Tag: Strategy

Why is competitor analysis important

Posted on by Jillian Whitmore

When was the last time you did a competitor analysis?

Scratch that… have you ever done a competitor analysis? 

It’s very common for small businesses to not know who they are competing with. However, if you are serious about scaling your business and want to win more sales in your target market – you need a game plan of how to position your brand as the preferred option among competitors.

85 percent of consumers conduct online research before making a purchase online

When your customers go searching for a solution, don’t you want to stand out from the crowd?

That’s where positioning comes in, and competitor analysis will help you create a strategy that’s sure to turn a few heads.

What is competitor analysis?

Competitor analysis is the investigation of other businesses that offer the same or similar solution for your target market. It’s the process of analysing the strengths and weaknesses of these businesses and comparing them to your own. Competitor analysis allows you to gain important insight to help you position and grow your brand.

Why is competitor landscape analysis important?

Competitor analysis or competitor landscape analysis is important to inform your strategies on how to:

  • grow your business
  • make better products and design better services
  • communicate clearly with your customers
  • remain the top choice for your customers
  • build your brand equity
  • differentiate your brand as unique
  • stay on top of market shifts
  • pivot faster when the market and customer needs change

Competitor analysis not only informs you of who else might be serving your customers, it also allows you to understand how your customers search for solutions and make comparable decisions between choosing your product or someone else’s. 

By understanding the competitive landscape you’ll identify whether you are dealing with selective or primary demand, which can greatly impact your marketing and brand positioning strategy. 

Difference between selective and primary demand

The difference between selective and primary demand can help determine the type of marketing decisions and messaging you place in front of your target market. 

Selective demand 

Selective demand is where the customer understands they have a problem and they decide to select a product or service to solve their problem. This is the case with highly competitive markets where there are many options for one type of solution. If your solution sits within a selective demand market, you might want to look closely at your competitors to make sure you are differentiating and offering more value to the customers making their selection.

Primary demand

Primary demand is where customers do not recognise they have a problem that can be solved for them. This is often the case with new products or services that do not already exist in the market. Messaging can be focused around educating the market about your new solution. Highlighting the problem they might not know can be solved with your one-of-a-kind solutions on the market.

How to differentiate your brand

Once you have a solid understanding of your competitive landscape and their strengths and weaknesses in comparison to yours. You can begin to start building your differentiation strategy or brand positioning strategy.

Conduct a competitor analysis

Researching your competitors will help you understand where you sit in the minds of your customers. You wil gain an understanding of what you offer your customers that no one else in the market can. Then using this as your unique selling proposition, you can differentiate your solution as bringing more value to your target market. Read more about how to conduct a competitor analysis.

Leverage your unique selling proposition

No one can build the brand you have set out to create, just like people, we are all unique and there are no two alike. If you have a thorough understanding of your customers needs and wants, use your unique-ness to offer them more value. While there may be similarities in your branding, language and pricing, the key here is to position your brand as different and offer something that your competitors simply cannot.

Highlight your competitive advantage

Don’t be shy to shout about your advantages over your competitors, chances are your customers have done their research online and will be comparing your solution against theirs. Make your advantage known, talk about it on your homepage, on your landing pages, on your social media and in your emails. And, like anything – test, measure, and try again.

Remain the top choice for your customers

Competitor analysis can be a daunting task if you’re a small business owner, entrepreneuer or an marketing team of one. However, it’s a key part of your growth strategy and something you need to stay on top of if you want to remain the best choice for your customers. You will need to constantly position your solution as the better choice in the eyes of your customer. Now how can you do that without monitoring what they are finding online so you can position your brand as more desirable? 
When asking yourself how often you should review your competitors, best practice says quarterly, if not monthly if you have the time. However, it’s wise to not dwell on the competition too much. Focus on what you can control, your brand and meeting your customers needs.

Don’t know where to begin?

This simple 6-step guide to competitor analysis will get you started!

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Jillian Whitmore
Jillian Whitmore, Author

I’ve worked with companies in both start-up and scale-up phases. I love helping new small businesses make sense of marketing fundamentals and empowering them to take their business growth into their own hands. Confidently scaling their businesses. Read more insights here. Subscribe to the Mood Marketing newsletter to receive insights direct to your inbox.

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How to conduct a competitor analysis

Posted on by Jillian Whitmore

A competitor analysis is not as technical as it sounds, you just have to be brave enough to start looking.

As a small business owner, this can sometimes be daunting if you have never seen who you are competing with to win your customer’s attention and business. Conducting competitor analysis has three main components. Understanding who your competitors are and the difference between direct and indirect competitors, doing the competitor research. Finally creating perceptual maps to visualise your findings and identify gaps in the market to inform your positioning strategy. 

Difference between direct and indirect competitors

A key step in analysing your competitors is understanding the difference between direct and indirect competitors.

A direct competitor is someone who offers the same solution to your customers, to solve the same need. Comparing apples with apples.

An indirect competitor is someone who solves the same problem for your customers but whose offering is different. Comparing apples with oranges.

For example, restaurants that sell cheeseburgers are all direct competitors for each other. Whereas, Subway is an indirect competitor for these restaurants because while they may offer a product that can solve the same problem (hunger) the products themselves are quite different.
Understanding your competitors will help you determine your market share and think deeply about the way you position your brand. You’ll learn what your customers see by researching products similar to yours or typing a question into Google to find out who is serving a solution to a problem.

Competitor analysis research

For small businesses with small budgets, simple competitor research can be done easily through Google. There are expensive agencies that can provide research for you, but with a bit of spare time it’s easy to gain enough understanding of your competitors to start building a positioning strategy yourself. There are 6 main steps for how to do competitor research and they can all be done with a laptop and a bit of snooping.

1. Define your offering and who you serve

First and foremost, you will need to define your market, your products/services and the benefits you offer your customers. This way, when researching for other competitors, you know what to look for. Many new businesses have a hard time defining what it is that they do, this is especially common for newer products and services that have yet to be tested in the market. Make sure you know what it is you offer, who it’s for, the benefit and the problem you are solving.

2. Research competitors who offer a similar service (direct competitors)

Start to look at competitors who offer the same services/products, solve the same problems and serve the same people. Narrow down your search to be relevant to the market you serve, for example; in a geographic region (people who live in Wellington, New Zealand). Search for the problems you solve by thinking about what your customers will be asking Google. Take note of how your competitors are offering and positioning their solutions in comparison to yours.

3. Compare their features and benefits to yours

Feature comparison is a key decision-making factor when your customers are choosing a product or service. Look at your competition’s product or service and take note of the features and value they describe. Read their websites while putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. 

Ask yourself: 

  • How does the customer journey feel? 
  • Do they have useful information?  
  • Are they making it easy for a customer to purchase a product or book a service?
  • What value do they offer that might be different to yours? 
  • Do you have more or better features than they do? 
  • Do you offer something that they don’t, or vice-versa? 

An easy way to make this comparison is to create a simple list of features and benefits that you offer and then plot where each of your competitors sit in comparison.

You may find that you are the only business offering a certain feature and you know it solves a massive problem for your customers. You can then make strategic decisions to highlight this feature in your marketing and offer it from a place of confidence. Using your key feature differentiator to position your product as more desirable because of its lucrative feature.

4. Discover what language they use to describe their value

Look at how your competitors position their solutions. You can do this by reading the language they use to describe their solution and the problem they solve. 

Ask yourself: 

  • What language do they use? Is it highly emotional, passive or direct? 
  • What benefits do they highlight? 
  • Do they have social proof from their customers? 
  • Do they have testimonials on their website? 
  • Do they have online reviews that validate their website messaging?
  • How would your customer feel reading their website?

A lot of businesses have a core brand language that they use to consistently communicate with their customers. Think about the language they are using and how it compares to yours all while putting yourself in your customer’s shoes. Take note of how they describe their solution, if you realise you are using the same adjectives, it might be worth thinking about changing yours up to grab more attention.

5. Understand their audience size and engagement level

Look at their social media followers and online presence, are they featured in the news regularly, do other publications and news sites talk about them? From this, you can gauge how big their reach might be in comparison to yours. This might also give you some ideas about how your business shows up online, and how you engage with your target audience.

6. Compare their pricing and packaging

Look at their pricing, do they offer a cheaper solution than yours? Is their pricing higher than yours? Does their pricing reflect the benefits they discuss on their website?

Pricing and packaging can be a difficult thing to compare. It comes down to how your customers value what you offer. Is there an additional feature or service you could offer to your package to make it stand out to your competitors? Can you group your products or services together that offers more value to your customer? 

Perceptual mapping

A perceptual map (or positioning matrix) is a visual graph that highlights where your brand sits in the minds of your customers in comparison to your competitors. This is a great tool to identify gaps in the market where no one is currently serving your customers, and it can also aid in positioning strategies to differentiate your brand and compete more fiercely with others in the market. 

Start by selecting the points of differentiation that are important to your customer when they are comparing solutions and place them on the axes. Plot yourself and your competitors on the matrix like the example shown. From this, you should be able to recognise who your biggest competition is and strategize to position your brand as the preferable option. Doing this exercise may also present opportunities in the market that you could look to fill. Don’t just do one matrix, think about other points of importance for your customer’s decision-making and develop a range of positioning graphs.

A key thing to keep in mind is that a traditional perceptual map needs to reflect the actual perception of your customers and not your biased opinion of where you think your brand sits among others in the market.

However, you can also use it to map your competitors against your own without having to rely on customer research and expensive data sources. Using this matrix as a positioning tool can help you define your positioning strategy and stand out from the competition. 

Next Steps

If you are a small business owner, revisit your competitor analysis at least twice a year to stay ahead of your competitors. If you are a larger business with larger growth goals and in a highly competitive industry, think about dedicating time at least every quarter to reassess the competition and re-evaluate your positioning strategy. 

After all your competitors may very well be analysing your positioning and trying to win top choice in your customer’s minds too. Staying on top of the changes in positioning will mean your business is more agile and can pivot appropriately to maintain the top spot. Read more about why competitor analysis is important.

Download the free competitor analysis template to get started!

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Jillian Whitmore
Jillian Whitmore, Author

I’ve worked with companies in both start-up and scale-up phases. I love helping new small businesses make sense of marketing fundamentals and empowering them to take their business growth into their own hands. Ready to scale up their businesses. Read more insights here.

What is brand positioning

Posted on by Jillian Whitmore

What is brand positioning?

Brand positioning is the strategic steps you take to create a positive perception of your business in the minds of your customers. It’s how you position your solution against competitors in the market and endeavour to make yours more favourable. 

Brand positioning is what you want your brand to be known for. It’s the way you connect and communicate your products and services to your customers. With a goal of creating a desire to purchase that leads to advocacy. Successful brand positioning is meeting the needs of your customer better than any other competitor in the market.

In their book, Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind, Al Ries and Jack Trout talk about, “How to make and position an industry leader so that its name and message wheedles its way into the collective subconscious of your market and stays there.”

Sounds easy right? Brand positioning is basically mind control.

Why is brand positioning important?

A brand positioning strategy is a well researched plan to scale your business and achieve your desired market share. The more minds your brand can influence, the more referrals, word of mouth, and brand awareness your business will have. How you position your brand and how you wheedle your way into your customers minds is key to your brand growth strategy.

Brand Management Mood Marketing

What is an example of brand positioning?

In New Zealand, this could be as simple as, “where everyone gets a bargain.” We all know that’s The Warehouse, not just because of the catchy jingle, but we honestly feel like we can go to The Warehouse to get a bargain. They know their customers want a bargain, so that’s what they deliver to the market and position their brand accordingly. 

Brand positioning is the proof of a company living their values and delivering on their promises. As The Warehouse says on their website page, Here for Good, “…we are committed to making sustainable living easy and affordable for everyone.” Although, it’s not just what they publish on their website, it’s how their brand has been positioned in our minds. Next time you’re in need of an affordable piece of homeware, clothing or halloween costume – where do you instantly think of? The Warehouse!

What is a brand positioning strategy?

A brand positioning strategy aims to increase customer loyalty, brand equity, and the willingness of customers to purchase from your business. The Branding Journal defines a brand positioning strategy as a combination of customer wants, business capabilities, and competitors in the market. These three components of your brand positioning strategy involve quite a bit of thought and require ongoing consideration as the market changes. 

Let’s break each of these down further.

Brand positioning strategy mood marketing

Customers

Your brand is what your customers think, not what you say.

If you’re wanting to wheedle your brand into the minds of your customers, you better have a good understanding of what they want. Knowing the needs and desires of your customers is how you develop better solutions to their problems and create messaging that resonates with them. Your first step to building a brand positioning strategy is to gather insights. 

Customers won’t pay attention to things that don’t offer them something they need. You want your messaging to be thumb-stopping and not to ‘feel like marketing’ but be something that is useful and of value to your customers. Be the solution they would love to tell all their friends about.

Market research and digital surveys are a great way to understand your customers and build your personas. However, the best form of customer research is to go out and actually speak to them, face-to-face. Hear straight from the horse’s mouth! Take this opportunity to ask questions about their problems. Don’t talk about your solution, you aren’t there to sell them anything, you’re there to listen to them.

Capture the words they use to describe their frustrations and use them in your marketing. Ask them what they know and think of your brand, what they like or dislike about your brand, and how they feel about competitor brands in the market.

This is valuable research and a crucial component of your brand positioning strategy. Don’t just talk about your promises to solve their problems. Prove to them in all your brand behaviour that you are true to your messaging and make sure you can deliver the solution.

Capabilities

Make sure your business has the capability to deliver on your strategy. 

It’s one thing to define a brand positioning strategy but if you cannot commit the necessary resources and time to delivering it, you will never reach the position you are aiming for. For example, say you want your brand to be in the top five choices in your product category. You learn how your customers think, you find out what their problems are and you come up with a new product and a marketing plan to go to market. But, then you get swamped by running your business and serving your existing customers. What about those positioning goals? What about the growth forecast you’ve sold to your investors?  

With any strategy, it’s not just about the actions of how you are going to achieve your goal, more importantly it’s how you are going to find the resources and funds to deliver the strategy. 

Don’t let your hard earned research and strategic ideas go to waste, build a plan and resource it appropriately. This may involve out-sourcing some of the deliverables, which can be a great way to access talent you might not have in-house. Grow your brand equity by ensuring your strategy is resourced appropriately.

Competitors

Differentiate your solution against competitors in the market. 

Think about your customers and their decision making journey, how do they research problems and find information? By following their journey you can easily see who else is in the market offering a similar solution to you.

Desktop research is a simple place to begin and can give you an idea of what your customers might see during their research. This involves a little bit of snooping, it’s not cheating to look over your shoulder to see what the other guy wrote for question 3. It’s a necessary part of competitor research and developing your brand positioning strategy. 

Compare your offerings, features, and how they describe their solution. What language do they use and what promises do they make? You can learn a lot from a humble laptop and a few hours of googling. Don’t feel disheartened if you find out your competitors are doing the same thing as you. Use this information to fuel your positioning and differentiate your brand from the competition. 

Strategically position your brand for the customer, become the preferred option and meet their needs better than any competitor in the market.

Have you thought about your brand positioning strategy?

Book a brand positioning consultant today!

Brand marketing strategy

Posted on by Jillian Whitmore

What is brand marketing?

Brand marketing is a long-term plan for a business to position itself in the market as the preferred option among buyers. A brand marketing strategy is about how your business connects with your audience emotionally and humanly.

Marketing is, after all – human – it’s about connecting a product or service with those who are in need of or want it. It’s about telling the story of how your solution can provide the change your customer desires. Why people should buy your product and the reason to fall in love with your brand and feel aligned with your purpose. 

Your brand is more than just your logo and your advertising, it’s the soul of your company and the north star to every decision you make. For small business owners looking to create love for their brand, this simple framework will help you to develop a brand marketing strategy. We call it a Brand Playbook.

What is a Brand Playbook?

A Brand Playbook is a guiding document that aids consistency, collaboration and clarity across your business. It is a living, breathing document that helps you make strategic decisions about your business, your marketing and your overall vision for the future. It’s a bit like your business bible, you and the people who work for you have to believe in it.

When considering how to build an authentic brand, everyone on your team should be singing from the same song book. Because when you don’t, your customers get confused about who they are doing business with and they second guess their decision to part with their money. Consistent brand building creates trust from your customers which leads to your greater share of the market. Keep reading to learn more about how to build your brand marketing strategy consistently and authentically.

Components of a Brand Playbook

There are four main components of a Brand Playbook that you should consider carefully and define clearly before diving into any marketing or business decision, these are your vision, mission, position and behaviour. Without a Brand Playbook as your north star, how do you make strategic business decisions with confidence? Gut feelings can only get you so far, and not everyone in the business will have access to your gut! 

Every small business owner or entrepreneur will tell you – to scale your business, you cannot do it alone. With this brand marketing strategy your team will be empowered to make decisions with confidence.

Vision
Mission
Position
Behaviour

Let’s break each of these down in detail:

Vision

A brand vision is a statement that describes why your company exists.

Guiding

Your vision will act as your company’s north star. When reviewing the past quarter of activity of your business, you should hold up your vision statement and ask – ‘What progress have we made in achieving our brand vision?’ It should hold your business accountable for what it sets out to do and be a tool at decision-making time. When considering who to hire, who to partner with and what services or product to develop, they should all strongly align with your brand vision.

Inspirational

Your vision should inspire customers to want to do business with you and your staff to want to work for you. It should be something that people can align with and feel something towards. Your brand vision should give your staff a purpose and a reason to jump out of bed in the morning – they should be able to believe in what they are doing and feel like they are making the difference you set out to make.

Lofty

Your vision should be aspirational, almost to the point where you wonder if you’re dreaming. You should aim high and make it something that will change the world in a significant way. It should be something that will sustain your company vision for a long time. Don’t make it something that can be achieved within the next 3 years. Think of a purpose that will be big enough to allow your company to grow long into the future. Once you have created a powerful vision statement you can then shorten it down into a memorable slogan.

Examples of vision statements: 

Create your own brand vision

How to create a vision statement

Start by gathering your team, get in a room and invite the founders of the company, learn their story and document the businesses origins. Don’t be a hero and write it yourself, get as many opinions and eyes on it. Simon Sinek’s Start with why is a great read to get you in the right frame of mind.

  • Why does your company exist?
  • Why are you driven by your goal?
  • Why do you seek to change the world?
  • What is your goal for a future state? 
  • What vision of the future do you have? 
  • What change do you want to see in the world? 
  • What difference do you want to make?
Download brand vision worksheet

Run a brand vision workshop with your team.

Book brand consultant

Mission

A brand mission defines who you serve (your market) and what you do (your products and services).

Defining these two things as your mission statement will give your team direction and focus. As part of this focus you should have a solid understanding of the problems your customers face and the value your products and services bring to them. It’ll help make your product and services better and your messaging clearer.

Personas

Define who you serve. Create target personas and think about their demographics, psychographics, and influences. Understand their pain points, desires and challenges. There are often different motivators for a B2C customer than a B2B customer. Consider the buyer journey and the decision making process. At the end of the day you are marketing to humans, you must understand them to be able to serve them.

Market research

Now you have identified who you are targeting, it’s a good idea to validate your efforts by ensuring your target market is large enough. Make sure you gather research from valid sources and go and speak to as many real humans as you possibly can. You may find that this exercise informs and enhances your personas and can help you develop better products and services and target the right people for marketing campaigns.

Define what you do

This may change as you refine your products and services to better serve your market. It’s a crucial step to not only give your team a clear direction on what they work on every day, but to inform your customers on what exactly you can do for them. What are you selling? Sometimes marketing messaging can be so focused about the benefit that they forget to mention what they are actually selling.

Position

To strongly position your brand you need to be aware of market competitors. You should have an understanding of the competitor landscape to not only measure your market share but to understand how your customer might compare your solution to a competitor’s. Learn what other businesses do by conducting competitor research. Use this knowledge to market your offering more effectively than the competition. 

Competitor analysis

Most small businesses have never researched their competitors which is an alarming discovery for most. Oftentimes they are too scared to look outside the walls of their company and would rather not know who they are competing with.

“Many businesses find themselves wrong-footed, not because they did something wrong, but because they failed to anticipate changes in the market.” Source: Qualtrics

Simple competitor research can be done by searching online for similar solutions in your market. Be brave, do your research, understand what’s out there and then build a strategy to offer something better to the market.

Perceptual maps

Once you have identified who your biggest competitors are it’s a useful exercise to develop perceptual maps. A perceptual map is a visual representation of where your brand sits in the minds of your customers in comparison to other solutions in the market. The key here is not to use your biassed opinion, but to gather real feedback from customers in the market. Understand what’s most important to them when they are considering your solution. This will help you differentiate your unique selling proposition (USP).

Branding

The biggest confusion out there is making an assumption that ‘brand’ is just the logo and the font of your business. Brand is about the soul and meaning of your business. Your branding on the other hand, is about the visual elements that become the visual identifier for people to associate a certain feeling for your brand when they see your branding. There are a few things to consider when creating your branding and positioning its visual elements in the market.

  • Make sure your branding is unique to your competitors. Stand out from the crowd.
  • Think about colour psychology in relation to how you want your customers to feel.
  • Choose colours and visual elements that are harmonious and not jarring.
  • Get input from your customers, what aesthetics do they like?
  • Hire a graphic designer to help develop your branding guidelines.

Stick to your brand guidelines

Brand Managers will tell you that sticking to your guidelines is one of the most important rules for building a brand. Sticking to brand guidelines is not just about using consistent language and messaging, it’s also about creating recognition of your solution through the branding applied. The more people who associate your logo or your brand colours with your solution the more recognition, brand awareness and brand love you can gain.

Behaviour

Brand behaviour or brand values are a set of guiding principles for how you behave with people in the market. It’s how you make them feel, how you talk to them, and how you build relationships with them. This is where your brand can come to life.

Brand values

Brand values are often the boring, corporate list of words that don’t mean anything to anyone. You know the ones, integrity, excellence, innovation, blah, blah, blah. Your values should be meaningful, they should be actionable (verbs), and they should be developed with your team’s input not from the business owner alone. 

Authenticity is a key part of building a brand and growing your audience. However, when you have defined a specific set of values to work towards, it can be difficult to come across as authentic, especially if you have had to ‘tell’ your staff how to act. 

Actions

There are tactics to make this easier and it starts with clarity, and ensuring you are hiring the right kind of people who align with the values you have defined. You cannot simply tell your staff to be ‘innovative’ and expect them to understand what you mean. Make sure your values are ingrained in the way you do business. For example, if you want to create a culture of innovation, give your staff the creative space and permission to think wildly about a problem.

Software company Atlassian has done an incredible job of building a culture of innovation. Likewise if you want to create a culture of ‘integrity’, make sure you are setting a good example of what that means. Reward your staff for ‘living and breathing’ the brand values to encourage the same behaviour from the rest of your team. 

Relationships

Relationships are a key part of business growth, but humans are messy and it can be difficult to create a consistent experience for customers when multiple members of your team are involved in delivering the solution. Think about the customer journey and the experience you want them to have with your brand. How do they feel when they speak to different members of your team? Do they feel like those people are giving them the same experience?

HubSpot does a great job of creating a company we love, by making every touchpoint feel the same. You feel from every sales rep, onboarding specialist and customer support staff that they truly want you to succeed. It should feel like they are on your team and rooting for you. You walk away from an interaction with them having ‘felt’ like you know them and appreciate the culture they have as a company, and it makes you fall a little bit in love with their brand.

Personality and tone

Define your brand language guidelines to describe how you want your brand to sound. Is it cheeky? Is it formal? Do you have a mascot or character that helps bring your brand to life? Make a list of do’s and don’ts with examples of written copy for each. Define the words you use and the meaning they have. Again, think about how you want your customers to feel when reading or hearing your words and tone. What emotions do you want them to associate with your brand?

Defining the personality and tone of your brand is equally as important as the visual branding guideline. Your brand language guidelines will allow your staff members to individually produce consistent work that sounds like your brand. By having these guidelines in place you will be able to build trust with your customers and meet their expectations at every touchpoint.

Next steps

So there you have it – a guide on how to develop a brand marketing strategy. Next comes the fun part, putting it into practice and using it to grow your business, consistently and authentically.

Use your Brand Playbook when making key strategic decisions about your business. As your north star, it can guide you towards your purpose, allowing you to make business decisions with confidence. Start building your playbook today!

Develop your Brand Playbook today!

Build Brand Playbook

SEO Basics

Posted on by Jillian Whitmore

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. The purpose of SEO is to improve your websites relevancy and authority on a subject to help it rank higher in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) eg. Google Search page. If you’re a small business owner or marketer with a limited budget, optimising your website for search engines is a great, low cost way of directing organic traffic to your website. Apart from your time and a fair bit of clever strategic thinking – it’s basically a strategy to get FREE website traffic.

To do this, you have to satisfy Google’s algorithms that are designed to give their users the best results based on the words they are searching for. Therefore, the content on your website needs to provide the answer to relevant search queries. In addition to your relevant website content there are three main areas of SEO you need to be aware of: On-page SEO, Off-page SEO and Technical SEO. It’s not as scary as it sounds – actually, it’s quite easy to get the basics right and I’m going to show you how.

Why is an SEO Strategy important?

SEO is a low cost way to smartly position your brand as a source of authority within search engines. Using your industry knowledge and brand positioning, you can can easily configure your website content to be found in a crowded marketplace.

Depending on your industry, some keywords and search terms can be incredibly easy to target. The trick is knowing which ones are right for you and your business, and knowing what is important to your target market and optimising your content that they are searching for. Developing an SEO Strategy is your first step in optimising your website content for organic traffic. Your SEO Strategy should include your chosen keywords, your target personas and your content plan. As well as checking off the SEO best practice tasks listed below.

Basics of Search Engine Optimisation

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO refers to the settings you make ‘on’ your website.

URL Structure

Your URL slug is the important part of structuring your website pages and content. Slugs are used by search engines to surface information to people who are searching for that relevant content. This is an example of a URL structure.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Depending on which CMS (Content Management System) you have chosen to build your website, you may be prompted to make sure the title tag and meta description settings are completed.

This is an example of a website page displayed in Google’s Search Engine Results Page (SERP). You know the ones right? When you scroll past all the Ads to find genuine search results based on their authority and relevancy of your search term and not their marketing budgets – that’s where you want to be. They call this position number 1, as Google has ranked this page as the most relevant and useful for the searcher.

Headers, Internal Links and Images

These are the settings you make to the content blocks on your website page. It is important to think about the structure of your content when creating a page on your website. Think about the audience reading it and what might make good headings so they can jump to the part that interests them most? Can you use images may help explain or describe what you are talking about? What other information might you link to throughout your content?

Design your pages with your end-user’s experience in mind.

This is an example of a blog showing the header, image and internal linking on the page.

Find out how your website is performing today.

Get an SEO audit

Off-Page SEO

This refers to the activity you do ‘off’ of your website.

Backlinks

A backlink is when an external website directs traffic to your website by publishing one of your URLs.

Social Media

Backlink Building

Online Directories, News sites / Bloggers, Industry authority websites

Local SEO

Google My Business Account are for businesses with a physical location that they want to be listed on Google Maps and shown in search results.

Technical SEO

This refers to the technical aspects of your website settings.

Security Certificate

An SSL certificate is required for you to have a https: protocol in your URL. Google will not return a site that does not have an SSL Certificate, modern browsers will display a warning to visitors for insecure sites. Meaning less traffic and less chance of being organically shown in SERPs.

Page Speed

If your web page is slow to load, visitors are more likely to leave the site. This tells Google that your site content is not relevant to the searchers enquiry and can negatively effect your SEO.

Make sure your page load speed is under 2 seconds. Use the Page Speed Insights tool to check your websites speed.

Duplicate Content

Duplicate content can potentially ‘blacklist’ your website so it doesn’t show in SERPs. It is important that your page content is either unique or uses canonical tags to highlight the primary content page. You can also add a ‘permanent’ 301 redirect to the more relevant or updated pages you want to be displayed.

Mobile Responsiveness

In 2022, research shows that over 60% of website traffic comes from a mobile device. It is important to make sure your pages are optimised for a small screen devices. Many CMS tools have viewing and configuration options to make a page responsive to mobile devises prior to publishing. If someone views your site on a mobile device and it is not displaying optimally – they are likely to leave the site quickly which damages your SEO. If traffic bounces ‘exits’ from your site quickly – that basically tells Google that your site did not provide the answer to the user and therefore should not be presented to other searchers.

Site Map

When building your website you need to start with your site architecture. This is an important tool to use when considering URL structure, interlinking opportunities, and how you want visitors to navigate your site. From your site architecture you can create a ‘Site Map’ which is a file of code that lists your important website page URLs.

Website Architecture

Google Crawlers / Spider Bots

Think of these as a friendly librarian. If the spider doesn’t know your content exists, how will Google know to return it in SERPs? Submit your Site Map to Google Search Console, ensuring every page is crawl-able from the homepage and indexed within Google Search Engines. Make sure your site map is clean and doesn’t include any published drafts or old URLs.

SEO Checklist Per Page

SEO doesn’t need to be as hard as it sounds. Start with this checklist to help you complete SEO best practices for each and every page of your website.

So, what are you waiting for?

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Jillian Whitmore
Jillian Whitmore, Author

I’ve worked with companies in both start-up and scale-up phases. I love helping new small businesses make sense of marketing fundamentals and empowering them to take their business growth into their own hands. Confidently scaling their businesses. Read more insights here. Subscribe to the Mood Marketing newsletter to receive insights direct to your inbox.

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