4 minute read

Well, 2020 is almost at a close and I think we all deserve a pat on the back for making it this far! Now more than ever we are thinking about ways we can make improvements in the coming year. Here are a few key resolutions we recommend you adopt in 2021 to increase the quality and effectiveness of your marketing efforts to ensure the New Year has a positive impact on your bottom line.

1. Be On-Brand

First impressions are everything! Think about how the URLs you use in marketing efforts reflect your brand identity.

URLs can be great marketing tools. Creating memorable or vanity URLs not only attract customers while emphasizing your brand, but a custom URL and a reliable redirection service can also make it easier for your audience to get to the content you want them to see on your website. To make even more memorable and creative domain names you can choose to use other top-level domains (also called TLDs or domain suffixes) to further reinforce your brand. For example, CES recently changed their URL from CESWEB.org to CES.tech. For whatever purpose you may choose to create a custom URL, it is critical to properly redirect that URL to your target content, or your SEO ranking may be negatively affected. URL redirection moves the SEO link power to your target URL and allows you to maintain and improve your ranking level. Masking or cloaking URLs creates duplicate content which Google will punish you for, and significantly deteriorate your SEO ranking. A clever, memorable domain name is not worth it if your audience cannot find you online, so it is important to use a fast, reliable URL redirection service that will help you maintain and increase your SEO ranking.

2. Be Secure

Always support HTTPS with your URL redirects to ensure visitors get the best experience.

With the recent release of Firefox 83, which features an “HTTPS-Only” mode, the need for companies and brands to redirect HTTPS links continues to gain momentum. Migrating your site to HTTPS provides many benefits for both you and your customers. In addition to added security for your site, search engines like Google reward HTTPS sites with greater SEO rankings. Not only do search engines favour encrypted sites, but many browsers also show warnings and security messages when visitors try to access non-HTTPS sites. With HTTPS migration comes the need for SSL certificate management, so ideally, you’d like one provider to handle both the redirection and the SSL certificate activation and renewal. Automatic HTTPS, where SSL certificates are automatically configured and renewed, is increasingly important as it will help your business save time and money, while providing increased security for you and your customers and improve your SEO ranking.

3. Be Targeted

If you’re not already doing it, you’ll need to make your campaigns more highly segmented in 2021.

As your audience becomes increasingly inundated with the usual online marketing tropes, and grows more savvy about how to ignore it, you’ll need to ensure that you’re rising to the top with quality, targeted campaigns. While audience segmentation isn’t necessarily new, marketers now have more data than ever before to help them target their audience. Don’t be afraid to get nerdy and dig into your visitor or campaign analytics, to better identify your audience, their subsets and the incredibly valuable niche players that may be lurking nearby. Once identified you’ll be better equipped to develop campaigns that serve up valuable content, speaking directly to them and their unique needs. This level of granularity can show up in your ad targeting, blog topics, social campaigns or SEO focuses, with the goal of ultimately driving better engagement and eventually better qualified leads.

4. Be Accessible

Use shortened and vanity URLs that are easy for people to type, or use QR codes so people don’t have to type at all!

While you may have thought QR codes died in 2010, they have made a strong comeback in 2020, making relevant online content more accessible to your customers. The more pages your site has, the more common it is for the content you want to highlight to become cumbersome to access. Using shortened URLs and QR codes, you can continually redirect those links to updated content, making it easier for customers to reach the information they are looking for, and that you want them to see. QR codes in particular provide a great asset for ecommerce sites, as you can link to an individual product purchasing page, making it even easier for customers to purchase your company’s products. Although URL redirection can help to provide a positive experience for your customers, it must be managed properly or your site’s SEO ranking can be negatively impacted. It is important to use a reputable and reliable redirection service that can manage the process expertly and securely.

If you want to make 2021 infinitely better than 2020, EasyRedir can help. Whether you’re looking for enhanced campaign URL analytics or to maximize valuable SEO cred, EasyRedir can improve your business and your bottom line. Sign up for a free EasyRedir trial today.

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