Month: February 2019

Where Does Your Business Digital Footprint Lead?

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The last post was on the importance of keeping your website well maintained. Once a repeatable schedule is set for maintaining the website, it should be expanded to maintaining your company’s digital footprint. A business digital footprint is all the content that you place on the internet about your company.  It’s referred to as a footprint because it’s a sign of where you’ve been and forms an online trail of sorts to your business. Failing to maintain that digital footprint will often result in people wandering off on unintended paths that do not lead them to your business.

So how can you beat a clear path across all your channels so that people will reliably find what they need from you?  It’s actually not complicated at all, just a consistent process of review and repair. The difficult aspect of the process is diligently organizing all that content to ensure it is consistently updated.

Your digital footprint can typically be split into three categories.

Directory

Many online directories have an automated process for crawling the internet and updating listings.  That’s one reason that keeping information on your website current is important as it will feed updates and corrections to other channels. 

But there are some important directories that rely on the owner proactively updating information. An important example of that is Google My Business.  I’m surprised at how frequently I find a company’s contact info or address is incorrect on their Google listing.  That’s usually a result of a move but the company either doesn’t know who to contact to update the listing or let it slip their mind completely.

Keep in mind that the listing appears for any user that searches their business directly on Google and this important digital channel is still sometimes neglected. 

Ads

Search engine or social media ads sometimes get the “set it and forget it” treatment.  Over time that becomes a disastrous scenario where a company is paying for ads that are either irrelevant or don’t lead users to a valid call to action.

If there is any time sensitivity to your ads, set an expiration for the campaign as soon as it gets implemented.  Ongoing ads should be regularly reviewed to make sure they are productive and relevant.

Social

Company profiles are becoming increasingly important as social media information is shared across directories and search engines.  Make sure that any contact information or company logistic changes get reflected in profiles across your social media channels.

Don’t misconstrue digital footprint maintenance with a censoring campaign. Often times trainers, consultants, or professional coaches focus on eliminating negative comments or references left by others. Digital footprint maintenance is a process of insuring YOUR content is accurate, not screening or filtering other people’s opinions.  

Your digital footprint should help people quickly find your company, products, or services. Consistency is paramount in this process.  No information does less damage than conflicting information. Keep an organized list of all your digital channels and systematically update all those channels when changes arise or content becomes outdated.

Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media

Dedicate Time for Site Clean Up and Organization

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Do you have a child with a perpetually messy room or a co-worker with a chronically cluttered desk?  Often times, seemingly disorganized people claim that they know where everything is in that mess.  Sometimes that turns out to be true.  However, a lot of times it’s not exactly accurate and even they struggle to find what they need.   Most company websites slowly accumulate content which gradually moves them to being that cluttered mess.  Dedicating scheduled time to organizing the materials on the website can ultimately drive more efficiency both in your digital marketing campaigns as well as your technical improvements.

A company’s website often serves as the central point of contact for all of its digital marketing channels.  As digital marketing reach and content grows, the website tends to organically expand to support those initiatives.  This expansion often creates an ungainly and disorganized set of files and folders that can be very difficult to maintain.

Many site owners use the same excuse as the messy child or co-worker, “I know where everything is”.  Even if that is true, it doesn’t account for that individual being unavailable or moving on to a different company or role.  It’s becoming less common for a single person to be the point person for all website activities.  Technical contacts and marketing partners also need access to the site for updates, upgrades, and integrations.  Sorting through cluttered file structures to accomplish tasks creates additional time and effort for every single initiative.

As a primary site owner it’s important to dedicate some time to review, organization, and retirement of the content on the website.  It’s likely to save you time personally but will save significant time for partners that don’t have as much visibility on how the site has grown.  The clean-up and reorganization can also be a clue as to whether your site’s navigation, which often mirrors file structure, could use some realignment.

Keeping your site as lean as possible with clean up initiatives sounds like a low priority item to most digital marketers.  And it is true that it can’t displace critical technical or digital marketing tasks.  That’s why it’s important to set a schedule so that it’s not perpetually on the back burner. 

This recurring clean-up process will make updates easier to complete because content is easier to find, current, and relevant.

Web Maintenance