5 Ways to Promote Your Vegan Business Online

The strategies behind promoting a vegan business on the Internet are not much different than any other conventional business. However, because the universal vegan community is so strong, it can often be easier finding relevant online communities, networking and relationship opportunities, and exposure on other websites.

All of these elements, combined with a solid web presence, can help increase the visibility and growth of your vegan business in many ways. Below we delve into five of those ways, and how you can actively leverage each of these strategies to expand your traffic potential and grow your company.

Establish & Optimize Your Web Properties

First and foremost, it’s vital to have specific web properties to represent your online business. The most common, and often most effective, is a website. Other assets include social media profiles (such as your company’s Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest pages,) as well as your Google My Business listing and other directory profiles (such as Yelp.)

The type of vegan business you operate will dictate your ideal web properties. For instance, if you sell vegan products and you’re trying to build your brand, then you may want to have a website and social media presence on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. However, if you operate a local business, then you could get away with having only a Google My Business page.

Overall, it’s best to have a website and few social media profiles that best represent your audience. You can even leverage “optimizing” these web properties to be better found in search. For a good example of this, see JustCBD and its online presence.

Be Found in Search

Going back to the local business example, there are certain ways you can optimize your website and Google My Business listing. Otherwise known as search engine optimization, or SEO, there are specific strategies that help increase your business’ search ranking in Google.

In other words, you can optimize aspects of your site and Google My Business listing for specific keywords that reflect your business (i.e. “vegan restaurants in Seattle” or “vegan cat food.”) To learn specific strategies, then Beginner’s Guide to SEO from Moz is a good resource.

As for non-local businesses, choose your keyword targets wisely. It’s often hard to outrank Amazon.com and other high-authority websites. So if you’re thinking about optimizing your website for “vegan protein,” you should probably consider taking that further with something like “organic vegan protein supplement,” "vegan protein powders without stevia" or “vegan paleo protein powder” depending on what it is that you sell. Understanding your potential rank for keywords surrounding vegan protein powders is vital to your success.

Grow Your Online Footprint

One factor that’s going to help your site rank higher in Google is links directing from other sites. In essence, the more links pointing to a site, the greater credibility and authority that site will earn. For this reason, you should invest a great deal of your efforts conducting outreach and further your business presence on other websites.

Grow the online footprint for your vegan business by following some of these action items:

• Get listed on local and business directories. Yelp.com, Yellowpages.com, Yahoo! Local, and Bing are good places to start for local directories. Beyond local, search around for vegan directories or other communities related to your product/service/cause/etc.
• Be active on social media platforms and engage with influential people, businesses, and brands that resonate with you and your company. Establishing relationships can result in wider exposure in front of new audiences (i.e. an industry influencer with 100k twitter followers retweets an article you wrote.)
• Reach out to other vegan websites for networking, sponsorships, link exchanges, and guest blogging opportunities. Contributing to other websites can help increase your online footprint all while generating some quality links back to your website.

Produce Content Regularly

To truly become an authority figure in your online vegan niche, I strongly suggest producing content on a regular basis. Whether that be weekly articles, a monthly video, or a combination of mediums, establish some type of content schedule and stick to it.

This can be both an enjoyable and creative aspect to growing your business. Coming up with great ideas for content marketing is not only fun, but highly effective for SEO and online exposure. When you produce interesting content that gains the likes and shares of your social media audience, you can really empower your company’s growth potential.

Whether it's having a blog for publishing product review posts or a YouTube channel to shoot video reviews, you can get creative by proucing content on products and topics you want to push, such as reviews on Garden of Life RAW protein powder reviews or Vega Sport Protein powder reviews.

Stay Engaged on Social Media

Helping to facilitate the efficacy of your content marketing and outreach efforts is social media. In addition to being found in search, having a strong social media presence is the bee’s knees to building your vegan business.

Like we alluded to above, invest in handful of social media platform that reflect your business model and target audience. If it makes sense to be on SnapChat, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, then do it. But if Instagram and Facebook are all that you need, then so be it. Unless you have advanced social media automation tools or social media savvy employee, managing all these platforms can be time consuming.

It’s time consuming because regularly posting and sharing content; reaching out and connecting with new people and brands; and engaging with your audience by responding to their comments; these are variables that define a stellar business.    

Author Bio

Tyler Tafelsky is a search marketing specialist with eight years of experience in the profession. Tyler is an advocate of plant-based living and leads an active role in the fitness community. His current projects are Better Triathlete where he writes about bikes, training, and recovery.

Image credit: Mayumi T. Photography

3 Tips to Start Cultivating a Business Web Presence Today

Every marketer knows that building a web presence is a must - but not every marketer knows how to go about it. While a website is good foundation, there are a number of ways to cultivate a greater web presence that can help grow business.

Here are three simple tips that will help you expand your company's web presence and allow you to increase both the visibility and profitability of your online brand.

1. Optimize Your Site Properly

Most people are familiar with the idea of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but that alone is not enough to build a successful and effective web presence. Of course, it is one of the things that's necessary, so you shouldn't neglect it.

These days, Google isn't interested in rewarding content that's stuffed with keywords at the expense of readability. In fact, it will be heavily penalized. If you want your site to top the search results, write content that's engaging and relevant, and make sure any keywords flow naturally with the other text.

However, attracting new traffic to your site is not enough. If visitors simply read what you've written, shrug their shoulders, and move on, then you've failed. You need to take that traffic and turn it into leads - and then take those leads and convert them into sales.

How do you do this? By giving them a clear, strong message about what you can offer them. Don't bombard people with walls of text. Instead, tell them in one sentence what your business offers that your rivals can't. Use simple words and easy-to-understand concepts, and avoid overly technical terms. Web presence optimization companies like Web Presence Group suggest that using Schema mark-up is also an effective way to optimize your website for better SEO performance.

2. Use the Power of Social Media

Building a really solid web presence doesn't only mean promoting your business on the web itself. Some sources now suggest that more people use social media every day then use the web - and if you're not also using it, you're missing out on a huge potential market.

Your competitors won't be making that mistake, so getting involved in the world of social media is a must. There are many networks out there, but only a few have real power to help your business grow. These include:

• Facebook - the world's largest social network, with over one billion users around the world.
• Twitter - fast-moving and anarchic, this makes a great place to seed viral marketing campaigns.
• YouTube - for targeting young people, nothing beats a well-made video. Keep it short, though!
• LinkedIn - you can't advertise directly here, but it's perfect for building business contacts.
• Pinterest - creative and slightly more female centric, this image-focused platform offers highly effective advertising.

3. Develop Your Content Strategy

However great your business and what it offers may be, if your promotional strategy consists of nothing more than a few pages on your website, you're not likely to succeed. If you have a good product to sell, then take it to other outlets, too.

One of the best options is blogging. Many people who aren't likely to visit a dedicated website are interested in reading bite-sized chunks of information on a regular basis. Post something every day about an aspect of your business and you can get your message across without overwhelming them.

Press releases are also worth publishing, since getting one picked up by business news sources will effectively provide you with free advertising. You shouldn't keep too narrow a focus on your own business, though, as this can come across as spamming. To build a really popular web presence, make yourself known as an authority in your field. Publish short, interesting, unique pieces about your industry, or about some of the people who make your business great. Human interest stories are always popular!

3 Effective Tools to Bring SEO In-house

In the current SEO climate, implementation of simple SEO techniques can only take your business so far in attain top Google rankings. Marketers need to do much more way in the deeper aspects of SEO to realize authoritative results, such as research, testing, constant vigilance, and consistency to achieve desired results.

SEO is an investment, and like any investment, marketers should actualize SEO in terms of they put in. Experiencing fruitful results can be achieved by adopting effective SEO tools that provide the insight and intelligence to make actionable decisions. 

To further your SEO potential in using such tools, you need skilled personnel, budget, time, technology, and appropriate resources. It does not matter you are investing or not, the important thing is that how it can be managed to optimize the marketing objectives.

Outsourcing vs. Insourcing SEO

You can adopt SEO through outsourcing and insourcing. The benefits of the outsourcing are that their professionals understand both the complications and advantage of the SEO techniques. They have the requisite skill and can give you long term benefits. It can also reduce the training cost of the in-house personnel.

For the insourcing, you will get the professionals who are specifically trained to bring improvements in your marketing strategies. They offer you more time and expertise to bring improvements in your business strategy. This reduces agency expenses and limits the extra staff expenses. The major different between the insourcing and outsourcing is that insourcing requires more time to achieve the goal and to acquire the corporation culture.

If you are looking for SEO tools for your in-house marketing team, then it is imperative to implement the most relevant tools to get long term benefits.These tools will help yield information to make calculated SEO decisions and execute effective SEO strategies, all while keeping your target top of mind in Google search.

1. Website Optimization Tools

When it comes to website optimization tools, you need to focus on some important factors such as website load speed, image and media size, and elements of conversion rate optimization (CRO), which often center on call-to-action (CTAs) and constructing the the design of your web pages. Optimizely and Pingdom offer great SEO tools for website optimization.

2. Backlink Scanning Tools

The backlinks scanning tools are considered effective for a successful SEO. It helps you to scrutinize the connection from a specific page, examines the link building possibilities, and accesses the connection quality. Backlink scanning tools will offer you data about the domain authority, anchor text analysis, incoming links, web rank values, PageRank, incoming links, and the link quality. Some of the best options in the SEO community are Majestic and Ahrefs.

3. Google Alerts

Google Alerts can help you to get all the updates about the news, blogs, articles, and about other general information. Google Alerts keep you on the top by offering all the latest industry developments. It not only helps you to understand the new arrivals and complications of the marketing strategies, it can also help to make the plans accordingly.

Google Alerts is one of the best ways to pinpoint opportunities to find inbound links and to build backlinks with genuine sites. This can help your business rank in better in the Google local 3-pack as well as organic results.

There are many solid SEO tools that you can implement in business and marketing efforts. The essential thing is that what is your objective and how can it help you to set long-term goals.

Google Local 3-Pack SEO & the Role of Citations

When it comes to local SEO, ranking in the Google 3-pack is the prized placement for local business. To underscore the value and importance of Google local 3-pack SEO, here's an example:

Let's say you are looking for a plastic surgeon in your area; a quick search turns up 23 plastic surgeons in your search radius. With 23 options, are you really going to drill down on each listing and research each individual plastic surgeon? This is the intention behind Google's new local 3-pack.

Google displaying the "top 3" companies associated with 'pins' on a map, in direct geographical proximity to the user, has really caused a stir in the cyber world. Of course the top 3 will vary depending on the user and their location, but it still puts the pinch on businesses to rethink their local SEO strategy. Below we offer insights on how to embrace Google 3-Pack SEO and how citations have a pivotal role in this area of search engine optimization for surgeons and other local businesses.

Local SEO Ranking Factors & Citations

Considering Google will decide which businesses go into the 3-pack based on many ranking factors like domain authority, reviews, and geographic proximity, there are somethings that are controllable and actionable for local 3-pack SEO. This is where citations come into play. A citation is simply a reference to your business online. It can be a full citation which lists all of your business information, or a partial citation which only lists the basics.

A full citation is desirable as it lists your company name, address, web address and phone number. This will not only make you more visible but makes you easier to find than limited information. A partial citation will only list perhaps your name and web address or name and phone number. Keep this in mind when placing citations. People do not want to do the work to look you up if another business beside you is fully listed with all the pertinent information.

Building Citations for Google Local 3-Pack SEO

Google will search for any mentions of your business name and information. If you have several mentions, such as in blogs, reviews, social media and yellow pages, Google then compares you to other like businesses in your area to find the top ranking, thereby completing the 3-pack.

If you are average with others, you will then land on the secondary, more choices page. But when it comes to local SEO, the most important thing of all to remember in your citations is consistency. In order to remain competitive, ALL your info has to be exact across the board to verify that you are even a legitimate business. This means you have to be vigilant. If, for instance, your phone number changes, visit every single place you may have a citation. Be it a partial citation or a full citation, make certain the updated information is correct in every possible area.

Citations are more important than ever before in promoting awareness of your business and improving your chances of landing in Google's "Snack Pack." Some companies hire a person just for the task of increasing their online presence. If you explore every avenue and put in the effort, you can start getting your name out there. Remember, With more citations comes more consideration from Google for the coveted local 3- pack.

Ecommerce Marketing Tips: Selling Your Products Online

Building an ecommerce business can generally have a lower overhead and start up price than a brick and mortar of physical business, but it is often harder to get traffic to your site. After all, you can't pick a good location on the internet that plenty of cars will pass by.

Location isn’t everything when it comes to building an ecommerce business but there are ways to ensure that you bring traffic to your site with little trouble. With proper product branding and marketing (via social media, SEO and PPC) you can build your ecommerce business to be something quite successful.

Acquire Good Ecommerce Software

The best ecommerce sites use software which saves them plenty of time and money when it comes to building their web store. Finding the right software for your needs will take some research as different packages offer different features. For example, Big Commerce is a platform that is great for an eBay based business while Ability Commerce is more tied to including mobile-optimized versions of your store.

Most will offer some additional features such as OMS (order management system) integration, content management, ecommerce SEO, design, hosting, and up to date automatic accounting as you sell products. Spend some time trying out demos and watching videos on each of the platforms to ensure you find the one that makes the most sense for your product and business plan.

Social Media is Your Highway to Loyalty

From simply setting up a Twitter, Facebook and Google+ account and letting your business slowly grow through grassroots, to creating viral campaigns such as outlandish videos for YouTube, reaching customers is key online. The more personable you can be the more they will trust you and your product.

There are plenty of ecommerce marketing groups out there that can help you do this if you don’t know where to start but, outside of creating a viral campaign, all of it is fairly easy. Simply post thoughts, stories and reply to your followers. It doesn’t always have to be something related to your business, just something that will get people talking. Then they will look to see who you are and what you sell.

Ecommerce SEO and PPC

Those letters are generally terrifying to a new ecommerce owner as they seem to be extremely confusing and all but impossible to implement. Ecommerce SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) can be complex but it's not impossible. Unfortunately, SEO is not the easiest thing to learn if you haven’t studied or practiced what search engines look for. The good news is, plenty of sites, such as Elance or Upwork, offer freelance writers that specialize in ecommerce SEO services at affordable rates.

Ecommerce PPC, or Pay Per Click, is a bit easier to do on your own, but is less cost effective. You do just as it sounds – pay for visits to your side per click. Through Google AdWords, for example, you would set a budget and an ad that will be displayed on the sidebar of a search and each click will cost you a certain amount of money. If you are in desperate need of traffic right away, ecommerce PPC is the way to go, but SEO is more organic and feels more like you are just another business.

Build Your Ecommerce Brand

No matter what you sell you need to build your brand as something people support. Look at Etsy for example. It started off as a small community focused business that saw alarming growth. It focused on being fair and open with its customers and that lead to loyalty and word of mouth discussions which lead to more traffic.

Toms Shoes is another fantastic example of natural ecommerce marketing that resulted in a powerful brand. With a strong focus on sharing their profits with those in need (providing a free pair of shoes for each pair sold) they created a brand that people not only respect, but are willing to spend the extra money because they are helping do something good.

Learn Analytics

This is going to be the most important thing to the growth of your sites traffic. You need to understand the analytics of what type of visitors you are getting, where they are coming from, and what they are doing on your site. You will likely use Google Analytics as your primary resource, so sit down and study. The information you can get from the site can help you stay agile as you grow while also identifying bumps in the road as you go.

Go Beyond Ecommerce SEO With Web Presence Management Services

For an ecommerce site to thrive on the web, it is important that it makes use of various comprehensive marketing and promotion strategies. Though many online stores have made heavy investments in ecommerce SEO services and strategies, just SEO along may not be enough to survive the stiff competition.

In addition to ecommerce SEO services, a more complete solution is found through web presence management services which focus on a more strategic approach to both brand-building and web marketing. A strong web presence management is defined by five major pillars. Below we delve into each of these pillars and how to orchestrate a more all encompassing approach that goes beyond a standard ecommerce SEO service program.

1. Search Marketing

It is the process of gaining visibility and traffic from search engines, through various paid as well as unpaid efforts. It encompasses Organic SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC).

• Organic SEO includes techniques and methods to obtain a high ranking on a search engine results page that are unpaid and algorithm-driven. Various popular strategies like optimizing for keywords, writing high-quality content, and building backlinks fall under this category.
• PPC advertising is a highly successful method of capturing quality exposure of search engines for certain keywords which drives profitable traffic to the website. Web presence management services can include the creation of PPC advertising accounts, as well as the optimization and management of previously existing PPC accounts to boost their performance.

2. Content Marketing

Creation and promotion of excellent and significant content acts as a big step in attracting quality leads. Blogging is one of the most popular content marketing techniques. Web presence management services promote the e-commerce brand by making use of various opportunities pertaining to content marketing, ranging from blogging & articles to illustrations, images, graphics, and videos.

3. Social Media Marketing

Making use of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to build and promote communities and relationships with users is known as Social Media Marketing. It involves creating attention-seeking content that is worth sharing. Over the time, social media marketing has gained significance for establishing long-lasting connections with the target audience.

Investing in web presence management services can aid in overall brand promotion and awareness. The website marketing team, together with the web service managing experts can together work to create an optimal approach for managing the social media pressure that the brand is facing.

4. Reputation Management

It is important that a brand's or website's image is positive on the Internet. A web presence management program from www.WebPresenceGroup.net ensures just that. It involves various techniques like publishing press releases, positive review generation and optimizing the company's web presence on various popular platforms like Google+, Facebook, Foursquare, and many more.

Some other useful forms of reputation management are timely responds to customer complaints, using the customer feedback for future developments, and making sure that no incorrect information regarding the e-commerce brand persists on the Internet.

5. Analytics, Performance Tracking & Reporting

The web presence management service providers analyze various rankings and the performance of your e-commerce brand to create a report which is used to improve the services and the marketing of your brand in order to get more leads. The analysis and tracking includes - finding the website’s conversion rate, calculations of the total number of orders placed, unique buyers, most selling products, and total revenue generated.

By making use of web presence management services, your online ecommerce brand gains the chances to thrive and succeed among its competitors. Using these services provides you with a web presence that's not only well-geared for SEO and search marketing, but also one that's top of mind with your target market.

The Best Directories for SEO (Yes, They Still Have Value!)

There's no doubt that business directories still have value for SEO, particularly with local SEO.

With benefits like: natural link generation, citation building (for Google local SEO,) and targeted inbound marketing, getting your business listed on directories like Yelp, Yahoo! Local, Google+, YellowPages, LinkedIn, and countless other trusted directories, you can advance your business's local marketing efforts beyond the scope of just SEO.

However, in this short blog post, we are going to share a few of the best types of directories for SEO. These directories are often overlook yet offer the greatest value for SEO.

Vertical Directories

Whether you run a retail store or some other kind of local business, there is probably a local directory that is perfect for your business. Directories in a specific field can be perfect for generating more leads. Additionally, these types of directories offer a good source of relevant and inexpensive links that are best for SEO.

Associations

Just like standard vertical directories, associations for a local business can be a great source of targeted leads and traffic. In most cases, associations are considered the authority domain on a particular topic.

Most association memberships are reasonably prices, and members even source business to some other members. In addition to the link value and inbound marketing potential, having ties to authoritative associations can only help boost your reputation and local credibility as a brand.

BBB’s, Chambers of Commerce, other Local Websites

It’s better to conduct a Google search for your particular city and business directories. Some standard results will be chambers of commerce, local directories and other groups. In short order, with a profile listing of your business on a Chamber site or the BBB site, you can earn a powerful source of SEO-friendly links that are locally-relevant.

 

Localized Directories

Localized directories, like Yellowpages, are great to get some citations for Google plus local optimization. These websites are also occasionally ranked for localized searches. You will be able to choose from numerous websites. Submitting to these directories manually is never efficient. It’s better to hire a local search engine optimization company for the job.

How Directories Help with Local SEO

It’s very important to understand that Google always wants local business organizations to get links from some other local websites. There can’t be a better source than a trusted local directory relevant to your business. You can even get a contextual link in a news story or press release in local newspaper directories. A directory listing is very easy to submit, and gives better returns on your investment.

Local directory submissions are the most important way for local business organizations to get citations all over the internet. The best part is that you won’t have to invest a lot of money and time in creating relevant content. Not every online marketer has the time to write around 500-1000 words to get just a couple of links. However, many webmasters can easily submit the website to a few local directories every week.

It’s very important to hire professionals for the job. If you want your local SEO efforts to yield positive results, you should look for experienced, qualified and skilled local search engine optimization experts. A professional company will help you choose the best local directories for submissions, and make sure your website receives targeted traffic.

These days, you can look for organic SEO companies on the Internet. Most trusted local SEO service providers have their own websites where you can submit your queries and schedule an appointment. Since there are a lot of companies, you need to conduct an extensive research. This will help you make the best choice.

What's All Hype About Search Engine Optimization "SEO"?

Search engine optimization (or "SEO") is exploding with hype as the new, cutting-edge marketing manuever for businesses.

The truth is, SEO has been around since the late 90's when Overture, Yahoo, and other blooming search engines were viewed as quality sources to get information.

Only in the last 5 years or so has SEO become a popular facet to a company's marketing plan. This grow has been fertilized by the ever-powerful Google (which accounts for over 70% of activity on the Internet.)

If you're interested in knowing more about the history and basics of the SEO, this Wiki page is a pretty good resources.

The focus of this post is to enlighten you, the Epic Entreprenuer, on how to leverage SEO for your business's marketing plan.

The Purpose of SEO

The purpose of SEO is to get your website as high in the search rankings as possible for keyword phrases that reflect what you have to offer. Individuals are actively searching these terms, so the website traffic is typically good. As a result, businesses can capture pre-qualified leads from web traffic via search.

Understanding Your Business's Unique SEO Strategy

Just like a marketing plan, the SEO strategy for your business will be unique. Certain keyword phrases trigger special search results that demand a unique approach.

For instance, if your business model is a(n):

• local business - you'll want to be aware of Google's localized search results (accompanied by the Google map with little pins.) These results are influenced by Google+ local pages (also formerly known as Google Places pages,) so you'll want to ensure you create one of these. Additionally, you'll want to modify your keywords to be geo-specific (e.g. "wine shops in Traverse City" or "computer repair shops in Peoria IL")
• online store or ecommerce website - you'll want to consider implementing the products of your ecommerce store on Google Shopping. These product listings are a huge sources of search traffic and can help be the ideal supplement to any ecommerce SEO strategy.
• advertiser, blogger, or publisher - if your business model centers on regular online publishing (or time sensitive information) see if you website or blog qualifies for Google News results. This is popular platform for search that can provide a wealth of traffic.

Get a Free SEO Audit

There are tons of SEO companies that offer free SEO/website audits. It's important to note that the best practices of SEO have drastically changed over the last year. Some SEO techniques are obsolete; however some providers still claim they're effective (loser denial, maybe.)

Unfortunately, this sketchy behavior has given the SEO profession a bad name over the years. Just be sure to do your homework and inquire to multiple SEO providers when scouting for services or consulting programs. Getting the opinion of multiple "SEO specialists" is key to weeding-out the amatuers and theives.


About the Author:
This article was contributed by Tyler Tafelsky, an Internet marketing manager at the Web Presence Group, a Yogi, a triathlete and an overall righteous dude. To learn more about Tyler, connect with him on Twitter or Google+.