Digital Marketing: Strategies & Tactics To Grow Your Website

If you run an agency or operate as a freelancer, you’ll know that client reporting is one of the most valuable and most tedious tasks that you can do.

Even though keyword rank does not directly matter the way it used to, local SEO rankings can still be valuable for small local businesses.

NAP stands for “Name, Address, Phone Number.”

NAP is the core element of local business citations (aka listings) across the Internet.

So you want to promote your website online…for free, preferably.

By now, you probably know from experience that the “build it and they will come” philosophy is flawed. You can have great content — in fact, you need at least “good” content — but unless you know how to promote it, your site is a ghost town. But you also don’t have the budget to go straight to advertising online.

You don’t need a grab bag of tips and tricks. You don’t need best practices to “go viral”. What you need is an actual process to follow consistently to create a “flywheel effect“.

Here is an exact, step-by-step strategy that I recommend to anyone who wants to promote their website online. The specific details vary, but it’s a pretty tried and true path for anyone who wants to promote their website.

Traditional keyword research has a tragedy of the commons problem. The more people that use a common keyword research sources, the less valuable those sources become.

So you have a rapidly growing local business, and you are looking to expand. You have the brand, the capital, and the processes to open a second or even third location.

You’re in a growing metro area with lots of opportunity and open real estate.

And yet, you know that every real estate agent and business analyst will tell you that long-term success depends on “location, location, location.”

Now, if you were a national retail chain or a franchise owner, you could hire a location consultant to comb through census data and expensive proprietary business intelligence.

But you aren’t sure it’s truly worth the price. After all, your local real estate agent knows most of the metro market. And you generally know what the Census data says…even though the Census data is almost 10 years old.

So what can you use to gather hard data about what locations are most likely to succeed?

Creating content for your website requires a ton of time, money & resources to do well. But when it doesn’t generate visitors or sales – it’s a huge waste.

There are a lot of reasons why a piece of content might not perform well, but you can dramatically increase your odds of success by prequalifying your content idea.

Anyone who owns a website and recognizes the opportunity to get visitors from Google organic search suspects the importance of keywords.

If you can appear in those results when someone types in a certain keyword – that’s not only a visitor…but a highly qualified, free visitor.

Wikipedia is the 800 lb gorilla in the Google search results. It ranks for almost half of all searches. It is the online resource. Google has even built large portions of its Knowledge Graph off the back of Wikipedia.

It’s also a motherlode of SEO resources – right behind Google Keyword Planner, Google Search, and Google Analytics. It’s useful for both on-page & off-page SEO for 2 reasons –

• Wikipedia is human knowledge. It uses language the way humans use it, because it’s written by humans. It connects topics and keywords in ways that only humans can.
• Wikipedia is the online resource. People trust it, use it, and reference it.

So whether you are just starting out planning your website’s keyword strategy, looking for new content ideas, or looking for ways to build trust for your website, here’s how to use Wikipedia for SEO and content marketing.

Quora is the largest question and answer website on the internet. It has been around since 2009.

While Quora never achieved the cultural prominence that it was hyped up to be in the mid-2000s, it has become a staple of the internet.

Quora allows you to get answers from real experts or at least people in relevant industries. Unlike Google, Facebook or Twitter, it allows you to get more nuanced answers.

But like any giant website with lots of user-generated content like Wikipedia, Pinterest or Reddit, it’s an absolute gold mine for SEO and content strategy.

Here are some ways that I use Quora for SEO, content development and link building.

LinkedIn has been one of the continually growing social networks on the Internet for years. But like Pinterest and Reddit, it has such a deep internal culture focused on recruiting & jobs that it gets written off by small & large content marketers alike.

SlideShare is an unsung staple of the Internet. It’s the place that’s all too familiar to conference goers, trade show attendees, and corporate pitch decks.

SlideShare is simply a website where anyone can upload and share a presentation. It’s owned by LinkedIn and it’s free and open to all, and promises to help you “share what you know and love through presentations, infographics, documents and more.”

And like other massive user-generated content websites like Quora, Wikipedia, and Reddit, it is a absolute goldmine for SEO and content strategy.

Here’s how to use SlideShare for keyword research, content development, and link building.

The biggest problem for website owners and marketers in 2020 and beyond isn’t the tools available. It’s figuring out how to use the tools they have.

What Is Ahrefs?

Ahrefs is one of the most powerful suites of social media & SEO tools that I’ve ever used. Most SEOs know it as a “backlink checker” that competes with Majestic, Mangools, Moz, and SEMRush. But “backlink checker” grossly undersells Ahrefs as a marketing suite.

Ahrefs has so many features that you can get lost and resort to simply staring at your own links – maybe rank tracking a few keywords. Here’s the guide to how to use Ahrefs that I wish existed when I first signed up.

*Reader’s Note 1 – all images are clickable if you want to see the full resolution.