How To Optimize Your Digital Marketing Budget

Digital marketing operations are complex ecosystems that require a combination of skill set to translate business initiatives and digital marketing strategies into bottom-line results in sales, revenue and client growth. Business owners and digital marketing specialist are facing challenges in formulating pivotal revenue turnaround strategies and growing e-business through developing a fully integrated internet marketing campaigns targeted at consumers as most people are tuning out of paid advertisement. There is need to fully do the first thing first by optimizing your site while considering running paid online advertisement.

We live in a hyper connected world, where change is sweeping the business world. Ignoring how important your online presence is to the success of your business could be detrimental to your overall goal. As online advertising (PPC) cost has skyrocketed in recent years and increase in click fraud with pop up ads, large percentage of the viewing audience sees paid advertisement as less reliable and annoying.

Based on this inherent draw back on PPC, increased Ad spend and consumers tuning out from paid advertisement using adblocks and other tools, I have prepared this SEO checklist to help you organize the most important digital marketing strategy that are often ignored.

The three Search Engine Optimization processes that can compliment your advertising budget and what to avoid while building your SEO foundation to get found online:

Search Engine Optimization Process to pay attention to: OPTIMIZE > REPORT > LOCAL REVIEWS.

1. OPTIMIZE: Once your business is up and running online, the next thing is to find an alternative with the most cost effective way of achieving highest performance under a given scenario or constraints such as: –

• Submit your url to search engines as soon as you publish your website for indexing and crawling.
• Create rich snippets to give users a sense of what your web pages is about and why it’s relevant to their search query. This will help increase your click through rates and decrease bounce rates, since user are expose to their relevant search results.
• Control Crawling by specifying what pages of your site that can be crawled by search engines spider by creating a robot.txt file and uploading it to the root of your hosted site.

2. REPORTS: Document specific information about your audience and statistics of your web visit capturing the changing behavior and interaction within your website such as:

• Review how many pages of your website are listed by search engines every 15 days.
• Check search engines list of inbound links to your site and where they are coming from.
• Track your website page rank on Google and Alexa every 15 days on a scale of 0 to 10.
• Review your keyword page ranking every month for specific searches on some selected search engines. You can use search engine visibility tool to review your keyword.

3. LOCAL REVIEWS: Check to see how your competitors business appears across the internet and how your business can standout from the crowd in local search results, what people are saying about your ratings and how to respond appropriately. Listing your business in local directory will boost your online presence. Here are some directories you can also list your site: Foursquare, yelp, yellow pages, city grid and facebook.

Here are some of the pitfalls to avoid while building your digital marketing foundation to get found online:

• Optimizing your website (SEO)
• Not having content strategy
• Ignoring a functional and responsive website
• Broken links on your site
• Ignoring user experience and customer journey
• Ignoring Web Analytics (Google webmaster, bings and others)

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