Digital Marketing for new start-ups: Traffic, SEO, Analytics

There are 3 key questions in the digital marketing world for new start-ups, and they’re all to do with online visibility and tracking your customers in order to maximise sales…

1. How do you get people to your website? – Drive traffic
2. How do you ensure search engines find your site? – Maximise your SEO
3. How do you know who has been to your site and maximise your efforts? – Use analytics tools

What is Traffic?

Traffic is visitors to your website. They are grouped into different segments, depending on how they found you. Get your head around the types of traffic that you’ll commonly see used in online analytics:

Direct traffic URL type-ins, bookmarks, or media links that are not tracked

Campaign traffic display ads, email campaigns, social media campaigns (you can create a campaign tag to link to a landing page to track this)

Search traffic from search engines, including both organic (defined below) and paid search

Referral traffic from other sites that have direct links to your site

Organic traffic all traffic that comes to your site as a result of unpaid search results.

There are 3 main traffic outcomes that you can measure:

Quantity will show you how many people come to your site

Quality will demonstrate how your visitors have engaged with your site, including the bounce rate, which is how many people have clicked on to your page and then closed it down

And finally the cost of traffic: how much did it cost you to get them there and doing something? Here’s where the CPA comes in, which can be cost per acquisition or cost per action.

So, now that you have an understanding of what traffic is and what you can track about your website visitors, here are…

5 digital marketing methods to get people to your site

1. Social Media Campaigns

Do you use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn? These platforms have intuitive and easy ways to set up ad campaigns where you can determine your budget and set your goal. You can define you who want to reach, where they live, or what their interests are, so you know your investment is getting your message to where it needs to be. However, make sure you don’t rely solely on social media.

2. Email campaigns

Are you building a network of contacts? Get them engaged by updating them about your latest offers, news and events by utilising a platform such as MailChimp.

3. Interactive advertising

Banner ads are image-based rather than text-based and are a popular form of online advertising. The purpose of this is to promote a brand and/or to get visitors from the host website to go to the advertiser’s website.

4. Online partnerships

Affiliate marketing is an arrangement by which an online retailer pays commission to an external website for traffic or sales generated from its referrals. Companies such as eBay, Amazon, Not On The High Street, and Shopify could be a great fit for you to maximise your business.

Link building involves getting other websites to link back to your website, and it’s a brilliant way to boost your SEO. Optimising this involves increasing the number and quality of your inbound links.

5. Search engine marketing

Search engine optimisation (SEO) – as explored below, this is the process of increasing the visibility of a website or a web page to users of a web search engine.

Pay per click advertising (PPC) – is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.

SEO Top Tips to Search Engine Optimise Your Blog Content

Search engine optimisation is incredibly important for marketers. When you optimise your web pages — including your blog posts — you’re making your website more visible to people who are entering keywords associated with your product or service via search engines like Google.

And this is the million-dollar question: how do you optimise? There are two types of optimisation, on-page, and off-page.

On-page optimisation, what you can do…

1. Increase the frequency of the key phrase
2. Ensure your keywords/phrase occur in headings <h1>, <h2>
3. Make sure there’s coherence in the anchor text of hyperlinks
4. Use a mark-up, such as bold text
5. Increase the density of word or phrase (where they occur near to each other in a block of text)
6. Proximity of phrase to start of document and gap between individual keywords
7. Include Alt data on all of your images (which is a short description of what your image shows). NB Adding alternative text to photos is a principle of web accessibility; visually impaired users using screen readers will be read an alt attribute to better understand an on-page image, Alt tags will be displayed in place of an image if an image file cannot be loaded, and they provide better image context/descriptions to search engine crawlers, helping them to index an image properly
8. Streamline your document metadata/tags: page title and description. NB Metadata is used to describe individual pages on a website, allowing search engines to understand what each page portrays.

Off-site optimisation, what you can do…

1.  Include links into a page from other sites, which is a good indicator of relevance
2. Maximise your chances of gaining natural links, which will be created if your content is useful and valued
3. Look for link quality, not link quantity
4. Conduct a proactive link-building strategy, involving:
   1. Trade associations – what organisations are funded by businesses operating in your industry?
   2. Suppliers and other business partners – who are your professional connections?
   3. Bloggers – are there influencers you can leverage to promote your product or service?
   4. Social networks – what networks do your customers and competitors operate in?
5. Aim for deep links to specific pages, products, articles rather than just to your landing page
6. Promote and engage with other businesses and with customers – the more user-generated content, such as reviews and comments, the better!

If you’d benefit from going into greater depth to enhance your website’s performance, take a look at our How to start selling online and use e-commerce to get more sales workshop and register for your place on our next one.

What Can Analytics Tell You About How Your Efforts Are Performing?

What you will want to know…

• Who has been to your site? How did they behave? Where were they from? How did they find you? Was it through search, referral, or a direct link?

An analytics dashboard will tell you:

• Unique visitors
• Unique visitors from SEO, social media
• How people find your website: organic, referral, direct
• Top keywords (non-branded)
• Top viewed pages
• Which social networks are sending the most traffic
• Referral websites (excluding major websites like Google and social networks).

Luckily, you don’t have to collate and number crunch all that data yourself!

Here Are 5 Digital Marketing Analysis Tools to Consider…

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. The tool records various activities of your users when they visit your website, along with the attributes (such as age, gender, interests) of those users.

2. Cyfe

Cyfe is an all-in-one online business. Cyfe integrates all of your online marketing analytics in one dashboard, helping you see all of your information in one place. You can see historical data, get real-time reports, and integrate custom data sources such as custom widgets or APIs and more.

3. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a trusted, advanced mobile and web analytics platform. It’s acclaimed for being simple, because you don’t have to write SQL queries. It helps you track actions (instead of page views) and also comes with predictive analytics features. Therefore, Mixpanel helps you measure and predict what actions people take on your app, whether it be on iOS, Android or web.

4. Moz Pro

Moz Pro is a SEO analytics and performance platform, built by industry experts, which provides intelligent data and tools to help marketers and SEO professionals generate actionable insights. It can be your complete SEO toolset.

5. SEMrush

SEMrush is a competitive analysis tool that allows you to take a close look at what your competitors are doing online, so you can adjust your strategy to beat them in search rankings. A complete marketing toolset, SEMrush lets you monitor your brand (and your competitors’ brands), social media accounts and more.

Goal setting – what action do you want your customers to take?

You want the traffic that visits your site to complete a set of actions to achieve your marketing objective. In order to do this, you need to be clear what actions you want your customers to take.

• Contact general enquiry, telephone, email, visit
• Book an appointment test drive, eye test
• Consume stream content, read news
• Click on advertisers
• Fill out an online order form, membership application form
• Subscribe newsletter
• Sign up for trial membership, subscription
• Download something app, brochure, white paper, timetable
• Add to cart, wish list, watch list
• Checkout and pay

Let our expert take you through the steps you need to complete to optimise your digital marketing. You can register for one of our upcoming Digital Marketing workshops here.

And remember…

Investing in converting visitors is easier and cheaper than getting new visitors.

Calculate your conversion rate optimisation (CRO):

Your Total Conversions is the number of people who did whatever it is defined as converting (email newsletter, made a purchase, and so on).

So, a site with 5000 visitors and 50 conversions has a conversion rate of 1%.

So, food for thought: doubling your conversion rate means halving your cost-per-acquisition. Now, all you’ve got to do is make sure you’re paying attention to your online visibility, and optimise it where you can. By doing this, you’ll get the traffic you need to your website that will help you to achieve your business goals!

Do you need some help with your marketing for your new business? Join Start and Grow Enterprise for free support with your website, social media, digital marketing, and your marketing strategy by registering on our courses & workshops and networking events.