If you haven’t done so already, January is a great time of year to prepare an online marketing plan for your website. Here are our top tips for a successful site in 2016.
Objective setting
It’s important to identify and set some goals for performance. While it is easy to measure and chase ever increasing visitor numbers that is very seldom the right approach. In our experience most businesses are looking for an increase in sales or enquiries from their site so having an accurate measure of your desirable outcomes – and a series of objectives – is the first step in this process. This can then be developed to identify improvements that can be made to the site.
As organic rankings are a priority for most businesses, the tracking of keyword visibility should be an important metric. In addition to your own visibility we would also recommend tracking your online competitors to give you a more objective assessment of any changes to ranking positions.
Research
Knowing about your target audience is the key to attracting and converting those people or businesses. It’s not just about attracting lots of visitors to your site but more about attracting the visitors that will be interested in what you have on offer and are therefore far more likely to convert.
The idea of attracting your ideal visitor by making it easy for them to find you, when they need you, will rely on SEO, content marketing and social media. This means that you need to know about their interests so that you can produce the type of content that they are most likely to want to consume. Amongst other things you also need to identify are the best tone of voice to use when talking to your audience and what social media networks those users prefer.
Once they reach your site you need to understand their behaviour and whether or not they are behaving as you had planned (they almost certainly won’t be). This will then allow you to identify any omissions in your presentation or enhancements that need to be made to it to get the desired action from the site visitor.
Responsive sites
In April 2015, Google announced that when delivering search results to mobile devices it would prioritise ‘responsive’ websites; those that have been designed to alter appearance according to the mobile or desktop device. In May 2015, Google announced that according to their internal data the number of searches carried out on mobile devices exceeded those carried out on desktop or laptops in 10 countries around the world. So there is a high likelihood that the first time a user sees your site it could be viewed on a mobile device.
At Purpose Media we have been able to measure a fall in search numbers for non-responsive sites in the latter half of 2015 and we believe that this trend is likely to continue into 2016. Everything points to a need to have a responsive site – so if you don’t have one, give this serious consideration in 2016.
Site speed
Another factor that is particularly pertinent to mobile devices is website loading speed. With evidence, going back as far as 2012, that a page load speed greater than eight seconds is likely to cause up to a third of visitors to abandon the site.
While the time taken for the page load is of interest, the time taken for the webpage to be usable is probably more important. It is the perceived speed that matters to the user rather than the absolute measure of the page load time.
Take action to make sure that your site is as fast as it can be and that the server configuration and the website content are optimised for short load times.
A number of websites are providing free to use tools to allow you to assess your website page loading speed. This will give you an objective measure of your site compared to your competitors and some sites will even provide guidance on the type of improvements you could make.
Back links
Getting content about your company, product or service published on other websites with a high ‘domain authority’ is an effective way to boost your organic SEO. Google values authoritative sources of information and this is one way that you can demonstrate your expertise on a particular subject or topic.
If this published content is accompanied by a link back to a relevant page on your website, using a keyword that is important to your page content, then the maximum benefit will result for your site.
Recent changes to the Google ranking methodology (Google Penguin) have made the quality of links far more important than numbers of links so this has increased the importance of sourcing quality links.
The most effective way of building these types of links is to use blog content to attract links by providing useful information. This can be backed up by issuing press releases and articles to on and offline publications such as local newspapers and trade magazines. Taking this approach will give you the best chance of creating a high quality set of backlinks to your site.
Assessment of link quality
We mentioned above that it is important to gain links from high domain authority websites. So it follows that it is important to keep a close eye on the number and quality of the links that are linking to your site.
Poor quality links should be avoided and links from sites that contain spammy content can be detrimental to your own site. In these cases, where it is not possible to request link removal, Google provides a facility for you to disavow those links and thereby remove them from their calculation of link juice (the benefit derived from the link) to your site.
Your link profile is also worth investigating to ensure that the collection of links that are targeting your site have a natural profile. That is to say there should be no indication that these links have been bought or that the attributes have been manipulated in any way. Any evidence of this type of activity will have an on-going negative effect on your site.
Our recommendation here is to take an interest in your website links and ensure that you have a plan for growing the number of clean and natural links.
Content
A hackneyed saying, but it’s true! Content is king!
While the notion of keywords and researching keywords is still important in online advertising and measuring organic SEO performance, it is no longer enough to simply embed them in the page content and meta information. Search engines are constantly evolving and now rely on machine learning algorithms to understand the content rather than perform direct keyword matching.
So the site-wide content needs to be target audience focused and engaging. This is best addressed by answering the frequently asked questions that relate to the product or service that is being described. By doing this you will be best placed to attract traffic from the increasingly significant number of users who are using their mobile phones to answer questions that occur to them during their normal daily routine.
You should also consider the way that user behaviour is viewed by search engines. It is easy for them to measure how the user behaves when they are referred to a website that appears in the search results. If too many visitors simply return to the search results after a short period of time on the site, then the search engine may interpret this as a site that is not meeting user expectations. This may then result in a fall in the site’s rankings. What will prevent this scenario is engaging content.
A website that has a well-written news/blog section that is regularly updated (at least one or two new articles per week) about content relevant to your audience, product and services will always win over a website that is never updated.
The ideal is a balance of technical information, FAQs that provide advice and other news such as new staff, company news, charity work, product news. This combination will improve your credibility and establish or boost your authority making the site perform better in the search results.
Prioritising conversion
Making sure that the maximum number of site visits result in the desired outcome, whether that is a purchase or an enquiry, has to be a top priority. We would recommend an audit of your site landing pages to ensure that these create the maximum possibility of a conversion or at least encourage users to stay on the site and view other content. This audit needs to take place on an on-going basis to ensure that the site still addresses the changing needs of the target audience.
While there’s no magic bullet when it comes to the success of your website, top-performing sites do have something in common: a growing focus on experience optimisation. That is gathering data about shoppers or browsers and then using that information to serve up better, higher converting experiences on the web and mobile.
To this end we typically employ our suite of user behaviour and A/B testing software to test and optimise the important conversion related pages. Following the evidence is the best way to get an objective assessment of these pages and ensure that you are making the right choices rather than applying personal preferences.
Our recommendation would be to come up with ideas and make an implementation plan that includes the tests that will show if the expected results have been delivered.
Social media
Being active on social media can be time consuming and unrewarding, particularly if done on a manual basis every time. The trick is to plan ahead and use technology to schedule posts. In a business that does not have many resources available our advice is to ensure your online profile on the relevant social platforms looks professional and that you can automate your social media posts from selected blog articles on your site to keep them up to date with minimum effort.
If resources are available to service this channel then the best practice way to do this is to use a system like Hootsuite to manually schedule pre-planned posts to the selected networks. This system can also be used for social listening to ensure that you are abreast of the current online conversation. The key is to reach influencers and gain their assistance in spreading your message and brand.
If your company is more business to consumer orientated, and therefore in a more competitive marketplace, a more robust social media plan may be required which also includes tracking tools and some paid for advertising on social networks which allows you to target your audience precisely.
Search advertising
A well thought through Adwords or Bing Ads campaign is one of the best ways to establish the value in any keywords. It is well suited to achieving a high SERP position while the organic ranking takes time to build up. The advertising is very tactical and can be suspended or modified easily to suit your business requirements.
It should be possible to achieve a return on investment on any campaign and also significantly raise brand awareness. While we know that many companies have tried this and failed, this is usually down to a few simple mistakes that they have made in the setup of their campaign.
We advocate the use of search advertising even when a site has good organic rankings. In this case it allows you to target additional, complementary keywords that may be difficult to reach in the organic results.
Summary
There is no one size fits all strategy when it comes to developing a successful online marketing campaign and online business. The above are the main areas where we would focus our efforts when trying to create a successful website.
It is important to remember that this strategy should also be linked to any offline marketing you do to maximise impact. Once you generate a steady stream of orders or enquiries you need to be constantly reviewing and improving your approach in order to maintain the results you worked hard to achieve. This is a never-ending process.
At Purpose Media we don’t believe that this process has to be a dark art and we have proven that using a strategic approach and working in partnership with our clients leads to a significant return on investment. The solution is simple – do the basics well and the results will come with time.
If you’d like to dig deeper or you’re interested in how Purpose Media could help you in 2016, get in touch today!
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