Set Marketing Goals
To start an SEO campaign or a marketing campaign of any type, you need goals. What do you plan to accomplish with this campaign? Why are you running this campaign in the first place? These questions will give you a good starting point to decipher your overall goals.
Your digital marketing goals should work along side your company’s overall goals. If your goal is to drive leads, how many leads do you need to make it worthwhile? If your goal is to sell and make money off of widgets, how many widgets do you need to sell to have a positive ROI? If your goal is to gain awareness, how will you measure that to ensure the campaign is performing?
There are many aspects that will come into play while deciding your company’s goals; they will be different for everyone depending on industry, business size, and business needs (there are many more variables, these are a few of the big ones).?
Measuring Goals
I briefly mentioned measuring goals above; this is a step I see often overlooked by companies. As an SEO/SEM person, measuring performance metrics and data comes second nature to me, but it is an important part of the discovery process for all marketing professionals. I can’t tell you how many Google Analytics accounts I have looked into for already established marketing departments who have no goal or event tracking setup.
?Google Analytics gives you 20 goals to use for tracking…USE THEM! At bare minimum you should be tracking relevant forms on your site.
Marketing professionals will tell me they are tracking visitors and watching their site’s bounce rate. These are needed metrics, but I dare you to tell me something truly insightful about your site with them. As marketing professionals we need to be getting into the nitty gritty of the site, looking for deeper understandings of our visitors.? Analytics will tell you how you can make your visitor journey a more conversion friendly path that drives visitors to an important call to action. Analytics allows you to track the steps they take and to see where they drop off. You can then make changes to your conversion path and track again.
SEO is a Long-term Investment
If you are looking for a quick fix to all of your company’s problems, SEO probably isn’t the best place to start. SEO is a long-term process & strategy that works on developing and establishing your company as best as possible on the web.?
Too many times I’ve had clients asking what sort of results we have after a week into the campaign and this just isn’t realistic. My job is to educate our clients that SEO is a long-term engagement.
Mobile is Key to SEO
Make sure your site is mobile friendly. The amount of users searching on mobile devices has been drastically increasing; your website must be accommodating to these visitors. I’m sure we have all ventured on to a non-mobile friendly site on our phone. What a pain that is: zooming in and zooming out while hoping to not accidentally click the wrong link with our gigantic finger-to-font-size-ratio.
On the other hand, a mobile friendly site can be inviting to visitors. Easily allowing for menu navigation and mobile formatted pages. No more zooming in and out!?
The bottom line is to make sure your website is mobile friendly. This may mean recreating your entire site on mobile or just a portion of it. ?Traffic reporting companies are now reporting that nearly 60% of all online traffic is via mobile. This trend has been increasing steadily.
Content, Content, Content?
Since day one Google has always been a HUGE fan of quality content. SEO professionals around the world stress quality over quantity when it comes to content. It’s our job to make the quality content we produce digestible by your visitors.
What is quality content?
?Your content should match your users expectations of the page. The content should be detailed and thorough about the topic you have promised in your title. Intrigue your visitors throughout your content; truly provide them a service with the information you are providing. In short, serve them the information they have ordered. They arrived on your site for a reason, it’s your job to figure out this reason and address it in your content. This type of content will spread on the web and gain more traction than content focused on quantity and keyword stuffing.?
The Lay of the Land is Ever Changing
Working on your site’s SEO means you have to be very adaptable. Online marketing is a constantly changing environment. It is the wild west of the marketing world, with very few hardened rules and exceptions to virtually all of them.
To be good at SEO, you will without a doubt have be a Jack-of-All-Trades. You will need to have skills in various areas of SEO, such as: link building, on-page optimization, technical optimization, UX, conversion path optimization, writing, research, marketing minded and other various skills. The “best practices” within each of these areas are constantly changing to adapt to new ways Google analyzes them. A common theme throughout SEO history has been a sense of, change or die off. If you are unwilling to adapt, your site will surely fall behind the times and fail.
Most recently The Penguin Algorithm by Google will be continuously updated moving forward. Previously, there were individual updates to the algorithm, but the most recent algorithm is being constantly updated and doesn’t have a foreseeable endpoint. Just as we are constantly optimizing our sites, Google is constantly optimizing how it deciphers our optimizations.
Adapt or fail.
David started his career in the advertising industry in 2007. Over the past several years he has moved his focus to the digital side of marketing, specializing in SEO/SEM, UX, & Conversion Optimization
