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You started a business for two reasons, you wanted the freedom of creating your own schedule, and you wanted to make money.
However, once you’ve tasted the success of landing your first client, and your second client, (and even your third, fourth and fifth), the novelty of being self-employed has worn off and now you’re working 90 hours a week for 15 different bosses (your clients) and a reeeeally crabby direct manager (yourself).
You haven’t created a lifestyle business, you’ve created a J-O-B.
You’re smart, creative, relate well with people, and you’ve already overcome some so many challenges to get this far.
You choose the amount of money you want to make in your business by the way you structure your service offerings.
Solopreneurs and business owners are at serious risk of burnout because of all of the tasks they are managing. From sales to project management, client tasks and personal marketing, it’s no wonder that most business close their doors after three years or less.
There are four main ways you can save you business (and your sanity).
- Sales Funnels
- Systems and Automation
- Outsource
- Passive Income
If you implement one or all of these strategies, you’ll be able to get back to loving your business, while working less hours and making more money.
Sales Funnels
Getting a sales funnel in place will save you TONS of time in the long run (although, I’m the first to admit, it takes a lot of time and focus to get set up – but, it’s totally worth it!).
When you’re creating a sales funnel for your business, it’s best to start with your final offer first. Brainstorm your ultimate goal of what you’d like to sell without any effort (services, a group consulting or coaching offer, or online course). Start by thinking of what problems you could solve for your customers – are there questions that you get asked over and over again? Do your clients have issues trying to DIY easy items (tasks that you’re not interested in doing for them)? If you can answer one of their needs or solve a problem for your clients, you know you’ve got a winning idea.
Then think of supplemental information that would help build up your authority towards being an expert in that final offer.
Ideas include:
- Assessments
- Guides
- Ebooks
- Mini Course
- Video Series
- Quizzes
- Guides
- Tips, Tricks or Checklists
- Swipe Files
- Trial Offers of Your Services
- Webinars
- Case Studies
Systems and Automation
When I first started my marketing agency, I was all over the place. I’m not making any excuses, but as a creative and marketer, I’d much rather do the fun stuff, like designing or working with my people, than focus on my systems. Ugh.
But it’s a necessary evil if you want a functioning business with happy customers.
Not to mention, once your systems and automation are in place, it’s a lot easier to outsource.
To create systems in my business, I started by taking notes on everything I did. I took an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper (one for each of my clients), and created a list of everything I complete for them on a monthly basis. I am more of a pencil and paper type of person when it comes to jotting down notes and brainstorming, but then I transferred all of my notes into a calendar template using the Trello app. I was able to keep myself organized and scheduled, and I did a lot better meeting deadlines and over-delivering for my clients.
Automation is another huge piece. Using social media planning tools (to which the social media managers out there will attest!) can be a huge time savings for you. I sit down at the end of each month and plan out a month of content for the following month. This includes blog posts, social media posts, and live marketing/sales items and more. If you follow weekly themes, it helps cement in your clients’ brains everything you can do for them versus jumping around to a different subject every single post.
You can also use tools to send your monthly invoices (especially easy if you have your clients set up on a monthly retainer).
Automate everything you can in your business, and you’ll save tons of time and money, even if you have to invest in some additional tools.
Outsource
There comes a time in every business when its owner is ready to take a step back and focus on the that bring them the most joy in their business. If there’s a task that you find yourself constantly putting off, consider hiring an outside contractor or specialist to manage it. This could be something like scheduling your social media posts or sending out your invoices.
Depending on your industry, there are a number of ways you can outsource your work, including:
- A contractor in the same industry
- Student Interns (Please pay them!)
- Hiring Overseas Help
- Hire a VA
Outsourcing your work can be challenging for a couple different reasons. For one, you’ve put a ton of time and effort into your business, and it’s scary to hand over some responsibility to someone else. I’m a total control freak, so allowing someone else to step in and help was really scary for me. You also have to be super organized, have your systems in place, and be able to give directions well. The person to whom you outsource also makes a huge impact on your success, so make sure to interview and follow your instincts.
My personal favorite way to save your sanity in your business:
Create Passive Income
Every single service-based business can create passive income.
- Retainer Based Packages (I can honestly say this is the #1 reason for my business’ success thus far.)
- Group Programs (Teach what you know. You’re an expert in your craft, so you can either educate a group of potential clients, or help a fellow business owner who is a few steps behind your current standing.)
- Courses (Online courses are huge right now and gaining popularity. Everyone has something to teach, and you’re no different.)
- Membership Sites (What kind of content is your client looking to receive on a monthly basis? Create a membership site and watch the dollars add up.)
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to creating a lifestyle business, and a brand you fully enjoy. Thanks so much for reading!
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“Allie, what is a marketing funnel?”
When I say marketing funnel, I’m talking about the kind of funnel that you absolutely must get right if you want to sell products and run an efficient business.
Your marketing funnel is made up of several stages, moving a potential client from total stranger to a total fan of your work. It’s the process of converting a first-time visitor or browser into a happily paying customer.Especially in the online world, where consumers have A TON of options and noise coming at them, a marketing funnel is made up of different pieces that will help you gain credibility and their trust. Through each level of the funnel, there are different stages of trust and types of content that the potential client will be prepared to consume, in relation to where they are with “getting to know” you and your business… not so different from dating. You wouldn’t want someone to ask you to marry them on the very first date, just like you likely won’t buy from someone without any sort of prior introduction.
There are basically two ways to market a business.
1. Cold Calling/Billboard in a Desert Approach
For businesses who are purchasing lists of phone numbers in order to call and pitch, their close rates are at about 1%. That’s a lot of wasted effort on the other 99%. Why? We have no prior proof that this audience is even remotely interested in what we have to give them. They’re not necessarily qualified leads, and they likely have NO CLUE how much our product rocks. Without that initial contact and time to start building rapport and a relationship, a swift no and a kick out the door (or in this instance, a phone “click”) and our contact with that person is gone.
You wouldn’t place a billboard in a desert, would you? Trying to reach clients when you know nothing about them or their level of interest is a complete waste of time and money.
2. Meeting the future customer on their turf
On the other end of the spectrum, businesses who are more focused on creating valuable content and placing it where a customer or client can find it when they are ready to begin the buying cycle have a much higher close rate. Potential customers can engage with your content (blog posts, infographics, videos) and learn about your company and its services without a cold call from a salesperson. Not only are they more receptive to the sales process (and not instantly tense and waiting for their chance to hang up), but they are a high-quality lead because they’ve already shown interest in what you have to offer them. Close rates for these types of customer contacts are typically close to 50%.
Most businesses are somewhere in the middle of these two examples.. they haven’t yet “perfected” their sales funnel, but they aren’t exactly calling strangers out of the blue to sell their products.
There are basically four stages to the sales funnel, and each stage needs to be treated accordingly.
A successful marketing funnel has EACH of the following stages:
“Create < Market < Sell < Delight”.Step #1 – Problem/Need Recognition – Create
If your future client doesn’t recognize that she has a need that must be filled, she’s not yet ready to make a purchase. In this stage, it’s important to create simple, easy to consume content, in order to start help her start realizing she might need help solving a problem. In the case of coaches and creatives, this would mean creating content
Step #2 – The Search for Information – Market
A search for more information is triggered once the problem has been recognized. Depending on the size of the need at hand, the hunt for information can take on a variety of forms and lengths of time.
Step #3 – Considering the Options – Sell
Your customer will start comparing her options once the problem has been recognized and she has begun her search. She will start sifting through the available options, including information provided, value perceived, and packages offered. Depending on the size of the purchase ($50 Facebook image design or $20K coaching package…), this option consideration can drastically vary in size.
Step #4 – The Purchase
Ah, yes. Your notifications let you know the purchase decision has been made. Your customer has identified her problem, sought out the information to solve that problem, shopped around and chose YOU as the best option to solve her problem. In this stage, it’s important to remember that customers are easily swayed by negative feedback and a difficult to navigate website; two VERY important keys to remember in order to close the deal
There is a piece of the puzzle that most funnel education neglects to mention. The journey is not complete just because the customer has bought from you.
Step #5 – After the Purchase – Delight
This is where the magic will happen for your business. The step AFTER the sale is even more important that the first three steps of the marketing funnel. You never want your clients to feel any level of buyers remorse or regret (something I’ve learned the hard way).
You want your customers to be greeted by a thoughtful onboarding process, personal attention, and all the resources they need to use and enjoy your product successfully. Give them this experience, and they’re more likely to confirm to themselves that they made the right choice. A confident and happy buyer is likely going to shell out the recommendations, referrals and endorsements. However, on the other hand, if your brand new customers experience disappointment and regret after their purchase, they’re more likely to request refunds, write negative reviews, and recommend that others in their social circles purchase from your competitors – a business killer in the online world, especially.
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If you’ve been posting the right content on social media at the right times without seeing results, there’s a reason why.
Social media strategy is a piece of the overall picture, but it’s not always enough to close the deal.
It’s hard to measure.
As a coach or an online business owner, you’re either making sales or you’re not. With social media, the ROI is very hard to measure. When you tie social media use into a marketing funnel, with a strategic combination of Facebook ads, opt-ins, guides, e-mail streams, mini-courses, videos, challenges, webinars and high-quality sales pages, it becomes a very different picture, and it makes a world of difference.
As a marketing funnel specialist and online business strategist, my main concerns for you are conversions and sales. If you’re interested in key performance indicators or measurement metrics that can be tracked in social media, Hootsuite published a great list of available social media KPIs that you may want to consider when tracking social media alone.
Know and understand your KPIs.
What are your key performance indicators? Do you know what social media should be bringing your direction? If you have 5,000 people that like your business page, does it matter if no one is responding to (or seeing) your posts? Your measurements should relate to things that are going to make your business money.
How does social media play into my sales funnel?
Social media is a very valuable and important part of any online sales funnel.
A marketing funnel or sales funnel should really be called a TRUST funnel. The entire act of creating a sales funnel is to create gradual steps in which our audience can learn to trust you. They learn to trust that you’ll provide the services you say you will. They learn to trust that you’re the authority. Your audience will learn you’re worth their investment.
There are ways to easily build social media into your funnel, to supplement what you’ve already been doing online. You can easily use it as a platform to connect with your targeted audience. Find out what Facebook groups they belong to and start making conversation with the tribe.
- You can post stories to start building relationships with members.
- Offer valuable answers to their questions and you’ll start building your reputation as someone to contact when they’re ready to take action.
- Create leading posts, talking about the success of your clients, and how honored you were to have helped.
Another bonus of using social media in your sales or marketing funnel, is that not everyone is at the same place in buying decision process. Social media allows you to reach potential customers before they know they need you. When it comes to decision making, there are likely three groups. Some aren’t even aware they have a problem that you could solve. Another group, has started to become aware of their issues and may be starting to collect information about how to fix it, and the third group, is greedily gobbling up all the information they can, desperate for someone to present the solution they need.
Marketing funnels, similarly referred to as Inbound Marketing, is the act of meeting the customer where they are, so that they can come to YOU when they’re ready to buy, versus consistently interrupting them with loud ads, pushy sales or sleazy tactics. A strategic, seamless marketing funnel brings the leads to you. You know, that whole make money while you’re sleeping thing.
Whether you’re a coach looking to bring in more leads with less work or a creative service provider looking to bring in new clients (or even launch your first course), creating a sales funnel will let you focus on serving your clients, versus constantly spending time hunting for new ones.
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I’ve had the opportunity to speak with hundreds of entrepreneurs about their goals and ideas for the upcoming year and there are common struggles between all of us that all relate to the following five areas.
1. Know Your Ideal Customers
The expression is that if you try to serve everyone, you end up delighting no one. From the one-person shop owner selling crocheted baby items out of her basement to the CEO of a multi six or seven figure business, if you aren’t clear on who exactly you’re helping, reaching your goals is going to be challenging, if not completely impossible. An exercise I offer my clients to figure out their ideal target client audience is to think about you current customer base. Do you have experiences that have stuck out in your head? What made that experience or that client better? Make a list of the traits you enjoyed about that experience – Did they operate with a certain work style? Were they heavily involved in the process or did they rely on your expertise to get the job done? How far along were they in the development of their own business?It’s important to have a visual of what your ideal client looks like. If you’re a visual person, scan Pinterest or magazines to create a picture of this person in your head, Marketing giants like HubSpot recommend giving your targeted audience (or buyer persona in their terms) a name, a personality, a job, a family… Dig deep and make this person as real as possible in your head. What do they do for fun? Where do they struggle? Think outside of the box – print pictures off and hang it on a vision board so that you see your targeted audience every time you create a piece of content. Once you know exactly who you are helping and why, your online marketing strategy will become that much easier to grow.
2. Understand Your Performance Indicators
I just finished reading the book “Crush It” by THE Gary Vaynerchuk. (READ IT if you haven’t yet.) In one chapter of the book, he basically says “screw the metrics”. Forget the analytics. If you want your business to grow, stop being hung up on the numbers.” Reading this was a bit ironic for me because two weeks ago, I was considering basing my entire business on teaching people how to study and learn from their analytics.. it was a bit of a pivotal moment in my business. That being said… sure, don’t focus all your efforts on your stats and metrics, but don’t completely ignore them. Don’t obsess over your stats, but understand them. Look at your Google Analytics (PLEASE please email me at allie@tinyoffer.com if you don’t have analytics on your site and I will personally walk you through installation.), review your Facebook stats, Pinterest stats.. any platform you are actively using for your business is bound to have some level of open rates, usage statistics or performance indicators. Know what they mean, and which ones matter. What is going to lead to more customers for you? Email open rates? Ad click-throughs? Webinar conversions? Study your own successes, look at where they came from, and then optimize the hell out of those channels.3. Focus on Human to Human Interaction
This one is huge. In an age of businesses to business, business to consumer, business to business to consumer (hey, it happens).. think about what really matters at the end of the day; the humans. Your business wants to reach other businesses? There’s a human behind that business. In an age of constant connection, email in the palm of our hands, mobile and tablet mania, I don’t need to tell you that we are more connected than ever before. As we’ve grown accustomed to this connection with our family, friends, and acquaintances, we expect brands to behave the same. Give your business and your brand a human personality and learn to interact with that persona instead of worrying about getting too personal. (See #1. If someone doesn’t like your brand personality, their not your ideal client. And there are plenty of others out there that WILL connect with your brand personality.)4. Outsource what you avoid
If you find yourself consistently avoiding certain areas of your business, be it the accounting, the social media, the content creation, whatever, it probably means you don’t really love it. Figure out a way to find someone else to take that off your plate, so that you can focus on the good stuff. All of us have areas of our businesses that we really enjoy and areas that we’d rather avoid. For example, my college education is in graphic design, so I’ve got the tools and the background to create printed design materials, but I always ended up putting off my design tasks for my clients.. After seeing myself do this on a consistent basis, I realized that I was better at building relationships with my customers and understanding their design preferences, then translating that to a contracted graphic designer. By understanding your own strengths and watching which tasks you save for last, you may start to notice patterns. Outsource what you avoid and stop distracting your core genius – this will allow you to work ON your business and not just IN your business.5. Document Your Process
Save time and understand your process. I saw a huge change in my own business when I streamlined and documented my processes. Not only did it make personnel growth easier, but it saved a lot of time by not recreating the wheel every time I bring on a new client. The easiest way to get started with process creation and documentation is a free tool like Google Docs. Take the time to think through every step you take for different tasks within your business, and type it out in your process documentation – the more detailed, the better. As you review your process going forward, you may be able to add or change details, leading to a more streamlined system, rather than bouncing around and starting over on every project. What systems have you set up in your business that have helped save time?Alright guys, what changes are you going to go out and make in your businesses? I’d love if you’d drop me an email and tell me about your business and what changes you’re going to make after reading this list.
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Does your sales funnel feel more like a tornado than a calculated, measured process which ends in meeting goals and making sales? There are so many ways to bring traffic into your funnel, whether paid or organic, and I’ll be working my way through a blogging series of my FAVORITE ways to get more traffic into your funnel.In the next five posts, I’ll be talking about utilizing the following campaign tools to get more people into your funnel.
- Facebook ads
- Organic Facebook traffic
- Webinars
- Video Creation
A few notes before we dive in though:
You have to know what you’re selling and to whom.
You can’t have an optimized funnel if you aren’t crystal clear about what you’re bringing to the market and what your ideal client looks like.Don’t forget about the people.
I’m all about people to people – forget business to business and/or business to consumer. There are people behind the businesses and people behind your conversion goals. Keep the people in mind when you’re visualizing your campaign funnel.Be willing to survey “your people”.
You might know your people and know what you’re selling, but do me a favor and read the book Ask by Ryan Levesque, and ask your potential customers what it is they want (not in those exact words of course, because many of your customers may not even know). This can have a huge effect on how you build out your sales funnel… from the verbiage you use to how you package your services and frame your customer interactions.Don’t get overwhelmed.
Your sales tornado, er.. funnel may behave like the storm it resembles. There are lots of moving pieces ebbing and flowing and that’s okay. As a business owner, marketing can be a roller coaster between viewing it at 10,000 feet and trying to swat your way through the fog at the bottom. We can work through it together, building it out, step-by-step, making it easy, and not-overwhelming.Do you have questions about building out a sales funnel? Where do you get stuck?
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Online business owners commonly struggle with digital strategies in three areas:
1. Not knowing and understanding your target audience
It is extremely difficult to market yourself online without a complete understanding of your ideal client. Without knowing how they speak, where they search and what their pain points are, it’s nearly impossible to get the attention your business deserves.
Hang out, listen to their problems, and figure out how you can help.
Do your research. Brainstorm. Test, and test again. Create a worksheet with details and even a picture of your ideal client.
That way, every time you create a blog post, video, Periscope, Facebook post or Instagram image, you know whether it’s going to catch the attention of your ideal audience… because you know them.
2. Inconsistency
“Maybe I’ll write a blog this month, or maybe I will come up with an excuse why I’m not ready to publish something permanent.”
“I just can’t keep up with all of this social media.”
“I’m feeling so burnt out on the social stuff.”You post one day, then not again for 3 weeks. The key to a strong strategy online, is posting, consistently, across your targeted online marketing sources. You want to have constant top of mind awareness with your target customers. When they subconsciously think “I wish I knew someone who could help me with _____.” They’ll instantly remember your name, your photo and your content, because you’ve already addressed their pains and you were memorable.
3. Lack of strategy and SEO knowledge
With strategy comes tracking, and testing. Without a strategy and a plan, you can’t track what is working and what isn’t working.
Without tracking, you’ll never know where to improve.
You won’t know what questions to ask your audience to better serve them.
Basic SEO knowledge, like keyword research and content marketing, will help IMMENSELY. Knowing SEO, and I don’t just mean writing meta tags and alt tags on your site, but understanding how onsite SEO, offsite SEO and content strategy all work together will help you gain confidence and an understanding of your market and how to better reach them – gaining more customers and ultimately making more money!
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Keeping a close eye on your competitor’s activities can be helpful for your business, whether it means identifying new opportunities, honing in on your keywords, or getting a better understanding for your industry. You can use online marketing tools to help you with this task.
Here are some of my favorite tools:
1. Google Alerts – a tool that monitors mentions of your competitors online. Reports are sent to your inbox.
2. SocialMention – monitors mentions but is focused on blogging, video, and social platforms. Key in your search term or company name, and the tool will show what’s being said about the term and how often it’s mentioned.
3. Topsy – a Twitter tool that let’s you look up your competitor’s tweets all the way back to 2006, if necessary. See which tweets were most influential and use a filter on the types of information that you need.
4. Marketing Grader – gives you your competitor’s overall score based on social media activity, blogging performance, SEO, and lead generation.
5. Competitive Research & Keyword Research Gadget – Place it directly on your website to get information on your competitors.
6. InfiniGraph – tracks what’s trending on your social media accounts. Use audience info to know what brands are trending.
7. Google Keyword Planner – focuses more on your own website, but can find competitor data.
8. Instapaper – tool that lets you save Web pages on your bookmark bar that you can access later from PC, mobile devices, or Kindle.
9. Monitor Backlinks – a new tool that lets you follow your competitor’s backlinks and send them straight to your inbox. Know which has the highest and lowest domains and also see their earnings.
10. SEMRush – tool to get information on your competitor’s organic keywords and ranking, ad keywords, and graphic.
11. SpyFu – allows you to know which keywords are targeted by competitors. Keyword list is download able.
12. Website Review from WooRank – multifunctional. It lets you track competitor’s data or use it to optimize your own site.
13. SpyOnWeb – a popular easy-to-use tool to find out what resources belong to a particular owner using a URL, Google AdSense, or Google Analytics code. You can also get results using IP addresses.
14. SimilarWeb – a tool for web rankings that gives you traffic insights for any site. Get global, country, and category ranks with a graph that shows weekly visitor counts in the last 6 months. See how many leads come from searches, referrals, social, or ads. You can even view suggestions of similar sites.
15. Compete Digital Marketing Solutions – type in thee domain and immediately see competitive rankings and unique visitors.
16. What Runs Where – track a list of your competitors and get an alert when they launch a new ad or publish new content.
17. Open Site Explorer – one of the most popular tools that allows you to follow competitor’s link building patterns. See who links back to them in terms of page rank, domain, and anchor text.
18. Ahrefs – shows you the top pages, IPs, and external links about your competitors.
19. Alexa – an advanced Web ranking tool that does linking, traffic, keywords, and more. It is an excellent tool for spying on international competitors.
20. Simply Measured – offers a bit of all on your competitor’s info including trends, traffic and conversions, analysis, social media, etc. With up to 35 reports.
21. Majestic SEO – lets you download link profiles of competitor sites and explore, and use the info as you wish.
22. The Search Monitor – focuses on competitor data. Monitor affiliates and trademarks, as wells as results from Google, Bing, Yahoo!, YouTube, and other platforms like blogs, forums, news, mobile, and shopping.
23. iSpionage – a keyword monitoring tool that shows the best performing keywords and how much the competitor pays for search optimization.
24. Ontolo – a backlinks tool that also focuses on content marketing. Use it to prioritize your content lineup and how to promote chosen contents.
25. Link Prospector – offers many link building features. Choose a report and type in your key phrases to generate link building opportunities that suit you.
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The realm of web-based marketing has a number of very important benefits that cannot be found in other marketing mediums. One of the most helpful of these benefits is the ability to analyze the success of a your marketing campaigns with a variety of tools available on the web, the most prevalent of which is Google Analytics. However, while Google Analytics are easy to view, many businesses struggle with taking action on the results.
For example, a business might find that a particular blog post or landing page is attracting a lot of traffic, but it can be difficult to use that information to help grow your site traffic on a broader level. So, many businesses looking to improve their online presence are raising the question: how can analytics be used to write good content for the right audience? Take a look at our tips on the three things you can learn about your website’s visitors from Google Analytics!
1. Gender & Age of Visitors
Any good marketer will tell you that one of the first steps in getting to know your audience is researching their age and gender. Google Analytics provides you with both of these statistics, which can prove very useful when trying to attract more traffic. For example, if you were writing content about planning a wedding your audience would likely (and hopefully) be from a younger demographic. Similarly, if you were writing content about men’s fashion, you would hope to see the demographics skewed towards a male audience.
2. Interests
Just gaining an idea of the demographic of your audience is often times not enough. A more crucial question to be asking is what are the interests of my audience? Google Analytics also provides this information to you. While this is very helpful in creating advertisements, it can also be used to gauge the effectiveness of the content you are writing. If you are a manufacturing company, you would like to see statistics that suggest your audience is interested in your product or services, rather than something completely unrelated.
3. Geographic Location
The final piece to the puzzle of getting to know your audience is geographic location, another statistic that is provided in Google Analytics. This insight is helpful in two primary ways. The first way this information can be helpful is in seeing if you are reaching the right geographic location for the possibility of gaining new clients. A cleaning service in Brainerd, for example, would find little value in attracting readers from Asia. The second way this information can be helpful applies primarily to businesses operating on a larger (regional, national, or world-wide) scale. The ability to see the geographic location of your audience gives you insight on the culture to which your business should be marketing. If the majority of your audience is from outside of the United States, you would not get very far by posting content that applies only to Americans.
At the end of the day, Google Analytics is a very helpful tool, and can be utilized by businesses of all types to improve their content as well as their overall web presence.
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Consider the process of Googling a topic, product, service, etc. You type in the words you’re thinking (whether they form a coherent sentence or not), hit the enter key, and trust that the most reliable information appears within the first page. After all, who has the time to search beyond that, right? But what exactly determines what the search engines like and don’t like? How does it weed through thousands of pages on one topic in order to present you with the highest quality content? This is where search engine optimization, or SEO, becomes crucial within internet marketing.
Keywords and SEO go hand in hand. However, this doesn’t mean pick a couple of commonly searched-for words or phrases and incorporate them into your site content everywhere you can. Search engines are smarter than that and will identify attempts to cheat the system.
Essentially, search engines like Google use software that “crawls” each and every landing page included in a website, sorting out high quality and relevant content from spam and unoriginal or irrelevant content. So what exactly is it looking for?
1. Page titles
These can be found at the very top of your browser. Each page is saved according to its page title. The pages on your site should be titled consistently with relevant keywords found within content on your website. A common misconception is that the name, logo, or other signature component of a business should be included in the page title. However, think about what users are searching for because it’s probably the product or service you’re providing rather than your company itself.
2. Meta tags and meta descriptions
This component tells the search engine which words and terms are the most important to your site. They should be identical to keywords found within the content on your site. Meta descriptions are typically 50-60 words and include the targeted terms within your content.
3. Content
High quality, user-friendly, and original content is the best thing you can do for your site in terms of traffic and valuable SEO. You will be rewarded by search engines for giving adequate attention to blogs, updates, and other content sources through higher rankings and penalized for copying the content of other sites through much lower search rankings.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to SEO, so don’t expect to get results overnight with one blog post stuffed with one keyword. It’s time-consuming and often times tedious work, that requires a very particular strategy. It can be difficult to set aside the time and energy to learn the ins and outs of proper and effective SEO when you have many other aspects of your company to grow and monitor, which is one of the reasons why hiring an outside source to improve this area can be extremely beneficial. Hiring a digital strategist that specializes in SEO techniques and practices not only takes some of the pressure off of doing it all yourself, but it also provides you with a knowledgeable team member that will help you understand exactly how SEO works and some of the strategies involved with optimizing your web content. In the long run, you may find that you’ve acquired the skills and knowledge to correctly manage SEO on your own, growing your business in ways that you never could have imagined. It’s hard to put a price on that.
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We know that social media and a solid content strategy is important in today’s SEO ranking metrics, but there’s much more to it. While content might be the gasoline that lights the fire, the on-site SEO should be the structure on which the fire burns. If you’re missing one of these key components of SEO, your site likely isn’t rankings as well as it could be.
The seven areas I review when performing a website audit include:
- Visibility
When I look at the visibility of your site, I’m checking for page errors. These page errors generally indicate a problem with your website’s hosting provider. I also look for robots.txt files that might be restricting search engine robot access to your website. The final visibility issues that may occur on your site are redirects. Do you have the proper redirects (if any) in place? - Meta Details
When performing a meta tag audit, I review your page titles, descriptions and Google Analytics installation. Your site needs to have unique page titles on each page, a unique meta description, and your Google Analytics code installed on each page of your site. An audit should make sure there are no duplicated titles or descriptions, and that no pages on the site are missing the GA code. - Content
Weak content is a major downfall for top rankings. I look at the word count of each page, review for duplicated content, canonical URLs and internal and external links. - Links
It’s important to make sure you don’t have any broken links on your site and also that you’re using appropriate link text to optimize your site for your targeted keywords. When is the last time you looked at your site’s links thoroughly? - Images
Each image on your site should be saved with keywords in the name of the image and then be assigned appropriate alt text. When performing an audit, I’ll look for any broken images, image file names, optimized ALT text, title text and image size. We’ll cover this later, but large images may be the culprit if you’re experiencing a slow performing site. - Semantics
When I look at the semantics of a site, I’m reviewing the site for headings and schema.org data. The headings H1, H2, H3, and so on, are one of the first places the search engine bots screen for keywords. It’s important to make sure this area is well-optimized. The schema.org data helps give the search engines more information about the goals of your site, and may change the way they display the micro data of your site. - Site Speed
Site speed is critical. When I perform a search engine audit for clients, I am looking for site speed performance on the desktop site AND mobile version. After “mobilegeddon”, site performance on a mobile device became vastly important. What type of things slow down your site? I also provide a list of actionable items you can complete to increase your site speed immediately. These action items include tasks like optimizing (shrinking) images file sizes, eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS, leveraging browser caching and more.
Curious how your site measures up in these core areas of onsite SEO? Learn what you can do to improve RIGHT NOW to increase your rankings and sell online.
- Visibility
