You have a ton of food at your house and if you don’t eat it, it will go to waste.  The food isn’t prepared and it looks like a lot of work and you think, screw it – I am going out to eat.  The place you pick to eat is packed but smells delicious.  You’re not quite sure if it will be better than the food that is definitely going to waste at home, it is going to cost a decent chunk of change, and the wait to be seated and get that first taste of bread is going to suck – but it will be worth it, right?  It’s just…easier.  What the heck am I talking about?

Stop thinking about food, open your browser and go to your website.  Your website is the food you already have at home – its traffic wasting away while you worry about getting MORE traffic using SEO, email marketing, PPC, social media, etc.  More isn’t necessarily better and the traffic you have, even if it is substantial, isn’t necessarily useful.  You need to KNOW things first.  Let’s say that you are a regional based service company.  You know that 99% of your clientele comes from a certain city or area.  Is it purposeful to get a ton of traffic to your website if they fall outside of that area?  Unlikely.  These things need to be constantly considered and the easiest way to do this is to analyze your website’s existing traffic.

Why go out to dinner before you have even looked in your cupboard?  You may be making poor decisions on budget spending based on assumptions that are completely unfounded.  For example, you decide to go after a keyword phrase tin pay per click that you believe will result in many more sales but in fact, you haven’t even set up Conversion goals in Google Analytics to find out how you are selling stuff already.  If you had, you would have known that you are actually receiving revenue from a completely different part of your website – a part that has nothing to do with the
keyword phrase you are going out and doubling down on.

So if today feels like a great day to go out to eat, do it literally – not figuratively with your digital marketing budget and efforts.  Make sure you are always looking at the traffic you do have and the information you have available to you.  Once you have these details you can make decisions that truly allow you to make great choices when it comes to spending that digital marketing budget.  Do you need help with the initial setup and ongoing analysis?  We do that.

WARNING: RANT COMING – This is one of those articles that simply will never be useful from a SEO perspective which means few people will likely ever see it.  Google pretty much considers it worthless by default – no keyword phrase about digital marketing in the title, no strong call to the same keyword phrase in the first paragraph, no alt tag’d image that specifically uses the same keyword phrase, no meta description utilizing the same keyword phrase, and a somewhat creative approach to writing (I know, limited creativity but hey, I’m no writer by trade) – honestly, this is a disaster of SEO proportions.

Isn’t it sad that is the state of things on the web?  You can purchase a copied and pasted 5 dollar blog that is infinitely more exciting to Google’s algorithm but original, creative content that doesn’t utilize all of those best BS SEO practices are utterly and completely useless unless you create truly exemplary, amazing, special content and get a thousand shares on social media and troves of links from reputable sites.  Of course, if it was truly creative and well shared, then either Google would just harvest the content itself and take away clicks from me or another website that simply steals original copy will take the information and scrape it with no negative effect and Google will blame the website for not getting high search engine results instead of the company stealing the copy.