Lead generation is at the top of every marketer’s and business owner’s mind. After all, having more leads means better opportunities for making sales. Over the years, many gurus and experts have come forward with different strategies and tactics to increase leads – from social media marketing tips, pay-per-click advertising, SEO strategies, email marketing hacks and, of course, content marketing.

Many tactics boast different results for just about every other business, but in this blog post, we want to show you one of the most effective ways to generate more leads organically, all while building up your brand and taking customers through the Know-Like-Trust cycle.

This method is called the topic cluster method, one of the newest ways to optimize your content strategy. So what exactly are topic clusters, and how can you use the topic cluster method to generate more leads? Let’s take a look.

What are topic clusters?

In 2017, HubSpot revealed the topic cluster method, explaining that it is “where a single ‘pillar’ page acts as the main hub of content for an overarching topic and multiple content pages that are related to that same topic link back to the pillar page and to each other.”

(Image source)

The model came as a result of multiple changes in Google’s algorithm, which has swayed marketers to focus on high-quality content if they want to be rewarded with higher rankings on search engines.

How exactly do topic clusters help boost your SEO efforts? Here’s a quick rundown.

Why use topic clusters?

• It increases web traffic organically. One of the biggest reasons topic clusters work well for content marketers is that you can increase your traffic using an internal linking system. When readers land on a specific page, they can find links to related content on your site. This reduces bounce rates and increases the time visitors spend on your website, thus boosting SEO.
• It helps search engine crawlers prioritize and rank content. When you use topic clusters, you’re linking what’s called “cluster content” to a main pillar page that contains comprehensive information about a certain topic. This allows search engine crawlers to properly organize and prioritize content when ranking your pages.

7 Ways to Use the Topic Cluster Method to Get More Leads

If you’re ready to take your content marketing efforts to the next level, topic clusters are not only easy to execute but provide long-term results. Here are 7 ways you can start using the topic cluster method in your business to get more leads and make more sales – without doubling your marketing budget.

1. Decide on keywords you want to rank for

The first thing you want to do when planning out your topic cluster model is choosing keywords you want to rank for. First choose a main keyword you’ll want to rank. This is the keyword you’ll be using for your pillar article.

As best practice, choose a long tail keyword that’s broad enough to cover multiple topics but still specific enough to allow you to create high-value content clusters. For example, “social media marketing” is a good example of a long tail keyword for your pillar article.

Use a keyword finder like WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions to choose the phrases and terms for your campaign.

2. Plan out your topic clusters and cluster content

Once you know what keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to plan out your topic clusters and the specific cluster content you’ll be putting up on your site.

Cluster content are individual content pieces you can publish separately as a deep-dive into specific aspects of your pillar article. Calling back our example from before: if you chose “social media marketing” as your pillar article keyword, you can then create cluster content such as “Facebook marketing,” “Instagram marketing,” or even “optimizing social media profiles.”

Pro-tip: you’ll want to create cluster content before building out your pillar article.

3. Create a pillar article

A pillar article will typically have between 3,000 to 5,000 words and is meant to be comprehensive. This is why it’s best to create and publish your cluster content first: afterwards, you can use these to outline, build up, then link to a brand new pillar article page.

Example of how content clusters can build up pillar content using “gum disease” as the overarching topic. (Image source)

4. Do a complete content audit

Just because you’re switching your content marketing model to the topic cluster model doesn’t mean your old content and posts are moot. Chances are you’ve already created several content pieces for your niche, so look through what you’ve already done to see how you can build a topic cluster from this.

Determine whether you have blog posts that can be expanded to become pillar content. Or if you have some highly specific content about a broad topic, you can use that to start building up a brand new pillar page.

Content that used to rank high, but dropped in rankings with time is a good starting option – with a little improvement, it can return to its former glory. Find such pages on your site in the Detailed report in WebCEO’s My Site Rankings tool.

(Click on the image to view it in full size.)

Simply choose Depreciated positions in the Filters and sort the table by the Position column like in the image above. The Web page column will have the pages you might want to update.

5. Sprinkle relevant high-value opt-ins within cluster content

Consider every piece of content in your cluster as a golden opportunity to bring in new leads. So not only are you giving readers a better web experience by linking out towards related content on your site, but you can also offer them added value by letting them opt-in in to receive a free resource, be it a whitepaper, checklist, or eBook.

And because much of your content relates to one another, you can easily increase exposure for the same lead magnet over and over. In advertising, one popular thought is that you ought to expose your ad to consumers multiple times before they take any desired action.

Make your lead magnets visually attractive, and sprinkle them across multiple cluster content. (Image source)

6. Interlink all content together

The most crucial part in the topic cluster method is linking your cluster content to your pillar article and vice versa. You can use your pillar article’s main keyword as the anchor across your cluster content. You can do the same from your pillar articles, or create compelling CTAs to link out to cluster content, i.e. “Click here to read more about the [cluster content topic].”

It’s where the magic happens that allows site crawlers to prioritize your posts and get you ranking higher on Google. That’s why you need to make sure all internal links on your site have descriptive, SEO-friendly anchor texts. Find all your anchor texts in WebCEO’s Link Text Analysis report.

Bonus tip: make sure to try and get as many backlinks to your pillar content as possible to boost your rankings even faster.

7. Consider content gating for certain cluster content

For added measure, you can get more leads to opt-in to your email list using content gating. Several sites and publications make use of this, either as a paywall or a free article you can access after signing up for an account.

This can be particularly helpful for businesses who do step-by-step tutorials or in-depth studies, for example. While we don’t recommend gating all your content – especially as it might leave a bad impression on first-time visitors – consider gating certain cluster content that has highly detailed information that users wouldn’t mind exchanging their emails for. As a litmus test for which content you can gate, ask yourself whether the information you’re giving away is valuable enough that some people may even pay for it. You’ll also want to map out gated and non-gated content with your marketing funnel in mind.

Conclusion

The topic cluster model is one of the best ways to streamline and optimize your current content marketing strategy. And by using the steps above, you can start implementing this method on your own website. Over time, you’ll see your content ranking higher on search engines, all while giving your site visitors better experiences and even added value. Start seeing your rankings rise in in no time!

The post Lead Generation: How to Get More Leads with Content Topic Clusters appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

How come SEO doesn’t work without content marketing? Why do you need both?

When you have only SEO: You get content that appears in search, but users don’t care about it. Do you want site users to be more than just viewers and bystanders? Do content marketing.

When you have only content marketing: You get content that nobody ever finds online. Your content and your audience; do you want these two to meet? Do SEO.

Content marketing is about making your content work and making content that works. With SEO in the equation, there’s also making your content rank. It’s clear that content is at the crux of all of this business, and that a successful union of content marketing and SEO requires fulfilling those three requirements.

And here’s how you meet them.

1. Making the best content

Let’s define “the best content” first. The devil is in the details, so let’s grab him by the horns and drag him out into the light.

• The best for whom? That’s easy: your target audience.
• The best at what? At being what your target audience needs when they use Google (or any other means of search): a solution to a problem, a source of accurate information, entertainment etc.
• If it’s the best, then what is it better than? That would be the best currently existing content, most likely owned by your direct competitors.

So the goal is to create content which has these three traits. All of them, even the third one, boil down to pleasing your audience. How do we do that?

Obviously, in order to be popular with your audience, you need to be intimately familiar with them. What they like and what they don’t, what they want, how they think – that’s the bare minimum. All these things are on your users’ minds every time they search for some specific content and can be summarized in three words: user search intent.

So, how do you satisfy search intent?

• Choose a topic (or a range of related topics) your target audience is interested in. With a variety of topics, you will be able to attract more visitors, but you’ll also risk turning into a jack of all trades and a master of none. Keep educating yourself!
• Create content that isn’t bad. Sounds painfully obvious, but this is the one step you absolutely cannot mess up at any cost. Otherwise your whole campaign will crumble like a house of cards.
• Create unique content. Users don’t want more of the same thing they’ve seen elsewhere. Your site may share a purpose with others, but the rest needs to be special.
• Make your content as in-depth as possible. This is the sort of content that tends to be the most popular, gets the most backlinks, ranks the highest and drives the most traffic. Be careful not to confuse depth with length; a 4000 word long-read might be full of water instead of anything actually useful.
• Anticipate questions that are related to your content’s topic. For example, if a user is looking for an article about getting rid of facial wrinkles, they’ll also want to know about the best diets and skin care products. Additional related information will make your content more in-depth, as well as add more keywords to rank for.

That should help you form a clear vision of what your content should be like. Proceed to create what you envision and make it better than whatever is ranking on Google’s page #1.

The next step is to give your content the ability to convert users.

Converting means making users perform a specific action on your site (such as subscribing or buying a product). As you can imagine, this is one of the most vital parts of content marketing; it’s where you sell your content. For this part, you are going to need careful planning and experience in using websites similar to your own.

• Include your main keywords in the titles, descriptions and URLs.

Not only is this really good for your SEO, it’s also the best way to let the users know you have the content they need.

• Give the users an incentive to perform the desired action.

Users will never do what you ask if they don’t get anything out of it. If they come to solve a problem, say the solution is behind a call-to-action. If they’ll want more content like the page they are viewing, let them know they will have more if they subscribe, and so on.

• Plan out the path from the top of the page to the CTA.

Place yourself in the users’ shoes. How would they use your content? Where would be the best spots to put CTAs?

You can try to play the guessing game, or you can analyze the pages on your site that have already attempted to convert users. Use a heat map generator both on the pages that succeeded and the pages that failed to see what works and what doesn’t.

• Emulate the more successful sites.

Learning from the superior is a sign of wisdom. And the best part about imitating websites with high CTR scores is that they don’t have to be your direct competitors. For example, you can safely pick an ecommerce site which sells different products than yours and see what it does better.

Find what works for others and start doing it on your own site. And if you can make improvements to their tricks, that’s even better. Content creation software tools could help you a lot in the process of planning and producing high-converting content.

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2. Optimizing content for search engines

Content marketing and SEO both play an equally large role in putting your site on the first page of Google. If content marketing can be described as the social aspect of conquering the search, then SEO is the technical aspect. So what do you do on the SEO side of things?

Use keywords that will bring you the most traffic

You can find keywords for your site with WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. But how do you know a keyword is good?

You know how Google works: you type in a few words, and the search engine shows sites which have them. But the search results don’t always have the exact match of your query; they may have synonyms or even be missing some of the words you used. What does this all mean?

The best keywords have these traits:

• Descriptive and clearly reflecting user search intent. These types of keywords are known as long-tail.
• Semantically related to your main keywords.
• Have a high number of monthly searches (or search volume).

If you have connected your Google Search Console account to your WebCEO project, you can check the effectiveness of your keywords in the Google Search Queries report, namely:

• Average ranking position in Google
• Click-through rates
• Clicks and impressions

Make your site mobile-friendly

Everyone has a mobile phone with an Internet connection these days. To make a long story short, make your website and its content work as well on mobile devices as on PCs – or even better.

• Increase loading speed
• Implement a responsive design
• Leave some space between elements
• Make sure your popups don’t cover too much screen
• Don’t use elements unsupported by mobile devices (such as Flash)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool to see how well your site looks – both on mobile and desktop.

Fix technical errors

Promoting a site full of errors is like trying to win a race in a broken car. You’ll never finish first, if at all.

Now, you can’t know when something might break on your site, but you must fix all errors no matter where and when they appear. A few examples of what could happen to your site:

• Broken links (they are especially damaging when they are broken CTAs)
• 404 errors
• Unindexed pages
• Server errors
• Broken page code

Use WebCEO’s Technical Audit tool to check if everything is all right with your site. If there are problems, see to them immediately!

Fix SEO errors

Unlike technical errors, optimization errors don’t cause your site to malfunction; in some cases, they might not affect a user’s experience at all. They simply mean you are squandering your site’s SEO potential. Googlebots can pass over your site and not really know what it’s about if you don’t optimize.

Here are a few examples of SEO errors you can fix to increase your rankings.

• Missing H1 tags
• Missing sitemap
• Missing robots.txt file
• Missing image ALT attributes
• Missing hreflang tag in localized pages
• Blank, overly long or duplicate meta tags

Find these errors on your site with WebCEO’s On-Site Issues Overview tool.

Break your content into segments

Long content can be a chore to take in all at once. If yours is like that, make it easier to consume by dividing it into parts. Here’s what you can use:

• Paragraphs. This is the easiest and most obvious way to improve readability. There’s no limits on how short you can make them; even one-sentence paragraphs work wonders.
• Subheadings. This is the best option SEO-wise. H2, H3 and H4 tags can act as titles for individual segments, which helps both the users and Google understand the structure of your content and what it’s about.
• Images. These are best used when they are relevant in the context, especially when they contain valuable data (such as diagrams).
• Calls-to-action. If there’s just one CTA on a page, some users will never even see it, let alone click on it. Placing a few CTAs throughout the page (where it makes sense in the context, of course) is a good way to boost your conversion rates.

Use high-quality visuals

Pictures and videos are among the decisive elements that shaped the Internet as we know it. They play a major role in driving conversions, too. What are the best ways to use them?

Images:

• Use only high-quality ones (unless there’s a point you want to make with poor quality)
• Set their height and width to the exact size you need, and not a pixel bigger
• Convert them to the format that will yield the smallest file size
• Merge them into a single image where possible

Videos:

• Use only the ones with high-quality visuals and sound
• Host them on other sites like YouTube
• Set them to play automatically where appropriate (for example, above the fold where you don’t want the users to miss it)

Increase site loading speed

Other than helping you rank, site speed is the decisive factor in keeping users on your site. Here’s what you can do:

• Host your site on a powerful server or a content delivery network
• Enable caching in the .htaccess file
• Use compression software such as Gzip
• Minimize your HTML, CSS, JavaScript and other code
• Optimize your images
• Don’t host large files on your own site
• Keep your page redirects to a minimum (the ideal minimum being zero)

Test your site with WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool and see what needs improvement.

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3. Promoting content

Now comes the “marketing” part of content marketing. Everybody says high-quality content is the key to ranking in Google. And of course, there’s a catch. Even the best tourist content about the Spain doesn’t go places on its own; it needs your help to make it happen.

See, content isn’t restricted to being Internet pages. Content, first and foremost, is information that motivates a person to become your customer. Anything that falls under this definition can be considered as content: an email, a Google ad, a TV commercial, even shouting in the streets. It’s only a matter of reaching your target audience.

Let’s assume you have picked your audience carefully and that your content matches their interests. Here are the next steps.

Build links strategically

Link building is where SEO and content marketing intersect the closest. Everyone will tell you that in order to build links, you need to create high-quality content. But when you try it, the best you get is a few nofollow backlinks from social media. Why does it work for your competitors and not for you?

Because this plan is missing several crucial steps.

You’ll be lucky to get any backlinks by doing nothing other than making content. Other sites, especially the authoritative ones, won’t stumble upon it by chance and just decide to link to it on a whim. The best link building technique is to create content which has value for the audience and for the linking sites.

Simply put, here’s the plan:

1. Expose other sites to your content

2. Give them an incentive to link to it

What possible incentives are there? Here are a few instances when link building turns into a mutually beneficial exchange:

• Your content is a source worth citing in Wikipedia.
• Someone (for example, a blogger or a reporter) is in the process of writing an article. You reach out to them and offer to use your site as a source. One of the sites where you can do that is Connectively.
• “Skyscraper” technique: you create an article and contact someone who links to its less in-depth, outdated version.
• Broken link building: you contact a site linking to a page that doesn’t exist anymore and suggest they link to you instead.
• Creating or sharing viral content on your site, for instance something the folks at Reddit would like.
• Making unique sources of data and statistics (case studies, researches, surveys).
• Creating your own non-stock images.
• Guest blogging.

The most efficient way to build links is to target specific sites where you want to create backlinks. And for that, you need to pick your targets first. Find the most authoritative sites in your niche through Google – or, even better, with WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool.

This tool finds your competitors for your chosen keywords. They are not all going to be your direct business competitors, so you’ll want to cherry-pick the ones who are actually stealing your audience.

Make your site appear in no-click searches

Featured snippets, quick answers, Knowledge Panel, voice search. All of them can generate traffic, but they were mainly designed to give users the content they want without making them click. Even so, if you don’t appear in those search results, someone else will.

The same applies to pay-per-click ads. They occupy so much space above the organic results, it’s a wonder SEO is still relevant.

Fortunately, the requirements for getting featured snippets aren’t very strict – they boil down to using keywords and formatting your content in a distinct way (FAQ, list or table).

Share your content in social media

How else are you going to get traffic from there in the first place?

Still, not all of your social media followers will engage with your content. That’s why you need a large audience: the more followers you have, the better your chances. How do you get more?

• Share your business pages’ content on your own personal pages
• Ask the people you know to share it
• Reply to commenting users
• Reply to the users who PM you (and reply quickly)
• Ask users to comment, like, share and follow
• Be active on other people’s pages
• Share other people’s content on your pages

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Use email outreach

Remember how content comes in many more forms other than site pages? Email is another one of those forms. Quite powerful, too, even despite the risk of getting stuck in spam filters. If you are subscribed to somebody’s updates, you know how true this is.

How do you make this method work for you?

• Have a ton of email addresses in your database. You’ll be lucky if even 5% of them respond to your call to action. The wider the net you cast, the more fish you’ll catch.
• Don’t email to your competitors and irrelevant sites. If the addressees aren’t your target audience, your emails will fail.
• Design an email newsletter. There’s no better way to make your emails unique and your brand recognizable. Quick tip: you can use a free email templates builder to make this process very easy.
• Prepare several good pitches. Don’t just send everyone the same email. If you have options, some of them are certain to work better than others.
• Make new pitches when necessary. There can be all sorts of occasions: Halloween, Christmas, Easter, your site’s anniversary and so on. A special pitch for a special day is a good way to spice things up.

Afterword

It turns out there’s a lot of extra oomph your SEO needs to be effective. You will want to check if your content marketing strategy is working, too. How?

By checking these metrics in Google Analytics.

• Page views (how many times users visit your site)
• Click-through rates (% of users who visit your site after finding it)
• Bounce rates (% of users who leave your site after visiting one page)
• Dwell times (how much time users spend on your site)
• Page depth (how many pages users visit per session)
• User flow (how users browse through your site)
• Goals flow (how users reach your calls-to-action)
• Conversions (% of users who complete calls-to-action)

And, of course, the Google site rankings for your keywords. Those can be seen with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool.

But the easiest way to tell if it’s all worked is to check your goals. The desired number of user registrations, the amount of profits, the ranking positions and so on – have you got them? And if you’ve gone above your hoped-for success numbers, how far above was it? If all your hard work has set a trend for growth, that’s how you will know you have become good at content marketing.

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The post Why Your SEO Strategy Isn’t Working (Hint: No Content Marketing) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

A target audience can be the result of a thousand questions. What is the target audience? What’s the difference between them and ordinary users? Does it have any influence on advertising, sales, and promotion?

You bet it does! Your product, your advertising campaigns, and your website will be very much affected by the concept of a target audience. 

Today we will help you to:

1. Analyze your current audience and make use of this information;
2. Understand what a target audience is and identify yours;
3. Apply new knowledge to promote your goods or services to the right people.

INSPECT YOUR CURRENT AUDIENCE: ASCERTAIN HOW YOUR BUSINESS OPERATES AND FOR WHICH PEOPLE

Why businesses need to know their audiences inside and out

There is a set of reasons why you must care about who your customers are:

• to see who is interested in your products at the moment. This concerns the number of people and how this number correlates with the number of purchases made. If these figures drastically differ, you will have trouble presenting your goods;
• to analyze the efficiency of your advertising campaign. For instance, if your product was created for teenagers but is bought by middle-aged people, something is amiss and specific changes have to be made;
• to see the way for the further development of your product based upon the needs of current customers. If the development of your product is built solely on your own preferences, you will never please customers who require constant adjustment to modern trends and individual approaches;
• to build a clear picture of your real target audience;
• to find the right and more efficient way to communicate with your customers via content, visual media, advertising, and so on.

Analyze your current audience and its motivation for visiting your website

There are different types of analysis you have to conduct:

1. Demographic Analysis

It includes users’ location, age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, occupation, education, cultural, financial, and social backgrounds.

This helps evaluate the price range and importance of your product depending on people’s everyday life and their need for your services. Some information is hard to get and can’t be obtained without permission because of privacy concerns. However, it doesn’t mean that you can’t get it at all. Just address your users in an adequate manner. 

The easiest way is to use Google Forms, one of the most well-known platforms for conducting surveys. Create a list of questions and ask your users and visitors to answer them.

Sometimes people jump over them due to privacy concerns. We recommend you mention that none of the given answers will be disclosed to the public. Don’t ask such details as first and last name, precise location and so on. It’s better to go with general questions so that people will feel more secure. 

How can this aspect help you?

This information will help you analyze reasons why people prefer your products or services, be it for study, household tasks, work, and so on. 

You can rethink your marketing strategy to reach the pain points of your customers and offer valuable solutions that they will gratefully take. 

Moreover, you can exclude some points from your marketing efforts if they somehow provoke uninterested people to visit your websites such as irrelevant images or texts. 

Learn more about the FAB (Feature, Advantage, Benefit) method in content management.  

N/B: You should understand that the geographical situation of some people can lead to dramatic changes in your marketing campaign. If you have a focus on specific locations, scrutinize conditions people live in, i.e. the level of a country’s prosperity, specific traditions and customs inherent in the culture, international or military conflicts, and so on.

2. Psychographic Analysis

People’s demographic conditions influence their psychological background, worldview and therefore opinion about your products or services. 

Psychographic analysis includes research on people’s mentality and psychology: opinions, prejudices, stereotypes they believe, some specific attitudes to trends or movements, beliefs and the like.

How can this help you?

With this data you will get an opportunity to create a circle of opinions about your business and understand how specific concepts or perceptions can build absolutely different images of one product. Some ideas you would like to use to design or promote your business can play negatively.

A psychological facet can lead to misinterpretation of the message you have put into, that’s why you have to “enter” your potential customers’ minds and pave the way to successful cooperation. Sometimes such an analysis can lead to several marketing campaigns for people in different locations or of different beliefs.

3. Behavioral Analysis

This is of the most important types of analysis in terms of understanding how people see your website. It includes insights on customer ways of learning information, their behavior on the website and paths they take to learn more about your business. 

How can this help you?

Behavioral research gives valuable data on points where customers stop their journeys, lightening problematic aspects you have to pay attention to, and approximate reasons on why some people buy your products while others leave your site without purchasing although they were attracted earlier. 

Having such knowledge, you can reconsider the logic of your website, i.e. shorten or extend the way to purchases, rewrite content, overhaul pricing plans and so on.  

The best tool to gather these three types of data is Google Analytics. A bunch of reports regarding people visiting your website will show you who comes to your website, where these people are from, what language they speak, how much time they spend on your website. 

Open the Audience report, and check the categories outlined there, specifically: Demographics, Interests, Geo, Behavior, Technology, Mobile. 

The three reports – Demographics, Interests, Geo – will show information about people’s demographics and psychographic aspects.

This sort of data can also be found in the WebCEO Google Analytics Module:

The Behavior report is an important step in identifying how people travel across your website. It will show you where people come to your website from (organic search, advertising, etc.), what pages they landed on at first, and to which pages they proceeded. Note the number of users that dropped out at each stage of the interaction. 

The technology report will show information on the browsers (down to screen resolutions and colors) and the operating systems visitors used. 

The mobile report will present information about the devices people used while navigating your website: desktops, mobiles or tablets.

If you work with social media, there are the WebCEO Facebook Insights and Social Engagement Tools that will help you work with opinions that people tend to leave on social media platforms. You can analyze the general impression about your product and improve points that were mentioned (if the feedback is negative).

Also, pay attention to the WebCEO Buzz Monitoring Tool to see what people say about your brand on Twitter, blogs and news sections. 

4. Competitor Audience Analysis 

Your competitors are not only companies you would like to outperform, but are also a source of knowledge you have to get and use. 

Analyze the audience of your competitors on the points we described earlier. You will not only extend your view of your ideal audience but also analyze what aspects your competitors attract people with. These aspects you can apply to your business and win some customers from them.

Besides the type of customers they have, you will learn more about a company’s development program, some features you haven’t thought about and so on. We are professionals but we are usually inside the bubble of our businesses. Competitors will help you burst the bubble and conquer new horizons.

5. Industry Analysis

Industry analysis means trends, movements and actions inside the niche you operate in and how people react to them. Not every trend gets a warm welcome; not everybody is on board with new trends or movements. If you put such new stuff into practice thoughtlessly, you can lose some of your current or potential clients.   

Identify channels that drive people to your website 

You must find out where your customers have come from.

#1: Make a list of all the channels that have brought people to your website

The User Acquisition report in Google Analytics will show you a list of channels people have come to your website from. For instance, it can be organic results, paid advertising, social media, email campaigns, referral sources and so on. 

This report may show you active sources of traffic that you haven’t thought about but they turned out to be lucrative. Hence, you can use them in your future marketing campaigns. 

#2: Shortlist hot channels

An important aspect to consider is the efficiency of channels you have consciously put a lot of effort into.

If the figures leave a lot to be desired, that’s a strong signal to rethink your strategy towards this very channel or find a more profitable alternative. 

If there are new platforms on the list which you haven’t heard about or worked with – examine them meticulously. Especially if these platforms bring real customers instead of casual visitors.

Next time you’d better include them in your marketing strategy. If they can provide you with the desirable results, this is a strong reason to work with them further and even design a sub-strategy to work specifically with these platforms.

#3: Double check less efficient sources

It’s obvious that you have to use any possibility to bring customers to your website. However, going on the stage underprepared is a bad decision. If there are sources that bring poor results, first shift your focus to other, more successful platforms, work with them and then research others. 

Analyze how other brands perform on platforms where you somehow failed, learn what methods and strategies they use, what type of audience dwells there, what they are interested in the most and rebuild your plan of action to succeed even on the extra-hard stages. 

Inspect people’s behavior on the pages of your website

Besides other places, you must review people’s behavior on your website as well: 

• What are the most interesting or preferable pages and blocks of information for them?
• How long is their path?
• Where do people stop their journey and what is their farthest point they tend to reach on your website?
• What percent of people come to a purchase and what percent drop out before that?
• What pages or blocks remain unattended?
• What interrupts the customer’s journey?

And a lot of other aspects.

This type of data helps you understand whether your website is well-structured and smooth enough to lead a visitor right to a purchase. 

We would highly recommend you try heat maps such as Crazy Egg or Hotjar. 

These tools show specifics of people’s behavior via hot spots that indicate places of strong interest. They also show the amount of people who spent time on your website and the length of their visits. 

After heat map analysis you can reorganize the content tree of your website, for instance, place the most important or triggering information that can encourage a person to buy something on the hottest spots. 

This analysis also helps evaluate the level of engagement. If spots are getting colder and colder scroll by scroll then it’s an alarm to do something with your content or the style of its delivery. 

BUILD AN ALL-PERSPECTIVE PICTURE OF YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE 

Here we’ve come to the most tricky part of our article.

The target audience doesn’t always correlate with your current audience. You may have previously targeted people whom you had mistakenly identified as your prime customers. This would lead to a low conversion rate and ROI. 

The target audience is basically people who really are interested in your products or services and would most likely buy them instead of just learning about them or complaining about the prices.

Your current audience can have some common features with your target audience. However, it’s not always a hundred percent match. The wrong audience specification will lead to mistakes in content marketing and promotion, i.e. texts that can annoy your potential customers and at the same time attract people who will never try your goods; or emotional messages and concepts that will resonate with the wrong audience.  

Mindmap your product according to its scopes 

Before creating a portrait of your target audience, you will have to identify the benefits and the scopes of application of your product.  

First, create a mind map of the product from your and your team’s point of view. Write down all the spheres and tasks where your product may come in handy. Then find relationships between spheres, tasks and people. The first draft of your target audience will be ready. 

Second, you can’t do everything alone, so create a focus group of absolutely different people by their demographic, psychographic and behavioral characteristics and ask them about all the ways they would use your goods. Don’t forget to ask about their attitude and ideas regarding the image of your brand. 

All of them will differ or complement each other. These details will become a huge help in the course of preparation.

Beyond that, people’s honest and straightforward opinion before the very start of your promotion campaign will give you some time to remodel it in case your expectations were wrong. By adjusting to people’s needs you will get a greater chance to spark interest and nudge an audience towards purchase.

You will definitely find more ways to use your products or develop them in the future. Consequently, you will extend or limit the circle of engaged people and build a more efficient marketing campaign oriented on your real customers. 

Thus we want to introduce to you to Google Trends. It can become your additional sources of information about local markets.

Google Trends manages trends and shows the level of interest in specific categories, locations (down to city and metro), periods of time, and search queries. 

This data is presented not only regarding organic results in web searches, but also images, news, YouTube, and Google Shopping. 

You can even conduct a contrast analysis of different products that are your opponents on the market. 

This tool will help you with market analysis. Google Trends shows top and rising search queries at specific periods of time. Your specialists can use this data to revise content or create it from scratch.

If you operate in different locations all over the country or world, this type of research is crucial because you will see where you will win and where you can expect losses.

Design a buyer persona

A buyer (or marketing) persona is a presentation of your perfect customer. This is a deeper analysis of the average person (or a couple/family) who would like to use or buy your products. 

The buyer persona includes every bit of the information we discussed in the first part, but also may contain descriptions of typical situations when your goods can be used by a person and even some details about his, her or their routine, motivations and so on. In some situations, it can even be a small description about somebody’s life! 

It’s like creating a person or a CV from scratch:

Source: Amy Wright

Buyer personas are also limited in terms of variety and reliability because there is no guarantee that a picture you created will be interested in your business. 

We can’t take everything into account, because a) the concept of the buyer persona is to create a general picture, and b) people are so different that it’s just impossible to put everything in one portrait because some points would cause a conflict.

Rand Fishkin has written a great article explaining why marketing personas don’t deserve your one hundred percent trust.

Live sources of information and opinions are more worth it. However, it doesn’t mean that the buyer persona will not help at all. Due to it you will investigate your potential clients more deeply and get more ideas for your marketing strategy. 

Rethink your strategy

Now, when you have fresh knowledge regarding your product and audience, it’s high time to implement some changes in your marketing strategy or change it from top to bottom.

Here are some points to consider so far:

1. Who is really interested in your products/services?
2. How can you help these people with your products/services?
3. Where can they apply your products/services?
4. Where do they live? Do they have alternative products/services they already use?
5. Does your concept or image comply with the external circumstances people live in?
6. Do your products/services comply with the age and interests of your customers?
7. What problems can you solve with your products/services?

If you have noticed some disparities between your previous view of the target audience and the newly developing one, it’s time to start working and moving forward.

APPLY YOUR KNOWLEDGE TO CREATE A MORE IDEAL USER EXPERIENCE ON YOUR WEBSITE

Your conclusions regarding the target audience should be seen clearly on your website. It’s the place where people come to find more information about products/services that interest them. If it doesn’t look relevant, attractive, easy to navigate or doesn’t answer the most obvious questions about your brand, you will quickly lose visitors that may become your customers.

What should you consider?

Show an appealing style of delivery based upon the needs of your target audience

Your website should reflect your product style at each detail:

• Write texts in the style that appeals to the age and gender of your target audience, for instance, use a less formal style when you aim for teenagers and young adults, and let yourself have a more literary or business approach in speech when you address a middle-aged group of people who will assess your brand even by the tone of your voice. Don’t exaggerate! Your texts should still remain straightforward and easy to understand;
• Choose the color palette and visual design that will be pleasant to the people of a different range: you have to keep your customers calm or excited but not exhausted because of a large amount of bright colors that can hurt their eyes;
• Make everything clear: sometimes people don’t need to read thousands of words to try or buy something because advertisements or first blocks of the text may have warmed them up enough to make a decision to purchase already. Create special buttons inside the text or at the most noticeable spots to help people purchase or get a trial/sample/demo call faster;
• Make their journey absorbing: diversify your content by implementing video or audio fragments, and maybe even some animation or GIFs; this can make people’s experience on your website more interactive and enjoyable;
• Follow SEO trends: even if your target audience consists of people who don’t really care about appearance and performance, you will still have to work on your website to implement the newest decisions for the technical and SEO sides of your website.

Work on the customer website journey

To create a convenient path from the familiarization stage to the purchase itself, you will probably want to draw a straight line for a user to reach the prime goal without shying away. 

He or she should enter your website, find a catchy element and follow the path that this element opens, i.e. a customer has to get acquainted with the general outlook of your product in the shortest time possible with the points you make driving customer interest higher and higher.

Everything is up to you. Create a chain of convincing arguments from the very first step on the website.

First, use the data you received from tools like Crazy Egg, Hotjar and Google Analytics to get rid of unnecessary blocks on the pages of your website that bore people and obfuscate their way to a purchase. 

Second, design an approximate line of jumps that a user from one of your target segments should make to learn everything about a product and be ready to go to the final step. Then create a trial path: use links, animation, hints and other interesting details to get a customer to the right place. Check it out on a member of your focus group. Ask what information they would like to explore and in what order. 

Work out several patterns for each segment of your target audience. 

Third, taking into account the previous point, restructure or create your content with the thought that a customer has to buy something in the shortest time possible. This will impact everything: the style of writing, the length of text blocks, blocks with visual media and even the style of links. Apply knowledge about your target audience’s backgrounds to write texts that will resonate with them.

You can also allow site visitors to ask questions in real-time through chats, and, depending on the answers, develop new paths for people who think like they do.  

Get data, analyze it, and implement necessary changes

The work isn’t over even after the start of your marketing campaign.  

Now, when everything is published, it’s high time to gather new data and check if your expectations are met. 

Give users some time to conduct actions, purchases, go through all of your pathways and then embark on the new stage of analysis. Compare data from before the changes to your fresh figures. See where you might have made mistakes or chosen the wrong turns. 

It’s okay to miss some things, you can always apply them next time. 

When your comparison analysis is ready, design a new plan of action considering the fresh data. Who knows, maybe your target audience will become wider with each new effort. It’s better to conduct research and analysis of your target audience more often because our world changes so fast and our needs change day by day.

Don’t forget to track your website’s position in different types of search: general and vertical search results, ads and so on. The WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool will help you understand if the keywords you have chosen to optimize your content for comply with the user’s search intent. It will show you fluctuations in your rankings over time and for what keywords you have gained featured snippets. 

The WebCEO Google Search Console Module will show you what keywords people have come to your website by. This data will come in handy when you decide to work on your content and optimize it for the right people and with the right keywords.

If your niche is defined as a local business, check out the WebCEO Google Business Profile Module that integrates the data from Google’s original platform. You can track your success over time there. 

To provide an even smoother workflow, we have designed an opportunity to get and answer the reviews that people have left about your business right from the platform. So there will be no need to enter your original Google Business Profile account.

WRAPPING UP

The target audience is one of the most important aspects to consider for any business. Thankfully, we have a lot of useful information and tools to analyze this. Identifying your target audience is not that hard, but it’s time consuming.

Start your work with the WebCEO Google Analytics Module to go deeper into the research of your current audience and then design a marketing strategy that will lead your business to success. 

The post Are You Targeting the Right Audience? appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

It’s 2024! How are your New Year’s resolutions doing? On my part, I intent to pit my gourmet and sporty sides against each other. Whichever gives up, I know I’ll be the winner (though my dignity might not be).

There are lots of other fun things in my list (like flying across the planet just to pet some cats), but believe it or not, some of them relate to work too – to SEO. New Year, new me, new approach to blogging and content planning. In fact, it’s such a great idea that it should be put into writing.

Rethinking and reviving your content making abilities! If content strategy is about taking action, then content planning is the part that comes before: thinking and preparing. Plot your route first, then speed towards your destination.

With that in mind, we can begin to describe the principles behind SEO content planning.

1. Know your goals and target audience

Every plan needs a clear goal before anything else. An SEO content plan begins with two questions:

1. What kind of users is your content for?
2. What kind of purpose must your content accomplish?

Answering these questions will help you shape your content, giving it the most optimal format, appearance and structure.

Types of users are as many as the stars in the sky, but content goals are easier to define. The most common goals include:

• More clicks;
• More views;
• More subscriptions;
• More sales;
• More publicity;

The list goes on and on. See any goals here that apply to you?

In short: decide what kind of people you want to come to your site and what you want from them. That way, you won’t waste your future efforts on anything unproductive or unnecessary.

2. Understand your target audience’s needs

We can’t really get inside people’s head and see what they want. Although Google gets progressively better at it, to the point it’s kind of scary.

Well, Google can’t read minds (yet), but you can already use its insight to your advantage. Try Googling the stuff you have on your site (for example, cheap cars for sale) and visit the sites that appear on Page #1.

Did you like them? Chances are, your target audience likes them too. Those sites are ranking so high for a reason: more often than not, they will have just the sort of content the users want. Therefore, there should be many topics that could be effective on your own site. You can learn from your mistakes, or you can learn from the best.

But don’t close Google just yet. Other than the organic results, the People Also Ask section is another invaluable source of information – after all, it’s literally in the name. It offers queries directly related to what you’ve just Googled. The autocomplete feature is a bit less reliable, but it’s worth checking, too.

3. Find keywords and use them efficiently

If you know your target audience, you can easily find keywords which match their search intent. The trick is to know which type of search intent your users hold.

Here are the various types of search intent:

• Commercial: when users are looking for something to buy or comparing products (best types of pizza).
• Transactional: when they want to spend money on something specific (order pizza).
• Informational: when they want to learn something (how to decorate home for holidays).
• Navigational: when they want to find a site or a page (Nicolas Cage Twitter).
• Locational: when they want to find a place (car wash near me).
• Seasonal: when they want something related to a time period (Christmas decorations).

You really don’t want to make a mistake here. But as long as you are careful, finding the right keywords will be a walk in the park. Simply use WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool.

You have three different places to look:

• Get Suggestions: enter a keyword and get a long list of related user queries.
• Spy on Competitors: enter another site’s URL and see the list of keywords it uses.
• Top queries: see the user queries that cause your site to appear in search – and how often it happens.

Each tab offers a different way to search for keywords, but the goal is always the same: choose the keywords which reflect user search intent the best. And if they have a high monthly search volume, even better.

If you find a keyword you like, check the box next to it, then press on Actions and click Add selected to Keyword Basket.

(pic)

Keyword Basket can help you in the next step: deciding how and where to use keywords on your site. For example, if you want a keyword to optimize a page for selling shoes, then tag it “shoes” in the Basket. If you a keyword is supposed to convert users, then tag it “conversion”. If necessary, assign multiple tags.

Do the same for all the keywords you use, and you will be able to group and categorize them depending on their effectiveness.

This simple feature will prove especially useful when you implement topic clusters. More on that a bit later.

4. Create every page with a purpose in mind

When you think about it, what exactly is high-quality content? “Useful,” “well-written” and “visually appealing” – but there must be more to it.

Indeed, there’s one decisive factor that separated good content from bad: whether it actually gets results. Which only happens after you release your content. Sounds like a Catch-22, doesn’t it?

Not at all. There is a way to tip the scales in your favor. When you create content, make it serve a clearly defined purpose.

It’s like preparing an entire SEO content plan on a small scale, sized down to a single page.

1. Define your goals for the page. Is it meant to inform, to entertain, to result in a purchase etc.?
2. Define the target audience for your page. What do they need and can you give it to them?
3. Find the appropriate keywords for your page (refer to the types of search intent above).
4. If you want conversions, include a call-to-action along with text and design that will entice the visitors to click.

Be serious about your content’s functionality, and you will be surprised how much difference it makes.

5. Create and develop topic clusters

What is a topic cluster? It’s when you have a very important page on your site and a bunch of other related pages linking to it.

Alternatively, there can be more than one important page at the heart of the cluster. What matters is surrounding them by those other related pages. Doing so signals to search engines which page is the one that should rank higher than the others, as well as offers your visitors additional information.

But that, of course, will require preparing many topics in advance and creating high-quality content around each of them. If you aren’t an expert in your field yet, the best time to start learning is yesterday. The second best time is today.

6. Have a plan for outranking your competitors

Every site has online competitors. Your content, too, will have to fight other sites for Google rankings.

It won’t be easy, but you can take the necessary steps to make it possible.

1. Find your direct competition with WebCEO’s Dangerous Competitors tool. All you need is your ranking keywords – plus location, if your site is for a local business.

2. Analyze their strengths and weaknesses. What they do better than you, what they do worse – it will help you in one-upping them.
3. Pick the easiest competitors to outrank. You don’t need to butt heads with the top search results straight away; it’s okay to start with the ones who are a position or two above you.
4. Prepare superior content. Create new pages or improve what you have – actually, why not both?
5. Promote your content. If you want more options for this step, use WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy to see where your competition gets their backlinks – you may be able to build your own links there too.
6. Rinse and repeat, but with more successful competitors next time.

7. Organize your content production

Whether you work solo or in a team, producing content requires a plan and a schedule.

Naturally, it will be easier for a team where multiple people can fill all the important roles:

• Writer;
• Editor;
• Publisher;
• Visual designer;
• Content distributor;
• Project manager;

Which is a lot of work for a single individual. Do yourself a favor and get other people to help you.

Aside from who does what, you also need to plan when to post each new piece of content. You can easily create an editorial calendar in Google Sheets – or even in Excel, if you insist on working solo.

If you are more of a team person, then you might want to use a project management tool like Trello to keep track of all your team activities and maximize its efficiency.

8. Create a list of must-have elements for your content

The sooner your visitors get active on your money pages, the better, right?

As much as we’d all like our visitors to make a beeline towards the call-to-actions, that just doesn’t happen so easily. Conversions don’t magically happen on their own; your content either makes them happen or it doesn’t.

And to make them more likely to happen, you should remember to make your content engaging and visually appealing.

How? Here are a few examples that have a power over users:

• Call-to-actions (obviously). If your content doesn’t have them, how is it going to be useful to you?
• Readable page URLs. If a page has a URL like example.com/how-to-prank-your-neighbor, anyone can see what it’s about. It inspires trust.
• Eye-catching headings. You know, the ones that go from H1 to H4.
• Table of contents. It collects all the headings in one place and lets users know what they can find on your page.
• Keywords. One in each important place: page title, meta description, URL, headings and so on.
• High quality images. Captions help too, as do ALT texts: accessibility is very important.
• Links to other pages. If you want to create topic clusters, links are an absolute must-have. They are also crucial for customer journey.

Make a checklist for all the things that your content should have. If you post different types of content, you may even end up needing multiple versions of such a checklist.

9. Have a content promotion plan

Creating content on your site is good and all, but it won’t be useful unless people actually see it.

And unfortunately, waiting until you appear on Google’s page #1 is not an option. Who knows when it will finally happen?

Take action first and share your content where people will see it before Google. Here are a few ways to do it:

• Social media;
• Email outreach;
• Guest posting;
• Collaboration projects (that way, you won’t be the only one promoting your stuff).

The more channels you have, the better. Even more so if you’ve carefully picked them to match your niche.

10. Update your old content

Is evergreen content truly evergreen?

That depends on the topic. Some formulas are so tried and tested that they practically never change (like food recipes), but when it comes to things like SEO, things don’t stay the same for long. A few years, maybe, but no more than that.

And then you run into the issue of outdated content. Once a page loses its relevance, it will rank lower and lower, dragging your whole website along. You can’t let that happen.

You have two options:

• Get rid of outdated content by deleting, deindexing or setting up redirects to newer content;
• Update your old content. This option is much more preferable since you retain all the authority your content has accumulated over the years.

You must have a page, or two, or more that are worth updating. If a page is meant to help with a problem that still exists and always will (e.g. how to fix your kitchen sink), then it’s the best candidate for an update. How long has it been since your last content revision? Now may be a good time to find all the outdated pages.

But a real expert can predict what kind of content is likely to become obsolete before it happens. If you can do that, great! Add those pages to your “To be updated in the future” list and keep an eye on the news about their topics.

11. Measure the results of your SEO content plan

Lastly, you need to ensure that your SEO content plan actually works. How can you tell that it does? By monitoring your site’s performance in search, of course.

You have added your site to Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4, right? Great. Then you can track all these metrics:

1. Site rankings. See how well your content ranks in WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool. To use this tool, just add your ranking keywords and run a scan.

2. Click-through rates and impressions in Google. How often do results from your site appear in search? How often they get clicks? Find out in the Top queries report (clicks and impressions for your keywords) and the Top pages report (for your site’s pages).

3. Click-through rates on your site. To check this metric, you must connect your site to Google Analytics and set up the necessary events (for example, tracking when somebody clicks on your call-to-action). To see your events or create a new one, type ‘Events’ in GA4’s search bar.
4. Bounce rates. Sometimes users won’t be satisfied with your content and leave as soon as they see it. How often does it happen to you? Find out by typing ‘Bounce rate’ in GA4’s search bar. (This feature is really amazing and convenient.)

If you see that your content ranks higher and users clicks more often than they leave, congratulations! You have become a true master of SEO content planning.

Afterword

It’s so much easier to get things done when you are not just winging it. When you know what you want from your content, how to make it work and what you can expect, the road towards your goals becomes much straighter and smoother.

And so, may all your plans, SEO-related and others, be fulfilled in the coming year!

Create your perfect SEO content plan in 2024! Sign Up Free

The post SEO Content Planning: How to Get Better at Making Content appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

The Internet has become a necessity for today’s evolving businesses. There are over 4.2 billion active Internet users around the world, with 3.4 billion of them using social media. Attracting the attention of potential customers in this crowded marketplace is a challenge. And the best tool for facing the challenge is search engine optimization (SEO).

Why SEO, out of all the marketing approaches available on the Internet? A proper SEO strategy helps businesses maintain a robust and user-friendly website that ranks highly on search engine results pages. For instance, adding a call-to-action (CTA) on every blog post may lead some readers to one of your product pages, thus increasing conversion rates. However, SEO depends on Google algorithms that are continually being updated. Strategies that may have won you the top-page result last year may not work today.

Each Google algorithm update is geared towards providing user-focused and user-friendly results and maximizing user experience (UX). UX fits into SEO since both of them share a common goal. They help marketers by providing them with relevant and useful information. SEO leads people to your content, while UX answers their queries.

If you’re a business owner, digital marketer, or blogger, it’s important to stay in sync with present changes. Use modern SEO practices to make sure you optimize your website for the needs of both search engines and users.

In this article, we will explore the most effective SEO strategies for marketers, as well as SEO tools for improving rankings and increasing website traffic, which will boost your business’s conversion ratios.

1. Create a responsive, mobile-friendly website

In 2015, Google confirmed that mobile friendliness is a ranking factor in its algorithms. People use mobile phones to search on Google, find local stores, and shop online. 52.2% of 2018’s website traffic was generated through mobile devices. Due to this change in consumer habits, mobile friendliness has become the norm for SEO.

Some businesses choose to have separate versions for mobile users. However, responsive design has become the norm in website design. Responsive design adapts website display based on the resolution and type of device used by the visitor. This allows it to look great at any size, from a 14-inch LCD monitor to 4.7-inch mobile phone. A responsive website ensures a better experience for your visitors.

2. Produce High-Quality, Relevant Content

Content remains king in the SEO realm, but the emphasis has shifted towards producing high-quality, relevant content that serves the needs of your target audience. Google’s algorithms have become increasingly sophisticated in recognizing content quality, relevance, and user intent.

Start by researching keywords to identify the topics and phrases your audience is searching for. Then, create comprehensive and informative content that addresses their questions and provides valuable insights.

Aim to become an authority in your niche by producing in-depth guides, blog posts, videos, and other content formats that showcase your expertise.

Optimize your content for featured snippets, voice search, and mobile devices. Structured data markup can also help search engines understand your content better, potentially leading to enhanced visibility in search results.

3. Optimize your business for local SEO

Local SEO is crucial for brick-and-mortar business and local services. It helps companies promote their goods and services to potential clients in their neighbourhood. Search engines gather information for local search, relying on local content, social media pages, web links, and citations to deliver relevant results to local consumers. Even if you’re not selling products or services online, being found on local searches is still vital to bringing customers to your door. Customers need to see your contact information, direction, and opening hours.

Establishing relevance on Google lets your business get found among local searches. Have a team of SEO professionals to provide a clear view of what SEO campaign suits your business. Local SEO providers focus on local consumer behaviour and have the right knowledge of how the local industry works.

Another advantage of local SEO is that the size of your business does not matter. You can be on top of your competition if you have great online reviews and an appealing business listing. Reaching local customers lets you cater to people who are already searching for a shop nearby.

4. Implement Secure HTTPS Encryption

Website security is not only crucial for user trust but also for SEO. Google prefers secure websites that use HTTPS encryption over non-secure HTTP sites. To secure your website, obtain an SSL/TLS certificate and configure your server to use HTTPS.

Once your website is HTTPS-secured, update internal and external links to reflect the secure URL. This includes updating canonical tags, sitemaps, and any social media profiles or directories that link to your site.

Google Chrome and other browsers may display warnings to users on non-secure sites, potentially driving visitors away, so securing your website is essential.

5. Boost SEO using schema

Using structured data, also known as schema, is a fantastic way to boost your online presence. A schema is code that is used on your website to help search engines like Google gather information based on your page content. Google has hinted that schema has the potential to become a ranking factor. Since then, modern SEO companies have considered schema as a fundamental factor in a website’s visibility.

Schema helps boost your search engine performance by displaying your website’s content in great detail. It acts as a diagram which helps search engines understand your page content by instructing search engine bots on how to interpret your web content and show it to search engine results pages (SERPs). Search engines read the code and use it to create “rich snippets.” They are eye-catching and instantly inform the reader about what it is just by looking. Rich snippets are content marked with schema that shows thumbnail images and reviews, for instance why other people liked a restaurant and why their food tastes great.

Here’s an example of what you can enjoy if you use schema.

6. Make use of link building

“Links in particular are really important to Google because that’s how we discover the rest of your website.” – John Mueller, Google

Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from another website to your domain (hyperlinks are embedded links used to help people to navigate from one site to another). They help search engines like Google to crawl between the pages on your site. This can be a valuable asset for modern web-based businesses. If you have not yet implemented this strategy, you may be missing out on potential business growth.

There are various ways to build links, and learning even one can lift you above the competition. Andrey Lipattsev of Google conducted a survey which showed that one of the most critical ranking signals for a website during searches is link building. However, not all links are “good” links. Low-quality links are “spammy” (e.g. irrelevant links in blog comments, paid links) and may risk your website ranking being penalized. One of the safest and effective ways to build links is through outreach and influencer marketing.

Strategies to get other websites linking to you:

• Put your goods and/or services where influential people can see them. For example, promote a giveaway or contest of your product on Instagram.
• Get links from family, friends, and people you know online. Remember, your biggest supporters are often family and friends.
• Create informative content that people will want to link and make it as their reference.
• Submit blogs for press releases and your website to local listings and directories.

7. Master Page Experience Report in Google Search Console

Google has strongly emphasized page experience and Core Web Vitals as ranking factors. It looks at whether your website is speedy, friendly on mobile phones, a secure place for visitors, and easy to navigate.

The Page Experience Report helps you find and fix anything that might annoy your visitors. With this report, you can make your website the go-to place for people looking for what you offer, just like creating a welcoming and comfortable space for friends to hang out!

In our previous article, we provided you with all the current data regarding the Page Experience Report in Google Search Console. The most significant change is the replacement of First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a part of Core Web Vitals by March 2024. Visit Google Search Console, be aware of these upcoming changes, and prepare for them. Monitoring your site’s performance through tools like Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights will help you identify areas that need improvement.

8. Invest in Video SEO

Video content continues to gain popularity online, and search engines increasingly incorporate video results into search listings. Invest in video SEO for your content to capitalize on this trend if you have the ability and resources.

Optimize video titles, descriptions, and tags with relevant keywords. Use high-quality thumbnails and create engaging, informative video content that resonates with your audience. Hosting videos on platforms like YouTube and embedding them on your website can help improve visibility in both traditional and video search results.

Remember to monitor video performance through analytics, track viewer engagement, and encourage social sharing to expand your video’s reach.

Social sharing of your videos should occur across platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Social sharing expands your video’s reach and signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant to a broader audience.

9. Use SEO tools

To stand above your online competitors, you need to have the right SEO knowledge. Essential SEO tools enable you to track your SEO performance, save time, and explore new possibilities. You can quickly check your website’s ranking position, traffic level, incoming links, social media results, and other metrics that play a significant role in your strategy. WebCEO has created 21 SEO tools that can help you achieve a high ranking on the SERPs. Small to medium-sized enterprises can efficiently monitor their metrics using these tools.

Here’s a quick list of SEO tools that are necessary for modern businesses.

Keyword Analysis Tool

You’ll have no need to switch between several keyword tools for great keyword ideas. Find thousands of keyword suggestions with the WebCEO’s Keyword Research tool.

Apart from the great keyword suggestions regularly found in the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll also get popular keyword phrases from the Google search bar autocomplete, the People also ask widget, and other sources.

• WebCEO Keyword Research

Rank Tracking Tool

Check rankings across traditional organic results, SERP features (Knowledge Panel, videos, images, maps, hotels, People also ask, and more), as well as paid results (ads, Places, shopping and hotels). Always know if a specific landing page is outranked by another page of your site.

WebCEO tracks all these types of results and shows special icons for each type of rank result in your SEO ranking report.

• WebCEO Rank Tracking

Link Analysis Tool

Get a full list of domains linking to your website with the Linking Domains report. Inspect whether the linking domains are diverse enough, take into account monthly organic traffic to the linking domain. Prove your website’s authority and make your backlink profile powerful using the WebCEO Backlink Checker.

Remember! It’s better to get a link from 100 domains each than 100 links from one domain.

• WebCEO Backlink Checker Tool

Afterword

There is so much work to do to maintain website optimization. Google changes its algorithm daily to provide users with better experience. Organic linking is effective if paired with high-quality content. The more organic links you get from trusted websites, the more search engines will consider your site as trustworthy too. For this reason, SEO tools plus a professional SEO agency can save you more time, effort, and money. This makes working less of a hassle and more productive.

Remember to focus first on making solid content and make an effort to understand basic SEO. With the frequent Google algorithm changes, heading into 2019 is a great time to reevaluate your strategies. As a marketer and a business owner, it’s vital to adapt to a changing marketplace. By hiring a local SEO provider, you are choosing to focus your valuable energies on tasks that matter the most and allowing their expertise to work for you.

The post 9 Modern SEO Practices for Money-Making Marketers appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

How many times have you heard praises about content marketing as a powerful marketing channel? You surely cannot count it on one hand.

There’s no denying its power to educate people and generate leads, but without an SEO strategy focused on bringing organic traffic, content marketing is just an extra element on your website, waiting to be found and used.

SEO is the best complement that content marketing has, and as such, you can’t ignore it. If you already have a content marketing strategy in place and haven’t developed an SEO plan to go along with it, you need to get started today.

Here’s how you can ensure that your content marketing strategy is SEO-oriented.

1. Analyze your current SEO performance

Start by analyzing your content marketing’s SEO performance, and to do that, you need to carry out an SEO analysis of your entire content operations.

An SEO analysis will show you how your current content performance in Google, what you are doing, and what you need to improve to boost your rankings. The analysis involves:

• Checking where you currently rank in search engines
• Checking your current crawling and indexing performance (i.e., what pages Google can crawl and index, and whether it’s ignoring key pages that you want to rank for)
• Auditing your site for technical and SEO errors
• Finding the backlinks your content has received and their authority
• Comparing how your content performs against its competitors

You can categorize each of the points mentioned above into two groups:

• On-site SEO analysis, which focuses on the way you optimize your pages to provide evidence to Google about the nature of your content.
• Off-site SEO analysis, which covers the backlinks your pages have acquired, their authority, and their nature (i.e., whether they come from natural linking, guest posts, partnerships, etc.).

To take your content marketing analysis even further, you can carry out a SWOT analysis that measures what you are doing right, what you could do to increase your rankings, and what could hinder your future results.

(Source)

2. Organize your keywords strategically

To carry out a successful SEO strategy, you need to implement keyword research—that is, the process of discovering the queries Google’s users use to search in the search engine.

You can put a keyword research process in place with the help of a keyword research tool such as WebCEO, which measures the number of monthly searches, CPC, and trends for each keyword in its database.

You can start your keyword research by adding your website to WebCEO and exporting all the keywords that your website is currently ranking for.

Then, make a list of your top competitors and export the list of keywords they rank for. With all this data, you want to:

• Create categories for your keywords by topic—e.g., all keywords about “tennis shoes” should go within one category, while the ones about “basketball shoes” go in another one.
• Create a backlog of keywords to target those that your competitors are ranking for and your website isn’t—in the future, you want to create content to target these keywords.
• Organize them by volume and CPC—you can create separate tabs for keywords with high volume and low CPC, and vice-versa.

A common mistake you want to avoid making is obsessing about volume exclusively. Intent is as important as volume because you should prioritize conversions (and growing your revenue) over driving traffic.

All keywords can be categorized in three ways:

• Commercial keywords: These keywords have a direct connection with buying—e.g., “buy tennis shoes.”
• Informational keywords: These are keywords where the user wants to find information about a topic—e.g., “what are tennis shoes.”
• Navigational keywords: These are keywords connected to specific brands, locations, and products—e.g., “nike tennis shoes.”

You can create separate tabs for each category or add a column in your keyword plan. In either case, your job is to uncover their hidden intent, which you can do by:

1. Analyzing their nature: Keywords with words like “buy” or “coupon” are commercial in nature; keywords that include words like “how to” or “tutorial” are informational; keywords with specific brands, locations, or products are navigational.
2. Check their CPC: Keywords with high CPC are often commercial in nature, as they convert better, while keywords with low CPC are informational or navigational.

After you have developed your keyword plan, you can start optimizing your pages according to their nature—i.e., adding commercial keywords to commercial pages, and so on.

3. Optimizing your content for SEO

After you have done your entire analysis and keyword research plan, you need to optimize your content both for SEO and quality. This last word is crucial, as marketers often end up over-optimizing their content, which alienates their readers, and this disgusts Google.

According to Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, quality content is:

• Unique, valuable, or engaging
• Made for people, not search engine’s bots
• Honest; it doesn’t deceive its readers
• Within Google’s guidelines—i.e., it doesn’t use tricks to manipulate search engine rankings

When you optimize your content for SEO, you want to make sure your content respects these guidelines. Think of your on-site optimization as the act of naturally adding keywords around your page, so Google understands what it’s about while still serving your reader.

Writing with SEO in mind is important, but only if the quality is there. If you feel that the content you produce isn’t clear, valuable, or honest, you need to rethink your content strategy altogether.

Assuming this isn’t the case, you can start carrying out your on-site optimization. Since this process is relatively simple and mechanical, you want to use a checklist that guides your marketers into optimizing the pages the right way.

At the minimum, your checklist should indicate the optimization of the following elements:

• Page Title: These are the titles that show up on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Add your keyword in your title pages.
• Density: This is the number of times a keyword shows up in your content divided by the total amount of words on the page. A good rule of thumb is showing your keyword once every 100 words; more is too much, less can be accepted, especially if you use variations of it (e.g., “buy tennis shoes,” “buy great tennis shoes”).
• Images Alt-Tags: This is a tag you use within your HTML to indicate Google the nature of your images. Add your keyword and their variations in your images’ alt-tag.
• URLs and Internal Links: Add your keywords in your URLs and internal links. If a page is already published, you can create a new page with the keyword in its URL and redirect the old “incorrect” one to the new “correct” one.

Some tools can help you with your on-site optimization, like TextOptimizer, which optimizes your content by adding or removing content from your text to improve your search engine optimization.

4. Develop a content marketing process

Content marketing is a complex process that involves several teams, stakeholders, and tasks. Your SEO optimization shouldn’t be an ad-hoc task you do every few months; it should be part of an on-going process.

The implementation of content marketing requires consistency. You want to balance your content creation and promotion with your SEO plan. For that reason, you need to have a content development process in place.

A content development process explains the steps your team takes to research ideas, prioritize, create, and promote them. It outlines the system your team uses to carry out your content marketing efforts. The one you see below represents the process I use to create content on my site; similarly, your process will show the different steps you take to do the same.

Consider developing a content calendar where you add the keywords you will target in the future with your content, who’s responsible for it, and the goals you set up. Add your keywords before the writer starts writing content; by the time they get to work on their content piece, they will have embedded your SEO in it naturally.

Your content development process will vary greatly depending on your goals, resources, and priorities. To give you an example, your process could look like this:

1. Define a list of keywords to target for the next quarter.
2. Assign content topics to each keyword—alternatively, ask your writers to pitch you topics for each one.
3. Pick a keyword and assign it to the writer. Add a brief that explains what it should be about and the way the piece should be optimized.
4. Set a deadline and ask the writer to start the article.
5. Edit the content for quality and SEO—use the checklist from above.
6. Publish the content and implement your marketing plan, which can include link building and outreach.

5. Leverage the power of guest posting

SEO is straightforward: to attract organic traffic from Google, you need to rank your pages. And from the hundreds of ranking factors Google uses to do so, backlinks continue to be one of the most important.

There are countless link building tactics, but one that continues to work is guest posting—the act of publishing content on third-party sites and getting links from it.

To start your guest posting, take the list of the keywords you came up with previously, and analyze each one in your SEO tool of choice.

Nico Prins explains in his thorough guide on guest posting that you can review the backlink profiles of each keyword using Ahrefs and focus on:

1. The number of referring domains each page in the top result has
2. The number of the referring domains that have a DR 50+ (DR is a metric Ahrefs uses to measure the authority of a domain)

According to Nico Prins, you want to pitch to sites that meet the following criteria:

• It has DR 50+
• It has 3,000+ organic visitors a month
• It has a Trust Flow over 20 (use Majestic SEO TK to measure this)
• It’s niche-relevant

Alternatively, you can use any of the following footprints to find opportunities in your niche:

• “keyword” + “become a contributor”
• “keyword” + “contribute”
• “keyword” + “guest post by”
• “keyword” + “guest post guidelines”
• “keyword” + “submission guidelines”
• “keyword” + “this guest post is from”
• “keyword” + “this guest post was written”
• “keyword” + “this is a guest article”
• “keyword” + “this is a guest post by”
• “keyword” + “write for us”
• “keyword” + inurl:guest-posts
• “keyword” + inurl:write-for-us

Add your chosen keyword where it says “keyword” (including the quotes) and make a list of all the sites you find.

Then, find the editors responsible for managing the content. You can search within each site or use LinkedIn. Before sending a pitch, find their emails with the help of a tool like Hunter.

Your pitch should be simple yet clear; send some ideas that you think their audience will like while showing respect to the editor. Here’s a framework Nico Prins recommends using:

(Source)

When you start writing your guest post, do it as if you were writing for your own site. High-domain authority sites tend to ask for high-quality content, thus to guarantee your content will be published, put quality above links.

One final tip is to use a URL shortener to track your results. With this data, you can analyze the number of visitors you drove from each site. If one site drives lots of referral visitors, you can post more than once and get not only links, but traffic.

Summary

Content marketing will continue to be one of the prime ways companies grow their online presence. When you are designing your content marketing strategy, make sure to optimize it for SEO.

• Start by analyzing your current performance.
• Create a thorough keyword research plan.
• Simultaneously, create a content development process that simplifies the entire content creation and SEO optimization tasks.
• Edit your content for SEO and quality.
• Write guest posts to attract high-quality, relevant links, and rank your pages.

Ensure your content marketing is SEO-focused. Begin by checking how your content ranks in Google.

The post 5 Steps to Befriend Your Content Marketing with SEO appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

There’s no end in sight for this quarantine, so money has become an even bigger concern for everyone than it was before. Ecommerce may be booming worldwide, but companies are still losing money left, right and center. We all want to minimize our losses – and preferably, to come out richer than before when this crisis ends. The immediate goal is to get more customers for your business, but how?

Times like these are when you appreciate having over 7 billion people on Earth – more than enough to try out everything and find what works best. Let’s dive in.

1. Move from brick-and-mortar to online space

Working from home is an introvert’s paradise. Do you agree?

If you used to work from home before you got your own brick-and-mortar spot, welcome back to your humble roots. If not, this may be a shocking change for you. Particularly there is a problem shared by many a small business these days: running out of stock and having to explain it to customers.

There aren’t many ways around it other than by stocking up before it’s too late. When everyone shops online, reserves tend to go empty faster than you can say “coronavirus”.

Obviously, you will have an easier time if you are selling services rather than goods. For example, psychologists, lawyers and the like can still consult their clients online without any problem. Likewise, yoga and dance instructors can record their lessons and upload them on their YouTube channels. And Skype is now your friend, too.

2. Run an SEO audit

SEO may not be able to cure COVID-19, but it can definitely protect your business from its effects. Rankings and traffic can be converted to money, so they matter now more than ever before. Spend some time to bring your site to top condition through these steps:

• Optimize your content to satisfy user search intent
• Track how you rank for your keywords in search engines
• Find and fix technical errors on your site
• Find and remove low-quality backlinks
• Check if your site is mobile-friendly
• Make your internal linking structure more efficient

It sounds like a lot of work, but there is a fast way to check everything at once. If you already have a project in WebCEO and it has data (such as your keywords, competing sites and social media pages you are tracking), then you can create a consolidated report. Click on PDF Reports in the side navigation and click on the Add Report button.

Choose your project in the Projects tab, then go to Report contents and check all the boxes that are relevant to you. (If you have doubts, you can check all the boxes, but then you’ll risk scrolling through dozens of report pages for the bits of information you actually need.)

Click on Rescan associated tools to prepare the most recent data for your report. And lastly, click on Download PDF (hidden under the collapsible menu on the picture below) to generate the report in a new tab.

3. Work on improving your CTRs

High rankings are inseparable from high click-through rates. If you lose in one, you lose in the other. Good news is, tweaking your CTRs is much easier than optimizing your site.

Everywhere you have a presence, you want users to give you clicks too:

• Google search
• Social media
• Business directories
• Review directories
• Your own site

Usually, improving texts and images to appeal to users is enough to make something more clickable. But before you do, find out as much as you can about the click-through rates you have at the moment.

For Google search snippets, look at the Performance report in Google Search Console. Check the box in Average CTRs to display them in the graph and the table under it. You can view how many clicks you get for each website page or search query that causes you to appear in Google.

Social networks are a bit trickier, but they still have more than enough data to help you understand what’s going on. For example, Facebook has Insights for business pages where it displays things like post reach and actions on a page, and LinkedIn has Analytics and Activity. Twitter, too, has its Analytics, but on a separate subdomain.

And to check the user behavior on your site, use a heatmap generator like CrazyEgg.

4. Optimize for local SEO

Brick and mortar businesses have all but shut down during the crisis. The only places still open are the most essential ones like hospitals and grocery stores. But if you have closed and are not seeing customers face to face anymore, that’s no reason to give up on local search optimization. Sooner or later, the crisis will end, and you want your site and its positioning to be in shape when that happens.

If you are operating from home and still doing business, keep collecting positive reviews as usual – and the more, the better. Make sure your service and delivery are top-notch even if it’s barely profitable under the circumstances: if people remember you as that company that was really helpful during the quarantine, you will earn a major reputation boost.

Now, what if you are one of those essential organizations who don’t have the option to close their doors? Then that’s all the more reason to make yourself easy to find. For this, the most important thing is having a Google My Business listing.

If you have a listing in Google My Business, you can:

• Put your business on Google Maps.
• Track your customer reviews. You can see and reply to them in WebCEO’s Reviews report if you connect your WebCEO project to your Google My Business listing.
• Track customer activity like site visits and phone calls. You can do it in WebCEO’s Location Insights report.

To give yourself more of an edge, you can also:

• Sign up on business directories;
• Use location-based keywords on your site;
• Build backlinks to your site from local resources;
• Use structured data to add your business information to your Google search snippets.

5. Reassess your costs

Messing up and causing unnecessary losses is way easier than it should be. And in times like this, it tends to be outright ridiculous. On the other hand, this crisis is a nice excuse to be a little greedy and start spending less than before. Your profits will likely drop, but it’s better than not paying your employees or, in the worst-case scenario, going bankrupt. In other words, switch temporarily to the “low risk, low reward” mode.

What can you do to protect your budget? For example, you can spend less on paid ads and double down on free promotion strategies. Social media is promotion-friendly even if you don’t use ads, and there are also dozens of business directories where you can create listings.

Another good idea is to recycle your old content wherever possible. Outsourcing new content may be a luxury at the moment, while creating it yourself from scratch still takes time and resources.

You can also try to play long-term and spoil your customers with big discounts. It’s a good way to lure in some fresh blood and get more clients for your business, too.

6. Improve your UX for new users

Since the majority of the stores are closed, people’s number one option for shopping is the Internet now. You can expect an influx of new users who aren’t as familiar with online shopping as your regulars. Do everything to make sure they don’t bounce off in confusion, but instead join the ranks of your loyal customers. That means making your site easy to use for the less experienced newcomers.

So, how to get more sales when you are presented with this rich opportunity? Some of the easiest tips include:

• Easy-to-use, intuitive navigation
• All important information in the open
• FAQ page
• Your contact data and support

Here’s something on the more ambitious side: if you run an online store, it’s a great idea to create rotatable 3D models of your products to be displayed on your pages. Alternatively, (and it’s also easier), you can just create videos where you show your products from all angles.

Your regular users will appreciate the change in UX for the better, as well.

7. Be quick at converting new users

Following up on helping the newcomers adapt, you want to act quickly when they come to your site. New users may or may not figure out the necessary steps on their own. Help them out by extending a hand yourself first.

• Make your chats open automatically;
• Implement callback widgets;
• Track user activity, send them emails and phone messages (or even call them);
• Use retargeting to lure them back.

8. Hang out in social media

It must be good to be a Facebook or Instagram employee now. Social media is operating the same as ever, just like its users who have pages to visit and update. There’s some stability for social media users during these trying times. It’s also a nice chance to introduce someone new to your brand: people all over the world have more free time, and free time is a friend of social media.

Things you can do on your own pages:

• Run contests
• Create quizzes
• Offer free samples of your products
• Talk about fun things to do during the lockdown (like dressing up your house pet)
• Post content about doing activities related to your business at home (like workout routines)

Don’t forget to engage with other people’s pages, too, such as those of your biggest customers.

If you play your cards right, social media may prove extremely helpful at finding new clients – and strengthening your bond with the ones you already have.

9. Offer educational content

Have you heard that the Ivy League schools have offered 450 courses for free? And they aren’t the only ones. Various companies are doing the same for their target audiences.

People want to spend their free time productively – for example, by learning something new. And not just hobbies, but skills and knowledge that make actual money. If you are currently learning something yourself, hats off to you! But how about you reverse the process and teach your audience anything good, yourself?

Consider creating online lessons – preferably in a video format, because videos are all the rage at the moment. You can greatly increase the numbers of your clients by luring new users in with some freebies. And frequent video updates can easily turn them into your new regulars.

10. Make your customer service excellent

You may suddenly find that your customers need you way more often than usual. If it’s due to an influx of new users, that’s certainly a good sign. But it can happen even without a fresh wave of customers. Everybody wants faster service now because the only alternative is waiting on a line outside – not a very fun pastime.

Besides, they might need your help as soon as possible. Pandemics aren’t the only cause of emergencies.

So what can you do?

• Make sure your site loads quickly. Test your loading speed with WebCEO’s Page Speed tool.
• Set up live chat on your site. Be quick to reply to your users.
• Set up a chatbot for the times you aren’t around.
• Encourage customer feedback.
• Have an FAQ page.

11. Use CRM software and other useful tools

If you are among the lucky ones with more free time on their hands, now is a good chance to upgrade your website and your entire marketing campaign. Take a pen and a notebook (or just open Notepad), open your favorite search engine and answer the following questions.

• What are some tasks and aspects of your working process that could be made easier (or even fully automated) by using tools and software?
• What other tasks and aspects could be added to improve your campaign’s results? What tools do they require?
• What tools do you currently use?
• What are some of the better alternatives?

For instance, all things SEO (like monitoring your rankings and finding site errors) can be done with WebCEO. If you need help dealing with customers, that’s where customer relationship management (CRM) tools come in. TrustRadius has a good list of such tools with detailed explanations about what each of them does, along with user reviews. You will definitely find something that suits you.

12. Send positive vibes

Above all else, stay positive!

We are all starved for good news and can’t wait for mankind to triumph over the virus. Be optimistic and show it in everything you do on your site – meaning, don’t attempt to profit off people’s fears. Instead, do the opposite and reaffirm your visitors that we are all going to make it. Then we will brag to future generations about having lived through an event from the history books.

Here’s something you can do right now: reach out to your customers and let them know you’ve got their backs. If you have implemented any new features on your site or you have created special offers, share the news with them. The path to a better tomorrow where you attract more customers to your business starts as early as today.

High spirits, high traffic and high rankings – that’s the recipe for success online. How about you start by checking your rankings?

The post 12 Healthy Ways to Get More Clients During the Crisis appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As a marketer, one of the most important numbers you should be paying attention to is your conversion rate.

This number tells you just how many people are converting based on a specific action you’d like for them to take, be it signing up for a newsletter, booking a free discovery call, or making a purchase on your website.

While it is not difficult to compute your actual conversion rate (it’s just the percentage of your visitors that converted to customers), it can be hard to think of ways to boost those conversion rates, especially for key landing pages across your site.

If you’re looking for ways to skyrocket your pages’ or sites’ conversions, you’re in the right place. Here, we will take a look at 11 different tips you can use to increase conversion rates on any landing page.

How to improve your landing page conversion rates

1. Be clear who your buyer persona is

Just as important as getting more prospects and leads is getting the right prospects and leads.

One of the surest ways you can make sure you’re getting the right people signing up, making inquiries, or following through to a purchase is by creating what’s called a buyer persona.

This buyer persona is a description of who, in detail, your ideal buyer is. This goes beyond a typical topline view of your customer; instead, you should really flesh out different parts of their lives that may influence their purchasing decisions.

These may include their biases, their aspirations, their daily routines, problems, beliefs, and more. You can easily use a pre-made template to create an effective buyer persona if you’ve never made one before.

You can see below an example of a clear and concise buyer persona that completely fleshes out a buyer. Notice how you can imagine this persona to be an actual person, even if you created the persona based on multiple interview and survey results.

An example of a buyer persona (Source: Alore)

2. Mention your client’s pain points in the title

After you’ve fleshed out who your typical buyer is, you can better optimize your landing page to get you the most conversions.

Your title is one of the first things, and arguably the only thing, that lets most website visitors know if your page is worth their time or not.

If they see a title that’s too long, vague, or irrelevant to their needs, you can bet they’ll be leaving your page faster than you can say “no conversion.”

While there are some title best practices you can keep in mind – such as a title that’s an average of 6 words, uses “you/your” over “we/our” – it still boils down to your title copy.

Your title should definitely include keywords that users will use to find your product or service. WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool offers the most up-to-date database of keywords to help you attract your audience and consequently increase conversions.

If you can find some way to hit your prospects’ deepest frustrations or pain points, they’ll assume you can help.

Take Tweetdeck’s headline, for example. While Twitter is by no means a new platform, many marketers and social media managers still struggle to make the most of the platform. Enter Tweetdeck.

The title is short and sweet; only 4 words (3, not counting stop words). It already tells you the biggest outcome you can expect from the tool – being able to use Twitter like most successful professionals on the network.

Based on this, you can also infer that the biggest frustration of Tweetdeck’s ideal user is not knowing how to make the most of Twitter for marketing purposes.

If you think limiting your headline to a few words is daunting, that’s where your sub-headline comes in. Notice how Tweetdeck’s sub-headline expounds on how exactly users can “tweet like a pro.”

For your own landing pages, boost your conversion rates by crafting a sticky, effective headline that has visitors practically racing to pick up what you put down.

3. Improve your copywriting skills

An old copywriting adage goes, “There’s no such thing as a sales page that’s too long – only too boring.”

The same is true of your landing pages. Even if you aren’t asking for a visitor to make a purchase, you’re still trying to get them to do something that can possibly benefit you in the future, i.e. giving their email address or booking a consultation call.

That’s why it’s essential to have clean and effective copywriting on your landing pages. You don’t always have to hire a copywriter just for landing pages; you can improve your copywriting skills all on your own by following some effective tips and tricks.

A good copywriters need to know where their competitors are and what they have to offer. This is where WebCEO’s SEO Content Checker Tool comes into place.

4. Optimize your form fields

Say your visitor gets on your landing page, sees your offer, and decide it’s for them. But once they click the Sign Me Up button, they’re greeted by too many form fields (or worse, too many required form fields), or other form field mistakes you may have made.

Chances are that person will turn the other way and abandon your site completely.

Optimize your form fields so that you’re only getting the most important information – at the very least, just an email address. (You can opt to make the First Name required, but this isn’t necessary in many cases.)

For additional peace of mind for visitors, add icons for guarantees and security in your forms. Speak in a language that’s easy to understand, and design the form in a way that’s even easier to fill out.

Example of a poorly optimized and well optimized form field

5. Include action words in your CTA

Before your visitor even completes a form with their contact details, you will need to first entice them enough to sign up or later encourage them to hit submit.

Your call-to-action button should be actionable and descriptive. Avoid using generic text “Sign Up/Submit” – your visitors read multiple CTAs a day from different sites and platforms, so you’ll want to be personal and relevant.

Here’s an example of a CTA from entrepreneur Melyssa Griffin’s website that’s simple but still effective, using an action word that not only shows an outcome but even elicits excitement.

Other common action words you can use for your CTAs include:

• Discover
• Learn more
• Enter now
• Shop now

6. Design and loading times matter

How your landing page looks and loads can make or break your conversion rates. Great design is important so readers can be taken through a journey, while fast loading times make sure people don’t immediately exit your site (the average person expects a site to load in 2 seconds).

For a no-fail approach at design, consider using beautiful landing page templates that only require minor tweaks and edits. That way, you can save time and won’t need to worry about whether or not you’re making use of good design principles.

One additional benefit to using pre-designed landing pages is that they’re also already optimized to load faster, making use of cleaner code than you might get if you attempted to do it yourself.

Example of a conversion-optimized landing page template (Source: Spark)

7. Include testimonials

Before a visitor turns into a lead, they will need to know they can trust you. Think about it: do you go ahead and give your email address to just anybody?

The numbers don’t lie: 90% of consumers worldwide trust earned media, i.e. testimonials and word of mouth, more than any other means of advertising.

Adding friendly, helpful testimonials can drastically increase your conversion rates. People trust other people, even if they’ve never met the person who gave the testimonial or review.

8. Add an FAQ section

Adding an FAQ section can be a small and easy trick to boost conversion rates with big pay-offs.

Because most people use conversational speech when searching online (starting queries as a question, for example), your FAQs can already answer their queries word-for-word.

This gives you a better chance of having your landing page discovered as a search engine result, since Google and other search engines can see that your page is the most relevant match.

WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool can assist you to find the most relevant keywords and not miss out on the audience that your content can be most useful to.

On the visitors’ side, they can also use the FAQs to determine whether or not your product or service is right for them.

A business owner looking for a marketing consultant, for example, might learn from the FAQs that you offer money-back guarantees and work especially with entrepreneurs who manage brick and mortar stores. When they see how relevant your offer is, they’ll be more likely to book that discovery call.

See how temporary tattoo store Tattly phrases their FAQs in the words of their prospects, answering every concern they might have.

9. Optimize using local SEO

If your business depends on local clientele, e.g. owning a brick and mortar, local SEO should be one of your top priorities. After all, Junto has gathered that 78% of location-based searches eventually lead to an offline purchase, while 18% of these lead to a same-day sale.

Take a look at this local SEO guide to get started. Some tips are as easy as adding [your location] at the end of your meta-title.

Bonus tip: you can implement every single SEO technique known to marketers, but one important added boost is having an SSL certificate on your website. Google search favors sites with SSL, i.e. sites beginning with https instead of just http.

Adding an SSL certificate to your site can be as simple as getting in touch with your website host to install it for you. Most hosts, in fact, might even have it automatically installed. Be sure to clarify with them how you can get one installed for your own website to eliminate any doubt.

10. Eliminate distractions

Hubspot released a finding that 55% of online visitors spend only 15 seconds on your website. This doesn’t give you a lot of time to pique their interest and get them to convert.

As an easy fix, strip away any and all distractions from your landing pages.

Here are a few things you might want to omit when designing conversion-optimized landing pages:

• Navigation links and menus (Home, Blog, About, Contact, etc)
• Opt-in pop-ups – your landing page is already the opportunity to opt in, no need to rub it in your visitors’ faces
• Irrelevant photos, sections, and information (latest blog posts, other offers)

11. Test your landing page before publishing

After you’ve implemented all the tips in this list, we’re sure you’re excited to share your landing page with the world and rack up those conversion rates.

Before you release your landing page out into the wild though, be sure to test it for any bugs and issues so all goes well. Make sure your design is mobile-friendly, test your CTA buttons and even the form itself (if needed, send a mock contact entry to see if all is in working order).

If everything looks good from end-to-end, you’re ready to hit publish and watch those conversions roll in.

Key Takeaways

Whether you’re designing your first or your fiftieth landing page, it’s always a good idea to optimize them to boost conversion rates. Sometimes even the tiniest tweak can make the biggest of differences, so make it a habit to consistently review, test, tweak, and repeat. Soon, you’ll be seeing better conversions that will only improve as time goes on.

For an easy way to monitor your progress, use WebCEO’s Web Analytics tool to connect your project with your Google Analytics account. All relevant data (visitors, conversion goals, bounce rates) will be immediately displayed in the Traffic Overview report.

The post 11 Ways to Boost Your Landing Page Conversion Rates appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

2019 is going strong, so forget the marketing mistakes you made last year. It’s time for a fresh start with both your goals and your digital campaigns. Take this year as a chance to start strong.

If you want to take your digital marketing strategies to the next level, first consider overhauling your analytics. Start by measuring certain digital marketing metrics you might not have known about, let alone realized were important.

Not sure what exactly these metrics are? No worries. We’ve got you covered and even have an infographic to make our message ring more powerfully.

Here are seven digital marketing metrics you need to start measuring today.

1. Top landing pages

Your landing pages provide leads and drive traffic to your site. This is why measuring effective and ineffective pages is important to your digital marketing strategy.

Analyzing your top landing pages will show you which ones are the most visible across the web, especially in search. This allows you to make any necessary adjustments to maximize your top-performing landing pages.

2. Channel-specific traffic

The traffic your website gets on a daily basis comes from a multitude of sources that can include (but are not limited to):

• Organic search

This is when a user finds your website via a search engine.

For instance, a user logs into Google and types, “Best sporting goods stores near me.” A second later, results appear and the user sees the link for your website on the first page. You get organic traffic when the user clicks that link.

• Direct traffic

You get direct traffic when a user searches for your website directly on a browser instead of going through the results page of a search engine. High direct traffic means people are already familiar with your brand.

• Social media traffic

This is when a user visits your website via a link from a social media network.

Here’s a scenario of how it works. Let’s say you have a blog on your website, and a customer reads one of your articles. This customer likes the article so much they post the link to the article on their Facebook profile. Their Facebook friends then see the link, develop interest, and decide to click.

A healthy social media following combined with quality content is a great way to earn social media traffic.

• Email traffic

This traffic comes from the links included in your email marketing campaign. You could use links to your blog or product pages to entice subscribers. Hopefully, they’ll click onto your website and bring you more traffic.

• Paid search traffic

Website traffic from paid search comes from links that you include on your pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns.

Monitoring these (and other) marketing channels will give you a concrete idea of where the majority of your website traffic comes from, so you’ll know which one to spend more of your budget on.

3. Cost per lead

To get your cost per lead, take the amount you spent on a digital marketing campaign over a given time period and divide it by the total number of leads the campaign generated over that same period.

Here’s a sample calculation:

You ran a PPC campaign for one of your products, and it cost you $10,000 over a period of 30 days. In those 30 days, you were able to acquire 400 new leads. That means the cost per lead for your PPC campaign was $25.

$10,000 PPC campaign / 400 leads = $25 cost per lead

Calculating the cost per lead of your various campaigns shows you which campaigns are strong and which ones you might need to re-evaluate or eliminate altogether.

4. Exit rate

This is the percentage of visitors who leave your site from a specific page.

Keep in mind that exits are not the same as bounces, even though the two terms are often used interchangeably by marketers. The key difference between an exit and a bounce is the method of exit.

An exit occurs when a user views multiple pages on your website before leaving. For example, a user starts on your home page, then goes to your “About Us” page, then goes to your “Products and Services” page before exiting.

A bounce, on the other hand, happens when a user leaves your website immediately after viewing only one page. It’s only recorded as a bounce if the user exits your website from the same page they entered.

You need to measure the exit rates of the pages in your website because a page with a high exit rate can indicate certain problems. Is the page slow to load? Does it lack information that will help the user? These are the things you need to find out.

5. Lead to close ratio

The different digital marketing campaigns you run at any given time can help you generate hundreds, if not thousands, of leads. However, the real question is this: How many of those leads actually convert in some form?

To get this information, you need to analyze the lead to close ratios of your campaigns. If you see your email marketing promotions are getting the most conversions, then you need to increase the budget for your email marketing campaign.

6. Conversion funnel rates

Like all companies, your business has a funnel that normally consists of four stages

• Awareness

The top-most part of the funnel: this is where you attract potential customers and try to catch their attention.

Example: Social media ads

• Interest

Once your potential customers are aware of your brand, this part of the funnel helps them know a lot more about what you’re offering.

Example: Blog content

• Desire

Now that your customers are familiar with your brand, they’re definitely interested in your product or service. This is the stage in which you build on that interest to lead them to the last stage.

Example: Product photos on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram

• Action or conversion

As the final stage in the funnel, this is where leads become conversions.

Example: Product checkout section of your website

You should keep an eye out for how your leads behave through each stage of the conversion funnel. For example, if you’re not getting enough leads, it could mean that the lead capture forms on your website are not attention-grabbing enough and might need improvement.

7. Mobile traffic

When you analyze your mobile traffic, you’ll be able to determine the percentage of your users who visit your website on a mobile device. You can even perform more granular analytics by tracking the specific devices your visitors are using, as well as each page they visit. You may even analyze the type of content they view on your site.

High mobile traffic means that your website is optimized for mobile. This is a good thing, as more than half of all traffic in the world is generated through mobile devices.

Furthermore, customers today spend significantly more time on their mobile phone than in front of a desktop computer. A study showed mobile users spend more than twice the amount of time online compared to desktop users.

To ensure your website is well-optimized for search engines and provides a seamless user experience across all devices, use WebCEO’s Website Audit Tool. This tool can help you check your website’s optimization status and identify areas for improvement, ensuring your site is accessible and engaging for both mobile and desktop users.

Wrap up

Measuring these digital marketing metrics will help you stay far ahead of your competition, so you need to start sooner rather than later.

If you and your team don’t have the capacity or resources for in-depth analytics, consider outsourcing these services. Digital marketing firms often have analytics experts who can help you with your goals. Either way, metrics can help you track your users and improve your company one iteration at a time.

The post 7 Underestimated Digital Marketing Metrics for 2019 [Infographic] appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

As a company providing agency-level SEO tools, we can’t help but look at our customers’ feedback with starry eyes – especially when they write it into a story. Today, we have the privilege of interviewing the Agnew Group, fresh from their all-time record month in both visits and lead generation in January 2019. A leading motor group based in Northern Ireland and one of the top 25 franchise car dealerships in the UK, the Agnew Group continues to go from strength to strength.

Colm Sharkey, Digital Marketing Manager at Agnew Group spoke to WebCEO about his role, all things SEO and how WebCEO is helping them achieve their online goals.

When was the first time you started using WebCEO? What SEO tasks have you solved with this platform?

WebCEO and I were first introduced many years ago. I was looking for a cost-effective, all-round piece of software as I developed my knowledge of SEO. The free version was easy to use and provided great insight, making the decision to upgrade a no-brainer. I first used the software whilst I was Website Manager at a leading Utilities company and immediately was able to identify glaring technical errors and make immediate improvements to the visibility of the website. Identifying and fixing the likes of broken links and 404 errors, I imagine, are how a lot of people start off their SEO journey.

Moving on in my career, I setup my own digital marketing agency, Blue Shark Digital, and WebCEO was an essential piece of kit that I relied on. Mainly dealing with SME’s, being able to scan and audit client’s websites and implement immediate and impactful changes and improvements was and is an essential component of what Blue Shark Digital offered.

You now work for Agnew Group and manage 6 websites! That’s a challenging responsibility. How does WebCEO help you with that?

To call it a challenging responsibility would be an understatement, indeed! (laughs) Well, the opportunity was too tempting to turn down. The role at Agnew Group came up and I knew it was one that I had to pursue. Having previously worked in a digital role in the automotive industry, the appeal of Agnew Cars was strong, with the chance to work with brands like Mercedes, Audi, BMW and Porsche amongst others.

Within the Agnew Group we have 6 websites: Agnewcars, Autoexchange, Autostore, Repair Centre, Agnew Leasing and Agnew Motability. WebCEO allows the digital team to monitor each site, create automated reports and alerts and to develop, track and compare different solutions and SEO improvements on the sites. The software makes the somewhat daunting task of monitoring 6 sites manageable and allows more time to be spent on digital strategy.

The digital strategy is continually evolving based on data-driven decisions, of what WebCEO contributes significantly. Each site has their own objectives and users. We track cross-domain traffic within our sites and study the online behaviour of each. WebCEO assists with this process, alongside other software such as Universal Analytics and UX software.

Have you tried other SEO platforms? What was the decisive factor that made you choose WebCEO?

Yes, I have used SEMrush and SE Ranking previously. However, each time I find the variety and reliability of WebCEO, combined with the competitive pricing, the best solution. My current role is the 3rd role in a row that I have subscribed to WebCEO.

What I like about WebCEO is the layout and user experience of the software. Some competitor software packages may have, or claim to have, similar features. However, WebCEO stands apart in terms of the clarity of the reporting, the clarity of the layout and supporting information it provides for each tool.

Rather than re-invent the wheel, WebCEO plugs-in industry-recognised metrics from the likes of Alexa, Moz and others for certain aspects. Having the ability to measure Moz Domain Authority and Alexa URL rank within the software is a massive plus, for example.

What is your favourite tool on WebCEO?

That’s a difficult one, depends which day you ask me. We are doing quite a lot of link-building as a team, and Competitor Backlink Spy is an absolute godsend. In short, I challenge my team to pick a competitor and identify every good link they have and target 85%+ of them to create links to our sites (where relevant).

Yesterday we had a good team discussion about where we are on Bing and Yahoo and what specific things we could do to improve our visibility. With non-Google search engine traffic still at around 10% of total visits, rank tracking on these search engines has proved invaluable. Being able to view Bing/Yahoo rankings and also the traffic from these sites in the same place was handy.

Tomorrow, well… Who knows?

What features do you honestly miss in WebCEO?

Some of the Competitor Analysis tools. I don’t think any one in particular is the authority in this arena, so having several different tools to monitor trends is of appeal. By their very nature, these tools all use different algorithms to analyze and estimate traffic on competitor sites. By having several tools to monitor at once, it can give you a clearer picture. The more tools the better in this regard to keep an eye on those pesky competitors of Agnews!

Congratulations on a record-breaking January! Could you tell us about it?

In January 2019 agnewcars.com had our all-time record month in visits, users, calls and emails. This was led by a 21% and 11% year-on-year growth in organic and referral traffic. With “SEO traffic sources” (search engines and referral) accounting for 65% of hard leads (calls and emails), the priority since I started this role was to devise and implement an SEO and content strategy starting from the neck of the sales funnel upwards. There is plenty of work still to do and scope to significantly improve the performance.

Launching new landing pages, we are able to track over time in WebCEO how we rank for the keywords we target, and the impact of traffic to these pages in terms of lead generation. These landing pages have had bespoke designed based on the latest CRO (Conversion Rate Optimisation) principles and they have accounted for almost 10% of total leads since launch.

We aim to continue to use WebCEO to assist in the implementation and continuous improvement of the Agnew Group websites.

The post How a Company Got a 65% Lead Boost with Agency SEO Tools appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.