Why Optimization Matters for Online Marketing

That’s why search engine optimization (SEO) is so critical for any Internet marketing strategy your company starts. It makes sure your website draws qualified traffic from search engines so your website can take over and convert those visitors into paying customers.

Optimization — and SEO specifically — is the process of improving your website to make it show up better in search engines. But you can also optimize other elements on your website to make them more user-friendly and encourage conversions.

These are just a few parts of your website that you can optimize over time:

• Navigation. You can improve navigation by creating an organized structure for your website. That can include categories, links back to your homepage, search functionality, and more.
• Content. It’s critical to optimize your website’s content to show up for the proper keywords. While you should never stuff lots of keywords onto a page, you should still use them naturally throughout your page’s text to ensure visitors know the topic of your page.
• Code. Since page speed is a major part of a site’s user experience (UX) factor, every page on your site should include sleek, streamlined code. That means every HTML, JavaScript, or Flash element serves a purpose that isn’t repeated by some other element on the page.

In general, if you want to have a successful Internet marketing campaign, you’ll need to optimize your site for success.

In addition, if you use pay-per-click advertising (PPC), you need to optimize those campaigns to get the most traffic possible, too.

But the bottom line is that optimization helps you get better results with each new strategy, meaning you get more returns for less of an investment.

If you’re interested in making more money for less of a cost, contact us online or call 888-601-5359 to discover how you can get started today!

These are the specific actions you can take to make sure your Internet marketing strategies are working at their fullest potentials.

How can businesses optimize their marketing campaigns?

When you’re optimizing your online marketing, you’ll use similar steps, but you won’t implement the same changes every time.

Sometimes the change you need to make is obvious, like typos or links that lead to 404 pages.

Others aren’t obvious, like determining the best call to action to use, so someone will go to your site.

Either way, the solution to finding those areas of optimization is simple — tracking.

Tracking

Regularly tracking your marketing campaigns means you’re constantly in the know about how much you’re spending, how much you’re making, and how you can change the campaigns you’re using.

Typically, you need to use an analytics tool to properly track all of your online marketing information, like Google Analytics. That’s not to say every metric is important to your campaign’s success, though — some metrics are critical to a marketing campaign, and others aren’t.

For example, if your marketing goal is to keep more people on your site for long periods of time, then you’re not necessarily looking for an increase in site traffic or page views. However, the “time on page” metric is the most important metric you could use.

On the other hand, if you’re looking to increase the overall number of conversions on your site, then the “time on page” metric isn’t as important as the amount of traffic you earn. After all, you need traffic if you’re going to get more conversions!

Analytics tools track all of these metrics (and more) so you can regularly check on the information you need to succeed. Plus, they’re almost always free, which is helpful for marketers on a budget.

Aside from tracking, you should also use another common optimization strategy to get the most out of your online marketing.

A/B testing

A/B testing — also called “split testing” — lets you test one element on your site or ads at a time, so you can see if a slight change can create a big difference in your conversion rate. You can also use A/B testing for other purposes, but the most common is conversions.

An A/B test is one of the most common forms of testing online, and it’s incredibly helpful to see what you need to do to make your marketing better.

And don’t ever assume that any element is too small to test — even a slight change in color, wording, and even your URL can result in a better conversion rate than you previously had.

The biggest rule to remember about A/B testing is that you can only test one element at a time. Otherwise, you won’t know what caused a positive change in your marketing.

Create an exact goal before you run a test (like “increase conversions by 1%) and use a testing tool like Visual Website Optimizer to follow through. Then, you can run tests on email subject lines, call-to-action buttons, blog titles, and more.

The final step of the process is to repeat it. Once you optimize one element of your campaign, test and optimize other elements, even if you’ve tested them before. It’s the only way to make sure you’re getting the best results out of your marketing strategies online.

WebFX has worked in optimization for decades

WebFX was founded in 1997, and that means we’ve been working in optimization for decades. In that time, we’ve kept up with every optimization trend and search engine update to make sure we consistently help our clients grow. And now we want to do the same for you!

Contact us today to create an optimization strategy for your company!