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Local SEO Vs National SEO

Posted on May 16, 2023 - 7:55 AM by
local seo vs national seo

In a competitive digital world, businesses now need to focus on their online presence more than ever before. A digital presence builds trust and relationships with your customers and allows you to be found easily online.

There are many strategies and tactics that you need to consider when building and promoting your business online.

To reach more people online, the Search Engine Optimization process plays a major role. SEO boosts your content online, making your website rank higher in search engines, and increasing qualified traffic to the website. Within SEO, there are two categories: National SEO and Local SEO. The two seem similar, there are different reasons for undertaking them and different strategies to help promote your organization on search engines.

Local SEO Vs National SEO

When it comes to marketing a business online, several different strategies and tactics can be used. However, one of the most important is search engine optimization (SEO)—and, within that, national SEO and local SEO. Local SEO is a strategy that helps to get more visibility for local search-specific keywords. National SEO is aimed at companies with a nationwide reach. It’s the strategy that focuses on promoting your business to rank for broad, highly searched keywords. 

What is the Difference Between Local SEO and National SEO?

There are some distinct differences between the Loacl SEO and Nationa SEO strategies.

Key Differentiation 1: Target Audience

Businesses that engage in National SEO generally target a broader audience. National SEO is best suited for businesses with a national or global target audience. If your target audience is national or international, then ensure that you optimize all the pages on your site with the right titles, meta descriptions, headings, and content that’s suited to the needs of your audience.

Local SEO businesses’ websites are designed to attract customers in a specific area. Optimizing your website for local searches is an important step to increasing location. Make sure that all your locations are listed correctly on your website so that customers can find your business easily.

Key Differentiation 2: Keywords & Targeted Search Real Estate

National SEO campaigns target various keywords and phrases that relate to the product and services without any geography. Important Search Engine Ranking Position (SERP) features include organic listings, People Also Ask (PAA) boxes, and featured snippets. 

In order to get featured on search engines, optimize the website content with broad keywords and long tail keywords. If ‘running tights’ is a broad keyword, ‘best breathable running tights’ would be a long-tail keyword. 

Broad keywords are highly competitive and may be harder to gain visibility for. Try to target long-tail keywords that use a different strategy. These phrases are longer and more specific than broad keywords and therefore may allow you to gain visibility for highly relevant keywords faster. 

Second, use semantic keywords (words or phrases that are related to each other conceptually) properly to get visibility for organic listings, PAA boxes, and featured snippets. For example, if we were to speak about “digital marketing,” a semantically related keyword might be “SERP” or “SEO.”

A PAA box includes similar questions that people have asked on the topic that the user is seeking more information on and appears like this on search engines:

people also askYou might find more PAA questions about your brand or related to your industry. Make sure to answer all of those questions on your FAQs page on your website. In order to rank in a PAA box, your content must include the most relevant answer for your target query.

A featured snippet, on the other hand, is a reversal of typical search results where the descriptive snippet appears first, followed by the website link:

featured snippetThe content that appears inside of a Featured Snippet is automatically pulled from web pages in Google’s index. Optimize the content on your webpage so Google chooses to use your content in the Featured Snippet. The key to scaling this up is to add lots of definitions, ordered lists, tables, and other formats that Google loves to put into Featured Snippets on your page.

Local SEO Campaigns, on the other hand, are best suited to target location-specific similar keywords and terms that individuals are likely to be searching in their local areas. 

Important SERP features that businesses can get visibility on include the local map pack, Google My Business cards (that show photos and other information about your business), and organic listings. To start, you need to conduct some research on local search engines and understand what types of queries people are using in your geographic area. You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keywords Explorer to get an idea of what keywords people are searching for in your area. Once you have a list of all relevant target keywords, you can start optimizing your website for them. 

A local map pack is a great real estate to appear in on search engines for local businesses as that’s what appears right under paid search results.

local packIf you’re looking to appear on positions 1-3 of Local Pack listings, work on optimizing your Google My Business listing as that provides more than 25% of ranking success in Google Local Pack. Pay attention to your Google My Business listing by verifying it first and optimizing it. 

Key Differentiation 3: Content

In National SEO, top-of-the-funnel content should be emphasized. 

  • Your content should be of unique and high quality and should be able to solve user problems. For instance, awareness stage keywords, such as ‘WordPress vs Drupal,’ where the user is trying to figure out a problem, is a great keyword strategy to adopt when creating a content strategy for a National SEO. 
  • Consider submitting your content on niche or industry-specific lists for higher quality and relevant links.
  • National SEO strategies rely mostly on high-quality content creation, including blog posts, white papers, and product, industry, and location pages. An important consideration here is whether to leave your white paper ungated to allow search engines to index the content or gate it for valuable lead information.
  • Ensure your website has a proper structure so you can easily access your important pages with as few clicks as possible. This allows people to navigate to your page easily and also signals to search engine bots that the page is valuable when it is not deep inside a complex navigational hierarchy.
  • Remember to create attractive and useful content that can engage maximum users as Google refers to user engagement and signals as determinants of web page relevancy. 
  • The main content marketing goal should be Traffic × Conversions = Sales.

Location-based content is emphasized in Local SEO. You should create content that is targeted toward local customers. 

  • These could be blog posts about events or attractions in the area or reviews of local businesses and services. 
  • Additionally, make sure that all of your content is optimized for local SEO by including location-specific keywords throughout.
  • Ensure that the Name, Address, and Phone (NAP) usage is consistent across owned, paid, and earned channels. This is referred to as NAP Consistency.
  • Ensure that you optimize location-specific pages.
  • Build backlinks from niche or location-specific citations.

In general, you should let content fuel your SEO strategy. 

Key Differentiation 4: Backlinks

Both Local and National SEO campaigns can benefit from having effective high-quality backlinks, which could be built using content marketing, niche blog postings, link building, and guest blogging. 

  • While building backlinks for National SEO, invest time in building trustworthy links from genuine websites in your niche. Moz Pro SEO, SEMRush, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Tag Manager, and WordPress CMS are a few important platforms that help in improving National SEO. These platforms help analyze traffic, backlinks analysis, competitor analysis, and visibility of websites in the search results.
  • An important aspect of local SEO is claiming and managing profiles on directories like Google My Business, Yext, and Yelp. These profiles help customers discover your business online and provide an opportunity for you to manage the information about your business that appears in search results. Make sure all the information listed is accurate and up-to-date, as this will help improve your ranking in search results.

Citations

  • Creating local citations won’t help national SEO campaigns at all. Instead, focus on creating and optimizing informative and valuable content, which helps in boosting the domain authority of the website. 
  • Maintaining NAP consistency throughout the citations is very important in Local SEO Campaigns. Any inconsistency can lead to dropping the keyword positions in the local search results. Include a map with directions or contact information on each page of your website so potential customers can find their way to your location easily.

Competition

  • National SEO has a lot of competition, and it is expensive to build top search visibility. If your website has informative and valuable content, it can attract high-quality inbound links that will boost the domain authority of the website and drive search engine ranking positions. To gain traction in search engines create high authority content (focuses on building your brand’s credentials in an industry), ebooks, how-to content (videos, blogs, infographics), and standout opinion pieces(platforms like Medium and Huffington Post have made it easy for thought leaders to share their ideas), original research pieces (whitepapers, case studies, interviews), and more. 
  • Generally speaking, local SEO has less competition compared to businesses looking for national search visibility, but the approach to building local search visibility relies on building local citations, getting content published in local, industry-specific directories, maintaining NAP consistency, and creating content that is useful, relevant, and local. You can improve your website’s visibility and reach new potential customers organically by creating a city-specific landing page, FAQ pages, hosting local events, and more.

Key Differentiation 5: Reasons to Choose National vs Local 

Reasons to Choose National SEO

  • Target Market: National SEO is an excellent technique for enhancing your brand recognition across locations and positioning yourself in the crowded marketplace.
  • Established Expertise: If you have a national SEO campaign in place, establish your brand expertise by developing thought leadership articles.
  • National Level Brands: If you have become big enough on a national level, national SEO can help you penetrate even the international market.

Reasons to Choose Local SEO

  • Local Area Focus: If your company is relatively new in the business and targets local clientele, it’s better to target local customers.
  • Local Competition: If you are only competing against local businesses that offer the same products and services as you do, then go for local SEO.
  • Nature of Business: Local SEO can definitely improve your chances of attracting people who might need your business in your area.

Conclusion

Having a solid SEO foundation should be a priority for your business. Every business is unique and requires a unique approach to marketing its campaign online.

The key ranking factors for local SEO are quality local backlinks, google my business optimization with high-quality images, frequency of listings, business updates listings, and review quality and quantity.

While a high-quality result for National SEO primarily depends on the authority, expertise, and reliability of the content.

With the right SEO strategies, you can increase your website’s visibility and rankings, as well as boost your keyword’s searchability and annual revenue. The best SEO company in Chicago can help in developing and implementing SEO campaigns for your business. 

SEO Agency in Naperville

How to Increase Traffic to Your Website in 2023 Using A Results-Driven SEO Strategy

Posted on February 24, 2023 - 10:54 AM by
seo strategy

Are you looking for an SEO strategy that will help boost your rankings and visibility in 2023? If so, then this blog post is for you.

SEO is one of the key pillars of all marketing strategies. 2023 brings with it a rapidly evolving SEO landscape. If you want to reach out to potential customers, you must be in sync with users’ search behaviors and continually develop your SEO strategy and efforts.  

Here are the biggest 2023 SEO trends that you need to know as it’ll help you change the way you strategize and develop an action plan this year. 

  1. Embrace Chaos

Expect lots of chaos and dynamism as SEO undergoes a major overhaul this year. We’ve been seeing traces of this trend last year with Google rolling out even more updates than it ever did. 

Google will continue to roll and finish fresh updates as the year progresses. It’s wise to stay on top of these search updates. It might seem chaotic at the outset, but it’s what will precisely bring the much-needed order to the SEO landscape. 

At Webtage, we’d like to add the caveat that while it is our job to stay on top of search algorithm updates and Google’s guidance, great SEO is about improving user experience – if users find your website relevant and useful they will keep coming back and Google will notice! And that’s the reason we don’t lose page rankings to algorithm changes.

  1. Get Acquainted With ChatGPT

​​Talking of Google, ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), the new AI-powered chatbot, has revolutionized search engine optimization. 

The potential of ChatGPT is huge with its easy, human-like conversational interface with users that answers all their queries. It’s no surprise that Google has recently announced its product Bard to compete with ChatGPT.

If you’re an SEO professional who’s not using ChatGPT, we highly recommend using it for your business’ benefit. From keyword research, writing meta descriptions, and using it as a search assistant, to a generic brainstorming tool.  

At Webtage, we use ChatGPT to consolidate research on topics, create meta tags for search engine visibility, and boost our copy creation process for blogs, ads, and the web. However, we strongly advise against using ChatGPT to create content without bringing in your first-hand experience, deep expertise, pointers, evaluation & refinement to make the output useful.

But you can use it to aid you for insights and even outline your content marketing strategy with a bird’s eye view of tactics for content related to your niche. However, if your competition is also using ChatGPT for their content strategy, then they would follow the same thing and create similar content like you. 

Google search engine’s stance on AI-generated content continues to evolve with time. Initially, Google was against any kind of AI-generated content. Now Google’s stance has been that it will penalize any “spammy automatically-generated content.”

Curious if the content you generate can trigger a spam (read “fake content”) alert? Check it here: https://openai-openai-detector.hf.space/

  1. Create Content For People, Not Robots And Spiders

Google released its first “helpful content update” in 2022, urging marketers to create web content that prioritizes people and offers users with a meaningful experience. Google prefers content created for people by people and it views AI-generated spammy content a violation of the company’s guidelines. It states you can use AI for insights and optimization, not long-form content such as articles. 

In 2023, Google is going to favor unique, fresh, relevant, purposeful, and user-centric content. The search engine algorithms are highly sophisticated, quickly spotting content that doesn’t satisfy the readers and has been spun by automated tools. Don’t go that route as there are high chances of getting penalized. 

Google also made an addition to its popular EAT (Expertise, Authority, Trust) acronym in December 2022. The updated acronym reads EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust). This makes sense in a digital world where there’s an influx of AI-generated content. Showcasing the experience of the author or creator builds trust and credibility that it’s written by humans for humans. So, create content that projects your expertise in your subject area. Display an author bio with their detailed experience, a separate author page with a list of all their articles or content, and social profiles. But it’s not just the experience of the author or creator that counts, but also topics of their content should be related to their experience.

With Google’s new guidelines showing a clear preference for long-form resourceful content, fix pages and posts with thin content. For example, product pages can have more details such as dropdown menus, FAQs, and testimonials apart from descriptions.

Focus on quality and not quantity with content creation in 2023. 

  1. Focus on Technical SEO  

In 2023, companies that focus on the improvement of the technical aspects of their websites will grow significantly. Google is incentivizing sites with better user experiences. Better user experience (UX) means higher ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). 

There are other key SEO metrics that mean more than ranking and that’s organic traffic via Google Analytics and lead conversions (Leads / Revenue). Unless ranking is affecting a company’s bottom line, it’s not the most important SEO metric to report to your clients. So, organic traffic and lead conversions are standard go-to SEO metrics to focus on. Other factors to measure your SEO performance include indexability, search visibility, time spent on the site, and the bounce rate. 

However, which SEO metrics to measure depends on your marketing goals. Have a bigger picture when analyzing SEO metrics and track a few related ones only. For example, a long time spent on the site might look impressive at the outset, but if it’s not leading to conversions, you’re probably attracting the wrong audience.

Keep an eye on and stay on top of Google’s Page Experience Update, Core Web Vitals, and Link Best Practices to fix technical SEO issues regularly within a certain time threshold. These include monitoring the page loading speed, browser response time, and content stability during loading for a seamless user experience. 

Like content, you’ll see many SEO automation tools and platforms that you can use to perform routine tasks and track technical SEO metrics. 

  1. The Rise Of Visual Or Multisearch

With the increased popularity of TikTok and Instagram, people are steering towards visual content. 

Multisearch was announced in April 2022 to help people view images and text at the same time when they search for something online. Multisearch, powered by Google Lens, allows people to use their phones to search images and text, and get the most relevant results. We can expect more advancements in Google’s AI development and Multitask Unified Model (MUM), a modern technology for answering complex questions that don’t have direct answers. It will provide users with a rich, interactive, and engaging experience as graphic cards of imagery and auto-complete features are directly tied into every search result.

You’ll need to balance the content, i.e. text with images and videos. Also, focus on the mobile optimization of these visual elements as it will become the norm in 2023.

  1. Shoot More Videos

There’s an increased amount of attention to video results when searching for something online. 

2023 will be the year of videos and if you haven’t included it in your SEO strategy, we urge you to do so this year.

The best part is that you don’t need fancy equipment to shoot your videos. Videos taken from your mobile also perform as well as professionally shot videos. The focus is more on the content of the video than the production quality. 

Conclusion

We’ve shared our SEO predictions and insights for 2023. To apply this SEO knowledge to yield results, you’ll need a dedicated SEO expert team, either in-house or by hiring an agency. 

At Webtage, the best SEO Company in Chicago IL, we excel in delivering one of the most comprehensive, realistic, and proven SEO strategies plans with an excellent and consistent track record of implementing the SEO requirements to help our clients achieve their desired results.

Best SEO Services in Naperville

Does Content Gating Still Work for B2B Lead Generation in 2023?

Posted on January 20, 2023 - 4:03 AM by
b2b lead generation

In the ever-evolving world of B2B lead generation, marketers are always looking for the best strategies to capture qualified leads. One of the most popular strategies is content gating, which involves requiring visitors to fill out a form in order to access a piece of content. 

White papers, e-Books, and other long-form content pieces have been popular lead-generation tools for B2B marketing agencies for many years. But with the plethora of gated content, it has become increasingly difficult to stand out and make an impact with gated content.

The question is: in 2023, are white papers and other long-form content pieces as lead generators dead? The answer is not entirely straightforward. 

While it’s true that gated content pieces are no longer as effective as they used to be, the creation of high-quality, premium content should still remain an important part of any B2B company’s lead generation strategy. High-quality content can and should be used to provide valuable insights into a product or service and help build trust with potential customers. 

In addition, the gating of the content may need to be done in more creative ways and possibly further down the buyer’s journey to better qualify the user’s purchase intent.

Should Content be Gated or Ungated?

Generating qualified leads is a key part of any successful B2B marketing strategy. Both gated and ungated long-form content, such as whitepapers, can be used for different purposes in the marketing process and in the buyer’s journey. 

While gated whitepapers have traditionally been used as a lead qualifier and lead contact information generator, the average landing page conversion rate is only 2.35%. This means that 97.65% of your landing page traffic leaves the page without ever engaging with your content or with your brand, leaving a tremendous opportunity to cultivate that initial interest.

One effective way to engage your audience is by “ungating” the content, which allows potential customers to access your content without having to provide any personal information. This approach helps to build trust and relationships with prospects, while also providing valuable insights into their interests and preferences.

Setting your whitepaper free, i.e., ungated and free to download without a form gate, is a perfect strategy to follow when you are seeking to build brand awareness in the industry. Allowing free access builds goodwill while promoting your brand as a knowledge source and a thought leader. 

This does not mean that ungated content cannot be used for lead-generation purposes. This also does not mean that the gating of white papers and other content pieces is dead.

How you can use Ungated Content for Lead Generation

Ungated content can be used in conjunction with other lead-generation tactics such as SEO, retargeting, lead nurturing, and marketing automation. 

Bottom line – create content that is useful for and resonates with your target audience. 

If you produce high-quality, premium content, even if you “ungate” the content,  you can nurture leads through the sales funnel and generate more qualified leads for your business.

  • Search Engine Optimization Wins – Ungated content, when optimized for search engine optimization purposes, can be indexed by search engines and give you high visibility on search engines. 

Gated content, by virtue of not being visible to the public and search engine bots, cannot be indexed for search visibility.

So if you are still building your SEO profile and your credibility in your audiences’ minds, ungated content may be your best friend.

  • Retargeting Ads & Remarketing Campaigns – Just because you allow ungated access to your premium content does not mean you have lost all lead-generation opportunities. 

Enable cookies on your site and create retargeting audiences for your email, paid, organic, and social media visitors. Segment the audiences by their level of engagement with the ungated content that you provided for free. 

Re-engage with the audience through paid ads (retargeting) and email drip campaigns (remarketing). 

Use gated content once your audience is further down the funnel as your target audience is better acquainted with your brand and is more likely to share their contact information with you at that point. 

Retargeting and remarketing campaigns also help keep your brand top of mind as your audience. 

  • A Larger Audience Reach – Ungated content creates a much bigger audience for your content and is also more likely to be shared within their individual networks. As marketers, you can still keep track of the consumption of your content, which in itself is a micro-conversion. As your target audience consumes more and more quality content from you, you build top-of-mind awareness for your brand, and that in turn, is likely to generate more inquiries from your audience when they have the intent to purchase.
  • Direct Sharing with Your Most Valuable Audience – Finally, use automation tools on LinkedIn to share your most valuable content. In fact, go even further and share it with your targeted list of accounts. That way, you are using a valuable, usable, and relevant piece of content as a conversation starter rather than a cold prospecting message.  

When & How You Should Gate Your Content

Despite the low conversion rates of gated content and the ways in which ungated long-form content, such as whitepapers, can be used in more creative ways for lead generation, gated white papers are one of the most effective B2B lead generation strategies. 

By gating content, businesses can capture qualified leads that are generally genuinely interested in their products or services. This is an important step in the lead nurturing process and helps companies to identify potential customers who have a higher likelihood of making a purchase.

Gating white papers also help companies to track leads more effectively and set up the foundations for marketing automation. Through this process, businesses can target and segment leads based on their interests and preferences. This way, they can ensure that their marketing messages are reaching the right people at the right time.

So when should you gate your white papers or other long-form premium content?

According to a survey conducted by Referral Rock, 59% of the surveyed marketers said they are most likely to gate a piece of content when it is more in-depth than a typical content piece they produce. 50% of those surveyed also said they gate content to qualify a lead as genuinely interested.

In our experience, here are the best practices for gating and promoting content:

1. Provide a solution to a specific and urgent problem – Unless a piece of content is seen as really valuable by your prospects, they are hesitant to share their contact information, even if you have spent hundreds of research hours and content creation time to create perfect, in-depth content.

Make sure your content piece is specific enough to help the reader find solutions to an urgent problem. Remember painkillers sell better than vitamins!

2. Use titles and keywords that actually speak to your audience – Sometimes, there are various ways to speak to a problem in the industry and not everyone may be using the same terminology to speak about the same issue.

Make sure you spend enough time researching keyword search volume, hashtags, and buzzwords being used in the industry to really match your content piece to user queries.

3. Provide content that they cannot otherwise find online –  Examples of content types that work well behind a form include information that is not easily available online, such as proprietary industry reports, toolkits to help with a specific problem area, product demos, white papers (as long as it meets criteria 1, 2 & 3), data sheets, webinars on new technologies or topics, how-to guides, templates for downloads, etc.

4. Ensure Gated Form Best Practices to minimize the chances of getting spammed. If the contact information that is shared is not genuine or linked to a business, it can dilute the lead qualification process. 

Best practices include emailing the content to the email address shared instead of allowing for a direct download and requiring a business email address instead of a generic one. There is also some evidence that progressive profiling improves conversion rates by reducing user friction.

5. Acknowledge that not all downloads have the intent to purchase – Sometimes readers may be top of the funnel and may only be looking for educational material to improve their understanding of the subject, i.e., not likely to become an SQL anytime in the near future. 

We are all guilty of this. We are looking for information for educational purposes and have no intention of reaching out to the company that authored the content for any commercial purposes.

6. Gate content lowers down in the funnel. At the top of the funnel, many prospects are still learning and exploring and are more likely to want to stay anonymous. By gating content in the middle of the funnel, marketers can ensure that they are getting leads who have already shown interest in their product or service and are more likely to convert. 

This strategy is perfectly aligned with the idea of ungating your premium content and then targeting the viewers with retargeting ads and/or remarketing drip campaigns. They are more likely to share their information once they are in the consideration or decision phase.

What does this mean for B2B lead generation?

Content still reigns supreme. Great content that helps your users with a specific pain point will always work in generating leads with the right amount of marketing. The point is that not all high-quality, premium content needs to be gated. In fact, if you are still building brand awareness, it may be best for you to make your content pieces, even the more in-depth ones, free for all.

However, if you really have something unique that’s not available online, your gating strategy may work really well in generating leads provided you promote the piece of content well. 

In 2023, with form fatigue building up, introduce other lead generation strategies into your mix, especially retargeting strategies, automated and personalized chatbots, and gating your content lower in your funnel to truly deliver leads that have a high intent to purchase.

B2B Lead Generation Services in Chicago

Why Top Quality Content is Essential for Healthcare Practice Marketing

Posted on November 15, 2022 - 11:30 AM by
healthcare marketing

Healthcare marketing is one of our favorite niches at Webtage. We get to tell beautiful stories of miracles and the resilience of the human spirit. But this is the easy part of our jobs.  

What we find challenging, and thus, more exciting, is building a solid foundation for our client’s content marketing. It begins with laying out a well-thought-out content strategy.

Good healthcare content can help:

  1. Generate trust in your expertise as a trusted healthcare provider, thereby helping with your reputation management
  2. Drive search traffic by helping your quality content rank higher on search engines
  3. Help your patients answer questions regarding health conditions.

Why would any healthcare practice not want to include content in its marketing toolkit? Even though quality content should be a part of any healthcare practice, a recent survey by SEMRush on State of Content Marketing 2022, found that only 26% of healthcare organizations use content marketing very successfully.

 We’ll be exploring healthcare content marketing in this article, the challenges, opportunities, and some actionable tips you can implement for your healthcare practice. 

Where Are Healthcare Marketers Going Wrong And What Can They Do About It?  

What truly matters is delivering value for your customers through your content. Unfortunately, that’s missing from healthcare marketing. Most of the focus is inward, and content marketing is merely another tool to hard sell their practice and its offerings. We also commonly see click-bait, low-quality SEO articles with keyword stuffing to drive search traffic. 

Another challenge is that healthcare marketing is a different beast from the other kinds of marketing because of HIPAA laws and high (read life-and-death) stakes. 

At Webtage, we believe that challenges are hidden gems of opportunity. It’s a chance to wipe the slate clean, present fresh ideas, and carve new pathways that are unique for healthcare marketing. 

7 Tips For Your Healthcare Practice To Ace at High-Quality Content Marketing 

Here’s how you can use high-quality content marketing to partake in your patients’ conversations and make a difference in their lives. 

  1. Step Into Your Customers’ Shoes 

 The internet is a gold mine for healthcare marketers. Your patients are looking at it as a reliable source for answers on their health and solutions. It’s their first go-to source which can lead them to stumble upon your website. 

Relevant and high-quality content is what will pull them to your website, browse for answers to their challenges, and reach out to you for solutions. 

 Your content must be empathetic, and that can happen if you think and feel like your patients. What your patient is looking for is a trusted partner that can solve their ailing issues. 

Your message should have your target audience and their needs at the heart of all conversations. 

 You must know your audience before creating material for them. Ask yourself: 

What is your patient experience like when they come to your website and when they visit your competitors’ sites? 

A strong content marketing program identifies and defines its target audience. Some tools that can help you are focus groups, one-on-one interviews, and qualitative and quantitative research. You should now have a strategic foundation to construct your content marketing program thanks to that analysis. 

 A firm grasp of your patient’s needs and experiences is key to building a winning content marketing plan and relevant engagement material.  

  1. Plan Well And In Advance

Content marketing must be strategic, like any other marketing element. 

A documented content strategy, in our opinion, is essential to any healthcare marketing strategy. Not more content, exactly. Intelligent content is the key. It’s a tedious procedure, but essential to your success. A strategy is now essential, not just nice to have. 

We engage your consumers and drive business growth with our differentiated content marketing approach which requires us to plan, create, distribute, measure, and optimize all content around the target audience.

At Webtage, we employ a Google Sheets content calendar that enables us to collaborate with our healthcare clients to manage their monthly content editorial plan. In order to make writing content less stressful and more focused, our editorial calendar concentrates on specific key areas and goals. Our top content marketing goals are: 

  • Consumer engagement 
  • Brand building
  • Lead generation and conversion 
  • Patient loyalty
  • Physician engagement 

Our editorial calendar is set up in two-month intervals. This enables us to prepare ahead of time and delegate tasks to our content creators.

  1. Content Creation 

Once you have the content strategy and editorial calendar ready, decide how you will ensure quality content that meets professional compliance requirements and is medically vetted, so readers get valuable, up-to-date information. 

Quality, up-to-date and accurate healthcare content is also important for search engine visibility. In 2018 Google unveiled its “medic update” which had strong implications for businesses in the YMYL (short for ‘Your Money or Your Life’) or in other words websites that provide any information that affects people’s health, wellness, or money. Put simply, it means that Google does not want to recommend “uneducated advice, opinions, or potentially fraudulent websites.” Google wants to be certain that the sites that they recommend display a high level of expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. algorithms place. 

That’s the reason that we follow the E.A.T. principle when creating and marketing content for our healthcare clients.

At Webtage, our content team comprises medical writers with experience in creating content that meets professional healthcare writing standards. This means some of the  specialized skills they bring to the table include:

  1. Ability to present information that is scientifically accurate
  2. Deep understanding of medical terms & conditions
  3. Ability to provide a logical structure, including logical presentation of ideas
  4. Ability to simplify complex medical information into simple, easily digestible pieces, without losing factual accuracy
  5. Ability to search reliable references from non-reliable sources
  6. Be able to combine factual information with compelling writing to appeal to readers and search engines.
  7. A clear understanding of statistical research, data presentation, as well as ethical and legal issues
  1. Content Delivery & Mobile Searches

It’s crucial that we present the content in an engaging way. Those who optimize for mobile platforms and present snackable content in text and video formats will reap the benefits of content marketing. Therefore, your content marketing must not only show relevance to the end user but also deliver it in easily digestible chunks while on the go.

  1. Pay Attention To Online Reputation Management 

Healthcare marketers must convince prospective patients that they are reliable considering the abundance of options for customers to get health information, both reliable and dubious.

Reputation management means more than generating and managing reviews (although that’s an important part of the puzzle). 

So how should you go about building a transparent & authentic brand while driving action & advocacy that goes beyond managing your reviews on Yelp and other public review sites? Remember, the approach is to push up positive content higher and higher in search engine results and bury the negative content. We offer several services to build a solid reputation for you.

Creating original content, such as thought articles, white papers, videos, Q&A, and other long-form content pieces and publishing them on your website and high-quality third-party sites helps to display your thought leadership high on search engines, thus boosting your reputation. Similarly, social media marketing, when done well, can not only increase your brand reach, but it also allows you to build your reputation through local community marketing.

  1. Collaborate With Influencers 

Even if a doctor may be the one writing prescriptions and advising treatments, if a patient is well-informed, she is more likely to follow the doctor’s advice or even inquire about it in the first place.

Online influencers are now a part of these doctor-patient discussions because of the expansion of digital healthcare research, and they have a significant impact on the possibilities that patients inquire about.

Think of the quality above number when choosing your influencers to work with in order to maximize your impact. Instead of only looking for influencers with the greatest following, when conducting audience research, look for specialty publications and websites that cater to your core audience and consider methods to collaborate with them.

Your own work will benefit from paying greater attention to these trends and how they change over time. 

  1. Content Analytics and Measurement

In order to maximize the efficacy of the program, you need to examine your content marketing endeavor to determine what is effective and what is not. You’ll discover the tactical move that most appeals to your target market through trial and error. 

Key performance metrics we use to understand content marketing success include:

  1. Acceptance of content pieces on high-quality and relevant third-party sites.
  2. Ability to produce medically compliant content pieces that attract traffic consistently.
  3. Reader engagement with the content. This could include social shares, likes, and comments on owned social channels.
  4. Website traffic to your content pieces, whether we publish them on your website or third-party sites.
  5. Reach of your content, calculated as impression share

 It should be clear that developing a successful content marketing strategy takes time. It needs nurturing and requires patience. But in the end, your firm might benefit from all of your efforts, strategic focus, tracking data, and meticulousness. 

Final Thoughts 

The key to enhancing your reputation as an expert in your field and drawing new patients to your health system’s website and online channels is timely, pertinent, and consistent quality information.

Marketers in any industry may position themselves for success by creating great content for audiences that are becoming more knowledgeable, prioritizing mobile, and spending money on influencer marketing. This is even more important for healthcare organizations as the content you create can have serious implications on lives if not created and vetted extremely carefully

Google has clearly stated that “medical advice needs to be written by people with high medical E-A-T to be considered high quality.”

Creating regular, excellent healthcare material is not easy—but it doesn’t have to be an insurmountable endeavor. We hope you find our advice on developing a master editorial content calendar and skills to create high-quality, up-to-date, and medically sourced content helpful. 

Finally, you might want to consider asking for support from a professional healthcare digital marketing agency in Chicago to help handle this challenging task with ease and comfort.

Healthcare Marketing Agency in Naperville

How Branding Can Make Your B2B Company Not Just Stay Alive But Also Thrive

Posted on October 2, 2022 - 5:14 AM by
b2b branding

There is plenty of brand preaching in the marketing world. Every company is looking to build its brand, be “top of the mind” of its consumers, and improve its ROI.

But how does branding exactly help you achieve your marketing goals, especially increasing sales and growing your B2B business? 

Does branding match up to all the hype? 

More importantly, does your B2B business really need it even if there’s truth in the hype? 

While the ‘noise’ around branding is certainly valid, it has, somewhere, diluted its meaning, and hence, power. 

We explore branding for B2B businesses in particular in this article so that you can find clarity, purpose, and meaning in it. We will look at it from the lens of both the company and the consumers. 

Why Does Branding Matter For Your B2B Company?

B2B companies had traditionally favored R&D and sales over brand marketing. This approach served the purpose for many years until the marketing landscape changed forever with the advent of digital technologies. With the target audiences now predominantly online, B2B companies can engage with them on multiple digital channels. In the digital world, marketplaces are continually changing and traditional barriers to entry are no longer as relevant. 

In this world of digital behavior, branding is more important than ever for B2B companies. One of the chief reasons branding is still relevant today is that brand loyalty still makes a difference between engagement and non-engagement. Consider these statistics by the International Council of Shopping Centers’ (ICSC) survey in the B2C markets:

82% of Americans are loyal to a product brand. 

While this might be the case in B2C markets, it is no different in the B2B marketplace. In fact, the only difference is that the brand loyalists in the B2B industry are the key decision-makers in your targeted clientele. 

A powerful brand messaging can help to: 

  • Keep your customers engaged 
  • Align with your customer’s values and beliefs
  • Differentiate your offerings
  • Amplify demand
  • Lower the cost of sales
  • Command a price premium
  • Improve stakeholder confidence 
  • Provide insulation from intermediate setbacks 

While these are some of the many benefits that brand marketing brings to your B2B business, the question remains: How does branding correlate to conversions and sales?

Decoding Brand Dynamics For B2B Companies

We will get to the bottom of this question by understanding the evolution of branding, its impact on consumer psychology, and how brand marketing directly affects your sales and ROI.

At the outset, people perceive branding as the creation of an image around your company. But branding runs deeper than perception. In fact, branding is not even about the creation of a perception or an image. Branding today is all about authenticity.

It explains why the old rules of creating a brand image no longer work. It’s not enough to be on top of the consumer’s mind.

Branding, today, is about authenticity, alleviating if not solving problems, and being an intrinsic part of the consumer community. Let’s dig deeper! 

  1. Authenticity

B2B consumers aren’t listening to your sales teams or believing every claim you make on your website or social platforms. Today’s consumers are astute to look for more details at the click of a button. 

Your consumers are listening to your brand as much as you stay attuned to social listening. They are forming wholesome opinions and images about your brand even after you’ve sketched it for them. 

They are actively listening to what their peers are talking about your brand. They are reading your online testimonials, not on your website alone, but on other consumer review websites. 

If there is a match between what you’re promising and what other consumers claim that you’re offering, then your target clientele will approach you to learn more. 

But if there is a mismatch between your claims and their findings, they will look elsewhere and switch to another brand. 

Here are some questions for you to introspect: 

  • Is there an alignment in what your brand is conveying, what it is being perceived as, and what it truly is?
  • Maybe it’s time to look at what others are saying about your brand. Are there certain negative reviews you need to look into? 
  • Maybe it’s time to look into your content marketing efforts and check if it’s in alignment with your branding. Perhaps you need to re-evaluate your brand messaging.  

The brand marketing dynamics have changed as now, the consumer is in the driver’s seat of all your branding efforts. 

  1. Empathy 

Branding allows you to help identify and reduce, if not solve, people’s problems. Fully engaged and loyal customers are more likely to refer your brand to others. Branding can turn your customers into advocates, leading to better ROI and business growth. 

Branding inspires your customers to pay attention and take action. And that can only happen when you are listening to them and delivering relevant and targeted content. Improving your current engagement levels with your customers leads to increased ROI. That’s the pure essence of branding. It inspires action.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, you can not only track ROI but also attribute ROI to the various phases of your sales funnel. They shared the following statistics:

  • 71% of B2B marketers felt that their content marketing is sophisticated/ mature.
  • 74% of B2B marketers felt the value their content provided was a top factor.

One respondent in the CMI 2022 B2B Research shared,

“We increased our empathy toward our audience and found them to be more receptive.”

Branded content tailored to specific phases of your buyer’s journey improves engagement and sales. You can even see how providing actionable, curated content directly affects your branding at every phase of your sales funnel. 

At Webtage, we track and measure our branding efforts with the below metrics to name a few:

  1. Branded Keyword searches 
  2. Social Media Mentions
  3. Social media Engagements
  4. Social Media Reach
  5. Branded Paid searches Engagement (CTR, Conversions)

Branding, content, and actions share an intimate relationship that’s successful when it’s based on empathy for your customers. Effective tailored content taps into empathy, helping you fix your customers’ pain points, offer value, build relationships, and earn trust, which propels action.

  1. Connections 

Today, branding calls for being an intrinsic part of the consumer community. This is backed by research studies as well. 49% report better ROI by investing in relationships over acquisition marketing as per the second annual Cross-Channel Marketing Report.

B2B Branding matters because companies act just like people when it comes to evaluating a purchase decision. That means, alongside their logical reasons for buying your products and services, they are also overcome with powerful emotional impulses that can influence their purchase decision. An effective branding strategy will tap into the totality of their buyers’ reasons and motivations. 

Brands drive B2B business by triggering their emotions and forming meaningful relationships. Emotional messages are more likely to create memorable bonds with your customers. 

Apart from tapping into the power of emotions, there’s also a need for smart B2B branding that is value, purpose, and sustainability-driven. 

A case in point is Yvon Chouinard giving up the ownership of his company, Patagonia to the Holdfast Collective (98%) and the Patagonia Purpose Trust (2%). Patagonia is still a for-profit business, as it stands committed to creating the best quality products and preserving its financial health to support its biggest stakeholder – The Earth and its people, including its employees and customers. 

A Strong Brand Can Prove To Be Your Business’ Biggest Insulation 

A strong B2B brand can solve many problems before and when they occur. A well-respected and liked brand can be the only thing keeping your biggest client. As this article elucidates, the efforts into B2B brand marketing will eventually prove to be valuable and help ease those occasional low, bumpy transitions in your business.

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

Top 5 Reasons Your B2B Company Should Consider LinkedIn Marketing

Posted on July 15, 2022 - 2:52 AM by

LinkedIn has come a long way from being just a portal for job seekers. LinkedIn started as a job search engine. But it has now grown into a powerful and integral tool for B2B marketing. 

B2B marketing or Business-to-Business marketing, like the name suggests, refers to marketing products and services to another business, instead of consumers.

Why Is LinkedIn A Crucial Platform for B2B Marketing? 

Let’s explore LinkedIn marketing for B2B businesses and what makes it the perfect social platform for B2B marketing. 

We explore LinkedIn marketing for B2B businesses, and also share our top reasons why you must consider LinkedIn for your B2B marketing. 

  1. LinkedIn Is A Gold Mine Of Business Professionals 

If your B2B company is not on LinkedIn, you’re missing out on enormous opportunities. 

What makes LinkedIn different from the other social platforms is the context. While platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have social leanings towards family, friends, and casual connections, LinkedIn is built for business connections only.

Consider this! There are 750+ million users on LinkedIn across 200 countries at the rate of 3 new members every second and counting. 

As per LinkedIn, 71% of professionals use the platform to convey their business decisions. That should convince you how active business professionals are on the platform, promoting their brands. 

It is smart marketing to meet up with other businesses on the platform where they are the most active. If you’re a B2B company, LinkedIn is the place to be. 

So, if you’re not on LinkedIn yet, we strongly suggest you set up your company page at the earliest. You could meet your next business client, partner, employees, influencers and whoever you want to target for your business.  

  1. Social Media For B2B Is Unlike B2C companies 

Unlike B2C or Business-to-Consumer businesses that are aimed at attracting a wider audience of consumers, B2B businesses have a niche audience of other businesses. 

A typical B2C marketing requires a lot of visibility, where the emphasis is geared towards the awareness phase of the buyer’s journey. We measure B2C marketing success more in terms of metrics, such as followers, likes, comments, shares, etc. 

However, B2B marketing runs deeper than just being known to your target audience. There is emphasis on not just brand building, but also on business networking because: 

  • B2B audience spans multiple departments: strategic, financial and operational decision 
  • B2B sales cycles are much longer, so regular communication to provide value for decision makers is critical.

Building a powerful brand gives your B2B business a competitive advantage. Brand building should be a strategic priority to speed up business growth. 

B2B Marketing should be distinct and authentic since there is a demand for purpose-driven brands that fosters trust in the long run among the target audience. Any brand that’s inauthentic and skewed more towards commercialization instead of purpose may not sustain for long. 

Competition is out, and collaboration is in. Brands that are authentic, purposeful, and collaborative are on the right track. 

However, this is easier than done, as most B2B businesses today are blindly following the B2C marketing template. This lack of creativity is damaging to your B2B brand’s success. At Webtage, our approach is to balance brand building and business networking. We carve our clients’ distinct brand personality, and convey it creatively to their audience, building trust, empathy, differentiation, and loyalty.

LinkedIn provides many useful business networking and lead generation tools, including LinkedIn Sales Navigator and LinkedIn Advertising that allow for deep targeting of your audience for best business networking opportunities.

When you’re on LinkedIn, think of the relationships as less as connections and more like collaborative business partnerships. LinkedIn B2B marketing is about building long-lasting partnerships with your relevant target customers.

  1. LinkedIn Is The Most Effective Platform For B2B Marketing 

There are several substantial reasons LinkedIn is so popular with B2B marketers. 

LinkedIn is an excellent place for businesses to promote their products and services and gain relevant business leads. Research has backed the claim of LinkedIn being an effective lead generation platform. An overwhelming 97% of business leads from social media platforms come from LinkedIn. 

Clearly, LinkedIn out beats other social platforms and works for B2B lead generation. When you dig further and look at the reasons backed by research findings, you’ll find that it all makes perfect sense. 

It’s highly likely that you will be in direct contact with high-level decision-makers of the companies you are targeting on LinkedIn. LinkedIn B2B marketing is a faster way to reach your targeted audiences and gain high-quality leads. 

Another reason that makes LinkedIn a popular choice for B2B marketers is that it is viewed as a trusted platform. 

  1. LinkedIn B2B Marketing Helps In Building Thought Leadership

As per a recent study by the Content Marketing Institute, 

  • 97% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn for their content marketing. 
  • 78% of B2B marketers say LinkedIn is an effective tool for content marketing.

So, LinkedIn is not just a networking place for business professionals, it’s also an active community that’s sharing relevant content. Consider these statistics by LinkedIn internal data:

  • There are nine billion content impressions on LinkedIn each week (LinkedIn study). 
  • Around 45% of LinkedIn article readers are in upper-level positions, such as managers, VPs, Directors, and C-level positions. 

So, as a business brand, you can build thought leadership with your LinkedIn short form posts, videos, and long form articles. There are high chances that the decision makers of your target audience will read them, and even approach you if they are original, high-quality, and well-written. 

  1. LinkedIn is A B2B Centric Platform 

While this might come across as stating the obvious, what most people don’t realize is how LinkedIn is built for B2B marketing. Whether it’s building business relationships, developing your brand, or doing business, LinkedIn is the place to be.

We can use precise and virtually limitless targeting tools and options provided by LinkedIn to reach your audiences. We also use strategic testing to determine which of your audiences and targeting parameter combinations can generate the optimal results.

There are several strategic actions we can take to improve your LinkedIn B2B marketing efforts. For example, we add the LinkedIn Insight Tag to our client’s website so that we can re-target the website visitors with relevant content in the future. 

We Can Help You Gain Leads With Our LinkedIn B2B2 Marketing Services 

LinkedIn is the platform to be on if you have a B2B business. Whether it is to attract relevant, high-quality leads, influencers to promote your products and services, or employees to join your workforce, LinkedIn is the strong dark horse of social media platforms. 

Our article has you covered all the benefits that LinkedIn offers for your B2B business. If you want to know more about how we can help leverage LinkedIn for your business, get in touch with Best Marketing Agency in Naperville & Chicago area.

B2B Marketing Services in Naperville

How B2B Social Media Marketing Can Take Your Business To The Next Level

Posted on June 2, 2022 - 11:36 AM by

Social Media Marketing (SMM) is typically seen as beneficial for B2C companies. But this couldn’t be far from the truth. 

If you don’t have a social media plan for your B2B business, you are missing out on huge benefits. Social media is the top distribution method for B2B marketers, with 89% using social tools.

We break down how social media is a fantastic platform to promote your B2B company and when done right, it can have multifold benefits. 

What is B2B Social Media Marketing And How Is It Different? 

While B2C companies use social media marketing to reach out to their audience and influence purchases,  the social media marketing goals for B2B is to sell their products and services to other businesses. 

B2B social media marketing entails strategizing, drafting, promoting, and analyzing content to engage your target audience on social platforms. 

While it might look simple at the outset, there are several nuanced factors including staying abreast of rapidly evolving social platforms and features that make it both challenging and exciting.  

The social media marketing approach for B2B differs from B2C companies. Typically, B2B social media marketing tends to be more strategic to influence business founders and decision makers. It involves relatively more nurturing of business relationships to influence large order purchases. Even the nature of content mix will look different for B2B social media marketing. For example, insightful, and informational videos, case studies, reports, white papers. 

Also, consider these statistics to understand how different the B2B buyer from the B2C customer: 

  • B2B customers spend 27% of their purchase consideration time conducting independent research online.
  • 44% of millennial B2B customers prefer not to interact with a sales rep at all.

B2B buyers are more proactive in their research and enjoy more autonomy in their purchasing decisions. It’s vital that your digital presence and social media marketing are strong for astute B2B buyers.  

[mk_padding_divider size=”100″][highlight_box style=”fade2″ height=”200″ textsize=”20″ iconsize=”18″ icon=”fas fa-search-location” text=”“Social platforms are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget; they should be central to its marketing strategy, and used in coordination with other marketing efforts.”
~ Richard Branson” clr=”#000000″ bgclr=”#66cccc” hoverbg=”#aac3c0″][mk_padding_divider size=”100″]

Top 3 Ways  Your B2B company should utilize social media marketing for maximum benefits

B2B social media marketing is one of the best ways to build a strong brand presence and customer loyalty. 

Here are the top benefits of B2B social media marketing. 

  1. Build And Boost Brand Awareness And Repute 

Leverage your company’s social profiles to provide useful information about what your B2B company has to offer for your clients.

Publishing relevant and high-quality content consistently on social media and engaging with your audience via comments and messages helps in improving brand awareness and trust with your customers. 

Sharing your industry expertise and insights by leveraging social platforms establishes you as a thought-leader and helps you stand out from your competition by attracting qualified partners. We are already seeing the benefits of employee branding, especially the increasing digital presence of C-suite leaders, such as the improved trustworthiness of your B2B company. 

  1. Create An Engaged Community And Improve Customer Experience 

Social platforms help you tap into a ‘mostly online’ audience to gain their trust and improve customer experience.  

Your business clients are on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, making it easier for you to build connections and collaborations with them. 

You can interact and help answer your clients’ queries, solve their problems, or thank them for their reviews online whenever possible. It shows them that you’re paying attention to them and are invested in their growth. It makes your brand more humane, approachable and authentic. 

  1. Drive Traffic, Generates Leads, And Increases Sales 

Social media marketing helps achieve your search engine optimization (SEO) goals. Being active on social platforms can improve your company’s positioning in Google’s organic search results, and can help in improving your ranking indirectly. 

“Social platforms are no longer add-ons to a business’s communication budget; they should be central to its marketing strategy, and used in coordination with other marketing efforts.” 

– Richard Branson 

Social media marketing helps drive the relevant traffic to your website, generate qualified leads and increase sales. 

The ultimate goal of all marketing efforts is to promote sales. Social media marketing entails identifying potential clients, positioning their products and services to the targeted prospects, building relationships and trust with them, and nurturing leads. 

It’s Time To Get Social

Social media marketing is a powerful marketing channel for enabling brand authenticity, trust, community and sales. 

As much as it presents a massive opportunity, it is also getting increasingly competitive. 

Looking to improve or initiate social media strategy for your B2B organization? Follow the streamlined 1-2-3-4-5 foundational steps to start your social media marketing on a solid footing!

Contact us to learn more about how Webtage can help you with our innovative and focused approach to social media marketing that can help you stand out from a sea of competitors. 

Social Media Marketing Company in Naperville

Top 5 Questions to Ask Your SEO Agency

Posted on May 11, 2022 - 10:28 AM by

Deciding to hire an SEO agency is easy. The tricky part is to skim the chaff and find the best SEO agency that helps achieve your business goals and outcomes. 

The global search engine optimization service providers’ industry is expected to grow from $63.19 billion in 2022 to $134.26 billion in 2026. It’s not surprising to see anyone with a computer become an entrepreneur today and start an agency offering their SEO services. But unfortunately, many don’t have the expertise to grow your business. 

This article is to save you the heartache and money from choosing the wrong SEO agency. We list some basic but crucial questions that will help you see through the bells and whistles that agencies offer to bait you. 

What is SEO And Why Is It Important For Your Business? 

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a critical digital marketing pillar for getting traffic organically from search engines. 

However, it is difficult to get your company showing up at the top of the search engine’s front page listings. It takes time, effort, and patience to achieve the desired SEO results. 

Most companies make the mistake of underestimating the importance of having a solid SEO strategy and action plan. 

Some of the main SEO benefits include: 

  • Improves your site ranking on search engine results 
  • Generates organic web traffic without having to pay for each lead 
  • Improves brand awareness, loyalty and advocacy. 

It helps make things easier for Google to find, index, analyze and rank your site. Not investing time in SEO activities can slow down your marketing efforts and hence, lead generation and revenue. 

SEO is a broad umbrella that includes:

  • SEO Audit
  • Link building
  • Keyword Research and Strategy
  • SEO-optimized content marketing
  • Local SEO
  • Voice SEO
  • Technical SEO
  • eCommerce SEO

No one SEO professional can handle the above tasks. Any reputed agency should have a credible SEO team of experts in the respective domains. 

If you have diverse SEO needs and scope of work, then you must consider an agency instead of hiring a freelancer or several freelancers. Hiring an agency will give you a holistic, streamlined, and effective SEO campaign instead of outsourcing the work to several freelancers and ending up with a disjointed campaign. At the worst, hiring several freelancers can hurt your marketing efforts and business.

What You Should Consider Before Hiring An SEO Agency 

You should tread with caution before hiring any SEO agency. Just as an agency has the power to spike your business’ marketing efforts and revenues, it could also ruin your business’ reputation and hurt the bottom-line. 

There are so many unfortunate stories of businesses crashing even before they take off, because of the wrong choice of an agency which scammed them. 

While there will be many agencies that will promise the moon to you at a fraction of the cost, there could be a catch to it. Like adopting black-hat techniques or strategies that go against the platform’s guidelines, or getting tons of irrelevant traffic with badly researched keyword strategies. 

[mk_padding_divider size=”100″][highlight_box style=”fade2″ height=”200″ textsize=”20″ iconsize=”18″ icon=”fas fa-search-location” text=”At Webtage, our primary SEO focus has been on producing high-value content or content that’s original, well-researched, and resourceful for our clients’ target audience. This approach not only builds our clientele’s social repute but also boosts their brand identity with thought-leadership content and creates very valuable backlinks that help with their ongoing SEO efforts.” clr=”#000000″ bgclr=”#66cccc” hoverbg=”#aac3c0″][mk_padding_divider size=”100″]
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Before you place your trust and hire any SEO agency, I want you to pause and reflect upon the following questions.  

  1. Do You Know Your Goals and Outcomes?

No SEO agency can help you determine your goals and determined outcomes, however good it is. 

There are many SEO agencies with distinct core strengths and specializations. If there is a mismatch in your goals and expectations and their expertise, then it’s a sheer waste of time, money, and effort. 

If your goal is for your website to rank on the search engines’ 1st page for specific keywords relevant to your business that your target audience searches for, then you’ll need an agency whose core strengths include SEO-optimized content marketing. Your strategy will be to attract your audience and educate them with compelling content and pull them into your sales funnels. 

Maybe your goal is to improve the domain authority of your site as you’re losing out ranking for your target keywords despite excellent content because your competitors have higher domain authority sites. You’ll need to find an agency whose core strengths include link building. 

Maybe you’ve noticed that your organic traffic has dropped despite publishing more content. This could mean several problems including a bad robots.txt file or bloated site with duplicate content or something more serious. In that case, you’ll need an agency whose core strengths include technical SEO. 

Maybe you’re a local business that caters only to local customers and needs leads/inquiries from certain locations. In that case, you’ll need an agency whose core strengths include local SEO. 

Knowing your goals and outcomes will help you shortlist the relevant agencies tailored to your needs. Agencies will also prefer to work with clients who are looking specifically for their expertise as they know they can serve them better. 

Based on your goals, desired results, and budget, you can choose an agency that has a specialist focus where it’s focused only on one or few aspects of SEO like technical SEO or a generalist focus where they offer a bouquet of SEO services. 

  1. Does The Agency Have A Defined SEO Process? 

A credible agency will have a unique and holistic SEO process that’s based on its vast experience with diverse clients. They have the experience of going through the ‘trial-and-error’ process in SEO to map out their process on what works to deliver the results every time. 

At Webtage, one of the top Chicago Digital Marketing Companies, our process follows the below 9 unique steps:

  1. Business Understanding & Website Audit

2. Competitor Analysis, including:

  • Backlink research
  • Content research
  • Keyword Focus

3. Keyword Research & Analysis

  • Conversion-ready keyword research
  • Monthly Search Volume
  • Competition Index
  • YoY changes

4. Tag Development & Optimization

  • Title Optimization
  • Description Optimization
  • Heading Optimization
  • Image Optimization
  • Content Optimization
  • Navigation Optimization

5. Technical SEO Analysis

  • Add Sitemaps(XML & HTML)
  • Add Robots.txt file
  • Internal Linking to create topic clusters
  • Structured Data set up correctly
  • HTML & CSS Error Resolution

6.Blog / Article Content Creation

  • High-quality, industry-standard content creation for backlinks and PR

7.Link Building/Promotional Strategies

  • Domain & Page Authority strategies
  • Percentage of Links Building Across Different Platforms Types, including:
    • Guest article publication
    • Local Listing /Business Listing Creation
    • Directory Submissions
    • Classifieds
    • Asset (presentation & video submissions)
    • Q&A activities
  • Spam Score policy

8.Tracking & Reporting

9. Google My Business profile Optimization

A good agency will not simply fix your SEO issues, but have a solid strategy and plan for growing your organic traffic in the long-term. They will have regular goals to achieve over a period to grow your SEO traffic and site every year.  

An agency with a clear and proven SEO process with deep expertise across the various pillars of SEO will grow your business sustainably. 

  1. Does The Agency Have A Knowledgeable And Experienced SEO Team?

There is a lot that happens in SEO and it takes specialized skills and in-depth expertise to be successful in this field. 

Check the credentials of the SEO team of the agency. Most reputed agencies list their team members on their website with their expertise. 

Ideally, the team should have experienced members with their unique strengths. They should have deep industry expertise after working with diverse clients. 

They should not only be able to manage amidst Google’s ever-changing algorithms but also stay ahead of the curve by spotting the future trends and patterns. 

An agency’s SEO team should also be able to give suggestions and recommendations for improvement, such as starting and growing on social channels, launching an optimized content marketing plan, starting a blog, improving the content on your website or the site speed. 

Instead of viewing your SEO partner as being sales-driven, it would do you well to listen to the recommendations and opt for the suggested SEO services that should grow your business. 

It should worry you if the team has no suggestions for improvements as it can tell poorly of their expertise, and it could also be a red flag of dubious SEO tactics to grow your business. 

  1. Does The SEO Agency Produce High-Value Content? 

A common mistake most SEO agencies make is to focus primarily on more mundane SEO-focused tasks, such as building backlinks. They neglect content, which is the major currency of SEO.

Search engines are getting so advanced and sophisticated that a lot of SEO tasks that were necessary a few years back are redundant today. Review the content on the agency’s website, and ask them for the content they’ve created for their client’s websites, social platforms, and other content assets. You should be able to gauge the worth of an SEO agency by the content they create. 

At Webtage, our primary SEO focus has been on producing high-value content or content that’s original, well-researched, and resourceful for our clients’ target audience. This approach not only builds our clientele’s social repute but also boosts their brand identity with thought-leadership content and creates very valuable backlinks that help with their ongoing SEO efforts.

We are cognizant of the audience’s preferences and platform’s best practices to produce both long-form (above 1200 words) and short-form content (below 800-1200 words). Long-form content works best for in-depth blogs, how-to-guides, case studies, and white papers. Short-form content works well on all social platforms, snackable blogs, news articles, infographics, sales copies.

We have led several successful SEO and PR campaigns publishing high-quality content on high DA third-party sites and building the brand reputation of our clients. 

  1. What Is Their Social Proof And Reputation? 

A good agency will be proud to display their client portfolio and testimonials as social proof. They will also showcase their industry-specific thought leadership in the form of in-depth blogs, research papers, and social posts, which reveal how they are the top of the latest SEO trends. Have they published their findings in a report from their exclusive company research and surveys? 

A reputed agency will be happy to share their list of clients, case studies, work samples, testimonials, and references. You can also check their online reviews, and especially the negative ones, to see if there are any red flags that you need to watch out for. Do they have the skills and experience to handle outreach, partnerships, and content promotion with journalists and publications? 

Their website should also be a good indication of how they perform in the SEO domain. If they are doing their SEO well, they can undoubtedly do the same for your business. However, some agencies focus their complete attention on serving their clients, and so you can ask them specifically for their recent client work or a case study.  

  1. What Is Their Company Culture Like? 

While this might seem like an odd question to ask, it is crucial before you sign the final deal. 

If you think about it, an agency is an extension of your business. What are your core business values and company culture? Check if you share a similar culture and values. This will make a fruitful, long-term relationship possible with them. 

You would not want to work with agencies with a toxic culture and environment. Are they realistic and transparent in their communication process? Or do they set unrealistic expectations such as promising you #1 rankings in a record-breaking time? Are they too focused on vanity metrics instead of showing you monthly organic progress on deliverables and reasoning behind their strategy and results? 

If they hide their SEO techniques under the pretext of confidentiality, you may have to think twice about proceeding ahead with them as the chances of a scam are high. 

Why Consider Webtage For Your Business? 

At Webtage, a Digital Marketing Agency in Naperville IL, we excel in delivering one of the most comprehensive, realistic, and proven SEO strategy plans with an excellent and consistent track record of implementing the SEO requirements to help our clients achieve their desired results. 

SEO Agency in Naperville

Why is building a brand image so important?

Posted on May 26, 2020 - 8:54 PM by

Why is building a brand image so important? It’s because this is how your customers/clients will remember you. And if there is no brand consistency, there will be only chaos and confusion. Nobody wants to deal with more chaos and uncertainty. Especially now.

 

Why do we remember brands like Coca Cola, Google, Apple? It’s because they invest in developing and promoting their brand identity. You cannot piece together a brand like a patchwork quilt from a dozen different sources just because it was the cheapest. This isn’t how you create brand loyalty.

 

Why do people pay more for a MacBook Air when they could get basically the same no-name brand for less than half the price? It’s because of Apple’s carefully constructed branding and image. Their message and their branding is not ONLY carefully constructed, but it’s consistent. It’s not about saving a few pennies or dollars here and there. It’s about an investment in a potentially amazing future.

 

There is a probably a LOT of competition in your area. What do you want to do to make your business stand out? What is important about YOUR image? What is the image you want to present to the world? You might think that, say, business cards are just a small, meaningless detail, but they are part of a foundation that is building your brand and even something as small as a business card is part and parcel of a consistent message: and part of that message is that YOU pay attention to EVERY detail: not only in your products or services, but your office setting, your website, your branding, your everything. Your image is what is working for you.

 

Spend the time, discipline and dollars now to perfect the image. Every single thing you put out there is representing YOU. This is the area where you can outshine every other mediocre and same-o same-o-business in your industry. Your business has a lot of potential to be unique and amazing with the right plan. This can be an exciting and creative time, getting your business off the ground or getting it to grow further by putting together a great brand with a good creative and marketing plan! So get out there, form a great team to elevate your brand, and create something amazing.
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About the Author

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Sandra Mui shines in her role as the Creative Director at Webtage. With over 15 years of experience in creative writing and visual arts, she gets the pulse of the consumer and creates content that strikes a chord.

Having previously worked for advertising agencies, such as Leo Burnett and other boutique creative houses, she has successfully launched Fortune 500 ad campaigns, including those for Procter & Gamble, Kodak Professional Division, Phillip Morris, FILA, Aki Italia & Champion Sportswear.

Sandra has a passion for reading, writing and researching. Her love of words and art gives her a unique vision and ability to put things together in ways that will make your brand pop!

Contact her at sandra@webtage.com

Digital Marketing Services in Naperville

Are you a Healthcare Provider That’s Offering Telehealth Services? This is What You Need to do Right Now!

Posted on April 14, 2020 - 6:26 PM by

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic and shelter-in place orders in many areas of the country, many healthcare providers, including hospitals, doctors, and mental healthcare providers, are now providing virtual care. Google has recently rolled out tow new features in Google Search and Maps to allow users to conveniently find telehealth options, “whether it’s to a doctor’s office down the street, the hospital across town, or a national telehealth platform.” You can also clearly communicate your COVID-19 information with your intended audience.

So how do you, as a provider, access these features? Let’s talk about Google Maps first (if you are not familiar with the significance of Google Maps for your healthcare business or have not claimed your Google My Business listing , learn why it’s critical that you do so now and while you’re at it, also learn foolproof tips on optimizing your GMB listing):

      • Google My Business now offers URLs dedicated to COVID-19 and telehealth services. Make sure you add the URL links to your Google My Business Page listing. After your edits have been reviewed and approved, it’ll appear in Google Maps listing and your detailed Google Maps listing as well. Here’s how you can add the URLs: Sign in to your GMB listing by visiting business.google.com. Next click on ‘Info’ on the left-hand side panel. If you are a healthcare organization, you will see two additional URL options for COVID-19 info link and virtual care link. Add the links as applicable and click Save.
      • List Telemedicine Services on your Business Profile on Google. Google adds that “you can choose what to offer from suggested types of services. If the type of service isn’t listed, you can add your own custom services, like “telemedicine,” “telehealth,” “video visits,” or “house calls.” Once the services edit has saved, patients will be able to see the services you have listed, including online visits or telemedicine.
      • Finally, in the Attributes section, add video visits to the offerings, if you do provide video visits. This will also help display your telemedicine option to your patients when they search for your services in Google.

I’d be amiss if I didn’t mention that Google is also helping healthcare providers with technology infrastructure and support via “HIPAA-compliant G Suite products (including using Google Meet for telehealth or virtual visits), deploying virtual agents to field questions related to COVID-19, and helping with capacity-planning and demand forecasting of key medical supplies to better manage their supply chains.”

If you need help planning your transition to virtual care, contact us at Webtage where we have facilitated the transition to online visits for healthcare providers, developed the capacity to communicate high quality and credible information in the midst of the health crisis, and marketed online visits to continue solid revenue generation for our client. 

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Healthcare Marketing Agency in Naperville