There are many reasons why your website may not be pulling its weight as part of your digital marketing. I’ve outlined a few of the most common — and critical — areas below. You’ll find that there is overlap across some of these, but fine tuning each will improve your website’s performance as a marketing tool.
Relevant content
If you’re not addressing the issues your audience is interested in, they will go elsewhere. To increase your traffic, review your website analytics data to determine which content is working well and which you need to either edit or eliminate.
Invest time in reviewing your competitors, as well. Do searches for the terms you’d like to rank highly for and then examine the sites that show up at the top. (The content of any single page isn’t the only factor in how well it ranks, so be careful about reading to much into a simple competitive intelligence exercise like this.) Compare what you find with similar content on your own site and shore up as needed. Remember that unseating a well-established incumbent can be difficult. You might consider focusing on related keywords rather than competing head-to-head.
SEO Effectiveness
The ideal is to aim to rank for terms that your audience is using and that your competition has ignored. You may need some help to get started or even a team to manage SEO on an ongoing basis, but it’s most definitely worth doing. Otherwise you may find your site making big moves in the rankings —but in the wrong direction.
Technical Performance
The speed with which your site loads is one of many factors that will influence your site’s marketing performance. The search engines place a premium on user experience, and users place a premium on how quickly and easily they can find and get to the answers they’re after. High bounce rates, low time on site, few pages visited per session are frequently caused by poor user experience. All contribute to the search engines painting a picture of poor user experience for your site.
Linking — Internal and External
Getting legitimate external links into your site is hard, but it’s a must for digital marketing success. (Do NOT be tempted by any shortcuts here. They’re viewed incredibly negatively by the search engines and will be penalized.) This is definitely an area where professional help is worth the expense. Even innocent link sharing amongst colleagues can run afoul of search engine standards.
Don’t overlook internal linking and its value. Link to related pages on your own site is great for user experience — it helps visitors access the content they’r most likely to be interested in without them even knowing it’s there! Consider working with your website development team to test different ways to link to related content. A sidebar section entitled, “You Might Also Like” can be effective. A link at the end of each article labeled, “Dig Deeper” can work, as well.
You may have noticed that all of these areas have an impact on both your user experience and your site’s potential for ranking well. That’s because the search engines want to deliver great results to their users — if your site is likely to deliver an excellent user experience, it’s more likely to be recommended by the search engines.
