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I’m just reviewing the end of year results and realised we had a large surge in organic traffic this year! In fact we DOUBLED our organic sales!

I think the biggest aim for most of my clients is to rely less on paid ads and to increase their organic traffic and sales. Although in my experience it has taken around 4 plus months to see a substantial increase, the results speak for themselves!

Might I mention that I only know the basics of SEO so anyone can achieve this through a few simple steps!

Client 1.

Client 2.

So I thought I would run through a few things we have incorporated into our marketing strategy this year that helped us to double our organic sales.

One of these was to increase our domain authority score.

What is a domain authority score?

According to MOZ, your Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

So for example, my site has a D.A of 19 and at the very top, we have Facebook with a D.A of 100.

So why does your D.A number matter?

Because your number predicts how well your website will perform in Google search engines. So in general, the higher the number, the higher the traffic a website receives and the higher it ranks above your competitors if your score is higher.

So what factors can increase your D.A?

( Image from Neil Patel )

Backlinks

The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

Tip – Although backlinks can be purchased, it is also a risky and Google could penalize you. Try to spend one hour a week reaching out to potential influencers to see if you can create a blog post for their site linking back to yours. Once again, we are looking for websites with a high D.A number.

Creating Content

Content has a considerably positive impact on your D.A if it is LINKABLE. One of the most linkable content formats is Infographics. Highly shareable and appealing in design, we found that they were the most shared content in 2017. Images tend to receive up to 45% MORE interaction than a piece of content that doesn’t have an image. Infographics can easily be created for FREE using templates offered to us by Canva.

Tip – Try to find an influencer in your niche and see if they will allow you to create an infographic for them which can be linked back to your website.

Social Media Mentions

Yes, ensuring you have a popular social media site and you have plenty of engagement and views also accounted for a large chunk and this is what we have really focused on this year. Expanding our reach, getting our brands name out there and working with major influencers who in turn send traffic back to our social media profiles and then from there onto our Website.

Tip – Ensure you have a link back to your website on as many social platforms as possible. So Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Google Plus to name but a few.

SEO

No surprise here…. Moz has explained that we need to improve ALL aspects of S.E.O on our websites. This includes keywords, site structure, meta tags, word count and navigability. If this sounds rather excessive and a substantial amount of work, try downloading the WordPress plugin called Yoast.

Tip – Yoast reminds you to enter in your keywords, edits your past posts, gives you tips on how to improve your sentence structure AND if you need to add a link in or two and its FREE!

Directories

We also entered in our website into as many high ranking directories as possible thus creating good quality backlinks. So think along the lines of Thompson and the Yellow pages. You can also add your link to social media profiles such as Twitter, Facebook and Quora.

So above are just a few factors we really worked hard on this year that really reaped in the benefits for us. An interesting point to mention that we found even having one popular social media platform that brought in a large amount of traffic did not necessarily bring in the organic sales we wanted, it was more a combination of the above.

Tip – None really here! It’s pretty self-explanatory but it means putting at least an hour or two aside to do this.

Any questions? Get in touch here!

travel

4 Simple Instagram Story Tips For Startups!

by Viking Wanderer

At the beginning of the month Instagram stories turned 1 and it’s already surpassed Snapchat! In fact, half of the businesses on Instagram have used stories in the past month.

I must admit, I was a little slower to tag along until I experimented and realised just ONE story alone gave me 260 views last night!

It’s also a fantastic selling tool, so here are my 4 tips on how to use Instagram stories for YOUR business.

Story Shares

Story shares is a brilliant way of collaborating with other Instagrammers and here’s how it works. If I was selling a travel product like a new backpack, I would look for travel companies with a similar amount of followers to me. I would then approach them and ask them to share my product in their story feed and to tag me in it. In exchange I would also advertise a special holiday offer of theirs in my story also tagging them.

This mutual exchange is a brilliant way of attracting new followers and expanding your reach and best of all it works!

Product Launches

Use your stories to launch a new product, event or special offer and remember to add the date and price. We want to be as transparent as possible here.

You can also tag in any collaborators that you may be working with or WISH to work with. Your story will refresh itself after 24 hours. Stories just isn’t about photos, you can also take short videos of behind the scenes too and share it with your consumer base.

So if how about sharing with your viewers your team? Or the manufacturing of a product? Just remember to make it fun!

Repost Content

Didn’t get as many hits on that blog post as you would have liked? Then advertise it in your story! Add your website URL to the story and a brief overview of what the blog post is about. Remember to use the hashtag feature to add in brands that you wish to see it!

Advertise Your New Client!

Are you B2B? Just signed up a new client? Nothing will earn you brownie points better than sending out a tweet introducing their company on your social media feed, so why not use their photo and tag in their company on your Instagram story too?

You can even use stories to introduce a new partnership or a new member of staff!

So here are 4 simple tips to create more engagement, connect to your audience base and drive traffic!

Any questions? then get in touch!

travel

How To Stay Ahead Of Your Competitors On Social…

by Viking Wanderer

I created a free marketing plan recently for a plastic surgeon based in Harley street.

Currently, he is not using any form of social media other than a Facebook page and he was really taken aback when I managed to find his top competitors are already very influential on Twitter, and he hasn’t even tweeted yet.

I think it can be very demoralising when you see your competitor has thousands of followers and you seem to be following 500 with only 50 following you back! But there ARE ways to get ahead of the competition, it requires consistency and determination.

Follow your competitors feeds

Rather than see competitors as a threat, I followed most of my competitors in the London area and made a Twitter list for them. This way I can get ideas about what promotions they are offering, which potential customers I can engage with and who to follow.

Most of my competitors have been in the freelance marketing scene for a number of years which makes them the PERFECT candidates to learn from. I check which of their posts received the most engagement, which blog posts had the most shares and look to recreate that using my own products – then I follow all THEIR followers and engage with them.

Blogging

I’ve spent hours, weeks, months trying to source the best blogging templates, the best marketing bloggers, HOW to add calls to action in a blog post, you name it, and last year, a business blog I created literally blew up and we doubled our traffic within 6 months without paid ads – it took A LOT of marketing though!

The issue with paying for ads is that the moment you stop the paid ad, you lose your potential customer where as blogging is free and in the long term can really increase your organic traffic. In fact, I DOUBLED my last clients traffic by creating 2 blog posts a week all under 500 words and you can do it too. Even better outsource it a freelancer on people per hour!

Not sure how to blog? Simply take a look at my tips below

- Create Emotion – The most shareable content on Pinterest ignites one of the following emotions. Surprise, fear, joy, sadness, anger, or disgust.

- Useful – Why is this blog post so valuable? Ultimately how will your service /product make my life easier?

- A Catchy Title – Titles simply sell the content. ‘How to ‘ posts are very popular for example, another example would be ’10 reasons why you shouldn’t ………..’. Need ideas? Then think about using a title generator.

- SEO – Try to be as specific as possible with your keywords. If you need assistance with SEO, then look to download a wordpress Plug in such as Yoast.

- Informative – Add a fact here, for example, if I were to write a blog post about why a customer should buy my photos, I would add an interesting fact. ‘Did you know that 90% of the transmitted information in the human brain is visual’

- Images – Taking the above fact, we can see how a great image can be a large factor in closing that sale. It also helps to break up the monotony of long paragraphs. Try taking a look at Canva, a fantastic platform with templates specifically for Twitter, Pinterest and the added option to add text to your image.

Making Twitter Lists Of Your Influencers

I think Twitter lists are VERY underrated. It’s vital a business finds influencers in their niche, so they can easily retweet appropriate content to their followers.

If you wish to follow influences outside your niche, then use your personal Twitter account, not your business one. Interested in influential marketers? Check out this Forbes list!

Sharing On 1 Platform Only

I hate to tell you this, but when I started creating 3 blog posts a week for my last client, I had to SHARE them on multiple social media platforms, NOT just my clients Twitter and Facebook pages. You have spent a whole morning creating a masterpiece. Don’t you want people to actually SEE it?

Take Action – Here are my top Facebook groups and Google Plus groups for business. This is where I share all my content. I also use Triberr where other Twitter users in my niche SHARE my content to their followers for FREE. You can find more about that here.

Triberr

Triberr is a social network for bloggers. The idea is to find other bloggers who write about the same topics. These writers group up in a tribe.

Whenever one blogger writes a post, the others read, comment and share it with their social networks.

The best part is, you pool together all your followers giving yourself a larger reach. So the more tribes you join, the larger your social media reach.

Category: travel

How We Doubled Our Organic Sales