When auditing a small business website for SEO that targets the local Hong Kong market, simply getting the attention of audience from organic search is not enough. The small biz should be stretch to integrate SEO with the overall plan of digital marketing. It is not like many years ago, an experienced SEO company could focus on working on search engine optimization campaigns for client’s business without touching much of content marketing. These days marketing techniques do cross over one another.
Take social media marketing as an example. When an individual is in the social media marketing specialist role, she doesn’t only have to cover this single channel. What she is expected is to be able to fit her work, projects and daily operations into the bigger picture of integrated marketing (or digital marketing).
Today, the landscape of an integrated digital marketing campaign for a Hong Kong business website may have to involve all of the following channels before it can strive:
- Search engine optimization with emphasis on local Hong Kong SEO
- Search engine marketing (including Google Ads and other paid search platforms)
- Native advertising, programmatic advertising and retargeting ads
- Content marketing and content creation
- Mobile marketing with the help from the above channels
- Forum marketing and Q&A site marketing
- Social media marketing through Facebook, etc
- Email marketing and CRM
For example, the overall digital and social media marketing role has to keep up-to-date the latest trends in digital and social media marketing, operate under a 360 degree multi-channel communication environment, understanding the changes in consumer journey and customer engagement, implement customer segmentation and customer persona, and integrate the attribution among paid, earned and owned media.
Identifying the objectives is important for the business. Overall objective should be set for the overall marketing effort. Each individual digital marketing channel including SEO, paid search, social media, etc should have its own key performance indicators (KPI). When it comes to performance monitoring of your business website, start with Google Analytics (as the default web analytics tool).
Firstly you can see your most important analytics data through the dashboard reports. Then follow it through by finding out which online campaign (especially those ad campaigns) have been bringing your site the most visitors and/or conversions (i.e. leads or sales). Find out where (i.e. which countries/cities) all these most frequently visited users are from. Figure out the 5-10 mostly viewed pages on your site. These popular pages must have some reasons people are visiting them the most often. This way, you can set up the priority to get optimize these pages just like how you would normally optimize landing pages for specific marketing promotions.
