Online Marketing Tips for Smart Businesses

As the world of tech-savvy businesses and online communication continues to evolve, so does the way brands connect with customers. Web-based marketing remains a highly effective tool for getting the word out about your business—if you stay up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices to maximize its value.

Knowing how to make vital adjustments as consumer behavior shifts will keep your ahead of the curve. These tips from the Hiring Headquarters—Upwork’s resource for entrepreneurs, executives, and freelancers—offer unique perspectives on expanding your online reach.

Be Smart About Brand SEO

Taking a quick and seemingly easy search engine optimization (SEO) route by resorting to shady shortcuts won’t always yield the results you’re looking for—not over the longer term. Sustainable SEO takes time, hard work, and understanding. Working smarter, instead of harder, will get you further without the hassle of learning by making costly mistakes. Integrating SEO thoughtfully into the marketing content you craft for your business is often a safer and more effective bet for growing your brand online.

“SEO, Social & Content: 3 Lessons Learned While Building My Business” outlines several important lessons about bolstering your brand through clever content marketing efforts. It encourages taking a creative, more organic approach to building top notch content to suit your niche. The article also suggests boosting your SEO by enhancing the relevance of your content, making time for targeted market research to learn more about your core audience, and taking care when delegating marketing tasks to outside parties.

Think Globally and Locally

The widespread prevalence of mobile phones puts information at our fingertips at any given moment. With location-targeted searches growing in popularity, there’s a greater chance people will visit the places that show up in search results. Capitalizing on this by optimizing your business’ website for exposure to local audiences can bring new clients to your doorstep.

“Optimize Your Web Presence for Local Searches” outlines tips to help you draw local traffic, sales, and clients to your business—all by making good use of a few simple adjustments to your website and online presence.

It recommends starting out by evaluating your current content management system (CMS) to ensure it’s as SEO-friendly as possible. Additionally, it suggests crafting a detailed Google Map listing with your store address, hours of operation, contact info, and other important tidbits. It also encourages you to seed mentions of your business online with links back to your main website.

Track Your Marketing Effectiveness

Marketing is an important but potentially expensive aspect of running a business. Whether you have a large budget or prefer a more grassroots approach, it takes time and money to implement a successful marketing plan.

This amplifies the need to track your marketing efforts so you can gauge the performance of different approaches. Tagged URLs can be a great tool to get the information you need to make adjustments to your marketing tactics. Without this valuable data, it’s hard to tell what works and what doesn’t.

“A Guide to Campaign Tagging and Online Tools for Building a Properly Tagged URL” explains what tagged URLs are and how to create them to help gauge the effectiveness of your SEO and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. The article also compares many popular tagging tools—like Google URL Builder, Terminus, Spreadsheets—and weighs out the advantages and disadvantages of each to help you decide what makes the most sense for your business.

Looking for more ways to enhance your SEO and online marketing prowess? You can find more tip-filled articles in the Hiring Headquarters.

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