How digital marketing can help to grow your business in 2022

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Running a small business in 2022 is not easy. The competition, especially online, has never been so fierce with new businesses popping up every single minute. According to First Site Guide, 64% of SMBs have a website today. Add to this the sheer volume of content being published online every single day and you realise that a digital marketing strategy is an important part of your overall business strategy.

Despite the challenging environment, there are lots of things small businesses can do to make themselves more competitive online without having to spend the earth.

Here are some of our top tips for growing your business online in 2022 and beyond.

Focus on user experience

At this point, we are going to go ahead and assume you already have a website – very few businesses can succeed in today’s competitive landscape without a strong online presence so a company website is an essential aspect.

In the past, many website designers and developers have sacrificed user experience for the sake of designing a “pretty” website with lots of cool features like scrolling banners, pop-ups, and video embeds.

The truth is, that many of these elements are distracting for the end-user and provide a negative user experience.

If you have a website that feels cluttered and makes it difficult for visitors to get to the information they are looking for, or that provides too many distractions, think about stripping it back to the basics and focussing on user experience.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and walk your way through your own website to see how they would experience your site. That way, you will gain a better understanding of the potential issues and the barriers to conversion.

There are some great examples of websites that are doing it well. Leading websites like Netflix, Amazon and Betway Casinos have all taken a customer-first approach to designing and developing their websites with easy navigation, clear headings and a clean look and feel. There is no clutter on these sites. They just make it easy for customers to do what they want to do, whether that is watching their favourite show, adding a product to their cart or placing a bet.

Optimise your website

Whilst a clean design and a focus on user experience is a great place to start, it’s also important to optimise your website for the keywords that customers are searching for.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the process of optimising the content on your website to meet the needs of people searching organically on search engines such as Google or Bing.

SEO is something that can be done in-house, however, we would always recommend working with an agency at the beginning of the project to carry out an audit of your existing website to highlight any issues. Once these have been remedied, then it is possible to work on optimising your website yourself.

Keyword research is an essential part of optimising your website as this forms the backbone of the content you need to create. Once you have identified the keywords that people are using to search for products and services that are offered by your business, you then need to create compelling content that answers those search queries in depth.

There are many different aspects to SEO but the main things to focus on are ensuring that your website is technically sound and ensuring that the content on your website is optimised for the keywords that people are searching for.

Google is constantly changing their algorithm to ensure that the websites they deliver on the first page of the search results are the ones that answer a searcher’s query in the most depth. SEO is not a one-time thing. It’s an ongoing process that has to evolve as Google evolves.

Google is constantly working to reward websites that focus on customer experience so making sure you tick those boxes as well as optimising for the right keywords will give you the best chance of increasing your website traffic from organic search.

Create engaging content

A big part of successful SEO work revolves around creating engaging content. Engaging content could be a well-written, in-depth blog post that covers off every aspect of a particular topic.

It could also be a well-edited video that answers a frequently asked question or provides an entertaining angle on a particular topic. 

Great content could also be a podcast series, a whitepaper, an infographic, or even a social media post.

People are consuming more content than ever online and whilst that presents an opportunity, it also creates a lot of competition and generates a lot of poor-quality content. According to Web Tribunal, each month, 70 million new blog posts are published on WordPress alone, drawing 77 million comments from users. Out of those 70 million posts, there is a large percentage that is low-quality and it’s important not to add to that statistic.

If you can’t invest the time to create high-quality content, it is better not to create any content at all. People’s expectations continue to grow when it comes to the content they expect to see from brands online so it’s important to ensure that you are happy with every piece of content you publish, from a simple social media post to an in-depth guide or whitepaper.

Summary

If you want to grow your business in 2022, there are three main things you need to focus on:

  1. Build a website that is customer-experience focussed
  2. Optimise your website for the keywords that your customers are searching for
  3. Create engaging content based on those keywords that educates, entertains or informs your customers

If you can tick off these three boxes, you will be going a long way toward growing your business online, helping to raise brand awareness and driving more sales and revenue.

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