• FAQs

          Search engine optimization (SEO) helps businesses drive visits to their website through organic search traffic. Given that the top organic search results receive a third of the clicks, a decline in ranking could be detrimental for your business. Implementing SEO best practices on your website will help to ensure that your web content is seen by as many potential customers as possible. The more visitors you have, the better your chances are of converting those visits into sales!

          Local search engine optimization (SEO) helps local businesses gain visibility by optimizing their local business listings for local search. A business that leverages local SEO will include its address, phone number, local opening times, and exact location in the form of a local citation. The goal is to rank for local searches which are usually performed by people in a specific geographical region looking for a business near them.

          We typically see results within the first 30 to 60 days, but when it comes to SEO, there are many factors at play. It's important to remember that SEO is a long-term strategy and results may not come as fast at you wish.


        • FAQs

          Digital advertising uses the internet to send advertisements to customers who are online through different websites and social media platforms like Google, Bing, LinkedIn and Facebook.

          The price for Google Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.

          The price for Social Media Ads management depends on the monthly ad spend. For accounts with $1,000 in monthly ad spend, the price is $550/month. Between $1,000 and $5,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $950/month. For $5,000 to $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $2,000/month. For more than $10,000 a month in ad spend, the price is $4,500/month.


        • FAQs

          This depends on the complexity and size of a redesign and if eCommerce is needed. On average, it takes around 14-18 weeks from the web design intensive stage to launch.

          If your website experiences the following issues: it’s not responsive on all devices, has a slow loading speed, the design appears old and tired, users don’t spend long on the site, sales are stagnant, or your business is going through a rebranding - your website needs a redesign to boost your brand awareness and sales.

          Sometimes there’s no need to rebuild a website. Minor edits, refreshing page content and images, or restructuring page layout for SEO best practices can boost traffic and sales.


        • FAQs

          Semantic search launched in 2013 with the release of Google's Hummingbird update. Since then, Google's search engine has become more complex. The integration of machine learning, with RankBrain, and NLP, with BERT, has enabled the search engine to better understand the context of a query and deliver more personalized and targeted results. Semantic SEO is the process of creating machine-readable content using structured data and linked open data to help search engines better understand your content.

          On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page SEO refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized, as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals. From meta tags to page content, website structure, and HTML, on-page optimization services are focused on making your website more visible to search engines.

          Structured data refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways. Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.


        • FAQs

          An SEO agency has experts in different areas of search engine optimization that may be out of the realm of your marketing team's abilities. SEO can be very complex and time-consuming. Furthermore, as search engine algorithms change it can be difficult to stay current on the latest ranking factors and strategies for improving online visibility. You will likely see a greater return on investment and better results from using a professional SEO agency than you would from tackling this on your own.

          As a digital marketing agency, SMA Marketing provides products and services in four areas: SEO, Local SEO, Digital Advertising, and Web Design

          We focus on building authentic, long-lasting relationships with our clients. We’re goal oriented and results driven and believe in doing good and making a difference in the world.

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What is the Value Chain and Why It Matters to Your Business

Why do people buy a product or a service? Because it adds value to their lives! Great companies can charge a premium for their goods and services because they have added value not just in what they produce, but throughout the entire process. In the video below I will walk you through the importance of the value chain and how you can use this concept to grow your revenue.

Video Transcript: 

Hey, thanks for checking out this video. If this is the first time you’ve watched, or maybe you’ve been watching a while and have not yet hit subscribe, please do so now. We would love to have you join our community. We publish new content each and every week. And make sure you hit the alerts. That way you know each and every time we publish a new video.

Let’s talk a little bit about the value chain. I’m not going to be using any whiteboards or slide decks today. I just want to have an honest conversation with you. The value chain is how we add value throughout the entire process. This is both an internal process for our business as well as an external process.

When it comes to marketing, there’s no better way to market. There’s no other channel that has more conversion power than referrals. And referrals come from customers who are raving fans, customers that really love what you do and that love it so much they can’t help themselves but talk about it.

HubSpot talks about this as delighting customers, right? When we talk about the inbound funnel. Well, this really works across every single stage. And if you want your team to add more value, and have more ownership, they also need to be raving fans of what you do and have a clear idea of what’s going on through the entire process. Now, this starts with the initial hand-off, right? When somebody closes a new deal, how you do a handoff, that’s up to your internal team. Do you have an internal team meeting? Do you have a discovery process? Or is it a little bit more automated? The reality is your team needs to understand how things work internally and how value is being added all along the way.

Maybe an order comes in through the website and the person who intakes that order in the warehouse and ships that box out, adds value throughout the process. Maybe that’s a handwritten note to the client. One really cool way a company did that was Piktochart with me. Now, Piktochart does these infographic tools, and you know, I was sitting around one day and the mail came in, and I had bought a subscription to Piktochart, and they sent me a handwritten letter in the mail. Like it was legitimately handwritten. Not one of those letters that you get that kind of look handwritten but that we all know are fake. They took time to write me a note to thank me for being a customer.

Now, I doubt that the CEO themselves took the initiative to do that. Maybe they did early on. Now, this was somebody on their team that added value by just shipping me a piece of mail. Right? It was a letter. Cost them, you know, a couple of cents. But to me, I was like, “Man, that was pretty powerful.” Because it was somebody on their team that took the time to say, “Hey, you’re worth a handwritten note.” And in today’s world? I mean, that blew me away.

But again, that started with an internal process where somebody was saying, “Hey, once somebody signs up and they’ve been active on our platform for X amount of days, we’re going to slow down and we’re going to write them a note and tell them that we’re thankful they are a customer of ours.” And that leads to me, the customer, going, “Wow, that was a really powerful experience.” And you have to continue that through the process, and as you do that, you begin to nurture your customers and make them raving fans.

So that was one way to add value. But you can also add value by sharing wins with your customer, by working alongside them, and maybe answering a few questions that they have and taking time to explain a process. The value chain is the same thing as we’re investing. You invest a dollar and you have X amount of interest on that dollar. Well, if you make an interest of 7% on the first year, the next year, you don’t make 7% interest on a dollar. You make 7% interest on $1.07, and it begins to compound.

The same thing happens when we add value to our customers and to our teams. As you begin to add value through each stage of the process, it begins to compound. And as that value compounds, your products and your services become more valuable, and your team begins to invest more and more time and energy into making sure that they do the best job possible. But it starts with the leader. It starts with the person running the department taking that initiative and saying, “Here’s how we can increase our value. Here’s how we can make our customers more excited about what we’re doing.”

Because then what you can do is leverage those customers for referrals. And then, again, even in that you have to do it the right way. You don’t want to say, you know, “Hey, we’ve had a really bad quarter. By the way, if you know of anybody else that wants to have a bad quarter.” I’m just joking. But, you know, we have to make sure that the timing is right, as well. So in making sure that our customers are so excited and so believing in the products and services we provide that they just have to go, “Hey, man, if you need a website, if you need a back massage, if you need coffee, if you need a T-shirt, if you need whatever it is that you’re selling, you have to go to this guy, because when they took care of this for me, it went above and beyond.”

These are the things that we can do to make our businesses stand out, because most business owners, not most, but some business owners, take the easy road. Maybe they have an installed customer base. They just kind of churn out their widgets and they do their thing, and they don’t think about the value added. But if you want to grow and you want to grow a lot and you want to make an impact bigger than only the monetary side of things, the value chain is an essential part of your business.

If you’ve got any questions on the value chain or any questions on how you can engage your customers more effectively, please comment below. Let’s continue the discussion. And until next time, Happy Marketing.

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