Make an SEO and Online Marketing Budget for 2019

Make an SEO and Online Marketing Budget for 2019

As the new year arrives, it’s important to take a look back at the previous year and evaluate where you want your company to go in the future. Did your business grow or shrink? Did you see your online presence expand? These are just a couple of the factors you'll need to consider as you sit down to make an SEO and marketing budget for the new year. Having a plan in place will help you focus and get started on the right foot to build your business over the course of the year. Below, Virtual Market Advantage lists some ways to set up a good SEO and marketing budget for 2019.

Look at Last Year’s Marketing Budget

The first thing you need to do when sitting down to work on this year’s SEO and marketing budget is to take a look back at how you spent your money last year. Are you happy with how last year’s plan worked? Note which factors benefitted your business and which did not. The easiest way to do this is by using an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. This lets you track all sorts of information concerning your website. Pay close attention to which types of advertisements drew in the most eyes and which pages tended to convert the most viewers into customers.

It’s okay if last year’s marketing didn’t do as well as you’d hoped, as long as you learn from the experience and make some adjustments this year. If you see something that worked, investigate why it worked so well, branch out with that technique, and up your spending there. If you see a marketing technique that had a poor ROI, try to use a new tactic this year. Your marketing budget can be adjusted to fit your needs, as long as you pay attention to what did and didn’t work.

Look at Last Year’s SEO

Your website can be an open door that welcomes new leads daily, but only if you keep it updated and optimized to its fullest potential. Take a look at your current SEO and work on a good plan for the coming year. Take the time to perform an SEO audit and a conversion audit to see if there are any flaws in your SEO development. You might need to update to more relevant keywords or give all of your pages a tune-up. Really dig into the site to see where it’s best to budget some of your marketing money for an SEO plan. Your campaigns should be driving traffic to your website, and you want a fast, user-friendly page to be what those incoming customers experience.

Set Online Marketing Goals

As you set your marketing budget and SEO plan for the year, have clear goals in mind. There are three major areas to think about when it comes to online marketing goals:

• Brand Awareness
• Lead Generation
• Revenue Growth

Go through last year’s marketing data and place your future budget where the marketing worked best and rework where it lagged behind. If your business is still fairly new and needs more brand awareness in your targeted market, then you might want to look at spending more of the online marketing budget on some paid advertisement and developing your social media presence. If you have a more established business, you might want to spend more of the online marketing budget on targeted marketing efforts. Setting clear goals for your online marketing for the upcoming year will help you stay on budget and on track for your business to grow.

Set Up Major Marketing Campaigns

Once you have your goals in place, it’s time to start setting up those larger marketing campaigns for the year. You don’t need all of the details set in stone - just have a clear idea of how you want to target your major campaigns. Make sure that these campaigns are in line with the marketing goals you just set for the year. The initial setup should be able to answer some of the following questions:

• What media/channels are we going to use?
• What resources are needed to run it?
• What's the overall estimated cost?
• What's the ROI needed for the campaign to be successful?

Organize the Smaller Campaigns

Once you’ve allocated some of your budget to the largest campaigns of the year, where will the rest of the time and money go? You still need to be marketing and promoting your business on a daily basis. Here are some ways you can use your online market throughout the year to benefit your business:

• Paid Advertising
• Content Marketing
• Improving your Website
• Webinars
• Video Marketing
• Staffing Needs

These are just some of the things that may come up throughout the year that can help your company grow and give you the opportunity to promote your business. Plan out as many of the details as possible in your marketing budget, but also keep a cushion for the extra opportunities that might pop up throughout the year. Maybe your website will need a small facelift in the spring. Maybe you’ll need to hire an extra social media person to handle the extra summer load. Or maybe something in the news will have people flocking to your website’s niche for a few weeks, giving you the opportunity to expand your advertising. Having some wiggle room in your budget will ease the stress later on and keep you on track to build your online presence this coming year.

Plan out as many of the details as possible in your marketing budget, but also keep a cushion for the extra opportunities that might pop up throughout the year. Click To Tweet

Prioritize and Set Budget Amounts

The final step in planning your general budget is to set your marketing priorities for the year and set planned amounts to spend on each project accordingly. Setting your priorities straight will help you develop your business more efficiently. As the year progresses, do your best to follow the pre-determined budget amounts for each marketing tactic. For example - set an amount for paid advertising and stick to it, and keep a set amount to spend on your SEO plan and stick to it. Staying on budget will improve your ROI and keep your business on track in the following year.

You know your business and your customers. Use the data you’ve gathered from last year and take the time to set up a good marketing budget and SEO plan to improve the traffic flowing through your site and the rates at which people convert into customers. You will be glad you did when you look at your data next year!

How to Perform a Website Redesign Without Ruining Your SEO

How to Perform a Website Redesign Without Ruining Your SEO

Every website can do with a facelift once and a while. If given enough time, the current styles and tastes change, content becomes stale, ownership changes hands, or other factors come into play that require a website redesign. It’s a good idea to always try to keep up with the changing landscape of online business and your customers’ needs.

However, the idea of redoing your website is intimidating if you’ve gone to a lot of effort to set up your SEO. Backlinks, social integration, and all the other SEO work you’ve done in the past can be undone with the press of a button if you don’t take the right steps to ensure that your website redesign doesn’t just erase your old work. Here, Virtual Market Advantage will take a look at what you can do to keep your SEO in place while giving your website a revamp.

Backlinks, social integration, and all the other SEO work you’ve done in the past can be undone with the press of a button if you don’t take the right steps to ensure that your website redesign doesn’t just erase your old work. Click To Tweet

Redirects

The very first thing you need to do when undertaking a website redesign is to redirect the old URLs to the new ones. This is called a “301 redirect.” If you’re copying over a lot of your old content, make sure you keep the same content on the same URLs. Create a spreadsheet and keep a log of the content pages along with their old and new URLs. This will help you stay organized and let you know where and what you need to redirect from the old pages to the new ones. If you can keep the permalink structure the same on your redesign, it will make it easier to transfer content and URLs at the same time.

Preserve your Link Inventory

Before you change over to your new website redesign, make sure you have all of your backlinks inventoried. Know where all links are coming from and where they’re going to. Have those websites update their links to point to your new site pages and reclaim your inbound links. Completing this step before you get too far into your redesign will save you time and headache once the process is complete.

Keep your Content

Your content has been crawled and indexed time and time again to build up your presence in the search engines. If you go in and change all of your content, it would be a major step back in SEO. Your website redesign can be done without changing all of that content. Try to keep your blogs, web text, and photo tags and descriptions the same. Your design is new, but the content doesn’t have to be.

On-Page Optimization

Perform a last-minute crawl of your old website to give you some insight into what has been working for your website and what has not. This step will allow you to pull all the key elements from you page and export them to the new one while discarding the elements that are holding your website back. You can then export your page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and other SEO work. As with your page content, you want to keep as much of this the same as possible, so directly exporting them from the old site to the new one will ensure that you’re doing just that.

Keep Your Old Site Live

If you’re doing a complete website redesign, do it in the background. Keep your old website live while you build the new one behind the scenes. This allows you to troubleshoot the new site, make sure everything is working, and even have beta testers peruse it before putting it out there for the masses. If you work on a new site while it’s already live, you will likely run into troubles with broken links, ugly graphics, incomplete content, and other issues. Spare yourself and your visitors the headache, and hide your developing new website until it’s good to go.

Technical Site Auditing

Use an auditing tool that will crawl your website and look for any new technical problems. There are many tools online that can help you get positive results out of a thorough technical audit. A good resource to use for this step is called DeepCrawl, which will give you all types of information about your site while monitoring your log files. Using such an auditing tool can help you spot any small issues before they become larger problems and will help you resolve any new issue with your SEO the minute they pop up.

When all is said and done, a website redesign should give you the opportunity to improve your SEO and your overall conversion rates, not destroy them. If your site has strong SEO roots and a good flow of organic traffic, then you will definitely want to take extra care to preserve that work. Follow the guidelines above to make sure your URLs are redirected, your backlinks stay connected, your quality content remains the same, and your new website goes up only after it’s been set up and debugged.

While you’re redesigning your website, check out VMA’s guide to creating a killer landing page, so your new one is the best it can be!

How to Create a Killer Landing Page for your Website

How to Create a Killer Landing Page for your Website

When building a website for your business, you need to entice your visitors to stick around after initially clicking on your front page. A first impression is so important, so you need to make sure that it’s going to stick with new visitors in a positive way. The best way to make this happen is to design the perfect landing page.

What is a landing page? This is the webpage that your visitors see when they’re first directed to your website from a search engine or other kind of link. Think of this process as an airplane (the viewer) landing on a runway (your website). You want that landing to be smooth, enjoyable, and an experience they want to share with others. You want it to be remembered for all the right reasons. Here, Virtual Market Advantage will take a look at what you can do to create the most memorable and easy-to-navigate landing page possible.

A first impression is so important, so you need to make sure that it’s going to stick with new visitors in a positive way. The best way to make this happen is to design the perfect landing page. Click To Tweet

Before You Build Your Page

There are a few factors to consider before building that killer landing page. Answering these questions will help make that landing page convert viewers into followers and customers by making it memorable and persuasive.

• What’s the Goal? What do you want your visitors to do once they reach your landing page? Fill out a form? Subscribe for more information? Buy something? Take a survey? Interact on your social media pages? Your answer to this question should be incorporated into the landing page in some way. Establishing this goal will help you get the conversions you desire.
• What’s the Competition Like? Know what you’re up against. Check out similar websites in your niche, observe what works for them, and see how you can replicate that success through your own landing page.
• Who's the Audience? It’s always important to know as much as possible about your audience when designing your website and producing content. Catering to what the audience wants once they get to your site is a huge part of building a successful landing page. Do they like giveaways? Do they like a certain type of product? What draws them to your site? Use analytics tools to research who's visiting your site and what they respond to the most. When you have this information, you can better tailor your landing page to your audience, and your conversions will go through the roof!
• How Did They Get Here? Pay attention to where your visitors are coming from. (This information is also available through analytics.) If you know what advertising message drew them to your site, you can rewrite the message on other platforms to draw even more visitors in. Knowing what lures in your particular audience will help you increase your conversions on your landing page.

Keep it Short

The average attention span while surfing the Internet is around 11 seconds. That means you only have 11 seconds to get and keep a viewer’s attention. How are you going to do that? The most important step is to keep your message short and uncluttered. Your landing page should provide all the information that’s needed, but not so much that it overwhelms a person who's scanning over it. Provide the essentials clearly and then stop. If your landing page properly grabs the viewer’s attention, he or she will click on other parts of your website to gain more information.

Provide Quality Content

Just because it’s best to offer a minimal amount of information on your landing page, that doesn’t mean that information should be junk. Offer content that’s rich and relevant. Make sure that you (or your copywriters) write engaging copy. Good, quality content results in more trust from those who are reading it. That trust turns viewers into customers and helps spread brand awareness by word of mouth.

Don’t Ask Too Much

If your landing page is there to create a list of potential customers, then you will need to ask your viewers for interaction. This could be in the form of signing up for an email subscription or requesting feedback. Remember that minimalist mindset as you ask for information, however. The more hoops you require your viewers to jump through to get to the information that interests them, the less likely they are to stay on your website long enough to convert into customers. Think about what you would be willing to go through if you were the one viewing a landing page. Can you think of a time when you quickly left a website because of too many pop-ups and requests for information?

Have a Clear Call to Action

A call to action can be your eye-catching headline or it could be embedded within your content copy. Either way, you want to make sure that you catch that reader’s attention quickly and then send them to do what you want them to do on your website. One great tactic is to make a clear offer in your headline and then give a quick overview of the offer in the following copy. This lets the reader know instantly what they can expect from you and how to get it. If you have a “click here now” button, make it very visible to the reader so they know where to go to get that offer mentioned in your headline.

Make it about the Viewer

While growing your business is a great goal for you, most visitors to your landing page don’t really care. People care about themselves. They want to know what your business can do for them and how you’re going to do it. Make sure you’re clear about what your visitors will gain from choosing your business and take time to showcase what you can do for them.

While these are just a few tips for building a more memorable landing page, there are plenty of other techniques you can use, based on your specific business. Once you’ve set up a decent landing page, do some A/B testing along with your analytics research to see what works best for your audience. Improving your landing page will help spread your online reach and get you more conversions from clicks to views to purchases!

How to Improve Project Management and Workflow

How to Improve Project Management and Workflow

Your business is thriving and your employees are accustomed to the daily routine. Eventually, however, you may find that your business’s inner workings hit a road block. A new project gums up the works, priorities aren’t correctly focused, and productivity slows down in general. This happens to every business at some point, and that’s okay. This is a great time to take a step back and assess how well your project management and workflow strategies are working.

Is anyone overworked/underworked or not on the same page? To help you get your workflow back into a smooth course, there are some great tools available to help you manage your projects to the fullest potential. Here, Virtual Market Advantage will go over a few of those tools as well as some additional ideas that can help you and your business flow more smoothly.

Look at the Big Picture

As you start to look at how to make your company more efficient, ask yourself the big picture questions about each of your current projects. Once you know the answers to these questions, you will be more ready to incorporate improvements to your project management and workflow:

• What do your project tasks involve?
• What is the overall goal you want to achieve?
• What is the projected growth of your company, and how can this project help with that?
• What kind of needs might your business have within the next year?

Knowing the answers to these questions will be key in setting up the tasks at hand. These big answers will help you set smaller goals for the future and understand how better project management will aid you going forward.

How to Improve Project Management

Now that you've asked yourself the big picture questions, set your goals, and are ready to go, there are a few different ways to go about improving your project management. If one way doesn’t seem to be working for you after giving it a good shot, it’s helpful to have another strategy ready to add to your project management agenda. Let’s take a look at three methods for improving your project management:

Don’t overcomplicate your projects. This is a factor that often happens over time and brings tasks to a standstill. Keeping your ideas and expectations easy for your employees to understand will make your project run that much smoother. Keep the tasks simple and your overall idea clear and your employees will deliver the project successfully to completion.

Communicate any changes. Whether you do it through weekly meetings, a group email, or a project template software, always keep your team updated on any changes taking place. A well-informed team will stay on task and be less likely to make time-consuming mistakes. No matter how small you may think the change is, it could be a very big deal to someone on the team who is working on a certain task. Always keep the communication lines open, and your project will run more smoothly from start to finish.

A well-informed team will stay on task and be less likely to make time-consuming mistakes. Click To Tweet

Establish a daily log. Your team also needs to keep communication open. By logging their work and tracking their current tasks, employees are kept accountable and on course. Logging activities should be a daily habit. This helps you record how the project is progressing as well as establish a general timeline of which tasks need to be completed in what order and when the project should be completed as a whole.

Choose a Project Management Tool

There are several tools online that you can use to make sure your team is on task, the lines of communication are open, and workflow is going well. Some software plans come with a free version for a limited number of people to use or with restricted extras, and the price point will go up based on usage. Four of the most popular online project management tools are:

• Trello
• Asana
• Wrike
• Invision

All of them let you create tasks for different projects, clients, and employees. Based on your business needs, some of these tools are better than others. For example, Invision has the best tools for web design. The easiest way to decide which choice will work best for you is to try out their free versions. Each business and its taskmaster will feel most comfortable with one option over the others for countless reasons. All of these options are great project management tools to help keep your employees and your business on track.

Overall, once you have set your project management tools in place, you will start to see your business's productivity pick up speed. Once your team is in a good place using these project management tools, you’ll experience improved communication, productivity growth, and more work being completed on time. Over time, you can add new ideas and processes to the workflow while keeping the original project management foundations in place. The first step to improving your project management is to take an honest look at the current flow, get back to basics, and start working on improving it today.

If you want more information on how to improve your business, check out Virtual Market Advantage's blog on reviving dead business leads here!

How to Build a Website without Coding

So you want to build a cool new website, but you don’t have any programming experience? That’s ok! There are actually a lot of resources out there these days that can help you. Websites like WordPress use a modular system that allows you to design your site by moving around pre-made components, such as text boxes and pics, without typing out the code. This makes it easy to put together a simple website yourself. Let’s take a look at how you can start building your website code-free!

Get a Domain Name and Business Email

Before you start building anything, you need to choose your domain name. This is the online address used to reach your website. Since so many websites exist already, you might find that your original business name is not available as a .com option, so you should come up with a few other options. You can search and purchase available domains at sites like godaddy.com or hostgator.com.

If you haven’t already done so, you also need to set up a business email address. As you set up and build your website, use this email for all business-related steps. This looks more professional and is safer than putting your personal email address out there. In general, a gmail address is a good way to go, since this simplifies a lot of social media setup, but it's not required.

Choose a Website Building Software

Now that you have your domain and email, you need to choose a good website building software that’s easy to use. Some of the simplest options are WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Weebly. Not only are they easy to use, but they’re also great tools overall. In fact, many people who know how to code end up choosing to use one of these tools, because they’re so simple and save a lot of time.

Your skill level and understanding of how websites work will determine which website building software you’ll want to use. Here’s a closer look at the four main options:

• WordPress - This is the most flexible website builder and the one that we tend to use at VMA. You can customize to your heart’s content with their versatile plugin system. However, it’s not the easiest software for beginners, and some previous experience is helpful.
• Weebly - This is the easiest website building software to use. If you’re a complete beginner and tend to shy away from technology, this is your best bet.
• Wix - This is a great all-around builder. It has many features and tools that allow you to drag and drop just about anything into place on your website.
• Squarespace - This is the most design-oriented builder. It has a ton of design templates to choose from.

Decide on Hosting

Now that you’ve started actually building your website, it’s time to find that domain address a permanent home on the Internet with web hosting. Think of this step as putting an address (domain) onto a house (host). There are four general types of hosting, and you should make a decision based on what you want out of the service (and your budget).

• Free Hosting - There’s almost always a free hosting option provided by the fully managed drag-and-drop website builders mentioned above. This is a great option for budget hosting, but it doesn’t come with as many options or much support.
• Shared Hosting - This is hosting that you share with other websites. Think of it like sharing your apartment with a roommate. This is simpler and more affordable than most individual hosting options, but leaves you with fewer options. One major downside is that the server can get overloaded if one of the websites gets a lot of traffic suddenly.
• VPS Hosting - This is another type of shared server that gives you more space, so that your site can handle more visitors. This is a great step to take before you jump onto your own dedicated server. Your website is growing, but not big enough for its own building.
• Dedicated Hosting - This is a server that’s set up just for you. This is like renting out that entire apartment mentioned above by yourself. This option is often used by larger enterprise websites that need more server space or cannot risk having the server overload and crash.

In most cases when building your first website, it’s best to start with free hosting. Once your website is polished up, getting more traffic, and you want to start tracking your visitors, you can move to a larger hosting space. Start small and grow your hosting along with your website. You can find more information on hosting here.

Fill Your Website with Great Content and SEO

After you've set up and designed your website, it's time to put it to good use! By providing a constant stream of quality content, you will keep your viewers engaged and coming back for more. Also, setting up a website is the best time to add some basic SEO strategies. Don't worry, this is also pretty easy to do. Learn how to set yourself up with great videos, blogs, SEO, and more with VMA's other blogs!

Basic Checklist to Build a Website

1. Choose a domain name and purchase it.
2. Set up a business email.
3. Choose your website building software.
4. Find a hosting company that works for you.
5. Make sure you have good content and photos, set up some basic SEO, and track your data so you can watch it grow.

With all the tools available, it’s easier than ever before to build a website. Most of the website building softwares have great online communities that can answer any questions that might arise. Go through the steps outlined above and you’ll find that you have a working website in no time. Then you just need to fill it with quality content and start spreading the news on your social media pages.

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by any part of the process of setting up your website, designing it, creating content, developing an SEO strategy, and connecting through social media, Virtual Market Advantage can help! Click To Tweet

If you’re still feeling overwhelmed by any part of the process of setting up your website, designing it, creating content, developing an SEO strategy, and connecting through social media, Virtual Market Advantage can help! We provide services to help with all of these aspects of online design and marketing, and you can pick and choose which parts you want us to handle for you.

How to Revive Dead Business Leads

When you start up a business, it’s common to spend a lot of time gathering leads. Some of the leads will pan out and turn into customers eager for your business, while others just won’t respond. There are many reasons why a lead can go dead. Maybe the person got too busy to remember you and your offer. Maybe the timing wasn’t right on that first visit. Or maybe you simply forgot to follow up on one of the leads on your list.

If some time has passed and you want to try to reconnect with old leads, there are a few good ways to go about it. Who knows - maybe the timing is better for them now than it was before or you have new appealing features. Maybe they went a different direction and regretted it. Maybe someone else is in charge of the purchasing department now. Below, Virtual Market Advantage will take a look at some effective ways to revive some of those dead business leads collecting dust in the corner. Hopefully your efforts will gain them as customers this time around!

Update Your Old Data

To ensure that your leads are always fresh and easy to check in on, regularly update your data. A good rule of thumb is to refresh that data every month or two. Why do this extra step? What if you go to contact an old lead, but you don’t have the right contact information anymore? To do this, you can update by hand or automate the process with online contact-keeping software.

Use the Power of Social Media

In modern marketing, social media is a key component of generating business leads, and it’s also a great way to reach out to old ones. Click To Tweet

In modern marketing, social media is a key component of generating business leads, and it’s also a great way to reach out to old ones. Before you email or make a phone call, try following the lead on Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn. This could give you some good insight as to what that business needs and how it’s currently operating before you call and offer your services again. Engage them by sharing interesting articles, commenting on posts, or retweeting them. This lets them see that you’re engaged in what they’re doing and have a genuine interest in them other than just gaining their business.

Bring Attention to New Features

One of the best times to revisit old contacts is when your business has an update or starts to offer a new service/product. If you launch a new service or product, look back through those old leads and see what they wanted that you couldn’t offer at the time. Maybe your new feature would draw them in as a new customer. When you attempt to follow up with a contact, let them know what’s new with you, and ask if they might be interested in looking at your company now.

Look for a New Way In

When reviewing your old contacts, you may find that you were just contacting the wrong person within that company when trying to gain their business. There may be another person in the company who has greater decision-making power. Don’t be afraid to move on to the next person, as that could be the person you needed to contact from the beginning. If the person you initially talk to seems reluctant about making a commitment, it’s okay to ask them who else in the company may be better suited to make such a decision.

Re-Engage with Better Content

When using online marketing, there comes a time when your content needs to be refreshed. Your articles may be dated or out of touch with new businesses and customers who are visiting your page. Once your content is freshened up, it’s a good time to reach out to those business leads gone cold. Let them know that you’ve updated your business and website and request that they have a fresh look. This could result in them wanting to use your services after all. Sometimes potential customers just want to see that what you’re offering is current and relevant to them and their business. Plus, a little update is great for your company overall. One great way to modernize your business is to start providing video content. Learn more about getting started here!

While these are just some of the things you can do to help regenerate old business leads, there are many others methods to try. You know your business and its leads better than anyone. Each lead may require a different approach, but the ideas mentioned above can help give you the tools required to turn those leads into customers.