There are times when you seem to be doing everything right, but your efforts do not end up generating anything positive. Digital marketing plans and implementations can often feel that way. There are literally hundreds of tiny mistakes you can make that can all add up and keep you from achieving your SEO goals. Even if you hired a digital marketing company, you need to ensure these common mistakes are not being made by constantly following up with the SEO firm.
- Not knowing your target audience
This is the most important piece of the puzzle. It’s crucial that you know who you are targeting. Once you get that, everything else will fall into place. There are key questions to understand your target audience: age, gender, geography, device preference, and interactivity preference. While quite a few things will get answered when you know your target audience’s age, gender, and geography, it is still wrong to assume that a millennial will use mobile and a baby boomer will use the computer to access your website. Your target audience will be very unique to what you are offering and you have to be able to capture their attention.
- Posting on social media without a goal
We scroll through thousands of memes, recipe videos, calls for donations, and cute dog posts every day. But once in a while, there is this one post, one video that we click to watch. Why do you think that is? That is because the owner of the content spent that time to understand you, the target audience and posted something that was relevant to you or something you are interested in watching. These are the posts you should be aiming to post on social media where your target audience will spend time, get to know your brand, and turn their visit to revenue for you.
- Not honing your SEO skills
While search engines do keep changing their algorithm to ensure their viewers are getting access to the most relevant content on the internet, there is still a core pattern to how things work when it comes to page ranking. Keyword stuffing and not meta tagging are two of the biggest sins in the SEO skill department. It’s always good to be aware of the relevant keywords for your website and use those to drive traffic to your page.
- Underestimating the power of mobile
Gone are the days when websites were redesigned for mobile or were “optimized”. Mobile-first design is the ask of the day. Mobile-first is nothing but starting smallest size first when it comes to designing your website. And then working upwards for larger screens. What this does is crucial – it shows you what you ACTUALLY want to show your viewers – the key message you want for your visitors. And it also helps you scale up simpler – once you tackle the smallest real estate first and make the navigation simple for a mobile, it basically then comes down to rearrangement of screen elements for larger screens.
- Not setting goals
This is a key business error when stepping into digital marketing. Much like advertisements, it is important for you to know your goal. It’s not enough to have numbers – the number of people who visit your page. Your goal needs to be multifold – right from page ranking to the number of organic clicks to return on investment. Treat it like a business venture where you are putting in money to earn money. And those goals need to be defined right at the start and not midway.
- Buying traffic
Did you know just number of people visiting your page isn’t enough for it to gain more weight in the cyber world? When you buy traffic in bulk, chances are, more than 80% of that traffic has no influence at all. This means you will have numbers to show traffic, but this traffic won’t add to your revenue. When a real person is active on cyberworld, the weightage of their profile AKA influence goes up. This is exactly why you tweeting about Adidas won’t have the same influence as Ronaldo tweeting about the brand.
- Not investing in a blog
Blogs are great and, more importantly, an inexpensive way to drive in more traffic. However, most small business owners commit the mistakes of writing the blogs themselves. Digital marketing companies can lookup trending topics and write detailed blog posts that generate interest. They not only have a team of content writers but they have SEO experts to find keywords that would make the post more searchable.
