If you own a business, then you no doubt understand the importance of advertising yourself to attract new customers and keep people returning to you. There may come a point where it is prudent for you to hire an outside consultancy in the form of a professional digital marketing agency that will handle the internet aspect of your customer outreach.

If you don’t know a lot about the internet, then it is natural you might be sceptical about the effectiveness of internet advertising. The following article will explain 3 critical reasons you should hire a digital marketing agency for your business.

Increasing sales

Of course, the main reasons you would hire a digital marketing agency is so that you can increase the sales of your business by attracting more customers via the internet. This involved making your website more discoverable via processes like SEO which seek to appease the algorithms of search engines like Google and Bing.

As more customers visit your site, the more popular it will become, and it will begin to organically grow larger and larger in authority. The more authority you have, the more customers will trust you and gravitate towards your offer even when there are cheaper ones from competitors because they trust you.

Building your website

It’s also a good idea to hire a digital marketing agency that has the capability to both audit and enhance your website so that it captures the maximum number of customers. This type of firm will have an in-house team of web developers who know how to make your website look beautiful and function expertly.

This is critical for your success online as even with great SEO customers won’t buy from a website that looks ancient and has poor performance. As soon as the user lands on your website, they need to be convinced to continue clicking and scrolling until they make a purchase or inquiry.

Of course, this is a lot easier said on paper than done – which is why you need to hire an expert digital marketing agency to take care of it all for you. Trying to do it all yourself will just cause you to waste time and money as well as cause you undue stress when it starts to fail.

Maintaining your ranking

When you engage a digital marketing agency and get good results, you should extend your contract with them so that they can maintain those good results and improve on them where possible. SEO results need to be maintained as the rankings are always changing – if you don’t keep spending money on SEO your competitor will overtake you eventually.

Make sure you hire a firm that you can build a positive, long-term partnership with and make sure that their services are scalable when you experience a period of growth. You can’t afford to become complacent as this is a fast moving industry that requires you to pay close attention or pay a digital marketing agency to do it for you so that you don’t fall behind the pack.

It’s entirely possible for Google to launch a change of policy here or rewrite a code there in such a way that an element of your online presence is made redundant or affects you negatively. Don’t run the risk – hire a digital marketing agency to help you stay above water when advertising online.

Basic SEO concepts that you should know

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a skillset within digital marketing that is incredibly useful for anyone who wants to market online. It can be used to boost your website to the first page of search engine results, giving you a huge increase in visibility to internet users who are casually browsing for the goods/services they desire.

SEO is one of the fastest growing industries as more and more businesses realise the need to dominate the online space. Since more people shop online, it only makes sense to posture in that direction.

SEO can be a complicated field to get started in because of the many technical jargon terms that have been developed since its inception. The following will examine some of the most common terms that you should try to become familiar with prior to starting any SEO work.

Keywords

Keywords are the bread and butter of SEO as they are the signals that search engines use to determine what people are looking for. If you own a chemist, then one of your keywords might be “prescriptions” and “medications” since they are relevant to your business and the service you provide.

The whole point of doing SEO is so that when someone types a search for a product or service you sell, your website appears as close to the top of page one as possible. This is why keywords are the most important fundamental factor to understand with this aspect of digital marketing.

PPC

PPC stands for pay-per-click advertising and is related to SEO in that it will use keywords in a different way. Rather than organically ranking for the keywords with optimisation tactics, PPC involved planning and budgeting for a Google Ads campaign that will serve sponsored results for those keyword searches.

PPC is extremely competitive because of the direct results it gives, and the biggest players in each industry have the most money to spend bidding for these keywords. The only drawback of PPC is that the ads are disclaimed by Google as ‘sponsored results’, meaning that a percentage of users will see this and not click on it because it is blatantly an ad.

Landing pages

Landing pages are the pages that users ‘land’ on when they click on your PPC ad. They are designed to convince the person who clicked on the ad that they have found the best provider of X and explain your offers to them.

Landing pages normally finish with a CTA (call to action) that prompts the user to act then and there by adding a product to their cart or even just registering for a follow-up email. The purpose is to construct a concise and flashy ad that the user can scroll and make a purchase decision at the end of.

These pages can be very useful for high-cost products where the user is spending a long time thinking about their choice and has time to be convinced by your ad copy. For example, someone who was looking at different installers for solar power might gravitate towards a company that gave them a landing pages with all the information they need to make an informed choice.

Those are just 3 common SEO concepts but there are many more than are worth learning about. If you want to get your website to page #1 of Google, you need to have a grasp of these concepts and how to apply them to your website.