One Basket, Four Eggs
You might want to pour your energy into one big idea, but in digital marketing, relying on a single tactic or striving for one metric can be risky. Instead, think of your digital value as a combination of four foundational metrics that drive your success. For us, your Digital Growth depends on:
- Content production on your website – Regular, quality content shows search engines and users that your site is active and valuable. It also attracts new users and engagement.
- Organic traffic – Getting people to your site without paying for every click is key to scaling your efforts and an investment for the long-term.
- Top 20 ranking keywords – These keywords ensure you’re showing up for the most relevant searches and driving qualified traffic.
- Online conversions – Whether it’s filling out a form, making a purchase, or subscribing to a newsletter, conversions show that your strategy is working.
If any of these metrics aren’t at least hitting minimum targets, they should become the immediate focus. A key principle here is to prioritize low-effort, high-impact actions first. For example, if you’re struggling with organic traffic, updating existing content for SEO could provide a quick win. These quick victories will help get things humming along while creating the right habits for your team to maintain momentum.
Once the Machine is Running, What’s Next?
When we look at some of our long-term clients, many have been working with us through our digital growth marketing program for several years. They’ve built up their metrics to the point where their marketing machine is running smoothly—they have consistent content production, good organic traffic, solid keyword rankings, and reliable conversions. However, in marketing, you don’t just “win” and walk away.
Marketing is a continuous effort. You’ll need to shift focus and work smarter, not harder. Incremental changes and optimizations become your new path to growth. For each of the four metrics mentioned above that make up your Digital Value, here’s our recommended targets and a few ideas of what comes next.
Content Production
Foundation: Your team is producing an average of 10 pieces of content per month.
Tool: Build a shared editorial calendar in Google Sheets to record what’s published each month as well as future ideas to keep your team on track.
Next steps: Create valuable, informative gated content for form fills to get users into your pipeline at various stages of the sales funnel. Produce a newsletter as another way to disseminate your valuable content and increase visibility and engagement with your brand.
Organic Traffic
Foundation: Depending on the size of your company, your organic traffic goal can be anywhere from 3000 to 12,000+ monthly organic visitors.
Tool: Use GA4 or Google Search Console to see your current traffic. Take it a step further and benchmark against your competitors using a tool like SEMrush or Moz.
Next steps: Continue to take advantage of the free data being collected in GA4. Check your top landing pages so you can really hone in one pages to update as well as pillar pages that can be used for contextual links pointing back to pillar pages to help increase your visibility.
Top 20 Ranking Keywords
Foundation: For most organizations, we recommend a target of at least 70 keywords showing in the top 20 (counting only keywords with a minimum volume of either 200 or 500 searches per month).
Tool: Using a tool like SEMrush or Moz will give you the insights you need to track your progress.
Next steps: When you look at your top ranking keywords, you’ll also see the ranking URL. By looking at trends MoM, you can identify specific pages that you can update to better match the desired keywords for ranking. Looking at keywords ranking just outside of your top 20 is the best low-hanging fruit as you can make changes to push those keywords more easily into the top 20 than keywords you aren’t ranking for at all.
Online Conversions
Foundation: Depending on your business size, your goal can be anywhere from 120 to 1000+.
Tool: Use Google Tag Manager to set online conversion tracking for all forms on your website and GA4 or your CRM for your reporting.
Next steps: In order to increase the quality as well as the quality of your leads, you’ll want to look at what channels your best leads are coming from. If a paid channel is working, test something similar on another. If specific email campaigns are working, note trends so you can continue with what is working best and remove what’s not working.
