Digital marketing constantly changes and evolves. To ensure your business stays competitive, incorporate new digital marketing techniques with each new year.
We’ve put together our top 12 Digital Marketing Tips to help you grow your site traffic, convert more visitors to leads, and build a brand people know, like, and trust.
#1 – Build Citations
Your business and website receive a citation every time it’s referenced online. More citations mean more authority for your business in the eyes of search engines.
Citations can happen naturally, like when someone mentions your business in an article. But you can make a concerted effort to build citations by submitting them to citation directories.
Citation directories are websites that feature information about businesses like their names, addresses, phone numbers, hours of operation, and website URLs. These sites are very similar to link-building directories with one exception: citation directories don’t always provide links to your site.
You Need More Citations If:
- You want more site authority and traffic
- You want to appear in more “map-pack” search results
- You want to rank for more competitive local keywords
Citations Will Help You:
- Improve your rankings in local search results
- Gain more recognition from Google’s Local Search Algorithm
- Have a consistent business profile across the web
#2 – Use Advanced Link-Building Techniques
Backlinks remain one of the top ranking factors for search engines. In addition to using link-building directories, businesses can use the following methods to get more quality links to their site:
- Searching for brand mentions – If your business has been around for a while, odds are there are mentions of your business that don’t link back to your website. Spotting these unlinked mentions and reaching out to site owners is an easy way to acquire backlinks.
- Guest posts – Guests posts are blog posts that you publish on websites other than those in your niche or related niches. You offer to write a post about a subject in exchange for a link (or links) back to your website.
- Outreach – Outreach for backlinks can help you receive very high-quality links. First, you find out who links to content similar to yours and then you “pitch” content from your website to these site owners in an attempt to get a backlink. Outreach is more time intensive and has no guarantee per pitch, but it will help you acquire more backlinks on average.
You Need Advanced Link-Building If:
- You want to rank for very competitive keywords
- You own a regional service area business
- You own a national or global services area business
Advanced Link-Building Will Help You:
- Rank for very competitive keyphrases
- Increase site traffic significantly by ranking for competitive keyphrases
- Gain enough site authority to compete regionally and nationally
#3 – Expand Your Content
The standards for content quality and length have changed in 2019. Whereas 300 words used to be the minimum viable word-count to rank a page on Google, that number is much higher now (500 or more for local business pages).
For competitive keywords (mainly companies with a national audience), 1,000-2,000 words of content are necessary.
For companies with a national target audience, we suggest a content marketing campaign with 2-4 posts per month of this length to significantly improve organic search traffic.
For local businesses, we suggest expanding the page content to at least 500 words per page.
You Need Content Expansion If:
- Your site content hasn’t been updated in the past 18 months
- Your website has thin pages with fewer than 500 words of content
- You want to rank for more competitive keyphrases
Content Expansion Will Help You:
- Increase your site traffic by adding more target keyphrase-rich content
- Rank for a higher number of keywords overall
- Meet industry standard content guidelines to outpace your competition
#4 – Improve Site Loading Speed
Slow-loading websites will hurt your search engine rankings because Google uses website performance as a ranking factor.
Your site should take no longer than three seconds to load. You can use Google’s page speed insights tool to gauge site performance as well as tools like Pingdom for load speed data and recommendations.
You Need A Site Speed Performance Boost If:
- Your site takes three seconds or longer to load
- Your site receives low scores on site speed tools
- Your site was built more than five years ago with out-of-date technology
A Site Speed Performance Boost Will Help You:
- Make your site visitors happy and more likely to become a lead or sale
- Increase your rankings with a Google-friendly website
- Have a website built to last and perform among Google’s changes
#5 – Secure Your Website
All websites must have an SSL certificate in 2019. Further explanation here: https://www.mltgroup.com/blog/website-security/
The main points are:
- Google uses site security as part of the algorithm
- Users may receive an “unsafe” warning message
- E-commerce retailers face liabilities without SSL certificates
You Need to Secure Your Website If:
- You don’t have an SSL security certificate
- You want to meet Google’s security standards
- You sell products online
An SSL Certificate Will Help You:
- Avoid warning messages to visitors
- Meet Google’s standards to improve rankings and traffic
- Create a comfortable environment for website visitors
#6 – Improve Technical SEO
Technical SEO is the process of fixing common site issues that affect SEO performance. Here are a few common technical SEO issues to look for:
- Redirects – Each time a page is deleted or a URL is changed, the URL has to be redirected elsewhere via a protocol called a “301 redirect.” If this isn’t done, your site will return a 404 error page, which harms overall performance.
- Redirect chains – After you 301 redirect a page elsewhere, you should replace all internal links pointing to the old page and add the link to the new page. If you don’t do this, then a redirect chain is created, which means you are creating an unnecessary buffer between links. This dilutes the authority your links pass to other pages.
- Broken links – Often, when linking to external sources, broken links can occur because the source that you linked either deleted or changed the URL of your page. Scan your site quarterly to find and replace broken links.
You Need Technical SEO Optimization If:
- You’ve had an active website for a year or more
- You write content that cites other sources online
- You’ve added, deleted, or changed pages on your site
Technical SEO Will Help You:
- Have a more SEO friendly site structure, which improves traffic and rankings
- Avoid a negative user experience for your site visitors
- Have a faster more user-friendly site (redirect chains can slow sites down)
#7 – Revise SEO Content With LSI Keywords
LSI (latent semantic indexing) keywords are keywords that relate to the target keyword for a page. Often, a page will begin to rank for these LSI keywords without them being in the content.
Adding LSI keywords that you already rank for can increase organic search traffic.
You can also search for additional LSI keywords that your pages don’t rank for and add them to your content.
You Need to Add LSI Keywords To Your Content If:
- You’ve been creating content for more than a year
- You rank on page two for keywords that you want to rank on page one for
- You want to rank for many keywords with a single page
Adding LSI Keywords Will Help You:
- Increase your keyword footprint for more traffic
- Rank single pages for multiple keywords, creating a compounding effect
- Provide users better information by adding related phrases, which aids buying decision
#8 – Focus On Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is the process of making your website more engaging to visitors so that they “convert” by taking the desired next step.
Examples include:
- Signing up to your e-mail list
- Filling out an inquiry or “request a quote” form
- Calling your business
You can make your site more conversion-friendly by:
- Strategically placing more opt-in forms across your website
- Writing stronger calls to action in various spots of your website
- Emphasizing information you want users to act on (for example, changing a hyperlink to a bright colored button)
- Adding pop-ups to your website
- Creating free resources like whitepapers in exchange for an e-mail list
You Need Conversion Rate Optimization If:
- You want more leads and sales
- You want more e-mail list signups
- You want phone calls to your business
Conversion Rate Optimization Can Help You:
- Get higher ROI for your marketing efforts
- Build long-term relationships with customers to increase CLV
- Spread awareness of your brand by retaining customers on your e-mail list
# 9 – Update Your SEO Data
There are important areas of your website code and metadata sections that should be updated occasionally as your campaign progresses.
- Title tags – Title tags contain the target keyword as well as other content meant to get visitors to click. Analyzing and re-writing tags for targeting and persuasiveness can improve organic search traffic.
- Meta descriptions – Click through rate (CTR) is the number of times people click on your page divided by the number of times people see the page. Search engines measure click-through rate as a ranking factor. Re-writing your meta descriptions to be more compelling can increase CTR and thus traffic and rankings.
- Image alt tags – These are tags used in photos. These tags help search engine crawlers understand what the photos are about since they can’t see them.
You Need To Update Your SEO Data If:
- You have pages with high impressions but low click-through rates
- You haven’t updated your SEO data within the year
- You want to increase rankings and traffic for low performing pages
Updating Your SEO Data Will Help You:
- Increase your click-through rate and site traffic
- Improve traffic by fixing the targeting on low performing pages
- Continue to be Google friendly and maintain rankings by updating data on your site
#10 – Make Your Website Responsive
If your website isn’t built to display well on mobile phones, you are going to suffer on search engines.
Since Google now bases its rankings on the mobile version of your site (or lack thereof), having a mobile-optimized site isn’t a choice anymore.
Your site needs to be mobile-optimized yesterday. Even better, you should build your site to be responsive. This means the design of your site will adjust to look great on any sized screen.
You Need to Make Your Website Responsive If:
- You don’t have a mobile website
- You have a mobile-only version of your website instead of a responsive website
A Responsive Website Will Help You:
- Make sure every visitor to your site has a positive experience
- Rank on Google’s mobile-first index and increase overall search traffic
#11 – Get More Reviews
Collecting as many reviews and testimonials as possible from customers and clients has multiple benefits:
- Google uses reviews as a ranking signal
- Reviews provide “social proof” that shows potential customers why they should trust you
- According to research from Bright Local, 91 percent of people surveyed said they read reviews (at least occasionally) and 84 percent said they trust reviews as much as their own friends
You Need More Reviews If:
- You haven’t been actively collecting them
- You have fewer than 10 reviews for your business
- You’re a new business
More Reviews Will Help You:
- Increase site traffic by adapting to Google’s local search algorithm
- Increase sales as reviews on search engine results page provide “social proof”
- Add an element to your marketing by placing reviews on your website
#12 – Redesign Your Website
As a rule of thumb, you should redesign your website every 3-5 years for the following reasons:
- Style – Design style and tastes change over time and you don’t want your site to look outdated
- Google – A re-build can help you meet all of Google’s new standards in one fell swoop
- Conversion – Many outdated sites don’t have a conversion focus, which is crucial for digital marketing in 2019
You Need A Redesign If:
- Your website is more than 5 years old
- Your website isn’t responsive
- Your website doesn’t have a conversion focus, which means you’re losing out on leads
A Website Redesign Will Help You:
- Meet all of Google’s standards, which will increase rankings
- Have an up-to-date site, which will increase visitor trust and lead to more sales
- Convert more casual browsers into leads with a conversion-focused design
Conclusion
These digital marketing tips are a handful of many you can use to grow your business with content marketing and SEO.
The most important step to take next? The first one.
Will this be the year you decide to fully to commit to digital marketing?
If so, let’s talk. Fill out the form below and we will send you a detailed website audit and proposal in 48 hours or less.