2018 brings a new year and new opportunities to improve the digital marketing for your building supply company. In this article, we’re going to dive into the exact strategies and techniques every business should be doing to get ahead for this new year.
SEO (search engine optimization) is back. The truth is, it actually never left. While the latest marketing trends have shifted towards a stronger emphasis on Social Media and paid traffic networks, SEO still remains a huge potential source of untapped exposure for your business.
When it comes to the local market, dominating the first-page search results for building supply companies in your area is incredibly valuable. For one thing, it provides some of the most highly targeted free exposure for your company available on the internet.
But not only that, it also is an ideal way to position yourself as a trusted expert in your industry. People naturally tend to place more trust in businesses that are ranking high on the search engines, compared to businesses with websites buried in pages further down in the search results.
So what’s the best way to dominate the search engines in 2018? A solid SEO strategy should include local citations, link building, and on-site SEO. In case you aren’t familiar with this terminology, here’s what that means:
Local Citations
Basically this is any mention of your business on the internet. Typically, these include a combination of your company name, business telephone number, address, and zip code. But, this doesn’t have to always include all of this information in its entirety. When it comes to local search results, the search engines tend to place a strong emphasis on local citations as a ranking factor. So, if you want your building supply company to rank highly for your city or state in 2018, you’ll want to make sure local citations are part of your game plan.
Link Building
Having links to your website is extremely important for SEO. Essentially, link building is the process of getting links placed to your website on other websites. These can include a mix of “natural” editorial links and self-created links from things like blog commenting, forum signatures, or user profiles. Employing a manual outreach strategy by reaching out to bloggers, submitting your website to directories, and posting articles on content sites is another way to spread your website link out on the web.
On-site SEO
Lastly, we have on-site SEO, which is basically the process of optimizing your website to rank for specific search terms related to your business. This is accomplished by strategically optimizing the individual web page’s content and even the actual HTML source code of the website.
On-site SEO is really a bit of a science and can be complicated for beginners who are less tech-savvy when it comes to the web. However, it is an essential part of the overall process of SEO and one of the most important ranking factors search engines rely upon.
While SEO is great for bringing in targeted organic traffic from the internet, AdWords is the paid advertising network offered by Google and should be a part of your 2018 marketing as well.
SEO rankings don’t happen overnight, and AdWords is a great way to pay for traffic on a per-click basis and get immediate exposure to people who are already looking for your services.
Now that we’ve covered SEO and why it’s important. Let’s move on to social media. Social media continues to play an increasingly bigger role in digital marketing, and that trend is going to continue into 2018 and beyond.
So if you haven’t already jumped on the social media bandwagon, it’s time to get on board. The fact of the matter is, businesses cannot afford not to have a strong social media presence in this day and age. Here’s what you need to know to be successful with social media.
Post Engagement
All that public sharing, likes, and comments you give and receive on your personal social media accounts are just as important for your business’ social media as well. Good social media marketing involves measuring social media engagement and constantly finding ways to improve upon it in order to gain more attention and business exposure.
Social Advertising
While post engagement could be considered the organic form of social media marketing. It is something that is expected to build up over time and should be incorporated along with social advertising for quicker and more consistent traffic. Paid marketing campaigns can be set up on social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in order to drive highly targeted traffic to your business on-demand.
Now we’ve covered SEO, AdWords, and Social Media but there’s one last piece to the puzzle often overlooked by most business owners. Reputation management. While having a strong online presence is important, it is just as important to properly manage your company’s reputation online as well. If you’re like most consumers today, you often check online reviews on Yelp and Google for nearly everything from restaurants to auto mechanics.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking your prospects will behave any differently when it comes to considering doing business with your company! Make sure you do not neglect this part of your marketing as well. Not having a proper reputation management strategy will result in a loss of many potential customers who have a habit of researching companies before doing business with them.