Improve Your SEO Efforts
The next tip for this year’s SEO Strategy for your website is to recheck and redefine your online marketing goals, if need be.
Define Your Digital Marketing Goals
A lot of people complain that their SEO effort is just not meeting its goal. Most of the time, the problem lies with the goals – they are just not clear enough to define a specific online or digital marketing strategy.
You need to ask yourself questions regarding your business and once you answer those, your business goals will emerge for you.
Some of the most important questions are :
Only you can answer these questions.
And mind you, for an effective inbound marketing strategy to work, you need your goals to be clear, crisp and concise. Once you have definitive answers about what you want from your websites, you would have a clear idea about the content you want to be created for your website. For example you would know if you should focus on informing your customers about your business or if there are specific products or services that you should focus on. Or else there is a “How-To guide that needs to be published or an ebook in the form of do’s and don’ts regarding your products/services. You can also write a question/answer guide on questions frequently asked by your customers.
You also need to measure the results of your content creation campaign effectively too to see if you achieved what you set out to. Analyze your results and compare them to your original plans.
For example, you need to define exactly what a successful sale might be for your business. Is it simply a purchase? Or an invitation to a bid? Or even a contract form filled? Your click rates, conversion rates and click to conversion ratios should give you an idea of how successful your efforts were.
An online marketing campaign for increasing brand awareness amongst your customers or finding out your current customer loyalty will not only involve you to attract them to you through subscriptions to your blogs or monthly newsletter, but will also involve you reaching out to them by going where your audience is (Blogs, Forum Discussions, Contests/Surveys etc). The number of likes, shares and the subscribers for your content will give you an idea about the success of your “brand awareness” through the content creation campaign.
Different marketing campaigns are designed around different marketing goals. And mixing the two is not going to get you the desired results.
Getting in on the forum discussions, guest blogging on popular blogging sites for your industries and inviting important industry thought leaders to post on yours are some of the ways you can reach your potential customers, make them aware of your products and services and sought out their opinions. They also give you an idea about what people think of your business and what they want from you. They are also effective ways to gather important intel on your competitors. However, these are not the ways of getting people to actually buy from you.
Similarly investing in paid ads, flashy banners and other online promotions is not the way you find out customers opinions about the products/services offered by you.
If you’re looking to increase the brand loyalty for your business, you need to increase the engagement levels of your customers and the way to do that is not through guest posting for other business blogs.
Whatever it is that you want, you need to clearly define it if you want to get to the end of your sales funnel. Gather data, qualify the potential customers, engage them and get them to finally convert through compelling call to action buttons or content.