Yes there can, as experts in digital marketing at ExtraDigital we know that all marketing channels have their benefits and disadvantages, this article will cover some of the ones we have most commonly observed.

Before we look at the disadvantages let first examine what SEO is.

What is SEO?

SEO or search engine optimisation is a digital marketing method that works to optimise a website to perform well in search engine results.

This includes ranking and appearing well for search terms and variations that are used by your target audience in natural or organic search listings.

The SEO method involves not only making adjustment to the website itself, but also work on the wider internet to build a sites authority and position.

Benefits of SEO

If you have spent any time looking at the SEO services available you will see lots of focus on the benefits.

While SEO has many benefits two areas we like to focus on at ExtraDigital are:

• building relevant traffic to your website
• supporting and generating leads and sales

Disadvantages of SEO

1)  Getting noticed by more than your target audience

As you get more visible online through SEO so your competitors will start to notice and they may well up their game to compete.

Increased competition is fairly common once competitors see your marketing is working especially if their leads and sales are dropping.

Also expect to be targeted by a lot more people trying to sell you their services. From other SEO agencies, to advertising the greater your exposure online the more others will start to see you as a desirable prospect to work with.

Spam too can increase for the same reasons, but with good filters in place this can easily be managed.

2) Over Success

As much as every business wants to be a success there is a real danger of too much and too fast. If you can’t handle the volume of leads and sales then opportunities will be lost and customers let down.

Once SEO gets into full swing I have seen cases where the up surge in leads has been more than the client could handle.

Unlike channels like PPC which can easily be switched on and off SEO isn’t so instant. Even if you stop your SEO it’s likely the work already in place will have some lasting effect. Although over time your SEO position will slip if not maintained often due again to the increased efforts of your competitors.

As you can see it’s very important to make sure you have the right structures in place to cope with increases in leads and sales.

3) Black Hats and White Hats

The SEO world can feel a little like the Wild West, while most agencies offer a good and fair service there are some that don’t.

Some companies (Black Hats) will happily break the rules to get you to the top in the short term only for you to find you get caught with a Google Penalty that gets you kicked out of search results due to their methods.

Then there are companies (White Hats) who work hard to stay within the rules and give you great SEO results through regular quality work.

There are also companies who sit between both camps almost grey hats so to speak.

Often it’s hard for businesses to know who to trust with their SEO and we sadly do see websites that have been damaged by bad SEO work.

Our advice is to look for the White Hat SEO’s, they won’t be the cheapest, but they will give you the best value for your investment.

Check the company’s reputation, have any of their clients had a Google penalty?

At ExtraDigital we are proud to be White Hat’s, working within Google guidelines with innovative as well as tried and tested SEO. While we have helped websites recover from Google Penalties we happily have never had one of our clients receive one.

Smart phones allow you to do everything from organise your life, keep taps on family members and friends, make purchases online, sell online, play on games and much more.

Communicating on a smart phone is even easier with the ability to send and receive messages via social media and email as well as traditional calls.

From a business prospective, in all this communication are the ever popular direct emails from companies to consumers getting lost amongst the many emails received from companies each day?

Is there a way to stand out from the crowd?

Is SMS Marketing an Alternative to Email Marketing?

As the use of mobiles as a marketing, promotional and point of sales tool heats up should you be considering alternative channel of communication instead of email marketing? One possibility is the use of SMS Marketing.

SMS Marketing has been around for a while now but has recently gained momentum as a great tool to help distinguish your marketing communication from the many others that an average consumer will receive each day.

The concept of SMS marketing is that you will send text messages to your potential clients reminding them of your sales, offers and deals. They can be used alongside other means of communication to act as a reminder or a prompt.

The Benefits of SMS Marketing

One of the key benefits to SMS marketing over any other form of direct or online marketing is that this is the fastest way of putting your message into your consumer hands.

Simply Cast states that the average time between sending your message and it being read is just 7 seconds! – couldn’t get any better turnaround time for those lighting sales or promotions.

Simply Cast also states that SMS Messages have an incredibly high open rate and conversion rate with almost every SMS sent opened and read, unlike emails. This instantaneous receipt of the SMS matched with its almost guaranteed action of reading the SMS means that this method of communication is well worth its very cheap cost of sending.

Indeed, when compared to email marketing the cost of SMS marketing is minimal. On top of this SMS marketing does not have to jump through all the hoops that are spam filters that email marketing does. The only restriction on the use of contact details is that you must have received permission from the person’s whose number it is for communication.

These factors make SMS marketing cheap, quick, easy and with minimal fuss and energy needed to run.

Use for Post-Sales

SMS marketing can also be used as a great way to ensure good customer service for your customers.

Many companies use SMS to send messages once orders have been placed directly to the purchaser’s phone. These messages include confirmation of delivery times or notification of items ordered available as click and collect.

Examples of companies who use SMS post sale are Wickes, Argos and Next. All of whom have achieved great results.

Do or Don’t?

As shown SMS marketing has many benefits but when it comes to whether you should, or shouldn’t, carry out SMS marketing it becomes an individual company preference.

If you are an ecommerce shop then yes, SMS marketing can assist you greatly and provide you with many benefits. This grows with the more engagement you have with your customers and how likely they are to appreciate reminders and promotions from yourself.

If you are a hotel or restaurant in the hospitality sector then SMS marketing can be very useful for yourself as it can allow you to keep in contact with previous guests and inform them of deals and discounts coming up  –  if they are a frequent user of hotels or restaurants then their appreciation for these SMSs will be greater.

Other industries like schools and nurseries can also use SMS marketing as a way of getting information directly to parents and guardians. Reminders about open days and events running can easily be sent via SMS and reduces the use of paper/letters which get lost or thrown away.

Even industries such as Recruitment can use SMS marketing as a way of reminding people on their books of new job opportunities and deadlines. An instant reminder rather than an email they look at a day to two later.

There really is no limit to SMS marketing other than the limit of the characters themselves. With an allowance of just 160 characters per text you need to ensure that you have the ability to get your point across with just a few characters.

What Tools are available to help me with SMS Marketing?

There are many tools out there that will allow you to send SMS marketing text messages, one of these tools is called FireText.

FireText promotes itself as the number 1 SMS Marketing platform for businesses – they provide a simple, flexible and flat rate pricing structure to allow you to use their SMS platform with no contract or commitment needed.

As with most services, the more SMSs you send the cheaper the price gets but you can expect to send each SMS for around 2.2p each.

Their SMS platform allows you to send, receive, track and analyse your text marketing campaigns with ease. Clients of FireText that currently use the service included Volkswagen, Pizza Hut and even The Cabinet Office.

Competitors to FireText include Text Local and Text Marketers.

Text Local offers a very similar service but is marginally more expensive. It’s users include John Lewis and P&O Ferries. Text Marketers’ service is also very similar but is the most expensive of the three platforms on offer. This service is used by Land Rover, BMW, Subways and Dominos Pizza.

Assistance Needed for SMS Marketing?

If you are looking for further information or assistance in running SMS marketing campaigns using any of the platforms mentioned in this blog post then simply contact ExtraDigital today.

Your contact details need to be up to date for this and correct.

Nowadays with websites, social media and online directories a lot of people are finding it harder to manage just a wide spread of contact details. Keeping them up to date is no longer a two second job looking at one location; it’s a multitude of login details and URLs to check.

The impact that poor contact information can have on your SEO is more than a lot of people think. Considering that all your social channels and online directories are linked on the world wide web, it becomes very clear to Google when you are out of sync. Out of sync signals lack of effort and care which in turn affects your rankings.

Not to mention the confused clients of yours who are reaching out to you cross channels.

If only there was something that could help!

MOZ Local!

MOZ Local allows you to do just that.

You can sign in and push latest contact information direct to all the major data aggregators and online directories.  This is great news as it means that it saves you time and it spreads your contact details throughout various sources very easily.

With MOZ Local you can get emails reminding you to update the listings, delete any listings and it even makes you aware of any duplications / errors in listings that you may have.

On top of all this it also highlights to you any potential channels that you aren’t utilising.  Might even be further avenues for growth to be found here for you.

Naturally MOZ Local offers full reporting of your listing status and allows you to view all rankings, reviews, traffic data and the performance of your listings over time. Great for assisting with your marketing objectives.

The Practicalities

The MOZ Local service itself isn’t cheap but when you look at the time you would spend updating these systems yourself then you may find that you save quite a bit. At the moment it is priced a $84 a year per location for businesses managing up to 99 locations a year.

You can get an Enterprise level for businesses managing more than 100 locations for $69 a year per location which makes it far better for those companies with multiple locations.

However if you want access to the reporting side of the system then you have to pay an additional $120 or $99 with the Enterprise level of business management.

Are There Alternatives?

Alternative sources to use other than MOZ Local do exsist. One example is Yext. www.yext.com

Yext does everything that MOZ Local does with prices available on request. However you can white label this service with your own company branding very easily.

Sources in the online marketing community have stated that there have been rumours of Yext removing all changes made whilst with them if you cancel their services. No concrete evidence of this has yet to emerge BUT MOZ Local state very clearly on their website that if you cancel your service with them then your listings remain and are not reverted to their previous state.

On the other side of the Yext / MOZ Local debate there are sources in the online marketing community who believe that Yext is faster at indexing your websites in the listings than MOZ Local at the moment.

What Should You Do?

Here at ExtraDigital we don’t think that one size fits all, your use of these services should depend on what benefits your company can gain from using them.

However, we do believe that you should make use of the free trials offered by these services as they do provide you with a useful overview of whether your company is actually ensuring that customers can contact you.

Below you can see both the MOZ Local (on the left) and Yext (on the right) results for the popular John Lewis department store.

Fire Design Solutions, a leading fire engineering agency in UK, approached ExtraDigital to redesign and market their website www.firedesignsolutions.com.

The site suffered from a high bounce rate and poor performance in search engines. The site was no longer reflecting the status of the company. Visually, the site did not appeal to their target audiences and personas and wasn’t making use of their brilliant project case studies they had of the excellent projects they have been involved with.

The Solution

ExtraDigital put a great web design together by taking the following steps

• User and persona research to see what type of user would be using the website and what information they would like to see
• Creating a selection of well thought out modern designs based on usability and best practice, taking into account how the users view and engage with the website
• Ensuring all CTAs were clearly visible to increase the volume of webinar sign ups
• Designed an intuitive case studies section to clearly showcase projects
• Optimising all content on the site in accordance with SEO best practice
• Successfully putting the site live and completing all 301 redirects so as to not lose any previous SEO value

The Result?

In terms of the marketing, the sites are performing well above the base line. The site operates in a very competitive niche which only enhances the results.

Here are the statistics a year on:

• 56.19% increase in page/session
• -14.11 drop in the bounce rate
• 68% increase in page views

One great way to improve you online reach and authority is to start a blog.

Blogging

Blogging is a big area and really started as an online journal or diary, but has grown to be so much more.

For business a blog is a great outlet to write and share content aimed at your target audience and industry influencers. You can promote what you do and show off your knowledge often in a way your existing website structure doesn’t allow.

Why Blog?

Blogging has been very popular over the past couple of years and is still a growth area. Online blogs are seen as a highly trusted source of information and as such have real power to influence customer’s decisions.

Blogs can also be used to provide content for your social media and email campaigns. How often do you struggle to find something good to post on social!

Blogs do need to be posted on frequently and the content needs to be:

• Useful
• Unique
• Quality

Ok so yes you want to start a blog, but:

Should I have an On Site Blog or an Off Site Blog?

Where to have your blog depends on what you want achieve.

 

Benefits of an On Site Blog

There are many benefits of having an onsite blog to your website, 3 of the main ones are:

Appeasing Google’s Love of Fresh Content

It can often be far easier to give Google the fresh content that it craves through the form of an onsite blog post than trying to add new pages to other sections.

So if you are struggling to put new content regular on your site a blog can help.

Helps Onsite SEO

With an onsite blog you can target keyword topics in more depth and build onsite keyword authority all under the one domain.

If you are struggling to get ranking positions on keyword areas for your website an onsite blog can give you a place to add the content, you need.

Attract Links to your Domain

Providing you put link worthy content on your blog you can use an onsite blog to help generate more back links to your website.

The key here is to add content people want to link to and to promote it well online.

Benefits of an Off Site Blog

There are also many benefits to having an offsite blog, the top 3 here include…

Tap into Existing Networks Audience

Blog sites like WordPress already have huge audiences and having a blog on one of these networks can help you reach a bigger audience than hosting it on your site.

The best way to gauge this is to do some research to see just how big the existing audience for your sector is on these Networks. This can also be useful in highlight good topics and other related tips like tagging.

Create Distance

If the topics and content, you want to cover doesn’t completely fit with your website then hosting it offsite can be a better solution.

You can then preserve the voice and feel of your website without compromising on exploring interesting topics that your audience want to know more about.

This can be good if you want to create more fun focused content that could jar with your domains SEO focus.

Trust Factor

An external blog can have a greater trust factor especially if it has more of an independent look and feel.

You can also invite industry experts and other suitable contributors to create content for the blog to further demonstrate its authority, which in turn will help build its readership.

That being said you should never mislead visitors into thinking they are reading content from an independent source if it is being produced internally.

To go with this content should be less about selling and more about helping and informing.

So Should I have an Onsite Blog or an Offsite Blog

If you’re in a small niche and struggle to find somewhere on your site to post fresh content, then an onsite blog will probably work best.

If you’re in a more competitive market and looking to explore topics and connect with a wider audience, then an external blog is probably a better option.

In some cases, you might even want to use both methods, which is fine providing both can be resourced and don’t use duplicated content.

Either way, get blogging and realise the full value for yourself today.

This need is acute for organisations such as charities; their reach and audiences are increasingly more likely to search for them via mobiles devices, often as a result of the immediate nature of the services and support they provide.

This was very much the case for Inspire Community Trust.

The Client

Inspire Community Trust are a growing disability charity based in Bexley. They were founded in 2005 with the aim to improve and develop facilities for less able people and carers in need of support.

With a brilliant hub in the Slade Green area they are able to provide a wide range of services to people with visual impairments, disabilities and sensory impairments.

The Project

The aim of the project was to give the Inspire Community Trust website a complete makeover, so that it would fit in with their new branding and raise the standards of the website to make it truly accessible to all those using their services.

ExtraDigital did this by re-designing their website to give it a more modern look, with a sleek design focused on the ease of use and accessibility for all.

At the heart of all of this was the much needed action to make the website responsive so that the visitor experience for all was the same across all devices. This helped future proof their website, (use of mobile devices will certainly not waning anytime soon), and ensure that all of their visitors could use the website with ease.

The Outcome

The website was successfully designed, built and developed by our in-house team of project managers, designers and developers to meet and succeed our client’s expectations.

The website has far more functionality than it had before, which has helped the organisation to use it in a much more useful way. Some of this additional functionality includes…

• Instant Feedback forms found on all pages to ensure up to date feedback on the services provided,
• Contact forms for ease of communication by all their users,
• Staff Only Areas to assist the employees of Inspire with their day to day activities,
• Online shop to provide instant access for their users to vital equipment and tools,
• An all round better responsive website that definitely has the ability assist with the aims of Inspire Community Trust.

Overall, this new responsive site has seen a fall in the bounce rate of organic traffic coming to the site of 40%. Whilst the amount of time that an average user spends on the site has shot up by 104% – showing just how much more useful and functional this new site is to its users.

How Can I Get These Same Results for My Website?

If you are a charity or an organisation that wants to see these types of improvements and more then contact our team today on 01227 68 68 98. We have a wealth of knowledge and experience that is sure to give you a better designed, better built and easier to market website.

Check out some of our other successes on our website today or our Portfolio to view more of our brilliant designs.