Introduction
The target audience for this imaginary marine conservation campaign’s wireframe is young adults (18-25). The design has several elements that should assist it in getting across to the intended audience and providing the necessary data. Improving a website’s ability to promote marine conservation calls for an optimization method that uses controlled experimentation. As a result, exploration of several website optimization tactics, customer conversion, and marketing instruments for raising awareness of the campaign is required.
Website Optimization Strategies
SEO refers to the steps taken to raise a website’s rank in organic search results on Google, Bing, and other search engines when users look for goods and services. Individual websites are more likely to be discovered and clicked on if they rank higher in search results (Vallez et al., 2022). Search engine optimization aims to increase website traffic that converts to paying consumers, repeat visitors, or other desirable outcomes (Miklosik et al., 2021). Given the importance of search engine optimization, this section gives recommendations for both on-page and off-page optimization of a website dedicated to marine conservation.
On-Page SEO Recommendations
The goal of on-page SEO, sometimes known as on-site SEO, is to increase a page’s search engine rankings and visitors. Simply put, it is a technique for making a website more crawlable by search engines. This has many advantages, including higher traffic volumes and click-through rates (CTR) (Baker, 2022). Therefore, the below on-page SEO recommendations are significant for marine conservation websites to ensure that their target audience of people aged 18-25 is reached and to reveal bad practices.
Keywords
The most fundamental way for a consumer to know if the website’s content addresses their inquiry lies in the language employed; therefore, I recommend that the website include relevant keywords (Baker, 2022). The likelihood that a page will be relevant to a search increases if the query terms appear on that page, either in the body content or the headings. This is sometimes obvious, as the designer working on a marine conservation website will likely wish to use phrases like “marine wildlife,” “decrease waste,” and “plastic” to boost search engine rankings.
Designers need to research their potential clients’ search habits so that they may include such terms in their work. Doing research ensures that designers take all promising avenues. Google Analytics will monitor the website’s search engine rankings and keyword performance (Cvijovic, 2021). It is simple to implement and provides valuable insight into what works and what does not.
Visual Assets
Include visual content like photos, videos, and infographics to keep site visitors engaged. The presence of visual assets also provides the website with additional avenues to improve its on-page SEO. With visual search being used by over 36% of online shoppers, the marine conservation website needs to implement this strategy (Baker, 2022). Whenever feasible, optimize the text that goes along with the image. For instance, some of the accompanying text may indicate the annual death toll of marine species or the annual weight of plastic waste dumped into the ocean.
Additionally, it is essential to keep in mind the file sizes of the images so that the page does not take forever to load. Ensure the photographs can be easily shared to find opportunities for backlinking, increasing the site’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EAT). Google’s Search Console is the most popular and straightforward method for analyzing the effectiveness of a website’s visual elements.
Targeting Multiple Keywords and Their Variations
Attempting to rank for a large number of keywords and variations thereof using a single website can be tempting. A web developer can even claim that this strategy will boost their sites’ rankings practically everywhere (What is on-site SEO? How to optimize a page, n.d.). However, it is not just a bad SEO strategy but also an old technique. For one, to rank for several keywords, a developer may have to lower the overall quality of their website to do so. Too many overused keywords can force a designer’s website to sound forced and discourage users.
Off-Page SEO Recommendations
Off-page SEO refers to the techniques used to boost a website’s visibility in search engines that are not directly related to the site. Link building, content marketing, social media marketing, guest posting, podcasting, and video marketing are all examples of popular off-site SEO tactics (Khan, 2022). Google can gauge the site’s popularity based on these signals. They lend the site an air of honesty and dependability. Due to the benefits of off-page SEO, the recommendations below are crucial to ensure its proper operation.
Link Building
Link building is a technique for getting quality inbound links to the website. It will increase the search engine rankings of a website so that the user may quickly find the site. Whenever another website links back to yours, it will send a positive signal to significant search engines like Google and Bing (Silva, 2022).
If other credible websites link to yours, yours will rank well in relevant search results. BuzzStream is an effective tool that will support link-building initiatives in every way (Link-building Tools, 2021). It will assist in running an efficient link-building strategy and tracking its results, from link prospecting to outreach.
Social Media Marketing
In this mobile-first era, where most digital customers utilize social media daily, I recommend using social media marketing. Social media significantly influenced how people used the internet, search engines, and social media in 2020 to find answers to their queries (Khan, 2022). Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are a few of the popular social media platforms that I will employ.
Authentic social media interaction and sharing increase the visibility of maritime conversations (LaFleur, 2022). Links and mentions increase as this topic receives more notice. These off-page SEO elements directly impact the rankings. The analytics work will be done with Hootsuite Analytics (Newberry, 2023) for this suggestion. I can monitor Metrics for every major network in a unified interface.
Customer Conversion
The goal of A/B testing, also known as split testing, is to discover which of two or more variable variants has the most significant impact on users and ultimately drives business metrics by randomly exposing them to both variants simultaneously (Shi et al., 2022). Essentially, A/B testing takes all the guessing from optimizing a website and allows seasoned optimizers to make judgments based on complex data (Kohavi et al., 2020). In A/B testing, “A” represents the “control” or “initial” variable, whereas B stands for a variant of the original test subject.
The “winner” is the version that improves the relevant business metric(s). Applying the modifications made by the winning variant to the page(s) or element(s) in the test can improve website performance and return on investment. Each site has its conversion stats (Rawat, 2022). For instance, the goal of the Marine Conservation website is to increase the number of persons aged 18 to 25 interested in helping clean up the oceans.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is an overarching strategy that includes A/B testing as a component for learning more about users on a quantitative and qualitative level (Rawat, 2022). This information can be used to gauge user reaction to website changes or to test new ideas for improving the user experience. A conversion is a favorable user activity that results in value for the website owner and is prompted by a call-to-action (CTA) message. The copy on your page and the design and usability aspects must work harmoniously to provide a smooth user experience that compels visitors to take the necessary action (What is a conversion? Definition, 2019).
Conversions can be any lucrative action, such as buying a product, downloading an e-book or free content, watching a video or listening to audio content, signing up for a newsletter, or signing up for a monthly membership. Any user who takes action in response to a call to action is said to have converted from the status of a casual browser to that of a potential client.
The success of a company’s marketing funnel can be gauged, in large part, by the rate of conversions it receives. Few visitors to a website are likely to make a purchase the instant they click through. Leads can be moved further down the sales funnel by establishing several touchpoints and tracking their progress at each (Gil-Gomez et al., 2020).
A visitor who takes the requested action becomes a lead, allowing businesses to determine who among their site users is interested in purchasing their goods. Conversions can also be used to spot issues with a company’s website or sales channel. Marketers can see what is and isn’t working, what traffic sources provide the most customers, and which ones should be discarded by studying the customer journey and locating bottlenecks.
Google Analytics, being a quantitative online analytics service, will serve as the A/B testing tool I employ. I can use this information to determine which pages receive the most traffic, how long users spend on each page, and how often they leave the site. I may begin by selecting the marine conservation website pages that receive the most daily visitors. (Rawat, 2022). After that, I may use Google Analytics to delve into this traffic’s finer, qualitative details. The below A/B testing can be tried out to prove it works.
Assigning Traffic Weight in Webpage vs. Webpage
During a standard A/B test, visitors are split evenly between two or more versions of a webpage based on a set of criteria. If I were conducting a split test between two-page versions, I would divide the traffic by 50/50 or 60/40. To ensure the experiment’s validity, repeat visitors will always be shown the same variety (Rawat, 2022). When deciding how much emphasis to give my page variants during a test, the most important consideration is timing: whether I am beginning the test with numerous variants at once or testing fresh concepts against an established page.
Starting from Scratch in Landing Page vs. Landing Page
If I am starting a new campaign and have numerous ideas on which path to follow, I can develop a variant for each idea. Under these circumstances, I would receive the same amount of consideration for each landing page variant. If there are two possibilities, it is 50/50; if there are three, it is 33/33/34, and so on (Rawat, 2022). I want to treat them equally and pick a champion as quickly as possible. Since I have no page-specific conversion data, to begin with, the playing field is altogether level for this experiment.
Comparison of Email vs. Social Media
Given the proliferation of digital marketing tactics, it is not easy to choose which tactics to employ and yet develop a comprehensive plan. Digital marketing strategies like email and social media advertising are different fruit baskets. They each have their place in the bigger picture of marketing, but they could not be more different in how they are implemented (Jakes, 2022). To expand their businesses, however, people must determine which channel is more successful and deserves more investment.
Marketing a business on social media brings in new potential customers and gives the brand a sense of direction. Email marketing emphasizes retaining loyal customers and works to deepen the relationships with those customers (Tran, 2023). These positives might work together to present the audience with the best quality marketing. However, in this section, they will be discussed in a different way to identify which of them should be used for a marine conservation campaign aimed at an audience aged between 18 and 25.
Social Media
Increasing exposure for any brand may be accomplished in a variety of ways using social media. What is more exciting is discovering each and deciding which is the top. These are a few examples of how social media may boost brand awareness: facilitating interaction, advertising content, and encouraging social sharing (Tran, 2023). Kindness (2023) estimates that at the end of 2022, Facebook, one of the major social media platforms, had 2.96 billion monthly active members. These results show a big audience on social media, suggesting that marine conservation efforts could benefit significantly from leveraging this medium to raise awareness.
In addition to fostering relationships with customers and raising brand awareness, email marketing offers several other advantages to organizations. To help marine conservation efforts reach a wide variety of people between 18 and 25, I will use their email address database to create customized emails (Hopper, 2022). Email marketing has many advantages, including marketing objectives such as increased exposure to the brand, increased velocity, reduced costs, more precise targeting, increased customer dialogue, measurable results in increased conversions, and improved customer relationship management (Zhel, 2023).
As of 2021, Jakes (2022) estimates that 4 billion people regularly use email. Additionally, statistical modeling suggests that this figure will continue to rise. The number of people who use email is projected to reach 4.6 billion by 2025 and will keep growing after that (Jakes, 2022). Marine conservation campaigns that want to reach the broadest possible audience should consider this massive population.
Knowing which channel is more effective for expanding marine conservation campaigns is vital. When polled, 60% of online marketers said email marketing was more effective than social networking (Zhel, 2023). The other 40% said they have discovered that social media and email marketing are different.
This indicates that each has benefits and drawbacks (Zhel, 2023). Unlike social media, email drives traffic and direct conversions more effectively. Email marketing is ideally suited for marine conservation initiatives since it allows for broad exposure and personalized communication with users.
Conclusion
Awareness-raising for marine conservation efforts relies heavily on website optimization, customer conversion, and digital marketing technologies. Web optimization guarantees that the intended audience is aware of and receptive to the campaign before arriving online. In addition, customer conversion guarantees that people familiar with the campaign will join in on the action. The campaign will reach a broad audience through digital marketing methods like email. When these three strategies are used, they increase the campaign’s visibility and help it succeed.
Reference List
Baker, L. (2022) 12 essential on-page Seo factors you need to know, Search Engine Journal. Web.
Cvijovic, D. (2021) Google Analytics keyword report: A step-by-step guide on how to track keywords in Google Analytics: Databox blog, Databox. Web.
Gil-Gomez, H. et al. (2020) “Customer relationship management: Digital Transformation and Sustainable Business Model Innovation,” Economic Research-Ekonomska Istraživanja, 33(1), pp. 2733–2750. Web.
Hopper, D. (2022) Email marketing: A tool to strengthen relationships, improve brand…, business2community. Web.
Jakes, D. (2022) Email marketing vs. Social Media: Which is most effective for your business?, TechnologyAdvice. Web.
Khan, A. (2022) 6 off-page SEO strategies for small businesses worth implementing, Small Business CRM & Automation. Web.
Kindness, J. (2023) Social media marketing vs. email marketing: Pros & cons. AgencyAnalytics. Web.
Kohavi, R., Tang, D. and Xu, Y. (2020) “Trustworthy online controlled experiments.”. Web.
LaFleur, G. (2022) How to incorporate social media into Seo Strategies: TechTarget, Content Management. TechTarget. Web.
Link building tools (2021) BuzzStream. Web.
Miklosik, A., Evans, N. and Zak, S. (2021) “Research on cross-session and Cross-Device Search: A systematic literature review,” IEEE Access, 9, pp. 82550–82562. Web.
Newberry, C. (2023) Social Seo: How to help people find you on social media, Social Media Marketing & Management Dashboard. Web.
Rawat, S. (2022) What is A/B testing? A practical guide with examples: VWO, Website. Web.
Shi, C. et al. (2022) “Dynamic causal effects evaluation in A/B testing with a reinforcement learning framework,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, pp. 1–13. Web.
Silva, C. (2022) What is off-page Seo? A guide to off-page Seo strategy, Semrush Blog. Web.
Tran, A. (2023) 9 ways to increase brand awareness on social media, AdRoll. Web.
Vallez, M., Lopezosa, C. and Pedraza-Jiménez, R. (2022) “A study of the web visibility of the SDGs and the 2030 agenda on university websites,” International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, 23(8), pp. 41–59. Web.
What is a conversion? Definition (2019) Omniconvert. Web.
What is on-site seo? How to optimize a page (no date) Moz. Web.
Zhel, M. (2023) Email marketing vs. social media: Why should you care? (2023), Mailmunch. Web.