Skills Every Digital Marketing Agency Should Excel in

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A great digital marketing agency should have the ability to learn your brand quickly and be ready to act as your in-house digital experts.  Since the digital industry is so diverse, how do you know if a digital marketing agency is really as great as they claim to be?  

Looking for a new digital marketing agency but have no clue where to begin? Working with a good digital agency that specializes in quality marketing strategies is an obvious starting line. Knowing how to choose a digital marketing agency is essential in your search to find the right agency fit for your brand.

Spending money on digital marketing is a big deal, and you want to find an agency that makes the most of your money and works with your business goals. If you’re tired of being burned by agencies that make big promises but deliver no results, check out our three must-have skills (and top red flags) to watch out for. 

1. SEO & SEM

Across the board, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important skills you can have in this field. Knowing how SEO and content optimization work is essential for running a successful campaign. A good marketing agency should have an up-to-date website. If they’re practicing their SEO successfully you can easily find them doing a simple google search. 

Both SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) form your entire digital strategy on a data and content level. At the end of the day, a great website should have all the key elements of an effective inbound marketing strategy:

  • An active blog.
  • Responsive design.
  • Intuitive navigation.
  • Effective conversion strategy with calls to action.

2. A Solid Team

A great agency should have a team that is equipped with versatility and expertise. Building a team that has experts in their respective fields i.e. design, development, SEO, content strategy, social media and brand development, will only make your agency more sought after and stronger as a whole.

Content is perhaps the core of digital marketing. Content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. After you’ve created your all-star team you should then be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for various channels. By understanding how to create an effective content strategy you’ll be able to easily engage and convert to various audiences.

Things can be a little challenging when it comes to creating different content formats. From video to social media, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, and white papers, it can be tough to create content that translates to these different formats. Working together as a team is the best way to face the beast that is, content marketing.

3. Tools and How to Utilize Them

Due to the marketing industry being so technology-driven, you need a good grasp on technology as well as be able to learn it quickly. It is immensely beneficial for a marketing agency to have a solid understanding of marketing tools as well as the technical skills that go along with them. For example, a CMS like WordPress – used by a third of websites – can be tweaked to boost SEO. 

Project management tools are important and its always good to ask what platform your desired marketing agency is using.  Nowadays there are many tools you can use to get the job done, for example Google Analytics, Hubspot, Salesforce, the list goes on. The bottom line is, any agency should be comfortable and familiar with all of these tools.

Now that we’ve covered the 3 top things to have as an agency, lets discuss the 3 Red Flags to watch out for.

Red Flag #1 – You Don’t have an Account Manager

A solid agency will pair you with a marketing strategist or account manager who oversees your business’s marketing success.

Something to look out for is talking to a new person every time you call. When you’re looking for an agency, make sure to ask who will handle your account. If it’s one person, that’s great. If they’re running a call center, look elsewhere.

Red Flag #2 – You Can’t Access Your Marketing Data

If the agency refuses to give you access to analytics, you should find an agency that will let you track your marketing success with them. There’s no reason for a digital marketing provider to be dishonest or hoard a business’s data.

The right digital marketing agency will allow you to see your data, and they’ll talk to you about the analytics as they work to improve your marketing performance.

Red Flag #3 – False Promises

If an agency is promising you that your business will be at the top of search results by working with them in a matter of weeks – it’s a bad sign. It’s always important to ask how if they’re promising you things they cant keep. If they’re talking about paid advertising, then rest assured you have nothing to worry about.

Its always best to find an agency that has realistic goals for you to improve your local search results.

Last Thoughts

Digital marketing is fast-paced and demanding. Understanding an agencies top 3 must haves and top 3 red flags to look out for will have you off to the races. At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

From SEO to social media, content marketing and strategy, We can help you gain up-to-date and relevant knowledge that will help you become an awesome digital marketer. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Social Media Strategies That Boost Awareness and ROI

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Social media marketing is absolutely necessary for brands and businesses in order for them to stay relevant. By having a social media strategy in place, it helps businesses engage and influence their target audience. 

There are so many campaigns across social media that have gone viral by simply having a strategy in place.

The average amount of time that people spend on social media is 2.27 hours. Considering the increase in popularity with apps like TikTok it has people spending more time scrolling throughout the day. Here’s a look at the benefits of having a social media strategy in place that can drive both brand awareness and ROI.

Benefits of Having A Social Media Strategy

A social media strategy is a plan that outlines your social media goals, the tactics used to achieve them and metrics tracked to measure performance. A strategy doesn’t need to be over-thought and difficult. The best way you can go about creating a strategy is by having a simple yet specific plan with meaningful measurable. 

This will help you clearly identify whether or not the tactics you’re implementing are successful or not. Ultimately, your social media strategy should drive brand awareness and engagement across social media channels for your target audience/s. 

One of the hardest things about social media marketing is consistency. It can be tough to try and recreate a campaign and hope for the same results. By having a social media strategy you can provide your business with the following benefits:

  • Increase Your Brand Awareness
  • Increase Your Web Traffic
  • Generate Quality Leads
  • Quality Data you can analyze and measure

There are so many benefits to social media and having a strategy in place will only strengthen your ability to achieve your business goals.

Steps to Building a Successful Social Media Strategy

Now that we have covered the basics of a social media strategy, let’s get into a couple specific steps you can take to create one. Here’s a couple tips on how you can implement a successful social media strategy:

Set Goals for Your Business

Spending some time in this step will help you understand and define what your social media goals are. This will ultimately determine the rest of your strategy.

Think about what your business wants to achieve from social media and understand that marketing and business goals are different. For example, are you trying to draw brand awareness in the marketplace, or expand your following or generate more leads? You may want to achieve these goals, but it’s crucial to note each one of them as they will involve different tactics on social media.

When you set your goals, define your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to understand which social media metrics are important. To be successful on social media, set metrics for each channel you use. Over and above basic metrics you can dig deeper and track audience growth rate. There are many metrics you can use to track success, so narrow them down to what matters to your business.

Research Your Audience & Your Competitors 

Your audience and your competitors go hand in hand. In order to create personalized messaging and content, you need to understand who your audience is and what they want. The best way to achieve that is to do market research. You can do this through online surveys, interviews with your customers or by setting up a focus group.

Once you’ve done this, you will get a better look at your buyer personas which in turn help you create a better understanding of what your ideal customer is. Then you can begin catering to that demographic.

Competitor research helps you understand what your competitors are doing online such as what platforms they use and campaigns they run. You can also see what their messaging is like, as well as their content and how frequently they post. By understanding how they engage with customers and the success of that engagement you can either emulate it or take another direction to capture customers’ attention.

Social Media Platforms

Choosing the best channels for your business can be confusing at the beginning. There are a lot of platforms out there to choose from. Depending on the type of business you are, you may be making a mistake by not being present on all of the platforms. 

Facebook: Is one of the biggest social media platforms and the oldest around. Facebook offers a targeted way to engage with prospects and customers. 

Instagram: Is a great visual platform. Instagram continues to be one of the most popular amongst younger audiences and has seen huge growth over the past few years. It’s a great platform to showcase products and connect with influencers to grow your customer base. Plus with in-app shopping coming to Instagram soon through shoppable posts, customers will be able to purchase on the platform. 

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is the place to be for B2B businesses and provides opportunities for B2C too. It provides businesses with a way to connect in the B2B space both organically and through paid advertising. Content that works well on this platform are blogs, white-papers, eBooks, and industry-related content. 

Twitter: Twitter is a real-time platform which means your content should be timely and relevant. It can be a great customer service channel for brands as it allows quick replies and its hashtags help discover new and trending content. 

TikTok: As one of the fastest-growing social media channels, TikTok is a great place for video content. Known for its short-form and quirky videos, it’s developing rapidly as a platform and can be used effectively for marketing. TikTok is a great place for influencer collaborations. 

Planning Your Content

When you plan your content, you’re creating a tone for your pages. It’s a way for you to figure out if you engage with your audience in a formal or informal voice. It’s how you showcase your brand’s personality. The best way to plan your content is by creating a content calendar. That way you can create posts and schedule them regularly on social networks.

You can measure your posts by monitoring their performance, tracking your KPIs, and lastly, testing out new content to see which keywords resonate with your audience.

Final Thoughts

Doing content marketing without a content strategy is a disaster waiting to happen.

The more you know about how social media works, the better your strategy will be. It’s important to understand the fundamentals of social media marketing along with the intricacies of each platform so you can target the right audience.  

At Onimod Global, our data-driven content strategies align your content marketing efforts to real business results. Our content strategy services make it easy to understand your audience’s needs, where your competition is winning, and areas where you have an opportunity to lead your industry.

As a Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, we are your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing skills. 

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

3 Simple Small Business SEO Hacks

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In this digital age of rivalry, every person that’s in business, especially small business companies, are eager to develop their effective SEO strategies to get your business off on the right foot with your digital presence business’s presence. With the changing trends in shopping and constant Google algorithm updates, an online presence is crucial to your success. In this article, I’ll provide suggestions from experts in marketing to develop a small-scale SEO strategy.

Is your small business just starting up and you’re looking for any way to kick start your SEO? Fear not, Onimod Global experts are here to help you with 3 simple small business SEO hacks.

1. Discover emerging search trends

Onimod Global experts advise all businesses, especially small businesses just starting out, to focus on optimization around certain topic groups with long tail keywords at each stage of their customer’s journey to reach specific customers. Google will continue to refine its algorithm, and they even do updates over 100 times a year. They have the ability to determine what content searchers are really after.

Small businesses should look for keyword opportunities and content gaps where they can add value by answering specific questions that their customers have.

2. Optimize your site for mobile

This is a non-negotiable for websites nowadays. Optimizing your website for mobile devices is essential to generally ensure you have aneffective SEO. Particularly, it’s more crucial for local SEO.

And the reason for this? Google’s data reveals that about 1/3 of mobile searches are based on location. This means for your small business, that most people looking for your service within your region are doing it while they are on the go with a smartphone. If your website isn’t functioning well on any mobile phones or other devices, there’s a good chance you’ll lose many potential customers.

Bryan Clayton, CEO of GreenPal, tells DreamHost blog, “Right out of the gate, there were major problems,” he says. “We assumed that the majority of our users would shop for a lawn care service from their desktop or laptop computer. But it became very clear, very quickly that more people were accessing the website from their mobile phones and tablets than from a desktop or laptop computer — 4-to-1.”

3. Share the stories of your customers

Onimod Global experts recommend for small businesses just beginning to start recording daily interactions with customers at any stage of their business, from inquiry and product comparison to actual sales or after-sales.

Make it easy for customers by including reminders and links to your Google Business Profile, Facebook, or other relevant review pages. Your Google Business Profile is actually even more important for generating leads than your website will be.

Think of what sparks your eye when you see a Google Business profile and all the details that are added. Ensure it’s completely filled out with accurate information. Make sure you’re using keywords in your business descriptions, and don’t be afraid to ask for reviews.

More from Onimod Global

More information on small business SEO hacks and other digital marketing tips can always be found on the Onimod Global blog. In addition to Google news and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Content Marketing & SEO

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SEO and content marketing are made for each other. A lot of people are confused about SEO and content marketing. Neither works well on its own, but, together they are a powerhouse for internet marketing. Let’s take a quick look at the importance of each and then how they work together.

SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Without each other you would not be able to fuel your potential online success. As a quick recap, it’s important to know the terms before we dive into SEO and Content Marketing.

SEO Basics

SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to improve the position of a page in search engine results by tweaking on-page and off-page factors.

Search engine traffic can be maximized by:

  • Optimizing pages until they appear on the 1st page of search results
  • Claiming special features like the local search map results or search snippets
  • Getting links into other high-traffic content

Content Marketing Basics

Content marketing is a way to use content to create interest or trust. Advantages of content marketing include:

  • May provide a lot of long-term value: The content created for these campaigns can be so effective that it can get shared for years in emails, lists of top guides, and social media channels. This kind of exposure isn’t vulnerable to sudden search engine updates.
  • Supports your brand: One of the benefits of content marketing is that providing solid information is always good for your reputation. Communicating helps customers know where you stand. The communicating you do during content marketing has a lasting impact on your brand.

Whereas content marketing is focused on using valuable and relevant content to drive customer and client action that in turn, becomes profitable. The most important thing to remember about the two is that SEO is strategized around content marketing. Every website needs words, substance, keywords and images in order to be successful.

Here’s a look at Content Marketing & SEO and what you need to know.

Keywords

The key to SEO is researching and finding relevant keywords and making use of them in your content so they rank higher in the search engine results pages, also known as, SERPs. You should avoid filling a page with keywords and over optimizing. In order for SEO and content to work, you need to find a balance between the two.

Keyword strategies are imperative for effective search engine marketing (SEM). Embedding target keywords is essential to rank well and boost traffic. Follow a strategy and avoid stuffing them in the content. Repeating keywords has a negative impact on SEO. Follow a reasonable approach and use the main keywords in the title and body section.

Quality Content

SEO and content marketing require consistency. Fresh, unique and creative content gets indexed quickly and ranks higher than low-value and repetitive content. Your content should be able to lure in your clients as well as solve a particular issue. One can write influential content by using important keywords and targeting visitors. 

This is the most important factor, where Google determines the relevance of a page and ranks a piece of content. By understanding the purpose of the page you’ll be able to better understand what criteria goes into evaluating that page for quality. 

User Experience

SEO is significantly more than just blogs, keywords and backlinks. It is equal parts, enhancing metadata and using the appropriate tags. It is also part of creating an experience for the user that is enjoyable. Optimizing URLs and making the slug everything after the (.com) concise, drives the search engine to find the relevant subpages and categorize the different parts of your site. This is crucial to the success of any SEO campaign. Technical optimization plays a key role and makes a web page appealing to the search engine and ensures that the site has no broken links and no error codes. Otherwise, it will be poorly ranked by the search engine. 

Header tags and title tags benefit the user by strategizing the content in a way that is useful and simple for readers to understand. A good title tag ensures a great user experience because the visitor can recognize the information from the page before they actually click on it. 

Final Thoughts

The biggest takeaway from this article is when Content Marketing & SEO work together in harmony you’ll see online success. Your Content marketing will only be as successful if it is properly paired with the appropriate SEO. 

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, expanding your social presence and digital marketing. Got questions about how to develop a digital marketing strategy for 2022 or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google Quality Standards

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Google released their search quality evaluator guidelines back in 2015, which has since then become available for every marketer out there. Today, these guidelines show how google looks at the web pages and how they rank content by high to low quality. Here’s what you need to know about EAT, YMYL, and beneficial purpose in 2022. 

Since its release, the guidelines have been updated 3 times, recently in October of 2021. It’s important to remember that search quality evaluator guidelines can only guide us to where we need and want to go. Think of it as more of a roadmap opposed to an answer key.

Beneficial Purpose

What is the concept of beneficial purpose and what does it mean for us marketers who handle SEO? Beneficial purpose essentially is the purpose of the internet – more importantly, the purpose of websites and web pages. Websites and their respected pages are created to help their users. 

By understanding the purpose of the page you’ll be able to better understand what criteria goes into evaluating that page for quality. The overall goal of this is to ensure that the page is created to help users. Here’s a couple examples of what a high quality “user-centered” web page should look like: 

  • Sharing information about a specific topic
  • Sharing personal/social information
  • Sharing photos, videos and other media
  • Expressing opinions or point of views
  • Entertaining users
  • Selling products or services

Overall, beneficial purpose plays an important role for your users. Your site and content should have some sort of ussr-focused purpose that benefits them at the end of the day.

YMYL: Your Money or Your Life Content

Your Money or Your Life content is the type of information that can directly impact the reader’s happiness, health, safety, or financial stability. When you create a YMYL page with bad advice or misinformation it can affect your users’ lives. Google takes content seriously when it comes to spreading bad advice. Here are a couple of examples of YMYL topics:

  • News and current events – advice and information on  business, politics, science, technology. It’s important to use your judgment and knowledge of your locale.
  • Civics, government, and law – advice and information over voting, government agencies, social services and legal issues.
  • Finance – financial advice and information over taxes, retirement planning, loans, banking, insurance.
  • Shopping – information about goods and services, essentially allowing people to make purchases online.
  • Health and Safety – advice and information about medical issues, drugs, and hospitals.
  • Groups of people – advice and information on groups of people such as race, ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, sexual orientation.

While there are many YMYL topics, the quality evaluators that google uses have to use their judgment to determine whether a page qualifies as YMYL content.

E-A-T: Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness

Once a page has determined its beneficial purpose, its level of E-A-T is considered in terms of whether the content is YMYL. Non-YMYL content doesn’t require the same severity as YMYL content.

The E in E-A-T stands for: Expertise 一 It refers to the creator of the main content on a web page. The expert must have credentials to back up the content on the website. People with relevant life experience in the topics that are being covered on the web page can be considered experts—no formal training or education required. However, this only holds true for non-YMYL content.

The A in E-A-T stands for: Authoritativeness 一 This refers to the content that appears on the website. Authoritativeness stands for people knowing your background and seeing you as a leader. 

The T in E-A-T stands for Trustworthiness 一 This refers to the creator, content and website. Being trustworthy means people can trust the information you provide. You’re credible as a good source for providing information.

Here are a couple of topics that require high E-A-T:

  • Medical advice
  • Journalism/news stories
  • Science topics
  • Financial, legal, and tax advice
  • Hobbies: such as photography, playing piano 

Final Thoughts

In order to create high quality ranking content, you should incorporate Beneficial Purpose, E-A-T and YMYL to your marketing strategy. Like anything else, Google is constantly changing their strategies. To stay on top of the curve, you should be adjusting your strategy along with their changes in order to stay relevant in your industry.

As Google Partners, Onimod Global has over a decade of experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, social media advertising, content marketing and paid search. Got questions about Google strategies or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Ukrainian Digital Vacancies at Onimod Global

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Some 3 million-plus Ukrainian citizens have been displaced in recent weeks, with some of them possessing in-demand technical skills. Onimod Global is in search of a Digital Marketing expert for two current positions. Read on to learn more and apply. 

Hiring Ukrainian Talent

We’ve all been watching the horrible events unfold since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. One thing that you can count on in our industry and country is how we come together in times of trouble to help one another.

SEO entrepreneur Olesia Korobka and Val Voshchevska, Ukrainian strategic communications experts, are helping bridge the gaps beween talent and job vacancies from across the globe. And Onimod Global is onboard. 

Marketers and digital marketing companies alike have been added to these sheets with information on specializations and skills as well as contact info and details about their companies.

Val Voshchevska was able to launch Jobs for Ukraine, a site that pulled together all job openings they manually found online. With already more than 2,000 vacancies for roles ranging from graphic design to tattoo artists and more.

Ukrainian Job Vacancies at Onimod Global

At Onimod Global, we’re always looking for unique talent in our ever-evolving field. That’s why we’re looking to fill two positions for a Digital Marketer at our firm, extending the applications to Ukrainian citizens.

  • Role 1: Digital Marketing Account Manager
  • Role 2: Paid Digital Marketing Internship

If you are Ukrainian, please submit for one of our two current roles here.

While can’t promise that you will be qualified to join us, we can promise that we’ll let you know right away, either way (within a working week).

Looking to Hire? 

Throughout times of war, the necessity for us to help those in need increases. Many of us are looking for ways to get involved with the current situation unfolding in Ukraine.

In this case, we are sharing this with our digital marketing community, in the hopes that it may help someone from Ukraine get a much-needed job opportunity. If you are short-staffed and are willing to hire a Ukrainian for SEO or PPC projects, consider contacting or going through the job list above. 

Why Onimod Global

Providing custom tailored digital marketing solutions to clients worldwide, we are a Chicago-based Digital Marketing & Consulting firm offering an eclectic mix of dedicated professionals working to create, implement and manage your digital marketing efforts. Your in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and serving as our clients’ consultative marketing team.

For more information on career opportunities and more, contact us today.

3 Ways To Boost Your Digital Presence

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These days, a strong digital presence is required for any business that wants to bring in or engage with new and existing customers. But what is a digital presence? And what elements are needed for a strong digital presence?  

In short, Digital Presence is essentially what people find about your business when doing an online search, including everything from your website to social media, customer reviews, and more. Oftentimes, in today’s digital age, digital presence gets overlooked. Digital Presence allows businesses to showcase themselves online. It’s crucial to have a digital presence implemented within your marketing strategy for many reasons. The main one being, people searching for your business online.

A recent survey done by Bright Local found that 93% of consumers used the internet to search for and find a local business and 87% read online reviews for local businesses. What consumers find when doing these online searches will impact how and where they spend their money. When you do a quick online search for your business or industry, what results appear? Do any reviews or consumer recommendations come up? Is your website in the #1 spot?

Generating a digital presence can be simple with the help of resources like a website, social media platforms, business directory listing, customer reviews and other online sources. Here’s a look at 3 simple ways you can boost your digital presence.

1. Boost Your Site’s Search Engine Optimization Strategy

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process that increases your website traffic and improves your brand’s recognition and online presence. This strategy helps potential customers have a better chance of finding your website when they search for terms related to your brand. Mastering SEO can also boost your rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

To rank higher, business sites must incorporate two categories of SEO: on-site and off-site SEO.

On-site SEO is the practice of optimizing the elements of a web page to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines. 

  • Good on-site SEO helps search engines understand what humans see and the value they would receive when they visit a page. To master on-site SEO, business owners should ensure their HTML source code is well-formed, and all elements of the site need to be optimized for speed.

Off-site SEO refers to actions taken outside your website that affect your rankings in SERPs. Optimizing off-site rankings involves improving a search engine and user perception of a business site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority.

  • Improve your off-site SEO by encouraging other relevant pages, sites, and people to link to and promote your website. This step vouches for the quality of the web content that you produce.

2. Expand To New Social Media Platforms

Technology has grown tremendously and it affects the way we communicate. Social media’s growth in the US is comparable in speed to that of most modern communication-enabling technologies, such as our phones and computers. The percentage of US adults who use social media increased from 5% in 2005 to 79% in 2019.

If you haven’t jumped on the social media train by now, you should definitely take advantage of it. Nowadays, almost everyone has a Facebook profile set up for their business, but other social media outlets can be great ways to connect with different audiences. Instagram and TikTok can be ideal places to display new products and upload video content snippets. It’s also a great platform to share photo content. For a while now, Twitter has been considered the go-to place for breaking news updates.

Start by determining where your target customers spend their time using social media and try to cultivate followings on a new platform in 2022. Spend some time expanding on customer profiles and determine which social media platforms are most likely to appeal to them. 

3. Increase Your Brand’s Authority

Brand authority builds as you connect more deeply with your audience. For example, does your audience know they can trust you for the latest industry news? When you consistently provide your audience with relevant content and prove you know what you’re talking about, and that they can trust you, you essentially build authority.

With a strong brand, you are able to do the following:

  1. Retain a loyal customer base that seeks you out first before turning to your competitors.
  2. Attract the attention of influencers within your industry, who can then use their authority to promote your brand.

Your brand authority has a significant impact on your SEO performance. A great way to work on the two is to look for opportunities to prove your place as an industry leader. For example, if you publish content to your blog and simply list your contributing authors as “staff” without creating fleshed-out author bios for them, this is a big missed opportunity to build your authority and earn some easy SEO points under the new EAT update.

Final Thoughts

Consumer tastes and behaviors are always changing, and it can be hard to keep up with the rapidly changing rules of SEO and the shifting demands of your market. By planning ahead and strategizing the next moves can help you stay ahead of the curve and create a more flexible, adaptable SEO strategy for 2022 and beyond.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, expanding your social presence and digital marketing. Got questions about how to develop a digital marketing strategy for 2022 or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

SEO Performance & Moving Your Website Host

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Here’s a little known secret: many people are afraid to switch their web hosts. But eventually your once state-of-the-art website will begin to lag in performance and speed. However, it is important to be aware of the value of updating your web host and the difference it makes for your site. Read on to find out why. 

When you’re in the process of optimizing your web pages your goal is to have your content rank high on a search engine, like Google. Ideally, you want your content at the top of a search engine’s results for keywords relevant to your product or services.

Changing the location of your website hosting can impact its performance in search results. It may sound a little scary at first when your website hosts are slow but don’t panic – the rankings will come back!

Here’s what you should know about changing your website host location.

Google Slowing Down Your Website

The first thing you will notice when you move your host location is that your website is slow, perhaps extremely slow. Rest assured, this isn’t something that will stay that way for long. Google makes your website slow when they notice a change in host. They do this so Google won’t cause any problems in the future.

Whether you’re moving to a hosting provider in the same location, or a new location, Google will be cautious with how much it crawls the site. Over time, once Google’s systems can tell that going faster doesn’t cause any issues, they’ll speed up again. This is independent of the kind of hosting change you make. It doesn’t make a difference if you’re moving to a different provider down the road, or moving to another country.

Impact on Website Loading Times

There are a couple of different scenarios that are at play if you’re thinking about moving your website. If you’re thinking about moving your website hosting to a new location, this can have an impact on how fast your website will load for your users. If a majority of users live far away from where the website is hosted, it could lead to a slower user experience. 

In turn, that could affect the speed and page experience ranking factors. Depending on how strongly this is visible, that can play a role in speed and the page experience ranking factor for a website.

Hosting Your Website in Multiple Locations

To avoid the likelihood of your website loading time being affected, you could host your website on servers in multiple locations. Content delivery networks, also known as (CDNs) often do this, and depending on the hosting platform you’re using your site may be on multiple servers already.

If you’re using a hosting platform the chances of them already doing this for you is high. With SEO, the server’s location is unfortunately not used for geo-targeting. If you want your website to target users in a specific location, you would need to use either the country-code top level domain, or the appropriate setting in Google Search Console.

A country-code top-level domain is an Internet top-level domain generally used or reserved for a country, sovereign state, or dependent territory identified with a country code. The appropriate setting in the Google Search Console can be found in the international targeting report in your settings. 

  • Use the International Targeting report to monitor your hreflang errors, or to choose a country that should be prioritized for your search results. This report has the following sections:
  • The Language section: Monitor the usage and errors of hreflang tags on your site. 
  • The Country section: Set a site-wide country target for your entire site, if desired.

Final Thoughts

Overall, changing the location of your website host will temporarily impact crawling on your website, and has the potential to impact loading time. It’s important to remember that this type of change will not impact SEO when it comes to geo-targeting.

At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. Our mission is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success. We have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing.

We have a preferred hosting vendor that boosts SEO performance. If you’d like to learn more about our hosting vendor and our services contact us today! 

The Importance of Digital Marketing in 2022

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Digital marketing is more important now than ever. You can utilize digital marketing to target specialized markets, allowing you to reach out to customers who may not have previously considered your company. But this industry is fast-growing, which also means ever changing and evolving. Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? Right here. 

As marketers think about building brands in the coming years post-COVID, how is digital marketing being leveraged to help companies bounce back? More importantly, how should you redefine your strategy for 2022?

According to a CISCO report, 90% of North Americans use the internet, and usage is expected to reach 92% by next year. Customers are now spending more time and resources on owned-media channels such as websites, mobile apps, and customer-service channels. There is also a noticeable increase in customer-conversion rates, with social and digital video channels driving the highest ROIs.

Having a digital marketing strategy in place allows you to reach millions of people cost-effectively. If your business doesn’t have a strategic digital marketing plan aligned with your business plan your business can suffer and you could lose out to competitors who are more digitally savvy.

Reasons To Use Digital Marketing

1. Reach a Specific Audience. 

With media like TV, billboards and radio, you are reaching out to a broad audience, and the chances of targeting a specific group of customers is low. Whereas in digital marketing, you can use the features of a marketing platform to specifically target an audience based on age, interests or behavior. 

Your chances of reaching the right audience are significantly higher, and you can pick and choose these metrics as your needs change. It also allows you to identify subgroups within your clientele. If you have more than one type of product, you can tailor a campaign to this more specific group of customers.

2. Access Metrics of your Digital Marketing Strategy ─ All in One Place.

Digital marketing metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the success of a business’s marketing efforts online. The goal of using digital marketing metrics is to track and decipher the way consumers interact with your brand online through websites and social media platforms. While there are many benefits of using metrics, the main use of metrics are used to drive improvements and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important. Overall, metrics reflect and support the various strategies for all aspects of the organization, including marketing, competition, standards, or customer requirements and expectations. 

Metrics indicate the priorities of the company and provide a window on performance, ethos and ambition. This allows you to determine your return on investment. You know exactly how profitable your digital marketing campaign was, as you can see the results of each aspect of your efforts.

3. Becoming Visible Within the Industry.

Some of the largest corporations have millions of dollars to spend on traditional advertising. If you don’t have that kind of ammunition, digital strategies allow you to outrank big corporations on a smaller budget. 

Here’s what visibility in business can do for you:

  • Helps you get exposure to a larger audience.
  • Build your brand awareness, so that people know who you are and how you help. 
  • Establishes your credibility and expertise.
  • Allows you to reach and sign more ideal clients.
  • Connects you to opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. 

It’s also a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with prospects, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field. More traffic means more potential clients becoming aware of your brand and services.

SEO is composed of three parts:

  • On-page SEO focuses on the content on your website’s pages. You can research keywords that resonate with your buyer persona or keywords that potential clients might ask. The task is to create quality content when answering those questions, so your pages rank higher.
  • Off-page SEO relates to all activity that happens away from your website. It involves external optimization practices that happen away from your site rather than on it. The main technique used for off-page SEO is backlink building since quality backlinks to your site from external sites tell search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality which helps to build authority.
  • Technical SEO is the back end of your website. Things like coding, image compression and cascading style sheets, also known as CSS. These are important aspects of your website that determine how quickly your pages load. Search engines like Google use it as an important ranking factor.

Social Media Marketing

Social media networks are open to all, giving businesses a chance to follow their consumers’ activities or potential buyers. This helps marketers become more informed about their target audience, likes, dislikes, and interests so that they can create a better marketing strategy to attract customers. The opportunities are endless when it comes to social media marketing. A big plus in  using this type of marketing tool is that most of the basic services are free. 

The end goal is to create more traffic and generate leads for your business. The social media channels you can use for this purpose are:

  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
  • LinkedIn.
  • Instagram.
  • Snapchat.
  • YouTube.
  • TikTok
  • Pinterest

In an increasingly connected world, your approach to marketing must be just as integrated.

Last Thoughts

In this day and age where just about everyone is connected to the internet, it is crucial for any business to have a strong online presence. As we continue to move forward within the digital age, younger generations are likely to be centered on using the internet to access different services. Having a strong digital marketing strategy is a must if you want to succeed in the increasingly competitive industries across the globe.

Could your digital marketing strategy use a boost? Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing trends. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Mastering Storytelling Content in 2022

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A well known shift in content marketing over the past 5 years has taken the form of storytelling. At its most basic definition, the digital storytelling process involves using a mixture of content and digital media to bring a narrative to life. Consumers have shown that a product or service that offers an experience is much more attractive to them. Storytelling takes content marketing to a whole new level where a customer is understood, inspired, compelled to use their imagination.

Principal analyst Brian Solis with Alimeter Group shares with MarketingLand what marketers must know today about the gap between content marketing and storytelling.

What should businesses know about storytelling?

Brian says: There are some common pillars of quality storytelling — and it all starts with knowing your audience, what they love/don’t love, what they value, etc.

Aside from the seven common plots of story, there are pillars that resonate with certain audiences, depending on their goals and yours. These include inspiration, usefulness, importance and inclusivity, just to name a few — and these apply to content marketing, too.

How does storytelling make an impact on digital marketing? 

Digital storytelling is now crucial to a successful digital marketing campaign tying together several forms of media; social media at the forefront of this campaign. In any successful marketing campaign, the goal is to achieve wider engagement from your target audience and build up a loyal customer base that identify with your brand and cling to your product or service for longer. Storytelling in digital marketing addresses the needs of a fast-paced society in which people cut through a lot of ‘fluff content’ and look to receive information and consume content as fast as possible.

Capturing the attention of potential customers is an important step towards reaching one of your main goals – gaining your customers’ loyalty. That is why storytelling has become so important to the success of digital marketing. It sets apart vibrant brands from simple businesses and loyal consumers from one-time, stop-in shoppers.

Here are three ways storytelling impacts digital marketing and how you can benefit from it:

1. Build up trust with your audience

Traditional boring and straight-forward marketing doesn’t help you form a bond with consumers. Instead, it’s information-packed content overwhelming or boring the user and often reads like assembly instructions. Storytelling is much more intriguing and urges people to follow along engaging with the story. It addresses consumer pain points on a deeper, more intimate level and doesn’t give off the impersonal and cold vibes of a hard sell.

2. Connecting with your target audience

Most consumers have mastered an art of their own — ignoring sales pitches. These days, people are inundated with marketing ads. This has conditioned the brain to skim information and dismiss anything unattractive, simple, and mundane. Digital storytelling, however, can engage them in a manner that leaves them more receptive to marketing efforts.

3. Branding with a genuine meaning

Actions speak much louder than words for customers of 2022. Using digital storytelling to demonstrate how your company is dedicated to your mission, as well as your customers, can help you prove that you’re in it for the right reasons. Taking people along on your journey to show step by step how your business evolved, the experiences you’ve had, and how this helped you provide solutions to their problems will capture your audience’s attention and personify your business.

More from Onimod Global

In addition to storytelling content in 2022 and other digital marketing updates, we will continue to share case studies and the latest SEO updates to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have expertise expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. We would love to work with you and assist with your company’s content creation needs. Got questions about content creation or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.