Search Marketing Sage

It’s a new year, and time to make some new marketing resolutions for 2013. Have you included any of the following in your 2013 search and social media marketing plans?

• Creating more fresh, quality content for your website?
• Leveraging semantic search?
• Digging up more useful data from your analytics?
• Branding your business online?
• Getting on board with Google+?
• Experimenting with social advertising?
• Creating and improving your landing pages?
• Getting a little creepy with retargeting?
• Making your site more mobile-friendly?

We’ve created this checklist of search and social media marketing tactics with 30 of the most important tactics not to overlook in 2013. Any marketer can use this checklist to augment their current marketing plans for 2013 with effective tactics that are also easy to implement.

As the curtain closes on another year at Search Mojo, we like to take one last look back at what made our year interesting – and our blog posts here on Search Marketing Sage are an excellent reflection of that. We write about the new things we as search marketers are learning about each day so we can pass that knowledge on to you, our awesome readers. And because of you, 2012 was the most successful year yet for the Search Marketing Sage!

We’ve compiled a list of our top 30 blog posts on search marketing, social media marketing, mobile marketing and content marketing for 2012. These were the most popular posts of the year, judged by your visits and feedback. We hope you enjoy these (and even learn something you didn’t know before), and here’s to a successful 2013 for all of us!

First things first, if you aren’t using Google Analytics, set it up now. If you are already using it, I really hope your Home tab doesn’t have the default Dashboard. Yes, okay, it may be helpful to some, to know how many visits are coming through, but you should consider setting up multiple NEW dashboards, where you specifically indicate what activity is shown when you first log in.

Dashboards are a quick and easy way to get a glimpse at the activity on your site. The great thing is, you can set up multiple dashboards down to the profile level, so if the programming department has a filtered profile, they can set up a dashboard that best suits them, while the sales department can see what’s most important to them, and so on and so forth. Google Analytics is a fantastic (and FREE!) tool that provides you with so much data you won’t know what to do with, but if it’s too difficult or time consuming to get down to the nitty gritty, sometimes it gets overlooked and thrown under the table when it could potentially be helping you improve your business.

Step 1: Establish Your Goals

Alright, I know this is what everyone wanted to read about on the last day of human existence,..so let me just start this blog post by saying, you’re welcome.   This post is an overview of how to use my Google Analytics debugging solution of choice – the GA Debugger for Chrome.

There are plenty of debugging methods out there, some of which are arguably better at pinpointing exact problems.  I prefer this one because it helps me isolate the problem rather than refreshing Analytics over and over saying to myself, “WHY??”. It might not always point you to a specific answer, but it will at least help you identify what the problem ISN’T so you have something more to say to your IT person than “heeelppp meeee”. If you would like to look at all the debuggers available, Google provides a nice inventory of debugger tools.