Sales and marketing, Sales and marketing, Small business

How’s Your Online Health?

Your body’s health is important. If you don’t take care of yourself, you’ll run your body down and it will quit working. From time to time, you may feel the need to visit a doctor just to prevent your health from declining or to keep your health up to speed. Well, your online health is no different. From time to time, you need a check up.

What’s an Online Health Check Up?

Running a business online is difficult. You have a lot to think about. You have a website, a blog, social media channels, probably some paid advertising, a video channel, and other tools to keep up with. Even if your business is a traditional brick-and-mortar operation, you’ll need an online presence just to remain competitive. An online health check up ensures you are staying current with best practices.

One critical question you’ll need to ask yourself is, what can you do to improve your search engine rankings? Is your website’s content optimized well? Do you have enough inbound links? Are you targeting the right keywords?

Website design is another critical piece of your online health. Is your design user-friendly? Is your website turning visitors away or losing potential customers through link holes? These are important questions you’ll need to ask yourself. An online health check up is designed to ask all the right questions to keep your online business operating smoothly and efficiently while generating leads and developing customer relationships.

Why You Need a Competitive Analysis

One of the most important aspects of your online health is how competitive your business is. You can’t really know that without an in-depth competitive analysis.

A good analysis of your competition might include:

  • Link portfolio inventory
  • Social media channel observation
  • Blog content deconstruction
  • Website content analysis
  • Newsletter content breakdown
  • Customer service interaction
  • Market penetration

These are just a few of the things you’ll want to look into regarding your competition. Is your competition doing something to capitalize on market potential that you can implement in your own business? If so, you might think about adopting that.

Twitter, for instance, last year announced it will autoplay videos to remain competitive with Facebook.

If you don’t understand your competition, you don’t understand your market.

What Do Your Metrics Say?

One area of online health many businesses find it difficult to get a handle on is analytics. Are you measuring the right statistics? Are the stats you are measuring helping your business run more efficiently and more profitably? If not, what needs to change?

Analytics is a very important part of your online health. So are website development, social media marketing, and link building. An online health check up gives you a view of all the important information you need to improve your online marketing. Why not take advantage of that?

Caroline Melberg, founder of Small Business Mavericks, is an online marketing strategist with more than two decades of experience. Read her ChannelE2E contributions here.