If you work in web marketing then you will know that it is ever evolving and you need to keep on top of new techniques and advances in order to do your job correctly. One of the major placers when it coms to marketing is Google. Google is the most used search engine and therefore it is important you follow their advance and guidance to try and get your websites ranked high.

Google have a number of free courses you can do which will help you learn about the different products they offer and how to use them. There are courses on Analytics, Ads, YouTube and Shopping for example. These courses are designed to teach you what you can do through these different marketing channels. Within each category you often have a series of course to complete. Some are aimed at beginners and then some are for the more advanced. You will first have to do a pre assessment, then you will learn about the platform then you will be given a short post assessment questionnaire to see how much you have learnt. These accreditations can then be linked to your Google account in Adwords etc to show you are certified.

With any website, it is important to have ways in which you can track how it is performing and how successful it is. There are several ways in which you can do this but one that is vitally important is to check where you rank organically on the search engines. Organic listings are the ones that are not listed as a lid for ad. The search engines have a ranking algorithm with they use in order to help them decide which websites to put where when a keyword or phrase is searched for. This algorithm is often secret but they usually will tell you roughly what they are looking for.

If you notice that your rankings are starting to fall down, it’s time to do some investigation work. Have a look at the traffic to your site and see if that has also dropped. Sometimes rankings can drop for no apparent reason and then they bounce back up so it is recommended that you monitor them for a week or so to see if it is a true drop in rankings. If it is then you may need to enlist the help of a marketing agency who will be able to assist you in improving the rankings once again.

When it comes to devising a marketing plan you may need to think about on page and off page marketing. On page marketing is work that is done directly on your website to influence its rankings and visibility on the search engines and improve conversions. It includes SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), content writing and includes adding internal links to other pages and improving or adding meta data, adding XML site maps and robots.txt files. This is just a few examples.

Off age marketing is work that you do away from your site with the aim of improving your site remotely. For example, building up external links to your site, creating blogs and comments on other sites, social media interaction, uploading videos to sites such as YouTube and PPC campaigns. These can all influenced your website success whist being controlled away from your website.

The best websites will do an element of both of these types of marketing to achieve the best results. A marketing agency will be able to advise you on what sorts of optimisation will work best for your business and which ones offer the highest return on your investment, which is especially important if your budget is tight.

As the UK slowly starts to come out of lockdown more and more businesses are investing in marketing to increase their sales. When shops and premises had to shut, a lot of businesses could only continue trading through their website or through social media sites. Lots of the general public, who had never before bought things online had to turn to the internet to make their purchases so online sales boomed in many industries. For this reason, lots of developers and online marketing companies saw an increase in demand for their services abs this has yet to slow down. Even many of the businesses that had to shut, used that time to evaluate what they were doing and how to push their business to the next level.

Companies that have continued to market their way through the pandemic should come out in a stronger position the other side of all this and may well of overtaken competitors that maybe paused everything for a while.

As a freelance web developer / marketeer or when working for a web agency it is vital that you manage your time effectively and customers’ expectations to ensure that no one is disappointed. This is crucial especially during busy periods.

If you have an established website that receives a fair amount of traffic each day then you may considering adding advertising space to your site as another way of making money. Many website owners think that they already have the site up and running so it wouldn’t be a massive amount of work to add in some advertising space.

For some businesses this can work really well but there are many important factors to consider. You need to ensure that by adding the advertising space, you are not going to put people off from using your site. If your site becomes over cluttered with adverts or pop ups you will often find that your visitor levels go down and bounce rate soars. This can mean you make money on advertisements but lose money due to lack of sales or enquiries through your site. As the traffic decreases to the site due to the adverts, you may find that your advertisers start to pull the plug too.

You may want to start off small when it comes to advertising and just have one or tow spots where you will place adverts. You can then monitor the effect this have on the traffic to your site and visitor behaviour and see whether it is worth pursuing.

A blog can be created for a number of reasons. You may have a blog to publish your own personal journey somewhere or on a specific subject such as travel or fashion. You may have a stand-alone blog site or you may have it attached to your website. Often marketing companies create blogs for their clients as a way of getting fresh, relevant content on to the site without cluttering up the main pages of the site. These blog posts should be unique and relevant to the business. Although you may of h=created the blog mostly for SEO purposes, it is important to remember that people may well read these posts so they need to be accurate and informative.

With a standalone blog you may need to work a little hard to get traffic to it as you cannot rely on traffic from a website. This can be done in several ways, but more and more people are using social media to promote their blog posts. Finding relevant groups on social media sites such as Facebook and then promoting your blog posts or page can help drive traffic through, always check what the rules of the group are in case you are not allowed to share links.

If your blog is part of a website then make sure you have a place on your home page which shows your latest blog posts as this will allow people to easily click through on to articles that are of interest to them.