Digital Marketing Strategies And Goals
Gearing up for Digitalks events in Sydney this Friday and Melbourne the following where I’ll be talking about how to build a stronger brand and with it greater rankings.
What I learned
- Which metric should you focus on to build your brand?
- How to monitor your branded traffic using GSC
- Boost your branded search for better conversion rates
- Should you worry about bounce rate?
- Build a community and not SEO
Transcript
Hey, welcome back, Rankers! Couple of things happening in the next two weeks. If you are in Sydney this Friday, please come and say hello. I’ll be doing the Digitalks with Aquent Vitamin T, Firebrand Talent. They do an amazing job of promoting these events by the way. There’s already I think, 250 at the Sydney event. And there is, we’re doing a Melbourne event the following week, and there’s already 200 there. So, Sydney, Friday May 11th and Melbourne Friday May 18. Just email [email protected] or Google it and I’ll send you a link.
We’re going to talking about things like the stuff we always talk about. Like these sorts of numbers, how do you go from sort of this to this. That’s in only about 18 months, that one. And we’re discussing a lot of those sorts of things and it’s about stronger brands and how businesses are growing their brands, and with it, their ranking.
Boost Branded Search
So this is Skinnymixers’ data. We’ve had a look at this one before. She went from 1200 organic a day to 12,000 organic a day. And she built a brand at home, in Adelaide. And with SEO and digital marketing, generally, it’s all about, which button do you push? Which needle do you try to move? So, we’ll get a client in here, we just got one in recently, actually. A retailer and they should be doing a lot. It’s a brand new site, first venture into online retail, but, strong brand. And one of the ways you can check to see if you’ve got a strong brand is go into Google Search Console, Search Analytics, and what you want to see in there is your branded traffic. You want to get it up at least around 50 percent. Now, you’ve got to have a reasonable sample size to start with. So, as far as clicks go per month, you probably need at least 2,000 to 5,000 at least, before you’re going to see any real data. But, if you can get that branded search up around 50 percent, you’re on the right track to growing your brand. Because if you grow your brand, you’re getting loyal customers, you’re going to get better click through rates, you’re going to get much better conversion rates.
But, for this retailer that has a good brand, their conversion rate was at .2 percent. And he gave us a number that he thought the site should be doing, or he wanted to aim for. And I said, “Well, actually it needs to be five times that. Because, based on the traffic that you have, and based on the conversion rate that you’ve got currently, let’s get it up to x percent. Because you’ve already got traffic there. You’re just not doing enough with it.”
Does Bounce Rate Matter?
So, do you try to get more traffic? Are you trying to maximise the traffic that you get? Do you want to? I mean someone asked me about bounce rate, “Shouldn’t we be worried about bounce rate?” when I showed them that graphic of 1.7 million in 18 months from just SEO alone. And I said, “Well, no, because if I’m getting the right conversion rates and I’m hitting the right revenue goals, why do I care about a bounce rate metric?” Which, in case you don’t know, the bounce rate is a metric you can see inside Google Analytics, and we’re told is about how quickly someone leaves a page. Now, when we look at say, Google’s shopping product listing ads, when we have a look at some of those numbers that people are getting there, and certainly we’ve seen it here, with our own clients … Where you’re getting return on Ad Spend of ten to one, but your bounce rate’s up 70 percent, does it really matter? Are you really that concerned? I think that represents something that is more about a flaw in the calculation of what a bounce rate actually means than anything else. Because, it’s not necessarily a real thing as opposed to a conversion rate, which is actually a real thing. Because you can say, how many people came on to the page, how many people bought. Whereas a bounce rate is … It’s a bit rubbery, I think.
So it’s all about which avenue, which channel do you exploit. If you don’t have any brand recognition … We’re always telling people, right, you’ve got to do something about your brand. What are you doing? What are you doing in PR, are you doing anything in PR? What are you doing on Facebook? So, Nikki Riddle with Skinnymixers, it’s like, a lot of people think, “Well, we need a big massive advertising spin.” Well, that’d be great if you could do that, but, if you can’t do that, you can still build strong brands in your niche with your buyer personas. And that’s what Nikki Riddle did, and that’s what thousands of bloggers have done. And bloggers really put me on to this, because you can see that their traffic increases over time, and they’re really good at building communities. They’re really good at the self-promotion and connecting people. For a lot of them, that’s why they became bloggers. But, these sites are also really, really easy to rank as it turns out. And, basically what they’re doing, they’re focusing on getting audience, or readers. They’re not focused on SEO. They’re not focused on even AdWords. They’re focused on getting exposure for their brands.
And that’s what you have to do, and that’s what we’re going to be talking about at Digitalks in Sydney this Friday, and Melbourne, next Friday. We’ll see you there. Thanks very much. Bye.
Jim’s been here for a while, you know who he is.
