What is SEO and why is it important in Malta?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is about increasing the quality and quantity of user traffic a website receives from organic search results. Basically, SEO is every effort you make towards your website ranking at the top of Google Search results for relevant search terms. For most businesses in Malta SEO is normally something they’ve heard of, but haven’t looked into properly, or brushed it off as an unnecessary marketing expense that they can do without. This results in a huge amount of missed opportunities. Here’s why.

Think about the way you research and purchase a product. We’re willing to bet that most of the time, your journey starts with a Google search. You’re either researching the product type, a specific brand or perhaps you already know what you want. You might just be looking for a website that delivers to your country. 

With that in mind, think about just how many purchasing journeys in your industry are started each day. How many of those is your business missing out on because your website isn’t optimised for SEO, and not appearing at the top of search results?

Another reason that for businesses in Malta SEO is a must is because of international competition. More and more businesses are looking overseas for customers thanks to the boom in eCommerce and the shift to remote work. This means that many businesses are less limited by geographic locations and can offer their services more broadly. This is where SEO efforts & Google Search results become essential. If you can rank well against all your competitors, including international ones, you’re guaranteeing that a large number of potential customers will find you organically.

SEO Services by Switch

At Switch, we understand that your website’s performance can make or break your company’s goals in a number of ways. While we can help you build a beautiful website, it would essentially be worthless without a steady stream of high-quality traffic. That’s where our SEO services come in.

Optimising your website to attract high-intent users from search is one of the first things we suggest. A large percentage of business leaders underestimate the power of SEO in Malta. And in doing so, miss one of the most effective ways of generating leads.

We get this done through a specific process that’s tailored to each of our clients. In the following paragraphs, we’ll take you through what the steps we take usually are. We’ll talk about why each step is so important, and what sets us apart from others in the field. You can also learn more about the importance of SEO in a little more detail if that’s what you’re looking for. Especially about how it can affect your brand’s trust & authority.

If you’re ready to talk about how to introduce SEO into your business, click here and let’s get the ball rolling. Otherwise, keep reading!

How Switch handles SEO in Malta

Context

Understanding the Industry

Before even looking at your website, we study the context of your business and its place within your industry. This is where we will need the majority of your input. At the end of the day, you know your industry and business better than anyone. During the process of onboarding a new client, we also set our research team loose. Their task is to gather every shred of information they can from all the sources available.

Audience Identification

One cannot really understand an industry without also analysing the market that it serves in-depth. Audiences can range from an entire country’s worth of purchasers to a handful of individuals responsible for purchases within organisations. Each audience that we identify always requires a unique approach, as they always differ in their behaviour and interests. Accurately understanding what attracts the right audience is already half the SEO content battle won.

Competitor Analysis

As part of our research, we deep-dive into all marketing being done by all local & international competitors in your industry. This usually results in an understanding of audiences that are currently already being targeted. Along with those that are currently left out and might be worth communicating to. When appropriate, we also analyse overseas players in the industry for further industry insights.

Website Technical Audit

Consistently high-ranking websites are created and optimised in a very particular way. This allows Search Engines like Google to easily scan them to understand their structure and content. The result of this scan judges whether they’re high-quality enough to rank well on search result pages. If your website was not built with SEO in mind, it may be lacking in certain key technical SEO areas, stifling performance.

We’ll perform an in-depth analysis of your website, then highlight and prioritise changes that would greatly improve SEO performance. Suggested adjustments can be related to any of the following:

• Indexing errors
• Low-quality content
• Incorrect Robots.txt usage
• Mobile page issues
• Structured data errors
• Inaccurate metadata
• No internal link optimisation
• Lack of https security
• Slow page speed
• Duplicate content
• Broken links

Content Strategy & Production

Keyword Research

With a strong foundation of research and knowledge of the industry, we can now begin our keyword research. Using cutting-edge industry tools, we determine which attainable keywords are most relevant to your business. These will also depend on what resources we have at our disposal. This is where our creativity and industry knowledge shines.

Attempting to rank for the most obvious industry keywords is a tempting idea, however, it’s usually an extremely expensive endeavour. Many-a-time there are other keyword opportunities hiding beneath the surface. These would allow us to capture specific parts of the market with significantly less effort and required resources. Capturing ancillary keywords gives a website just starting to optimise for SEO the chance to begin collecting useful traffic, while also building its authority through great content.

Effective, Long-lasting Content

Putting all the research and technical jargon aside, you still need excellent content to be able to attract your target audience. At Switch, we are a multidisciplinary team of writers, designers, illustrators, photographers, video specialists, and audio dabblers. We’re happy to push ideas around and see how they grow and flourish as each mind adds something to the story. 

With a broad and eclectic set of sources of inspiration and an unusual way of connecting the dots, we’re known for creating work that’s beautifully innovative.

Authority & Link Building

Ranking well in competitive keyword landscapes also depends on the number of times other websites have linked to yours. We call these backlinks. The more backlinks you have, the more authority you have in Google’s mind. And the more highly you’ll rank for a given keyword. Google also takes into account other factors, such as your social media presence and online conversations about your brand.

Building quality backlinks and authority is extremely important, but it’s also a complicated process. One of the most challenging but effective ways of building backlinks is to create content that other websites want to link to. The more authority the website that has linked to you has, the more valuable the link.

Through our content strategy and keyword research, we’ll identify the absolute best opportunities available to build these links. With time and effort, ranking for more and more competitive and valuable keywords will become easier.

Optimisation & Reporting

Just like any other marketing campaign, reporting and analysis of results is an essential part of the process. Here’s how:

• Keeping constant track of our progress on each individual keyword we’re attempting to rank for.
• Monitoring the performance of each piece of content we produce, along with what the competition is actively doing.
• Using a combination of our years of experience and the industry tools available to us.

Through an extensive set-up process, we’ll also make sure to be constantly analysing the behaviour of the traffic we’re drawing. This way, we make sure we’re pulling in the intended audience. At the end of the day, getting huge amounts of traffic is useless if nobody is converting into paying clients. Regardless of the results, we will always aim to boost the conversion rate of all the traffic we send to your website through a live content strategy and constant keyword research.

What are the benefits of SEO?

Matching user intent to useful content.

The whole point of a search engine is simple. It takes what people are searching for, scours the internet for it, then provides the closest matches. That may be the mother of all oversimplifications, but that’s the basic gist. This happens really quickly, and it happens literally billions of times per day.

If you want a little more detail on how search engines (mostly Google) have gotten this done over the years, take a look at this video by Google themselves.

With all that context in mind, SEO is basically the act of making it as likely as possible for a search engine to pick your website when someone searches a term that’s relevant to your business.

Quality Traffic

Digital marketing efforts are often measured in clicks. Your marketing team might give you a report on a particular campaign and hail it a success because it generated so many of them. 

But this begs the question – how many of those clicks were actually worth anything?

The click is only the midway point of the journey towards a conversion. If your campaigns generate 1,000s of clicks, but 95% of those clicking users never got past your homepage, how successful are they?

This is the most obvious reason for investing in SEO, and, in turn, investing in traffic from organic search results. Think about your own behaviour. If you’ve Googled something and clicked on a result you found interesting, you’re going to give a decent look at that website. Especially if the site has what you’re looking for.

Trust & Awareness

If a website ranks at the top of Google search results for a relevant query, that result alone provides it with some level of authority and credibility. You’re much more likely to trust a website that occupies the spot usually kept by Wikipedia. Then, if that website ranked #1, the user clicked, then had a positive experience, a relationship has been formed. Even if it’s the first time that particular user is interacting with that brand.

If SEO is properly implemented on a website, it will achieve high rankings on a number of relevant industry keywords. Then, it can enjoy a flow of organic traffic and leads without having spent a single cent on paid digital advertising.

As we’re explaining above, it’s obviously not something that can be achieved at the drop of a hat. It requires technical knowledge, a sound strategy, the means to produce great content, and a little bit of grit.

Does your business need SEO services?

If you have (or need) a website which will generate leads/purchases with the right traffic sent to it, then you definitely need SEO services. If you had to take potential leads and spread them out on a scale from cold to hot, the majority of leads that are generated through SEO are definitely on the hot end due to their intent. And what business doesn’t need more hot leads?

For businesses that want to be ahead of the curve in Malta SEO is a no-brainer. That’s because of a combination of competition from overseas markets, along with the apathetic approach to SEO that many local businesses suffer from. If you’re ready to take the next step and are looking for a guide, click here.

Free SEO Audit

Still unsure whether your website needs an SEO strategy? Why not start with finding out where your website stands from a technical SEO point of view? Just fill in the form below to get a free, no-strings-attached audit of your site, sent straight to your email.

SEO Trends in 2022

If you want to read about the very latest trends dominating SEO in 2022, and how they will affect your SEO efforts in Malta, click below.

Further Reading

If you’d like to learn more about SEO, here’s a list of articles we’ve put together at Switch on the subject. These are based on our decades of experience, and include tried and tested tips & suggestions. We hope you find them useful.

Planning 2022: SEO

Local SEO in Malta: 3 Essential Tips to Get Started

Why Writing for SEO in 2021 is Bad SEO Advice

Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out.

SEO Trends 2022: More Human

The post SEO Malta: A Complete Guide appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Click below for a free PDF version of our overall 2022 marketing trends report.

Intro to SEO Trends 2022

The practice of SEO has been the equivalent of a cat-and-mouse game for years now. SEO experts are basically just trying to keep up with Google’s latest updates, and always trying to figure out how to stay ahead of the algorithm game. 

That was true for 2021, and will continue to be true into 2022. 

But the direction Google has been steering its ship towards for many years now is clear – make search more helpful to humans through AI. Here’s a list of SEO trends that you’ll definitely need to be aware of if you want your business to make the most out of SEO in 2022.

Not an SEO practitioner? Read this first

We’ll be getting into a few technical details throughout the article, so here’s a very short Cliffs Notes version of what you can expect in the rest of this article. If you want to get straight into the nitty-gritty, skip this part.

1. Familiarise yourself with Google I/O – it’s a yearly event where Google announces changes to the way search works. This year’s edition reinforces what we already know – content that follows EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) will continue to win.
2. Write content that answers questions, so it has a good chance of appearing on Featured Snippets in search result pages. Quick, snappy, clear answers to common questions.
3. Look up what Google Shopping is if you sell things online. Thank us later.
4.  Get in touch with your Web Developers and ask them how your website’s Core Web Vitals are doing and make sure your website works well on mobile.
5. Create lots and lots of good video content that your audience will find useful, and make sure you clip-mark it.
6. Wean yourself off of third-party cookies for advertising purposes. Start finding ways to build your own first-party data using SEO.

Trend 1: Google is working on understanding context across data formats

The way someone asks a question and the way they type a query into the Google Search bar have always been a little different. Ever since the introduction of voice assistants though, Google has understood that their definition of a search term needed to broaden. 

Over the past few years, they’ve developed their AI to understand longer and more complex searches that come from voice users. 

They’re now taking that to the next level with something called the Multitask United Model, which they showed off during Google I/O 2021. In more understandable terms, MUM is an AI model that focuses on natural language analysis – it basically tries to understand the meaning and intent of human language beyond face value, and provides contextually accurate results based on that analysis.

It’s also capable of generating responses while drawing information from multiple sources and formats of information, even across different languages. What we’re trying to say here is that Google is attempting to consolidate all the data it already has, and make complex search terms that seem more conversational in nature possible to search.

Imagine asking Google whether your hiking boots are good enough for taking on Mount Fuji by snapping a photo of them and just asking. Google would then take the data from the photo, and give you a definitive yes or no answer, along with information about the best hiking gear for Mount Fuji. That’s the level of helpfulness Google is trying to reach using MUM.

So what does MUM mean for SEO practitioners? 

Will it be a game changer? Not necessarily. The exact way MUM will be drawing information from the internet is yet to be determined, but if it’s anything similar to previous AI models, there will be a continued emphasis on EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). 

So keep creating content that other humans will find genuinely helpful. Use visuals, videos, long-form content if you want to rank well, and make sure your website is technically up to Google’s standards – more on that later.

All this was announced at Google I/O 2021 – a yearly event where the company shows off its latest developments across their products – including Search. Taking a look at the developments that Google announces is essential for any SEO practitioner to stay updated with what’s coming. And it is genuinely insightful.

We’ll be discussing more of what was announced at Google I/O 2021 later in this article.

Here’s a compressed version of the event if you’re interested:

Trend 2: Featured Snippets & Passages

As part of Google’s shift towards answer-based search results, featured snippets and excerpts are being rolled out globally. In Google’s ideal world, every search term has a definitive answer that it can provide with confidence – that’s what the featured snippet tries to accomplish.

As an SEO practitioner, you might find it difficult to rank your page for a highly competitive, broad keyword, but through well-written, answer-based content, an excerpt of your page could be used to answer a long-tail search term – essentially leapfrogging higher ranking and more authoritative pages. 

So make sure that you’re using your titles and headings in a way that allows Google to easily understand the content of your page, and easily lift passages to answer commonly asked questions. 

In the above screenshot, the website that provided information in a clear, simple, step-by-step format that directly answered the question posed by the search term was placed in the featured snippet. The website itself didn’t even rank in the first page of results for the search term!

As a bonus, featured snippets are also the answers that Google Assistant provides users who are using Voice Search.

Google has said that 7% of all search terms will include a featured snippet once it rolls out globally, so this is definitely something to keep in mind when creating your content. 

Trend 3: Google Shopping: Real-time Product Data

The evolution of online shopping was given the equivalent of a can of Popeye’s spinach during the pandemic, and Google has taken note, and adapted. Thanks to their existing infrastructure, Google is capable of drawing data from across the web to provide extremely accurate recommendations based on search terms.

Using partnerships with global eCommerce providers such as Shopify, along with a huge amount of data straight from retailers, Google Shopping offers product results based on a number of different factors such as availability, reviews, loyalty schemes, and prices. They also removed the fees and commissions that previously existed to use their platform to make it more accessible to smaller businesses.

They call the underlying AI model Google Shopping Graph.

Google is in a unique position in terms of eCommerce. If its shopping platform truly takes off, it could even pose a threat to some of the online retail giants that don’t want to play ball with them. If the item you’re searching for on Google shows up on the search results page with the best available deal from across the internet, why would you bother going to Amazon?

If it’s not present already, make sure you’re looking into the Google Shopping platform for your eCommerce site, otherwise you could be seriously missing out in 2022. 

Trend 4: Core Web Vitals & UX Optimisation

As the pool of data and websites has become richer over time, Google Search has become pickier. For example, if your website has excellent content, but loads very slowly on mobile, you’re likely to get shunned by the search engine. 

In order to judge your website from a technical point of view, Google is adding something they call ‘Page Experience’ to the list of factors that can have an impact on whether or not your website ranks well on search result pages.

Google defines ‘Page Experience’ as: 

“a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.”

What are these signals you ask? Well, there are 4.

Core Web Vitals

The most important is Core Web Vitals, which measures 3 main metrics on your website. These are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures loading performance. Google recommends aiming for an LCP under 2.5 seconds after a page starts to load.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. Google recommends an FID of less than 100 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. Google recommends a CLS score of less than 0.1.

The above may or may not sound like technical jargon to you, but in plain English, Google is measuring:

• How fast your website loads
• How quickly it responds to input by the user
• How stable your website’s visuals are (in other words, it measures whether elements on screen are moving around way more than they should)

If you’re not entirely sure how your website is performing on these fronts, you can follow Google’s own instructions (warning, more technical jargon incoming) or ask your web developer to look into it. The scores you’ll want for each of these metrics are as follows:

If you want a quick idea of your website’s technical health from Google’s perspective, you can also run a quick PageSpeed Insights report. 

Mobile Friendly

This isn’t exactly 2022-worthy news, but it bears repeating. Your website needs to work well on mobile, otherwise it’s useless to a huge percentage of your potential traffic. Google knows this, and will penalise your website severely in its search rankings if you ignore it.

Not sure whether your website is really mobile friendly or not? Fear not, Google has another test you can run that you can show to your web developer.

HTTPS

The third factor that makes up Google’s Page Experience rating is security. You need to make sure your website has a security certificate. In plain English, just make sure your website has that little security lock next to the URL on Chrome.

This one.

If that little lock isn’t there, you need to give an earful to your web developer, cos this is pretty basic.

Intrusive Interstitials

The last element that affects your website’s Page Experience is ‘No Intrusive Interstitials’. Google loves its jargon doesn’t it?

Don’t you hate it when you load a website that seems to have the exact information you need, but as soon as you enter the site, a bunch of pop-ups and banners appear trying to get you to sign up to their newsletter? 

Well, it turns out that Google doesn’t like that either. So make sure your content isn’t getting hidden behind a bunch of annoying crap as soon as the website loads. This applies for desktop, but especially for mobile, where the lack of screen real estate makes these issues more obvious.

That said, your page won’t be penalised for pop-ups that are legally required, such as cookie usage notices or age verification notices.

Don’t do this.

Trend 5: Suggested Clips & Key Moments

You have most likely noticed recently that video results are turning up more and more often at the top of search results over the past few months. That’s because Google understands that sometimes, the answer people are looking for is best explained visually, using a relevant video.

For example, let’s say I’m an aspiring musician, and I want to quickly get an example of how to pluck a cello. More than likely, I’d take that exact term: ‘how to pluck a cello’ and run it through Google search. Just a few months ago, I would have been given a set of search results, and maybe some video options as well.

Now, though, Google takes it a step further through ‘Clip Suggestions’. Not only does a video appear at the top of my search result page, but a particular clip is selected, showing me exactly what I’m looking for. See for yourself:

If I click on that option, I’m taken to the video itself (not YouTube, just the video), and the suggested clip begins playing.

In the past, this YouTube channel would have likely never really been close to ranking this high up on a search result page. But Google is flexing its video muscles by including more search functionality into its YouTube infrastructure. By analysing the video visuals and audio, Google is able to understand what exactly is happening in the video, and whether it would be valuable to someone who is searching.

A while ago, a feature was added to YouTube videos called ‘Key Moments’, where video creators could essentially bookmark, or segment, their videos. This way, just by mousing over the video, you could get a quick idea of what’s in the video itself.

Extremely useful for those who like to watch YouTube videos, right? Not only. Google is using this extra data gathered from the video creators to provide even more detailed, and specific information on Google Search results.

The screenshot above is from a video review of the latest Apple laptop. Most likely, this video is the absolute best way of getting a quick but in-depth understanding of this product. So if I search for ‘m1 max macbook pro review’ on Google, this is what shows up:

Not only does the video itself show up first, but Google also provides me with a breakdown of exactly what’s in the video, using the Key Moments feature mentioned earlier.

So what’s the lesson for SEO practitioners? Well, thus far, video has mostly been a ‘nice-to-have’ in the SEO world. Now though, with Google giving more value to video results, video is going to be a ‘must-have’ sooner rather than later. Not only should you have videos that accompany your text content, but ideally you’re also creating high-quality, standalone videos that thoroughly answer the questions your audience is asking.

Trend 6: SEO will be essential for first-party data

With the slow, drawn out death of the third-party cookie, you could be forgiven for having a relatively lackadaisical approach to building your own audience database. After all, we’ve been successfully targeting new users through paid formats such as Google Display and Facebook Ads for years now.

The problem is that it’s not sustainable in today’s social climate. People are resisting having their personal data used for advertising purposes, and with good reason. While most advertisers are just trying to sell their products to people they hope might be interested in them, recent events have shown that ultra-targeted advertising can be weaponised for more nefarious purposes. Plus, a lot of people don’t like big tech companies they don’t trust holding so much of their data.

So, in a this-is-why-we-can’t-have-nice-things move, tech giants such as Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. are being forced into giving up some of their ability to sell their users’ data to advertisers.

This means that, as a (hopefully) non-malicious advertiser, you’re going to have to fend for yourself if you want to target new interested users and build conversions. 

SEO is definitely one of the best tools for that job. 

For example, by creating content that is genuinely useful and interesting to your target audience, you can generate a database of interested users through email sign-ups. 

Say you have an excellent piece of content about the Marketing Trends of 2022. You publish it online, but it’s a pretty long, but valuable piece, so you also offer an option to your audience to download a specifically designed PDF so they can read it at their own pace. In exchange for the PDF, you ask for an email address.

If your piece of content is good enough, and you’ve built a solid reputation with your audience, most people would gladly provide their email address because they know they won’t regret it later on as they’re emptying their spam folder. 

That’s the way you can leverage SEO to build a first-party database. But, doing that takes a lot of time and effort. And even though the death of the cookie is still a while away, you need to start building that database. Yesterday.

To Wrap Up

The evolution of Google Search, and by association, the SEO industry, has been slow, but steady. Every update seems to add a little bit more of what humans are looking for, rather than what an algorithm would. 

What’s great about this is that, even though there are less ‘hacks’ and quick wins to be had, it means that it should be easier than ever for genuinely good, human-focused content to rise to the top of search results. The difficulty lies in creating that content, rather than getting it to rank.

We hope these 2022 SEO trends help any practitioner on their way to creating genuinely useful content for their audiences. If you have any questions or would just like to have a chat about SEO, drop us a line.

In the meantime, happy ranking.

Want to read more marketing trends for 2022?

Here are a few more resources we’ve put together, with more on the way:

Web Design Trends 2022

Marketing Trends 2022: The Year of Conflict

Seven Regional Marketing Trends We Want To See More Of

Social Media Trends 2022: The Year of More

B2B Marketing Trends 2022

The post SEO Trends 2022: More Human appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

As a nation, historically we’ve looked at global trends and decided they can wait a few years before we collectively relent and begrudgingly adopt it. This has happened with most major technologies, pop-culture fads, working techniques, and cultural norms. 

However, over the last few years, we seem to be a little quicker on our feet when it comes to adopting technological innovations. 

Just Google ‘the Blockchain island’ and you’ll get where I’m coming from.

Digital marketing has a similar story. Local marketers held off on adopting digital advertising for as long as possible. We were mostly comfortable with our traditional media and weren’t looking for an industry disrupter. 

The problem with disruptors is that they happen whether or not you want them to. 

That marketing disruptor in Malta? Social media. Maltese residents love social media. That’s forced marketing to evolve and evolve quickly into the digital-first landscape we have today. So here are 8 things you need to know as a business leader or marketer operating in Malta when it comes to digital marketing.

Boosting Posts on Facebook is not enough

Disclaimer: Boosting posts on Facebook isn’t a bad thing. But most people tend to misuse it. Whenever you place ad spend behind a post on Facebook, you’re asked to choose what objective you have, such as engagement, reach, or website traffic. Each of these sound relatively good for any brand to gain, but they provide significantly different results. For example, boosting a post to gain post engagement will place your ad in front of people who tend to comment or like things often, and not necessarily the people you actually want to influence.

Placing ad spend behind social media content should be one of the last things you consider. Start with your brand, your audience, and the goal you want to achieve with the content you’re creating. There’s no one perfect way to spend money on Facebook. Spending money to get likes & comments might make it seem like you’re doing well, but you can likely do better with a more rounded approach.

Google Search is underused

A huge number of consumer journeys start with research. This is especially true for products that are either too expensive or complex for impulse buying to be common. The go-to platform for said research is Google Search. For most websites, in fact, traffic from Google is their most valuable source of traffic for a simple reason. Those who arrive at a website from a search engine have a very specific intent. They know exactly what they’re looking for and will know they’ve found it when they see it. 

Locally, it’s surprising to see just how many valuable search terms are non-competitive. When we say valuable, we mean that those using that search term are likely to be individuals who are looking to purchase something. When we say non-competitive, it means there are not a lot of brands vying for the top results for those search terms. 

If you’re not sure whether to delve into SEO (search engine optimisation), we wrote a quick guide to figure out whether it would be worth it to you or not. And here’s a useful tool you can use to figure out what kind of volume and competitiveness the search terms in your industry have. You might be surprised.

TikTok Ads are coming

If you’re over the age of 30, you’ve likely been trying to ignore TikTok and convince yourself that Instagram is still the trendy platform to be on. 

You might even think the word trendy is still used. 

Well, the reality is that TikTok is here to stay for the time being. Even some unexpected organisations are taking the leap. Whether it’s the right move or not, we’re not entirely sure.

Not too long ago, TikTok launched its ads platform, just like Facebook and Instagram did a few years back. However, it’s yet to reach Malta. For now. That doesn’t mean your brand shouldn’t already be there. If your audience is predominantly below the age of 25, it’s definitely worth taking a strong look at what content production capabilities you have, because one thing’s for sure – standard brand-focused content doesn’t fly on TikTok.

Once ads make their way to Malta, it will become the hottest platform in the local industry.

Don’t think of influencers as just celebrities

At Switch we’ve been working with influencers for years, and if there’s one thing they always are happy about when they work with us it’s this – we don’t use them as celebrities. 

Traditionally, getting a big name associated with your brand is seen as a clever tool to get fans of that celebrity aware of your brand. 

And that’s all well and good. 

But the influencer scene in Malta is a little different, purely because of the very first point I mentioned – there aren’t a lot of us on this island. 

That means that the same handful of big-name influencers have hugely overlapping local audiences and they tend to get overused by brands who want to reach that audience. That’s not the worst of it though – a lot of brands approach influencers with very little in the way of direction. They expect them to come up with the strategy, content, and execution on their own, which is especially egregious when they’re not given that much information to work with.

Before even making a list of influencers you want to work with, you need to:

• Pinpoint your audience.
• Analyse influencer collaborations in your industry.
• Make a list of both big-name influencers and micro-influencers.
• Write a detailed brief.
• Have a two-way conversation with potential influencers to figure out whether your brands are a match.

Only with all that done can you begin to discuss the actual content.

LinkedIn is not just for recruitment

If you’re a business that relies on B2B sales and word-of-mouth for business development, then LinkedIn is essential. For years, LinkedIn has been regarded as the platform to find a new job on. While it still fulfils that purpose, it has evolved into a space where professionals build their personal brands, and by extension, their company’s brand while widening their network.

While we definitely encourage brands to use it, don’t treat it like Facebook. The content that works on Facebook doesn’t have the same effect on LinkedIn. What works are thoughtful business-related posts that have humans in mind. Spend 5 minutes scrolling though – you’ll notice that the posts that do well are those coming from individuals talking about their experiences, not about companies talking about their products. 

YouTube is the new TV

As a kid, I grew up watching cartoons on a foreign TV station. I was subjected to countless ads for toys that were only available in strange, distant places. 

I probably saw thousands of life insurance and debt consolidation ads from UK companies that were meant for whichever adult was around me. 

This is probably a pretty relatable scenario those of us who grew up before the content on the internet had really caught up with TV.

A lot of time has passed since then. 

Kids who weren’t yet born when Ira Losco first stole our collective heart with “7th Wonder” are now driving around and going to university. That means these adults who are already making major purchase decisions were 5 years old when YouTube began, and have grown up finding most of their personal entertainment online and will likely continue to do so.

Setting up YouTube ads is more flexible than ever, with a variety of different goals and distribution techniques available. Make sure you have a strategy for it.

Your website is your most valuable asset

Going back to what I said at the beginning, targeting the right audience in Malta isn’t easy – we’re just too small. The targeting tools available to marketers on the ad platforms can help, but those have been designed for countries with tens of millions of residents, not a measly half million. That means that those who are interested enough in what you have to offer to visit your website after you communicate with them are extremely valuable. 

To do that, you need a website that’s configured and designed to drive as much traffic to it organically as possible, while also making it possible to retarget individuals who visit on digital ad platforms. If your website isn’t up to scratch, and not well-optimised for this, we guarantee you’re missing out on business.

Get inspiration from…Twitter?

That’s right. Twitter. While the relationship between Maltese residents and Twitter is usually limited to a screenshot of a politician’s statement being shared on Facebook, the platform is extremely useful for marketers. Brands that have been around on Twitter globally for a while have figured out that Twitter is the perfect place to have live conversations with their audience. 

Take a look at the interactions between big brands and individuals, and even between the brands themselves. Most of the time they’re informal, off-the-cuff conversations. The success of these interactions has now led to a lot of brands doing the same thing on other social media platforms as they’ve realised that people tend to respond more to content that isn’t corporate.

If you want to see where social media in Malta (and the world) is going over the next few years, take a look at what’s going on on Twitter. The first local brands that try to emulate the informal tone will be taking a risk, but they also stand the most to gain by being first-movers. 

Not sure about something in particular?

Obviously local digital marketing goes beyond the 8 points mentioned above, and each of them have more nuance than anything we could explain in a single article. So if you’re running a business (be it Malta, or anywhere else) and want to have a chat about something you’re unsure of, just drop us a line – no strings attached.

The post Digital Marketing in Malta: 8 Things You Need to Know appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Sure, they used to think about what kind of advertising their audience might respond to and decide at what time the ads should air. But nothing compares to the proverbial tonne of data and tools that digital marketers today must sift through to try bring value to their brands.

Not to mention an audience that is growing sicker and sicker of advertising and the issues that come with it. Specifically, advertising that is too repetitive and brings no value to their lives. The days when interrupting people’s day with out-of-context commercials was considered the most effective technique are over. Now, people expect advertising to be more specific to their needs, but not too specific. 

This is where intent-based marketing comes into play. 

Interruption vs Relevance

There are essentially two types of relationships one can have with advertising. The first being what I alluded to earlier – ads that interrupt what you’re doing in order to pitch you something. These ads have been around for a long time and fundamentally have not changed much. YouTube Ads that stop your video mid-way through to show you an unskippable 8-second ad are not all that different to the commercial breaks on regular TV.

The problem with this kind of advertising is that it’s propositioning a very cold audience. An audience that mostly just wants to be left alone with their entertainment. This places a huge amount of pressure on the content of the ad to be effective and draw in consumers. So effective that the viewer would potentially refocus their attention on the ad versus their chosen piece of content. While not impossible, it’s not easy. Especially if the behaviour you’re asking your audience to undertake isn’t impulse-based or the product/service isn’t particularly visually provocative.

The second form of advertising that has risen, thanks to the internet, is one that provides significantly more value and relevance to the end-user. Not through any special form of expensive content-creation, but rather by placing the ad in front of individuals that would be much more receptive to product or brand information. The main proponent of this kind of advertising is search engine marketing. 

Individuals who are actively searching the internet for information, or, ‘high-intent individuals’ are significantly more receptive to relevant advertising than anyone else. If provided with information that can be useful to them in their search, the chances that they will perform an action you’re looking for are significantly higher. In fact, a recent study has shown that search engine advertising has a conversion rate that’s almost 5x more effective than display advertising.

This is not to say that intent-based advertising is limited to search engines. YouTube advertising can also be used for this purpose. Selecting particular channels or videos for your brand’s communication to feature on is a way of targeting high-intent individuals. For example, a tech-based product targeting YouTube channels that review tech products is an intent-based marketing technique.

Demographics vs Behaviour

Demographic behaviour has been an essential part of advertising since it began. Now, however, demographic data is becoming less important in comparison to behavioural data. Rather than focusing on the assumptions or information we have regarding particular cohorts based on age, gender, and location, marketers prefer to focus on specific behaviour – especially when it comes to intent-based marketing. 

This is usually done through the active input that consumers have in this process – search terms. Analysing what people are searching for reveals a lot about their intent. An in-depth keyword research exercise and on-going analysis can rival the most expensive piece of content in terms of advertising effectiveness at a fraction of the price. Once those keywords have been identified, writing the write copy based upon the intent behind the search terms is critical. If the user experience – starting with the initial search, and ending with a conversion on your website – is a fluid, cohesive one, it will become one of the most efficient sources of leads and purchases you have.

Where’s the data?

If your website has already been active and drawing traffic for a while, you already have a treasure trove of data at your fingertips. Delving deep into your website data will provide you with specific insight into what your users are searching for, and which pages provide them with the most value. Simply taking a look at the data for the most visited web pages within your website is a good starting point. Ideally, you would also filter out any traffic that isn’t organic. Then, ask yourself the following questions.

• What kind of pages are they? Product pages? Informational pages?
• How long do they spend on said pages?
• Which pages did they navigate before and after visiting this one?
• What’s the search terms they used that led them to this particular page?

By answering these questions, you can already surmise a great deal about the behaviour of your current users and their relationship to your content. You can see what type of content seems to be more in-demand. Or which search term seems to drive the most engaged users to your site. 

Get Granular

Using slightly more advanced marketing techniques, you can also identify which of your website’s visitors have shown interest in what you offer, but did not convert. You can then use this information to enhance your display advertising and targeting. Creating specific content for hot leads and retargeting them through other channels such as social media and Google Display advertising is also part of intent-based marketing, and will provide significantly higher conversion rates than other forms.

Our advice is to spend time with your Google Analytics account (or whichever analytics tools you have available) and understand where your high-value visitors are coming from and what they’re attracted to. Once you have that information, you can begin to expand your advertising and content-creation strategies to match what you already know works. Or, have a team of professionals who do this kinda stuff for a living do all of that for you.

The post Intent-Based Marketing: The Future of Digital Advertising appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Local SEO is the process of optimising your brand’s presence on search engines to get more attention from those who are geographically close. You might wonder, what’s the difference between Local SEO in Malta and just, regular SEO? Malta is so small, Local SEO is just regular SEO, right? Wrong. The difference lies in the way the efforts manifest themselves on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). 

For example, I’m writing this blog in Swieqi. The below are the results from a “restaurants near me” search I just did on my laptop. (That search term gets around 500 searches per month in Malta, by the way.)

You’ll undoubtedly notice that the majority of the space isn’t taken up by the standard search results – the two at the very bottom. Rather, the page is dominated by the section above, called the Google Snack Pack. It takes your exact location, then finds the top 3 local business listings most relevant to your query, and displays their info to you, along with a helpful map to show their exact locations. 

On mobile, it’s a similar story.

And that’s important. Around 40% of all search results in Malta over the last 12 months have originated from mobile devices.

These Snack Pack results pop up every single time there’s a “near me” search, and also whenever there’s a Service in Location search, such as “plumber in Birkirkara”, “coffee shop in Sliema”, or even simply “supermarket malta”. Don’t ignore it – a study has shown that these results claim 33% of all SERP clicks.

Does your business need Local SEO in Malta?

If you sell absolutely anything in a physical shop, or provide a service in a moderately competitive local market, then absolutely, yes. If your business relies on B2B leads, especially in a growing remote-working market, then local SEO might not be as important. 

Local SEO is absolutely essential during touristic high seasons too. Statistics show us that more searches happen on desktop overall, but you can be sure that the overwhelming majority of tourists aren’t lugging their laptop around to search for restaurants.

What can you do to get started?

The quickest way to get up and running would obviously be to secure the services of SEO specialists with knowledge of the local market. That said, here are 3 things you can do right now that will start giving you results relatively quickly.

Get yourself onto Google My Business

This is probably the most important step you can take to get started with local SEO. The direct benefits of having a well-optimised Google My Business account fair outweigh the effort required to create it. The most obvious gains being visibility on the snack pack results, along with visibility on Google Maps. If someone searches for your brand name directly, a Knowledge panel will show up on the SERP with the exact information you provide on your My Business account.

It will even allow Google to confidently provide specific information about your business, for even more ease of use for the searcher.

Setting up your brand’s profile on Google My Business is a relatively simple process. Get it done today.

Understand what people are searching for

Having a comprehensive list of search terms that your business would be relevant for is important. These search terms will allow you to make basic optimisations to your website to give you the best possible chance to appear in common search results. 

The most basic way to get an idea of what people search for in your industry is to take a look at Google’s auto-complete suggestions.

Another way of quickly building basic keywords is to brainstorm all possible Services in Location terms we mentioned earlier.

Here’s an easy tool to get you started if you don’t know where to begin.

With these keywords in hand, take a good hard look at all of your brand’s online touchpoints. Are most of the search terms covered in the content of your website? Do the service categories you chose on Google My Business adequately represent all the search possibilities?

Get your online presence in sync

Many businesses in Malta have a few or all of the following:

• Website
• Facebook Page
• Instagram Page
• LinkedIn Page
• Business listings (yellow, findit, etc.)
• Google My Business
• TripAdvisor (or industry equivalent)
• Official business directories

All of these platforms contain basic information about the business such as name, contact details, location, website, etc. The more of these ‘citations’ as they’re known, the more confidently Google will serve that information on the SERP. If you have multiple citations that contradict each other, that’s going to do more harm than good. Every once in a while, make sure you audit every possible presence your business has online to make sure all the information is still relevant.

Is there more?

Yes. A lot more.

But by completing these first 3 steps, you already give your business a fighting chance. If your particular industry is relatively saturated, these efforts are probably not enough. 

You’ll likely need to restructure your website to take advantage of the benefits of technical and On-Page SEO. Your current website might not be mobile-friendly. Your business might benefit from creating excellent content that might build traffic to your site. Building backlinks from high-authority sites is what you might need to get over the hump.

All that said, these first 3 steps are essential. If you want to take your Local SEO efforts to the next level, you know where to find us.

The post Local SEO in Malta: 3 Essential Steps to Get Started appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

SEO, one of the most fundamental aspects of modern marketing, has been around since 1994.

A lot has happened in the years since then. 

The internet has gotten faster, websites smarter, search engines more like AI than algorithms. The techniques historically used for SEO in 2000 are not viable in 2021, when search engines have become so complicated that there are entire courses taught on how to capitalise on search engine optimisation, and IT professionals who freelance as SEO experts. 

Most of the advice given is sound. You should use keywords. You should write content at length, ideally at more length than your competition, but only if you have enough to talk about. The easiest way to a search engine’s heart is through its algorithm. 

But there’s one thing we struggle to agree with, the advice that sneaks into every SEO blog as an underlying mantra: you should write for SEO. 

Respectfully: no. 

You should write for people. 

What’s the difference?

Writing for SEO is writing for a machine. 

Writing for people is writing for people. 

When you write for SEO, you’re writing to play to the strengths of an algorithm: how many keywords, how much length, when should you break for a paragraph, how often should you repeat your keyword length. Done carefully, SEO writing turns out a little bland, but serviceable. 

Done poorly, SEO writing is difficult to read at best, and completely unintelligible at worst. 

So why was it ever done?

It’s important to look at SEO writing in context. 

At the start of writing for SEO, a lot less was known about how search engine optimisation worked, and the algorithms powering those search engines weren’t as powerful as they are now.

Also keep in mind that most of the SEO advice you got was from people who worked very hard on figuring out correlation between what they saw on pages that ranked. But we all know that correlation and causation are two very different things.

The internet then went on to have a boom of rapidfire escalation and improvement that scientists are still trying to charter. The same internet that was around in the 2000s bears no similarities to what we’re using now. 

Ultimately, writing for SEO was not bad advice at the start of learning how to write for SEO. Now that we know better, and the search engines have advanced greatly, the definition of writing for SEO has changed. 

You can, of course, still use the old rules: stuff your content full of keywords to rank, formulate your sentences to make it easier for Google, structure your content around the idea that the search engine will do the work for you.

We have a different idea. 

You should write for people. 

Why write for people?

Your content isn’t going to be read by the search engine. 

It’s going to be read by your audience, most of whom is made up of humans, that (we assume) are not an algorithm. Please disregard if they are. 

When you write for people, you’re writing content that is readable, easy to understand, and fun. Content that will get shared. Content that will get linked back to you. Content that people will talk about with their friends. 

Great content and typical SEO rules don’t really go together, and even Google has started to understand that and to adapt that to their search engine algorithm. 

Think about it this way: if you’re going to read a long blog post – 5000 words, at a minimum a 15 minute investment – do you want it to be repetitive, dry, and a little bland?

Or do you want it to be fun?

Do you want that blog to make you think?

Do you want to share that blog with others, get their opinions on it, talk about it with your coworkers?

We like content that reads like music. It’s what we try to write ourselves, and what we look for in other blogs, and what we like reading. 

That is content that is written for people. 

So, what do I do?

Okay, so you still need to rank, and your page still needs visitors. 

There’s a middle ground there. 

Write your content for people. Make it as fun as you like, make it the kind of blog people share, make writing it the most enjoyable exercise you can make it to be. 

But plan it with SEO in mind. 

Top five tips for writing for people, planning for SEO

It sounds hard, on paper: writing for people while also writing for a machine while also making sure to make it sound like you’re writing for people. And it is hard, but there’s a few ways you can make it easier on yourself. 

1. Think about search intent. When you’re Googling the answer to a question – for example, which coffee shop stocks a particular brand of coffee – you’re going to phrase it in a particular way. That needs to be the backbone of whatever you’re writing. 
2. Write your content first. Put the keywords in later. Your content is what’s going to keep people on the page, so it needs to be what takes priority. On your second round of edits, go through it again, see where you can work in a keyword or two which will add value to your piece. 
3. Answer a question. Looping back into the first point about search intent, any good piece of content will have an answer in it, whether or not it’s the answer the buyer is looking for. An answer will keep people coming back, will keep people reading, will keep them interested. 
4. Add visuals. Visuals are important. Visuals break up text on the page, and make it seem manageable, so if you’re writing at length, giving your reader a break to absorb the information helps. It also makes the blog post seem far shorter. 
5. Check what Google is doing. Google is in the process of updating and improving all of its services. To write blogs that take advantage of current SEO practice, you need to know what Google is doing with its SEO algorithms. 

There’s more to think about when it comes to SEO, but it’s technicalities, little things that can be fixed in post or in editing. 

What matters is how you write. 

Write for people, and people will read. 

Write for a machine, and the machine will have a field day – but that’s not going to keep your audience on your page. 

Unless your audience is robots. 

Then you should definitely write for robots. 

The post Why Writing for SEO in 2021 Is Bad SEO Advice appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Deciding whether or not to invest time, effort, and money into something that doesn’t seem like a sure thing is not easy. As soon as you Google the word SEO, you’re just inundated with guides, tips, best practices, and lots of other information. Looks like you either need to hire an expert (whose opinion you can’t trust if they can benefit from the result of said opinion), or take the plunge yourself. The former will likely be quite expensive financially, the latter expensive in effort and time.

So this piece is for those who are on the fence – unsure whether SEO for their website would be worth it or not, but aren’t willing to spend too much time or money to find out. We’re outlining a few simple(ish) steps you can take to see whether working on SEO will bring real value.

Let’s get started

The whole point of this exercise is to see whether your particular website is primed for a boost in organic traffic with some SEO effort. To do this, we’ll be taking a look at a few pieces of existing content on your website, then spending some time lightly optimising these pages to see whether they benefit from SEO. Before we get started though, make sure you have access to:

• Google Analytics (or equivalent)
• Your website’s backend

If you don’t have these on hand, get in touch with your web admins, or speak to us and we’ll do it for you.

Look for a few pages that already have some traffic

First off, find a page on your site that already draws a little bit of traffic. Take a look at your analytics tools over the past few months, and take note of any particular pages that are already popular, have valuable content, and (if you have the data available), drive conversions.

Ideally, the pages you choose are ones with some informational content, rather than pure conversion (a blog post, for example).

Choose target keyphrase/keyword for each

Essentially, a target (or focus) keyphrase is the search term that people type into Google that you’d like your content to rank for. You’ll need to choose a keyphrase for the page you’ve chosen, so we can optimise the page for it. So how do you find the right one?

As an example, if your page provides information about interior design trends, you should start with the main subject. In this case, interior design (obviously). Then, use a free keyword research tool, such as this one from ahrefs.com. From there, you can see what search terms are most popular and relevant to the topic. You even get a difficulty score, which will tell you how much effort you’ll need to be able to rank for that keyphrase.

In this case Volume represents how many searches are happening with that keyphrase per month, and KD or Keyword Difficulty represents how difficult it will be to rank on the first page of search results for that keyphrase.

The aim here is to find a keyphrase for the page you’ve chosen that:

• Is relevant to the content you already have. Ideally, your content solves a problem or pain point that is revealed by the search term itself.
• Is not extremely competitive. The more competitive the keyphrase is, the more difficult it will be to rank. Look for a low KD (Keyword Difficulty) score.
• Has a decent amount of search volume. “Decent” depends on the potential size of the target audience and the value of a single lead.

You should spend a little bit of time on this bit of the process. Choosing the right keyphrase is probably the most vital part of the exercise – it will feature heavily in the next step.

Optimise those pages with these best practices

Get your chosen keyphrase, and make sure it features in the following places on the page:

• URL
• Page title
• Meta description
• H1 & H2 header tags
• Image alt tags
• Body content
• Image file names

Tip: Don’t flood the page too much. Spamming the keyphrase will set off alarms with the Google algorithm, and this exercise will have done more harm than good. Don’t forget, you’re writing for humans, and humans don’t like too much repetition (unless it’s from Daft Punk).

If you’re not sure what those listed things are, here’s a complete glossary of SEO-related terms. CTRL-F is your friend.

Build internal & external links

Having a healthy number of internal and a couple of external links usually make a page more useful to whoever is browsing it. If you have content on other pages that would be relevant to anyone who used the focus keyphrase, make sure you link to it appropriately. The same goes for external links – look for content outside your website that would be genuinely useful to include in your content.

Post on social

If you already have relatively active social media pages, make sure the page you’re doing this exercise on has been shared recently on all the platforms you use. When the Google algorithm finds a valid link to a particular page, it deems that page slightly more valuable – especially if coming from a high-authority website. If you create sufficiently great content, you might be able to get other websites to link to your page.

Wait a week or two

This is the most frustrating bit – SEO takes a bit of time to start showing results because you need to wait for Google to scan your website. That typically happens once every few days, so it’s probably best to set yourself a reminder for about 10 days in the future to check the results. 

Did it work?

Take a look at the organic traffic received from search engines – has it increased? If you search the focus keyphrase yourself, did your website’s result jump up? If you answer yes to any of those two questions, you know there’s potential for more value to be gained from SEO. 

What’s next?

Do it again. Find more pages that could benefit from the entire process. At some point though, you may find yourself up against a keyphrase with too much competition. Or you might struggle to figure out how to target a very particular user intent. Or you might need someone to take on the task of writing engaging content. The structure of the website itself could also be holding you back. 

That’s where a lot more of the technical stuff comes in, and you’re probably best off getting in touch with an experienced expert. Especially if you’re seeing valuable results coming in from the effort you’ve put in.

The post Is SEO worth it for you? Here’s how to find out. appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Dos

Online marketing will be perfect for your company if you have a large local or international target and if your offers are constantly evolving; marketing itself is always changing. Here are the five rules of thumb for efficient online marketing.

1. Make a plan

One of the key elements in marketing is anticipation. You have a ton of questions to answer: Who? Where? When? How will you target people? In addition you have to be convinced by your offer before trying to convince anybody else. Make sure your plan is comprehensive and your offer understandable – it’s vital for converting potential customers into real ones.

2. Create a relationship

Make your brand known → Make your brand loved → Make people buy your product
The priority in marketing is to create a relationship between your company and your clients. Nowadays we are challenged to create proper relationships through social media and it can be difficult for a customer to feel close to an international brand. Besides, social media tends to become antisocial media, this is why you absolutely have to adapt your marketing to the different country or the different gender, or age. Be global but act local, thus, your brand image will be loved by clients.

3. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer

Competition is positive. It helps your company to continuously improve the service it offers, but in order to do that, you need to know your competitor. Regularly run a search on different social networks and see what your competitors are up to. Don’t try to do the same thing – it would be a waste of time and energy. Rather, try to do better!

 4. Be active

The internet, and our society as a whole, is always changing. According to Wearesocial.com 2078 billion social media accounts are active right now, so you must be too! Online marketing can really be a source of advantages if used well. Indeed the goal is not to be simply noticed, but to have relevant, updated and non redundant content. Your main mission is to catch the attention of the reader and make him want to come back to your website. It is essential for a company to have at least one person in charge of online marketing who will assure the company’s visibility on social media.

 5. Do your own research

Yes, the internet is useful, fast, and comprehensive. But since the internet is accessible by everyone, that means that everyone has the same information, the same “original” ideas. You are not everybody! Do your own research, borrow books from the nearest library, subscribe to a specialised magazine and take a look around you. If you are not taking any risks, nothing will come of your efforts. Obviously, this does not mean acting before thinking, but we’re definitely encouraging you to be more original and less fearful.

Don’ts

As useful and wonderful as online marketing is, that doesn’t mean that nothing can go wrong. A little slip up could easily damage your brand image. It’s all about e-reputation. You may know what you are posting on your blog, your Facebook wall or Pinterest board… but are you aware of what internet users think about your company?

1. Lie

More and more internet users tend to lose trust in brands because of their often exaggerated promises. Nowadays consumers look towards online peers for honest reviews and opinions. They ask questions on fora, they give advice on comparison websites and they share information about products. If you are lying about your products or capacities, you can be sure that it will be made public in the blink of an eye. Your brand will be damaged and it will be really hard to convince your clients that you are honest with them. The result? You risk losing them and any other potential customers.

 2. Spam

Yes, you have to update your content and keep it interesting, but if you post too often, followers might begin to resent the constant barrage of content. Schedule content so it’s spread over the day, not all at once. Users would want to find what they saw previously and show it to their friends so when you fill their feed with spam they would not be able to do this.

 3. Use poor language

The online marketing language can be less formal than a commercial brochure or a business letter, however bad language is banned! You have to take care of your spelling and make sure that the tone of voice isn’t too casual. Of course, adapt your writing style according to your company’s tone of voice. For instance it is not useful to put smiley faces everywhere if you are a professional appliances retailer.

 4. Waste your time

You cannot try to target everybody. By having an online marketing plan which is too vast, nobody will feel concerned about it. You have to focus on your main audience and take care of it. Do not waste your time and energy, instead of reaching everybody you will reach nobody!

5. Forget about SEO impact

Search Engine Optimization is a compulsory step for you to improve your online marketing. SEO is not that complicated, you can easily develop some skills by searching for information on suitable content. If you cannot do that for any reason, you will have to put somebody in charge of, it is true you will spend money to pay someone but it will quickly become profitable. SEO is one of the keys to success.
What you have to keep in mind…
Online marketing through social media is the first impression that potential clients will have of your company. This is simply the mirror image of your values, your work, and your relationship with the clients. Even if you’re not selling products on the internet, you should not disregard online marketing. Having a social media presence will broadcast a good brand image and let the customers know you are there for them!
If you want to find out more about how to improve your social media marketing, why not pop in for a chat over coffee?

The post Dos and Donts of Online Marketing – 10 Before 10:00 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Choosing a domain name

If you already have a domain name, this section might not be very useful to you. Then again, knowing the gist of why a domain helps SEO won’t hurt. If you’re still trying to choose the best domain name for your business or project, don’t give up.
It’s becoming very difficult to find the URL you want that is not registered yet. I’ve found that the best domain ends with a .com but there are successful websites nowadays that end with every possibility you might think of.
Contrary to popular belief, the keywords that you’re aiming for don’t really have to be in the domain name, so you can feel free to choose a name which is not directly related to your subject matter.
After all, it’s all about the way you run your site, and in terms of SEO it doesn’t make much of a difference if the content of your website is relevant to the keywords you’re trying to rank for.
It is also good to know that some sources say that having your website registered for at least a year helps. As your domain ages it gets more attention from Google.
The length of your URL is another factor that should be given some attention, as it is suggested that the length of the URL will be better if it’s 8 letters or less.

Choosing the best keywords

Now that you have chosen a domain name, you can start researching the best keywords for your website. By best I mean the ideal set of words to use in your site’s content to make it more appealing to search engines.
This helps search engines get to know your website better, and consequently show it as in results which match your target users’ searches.
Start off by finding what keywords your competitors use and what people are more likely to search for when looking for sites like yours.
Next, gather the top 10 keywords and start including them in the text of your website. Remember to add some of your main keywords to some article headlines to make them more prominent.
But don’t overdo it and duplicate a lot of content just to stuff different keywords in. Google will realise that you’re trying to cheat and won’t be very willing to show your content to those searching for it.

Get your content to work for you

Now that you know what keywords are best to use on your website, it’s time to getting them to work for you. The best way to start is to add them to title tags, alt tags, meta descriptions and in H1 tags.
Contrary to popular perception, content length doesn’t really matter as long as it’s original content. So don’t lose sleep over whether the text on your pages is is 500, 1000 or 2000 words long, even though quite a few sources say that the ideal is to have around 1500 words per page. It’s better to have less content that makes sense in the context of your site than to have a lot of content that’s rubbish just for the sake of it.
Other factors that might need some attention include page speed and image optimisation, finding and fixing broken links, grammar and spelling, HTML errors, W3C validation, and designing a user-friendly layout.

Bringing your website to life

User experience is another vital factor that determines how much traffic you can get to your website. You cannot just have a website designed and leave it there doing nothing. It’s best to update it regularly to show Google that it’s still active and might be useful to users. It’s also important to have a contact us page that is clear and easy to understand and use, maybe with a form and a map so users can easily find you and get in touch if they need to.
Google also promotes mobile-friendly websites on searches originating from mobile devices. Having a mobile version of your site (or a responsive website that adapts itself automatically to mobile devices) will therefore increase your chances of winning traffic from mobile searches.
Other relevant technical factors include the presence of a sitemap, using Google Analytics & Webmaster tools to improve performance, easy navigation, and including terms of use and privacy policy pages.
The presence of reviews, testimonials and comments on your website help perception too, but this all depends on the nature of your business.nIf you’re working on a link building (and/or guest posting) exercise to improve your chances of being ranked higher on search engines you have to ensure that you’re only getting links from high quality sites that are relevant to your industry.

Engaging users through social media

Your presence on different social media is considered to be as important as having a website. There are a lot of platforms to choose from to engage users, but you have to decide on which are the best ones for your business.
For example, it doesn’t make sense to use LinkedIn if your target audience aren’t business people. Google gives a lot of attention to businesses that have a significant amount of tweets, number of Facebook likes and shares on Facebook, Pinterest pins and other mentions and interactions.
A lot of hype was made about whether or not Google+ ultimately makes any difference or not for SEO. Lately, Google released an announcement saying they are going to split Google+ into different sections so that it will make much more sense to get some SEO relevance from it.
As you may have noticed this topic is broader than expected and might be quite a lot to handle. If you decide that you need some extra advice, we’ll be glad to help you along with the process.
As you go along be careful you don’t opt for shortcuts to optimise your website as Google will penalise your website and it might be difficult to earn its trust back.
Remember that SEO might take a lot of time to eventually work and get you to the top of results, so roll your sleeves and start working on it now.

The post What's all this fuss about SEO? appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

1. Be eye-catching

Perhaps one of the easiest ways to refresh your company page is through the use of some new images. Go through your website and change round some of your featured images so as to give the posts a new appearance, making them more appealing to visitors. Don’t be afraid to recycle posts and share them on social media (a perfect way to keep an active social media account if you’re low on new posts).

2. Take a look back

April brings the end of Q2 – the perfect chance to assess your work so far. Did you stick to your goals? Perhaps you need to try something new or make small changes. You can only plan for the future if you look back at previous work and evaluate what worked and what didn’t.

3. Spring time SEO

Go through your website’s SEO – are the keywords you used still relevant? Perhaps some of your posts introduce a different angle. It’s important to make sure that your SEO is an accurate representative of your work. It may be time consuming to ensure that all your pages have good SEO but it will help boost your page to the top of Google – bringing in more business!

4. Unfollow people

We’d normally tell you to engage with your audience and follow people – but let’s be honest, sometimes you need to remove a couple of people from your lists. Perhaps they’re inactive, or maybe you just want to make sure that the people you’re following are important to your company. Either way your feed will benefit from a spring clean – and so will your follower to following ratio!

5. Who are you?

Go through your social media accounts and check the ‘about’ section – does this accurately represent your company? Perhaps you’ve taken a new tone of voice or a new direction. Let your ‘about’ section represent your company’s branding. Also, make sure that the ‘about’ is universal throughout all of your social media accounts so that you’re presenting the same message throughout.

6. So social

Speaking about social media accounts – go through your social media accounts ensuring that they’re all giving off the same message. Check your social media strategy (or come up with one!) in order to ensure that all accounts are getting the same amount of love- there’s nothing worse than a neglected account!

7. Protect your passwords

That’s right – it’s important to update your passwords regularly. Try to change them at least every 3 months even though it’s very tedious- better safe than sorry after all.

8. Explore new options

Don’t be afraid to delve into new social media channels. Take a look at what’s hot and evaluate whether these are relevant to your company – and more importantly, your audience. Maybe try Pinterest or Instagram just to start off with.

9. Social sharer

Is your site social sharing friendly? Take a look through your posts and see whether you’ve made it easy for people to share your posts. Are social media buttons easy to find or do people have to search the whole page just to find your Twitter handle?

10. Your milestones

A lot can happen in a year – especially if you’ve worked hard. Do you have any milestones you’d like to share on social media – what have you achieved and how can that improve your business? Go ahead, show off!
Obviously there’s always going to be a lot that you can do in order to improve your online presence and your digital marketing skills, but these are a few of the basics that you should have covered in order to ensure success. If you’d like to do more and want some help why not drop us a line or subscribe to our newsletter? 

The post Spring cleaning your social media appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.