Are you struggling to adapt your digital marketing strategy and need a few extra tips? Here’s a small grouping of underrated marketing practices we think you should include in your plan.
Top 6 Digital Marketing tips for your marketing strategy:
- Get the basics down first
- Research your competitors
- Use your Google my business listing
- Use social media
- Partner with influencers
- Keep a quality blog
Website Basics
First off, it’s crucial to have a well-built website to start with. Focusing on digital marketing activities involves a lot of effort and, if after all your efforts, you’re being held back by a simple design flaw, then you’ll kick yourself.
Look closely at the site structure and make sure its a logical flow for your users. Don’t create a complicated structure with multiple subcategories. Keep it simple. A best practice is to only ever be 3 clicks away from any page on your website; anymore and Google search crawlers will struggle to index all your content. Another great tip is to make sure you have an XML sitemap for your website – This way, search engines can crawl your site much easier.
URL structure goes hand in hand with your site architecture. Your URL slugs should describe what that web page is about and also include your focus keyword for that page. Evidence suggests the longer the slug, the lower your ranking potential, so keep them concise.
Securing your website is becoming more and more a priority for webmasters. An SSL certificate is very cheap (if not free) and secures your website from hack attempts AND protects your users’ data. This is a must for eCommerce websites due to the sensitivity of data being transferred.
Status codes. You can use this tool to check your website has proper redirects, no broken links, and hopefully, 200 status across all of your web pages. Linking out to relevant content externally and internally is helpful to your visitors and your organic rankings.
Submit your site to Google Search Console. Having control of your website on Google’s index means you can react to any issues with your website, monitor your site’s performance, and take actions to better place your site on Google.
Optimise your metadata. Write your keywords and LSI in your title, description, alt tags, heading tags to improve user experience and search rankings. Don’t stuff them though as this would have the opposite effect.
Research competitors
The digital space is arguably the most competitive marketing channel. On every platform, you’ll be in a battle to outbid, outrank, and out-market your counterparts. Keep your enemies close could not apply more, and with web tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs; Keeping tabs on your competition couldn’t be more rewarding.
Before you start any campaign, you should look at competitors, analyse what they’re doing, copy and do it better! There are quick wins like easy keywords and backlink opportunities to be had here.
Researching your competitors, you’ll also be able to benchmark your website’s performance against theirs and make better-educated projections of what your website could be like.
Google My Business
Your Google business listing is an important piece of online real estate for your business. Here is your opportunity to tell Google about your business and gain more prominence on search results.
If you don’t already have a Google My Business listing, then go to this link and set one up. Make sure to fill out all the information correctly and try and make your profile as thorough as possible.
Here are a few tips to gain more views on your business listing:
- Add keywords to the description
- Select all relevant categories your business falls under
- Promote customer reviews on your business listing
- Add service locations to your listing
- Create posts to your business listing
Use Social Media
Social media isn’t just for communicating with your customers. If your business website is correctly linked to your social media profiles and you’re actively posting, then you will receive SEO benefits which build Google’s trust in your brand. If you choose to up your social media game, then be sure to verify your profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. Also, as with any profile for your business, complete all the information and keep it consistent across all of your chosen platforms.
Social media platforms are also a great place to spy on your competitors and understand what they’re doing. We know it can be difficult to focus on so many platforms so primarily use the ones that suit your business’s needs, i.e. Facebook, as this suits all businesses, and if you’re a B2B, Linkedin would be the right choice.
Partner with influencers
If your business is in its infancy, you might not have the best brand exposure to attract new customers. One way to combat a lack of brand awareness is to partner up with a relevant influencer that already has a large following and have your influencer market your products for you.
This can be a great solution as followers are willingly following that influencer because they like what they do. In short, this means your leads may be slightly warmer as you’re targeting a relevant audience.
Keep a quality blog
Writing content on your website’s blog adds so much value to your business. You can not only become an expert within your field but also increase traffic and leads to your site.
Evidence shows your word count should be around 1,890 words for optimum SEO conditions though longer form content has also proven to do better.
After deciding on a good keyword to go after you want to analyse all of the top results on that search engine results page and consolidate all of that knowledge mentioned on competitor blog posts and add to it as well.
Link out within your blog posts to external resources that would help your readers, also remember to link to your other content with relevant anchor text. After writing a few blog posts, you begin to build up your Author’s authority and rank better on Google.
Finally, be sure to share your blog content after you’ve published, do a bit of content marketing. SEO is a slow game, but if you can create a general buzz around your content then you’ll have a much easier time ranking.
Conclusion
There are a few digital marketing tips here to get your marketing strategy back on course. We also recommend you read our digital marketing glossary, as you may find more areas to focus on.
