Pattaya Trader ‘s Marketing round up for 2018
A Look Back to All Things Digital Marketing in 2018
Back in January we looked at the every increasing focus of website speed.
The fact is that speed is king and if you have a slow website then be prepared for it to underperform. Combine this with the fact that more than 50 percent of your website traffic arrives via some form of mobile connection then speed really is important.
If you aren’t on top of things, then a visit to a couple of website should give you the head’s up on what needs to be optimized to improve things.
Don’t take my word for it, blogging superstar Neil Patel has an excellent article on the very subject – “How Loading Time Affects Your Bottom Line”
Managing Your Online Reputation
February saw us take up the mantle of looking at ways to manage an online reputation.
With most buyers researching via the web, it is sensible to make sure that any mentions about you or your business are as positive as possible. That said, if you have been around for some time then it’s easy to have the odd bad review or comment posted – even for the best businesses.
When this happens you have a choice. Either do nothing, or get active.
Here’s a simple checklist that should help in these situations:
Respond to both negative and positive reviews alike
Ensure your social media profiles remain updated
Whilst you might not be able to remove damaging posts, clever use of social media channels can at least demote these to lower search positions. All useful in the fight for the best online profile!
Facebook News Feed Changes
March was a massive month when it comes to Facebook.
We saw the roll out of a radical change to the way the social media giant provides its users with posts.It was a huge reality check for many business owners, who over time had built up a large following.
What happened was that Facebook decided to show much lower volumes of “organic” content on its feeds. A much smaller percentage of your followers would see the content that you publish. This seemed to be in favour of an increase in paid for ads and content that had been shared / commented or liked from your friends or family. Normal posts that had an image and some text were hardest hit, with a huge drop in reach volumes. Video content fared much better which in turn saw publishers move a lot of their content this way.
The takeaway here is don’t continue to do the same thing you have always done on Facebook, the results just aren’t there.
Get Your Website Secure
While there were other notable events in the year that we covered, none were bigger than what happened when Chrome went to version 68. I appreciate talking about a web browser update isn’t that sexy; however, this one was very significant.
Google gave a fair warning that they would be making a big change to the way a website was shown in the URL bar. And sure as eggs are eggs, it happened in July 2018. You will (i’m sure) have noticed that when you go to different websites some or indeed most of the have a little padlock next to the website URL – this is significant because it means the site is using the httpss protocol and is secure.The flip-side to this is sites that aren’t secure show the message Not-Secure in the browser area. Making it much less likely that a visitor will enter personal information on them.
Readers who missed this post can catch it by going here – https://www.pattayatrader.com/business/Google-Chrome-&-Secure-or-Not-Secure-Browsing
The Wrap Up
Personally there was quite a bit of digital changes to content with during 2018, it was certainly a challenge to stay on top of things as they unfolded. If you do nothing else, then do make sure you investigate the above a little bit further. There is some sound advice that will pay dividends going forward.