Top Digital Marketing and SEO Tips for Your Website

Many newcomers to both SEO and digital marketing often confuse the two as synonyms. In reality, SEO is one of the various tools used in and by digital marketing and digital marketers to accomplish their goals. While SEO aims to increase a page’s quality and relevance in the eyes of Google and other search engines through content and links. Digital marketing also incorporates paid advertising, social media marketing and other on and off-page tactics and methodologies to drive sales. Because of this, there can also be significant cost differences between the two. Whatever their differences, the more comprehensive your digital marketing tactics and strategies, which must include SEO, the higher your likelihood of marketing success. Below are some of the top digital marketing and SEO tips for your website.

SEO Tips

Let’s start with three crucial SEO tips that you need to follow if you want to enjoy organic traffic.

Do Keyword Research

If you know the basics of SEO, you know that the goal of your website’s content is to rank for niche-specific and localized keywords, e.g., “SEO Brisbane” – in your niche so that when people perform organic searches of those keywords on Google your pages appear at the top of the SERPs where people are more likely to click.

One of the biggest mistakes new websites make while trying to rank for keywords and establish themselves is they go after keywords that are going to be very difficult to rank for. While it is not useless to go after the highest-value, most competitive keywords, you stand a much better chance of actually ranking, let’s say, in the top five SERP positions, if you are targeting keywords that aren’t already firmly under the control of much older and likely much larger and better-funded competition.

Do Competitor Link Analysis

As with any industry, one of the first things any new entrant does when determining strategy, pricing, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities is competitor analysis. This not only lets you know what you are up against, but shows you what kind of tactics, and in this case SEO, established players in the industry are using to rank and score conversions. Competitor analysis is especially important when it comes to determining what kind of backlink profiles you will likely need if you want to move up in the SERPs.

Your backlinks from other authoritative, reputable sites are what will make or break your ability to rank for certain keywords. Links, in Google’s eyes, are signs that your website and content are worth visiting and attempting to duplicate your top competitors’ link profiles is a good way to ensure you have a fighting chance of ranking.

SEO Tips – Responsive Design

Responsive design refers to web design that allows a site to be displayed in a way that is intuitive and easy to use across a variety of devices. It is somewhat of a mantra in the digital marketing world, but there are still many websites that don’t understand its importance or continue to make many common mistakes. The reason responsiveness makes such a difference in modern SEO is that the majority of web traffic is now mobile. People are accessing the internet more and more from their phones, so having a website that only displays well on desktop and tablets is a surefire way to lose traffic.

This is because most netizens have extremely thin patience when it comes to user experience. If someone trying to access your site on mobile finds it too difficult to navigate–because of text, image, or layout issues–they will simply leave. The rate at which people leave your site is your bounce rate and Google penalizes sites with high bounce on the SERPs, under the assumption that people are leaving for good reason.

Digital Marketing

Now that we’ve covered some of the SEO must-haves, let’s take a look at digital marketing more broadly.

Clear and Frequent Calls to Action

One of the foundational principles of marketing, digital or otherwise, is that if you want people to buy something from you, you have to induce or urge them to make the purchase. The way you do that is with “calls to action.” Calls to action, or CTAs, are inducements to do something–purchase, find out more, enjoy something for free, sign up, call–that take the form of clickable buttons that are placed throughout your site.

Each time you have offered or explained some or all of your value proposition on your site, you have an opportunity to ask the customer to buy or continue their purchasing journey. CTAs contain hyperlinks that will take a customer or visitor to a checkout page, a service page, a FAQ page etc. with the aim being to get them one step closer to converting.

Stay in Touch With Your Customers

Once you have secured a new customer, the goal is customer retention. If you want people to keep coming back to you for future purchases, whether you are selling a product or a service, you need to stay present in their mind. One way to do this is to create an opt-in emailing list. Sites normally prompt people to sign up for an email list at some point during their time on-site and, presumably, after already having seen enough content to make a decision as to whether they want to sign up. They are also commonly used as a person is in the process of navigating away.

An emailing list is a useful way to let people who have purchased from you in the past, or who may not have purchased but were nonetheless interested in staying in touch or finding out more, what is happening at your business. You can use your emailing list to advertise new blog content, to let people know when you have new products or services, or to provide discounts and special offers.

Crosspost, Crosspost, Crosspost

Cross-posting refers to using different communication channels to advertise new content, offers, customer reviews, etc. When you cross-post, you amplify the impact of new content and put it in front of more viewers than you would if you just stuck to any one channel. For example, if you have a new piece of evergreen long-form blog content that you want people to read, let them know about it on your Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook profiles. If you are in the leading industry publication or blog, do the same. That cross-post from Linkedin to Facebook might pique the interest of a subscriber who then posts it to their social media channel. There it is available for a third party and so on.

Digital Marketing & SEO Tips – Conclusion

SEO is a foundational part of your digital marketing and digital marketing is all of the ways you use the internet to increase brand awareness and advertise and sell your products and services. Traditional marketing channels like print, television and radio are still around. They increasingly give way to digital ones – the largest and most profitable. Television is the medium that has hung on the longest, with radio and print much more devastated by the digital revolution.

The best thing about digital marketing is that you don’t need a massive budget like you do, for instance, with television, in order to see great ROI. Keep the above SEO and digital marketing tips in mind and build a website that people find and navigate with ease and, consequently, don’t mind giving their hard-earned money to.