Many of our clients have marketing teams that handle ads, content, and overall strategy. But even with a well-structured marketing team, it’s easy to spin your wheels on elements of your website that don’t have a clear formula for success.
In this grey area, we’ve found some patterns in what our clients need help with. From careful research and testing with hundreds of websites, we’ve compiled some best practices in how to handle common marketing struggles.
1. You know SEO is essential, but you’re unsure where to spend your time.
Everyone seems to understand the importance of organic optimization. But as your competitors start to invest in SEO, you quickly realize that you can’t do everything without a large specialized team.
So how do you identify the quick wins or your “best bang for your buck” initiatives? One way we help our clients discover these quick wins is by completing an SEO audit in an effort to point them in the right direction.
Our SEO audits are generally not a one-size-fits-all template. Instead, we take some time to understand your business goals and review your Google Analytics profile. From there, we identify pain points and discover opportunities that are worth taking a deeper dive by leveraging other tools.
These deep dives provide actionable steps to get you ranking for the best keywords. For example, we might:
- Find page two keywords and provide an internal linking strategy to help achieve page one results.
- Evaluate site speed performance and identify the top development changes to give you a boost.
- Provide keyword clusters that help you build a focused content strategy.
- Generate lists of “unlinked mentions” so you can reach out for backlinks over time.
- Create guides including best practices for your continual reference.
2. You’re unsure if your site structure is optimal.
Does your site have all the necessary information for a potential buyer? Are the right pages prioritized in your navigation? Are the pages named correctly? Are the URL’s optimized? Does the hierarchy make sense?
There are many factors to consider with creating an improved information architecture. At Atlantic BT, we tend to use a mix of our own well-tested techniques and apply SEO best practices. It’s also important that we follow a certain order in this process, as many steps have dependencies.
1. Initial workshop(s): First, we work with your team to help you choose the best categories and page names that will make sense to your customers. This is usually a workshop where we gather business information and ideas. In some instances, we’ve built these strategies in a quick 30 minute meeting. In others, we test naming conventions with card sorts and interviews.
2. Visual recommendation: Then, we take this stage into consideration and recommend a hierarchy and sitemap. This step may also include categories and filtering options for certain areas of your site. For ultimate clarity with a messy concept, we create both a visual map and a spreadsheet.
3. SEO optimization: Finally, an SEO specialist will review the recommendations to create optimal URLs and select the best target keywords for each page. At this stage, we may also map the appropriate 301 redirects.
4. Implement and measure: When these steps are complete, it’s easy to work with developers to implement. We can measure the success of the new site structure by observing conversion rates, heat maps, and other website metrics.
3. You’re unsure if you’re getting the most out of your blog.
A blog strategy goes beyond topically relevant content. When asked what is the purpose of your blog, are you able to answer?
The best blogs have multiple purposes. For example:
- Attract people who could potentially be interested in your product or service. Provide educational resources, describe problems they may face, or share news to keep them in the loop of latest trends. You’ll need to build paid or SEO strategies around bringing in new prospects with this content.
- Inform people on why your solution is the best option for their problem. This is where you talk about your process, unique differentiators, and company culture. You can provide value to new users or cater this content to people who are already familiar with your brand. It’s also ideal content for remarketing campaigns.
- Build confidence in customers’ decision to choose you. Continue to publish content on how your company is innovating and staying ahead, and inform existing customers of anything you think they should be aware of.
No matter what your buying cycle may be, it’s helpful to list out existing content and ideas for new content. Fitting these ideas into your buyer’s journey will help you spot any missed opportunities. Atlantic BT can help you map out your content strategy in this way, which is called a gap analysis.
4. You’re looking for ways to improve without knowing what you need.
You always want to keep improving your website to stay ahead of your competitors, but the marketing activities that prove successful start to become weekly tasks. With so many set activities on a daily basis, there comes a point where it’s hard to step into a high-level view and find new opportunities.
High-level website audits turn into deeper dives.
Sometimes people ask us for general website audits to find any missed opportunities as a safety measure.
Atlantic BT can conduct a quick general site audit that identifies areas that may require a deeper dive. For instance, we may begin by reviewing site performance, keyword analysis, heat maps, and competitor websites. Based on our findings, we may recommend something more specific, like a UX audit, SEO audit, or site speed audit.
We’ll handle development.
A deeper dive can help us build a marketing roadmap for you to follow. Because marketing and development are closely tied, these roadmaps often include development work. Atlantic BT can seamlessly step in to support you in the development pieces if needed.
Do you feel any of these marketing pains?
Do you relate to any of these struggles? We’re happy to help in several ways. We conduct discoveries to build strategic recommendations, and we can help you evaluate what technology will fix core issues. Reach out to hear from an expert and learn more.
