Google can guide your marketing
If you work for a small business or non-profit organization most likely you don’t have a big marketing budget or SEO and inbound experts on staff like at a multi-million tech start-up. Don’t fret, there are good resources available from Google to help you determine if your digital marketing program is on track.
Websites on the Go
According to the Pew Research Center, 68% of U.S. adults have a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011 which means more people expect to access content on their phones or tablets. Your website needs to be mobile ready for your on-the-go audience. You can check to see if your website is mobile optimized with Google’s online test. Just type in your website and click “analyze.” I’m always surprised to see how many organizations don’t have a mobile-friendly website since this is an easy problem to fix. Wordpress, Squarespace and Wix offers a variety of mobile-friendly templates.
Speedy Pages Leads to Engaged Users
How fast your website pages download across all devices, makes a difference in how long people will stay on your site and browse what you have to offer. Google’s Page Speed Insights analyzes your website address and scores for user experience and the time it takes to download your web pages. Once your results pop-up, you can access detailed instructions for improving page speeds. Just a word of advice, don’t attempt to tinker with your website if you’re tired. Also, you might want to consider handing this task off to your webmaster. A good web designer will already have a handle on the importance of this. But if they don’t, just knowing about this potential problem is a good thing.
You Ought to Know What’s Trending
To build a good content strategy for your organization and brainstorm topics and keywords to drive the best traffic to your website, Google Trends is a helpful tool. Type in keywords or topic ideas to gauge popularity over a period of time and by region and even do a comparison against other ideas. Look in the related search section to learn about other queries based on your search terms and see what’s rising in popularity.
For example, for the topic of “social work” you’ll see the search popularity for this term has declined against all other Google searches. This could be because of the increased amount of content published on the Internet which makes it unlikely “social work” would trend against bigger headline news. This also means, if you’re writing about social work or selling into the social work space, you have a smaller but potential more interested audience.
Within the “social work” niche, you’ll see related queries are “Master of Social Work,” “social work jobs,” and “school social work.” This indicates other topics people are searching for online. Under queries, toggle to the rising tab to see which search queries which have had the greatest traction.
So I hope this helps to get you thinking about how to improve your marketing program especially on a small budget. Also, check out this great article from HubSpot, 10 SEO Tools to Analyze Your Website Like Google Does.