Your online goals:

Taking your business online offers a lot of opportunities, but with so many options,
it's easy to spin your wheels and lose focus. Setting specific goals can help as you
begin to navigate the digital world.

there are alots of ways that digital can help your business such as: building
relationships on social networks, selling online, finding new customers or even
keeping existing ones.

why exactly do you want to be online?

people have to know that you exist.

Getting the world out in the digital marketing:

one easy win is listing your business in local online directorise.
you maybe built a website to share your information about your business, this
could be things like: your opening hours, your location, your prices and the
services that you offer maybe even photos and videos that could entice new
customers to walk through your door.you could even set up a social media page
to help you with this.

you can also add new features things like: online appointment scheduling,
maybe a review section where people can say nice things about you or even an
e-commerce store to sell your products online.

Now that you are using digital to attract to attract visitors and turn them into
customers, you could start expanding your business by investing in online
advertising.

Analytics: lets you know what is working well and what could be tweaked.
before you going online, think about exactly what you want to achieve then
prioritize different online opportunities to help your accomplish those goals.

Building your online presence:

Let’s take a look at all the options for launching your business online, step by step. We’ll
cover:

● local listings
● social media and video, websites and mobile apps.
Marketing your online presence: There are 2 main ways you can use search
engines. The first is search engine optimization, or SEO, which helps you
promote your business in unpaid search results. The second is search engine
marketing or SEM, which lets you buy ad space in the search results.

Email marketing is also an important way by sending relevant information and

offers to people who’ve already said they’d like to hear from you, You can send
coupons to people who have made an appointment on your site, advertise a
special event, or promote sale items.

Analyse and Adapt

Don't expect too much too soon, it can take a bit of time to set up your digital
presence and get noticed online.

Measure what you are doing and make sure it's working. This is called analytics
and it can show you how people find your website and what they do when they
get there.

Tracking what people are doing on your site, can help you understand what is
working and what is not. So you can make changes and continually improve
what you are doing.

It's important to remember that the online world is constantly changing. New
tools, technologies, and tactics pop up pretty much daily. So a good plan
combines the basic concepts that don't change that often, with forward-thinking
to keep up with the latest and greatest.

To summarise: First, know your online goals and set yourself realistic
expectations, next use analytics to track and measure what you are doing and
how it's working and lastly always keep up to date.

How websites work

To sum up: Deciding to build a website for your business starts with
understanding how it all works together, A server hosts your site, and a domain
name helps people find it.
Key website ingredients: A website consists of many parts. Build and
blend them right, and you’re sure to succeed. In this lesson, we’ll cover:

● your name
● the website’s organization
● text, photos, and other interactive elements

Make your website easy to use: Visitors to your website

should be able to navigate and interact with your site easily – that's called
usability. Bring them back again and again by:

● providing simple and clear navigation

● creating a consistent layout
● writing relevant and effective content.

When designing your website, watch out for mistakes that often chase
customers away. In this lesson, we'll outline some ways to avoid frustration,
such as:

● quick-loading pages
● mobile-friendliness
● general accessibility.

An online business strategy can boost your chances of digital success, helping
you to define clear goals and focus on your online activity. In this lesson, we'll
explore:

● how an online business can benefit from a business strategy

● best practices when creating a business strategy
● examples of common goals and popular strategies to achieve them.

When taking a business online, understanding how customers browse on the

web is an important factor in ensuring your online efforts are rewarded. In this
lesson, we will explore:

● customer behaviors online, and how these overlap with offline behaviors
● the "See, Think, Do, Care" framework, and how to use this to help
understand the online customer journey
● how to group your audiences using audience segmentation.
Create the best possible online experience for customers by understanding how
to make the most of the moments when they interact with a brand. In this lesson,
we'll explore:

● what customer touchpoints are

● how to map common online customer journeys
● how to identify customer touchpoints that generate business goals.

Understanding the competition is a key component of your online strategy,

enabling you to position a business correctly in the marketplace. In this lesson,
we'll explore:

● how to identify what makes a business stand out in a busy marketplace

● why Unique Selling Points (USPs) are important and how to construct
them
● online tools available to help you research the competition.

Use a SWOT analysis which helps ensure business decisions are well-informed.
SWOT stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Ask
yourself what is it we are good at? these are Strengths. what we can do better?
these are Weaknesses. how can we grow, change and improve? these are
opportunities. what is happening or what could happen? these are Threats.

When marketing your business online, it's important to use the data and metrics
available to evaluate how your online activities are performing. In this lesson,
we'll explore:

● why setting goals and KPIs are so important to online businesses

● how to construct a KPI using the SMART framework
● how to analyze data gathered to help improve online marketing efforts.

KPIs: key performance indicators.

How search engines work: first they examine the content they learn about and
have permission to see what is called “Crawling”. Second, they categorize each
piece of content that is called “Indexing”. And third, they decide which content
is most useful to the searches that are called “ranking”.
When a person types in a word or phrase on a search engine, a list of results
appears with links to web pages and other content related to the search. This
results page is organized into different sections; this video covers the adverts.
You'll learn:

● a bit about advertising on search engines

● why advertising on search engines is so effective
● how advertisers compete for an opportunity to show ads on the search
results page.

Google search console: It's a service that gives you feedback about how
your website is in google search results.

To add your website: www.google.com/webmasters.

In this step-by-step process to create an SEO plan for your website, you'll learn
how to:

● develop
● prioritize
● adjust the plan to best suit your goals.

This video explains the SEO process and the steps you need to take in order to
optimize your website, including:

● discovering what words or phrases people use to search for your products
or services
● improving the content on your site.

Choosing keywords is the cornerstone of successful search engine optimization.

In this video, we'll discuss:

● why you need to do keyword research

● the difference between short-tail and long-tail keywords
● what to consider when selecting keywords.
Making your web pages search friendly
Get started in search engine optimization by improving the pages on your
website. This video explains the elements that you can tweak to make your
website easier for search engines to understand. We'll cover the following:

● title and description meta tags

● heading elements
● page copy.

The title is used to generate the first line shown

The meta description is used to generate the few short sentences that follow, A
good meta description is usually 2 short sentences. It should also reinforce the
title by using the keyword or phrase again.

A title should be short and sweet, A description should match what the page is
about.

You can improve your search visibility across the web by thinking about off-site
optimization; that is, using what happens on other websites to promote yours.
This video will show you some ways to start, including:

● encouraging links to your website

● engaging with your audience through good content
● promoting your site with social media.

Different countries require different marketing tactics, and international search

engine optimization is no different. In this lesson, you'll learn about changes to
make when your website crosses international borders, including:

● language
● localization
●
● country targeting.
Traditional advertising broadcasts a message to the world at large. But search
engine marketing targets a very specific group of people – those actively
looking for your products and services. In this video, you'll learn:

● what SEM is
● how it works
● why it works so well.

Search engine marketing is a uniquely powerful option for your business. Its
simble but effective. people search for things they want and advertisers target
specific searches but only buy when someone clicks to learn more.

When you’re starting a new search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, it’s
important to understand what makes a keyword “good”. In this video, you’ll
learn which factors to consider before bidding on keywords, including:

● relevance
● traffic
● competition.

How to take your ad to the next level and make it jump off the page? Let's
start with Relevance. Relevance is the name of the game in search engine
marketing. Try and write your advert’s headline to match the search words as
closely as possible. Second, make it Unique. Let's take your first description
line which said photos for all weddings and update it with special offers. How
about this? Get 25% off your photo collage. This already looks more exciting
and gives your customer more reason to visit your website. a second line such
as: view our wedding gallery. This is much better than telling your customer
what they should do when they visit your website.

Web analytics can answer questions about what people are doing – and not
doing – on your website. In this video, you'll learn about:

● the kind of data web analytics can provide

● how to understand that data
● how simple it is to get started.
let's start with a metric: This is basically anything you can count, such as unique
visitors or time spent on site.

You will analyze your metrics by using what are called dimensions. You can use
web analytics tools to learn more about your website’s visitors. There are lots of
things that you might want people to do on your website, Such as placing and
order or getting directions to your shops, or even filling out a contact form. This
is known as a conversion. Web analytics tools can tell you if your conversion
rate changes, based on, where they came from, whether they’d been there
before, or even the type of device they are using.

Collecting and analyzing data can offer many benefits to online businesses. To
take advantage of these benefits, it's important to first understand the types of
data available to you as well as the best way to gather it. In this lesson, we'll
explore:

● the differences between quantitative and qualitative data

● how online data can be used to complement your offline business
approach
● common ways to collect data.

Key learnings
Sometimes having so much data at your disposal can seem a little
overwhelming. Using spreadsheets gives you a way to manage this information
and make the most of the data provided. In this lesson, we'll explore

● what a spreadsheet is, how you can use it to collate and analyze data
● basic spreadsheet formulas that can help make life easier.

The function SUM( ) allows you to calculate the total of two or more
spreadsheet cells. This is handy if you want to know the total number of people
in the town.

Average or AVG returns the average of the numbers selected, it could be used to
work out the average age of the town’s population.
The COUNT function counts how many times a certain value occurs, The
number of people who have lived in the town for 3 years or less.

A fully functional online store doesn’t push customers towards over-the-phone

payments, but it does make it easy to buy through the site itself.

It gives you a backend system that allows you to easily manage orders and track
shipping. You’ll then have control over the features of your online store, which
will allow you to design it so that it feels more like a real shop for customers.