Designing for Corporate Identities

Design is difficult to define, because there is a broad range of skills, projects and people involved.

Marketers have their hands in the design pot – often dictating where a design should go and what needs to be changed. Executives sometimes voice their opinions as well, to ensure designs meet a corporate identity. Even the public can get involved – like in the case of Google’s logo update – people on the Web sounded off with their opinions.

The professionals at Virtual Focused Marketing who have to take all of this into consideration are the designers who have to plan, tweak, defend and rework their creative elements. When it comes to corporate design, their hands are often tied by those trying to maintain a certain image and recognition. For those in the workplace tasked with working with designers for the first time, here’s a list of considerations everyone must make when designing for corporate identity:

THE LOGO

The logo of your company should be designed for immediate recognition. There are probably a number of companies that you can identify simply by looking at a logo. The logo is a major aspect of your company’s branding strategy. It is what helps consumers differentiate your company from your competitors. A great logo along with great branding is crucial to corporate identity. Great logos are clean, simple and extremely easy to process making them memorable to consumers. Companies should really consider somehow adding what they actually offer into the logo. Pinterest, for example, has a “pin” incorporated into its logo as users “pin” clippings from across the Web.

TYPOGRAPHY

Well-proportioned fonts have a great impact on your website and marketing collateral. Appealing to visual senses through font can help someone focus on one idea and even act on it simply based on that font. One of the most successful fonts that is quite popular and has been around for the past half century is Helvetica. It is simple yet striking. The typography can enhance a company’s motto or message. Classic serif typefaces such as Times New Roman reflect companies that are conservative. 

COLOR

Designers need to take great care when designing visual identification marks for corporations, especially when it comes to color combinations. As a marketer, executive or the like, it’s important to trust your designer in this area (although everything including colors should be tested for audience response). Choosing the right color is crucial to the overall design since colors have different meanings and theories. Color can tell a lot about a corporation and how it conducts business. The colors you settle for should emphasize the philosophy and strategy of your corporation. Check out what brand colors say about your business here, or how color affects purchases or this infographic (a preview is shown below) on how businesses use color to affect emotion (infographic by Ruby Media). 

QUALITY

Quality is a very important element when it comes to graphic design. It defines your company’s policies, responsibilities and procedures. The quality of your company design is perceived as great quality in the products and services that you offer. Quality should reflect in every aspect of your company if you want to keep your customers coming back. You should not be afraid to splurge on quality design because it is what the customers see before they can actually try your product. This is especially true of Web design. The design of a website must meet consumers’ lofty expectations with elements like prominent and intuitive navigation and site search, as well as common functionality like having the logo in the left-hand corner which will take a visitor back to the homepage wherever they are on the site. Read, “4 Habits of Successful Web Designers.”

BRANDING

Your brand tells how your company is perceived by others. It is more than just the name of the company. Your brand identity communicates your company’s strategy in a way that will attract your target consumer group. Branding is not about giving your customers a choice but showing them that you are the only and best option to choose. It builds credibility and motivates your customers. How and where a company presents its value proposition is a good example of this (here’s what not to do). The image below is a preview of this infographic detailing what makes a successful value proposition. 

COMMUNITY

Building a community is also a crucial part of your business identity. Creating a dedicated and enthusiastic community around your product is a great way to boost your reputation by leveraging this power. While social media is a great place to foster a community (check out these examples), a business will need to ensure its design elements are consistent across channels to give consumers a sense of security that they are engaging with the same company and one that values their engagement across channels. 

DBA SUPPORT

With so many moving parts in corporate identity, a company would be wise to improve its database systems fro better business process. One way to do so is by enlisting the help of a DBA (database administrator) agency that can monitor critical systems round the clock to ensure that your data is well stored and protected. This, among other factors, can ensure designers have quick access to the information they need to uphold corporate identity and make sure those with malicious intent do not. 

– See more at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/12/24/a-beginner-s-look-at-design-for-corporate-identity.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter#sthash.w4L8PB6b.dpuf

Social Selling the Winning Combination

Social Selling Importance

I read another article this morning predicting that by 2020 fifty percent of salespeople will be looking for new careers. By the way, some pundits predict that number will be much higher. With a buyer’s ability to do early stage product and solutions research, and often a disdain for being forced to work with salespeople (who waste their time) just to make a purchase, I believe it.

While the buyer’s journey has been evolving, salespeople have been slow to wake up and change how they do things. Now that the concept of social selling is being touted as the ONLY thing you need in selling, I fear that salespeople are in danger of making themselves even more irrelevant. After all, it takes more than a well written social profile or a few connections, clicks and likes to achieve sales objectives.

There is no easy button called social selling. Like all aspects of being good in sales, how you utilize social channels as part of your sales process takes work. Patience, planning, the right mindset and sales and technology skills all factor into the success equation too. In response to a different kind of buyer, salespeople and their leaders need to change their mindset and selling behavior. You cannot slap new technology – social channels – onto outdated sales approaches and expect to win. Cheesy selling, or is that sleazy selling, is still cheesy and buyers hate it. Adopting a new type of selling mindset means change. It means doing things differently, regardless of what worked back in the day.

Like anything new, there is a learning curve. Adoption takes effort, time and planning. As I’ve written about often, jumping straight to tactics is one of the primary reasons that many salespeople are floundering around trying to figure out how to make social selling work for them. From my point of view, you need three things to succeed: strategy, skills and execution.

Strategy – It is tempting to want to skip right over this important first step. You may be thinking that there isn’t time to create a strategy; you need more sales now. Make time. If you want different sales results, you need to do things differently. In less than thirty minutes and on one page, as a salesperson you can determine the ideal characteristics of your buyer, what social channels they are likely to use, figure out what training help you need, determine your core goals and establish metrics that you will track.

If you are a sales leader, do not assume that your marketing team has this covered. Even if they have a plan for using social media on behalf of the business, it probably does not address the specific needs of your sales organization.

The planning process should answer questions like these and more:

• Are our sales and marketing goals aligned?
• Who is our target audience and what do they care about?
• What social channels are our prospects likely to be engaging in?
• How can we make it easy for salespeople to track their online connections and track conversations as part of our current CRM process?
• Do we have a process for capturing leads that come from non-traditional sources like Twitter?
• Have we created and clearly communicated social communication guidelines to our salespeople?
• What social networking platforms should our salespeople use?
• Have we created a training plan to ensure that salespeople are properly prepared and have the right sales and technology skills?
• How do we define success and what will we monitor, measure and track?

With more variables to consider in today’s selling environment, there is great risk in ignoring these questions and others. Blindly jumping forward is not the answer.

Skills – Sellers today need a combination of great sales skills and the ability to use technology to strategically support their goals.

In a Digital Marketing Digest released by Silverpop last year, they say that “Buyers, fed up with crowded inboxes and irrelevant advertising noise, are shutting out content that isn’t relevant to them and using search and social to control their own buyer journeys.” Salespeople need to develop a completely different approach, but don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. If you are a cold calling fan (I’m not) and it works for you, so be it. But ignore what buyers are telling you – loudly – at your own peril. They’ve had it with salespeople whose only approach is to pitch through feature/benefit/demo dances. Those routines are out of date and waste their time.

Without training and guidance, many salespeople are short circuiting sound selling principles by using social media to cast a wider net to reach prospective buyers while simultaneously trying to sell to them. This spray and pray mentality only serves to push buyers away. Second chances are hard to come by.

To solve the skills gap, implement a training curriculum focused on:

1. Teaching salespeople consultative selling skills, which includes focus on communication, listening, good questioning, strategic thinking, planning and presentation.
2. Teaching salespeople the effective and strategic use of social media to support their sales process.

Execution – This is the step that brings everything else together. Execution is about disciplined behavior – salespeople engaging in the right activities consistently and using technology in the right way. It takes sweat equity and any expert who tells you otherwise is a fool. Don’t believe them!

A variety of sales and social media activities must be well executed. Salespeople need to represent the brand online, generate new leads, reach decision makers fast, differentiate themselves from competitors, present solutions, demonstrate business acumen, manage multiple relationships with decision makers, negotiate deals and close them quickly. Social media plays an important role in today’s selling process, but it is NOT the only thing you need.

To determine what’s working and what isn’t, sales leaders must diligently monitor and measure the effective execution of sales activities, which includes constantly evaluating the skills of their people and providing the ongoing training, coaching and support that they need to succeed.

I will close by saying that I’d like you to think of social selling as you might a winning sports team. You need a strategic play book, salespeople with the right skills who execute well at all phases of the game. Would you send a football team out on the field with players in no particular order, hand them a ball and expect them to win the Super Bowl?

Without the trinity of Strategy, Skills and Execution, salespeople may be seen by more prospects or bring in a few new leads, but they won’t win the big game over time!

Via: Social Selling

Accomplishing Goals: A Guide to Getting Stuff Done

Did you set goals for the new year?

Want to be more successful setting and achieving your goals?

To discover how to accomplish goals, and to hear about the Kickstarter campaign for his new book, I interview John Lee Dumas.

More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It’s designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview John Lee Dumas, the host of Entrepreneur on Fire, a daily podcast where he interviews entrepreneurs. John has published over 1000 podcast interviews and discovered a lot along the way. He’s about to publish The Freedom Journal: Accomplish Your Goal in 100 Days.

John will discuss goal setting and how you can gear up for your best year ever.

You’ll discover why it’s important to set SMART goals.

Listen as John Lee Dumas shares his thoughts on accomplishing goals.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.

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Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this show:

Getting Goals Accomplished

John’s plan for promoting his book

John talks about putting together The Freedom Journal throughout 2015 and shares that he will be launching it on January 4, 2016, via Kickstarter. Although he was inspired by what Seth Godin did on Kickstarter with The Icarus Deception, he’s decided to use Kickstarter in a very non-traditional way.

He says he wanted The Freedom Journal to have a significant impact beyond the people who purchase the book and shares how he decided to partner with Adam Braun of Pencils of Promise, which is a great organization that builds schools in developing countries.

John Lee Dumas decided to use Kickstarter in unique way for The Freedom Journal.

John explains what’s unique about how he’s using Kickstarter; he’s not using it as a way to raise funds to produce the books. He’s using Kickstarter as a platform for marketing and exposure, while allowing people to contribute to a cause.

Each time the project hits one of four different funding goals, John will personally donate $25,000 to Pencils of Promise on behalf of Fire Nation. He recognizes that not everyone can donate $25,000 to help build a school, but says they can buy a journal, knowing part of those proceeds will go toward building a school in a developing country.

John talks about why he’s going to keep his publishing in house and shares other plans for the rest of his 33-day launch campaign.

Someone else who has traveled around the country doing launch parties is Lewis Howes.

Listen to the show to learn about some of the Kickstarter rewards for people who purchase The Freedom Journal.

Why John wrote a book on goal setting

The Freedom Journal by John Lee Dumas.

After doing many interviews on EOFire, John says the question he’s most asked about his guests is, “What’s the magical recipe to success?” He shares that in addition to hard work for a long period of time the major commonality is that his guests know how to set and accomplish goals.

After polling his audience, John discovered his listeners struggle with setting and accomplishing goals.

He knew this was something he could solve and explains why he chose to create a leather bound journal instead of a PDF or an online app.

Listen to the show to learn how many interviews John has done for EOFire.

What’s a goal

John defines a goal as SMART, an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time Bound. If something doesn’t have those five qualities, he says, it’s not a goal.

The Freedom Journal starts by teaching you exactly how to set a SMART goal. Once you set the SMART goal, you can go forward to accomplish it.

Listen to the show to discover what John thinks keeps people from succeeding when they set a goal.

John’s military training

John talks about his military service and shares how his military training helped with his goal setting.

He says he quickly learned the value of Parkinson’s law (tasks will expand to the time allotted) and the Pareto Principle (80% of the stuff you do is not resulting in the 20% success that you want, so get rid of the excess stuff, and focus on your core 20%).

When he left the military and entered the entrepreneurial world, John says he had a completely different perspective from a lot of people. He had to adjust to the fact that the code of conduct in the military was not the same as the code of conduct in the rest of the world.

Listen to the show to hear more about John’s military “crash course” in time management.

How to set goals

John offers the example of setting a goal to “lose weight.” The problem is that saying “I want to lose weight” has no elements of the SMART acronym.

Does your goal have all five SMART qualities? Image: Shutterstock.

He explains a better way to express the goal is to say, “I want to lose 10 pounds in 45 days.” This is a SMART goal. It’s specific (you want to lose 10 pounds), it’s measurable (10 pounds), it’s attainable (losing 10 pounds in 45 days is likely feasible), it’s relevant (it matters in your life, so you will do it) and it’s time bound (you have a hard deadline, but you still need checkpoints).

John set the time period for achieving goals in The Freedom Journal as 100 days and shares why that timeline makes sense.

Within those 100 days, he’s set checkpoints along the way. For example, day one is the first of ten 10-day sprints. John calls these micro goals and describes how they get you 10% closer to your goal.

At the end of each ten-day sprint, you do a ten-day sprint review to see if you accomplished your micro goal, analyze why or why not and decide what you need to do to go forward. If you fall behind, you need to figure out what you need to do to get yourself back on track.

Listen to the show to learn how to know if a goal is relevant.

The Freedom Journal exercises

John explains how everything in The Freedom Journal continues to point, re-correct, pivot and adjust you toward achieving your 100-day goal.

Goals require course correction over time. Image: Shutterstock.

He says that when you’re working toward a goal, you need to make minor adjustments every single day and night. Accomplish those ten-day sprints. Then look back over them to make sure you had the right ten-day sprint and determine how to improve the next one.

John shares one of the exercises from his book, called quarterly reviews. Every 25 days (day 25, 50, 75), you complete two full pages that go through what’s happened the last 25 days. You identify your two major struggles and two major wins, as well as what worked over the past 25 days (25% of your entire goal) and what you need to do to pivot moving forward.

Listen to the show to discover the purpose of micro and quarterly goals.

Accountability

John talks about how his Podcaster’s Paradise community started doing accountability matchmaking 6 months ago. He says they give people a choice of being matched with one person or a mastermind of three to four people. They’ve discovered that people who get matched up with an accountability partner are finding more success and enjoyment from the Podcaster’s Paradise community.

So while the book is designed as an accountability partner, John says he’s also designed a free app that will ask you if you’ve accomplished your day’s goals, your night goals, your ten-day sprint. In addition, people who purchase The Freedom Journal can join a Facebook group where people will be encouraged to match up and become accountability partners for their 100-day goal.

Listen to the show to hear why the book is not just for entrepreneurs.

Via: Accomplishing Goals: A Guide to Getting Stuff Done  

How US buyers are looking at holiday gift ideas in 2015

With Google estimating that 30% of all online purchases now happen on mobile phones, this holiday season will see retailers fighting for shoppers’ attention across more devices and channels then ever before.

According to a new Searchmetrics study, 67% of 2,000 US consumers polled will have researched gifts online on their smartphones. However an impressive 20% say their phone is the only device they’ll use for researching gifts online during the holidays.

And where are shoppers doing the bulk of their shopping research? 62% of US consumers will have researched Christmas gifts by looking on Amazon, and 44% performing searches on Google.  

It makes sense that Amazon and Google have been named as the most popular sources of gift ideas, they are after all the biggest names in digital. However social channels are fairing well too, with 27% of consumers using Facebook, and the same percentage using Pinterest, which also revealed in November that it has accumulated 17.7m holiday gift pins on its site. 

16% of the consumers said they will use Instagram for gift ideas, while 12% mentioned Twitter.

So what can online retailers do to take advantage of the above trends and make sure they have as much visibility as possible on mobile, search and social throughout the holiday shopping season?

A few handy tips:

Pinterest

Your brand should definitely be on Pinterest, and within all those lovely, creative and diverse boards that you create you should also definitely make sure you have either Rich Pins or Buyable Pins enabled.

Rich Pins offer more details than your standard Pinterest pins, therefore making them more useful. If you’re a retailer you can include product information such as real-time pricing, stock availability and direct links to the product page.

Buyable Pins are a more direct route to purchase, with the user not having to leave the Pinterest app to buy a product within a pin they’ve found. Instead they can just click on an integrated ‘buy it now’ button.

At the moment, only a few major retailers have access to this, but if your store uses the Shopify platform then you can use these straight away.

Facebook

Yes it’s tough out there on Facebook, with branded pages almost dropping out of follower’s newsfeeds entirely. But clearly users are still using Facebook to research gift ideas, so don’t abandon all hope.

You can go the paid route and get content surrounding your products a guaranteed audience by investing in some Facebook promotion. But there’s no guarantee that audience will care about what you’re hawking. So you’ll have to be clever. 

Instead of individual product posts, why not try a ‘holiday gift guide’ that shows a range of available gifts from your store, like an online version of a Christmas catalogue. Or how about content on how your store can help you ‘survive the holidays’, or a list of ‘things to look forward to once the chaos is over’.

Basically anything that’s unexpected, funny or useful that will help your social posts stand out from the crowd.

Search

Make sure update your holiday hours on your Google My Business page. In November, Google launched a feature that allows you to pre-schedule specific hours for holidays or special events on your business page.

This is very important if you have longer opening hours during the holidays, as local searchers may wrongly be told that your store is closed.

You should also make sure that all of your contact information, telephone number and address is accurate and up-to-date.

It may also be worth considering taking out some Product Listing Ads, which appear in the Google Shopping part of results pages.

These ads will feature relevant product details, rich images, product prices and your store name. You may find they have a higher click-through rate thanks to their richer format, rather than the standard paid search text listings.

Mobile

I probably don’t need to mention that your site needs to be mobile-optimised, otherwise Google will rank you lower than your competitors, but perhaps I do need to highlight how important it is that you provide the simplest, quickest and most barrier free ecommerce experience on a mobile as possible. Things that may irritate a customer on a desktop, will enrage them on a smaller screen.

There are also lots more handy tips here in It’s not too late: 12 ways to boost sales this holiday season.

Via: How Consumers are Reseaching

5 Link Building Myths You Might Hear in 2016

As 2015 draws to a close I can all but hear content marketers dreaming up the click bait headlines that will run amuck in 2016.

Rolling over to a new year is a trigger point for “this or that is dead” articles; you would think that Google only makes update at the end of the year the way articles start popping up. That being said, here are five link building tactics that will still work in 2016 unless Google does decide to actually make a yearend change, in which case, we will cover it here, so sign up for our email newsletter if you haven’t already.

1. Guest Posting is Finally Dead

Low-quality guest posting for the sake of building keyword rich anchor texts has been a bad idea for a few years now, if you are still doing this, it is time to get up to speed. If you are reaching out to high-quality sites that market to your audience, guest posting is never going to die. Even if it didn’t boost your rankings, it would still send qualified referral traffic, an instant win. So next time you read about the imminent death of guest posts in a headline, save your time and read something useful like how to build high quality links without writing a ton of content or tips on how to create great content.

2. Web 2.0 Link Building No Longer Works

In the past many link builders would start link building campaigns off by creating blogs on sites like WordPress, Blogger and Rebel Mouse. In the past, a single article, often times spun, would be added to the blog and linked to the money site. These blogs would then have high volumes of low-quality links built to them in order to boost the Page Authority hosting the link. This method is no longer a good idea, as a matter of fact it should have ended in 2013 at latest. 

That being said, you can still derive value from building out Web 2.0 sites. They can be a good source of traffic, can help you control your online brand reputation, and they can still be part of a good link building strategy. In order for them to have value though, you need to spend the time to create blogs that actually offer value to the reader. Every site should be set up as a standalone blog that people would want to read. Quality content, regular updates and ongoing link building to these blogs are a must if you go this route in 2016. Here is a great example of Tumblr, a Web 2.0 site being used by a brand properly.

If you don’t have the time or resources to manage Web 2.0s properly, focus on outreach link building instead.

3. PBNs are All You Need

Done correctly, private blog network (PBN) link building can be pretty low risk and incredibly powerful. These types of links are like dynamite though. If you aren’t experienced, using them is dangerous. Failing to use them in just the right quantity can be disastrous and they are not always the best solution. If you are not familiar with building PBNs, don’t risk it, there are too many things that can go wrong. If you are using them, don’t make the mistake of using only these types of links. Link diversity is very important and you should be diversifying your efforts by getting links that drive traffic as well.

4. SEO Software is “Only for Spammers” or is a “Push Button Link Building Solution”

There are tons of pieces of SEO software on the market today that range from automated link building tools like GSA Search Engine Ranker to tools like Scrapebox, often referred to as the Swiss Army Knife of link builders. Automated link building is not a good idea in 2016 unless you know exactly what you are doing, why you are doing it, and fully understand the risks of your methods. Other pieces of software are also wrongly demonized by those who don’t quite understand the many legitimate uses for those tools. Take Scrapebox for example, it was originally made to be a bulk comment spam tool and for that purpose, it is not useful to link builders any longer. On the other hand, you can use the tool to find broken links, locate resources pages at scale, and to pull URL lists from even huge sites, all of which are legitimate uses. Next time you read about a tool being the reason for an SEO failure, remember, no tool is better than its operator.

5. Link Building is All You Need

This may seem obvious to some of you but I have gotten numerous calls from people asking for our link building services and wanting to pass on any on-page SEO reviews or edits. As I touched on last week, SEO has evolved and with it, our role as marketers has also evolved. In order to successfully promote and rank a site, technical on-page SEO, page speed, UX, content assets and link building are all needed. If you want to get to and stay on top in 2016, you need to build assets that deserve to be ranked and that users will enjoy.

Bonus Tip: Stop Asking – Start Researching

I see and hear one type of question all the time. How many links do I need? What anchor text ratios should I use? How long does my content need to be? Etc. Etc. Etc.

The truth is, there is not a set number that you should shoot for across the board. If you are trying to rank for roofing services in St Louis, take the time to see what the top 10 sites are doing and make a side by side comparison of those metrics. You will quickly see that every keyword, niche and location takes a different combination to rank so stop asking for generalizations and spend that time doing research. Contact us at http://virtualfocusedmarketing.com/ for help with content marketing for your small business.

– Via http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/12/08/5-link-building-lies-you-ll-hear-in-2016.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter#sthash.5bLGgJeH.dpuf

Re-Shape Your Thinking to Overcome an SEO Plateau

Search Engine Optimization Results Can Level Off

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a fickle mistress; anyone who seeks to tame her needs to stay on their toes or risk being forgotten in the recesses of search engine results pages (SERPs). Regularly updated search algorithms and the ever-growing dominance of digital marketing has led to the unending refinement of SEO tactics.

That said, there are times when SEO practitioners might find themselves asking what they should focus their efforts on, especially when it seems SEO campaigns are stuck in a plateau.

The answer lies in a play written around 411 BC by the Greek writer, Sophocles: “A man, though wise, should never be ashamed of learning more, and must unbend his mind.”

Beginning an SEO campaign is an exciting period in the life of any business. If a company decides to undergo the work in-house, it will be greatly rewarded with knowledge that will help steer it when undertaking future Web projects. Similarly, if a third party is brought in, there’s the excitement and anticipation that comes when eagerly awaiting tactics to start showing results.

Once keyword research has been completed and landing pages decided on or created, the real fun begins. Companies can then start implementing on-page optimization and building up a library of content that allows a company to promote backlinks.

If everything has been researched and put into practice correctly, there should be pages starting to head upward in SERPs after this initial period.

The next stage is pretty much always maintenance – fixing mistakes, improving existing site issues and tweaking anything that doesn’t give optimal results. This can take anywhere from a couple of months to several years depending on how big the site is and how competitive desired keywords are.

As time goes by, maintenance requirements will begin to decrease if those in charge of content and web development are on form and don’t create more issues as they go along.

Is Search Engine Optimization Set & Forget?

So when the website is finally ranking highly for the desired keywords and traffic has greatly increased, surely it’s time to kick back and relax, right? Wrong.

After all the easy SEO fixes have been made, it’s likely traffic and keyword ranking will start to plateau and although the website could be attracting a lot of attention, it’s easy to get stuck at just decent rankings.

This is where good old Sophocles comes in. At this point in an SEO campaign, there is a need to ‘unbend minds’; things are good, but they can always be better. It’s time for a refresh and this doesn’t just mean new tactics.

This is a great opportunity to learn more, not just about SEO, but about topics intrinsically linked like Web development, design, analytics, content marketing, AdWords, email marketing and so on. ‘Never be ashamed of learning more,’ never let the mind mimic an SEO plateau.

As for tactics, there are always new alleys to go down.

Ensuring content is being used in the best possible way is a great place to start. Is it getting to the right people? How can it reach a similar and yet previously untouched audience? These are good questions to ask when kick starting the campaign out of the plateau.

Tools such as Followerwonk, SEMrush and Buzzsumo are great at analyzing what clients or competitors are interacting with or consuming and can help tailor content more specifically.

In addition, a new round of keyword analysis is a great idea at this point. If a website is dominating for its chosen keywords, it might be time to explore similar terms people are searching for. Content needs to be created for these terms and suitable landing pages developed.

If traffic is high – thanks to an abundance of high ranking pages – but conversion is low, the solution is to pay more attention to the customer funnel on the website. Google Analytics makes it possible to see the behavior flow of visitors through a site and analyze where – if anywhere – the customer journey is going awry.

This is also a good point to dabble with new things previously overlooked, whether it’s AdWords, different social media platforms or multi-language targeting.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with a little bit of trial and error to see what works, especially when it comes to SEO. Remember, getting to the plateau is not a negative. In fact, some sites will never get past the stage of fixing issues. The best way to look at it is to get creative and go on a quest to improve digital knowledge. In short, visit Virtual Focused Marketing for solutions,

– See more at:http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/archive/2015/12/01/unbend-your-mind-to-overcome-an-seo-plateau.aspx?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter