Real Estate Content Marketing: How to Get More Leads

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Hand of Business people calculating interest, taxes and profits to invest in real estate and home buying

Getting noticed in a crowded market is hard—and the real estate industry is no different. If you want to attract buyers or sellers as clients, you need to reach them in innovative ways and make it easier for them to find you.

This means you will want to use a variety of marketing methods to connect with potential clients. In addition to traditional marketing methods like direct mail, you will want to utilize the high-ROI tactics that digital marketing is known for, including search engine optimization, PPC and social media ads, and content marketing. Today, I’ll be covering the value of real estate content marketing, why it’s a great tool for real estate agents, and how you can create helpful content that helps you score more clients.

What is Real Estate Content Marketing?

Content marketing is all about driving leads to your site and engaging with potential clients with a variety of content.

When it comes to real estate, this includes:

  • Newsletters: Stay connected with weekly or monthly newsletters that detail what’s happening in the market, the industry, or your agency. Share things that matter to your audience for maximum impact and make it easy for clients to contact you.
  • Blog Posts: Blog posts are a great way to share news and helpful or fun information with your audience. Plus, by using a keyword strategy, you can help provide your website an SEO boost and make it easier to rank higher on Google and other search engines.
  • Social media posts: Promote your blog posts and other content on your social media channels while also sharing original content on Instagram, Facebook, and the other channels that your target audience uses.
  • Infographics: Infographics make taking in data easier. 
  • Ebooks: Have you ever just wanted to give a client a guide to being a first-time home buyer or seller? Imagine what a useful tool it would be to attract individuals looking to purchase or sell their first home! Other useful real estate ebooks could be market-specific, like the benefits of various Tampa neighborhoods or what to consider when purchasing investment properties in Florida.
  • Videos: Use easily-digestible videos to walk potential clients through the process of buying or selling a home. 

Why Realtors Need Real Estate Content Marketing 

When you regularly publish useful content in your industry, you showcase your knowledge and set yourself up as an expert. This helps establish trust with potential clients and makes it more likely that they’ll reach out to you when they’re ready to buy, sell, or lease property.

At the same time, content marketing is a crucial part of a well-rounded SEO strategy. Because Google always wants to provide searchers with relevant results that are authoritative and trustworthy, creating content that illustrates your knowledge of the industry and is centered around particular keywords can help you rank higher on Google. Most people click on the first few Google results, with the top result getting the most clicks. By increasing your Google ranking, you can increase the number of visitors to your site organically (i.e., without paying for ads).

Essentially, real estate content marketing can help Realtors build an online presence, draw in new potential clients, and stay connected with existing and former clients. There are no downsides to content marketing—as long as you have a well-planned strategy, quality content, and regular posts, you can start seeing the benefits.

Creating Real Estate Content People Want to Read

So how do you start reaping the benefits?

Start With a Strategy

When integrating content marketing into your digital marketing plan, you want to create a strategy and note which types of content you want to create and how often. Consider who your audience is so you can focus on topics and channels that are more likely to resonate with them.

For example, if you are a commercial real estate agent, you may want to focus on creating content like:

  • How to Find the Perfect Retail Spot for Your Business
  • What to Know Before Signing a Commercial Lease
  • Do You Need a Real Estate Agent to Get a Commercial Lease?

Basically, you want to get into the minds of your potential clients, and address topics that you know are important to them. If you aren’t sure where to get started, you can:

  • Look at forums to discover what types of questions your target audience is asking about real estate or other related topics
  • Make a list of the questions you get asked most frequently
  • Check out what the competition is doing
  • Run a content gap analysis using a tool like SEMRush or Ahrefs

In addition, you’ll also want to consider how frequently you post. The key is to create a consistent schedule. Even if you only post once a month, you should consistently create a new post each month and share it far and wide. For better results, you may want to post twice a month or even weekly. However, you want to make sure that your focus is on quality and not quantity. If you can’t write an insightful post every week, stick to a schedule that will allow you to maintain your quality standards.

Measure!

If you already have a content strategy, then you must regularly monitor the effectiveness of what you’re doing. Otherwise, you may end up wasting time on creating content that just isn’t working for you.

You should measure:

  • Organic traffic
  • What pages people are visiting on your site
  • How long people are staying on your site
  • Post or video traffic and views
  • Bounce rate
  • Comments or shares
  • Keyword rankings

You want to see how many new and returning visitors your content brings to your site, how they’re engaging with it, and what they do after they visit. Are they reading your content and then filling out a contact form? Are they subscribing to your newsletter? Are they just bouncing after 30 seconds?

You also want to track whether you’re seeing improvements in your rankings, which can have long-term benefits for driving organic traffic. If you’re consistently posting and sharing your post but not seeing any results, you may need to adjust your topics or strategy.

Make Improvements

And, of course, there’s always room for improvement! Every strategy should be seen as iterative. Run tests to identify growth opportunities and ensure that you’re providing valuable insights to your audience.

You can test:

  • Posting frequency: If you don’t see results from your posting schedule, consider whether you’re posting too much or too little. Adjust your schedule to see if it helps.
  • Personalization: Not sure whether personalized or segmented newsletters are a good idea with your clientele? Run A/B tests to see which ones get more opens and clicks.
  • Content length: Not everyone wants a deep dive into a topic. Some readers prefer easily digestible chunks of content. Try switching up your content length to see whether one performs better than the other or whether one reaches one segment of your audience while the other reaches another segment. 
  • Newsletter frequency: Dial in the right newsletter cadence by
  • Newsletter content and length: With A/B testing, you can test whether a newsletter with photos, more links, or just more content scores more clicks, then make adjustments to your strategy.
  • Channel engagement: Check which channels work best for you by measuring engagement on your posts or newsletters and then focus on testing to see if you can bring your numbers up.

Real estate content marketing is a lot of work—which is why a lot of Realtors don’t bother with it, rather than missing out on the leads that content marketing can drive for your business, partner with an agency that can help you reach your goals. 

At Digital Neighbor, we have years of experience helping Realtors create unique brand identities, showcase their market knowledge, and build connections with potential clients. Contact us today to learn more about our expert real estate content marketing services and get ready to grow your business.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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Your Guide to Long-Form Content & How to Get Started Creating It

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If you want a more substantive SEO boost from your content, then long-form content is a must. Unfortunately, too many businesses focus on quantity over quality, creating bursts of short posts just to ensure they are putting something up on their blogs. To maximize the value of your blog and meet potential customers’ needs, you need a content strategy that considers what your audience is searching for and provides them with in-depth answers. One way to do this while increasing your Google ranking and making it easier for people to find you is to incorporate long-form content into your content plan.

What Is Long-Form Content?

There are plenty of types of content, and each has a valuable place in your content strategy. Long-form content is comprehensive content that covers different aspects of a topic. It can be a guide, a how-to, or just an excellent overview. It can be written or recorded. 

What truly sets long-form content apart is its in-depth nature. It answers many questions about a specific topic and serves as a resource that your audience will want to turn to time and time again.

How Long Should Long-Form Content Be?

Ok, so long-form content should have more words than a quick blog post. 

But just how many words?

Honestly, there’s no hard and fast rule for the length. According to Hubspot, articles with over 2.5k words get the most backlinks, and those between 2.25k and 2.5k score the most organic traffic. 

We find a 1,000-word post can provide a good overview for many topics. For more complex issues, though, you can go upwards of 2k to 3k words. 

For example, if you wanted to create a post on choosing the best XYZ, you will probably end up with a post that’s a couple of thousand words long to capture each possible point your readers may be interested in.

That said, the main goal shouldn’t necessarily be a particular word count. You want to aim for a comprehensive overview of a particular topic. Think of it as a definitive guide. You want your long-form content to answer all of the crucial questions on a specific topic that someone may have.

What Are the Benefits of Long-Form Content?

Content is a crucial part of a winning SEO strategy. By creating pages, posts, videos, and infographics around your industry keywords, you can get more people to your website, build trust, score backlinks, and boost your brand visibility.

Drives organic traffic to your site

Long-form content generally has plenty of keywords for Google to find. Because you are covering one topic from various angles, you are naturally incorporating associated keywords and long-tail keywords into your content. These are the same keywords and phrases that people enter into Google. Using them naturally in your content will increase the chances that your page will rank highly for those keywords and phrases, thus increasing the number of people who will see your content. Because most people click on the top links on the search results page, creating high-ranking content will naturally increase your organic traffic.

Builds trust and authority

You may have heard of EAT. That’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness—and some of Google’s rankings can be attributed to it. 

If you want to boost your EAT, then long-form content is one way to go. By focusing on a particular topic that is relevant to your industry or business with an in-depth post, you can showcase your expertise, boost your site authority, and highlight your trustworthiness all at once.

According to Backlinko, long-form pieces get 77.2% more backlinks than shorter pieces.

When people share a post or link to another site on their post, they generally do so because they’ve found the original content to be of value. They want to share those insights with their audience. When you create comprehensive content that showcases your expertise, you make it more likely that people will want to share it. And those backlinks help show Google that your post is relevant and useful, increasing the chances of ranking well. 

Creates brand awareness

Because long-form pieces are shared more frequently across social channels, they help create more brand awareness. While it may not cause someone to purchase from you immediately or schedule an appointment, it will make it more likely that they will return to your site when they are ready to buy or make an appointment. Brand awareness is all about staying top of mind so that when a potential customer or client is ready to take that next step, they think of you.

Long-form content should be relevant to your visitors. In most cases, it should be evergreen content that you can regularly update with new information. This will help ensure you continue to reap the benefits from the content for as long as possible.

Short-Form vs. Long-Form Content

Now that you know how valuable long-form content is, should you scrap your current content marketing plan and invest only in longer pieces?

Ultimately, not every topic needs a long comprehensive post. Maybe you just want to create a short blog post about a news item or answer just one question in particular. Short content is excellent for this. Plus, not everyone wants to read a long post. As long as your post tackles your content matter well and speaks to your target audience and where they are in their decision-making process, then it can still be a valuable resource on your blog.

Types of Long-Form Content You Can Start Working on Today

Are you ready to start cranking out content? Remember, you want your posts to be comprehensive. Here are some content types that you can integrate into your content marketing plan to help capture additional keywords and generate more traffic.

How-to Posts

Tutorials are an interesting way to introduce how to use your product or do something tangential to your product or service that your audience is interested in. 

For example, if you sell hardware, you can create tutorials for different DIY projects featuring your products. For us, a good How-To post might be something like “How to Create Your GMB Profile” or “How to Get More Reviews From Your Happy Customers.” Consider what is important to your target audience and which topics may fit in with your goals, then start researching them to identify an exciting way to tackle the topic.

Deep Dive Explainer Posts

Whether you’re selling appliances or offering legal services, there’s plenty about your industry that potential customers and clients want to know. A deep dive into one aspect of your product or services can help introduce top-of-funnel web visitors to your site, capture more keywords, and showcase your expertise. Legal experts can expound on different defenses, legal statutes, and more. Realtors can discuss the intricacies of selling or buying a home. Doing so helps establish trust while boosting your SEO, so don’t discount a topic just because it may seem easy or obvious to you. Share your knowledge!

Pros and Cons

Have you ever poured over a pros and cons list for a new camera, laptop, or other product? They are extremely helpful for people considering a purchase but who are on the fence and just want to know more. By sharing information about your products and making it easy to determine which features they have and their benefits, you simplify the buying process for your potential customers and make it more likely that they will be from you. You can also compare different products or even different models of the same product. 

Do’s and Don’ts

Do’s and Don’ts posts are almost like short tutorials or guides. They help emphasize the best practices of a particular aspect of your industry. For example, if we wanted to do a “Do’s and Don’ts” post, we could do:

  • The Do’s and Don’ts for Posting Saveable Content on Instagram
  • The Do’s and Don’ts for Creating a Backlink Strategy that Google Loves
  • The Do’s and Don’ts for Writing Content People Want to Share

Think about where your expertise lies and what types of content your client base may be interested in. For example, a Realtor could tackle “The Do’s and Don’ts for Stylishly Staging Your Home So It Sells Fast,” while a Personal Injury Lawyer could pen, “The Do’s and Don’ts for Dealing with a Traffic Accident.”

FAQs

Want to capture featured snippets and tackle some of the questions you or your staff get asked the most? FAQ posts are a great way to capture a variety of keywords related to your industry. By answering the questions your team gets asked all the time, you make it easy for potential customers and clients to learn what they want to know. Plus, because featured snippets on the Google search results page are generally in question form, you can increase your chances of being linked from one of those coveted spots. 

Industry Glossaries

Not everyone is well-versed in your industry. In some industries, the terminology can be confusing and may leave people frustrated. A glossary that defines your industry terminology can make it easier for visitors to navigate your site and understand your services.

For example, if you are a lawyer, a glossary defining commonly used legal terms can make it easier for potential clients to understand their situation and have a more productive conversation with you as their potential legal counsel. The same goes for any specialized industry—financial services, fintech, health companies, cybersecurity firms, and more.

Create a Video (and Get the Transcript)

Videos can be an exciting way to introduce content variety while still ticking the “long-form content” box. A 20-minute video will produce a transcript of about 2,000 words depending on how quickly you speak. You can either create a script and post the script with the video so people can choose whether to read or watch. Or you can speak about a topic and then send the video to be transcribed. Post the transcript with the video so Google can easily crawl it and index it.

Adding Long-Form Blog Posts to Your Content Strategy

Your content strategy should detail what you’re publishing, who it’s for, and when it should go live. For example, if you want to do a blog post about eco-friendly dry cleaning, you will want to determine your audience (people who are curious about green cleaning but haven’t tried it out yet) and then create your timeline. Your posting date should provide you with plenty of time to create, edit, upload, and optimize your content. 

To add long-form content to your pre-existing strategy, you will want to create a column specifying the content type or length to your spreadsheet or doc. 

Next, take a look at what’s already on your content strategy. Could some of your blog post ideas be used as a basis for more comprehensive posts? If so, note that in your length/content type column. If not, spread out your content to create room for longer posts and begin the content and keyword research process to find exciting angles to tackle.

You should try to do a long-form content piece every month. As with all blog posts, consistency is important, so stick to your schedule and continue to create new content that appeals to your target audience.

If you don’t already have a content strategy, what are you waiting for? Content is one of the best ways to get more people to your website and highlight what’s unique about your business. 

Need help brainstorming ideas, generating posts, or just running your blog in general? Want the results without the learning curve? With Digital Neighbor’s content service, you get a whole content team on your side. Contact us today to learn more.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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What is Retargeting? (& What You Need to Know to Get Started)

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If you have used PPC ads as part of your digital marketing strategy, you probably know what targeting is. By filtering who can see your ads by age, location, time, and other factors, you can increase the effectiveness of your campaigns by ensuring your ads are popping up for people who are most likely to buy from you. But what about retargeting? What is it, and when does it come into play?

What Is Retargeting?

When you run a PPC or display ad campaign, a cookie or pixel is installed on the browser of those who click on it. You can also install said cookie or pixel on the devices of individuals who visit your website. 

This cookie or pixel allows you to show those individuals additional ads. So retargeting is the ability to reconnect with prospective customers or clients who have already taken steps to engage with your business in some way.

When Can You Use Retargeting?

To retarget individuals who have clicked on your ads or visited your website, you must be able to place a cookie or pixel on their browser. Some users may not allow this. They may have particular security settings on their browsers that reject these trackers. Additionally, some platforms no longer allow tracking or make it very difficult. Recently, Apple changed how users are tracked when on their mobile devices, making it harder for marketers to use Google and Facebook ads for potential retargeting of customers. 

As long as you have a cookie or pixel attached to your ad or installed on your website—and as long as visitors allow it to be placed on their devices—you can create retargeting campaigns to reconnect with those visitors.

Why Should I Use Retargeting?

Retargeting is one of the most effective ways to increase conversions. By reaching back out to people who have completed particular actions like visiting your website or adding an item to their cart, you can increase their chances of making a purchase from you or engaging your services.

Retargeting can:

  • Reduce cart abandonment
  • Increase brand awareness
  • Increase conversions/sales

Not only that, but retargeting ads have a higher click-thru rate than regular ads. Why? Because you are simply reminding people that they were already interested in your company or product. According to Wishpond, that CTR is 10 times higher than regular ads. 

Who Should You Retarget?

The value of targeting comes from only showing your ads to those individuals who are most likely to buy from you. This is the same for retargeting. If you want to increase your conversions and sell more, you only want to retarget those who have shown interest in your products and services. 

When narrowing down your retargeting list, consider:

  • Which action or activity you wish to retarget (do you want to focus on individuals who have visited a specific page, submitted their email, clicked a particular button, or added something to their cart?)
  • Whether you want to focus on specific customer segments (maybe you just want to retarget a specific demographic or a certain customer group interested in one specific item).
  • How frequently do you want people to see your ads? And, for how long do you want sem to see the retargeting ads? (For example, you can set a cap of 2 impressions over 5 days).
  • When you want people to see your ads (if you have a restaurant, for example, you don’t necessarily want to have ads running when you’re closed).

These questions about retargeting should allow you to create a manageable retargeting list and set clear goals for your campaigns.

Retargeting Best Practices

As you get ready to launch your first retargeting campaign, make sure to employ these best practices to get good results.

Exclude individuals who have converted/made a purchase.

When creating your campaign, be sure to exclude individuals who have already completed your desired action. Otherwise, you will waste ad spend and possibly annoy your customers or clients.

Create Different Ads for Your Different Customer Segments

Not everyone will respond the same way to your ads. If you want to increase conversions, you need to create ads for the different customer segments you’re targeting. For example, if you have services for Millennials and Boomers, create two ads that speak to the problem you solve for each demographic.

A/B Test

To get the maximum effectiveness from your campaigns, you need to test what works. With A/B testing, you can see which copy, imagery, or calls-to-action impacts your metrics so you can create better ads. Without testing your ads, you won’t know the impact of the different components of your ads. Your ads may perform well, but they could be performing even better if only you switched up the graphics, the CTA placement, or the copy. 

Track, Measure & Optimize

We always recommend that you track the performance of all your campaigns, measure the most important KPIs, and then optimize your campaigns to improve performance. If you don’t, you aren’t making the most of your marketing budget. When combined with A/B testing, tracking and measuring can help you create the most effective ads so you can wisely invest your marketing budget in the channels that work best for you.

Send Them to a High-Converting Landing Page

To make the most of your ads, make sure you send individuals who click on them to a particular landing page to take the next step in the sales funnel. Creating specific landing pages for your various ads can help ensure that you are still focusing on the same goal mentioned in your ad.

Interested in learning more about retargeting? Now that we’ve answered “what is retargeting,” let’s chat about what it can do for you and your business. Contact us today for information more specific to your industry and goals. 

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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SEO and Social Media: 5 Ways to Support Your Goals

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Any digital marketer will tell you that SEO is crucial for getting your website found online. Search engine optimization is more than just using appropriate keywords, though. There are plenty of on-site and off-site factors taken into account when creating a good SEO strategy. One SEO question we often get is whether social media impacts search rankings. While social media is not a ranking factor in and of itself, it can impact your SEO. Here’s what you should know about SEO and social media.

Types of SEO Factors

SEO is about attracting relevant organic traffic to your website. Different search engines have proprietary algorithms to determine which results they will provide during a search. No one publicizes these, though industry experts often share what they have learned about Google ranking factors through testing and what may impact them. 

I mentioned on-site and off-site factors above. When Google’s algorithm decides where your website should rank for a particular keyword, it takes a look at specific factors on your website and off of your website. 

On-site ranking factors include the keywords you use in your content, alt text, and metadata; your site hierarchy; user-friendliness; page-load speed; and more. All of these factors are predominantly in your control. You can fix your headings, create more keyword-rich content, organize your site better, etc.

Off-site ranking factors include your Google Business Profile, reviews, backlinks, directory listings (like Yelp), and social signals.

Some of these factors are in your control, while others aren’t. While you can create directory listings for your site and business, you can’t leave reviews for your business or control what people say about it.

Off-site factors help showcase how trustworthy and authoritative your business is, both of which are important for ranking well. For example, reviews show what people think of your business. Listings and your Google Business Profile help show that you are who you say you are. 

You may have noticed that social signals are an off-site ranking factor. So what are these social signals, and how do they play into your rankings? 

How Social Media Impacts Your SEO

Your social media accounts allow you to reach more people and share your content. You can build a community and increase your brand recognition through social media.

In this way, you can impact web traffic to your site. When people share your posts, they are expanding your reach and helping you reach even more people. 

While this won’t help you rank higher on its own, this will help influence other factors that help you rank higher. So if people are sharing your posts and linking to them, if those are quality backlinks, you are positively impacting your SEO. 

Now, social signals are believed to be a part of local SEO. However, estimates place it at around 2% of a ranking. This is likely from the directory listing aspect of social media. It serves as another NAP (name, address, phone number) listing for your business and helps verify that your business is legitimate.

Similarly, the brand mentions, likes, shares, and backlinks may help make up those social signals.

Again, we’re dealing with proprietary algorithms. We know based on what people have tested, studied, and learned over time. This is our best guess right now, and an algorithm change could alter this in the future.

How to Get the Most from Your SEO and Social Media Connection

While there’s no direct link between followers and SEO rankings, you should still consider how your social media can support your larger goals. To maximize your social media and ensure that it supports your SEO goals, do these five things.

Create a Social Media Strategy

Posting without a plan may get you some followers. But to get the most from your social media accounts, you should create a measurable strategy that you can amend as needed.

Your social media strategy should detail what platforms you will be posting to, how frequently you will be posting, and what types of posts you will be creating. You want to consistently post and do so in a way that aligns with your brand mission and goals.

Share and Reshare Your Content

You’ve worked hard generating exciting blog posts, infographics, images, videos, and more. Make sure they get seen by sharing them widely across your social media channels. Don’t just post them once! Create multiple posts by pulling out different quotes and asking questions. If your content is evergreen, you can reshare it periodically every few weeks or months. 

Also, think about how you can repurpose your content. Can you turn a blog post into a video you can post on your social channels? Can you do a Facebook live about an adjacent topic and then link to your blog post? 

Engage

Social media is all about being social. If you want to get the most benefit from it, you should actively engage with your followers. Respond to comments, like other people’s photos or comments, and truly create a conversation. If it feels too one-sided, people will stop engaging with your brand. Some of the most successful social media accounts are those that provide a unique voice and who are actively engaging with their audience. They don’t always focus on selling—they focus on brand awareness.

Be Original

Your social media strategy should detail your brand voice and discuss the type of imagery that is appropriate for your posts. It should help you create a space where you can positively express your brand persona in an authentic way. You want to focus on unique images and steer clear of stock photography if possible.

Don’t Just Rely on Social

Ultimately, you don’t own your social media channels. If something happens to one of your accounts, you may need to start over. Similarly, if algorithm changes impact who can see your posts, you may find yourself with limited visibility.

To ensure you’re getting the most out of your accounts, regularly send your followers to your website to sign up for your newsletter or SMS lists. These are lists you own that can’t be taken away from you. While you’ll need to adhere to federal guidelines (don’t worry, most platforms take care of this for you), your lists provide you with a direct link to your customers. And yes, people are willing to open your newsletters!

SEO & Social Media: Conclusion

SEO and social media are linked, but not directly. That doesn’t mean you should ignore social media, though. Social media can boost your brand visibility and introduce you to new potential customers. It can also be a part of our customer service experience.

We hope this post has given you a better idea of the impact that your social media can have on your search rankings. If you were hoping that they were more closely related and that your high follower count would lead to a better Google ranking, don’t worry. An SEO strategy that incorporates a thorough website audits, on-site improvements, and a keyword-rich content strategy can help you improve your rankings and organic traffic.

Ready to get started? Let’s chat and brainstorm about how we can help you reach your goals.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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How to Set a Digital Marketing Budget for 2022

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It’s never too early to start planning for success! Setting a winning digital marketing strategy for 2022 is key for connecting with new customers, nurturing current relationships, and building brand recognition. As 2021 winds down, we must take the lessons we’ve learned this year and transform them into actionable goals for next year.

As you look to set your digital marketing budget for 2022, keep these things in mind so you can set a flexible budget that supports your business goals.

What Do You Want to Achieve?

To better understand how much you should allocate toward digital marketing in general and which specific channels you should focus on, you should first nail down your goals for the coming year.

For example, do you want to increase your brand visibility? Draw more people to your website? Increase your online revenue by a certain percentage? 

Start visualizing your goals, and then, from there, you can start thinking about what those goals look like in action. Is brand visibility about more engagement on your social media channels? How much more traffic do you want to draw to your website? What increase in revenue do you want to see? 

By starting with the endpoint, you can better create the framework for getting there.

Review Past Campaigns

The performance of your past campaigns can help you determine which efforts may be the most advantageous for you moving forward.

If you have access to your digital marketing reporting, look at what’s driving traffic to your website, which campaigns are converting and driving sales, how well your website and specific pages and posts are performing, and what isn’t working.

Are there specific PPC keywords that you thought would work but didn’t? Did some of your ads do well while others missed the mark? Did one channel consistently outperform another? 

Consider investing more on campaigns that brought in qualified leads and running tests on channels that didn’t fare as well to see if you can improve performance.

Diversify

2021 has taught us that you shouldn’t have all of your digital marketing eggs in one basket—which is to say that you should diversify your ad spend so that if something happens on one channel, you’re still seeing the benefits of your strategy. This year, Apple shook up the effectiveness of PPC on Facebook and Google with their new privacy features—and something similar could always happen with little to no notice. By diversifying your campaigns, you can help minimize the effect of any one channel on your revenue.

Different channels and tactics to consider include:

  • Display Ads: It’s not all about PPC! Display ads are a great way to get your message right into your customers’ hands.
  • Alternative Channels: If you’ve only ever done PPC ads on Google, consider checking out Bing Ads or investing in social media ads.
  • Content Marketing: Blog posts, newsletters, videos—content marketing is all about creating valuable content that potential customers want to read.
  • SEO: Search engine optimization can help you get found more easily online. From keeping your Google My Business profile up-to-date and link-building to creating new web pages to capture additional keywords, SEO helps set you up as the answer to a searcher’s query.

Some tools, like SEO and content marketing, are useful regardless of your goals, though increased budgets can help you improve your search rankings and grow your organic traffic more quickly.

While considering which channels may work best for you, think about new tools that you haven’t used before. For example, if you’ve stuck mainly with written content, why not do a video? It can be a great way to share a difficult concept or a new product with your audience while illustrating everything that makes your brand great. Set aside some funds for trying something new and for testing different tools so that you have the wiggle room to continually improve your strategy. You want your digital marketing strategy to remain agile, not go stale!

Also, think about whether it’s time for a refresh. How old is your website? Is it working well for you? Is your branding out of date? These are both essential tools for building connections and converting visitors into customers or clients. Suppose your website is lacking features that are now expected, like mobile responsiveness and user-friendliness. In that case, it’s probably time to launch a new site that positively highlights everything great about your business. Get started with a website audit to identify opportunities.

Allocate Enough

Sometimes, you don’t see the effects of a campaign unless you invest enough into it. Running a $100 campaign over a month will not get you the data you need to create a winning ad that consistently gets you new leads. The old adage is true—you gotta spend money to make money. And nowhere is that more evident than with your digital marketing plan. 

One general rule is to allocate about 10% of your revenue towards marketing, with almost half of that being for digital marketing. However, if you’re just starting or are launching some new initiatives, that may not be enough. Consulting with a digital marketing agency about your goals could help provide you with additional guidelines that are more specific to your industry and what you want to achieve. Plus, the cost of certain digital marketing campaigns will vary depending on your industry, so it’s always a good idea to get input from an expert as you set your budget. The PPC costs for lawyers, insurance agents, and financial experts can be much higher than those for other professionals because the keywords are so highly sought after. If you want to utilize those tools that are guaranteed to get you seen, you need to know how much they cost to invest enough to get you the results you want.

Also, if you are planning any product or service launches, don’t forget to increase your budgets during those launches to make the most of them and attract attention! 

Are you ready to talk about creating a digital marketing budget for 2022? Let’s start a conversation. We’ll help you plan out which tools may be best for your businesses and provide you with guidelines for how much to invest to reach your goals. Contact us now to learn more.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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7 Holiday Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

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Small businesses have to get creative to compete for consumer attention, and that’s no different during the holiday season. If you’re ready to stand out and get your business seen during the busiest shopping time of the year, follow our tips for rocking your holiday marketing this year.

1. Research!

Let’s talk about PPC and display ads.

Not all keywords, approaches, or ad types are going to work well for your business. If you want to succeed with Google Ads, Facebook Ads, or Display Ads, you need to understand your target audience and how they use different platforms. 

So what do you need to consider to build out a winning digital marketing strategy for the holidays?

First up, think about who your audience is. Are they busy moms who juggle work and parenting? Millennials with disposable income who love animals? Parents, who need an easy but healthy meal option at the end of the day?

From there, you can start extrapolating what problem your service, product, or shop solves for your target audience and how it does it.

One way to get insight into this is to look at your 5-star reviews. For example, a quick look at our Google Reviews shows that our clients think:

  • We’re easy to work with
  • We’re helpful and willing to explain complex concepts
  • We’re knowledgeable about what we do

We could run a campaign that differentiates us from the competition by showcasing our expertise and willingness to share information from these insights. These are traits that resonate with our clients, and most likely, with our target audience.

Once you know your audience and how to approach them, you need to research which keywords to bid for if you’re opting for PPC or display ads.

Your keywords should reflect the terms your customers use to find you. These keywords may reference particular services, products, or areas. Let’s say you’re selling poinsettias in Tampa and are offering delivery. Possible keywords may be Tampa poinsettias, poinsettias in Tampa, Tampa flower delivery, Tampa holiday flowers, etc.

It’s important to note that your holiday keywords may differ from keywords you use during the rest of the year. Right now, people are focused on gift-giving and prepping for the festive season. So, while you may sell great musical equipment and focus on branded keywords during most of the year, during the holiday season, you may need to tweak your keywords to highlight your most popular giftable items.

There are a variety of tools you can use for keyword research. If you’ve run campaigns in the past, give your historical data a lookover. You should also examine your Google Analytics dashboard to identify current trends and see where your traffic is coming from. Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs can help you find popular keywords in your industry, and don’t forget to do a competitor analysis to see what the competition is bidding on!

2. Start Your Holiday Marketing Early

Right now, there’s a lot of pressure on businesses because of the supply chain, staffing, and shipping issues. Customers are being told to shop early—which means businesses need to start advertising early. While there will always be last-minute shoppers that you can try to win over, you don’t want to bet the bank on them. Start your digital marketing ASAP!

Keeping track of your ad performance year-round and understanding which channels work best for you can help you mobilize quickly. 

3. Engage!

Want to make authentic connections with your customers? Engage with them in a fun way. Hold a giveaway or ask them to submit a fun photo featuring your product or their favorite holiday activity. 

With the latter, you can feature the top entries on your social posts. User-generated content is extremely popular on sites like Instagram. It shows you have a unique connection with your target customer and helps your followers see how your product or brand could fit into their own lives.

The sky’s the limit with this one. Ask your customers to create festive jingles featuring your brand for a chance at a gift card or have them share their favorite holiday recipes. The only thing you need to focus on is being authentic to your brand. Whatever you post or share should be in line with your brand voice and mission.

For maximum impact, try to do something similar every year. That way, it becomes an identifiable part of your brand and something your customers look forward to year after year.

4. Feature Your Own Gift Guide

Have some great items or services that you want to make sure customers know about? Or how about some new seasonal offerings you want to share? Creating a gift guide and sharing it on your blog, social media channels, and newsletter is a great way to highlight your unique products or services and show why they make great gifts for different audiences. Create gift guides featuring the best relaxing products for Mom, top science gifts for tweens, fun gifts for your techie boyfriend, or whatever aligns with your brand goals. Get creative!

5. Don’t Forget the Last-Minute Shoppers

It’s a given that some people will start their holiday shopping late or forget to buy a gift. Make it easy for those last-minute shoppers to score something great by offering deals near the end of the holiday season, like 10% off your gift cards. Or you can bundle some products or services together to create a unique last-minute gift idea.

6. Use a Countdown Timer

A sense of urgency can be crucial for getting customers to take advantage of an offer like free shipping or a deal. A countdown timer can also serve as a reminder for the last day to score regular shipping to ensure holiday delivery during the holiday season. You can find a fun, festive countdown and have it show up on particular pages on your site or sitewide.

7. Hire a Holiday Marketing Expert

Often, small business owners end up putting too much on their plates. In addition to worrying about the day-to-day operations of your business, you don’t need to tackle the learning curve of digital marketing. Rather than wasting time and money on teaching yourself how to use different ad platforms, make sure you hit the mark from the start with a skilled team ready to score your results.

At Digital Neighbor, we’re all about helping our clients reach their goals and grow their businesses. We help them navigate the sometimes confusing waters of digital marketing to focus on what they do best—running their businesses. From SEO and PPC Ad Management to Social Media Management and Content Creation—we support small businesses through a suite of services engineered to get them noticed. When you hire a digital marketing agency, you benefit from their combined experience, the ability to scale quickly, and a partner that wants you to succeed. Ready to get started? Contact us, and let’s chat about how to make a holiday marketing campaign that gets your business noticed.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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The Importance of Social Media Tracking for Businesses

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Research shows that less than 30% of marketers know how to measure their social media efforts. Without the ability to measure your return on investment (ROI), there’s no way to know how to make social media platforms work for you.

Since there are 4.74 billion social media users, it’s important to make sure you’re reaching these potential customers effectively. Understanding and using the social media tracking tools available is an important step in getting the most out of your social media efforts.

These tracking tools help you make important decisions about your marketing strategies. How can tracking tools help you? There are five areas that social media tracking helps you increase your business.

How Social Media Tracking Helps You Measure Success

81% of small and medium-sized businesses currently use social media as part of their marketing strategy. Without a plan in place to measure these attempts though, this interaction means nothing.

By utilizing tools on the different social media platforms, or using tools such as Google Analytics, you can make sure your social media efforts are reaching the right people in the right way.

Help Create Effective Campaigns

One way these tracking tools can help you measure social media success is by helping you see how your social media campaigns perform. When you create content to share on social media, you need to know what content proves most effective.

Tracking tools help you see what content gets the most response so you get the most out of your efforts. You can see

  • Which campaigns are working best.
  • What content gets the most response.
  • Which demographics are responding most with your content.

Understanding these factors will help you create more compelling content. This will also help you determine where your leads come from and how to better reach your target demographic.

Part of creating effective content is understanding who will respond to the content. If you use tracking tools you can tailor your campaigns to reach the audience you need to reach.

This will also help you see when certain content is losing steam so you can rotate accordingly. It’s important to make sure your content stays relevant to social media users to get the best interaction.

Determine Which Platforms Work Best

To reach your target demographic, you first have to know where to find them. By using social media tracking tools, you can determine what content works best for each social media platform.

Understanding how different content performs on each platform will help you determine which platforms to give the most attention to. Just because a platform is popular doesn’t mean it’s the right platform for you.

For example, 68% of social media users are on Facebook. Facebook is more about personal interaction though. If your brand is geared towards other businesses you’ll likely have more results from a platform like LinkedIn than Facebook.

Utilizing tracking information will also help you determine how often and at what times you should post content for the platforms you use. This helps to ensure you’re reaching more of your audience effectively.

Know Who’s Interacting With Your Brand

part of a successful social media campaign is creating customer loyalty. By using tracking tools, you can find out which customers are interacting with your content. You can also find out who’s talking about your brand.

If you know who your loyal fans are, you can create campaigns to reward these loyal followers. This helps you create more brand loyalty and keeps your customers talking about you.

Creating loyalty campaigns can also help you reach new followers. People like to feel appreciated and they will share their experiences with others. If people see that you appreciate current customers, they’ll want to give you their loyalty as well.

This can also help you determine what’s most important to your followers. This way you make sure you’re keeping them around by addressing their concerns and interests.

Differentiate Between Real and Fake Traffic

There are plenty of bots and scammers out there that can skew your traffic results. With the proper tracking tools in place, you can determine where your real traffic comes from.

Tracking tools can tell you how many clicks, likes and shares your content receives. If you rely solely on how many people see your content, this doesn’t give you a clear idea of the response to your campaigns.

Tracking tools also show you where these interactions come from. This will help you see if any of the interactions are inflated and determine the true interactions.

Help Create Realistic Goals

If you want to grow your business, you need a way to set realistic goals. Using social media tracking helps you see

  • How many followers you have
  • Who those followers are
  • What content interests them most
  • How often people interact with you

Understanding the effect your content has will help you create new growth goals that you can reach. By seeing the growth you already have you can better understand how to create more organic growth moving forward.

Knowing how your campaigns are doing also helps you create new goals. Sometimes goals need to change based on what’s already working for you.

If you see a campaign is working on one platform, you may want to see if you can recreate that success on another platform. If you see that a certain platform isn’t working out, you can make decisions about changing your strategy or letting go of that platform.

How to Measure Social Media Success

To get started measuring your social media success, you first need to understand what tracking tools are available to you. You also need to understand what information they provide.

Each social media platform provides analytics tools to help you track your progress. These tools will show you information such as

  • How many people have seen each post
  • How many people have interacted with the post
  • How many likes you have
  • How many shares each post has received
  • When your posts have the most interaction

Each platform shares this information in a different way, so it’s important to get yourself familiar with the set-up of each platform’s analytics tools. These tools will help you see which posts are most popular.

These analytics will also help you see the demographics for who interacts with individual posts. This will help you tailor content.

This tracking information will also help you see how many people click through to your website. This will help you see how many leads you get from content.

Using Google Analytics

Chances are you’ll want a little more detailed information about your social media efforts. By setting up Google Analytics for your website, you can get a better idea of how effective your social media campaigns are to sending leads to your website.

Google Analytics helps you get a better idea of where you’re getting your website traffic from. This will better help you determine which social media platforms are working for you.

This analytics tool will also help you track which pages, posts and media are getting the most interaction on your website. This will help you determine what to share in your social media campaigns. This will also help you see which campaigns are already working for you so you can more effectively drive traffic to your site.

How to Use this Tracking Information

To get the most out of your tracking efforts, you need to know what you’re tracking. Determine what’s most important to you.

Do you want to know how much traffic you get? Do you need to know your conversion rate? Do you want to understand how much interaction you receive in general?

Understanding what’s most important to your business goals will help you track the right information. It’s important to create clear goals for your social media campaigns to get the most out of your tracking efforts.

Make sure you check your results regularly. It’s best if you set time once a week to check your results so you can make any necessary changes to your social media campaigns.

You also need a willingness to change goals as necessary. Watch the trends around your campaigns so you can readjust your efforts. Sometimes things work differently than you expect and you need to prepare for this.

Re-evaluate your goals regularly. A good rule of thumb is to do a monthly evaluation of your social media goals.

Look at what’s working and what’s not. Determine how you can use the most popular material to create new campaigns. Do not be afraid to change the game-plan.

Creating Successful Social Media Campaigns

Social media tracking is just one aspect of your strategy. To create successful social media campaigns you need to understand how to use this information to create an overall strategy. A successful social media strategy should fit in well with your overall marketing strategy.

If you’re not sure where to start, there are options available. For help with your social media or digital marketing strategy, contact us to see if our solutions could help your business.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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Why You Should Hire a Local SEO Company – Your Friendly, Neighborhood SEO Expert

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Are you trying your hand at local SEO? Do you want people in your area to find you more?

Local SEO is a fool-proof method for someone to find you in your geolocation. It helps make your business stronger and can bring in the right people.

If you want to hire an SEO expert, the smart way to do it is to find someone near.

A local SEO company has many distinct advantages over an outsider. If you’re not convinced or if you’re still on the fence, we’ve got you covered.

Keep reading to discover why you should hire a local SEO specialist. We promise, the best SEO expert for your area is someone right around the corner:

1. Local SEO Experts Know The Area

The first reason why you’d want an expert SEO company from your area is their knowledge. Local SEO is more potent if your experts know the lay of the land. Their inherent understanding of your local audience will give you a natural advantage.

Targeting a locale means you need to have a deep understanding of its people. Every area has different customs, traditions and diverse mix of demographics. If you are targeting for a locale, you want an organic SEO expert that knows what people want.

The best SEO expert knows what people’s tastes are. They know what type of searches the locals do and have connections that can get your name around.

If you’re a brick and mortar business, you want to create a genuine connection with the target locale. They know how to design the right system. They also know how to help improve your visibility.

If you’re from Tampa, a Tampa SEO expert can give you the nitty-gritty on how to get the hearts of Tampa people. They know what approach works for the locals.

2. Easier Consultation

Another advantage of hiring a local expert SEO company is the proximity. If you hire someone from nearby, it’s easier to access their services whenever you want. In the SEO and marketing world, easy access to your experts is invaluable.

If you get an SEO expert nearby, you know where to find them in case they don’t answer. This is not possible when you have a remote SEO team.

When you have a new idea, new trends or issues, your organic SEO expert is there. You don’t have to go out of state to discuss your business with them.

When your optimization team is nearby, business meetings are not a hassle. This means you can go for a more precise goal with them, as any revisions are possible to discuss in perform.

3. Local Talent = Better Background

Let’s say you’re looking for the best SEO expert in your area. To find the best, you need to check on different teams and see how they can take care of your business. This means you need to find a broad number of options to choose from.

Hiring local means you can vet for the expert SEO company you need without hassle. You can visit their offices nearby, get them to visit you or meet in a neutral location.

This gives them time to show you their portfolio and their battle plans. If you go local, this means these people are in their best shape. They can show you how to make your business more visible.

Getting a local organic SEO expert also means your vetting is much easier. Skype and video calls are great ways to conduct meetings. Even then, there’s no way you can substitute face to face interview.

Local talent means you can find a better background with your potential SEO team. This helps with them being more honest with what they can do. Take this as a way of filtering them.

4. Results with Less Frustration

If you call SEO expert companies, the last thing that you want are greenhorns or those who will dupe you. Many businesses online tend to care less if they don’t see their clients face to face. This can lead to incongruent goals and even paying for lousy service.

The standard issue with online service providers is how shady they tend to be. Many services will promise you the world to get your money. Once you start, you’ll dread that all they can offer are basic things that will not help you grow.

If you get a local expert company, you cut down the chances of bad service to the least possible outcome. For example, hiring a Tampa SEO expert, if you’re from the area, means it’s easy to run the entire project with them. You’ll see the results for yourself and make the whole plan actionable.

When your service providers are close by, you reduce the frustration from SEO mistakes. You can call of quick meetings, adjust the mistakes and start working again. This means there’s more confidence in the project.

This also means that you get more out of each success. You can work on more strategies with your expert SEO company. That’s more planning time and more execution time for everyone.

5. Hire SEO Expert From Locale for a Bigger Network

When you have a local organic SEO expert, they can help you find more vehicles to improve your SEO. This ties with their knowledge of the local culture. How?

Most SEO teams have a network of companies working with them. This network can create a web of businesses that you can work within your local SEO.

A good example is trading guest posts to feature each other’s businesses. People in communities have a tendency to create a bigger network to help each other out. Even if you don’t want the network, the best SEO expert in your locale can use techniques that work for others in the area.

This is great, considering ranking for local SEO means a more explicit local presence. Local focus means working together with others in your general area to carry each other.

6. Less Time Needed to Adapt Techniques

When you want tried and tested local SEO skills, it may be hard if they’re not from your area. Sure, they may be able to do SEO, but the ability of a remote SEO team to adapt your optimization needs may take a while.

Businesses outside your locale will not have enough insights to understand what people may want. They don’t know the local culture so it may take a few tries before they get the right mix of techniques. This may lead to frustrations on your side and a delay from the trial and error.

While it’s good to test and adapt, don’t you think you want to cut down on it a bit? You want someone who understands your target audience. You want the best SEO expert that knows the target market because they’re part of it.

Getting a local expert means they have an idea of what to do, which means they need to do less trial and error. They did this many times over for other clients, so they know what they’re doing.

We keep talking about the local firm understanding the locale better, and it’s true. Even then, another advantage of having to hire an SEO expert from your locality is their understanding of current marketing trends in the area.

Every locale has a different marketing trend going for them. This translates to a unique way of knowing where the tide of your target customers will go. They can then provide you with fresher ideas to improve your conversions.

If you’re in the Tampa area, a Tampa SEO expert has valuable knowledge of the current trends. They can then use these trends in your favor, letting you get the right audience for your business.

Getting the right consumer trends means a better, more targeted optimization effort. It stops your business from wasting money on broad results that do not convert.

8. Local Optimization Teams

Hiring local SEO teams can help you with the growing pains of SEO. Many small businesses tend to forget, but search engine optimization is not instantaneous. It takes at least 3 to 6 months to take effect.

As your business grows, there will be ups and downs when it comes to your optimization efforts. Even if you get an SEO expert, they won’t hit all the marks all the time. There will be down times – issues that they should resolve.

Getting a local team means you can create better strategies to correct these issues. Matching goals with a new SEO team can take a bit of work, so having a local expert SEO company makes all the difference.

Working with an SEO team from the other side of the country, or even the world, is not optimal. Time zones, work cultures, and priorities will never match up. If you’re in Tampa, a Tampa SEO expert can be the perfect match when it comes to goals and priorities.

9. A Local SEO Team Is Cost Efficient

When you’re working out your business, one of the things that you want to have in your SEO agency is cost efficiency. You don’t want to waste money, so working with an organic SEO expert in the area works.

First, this prevents you from having to hire an in-house team. If you need local SEO, getting an in-house team is a good option. The problem is you’ll pay them whether or not there are results.

The problem? Results only come after a few months in SEO. This means you’re stuck with paying employees that you’re not sure with the results.

You would also need to pay for your team’s tools. Without SEO tools, it’s going to be hard to automate many small things in optimization.

When you hire an expert SEO company, everything comes bundled together. This includes the people, expertise and the tools of their trade. Because you’re paying tested experts, you assure yourself of the stable outcome.

SEO companies will show results. Otherwise, they will lose you as a client.

When you hire an organic SEO expert, you’re paying for results. They will find a way to work with your budget and give your business some gains.

Local teams tend to cost lower than online and out of the area SEO teams. Not only will they save you money from not needing to hire, but they’ll also save you money from needing fewer steps to do the same work.

10. Tiered Services Right for Your Needs

When you rely on an SEO expert from your locale, you’re not only getting SEO. Many local services will provide supplemental services that will fit your local target audience. From PPC, web design to social media, they’ll make sure you get something that helps you succeed.

For businesses in the United States, a Tampa Local SEO consultant will give you the right combination of services that appeal to the locals. This may start with a PPC campaign as a headstart, and then work it with local SEO.

You will get an integrated step-by-step program on how you get your share of your local audience. If they’re from the area, this digital marketing plan will suit the local flavor. There will be specific keywords, segment research, and interest gauges that fit your needs.

A plan that fits your needs means better results at a faster rate. If something doesn’t go as you plan, they can also change their approach without losing track. Local SEO is a matter of who can do the best corrections after all.

In Tampa? Find the Local SEO Expert Near You

If you are boosting your local business, you’ll be hard pressed not to find the best local SEO expert near you. They know the lay of the land, they know who to target, and they know how to do it.

Hiring local not only helps the economy. It gives your business the level of flexibility and agility you won’t get when working online.

If you’re from the Tampa area and you’re looking for a Tampa SEO expert team, all you need is Digital Neighbor.

Digital Neighbor specializes in SEO, local SEO and digital marketing for the small and medium businesses of Tampa. Whether it’s a multi-location business or you need that extra visibility online, we know how to win you the results that matter.

Talk to us at Digital Neighbor and see why this expert SEO company is the right one for you. Get our neighborly advice now or explore our SEO services.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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7 Outlandish Benefits of SEO Teamed Up with PPC

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Chocolate is great on its own. But when you combine chocolate with peanut butter, you have a tasty revolution.

The same is true about SEO. In fact, there are benefits of SEO and PPC all on their own. But when you combine the two, you end up with a complete marketing strategy that leads to greater searchability for search engines and your customers to find your website.

We want you to create a marketing strategy this year that helps you succeed. With that in mind, we’re sharing with you what happens when you team up SEO with PPC.

The Benefits of SEO Include PPC

SEO (search engine optimization) is used to increase your site’s organic ranking on search engines. It’s done by using targeted keywords along with high-quality content.

There are several components that help create effective SEO. And when done correctly, PPC is a part of an SEO strategy.

Let’s take a look at the components that make up an effective SEO strategy.

On-Page Optimization

Your first step is on-page optimization. This strategy involves using specific keywords in your metadata and content which allow search engines to easily crawl your site.

External Links

External links are backlinks to your site from various sources. These external sources help add relevancy and authority to your site.

PPC

Finally, there’s PPC or pay-per-click. How does PPC work? It’s a strategy businesses use where they only pay for advertising when someone clicks on a link that takes them to a specific landing page the business has set up for marketing purposes.

However, PPC is only effective when the landing page consists of relevant information that converts people into taking a specific type of action that the business wants them to take.

When done correctly, PPC is cost-effective and helps in the conversion process.

How to Combine SEO and PPC Together

One easy strategy is to modify your organic keyword strategy in order to create and optimize new content. Doing so helps you rank higher within a specific geographic location.

You’re applying exact phrases that your niche market uses that will align with their intentions.

Combining SEO and PPC also helps you adjust your PPC budget so that you’re only running ads directed at your most popular markets and during the most effective time frames. This strategy helps you to enjoy maximum profits while paying the least amount of money.

And combining the two together helps you align your PPC ads with an offline marketing schedule to maximize on public awareness and conversions.

Now let’s look at the benefits.

1. Increased Visibility

When someone performs an online search it’s not uncommon for them to find thousands of results. But between 71% and 92% of consumers are searching beyond the first page of their results.

Even results found on the second page only yield 6% of all website clicks.

By combining SEO and PPC, it adds to your site’s overall exposure on search engine results pages (SERPS). The problem is that when it starts working effectively and their website begins to rank, clients often feel they can reduce their PPC efforts.

The Top Searches Are PPC Ads

But it’s also important to remember that the top two or three results on most SERPs are actually PPC ads.

When you use both strategies together, you’ll dominate not only organically but in paid search results. Your goal is to have your company featured at the top not only for PPC reasons but because your SEO campaign is also highly effective and you’ve ranked at the top organically as well.

Using them together greatly increases your online traffic.

It also gives the impression to potential customers that your business is an established presence in a particular market.

2. Shared Keyword Data

It cannot be stressed enough the importance of using the right keywords for your campaign. That’s just as true for SEO as it is for PPC.

Keywords are used in PPC to increase relationships with your consumers who are already at least partway down your conversion funnel.

In SEO, keywords are used to determine what information you share on your website and the content you add to it. Keywords help your audience find the most relevant content on your website.

When PPC and SEO Work Together

In both PPC and SEO keywords help you align with your core audience’s online behavior, drive qualified conversions, and project traffic growth.

By sharing keyword data, you can coordinate your messages to keep your brand on the top of your customers’ minds as well as soliciting qualified conversions.

3. Testing Your Keywords with PPC

It’s not always easy to determine which keywords are most effective for your marketing campaign. One way to easily test out keywords and phrases is to use them for your PPC ads.

This way, you get immediate feedback on how effective your organic keywords are. You can easily and quickly make changes to your strategy until you find a winning combination.

4. Shared Goals and Metrics

Make sure you know how to read and understand your stats from both your PPC and SEO strategies. It will help you to understand how well your campaigns are going and you can more quickly and easily pinpoint when and where you need to change or tweak a strategy.

But it does more than that. You can use that data to support your brand’s inbound marketing campaigns.

Your Metrics Help You Achieve All Your Goals

By knowing your bounce rates, pages per session, and average session duration, you can gain tremendous insight as to how your consumers are interacting with your ads and site. You can even figure out how they behave after they leave your site.

But not only can you apply the information and insights you’ve gained to your PPC and SEO strategies, but you can also apply them to other marketing channels such as email marketing, PR, and even social media.

Don’t Treat SEO PPC as Separate Entities

The information you gather from both your SEO and PPC efforts should be shared. If you have separate departments working on these two efforts, make sure your teams share the following:

  • Communication portals
  • Objectives
  • Reporting

Combining the two together helps increase internal awareness of key conversion opportunities.

5. Increased Social Media Visibility

$32 billion dollars were spent on social media marketing worldwide in 2017. By 2021, that figure is expected to grow to $48 billion. In 2016, the US alone spent $14.8 billion dollars alone.

Social media advertising has many advantages. For one, it’s affordable. Facebook allows you to create a marketing campaign for as little as $1 per day.

And it’s incredibly easy to create ads targeted to specific groups of people by using the social media site’s profile information of its users.

You can take that data from your campaigns to discover small details about your target audience that can help you refine and perfect your strategies.

6. Helps Negate Negative Publicity

No matter how great your products or services are not everyone will become a fan. At some point, it’s highly likely someone will say something negative about your company.

And you’ll need to do damage control. It’s a lot easier to ensure a positive outcome when you combine SEO with PPC.

That’s because you’re focusing on visibility. It’s a strategy that lets you guide the conversation effectively as you control the results from your SEO and PPC campaigns for a specific term.

Control Your Story No Matter How Bad the PR is

After the oil spill in the Gulf, BP had a lot of negative press to handle. BP paid for PPC ads that were linked to the keywords “oil spill.”

That PPC advertisement then led to a page on BP’s website that talked about the cleanup effort they were making. BP took control of where the conversation was heading.

More recently Wells Fargo dealt with a scandal involving fake accounts their employees set up to reach their quotas. Wells Fargo embarked on a huge campaign involving social media, email marketing, and PPC advertising.

It’s all focused on the messages of forgiveness and change.

Using a combination of PPC and SEO allows you to be in the driver’s seat no matter what happens.

7. Reach Previous Visitors By Remarketing Your Campaign

It’s not uncommon to have your website rank well thanks to SEO efforts. You might find your traffic numbers are high but there’s still a problem.

There are shoppers or potential leads who are taking their sweet time making up their minds. By combining SEO with a form of PPC called remarketing, you can bring back those visitors so they complete their purchase or make their conversion at a later date.

Say you sell women’s clothing on your website. Someone shops on your site and has a full cart but hasn’t yet made a purchase.

Remind Customers About Their Intended Purchase

You can then purchase ad space from a website in Google’s network. Your customers then see those ads for the same exact purchases they have in their cart at a later time.

It’s a way to remind your shoppers to come back to your site to complete their purchase. You can reach previous visitors to encourage them to finish their purchase or convert them into a lead rather than letting them forget about you and their full cart entirely.

Get Help

The benefits of SEO and PPC together are numerous. They act together as a powerful team to ensure you get and keep your customers coming back time and again.

It’s a great way to increase visibility and slay the competition. But it’s not easy to implement a strategy on your own.

We can help. Contact us and we’ll help you get started in the right direction.

Eric Ritter, CEO

Eric Ritter

Eric is the conductor of an orchestra here at Digital Neighbor. He knows how all the digital instruments should sound together. When he’s not solving marketing challenges for the neighborhood, Eric is also an adjunct professor at the University of South Florida, where he teaches Digital Media in the Zimmerman School of Advertising and Mass Communications.

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