Compass Con: Answers to Your Digital Marketing Questions

Thank you so much for attending our 2024 Compass Con! We greatly enjoyed getting to spend time with everyone (and our furry friend Mac & Cheese definitely enjoyed all the attention!). We didn’t have enough time to answer all the questions that came in through text, so we wanted to share a few thoughts that can point you in the right direction.

Questions About Digital Marketing & Website Services

What are the core items you have as part of a digital marketing package?

Most of our digital marketing packages start with our Digital Discovery process. We have three core audits: SEO, Visitor Behavior and Competitive (plus additional audits you can add to your package!). By partnering with Blue Compass for these audits, you gain a team of dedicated experts who devote exclusive time to analyzing your marketing tactics and elevating your ongoing efforts to:

• Uncover big-picture insights about your industry’s digital landscape
• Maximize your marketing efforts with data-driven solutions
• Receive tailored recommendations to improve web performance
• And more!

After you complete the Digital Discovery, we then create a strategy of our recommendations that can include but is not limited to: search engine marketing (SEM) and paid social media campaigns, pillar piece creation, content optimizations, Google Analytics 4 (GA4) reporting and much more!

How do you audit for SEO?

We take the time to uncover your current standing on your website before we move on to other areas. An SEO audit includes an exhaustive error check, where we use our digital tools to crawl the site and compile a complete list of errors found, including technical errors, on-page errors and image errors. We also review site content for potential optimizations like linking opportunities, navigation structure, content length and structured data.

If you’re curious about more details, please check out our SEO FAQ page to dive in!

What advice would you give a small local company that simply doesn’t have the budget to compete with our nationwide competitors on keywords and keyword rankings?

Use your location to your advantage! You may not have the same reach as a corporate giant, but you are local and personable to your area. By optimizing your Google Business Profile, you can improve your rankings in the Google Local Pack and take up more real estate in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Additionally, with your paid campaigns (through traditional RSAs and possibly Performance Max ads), you can focus on locations and keywords that are based on what users are looking at in your area—these are options that are more challenging for large corporations because they have so much ground to cover.

When should I link a PDF vs host the content directly on the website?

The key is to have a clear strategy for your PDFs. If you have a great piece of content where you can easily add hyperlinks and backlinks to, we normally suggest making that a blog or some kind of interior page on your website. However, there are some specific use cases that are a great fit for PDFs. Here are two:

• Forms — If you have forms customers or clients need to download and print on a frequent basis, that is a great time to use PDFs. By readily providing the materials they need, you create a positive user experience.
• Gated content — You may have a checklist or how-to document that you would really like to promote. You can create a simple landing page that tells a little bit about the content, including a basic form where you collect a name and email before they’re able to download the PDF.

If my website was built by Blue Compass, does it already have schema markup or should I be doing that work internally?

All schema has to be added to each page individually or through custom apps. If you have not had a conversation with our team yet about adding schema to your website, you likely do not currently have it. However, if this is something you would like to add to your DM package, please connect with your account executive.

Do we need to start thinking about how we might have to comply with tightened consumer privacy regulations (like the new California Privacy Act) as it relates to digital advertising?

We recommend checking with your company attorney on when these regulations become applicable to your organization. There are multiple factors including but not limited to sales and percentage of web traffic from impacted areas (for example California for CCPA or EU countries for GDPR).

How do you identify pillar piece opportunities on an existing website that wasn't built with pillars in mind?

A pillar piece could easily be a main service or product page (think level 1, 2 or 3 in your navigation). These pages likely already have a great outline, but you just need more content. You could add more details by including H2s with chapter-like summaries for each section, and then add a button to the end of each section to direct your audience to a more specific page on that topic. You could also include hyperlinks to other areas on your website, from blogs to specific products.

Questions About Social Media

How often should a company be posting? Should you duplicate posts across platforms and just tweak it to match the audience?

Two big considerations: always think about your audience and be as consistent as possible.

Each platform is so different, both with their users and algorithm. You may want to highlight the same service page or event on social, but the verbiage you write for the posts should be different to each platform (along with the right character count and relevant hashtags). At the same time, there might be content you create for a specific platform. For example, the fun, casual video you create for Instagram likely wouldn’t be a fit for the professionalism of LinkedIn.

And like we mentioned, the other consideration is consistency. Try to post the same amount of content each week. If you can only put out two posts a week, do that! And then, once you have that schedule down, you can increase your posts gradually. If you haven’t been posting consistently, don’t make your first goal to post every single day; make goals you can accomplish!

What do you recommend for an engagement strategy for social media?

You can do several things to enhance your engagement on social! As this is a large, broad question, we have several recommendations:

• What content has worked and what hasn’t? Take inventory of the posts that have performed well. Are your culture posts getting strong engagement? What’s the difference when you post images vs graphics? Make some observations about what’s been working well and build your content strategy around those types of posts.
• Do your posts have CTAs? Giving your audience something to interact with (a page to visit, a document to download, etc.) will likely enhance their engagement.
• Do you have any paid campaigns running? We recommend a mix between organic and paid posts. Organic posts (especially posts that highlight your culture and people) can be effective. At the same time, paid campaigns provide more options. Depending on the platform, you can target certain keywords, locations and demographics in a way that organic posts just can’t.

These questions are simply a starting point. We welcome a conversation to talk through this topic further.

Questions About Videos

What are tips for optimizing videos on the website to not hurt page load times?

Our recommendation would be to first upload your video to YouTube and then embed the video on your website! This allows your video to be easily accessible but won’t require the insane amount of load time required if you simply upload your video directly to the page.

If you have your website on Slate (our CMS at Blue Compass), we could upload the video through a specific module. We use a picture of the video thumbnail that will only load the video when a user clicks on the image. Essentially this creates the same experience for your user and doesn't impact your page speed.

Does it hurt you to embed videos from other video hosts on your website, other than YouTube? Does it hurt you if you have a video in multiple places, such as YouTube and your website (i.e. how does this affect SEO)?

It doesn’t hurt your video to embed it on your site—in fact, that is what we recommend. We recommend uploading to YouTube whenever possible, as the search and use of the platform is much greater than other video platforms. Additionally, YouTube allows you to write headlines and descriptions, which enables opportunities for keyword inclusion. You can also add timestamps and links back to your website, both elements that improve SEO value.

Connect with Blue Compass

If any of these answers sparked your curiosity, please reach out to our team or connect with your account executive. We would love to talk with you further. And we are already looking forward to the next Compass Con!

Mac & Cheese

Mac and Cheese is on the Digital Bark-eting team at Blue Compass. He loves greeting his team members when they arrive for the day, encouraging fun breaks during the workday and taking naps in various places throughout the office. He also enjoys saying hello to clients and other visitors - especially the mail carriers who bring treats! Mac is an important part of our team of digital experts at Blue Compass, where we help brands succeed online through web design, development and digital marketing strategies.