A lot of businesses in Nigeria are going online these days. That’s because that’s the new frontier where the battle to find and retain customers is being fought and won. If your business does not have a professional website or any online presence, particularly if you’re looking to expand beyond your neighborhood and attract more clientele, then you’re missing out on tons of opportunities to get your business seen by more customers.
Almost every potential customer for your brand owns an android phone. It’s become quite the norm these days for people searching for any service to type in what they want into their phones, and voila it spews out all the information they need.
Heck, it’s even as simple as saying the command and Siri or Googles assistant or whatever other voice search AI that’s been invented rush to do their best to answer your queries down to the tiniest specifics.
So, What exactly am I rambling on and on about? Digital marketing, that’s what. Unless you’ve been living under a rock out in the desert with no access to any kind of mobile device, you’ve probably come in contact with some form of digital marketing.
When it comes right down to the basics, digital marketing is all about promoting content in various forms using different digital technologies.
What exactly is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is promoting a brand using digital technology. Websites, smartphones, online display banners, social media ads, emails are all forms of digital marketing.
When it comes right down to the basics, digital marketing is all about promoting content in various forms using different digital technologies.
Before you head to your all-purpose digital marketing company in Nigeria, which is right there on Google, promising to create a fully responsive website design and yadda yadda, it’s usually a good idea to check the quality of webcopy they have on their website.
What does digital marketing do for your business.
- Your objective for having a website designed for you should be to drive more traffic to your business. To do all these, you need the services of an agency that can help you design the website and provide all those technical bits that would help it become visible on the internet.
- You also need to promote your company website online using the right marketing channels to reach your target audience.
- The last part is having your website come up on search engines when people search for your business services. Please note that this is different from having your website come up when they type in your business name.
A Full-service digital marketing agency in Nigeria should ideally, provide you with all you need to take your brand to the first-page of Google.
Please, also note that I used the term full service to denote an agency that has specialists taking care of all the different aspects of getting your website fully functional.
Unfortunately, in Nigeria, we have very few full-service digital marketing agencies that employ professional content writers( not IT students that are probably paid with m&ms ). The same persons juggle the functions of a technical SEO expert, analysts, as well as social media advertising experts.
Many digital marketing agencies in Nigeria are all-purpose marketing agencies that specialise in everything and are experts at nothing.
Before you head to your all-purpose digital marketing company in Nigeria which is right there on the first page of Google, promising to create a fully responsive website design and yadda yadda, it’s usually a good idea to check the quality of webcopy they have on their website.
What to look for when hiring digital marketing agencies in Nigeria.
Google uses several ranking factors to determine the order in which websites are ranked organically.
By organically, I mean ranking based on a natural response to a query typed in by someone looking for your services.
Let’s say for instance; you sell used automobiles and automobile spare parts. Ranking organically for you would mean that whenever someone types in the words ‘automobile spare parts in Nigeria’, or any synonyms, your business name pops up on the first page of the search engines results pages.(SERPs).
There are actually over 200 ranking factors, but the top three are:
Content quality
Backlink quality
Rankbrain
Somewhere in there also is the speed of the website and the overall satisfaction users (Ux)get from visiting this website. The way Google figures it is if your audience is happy with your website, as determined by their Click through rate (CTR) and time on page (TOP) then that website deserves to rank well( all other factors being equal ).
Look out for the quality of the articles produced by your digital marketing agency.
For the sake of simplification, I’ll divide content quality into four key parameters.
- Content relevance
- Readability
- Content depth
- User experience
Readability
- The first thing you must do before you hop on board with an online advertising or digital marketing agency in Nigeria is to head to their blog section. Check the quality of the articles they post in their blogs. I don’t know about you, but I get put off by grammatical errors, and it could even stop me from subscribing to a particular service or buying a product. You expect your website to reflect your professional image and poorly written web copy will most likely affect the way customers view your brand.
Content relevance
Content relevance applies to how well the information provided on a topic addresses the user’s intent when searching for that topic. For instance, continuing with the analogy of automobile spare parts website – what would a person searching for such services type in, and what is the intent behind their query?
Depth of the information
Another thing you need to check is the depth of the information presented. Writing 100-150 words on a topic that requires in-depth analysis is not the best way to rank on the first page of the search engines.
You need to be wary of digital marketing agencies that mass-produce short posts regularly. How much can you learn from an article that’s less than 500 words long? It stands to reason that any digital marketing agency that doesn’t do its best to provide in-depth information on their own blog topics probably would not do justice to your website copy as well.
The comprehensiveness of your web content is a critical factor for Google when it comes to ranking content quality.
User Experience (ux)
User experience (Ux for short) covers everything related to the visual appeal of a website. It includes web design, easy navigation, as well as the loading speed of the website. A website that loads slowly would most likely tune people off. In a country like ours where internet quality constantly fluctuates, having a slow loading website may prove detrimental to your business. The average loading speed recommended for a website to load fully is less than 3seconds on mobile.
If your digital marketing agency in Nigeria has a website that loads slower than that, probably because of all the unnecessary decorative effects, then you should have a rethink about hiring their services. It shows that they are not concerned about a critical part of search engine optimisation (SEO) which could affect how people visit your website.
Google says 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead. (MicKinsey & Company)
Backlink building strategy
The number of backlinks, as well as the quality of backlinks, is a significant ranking factor for Google; as crucial as content quality. The way Google sees it is if quality websites are linking to your website, it means you must have a high level of EAT( expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).
Due to the great importance attached to backlinks in ranking websites organically, a lot of digital marketing agencies invest in buying shady links.
There are some excellent ways to build backlinks, but please note that getting high-quality backlinks doesn’t happen overnight. Methods like guest posting, posting content to social media forums, and listing your business on online directories are excellent ways of producing natural backlinks.
Most of these shady link building schemes that some marketing agencies employ, involve a lot of underhand black hat SEO which Google frowns upon.
It may seem like a lot of people are getting away with it. So they thought several years ago before Google penalised some high authority websites post-penguin algorithm roll-out. According to Google’s webmaster trend analyst John Mueller, your focus should be on building links naturally. This link to a post on search engine land shows you how you can do that.
Always remember that having few natural backlinks is safer than having lots of low-quality spam links that could get you a manual penalty from Google.Any digital marketing agency in Nigeria that promises to get you lots of links to your website in a short period is a digital marketing agency to avoid like the plague.
How well does the digital marketing agency optimise your website for the Rankbrain algorithm?
Rankbrain is an artificial intelligence that Google uses to determine how relevant an article is to a user’ s search intent. If your digital marketing agency in Nigeria is continually talking about keyword optimization, then they’re probably still living in the 90s.
What your marketing agency should focus on is optimising for user intent or search intent, first.
Basing the success of your site on ranking for some keyword should not be the ultimate goal of your digital marketing agency.
Your website content should be tailored to fit in with the buyer persona for your brand and to optimize your content for a specific keyword may not target people looking to buy your services or products.
There are three different kinds of search queries that users type into the search engines and you need to understand how these work to get the most of your optimization strategies.
Transactional queries:
They want to buy a product or subscribe to your services, and they’re asking for specifics. Queries like where to find the cheapest spare parts in Lagos, Used spare part dealers in Lagos, the best shawarma spot on the Island, etc.
Informational queries :
Examples: How do I start a spare parts business in Lagos? How do I start a sharwarma business? How much do I need to open a boutique in Lagos?
Navigational queries:
These are queries a user types in to navigate to another page. Queries like Youtube, Facebook, and Google are navigational queries.
A professional digital marketing agency should optimise your website to satisfy as many transactional queries that users are looking for your services type into search engines. You should also optimise content for informational queries too because there is often an overlap when it comes to certain kinds of questions. For instance, a customer typing in ‘what to look for in a digital marketing agency’ is probably looking to hire such services and needs a bit of information to help target the right one.
Warning signs that your online advertising agency may not be the real deal.
- They promise you a specific timeline in which your website will rank on the first page. Organic rankings, unfortunately, do not work that way. Nobody can give a guarantee; it could take a week, month, three months or even six months. It all depends on the competitiveness in your business niche and how consistent you are with your SEO efforts, which includes the quality of the content your produce. You should see results in a month, and these results should consistently improve over the following months.
- They give you a guarantee of the number 1 spot on Google for your search terms.This is even worse than promising you first page rankings in a specific time, because nobody can guarantee number 1 rankings for any website.( not even Google’s staff)
- They ask you to pay upfront for a full year service. The challenge I see with paying for a year of the digital marketing service is that you can’t opt out if you do not see any results. Ask to pay for their services on a per month basis. If they are sure about the quality of the services they provide, they will give you that as an option too or offer a full back money guarantee.
- Their services are too cheap. Digital marketing ( the whole works ) is not exactly cheap. Its time and effort consuming and includes SEO copywriting, content marketing, setting up PPC ads, monitoring CTR and conversion metrics, optimising for organic rankings, regularly monitoring website SEO, competitor analysis and a host of other things. If you get an agency charging peanuts for the full-service package, you’d best flee while your company’s image and your money is still intact.
In case you’re wondering if we are an advertising agency or digital marketing agency. The articles depot is not a full-service digital marketing agency, but we do offer digital marketing services. We are a team of SEO writers and marketing copywriters in Nigeria dedicated to producing topnotch content for your websites, landing pages, and for all your digital marketing strategies.
Why should you hire us?
If you had a toothache, you wouldn’t visit a GP, would you? In the same vein, if you need quality web copy to help your business stand out, then you should hire an SEO content writer in Nigeria.
At the Number 1 SEO content agency in Lagos, we help you research, plan and create SEO copy for all your brand promotions.
Our content planning and strategy is free and we don’t charge consultation fees. To book a meeting with us, just fill the short form below and we’ll get in touch with you within 24 hours.
