Three Steps to a Better Performing Website

Why do your competitors’ websites continuously outrank and seemingly outperform your own?

It’s a question many organizations may find themselves asking.

But thanks to the relative open nature of the Internet, we can grab glimpses of their digital strategies—and see what’s working.

In this post, we will briefly examine steps your digital team can implement today for results tomorrow.

From a competitive perspective, we can monitor keywords, backlinks and page count.

Keywords

On the Internet, keywords describe the content on your site and make it possible for your audience to find you via search engines. They are the natural byproduct of authentic storytelling on a website or landing page.

You can generate specific keywords that drive searchers to your site by staying on point and sharing your purpose (e.g. product/service or donations) and a reason for your audience to engage.

This process is part of the genius of Internet search engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, AOL). A search engine rapidly calculates and determines pages/websites that have the highest likelihood of satisfying a searcher’s need or curiosity.

So the question to ask yourself is: Is your target audience able to find your site based on the core keywords related to your mission?

Monitoring your keywords—and to some degree, your competitors’ keywords—will help you understand angles of threat and opportunity.

Page Count

Page Count is simply the total number of indexed pages of a given website.

Story telling, when it’s relevant and satisfying, will drive organic search traffic and action—no matter the medium, be it a blog, landing page, video or podcast.

Consistently creating relevant, actionable content will boost your ROI and your overall page and site ranking.

Backlinks

Another great byproduct of creating quality content for your target audience is the backlink.

A backlink is a hyperlink on another web page that links to a page on your own website. Here again, you can go for quantity and/or quality.

Take this very blog post as an example.

DMAW would link back to KM Digital, using a hyperlink in the About the Author section. And of course, KM Digital would likewise post a snippet of this article on its own site pointing back to DMAW. It’s a force multiplier that creates a win/win outcome.

Writing as a guest, sharing relevant impactful content on your own site, and capturing great video or photography will all help foster an environment conducive to natural backlink building.

Take 3

Keywords, page count and backlinks are all part of creative digital marketing strategy. The goals, objectives and digital assets of your firm must be managed to maximize relevant storytelling.

Harnessing creativity and the means/methods available in the digital sphere will help you gain market share, expand donor bases and elevate the overall value of the organization.

If you’re a leader in any firm—no matter the size, no matter the market—the great equalizer of the Internet beckons for your content.

Make it count.

Christopher Gleason is a business development and digital strategist at KM Digital in Leesburg, Virginia. He can be reached at cgleason@kmdig.com or 703.581.5579.