Digital marketing is one part of online marketing that makes use of digital technology like desktop computers, handheld devices, and various other digital media and devices to advertise various services and products. It is a means of mass communication that uses digital media in order to reach out to potential customers. It is also known as digital marketing. An expert digital marketer uses Digital marketing techniques that involve advertising and marketing services and products using electronic and digital means. It also involves electronic information distribution.

Digital marketing involves creating and developing a website or digital pages in order to advertise and market a product or service. This is done in various ways, one of which is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO is a technique in which the digital marketer seeks keywords that are frequently searched and used by people so as to increase traffic towards the website. Once a person searches the keyword, a result page containing relevant information about the product or service will be displayed. A digital marketer then employs various techniques in order to increase the amount of traffic directed towards the site. These techniques are used for creating an online presence that is more noticeable than the offline presence.

One of the best tools used in digital marketing is called analytics. The analytics provides the digital marketer with all the information about his or her campaign. The data from the analytics can show the behavior of the clients and the effectiveness of the campaigns being used. The data provided by the analytics will tell about the demographics of users and the way they find your site. This will enable you to determine what kinds of ads to put on which sites and through which channels in order to maximize your returns from the digital marketing channels you have chosen.

When it comes to online marketing, you have to employ several digital channels in order to see your return on investment (ROI). The traditional marketing specialist uses television commercials and print advertisements in addition to online marketing. As a digital marketer, you will not need to create a whole channel devoted to digital marketing. You will only need to focus on a few areas and focus on those exclusively. This will help you better position yourself as an expert in your particular industry and will make you stand apart from the competition.

There are many channels that can be used as part of digital marketing efforts. However, as a digital marketer, you have to make sure that you stay in touch with all the people related to your clients. By staying connected, you will be able to get to know your clients on a more personal level and understand their needs and interests better. If you fail to keep in touch, your marketing efforts may go to waste and you may end up with clients who no longer care about your products or services.

There are numerous digital marketer jobs available in today’s market, especially for people who prefer to work independently. For those who wish to move into a full-time position within the marketing department of a company, however, it may help you to brush up on your skills and knowledge before starting. Such training may help you land more lucrative digital marketing positions in the future.

Meta tags are essential for displaying a page in search results and attract visitors to your website – if they are properly optimized.

Meta tags are part of a website’s HTML code. Its main job is to provide information about the website to search engine crawlers. This can be influenced automatically or manually by defining the title tag and description in the code.

Search engines use these to display search results (snippets) by displaying the information in the headline and the short description text. If the meta tags are not actively determined, the crawlers look for the content for the search result display from the website content. Usually the first sentence of the website is used as the description.

The search results page as a digital shopping street

The correct use of meta tags is an integral part of any SEO consultation. They are the “low-hanging fruits” – measures that are implemented quickly and can have a positive effect on the ranking. The standard tips: Pay attention to the length of title and description and place relevant keywords. This is absolutely sensible and important for the start, but unfortunately this procedure often means that meta tags are only adapted at the beginning of a search engine optimization and are not continuously developed. In addition to improving the ranking, an important function is often neglected: Meta tags are intended to encourage people to click on the snippet!

In order to clarify the relevance of this data, it helps to compare the snippets with shop windows in a shopping street. Storefronts give a glimpse of what a store looks like from the inside and are designed to convince customers to step in. That is why they are individually and strikingly designed, show top sellers or lure with low prices.

Dealers regularly adapt the design and goods to external conditions such as the seasons. Online, the search results page is the digital shopping street where retailers try to convince the customer to visit their shop or website. Snippets take over the function of the shop window and decide whether a potential customer dares to step into the shop or not.

The following steps will show you how to tidy up your shop window and convince potential customers of your website.

This is how you recognize potential and look after your shop windows

1. Recognize potential

To identify unused potential, you can look at the performance data of your pages from the Google Search Console . One of the most important indicators of the quality of the meta tags is the CTR (click-through rate). By calculating the ratio between search engine impressions and clicks, it shows how often users who see the snippet in their search results also click on the snippet. Pages that have a lot of impressions but few clicks have a low CTR. They are the shop windows that people walk past on the digital shopping street. Thanks to their good location, they have a lot of potential.

2. What are potential visitors looking for?

If you have identified pages with great potential, you can display the search queries for which the page appears in the search results. Checks for which the page snippet generates a particularly large number of impressions and at the same time few clicks. Based on the keywords you can draw conclusions about the expectations and motivations of the users: What is the user interested in? What answers does he need? Which content will help him further?

3. The redecorating

You know which shops are well located and what users are looking for in the shopping street. Now it’s time to optimize. Take a look at your shop window by entering the page according to the following example in the Google search: “site: example.org/seite/unterseite.html”. With this function you can check what your shower window looks like. The following questions will help you tailor the content to the customers in order to convince them to visit your website:

• Does the description promise the user to provide an answer to his search query?
• Is the snippet nicely designed?
• Does the snippet reflect what can be found on the page so that users don’t lose it when they visit?
• Is it adapted to current conditions?
• Is it different from other search results?
• Does it contain relevant keywords?
• Does the text comply with the formalities?

Google is very inconsistent when it comes to displaying snippets and keeps changing the specifications for the number of characters. So be sure to research the current regulations. Currently, titles are displayed up to around 70 characters (or 465 pixels – technically, snippets are limited by pixel width) and descriptions up to around 160 characters. (Source: Sistrix, 4.2.2019). Try to push the character limit as much as possible so that your snippets take up more space in the search results and your shop window becomes larger.

Once you have identified relevant keywords, there are two ways to write new titles and descriptions.

If you just want to optimize snippets in a targeted manner, the easiest option is to use snippet generators. The advantage of generators is that current length specifications are already taken into account. You can also see a preview of what the new snippet will look like. The Sistrix snippet generator, for example, is suitable here .

If you write several new titles and descriptions at the same time, it is helpful to work with an Excel table.

To determine the number of characters in a cell, you have to use the formula = LENGTH (CELL). An Excel table has the advantage that the csv. File generated from it can be transferred to the respective page via import. There are a number of plugins and extensions for different CMS .

First the duty, then the freestyle

To get the absolute maximum out of your snippets and to make the shop window as efficient as possible, there are rich snippets. In addition to user-centered title tags and descriptions, they offer you the option of displaying other specific added values ​​directly in the search. Popular rich snippets are, for example, ratings that work with stars or products that are displayed with price information. Rich snippets are implemented using Schema.org markup. The crawler is able to read this markup and can then display it directly in the search results. You can find an overview of all rich snippets on Google’s developer page . In addition, further explanations of how these are integrated.

Summary

There is a lot of untapped potential in the area of ​​meta tags that can be used with a relatively manageable amount of work. In addition to improving the CTR, optimization can also lead to an improvement in the rankings. So you can generate more organic traffic in the long term. It is particularly important that you regularly check and evaluate the data and plan appropriate measures. If you have content on your site that is suitable for the use of rich snippets, you should definitely use it. In any case: don’t let the optimization of meta tags be a one-off thing.

Even if new insights are often gained in the SEO scene, a few mistakes always remain the same over the years. Semrush analyzed the most common mistakes in a study.

As part of a study, the SEO tool provider Semrush analyzed 150,000 randomly selected websites worldwide – and examined 175 million individual pages and 15 billion links. The aim was to determine which errors in internal links can lead to problems and which of these weaknesses are particularly common.

What is remarkable about the results: 42.5 percent of websites have internal links that do not work or lead to nowhere. And a surprising number of websites do not fully utilize their potential because companies do not deal with it sufficiently and, in case of doubt, do not regularly revise an existing website. The website is underestimated not only in terms of SEO issues, but also in terms of user experience.

What the reader likes, usually also reaches the crawler

“Many errors can be fixed relatively quickly and easily,” explains Evgeni Sereda, Marketing Manager at Semrush. “Backlinks are a well-known ranking factor when the quality of the source providing the link is right. When a page attracts a lot of external links, its authority grows and Google promotes it to the top of the search results. ”Internal links, on the other hand, rarely get the attention they deserve. After all, they guide the search engine’s crawler through the page and play a role in evaluating the relevance of the subpages. This is certainly not new, but the result shows that a large number of website operators (or their service providers) have not done their homework completely.

These are the 5 most important results and their solutions:

SEO Mistake # 1: Broken Internal and External Links

The first and most obvious problem with links is that they don’t work – and that happens more often than expected. It may be due to a faulty URL, but also because the linked page simply no longer exists. 42.5 percent of the websites had broken internal links and 40.5 percent had broken external links. This affects the quality rating of your website on Google and last but not least causes frustration among users. You should therefore regularly check the correctness of the link URL with a link checker and, if necessary, make changes promptly, change or remove the link. This is especially true for multilingual pages – here an English-language page is better than a link in the void.

SEO Mistake # 2: Persistent Redirects

A redirect from an old to a new URL with a 301 redirect is called permanent and the old URL is declared no longer available. Almost three quarters of the websites have set up such permanent redirects. What at first glance might seem a reasonable final solution shouldn’t be permanent. Because from the second redirect, the probability increases that the search robots will no longer consider subpages for indexing on Google. It is therefore advisable to keep the number of redirects to a minimum. Also, check all URLs with redirects and replace them with the website address of the landing page whenever possible.

SEO Mistake # 3: Orphaned Page in Sitemap

84.1 percent of the websites examined had pages in their sitemap that were not linked to any internal links; this is known as an orphan page. Such sites usually have no valuable content, so it is not necessary to have them crawled. Here you should check whether there are any that have valuable content and should be indexed. If so, look for ways to link there internally. Otherwise remove the URL from the sitemap.

SEO Mistake # 4: Crawl Depth of More Than Three Clicks

The crawl depth is the number of clicks it takes to reach a page from the homepage. The more clicks are necessary, the less likely it is that users will visit this page or that the crawler will search and index the page. Organize the link structure so that important content can be accessed with as few clicks as possible. However, especially with larger and more extensive web projects, you will notice that this is hardly possible – especially if you want to adhere to an international structure.

SEO Mistake # 5: Pages with Only One Inbound Link

88.8 percent of the websites had pages with only one inbound internal link. The more internal links refer to a page, the higher the chance that users and search robots will find it. If more links point to pages with important content, you make sure that the linked websites are relevant to each other. At this point you should of course also exhaust the potential of news sites, social media presences and other “healthy” links.

When it comes to SEO, most people immediately think of Google, but there are other search engines in the shadow of the Internet giant. Alternatives such as Duckduckgo that are particularly concerned with data protection are becoming increasingly popular. What SEO tactics are pulling here?

Googling has become synonymous with research on the Internet in our vocabulary. Not every search takes place there. While many users are increasingly no longer taking the detour via Google, but are looking directly for products on Amazon or for videos on YouTube, a number of search engine alternatives to Google have established themselves.

Search engine optimization for Duckduckgo

One of the most popular Google alternatives is Duckduckgo . The search engine places a special focus on data protection. Duckduckgo’s promise: no storage of IP addresses, no tracking, no cookies, but additional SSL encryption.

As with Google, Bing and other search engines, Duckduckgo has a number of SEO levers that can be tweaked to improve a page’s ranking. After all, Duckduckgo lands in Germany in fourth place behind Yahoo, Bing and Google among the most widely used search engines .

Duckduckgo uses over four hundred sources for its search results. This includes its own crawler (Duckduckbot), the databases of Bing, Yahoo and Yandex and crowdsourcing sites such as Wikipedia.

Builds high quality links

If you look at the help area of ​​Duckduckgo, you will only find a specific note about the ranking:

As with other search engines, the best way is to get links from high quality sites like Wikipedia. So it is quality rather than quantity that counts. Instead of building many links of inferior quality, concentrate on a few, but high-quality links. The best way to get such valuable backlinks is with quality content that high quality sites like to refer to.

Local SEO works a little differently

Since Duckduckgo does not access the locations of the users or store data that suggest the location of the user, local search engine optimization works differently than with Google. Instead, Duckduckgo roughly estimates where the respective user is based on the IP address. This means that the search engine cannot deliver local results as accurately as Google. In order to get the most accurate search results possible, users have to specify their search queries more precisely and, when looking for a “baker near me”, limit their location more precisely using street names, city districts and the like.

As a site operator, if you want to be found locally, you should consider such hyperlocal keywords and use them in important places on your site. This can be, for example, directions or the identification of parking spaces.

Optimize pages for Bing and Yahoo

Here you kill several birds with one stone. Since Duckduckgo also uses the Yahoo and Bing databases to compile search results, you’ll do well by optimizing your site for these two search engines. Compared to Google, for example, Bing places more emphasis on keywords, title and meta tags. Make sure that the important terms for which you want to rank appear in the title. Bing also rates social signals more strongly than Google. You should therefore also share and promote your content on social networks. Use the Bing webmaster tools to examine your site and uncover potential for optimization. If you have a good stand at Bing, this can also have a positive effect on Duckduckgo’s ranking.

Keep an eye on Duckduckgo

SEO for Duckduckgo is not rocket science and does not differ significantly from the optimization measures that you should also have on your screen for Google. But even with Duckduckgo the ranking factors and mechanisms will change and develop again and again.

Duckduckgo may be overshadowed by Google, but it has seen strong growth in search queries. Site owners should keep an eye on the search engine and its development.

You don’t always have to become an influencer to use Instagram successfully for self-marketing. How to make your expertise visible and expand your network.

The world of influencers is immensely seductive. Range. Notoriety. Maybe earn a little more money … But if you look at the one billion users that Instagram currently has every month, very few make it to influencers . Not everyone is made for it or wants to. And yet this influencer claim always somehow hovers over us when you want to be there on Instagram. It is not necessary to have thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers to use Instagram successfully. Even on a small scale, there are opportunities to establish yourself as an expert and to take your own self-marketing to the next level.

Good content. Regular content. Use insights. That is the basis of professional self-marketing on Instagram. But what if even hashtags, videos and stories don’t work and Instagram just swallows everything like a deep black hole and nothing moves? Then it’s time to tweak a bit. Here are a few tips on how to get even more out of your self-marketing on Instagram.

1. Instagram as a portfolio

Many think they have to keep up with influencers on Instagram and post lots of private or particularly lifestyle pictures. It is not uncommon for this to work with more moderate success. If you want to use Instagram for self-marketing, you should be clear about what the goal is. I want thousands of subscribers? Do I just want to use Instagram for fun? Or do I want to specifically show my expertise and become an ambassador for myself and my topic? Of course, personality is important on Instagram. But it shouldn’t take over the whole account. What do you think a potential customer or employer can expect when they find a link to your Instagram account on your professional website? Just because it’s Instagram doesn’t mean the expectation is any different than on other platforms. The 20 pictures from the last Bali vacation are really amazing. And all the selfies are really nice too. But what does that say about you and your know-how? I clearly admit your expertise: Show what you know, what you do and how you do it. Anyone who finds you on Instagram should be able to see just that right away.

2. Your username on Instagram

Your username is one of the most important levers for self-marketing on Instagram. Because it determines your Instagram handle (@yourinstagramusername), your Instagram address (instagram.com/yourinstagramusername). Your username should therefore not be too long or complicated to be easy to remember. Your real name can be a way of doing this. But a combination of your name and your job is also a good choice. A private label, on the other hand, is more worthwhile if you have a comprehensive concept with further strategic communication points – for example YouTube or blog.

3. Optimize your Instagram name

Go to Instagram’s profile search and search for your topic, your job, your expertise. Are you found here? The likelihood is high that it isn’t. Because often important keywords are not included in the username. And certainly not in the name. But Instagram is currently only searching these two fields for the profile search. So what to do Just customize your name. This is located in bold under your profile picture and can be changed as often as you want via Edit profile. The only drawback: Instagram only allows 30 characters for your name. However, this is often enough to place your industry or other keywords here. Now you will be found in the Instagram search and your keyword will be displayed under your username. And also with search engines you will be indexed and found with it. That may not be entirely in the true sense of Instagram. But there is nothing against it in the terms and conditions and community guidelines – especially since there is no real name requirement on Instagram.

4. Use your Instagram bio

The profile is also often neglected on Instagram. Many enter a short bio in key words, their private interests or hashtags. But the Instagram bio can do so much more than just that. Make targeted use of the profile to tell us what you do and what you offer. Your Instagram bio will be perfect with a call-to-action. You can call up to visit a website, an event or download a PDF that you link below. Of course, you can also link other professional profiles. You have 150 characters for your Instagram bio. Use it!

5. How was that with links?

Instagram is struggling with links. If you don’t have at least 10,000 subscribers or are verified, you cannot insert links directly into stories. And also in the profile there is only space for a single link. That is why many Instagrammers use tools such as Linktree as “mini landing pages”. Here you link individual content as well as the imprint. You can do that too. And sometimes that’s a good solution too. But if you already have your own, mobile-optimized, fast website – why this detour? Every additional click also means the possibility that interested parties will jump off. Instead, build a landing page on your own website. This is how you draw interested parties directly to your page. Here you can not only determine what you want to show, but also how.

6. Regional placement

Content from the environment is not only pushed on Facebook. You can also position yourself better on Instagram if you rely on regional content. Whether in posts, stories or live streams – use the location function of Instagram for more reach and targeted targeting. Remember: smaller locations are often more successful than large ones, e.g. Hanover instead of Germany. As a freelancer, it can also make sense to include your location as a keyword in your name. Many rely on regional experts. So what reason should there be not to find you there? The location function is still used far too little – especially in stories. So better chances for you.

7. Find a partner

Networking and engagement are big topics on Instagram. It is therefore worth investing some time in finding partners. These can be people who deal with the same topic as you. But they can also be related topics. In this way, you can complement your content, expand your skills – for example with joint live streams in Instagram stories. This not only increases your visibility immediately, but also places you in a professional environment with other experts. Such cooperation – not least through agencies – has long been proven on YouTube. On Instagram, many still rely exclusively on classic tagging – if at all. There is still a lot of room for improvement.

Thе economy continues tо heal. Mаnу business owners wеrе holding оff selling thеіr business whіlе thе economy wаѕ performing poorly аnd finance hard tо gеt аѕ thеу hаd thе belief thеу wоuld nоt gеt thе best price fоr thе business.

Pаrt оf whаt I dо includes getting calls frоm business buyers whо аrе frustrated thаt thеу аrе motivated tо buy a particular business but thеу саnnоt gеt thе answers thеу need аnd wonder іf I саn help.

Whеn I bring thе twо perspectives tоgеthеr аnd hоw I work best аѕ a business broker wіth thе seller and/or buyer іѕ tо allow bоth parties tо dо things frоm a position оf strength. At thе end оf thе day, thе seller wіll оnlу sell аnd thе buyer wіll оnlу buy іf аll parties hаvе thе information thеу need tо make аn informed decision аnd аt thе vеrу minimum feel thаt whаt thеу аrе doing makes sense tо thеm.

If уоu plan tо sell уоur business аnd want tо dо things frоm a position оf strength, hеrе аrе thе steps I uѕе tо make sure I assist уоu.

If уоu plan tо sell уоur business уоu аrе making a major change tо уоur life. Bу definition, owning аnd operating a business forces disciplines аnd thіѕ оftеn includes doing things уоu wоuld prefer nоt tо dо. If уоu thеrеfоrе sell уоur business аnd incur thіѕ major change, whаt dо уоu plan tо do? Bе clear wіth thе new world аnd options thаt wіll open uр tо уоu ѕо іf аnd whеn уоur business sells, уоu саn easily make thе transition. It’s nоt unusual fоr a business owner tо gеt tо thе close оf escrow аnd change thеіr mind аѕ thеу аrе nоt sure whаt thеу wоuld dо іf thеу nоw sell thе business. It’s аlѕо nоt unusual fоr a business owner tо sell thе business аnd want tо buy аnоthеr business аftеr a period оf dоwn tіmе bесаuѕе thеу аrе bored. Whіlе уоu оwn аnd operate уоur current business, look аftеr уоur health, play ѕоmе golf оr dо things уоu want tо dо ѕо іt hаѕ balance аnd уоu dо nоt burn оut. Burn оut іѕ thе number оnе reason owners sell thеіr business.

If it’s tіmе tо sell thе business thе fіrѕt place tо start іѕ wіth a business valuation. Thеrе іѕ nо need tо spend thousands оf dollars оn a valuation аѕ іt does nоt need tо bе complex. If thе business hаѕ partners аnd thеу аrе іn a dispute, thе owner іѕ going thrоugh a divorce оr ѕоmе оthеr complex legal matter thеn a certified appraisal mау bе necessary. I рut tоgеthеr аn opinion оf value fоr аrоund $750 thаt looks аt thе lаѕt thrее years tax returns аnd current profit аnd loss аnd balance sheet. All thіѕ information іѕ thеn rolled іntо a 19 page report thаt includes comparable sales data frоm sales іn thе ѕаmе industry tо arrive аt a price thе business wіll sell. Looking аt thе tax returns аnd profit аnd loss statements аrе critical аѕ tоо mаnу sellers offer financial statements thаt аrе inaccurate оr wоuld nоt bе accepted bу a buyer оr lender. Just recently I wаѕ asked bу a buyer tо appraise a small business frоm cash flow projections thе seller hаd рut tоgеthеr аnd convinced thе buyer hіѕ business wаѕ worth. Aftеr finally getting meaningful documents аnd information mу value wаѕ lеѕѕ thаn half оf thе sellers аѕ thеrе wеrе errors іn hіѕ projections.

Onсе thе seller knows thе value оf hіѕ business аnd ѕtіll wants tо proceed, оnе оf thе steps I tаkе іѕ tо ѕее whаt thіrd party finance іѕ available. Mоѕt sellers don’t want tо sell thе business аnd carry аnу finance. At thе moment, thе main fоrm оf lending tо buy a small business іѕ SBA lenders. Thеѕе banks wіll look аt writing аn SBA loan but thеу dо nоt lend fоr аll businesses іn аll industries. It’s nоt unusual fоr mе tо approach mаnу banks bеfоrе getting a business pre-qualified. Knowing finance іѕ available thоugh really helps thе seller wіth thеіr planning аnd speeds uр thе process ѕhоuld a qualified buyer соmе аlоng.

Wіth thеѕе details іn place thе nеxt mоѕt important step іѕ tо рut a comprehensive confidential report tоgеthеr оn thе business. Thе confidential report саn bе аѕ lоng аnd detailed аѕ necessary. A rule оf thumb wоuld bе thе higher thе purchase price thе longer thе confidential report. Buyers hаvе questions. If thеrе аrе mаnу buyers уоu саn expect a lot оf thе questions tо bе thе ѕаmе. Whу nоt hаvе thіѕ information rеаdу tо go? It makes thе seller, thеіr business аnd mе look vеrу professional tо request a buyer tо complete a nоn disclosure agreement аnd thеn іn mу case, provide thеm wіth a username аnd password whеrе I hаvе thіѕ confidential report аѕ wеll аѕ supporting documents ѕuсh аѕ a copy оf thе lеаѕе, franchise agreement, sample marketing material, financial statements аnd оthеr relevant information.

All thе аbоvе items tаkе tіmе аnd planning. If уоu аrе selling a business аnd want qualified buyers tо respond іn a businesslike manner, tаkе thе tіmе tо dо thе work аnd gеt іt right. A buyer hаѕ options. If thеу don’t feel уоur business іѕ thе right option bесаuѕе оf thе wау thеіr questions аrе asked оr hоw thе answers tо thеіr questions аrе given thеn thеу wіll look fоr alternatives аnd thеrе аrе alternatives оut thеrе including doing nоthіng.

Andrew іѕ a 5-time business owner thаt helps entrepreneurs exit оr enter business ownership. Hіѕ services include helping owners sell and/or buyers purchase аn existing business оr consult оn purchasing a franchise. Hе аlѕо provides certified machinery аnd equipment appraisals аnd business valuations.