So, I’m going to guess that you’re either creating a digital marketing strategy or rethinking the one you’ve already got. Good! In an age where online customer activity is growing rapidly, a good digital marketing strategy is essential. In the UK alone, online sales amounted to over £60 billion, growing 14.9% from 2015 to 2016.
Planning your Strategy
Understanding where your business stands within your industry, and therefore how your website is performing against your competitors, is a good starting point. From here, you can design an effective strategy to improve your online presence and get ahead of – or at least keep up with – the competition.
Your strategy should be made up of a point by point plan of the targets you aim to achieve. You might consider organising your points according to priority and the time they will take. Do you most want to increase conversion rates or your page ranking? How long will your plans take to achieve?
Prioritising SEO
It’s important to include targets based on search engine optimisation as achieving these will have a positive impact in other aspects of a business. For example, if you want to increase traffic to your website, one of your main priorities should be to optimise your website to improve your search rankings as this will inevitably increase site traffic. In fact, 33% of traffic from a search results page is taken up by the first ranked spot and 67% of clicks go to the top 5 positions.
When creating an SEO plan, you should definitely create keyword maps to help you to place the best keywords and phrases on your web pages. Keywords are essential as they will need to perfectly reflect your business and the products or services you provide.
When you create your keyword map, you decide which search terms you want your website to appear for in search results. This will require a complete understanding of your business and industry as well as a firm grasp on your demographic and their needs.
Once you understand who your demographic is and have planned which keywords and phrases you want your website to appear for, it’s important to integrate these into your content marketing strategy.
Planning Your Content Strategy
When generating content, you need to consider if it’s going to be useful to your key demographic and whether it relates to their interests. This will ensure that the content you create will be relevant to your target audience, and will therefore retain their interest in your brand and generate leads.
Keywords are also a ranking factor search engines use to determine your site’s position in search results. The likes of Google are focusing on quality content and good user experience to determine good SEO. This means that you have to use your keywords naturally and consider how and why you are using them on each page.
Outreach
Another element you should also consider is an outreach plan. It’s all well and good creating content for a website, but you must help that content be seen by as many people as possible. If you don’t, you greatly reduce the chance of potential customers seeing that content, being wowed and then enquiring about purchasing a product or even wanting a similar piece of content from you for their website.
Mobile Search
Mobile search is on an unrelenting rise with nearly 60% of searches now coming from mobile devices. This means it’s more important than ever to make your services accessible on the go. It is important that you ensure your website is “mobile-friendly”. In fact, since the last algorithm update from google, websites are now punished if they aren’t mobile friendly.
Optimising for mobile is great for your local business as well as 88% of searches on mobile are local queries. This is a great opportunity to catch your customers when they are nearby and will encourage them to physically visit your store, where you can work your sales magic in person. It’s basically like having a huge sign on your shop saying “OVER HERE! BUY FROM US!”
Considering how much of an impact your online presence can have on your business, it would be a huge mistake to leave it all to chance. We know that the higher your ranking in a search result the more traffic will be lead to your site. Think about it as a one way high street and all the shops provide the same products.
It’s extremely unlikely that anyone will go to a shop at the other end of the street, when they can just go in the first shop they see. Make it your aim to get that prime location and using SEO in your marketing strategy is the road to go down.