Long-term success still hinges the on validation and reputation of your product/service via PR wins like testimonials and reviews. However, if those resources do not yet exist for search engines to crawl and prospects to discover -what is your play?

Address The Core

Visualize a wagon wheel. The center hub is your well-built and crawled website. The spokes protruding from that hub represent a flow of inbound and outbound links.  The outer wheel represents social channels, backlinks, and influencers which ‘feed’ the spokes and hub.

When a website is crawled correctly, has compelling sharable content, and is updated consistently, all parts of the SEO/SEM ‘wheel’ maintain inertia, while your business builds validation and reputation wins.

This analogy of a wheel holds true; a warped hub or broken spoke will leave you stranded deep within the SERPs Hinterlands, fighting for attention. 

Your Wheel is Broken

What if your digital marketing ‘wheel’ has been neglected? You could stay below the radar and develop your product while quietly growing the customer base, however this strategy runs the risk of losing ground to competitors already engaged in the delivery of content, even if that content is marginally useful -it will track.

Additionally, clicks are not easily won, once you have a prospect’s attention where will they end up? Neglected webpages and social postings with irrelevant, dated content will leave a prospect cold.

Fix The Wheel

If you don’t have a grasp of where to focus your efforts, an audit of your competitors web/social presence, keywords, and influence could be determined via numerous online tools, such as MOZ, SEM Rush and SpyFu.

If you know how to use them, these tactical tools help uncover ‘lanes of opportunity’ that exist due to competitors who cannot be bothered with addressing long-tail keyword phrases, answering FAQs or developing content that educates vs. hard selling.

Find a Dedicated Resource

I should start with this disclaimer; a highly competitive marketplace demands a 360 degree strategy – one that’s been developed by a dedicated digital marketing professional; not your overworked graphic designer, web developer, account manager or well-intended administrative assistant.

Seeking a dedicated professional to help discover things you didn’t know about and innovative approaches you would likely never think of, maximizes business development dollars to build and maintain your digital marketing ‘wheel’.