
Start with a plan
Audit & Road Map
Your digital marketing needs a considered plan to achieve its potential.
To devise the best strategy and tactics, we need to understand your company, its markets and its marketing. Then we can tailor our service to meet the needs of your business.
This is why all work by Alban Digital starts with an Audit and Road Map.
The Audit and Road Map is the most important part of all the work involved in online marketing, from planning to delivery. It’s therefore an extensive and detailed piece of work (but don’t be scared!). Our Audit and Road Map process covers:
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Pay Per Click advertising (PPC)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email marketing
- Existing technical implementation
- Link profile assessment
- Analytics
Key features & benefits
Your brand
Your brand is your most precious asset, so all our SEO and online marketing is targeted to protect and enhance it.
Data-led return on investment (ROI) plan
An accurate ROI forecast gives you the information you need to budget for investment and return. We forecast using our own systems and software to estimate market size, market share and current visits. This data is used to forecast not only the cost of investment but also potential conversion rates, sales and revenue.
Content-centred actions
Technical expertise makes sure ‘the car’ (your website) works. Creative quality content and promotion puts you ahead in the ‘race’. Much of our work is centred on quality content that attracts interest and converts customers.
Strategizer
Alban’s unique Strategizer system helps you to identify your site’s most profitable keywords, monitor and report, and plan your search campaigns. It builds on the importance of keywords, quality content, and technical optimisation, with concern for branding, visitor behaviour and social media.
Integrated SEO and SMM action plans
We deliver a Road Map that maximises results for your business by integrating SEO with social media, PPC, email and offline marketing.
A step-by-step action plan
All our recommendations are discussed, explained and summarised in a simple, step-by-step, prioritised action plan.
Working with your teams
We believe in helping clients take ownership of their SEO campaigns. We can offer your company the support it needs to gain the skills and experience to fully manage and implement its SEO in-house.
In the meantime, some jobs are done more faster, cheaper and more effectively by specialists. We advise you of the best mix, and can continue to advise and train in-house teams for as long as is needed.
Estimates for further work
It’s your journey, and you’re in control. All recommended actions come with our estimates for delivering the work. But you can choose to ‘drive your own car’ using any suppliers you like.
The Audit
To plan your SEO campaign, we first need to understand the history and current state of your site, its marketing and results. The analysis is divided up into a number of parts:
- Visits
- Response
- Links
- Market
- Marketing
- Technical issues
Visits
We’ll tell you how much traffic your site gets and where it comes from, including:
- Search engine visits (from Paid Search and Organic Search)
- Visits from searches with and without your brand name
- Which groups of keywords (keyword niches) bring traffic, and how much
- Which countries and regions bring the most significant traffic
- News, image, video and product searches
- Social media and other websites
The availability of ‘Visits’ information is dependent on your site having analytics software correctly installed.
Response
We find Response, or Conversion rates (the % of visits that performed a wanted action like buying something, or signing up to updates) and response numbers (the number of these conversions) for different groups of keywords (keyword niches).
You can then target all marketing, including SEO and PPC to the visitors, marketing channels and keyword niches that bring the highest response. This simple but often neglected process makes maximising your return on investment (ROI) possible.
Links
Inbound links from other websites are essential for your website to be found. Lasting SEO success requires a range of links from high-quality sites.
A bad inbound link profile, sometimes acquired from poor SEO work, risks a Google penalty (aka a ‘manual action’).
We analyse your site’s link profile for these risks and the potential to help you improve your rankings.
Market
Marketplace
We’ll find your online marketplace. This consists of a network of websites (news sites, social media, specialist sites, blogs, forums and others) that your target audience visit.
Audience
Who is your target audence?
What do they like? What do they love? What really makes their heads turn? What makes them click on a story headline or product description? We can help identify and find your audience and its influencers, be they social media influencers, bloggers or others.
As well as understanding the people and organisations you’re targeting, we want to know what keywords they search Google with. These, of course, are the target keywords you want to rank best for in Google – at the top of page 1.
Market share
Your online market share can be measured as a percentage of sales and as the percentage of relevant searches that find your site on search engines.
Competitors
We’ll find your competitors, analyse what they do, and learn what lessons we can from them.
Marketing
Content
The right, high-quality content for your target audience will attract links, likes, shares and positive branding. This will help to deliver the results you want from search engines and visitors.
We’ll analyse the relevance of your existing content and make recommendations for new content on your site and social media properties.
SEO
We’ll review your existing and historical SEO, looking for good work to build on, opportunities for improvement, and errors that must be fixed to avoid issues with Google.
Social media
We’ll analyse your site and brand’s presence across the big generic social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram), as well as smaller specialist interest sites and the influential blogs in your online marketplace.
Conversion
It doesn’t matter how attractive or popular your site and content are. If there’s no optimised conversion process, it’s all in vain. So we’ll evaluate how you convert your visitors to customers, and can make recommendations for testing.
Technical optimisation
Poor site and page structure, internal links and navigation, your pages’ load speeds, and even your page urls can all stop your site being indexed and optimised for search engines and people alike.
We’ll thoroughly check your site for a wide range of technical issues including: page metadata, canonical and hreflang tags, broken links, microdata, bloated and unnecessary code, bad redirects, analytics configurations and much, much more.
We’ll start with a free, 30 minute consultation – that’s enough time for us to see your site and evaluate how much we can help you.
The Road Map
Once the analysis and Audit are complete, we can plan your Road Map to online success. This will include:
SEO strategy
Technical SEO
A list of technical tasks required to optimise your site for search engines
Target keyword niches
A prioritised list of target keyword niches
Content strategy
A range of quality content ideas and types that will interest your audience and their influencers alike, and enable your site to get Organic search results for your target niches.
External link building
Starting with plans to build a network of contacts within your online marketplace, and a brand-enhancing link building campaign to promote your high-quality content to that network.
SMM strategy
Generic social media sites
Plans on how to use the big social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest to boost your brand’s online presence, SEO and conversion rates.
Specialist social media sites
Plans on how to use specialist social media sites (related niche blogs, forums, and specialist sites) to boost your brand’s online presence, SEO and conversion rates.
Pay per click (PPC)
We’ll recommend any wanted new paid campaigns on Google Adwords, Facebook and Yahoo-Bing; and the optimisation required of existing campaigns.
Conversion
Fundamentals
We’ll advise on conversion fundamentals like lead recruitment, clear user journeys, calls to action (CTAs), and email marketing.
Testing
‘Always be testing’ is the mantra of conversion optimisation. Once the basic elements of conversion are in place, conversion optimisation requires a testing process which we’ll advise on.
Metrics
What to measure, how and why
The right metrics and matching reports are essential to know what is working, what is not and where future efforts should be directed. Clear recommendations will be made, including (all for different keywords, keyword niches and other visitor segments):
- Positions in search engine results pages (SERPs), aka ranks
- Visitor numbers
- Response rates
- Response levels
Simple, action-focused reports
We’ll recommend quick and easy to read reports. They come ready analysed, and with our recommendations for action.