody claiming to have a database of email addresses, including company CEOs and interested customers. These lists are often outdated and the recipients have moved on or even closed their email accounts. In some cases the list may be totally made up, or the addresses just gathered at random. If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. Do not waste your marketing budget on lists of thousands of email addresses you’ve never checked yourself.

Untargeted

Unless you build your own list of email addresses, how do you know any of the recipients are remotely interested in your services or products? The fact that these are sold to many different people, over and over again, suggests they are completely random and not based on any specific demographics. One of the key principals of marketing is targeting your audience, why send something to somebody who is unlikely to respond?

Little Interest

In recent years various tests have been done on these kinds of email lists and it’s been proven that they simply don’t work. Tracking the incoming hits reveals that a blast of hundreds of thousands of these email addresses, results in less than 0.01% responses. We’re talking only a few dozen hits! It’s simply not worth it.

It’s Spam

Part of the lack of interest will be down to the poor quality of the lists, but there’s also the fact that email providers are now smart enough to recognize spam and will send your message straight to the spam folder. The recipient may therefore never even know you sent them an email in the first place. Even if it does get through they may simply send it to the spam folder themselves. Ask yourself, how many unsolicited emails do you actually respond to? If the answer is "not many" or "none," why would this method work for you? If anything it will give your brand a negative image. Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo also require bulk senders to authenticate their email (SPF, DKIM and DMARC) and to offer one-click unsubscribe, so unsolicited blasts are less likely than ever to reach the inbox.

How to Do Proper Email Marketing in Sri Lanka

If you want to forge relationships with other business owners in Sri Lanka, you have to do it in a professional manner. Seek out the person directly and send one single email, or send them a regular letter, or give them a phone call.

If you want to market your products or services to potential customers, email marketing needs to be targeted and "opt in." This would involve using your website or social media presence to prompt people to sign up to your "newsletter" or something similar. This means they are genuinely interested in what you have to offer, and because they opted in, your emails will generally not go to their spam folder.

A professional internet marketing company will be able to implement effective email marketing as part of their wider strategy, which may also include social media management, search engine optimization, and advertising campaigns. They will have the expertise and required tools to bring real results!

One of the most lucrative sources of real traffic is from search engines. This can fall under paid search or organic search. Paid search is particularly beneficial if you need traffic and sales right away.

What Is Organic Search?

Organic search has traditionally been the core driver of traffic on the internet. The likes of Google crawl the web, indexing pages and ranking them for search terms, based on the content and a range of other factors.

In order to have success with organic search your site needs to have been established for several months and contain a moderate amount of content. Gradually searchers will stumble on to a page when Google believes it to be one of the most relevant pages for search terms.

While generally this is an automatic process when you launch a website, to rank highly for competitive search terms it is important to implement a search engine optimization strategy, which can be accomplished by hiring a professional internet marketing company.

What Is Paid Search?

Google and other search engines also offer premium ad positions alongside regular search results that advertisers bid on.

Perhaps the best thing about this is that it’s always there as a backup in case you run in to trouble with organic search or other methods of generating traffic. Once a campaign is up and running the hits will be instant, so there’s no waiting around to see the payoff.

You can also target specific geographical locations, which is especially beneficial if you only serve a local area.

Though there are certain quality guidelines, paid search is not driven by the content of your pages, but rather how much you are willing to spend. This means you can be on the first page of results straight away (though paid results are distinguishable from organic results).

For example if you had a website selling health foods, you might bid on the search term "Acai Berries" Depending on your budget your ad will then be featured in a number of prominent spots on the first page, alongside regular search results for that term.

Data suggests that paid search ads are clicked more frequently when the search term displays "high commercial intent" meaning the searcher is ready to buy a product and has searched a term like "Buy Acai Berry."

If you’ve only just launched a website you may decide to use paid search to get an initial flow of traffic while your content is still being indexed and ranked. This is also practical if you don’t actually have much content at all.

Also if after several months or even years you’re not getting the organic search rankings you’d hoped for, you might turn to paid search to gain that extra exposure.

In normal circumstances paid search should only be one factor in your overall strategy. A professional internet marketing company will help you balance paid search, with SEO, social media management, and other forms of paid advertising. However if you are having trouble generating traffic, paid search brings immediate results.

While taking out local newspapers ads, handing out flyers, and other traditional marketing techniques still have their place, internet marketing has quickly become a key method for small and medium sized businesses to reach new customers.

If you own such a business, there are a number of reasons why you should consider hiring an internet marketing company to promote your brand online, today:

Cost Effective

Internet marketing – which may consist of search engine optimization for your website, building a social media presence, and direct online advertising – is much more cost effective than its offline equivalents. You can reach thousands of extra people at a fraction of the price it would cost for a commercial on the radio or an ad in a well circulated publication.

Better Targeted

Not only is internet marketing cheaper than traditional marketing, but online campaigns are often much more targeted than offline campaigns. Take for example online advertising platforms like Google Ads or Facebook Ads.

Google Ads allows you to choose the keywords a user will have to search on Google, in order for your ad to be displayed. So if you sell "Heavy Duty Men’s Trousers", you can reach only the people that search for that phrase or related keywords.

Taking out an ad in a big newspaper is going to cost a lot of money, but you will reach thousands of people who do not care about "Heavy Duty Men’s Trousers." That’s not a good return on investment.

Facebook Ads even allow you to define the interests, ages and other demographics of your audience.

Hiring an internet marketing company to handle such campaigns will ensure you only reach people who are genuinely interested in your business, targeting them with pinpoint precision.

Builds an Audience

Developing a social media presence on Twitter, Facebook and others, creates an ongoing relationship with your customers, which can result in trust and loyalty to your brand.

These platforms are ideal for interacting with customers, running promotions and announcing key business information like product launches or offers, as well as sharing interesting stories relating to your industry.

Keeping track of your online audience, both on social media and other marketing channels, provides invaluable data that is simply not available with traditional marketing methods.

Therefore a professionally managed social media presence is an important element of success in the modern world. Over time you will learn about your audience, they will learn about you, and your business will grow.

Increases Sales

The ultimate benefit that combines all of the above, is an increase in sales or interest in your service. This is the primary goal of every business.

Whether your customers are driven directly through online advertising, organically through search engines to your website, or from a relationship on social media – a well crafted internet marketing strategy will improve your bottom line.

Outsourcing this to an expert internet marketing company will ensure you reap all of the benefits, while not sacrificing the time you need to spend on the day to day activities of your business.

While there are always things that can be done yourself to build awareness for a website, such as opening social media accounts or starting a blog, outsourcing your internet marketing strategy to a professional company has a number of key benefits.

Time Saving

Internet marketing will quickly become a time consuming process if you do it right. You’ll need to manage and update blogs and social media accounts with engaging posts, carry out effective advertising campaigns, build relationships with other websites, and optimize your site for search engines. All of this work is on top of your daily responsibilities, so you can easily end up doing a poor job because you don’t have the time, or worse, end up neglecting other important areas.

Outsourcing all of this to an internet marketing company allows you the time to focus on the core aspects of the business and expand in to other areas.

It will also reduce stress and increase productivity.

Specialized Services

Everybody with a business knows some basics about advertising and promotion, but the internet can be a highly technical place. Perhaps you can come up with an eye catching ad or engaging Tweet, but do you know how to target keywords that convert and rank high in search engines, or navigate Google Ads and maintain a high Quality Score?

Outsourcing your internet marketing opens you up to a wide range of specialized services that would usually be out of your reach.

Real Results

It’s one thing to have a hobby site that you share with friends, but if your site is part of a business venture you can’t afford to do an amateur job at marketing it. Outsourcing this responsibility to a professional company ensures that you will get real measurable results.

While your business may be selling shoes, their business is promoting websites. If you want your online project to be successful, investing in professionals will pay off in the long run.

Not only will you get results but you’ll also be taught how to interpret such results.

Streamlined

Outsourcing to one company that will handle your entire internet marketing needs is an efficient strategy to take. Trying to use one freelancer here for one purpose, and another over there for something else, will quickly become a hassle and will not bring the same kind of unified results.

Furthermore leading internet marketing companies have more resources than individuals and are able to make use of cutting edge research tools and marketing related software. This is not only more accurate and efficient at the planning stages of the marketing strategy, but will ultimately lead to better results.

Fresh Eyes

We’ve all done it. You have an amazing idea that you put in to practise, that gradually grows in to something special. It’s your baby that you’ve been immersed in since day one, and don’t want other people to mess it up.

However the problem with being so hands on with a project means your perspective of it can be skewed. What you see might not be what the wider public sees.

In terms of marketing it’s important to get a fresh pair of eyes to give an unbiased appraisal of what to do next.

Outsourcing allows you to see your project from different perspectives, that you may not have considered while developing it.

Accountability

If you pay a professional company to do your internet marketing you are guaranteed a high level of quality. They are accountable if things go wrong and are responsible to make things go right. At the end of the day it’s their job, and they will work with you until you reach your goals.

Doing it yourself or giving the project to a friend is less formal, and you’re less likely to see the same kind of effort, even if you do know what you’re doing. You might cut corners, take time off, or make bad decisions.

Although the fundamentals of an optimized website with quality content will always be important, internet marketing methods change frequently. That’s why if you’re a small or medium business owner it is important to turn to the experts who are on top of the latest trends. Using outdated techniques will not only bring poor results and waste your time, but in some cases may even harm your online presence.

There are a number of changes and trends to take note of for 2016. Here’s some of what we forecast:

Targeting Mobile Traffic

The last few years have been huge for apps and the mobile web. People just aren’t sitting at their desktops anymore, in fact Google received more mobile traffic last year than any other source. And this trend is only going to increase in 2016.

What this means for your website is that it absolutely must be mobile friendly, or as Google likes to call it "responsive." Failure to do this is not only going to turn users away (because the site doesn’t look good on their device), but Google will also drop you down the rankings in favour of sites that are mobile-friendly.

In terms of marketing it is therefore also wise to ensure any paid ads are targeting mobile users. The larger platforms like Facebook ads or Google AdWords do this as standard.

Mobile Commerce

If you sell products directly from your website then you may already be aware of the increasing number of people who buy products using their mobile devices. A mobile friendly store is one thing, but in 2016 more business owners are going to make the jump to a full blown app solution. With all of the leading online retailers offering user-friendly apps, it’s an experience consumers are beginning to expect.

Targeting Wearable Traffic

While mobile traffic will dominate this year, traffic from people using wearable devices like smart watches will begin to emerge more strongly as well. Some of the same standards of mobile-friendliness apply to wearables (responsive web designs cater to all screen sizes), but we predict wearables will start to demand some of their own unique optimization requirements.

We also expect that similar to mobile ads, there will be wearable specific advertising options to market your business in the near future.

Video as a Marketing Method

Last year YouTube continued its place as one of the most visited sites on the web and the premiere destination for video content, and there’s no sign of that changing. Using video as medium for marketing will continue to grow in 2016, as both direct marketing (commercials or ads on existing videos) but also as a content platform for brands and businesses. If your site doesn’t feature video content then now’s the time to start.

Data suggests that users are often more engaged by video than text, and visitors will stay longer on pages that have video content. From product information, to FAQs, reviews and more – video should be a part of your overall web presence.

Social Searching

We all know how important social media is for marketing your business and brand, but it’s rare that we consider a Tweet or Facebook post to be a long term traffic generator. Even if it goes viral the buzz tends to die down in a few days. It’s more of an ongoing process. This may all be poised to change in 2016 with the refining of "social searching."

This term can mean different things, but in general it’s referring to the ability to search social media effectively. Facebook for example is currently working on a revamp of its own search engine that will allow users to find historic posts more easily.

The major search engines are also constantly revising how they should show social media posts in the search results. Could 2016 be the year we begin optimizing social media posts to appear prominently in social searches?

Social Media Diversification

As with everything else on the web social media is always evolving. While a Twitter and Facebook account might have sufficed in previous years, 2016 is the year where marketing on social media really diversifies. This means considering looking further afield to the likes of Snapchat which is now ranked the third biggest social network.

There is also a trend towards live streaming apps like Periscope and Blab, which offer a brand new avenue for marketing in real time.

Content Is Still King

No matter what happens in 2016, quality content is still going to be the primary factor in attracting customers to your website. This is still what search engines will pick up, it’s still what you will be linking to, and it’s still what people want to read. Providing users with the information or products they desire (preferably both) is what will still set you apart from the competition.

Email Is Still Queen

While everyone seems to be outwardly focussed on social media email marketing is as strong as ever, and it remains one of the best returns on investment if done right. Like web pages your email campaigns must be optimized to appear correctly on all devices, as around half of all emails are opened on mobiles.

Interactive Content

While content is still king, some of the ways that content is being delivered are changing. There is a sure move towards interactivity and visuals to complement the SEO optimized written content. Slideshows, Informative infographics, videos that prompt users to click and make decisions, webinars where you address your audience, Twitter Q&As, and other delivery methods are giving internet marketing a new lease of life and engaging users like never before.

By now we all know that social media is an important element of marketing your business. It helps you reach a wider audience, engage with new and existing customers, and build your brand image. However not all social media platforms are the same, so it’s important to understand how each one functions in order to get the most out of them.

Twitter for example is limited to only 140 characters, while Facebook allows you to make posts as long as you want. If you want to convey a similar message on both networks you’ll have to think of different ways to do it, or even change your strategy completely.

Many of these "limitations" are actually advantages that allow you to diversify your marketing approach and target different users in different ways. Here are some of the unique advantages that each major social media site offers your business.

Facebook

Facebook is still the king of social media and the sheer size of its user-base puts it ahead of most of the others. In the first quarter of 2015, Facebook had 1.44 billion monthly active users. That’s huge!

As well as its built in user base Facebook is also extremely versatile, allowing you to share videos, images, direct links to your website, and text posts of any length. You can even schedule these to post at future time, so you can plan your marketing efforts well in advance. What makes it particularly useful for marketing is the wide range of statistics Facebook page owners have access to.

You can see how many people are liking and leaving your page, how engaged they are with posts and videos, and their demographic (i.e. age, geographic location etc). Monitoring this data can help you better target your audience, generate more traffic, and ultimately earn more sales.

Google Plus

Google Plus is not as widely used as Facebook and Twitter but because it is the search giant’s own social media platform, it offers benefits that none of the others can. Setting up your business page can lead to more visibility in local and global Google searches. You may also find that some of the content you post ranks easier than content on your website, making it an invaluable avenue for targeted organic traffic.

One interesting feature is "Circles" which allows you to organize followers in to specific groups. This allows you to share posts with certain circles and not others, something most social networks cannot do.

Google Plus also integrates well across other Google services you might be using, such as Gmail and YouTube.

LinkedIn

As a business owner customers are obviously who you want to attract, but businesses don’t thrive without employees, suppliers, partners, and other associates. LinkedIn is a business and professional orientated social network that allows you to connect with those who already help make your business tick, or those you think may have something to offer in the future. In short LinkedIn is the virtual version of attending a business function and slipping people your business card.

Twitter

Because of its 140 character limit Twitter is ideal for sharing links to your website, blog, or niche related news articles. It is also often used as a way for business owners to be more informal and down to earth with their customers. Trust can be built when you present yourself as a real human, so if you have any funny things to say or nuggets of wisdom to share, Twitter is the place to post them. The hashtag feature also allows you to piggyback off current trending events. For example if it was the Cricket World Cup season you could chime in with the #WorldCup hashtag included in your Tweet and anyone following the hashtag will be able to see it.

Creating your own hashtag is also a good way to engage users and track customers during a promotional campaign. For example "Tweet us with the hashtag #summerdeal to get 20% off orders."

Pinterest

Pinterest is an image-centric social network which is tailored especially for businesses that sell products. It allows you to share pictures of your products, with links to your sales page, and even pricing and product information.

What makes Pinterest so important is that unlike other social platforms users go there specifically with the intention to buy something, which means your ability to close a sale should be easier.

Monitoring Pins to your site and Repins of your content will allow you to refine your Pinterest marketing strategy.

YouTube

While YouTube marketing takes some extra effort (after all you have to make videos not just simple text posts), the results can pay off in a big way if your video goes viral. This is especially true for funny commercials and other entertaining content. The possibilities are endless, you could provide hands on reviews of your products, video blogs about your niche to build authority, or create customer guides and FAQs in video format.

YouTube has the benefit of ranking well in Google, so if you apply some SEO logic you can get videos ranked for keywords that you might struggle with on your own website.

You can also add an associated site to your YouTube account allowing you to add a clickable link to any portion of your video, that will take users directly to the page.

Instagram

Similar to Pinterest Instagram is all about imagery and you can also post lengthy captions along with the pics as well. This makes it ideal for product promotion, but you might also use it informally to give users a behind the scenes look at your business. Busy in the office? Snap a pic. Just got some new stock in? Show everybody the unboxing. With over 3 million users Instagram has now surpassed Twitter, making it an important platform for generating traffic. Like Twitter it also uses hashtags that you can latch on to or create yourself.

What’s good is you don’t have to be a professional photographer because Instagram has a useful selection of filters and effects that can be applied to any image to make it look better.

The likelihood of closing a sale or creating a consumer rests in your brand’s authority – and there’s no better way to build that name than through social media marketing. In fact according to the Pew Research Center 52% of online adults now use two or more social media sites, so the potential for generating traffic to your business cannot be overlooked.

If you want to build your brand using social media, here are 6 important steps:

The Right Platforms with the Right Name

One of the key elements of branding is consistency, so if your website is called Widgets R US, but your Twitter handle is Widget Man people are going to be confused by your brand. Furthermore certain social media platforms are more fitting for certain businesses than others. Pinterest for example is great for online stores because you can share photos of products with a direct link back to the product page. You should however always maintain a Facebook and Twitter account because these are by far the most used social media platforms.

Define Your Brand

What’s good about social media is it forces you to describe your business in only a few characters on your profile pages. But don’t waste these lines with something generic. This may be the first thing a future customer will learn about your business, so you need to be able to define your whole brand in a striking and clear manner.

Formulate a Strategy or Hire a Professional

Nobody should go in to a new marketing campaign blind. It is important to know your goals, formulate a strategy to reach them, and have a mechanism for measuring success. Hiring a professional internet marketing company to handle your social media presence is a wise way to ensure you’re doing it right. But there are still some basic principles that everyone should understand.

Interesting and Shareable Content

Social media marketing is not just about linking to your products or making press releases, posts need to be interesting enough that your followers will want to engage and share them with others. This will increase your brand image and exposure. Of course this is easier said than done, but a link to the "Top 10 Cleaning Tips for Busy People" will draw more of a response than a link to your vacuum cleaner sales page. You need to find the right balance between hard-selling and community engagement.

Promote Your Accounts

Even though you’re using social media to market your business you should also use your business to market your social media accounts. With every sale, email, offline letter, or interaction, you should make note of your profile names or links. This marketing loop will keep your brand in customers’ minds.

Leadership

If you want brand authority, you should demonstrate authority and leadership in your posts, and if you’re in the right niche you should be an expert anyway. For example if your market is hiking equipment, you should be able to post in an informed and critical manner regarding the latest hiking news, and be ready to offer detailed answers to people’s questions about hiking and hiking products. If your competitors (or worse your customers) are more knowledgeable than you, they’re not going to want to spend money at your store.

It’s all good having a killer product or awesome service, but without a brand to back it up you can only go so far. But what is a brand?

A brand is the unique name and image that you cultivate around your business. You’re not a store that sells shoes, you’re "Skyrocket Shoes" providing "the best priced shoes in the whole universe."

Ok, maybe your brand won’t be so cheesy but it’s important to differentiate yourself from other similar businesses, even if the only real difference is your brand name, logo and tagline. Over the years customers will grow to trust your brand and if you’ve marketed it successfully, the brand should become instantly recognizable. There are hundreds of cola drinks, but everybody knows Coca Cola right? Part of that is its taste, but a huge factor is their success in branding.

In 2015 one of the most important factors in building your brand is the internet. If you don’t have a professional and easy to use website, a strong and active social media presence, and aren’t making use of targeted online advertising, your brand awareness will be much less than the competition.

An experienced internet marketing company can handle your online brand for you so you can focus on other areas of your business. They will optimize your site for search engines so your brand is more prominent in the search results, engage existing and potential customers on social media to build awareness and loyalty for your brand, and manage advertising campaigns like Google AdWords to bring you direct traffic and sales.

If you want to achieve your business goals, here are some facts about brands that speak for themselves:

Without a Brand Customers Won’t Return

No matter what type of business you run, without consistent branding you are not going to be memorable to customers. This ranges from literally sticking your brand logo on your products, to engaging customers online. Without a brand they’ll forget who you are and won’t return, and they certainly won’t be telling their friends about you.

Social Media Works

According to the Altimeter Group the average large brand has 178 social media accounts! This might not be feasible for you, but as long as you have a presence on platforms like Facebook and Twitter you’re on the right track. Social media allows you to interact and build a relationship with customers. Over time this could grow in to a thriving community. Not everything you post should be about your products or services, but everything you post will help improve your brand image and awareness.

Brands are Built by Happy Customers

A positive brand image is created by customers after they’ve had a positive experience. This means your customer service and products have to be top notch. According to a 2011 Customer Experience Improvement study, 89% of Consumers go to a competitor after a poor customer experience. So treat them right, engage their queries on social media, and they will promote your business for you. (Don’t forget to use their testimonials on your site.)

Call in the Experts

The majority of business and website owners that attempt to build their brand online and do their own internet marketing will never put 100% effort into it. This is why it’s important to hire an internet marketing company who have the expertise and cutting edge tools to do it for you. This is their job, and they can put 100% in while your effort is focused on the other core aspects of your business.

Google rolled out its new mobile-friendly algorithm on April 21st, 2015, with the aim of improving the web for mobile users. To that end, sites that are compliant with their new mobile friendly best practices have been given a boost in the search results over websites that are not very accessible on mobile devices.

For example a page coded for a large screen may end up being outranked by a site that is easily viewable on the screen of an iPhone.

To fully understand how this may impact your business Web Marketing Army answers your questions:

1. Are mobile rankings separate from desktop rankings?

Yes, the default search results shown to users of mobile devices are different from those shown to desktop users. This means the changes to the algorithm will only impact your site’s position in the search results of the mobile version. If somebody searches your keyword on their PC, your site will still be in the same position. If your site is already optimized for mobile devices it may have jumped up the mobile search rankings already.

2. Does this impact each page individually or my entire website?

Each individual page is taken in to account, meaning if one page from your site is optimized well for mobile devices it will rank well in mobile search, but if another page isn’t it will rank better on desktop search.

3. How can I tell if my pages are optimized for mobile?

It is now easy to see whether your site’s pages are considered mobile-friendly by accessing the "Mobile-Friendly Test" from your Google Webmaster Tools account. You can run this test page by page or view an overall Mobile Usability report for your entire website. This is dependent on the last time the site was indexed. The report will list the number of pages with errors and what they are. For example, the font size being too small, or the use of flash content which mobile browsers can’t read. If you go through this list and make changes accordingly, your site should become more mobile-friendly in Google’s eyes.

4. If I have yet to make mobile-friendly changes to my site how long does it take for them to be recognized once I do?

Unlike standard Google search updates mobile-friendly rankings are determined every time your page is crawled and indexed. Meaning if you make changes to your pages to make them more mobile-friendly today and Google crawls them tomorrow, it will recognize those pages right away. If Google tends to crawl your site slowly you can speed the process up in Webmaster Tools by using the "Fetch as Google" and "Submit to Index" features, for each URL you have updated. To do this in bulk you can simply resubmit your sitemap, which might already be setup automatically anyway.

5. How quickly are the new mobile search results finalized? When will I notice changes in traffic following April 21st?

April 21st is the initial roll out date, but the mobile search rankings will not be finalized for another week or so as Google continues to crawl the web and find mobile friendly pages. You won’t notice significant traffic changes until Google crawls your site and other sites in your niche.

Conclusion

Since mobile devices are now a very common method for browsing the internet it is important for you to follow Google’s guidelines and make your site more mobile-friendly. Failure to do so may cause you to lose traffic and sales.

If you own a website or online business this data cannot be ignored. There should be no holding back on your social media marketing strategy. Now’s the time to get the ball rolling.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the benefits and advantages of using social media to market your business online.

More Exposure

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that connecting with people via social media will give your business more exposure. This brand recognition is invaluable in the internet age, and allows you to reach potential customers who may have never stumbled on to your business through other channels. Even if they don’t engage right away, seeing your presence multiple times and on multiple social media platforms keeps you in the back of their mind.

Build Loyalty

This also applies to existing customers. If they regularly see your social media presence and have had a good experience with you in the past, you’re going to build a trusted relationship.

Direct Sales

Whenever you link to your site on social media (even if it’s not a direct link to a product or service) you increase the odds of making a sale, by getting the user through the door. Of course not every engagement is going to lead to a sale, but it could build a relationship that will result in a sale at a later date.

Relationship Building

Social media is not just about building brand loyalty in a passive sense. While people simply observing your links and posts gives you more exposure, it is also important to interact directly with these users. Allowing them to Tweet and message you directly, or running interactive offers and competitions, or simply asking their opinions, all helps build a close relationship. They will view you as genuine and accessible, which in turn builds loyalty and trust in your brand.

More Efficient Than Traditional Methods

Traditional marketing methods like newspaper adverts or handing out flyers, can be long and tedious methods, that do not always convert. A Tweet or Facebook post however can be done in a matter of seconds, and has the potential to be shared to thousands of people at no direct cost. Traditional methods can be very expensive.

Customer Insights

Because you can track the success of social media campaigns, by measuring things like comments or re-tweets, as well as the number of hits coming through to your site, you can learn all sorts of valuable insights in to your customers. This will give you a better understanding of what they respond to and what doesn’t work.

Conclusion

While social media certainly shouldn’t be your sole marketing method, it makes up a huge chunk of online activity and is a great way to reach your customers. Hiring a professional internet marketing company to manage your social media accounts, will not only ensure you’re making the right kind of postings, but will also free up time so you can focus on other aspects of your business.

As long as the internet is around and businesses need to drive sales or traffic, hiring an internet marketing firm will remain an important part of the puzzle. However internet marketing is not always going to look the same as it does now. For example before the 2000s there was no social media in the way we view it today. In fact even 10 years ago MySpace was only just becoming popular, Facebook was still being developed, and Twitter had not even been conceived.

Today many businesses couldn’t even imagine not having a social media presence as part of their marketing efforts. But the internet evolves and in order to survive businesses must evolve with it.

Internet marketing companies are more savvy now than they’ve ever been, when it comes to looking ahead and adopting new strategies for their clients. So what can we expect in the next 5 years from internet marketing?

All About Images

With web users being exposed to a record amount of information and ads, it’s increasingly important to keep things simple and visual, especially for those swiping away on mobile devices. The most successful campaigns on social media use big images and simple calls to action.

In terms of websites, people’s attention spans are getting shorter, so content needs to reflect this by being more concise and visual. With the rise of sites like Buzzfeed, which popularized the list based blogging method, it’s clear that this is only going to become more prevalent in content marketing.

More Mobile Targeting

In the western world almost everybody has a smart phone, but it has still taken time for mobile ad campaigns, apps, and mobile optimized web pages to catch up. This will only increase over the next 5 years, and there’s no telling the novel ways in which marketers will begin targeting phone users.

Research shows that 95% of people on the planet now have a mobile phone, 21% of which are "smart." This is expected to increase to 50% by 2018 – making smart phone targeting an important aspect of internet marketing.

Easier Targeting The Right Audience

Internet marketing companies use a lot of powerful techniques and tools to target your desired audience, and this will only get more precise as the years go on. The internet itself is becoming much more segmented. If you wanted to, you could probably find a podcast for every hobby or subject there is. That also means there’s an advertising outlet for every product.

As the tracking of users and the interpretation of that data becomes more advanced, internet marketing should soon reach pinpoint precision.

Google’s Approach To Social Media

Google search honcho Matt Cutts took the SEO world by storm in 2010 when he began using the term "social signals" and revealed the search engine was beginning to count social media activity in its rankings. Some internet marketers jumped the gun a little and believed that social media links and their viral appeal was now directly impacting the positions of web pages.

In 2014 Cutts clarified that Google’s crawlers weren’t necessarily treating social media any different than other web pages, and that it wasn’t practical to track viral appeal through social media, because the likes of Twitter and Facebook move too fast and are not permanent.

This might suggest that Google had fully intended to go in that direction, but the technicalities didn’t work themselves out. In 5 years it’s likely they will have perfected a new approach to using social media in their rankings. This will have a big impact on SEO and internet marketing.

1. Ranking Is Irrelevant

The idea that ranking in search engines is now irrelevant and SEO is essentially dead, has mostly been floated with the rise of social media and the fact that so many sites have been negatively impacted by Google updates like Panda and Penguin.

The first theory suggests that because social media has become so big, businesses can thrive only on traffic generated from the likes of Facebook and Twitter. This is coupled with the second theory that Google simply no longer rewards search engine optimization and your strategy should be abandoned.

In reality an engaging social media presence is of course very important, but this needs to be partnered with high quality content and an up to date SEO strategy. Those complaining that SEO is dead are mainly those that failed at it, are behind the times or were trying to cut corners, and Google finally caught up with them.

As long as search engines return searches, SEO will remain alive and well.

2. I Just Need To Include My Keywords

Keywords are still the bread and butter of how Google and other search engines operate, but the idea that all you need to do is choose a few keywords and work them in to your website’s content, is grossly misrepresenting the time, effort, and range of technique needed to rank high in 2015.

Did you know that since 2009 Google does not even use the meta description and keyword tags as a ranking factor? You could describe your fitness blog as "a giant chocolate elephant," and it would have no direct impact on your rankings. It will however turn away real users, which should always be your main focus.

3. SEO Is For Bots Not Humans

This is perhaps the biggest misnomer of SEO. The idea that all you need to do is optimize your website for Google’s web crawlers and the traffic will come flying in. The intent of Google has always been to return the highest quality and most relevant content for human users. In the early days of SEO certain loopholes like spamming keywords or paying for tonnes of irrelevant backlinks essentially allowed you to trick the bots in to thinking your site was the best. However in 2015 Google has a highly evolved algorithm that can easily distinguish between high quality content written with users in mind, and spam written just to fool search engines.

An intelligent web marketer knows that for real success targeting the user and the search engines is a hand in hand relationship.

4. I Can Do It All Myself

While anyone with a cursory knowledge of website development can implement some SEO best practises, chances are they would prefer to spend their time doing something else. An online clothes store wants to sell clothes, not rank web pages. The risk of crafting your own SEO plan is that as time progresses, you just won’t stick to it, you’ll get behind on the latest SEO trends, and other areas of your business will suffer.

An internet marketer and SEO specialist makes it their job to constantly tweak your SEO strategy and stay on top of the latest techniques. Hiring a professional is still the best option in 2015 for your website.