Anyone who has built and launched a website has likely encountered an oft-repeated acronym: SEO (search engine optimization). And while you might not have ever done SEO yourself, you've benefited from it in the past: Every day, search engines like Google employ complex algorithms to sift through more than 400 billion web pages and deliver the most relevant results.
Website owners like you use SEO techniques and strategies to get their websites to the top of the search results for relevant user queries. But SEO is not a one-time endeavor — Google and other search engines change often, and ongoing SEO ensures your website stays in front of the people you want to reach. Just as a physical storefront requires regular maintenance and updates to stay competitive, your website needs ongoing SEO to remain visible amidst the ever-changing digital landscape.
The ABCs of SEO: What is Ongoing SEO and Why Does It Matter?
Don't let the techy jargon intimidate you. HubSpot — considered one of the gold standards for SEO and digital marketing advice — defines SEO as simply a collection of strategies and tips that "expand a company’s visibility in organic search results'' and help "drive more visitors to the company’s website, increasing their chances for more conversions which leads to more customers and more revenue."
SEO Connects the Search Engine Algorithms With Your Website's Content
Regardless of your website's goal or industry niche, all SEO techniques have one thing in common: They look at ways to optimize your website's content, keywords, and links to help search engines rank your website higher in the search results when someone searches for something related to your keywords, content, or brand name.
According to HubSpot, SEO needs to address the key factors that all search engines use to determine the value of your website's content — and therefore how high in the search results your website or specific landing page should appear:
- The intent or meaning behind why someone is searching for a specific term or question
- The relevance between what someone searches for, and the content on your website
- The quality of your content (for instance, a website about physical exercise written by certified personal trainers is deemed by Google to be higher quality than a website where the articles are written by non-experts)
- The performance of your website, such as how long it takes a page to load and whether it works well on mobile devices
Static SEO Versus Ongoing SEO: Why It Matters to Stay Fresh and Keep Your SEO Updates Current
As users' web behavior changes and technology evolves, search engines proactively adjust their algorithms.
If you aren't conducting ongoing SEO maintenance and upgrades, a well-optimized website today can quickly become obsolete tomorrow, causing your search rankings to drop and attracting fewer organic visitors. Google itself updates its algorithms several thousand times per year, including significant "major" changes every few months that dramatically change how it crawls and ranks content. For example, Google's infamous Panda update changed how it ranked how-to lifestyle content on the Internet, causing one major content publisher to lose a whopping $6.4 million of traffic and advertising nearly overnight.
How Ongoing SEO Influences Your Website Strategy
Staying abreast of changes to SEO techniques and strategies provides important guidance to your content, marketing, and overarching website strategy. For example, it can dictate or influence:
- How much content you publish, and the content's format, length, and focus
- How you incorporate other forms of media on your website, including images, video, and audio
- How you organize content on your site, including landing page layouts and your site's navigation
- What keywords and target users your website focuses on
Embrace the Power of Ongoing SEO
Caroline Forsey, an expert in thought leadership and marketing content, looked at the survey results from more than 400 of the world's leading web analysts to predict the biggest SEO trends of 2024. According to her data, some of the top changes in SEO strategies this year include:
- A heavier emphasis on expertise, meaning the content on your website should come from experts in your related field (including bylines and author bios that demonstrate the author's credentials and experience on the topic they're writing about)
- A renewed emphasis on first-person, credible content, especially as more websites generate high volumes of low-quality AI content (Google itself has announced upcoming changes to tackle low-value articles created by AI)
- A priority on websites that are deemed trustworthy, such as e-commerce sites with well-rated customer service, or content sites that do a good job of citing trustworthy research and statistics
- Bonus points on content that is creative and original and doesn't simply rehash content found on other sites
Of course, these SEO trends will inevitably change every year, and ongoing SEO will keep you competitive no matter what Google, Bing, and other search engines do. No matter your website's industry or content strategy, ongoing SEO requires that you:
- Focus on keeping your content fresh and high quality, including new blog posts or regularly refreshing and updating old product descriptions or articles
- Conduct keyword research often, since the terms or phrases that your core audience uses will evolve over time
- Maintain your website's overarching performance, such as mobile-friendliness as mobile devices evolve, and page load speed
- Build a diverse portfolio of high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites within your niche, which may include outreach campaigns, getting others in your industry to write guest blogs, and participating in online forums or communities
- Keep on top of technical and performance metrics, such as scanning your site for broken links (and fixing the links you uncover) and using tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track organic traffic, keyword rankings, click-through rates, and conversion rates
- Stay on top of algorithm changes so you can adapt your SEO strategy in real-time
Some website owners think of SEO as the first step of their promotional strategy. But it's less a first step, and more an ongoing journey to ensure you, your brand, and your content stay relevant in such a competitive atmosphere. Whether you choose to go it alone and take a DIY approach to SEO, or you choose to consult with a digital marketing and SEO agency, check in often and make sure your SEO evolves as the world around you evolves.
If you ever tried a free software trial, there’s usually not a lot of risks. You test drive it and if it fails to perform, you can simply click “No thank you” when prompted with a monthly subscription request. However, it's not that easy when it comes to workplace integration technologies. Knowing their capabilities - and any gaps or flaws upfront - is imperative to business success, especially as it relates to enterprise software solutions.
With today’s competitive market, integration failures can cost your business time and money. Businesses don't want to lose customer retention due to gaps in CRM that's not fully integrated with their other technologies. Further, no organization wants data leaks, poor data hygiene or disruptions with customer interactions. It’s one of the reasons an ERP system (back-end process) and CRM (customer-facing data) go hand-in-hand. They are both proven to provide 360-degree views. Hence, software solutions, while top of mind, must fully integrate and leave zero room for error to ensure business continuity.
Let’s take a look at questions you should ask about marketing automation technologies to ensure they integrate with your existing technologies. Then, we'll explore how marketing automation and CRM integration helps businesses unify their sales and marketing teams.
Software Integrations
Will this integration work with our other software? That's a big concern for a lot of businesses. They may not have the budget or maybe they're not ready to take a chance on integrating disparate systems. Taking a supplemental model from a single provider might look like the answer. However, it’s not suitable for long-term growth.
To meet business expectations, select cost-effective solutions that centralize data, easily display customer behaviors and maximize workflow prioritizations. Consult with leading web design vendors and include your IT department in your discussions. Furthermore, with any new integration, you’ll want to ensure your new technologies can meet customer and client expectations and project deadlines.
Use the best practice questions below about integration capabilities to help ensure deployment success.
Is it really a seamless, automated data transfer connection?
A lot of new tech boasts about seamless integrations. Some of these are pre-built platforms that include automation. But secretly they might not tell you that you need to now make daily imports to keep your information up-to-date. Manually scheduling data transfers is a huge no-no. It’s also an added step that can lead to lags and silos which you don’t want.
How to Address This
Talk to your vendors to confirm automatic transfers of data. Then, create a model of your business processes. Outline which processes and data you need to share and when this should occur. Lastly, include how frequently transfers should take place to ensure users can then execute their tasks.
What could possibly go wrong...now and later on?
Businesses don't want scope creep (uncontrolled growth, over-budget projects that don’t meet deadlines). Hence, you should map out your plans in advance. To keep your projects controlled, documented and well-defined, establish a time-line.
How to Achieve This
Outline your initial parameters and expectations on your go-live dates, one month in, after one year and further on. Next, consider your scalability.
Questions to ask about cloud computing might include:
- Will you need to connect more systems down the road?
- What about your future product or service expansion?
- If this doesn’t work with our existing technologies, should we consider a custom integration, i.e., custom APIs?
- What current pain points need addressing?
- What future pain points might occur?
- What about changes to your site as you work in new markets?
Having flexible integration options and measurable goals can help keep your expectations and numbers in check. Consider the metrics and KPIs you want to establish. Then, talk to your vendors and account managers about having all your technologies fully integrated and how to streamline those processes. These can all help you to consistently monitor growth instead of applying temporary fixes.
When is the best time to deploy?
Are you really ready to boot up to that API system? While it’s tempting to quickly say “Yes” and hit the ‘go-live’ button, it’s a costly mistake you want to avoid. Deploying a new system requires a special recipe for success.
To Achieve This
Create a deployment checklist. It might include the following items:
- Confirm test scripts run correctly. Outline the metrics and goals you want to achieve before testing starts.
- Clean and scrub all data and remove duplicates before transferring any information. Train staff ahead of time (hands-on training, demos) on the new software.
- Assign tasks to staff and walk them through any new daily assignments.
- Decide which workflow campaigns to automate.
- Establish both online support and in-person training to fast-track users.
- Confirm your vendors are available especially after deployment. You may need them for follow-ups and any “tweaks” or patches. Discuss how they will handle upgrades.
Now that we've explored integration questions, let’s take a look at marketing automation and CRM integrations.
CRM and Marketing Automation
Fully leveraging all your technologies can help you maintain a competitive edge in a complex business environment. When your technologies are fully integrated, they should work seamlessly for both your marketing and sales teams. But, what happens when they don’t? Here are a few questions to ask about marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
What problems can occur if we don't unify our systems now?
A CRM integration for sales teams can come from native integrations built into the CRM system. They can also come from third-party integrations developed for you or custom integrations with custom APIs. Some businesses mistakenly started with a CRM system and then added on marketing automation. The problem with this is it can become laborious, separate interfaces, with separate databases and logins. That means it’s prone to gaps and silos. And, you don’t want roadblocks with your messaging.
Downstream Problems
Downstream problems with separate systems can include:
- Fragmented customer journeys: Your marketing team may not have full or direct access to your CRM and miss out on valuable insights that can maximize campaigns.
- Maintaining separate databases: If a change in one database isn’t reflected in another.
- Billing: If a credit card expires in one database it might disrupt the data flow with the other.
- Data flows: Your data might smoothly go from marketing to your CRM but is CRM sharing data with marketing? Consider that potential lead that reverts back to a prospect. How is this reflected from CRM to marketing, if at all?
To Address This
Unifying your CRM and marketing gives you one interaction with customers and it’s always constant. As an analogy, it’s better to have one conversation (centralized data system) to improve customer experiences (CXs). Having two databases is like having the same conversation with a customer twice (it’s a loss of value and time).
Selling Points for Unifying CRM and Marketing Automation:
- The integration helps you efficiently analyze customer behaviors.
- The centralized platform simplifies your customer data and optimizes your customer relationships.
- Your marketing technologies can integrate with CRM and capture and measure your leads and contact data.
- They can also include capabilities to help CRM and marketing integrate with custom ERP's and/or accounting technologies.
- There are fewer user ID details to keep track of and you won’t have to spend so much time on scraping data.
- Your teams will have more accurate analysis in real-time and better campaigns.
The end result is a 360-degree view of customer journeys with no gaps, lags or broken integrations.
Will this improve our compliance management?
Another question to ask before any integrations is if your compliance best practices are up-to-date. You also want to address how marketing automation and CRM integration can help you meet regulations.
To Achieve This
Your email compliance policy should include protocols for sending email marketing. As an illustration, special watermarks can make your customers’ emails less vulnerable to Phishing attacks. An opt-out option on every email is another protocol to employ.
Will this system alignment improve our sales and marketing initiatives?
Maybe you’re new to CRM or you’re interested in changing your existing CRM. CRM provides data centralization to reduce confusion with multiple databases that can lead to gaps. It also provides better collaboration and increases teamwork.
Boost Productivity
Having data in one system can help raise productivity. All correspondence and customer data is sharable and in one central location. Further, CRM helps you create and share accurate reporting in real-time. From data-driven reports to a convenient dashboard, it’s easier to connect with customers, increase revenue and scale. And, when you combine that with marketing automation, you can improve workflows.
Improve Workflows
Automating your marketing (emails, texts, speech recognition technology for voice) gives you more time for customer interactions. From automating prospect engagements to single campaigns for targeted audiences, you can have more accurate data analytics and know which leads to follow-up on.
Unify Teams
Your data-driven metrics and KPIs can also help align sales and marketing teams and reduce the dichotomy-laced relationships that exist between the two. With less friction, there’s more accountability - and less time wasted pointing fingers.
Questions to ask about sales software might include:
- Will it scrub the web and collect relevant data and remove dupes?
- Will it scour the collected information and then verify and score leads?
- Will it accelerate our onboarding process?
- Will it include AI insights and predictive scores?
- Will it deliver real-time insights in our CRM?
- Will it keep us abreast of account changes (threats, updates)?
- Will it include custom meeting briefs in our team calendars? Will it tell us which leads and customers to call first and what to say to them?
- Will it help improve performance for our sales reps?
- Will it help our sales team close more deals?
- Will it help us create lead follow-up tasks?
- Will it increase our revenue? And, by how much?
Are we losing our competitive lead by not integrating now?
If you’re having trouble tracking leads, sales team progress or managing customer data, you might need marketing automation and CRM. Other reasons might include if customer service is lacking and you have customer complaints and long hold times. You might also have problems tracking conversion rates from campaigns and testing their effectiveness.
How to Address This
Integrate marketing automation and your CRM. CRM helps you manage interactions and all communications with customers/leads and your brand. Marketing automation, on the other hand, can help optimize your marketing efforts over multiple channels. And, it can reduce repetitive tasks to free up time for your staff. That way they get more face time with customers and can close more deals. Together they’re a powerful solution as these essential components complement each other. By using marketing automation, you can reach wider audiences. CRM is there to help your sales staff nurture new and existing relationships.
A Unified Approach
Your sales and marketing teams share common goals - gain and retain customers and close deals/make sales. When you include your service team, now you have 3 separate teams that need to work with the same customer. It’s hard to attain this parity with siloed systems. Hence, integration is crucial as the integrated platform helps you track and analyze your customer interactions and behaviors.
Accordingly, your integrated software helps improve accountability and workflows. You can convert leads into customers and accurately track the customer’s billing and buying cycles. While you're at it, don't forget to optimize your site to reduce bounce rates. It can help with cross-selling products and generating leads.
Meet Your Business Goals With Integration Success
The best software integrations require careful forethought and planning. Follow our best practices and walk through the questions above with your teams, vendors and IT department. To optimize your software solutions and have a unified CRM, talk to Sync’s integration experts.
Synchronicity Designs is a leading digital marketing agency. We specialize in aligning marketing and sales teams through marketing automation and CRM technology integrations. Leverage the marketing automation, CRM and ERP solutions your business needs. We can assist with installation, deployment and support for a seamless transition that maximizes your ROI and growth.
Learn more about Sync’s integration solutions. Request a CRM needs assessment or schedule a consultation today!