Last week Cyprus went into lock down. Businesses closed and this caused devastating effects to stores who rely on high street sales. With this we’re witnessing more businesses becoming dependent on online sales and some are not thriving due to a lack of a good online presence. This is where you can utilize your time and team up with a digital marketing agency in Cyprus! Most agencies have the capability to work remotely so if you’ve got free time on your hands from self-isolating consider taking the time to really look at your online presence.
It goes without saying that after Cyprus went into lock down the internet usage increased; in fact, it has dramatically increased around the world with an average of a 20% growth of web traffic in most countries.
The sites with the highest amount of traffic and therefore still receiving inquiries and sales are of course those that rank on Google’s first page. We will cover why and how they appear on the first page throughout this article. As well as why you need to follow suit. And do not forget, once this is all over you will need an epic online presence to bring activity and sales back up.
So, let’s go through the important questions you need to consider:
- How is your website speed?
- Do you rank of the first page of Google for your services?
- Do you have high quality content?
- Does your website have video content showing your services?
- How up to date are your social media pages?
The Importance of Website Speed
Imagine this scenario: You’re interviewing someone for a quality position within your company and they arrive late. Is that a good first impression? You’re less likely to hire them, right? Well it’s the exact same for slow loading speed on your page. According to statistics if your page doesn’t load within 4 seconds you will lose 25% of your visitors, meaning the number of conversions is heavily impacted. The visitor has such a bad first impression that even if you have high quality content on your site, they won’t bother to read it.
In today’s world people automatically associate fast loading speed with professionalism and are confident your site is worthy of their time if it loads quickly. Therefore, site speed is vital for good UX (user experience), whatever it is that your audience are looking for, give it to them fast! They will presume you’re highly professional and this will increase your ranking.
Speaking of rankings, Google rankings are affecting by site speed. Google’s algorithm considers page speed so if your site takes more than 2 seconds to load Google is less likely to care about your most recent blog or update.
Now it’s time to find out why you need to partner with a digital marketing agency in Cyprus to help you out.
To achieve essential loading speed, it takes someone who is tech savvy to minimize files, optimize images, enable compression, optimize the server and minimize the HTML, just to name a few. Luckily for you, every digital marketing agency will have a developer who does on-page SEO.
How to Achieve Good Search Engine Rankings
Since we mentioned page rankings in the previous paragraph lets delve into the subject a bit more. Firstly, do you ever go onto page 2 of Google to find what you’re looking for? Much like how people
associate fast loading speed with professionalism, people also associate first page sites with being more reliable and trustworthy.
Now as we mentioned, page speed has an impact on search engine ranking but let’s not forget about backlinks. Backlinks are when a site links to another site and this is considered very important to Google. If you receive a backlink from an aged domain you’re doing very well, although a backlink from a newer domain isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Second thing to consider is page level factors. If you are writing content and using an outdated system of ideas, then you won’t get the rankings you strive for. Yes, keywords in the title tag are important but they’re not as important as they used to be. It’s the same with the content you upload, it’s outdated to upload a lot of short articles, instead upload a few high-quality pieces a month.
Obviously, these a just snippets of how to achieve good search engine rankings however every good digital marketing agency in Cyprus should have a SEO and content expert who can examine your site and give a detailed guideline of how they will improve your rankings.
Creating High Quality Content
A major part of SEO and what helps your business with gaining good online presence is the quality of content you post. There are 3 key factors in content, keyword research, copywriting and structure.
Every expert will start with keyword research; this is where you need to study what key terms people use in search engines related to your services. Now there is a lot more detail to this, however I doubt you really have the time to run a business and be a SEO and content expert, so leave it to a digital marketing agency in Cyprus.
Anyway, on to copywriting. This aspect needs to be carefully though through as it needs to be attractive for the reader and Google. You need to think about sentence length, writing clear paragraphs and text structure. If Google is clear on your subject matter than it’s a green light for their algorithm as well as giving you a happy and satisfied page visitor or penitential client.
The last step is to structure the content so that Google can understand it and so that it’s UX friendly. A table of content is a must! As previously mentioned, people trust sites that load quickly because it’s worthy of their time, this is the same for finding the right content. If they can click on the section they want to read from the table of content and the page automatically takes them to that section, then perfect! No time wasted!
Video Content as A Trend
Did you know that by 2021 80% of online traffic will be due to video content? So, you can see why it is so important and if your site is lacking video content, then you need to start creating and posting it now!
Video content is extremely important to Google, so your site will begin to climb the ranks of search engines as well as making it much more memorable to your audience as you’re engaging their visual senses. With all this being said, don’t forget that Google needs clear sections to understand the content, you cannot simply record any subject and upload it. It needs to be planned and executed perfectly in order to be effective.
Now once you have your video content ready you need to optimize it for SEO; this includes using keywords in the title, having a good description and using tags. But it doesn’t finish there, you also need a blog post on the same subject as your video, this will then improve your bounce rate.
Social Media Presence
What is the second biggest search engine? It’s YouTube! Therefore, you need to make sure it is optimized with great content (video content as mentioned above).
As well as a strong YouTube presence, you also need to be active on sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. This is simply because social media is part of our daily life and this is where you get shares on quality content and follows on your page and website.
Remember that during this crisis the use of social media has risen, with some site usage increasing by 75% therefore it only makes sense to optimize your social media pages now.
However, if you’re unsure about tactics to optimize your social media pages then contact a digital marketing agency. Most agencies have someone who is specialized in creating and maintaining a strong social media presence so ask for a plan of action and KPIs.
Finally, stay safe during this period of uncertainty!
