Well, it’s that time of the year again. The New Year is approaching and pretty soon we will all be in 2015. Of course, marketing doesn’t stop for anyone so how can you make sure that you have a solid plan for the up-coming year? Don’t worry – we have you covered at Marketing Giant.

Here are some of the most important fundamentals that you should be focusing on for your marketing in 2015 including everything from keyword research and on-site optimizations, to social media and increasing your brand awareness.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is still an extremely important part of the marketing process. Have major search engines taken away most of the valuable search information? Yes. Does that mean we can’t figure out what the best keywords to target for are? Absolutely not.

Here at Marketing Giant we like to use a systematic system to keyword research. Once you know everything about your client and what they are trying to rank for, determine whether or not they are a local business or a global business. If they are local, you want to make sure to add location keywords into you optimizations. If not, you want to broaden your options and either focus on specific high-opportunity keywords, or brand awareness.

For example, if you are doing some marketing for a company like “Nike”, you certainly don’t need to add “Nike Portland” as a keyword. Now, if you are doing marketing for a local Nike outlet that is located in Portland, you might want to consider this keyword.

Helpful Tools for Keyword Research?

• Google keyword planner
• Google search (start typing in your keyword and enjoy)
• Bing search information
• Google trends

Webmaster Tools

In 2015 your website should be completely up to date from all errors, and your sitemaps and URL structure should be clean and to the point. Make sure that your website is submitted to both Google and Bing, and make sure that the respective search engine is crawling your website the way that you want it to.

Helpful Tools for Webmaster Tools?

• Google web tools
• Google Analytics
• Bing web tools
• Yoast Plugin for WordPress
• Google sitemap generator

On-Site

To those that still think that on-site SEO is dead – think again. We have shown great results from on-site optimizations and many of these techniques are still extremely relevant. Here are some of the best ones for you to use. Run through each page on your website and make sure that they are all up to par.

• Title tags (make sure they are the right length)
• Meta descriptions (make sure they are the right length)
• Internal links (at least 3 per page)
• Alt tags (at least 1 per page)
• Content optimization (use keyword 2-3 times within body text)
• Keyword in

  or

  (once is good enough)

• Social qualifiers (use related keywords within text)
• Location optimizations (if brick & mortar business)

Offsite

No, offsite marketing is not dead. Gaining links is still one of the greatest things you can do to increase your website’s domain authority and rankings. The problem is that so many people are still using spammy methods. You have to let the external linking happen naturally. Here are some things to watch out for.

• Don’t submit your site to sketchy forums
• Stop linking to your site within blog comments (unless it’s relevant)
• Stop paying for links
• Stop writing pointless content

Social Media

It’s simple: your business needs to be on social media. At the very least, your business should be on Google+ (if not for authorship and publisher alone). Create accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest at the least. Here are some things to make sure you add to your accounts in 2015.

• Make sure banners are the right size – crisp and clear
• Make sure avatars aren’t messy, and make them the right size
• Link to your other social media accounts
• Input the correct information for your business (address, phone, website, etc).
• Verify accounts when possible
• Stay active!

Content

It’s simple: you need to stop using duplicate content, and you need to stop writing pointless content. Create a sold content marketing plan and stick with it!

If you have any more tips to add, please comment below!