Now that spring has finally arrived, it’s finally time to knuckle down to undertake those tasks we’ve been avoiding throughout the gruelling winter months. For businesses, the same can be said for their online marketing. By scrubbing away at bad habits and polishing under-performing campaigns until they shine, marketers could really begin to identify an increase in the fundamentals- traffic, conversions, search engine rankings and ultimately, their return on investment (ROI).

With this in mind, check out our online marketing spring checklist that’ll get your strategies spic and span:

Target low hanging fruit keywords

When determining target keywords, it’s easy to assume focusing your SEO efforts on highly searched keywords you are currently unranked for or are positioned far down in a SERP, will generate the best key performance indicator (KPI) improvements, such as: rankings, CTR and organic traffic. Although this is an effective long-term strategy, the benefits won’t be immediate, especially if they have high search volume and are extremely competitive.

Targeting low-hanging fruit keywords- keywords that are already positioned in the ’sweet spot’ (position 5-15) in a SERP, is one of the quickest and most cost-effective ways to demonstrate results for your KPIs. However, recognising the importance of low-hanging fruit keywords isn’t enough, you need to determine which keywords are missing out on these ’sweet spots’ and offer the most potential.

Offline to online effectiveness

The fluctuation of industry trends is causing consumer demand to shift; meaning businesses need to cater for both online and offline shopping. Whether we’re browsing in shops or searching on mobile devices, we expect to receive consistent information to complete online and offline purchases.

Eighty-one per cent of consumers research products online before purchasing in store, so connecting the online and offline customer journey has never been more important. But how can you measure the success of your offline marketing methods?

Static numbers

A study by iProspect identified 44% of consumers were encouraged by television ads to research a company or visit their website, while 35% were influenced by magazines/newspaper advertisements and 23% from radio content. If you’re including telephone numbers on these methods, how can you determine which offline marketing method the call derived from?

Static numbers are unique tracked numbers specifically for offline marketing. A single number is assigned to each campaign you want to track- if you had a TV commercial from a shoe retailer that reads ’for more information visit www.shoes.com/info’, a static number would determine how many calls your website is generating in conjunction with the TV ad. Call tracking provides static numbers to track offline marketing, allowing you to determine which methods are generating enquiries and re-arrange your marketing spend based on these results.

Update your website

Typically, websites will feature several actions which visitors can take to interact with the business, such as form submissions, phone calls, downloads (PDFs) and purchases; these are all individually counted as conversions- completed actions you have defined as valuable to your business. If you have multiple conversion paths available, tracking the success of your online business overall conversion rate is essential.

‘Goal tracking’ measures and analyses the amount of completed activities (conversions) that are contributing to your goals and therefore the success of your business. Defining goals is a fundamental component of any digital analytics measurement plan. You can set up goals in Google Analytics by going to Conversions, Goals, Overview.

Optimise keyword landing pages

Whether it’s obtaining information or making a purchase, consumers will use the most relevant, user-friendly website that allows them to complete their desired action. If you are targeting keywords with the intention of moving into the top listings in a SERP, then ensuring the individual landing pages are optimised for these specific keywords is vital. Failing to optimise these pages could result in a high bounce rate (users visiting a website and leaving without looking at another page) and potentially a Google penalty.

Let’s say a retailer’s homepage was in first position for the keyword ’clothes’ and a user decided to click on the first result, but unfortunately, their homepage has an incredibly slow loading speed in comparison to the other webpages. This could dramatically affect the conversions and, ultimately, their ROI from investing in this keyword especially considering 47% of visitors expect a website to load in less than two seconds, while 40% will leave if loading takes more than three seconds.

 

By Natalia Selby, marketing coordinator at Mediahawk

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