Marketing your brand, products, and offers to your customers is fundamental to your business, and so is the process of managing how this information is delivered via the web. URLs are often your customer’s initial interaction with your company, and an effective link management process is highly critical for any online business.
First impressions are everything! Link management includes URL shortening and redirection, and is essential for all businesses with an online presence. URL shorteners and URL redirects can help build customer trust and satisfaction, provide valuable marketing analytics, and maintain and improve search engine optimization.
URL shorteners are a part of link management that should be considered for every business that is interested in emphasizing their brand and serving their customers. There are a lot of ways to shorten and brand URLs these days. URL shortening is a great way to:
- Reach your customers and keep them happy by directing them to updated, relevant content they are looking for
- Build trust to prevent looking spammy or untrustworthy
- Maximize your voice through social media to say more, in less characters
URL redirection is what happens after you create custom shortened links that take your customers to your existing content on existing domains. The efficiency and effectiveness of this service is critical to managing how well you are able to serve your customers online.
Along with increasing trust and engagement with your customers, URL shorteners are also being used to build brand awareness and measure how your brand is being accessed. Link shortening and redirection are beneficial to any marketing campaign, and they work in a similar way depending on the service. When you create custom URLs, you can continually use these by redirecting them to updated content. You can then add UTM tags to your links so that you can track your campaigns, and see results in Google Analytics without paying a link management service to provide you with the same results.
The Impact on SEO
Effective link management is an integral part of increasing your company’s SEO rankings. URL redirection moves the SEO link power to your target URL and allows you to maintain and improve your ranking level. As discussed in one of our recent blog posts, it’s important to use the proper kind of redirect, a 301 permanent redirect, rather than hiding URLs, in order to maximize the SEO power of the URL. Masking or cloaking URLs creates duplicate content which Google will punish you for, and significantly deteriorate your SEO ranking.
The behind the scenes process of redirection can be complicated, so a trusted service is highly important. Some URL shortener services don’t work with your domain, and the links cannot be changed once created. Some others provide limited custom domains, and some provide unlimited custom domains. Depending on your needs there are a number of different free and paid services. Your link management partner and process play a pivotal part in your online infrastructure. Whether you are shortening URLs, changing domains, or adjusting embedded links, it’s important to make sure your redirection service manages this wizardry, securely, and reliably.
Looking to use a URL shortening strategy for your business? EasyRedir can help with all of your cross domain URL redirection needs. To find out how you can improve your brand presence and make sure your customers are seeing the content you want them to see, check out our plans and what our customers are saying, and sign up for a free trial with EasyRedir today.
