7 Digital Secrets That Will Make You Look Brilliant in Your Planning Sessions
Yes, it’s that time of year again. It's time to start talking about trends, New Year’s resolutions, and fourth-quarter planning.
Cup O Content spends a lot of time talking with businesses about their goals and what prevents people from reaching those goals. And while no one is arguing that digital is a big influencer to success, many businesses and their leaders remain a bit confused about what digital marketing is, exactly, and how it can and can’t help them grow their business. That’s why we’re sharing digital secrets to use in your fourth-quarter planning.
To help businesses in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and beyond work on fourth-quarter planning, here are seven digital secrets that you can incorporate into your marketing tactics in the coming year.
Digital Secret #1: Snippets Directly Affect Page Views
A meta-tag is the web code that translates into the snippets you see on search engines. Snippets are content previews of the website and its content. Many SEO firms ignore meta-tag programming because snippets are no longer crawled for keywords. However, spending time creating compelling snippets that encourage searchers to click on your site will be critical to your SEO success in 2019. The more attractive your snippet is, the more people click on your site…which results in improved site traffic. And isn’t improved site traffic the reason you want better SEO in the first place?
Confused? Find out more in our blog, Why Meta Tags Matter.
Digital Secret #2; Keywords are Only as Strong as Their Syntax
While many people interested in better SEO focus on keywords, you also need to pay lots of attention to words and phrases surrounding keywords, commonly referred to as LSI (latent syntax Indexing.) Back in 2011, Google started making big changes to search engine crawlers that helped them to rank sites based on their overall content and relevancy instead of relying on keyword counts. These new technologies enabled Google to refine search and provide more relevant results. Other search engines followed suit. So now it’s easy to search for dog treats vs. corn dogs vs. the Three Dog Night.
Want to find out more about the role of LSI? Check out this blog.
Digital Secret #3: Subheads Matter
Ever notice that blogs and online content are often broken up into many smaller paragraphs with lots of headings and subheadings? This is an intentional formatting choice. When developing online content, subheads and headings can be coded for higher visibility to search engines. These subheads then get extra attention from search engines when categorizing content and keywords. So make sure all your website text has lots of headings and subheads, and that these are all full of keywords, and coding with <H1> - <H6> coding
Neil Patel has a nice blog on the importance of headings and <H1> code – it’s worth checking out here.
Digital Secret #4: A Picture is Still Worth a Thousand Words
Pictures are great communication tools. They add visual interest. Skilled use of images helps readers understand content more quickly and more completely. And on websites, images are a way to add keywords with alt text coding.
One of the most frequent problems Cup O Content encounters on websites is that programmers neglect to add alt text descriptions. In fact, many coders don’t consider this part of the job of building a website – they delegate this time-consuming task to SEO teams. If your programmer didn’t include alt text descriptions on your images, you may be missing out on dozens, or even hundreds, of opportunities to improve your site’s SEO.
Digital Secret #5: Linking to Other Sites Can Improve Your Site Traffic
Search engines rank your website on a variety of factors. Outbound links to related and highly ranked websites are a signal to Google that you are an authority on your topic. That’s why links to other websites, that are also experts on the topics you discuss on your site, are a great way to improve your SEO.
In this blog alone, we’ve linked to three “authority sites” as a way to give you, the reader, more information, but also as a way to improve our own site’s SEO. Pretty neat, huh?
Digital Secret #6: Blogs are the Swiss Army Knives of Digital Marketing
We love blogs at Cup O Content. They allow us to do so many things. Blogs provide information for the reader. They position you as a credible leader in your industry. They give us a format for including keywords. Blogs provide ample room to ensure adequate LSI. They’re a way of loading up on headings and subheads. Blogging is a perfect format for outbound links. Regularly scheduled blogs ensure that your site’s content is dynamic (essential for good SEO.) A steady stream of blogs allows you to incorporate more images and videos onto your site (helping SEO.) You can promote blog info on your social media platforms, helping you build a social media following and driving more traffic to your website. You can repurpose blogs for sales and marketing materials. And on and on and on. If you don’t have a blog, 2019 might just be your year. Contact us for more details.
Digital Secret #7: The Best Website Traffic Tool is Free (and Easy to Use.)
Did you know that Google offers Google Analytics absolutely free to websites? This tool allows you to track site traffic in real time, see where traffic is coming from, see how many people are searching for your site every month, track the average time spent on each page, compare month-to-month or year-to-year traffic, and perform hundreds of other tasks.
And it’s free. To everyone.
There is no premium pay version, and it’s not a limited-time trial. It’s 100% free now, in the past, and for the foreseeable future. If you don’t have this extremely useful and inexpensive tracking tool linked to your website, make sure you set it up for 2019. Get instructions by clicking here.
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Cup O Content wishes your business the best of luck in 2019. If you need more than luck to grow your business in 2019, contact us, and let’s set up a time to discuss your business and your marketing needs.
Want to read more blogs about digital strategy? Check out these Cup O Content articles.
