If you want to be ahead of your competitors and make your digital marketing efforts to succeed in 2020, here are some of the items you need to have on your website:

Ensure Your site is mobile ­friendly

This is one of the most important elements in a successful online strategy. Search engines are now penalizing businesses that don’t have a mobile ­friendly version of their website. Use one of these tools to check your site or learn more about Google’s mobile-first initiative.

Secure your website

The search engines are now giving preference to websites that are 100% secure. This means you may need to purchase an SSL certificate and have it installed on your server. Your hosting company can help you with this.

Build something people need

You need a ‘lead magnet’ – a piece of valuable content that you provide in exchange for action or email addresses. Ideally, something that speaks to the interest of your web visitors. It could be material related to how to maintain a boat in its best condition. Your business needs to build a list of prospects ­and a lead magnet to attract these prospects.

Create content that’s superior to your competitors

Probably one of the hardest things to do, but by far the most effective. Creating content (blogs, videos, podcasts) that solves problems (related to your boating business) will bring more and more traffic to your website. Think quality and not quantity.

Make sure you control what’s already yours (or should be)

It is alarming the amount of business that believes they own their web components when in fact they don’t. Make sure you own your own URL, data and all the key items related to your website. If it is owned by a web designer or marketing agency, they could hold it hostage. 

“Pixel” your site visitors

Once you’ve built some great content and a good lead magnet, you need to track people that are consuming it. You can do that with a pixel -­ a small piece of code that you load on your site. Then you can run retargeting ads to those folks to increase your branding. We can help you get this set up.

Have a speedy website

Google gives poor ranking to websites that are slow. If your site is slow, consider caching, a CDN or you may need to consider moving to a better web host. 

Claim Your Listings

Verify your business listings on the major sites such as Google My Business, Bing Places, Yelp, and Houzz. These are free and should be optimized with your hours, location info, phone number, and pictures of products and of your physical location.

Get Reviews

Want to outperform your competitors? This is one great way to really set yourself apart. After you’ve claimed your listings on the services mentioned above, concentrate your efforts on getting reviews from your customers. You need to include these on your page. It will help you build credibility among the online community.

Stop Being Afraid or Ignoring Facebook

There are around 3 billion people on Facebook; even just in your city, there are thousands, perhaps millions of people that you could reach by simply posting once a week. Also, your Facebook page can show up in Google’s results, which means it will limit the space of your competitors on the first page of Google results.  

Tune In To What People are Searching

To provide your customers and prospect with relevant content you need to inform yourself of what they are searching for on the web. Answer The Public is a very useful tool that will help you understand your target market interest. Impressive, right?

Get Links

Every link to your website from another site counts as a “vote” for your business. The more votes you get, the higher your site will rank. Make sure organizations you belong to have linked to you – chambers, networking groups, the BBB, etc.

Follow the Rules

Don’t think you can trick Google with hidden keywords, doorway pages, or multiple websites all pointing to each other. Instead, build a strong, credible website that offers solutions to people looking for your services.

These 13 tasks will give you a great foundation for your website in 2020.

Boat Marketing Pros is here to help your boating business succeed online.  If you are unsure about any of the tasks we’ve mentioned in this checklist, we’d love to help you get them done. Give us a call at 888-928-4587.