10 SEO Priorities to Tackle as a New Digital Marketing Manager

Intro

Starting a new role as a digital marketing manager is pretty exciting. It’s a chance to put your own stamp on campaigns and be at the forefront of innovative ideas. But starting out in a new marketing role can also be stressful. You’re introduced to new procedures and technologies – at times, it might seem a little overwhelming.

Among other things, you’ll also need to create a winning Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for your organization’s website. This is one of the biggest priorities for a new Digital Marketing Manager; helping to determine your business’s visibility to online customers. But SEO can be difficult to get your head around, especially if you’re coming from a background in paid or social.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is the process of improving your website to rank more highly in search results. It’s a combination of on-page (on your own website) and off-page (on other websites) tactics to make sure you get found for your most desired keywords.

Imagine you’re choosing a location for a retail store. Would you choose (a) the prime location in the center of town or (b) a spot in a run-down neighborhood? It goes without saying that the answer is (a).

The same thought process should guide your approach to SEO. If your website is difficult to find, they’ll go elsewhere. In fact, 75% of people will not go beyond the first page of search results. This is why it’s crucial to work hard and appear in the top 10 results for the keywords your customers search for.

But what are the biggest SEO Priorities? Read on to find out…

Choose the Right Analytics Software

As you execute your digital marketing strategy, you’ll collect all sorts of data. Much of this information can be used to improve your website’s SEO performance. But alone, data is useless, so you first need to be able to understand the information you’re gathering. For that, you’ll need the right analytics tools to help guide your SEO efforts.

This is where Google Analytics (GA) comes in. GA is Google’s flagship software. It’s packed with features that help you to better understand your data. Since its launch in 2005, the tool has received constant updates. Today, it can give you more in-depth information than ever. But how can GA help you to improve your SEO?

Google Analytics comes packed with useful features that let you analyze your website’s performance. You can see how many visitors you get every month, as well as where those visitors come from. You can find your top-performing pages as well as the results they bring based on the goals you set.

Before doing anything with Google Analytics, make sure you pick the right version when setting up the tool. The latest version, Google Analytics 4, comes with new functions that can provide you with even better data. The older version, Universal Analytics, is due to be discontinued in 2023. You might need the help of a digital agency if you plan to migrate universal analytics to GA4.

(Image source: cardinalpath.com)

Set Up Google Search Console

This is another tool that is vital for improving many aspects of your website. Google Search Console reports provide information about the performance of your site. You can use it to find out which of your pages are ranking for certain keywords to better guide your future strategies. You can also uncover potential fatal errors that can cause underperfoming website pages.

When it comes to SEO priorities, Google Search Console should be at the top of the list. The tool is loaded with information that can help give your SEO a boost. You can easily find issues that could make a major impact on search engine performance.

For example, GSC will show you pages that are not getting indexed and therefore, search engines cannot see them. It will also tell you if there are technical glitches that are preventing some pages from showing up on mobile devices.

You can also use GSC to show the latest backlinks to your website - links from other sites to yours. For further help improving backlinks, take a look at Ranktracker’s backlink checker. It’s like Google Search Console on steroids as it has accurate and up-to-date data at all times.

Don’t Forget Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager (GTM) is the last piece of the Google tools puzzle and it is essential in your efforts to improve SEO.

But first, what is GTM? Once you’ve built a website, you’ll want to know how customers are interacting with it. That’s where GTM comes in. You can add tags to your website to track very specific user interactions, such as someone visiting a landing page or purchasing a product.

You can use the insights provided by GTM to improve your website, enabling you to create better user experiences. This is particularly useful when looking to improve your content marketing and create blogs that people want to read and interact with. You can break down user behavior into micro funnels. Which pieces of content are holding a user’s attention the most?

Below are some examples of how the information that GTM can provide.

• How long a user spent scrolling on a webpage

• Information about how users interact with certain elements of your website (landing pages, pop ups, signup forms, etc.)

Know the Scope of the Problem

How many subdomains does your organization run? Larger businesses will run many interconnected web properties, extending their presence online. Whilst this is definitely a good thing, it also exposes a potential problem. The more properties that you run, the greater the likelihood of SEO issues arising.

From day one, it’s important that you know the scope of existing problems. To do so, you’ll need a crawling tool that can scan each of your web properties. Besides the Google tech stack, we suggest running a technical SEO audit of your properties to know what you need to do to get started.

Give Your Site a Speed Boost

No one likes a slow-running website. In fact, data shows that 40% of users won’t wait longer than 5 seconds for a website to load. If you want your website users to stick around, you’ll need to put speed at the heart of everything you do.

(Image source: envisionwebcreation.com)

When choosing a website’s position in search results, Google has put website speed as one of the major ranking signals. This means that if two websites have equally good content, the one that loads faster is going rank higher.

Speed issues are usually technical in nature, so we suggest looking into a tool that will find your current loading speed, broken down by different factors. Once you know the culprit for the slow loading times, you can work on that specific asset of your website - or delegate it to a developer.

Write Better Meta Descriptions

When looking at web pages in search results, you’ll notice that they include a small snippet of information below the link. This is known as a ‘meta description’. A meta description is a useful tool for marketers. A short, catchy description can help to persuade a user to click on an article.

While meta descriptions aren’t the end-all SEO aspect of your website, it’s a great idea to tidy them up to prevent any errors. They need to be a specific length to show up fully in search engine results and they need to be unique for each page and keyword.

Stuck trying to find the best keywords to use? Ranktracker’s keyword tracker might be able to help.

Optimize Your Content

As you craft a content marketing strategy, it might be tempting to think more is better. Publishing new content regularly helps to drive new visitors to your site, and keep people engaged. However, the answer is not in quantity, but rather in quality most of the time.

This is where content optimization comes into play. This is the process of looking at existing content on your site and asking, ‘how could it be better optimized?’. This doesn’t usually mean rewriting an entire article. Instead, it involves considering certain aspects of your content.

Here are some further factors that you might want to consider:

• Have you chosen the right word count? Look at successful articles covering the same topic and check their word counts.
• Are you using keywords as effectively as you could be? Finding the right keywords is an important part of content marketing. But density is also important. Make sure to avoid overusing keywords. More instances of a keyword does not mean that it ranks better - it’s in fact the opposite
• Are you covering related topics? The best articles cover multiple user queries. Head to the ‘People Also Ask’ section in Google to find other relevant topics to include within your article.

The Global SEO software market is huge, so there’s thousands of tools out there to use to help you optimize your content. Ranktracker has a whole suite of tools that can help you in this department.

One example… after you’ve spent time optimizing a page, you’ll want to know how it is performing. Ranktracker’s Ranktracker gives you access to progress updates in your SEO campaigns. You can even receive email alerts when you hit certain targets.

Persuade Visitors to Stay Longer

You’ve probably worked hard to create content for your website. But a user needs to stick around if you’re to reap the SEO rewards. Google has described ‘dwell time’ as one of the leading SEO Priorities. As the name suggests, this is the amount of time that a user sticks on a page and reads an article.

If you have a longer dwell time than your competitors, your pages will appear higher in search results. But to achieve this, you’ll have to think of ways to improve the user experience. Besides writing engaging articles, you can also work on your internal links to encourage visitors to go to other pages on your website, instead of another website

Make Use of Annotations

Over time, you’ll collect large amounts of information. As time moves on, you’ll forget the context of the data. For example, there may have been a large spike in traffic due to a marketing campaign. Looking back a year later, you’ll see the spike but might not remember what caused it.

If you're using Google Analytics, there is a handy tool called ‘annotations’ that can help you make sense of old data. With annotations, you can highlight a specific report, and add additional contextual information. After all, context is everything when it comes to data, and can help you to better predict future trends.

With any luck, your organization will already have set up Google Analytics. If so, your predecessor may have left some annotations behind. Take time to review them and see how they can help inform your future tactics.

Make Your Site Voice Assistant Friendly

Today, more and more people are using voice assistants as a way of finding information online. Unfortunately, this adds a new challenge for website owners. If your content isn’t optimized for voice searches, you are missing out on potential users.

For this reason, reaching these users should be at the top of the list of SEO Priorities for new digital marketing managers. But what can you do to make your website more voice assistant friendly? Start by using more long-tail keywords (keywords that contain multiple keywords). These are the queries commonly used in voice searches.

Another great idea is to make sure that all of your images have great ALT descriptions, explaining what is in the image.

(Image source: clickrain.com)

Keep on Track with SEO

Sometimes it can help to have a simple list of tasks laid out in front of you. If you feel you’d gain from this, consider Ranktracker’s actionable SEO tasks. This provides an easy introduction to SEO.

SEO is a Top Priority

It can be very easy to get distracted by more exciting jobs when starting your new role. You’ll probably want to start building strong teams and planning new marketing campaigns. But remember, SEO should be one of the top priorities for any new Digital Marketing Manager.

As we’ve explored here, there is no one SEO tactic. Instead, there is a whole list of actions you’ll need to complete if your website is to be search engine friendly. It can seem a lot to take on, so try and approach SEO in multiple steps.

With the right approach, you’ll be well on your way to crafting the perfect SEO strategy. As you get SEO out of the way, you can get on to other important digital marketing tasks, such as growing your business’s share of voice.

So, what are you waiting for? Start tackling SEO today!