Blog

Top SEO & Digital Marketing Tips for Your Website

A new year is here and it’s time to review and be sure you are implementing the top SEO & digital marketing tips for your website!  Is your website and digital marketing doing each of these items? It’s time for you to review and I’m providing the checklist and tools!

Ready to dive in and get my top SEO & digital marketing tips?  Let’s do it!

Listen Now:

Subscribe:  Halftime Mike on iTunes  | Android users via RSS  | Listen on Stitcher.

badge itunes lrg Growing Business Online: Identifying your Ideal Customer

VIDEO PODCAST: Top SEO & Digital Marketing Tips for Your Website for 2019

4 Tips to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy

One of the key advantages of digital marketing is you can track, measure, and tweak your campaigns immediately. If you feel your AdWords campaign isn’t working, change the ad copy, ad size, or other factors. The same applies to your blog articles. Play around with the content type, length, and posting frequency until you find a working formula.

With that in mind, let’s look at the four most impactful adjustments you can make to your digital marketing campaign for accelerated growth.  

1 Focus on Mobile

In 2016 mobile overtook PC as the preferred device for internet access. Currently, more than 65% of consumers prefer mobile, and nearly 30% use mobile only to access the internet. If you ignore mobile marketing, you're ignoring a huge chunk of your potential customers.

To take advantage of the huge and ever-growing mobile market; make your site mobile responsive, create mobile-friendly content with AMP (accelerated mobile pages), get local with Google My Business, and consider text message marketing.

2 Make Engagement Easy

Marketing Week recently conducted a study to find if people understand the meaning and purpose of engagement in marketing. The results weren’t shocking; up to 25% of respondents didn’t even know the business definition of engagement. About 38.5% knew the definition but didn’t take the metric seriously.

It’s important to understand and appreciate engagement as a marketing metric. Focus on ways to make engagement easy. Options to consider including are making your Calls to Action (CTAs) easy to find, integrating social media into your website with social buttons and social login, providing a comment section for feedback, using email to remain in touch, and chatting with your community on social media, chat tools, and online public forums/blogs.

3 Use Designated Landing Pages

According to Marketing Sherpa, a whopping 44% of B2B clicks are directed to home pages, with an even bigger number for B2C. You’re missing out big time if you're in this category. For maximum conversions, you need specialized landing pages for your campaigns. Why? Because landing pages are designed for lead generation and your homepage isn’t. Landing pages are easier to navigate, have fewer distractions, and don’t require scrolling like home pages.

Take a business that specializes in portable toilets as an example. These toilets are rented temporarily by construction businesses and music festivals, but there are many companies in local areas providing site toilet services. If the buyer lands on a homepage they might not be willing to take the extra steps to find out key features and benefits that would land the lead. A landing page gives them a run down upfront along with an easy sales funnel.   

Bottom line: Ensure that each campaign has its own landing page.

4 Test, Monitor, and Test Again

Like everything else in life, no marketing campaign is perfect. It doesn’t matter if you’re converting 50% of your leads; with a few improvements, you could hit 60%. This makes testing very important. Testing allows you to determine what’s working and what isn’t. It can be useful in predicting future trends which help you stay ahead of the competition.

Test often, consider split testing every marketing campaign, use social media to test, and always focus on your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).  

Why Work at SEO for Your Website?

A recent study by Conductor shows that 64% of all web traffic comes from organic searches. An organic search is where a user naturally discovers a product or service provider on a search engine without undue commercial influence. SEO is the key to a flourishing organic search campaign.

SEO Actually Works

Finally, marketers should also take SEO very seriously because it works, and works very well. In a recent State of Marketing report, 66% of respondents said that SEO is “very effective” with only 7% stating that their SEO efforts were “not very effective or not effective at all.”

10 SEO Tips to Take Your Business to the Next Level

Below, we discuss actionable SEO tips for favorable SERP rankings, increased visibility, and maximum conversations.

1 Invest in Keyword Research

Keywords are a vital cog in any SEO strategy. According to a recent Quick Sprout article, they make up 15.04% of Google’s search algorithm, meaning that professional keyword research could be the difference between a first-page ranking and total oblivion.

To get the most from your keyword campaign, invest in professional keyword research. Navigating the complex world of keyword research requires expert approaches. Therefore, avoid the tendency to DIY the job when you lack technical skills. Work with SEO professionals instead, as they know how to prevent negative repercussions and keep your website’s ranking safe. If you run a legal business, for instance, hiring the best law firm SEO services will help you attract more clients through effective keyword research.

Keep in mind you also need to know your negative keywords. Rather than settle for “global” keywords, use keyword research software tools to discover the best performing keywords in your industry. These tools will even help you uncover the keywords your competitors are using. 

Tools:

2 SEO Tip: Provide Great Content

With keyword search done, the next step is to create great content. Great content is unique, provides value to the reader, and is free of grammatical and other mistakes. The content should also be provided in the right form, at the right time, and via the right channels.

Begin by finding great topic ideas. You can find plenty of ideas on platforms such as Tumblr and Quora. Think about questions you are asked by customers or potential customers.  Answer the questions! Be the resource and share testimonials, how-tos and more. Once you have topic ideas, find an exceptional writer or content marketing company to create the necessary articles. Then, publish on your website blog, other social websites (LinkedIn Publisher), and potentially Medium. For maximum reach, promote 600-1000 word blog post content via email and social networks. On average, to be really pursuing great SEO, you need 4 blog posts a month (or 1 per week).

3 Optimize Meta Titles and Descriptions

To make your content easier to find, not only for readers but also for search engines, optimize all meta titles and descriptions. A Meta title is the bold blue header in search result pages that users click to visit your site. A meta description is a short sentence (or two) that appears right below the link to your site in SERPs.

For purposes of SEO, all meta headers should be short (50 to 60 characters), punchy, and to the point. Your headers must also include your keyword(s). The meta description should be a 50 to 300-characters long (including spaces) summary of the content and must also include your keywords.

4 Optimize Post Headings and Sub-Headings

Headings and subheading are vital to your articles. The object of headings is to allow the reader to scan the article and read the section that catches their eye. In your article, your headings should look reflect the article outline.

Headings are wrapped in heading tags, H1, H2, H3 through H6. Google cares the most about H1 through H3. Heading 1 is used in your page or post title so no need to add it to the actual content. H2 and H3 should be used in a hierarchy fashion with H2’s above H3’s. For example in this eBook, the title, Top 10 SEO Tips for Your Website, uses H1 tags. H2 tags are used by the subheading, What Makes SEO a Decisive Digital Marketing Tool? And Limited Number of Businesses pursue SEO uses H3 tags.

Be sure to use all 3 headings in your article and include keywords in your headings as much as possible.

5 Optimize All Images and Videos

Plain content no longer works. To attract maximum attention, you need to sprinkle your words with relevant images and videos. Don't forget to optimize all your images and videos for maximum search visibility to boost your SERP ranking.

The simplest way to optimize images and videos is by modifying their names and ALT tags. Begin by providing a name for each image and video. Then, make sure that your keyword is present in the names. And lastly, in the Alternative Text (ALT Text) section, provide a short description of the image.

6 Take Link Building Seriously

You might not believe this, but links are a top three ranking factor for Google and other major search engines. A 2018 Quick Sprout study shows that your link building efforts have a 20.26% impact on where you end up in SERP rankings.

We recommend that you use internal linking to increase the visibility of your not-so-popular pages. Then, invest in outreach programs such as guest posting to earn quality links. Other ways to get worthy links include; fixing your broken links, and answering questions on social networks/forums, with backlinks to your website.  Link building doesn’t need to be a time-consuming method; there are link building services like these that can make it an easier process. Link building is big business and it should be one crucial strand to your bow when it comes to ranking on Google. By using link building services that provide quality links, this bolsters your content further. 

7 Work on Your Page Load Times

It’s baffling that some business owners still ignore page load times. Studies show that 40% of visitors abandon searches after just 3 seconds. An additional one-second delay, from 3 seconds to 4 seconds, takes the figure to 60%. It gets worse after they leave, 80% of visitors never return! Don't let page speed affect your business.

To improve your site speed, start by finding out your current page load speeds using a tool such as PingDom. Then, get rid of elements that might slow your speeds. Also, compress your images and, if need be, switch to a hosting provider with faster speeds.

8 Boost SEO with Social Media

Yes, you can use social media to boost your SEO. The Search Engine Journal has done an extensive article on this, explaining how actively posting and conversing on the likes of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram can actually help your SEO. In a nutshell, these activities can help with link building, audience building, and branded searches.

To use social media to boost your website ranking, Forbes recommends driving traffic to the site by placing a lot of inbound links in your social media posts and optimizing the posts for searches. Also, encourage social sharing by placing social network links on your website/blog.  Want more detail on this?  Take a look at ordering my book.

9 Work on Technical SEO Elements

Technical SEO covers a lot, but you need to focus on four elements: HTTPS migration, 301 Redirects, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and sitemap submission.

Google and other major search companies currently favor HTTPS over HTTP, making migration to HTTPS a must. Permanent 301 Redirects automatically send visitors to new pages, completely ignoring old pages. This prevents issues like duplicate content and poor user experience. CDNs accelerate content delivery thus boosting user experience. And, sitemap submission gives better site visibility to search engines for faster indexing. Faster indexing can positively impact SERP ranking.

10 Measure and Analyze

Finally, and most importantly, never forget to measure and analyze your SEO campaign. Measurement will help you determine whether you’re on track and what you could do to further improve your growth.

For SEO, the key metrics to measure include; link quality and quantity, traffic sources and quality, time spent on page, bounce rate, Click-Through Rate (CTR), top exit pages and Domain Authority (DA).  The best tools for SEO measurement and analytics include Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Page Speed Insights, and MOZ.

Now, Get Started!

If you can implement all the tips discussed here you should see a jump in your website's search engine rank.

Other Resources:

  • My complete guide to Digital Marketing in 2018 including Facebook and social media lead generation online...  Game Plan Book >>
  • Getting your Business Setup and Running Well on Instagram >  New Ebook Resource
  • New Book - Making the Miles Count - 21 Day Guide to living beyond the daily grind!

Help Spread the Word!

Please let your Twitter followers know about this podcast.
Simply click here now to post a tweet >>.

If you enjoyed this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast, please “go over to iTunes,  leave a rating, write a review and subscribe!

Thank you so much for your support!

Why the Halftime theme Mike? 

I’m an Indiana Hoosier native where basketball is the top sport. Every team heads to the locker room at halftime to evaluate the first half and create an updated plan for the second half. That plan includes adjustments based on reviewing what worked and what didn't. The “halftime” is a key review point where the game stops, the team pulls away to huddle in the locker room away from the fans, and they come out prepared and ready to succeed in the second half.

That’s what this podcast is all about, taking the time to pull away for a bit to evaluate, learn, and set some strategies for your business to succeed in the second half. Join me by subscribing and let me be your “business halftime” to help you find great success going forward!

Subscribe: Halftime Mike on iTunes | Android users via RSS | Listen on Stitcher

Catch all the episodes of Halftime Mike by signing up for inbox delivery below!

Need help planning your Social Media and Online Marketing?  Contact me!

Blog Categories

nordvpn

Recent Posts

flippa
Search Site
© 2012-2023 Mike Gingerich Global, LLC    Contact   -   Privacy
magnifier linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram