As marketers, we spend much of our time thinking about what we need to do in order to enhance our digital marketing strategies. Meanwhile, our teams are down in the trenches performing these tasks and ferociously plowing through to-do lists that will ultimately lead to what seem like the three main goals of any internet marketing campaign: traffic, leads, revenue. We spend so much time on the to-do’s that we often ignore the don’t-do’s. It’s really the little things that may have seemingly little effect in the short-term that could kill your digital marketing efforts in the long-term.
An infrequently updated or non-existent blog
Google’s primary goal is relevancy; it aims to provide the ideal user experience for its searchers so they can quickly and easily find information relevant to their queries. Actively managing a blog is one essential way to keep the content on your site fresh, thus boosting relevancy in Google’s eyes and ensuring that visitors and search crawlers continue to visit your site and index its pages on a regular basis.
Take your biggest competitor’s site, for example. Let’s say that your competitor launched a content marketing strategy and hired three writers to populate the company blog with 30 posts over the next 30 days. The kicker is that these posts are being created with SEO in mind (keywords, internal links, etc.). Now let’s say that your company blog has a few posts you wrote a few months ago, and you just haven’t had time to keep up with it. Which do you think outranks the other over the next 60 days: the one that provides daily content for its visitors or the one that might be a better site but hasn’t updated its blog in 90 days? Content is king.
No clear goals for your homepage
We often fall into the trap of thinking that the more decisions you give someone on a web page, the higher the chance of a visitor clicking on one of them. “Call Now! Fill this Out! Talk to One of Our Professionals! Subscribe to our Newsletter!” However, these options can be, and typically are, overwhelming for your visitors. Decide what your top one or two calls to action are and focus on those. This will give your site more clarity and allow your visitors a little space to breathe, which will undoubtedly result in improved click-through rate (CTR).
A silver bullet approach to SEO
There are no silver bullets in SEO; not one single type of SEO is going to drive the majority of the traffic. All facets work together, and they all contribute to the success of the next. You might have a well-optimized site, but if you’re not posting fresh content, you’re going to miss out on an abundance of potential traffic. Alternately, you might be building a strong link profile with keyword anchor text on other domains, but if you’re not using those keywords on your site, it is a missed opportunity.
Plain and simple: taking part in one SEO initiative while ignoring others will leave you disappointed with the results in the end.
Trying to do it all internally
I bet I can name a few traits that describe your company’s digital marketing team: 1) Talented; 2) Guides the company’s online marketing strategy; 3) Swamped; and 4) like everyone else, can only get so many things done in a day. These four aspects ring true with most marketing departments in a variety of different industries. Perhaps not too surprisingly, the teams that see the most success are the ones that enlist vendors to assist them when the need is there. Whether that’s an SEO campaign (or even just consulting), content marketing, link building or social media, it’s important to know when to ask for help. Sure, your team may be capable, but does your team have the time? It is critical to know when the need is there and when to ask for help.
I hope these tips have been helpful in evaluating your digital marketing initiatives. While this is not meant to be an exhaustive list, resolving just these four common issues in digital marketing can produce significant results. Please don’t hesitate to post comments below or contact me with any questions – I welcome your feedback and insights.
Mitch Holt is an Internet Marketing Coordinator at Volacci Inc. in Austin, Texas. Volacci is a premier Drupal SEO and Internet marketing company that specializes in SEO, PPC, reputation management, email marketing and social media.