There are only two broad ways to get results with digital marketing for your business: organic traffic (as a result of content marketing, social media management, growing your email list from your regular daily visitors, etc.) and paid traffic on platforms like Google or Facebook among others.
Whether you choose to work with organic or paid methods to attract web visitors, all that traffic should be sent to landing pages and sales funnels to make the most out of your efforts and budget. Landing pages and sales funnels ring it all together by collecting leads, nurturing them, and making sales happen while building a pipeline of highly-interested, potential customers.
But not every business has the funds and tools needed for a full-blown paid advertising campaign that brings results. At least, they don’t initially when most businesses bootstrap and struggle to stay afloat.
Your best bet (whether or not you do paid advertising) is to ensure that you always invest in ongoing organic digital marketing efforts such as blogging, social management, content marketing, content curation, search engine optimization (SEO), and growing your email list naturally.
Think of doing organic digital marketing as your base, a foundation to maintain and continue. This is your long-term game.
In our experience, about 80% to 90% of organic traffic will come in thanks to your search engine optimization efforts. While the SEO landscape is always changing and becoming more and more competitive, you don’t have to stress yourself over it.
As such, you don’t need to overdo your SEO. Do everything else pertaining to organic digital marketing such as social media management and continue to grow your email list by tapping into the traffic you are already receiving.
Here’s how you put in continuous effort to up your SEO game in 2019:
Optimize your website for SEO friendliness & user experience
Too many marketers and businesses focus on SEO hacks and growth hacking tricks while completely ignoring the basics. A good digital marketing strategy starts with how your website is built and optimized for search.
At the outset, host your websites on servers that are optimized for speed, security, and long-term reliability.
When visitors arrive on your website, it should be immediately clear as to what your business is. Then, as they “dwell” on your site, consume content, scroll through each page, and visit multiple pages, it’s the user experience that really matters today.
Google made it clear that user experience is paramount to the search engine giant. So much that it also introduced RankBrain — a machine learning system that continuously monitors your web pages for user experience, the average dwell time (time spent on your site), and the “stickiness” factor of your content.
RankBrain monitors how users interact with search results and links leading to your site and then how well your website delivers the information that your potential visitors are looking for.
RankBrain is of the top factors for Search engine optimization today (more so in 2019 and beyond) and all of it centers around the user experience on your site.
Ensure faster web page loading speed
How important is “speed” when it comes to websites and online stores? According to BigCommerce, if an online store makes $50,000 a day, a 1-second delay in page load time causes about $1 million in losses per year. Each second delay causes 7% loss in conversion.
The faster your web pages load, the more money you will make. Period.
According to Billy Hoffman who wrote for Moz, your website backend performance has a direct correlation with your search rankings than your website’s frontend performance. While frontend performance matters for user experience, the backend performance affects your search rankings.
In a nutshell, you’ll need faster websites and user-focused design to make it all ring together.
Use the following free tools to see how your website performs:
- Conduct quick web page speed tests with Pingdom
- Test your website’s mobile-readiness with TestMysite from ThinkWithGoogle
- Get your page speed load time and recommendations from GTMetrix
- Use Google’s Page speed Insights & the entire suite of tools Google provides for page speed optimization
- Rigor’s Free performance report
Then, take the necessary steps to increase your page load speeds.
Note: Shared hosting sucks and penny-pinching here would mean that your site is vulnerable to hacking, susceptible to malware and vulnerable scripts, and your web pages will load slowly
Start before you really need to start
Everything you need to do with organic digital marketing such as search engine optimization will take a significant amount of time. As such, it’s critical that you have time on your side before depending on SEO to produce results for your business.
According to Jeff Baker of Moz, it’ll take you about 90-100 days or more for your new content to start ranking and to realize its full potential. It’ll take anywhere from 3-5 months for your new content to perform and fully-mature.
So, despite doing what you do with regards to content marketing, you’d also have to give it all the time in the world. What this means for many businesses is that they’d have to start working on SEO at least 6-9 months prior to the period of time that you actually expect results.
Since most businesses barely have the time and patience to wait, we always recommend starting to put in all the efforts even before you officially launch.
This is an incredibly effective strategy that allows you to not only take advantage of the traffic resulting from your organic efforts but also allow you to build an audience even before you launch your business.
Produce and distribute content systematically
The biggest open secret when it comes to SEO is to produce and distribute content across channels consistently, regularly, and with a predictable frequency over long periods of time. You should:
- Create blog posts published with a regular frequency (usually weekly)
- Update your social feeds with your published content, other relevant content from non-competing sources, and to maintain those conversations on social networks.
- Produce other pieces of content such as curated lists, infographics, podcasts, and videos along with your main blog posts and social updates. Then, distribute these content pieces along with your main content.
- Repurpose your existing content into other formats. For instance, you can repurpose a long list-type blog post as a slide deck. You can then share your slides on LinkedIn SlideShare.
- Use content curation to not only create content quickly but also provide huge benefits to your readers or visitors. Content curation also helps you with link building and rapid growth.
Each of the points above will demand continuous production of content and consistent distribution. Use marketing tools (software and apps) or people or a combination of both to achieve results.
Keep updating your old content
This might seem obvious, but it isn’t. Updating your previously published blog posts is like your content marketing Swiss army knife with multiple benefits.
First, updating your old content helps keep your content updated, informative, and most relevant.
Second, as you update your blog posts, you’d end up adding more juice to your existing content and inch towards creating long-form content which is great for optimizing for search results.
Third, you’ll help add more statistics, contributor quotes, research, social proof, outbound links, and inbound links as you go big on quality by updating your top performing blog posts.
Use videos as a part of your content
User behavior when it comes to consuming content is changing fast. More than 43% of your online visitors demand video content. Video plays a huge role when it comes to user engagement, how long people will spend on your site, and how they consume content.
Further, video ranks well while making it easier for your visitors to consume content. Cisco predicts that by 2022, more than 82% of all traffic will be video-driven.
Create dedicated videos for your YouTube Channel. Create videos to explain concepts or to share your screen while you write your blog posts. Use a bunch of related videos and use them to create a free course which works as an awesome lead magnet to help you grow your email list.
Integrating videos with the rest of your content marketing strategy is the single best thing you’d do for your business in 2019.
If you’d like us to help you with your digital marketing strategy, sales funnels, landing pages, and paid advertising campaigns or if you’d like to know how to best position your marketing strategy for results, fill out this form and we’ll get in touch with you right away.