Are Digital Marketers Goldfish?

The zoo is almost complete. We’ve had Monkeys, Donkeys and Turkeys explained. Now let’s look at the Goldfish of our world. The Digital Marketers.See, marketing is all about keeping up to date with trends and techniques for ensuring conversion. People think marketers are incredibly creative people who spend their days drinking and partying and talking. Having brainstorming sessions and amazing conversations about fantastic things. Attending photography shoots and other things that it seems like everyone wants to do.But the reality of it is, marketing and especially digital marketing is none of that. Actually, we usually spend our days staring at graphs (like the one below) and reading white papers about how to change the graphs.But, there are so many people out there who claim they can help businesses grow. Or do their SEO, or whatever nonsense they’ll say. Here’s a quick tip as an aside. Anyone who does “SEO” and doesn’t use software to monitor webpages and websites is not really doing SEO.Let me tell you a story about a previous client we had.It was quite a large company which had about 350 staff members and a very large web presence. Their website was about 150 pages big and they’d been regularly marketing their products for a number of years. The majority of their marketing had been outsourced since their inception. Once they hit a certain point in their business life, it became less economical to utilise outside sources and they built an internal marketing team.One of the members of the team that they employed was a Search Engine Optimisation Specialist. He sat in the company for over a year apparently optimising their website, and sending through screenshots of placements on Google showing the webpage high in search results.After he left the company, they asked us to have a quick look at the webpage to see how it was actually going. The first thing we did was run the website through some SEO software to analyse where it was at. This is what we found:

• About 65% of the pages had technical errors and SEO errors
• There was a huge amount of duplicate content cause by new things needing to be added to the site, and old ones not being removed
• There was no website SEO done at all, only some on page SEO completed
• The back end of the webpage was filled with hundreds of default images, blogs, portfolios and everything from the template they had picked
• There was a large number of useless pages that didn’t need to be there
• There was a serious deficiency in the conversion rate of people landing on the page to converting to leads

After questioning the team there we found that the previous SEO Specialist (who apparently referred to himself as the SEO King) was using the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress as his sole piece of technology for SEO. His experience also lay in niche market place websites. In his previous examples of SEO that he had done, his websites had next to no competitors. So it was incredibly easy to get to the top (the example I gave was, if I was selling “Fandooklamons” I’d very quickly land at the top of SEO, because no one else sells Fandooklamons). This company had over 4,000 competitors to fight with.He was also not monitoring things like lead numbers and the flow of users on the webpage to see where they were falling down.So, we gathered the team and rebuilt basically from the ground up. We merged a large amount of pages, removed all the useless plugins and content that didn’t need to be there, analysed keywords to discover which ones were high converting, looked at competitors to see their rankings, redesigned all the main pages to improve conversions. It was a huge job, but we dedicated quite a large number of resources to the job to get it done quickly. We had web developers, content writers, graphic designers, sales and marketing and actual Digital Marketing experts working together in a team to fix the problems.In the first month, while we were rebuilding the website, the page generated 20 leads. The company was targeting 20 leads per week. By first changing the individual pages to improve the conversion of visitor to lead, we were able to improve the lead rate to 60 for the second month.We then worked incredibly hard to optimise not just the individual pages, but also the entire site for the best keywords and customer flow for conversion. In the third month, the website generated 88 leads. But even though we’d met the target, we weren’t finished. We were able to drop a lot of resources and utilise a real SEO king (or queen) to monitor and improve the website for just a few hours a week. In the next month, we hit 127 leads for the month.We were able to generate reports to show the client exactly what was happening, where the leads were coming from, everything we had done to fix it and basically everything the client needed to ensure that they were able to continue with their current website from then on.In the end, a goldfish had been working for them. But a team of digital marketers helped them to fix everything the goldfish had broken.