Your marketing plan should have a section relating to online marketing – if it hasn’t yet, start with a list of key online marketing channels as a starting point.
Main areas should include:
- Your website
- Email marketing
- Online advertising (Google Adwords, advertising on others’ websites)
- Social media (including blogs, YouTube and other popular social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Pinterest)
- Online PR
And last but definitely not least, search engine optimisation (SEO).
Your website is top of my list for a good reason; all of the other marketing activity you do online leads visitors and search engines back to your website. Making sure that your website is both visitor and search engine friendly should be a marketing priority.
But you already know this! So what would I recommend today as the top five SEO tips for your website?
1. Define your best keywords. Whilst SEO constantly evolves, some of the basics remain the same and this is one of them. You should know which words your customers/potential customers are likely to use to find your products or services. Start with these then use the Google keyword tool to see what the volume of search is and view suggested synonyms. Well worth doing and will help to formulate your content plan.
2. Content, content and more content. Not just creating website pages once but updating copy regularly, blogging, providing added value information and content on your website. Give other websites a reason to link to you.
3. If you’re a location-based business, make sure you’ve got a listing on Google Places (now also appearing in Google+ but at the moment you have to continue to manage a Google Places account separately.) www.google.co.uk/places/. Doing this means you can appear at the top of search results for local search terms:
4. Social media. Even if you’re B2B social media has a place, think about your target audience and where they might engage with your business. LinkedIn is a must for most of us, but Facebook brand pages, YouTube and Pinterest can work really well. Google is beginning to look at social media activity and remember those valuable links back to your website.
5. Measure and test. Use Google Analytics to see which keywords bring traffic to your site, where your traffic comes from (referrals and sources) and seriously consider Google content experiments, used to be Google website optimiser (now in Google Analytics.) This means testing different pages and seeing what the results are.
If I had to pick one of these as the absolute essential for today, it would be content, that’s the one to give some serious thought to you in your marketing plan.
Karen McNulty
