With the new year upon us  everyone is vowing to, among other things lose weight, travel more and read more. You may well be thinking about improving your business.

Is your digital marketing strategy still drawing the clicks, customers and sales it used to? If not, you should try to improve upon it.

If you notice any of these four signs, it may be time to update your marketing strategy or make a new one from scratch:

Falling through Google’s Ranks
One of the main objectives of any online marketing campaign should be SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). In other words, making your business and website easier to find online, especially with search engines. While you should laugh at any fraudulent claims that your business will be “on the front page of Google”, SEO is a vital aspect of being noticed online, and helps to drive brand awareness, sales and more.

As trends shift and search engines update their code, it’s vital to keep your SEO techniques current, or you might lose your traffic, clicks and conversions for good. 

While there are many reasons for a drop in search engine ranking, the most important are the technical aspects of your site.

Major search engines like Google consider the usability, speed, stability, structure, and security of sites to determine their ranking, so poor performance in these aspects will hurt your rank. Make sure to monitor all aspects of your website to keep things ticking over smoothly.

You also need to keep an eye on your keyword list, remove any that aren’t performing as well as they used to, and replace them with more relevant terms. This isn’t always an exact science, so trial and error may be needed. Constant effort is needed to stay relevant online, so is it time to do a bit of spring cleaning around your site?

So Many Visitors, So Few Conversions
When all the visitors to your site and all the people searching for your products and/or services online aren’t buying, you aren’t earning. 

If you can track the behaviour of your visitors (like how long they spend on each page, where they go afterwards), then you can address things that may be driving potential customers away.

Generally speaking, the responsiveness of the website, ease of navigation and lack of engaging content are the main reasons that visitors would leave without buying anything. If you can get plenty of visitors to your site but struggle to make sales, you should examine your site and change some things up.

Social Media Flops can be Stopped
As a growing number of small and medium businesses move towards social media for promoting themselves online, it’s important to consider the pros and cons of the medium. 

While social media has the potential to result in ‘viral’ sensations that catapult businesses and brands into the mainstream for virtually no investment, this is rarely the case.

However, if you’ve given up on being the next viral trend and turned your back on social media, give it another chance and try to start anew next year. 

It will take time and effort, but through regular engagement and promotion, you can improve your presence online.

There are many methods to increasing your reach on social media – like influencers, competitions, and guest posts – but you need to remember the “person” in “personal interaction”. Make sure to respond to your followers and customers (especially the negative ones), and use a personal touch – after all, people buy from people, not corporate Facebook accounts.

An Unresponsive Site means Responding Customers
If you keep seeing traffic and visitors leave your site after a short period of time, then your site is probably lacking a certain something. Two main culprits are slow load times and differing looks/performance across different devices.

If a visitor can’t see what they’re looking for in seconds (especially when on a mobile device), then they’ll probably leave your site, losing you sales. Scrutinise your site traffic, conversion rates, and ways to improve your page speed, to improve traffic and conversion.

Ease of use, streamlined design and reducing the steps between entry to checkout should all be primary goals to improve sales and conversions. Is your site ready for a new year’s reworking?

All of your online metrics – from page visits to sales and conversions – are trackable, meaning that you should be measuring the success of your online marketing, and tweaking things when they stop being as effective.

While this should be an ongoing process, it sometimes takes a special occasion to really make us think about self-improvement.