Beating the digital marketing terrain takes a lot that most businesses are still yet to figure out. There seem to be infinite processes to create, campaigns to manage and track, and marketing gurus on LinkedIn sharing their profound yet unimportant secrets.
You’re often left wondering if you’ve made even the slightest progress toward having a cohesive marketing strategy while sitting at your desk because you can’t tell yet.
Here’s a secret; Digital marketing does take much planning and strategizing. To top it off, you don’t get results immediately because it is a process. Thankfully, through frameworks like the digital marketing funnel, you can make sense of the chaos.
Similar to sales funnels, digital marketing funnels are ways of looking at website traffic and conversions.
They support marketers by allowing them to track prospective customers as they move through various stages.
However, to be a successful digital marketer, you must understand digital funnels, why they are essential. Before we go further, let’s take a brief look at digital marketing funnels.
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What Is a Digital Marketing Funnel?
A digital marketing funnel is a model that depicts the entire customer buying journey and highlights all the steps customers take from when they first learn about a product to when they make a purchase.
A digital marketing funnel aims to direct qualified traffic at the top, nurture the traffic with content marketing and other frameworks, and convert that traffic into paying customers.
Businesses need to move modern consumers through the entire marketing funnel if they want to connect with them. Being active across various platforms and bringing back engaging marketing content is required.
You cannot change the hard fact that leads are at the top of the marketing funnel, but you can redesign your digital marketing strategy to create a better funnel.
Instead of concluding with a click that sends users to your website, the digital marketing funnel’s final stage should involve a satisfying interaction with your team.
To do this, you must have guided your customers through the funnel so that they are happy with their interaction with you and look forward to a repeat transaction or purchase.
The digital marketing funnel has been separated into stages to help organizations better understand and steer prospective clients through these processes.
These stages will help you identify where your clients are in the customer journey and provide insights into what methods to use at each level.
Stages of the Digital Marketing Funnel
Awareness
The awareness stage is at the top of the funnel, where potential clients become aware of your product or service. This is where your content comes into place.
You build trust in the awareness stage by sharing your knowledge and experience and providing value-added services which give customers a reason to choose you over a rival who merely sells items.
Your goal at this point is to attract potential customers. In the initial stage, customers search for the product they require and a solution to their query.
To attract more customers, increase your content, so it responds to inquiries about your products from customers without requiring assistance. To react quickly to any frequent questions from visitors, you could, for example, include a FAQ section on your website.
A thorough, outstanding, and informative piece of content can attract more visitors still looking for specific products and services.
When designing an SEO marketing funnel, you should focus on the keywords that people use to search for the products you sell. It is recommended to use long-tail keywords because they are specific and less competitive than short phrase keywords, helping your website rank higher.
Research
In the second stage of the digital marketing funnel, customers are almost ready to make a purchase, but they need more information about the product.
96% of website visitors won’t make a purchase at the first visit. You are responsible for developing a plan to help them remember your product and persuade them to buy it from you.
To do this, you must make efforts to appear more on search engine results pages.
Content is the best way to attract new visitors and win their business. It makes sense that customers considering your website’s product options would have a range of inquiries about specifications and prices that could help them choose which item to buy.
The best content for SEO goes beyond just being optimized for search engine ranking algorithms. Concentrate on producing content that gives users the required knowledge and helps them on their journey.
Remember that whether you’re writing a blog post or a product description, you must incorporate keywords into all of your writing, as well as your meta descriptions and titles. It will improve your ranking and make it easier for customers to find you.
Conversion
When you create high-quality content, you attract more people to your brand. However, this is insufficient because the number of visitors does not affect your ability to make money. You must convert them into clients before you can monetize them.
If you’ve already written product descriptions and blog posts about your products, you should focus on providing relevant information they aren’t looking for in this final stage.
At the end of this stage of the SEO marketing funnel, users should have all the information they need to make informed purchases. You may show your prospective clients reviews, case studies, or even testimonials about your products or services at this stage.
It is also beneficial to increase your perceived authority and dependability. Customers are more likely to buy from you if they see high ratings for products with thousands of reviews than your competitor with only 100 reviews.
When comparing your product with competitors’ products, emphasize why customers should choose yours.
The more information you can provide your customers, the better off you will be, so take the time to go above and beyond. Well-designed SEO funnels can entice the right readers and keep their interest until the conversion point.
Improve Your Digital Marketing Funnel Using these Tips
Build an SEO-Friendly Website
Always take measures to maximize your efforts to build a funnel with an effective SEO strategy. Ensure that your funnel’s foundation, which is the creation of your website, reflects your SEO intent.
One of the ways to build an excellent foundation for your digital marketing funnel through SEO is to choose the right content management system for your website.
An SEO-optimized CMS includes a template system for quick website building and other capabilities to keep your site running smoothly. Furthermore, its different plugin features make it easy to fulfill your search engine ranking goals.
For example, the WordPress content management software has some fantastic plugins, such as Yoast SEO, that make fundamental SEO easy to grasp and provide instructions for generating website content.
Create Helpful Original Content
You educate your audience by creating content. Therefore, your content creation and SEO plan must go hand in hand to build an effective digital marketing funnel.
Content marketing is critical in helping your website rank higher in search results. When you produce content, you attract leads searching for information about your industry to your page.
If you want an efficient SEO marketing campaign, you must invest in a high-quality content marketing strategy.
Remember that you are trying to attract website visitors in the initial stage of your digital marketing funnel. To do that, you must have something that compels your website visitors to stay on your web page after they arrive.
Product is not always enough. Customers or prospective customers now have more questions than ever, and the internet is where they find answers. Having the answers ready for when they need it wins you loyal and long-term clients with little need for convincing on your part.
However, don’t forget to incorporate keywords research into your content creation. The SE Ranking tool can help you track keywords with complete accuracy at any time and from any location.
It also comes with a tool that compiles a thorough comparison of your website and those of your competitors, including information on traffic distribution, organic keyword competition, and the top 5 organic competitors for your niche.
In addition to winning your customers, creating helpful content in your niche helps establish you as an authority, thus increasing your website traffic and ranking on search engines.
Use SEO Across Sales Funnel
Your sales funnel aids in bringing customers to you. It includes phases like pre-sales and marketing. At this stage, you send your sales and marketing materials to your prospective customers so they can see what services you provide and decide on purchasing from you.
You must optimize every step of your sales funnel to avoid losing prospective clients. This means you must apply the same SEO strategies you intend to use on your website everywhere, including your marketing or campaign copies.
When creating quality content for your websites, use keywords. Make sure to include these keywords in all marketing and advertising materials.
Doing this helps build a powerful brand image that persuades new visitors to use your brand for business. Additionally, it maintains a consistent brand voice throughout all of your content.
Long-Tail Keywords
According to studies, long-tail keywords account for more than 70% of online searches. Long-tail keywords increase your sales and marketing efforts by improving your ability to reach more individuals.
For example, a user gets on a search engine and searches “search engine optimization guidance.” A long-tail term for this search might be “search engine optimization tips for small enterprises.” Most users often search these specific terms, so targeting these kinds of long keywords and phrases is an excellent SEO approach.
Long-tail keywords are more effective since they have less competition and greater purpose. Use them while running a tailored SEO campaign.
Ahrefs provides the most comprehensive keyword research tool, including suggestions, difficulty scores, and other features.
In addition, the software includes a free keyword rank checker, which allows you to see where you rank in Google for your chosen keywords.
Internal Linking
Internal links are the bedrock of good SEO. They make it easy for users to traverse the critical pages of your website. Internal links provide structure and meaning to your website and its content. It informs search engines that your sites and content have relevant information to a user query.
Internal links increase how search engines explore and index your sites. To enhance SEO and sales, use best practices for internal linking. Conduct a link audit every few days to ensure that no links are broken or point to pages that have been deleted.
Increase confidence in your website by employing internal links to naturally move readers through it, as users are more inclined to remain on it for the additional resources rather than return to the search results.
Do a link audit every few days to make sure that none of the links are broken or lead to pages that have been removed.
Use SEO-Optimized Metadata
Each page of your website has its metadata, which includes things like the page title, header, subheading, and a brief description. Like sitemaps, most of this data is hidden behind the scenes, out of the reach of human readers.
Metadata is critical to web spiders’ ability to identify and rank each page on your site.
Titles may be improved by, for example, including the page’s primary keywords in the title tag. Including these keywords in the meta descriptions is also recommended. Metadata might have varying lengths, so check for the required length for each content before making them.
To avoid being cut off on search engine results pages (SERPs), page headlines should contain no more than 60 characters.
Yoast SEO is one of the greatest WordPress metadata checker plugins. The software tool makes creating meta descriptions easier by providing SEO analysis comments as you write them. It will also notify you if the length of your meta description is too short or too extensive, as well as if the focus key word is missing.
Make sure to optimize your URLs as well. In terms of URL format, Google recommends avoiding lengthy ID numbers and special symbols like underscores in favor of short, descriptive phrases.
Image Optimization
Including graphics in your content helps increase reader engagement by breaking up the writing and spicing up your blogs and articles. However, images might be challenging for web spiders to explore. Therefore, using appropriate alt text is crucial.
Alt texts are the written texts you get when images refuse to load online. Although you can only see them when errors like that occur, they’re always available in the background to help search algorithm index content.
They also enhance the likelihood that your image will show in Google image searches, thus generating more visitors to your website.
Not only do SEO-optimized images improve the user experience on your website, they also raise your ranking in search engine results, attracting more users to your website.
Always use human-friendly language in your alt text, and ensure it accurately describes the image. Avoid or keep special characters to a minimum.
Increased Page Loading Speed
The loading speed of a website can make or break that website. Page speed refers to the amount of time it takes your content to load when someone visits a page on your site.
The average page loading time for the first-page result on Google is 1.65 seconds. In other words, if your website is incredibly slow, you may be unlikely to appear on Google’s first page.
A slow web loading page increases the bounce rate on a website as modern website visitors will choose loading another website over waiting for a slow loading page to open. This could, in turn, send negative feedback to the search engine.
Once that happens, your ranking may reduce, as page speed is one of the factors Google takes into consideration when ranking web pages.
To improve your page speed, consider the following:
- Performing web hosting solutions
- Cached web pages
- Compressed images
- Minimize redirects
With Google Analytics, you can see which pages on your site take the longest to load and monitor your progress toward faster page loads.
Be Consistent
By continuously publishing fresh content, you can keep your website up to date with the latest news and beat off competitors for the top spot. It also tells Google that your site is still up and running, which is more important for SEO. Inactivity means fewer visitors for an algorithm, which reduces ranks.
However, producing a constant supply of long-form, high-quality content can be challenging, especially for smaller marketing teams. Creating a six- to a twelve-month plan of upcoming material can help you keep organized.
For instance, Workfront will aid you in planning and highlighting the most crucial assignments and upcoming deadlines. Additionally, the software provides real-time information on project modifications to help you and your team members be as productive as possible.
If paying a team of copywriters is out of your budget, consider hiring a few exceptional guest bloggers instead. These must be reputable subject matter experts who are well-known in your business.
Making this a priority boosts your overall domain authority and makes your content as shareable on social media as possible.
Update Old Content
Freshness is an important ranking factor for Google’s algorithms. However, as previously said, maintaining a continual supply of new information can be difficult. One solution is to update current content regularly.
Examine old posts for new information, then republish or edit them. You only have to do this once a year to maximize the SEO potential of your website without having to create something entirely fresh.
For instance, if in the previous year, you posted content titled “Best ranking factors for 2021,” there is a possibility that the information might have changed or needs a few additions to meet the requirements for 2022 best ranking factors.
Negligence to update previous content might prompt search engines to provide users with newer updates for another website, thus negatively impacting your rankings. With its SERP analyzer and content editor, SurferSeo can evaluate your written material for search engines, including blog posts and articles.
Track Your Progress
To optimize your SEO approach, you may use Google Analytics to track your website’s progress over time by comparing previous performance to current data.
Finding the pages that are performing the best and adding extra calls to action or keywords to them is a straightforward approach to increasing your website’s performance.
Google Analytics may also examine other data, such as organic vs. non-organic traffic to determine what works and identify further opportunities to enhance your results.
Mobile Optimized Website
More than 70% of online users reach the internet from their mobile phones. As a result, it is essential that you use a website with a mobile responsive design as even search engines place more value on mobile-friendly sites.
Mobile sites are ideal for sales since users can check out the product and buy it safely on the same device.
In contrast, visitors will negatively perceive your brand and choose more mobile user-centric sites if the mobile version of your site is challenging to navigate.
Having a mobile-optimized website will provide you with a competitive advantage over the competition in terms of both conversions and ranking.
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Promote SEO Content on Your Social Media
Although social networking does not directly affect search rankings, it can favor them in other ways. Sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media networks can enhance traffic to your site, gradually raising its rankings.
While your SEO and social media strategies are most likely separate, there are a few simple ways to combine the two.
Create a schedule for distributing specific website content on social media. Use relevant keywords and hashtags to boost the chances that social media users will discover your posts through organic search.
Tools like SERanking allow you to include a social media sharing button on your website. You generate organic traffic when a web visitor reads anything on your website and decides it is worth sharing for others to learn from.
A/B Testing on Landing Pages
For SEO and online sales, A/B testing is a tried-and-true testing method. A/B testing is used to direct various user groups to similar pages on a website. The objective is to evaluate user engagement and identify the most effective page design and content.
Utilizing A/B testing informs search engines that you are actively working to deliver an improved user experience.
Once you’ve found the page that gets the most outstanding results, keep working on improving its SEO. Sales and conversions will soar as a result of your stellar efforts.
Build Brand Recognition with SEO
Solid brand recognition is necessary for sales. People who learn about your company from reputable sources are more likely to believe it. SEO brand exposure methods directly affect your sales funnel.
Making use of branded keywords is one strategy. Branded keywords are terms and phrases connected to your company name, goods, and services.
A branded keyword is any search engine query that combines the name of your organization, business, or brand with a product or service being sought by a user.
This method for efficient SEO and sales works effectively when clients are aware of your brand. When crafting your content, combine branded and generic keywords; this will, in turn, increase your market share.
When new customers use your company’s name in online searches, it indicates brand familiarity. You obtain additional benefits by extending your customer base when existing clients are exposed to your stuff via organic traffic.
In Conclusion
Using a digital marketing funnel is a fantastic method to reach new customers and boost sales for any business. You can design a marketing plan unique to your company and objectives by comprehending the various stages and adhering to the SEO techniques pertinent to each step.
If you require additional tools for your digital marketing funnel, check out our list of the finest SEO tools.