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.
How Your CRM Can Lead To High Growth In 2020
Whether you are a small or large enterprise, you are probably always wondering how you can grow your business and keep it viable. You know that you have to invest a lot of time and effort to ensure your company stands out from the pack, but how exactly do you do that?
In this article, we will give you six practical steps your business can take to achieve high growth in 2020 and beyond. Let’s delve in:
Brand and messaging
Every time someone in your organization sends out a message, they represent your brand. All the people in your organization, whether they are interns or junior sales representatives affect your brand. All their interactions end up affecting how your customers perceive your brand.
For this reason, you must ensure that all your staff knows your organization’s culture. Everyone in your company should know how to convey the desired brand image whenever they communicate with clients, vendors, and leads.
One way of ensuring consistent brand messaging is by using your CRM to create templates for different communication channels. You can create as many templates as you want, therefore eliminating the differences in human communication, branding, and language. However, don’t forget to leave space for your staff to send personalized and human written messages when there is need.
You should also ensure that all your communication is traced through your CRM. This makes it easier for your managers to monitor whether all your communications, (both internal and external) are in line with your policies and how the messaging is affecting your client retention, revenue and lead generation.
Data management
Most businesses have access to customer data. The problem is that some of these businesses (at least 41% according to search business analytics) find it hard to tie customer data to business actions. This, however, should not be the case for your company.
With a CRM, you can make the best of your data by finding out important customer insights such as how your customers are marketed to and their response to different marketing strategies. Once you have this info, you can use it to make vital business decisions that will see your business experience high growth in 2020.
The data from your CRM can help you:
- Send personalized messages.
- Identify your top customers so you can pay more attention to them and attract others like them.
- Identify the best strategies that help you win and close deals so you can replicate them in the future.
- Anticipate what your customer is likely to buy and use the information to upsell the right products at the right time.
In short, organizing and managing your CRM data will help you create an all-round strategy for exceptional customer experience.
Martech- onboarding and integrating the right technology
Initially, marketing technology (Martech), was comprised of software such as social media, monitoring and management tools, SEO and website analytics tools and marketing automation platforms among others. In recent years, however, the Martech landscape has grown to include sales and service as well.
While this wide variety is a good thing, it makes it difficult to identify and implement new technology. In fact, one of the most difficult challenges that businesses face is deciding on the right solutions and implementing them correctly.
That being said, if you want to experience high growth in 2020, you must learn how to onboard and integrate the right Martech tools. The following tips will help you do this:
- Start by defining exactly what you hope to achieve. This will help you decide on the features you want and whether the problem you are trying to solve is worth solving in the first place.
- Decide on who will handle the on-boarding process and how you will determine whether the process is working or not.
- Think about how the tech will integrate with your current tech such as your CRM.
- Create a clearly defined mission plan that details the on-boarding process before you begin. Ensure that you include the ways in which you will receive feedback and criticism concerning the new system.
Marketing and sales alignment
Sales and marketing alignment is probably the greatest opportunity your business has of improving its performance. Once your sales and marketing teams unite in one revenue cycle, you will see dramatic improvements in your marketing ROI, general growth, and sales productivity.
One way to improve your marketing and sales alignment is to implement the right CRM software. A good CRM will enable your business to analyze and manage customers’ interactions throughout the lifecycle. The information you gather will help you convert leads, enhance relationships, nurture sales, and help in customer retention.
You are probably wondering how a CRM will help you do all of this. Well, here are a few alignment opportunities:
- Improved communication- a CRM will provide your managers with extensive contact records as well focused tracking reports. It will also enable you to better track the most effective marketing and sales outreach tactics.
- Deeper insights- since both the sales and marketing teams share the CRM , they all access the lead’s contact details, company background, competitors and interactions with the brand.
- Shared goals and expectations- a CRM ensures that your sales and marketing departments collaborate to define sales nurturing, lead generation, and scoring strategies. This means that both teams work together to develop ideas or reduce bottlenecks instead of working in an unfocused way with unclear expectations.
- Avoiding duplicated insights- since a CRM allows both the marketing and sales teams to see where each customer stands in the buyer’s journey, they are better able to focus their outreach to more interested customers.
Personalization
According to accentuate, 81% of customers want brands to understand them and know the right time to approach them. Customers of today not only respond to personalized messages, they expect them. A message that is not personalized and relevant is sure to go straight to the trashcan.
Your company can make use of a CRM to better personalize the messages you send to your customers. For instance, you can get to know the customer’s name, address, telephone number, past purchases, and where the customer currently is in the sales funnel.
This information, when used well, can help you address your customers by their names, and even make suggestions that are useful and relevant to their needs.
Revenue attribution
Revenue attribution involves identifying the touch-points, marketing actions or assets that contribute to the bottom line revenue and by how much. Marketing revenue attribution can bring fundamental changes to the way your organization approaches marketing.
The problem with marketing revenue attribution is that it can be difficult for marketers to tell what led to the sale. Was it the product review, the tweet or trade show appearance? This lack of accountability is dangerous for your organization both from a market and employment perspective.
Luckily, using a CRM can help you track your digital assets, where and how they are consumed and then record the information for further analysis and use.
In a nutshell,
To grow your business in 2020, you need to invest in a good CRM software that will help you:
- Send consistent brand messages.
- Organize and manage your data so you can use it for your benefit.
- Better align your sales and marketing so you are able to identify the strategies that work well for you.
- Create personalized messages that are relevant to your customers’ needs.
- Allocate your revenue better by determining the assets, touch-points and marketing actions that bring you revenue.