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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Four digital marketing strategies to prepare for a wild holiday season

30-second summary:

Ecommerce has become an increasingly important element of any business, but it is more important than ever going into the 2020 holiday season.

With the plethora of brands vying for ad space online, companies must make the most of their marketing budgets by adjusting their digital strategies.

Socium Media CEO Owen Loft offers four tips for breaking through the noise to get in front of your customers and boost sales this holiday season.

Retailers already set up for online sales had an immediate advantage, but others quickly fell behind. Instead of reaping profits from consumers who have chosen to shop from home, retailers without online infrastructures have missed out on booming sales opportunities. Online shopping was already trending upward before the pandemic, but the pandemic pushed the shift from physical to ecommerce ahead by five years.

Businesses cannot afford to overlook digital. But one question remains: How can they bolster their online presence and get in front of their target customers in the current landscape?

Holiday season 2020: A perfect storm of competition

Reaching customers who have flocked online has become more challenging (not to mention costly) as large retailers take control of valuable advertising space. And big-box stores aren’t the only ones driving up the cost of digital advertising — political candidates have sunk more than three billion dollars into campaign advertising this year.

Major retailers such as Best Buy and Walmart are taking more online-centric approaches to holiday shopping this year. Many have already announced that they will keep their physical stores closed on Thanksgiving. Some will even remain closed on Black Friday or offer limited shopping hours, pushing customers to stay home and shop online.

With the coronavirus pandemic stretching into the fourth quarter of 2020, major elections, and the holiday season, marketers have major competition for valuable online ad space.

Revamp your digital marketing strategy to reach customers at home

To break through the noise and make the most of your marketing budget in the current environment, you must adjust your digital marketing strategies. Here’s how:

1. Prepare for the early rush

In years past, Black Friday signaled the start of holiday shopping. This year, however, Amazon’s annual Prime Day — typically held in the summer — was rescheduled to early October due to the pandemic. Some experts predict this will be the starting point for holiday shopping in 2020, which amounts to roughly an extra month and a half of holiday-related advertising and deals.

Another reason for the early start? Getting ahead of anticipated shipping delays. Some businesses already have felt the coronavirus-related strain on deliveries; pair that with additional demand, and customers will probably start shopping early to make sure their gifts arrive on time for the holidays. It will be more important than ever to start your holiday marketing efforts early. You’ll also want to communicate shipping cut-off dates clearly on your website so customers can plan their purchases accordingly.

2. Leverage your email lists

With major events converging at once — COVID-19, the 2020 election, and the holidays — consumers will be bombarded with ads across the internet. Considering this perfect storm, it might be easier to reach your target customers in their inboxes. And if they subscribe to your business’s emails, it means they’ve had positive experiences and trust your brand. They’ll be more likely to order from you, a known quantity, rather than the thousands of other retailers jockeying for their attention.

3. Highlight gift-able items in your ads

Some items in your business’s inventory simply won’t wrap well, while others are practically made to be gifted. Analyze your inventory and determine which products would fit in a gift guide for your business.

To do this, harness the data you already have. Which products are popular with your customers? What were your top sellers during the 2019 holiday season? You should also research consumer trends to see what up-and-coming products will be popular this year, which will allow you to highlight them in your marketing.

Once you’re armed with that knowledge, make sure you have adequate inventory of those products — even if those items aren’t your typical bestsellers — and plan your marketing strategy around them. With high-quality images and video and updated ad copy ready to go, those products are sure to fly off the shelves.

4. Be flexible

While online shopping is by no means new, ecommerce in the time of COVID-19 is unprecedented. Retailers — even major ones — can’t predict how consumers will behave this year. With a slew of retailers staying closed during the traditional holiday shopping times, some consumers may shift to ecommerce for everything. Others may decide to play the waiting game in hopes that physical stores reopen before the holiday season kicks into gear.

Because it’s impossible to know precisely what consumers will do, your tried-and-true marketing methods may not work. If you don’t already, prepare some contingency marketing plans in case you need to pivot quickly and try a new strategy to reach your customers.

Ecommerce has steadily become an important part of business, but this year it is absolutely critical. With a veritable trifecta of competition due to the pandemic, election, and holiday season, marketers must reassess their digital marketing strategies to ensure they can reach customers and boost sales.

Owen Loft is Co-founder of Socium Media, a performance-focused digital marketing agency specializing in paid search, paid social, and SEO. He can be found on LinkedIn.

The post Four digital marketing strategies to prepare for a wild holiday season appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/13/four-digital-marketing-strategies-to-prepare-for-a-wild-holiday-season/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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The rise of vertical search engines

30-second summary:

Google’s rise as the dominant search engine has left the industry undisrupted for 20 years.

The number of use cases for search are infinite meaning Google’s information lacks depth in some cases.

Vertical search engines support unique workflows and provide domain expertise.

Specialized search for consumers is well established but B2B search is rapidly growing due to a “digital exhaust” effect.

B2B search helps fuel SMB’s and the mid-market because more businesses get found.

On October 20, 2020, the Justice Department sued Google, an Alphabet subsidiary, claiming the company’s internet search platform is an illegal monopoly that is harmful to both competition and consumers. The case aims to prove that Google’s position as a dominant search provider limits consumer choice and partnerships with companies like Apple suppresses competition. Taking on Big Tech has been a mainstay in the national conversation ever since the 2016 Presidential election, but this is the first antitrust action taken against Google. While we might not reach the end of this story for years, the DOJ’s suit signals a larger shift in the search industry, which hasn’t been disrupted in over 20 years. The unintended consequence of Google’s conquest to broaden search is limited depth for some. Businesses tend to be affected more than consumers because of how results are ranked. Therefore, in the wake of Google’s antitrust suit, a new market for specialized information has emerged.

Shifting dynamics

In 1998 Google processed 10,000 search queries per day – roughly 3.65 million annually. The official Google Zeitgeist reported 1.2 trillion searches in 2012, the year it was published. That trend would eventually stabilize to an estimated 2.3 trillion searches per year in 2020.

Despite its size and tremendous growth, web search dynamics have begun to shift. Google has taken a super-aggregator and partnership approach to many growing verticals. Google Maps, for example, aggregate Booking.com, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Google Shopping and Google Finance are aggregators for ecommerce and financial information, respectively. Vertical search has always been at odds with aggregators, wanting to be found but also wanting direct traffic. Vertical search engines have built their own mobile apps to lure users away from the Google search bar.

Defining a vertical search engine

A vertical search engine is a search engine that focuses on a specific domain, or vertical. Think of LinkedIn for people search, Zillow for housing search, or Kayak for travel search. The benefits of using a vertical search engine are:

More precise information due to narrowed scope

Calibrated systems for providing users with vertical expertise

Purposefully designed to facilitate a specific task or workflow

The third point is particularly noteworthy, especially when comparing vertical search engines to Google. It’s unlikely that you’re searching for car prices and inventory for fun. The price tells you if you can afford it; location information tells you where the nearest dealership is. Search is part of a workflow. Google, in most cases, acts as a middle man, guiding users from point A to point B.

Like web search, vertical search also supports various workflows. Where they differ is providing users with both the pathway and tools to complete an intended action. Here’s an example: Zillow users start by searching for homes, weighing data on home prices and taxes against other factors like school districts and proximity to work. The user’s workflow ends with an appointment for an open house with the listing agent. Workflows differ greatly depending on someone’s need, which is why the market for vertical search engines is so vast.

In recent years Google has attempted to compete with certain consumer search workflows. Google Flights, a Kayak competitor, brings users closer to booking travel all within one platform. Interestingly enough, Google’s purchase of ITA Travel in 2011 (which became Google Flights) was reviewed and cleared with the DOJ. If history is any lesson, Google is surely capable of competing with certain vertical search engines and capturing market share for consumer-based search. Business to business search, however, is a different ballgame.

The need for B2B search tools

There is a gap in the B2B search market. The gap exists, in part, by the design of Google’s search algorithm, which ranks websites based on five key factors. You’ll find the most popular business websites, but not every business website. More importantly, results might not provide the right business.

B2B search is beginning to transform, however. The amount of digital exhaust has increased drastically over the last few years. The emergence of Shopify, Squarespace, and others have decreased the barrier to entry for businesses on the internet. In 2014 the internet surpassed one billion websites and two billion is within reach. Having a website is one thing, but getting found is another. Companies must invest in website tools and resources and consistently optimize website content. Not to mention, it takes time to accumulate domain authority. If you’re a small business in a constrained economy, this looks like a tall order.

Google’s ranking algorithms, limited workflows, and surface-level information create an opportunity for B2B search engines across multiple functions. For example, ThomasNet (www.thomasnet.com) is an industrial sourcing platform connecting procurement professionals and industrial manufacturers. Drugdu (www.drugdu.com) operates medical device databases citing access to over 1,000,000 products.

With so much focus on small businesses this year due to COVID-19, it should be noted that B2B search products are good for SMBs, thus good for the economy. Tools like ThomasNet and Drugdu even the playing field, allowing small businesses to be found. Information also tends to be more trustworthy because of the general absence of advertising and crowdsourced information reduces reliance on individual company databases.

The big picture

The last antitrust case presented against a large technology company was in 1998 when Microsoft was, ultimately, found guilty of abusing monopoly power. Over the last two decades, Google has emerged as the clear leader in consumer search, but they’ve failed to extend their reach into vertical search engines. That void has since been filled with dozens of specialized search engines, platforms that mostly benefit small to mid-sized businesses. The advantages for users are clear: focusing on a limited set of data accelerates workflows and supplies better information. As the Google saga unfolds, vertical search engines are well-positioned to grow by facilitating business-to-business commerce.

Andrew Bocskocsky is a software expert, CEO, and Co-Founder of B2B search engine Grata.

The post The rise of vertical search engines appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/13/the-rise-of-vertical-search-engines/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Internal communication plan: How SMB marketing teams can achieve growth

30-second summary:

With remote work and the peak season coming in, creating an internal communication plan has become a massive priority for upper management to facilitate great teamwork.

How can companies create internal communication plans that not only work in the short term but can also be utilized for years to come to achieve steady team growth?

Eight great steps to improve your SMB digital marketing team’s internal communication plan and optimize successful outcomes.

Creating an internal communication plan has become a massive priority this year.

With more companies working remotely, documenting processes and making them accessible to teams has taken precedence over many other tasks.

Since team members cannot walk over to each other’s desks for a quick chat, it has become key for upper management to determine how best to facilitate teamwork.

Overcoming communication barriers in such an environment will take planning—especially as this remote working situation is set to continue for some time.

How can companies create internal communication plans that not only work in the short term but can also be utilized for years to come to achieve steady team growth?

We share a step by step guide that will help marketing teams communicate better in the long run.

1. Audit established internal communication plans

Before you go steaming ahead to create a new internal communication plan, you need to look at what you already have—or whether you have something at all.

Analyze your documentation to see whether you have the most up-to-date information. Examine your process flow to determine whether obstacles are being overlooked.

Study how effective your former communication plans had been—did you reach the goals set out for it? If not, what areas require improvement?

It’s also worth creating a company-wide survey to get a better understanding of where your employees think the company is.

Are they comfortable with the way communication is handled? Would they prefer changes in a particular area?

A thorough audit, like in the example below, will make it much easier to start creating an internal communication plan that helps your company grow.

Source: Venngage

2. Internal communication plan metrics

Now that you’ve determined what worked and didn’t in your previous internal communication plans—or that you do need one—you need to determine metrics for it.

Some metrics to aim for include:

Employee reach

Employee engagement rates

Employee retention rates

Message open rates

Message click rates

Level of productivity

Employee net promoter score

Revenue increase

Your SMB may not be focused on all of these metrics—but you should aim for at least a few of these in your initial plans.

You don’t want to have a narrow focus such as increasing productivity rates that don’t improve engagement or revenue.

Instead, choose a set of metrics that you can calculate, and that won’t be unattainable, like the open rate below used by Contact Monkey.

Source

3. Setting goals for internal communication plans

Miscommunication can cost SMBs an average of $420K in losses, found SHRM. Which is why internal communication plans are so necessary.

When you determine your metrics, you also need to set goals for your company and how the internal communication plan will tie into those goals.

How do you choose a goal for your plan that will help your marketing team grow? By using the SMART goal-setting method:

Be specific about what you want to accomplish, and use simple language to convey it

Choose a measurable goal that you can analyze

Make the goal attainable so your communications don’t aim for something you can’t get

Your goal should be relevant to the team and your overarching company goal

The goal should also be time-based so that your plan doesn’t miss deadlines

Here’s a visual overview of SMART goals that your team can refer to in the future.

Source: Venngage

4. Identify internal communication plan stakeholders

No matter the size of your company or marketing team, your internal communication plan needs to be targeted towards specific stakeholders.

This is because not all messages are relevant to every member of the team.

The way a website design team functions will differ from the PR team, or social media team, like in this example.

Source

You also don’t want to bombard other teams with marketing information that won’t be important to them.

Creating a one-size-fits-all plan for your company will only cause more misunderstandings—that is why you need to outline your target audience before creating a plan.

Use behavioral targeting methods to understand how, when, and why your team members need to be reached. This will make communication more effective.

5. Brand your internal communication plan

Branding is an essential part of external communications, but it should also be acknowledged for internal communication plans.

While brand symbols like logos, colors, and fonts are meant to evoke a connection between companies and consumers, it’s also necessary to maintain consistency within the company.

Branding ensures that your team is seeing the same message design internally and on your external channels.

So, make sure your internal newsletters and your business letter template, like this example, are updated regularly to reflect your branding styles.

Source: Venngage

But remember that branding isn’t just about the visual appearance of your company—your tone and messaging should also be consistent in your communications.

Don’t adopt a serious tone internally, only to be jovial with customers—your team is in many ways a customer, as well.

Your messaging should also be consistent—don’t tell external parties something that your marketing team doesn’t already know.

6. Design the internal communication process

One of the key aspects of an internal communication plan is workflow—your team should know whom they need to send content and strategies for approvals.

You should include a flow chart in your plan—these demystify approval processes so team members send their material to the right people in the right order.

7. Channels to implement internal communication

There are numerous channels where you can implement your internal communication plan:

Emails

Intranet

Internal newsletter

Closed social media groups

Project management tools

Slack, or similar alternatives

Video conference calls

Most of these channels are completely free to create and maintain but some of them can be time-consuming, as you can see from this chart.

Source

Emails aren’t as instantaneous as they used to be and many people have found themselves using them solely for external purposes.

On the other hand, instant messaging tools have allowed remote workers to keep in touch with each other and respond immediately.

Your SMB may not have the ability to institute an intranet, but you may be able to design newsletters to send to your team.

Include which channels you will be using in your plan and for what kind of communication so that team members are aligned and know where to reach out for responses.

8. Regularly evaluate your internal communication plan

If you think your job is done because you’ve created your internal communication plan, I’m afraid that isn’t the end of it.

Your plan will need to change to reflect your marketing team’s structure, your company’s new goals, and even the external environment.

Be prepared to assess the following on an annual basis:

Email open rates

Click-through rates

Channels used

Feedback from your team

Common barriers

Areas for improvement

Once you determine how these areas have performed you can redesign your communication plan.

Conclusion: Create an internal communication plan that keeps your team aligned

Creating an internal communication plan that works takes time and energy. You will also need to A/B test your tools and processes to define the ones that work best for your company.

To recap, here’s how you can create an internal communication plan that works:

Audit your current plans

Choose your metrics

Set plan goals

Identify stakeholders

Brand your documents

Design the process

Choose your channels

Evaluate your plan

By following these steps, you can create an internal communication plan that will help your marketing team become aligned with your company.

Ronita Mohan is a content marketer at Venngage, the online infographic maker and design platform. Ronita regularly writes about marketing, sales, and small businesses.

The post Internal communication plan: How SMB marketing teams can achieve growth appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/12/internal-communication-plan-how-smb-marketing-teams-can-achieve-growth/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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17 Unique Ways to Come Up With New Content Ideas

Are you looking for ways to come up with unique content ideas?

Content is the best way for you to increase your business’s searchability on the Internet. With over 30 million businesses in the United States, it’s important to do what you can to improve and stay relevant on the Internet. However, as you create content, you’ll notice that the only thing harder than creating suitable content is coming up with ideas for content creation.

If you don’t come up with enough ideas, your business may become doomed to irrelevance. What’s great is that there are many ways for you to come up with online content.

Read on to learn how you can generate content ideas without burning yourself out. Use these tactics to create content that your customers will love and to increase your SEO score today!

1. Ask Your Audience

Your best source of content ideas should also be the same people creating the content for. They’re the ones who will make the most out of your content, so there shouldn’t be any harm in asking them. There are many ways for you to do this.

The easiest way for you to ask your audience is through social media. It’s also the best place to ask first since 72% of American adults are always on social media platforms. This means that if you ask someone a question here, your post is likely to get engagements.

When doing this, make sure to make your posts eye-catching enough for your readers to notice. Content for social media needs to pop out of the browser’s feed. The content you post to ask should have a color that contrasts the platform’s usual background to be noticeable.

2. Send Out Surveys

Another way for you to ask your audience is by sending out a survey for them to answer. This is a great method if you’re looking to capitalize on email marketing tactics. This way, you can grow your marketing campaign and your SEO score at the same time.

When making a survey for your subscribers to answer, remember to keep it short. Nothing kills a consumer’s mood than a long survey. It’s also important to keep it interesting since the average human attention span has gotten shorter in recent years.

You can do this by adding eye-catching visuals to your surveys. Animated transitions are often enough to keep their attention. There are also some color combinations that can help you keep them focused on the survey.

3. Review Your Blogs

Another great way for you to come up with content ideas is by reviewing your blog. A well-made website should always have a comment section for visitors to use. Not only will this increase the engagements done on your website, but it will also help you come up with good content ideas.

This is because people will leave comments on your website if they have questions to ask about your product, service, or field of expertise. You can use these questions to come up with content to create for the same audience. This way, you can be sure your posts get engagement, too, since it answers the customer’s questions.

4. Check Out The Competition

If you’re still starting up as a business, you may not have the reach or resources to use the methods mentioned above. In this case, the best way to come up with ideas is by checking out your competition. Visit any website relevant to your product or service and take a look at their posts.

Check out the topics they’re covering and use those for inspiration. Of course, you shouldn’t copy the content and paste it on your blog page as your own. Doing this sets out a ding on your website for plagiarism.

Search engines detect this and will then lower your overall SEO score. It’s better to come up with original content, instead, with the topic as an idea of what to write about. You can use this as an opportunity to improve on your competitor’s post and correct any information they got wrong.

5. Use Search Engines For Suggestions

Search engines are the best place for you to get questions to your answers. This means it’s also the best place for you to get topic suggestions for content!

The way to do this is to type your product/service into the search bar. Once you do, the search engine should auto-generate suggestions for you!

These suggestions are all based on the searches that people did in regards to the words preceding it. It means that it’s these suggestions are all topics you can use to answer the questions of people looking into your area of expertise.

6. Look to Local News

Checking out the local news will always be a good source of ideas. Look for a report that’s sure to make a lot of people go crazy in a good way. Positive news will always stick to people, and you can use this to direct some attention to your business.

This also works in a local SEO sense. When a controversial topic appears in the local news, many people are sure to do searches about it. Linking the searches to your business in any way is sure to direct some attention to you.

7. Capitalize on Trends

Capitalizing on the coming trends is also another way for you to generate ideas. Twitter is often the best place for this as their hashtag system will show you what people are talking about. Taking a look can inspire you and help you come up with a topic to talk about.

This is also a great way for you to help with your content marketing campaign. Creating content over a trending topic is sure to help you generate traffic to your page or website.

8. Look at Upcoming Events

You can also take a look at whatever event is coming up. Things like a concert or a big charity event are sure to give you some ideas on content topics. Like with the trends mentioned above, this will help you generate some short-term traffic, too.

If you’re desperate for ideas, you can always use whatever holiday is coming up. All you need to think about now is how you can link things like Christmas or Halloween to your brand. This should be easy enough since brands and businesses are flexible enough to fit such themes.

9. Make Product Reviews

If a newly released product can help your business and industry, you can make a product review about it! You can do this through a blog post or a video, the choice is yours. The only thing that matters is that what you make engages your audience.

Talk about the product and tell your audience how to use it. If the product is a big benefit, tell them how it can be so. If not, tell them what it lacks and what they can do to compensate for it.

10. Create a Story

Stories are another good idea for you if you’re strapped for ideas. People love a good story because they can relate to it. So, you should make your stories relatable by making them true.

Try taking a story from your past. This ensures that it’s all authentic and that customers can relate to it. Tell them how your experience before made you learn about your skillset now.

It’s a great way to market yourself as an approachable brand. More people will relate to you and get in touch with your human side if you do this.

11. Make a Tutorial

Tutorials are the perfect content to make if you’re not coming up with many ideas. These are easy to do and shouldn’t take up much of your time. What makes a good tutorial is that it be informative for your viewers.

This makes it important to make a tutorial about something your audience struggles with. Doing this allows your tutorial to become useful for the majority of your audience if not all.

12. Update Past Content

If you’ve been creating content for a long time now, then you will find that you have tons of content from before. Explore your archives to look for any topic that you can update. This is a great way for you to keep your brand updated on whatever change happens in the world.

You can also use your past content as a way to help your marketing campaign. You can do this by writing a guest post for another company. This way, you can create backlinks that lead back to your website.

13. Tackle Issues Your Industry Faces

Can’t think of any content idea to use? Check the big picture and tackle any issue your industry faces! There are always issues within an industry that will affect buyers and sellers alike.

Creating a post about these issues and tackling them helps you create content for your brand. Doing this also makes you look like a pioneer in the industry. People are always looking for a leading voice, and solving an issue may be the key to becoming one in your industry.

14. Challenge Your Audience

Audiences respond well whenever a company challenges them to do something. This can be a way for you to keep your audience active in your community while you think of other topics to use for content.

When challenging your audience, what’s important is that you catch their attention. Using whatever visual aid you can helps you in doing this. It’s also important that you reach as much of your audience as you can.

This means that you should make use of social media platforms again. It’s a surefire way for you to help your challenge go viral. Make sure that the challenge is relevant to your industry or to a trend to keep it interesting.

15. Let Your Customers Create Content For You

What better way for you to generate content than by having your audience create your content for you? This is a type of content called user-generated content, and a famous example is Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign.

This way, your customers will generate content for you on different platforms. They will also be the ones who will do most of your marketing for you. It’s an efficient way to get customers to buy your products and help you out some more.

To be successful with this campaign, you need to market on Instagram and Tik Tok. These platforms are great at making things go viral due to their format.

16. Use Topic Generator Platforms

You can use online resources to help you come up with ideas for content creation. Among these online resources are topic generators. These are great if you’re not able to come up with anything yourself.

All you need to do is input some keywords into a bar that the generator provides. It will then run some processes and come up with potential topics for you to use!

17. Check On Some Analytics

If all else fails, you can always check out Google Analytics and related services. These are the main resource of most writers and companies when thinking of ideas to create. This is because these platforms dictate what people are likely to search on search engines.

You can look up things like keywords and bid on them to use them. These keywords should give you a good sense of what idea you should base your content around. What’s great is that these will have high searchability, leading to more traffic on your post and website.

Use These Methods to Come Up With Content Ideas Today

Keep your company ahead by generating ideas for content on the regular. If you can’t come up with anything by yourself, use the content ideas above and keep grinding out the content. Ensure you have a successful content marketing campaign today!

Are you looking to generate content to increase your SEO score?

Raising your SEO score ensures that more people will find you on search engines like Google or Bing. However, managing it on your own means you won’t find time for your other responsibilities, and hiring an individual doesn’t guarantee success. Contact us, instead, and we’ll get it done and get in touch with you as soon as we can!

Source: https://riserr.com/17-unique-ways-to-come-up-with-new-content-ideas/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=17-unique-ways-to-come-up-with-new-content-ideas

from Riserr https://riserr.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/17-unique-ways-to-come-up-with-new-content-ideas/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Holiday marketing: Get the data that puts you ahead of the competition

What you will read in this post:

Understand holiday season traffic trends

Optimize for strong SEO and PPC keywords

Analyzing keyword-driven traffic for seasonal marketing

Which sites won the most keyword traffic?

Black Friday marketing: November 2019

Christmas marketing strategy: December 2019

Build strong display and referral partnerships

Analyze historic conversion data

The biggest display and referral sites (and the brands winning traffic)

Black Friday marketing strategy: November 2019

Christmas marketing: December 2019

Already imagining the taste of the delicious holiday meals and the laughter of your kids when the entire family comes together? Sorry, we know you’re a marketer; you don’t have time for that. You’re busy worrying whether you have everything you need so your marketing strategy can ensure the biggest possible chunk of holiday traffic and generate maximum sales.

This post investigates seasonal marketing statistics of the past few years and provides some eye-opening insights from SimilarWeb’s Digital Marketing Intelligence that helps plan your seasonal marketing.

But first, let’s quickly look at how the COVID-19 pandemic changed consumer preferences and spending this year. Keep these in the back of your mind when you set goals for this year’s holiday marketing strategy.

According to a recent report published by McKinsey & Company, consumer behavior has shifted in five main areas:

Increased online buying

Increased interest in household goods

Higher focus on essentials (health, hygiene, security, and sustainability)

More mindful buying (consumers are researching more, looking for cheaper alternatives and value)

More readiness to break loyalty to a brand

Pay attention to the last point. Consumer loyalty has suffered during the time of crisis. This can be meaningful for your retention marketing and also serve as an opportunity for your acquisition marketing and content SEO strategy. One thing is for sure: Competition is going to be more fierce than ever during November-December.

Content created in partnership with SmilarWeb.

Holiday Marketing 2020

It’s now more crucial than ever to know how to leverage your digital marketing channels and optimize campaigns in real-time to reach relevant consumers and stay ahead of the competition. You need the most up-to-date data on overall traffic trends and impactful digital marketing strategies to ensure you can pivot and optimize campaigns as trends emerge.

So digital marketers, to learn how to stand out from the countless online businesses vying for your customers’ attention away from, tune in as we deep dive into SimilarWeb Pro data focused on SEO, PPC, and affiliate channels.

This article will help you understand the data behind seasonal marketing and how to translate it into a strong digital marketing strategy. Make sure you are well-positioned to beat the competition.

Understand holiday season traffic trends

Prime Day isn’t usually part of the official holiday season. However, in 2020 “usual” doesn’t count. Due to the wrinkle of COVID-19, Prime Day was pushed back and correlated with the seasonal kickoff this year.

We decided to look at its impact in previous years to understand how this might affect the shopping-heavy fourth quarter of the year and help you draw conclusions for your holiday season marketing push.

Amazon’s annual two-day event has grown in significance over the past few years and not only impacts amazon.com (and it’s dozens of subdomains), but the whole ecommerce space.

In 2019 we witnessed more than 8% growth in traffic during the Prime Day week, compared to the year before. Shopping in December has been increasing over the years as well. Meanwhile, traffic during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday week did not increase in 2019 compared to 2018 when a record growth of 12% year-over-year (YoY) occurred.

This year we are faced with the question: How will COVID-19 impact consumer behavior during the holidays? Analyzing shopping behavior on Prime Day may indicate what you can expect for the remainder of the year.

According to Amazon, 2020 Prime Day sales topped last year’s by almost 40%. And based on our data, half of the 50 best-selling products are private label brands. That’s good news for ecommerce. Or is it? Forbes tells us that Amazon avoids comparing numbers with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so we are wondering if Prime Day sales met the goals.

Looking at the data provided by SimilarWeb’s digital marketing intelligence tool, we see that non-amazon retailers saw increased traffic of just below 30%.

Target, for example, created a rival Deals Day, which led to a 54% week-over-week (WoW) traffic increase. BestBuy, with its exceptionally attractive deals, experienced the most significant growth among top retailers. Next in line was Costo with a traffic increase of 59%.

It looks like last year’s trend for Prime Day continued. If this is true for the remaining two months of 2020, Black Friday will be less significant, and shoppers in December will look for the best deals. For marketers, it means now’s the time to buckle up; you might need an extra-aggressive holiday marketing strategy.

Optimize for strong SEO and PPC keywords

However heavy holiday traffic in 2020 will be, you need to grab your share. It’s a good time to review your keyword strategies for SEO and PPC. After all, they are both major traffic drivers.

SEO means optimizing your website’s content, structure and user experience according to Google’s Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). This starts with an effective keyword research for organic searches and competitor analysis, followed by a review of your pages, and optimization of your pages according to your research findings.

For SEO, it’s crucial that your pages stay focused on the topic at hand which means your meta tags need to be relevant and your pages need to include related and relevant information around the right focus keyword.

Another important factor is that your content needs to be linked to from other pages on your site as well as from other websites. As your content pages gain authority and rank over time, they will move up the SERP.

The process of optimizing your pages should have started months ago so, now is an excellent time to re-check your internal linking, meta titles, and image ALT tags and ensure everything is in the right place.

It’s also critical that you check search volume changes and new trending keywords to make sure you’re still targeting the best keywords. People’s searches are constantly changing so there may be a new keyword phrase growing in search volume that your competitors aren’t targeting yet. The closer we get to the holidays, the more competition gets fierce over major seasonal terms.

Keyword analysis for PPC is one of those critical tasks for the holiday season. To get optimal results with PPC, you have to be on the ball with the latest trending keywords.

This is the time to finalize your budget, adjust your bids and overall strategy, so you can easily adapt and pivot during the busier times ahead as you see campaign results and understand how your audience is responding. You may also want to adjust based on what your competitors are doing to drive clicks.

Analyzing keyword-driven traffic for seasonal marketing

During the holiday period, brands largely dictate what shoppers are searching for. That’s because consumers don’t want to miss out on their uncounted deals and special offers.

For you, this is an opportunity to hook onto the right keywords and go head-to-head with your biggest competitors. It’s a once-in-the-year chance to “steal” large amounts of traffic from under their nose and convert them into paying visitors. Once you’ve acquired new customers, it’s hard for others to win them back.

How do we know this? Our keyword research tool provided us with data from previous years. Contrary to other keyword research tools, SimilarWeb Pro leverages actual user search queries and clicks to provide highly reliable data.

You can use the tool to receive the freshest keyword-related data and identify trends before anyone else. Can you see how you would lead the keyword competition for paid traffic? The tool also lets you generate and prioritize keywords, optimize traffic share, benchmark against your industry, and more.

Next, we want to see if brands also snatch the majority of the traffic. Spoiler: No! SimilarWeb data shows that publishers and Black Friday sites receive the majority of search traffic in the U.S..

This underlines the importance of partnering with affiliate and coupon websites- such as Slickdeals and CouponChef – that know how to leverage search traffic and seasonal trends. The top winners were bestblackfriday.com and blackfriday.com, both with approximately 11% traffic share, followed by bestbuy.com and walmart.com at around 9%.

Which sites won the most keyword traffic in the holiday season?

Black Friday marketing: November 2019

A review of popular keywords in November 2019 shows that three out of the top ten paid search keywords were related to gaming, representing 24% of total paid search traffic.

‘Battlefield 5′, ‘Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’, and ‘Fire Emblem Warriors’ were popular video games, and it’s fair to assume that they appeared on innumerable wish lists that people were attempting to fulfill. It seems Black Friday marketing that considers Christmas wish lists are a good bet.

It is also interesting to note that amazon.com claimed over 96% of all traffic from these terms in the time period analyzed. When we look at Black Friday keywords specifically, things get more interesting.

The top PPC-related queries at that time included the term ‘Black Friday’ in combination with a branded term. The keywords ‘Black Friday ads 2019′, ‘call of duty black ops 4’, ‘Nintendo Switch Black Friday’, and ‘black Friday deals’ claimed traffic shares ranging from 9% to 12%.

Specific Black Friday campaigns paid off. Most of the traffic winners were well-loved retail brands such as Best Buy and Walmart.

Most searched organic terms related to Black Friday in 2019 were ‘deals’, ‘black friday’, ‘cyber monday deals’, and ‘black friday ads 2019’ claiming respective traffic shares of 3% to 5% each. Unlike PPC-driven traffic, none of the leading organic search terms were branded.

Not only did big box retail names win traffic from these keywords, top affiliates such as blackfriday.com and bestblackfriday.com also made it into the top 10, which you can see in the graph below.

To sum this up:

Top organic searches were generic

Top PPC terms were 50% branded and 50% generic

Organic search traffic went to retailers, brands, and affiliates

PPC traffic went to popular household brands

The top ten winners can be seen below.

Christmas marketing strategy: December 2019

As expected, the overall November trends continued throughout December. The highest traffic-driving keywords were again gaming-related gifts and gadgets. The three most searched terms were ‘just dance 2020’, ‘star wars jedi fallen order ps4’, and ‘the witcher 3’.

Interestingly, Amazon scooped up over 96% of all traffic for ‘just dance 2020’, and ‘the witcher 3’; rd.bizrate.com won 97% of the traffic for the keyword ‘star wars jedi fallen order ps4’.

Now let’s take a closer look at terms related to the December holidays to see how Christmas marketing campaigns compare.

Most searched organic terms were ‘cyber monday’, ‘deals’, ‘ugly Christmas sweaters’, and ‘laptop deals’ with traffic shares of 3% to 9%.

Paid keyword terms with the highest traffic shares were ‘cyber monday deals’, ‘siberian husky christmas blowups’, ‘black friday deals’ – still a high traffic share, however 68% down month-over-month (MoM), ‘christmas tree’, ‘icicle christmas lights’, ‘die hard christmas book’, and ‘nintendo switch games for christmas list’. Interestingly, several of the top keywords were related to Christmas decorations, with gift-related keywords coming in closely behind them.

‘Ugly Christmas sweaters’ was the top Christmas related keyword driving organic traffic in December.

See the ten winners for Christmas related keywords here:

Build strong display and referral partnerships

Referral sites and a Display Ads strategy are crucial during this time. Why? Consumers are looking for deals, but they also know that not every ‘deal’ is a good bargain for them. They trust 3rd party sites to review and guide them through the jungle of deals during the holiday seasons.

We found that SimilarWeb data supports this assessment. Some of the affiliate and display publisher sites driving the most traffic fell within the 10 top winners of keyword traffic over the holiday season in 2019.

Here’s your opportunity to generate more traffic to your site. A display publisher will show your display ads on the ad space of their websites. Rather than publishing your display ads by yourself, use affiliates to do it for you. The same goes for other referral sites such as deal comparison sites and review sites that can help you win a bigger chunk of the traffic share.

Use SimilarWeb’s digital marketing intelligence tool to find your best affiliates by analyzing performance statistics of display publishers and referral sites. You can compare relevant sites and identify the biggest traffic providers. The tool also lets you benchmark against your main competitors for traffic from the significant sites.

Analyze historic conversion data

Looking at the stats from 2019, we see that direct traffic brought the highest conversions volume on average in November. Retailers experienced the largest growth in converted traffic from Display and Referral channels during this month, growing MoM 42% and 32%, respectively. Also, referral was the best converting marketing channel at 11%, overtaking even direct traffic, which converted approximately 9% during that same period.

Referral traffic spiked during the last week of November. Display ads’ traffic growth wasn’t as concentrated and was used more evenly to promote future deals and increase brand recognition.

The biggest display and referral sites (and the brands winning traffic)

Black Friday marketing strategy: November 2019

When looking at retail winners, Kohs and BBB experienced the largest increase in overall traffic during the last week of November in 2019. Other big winners include Costo, Walmart, Target, and Wayfair.

During this time, Costco and Sam’s Club saw the highest growth of referral traffic during, growing 241% and 199% from October to November, respectively. Another big referral traffic winner, Walmart, came in third, increasing its traffic on this channel by a whopping 114%.

Referral leaders have received more than 50% of referral traffic from the top two coupon and rebate sites, with bestblackfridaydeals.com sending about 45% of all referral traffic to the competitive set during November. Walmart seems to have had a solid relationship with the referral site. About 81% of all its outgoing traffic went directly to the retail giant.

While slickdeals.net was the second-largest referral site during that period, it only drove about 6% of traffic. However, display traffic tells a very different story, as slickdeals.com claims the number one spot.

Bestblackfridaydeal.com dropped down to the third spot with shares of 18% and 2% of display traffic, respectively. Cosco.com scooped up about 73% of that traffic in November. Shopping-category leaders utilized display advertising traffic analytics to increase their brand awareness on affiliate sites.

Did we mention the importance of display and referral sites for your holiday marketing? The numbers speak for themselves.

Christmas marketing: December 2019

Now, take a look at the interesting shifts in winners throughout the holiday season of last year. November’s big winners were overtaken in December. As Christmas approached, michaelkors.com grew by 191% when compared to October the same year, claiming the number one spot for overall growth.

While neither Walmart or Target landed in the top spots for MoM growth, the retail conglomerates did win massive overall traffic. Walmart.com saw a mind-blowing 450M visits while target.com was able to rake in upwards of 250M.

Swagbucks.com was the top referral site in December 2019 for the best-performing sites during that period with an 8% traffic share. It drove about 63% of its traffic to worldmarket.com. Other big referrals sites were slickdeals.net and cashbackholic.com.

Among the display publishers, Rakuten secured the largest traffic share with almost 17%. Dealmoon could seize 9% and Slickdeals managed to grab 4%. In fourth place was Dealsplus, everyone else in the top 10 got less than 2%.

The holiday marketing games are on, roll up your sleeves!

During the holiday season, optimizing your digital strategies is more critical than during any other time of the year. You can only be sure of it’s efficiency when you build on reliable data about you and your main competitors’ performance. Make no mistake, they are getting ready for the winter games as well.

Understand how different channels work together to drive success. Leverage marco and seasonal market trends and determine how to make consumer behavior work in your favor. In our example, we’ve learned that brands who partner with affiliates have the best chance of winning traffic from top keywords.

Now use SimilarWeb Pro to find the best affiliates to partner with, the most successful channels to utilize, and the highest trending keywords in real-time. Get started by opening an account now!

And if you can’t wait to see how you can fine-tune your marketing strategy for this holiday season, use the form below to download the most-up-to-date data for this year and get the competitive edge you need to blow your competition away.

The post Holiday marketing: Get the data that puts you ahead of the competition appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/10/holiday-marketing-get-the-data-that-puts-you-ahead-of-the-competition/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

Text

How visual content can give a boost to your SEO and how to take advantage

30-second summary:

Visual content offers a ton of value for your website.

It can boost critical statistics such as time on page.

Visuals guide the reader through your content more smoothly.

They make your content more consumable and increase sharing.

Google loves images that are optimized for search.

Read on to learn more about how adding optimized images to your site can boost your search visits from your target audience.

See examples of how companies are successfully incorporating visual content into their marketing and websites.

It’s no secret that visual content is hot right now (queue the Zoolander references). You know content formats like video, infographics, GIFs, memes, and more should be a part of your content strategy, but did you know these also impact your site’s SEO?

How does visual content impact SEO?

There is so much value to adding visual content on your website. While your written content serves the purpose of enabling you to naturally incorporate keywords and create more content to rank in search engines, the visual content you add to your site and elsewhere can help give that content a further boost.

1. Video content keeps visitors on the page

One stat Google loves is “time on page”. If visitors are checking out your site and leaving after an average of 10 seconds, that signifies to Google that your content is bad or isn’t relevant. By placing a video in the middle of your written content, you can keep people on page longer.

Think about it. Let’s say it takes someone 10 seconds to read the first two paragraphs of your article. Then, directly on your site is a video your visitors can easily click on that adds more value to the piece.

They click to view and end up watching the full two-minute video. This intrigues your visitors to dig deeper. Before they know it, they’ve been on your site for five minutes. This can give a huge boost to your time on page stats.

Video also impacts critical stats like your bounce rate, which is also a critical factor used by Google. The last thing you want is people visiting your site and bouncing away after just reading a few lines on one page. Video can help reduce your bounce rate and convince people to stick around.

While we’re on the subject, here’s a video from Neil Patel that explains this concept a bit more. In the video, Patel highlights a few ways (including video) that you can use to reduce your bounce rate.

youtube

2. Visuals help guide the reader through your content

Reading straight through a 1000-word article, no matter how well-written, can become tedious quickly. To keep site visitors flowing through the content, you can add things like infographics, screenshots, and more to help visualize the concepts you’re presenting and push your visitors further down the page.

Breaking up your content with related visuals allows readers to take a break from soaking up the copy and instead check out a few related graphics, videos, or other visual content. It also provides an opportunity for the reader to pause and look at a graphic that might more easily explain a complex subject you’re presenting or highlight some related stats visually to really drive home the impact, so they don’t get lost in the text.

Here’s a great example of an infographic that grabs readers’ attention and gives them something more to soak up in addition to just text. These are a few screenshots from a larger infographic that appeared in an article highlighting the state of SEO in 2019.

To view the full infographic, click here.

3. Google’s machine learning is learning to read visuals

While it’s not 100% clear how this works, it’s out there and known well enough that Google is actively learning how to read images on pages. With billions of images online, Google’s machine learning becomes adept at using shapes and other elements to compare and comprehend what the images on your site represent.

I mean, is there really much more I need to say here? If Google is focusing on learning how to crawl something and then attribute it to the value your site brings to the Internet, you need to pay attention. That’s why it’s so important to ensure your images are relevant and are formatted in a way Google can read them.

How can you use images to boost SEO?

So, now that you know the “why” part, let’s dig into the “how” part. It’s important to dig a bit deeper and explore some of the ways you can apply visual marketing to your efforts to boost your SEO.

1. Make sure your images add to the story

There is a ton of value in adding things like graphs, screenshots, and other content that actually relate to your article and adds value. There is decidedly less value in adding generic images that simply represent the concepts and don’t really add anything. Since we’re on the topic, why don’t I use some visuals to show you what I mean?

For example number one, you can see instructive screenshots dropped into this piece of content. These are screenshots from an article I recently wrote that details how to use HARO for SEO and backlink building. I used screenshots to walk readers through each step and provide them with actionable guides like the image of the email template and the walkthrough of how to set up an email.

On the opposite side, you have the images below that show an example of using images that relate to the topic but don’t really add value. This is another article on my site. I decided to test out generic images on this piece, as you can see in the screenshots below. The images relate to the content, but they really don’t add much extra.

As you can see, both do add a certain level of appeal to their respective articles. That said, for example one, the HARO article, has 12 times the number of page views, 11 more comments, and double the time on-page. So, you can see the value is clear that adding relevant images that add to the story brings a boost to your SEO.

2. Optimize your images

It’s not enough to just add images to your pages and posts. You also need to ensure they are optimized. If you ignore this step, you can run into issues with the performance of your site. For example, images that aren’t optimized can lead to slow load times on your site, and site speed is a critical ranking factor for Google.

To ensure you aren’t bogging down your site with heavy images, try using appropriate image types. The best formats to use are JPEG, PNG, and GIF. And as for videos, host the videos elsewhere (YouTube, for example) and then embed them on your site rather than uploading them directly.

Another important factor in optimizing your images is the tags you add. Just like you need to add meta tags to your posts, you need to add tags to your images as well. This serves as a way to tell Google (and let’s not forget other search engines, of course) what your images are about.

Source: Kayako

3. Take advantage of off-site search

You’ve likely heard this before, but it deserves being restated. YouTube is the second largest search engine. Second only to…drumroll please…Google!

So, why not take advantage of posting videos to YouTube and optimizing those videos to give you more content to rank in search?

While this is obviously an off-site strategy, if you create excellent video content and then optimize it properly to appear in search, your videos can grab some SEO value.

You can then add links back to your website in your video descriptions and on your YouTube channel, and as your videos become more popular, clicks from the links on your YouTube channel will give a boost to your site traffic.

Wrapping it up

So, you get it now, right? Images are good for the health of your website and the impact of your SEO strategy. They not only add some life to your website and grab readers’ attention, they also help you improve critical stats that can help give your SEO a boost.

If you’ve been using visuals in your content, your first step should be to review those visuals to ensure they are optimized. Make sure they add to the story and then check to catch any missed opportunities to enhance your files with the right file types along with proper tagging.

Using images and video content on and off your website is a no-brainer. In today’s visual world, it’s important to stay on top of the continuing trend toward a preference for visual content. Make sure to work visuals into your content to give your SEO a serious boost.

Anthony is the Founder of AnthonyGaenzle.com a marketing and business blog. He also serves as the Head of Marketing and Business Development at Granite Creative Group, a full-service marketing firm. He is a storyteller, strategist, and eternal student of marketing and business strategy.

The post How visual content can give a boost to your SEO and how to take advantage appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/10/how-visual-content-can-give-a-boost-to-your-seo-and-how-to-take-advantage/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

Text

Artificial intelligence (AI) is key to reducing digital ad waste

30-second summary:

As PPC costs continue to increase, it’s more important than ever for marketers and agencies to be able to access their data – all of their data.

What’s even more critical is to track true conversions, meaning the leads that actually convert into paying customers for a business.

The issue is that Google and other ad platforms treat all conversions as equal, a major flaw in the system.

Do you really want your advertising budget being wasted on ads that are producing solicitations instead of qualified leads?

More insights on how the world’s first AI Smart Core℠, SherloQ

is revolutionizing how websites and digital ad campaigns operate altogether.

As pay-per-click (PPC) costs continue to increase, it’s more important than ever for marketers and digital ad agencies to be able to access their data – all of their data.

A recent article by Susan Wenogard talks about just how critical it is to track all conversions. I would argue what’s even more critical is to track true conversions, meaning the leads that actually convert into paying customers for a business.

The issue is that Google and other ad platforms treat all conversions as equal, a major flaw in the system. Here’s an example. Let’s say an ad generates 10 clicks and out of those clicks, five of them convert into a lead on the site either through a phone call, email, or chat. Out of those five conversions, only one converts into a customer while the rest are solicitations. However, the automation systems of the advertising platform will equate all of these conversions as valuable to the business and optimize its campaigns accordingly.

Do you really want your advertising budget being wasted on ads that are producing solicitations instead of qualified leads? I think not.

Content created in partnership with SherloQ

, Inc.

Here we go, again: Disappearing data

Google Ads also recently started to limit the data shared in its Search Terms Report to only include terms that were searched for by a significant number of users. Google has stated that this change is in regard to privacy compliance.

But, what does Google define as significant or insignificant data? This change reduces an advertiser’s ability to identify the search queries that triggered an ad, even for those that generated a click or conversion. This spells even more waste for advertisers and is equivalent to losing 28% of your budget’s visibility.

Are you ready to throw away 28% of your advertising budget? Again, I think not.

The real solution to reducing digital ad waste

With the world’s first AI Smart Core℠, SherloQ

is revolutionizing how websites and ad campaigns operate altogether.

allows marketers to easily train their AI-models on the types of leads that are most valuable to their business. First-party customer data from call tracking, chat vendors and on-site form submissions are piped into the system, and then SherloQ

rates and assigns each lead with an Ad Rank Score

, while also accounting for bio-patented feedback from the end-user.

SherloQ

continuously feeds this data back into individual advertising platforms, informing them to optimize for the ad campaigns that are driving real customers for the business – thus eliminating ad waste.

In a recent case study of the McKnight’s Senior Living Directory, the number one publisher for senior living in the United States, the team shared some insights on how they are using SherloQ

with IBM Watson:

“Our directory has over 14,000 retirement and assisted living communities listed, including the multiple agencies we work with to manage assisted living websites and digital advertising for our listings. SherloQ’s

AI automation and data mining capabilities allows us to expand our digital media offerings and effectively run PPC advertisements for all 14,000 facilities while having a global view that would otherwise be impossible.”

Additionally, SherloQ

is giving marketers control over their data, at a critical time, too. SherloQ

provides marketers and agencies with user intent and intelligence that’s based on first-party data, identifying the specific landing pages and language/keywords consumers use to describe or find a business. This intelligence can be used to improve website SEO and content marketing strategies, ad copy and creative, and identifies potential new markets to enter.

For marketers and agencies seriously looking to reduce or eliminate their digital ad waste, download our white paper to learn more and contact SherloQ

to sign up for a demo or free 30 data trial.

The post Artificial intelligence (AI) is key to reducing digital ad waste appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/09/artificial-intelligence-ai-is-key-to-reducing-digital-ad-waste/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

Text

Customer experience optimization (CXO) for online stores: Three proven SEO tactics

30-second summary:

Once you have the right product and pricing, succeeding with your online store essentially boils down to effective digital marketing and delivering a top-notch customer experience.

For ecommerce, in particular, SEO — or ranking on the first page of Google — plays a huge role in effective marketing and online branding, as it builds trust in the eyes of your audience which paid ads can’t. And trust translates to a better customer experience.

Here we discuss three proven SEO tactics that boost your search engine rankings while also enhancing your brand’s customer experience in ways that go beyond trust-building.

Your modern online store has a lot of moving parts, with hundreds to thousands of different product pages, numerous variations of the same page, and dynamic elements. And you’re well aware of the importance of having your store rank on the first page of Google — more traffic, brand awareness, trust, and sales. However, SEO today is not just about including the right keywords and building backlinks to your online store but is closely knit with providing a great user or customer experience (CX).

When you work on your SEO by keeping the customer experience aspect in mind, you’ll build a store that not only garners top rankings and tons of organic traffic but also converts that traffic into customers.

In this post, let’s take a look at three tried-and-true SEO tactics that directly improve your store’s search visibility while also establishing an outstanding customer experience.

Tactic #1: Make your store load lightning fast

Page speed is one of the most critical factors that can make or break your store’s rankings and CX. Most people today lack the patience to wait for even three-to-five seconds for your website to load, and won’t think twice before bouncing off to a competitor.

Source: Think With Google

Site speed is an official Google ranking factor since 2010. Thus, optimizing your store’s speed is pivotal to both search rankings and CX.

That being said, the sheer number of visuals and dynamic elements on your store can make this seemingly straightforward task a tall order.

The best way to go about optimizing your site speed is to run your site through a free tool such as GTmetrix or Google’s PageSpeed Insights to assess how your site performs currently. These tools will generate a list of suggestions and optimization opportunities that you can then check off one by one to make your store lightning fast.

For example, you may have bulky image files that need to be compressed using an image compression tool. Or, you may have yet to enable browser caching so repeat visitors don’t have to reload the entire page each time.

Similarly, it is possible that you have too many unnecessary redirects in your product pages or render-blocking resources that negatively impact your site speed. Use the aforementioned tools to pinpoint the exact reasons for suboptimal speed, and then work to individually improve every aspect.

Tactic #2: Ensure content on all pages is unique and updated

Google wants you to have unique, high-quality content on every URL of your store. But with countless URLs owing to product variations and categories, this can become a tough nut to crack.

That’s because, on top of creating unique, keyword-optimized, and descriptive content for each product page, you must take care of internal search result pages and product filters (such as color and size) that result in too many low-value duplicate pages which you don’t want Google to index.

And duplicate content (for instance, multiple colors or sizes of the same shirt) can seriously hurt your SEO.

To dodge this, opt for one of these three options:

Include a canonical tag (rel=canonical) on product variation pages that points to the main product page.

Place a “noindex” tag on the pages you don’t want Google to index.

Block the variations within your robots.txt file.

Next, you need to have a plan for dealing with outdated content, such as products that are discontinued or seasonal. You need to deal with such content in a way such that the SEO value is not lost and customers aren’t left confused.

The easiest way to do that is to use 301 redirects to point old URLs to the new ones. This way, visitors get the most up-to-date content on the product they are looking for (thus ensuring consistent customer experience), while the link juice from the original URL is correctly passed on to the new page.

Tactic #3: Focus on the mobile experience

Online shopping on smartphones and tablets has become mainstream in the last decade. Today, mobile is where the money’s at.

Take a look at these numbers from the recent holiday shopping seasons:

On Black Friday ($6.2 billion in online revenue in 2018), nearly 40% of sales on the conventionally brick and mortar shopping day came via a mobile device.

On Cyber Monday ($9.2 billion in online revenue in 2019), 54% of visitors came from mobile devices, while around 33% purchases on their mobile device, up over 40% from the previous year.

What’s more, in 2021, 53.9% of all retail ecommerce is expected to be generated via mobile. In other words, odds are that the bulk of your visitors are coming from a smartphone or tablet than a desktop.

Despite that, 84% of users have experienced difficulties in completing mobile transactions. This means you have a great opportunity to surpass your competitors in terms of customer experience (CX) and rankings by creating a mobile-friendly store.

Due to Google’s mobile-first indexing, the mobile version of your store (not the desktop!) is the benchmark for how Google indexes your website and determines your rankings.

Follow these best practices for a stronger mobile experience:

Incorporate a responsive design, so all the content on your store automatically adjusts to the screen size. This way, you serve the same HTML code and URLs regardless of the visitor’s device.

Mobile page speed is an official ranking factor, so ensure optimal speed on mobile by optimizing images, enabling compression, minifying CSS and JS, avoiding redirects, improving server response times, and leveraging browser caching.

Don’t forget usability. Make your store easy to navigate, even on mobile. Enable autofill for contact forms, wherever possible. Make buttons large enough to be easily clickable. After all, Google rewards excellent experience no matter the device.

Furthermore, make sure to avoid these common mobile UX mistakes:

Blocked JavaScript and CSS files

Unplayable video content (due to Flash)

Illegibly small font size

Cluttered touch elements

Simply put, smartphone ecommerce is a growing trend and Google is prioritizing mobile experience. And so, focus on your store’s mobile-friendliness for better rankings and CX.

SEO and customer experience (CX) are two sides of the same coin

The modern customer won’t settle for anything less than a sublime online shopping experience, which starts from finding your store on the first page of search results to a fast loading site, up-to-date content, and beyond.

Coupled with the fact that search engines like Google have now evolved to a point where they’re able to reward remarkable customer experience with first-page rankings, you know you’ve got to work on your store’s SEO from a CX perspective.

The three tactics outlined above directly improve your SEO and CX, so focus on getting these right to not only boost your store’s search rankings and drive more organic traffic but also to render an impressive shopping experience that customers keep coming back to.

Harsh Agrawal is the pioneering blogger behind ShoutMeLoud, an award-winning blog with over 832K subscribers and a million Pageviews per month.

The post Customer experience optimization (CXO) for online stores: Three proven SEO tactics appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/06/customer-experience-optimization-cxo-for-online-stores-three-proven-seo-tactics/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

Text

Page speed is a big deal – Why? It impacts SEO rankings

30-second summary:

Consumers expect ≈ and apps to respond quickly. Each second of delay can cost $100K in lost revenue for brands.

There are tools to help understand a page’s overall speed. Looking at the relationship between page speed and SEO ranking shows that having a faster performing site/page does impact ranking in a positive way, albeit slightly.

As marketers look for additional data points about why they should prioritize page speed, Jason Tabeling highlights the data and how it fits into an overall SEO strategy.

The saying is, “Speed Kills.” However, when it comes to digital speed, it’s really, “Slow speed kills.” According to a study by Google and Deloitte for every 0.1 seconds that your page speed improves can increase your conversion rates by 8%. That data point creates a pretty powerful business case to improve the performance of your site. Think about this data point from your own experience browsing the web, mobile, and desktop. Have you ever found that a page was just loading too slow that you moved on to something else, or that brand lost the sale? I know I have.

So, we know that speed improves page performance, but what about how it impacts SEO rankings? I took a look at a small data set to try to get a sense of the impact that page speed has on rankings. I took 10 retail and conversion based keywords and ran the specific webpages through the Google Page Speed Test to look at the correlation between speed and rank. This data set gives a good directional study on the impact. Here is what I found;

Rank and page speed are only slightly correlated

Creating a scatter plot of each website’s rank with the page speed shows the distribution. The data does show a relationship between speed and rank. The correlation of the data suggests there is just a 0.08 correlation. A correlation of 1 would be perfectly correlated. So, this score isn’t very high, but there is a correlation and when you are looking for an edge and you know the impact speed has on conversion rates becomes very meaningful. The way to forecast the impact is to use the trendline and its slope. If you remember your algebra class you can use this data to create the equation of a line and estimate what your page speed needs to be a achieve a certain rank. Using that equation you can see that every 10 points of additional speed roughly equals a tenth of a point in rank improvement. So moving from a speed score of 10 equals a rank of 5.3, but a page speed of 100 would equal a rank of 4.4. This might not seem like a big deal, but remember speed dramatically improves conversion rates and has a positive impact on rank as well.

What action should you take?

Here’s an outline of a few steps you can take to optimize your speed.

1. Improve your page speed

There are a lot of opportunities for brands to increase their page speed. Probably the most surprising thing was how many sites had very slow speed rankings. Look at the data in the histogram below. 56% of page speed scores came back <20. That is pretty remarkable considering there are some very well known brands in this study. There are so many opportunities to improve page speed and Google’s tool, and many others provide very step by step actions to take to improve. If you haven’t run your site through this tool or another one you should do that to start – https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/testmysite/

2. Don’t forget that speed is important but it’s just one of many factors that impact SEO rankings

While this article is about speed, it should be clear that SEO has many more key items that impact rank and overall results than speed. SEO is a holistic strategy that includes content and technical resources. You can’t forget about how well your content resonates with your audience, how fresh it is, and how well the search engine spiders can crawl and understand your site. So many businesses get caught up in their re-platforming their ecommerce platform and never put a minute of thought into the SEO strategy.

The post Page speed is a big deal – Why? It impacts SEO rankings appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/06/page-speed-is-a-big-deal-why-it-impacts-seo-rankings/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Four ways to test your marketing ideas instead of trusting blogs

30-second summary:

Blogs are a valuable and insightful arm of any brands’ marketing strategy.

The drawback to that, of course, is that industry blogs are filled with untested theories and can start to resemble echo chambers if relied upon solely.

Marketing innovation comes not by reading the work of others, but by continually testing and trying new approaches to age-old problems.

Sarah Fruy explores new testing strategies marketers can explore in order to maximize the value of their funnels.

If more than a decade of work in the marketing trenches has taught me anything, it’s that no silver bullet will make all your problems go away.

Unfortunately, a misconception exists that a one-size-fits-all answer is available through a simple Google search. One marketer finds success with a particular tactic, writes a blog post about it, and tells everyone to use the same strategy. Before you know it, a listicle features this tactic and more people start viewing it as a best practice.

Rinse and repeat.

While this tactic might very well be the right strategy for your business, chances are good that it’s not. I absolutely encourage scouring the internet for helpful advice, but you must test that theory with your own audience on your own platforms. Consumer behavior is constantly evolving. As effective marketers, we need to test our theories as much as possible to avoid costly mistakes.

Building a culture of testing

Marketers who neglect testing are probably working from a waterfall approach rather than using an agile method. They believe success stems from big-bang campaign launches, with a long planning period leading up to a major release. They value their instincts over data-driven decisions.

This might result from a lack of knowledge around agile marketing practices or an organization that requires many layers of approval before a launch. Others believe that success lies in following in the footsteps of “greater” marketers and implementing their playbooks the best they can. They think, “If it worked for so-and-so, it will work for me.”

Others might cite budget as a barrier. But even a bootstrapped startup with no budget can find ways to test and validate ideas before going all-in. A large budget doesn’t prevent failure, as even larger corporations suffer from premature releases of products and ideas. For example, Microsoft developed a reputation in recent years for rolling out clunky products and campaigns — from Vista to corrupted chatbots — that suffered from hurried rollouts.

Who wants to risk a failure with so much time and money at stake? A few factors will help you better analyze your campaigns and institute a more successful testing program. Use these tips to build the testing culture you need to thrive:

1. Work with a cross-functional group

A recent Deloitte report found that 89% of executives listed organizational design through teams as their top priority for handling challenges in their businesses.

Building cross-functional teams with employees from different departments and skill sets allows for faster communication and decision-making. It also adds to the conversation more diverse perspectives and experiences, allowing you to interpret data points from a variety of angles and fueling more creative testing ideas.

If you aren’t ready to completely restructure your operations just yet, start by establishing an outside-in approach to idea generation by pulling in members of other departments for input and new concepts. Even a single variant perspective strengthens the ideas you’re building for new campaigns and helps you spot potential issues before implementation.

2. Don’t run one-off tests

An agile marketing team’s initial goal is typically to release a minimum viable product and then test the waters and see how a select segment of your market responds.

If you get a signal that the campaign is working, develop, and amplify that success. If the campaign doesn’t perform to your expectations, iterate on your approach or move on to a new program. Using the data as your guide, you will be building an entire culture of testing so you can be confident in every initiative you deploy.

Earlier this year, we decided to test exit modals on our website. The initial results were positive, so we scaled the number of pages and continued to see success. Our next step included personalizing the experience and testing different types of creative messages.

As you can see, one idea — “Should we implement exit modals on our site?” — spawned an ever-expanding list of testing ideas for our team. A well-structured program will yield many tests to prove a hypothesis before it’s ready for full-blown exposure, so stopping at a one-off test leaves plenty of valuable data undiscovered.

3. Don’t optimize for a single metric

It’s easy to set up a test and optimize for clicks or form fills, but you might also want to consider the long-term impact of short-term gains.

Maybe more people sign up for your free trial, but they also churn at a higher rate. If you optimize solely around their interest to sign up, you miss out on the bigger insight down the road: This new audience is actually decreasing your overall revenue. To illustrate why you can’t focus on one area, look no further than Homejoy, a home-cleaning startup.

The company invested a ton of resources into a single metric — customer acquisition. A $19 first-time customer promotional price fueled its growth. However, the deal mostly attracted a customer base interested in the discount. With no focus on customer retention, Homejoy saw only 25% of those homeowners return, and the growth stagnated, expediting the failure of the company.

4. Include both quantitative and qualitative research

A few years back, I was under pressure to have my startup business sponsor an event as a way to market our new product. Being in the early stages of product development, our customer persona wasn’t fully developed yet, but the opportunity guaranteed press coverage and a large volume of foot traffic in the market we were beta testing. So I took a risk and got us a booth.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the event’s audience wasn’t a strong demographic fit for us — something we would have learned if we had attended a year earlier and interacted with the audience firsthand.

Running tests can be very exciting when you hit statistical significance, but don’t let that evidence shield you from actually talking to your audience. Make sure to include open-ended questionnaires or user groups in your research program. Try to balance your research so you understand not only how a user responds, but also why the user responds that way.

No single idea or marketing initiative will work for everyone, no matter what the blogs say. Don’t rely on untested insights to drive your campaigns. Instead, do your research, narrow the scope to fit your needs, and test each new plan to ensure you’ve got a real winner on your hands.

Sarah Fruy, Director of Brand and Digital experience, leads the strategy and goals for Pantheon’s website and branded content. You can find Sarah on LinkedIn and Twitter @sarahfruy.

The post Four ways to test your marketing ideas instead of trusting blogs appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/04/four-ways-to-test-your-marketing-ideas-instead-of-trusting-blogs/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Winter is coming: How to prepare your content strategy for a COVID-19 winter

30-second summary:

With the number of cases of the novel coronavirus rising once again, content marketers face a resumed challenge to meet consumer needs.

Sales around the holidays will need to be approached sensitively, as unemployment rises and families are forced to tighten their belts.

Creating empathetic and emotionally-driven content will be more likely to appeal to audiences during these times.

The potential for future lockdown measures will see a potential increase in the demand for video content, particularly tutorials and explainers for new skills and products.

Although the last few months have seen quarantine restrictions being eased around the world, a resurgence in COVID-19 cases has led to a new round of measures being put in place to quell the spread of the virus before winter. However, now that scientists have a greater understanding of the nature of the novel coronavirus, it seems more likely that these new rules will be less all-encompassing than they were the first time around — pending any drastic rises in numbers, of course.

What this does mean, however, is that people in lockdown are likely to still be looking out for content that’s relevant to their current situation. We already talked you through what businesses learned about content marketing through the first phase of the pandemic, and the ever-changing state of things shouldn’t stop you from maintaining something close to your regular content schedule.

But based on what we now know about the virus, and what has and hasn’t worked with content strategies during the pandemic, there’s a lot your business can do to prepare for the winter ahead. Here are four key things to consider.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday

Traditionally the day for huge savings on big-ticket items, Thanksgiving weekend accounts for around a third of consumers’ entire holiday spend. But with Turkey Day fast approaching, many consumers are not even sure how (or if) they’ll be able to see family safely. Stores are having to come up with new ways to mark the occasion and give their customers the discounts they expect. Fortunately for most businesses, this primarily means giving their online offerings a shot in the arm.

In the midst of a huge global economic downturn, however, businesses will be wise to approach content around sales and promotional offers extremely carefully. The products you choose to put on sale at a discount may have to change to meet the different demands customers have had and will continue to have, during the pandemic. Consequently, writing copy that will emphasize your business’s reasons for doing this could help potential customers see eye-to-eye with your motivations, and help demonstrate an understanding of what consumers need on a wider level.

Emotional content

Going beyond Thanksgiving, the other focal point of your fourth-quarter content marketing campaign will likely be Christmas, but this festive season will clearly require a different approach from previous years. In particular, as The Drum points out, “how brands give back to communities and people will be a huge influence on shoppers this year.” This means that in addition to the keyword research you conduct to determine what you write about, how you write your Christmas content will be just as important.

Beyond the economic impact, most are feeling as a result of the pandemic, which is highly likely to shift consumer behaviors, people are far more likely to be reevaluating what is important to them during this time of year. The possibility of not seeing friends and family as they would on a normal.

Christmas means that the content your business releases will need to be sensitively-written, and seriously take this into consideration. However, Retail Week recently reported that nearly two-thirds of shoppers are more willing to “explore new products” at this time of year than any other time, so combining the emotional appeal with consumer appeal is critical.

This doesn’t only apply to customer-facing companies, however, no matter how easy it may be to forget that real people are responsible for the decisions a business makes. In the wake of the pandemic, emotionally-driven B2B content has been widely discussed and strongly recommended. One Linkedin discussion which took place in early May noted that “B2B audiences share the same fundamental human priorities and are just as interested in seeing their personal experiences reflected in the content.”

Video content

The most effective form of emotionally-driven content your brand could put together for the holidays is through video, which has seen a huge increase in viewing times since the onset of the pandemic. This has been the case across all sectors, and Econsultancy reports that video ad spend has increased by between 60% and 74% since the pandemic began.

As a result, it’s never been more important to start preparing easily-digestible video content to promote your products, explain your brand’s values and give people something fun to watch. But your work isn’t going to be done once you’ve completed the final cut — taking steps to carefully optimize your video content is essential if you want your videos to be seen.

Tutorials and explainers

From makeup tutorials and guides to making your own facemasks, to step-by-step advice on developing new skills, video content has been particularly beneficial during the lockdown as people seek out new ways to pass the time and feel a sense of accomplishment. DIY learning resources have become big business, and the most-searched-for terms — which YouTube has publicly claimed are “astonishing” in their consistency — mainly revolve around picking up new hobbies or coping mechanisms.

These have included baking (particularly sourdough), yoga and guided meditations, and home improvements, all of which would be useful in less fraught times, but particularly centering now. And brands which wouldn’t otherwise be providing this sort of content are getting in on the act, with the likes of Nike and DoubleTree Hotels diverting their budgets and strategies to give searchers the kind of useful content they need. With no clear end in sight for the most recent round of restrictions, videos of this nature are likely to continue being an excellent entry point for bringing new customers to your brand, so finding relevant subject matter will stand you in good stead through the holidays.

Edward Coram James is an SEO professional and the Chief Executive of Go Up Ltd, an international agency dedicated to helping its clients navigate the complexities of global SEO and the technical aspects of delivering location-specific pages to targeted audiences.

The post Winter is coming: How to prepare your content strategy for a COVID-19 winter appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/04/winter-is-coming-how-to-prepare-your-content-strategy-for-a-covid-19-winter/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Does changing your business phone number affect SEO?

30-second summary:

Although a business phone number isn’t as tough on your SEO as a complete rebrand, changing it can have an impact on your SEO.

Preserving NAP consistency should be your primary goal when changing your phone number.

Your marketing strategy can help make the transition easier for your customers, too, as you can notify them of the change ahead of time.

The key goal in addition to retaining your ranking should be to not lose the trust of your customers by changing your information – hence the need to approach the process carefully.

Much like all other aspects of digital marketing and brand positioning, SEO is a constantly changing game. With so many moving pieces and evolving trends, it’s no wonder that brands aren’t quite certain which decisions will negatively impact their SEO, and which ones are safe enough to make.

One day, it seems that one kind of behavior is perfectly fine, while the next Google will penalize it because they’ve implemented algorithm changes. Add customer expectations into the mix, and it gets even more difficult to figure out just what’s worth the effort, and what should be left alone.

When it comes to your business details, including your name, address, and phone number (neatly packed into the notion of NAP information), change can be good. After all, entire companies have successfully rebranded without a hitch. However, changing a single piece of information such as your phone number can change the entire customer journey if not done right.

Here, we’ll tackle a few essential steps in the process to keep in mind, so that your phone number shift doesn’t impact your ranking or your brand perception negatively.

NAP it in the bud

Local search is a vital component of your overall SEO strategy, all the more so when you’re running a strictly local business with a physical presence, such as a pastry shop, a car repair facility, or a beauty salon. Your foot traffic heavily depends on your customers’ ability to find correct information online when they search for your services.

If they stumble upon an outdated number, they’ll call the next business in their search results with solid reviews and forget that you exist. Simply put, consistency matters. Google doesn’t want to disappoint its users, so it penalizes businesses with inconsistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information across the internet. As soon as your directories, your website and other online listings don’t show your actual phone number, your ranking will suffer.

The remedy is fairly simple. If you have decided to change your phone number or your entire communications system, for that matter, you should take the time to revise all your local business listings and directories where your company pops up.

NAP consistency is a vital ranking factor that can either plummet your business in the eyes of search engines, or it can help you reach those topmost desirable spots in the SERPs. So, while changing your business phone number might not be a cause for worry on its own, how you distribute it will greatly matter in local rankings.

Take care of your call tracking

Some businesses steer clear of call tracking simply because they aren’t sure how to go about it, afraid to damage their SEO in the process. Even more importantly with regards to call tracking, every business needs to adhere to those key legal requirements, such as the EU’s GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation, to make sure their customers’ sensitive information is safe. But when the time comes to move from outdated landlines and change your numbers or merge them, you can also reap the benefits of this potentially SEO-beneficial process.

Wanting to unify and improve their communication systems, companies are switching to digital phone solutions such as voice over internet protocol (or VoIP for short). There are many perks of such a transition for call tracking, smarter customer support, and better customer engagement, all of which can support your SEO efforts in the long run. As you learn about VoIP and its many applications, you’ll be able to make the most of your phone-based interactions with your customers to serve your brand reputation, but also your ranking.

In addition to having more business phone numbers at your disposal if you need them, you should know that VoIP platforms come with other useful features such as call analytics, recording, emailing, and texting. Collecting all of that data and implementing SEO-safe call tracking with the help of Dynamic Number Insertion both work in favor of your SEO.

Building and preserving customer trust

When done right, changing your business phone number can be a seamless process that doesn’t do any damage to your ranking. However, it’s important to remember the reason for the ranking in the first place: search engines want to give users the best, most trustworthy results first and above all other available options online. In doing so, they reward businesses that accurately portray themselves online, and contact information is a vital component of that representation.

The basic premise goes as follows: if a customer calls you and gets a notification that the number no longer exists, they lose trust in your brand. Google and other search engines recognize that lack of trust and thus push other businesses above yours, with accurate and verified contact details available. In a sense, it’s customer trust that drives search engine ranking.

Research has confirmed this, as 80% of surveyed respondents in BrightLocal research have stated that they would lose trust in a business with incorrect and inconsistent contact details. If you’ve decided to change your phone number, making sure it’s consistently represented across all of your digital outlets is the key piece of your SEO puzzle: to preserve customer trust and thus to preserve your ranking.

Notifying the customer in time

Thankfully, you can make sure that your customers have the correct information in a few simple ways. If you’ve taken care of all of your business directory listings, your social media pages, messaging app presence, and your website, you can use your marketing strategy to get the word out.

Your subscribers and return customers will want to know that your business has changed a vital piece of information. Just like you don’t want them to spend an hour going to an old address of your café only to discover a weird-looking shop for plumbing supplies, you want to have your new number added to their contacts list.

You can use your weekly/monthly newsletter to notify them of the switch, post a social media update letting customers know the new number they can reach you on, and post a little announcement on your website, too, especially if you gain plenty of call traffic from all of these outlets.

Changing a business phone number can be a simple process in itself, but its impact on your business will not be unless you prepare properly. Taking care of all the business registers where your company is listed paired with implementing search engine-approved tracking tactics as well as customer engagement will be more than enough to help you through the process.

Emma Worden is a digital marketer and blogger from Sydney. Emma writes for many relevant, industry related online publications and does a job of an Executive Editor at Bizzmark blog and a guest lecturer at Melbourne University. You can find Emma on @EmmaRWorden.

The post Does changing your business phone number affect SEO? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/03/does-changing-your-business-phone-number-affect-seo/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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What’s left when the cookie goes away?

30-second summary:

Ever since Google made the announcement in January that Chrome would phase out the technology in two years, marketers, publishers, agencies, and data owners have been scrambling to prepare for this sea change.

Many marketing tech companies are built on the faceless calculations of cookie-based tracking, targeting, and attribution.

Michael Hussey, President of StatSocial, discusses how the demise of the cookie presents opportunities for consumers and data-dependent organizations.

COVID-19 is still dominating business headlines, but inside the digital marketing industry, the biggest story remains the coming demise of the third-party tracking cookie. Ever since Google made the announcement in January that Chrome would phase out the technology in two years, marketers, publishers, agencies, and data owners have been scrambling to prepare for this sea change.

It was always imperfect, but the cookie developed into a currency that allowed various marketing stakeholders to make sense of online and offline behavior and do business based on it. For example, being able to prove that a digital ad campaign led to a lift in brand awareness, new sales, store visits, and the others were made possible by syncing cookies across different data providers (for example, did the household who saw a Yoplait yogurt ad actually purchase more yogurt?). In turn, this gave confidence to marketers to invest in campaigns that were proven to provide sales and brand lift.

Many marketing tech companies are built on the faceless calculations of cookie-based tracking, targeting, and attribution. But as the general public came to understand how their data is being traded and used, their concerns sufficiently inspired regulators to come up with ordinances like GDPR and CCPA. Google’s decision to eliminate the cookie will make its own dealings with regulators easier, but it also forced a lot of companies who benefited from the ecosystem to rethink their own data practices from the ground up.

And so the demise of the cookie presents us with an opportunity – both for consumers and data-dependent organizations. What arises to replace the cookie in the coming years should lead to a more accurate, honest, and valuable digital ecosystem. Here’s why:

What’s changing for the consumer?

From a consumer perspective, the primary problem with cookies is a lack of transparency about their origins. Without the ability to know the source of the data, permanently opting out of cookie tracking was generally futile. The most promising new identity solutions rely on PII-based structures that make managing consumer consent much easier, allowing for more accountability throughout the value exchange.

To solve this, CCPA is now ushering in a radical change. Instead of anonymous identity graphs, which are impossible to manage and maintain for consumer opt-outs, the future of online identity will be tied to some form of personally identifiable information. Google is already operating this way, as they know your name and Gmail address, and so they can tie all communications, analytics, and advertising back to actual people. Consumers have given them that information in exchange for their free services.

And now the broader digital ecosystem is moving in the same direction. Publishers, marketers, data companies, and agencies will legally require identity solutions to provide their services while protecting consumers who both want to participate, and those who want a permanent opt-out ability. This is analogous to opting out of marketing emails by way of the CAN-SPAM Act, a regulation that has been largely effective at cutting down unwanted emails. Expect the same in all other forms of digital marketing going forward.

A better future for marketing technology companies

And while the new rules and requirements to protect consumer data will be more stringent and costly for marketers, media, and data companies, the new system will lead to better results for marketing technology as a whole.

Better data, analytics, insights, attribution models, and higher-quality target audiences are being ushered in. In fact, this is why Google waited so long to make this move because their identity solution (underpinned by billions of people with a Gmail address) was always a competitive advantage they shared with a few other market leaders (e.g. Facebook).

As real identity solutions become the new standard and easier to adopt, there are new opportunities to level the playing field for brands and those outside the walled gardens. There will be costly investments required, but this is ultimately a win-win for consumers and the marketing technology ecosystem. Right now there’s a lot of space for new ideas and innovation, and we should all embrace it.

Michael Hussey is President of StatSocial, an earned audience intelligence platform.

The post What’s left when the cookie goes away? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/02/whats-left-when-the-cookie-goes-away/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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The untapped value of qualitative keyword data

30-second summary:

Google Keyword Planner helps us filter down our seed list, show trends in the wording people use when they search and highlight big opportunities we should be tapping into.

Contrary to popular belief, Jack Telford, Starcom’s Owned Strategy Director argues that most keyword research today is over-reliant on this quantifying of searcher behavior and therefore misses out on the huge value in studying low to no-volume search terms.

Jack shares a quick keyword research insights guide that helps you discover how a qualitative approach opens up a host of new opportunities.

Analyzing search volume figures from tools like Google Keyword Planner is a core element of keyword research. However, contrary to popular SEO belief, the magic lies in qualitative keyword data and not quantitative ones. Even though, quantitative data shows numbers that help us filter down our seed list, show trends in the wording people use when they search and highlight the big opportunities we should be tapping into. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a search professional who doesn’t agree with this.

I’d argue that most keyword research today is over-reliant on this quantifying of searcher behavior and therefore misses out on the huge value in studying low to no-volume search terms. A more qualitative approach opens up a host of new opportunities, by looking at what the existence of terms can tell us, rather than what the numbers attributed to them can.

Why is qualitative data important?

The main reason I favor this approach is because of the inherent flaws with the data that search tools provide. If these tools were 100% accurate and comprehensive, we could use them as our sole data source when building out a strategy. The fact is though, even the best tools we have don’t give the full picture.

Why does this matter? It means that many of the terms and topics we’re disregarding due to non-existent search volume figures could actually represent great opportunities.

If you don’t need persuading on the limitations of search volume data, feel free to skip to the “how do we find qualitative keyword data” paragraph. Otherwise…

The limitations of search volume data

I’ve largely focused on Google Keyword Planner here, as this is the tool which *I believe* all SEO tools are at least in-part reliant on.

Google Keyword Planner groups semantically-similar terms together. This means you can request data around highly searched keywords and get no result within the platform, just because that term is bucketed with others. Even if you do receive the grouped term back within the tool, you can’t tell the difference between the distinct terms collated in this category and therefore miss an accurate view of how many people search for them. This is exacerbated by the fact that phrases which genuinely have different intent are grouped together. Rand Fishkin of Moz highlights “types of light” vs “types of lighting” as an example in this article, but there are many more out there.

Google bundles the volumes that it shows into specific bands. This means you’ll see ranges like “50” and “90” come up often when the real average numbers could be a long way off this. More importantly, you’ll never get a number for anything with under 10 searches a month. Considering 15% of searches have never been seen before, this is a massive hole in what the tool is showing you.

Google Trends data doesn’t line up with the Keyword Planner. If you’re looking for proof that Google’s not showing us the full picture, try comparing two terms in Google Trends, then doing the same thing in Google Keyword Planner. There’s a good chance you’ll see totally different results. Some may not even show up on one or other of the platforms.

Google doesn’t disclose a good share of keyword volume data. You can easily prove this for your own site. Pick a strong piece of content, then pull out the most clicked keywords it ranks in top spots for from Google Search Console. Run them through keyword planner & you’ll likely find two things. Firstly, some of them won’t show in keyword planner at all. Second, some of them will show as having a lower search volume than you can see they have via your impressions.

Google doesn’t show data around a lot of non-commercial terms. This stems from the primary purpose of keyword planner, to help advertisers plan their – largely commercial – PPC campaigns. However, these are often exactly the sort of terms we want to target with awareness content through SEO.

There is an argument for tools like Ahrefs, which don’t group terms together, but they too call on Google for search data to a certain degree. What’s more, they rely on clickstream for the rest, which itself is only a representative view of searches, based on analyzing the behavior of certain users.

How do you find qualitative keyword data?

INSERT IMAGE – QUALITATIVE SEARCH VOLUME DATA

OK, so we can’t fully trust the numbers. We could see this as a problem, but equally, we could see it as an opportunity.

Suddenly, a 0 in keyword planner is no limitation. We can set our sights on a whole host of other tools and practices to inspire our targeting approach, as well as tackling areas we know from experience that our customers are interested in, even if the data doesn’t seem to prove it. Here are a few approaches I’ve found useful in the past.

Use Answer the Public & io – these tools scrape Google’s autosuggest functions to find a huge number of long-tail keywords that you’d miss in standard SEO tools. There are also others out there, including the aptly named Keyword Shitter

Use Search Console – often, a huge range of terms will show up in your Search Console account that you’d totally miss if relying on the likes of Keyword Planner. You also have the benefit of impression numbers here, which give you a rough gauge on the number of searches taking place.

Mine social channels and customer forums – Look at what people are saying online around your brand and similar brands to yours. There are likely to be a lot of FAQ-inspiring questions and comments out there, as well as those which could insight broader informational campaigns, and even new product development.

Use autosuggest in Google – it’s a bit manual, but this again helps you to understand what others have been searching for in your category, and can insight the content you put on your site. Try queries with things like “why is [brand]”, “best [brand] and “which [brand]” as a starting point.

Remember, the fact that terms appear at all through these methods means they are being searched. You can generate a lot of clicks from terms with no recognized search volume on standard SEO tools.

How to combine qualitative with quantitative data

Like I said at the beginning of this piece, I am not suggesting that we should totally do away with search volume data, as it does provide a useful guide as to the most searched terms in your space. In reality, combining niche and high volume targeting will be the key to long term success.

My recommendation is to ensure key pages on your site tackle the most highly searched terms in your vertical, but that you also supplement this with content that addresses the varied and rich data you get from a more qualitative approach. If nothing else, qualitative keyword research will allow you to understand the breadth of your audience’s interests and concerns better. That’s got to be worth a go.

Thanks for reading, let me know in the comments below if you have any questions.

Jack Telford works as an Owned Strategy Director at global media network Starcom. He leads clients’ overall SEO approach and direction, whilst overseeing a team of SEO specialists working on content, technical and off-site plans. He can be found on LinkedIn.

The post The untapped value of qualitative keyword data appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/11/02/the-untapped-value-of-qualitative-keyword-data/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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Five fears of channel owners: What spooks you about creating your own CTV app?

30-second summary:

Recent data from Roku shows that 85% of Americans are now streamers. Making them feel excited about some new CTV app is not a piece of cake but also not totally unfeasible.

In the dark, dark woods of AdTech, Connected TV (CTV) apps are a dime a dozen. This may sound spooky enough for a proper Halloween horror story.

The market is currently dealing with many potentially brilliant content creators having cold feet when thinking of launching their own CTV channels.

Alex Zakrevsky, CEO of Allroll, helps you overcome these fears.

In the dark, dark woods of AdTech, Connected TV (CTV) apps are a dime a dozen. This may sound spooky enough for a proper Halloween horror story. In reality, the impressive growth of the CTV market strengthened the competition and endowed it with many “survival of the fittest” features. As a result, the fact that the number of connected TV devices in the US reached 400 million this year, as per Leichtman Research Group, is not that appealing and comforting for channel owners anymore. The market is currently dealing with many potentially brilliant content creators having cold feet when thinking of launching their own CTV channels. To overcome these fears, it’s important to embrace them first.

1. Failing to start

There is a belief that developing a channel from scratch requires either proficient coding skills or paying a fortune to those who have such skills. So, instead of starting, let’s say a Roku channel, content producers tend to be terrified of the prospect of coding or not being able to make ends meet. To lower the level of anxiety, it’s always useful to look at available options.

If watching someone building a channel for you is the most preferable model, specialized agencies are the best choice to make. These companies usually have their own in-house developing teams and charge a set price or a revenue share, which gives room for maneuver. Alternatively, there are freelance developers whose price tag normally starts from $25/hour on Upwork.

The downside of both solutions is that they will depend on developers’ availability and may eventually turn out to be slow-moving and quite pricey. Yet, they will definitely help have less on one’s plate. At the same time, there are ways of developing a CTV app without going bankrupt or going full-on with programming languages.

In addition to custom channel development, some CTV platforms, such as Roku or Amazon Fire, offer their no-coding solutions for channel owners. Roku, for example, has its on-the-house model called Direct Publisher. Yes, this tool limits customization, monetization, and third party analytics options, but it does save time, money, and, more importantly, keeps channel owners with no coding experience sane. As a compromise between basic and advanced features, there’s a moderately-priced service for developing Roku channels that is cloud-based and code-free. Instant TV Channel costs $45.95/month. It creates and maintains a video feed as well as offers a range of customization opportunities. Consequently, if coding isn’t a channel owner’s strong suit, it’s needless to pay millions or spend months trying to make sense of programming. What’s crucial is the idea that drives a publisher and the content that will drive potential viewers.

2. Being mediocre

As CTV ad spend is surging and has already increased by 19% this year, based on IAB’s figures, more and more publishers are getting on board each day. This makes creating original content pretty challenging. Ultimately, channel owners are surrounded, on the one side, by fears of meeting their channel-doppelganger and, on the other side, being ‘eaten alive’ by channels-giants, like Netflix, Animal Planet, and others. Sounds quite dramatic, doesn’t it? If someone is still wondering whether there’s any space left for new apps in the CTV universe, it’s worth checking on how many people delightfully watch channels, which others would not even think of, in the screensavers or special interest sections on the Roku platform.

As for the chances of becoming a copycat of your own concept, great minds do think alike but most of the time not so literally. Therefore, becoming a successful channel owner calls for out-of-the-box thinking, doing some research, and being generally both strategic and brave.

3. Having zero installs

Recent data from Roku shows that 85% of Americans are now streamers. Making them feel excited about some new CTV app is not a piece of cake but also not totally unfeasible. So, if there is a genuine fear that no one will ever install a new Roku channel, here are several promotional techniques for not letting this happen.

First of all, it’s essential to make as many people as possible aware of a new channel via a website, emails, and social media. This is absolutely free, a bit time-consuming but worthwhile. Secondly, it’s important to attend online/offline events and accept all networking opportunities where a channel owner can meet potential viewers and introduce a channel to them. Then, it’s good to think of collaborating with like-minded channels so as to make friends with indirect competitors and promote each others’ content.

Additionally, it would be beneficial to be included in one of those guides with top new channels one should install. For this purpose and in general, getting feedback on the content from influencers can be really game-changing. Finally, in case there’s a request to level up the current promotional approach, it’s time to consider monetization.

Roku has its self-serve platform for growing publishers’ audiences using the tailored display and video ads. While its CPM rates can range significantly with no guaranteed number of installs, the platform is quite flexible in terms of budgets and can meet various needs and wants. What’s more, there’s the Allroll marketing platform aimed to drive viewers to Roku channels by the means of advanced targeting options and personalized advertising messages. It provides higher apps’ exposure and, ultimately, + 60% installs with the same budgets as those required for the native platform. So, there’s definitely a lot one can do to enhance the channel’s results without getting overwhelmed.

4. Surrendering to YouTube

When talking about video channels, there is always an elephant in the room. This elephant’s name is of course YouTube. Some publishers are still skeptical about CTV platforms, thinking their videos will never perform there as well as they do on good old YouTube. They might as well imagine having to stick to one platform to have windfall gains. In fact, there’s much more to this than meets the eye.

No matter how successful, YouTube is just a service. At least for a content owner and not an employee of YouTube. Thus, there is no need to choose between different stages on which to play the content. On the contrary, it is better to use as many platforms as one can manage to reach out to as many viewers as possible. This is the smart way of promoting video content, raising brand awareness, and maximizing profit in the soaring digital space.

5. Getting lost in streaming obscurity

It’s not particularly a secret that the world of streaming is currently run by four major operating systems: Roku, Amazon Fire, Android TV/Google TV, or Apple TV. The first two have the biggest share of 100.2 million (Roku) and 72.7 million (Amazon Fire) users, according to eMarketer. The rest of the players are of somewhat a lower caliber. Picking one platform for an app may seem like a tough job, bearing in mind their characteristics resemble each other in so many ways. For instance, Roku uses Audience Network with broad geolocation options for targeting and a revenue share model for monetization within its Direct Publisher mode. In the meantime, Amazon Fire’s code-free Amazon Creator offers extensive data on consumers’ preferences collected from Amazon devices and a commission-based monetization. This may rightly seem quite confusing.

The reasonable tactic for not getting puzzled by the best bets is to follow the audience. People mainly prefer streaming platforms that relate to an operating system they are plugged into in their everyday lives. So, if they have an Amazon Prime account that they actively use or they are fond of Alexa, these consumers are likely to go for Amazon Firesticks in their streaming experience.

Similarly, Apple products’ adepts will favor Apple TV, whereas Android users will stand for Android TV. Roku is sort of a black sheep in this family, as it has always been solely TV-oriented. Though, it’s extremely user-friendly, very affordable and its devices were voted the best of this crowd on numerous occasions. Without beating about the bush, knowing your audience is the key.

Takeaways

The CTV market has been on the rise offering publishers more advanced opportunities to reach their viewers. Meanwhile, the stakes of being bog-standard or outdated got higher, as the competition became more severe. This left some content producers panicked about their chances to succeed instead of being focused on bringing new creative ideas to life. After all, living in fear is counterproductive. Hence, the best method of facing fears is to meet them in person. The launch of a new CTV app will consist of a series of important rendezvous on each of the steps: a platform or platforms to use, development strategy, content ideas, promotional tools, and monetization models. It’s vital to pay attention to every single decision throughout this journey. Now, time to get down to business.

Alex Zakrevsky is the CEO of Allroll marketing platform for CTV/OTT channel owners. Innovator, product lover, CTV, and programmatic enthusiast. He believes that the quality of the product always wins.

The post Five fears of channel owners: What spooks you about creating your own CTV app? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/10/30/five-fears-of-channel-owners-what-spooks-you-about-creating-your-own-ctv-app/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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First Impressions Matter: 10 Website Design Tips for a Stand Out Site

Did you know that a difference of half a second in page load time is likely to make a sales difference of 10% for an online retailer? Simply put, online shoppers will move to the next site if yours is taking more than three seconds to load. Yes, three seconds!

Your website is the best tool you have for creating a lasting first impression. A poor design, slow loading time, and low-quality content will make you miss out on potential conversions. Having a great website design shouldn’t be debatable.

Fortunately, there are practical website design tips that you can consider. Keep reading for website design ideas that will take your online business a notch higher.

1. Prioritize Website Optimization to Drive Conversions

The growing use of the internet has led to a surge in the number of active websites. Today, millions of businesses have websites. You’d be surprised at the number of websites you’re competing with!

It would be absurd to imagine that you’ll get visitors to your website effortlessly. Now that you have created a website, you need to strategize about its optimization. When you have an optimized web design, it will be easier for visitors to stay longer on your homepage and scroll through other pages.

Your site visitor should have a well-mapped journey from the homepage to the point where they convert. Getting through every point should be as simple as possible if you want to work on your bounce rate. You might want to test the website to get the first-hand experience before inviting visitors.

Some of the website design tips you can consider for optimization include bolding the main conversion points, having a clear CTA, and an easily notable lead box. Your website visitors shouldn’t struggle to try to figure out where to click to purchase an item!

2. Consider the White Space

It’s not surprising to find websites that have filled each space with features or content. Understandably, you might be having great ideas that you want to share with your site visitors. The result will be a crowded website that can be a turn-off.

When you create a website, you have to consider the end-user. Overcrowding your pages will reduce comprehension by a significant percent, as it will be quite distracting. You should have adequate white space to allow your visitors to have a break, which helps them grasp what the page is all about.

Different types of websites might require diverse provisions when it comes to balancing websites. However, any site should consider having white space between footers, graphics, columns, margins, and gutters. Each of the elements will be readily understood if the whitespace in between is sufficient.

3. Build a Visual Hierarchy in Your Website Design

Hierarchy is central to website design. It ensures that you’re displaying your content correctly. Using hierarchy in the right way will allow you to lead your website visitors to different page elements in your site based on their priority.

Visual hierarchy has several components, with size and weight being the first elements. It is crucial to highlight your site’s most remarkable assets like your logo and business name. Make these assets prominent by enlarging them as readers will prioritize bold and large titles.

When it comes to element placement, focus on having the ideal website layout for your visitor to pay attention to the right direction. You can centralize your logo or have a CTA button at the center.

It would also be vital to have spacing, contrast, and striking color to increase accentuation. With the visual hierarchies, visitors will unconsciously follow your guide.

4. Use the Right Pictures

Images produce a 650% higher engagement than the typical text-only posts. Your website and blog should have good visual content if you want to appeal to users. Your audience will comprehend the message better and retain the information for long.

The type of images you use can be a deal-breaker for your website. The pictures should keep your visitors engaged while building trust. You can’t use any image, so you’ll need to think critically about the type of message you want to convey with the pictures you use.

Focus more on having real images of either people or products. You can consider the professional headshot of your employees. Website visitors spend a significant amount of time checking out the portrait images on your site!

If you’re in a position to get actual images, avoid stock photos at all costs. Real images evoke a sense of credibility and trust. The right images will bring a sense of realism to your products, especially if they complement your shared content.

5. Incorporate Social Share Buttons

If you don’t have social share buttons on your site, you’re missing out on one of the best website design tips that can give unbelievable traffic. Given that more than 3.8 billion people are active social media users, failure to have a presence in social media sites is a disfavor to your brand. Your website content should be shareable.

You can have social share buttons at the top or bottom page of your blogs. The buttons are small icons that allow you to share the page to sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These buttons are non-pushy tools, and they will encourage people visiting your site to share if they deem the site valuable.

Social sharing buttons are a great way to increase brand awareness. They also improve your bounce rate. Readers who find your blog impressive need a sharing option, which will increase your site’s popularity.

The more social media links you have, the more you’ll have people coming to your website. You can use tools like the Shareaholic and SumoMe to have the social sharing buttons on your site. If you want to create a vibrant social media presence for your brand, your website design should have noticeable social sharing buttons.

6. Work on Your Site Speed

Site speed is an indispensable aspect of good website design. You have to convince your site visitors to stay longer by improving your load time. Failure to have a commendable site speed will have people leaving your website even before taking any action.

You need to have a site speed of about five seconds or less! Your valuable customers won’t wait for your site to load if it’s taking more time. With an improved site load, your bounce rate will be unmatched.

One of the ways to improve the site load is by eliminating unnecessary plugins. Your plugins have to load when a visitor clicks on your site; many plugins mean more load time. Not unless the plugins are entirely useful, get rid of them.

It would also help to truncate your image files as pictures tend to take up unimaginable bandwidth. You can reduce the size of the images to take up less bandwidth without messing with their quality. Minifying your site’s code is another way of improving your website’s load time.

7. Have an SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization is among the website design tips that you can’t afford to ignore. Without SEO, your website won’t be found. Your visibility will depend on the efforts you have made towards SEO.

If you’re not familiar with this concept, a complete guide to SEO will give you great insights. It would be best if you start by creating a great SEO strategy. You’ll need to consider your target audience and what they’re most likely to search for.

With SEO, your content has to align with your site visitors’ needs. You can use e-books, blog articles, and videos to get your content to prospective buyers. The right keywords will help you come up with content that will enable you to rank.

Once you have created a website, research more on off-page and on-page SEO. There are many approaches that you can use to rank. Your SEO strategy will increase your competitiveness and allow you to outrank other local eCommerce sites.

8. Use Colors Correctly

Colors evoke different emotions. They are part of any website design. When you create a website, you have to be sure of the aura you want to create as you choose the colors.

If you want to arouse calmness, go for blue; red signifies excitement. Yellow evokes happiness, while green is a sign of growth or positivity. You have to know which color to have without making your site appear ‘busy.’

When requesting customers to take action, such as answering a survey, you can use the color blue as it shows calmness. For time-sensitive deals that you’d consider urgent, use red. Having a red pop up with the message ‘Clearance Sale!’ is more likely to prompt customers to act.

You might also want to consider your color scheme to avoid emotion-provoking colors that don’t complement the primary hues. The contrast between colors shouldn’t cause visitors to strain their eyes. If anything, your choice of colors should enhance readability.

9. Mobile Responsiveness

Are your site visitors able to navigate the pages when using their mobile phones? About 72.6% of global internet users will be accessing the web solely through their smartphones within the next five years. You need to consider mobile responsiveness as part of the website design tips that will elevate your business.

Responsive website design will ensure that visitors using mobile devices can have a commendable experience on your site. You don’t have to limit potential users to desktops. Some consumers might want to check out your website while on the move, and they shouldn’t feel frustrated trying to make sense out of an unusually large image covering the whole screen.

Utilize CSS and HTML coding to minimize, hide, or change the design elements based on the device you’re using. With the technicality involved in making a website responsive, you might need to work with a professional developer. Alternatively, you can create a basic responsive theme then have additional customizations.

An unresponsive site will increase the bounce rate as it won’t be appealing to visitors. Mobile responsiveness is also a significant part of SEO.

10. Your Website Content Should Be Easy To Read

A good website design should have the right readability to reach the intended audience. In this case, readability means having sentences, phrases, or words that people can recognize easily. Users should be able to skim through the site effortlessly and still get what it’s all about.

You can increase your content’s readability by having large-sized fonts. The size you choose should be visible enough, and visitors won’t need to strain their eyes to read through. You’ll also have to consider the type of font, which should either be serif or sans serif as they are ideal for lengthy texts.

It would also help to have a limited number of fonts as using more than three in a single website can be distracting. Unless you’re dealing with specific projects that call for font combinations, having different fonts can make your website appear cluttered and distracting.

Contrast is also vital in your website’s readability. Consider having adequate contrast between your background and text color to improve website accessibility and readability. While you’ll still want to maintain your brand’s color scheme, your elements should have enough contrast to be visible.

If you have a good marketing partner, you won’t struggle with readability. The experts know the steps you’ll need to take to ensure your site has adequate content readability.

Website Design Tips Are Resourceful for Businesses

Practical website design tips can help people who are considering websites for their online businesses. However, it is crucial to point out that website design has several complexities that might overwhelm you. The best option is to work with a competent agency for guaranteed results.

Do you need professional web design services to take your business to the next level? Riserr has years of experience in website design, SEO, and all forms of the digital market. Contact us today and book a free consultation with our team.

Source: https://riserr.com/first-impressions-matter-10-website-design-tips-for-a-stand-out-site/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=first-impressions-matter-10-website-design-tips-for-a-stand-out-site

from Riserr https://riserr.wordpress.com/2020/10/30/first-impressions-matter-10-website-design-tips-for-a-stand-out-site/

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thelmasirby32 · 4 years

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How to immediately profit from your next piece of content

30-second summary:

Most content marketers focus on creating blog posts and writing guest posts to improve SEO rankings. This approach overlooks the value of insightful content as a sales resource, especially for B2B firms.

What type of content works best for sales prospecting. Examples of content and an overview of how to create your outreach list.

An overview of two campaigns where blog content was used to generate leads for an SEO agency. Included in the overview are email templates and campaign outcomes.

How to review and optimize your content marketing outreach campaigns to generate more leads for your business.

Significant business resources are invested in creating content that is never engaged with, writing guest posts that are never read, and sharing content that is never seen. It’s a reality that most of us choose to ignore because we are fixated on inbound marketing.

While inbound marketing is effective, it’s not without problems:

Most of the visitors who engage with your content will never return. It’s generally agreed that somewhere in the region of 2%-6% of first-time visitors return to a website.

You have little control over who visits, and most visitors do not fit the profile of your customer persona (you’ll be doing very well if you convert even 0.3% of site visitors into customers).

There are only so many spaces on the front page of Google. Truthfully, most of us will be fighting and failing to achieve our desired SERP rankings.

Outbound marketing sidesteps two of those three issues.

When you create a list of companies that fit your target demographic and then send emails to the relevant people in that company, you gain a degree of control over who consumes your content. Where you sit in the search rankings will not impact the outcome of your campaign.

While most sales teams use outbound marketing, few companies coordinate their content marketing efforts with outbound sales initiatives.

I believe that this is an oversight. I’ve secured several new customers for my agency in the last three months by coordinating my sales and content marketing efforts.

This guide will share an approach that I believe can help all businesses, but especially small to medium-sized businesses, that operate in the B2B space acquire new customers. It’s a strategy that relies upon creating a small amount of really great content, then actively promoting that content to the right people. Let’s dive in.

1. Consider the goals of your customer

Ideally, your outbound marketing strategy should neatly fit into your long term content marketing goals. For me, an optimal content campaign that aligns with sales should look something like this.

At the start of the campaign, you need to identify relevant keywords to target.

The keywords you pick should align with your ideal customer’s pain points and the solution that you offer either through your product or service. For example, at my company, we help businesses in the SaaS niche secure guest posts on relevant sites. I decided that the initial outreach campaign would be based around my guide on how to guest post.

You can see how the topic aligns with the solution.

If you’re going to run an outreach campaign that utilizes content from your site, you must use informative content that offers value. After all, the article will be the first impression that you leave with a potential customer interacting with your business.

You can create multiple pieces of content around your product or service offering. However, I recommend you start with one piece of cornerstone content.

2. Create a customer outreach list

There is a good chance that you already have a strategy in place to promote new content. Often, that involves creating a list of sites that have linked to a competing piece of content. You then find the contact details of the author and send them a message asking for a link.

A sales outreach campaign based around a piece of content is just as straightforward. However, the goal and who you target is different.

I’ll assume you have a customer persona. You know what type of companies buy your products or services. You need to create a list of suitable companies. You can use resources like Google My Business, the Inc 5,000, and other business roundups to quickly create a list of suitable companies to contact.

Once you’ve created your shortlist, you need to find the details of the person in charge of purchasing decisions at each company. For an SEO agency, that person typically has a job title like ‘Chief Marketing Officer (CMO)’.

I generally use a combination of LinkedIn and an email finder to get their contact details. Hunter and Voila Norbert both offer 50 free searches, which is enough for an initial campaign.

Pull all of that information you collect into a Google Sheet.

3. Run your outreach campaign

There are numerous types of sales outreach campaigns you can run that incorporate blog content. For example, I collected the details of everyone who left a comment on the Backlinko blog. I removed individuals and companies that didn’t fit my customer persona and sent them all an email.

Below is a screenshot of the email template I used alongside one of the responses.

You can see this is a soft sell. The only reference to the service I offer is my email signature that links to a sales page. The primary resource in the email was this blog post.

I wanted to start a conversation with prospective customers not generate an instant sale.

This particular outreach campaign, which was sent to around 200 people, generated two leads. In addition, I was asked to appear on a podcast and was offered a couple of guest post opportunities.

You can be more direct. Here is an example from another campaign.

We leveraged the credibility of Sumo for this sales campaign. The company has more brand recognition than Launch Space, a site that few people would recognize.

The primary resource used for the Sumo sales campaign was this article. The guest post fits the criteria of a cornerstone piece of content. It’s actionable, insightful, and relevant to the needs of prospective customers.

You might have noticed that I adapted my email signature for the campaign. We generated two leads from our first 100 emails.

4. Review the results

If this is your first campaign, I recommend you send outreach emails to between 100-200 companies. Send your emails, then a week or two later, review the results.

The first campaign we ran had a 1% conversion rate. I sent 100 emails and got one customer.

The math was simple.

I didn’t use any marketing tools for the campaign. You might choose to start the same way.

To improve the results of any marketing campaign, you need to track relevant metrics. There are plenty of affordable email tracking tools that provide insights like email opens, link clicks, and other statistics.

Good email tracking tools will allow you to split test your copy. You’ll also gather information on when people open your email and who opened your message multiple times but didn’t respond. You can use this data to improve your campaign results, for example, by scheduling your emails for the optimal time or day of the week or deciding on who to send multiple emails to.

Wrapping up

In this guide, I outlined how you can include blog posts and guest posts in your cold outreach to generate leads for your business. It’s a strategy that I’ve used to consistently land fresh clients, which has, in turn, helped me grow my business.

If you’re a B2B company selling a product or service with a high-profit margin, outbound marketing will normally provide you with a positive Return On Investment (ROI). It’s logical to utilize blog content as a sales resource, especially if you presume that the content will eventually generate leads through inbound marketing. Most companies don’t do this; I hope this article has provided you with the impetus to try.

Nico Prins is an online marketer and the founder of Launch Space. He helps companies develop their digital marketing strategies. He’s worked with everyone from Fortune 500 companies to startups helping them develop content marketing strategies that align with their business goals. Follow him on Twitter @nhdprins.

The post How to immediately profit from your next piece of content appeared first on Search Engine Watch.

from Digital Marketing News https://www.searchenginewatch.com/2020/10/29/how-to-immediately-profit-from-your-next-piece-of-content/

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