Building A Digital Strategy

Good morning everybody!  I thank you for being here today. As Angela pointed out, I'm the SEO guy. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how the sausage is made, I guess.

SEO has a tendency to be this big, mysterious entity, and nobody is quite sure what it is, but it's really kind of - I'm the guy who looks under the hood when you have a problem. And that's what happens when we do these technical audits.  My goal here today is to give you a very non-technical review of what I look for and why it's important and what you should be looking for if you want to have a successful marketing strategy.

We're going to look at the platform - Does it support publishing? Is it easy to discover? Does it have speed issues? Is it mobile-friendly?

We're going to take a look at your competitors. It's very important how you stack up against your competitors. Keyword research. What are the best keywords for you? Are they realistic keywords? We’ll review content strategies.

A little bit about your audience and you've got owned assets, earned assets and paid media that you can use.

These are all part of your audience’s conversions as Angela pointed out before. you've got SMART goals that should be set up. Well, now we have to make sure that we're converting on those SMART goals. And how do we do that?

Lastly, would be Measurement. How can we measure that these things are happening?

Platform - What to look at. From a technical standpoint we want to know if it up to date. We're going to use WordPress as an example. Most of the sites we work with are built on a WordPress platform since it's one of the most popular ones out there. Very rarely when I do a site audit, will I log into the back end of a WordPress site and see that everything is up to date.

It is crucial that you keep your plugins up to date. It's crucial that you keep your themes up to date. Most of these things will not only be for performance to give you more features, but a lot of them are security patches, and you don't want to fall behind on that.

In the most recent Flight Plan that I've done I found a theme that was no longer supported and had been out date for a couple of years now. That means at some point in time it's going to stop working with the plugins that are out there because they've fallen behind.

Now, is this something? Yeah, I promised nontechnical. This may be a little technical. But, to my audience out there listening to this now, you may not be the person that actually does this. You may bring it back to your web developer. You may bring it back to your IT person or whoever built your website. But you should know to ask them to look at this stuff. “Hey, when's the last time my plugins are updated? Hey, is everything up to date here?”  That's something that you want to keep your eyes on for sure. Next, is it error free?

There are hundreds and hundreds of different types of errors that our tools can find. Some of the ones that are the most concerning and will make for a bad user experience would be broken, internal links or too many redirects, images that are 404’ing. It will not only hurt your user experience, but it will also hurt you in Google's rankings. The more errors and stuff they see, the more re-directions that are happening behind the scenes, it dilutes the search engine value of your website.

One of the things we look at and why you should pay attention to it; make sure you don't have too many 404 errors on this site and try to eliminate unnecessary redirects if you can.

Security is the next thing.  I'm sure everybody has seen the little lock that's on there now. Google has gotten very, very serious about security now. They're getting to the point now where it's actually in red to alert you this site is not secure. Ask yourself, do you want to proceed?

These days I'd like to think that everybody has a secure site, but I still want across sites that are not. Not only do you want to make sure it's secure, but you want to make sure it's secure in the proper way. We've come across, a lot of sites that are secure but, a lot of these things within this site are not secure, you’ve got mixed content. That's something that you want to probably take a look at.

Is your site mobile-friendly?

Mercifully, most of them are now but I'm actually working on a site now that still isn't. Google has a free test you can do a Google search for ‘mobile-friendly tests’ that will come up and you can get an idea of how your site is rendering in Google. You want your site to be mobile-friendly.

Several years ago, we reached the point where more searches were happening on mobile than they were on desktop. Even though that may not apply to your specific situation, Google is basing its rankings on how you perform on mobile.

What that means is you may have 80% of your people who come to you on a desktop but when Google looks to rank your site, they're going to see how you perform mobile and they're going to base your rankings mobile and desktop based on that performance.

Which brings us to our last item, is it fast?  You want to make sure that you've got a fast speed. Google's got a site; it's called Test My Site by Google and you could do a speed test on it. And believe it or not, they want your site to be 2.5 seconds or faster. Now the mistake people make with this is they go through that site or they go to a website and they type into website. The site comes up blindingly fast and think “Everything is good here. I don't have any problems loading fast.”  But they are loading this on a cable connection, a fiber connection, of course, is going to be fast. The way Google's looking at it is they want your site to come up in 2.5 seconds on a 4G connection. Not too many sites can do that. One of the last sites that I tested came up 9.9. That's considered very slow. If you're slow, you are going to lose traffic. People are not going to wait around for that, and you're going to suffer in the rankings. Next slide, please.

Competitive analysis

 I'm gonna tell you all a little bit of a story. There are two guys walking through the woods. And all of a sudden, this big hungry bear comes out and starts chasing them. So, they’re running and, they’re running, and one guy turns around to the other guy and says, “We're never gonna outrun this bear.” Well, the other guy turns around and says,” Well, I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun YOU.” And that's sort of the way it is with your competition.

You need to be very aware and cognizant of how your competition is doing so that you can be better than they are at doing it. Basically, you're not being measured against every single site in the world. You're getting measured against the people you want to compete with. They're competing for the same keywords that you are, competing for the same market share.

If you notice in this slide that there are a couple of different features on there. I hope you can see it, because it's tiny, but there's something called authority SEO score and that's basically 1 to 100 score of how your site performs on a lot of things that Google holds near and dear to their heart.

If you're competing against a site, if you've got a 20 authority score and your competitor has a 50, which is much higher, you're probably not going to be able to compete for a lot of the keywords that they are. And all of these things are built around site speed, they are built around how many backlinks are coming in, built around how many pages you've got on the website. One of the things we do when we do a Flight Plan is to ask you for three or four of your top competitors and we will do a head to head analysis of these key aspects and show them to you. We will show you where they are, where you are and where your best hope to beat them will lie. It's very important to look at what the competitors are doing. If you want to succeed.

Keywords

Keywords are always important. As I alluded to before. you may want to rank for a certain keyword which may or may not be a good keyword. Part of what we do is keyword research to find out not only what Google thinks your site is about, what you think your site is about. Whether your keywords are In line with what your site is showing, which we'll talk about more in content later on, but also take a look at what your competitors are doing and, and more importantly, what's working for them.

We have tools that will allow us to find out what's converting well for your competitors, what's getting more click throughs, and then you match that up to what you're doing; what you want to do, what you think is relevant on your site and see where opportunities lie. Keyword research will take advantage of taking a look at the content on your site. We'll take a look at what keywords your competitors are ranking for.

In the competitive analysis we did earlier, will be able to see where you stand or where they stand in relationship to trying to rank for that keyword, then, make recommendations for that as we go on.  Ideally what you want to do, and this goes to attainable goals that Angela spoke to before, you want to make sure that if you want to embark on an SEO plan you want to choose keywords that are going to convert for you, but you're also going to have a realistic chance of getting on that first page. It's a good that's a big part of what we do in our analysis.

Site content.

 Many, many times I've had people ask me “Hey, can you submit this keyword to Google for me? I want to rank for this keyword. Submit it to Google.” Well, that's not the way it works. You don't submit keywords to Google, Google crawls content on your site and they decide what's relevant for that keyword, what's relevant for a phrase, and what's not relevant for that phrase. It's not a matter of submitting the keywords. If the keyword is so important to you that you think you want to rank for it, and if it's been shown to be a good traffic generating keyword, you need to build content around that.

Quite often in those scenarios where somebody wanted me to submit a keyword, that keyword was very rarely or sometimes not at all, even on the site. If that phrase isn't important enough to put on your site, then either your site is lacking and you need to change that, or the keyword really isn't a good keyword for you.

Sitting back and analyzing the content on your site, is it compelling? Is it the right content that you want to be putting out there? Are you sending the right kind of message? Is it compelling?

These days you really want it to be shareable too because, ideally what you want somebody to find a piece of content that they find so valuable and  so intriguing that they want to share it with other people because that's going to help you win that battle of getting all your I's dotted and T's crossed so you can compete with some of your larger competitors.

Can you publish content to your own site? Again, most people have WordPress sites which makes it very easy to add pages and blog posts. But are you doing it? A lot of times people will have a blog on their site and when I'm doing an analysis, I'll see that the last time somebody put a post up was 2 1/2 years ago. Sometimes old content is more harmful than no content because Google also looks at things like how often your site has been updated.  It's really important to get your Content strategy built around that solid keyword strategy and that would put you on a path to success.

Audience - Now we’ve got to speak about the audience.

You can build visibility to your site through various different ways. There are owned resources – email, social media. These are things that are really in your control to impact.

There is earned. Basically, links coming in from other people that have found something valuable and want to share – PR, news releases; if you've done something that's newsworthy and somebody is going to put you in their post.

And there is paid. Stuff that will get you there quicker. You can do pay per click, offline advertising stuff that you're actually paying to get.

One thing builds upon another. If you've got a good keyword plan. if you’re building up the content on your site, well then, this site should be a very important lead generating tool for you and building up its audience. You would probably want to support that with email, but you definitely want to support it with social media because before when I mentioned that ideally you want people to share content on your site. If you build it on your site and you put content on there, sometimes that's not enough. Sometimes you want to, if you write a blog post, that's very topical to something that is happening in the industry that you're in, putting on the blog is great. Google will find it. You may get ranked well for it, but it’s much more effective if you can promote that through your social media and take advantage of that. Then, other people will share it, which starts to build into that second category of links. You may get somebody, pick it up and get real press on it if it's really informative, but, at the least you may get some people linking to it, and this is all going to help you succeed in building that site up and getting stronger to be able to compete with your competitors.

If you’re in a hurry for it, there's always paid search. You can start a paid campaign and literally get on the map with some of those keywords in about a week. But, the one thing to remember about that is why you may not have to do all the roll up your sleeves work that's involved with building up the content and getting everything corrected on your site, doing the legwork will result in ultimately longer rewards for you and probably be more cost effective in the long term.

Paid search can get you on a map immediately. As soon as you stop paying for it, the spigot gets turned off and you may still be left with the site that needs keyword adjustment, technical adjustment, new content. Etc. All you've really done is delayed. A good strategy generally would be if you cannot wait the time it takes to do the things to build up your foundation, use paid to bridge the gap but, continue to do what you need to do to succeed with the site.

Now conversions!

I've got you to do all this work that you really don't want to do, and you didn't think I was going to tell you to do it in the beginning of this conversation. But you've done it.  What should we see? Conversions. Ideally you want to address the needs of your market. You want to create assets and resources that drive profitable curser action on this site. You've got great content now people are paying attention to it. It's interesting. You've piqued their interest. They've got the desire now to do some sort of an interaction with you. You're halfway there!

Now comes to the point of the action. You must make clear calls to action on your site. Once you've got that person there, you have to make it very easy for them to understand what it is you expect them to do.

If it's a site where you're selling something, well, that's usually a little more obvious because you're going to have a “buy now” button or something like that. But you'd be surprised again how many sites that their main goal is to get the phone to ring but you have to go searching for the phone number. You have to go to like a contact page. Well, that phone number should be on every single page of the site. Think about it, if you're a restaurant and you want somebody to make a reservation for you, well, the chances are they're going to be on a mobile device. So if they look you up they find your site and they can't find that phone number immediately, it's not like present right on that page, they’ve got to dig around through the contact form to find it,  well, they're eating at the restaurant next door then because they're not going to deal with that. They want instant satisfaction.

You really need to work on your calls to action to get the person to do what you want them to do. If you want them to fill out a form, make that form visible on the page, don't make him go searching for it. You want to have all that stuff visible. Make it as easy as possible.

Now of course, how do we know this is working? Well, you need to measure it.

A wise person once said that you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Now you've done all these things, you've got your goal set up and you've made the calls to action very clear. How do we know any of this is working? How do we know what's driving the traffic?

Well, most sites these days use Google Analytics. It's a free tool. It's a great tool. It's a daunting tool to a lot of people, which is why you generally want to find out just the specific things that are germane to you and work with that but you want to have Google Analytics on your site. You definitely want to have goals set up because there are very easy ways in Analytics to be able to track whether a phone number has been clicked on, whether a form has been filled out and the reason you want to do that is you could now tie it back to looking in analytics to see what made that happen. Did that person come to you from an email campaign you sent out? Did they come to you from Facebook and click over from there? Did they come over from the search engine? And what page did they land on? This page is converting. This page isn't converting.

Do I need to do something to this other page to make it a convert as well as the other one? These are all things that you can get within Google Analytics. You need to sign up for Google Analytics. You need to make sure it's on your site. You may need to make sure it's configured correctly, and you need to make sure that you've got goals set up and set up some easy KPIs that you can look at. Google will allow you to construct your own dashboard. You can put stuff that you're interested in instead of having to wade through pages and pages of data that can be daunting sometimes.

What we do for our clients is we actually talk to them during our engagement and generate reports from a third-party tool to give them information that they're interested in, then put it in front of them and make it easy for them to digest to see what's working and what's not working.

That's the end of my time here, and I'm going to pass it back to Angela.