Your website is one of the most important assets your business has.
And every top-performing business pays close attention to its most important website metrics.
Obsessing over the details, from big things like your traffic to smaller details like how fast your pages load, can give you the edge over your competitors. Here are some of the most important metrics you should track and share free ways to improve each metric.
Website metrics are how you measure your site’s performance. Metrics tell you what’s working, what’s not, and where you can improve.
Without paying attention to your metrics, you’re working off assumptions, and you have no idea how much your website helps your business grow or the opportunities you’re missing.
Honestly, it doesn’t need to be complicated or time-consuming. The metrics we’ll discuss today can all be measured in minutes, using free tools like Google Analytics.
6 Website Metrics You Should Measure
There are so many metrics you can measure — the choices are almost unlimited. But just because you can measure something doesn’t mean you should. In this post, You’re going to see six metrics that matter to your business. Let’s jump in.
1.Website Traffic
Traffic is essential for any website; this metric tells you how many visits your site receives. In many ways, it’s the metric you should measure because without traffic, there is nothing else to measure.
Traffic tells you how many people visit your website over a given time, and it’s a great way to tell if your website is growing, standing still, or even in decline.
2.Traffic Sources
Once you’ve learned how many visits your website receives, it’s worth finding where that traffic is coming from. This tells you how people come to your website and helps you determine:
The sources that drive the most traffic.
Ways you can grow your traffic.
This data is available in Google Analytics and, by default, is grouped into six channels:
Direct: Traffic from entering your URL directly into the browser address bar.
Social: Visit from social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
Email: Clicks from email campaigns, or links within any email message sent (e.g., email signatures).
Organic Search: Traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.
Referral: A visit to your site from a link on another page.
3.Page Load Speed
The faster your pages load, the better, for two reasons:
People HATE waiting for web pages to load; if your pages don’t load instantly, some visitors will bounce before they consume any of your content.
Faster page speeds help sites rank higher in Google.
4.Search Engine Impressions and Clicks
Search engines are one of the best ways to grow traffic to your website. For example, Sumo generates over 170k clicks each month from Google alone:
The great thing about SEO work is that it compounds over time. Look at how the clicks to Sumo from Google have trended upward over the past 12 months:
When measuring search performance, focus on two metrics:
Clicks: The number of times a user has clicked through to your site from Google.
Impressions: The number of times your site has shown in search results.
These two metrics go hand in hand; often, as impressions increase, so will clicks. But if you see impressions increase and clicks stay the same, this gives you some opportunities to improve.
5.Goal Conversions
What’s the action you want someone to take when they visit your website?
Maybe it’s an email sign-up, making a purchase, or downloading a lead magnet. Whatever it may be, you can often measure your goal with Google Analytics.
In Google Analytics, you can measure goals in four ways:
Destination: Visiting a specific URL on your site.
Duration: Sessions that last a specific amount of time or longer, like 1 minute or more spent on your site.
Pages/visit: The number of pages you’d like people to visit per session.
Events: An action you desire people to take on your website, such as played a video or clicked a CTA.
By measuring goal conversions in Google Analytics, you get a quick snapshot of your site’s performance and the progress you’re making toward your goals.
6.Top Pages
With most websites, you’ll find that the Pareto principle — AKA the 80/20 rule — rings true, with the most traffic to your website coming from just a few of your top pages.
This is certainly true of the Buffer Library, a hub for SEO-focused content.
When just a few of your pages account for so much of your traffic or sign-ups, it’s important to keep an eye on how those pages perform.
There are billions of people watching online video content, and that number grows every year. Video is a gold mine for content, so the SEO strategy you’ll need to capture viewers will be different from your common SEO strategy.
However, SEO for video marketing still needs to be a part of your overall strategy. There are even some specific Youtube SEO techniques you can use to rank videos with Google.
Here are the 5 ways you can optimize SEO for video content
What is Video SEO?
Video SEO is different from SEO for search engines. After Google, Youtube is the second most used search engine on the internet, and it has its own search rules, keywords, and search intent.
It helps that Google owns Youtube, so linking or associating your videos with your other content can help your SEO efforts. The searches conducted through Youtube have a different intent, and the keyword research you do will reflect this difference. Search intent in this case would not be transactional; it would be more instructional.
Someone won’t want to know where to buy stir fry; they’ll want a video showing them how to make the quickest and easiest stir fry.
Alongside their selected video, Youtube will show them a stream of suggested videos. Youtube generates these videos based on search intent and the user’s viewing history.
If you can tap into a niche with your keyword research, your videos can have a long-lasting rank for suggested videos and continue to serve you.
SEO for video is specialized, so you can’t just use Google keywords and Youtube keywords interchangeably. While there will be cross-over, you do need to treat each search intent separately.
5 Best Practices for Video SEO
1.Video Thumbnails must be Eye-catching
Much like a SERP, where people choose a link based on the meta description and their intent when people decide to watch a video, their choices are made mainly on the thumbnail image presented to them.
If you don’t engineer your thumbnails, then Youtube will present an image from the video. If you’re not careful, your thumbnail may be of someone pulling an awkward face, or an otherwise useless frame. Not only do these thumbnails not represent what the video is about, but it is also unprofessional and will reflect poorly on your brand.
The Youtube Studio app can help you make thumbnails. You can choose 3 options from your video or choose to make your own. Make your thumbnails relevant to the topic and eye-catching. Through the thumbnail image, you immediately know what the video is about, and the brilliant pops of yellow on the purple background are very eye-catching.
2.Your Title Tag Must Relate to the Video
For search intent, people will click on a video that matches what they’re looking for. If they click on your video and it doesn’t fulfill their search intent, they will click back and go elsewhere. Google, and Youtube, will notice this, and you might receive a drop in your search rankings.
Google will also penalize you if you try keyword baiting, where you deceive people into watching your video by tagging with irrelevant keywords. Do some keyword research and write a good copy for your title tags.
3.Contextual Video Description
Your video description works much like a meta description. They should be relatively short and to the point with some keywords included. Don’t stuff keywords into the description, and don’t lure people using a false description. Penalties will apply if you do.
Google bots search your video description, so make sure you’re serving up what the viewer wants when they’re searching for your content. Include keywords from your research to work with that SEO campaign.
4.Tag your Video Appropriately
Video tags help categorize your video. When combined with the title and the description, video tags work in SEO harmony and can help boost your video up the search rankings.
Video tags help Google return videos that match search intent and can help users find similar videos by selecting the tags to search under.
To add a tag to your Video:
1. Sign in to your Youtube Studio. (You should have one if you have a Gmail account.) 2. On the side menu on the right, select CONTENT and select the video you would like to add tags to. Add your tags.
You can also do this via mobile.
5.Upload your Video’s Transcript
Transcribing your video is possibly the best tip to boost your video’s SEO. Transcripts comprise the text that appears in your video’s closed captions. They can appear in the comments below the video as well.
Naturally, you’re going to be talking about the main topic, which has been researched and includes keywords, so the transcript will have that. But there are more benefits to uploading your transcript, including:
1. Google crawls the text for SEO ranking. 2. It allows people who have hearing difficulties to follow along with your video content as well.
If you include the transcript in the description or comments section, you can add time markers to key points, so those who want answers immediately can jump to the timestamp and get the content they need.
There’s plenty of place for paid tools in SEO. But if you’re just getting started or lack the budget necessary for fancy tools, there are still many resources available.
In this section, we’re going to incorporate five favorite FREE Google tools, and how they can help you raise your SEO game.
1.Google Trends
Google Trends is used to track the “trends” around search queries. This makes it a great tool for keyword research.
Finding new keywords
When you go to Google Trends, you’ll see a search bar where you can input a broad topic or specific search query. Upon entering your query, you’ll be presented with a trend chart of interest in the query over time.
While this may be useful, the real gems are at the bottom of the page: Related Topics and Related Queries.
By default, these boxes will both be set to “rising.” This means that these topics and queries are currently gaining traction. These are the keywords that you may want to capitalize on quickly, as you could be a first-mover and gain rankings quickly.
Advanced keyword research
Even at a base level, Google Trends is helpful, but you can always take it a step further. Across the top of Google Trends, there is a menu that allows you to specify a region, period, category, and search platforms.
The region allows you to determine where you want to pull search data from geographically. This can be especially useful when working on local SEO projects.
The category allows you to select the category you’re competing in. This is a nice feature for people who offer a service in a specific industry, or who have an extremely common query.
Search platform allows you to refine the data to specific platforms such as YouTube Search, Image Search, Google Shopping Search, and News Search. Search platform modifiers are great for those with an integrated SEO plan.
2.Rising Retail Categories
Though it’s almost impossible to predict what the Next Big Thing is going to be in e-commerce, you can still stay on top of the game with Rising Retail Categories.
This is Google’s compilation of data on retail. On it, you’ll find currently trending product categories and the searches around them, as well as where exactly they’re trending.
As an e-commerce SEO, this can give you a good idea of which products to focus on for the most potential impact.
As an enterprise local SEO, you can use this data to determine which products to focus on in each market.
3. Visual Stories
Google summarizes Visual Storiesas “Bite-size visual stories for busy marketers, driven by trending topics and data from Google.”
These stories range from holiday shopping trends to specific industry case studies, and more. They’re interactive slides, each with a few insights or data points.
For example, there’s a Visual Story about the automotive industry. Throughout the story, there are data points shared to give insight into how the pandemic has affected the car-buying process.
These data points don’t just focus on search data, though. This has been a full-on case study by Google. Some insights are shared to address the desires, experiences, and perceptions of the audience.
This information can easily be used to change the user journey, including the things that matter to the customer earlier on. It could also be used to address pain points that hadn’t been previously uncovered, or, on a more basic level, give an SEO an idea of what keywords to focus on.
4.Grow My Store
Grow My Storeis a fantastic tool for those selling a product either online or in person. Grow My Store tests sites for Google Identifiers for Successful Online Stores.
These identifiers are broken down into five categories: Product Information, Store Details, Personalization, Customer Service, and Security.
This tool hands over Google’s idea of the must-haves for a product-selling business website. Some of the components included are product reviews, profiles for shoppers, live chat, and HTTPS.
To use Grow My Store, you simply answer three questions: what is your domain, what type of business do you have, and what industry are you in? Once you answer the questions, you will see a preview of your report with your overall score and some data around your industry. To get your full report complete with recommendations, you have to create an account. The report is then sent to your email.
You then get an account where you can create (and track) a checklist of changes that need to be made — according to Google.
In addition, you’ll get customized data and insights based on your industry. To find this data on Grow My Store, in the menu, select “Reach More Customers.” If you scroll down a bit, you’ll find a section with the heading “Understanding industry trends.” Here you’ll be able to choose your industry and specific category to get specific information such as top searches in that industry, top months for the industry, and so on.
5.Test My Site
Another great tool for measuring your site in the eyes of Google is Test My Site.Much like Grow My Store, Test My Site tests for three very specific categories of features on your site. These features are Speed, Personalization, and Experience. Unlike Grow My Store, Test My Site is for any website, not just product-based business sites.
The first report you will get from Test My Site is a mini-report that breaks down your mobile site speed and any recommendations for fixes. There is also a tool to show the potential ROI of speeding up your site.
If you want even more information, which you will, you can sign up to get the full report. The full report is emailed to you and breaks down recommendations and explanations for both marketers and developers.
Bottom line
While Google can often be cryptic about what they care about on websites, they’ve created quite a few resources that can give you insight into what they find important. Using these tools can easily get you a step ahead.
It’s not just about the tools, though. In 2021, data is more important than ever, and who better to get data from than The Giant themselves?
Now, go forth and be excellent — using free stuff!
Your content is the foundation of all your digital marketing efforts. It can make or break a marketing campaign. Content acts as a connection between your customer and your brand. And connecting with your audience with authentic content will increase your results exponentially. Content Marketing is the creation and distribution of content to achieve your business or marketing goals. It can help build your brand, spread awareness about your brand, get website traffic, and drive sales.
Therefore, keeping yourself up to date on Content Marketing trends and designing your content strategy with these trends in mind is always a good idea. So, let us have a look at some key Content Marketing trends that can help you shape your content strategy
Authenticity and Transparency
Create Visual Content
Brand Storytelling
Ads as a Part of Content Marketing Strategy – Content Advertising
Aligning Social Media with Content Marketing
Authenticity and Transparency
Content Marketing is all about providing value to your audience by educating them. In doing so, you communicate a sense of authenticity and transparency through your content, building trust towards your brand. Hence, authenticity and transparency are the two most important factors that help add value to your content.
The best way to provide value through Content Marketing initiatives is to create content that:
Aligns with your overall message and mission.
Helps your target audience accomplish their goals.
Makes your audience comfortable engaging with your brand in the future.
Now, let us go ahead and understand “Why do readers respond to transparency?”
There are two key elements that transparency affects – Value and Trust
People value content mainly for its usefulness and transparency helps make the content more useful. By providing high transparency like personal examples and experiences in detail, you help the reader see your advice in action. When your content is backed by personal stories and experiences, it adds value to what you are trying to convey. It moves you from an advice-giver to a credible source of information and real solutions.
And then there’s trust. When people read a product review or case study, their skepticism radar is at high alert. Hence, earning a reader’s trust is not an easy task. But transparency goes a long way when it comes to building trust with your audience.
Now, coming to “Why readers respond to authenticity?”
Honesty and authenticity build trust for your Content Marketing efforts simply because authenticity cannot be faked. It requires a commitment to delivering through on promises and engaging in an honest level.
Your audience expects you to be reliable. Instead of just talking about your products or services, the key to drawing in an audience is to create reliable content that they can relate to. Providing authoritative content in an honest way builds a foundation for your current readers and potential future connections.
Your brand will always work better with authentic content as your audience will stick around because they know they are learning only what’s real and reliable.
Create Visual Content
People do not like reading anymore. Videos, on the other hand, are the way people like to see content these days. Most people prefer visual content rather than text because it is easier to consume and understand. To make the best of this favoritism, brands are continually thriving to incorporate videos into Content Marketing. Include more visual content in your content strategy, be it infographics, photos, videos, or memes, take your pick and start creating.
When it comes to visual content, videos will continue to dominate. According to a study by Cisco, videos will constitute 82% of online traffic by the year 2021. This indicates the increasing importance of videos for Content Marketing. What makes video content so popular among brands is its ability to deliver varied content in a captivating form. Videos can be used to drive awareness about your brand or feature the inspirational journeys of your customers. Video content makes the audience connect with your brand even more. The important factors to remember while creating visual content are
Be engaging and unique
Be relevant, and
Make sure your content is mobile-friendly.
So, if you haven’t already started using video content in your Content Marketing strategy, this is the right time for you to start. The secret to success is experimenting with new things without becoming immediately addicted. Try and test new formats and mediums, but also be willing to ditch them soon enough, in case they do not work for you. The only thing that matters is that your content has to provide value to your audience.
If you have already been working with long-form content, it could be beneficial to test out shorter, bite-sized formats, like Instagram and Facebook stories. Or if you have been focussing on shorter video content, try testing longer-form content that can rank well in search, increase traffic, and offer SEO benefits. Take time to plan out a solid content strategy that attracts your ideal customers, serves your current audience, and works towards your broader goals.
Brand Storytelling
We all know the power of stories. They add color, humanity, life, and meaning to our communications. Now, imagine blending a beautiful story into a Content Marketing campaign. The undeniable power of stories gives your marketing the ability to attract an audience. Storytelling gives your content life and makes it relatable, understandable, and personal. It is a big topic for marketers. Stories engage people, and people tend to remember them more than almost anything else.
Brand storytelling Content Marketing is the art of developing a narrative about your company which makes it easier for your audience to relate to who you are and what you do. It engages customers on an emotional level, so they see dealing with you is the right choice for them. Brand storytelling is about sharing your experiences and how you engage with your customers.
How to create your brand story?
Understand Your Customer – Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and understand the challenges they face. Remember to make your story customer-centric and advertise your product as a product that helps them change it for themselves.
Be More Than What You Do – It’s important to give your potential customers a compelling reason to buy from you. You need to give them a value-based reason why they should turn to you.
Be Honest – Your story needs to be authentic even if it sometimes means talking about your failures. An underdog story is more appreciated than a fake successful one.
Ads as a Part of Content Marketing Strategy – Content Advertising
Content advertising means creating content to promote it through paid distribution channels. Depending on the purpose of your content and the potential audiences, you can use a variety of paid channels to get your content out there. This can include paid social, PPC campaigns, sponsored placements, and any other type of paid promotional opportunities. The idea here is to combine digital marketing and Content Marketing under one umbrella to drive sales.
When it comes to ads, the takeaway is to brainstorm what makes a person click on your ad? What does a customer expect from your brand? Once you have a clear picture of this, you’ll be able to devise the ad copies that your brand needs.
Here are the key points to keep in mind for Content Advertising-
Know your audience.
Set your business goals precisely.
Always invest in quality content.
Repurpose concepts from top-performing organic content.
Experiment with new ad formats.
Conduct A/B testing for results.
Any content format can be created as part of a content advertising campaign. For instance, you could create a whitepaper focusing on common problems in the industry and promote this through paid social ads. Moving forward, let us have a look at some of the advantages of content advertising.
The biggest advantage of content advertising has over organic Content Marketing is that it doesn’t rely on search or discoverability. That means if you’re paying to promote your content, you don’t have to worry about appealing to a wider audience, or trying to appease the SEO gods to make an impact. You just need to find your audience and use whichever distribution channel suits your requirements.
Another advantage of content advertising is that it enables you to zero in on laser-focused topics that may be considered too niche to succeed organically. It means you can find specific points and tailor your content to meet the needs of your customers.
Remember, leveraging user intent and understanding the pain points of consumers in your conversion funnel is crucial to the success of any content advertising campaign. Make sure that your content is going to the right people, with the right offer, at the right time.
Aligning Social Media with Content Marketing
Content marketing and social media complement each other. Here are a few elements that apply both to Content Marketing and social media marketing. To succeed in your content and social media marketing strategy, you must address them in both-
Objectives
Buyer personas
Product
Editorial plan
What are the Aligning Objectives in Content and Social Media?
Help your audience understand the subject matter specialization.
Entertain your audience with fun and relevant content.
Educate your audience on new best practices.
Convince your audience to buy your product with strong content.
To turn your business goals into social media goals, you first need to convert them into the marketing equivalent, then the Content Marketing equivalent, and finally into social media marketing.
Social media is the prime vehicle on the Internet that drives your content in the right direction. It has many reliable platforms that you can use, which means you are not driving your Content Marketing vehicle on just one street. Social media can engage your targeted audience, give you a global publishing platform and reach out to a broad audience to establish brand awareness.
You must align with social media to make your Content Marketing campaigns a roaring success. This alignment needs some planning and strategy.
Companies need to get creative and enthusiastic about spreading their content to the right people. Don’t let your investment in content marketing go to waste by sitting on some of your most valuable marketing assets.
The five tips and tricks for increasing your website traffic include on-page SEO, the creation of shareable, linkable content, technical SEO, social media, and advertising. These tips can be categorized into three traffic types: organic traffic referral traffic, and paid traffic. Each source type is unique and can be increased using various strategies.
Organic Traffic
So, let’s start with organic traffic – Organic traffic that comes from a search engine where a user will “organically” discover your site in the results of a search results page. Organic traffic is most directly affected by SEO.
So, what is SEO? SEO, search engine optimization, is one of those fancy acronyms that some marketers throw around to make themselves sound super smart. Essentially, SEO is simply improving your rankings for various search terms on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
On-Page SEO
The first element of SEO is On-Page SEO or simply optimizing your page or blog for visibility in search. A few tactics that can be implemented to achieve on-page SEO include optimizing content, URLs, and internal links.
When you decide to optimize your content for the benefit of on-page SEO, the number one rule of thumb is to include your main keyword in the first 100 or 150 words of your content, as search engines, specifically Google, have a short attention span and will hone in on the words that show up first. In addition to your keyword’s early appearance, it also needs to be repeated to ensure your chosen search engine knows exactly what your content topic is.
Similarly, you’re going to want to include your keyword within your URL. This combined with a concise URL is going to enhance your on-page SEO. When it comes to internal linking, you need to establish what your most important content is, the content you think brings the most value. This content will need to be linked repeatedly so your customers can easily navigate to said content.
Off-Page SEO
Off-Page SEO is the second area where you can make a big difference in your organic traffic. Generally speaking, Off-Page SEO is mostly comprised of gaining links to pages on your website from other sites on the internet. In contrast to On-Page SEO, this type of SEO gives you very little control, as it’s not a change you can make directly to your website. You can ask your buddy to link your latest blog post to their website, for example.
Enhancing your off-page SEO is going to move your web page up in the search engine rankings. The primary factor incorporated into successful off-page SEO is backlinks.
Backlinks are the foundation of off-page SEO. Unlike internal links that link to another piece of content within your website, backlinks link from one website to another. To increase backlinks to your website, write guest blogs for other businesses, format your content into a popular backlink format: infographics, list posts, quizzes, and create compelling content that others will want to link back to. One way to do this is to search for a popular industry topic and read the first one that pops up in your search engine results. Now, take this topic and write content that is 10 times better.
Technical SEO
Simply, Technical SEO is everything that doesn’t fall under the umbrella of on-page or off-page SEO. The primary goal of technical SEO, similarly to off-page and on-page, is ensuring you have a highly ranked website and heavily trafficked content.
To improve your technical SEO, you’re going to want to focus on your website, both the structure and ease of navigation. When you build your website, you’re going to want to be sure you are following a “flat structure.” This means that all of your website pages are a few links away. Search engines analyze your website structure in this way: the more clicks, the less important. You want your content to be organized and easily accessible by both your customers and search engines.
Referral Traffic
Traffic can come to your site directly from other sites, whether that’s a mention in a news article or a tag in a social media post. Referral traffic is valuable because you can assume a level of trust has been built by the site that referred a potential customer to you. In many cases, referral traffic has the beneficial side effect of increasing your SEO, in the form of a backlink, as mentioned previously.
Social Media and Other Referral Sources
According to the statistics, social media now accounts for about 3.6 billion users worldwide. Despite the warnings that documentaries, such as Netflix’s The Social Dilemma, exude in regards to the dangers of social media, people are going to continue to use the platforms and use them religiously.
No matter who your target audience is, they are likely going to engage on one social platform or another. Provide value teasers on your company’s social media platforms. An example of a value teaser would be an Instagram story with a copy surrounding a new product your business is planning to release. Within the story, you can include a link to a blog post and THAT is where you will reveal what the actual product is.
Social media can move your audience from the platform they spend hours on each day to your website in one click, generating website traffic quickly, 89% of marketers see social media generating more exposure for their company. Other referral sources include overall backlinks, guest posts, press releases, and influencer marketing to name a few.
Paid Traffic
Paid traffic speaks for itself, as it’s the traffic you have garnered from advertising promotions your business has paid for. The most notable form of paid traffic is advertising.
Advertising
Although advertising costs money and has the potential to eat into the revenue you are generating from website traffic, you can control the amount of traffic to a large degree. Plus, you don’t have to wait for other organic factors. So, there’s a weighted pro-con relationship going on here.
A few great advertising tools include Google Search Ads, targeted ads on social media, and banner ads. When you search for a certain term within Google, the first few results are bound to be ads. Your business can pay to show up in this format; while it’s costly, it does get you to the top of that results page.
Targeted ads on social media are those that appear after you talk to your friend about Cheetos and a Cheetos ad pops up on your Instagram page. Ok, not exactly. Your phone isn’t listening, but it is watching what you search and purchase. If you decide to leave Cheetos in your cart, a targeted ad is likely to pop up within your feed.
Banner ads are also referred to as display advertising, as this type of advertising is image-based. These are ads you can pay for to be displayed within a web page, usually a web page that your ideal customer base visits frequently. These ads can easily be linked back to your website.
And there you have it! A few tips and tricks that are sure to help your business generate more website traffic and move to the renowned first page on Google. If you’re feeling overwhelmed or need some help along the way, feel free to reach out and book a consultation.
Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? It’s still a common challenge since many businesses know how vital digital and mobile channels are today for acquiring and retaining customers. Yet they don’t have an integrated plan to support digital transformation and company growth and engage their audiences effectively online.
So, if you don’t yet have a strategy, or maybe you want to review which business issues are important to include within a strategic review, we’ve set out the 10 most common problems, that in our experience arise if you don’t have a strategy.
You’re directionless
Companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don’t have a clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don’t have goals with SMART digital marketing objectives you likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.
You won’t know your online audience or market share
Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven’t researched this. Perhaps, more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace. The dynamics will be different from traditional channels with different types of customer profiles and behavior, competitors, propositions, and options for marketing communications.
We’ve got marketing tools to support your research and planning. Our popular competitor analysis module in our RACE Practical Digital Strategy Learning Path is packed with templates and matrixes to review the relative performance of your key competitors. Plus, find out more about your audience’s intent with our Google keyword planning tools.
All our marketing training will support you and your team to build a winning marketing strategy to reach, convert and retain more customers and accelerate your ROI from digital marketing. Sound good? Take your next steps to a winning strategy by getting started today.
Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share
If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital, or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!
As a member of Smart Insights, we’ll keep you updated on the latest trends and innovations in your sector. So you can stay ahead and not fall behind.
You don’t have a powerful online value proposition
A clearly defined digital value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal. Developing an omnichannel marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing, and on your blog.
You don’t know your online customers well enough
It’s often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think. You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them.
You’re not integrated
It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT, or a separate digital agency. It’s easier that way to package ‘digital’ into a convenient chunk. But of course, it’s less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.
That’s why we recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy, so your digital marketing works hard for you! With your integrated plan in place, digital will become part of your marketing activity and part of business as usual.
Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance
Insufficient resources will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing. There is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.
As a member of Smart Insights, you’ll have access to strategy and planning tools including performance and digital maturity benchmarking, and regular marketing data reports, so you can keep track of your position in a competitive landscape.
SEMrush is an SEO tool used by professional SEO managers. It contains a database of around 35 million keywords, which are continually researched and used to better discoverability for various websites. This data is gathered directly from Google’s Adwords and Search results, which allows you to get full visibility of your online traffic. Without tools like SEMrush, it can be quite hard for managers to properly maintain their SEO as they will lack the essential information.
What are the benefits of using SEMrush?
Better marketing strategy
Designing a marketing strategy for promoting your company can be quite tricky. And, as it is with most things, the best way to start is by researching your competition. By finding out which moving industry software other companies are using, you will be able to improve on their ideas and make your marketing strategy work. Well, luckily, that is what SEMrush is all about.
Keyword research
One of the most apparent benefits of using SEMrush is the possibility to efficiently research keywords. SEMrush will allow you to quickly identify keyword phrases that will bring you traffic to your website. Also, it will help you find related keywords that are associated with particular root words. This will allow you to reach your client base more efficiently, as these keyword associations are mostly based on client behavior. And, to keep proper track of your keywords, you will have access to the number of monthly searches connected to them.
Knowing whether or not your marketing strategy is working is best done by checking your Google rankings. The higher your rank is on Google, the greater your website value is, and the easier it is for people to find you. Well, SEMrush allows you to monitor your rankings continuously. Remember, SEMrush connects to both Google Analytics and Google Search Console. That allows you to compare your current ranking to previous ones and helps you organize your marketing strategy in the long run.
Advertising gains of using SEMrush
Now, there are two ways in which you can approach companies for affiliate marketing. You can either be first. Or, you can provide the best possible content. And, although providing great content is necessary, being first is usually much more straightforward. Luckily, this is one of the benefits of using SEMrush. By using it, you will be able to:
1. Find out which domains the companies are using.
2. Which keywords they use for their ads
3. How much traffic they generate with their ads.
4. And the cost that is behind the ads.
Backlink Analysis
Another critical aspect of growing an online presence is the inbound links. By using SEMrush, you will be able to keep track of other companies’ backlinks. Furthermore, you will quickly see the quality of the links and how well they connect to moving or storage. That will help you in designing an effective backlink strategy, which is essential for generating moving leads a maintaining an online presence.
Guest Blogging
Guest blogging is a great way to approach online marketing, especially if you create good content. But, it can be quite hard to find out which websites are worthwhile since there are so many. Well, that is where SEMrush can again be of great help. With SEMrush, you can do the necessary research to figure out if the site you are considering is worth blogging for.
Digital marketing includes all marketing endeavors that use the internet. It’s the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet. This includes social media marketing, E-mail marketing, and even blogging are all good examples of digital marketing. It helps to introduce people to your company and convert them to buy your products.
Why it is so important to promote your business?
Digital marketing aids you reach a wider audience and target the prospects who are most likely to buy your product or service. It’s cost-effective than the traditional advertising method and enables you to measure success daily.
Here are some important advantages of digital marketing.
Target the people most likely to purchase your product or service
If you publish an advertisement on TV or magazine, you have limited control over who sees the ad. Of course, you can measure certain demographics. But it’s still difficult to identify some statistics. On the other hand, Digital marketing enables you to identify and target a highly specific audience, and send that audience high-converting and personalized marketing messages. You have the advantages in social media marketing that target certain audiences based on age, gender, location, interests, networks. Ultimately, digital marketing allows you to improve your marketing strategy over time to ensure you’re reaching prospects most likely to buy. If you want to sell multiple products or services to different people, this is especially helpful.
More cost-effective than traditional marketing methods
Digital marketing helps you to track or monitor campaigns daily and minimize the amount of money you’re spending. You have entire control over where you wish to spend your money. Mostly choose to spend money on design software to create high-converting social media content. It allows you to ensure you’re never wasting money on channels that don’t perform well. If your business is small with a limited budget, you might try investing in social media, blogging, or SEO. These three strategies can give you a high Return of Investment(ROI) even with minimal spending.
Digital marketing lets you outrank bigger players in your industry
If you work for a small business, it’s likely challenging for you to contend with the major brands in your industry, many of which have millions of bucks to invest in television commercials or national campaigns. Luckily, there are lots of opportunities to outrank the big players through decisive digital marketing initiatives.
For example, you might identify some long-tail keywords that correlate to your product or service, and make high-quality content to assist you rank on search engines for those keywords. Search engines don’t consider which brand is the biggest — alternately, search engines will prioritize content that resonates completely with the target audience.
Additionally, social media allows you to reach new audiences through influencer marketing. I don’t personally follow any big brands on social media, but I do follow influencers who will hardly showcase products or services they prefer — if you work for a small-to-medium-sized company, this could be a good street to consider.
Digital marketing is measurable
Digital marketing can proffer you a whole, start-to-finish view of all the metrics that might value to your company — comprising impressions, shares, views, clicks, and time on page. This is one of the hugest benefits of digital marketing. While traditional advertising can be useful for particular goals, its biggest constraint is measurability.
Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see precise results in real-time. If you’ve ever put a commercial in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people flipped to that page and gave attention to your advertisement. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was accountable for any sales at all.
On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can estimate the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Here are some examples:
Website Traffic
With digital marketing, you can see the definite number of people who have seen your website’s homepage in real-time by using digital analytics software, available in marketing platforms. You can also view how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, among other digital analytics data.
This info helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are pushing to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you seemingly need to spend some time on SEO to improve that percentage.
With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are communicating with your brand before they have an interaction with a seller or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s responses before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can do more informed decisions about how to pull them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.
Content Performance and Lead Generation
Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes — that advertisement is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people uncovered your advertisement or how many people threw it straight into the garbage.
Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure accurately how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are interested in your content, but you’re also forming qualified leads when people download it.
Attribution Modeling
A powerful digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to track all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your trade. We call this attribution modeling, and it enables you to identify trends in the way people investigate and purchase your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more consideration, and what parts of your sales circle need refining.
Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important. Companies with effective sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decay in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can enhance your customer’s journey through the buying cycle by employing digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect emphatically on your business’s baseline.
