Whether you want to start using a different website service or simply make major updates to your websites look and feel, but you are worried about losing all your hard-fought SEO rankings, keep reading. Here are the steps we have taken with websites that, if done properly, will allow you to keep your great SEO ranking and still update or move your website.

        1. Make sure your permalinks remain the same. Your website address should not be changed at all costs, because this will start over your SEO efforts. Furthermore, your permalinks also need to remain the same on the majority of your high-ranking pages. Your permalink is the permanent static hyperlink to a particular page on your website, for example : https://www.bagyourgrain.com/grain-baggers.html the permalink in this is everything after the .com/ When you create a whole new website that is hosted elsewhere you might find that as you are building the page the permalinks are atomically being created with default hyperlinks, for example, if I was recreating the website listed above and the page grain-baggers.html , it might default to just grainbaggers , which when published would prompt search engines to see this as a completely different site, thus losing your SEO ranking because you are essentially “starting over” with a new website. So, keep this in mind and make sure those permalinks stay the same. 
 
        2. Make sure your metadata stays the same. Meta data is the page title, description and keywords about each page of your website. If you have a good SEO ranking, changes are good that you have good metadata. So make sure that you keep your descriptions, keywords and page titles the same as your last website. Using a spreadsheet can sometimes be helpful for keeping information the same. If you are simply making updates to your website to increase your SEO ranking, then adding good descriptions and keywords you want to rank for are necessary for each page of your site. 

(adobe muse help center)

         3. Paste your Google Analytics code in the header of each page of your website. This helps google recognize your new site and will help with not only tracking your new site, but keeping it searchable and SEO friendly with google. 

(weebly help center)

       4. Keep alt tags on your pictures. This one isn’t a complete necessity, but good alt tags on pictures are always a good idea. This is just another way that can help you when google crawls your page and finds whether your page is relevant to the search a potential customer has just made. If you have pictures that you can add relevant keyword alt tags to, you will be ahead of the game. 

Click below for more resources on updating your site without losing your SEO ranking. Happy Building! 

https://blog.doteasy.com/2008/05/28/are-meta-and-alt-tags-still-important/
https://moz.com/blog/how-to-avoid-an-seo-disaster-when-changing-your-website
https://thomasdigital.com/2017/03/10/keep-seo-rank/
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You hear a lot of people talk about content, your content marketing strategy and how it can help your business.

But what is content marketing and why is it important for your marketing strategy?

Content marketing is any form of information you (or an agency helping you) create related to your field. So this can be blog posts, videos, graphics or tips that is generated by you with the intention of bringing value to your potential customers. It does not necessarily promote your specific brand, but it solves burning questions, gives tips and provides information that customers in your field would be interested in learning about.

Why is it important? Content marketing is important because it has been proven to create brand awareness and overall help your business be seen as an expert in the field, something that customers respond to more, especially online, versus blasting them with buy now and stats on why your product is better than the competition. Consider these stats on content marketing:

“Small businesses with blogs get 126% more lead growth than small businesses without.” 
(McCoy, 2017. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/stats-invest-content-marketing/)


“Content marketing rakes in conversion rates six times higher than other methods.”
(McCoy, 2017. http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/stats-invest-content-marketing/)


Consumers want their brands to provide them value online, not simply give them a sales pitch on every post.
​A good rule can be 80/20, meaning 80% of your content should be content marketing and 20% actual promotion of your specific product.
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How can you accomplish it? There are a couple of ways of going about this. If you have unlimited time to dedicate to your businesses marketing effort, then you can create content on your own, across all digital media platforms, including videos, graphics, blog posts and full on articles. If not, this is where digital marketers can help your business. With your direction, they can create quality pieces of content and distribute them at the appropriate times across the appropriate platforms like facebook, your website, blog platforms like Medium, twitter, Instagram, snapchat and youtube to name a few. Having a robust tool box of content, a content calendar stating when each piece will be published where and what other types of marketing might be helpful like shooting customer video testimonials or seminars you might be speaking at, will help to keep your content fresh and provide the most value to your customers and potential customers. 

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When you are starting out, social media can seem overwhelming- there’s so many different platforms, so much content and everything seems different. Here are 3 things that helped me out when I got started.

1. Get a mentor. Whether this is a person you know and admire who has succeeded in social media or someone you do not know but can consume their information online, get a mentor. I have a mentor inside the ag advertising community but I also found a mentor that I have never met. I started watching a lot of YouTube videos and came across Gary Vaynerchuk. He is an entrepreneur and has a digital agency that services fortune 500 companies. He has built himself as a brand and expert in digital and social media. He is an author and motivator. I love his attitude which is focused on not making excuses and just putting the work in. I continue to read his books, watch his talks and listen to his podcasts as well as monitor what he does on social media because he is so successful and I think he provides a lot of value to his audience. This is one of the main lessons I was able to learn from watching him talk: provide value to your audience. Don’t try to sell, sell, sell, or just promote sales. Give your customers something they want like solving a problem in their community. For example, instead of posting about a blowout sale, perhaps share a “how to” blog post you wrote about a problem that faces your business industry. For example, grain storage is an issue for the agriculture community I am in, so I wrote this blog post. 

2. Snoop others pages. Another thing I did was dive deep into what other brands were doing on social. I looked at products I personally follow, products that I buy, and looked at what they were doing on social. I looked at our competitors to get a grasp of what others in the industry were doing. And I decided whether they were succeeding or failing, and I drew out what I wanted to ditch and what I wanted to mimic.

3.Keep Learning. Never stop learning about the new digital trends. Take online classes, Facebook offers BluePrint, free courses to help you grow your knowledge of running Facebook and Instagram ads, listen to webinars, attend digital marketing conferences, talk to others in the industry. Absorb as much knowledge as you can because its ever changing. What worked for you last year might not work this year. Things that are working right this second like video streaming, mobile video and live video might change tomorrow (which it probably won't, video is by far the most consumed content and is projected to stay throughout 2018) but the point is, keep up to date and don’t get stuck in doing the same thing and forget to learn about what is coming up the line.