In my last blog, I mentioned that 81% of SMBs change SEO providers because they feel they’re paying too much. But it’s not just in the SEO space. Based on one survey, digital marketers around the world estimate that they waste, on average, 26% of their marketing budget on the wrong channels or strategies. Almost half said they misspent at least 20% of their budgets.
While there’s a vast number of things that can contribute to those stats, the most important thing is to avoid becoming one of them. You can spend less to get more by doing these three simple things.
1. Stop competing for unobtainable, high-competition keywords
In the never ending quest to drive visitors to your website, the easiest way is to identify the keyword rankings your competitors are using and copy them. Right? Wrong! All you’ll end up with is a list of keywords high in search volume but with a massive amount of competition.
So what do you do? Use competitive analysis tools to find keywords low in competition but with enough search volume to make them worthwhile for your business. But remember! Don’t compete against yourself! Make sure your homepage focuses on only the most relevant keywords. If you have multiple pages ranking for a particular keyword, remove instances of keywords from pages that shouldn’t be ranking to give authority back to the page that should.
2. Stop investing in volume blogging
According to Hubspot, 55% of marketers prioritize blog content creation for inbound marketing. Why? Because it works. Marketers who prioritize blogging are 13X more likely to see positive ROI than those who do not. Publishing 16+ blog posts per month will give you almost 3.5X more traffic than if you only publish 0-4 blogs each month. So what’s the problem with blogging? For most SMBs, trying to post too many blogs spreads your resources and lowers the quality. As soon as that happens, Google will penalize you for thin content.
The solution? Reduce the number of blogs and focus on producing quality content that delivers real value to your readers. Only increase the volume of content you create if you can maintain the quality.
3. Reduce bounce rates to increase conversions
If visitors arrive at your site only to quickly “bounce” to another without visiting any other pages, you’ve got a problem. You’re either attracting the wrong type of visitor, or you’re not giving the user the experience they expected. To increase your conversion rate, you need to reduce your bounce rate.
How do you do that? Make sure you create the right content and use the right channel to distribute it to your target market. If your customers use mobile devices, make sure your website is mobile friendly. Improve readability by avoiding large chunks of content. Make headlines big and bold and use subheadings, bullet points, and white space. Ask questions in the content to keep the reader engaged.
I’ve only addressed a few things that you can do to make your dollars go further. There are many other things that you can do to attract visitors, reduce your bounce rate, and increase your conversion rate. If you’d like to know more, don’t hesitate to visit http://creologic.ca/ or contact me at info@creologic.ca.
About the author
Kelly Grainger is the Founder and President of CreoLogic Design Inc., a leading website and SEO company based in Edmonton, Canada. Leveraging 20-years’ experience, Kelly’s focus is on helping local companies take advantage of digital transformation to enhance services and create competitive differentiation.
