I was lucky enough to attend my first ever SASCon event in the form of SASchool. The event gave aspiring digital marketers an insight into search, social and analytics and was led by leading practitioners of the digital marketing industry in the UK and internationally.
Here is a list of the top ten tips I learnt:
1. Research
Data has a stigma of being ‘geeky’ but this gives you great insights into what is happening within your business or industry. Just knowing your facts and being up to date with the latest trends and news can give your company a competitive advantage and by using this data, we can create better content for our target audience. Plus, data doesn’t lie!
2. Planning
It is essential to plan out a strategy, set out objectives, steps to take, where you’ve been successful (or not) so far and what we can do to improve this. Having a plan gives you a starting point but it also gives you a backup plan.
3. Social/user signals on the rise
With mobile usage on the rise and people looking for instantaneous information click through rates, bounce rates, time spent on page and average time on site has been more important than ever. It is important your website is responsive and quick because the User Experience (UX) of that customer is the most important factor when choosing whether to buy or use your product or service.
4. Take risks
SEO is hard work, and you won’t see results overnight. You have to accept that sometimes it might not work or be successful as you thought but you have to be willing to take that risk.
5. Outreach
Building and maintaining relationships is one of the main activities a company or agency should consider a priority. These are the relationships that give you good quality linking allowing your website to rank higher on search engines.
6. Quality score is key
The quality score is a way of google ranking your content and seeing whether your content is relevant to the search query. Being creative and having unique content will always work in your favour.
7. Monitor
Monitoring progress to see what works, what doesn’t and how we can change this. If you can measure it, you can improve it and we are always looking for ways to improve and build a client’s visibility.
8. Adapt to change
The digital marketing industry is constantly changing and you and your business has to adapt quickly, in order to meet customer and market demands.
9. SEO is NOT dead
Despite what people think, I repeat, SEO is NOT dead. With over 28 million searches per month and 1.4 billion searches conducted per month that gives use a million more reasons to carry on optimising websites.
10. Content, content, content!
Above all, content is king. Unique and high quality content is key for the businesses to gain high rankings. According to the Internet Activity Index users spend 5% of time searching and 95% of time consuming content (news, videos etc). Through content we can really engage with the customer and reduce the bounce rates through our website and increase our search engine rankings.
