Keeping Up with Digital Marketing Best Practices

It’s 2018,  the digital landscape is changing and marketers have to adapt. In order to make sure OTM sticks to the latest digital marketing best practices, Stacia Fortenbery, our Digital Strategy Specialist, went to Seattle to attend MozCon, and project manager Mollie Coniglio and I went to Denver’s Digital Summit in July.

Five days of seminars gave us a lot of insight into the latest digital marketing strategies. That’s a lot of info to absorb and summarize! As we start implementing everything we learned, a few key points jumped out at us. Stacia and I highlighted some key strategies and statistics that jumped out at us:

  • Google’s goal is to organize the world’s information, not just the world’s websites. This means it crawls websites but also ingests information more efficiently from: feeds, APIs, databases.
  • Google’s search engine results pages are changing the way people search and find information. Google now provides answers to people’s questions directly on the SERP page, resulting in a lot of “no-click” searches in which users find their answers immediately on Google. For every 10 organic clicks, 8.8 searches result in no-click searches.
  • Our audiences are not that interested in being engaged by us. Marketers tend to conflate content marketing and blogging. High-quality content is not the same thing as effective marketing. Businesses are screaming about themselves instead of being customer-centric.
  • 4 Steps to Intent Optimization
    1. List all of the tasks and problems the searcher ins attempting to solve with their query
    2. Visit all the pages ranking int he top 10-20 results, and add to your list any tasks they’re helping to solve
    3. Use related searches, search suggestions, ranking competitors and intuition to prioritize the list
    4. Write a title/headline that covers the top 1-3 and optimizes the page’s layout to solve the questions in order
  • Instead of trying to beat the top organic ranking websites – try and get on them. For example, searching for top credit cards, Nerdwallet ranks #1 organically, so the goal for Chase Bank would be to get listed in that article by Nerdwallet, not to BEAT Nerdwallet in being first (because that is not going to happen – most likely).
  • If you target smaller sites and bloggers with PR efforts, you aren’t likely to get traffic. Targeting the large sites gives you more for your efforts.

Digital marketing best practices have evolved so much that keyword-stuffing SEO techniques are starting to look primitive. OTM is devoted to adapting to keep our clients’ digital game one step ahead of their competitors.