With the present powerful analytics tools, a website can bring you a great deal of useful information. How to harness those data for the company’s digital marketing endeavours?
MENU SET 3: All roads lead to Rome, and all digital marketing efforts start with the website!
When a company hires you to take over their digital marketing, you probably have a lot of questions about where and how to start. If you have a team, perhaps the answer is simpler, but if you work for a startup, where everyone is too occupied to brief to you what needs to be done, or people actually don’t have a clue what to do to improve their digital marketing. Voilà, you’ve been entrusted with the tasks to take care of the situation on your own!
What are you going to do first?
This menu set will provide you with the first three phases you can start with.
Phase 1: I call it “Digital – checkup”
Website audit:
You can use these tools for website auditing such as Ahrefs, SEM Rush, and KWFinder or many other tools suggested online. I have tried these and personally prefer Ahrefs. Their user-interface is friendly, coupled with rich information on their blog, you can basically search for any concepts or terms you aren’t sure when using their tools and dashboard.
Below is an example of the dashboard overview when I did the audit for Bose Sleepbuds, using Ahrefs tool and on the left side menu, you can access to the details of each category.
When the tool finishes crawling your website, you can see in the report, where are the problems and the aspects that can be improved.
When you click on the numbers on the right column, you will be directed to the detailed view of the pages that have problem and the suggestions to improve.
Now you can have the task list for the first week at work!
Obviously, to improve these issues, you do need to understand the customers, the business goal, the product and many more. However, in the scope of this post, I only mention and explain the practical tasks a digital marketer can do when working with a new website.
Are the pages indexed properly?
Besides using these tools to audit the website, you can check if the website is indexed properly. What does that mean by “indexing a site properly”?
As mentioned in the previous post, search engines’ crawler team is always on the hunt for new and updated stuff on the internet in order to get those indexed. You can check when is the last time your website gets crawled by Google’s search engine at Google Search Console:
It’s highly likely that the company’s pages are already indexed, but are the contents new? Are there anything that aren’t valid anymore or can be improved?
Take TripAdvisor as an example. The texts: “See all. The world’s largest travel….” are called meta-description. It’s what the user will see about your website on the internet.
With website audit, we can only see the problems, however, even if there is no problems, the contents of the meta descriptions can be outdated when the business is progressing.
Check out how your webs pages are indexed by simply typing site:your domain onto Google browser.
You can go through the main important pages and check if there are anything that can be updated or improved. If a user uses search engines to look for some keywords in your industry, these are expensive spots for your “sales pitches” about what your company is doing and whether those texts trigger clicks or not.
Phase 2: “Digital – Fix-up”
To go to this phase, I suppose you already learn about the company’s business in the first (few) weeks. You can’t just detect the problems and fix them whatever way. There is this tip I learned from Robert W.Ly in Copywriter’s Handbook when it comes to writing ads that sell:
Let me tell you how I go about writing a headline. You may find these techniques useful in your own work. First, I ask three questions:
1. Who is my customer?
2. What are the important features of the product?
3. Why will the customer want to buy the product? (What product feature is the most important to him?)
Robert W.Ly
I find these not only helpful in writing ad headlines but also in writing contents. Learn as much as you can about the new company you just get in, you’ll then find ways to fix those things on the site.
It depends if the fix-up is major or not, you can request Google to recrawl your site to accelerate the process. In the end, Google will crawl and fetch those updates, but why wait when you can actually request indexing:
Access your Google Search Console, use URL inspection tool, paste your website URL here and click Request indexing.
The time for the process depends and it can take a few hours, a few days or even a few weeks. Submitting the request twice doesn’t speed up the process, so be patient. You have to be in queue!
Phase 3: “Digital – Game-up”
What are the important key building blocks of a digital marketing strategy?
It largely depends on the business type, industry, scope, mission and vision to allocate their resources into different areas of digital marketing.
In this article, I only introduce how to start your digital marketing journey with a new website, and how to use the data provided by the website to improve SEO and influence other channels’ contents.
When doing the website auditing with Ahrefs, you can utilize the tool to dig deeper in keyword research, checking how big is the volumes of the keywords and what are their ranks on SERP(s).
The tool also offers keywords & phrases generation, which can give you more ideas on how to improve your current SEO.
If you make a word map from those keywords from the tool, you’ll probably have ideas for your social media contents, Facebook ad headlines and more.
With SEM Rush, you can also have access to these toolkits available within the platform:
Good luck with your endeavour! And a bonus point: it’s always good to audit your competitor’s website too!