2 Digital Marketing Products to Better Your Small Business

‍An effective SEO/SEM plan requires a significant time investment in keyword research, content creation, link building, and the list goes on. The same is true for an effective social marketing campaign. It requires social monitoring, hash-tag research, content creation, @-mention research, and a whole list of other steps. It's hard for any business, especially a small business, to invest the time needed to successfully make these campaigns work, leaving many disappointed and frustrated in what their digital marketing products provide.

There are a couple of solutions that might help you manage these programs better. One is to hire a marketing agency to do it for you. The other is to find software platforms that make the task easier. There are several great tools out there to use. We will share two that we use. We did not receive compensation to write these reviews. We use them because they have made our SEO and Social work better for our small business.

SEMrush Is a Great Product for All Digital Small Business Marketing Needs

SEMrush is a program that combines several different tools and products that small businesses can benefit from using for their digital marketing purposes. This includes social media scheduling, keyword research, content creation, link building, and a host of other tools. We've also used SEMrush for our research purposes regarding keyword planning, monitoring, content creation, and link building.

If you're trying to run your small business marketing alone, a digital product like SEMrush can help you significantly improve the results of your SEO and Social Media Marketing. There are numerous competitive products you can use. We've found SEMrush works best for our needs. We recommend that you do some comparison shopping to find the right SEO and Social Media Marketing products for your small business's digital needs.

Site Speed is Critical for SEO, Conversion, and Bounce Rates

If you've run Google Page Speed and found your site to be slow, you're probably using a theme built for a content management system like WordPress. The great thing about themes is that they have greatly simplified website building. The downside of non-custom-built themes is speed. You probably only use 10-20% of the options that a given theme offers, but 100% of those options are served when you open a page. This leads to a lot of unnecessary code and increases load times.

Page Speed Matters

Web design matters. Bounce rates start to climb rapidly once your page takes longer than 3 seconds to load. In fact, a site that load in 2 seconds more the two times more visitors than one that takes 4 seconds. If you are using a theme, you can do little unless you strip out the code that you do not use. This can break your site if you do not know how to code. This is where a web design firm can be very helpful.

After reviewing what it would take to strip down our theme, we decided to take a different approach. We moved to Webflow. We plan to launch it soon, but we saw an increase in our Google Page Speed for 30-40 to 95+. With the advent of online website builders, website design is an important service that many small businesses overlook. This can be a big mistake when it comes to SEO, conversion, and bounce rates.

We love Webflow because it marries some of the ease from the drag-and-drop theme builders while not creating unnecessary code. Now, Webflow does require some coding knowledge – not as much stripping down a theme, but you need to understand the basics of Cascading Style Sheets (CCS) and the like. The design options offered by Webflow are specific and straightforward.

That said, given the need for some coding knowledge, it is most useful for people that have experience designing their webpages, not just for people making their first site.

Key Takeaways

Here are two things that we hope you take away from this posts

1. Improve your page speed. Consider a custom build or create one yourself using a tool like Webflow
2. A program like SEMrush can help make keyword research, content creation, link building, scheduling, and the rest easier.

This post focused on the specific aspects of two products, we cover digital marketing for small business in great detail.