The year 2020 has been exceptional in many ways, to say the least. Around the world we have seen floods, fire, pestilence and now we also have a global pandemic (Covid-19, or Corona Virus as it is often known). If this year doesn’t go down in the history books as one of pure Armageddon, we will all be amazed for sure.
The year in the UK has seen many businesses fail, and others working hard to survive by diversifying where they can. Sit-in restaurants offering take-aways, pubs building outdoor marquees to ensure they can still serve a pint (outdoors of course), retailers maximising on the online opportunity, and manufacturers going from making car parts to building respiratory machines for hospitals to try to save as many lives as possible. Us Brits, and others like us around the world, are amazing!
With lockdown and shielding meaning people are more indoors than ever before, holidays cancelled, potentially Christmas too, the rise of the online shopper has been prolific.
The global coronavirus pandemic is affecting consumer behaviour worldwide. In the week ending June 14, online traffic in the supermarket segment increased by 60.7 percent compared to the reference period in January and February 2020. Online visits in the tourism sector decreased by 47.5 percent during the measured period. – Source Statista.
So how can you, as a business owner, help yourselves to a little part of this digital landscape?
As Digital Marketing Experts, we show you how!
Things to look out for are the type of audience you are receiving – are your website visitors coming from a desktop, laptop or mobile.
Secondly look at the bounce rate, if this is high, then ask yourself why. Look at page speed too, if a page loads really slowly, it could be hurting your user experience.
As friends and family to use your website and highlight the areas that they find annoying – you may find that this aligns itself with the high bounce rate pages. As then to try different pages, focusing on those with high bounce rates and slow speeds, and also ask them to use different devices.
Now you know the pain points, you can make changes to your user experience.
THIS IS SO IMPORTANT – because it is not just Google we are looking to make happy, but your website visitors must feel welcome on your website and not put off by buttons that do not click, images that do not load, and videos that go off the edge of their mobile device so they cannot see it in glorious full detail.
Your aim is to make the user happy, and in turn you will achieve better results with Google who include user experience as a part of their algorithm.
Remember, Google is a programme and as such, it cannot see. So it has to take its lead from the data it receives, which is why looking at your Google Analytics data is so important.
Google also sees data from Google Search Console, and again if you do not have this in place, we strongly recommend that you sign up for it. This is where 1) google sees more data but also 2) you can influence what Google sees.
In Google Search Console you can ask google to review a page and consider it for indexing. In most cases, you will be able to submit a Sitemap, which changes as you add more content onto your website. However, some platforms do not have that ability, so submitting page by page is something we would then recommend. Make it a part of your routine whenever you write a blog post or create a new page or product on your website.
Google also includes a lot of testing links, so you can test how Google sees your site on a mobile device for example.
Get in front of people fast.
So how do you now get your exceptional website in front of those people who are searching for your products or services right now?
Content is the answer. Creating new content and therefore new pages means you have more opportunity to be found. Don’t just write for the sake of writing, create something that will be interesting for your viewers, something they would find useful and informative. This will lead to people finding the page because they are genuinely interested, which in turn leads to a lower bounce rate, which is (if you remember) a part of the Google Algorithm as it evaluates the data for User Experience.
That will lead to organic traffic, the kind that you earn, not the kind that you pay for, however, you do need to keep adding content for the long-term benefits, and to enable that steady growth of web visitors.
And, yes you can pay for traffic too using Google Ads (often referred to as PPC). Working with a Google Partner (like M3 Strategic Marketing) will in fact save you money, as we use our experience to help you reduce the cost per click and increase your conversions – conversions being what we determine together, and a way of measuring success, which is often a form completion, or could be a sale on an ecommerce website. It could be a phone call or even a send of an email. Whatever you determine is a valuable action on your website, we need to measure it and your budget should be geared towards getting the best for your money.
Of course, this means that M3 would need to ensure your website is fit an healthy too, and that the User Experience on the landing page we are directing traffic to is a good one., But also we need to ensure that we are getting the right kind of traffic.
Anyone can get clicks… We make sure very click counts!
