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.

Part III: Track Your Success

We’ve come to the last but not least part of our social media optimization journey. Today you will learn how to analyze the results of your social media optimization campaign and what instruments you might need for this task.

TRACK YOUR SUCCESS

Step #1: How to Track the Results of Your Social Media Campaign

[ Quantify your success with Social Analytics Tools ]

Social media marketing ranges from “somewhat effective” to “very effective” for businesses.

Your results will come in figures. Real success comes in high figures.

A lot of statistics for business accounts are provided by social media platforms in the form of APIs. Through WebCEO or stand-alone social media analytics tools, you can access these data pipes. You will need to analyze percentages, graphs, and diagrams. The advantage of using tools is they offer a coherent investigation and control over your performance on multiple social media platforms starting from the research steps and going straight to the gathering of results.  

Let’s learn some of them:

1. Buffer

Buffer is a platform where, apart from analyzing the results of your content promotion, you can publish on major social media platforms. You will get access to the following helpful features:

• post writing and planning: write posts and add them to a calendar to control the timing and campaigns dedicated to special events on specific platforms;
• posts an “achievements” analysis: get stats on the quantity of new followers, engagement rate, unique reach on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, etc.;
• collaborate with your team: if you work on a team, you will get the necessary elements for building a convenient working environment for team members; sharing the responsibilities will become significantly easier and more effective;
• communicate with your customers: start a conversation with interested customers, reply to their messages, sort them by tags and folders, give your team members the right to take part in specific conversations.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo will lead you through the whole process of promoting on social media. Research, planning, content creation, results analysis; cooperation with influencers will no longer be a tough mission.

• pick up what is trending now and follow the newest ideas: analyze the freshest content on the Internet by different locations and time of release. Build a clear picture of who you can attract and surprise new users with;
• analyze the essentials: get a list of formats your audience might be most satisfied with and find out why your competitors outrun you;
• find your influencers on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, analyze their performance by different metrics; you will have an opportunity to examine the influencers who work with your competitors and identify their strong and weak sides.

3. Social Sprout

Sprout Social will help you organize your working process and make it easier, helping you and your team act in rhythm. 

Sprout Social provides everything a user needs for research, analysis, planning and publishing. You will be able to manage your publications: create drafts, schedule them and add to a corporate calendar, administer several platforms simultaneously and assign specific team members to particular tasks.

Sprout Social creates all the conditions for efficient work with messages. Your team members will be able to hold conversations with customers as soon as a team leader gives permission. You will receive reports on your social media performance.

4. TapInfluence

If you are going to work with influencers, this platform is totally for you. It will help investigate influencers who are popular in your niche by keywords and their performance. Get a full profile on a person you would like to cooperate with: age, gender, location, education, etc. Influencer’s history on social media, his or her insights and revenue you could get after the cooperation – these will be outlined for a user to help choose the best representative for a product. You will find a top-notch influencer for your business.

5. Google Trends

A free SEO tool provided by Google will be helpful if you don’t know what keyword to choose between several variants: it will demonstrate how popular these have been through time. This tool will also show you recently trending keywords, stories and insights.

If there are other tools for social media performance analysis, then why do I need the WebCEO Social Analytics Tools? – you might ask.

First, WebCEO puts everything in one place. This is significantly more comfortable than switching between different types of statistics on different websites and applications.

Second, WebCEO not only shows you statistics, we analyze the statistics for you and determine your weak and strong points.

Third, WebCEO helps you spy on your competitors.

All you need is to create content. WebCEO will care about everything else, for example:

WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring Tool will show your mentions on different blogs, news sections and tweets. You will see the headlines of articles, the time of their publication and a link to a source and its name. Regarding Twitter, you will be provided with the list of tweets you are mentioned in, plus the number of their retweets and likes.

WebCEO’s Social Engagement Tool will tell you everything about your Facebook and Pinterest performance:

• The level of engagement on Facebook with detailed data concerning likes, shares, and comments;
• The total number of Pinterest shares;
• Your competitors’ citations in comparison with yours;
• Your social traffic in terms of the number of sessions, average bounce and conversion rate, the number of completions and their monetary value.

WebCEO’s Facebook Insights Tool takes the data from your Facebook account to present it in the most comfortable way. Using this you will be aware of:

• Your competitors’ Facebook engagement level: reactions, shares, and comments on their Facebook pages by day;
• Your page metrics by chosen periods of time in comparison with previous results: likes, feedback, organic page reach, level of post engagement, and the number of clicks on them;
• Page demographic.

To learn all this data without traveling between websites and tabs, start scanning on WebCEO and we will present you with everything at once.

No need to thank us; we are happy to do this for you!

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Step #2: What Are the SEO Benefits of Social Media Marketing?

[ Learn what you get when your website performs well on social media ]

Social media has become an essential part of SEO, even if search engines were not measuring likes and shares on various platforms (Google does this). You will help your website grow significantly because your traffic should increase to become 25% of your total traffic if you use social media.  

You will build your reputation. Social media can make you popular as soon as you go there with viral content. Give this a lot of quality, thorough research, and build your material using expert thought processes and real evidence. Write as well as you can and present your work to a relevant audience. A great job will be rewarded and lead to great results.

Why is this worthy of any attention?

If you are respected, you are linked to. Your words, your work and you yourself will have some value in the eyes of your niche audience. And here we smoothly go to the next benefit.

You will get backlinks. Not directly, because of the NoFollow aspect of links posted on social media platforms, but with the help of “mediators”. For example, you will promote your content or its extract on social media platforms. People will go to your website, if you attracted their attention, read your stuff and decide to share it on their websites. As a result, your domain authority will rise. However, always check your backlinks! Toxic or spammy links will cause harm to your website and rankings.

Use WebCEO’s Backlink Quality Check and be aware about the value of the links leading to your website.

IN CONCLUSION, social media platforms are among the most powerful instruments for marketing. The benefits you will get should easily be worthy of all the effort you are going to put in. If you still don’t use social media professionally, it’s high time to start doing this. Begin your journey with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool, identify your competitors and build up a proper marketing strategy for your future success.

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 3 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part II: Writing a Post

In the previous part of the article we discussed the following points of social media optimization:

• Research,
• Target audience identification,
• Planning, and
• Social media profile optimization.

In short, that was the preparation stage.

Today in the second part, we will dive into one of the most essential parts of SMO: content creation and optimization.

Social media content isn’t the same as the content you create for websites. On social media platforms, certain rules apply. Length, style and visuals – here are just a few things to double-check and improve. This is where your creativity and passion are put in the spotlight.

It doesn’t matter what type of content you have been producing or are going to produce; social media accepts everything. You can run an educational channel or one for entertainment or news. There is a different strategy for each of these types of channels.

Step #1: How to Make Your Post Visible

[ Find your keywords and optimize your posts properly ]

Optimized social media profiles are undoubtedly important. However, you will never succeed if your posts aren’t seen by social media platform inhabitants. If you want to be noticed, use keywords.

Social media platforms work a bit like Google, exploiting keywords. However, social media’s most important keywords consist of hashtags. They should be relevant to your niche and popular among users:

There is a range of different services which can help you choose relevant and highly demanded hashtags in your niche.

Those are:

• WebCEO’s Keyword Research Tool which helps to find the best and most profitable keywords depending on the niche you perform in. It gives you suggestions on what people look for besides your query. You can easily use these substitute queries as hashtags on social media:

Not only will more people find you in searches on the social media platform itself, but Google will often show social media posts in their results if a relevant hashtag is used, like this:

• Keyhole is a good site to gather analytical data on hashtags and track results of a social media hashtag campaign; 
• Flick shows hashtag statistics in terms of general and recent popularity, month and week trends, and will provide you with a list of relevant hashtags and where they are mostly used.

Pick the best keywords with WebCEO's Keyword Research Tool Sign Up Free

Step #2: How to Behave on Different Social Media Platforms

[ Learn how to optimize your social media like a pro and use it to the fullest ]

Social media is the easiest and fastest way to spread any kind of information.

Each social media platform is used by a specific audience. You must be careful because a wrongly prepared post will have weak results. Analyze properly who uses each social media platform in terms of age, location, nationality, etc.

Each platform has its rules and features, so you should follow the game:

X (TWITTER) POSTS

Age group: 25 – 34

Since Twitter sets limit of 280 characters for a single tweet, think wisely about each word you are going to type. Each post should contain a relevant hashtag or two, so the number of characters will be reduced even more.

Surprisingly, too many tweets will actually work against you. Users don’t like their content diluted. Three or four posts per day should be enough.

There are a lot of other useful features on Twitter you can use for your marketing campaign along with hashtags. Look, please, at the screenshot below. There you can see some options to use in order to make a post more engaging:

• Photos and videos: people absolutely fall for various types of content. Make your post entertaining, interesting, and bright! Attach short, yet funny videos or photos for an ordinary follower to watch with pleasure!

Remember to optimize your image size so that those will load faster. Avoid posting photos or videos people are likely to have seen before or, worse, think they have seen before. Snap your own photos before borrowing one from the Internet. Get a photogenic friend or employees to do various things with various tools and emotions so you’ll have a library of compelling shots others have definitely never seen before.

• GIFs: These 1 to 2 second mini-videos are a lot of fun and very popular. Relevant and witty GIFs will make your post attractive and hilarious!
• Polls: people like polls because they like to share their opinions. These are also a great way to check the level of engagement on your Twitter and maybe learn what products people prefer to use in terms of your niche;
• Location: if your business is location-focused, you can add the exact location to a post or mention it in hashtags in order to analyze how much your product is demanded in a specific area:

• Threads: this will definitely come in handy if you want to share a big amount of information on Twitter and don’t want this data to be lost in a long line of replies. You can “attach” tweets to the main post and those will be the first on a queue.

How can Twitter help to increase traffic and extend your audience?

You are likely to benefit from followers’ and hashtag searchers’ actions: likes, retweets, replies, tags, embedded tweets, and other.

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FACEBOOK POSTS

Age group: 18 – 34

Facebook is one of the most comfortable places to run a business campaign and sell your content. Facebook works well even with local SEO.

Facebook is all about reactions and discussion. It is actually used by all generations since its main goal is communication. Create posts that are highly engaging: ask questions, inspire people to leave their feedback, like, share your posts, or just thank you for great content. As Facebook is created for communication between friends, give followers the opportunity to set a connection with you like with a close buddy.

On Facebook you can use a large set of features to promote your content or products. Let’s learn some more about them:

• Live video: if you a running a presentation open to the public, you will not find a more comfortable way to share it than use social media. This is easy, comfortable, and all encompassing in terms of an audience being able to search for and find you. Insert hashtags to the posts with webinars or live videos, to make finding you easier.
• Photo/video: the classic way of sharing your content. Got anything your audience would love to see? Post photos. Videos are even better.
• Life event: a great feature to bring some attention to your product and your actual location:

In the post itself:

• Feeling/Activity: not a really useful feature for optimization, but it may stir some reaction from followers and make them ask questions, like or comment on your actions:

• Tag people: invite people you want to react to your posts. Naturally, you should avoid tagging random people who have nothing to do with you or your page.
• Polls are similar to those on Twitter where people like to share their opinions.
• Check in: a location feature that specifies where an event/photo/video, etc. takes place, a useful option for location-focused businesses.

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INSTAGRAM POSTS

Age group: 18 – 24

Instagram is now especially favored by people interested in their local environment. The post optimization on this platform is similar to other ones mentioned earlier. Except for:

• There are a set of filters which help users to make their images prettier before publishing, and
• Carousels – a set of several photos or videos within one post.

Instagram allows live videos and STORIES. People like these update features and use them a lot. Follow their example.

Adopt the strategy of posting regular stories. They attract people even more than pictures on profiles! Trends are changing daily, and now people tend to create more stories and make posts only on special occasions. You may use a wide range of possibilities which this way of updating provides you with:

• Location;
• Mentions;
• Hashtags;
• Polls, questions, and quizzes;
• Gifs and stickers;
• Countdown;
• Music, and other.

You can upload a video or an image to your story, even insert links leading to specific websites.

Stories don’t live too long, only for 24 hours. However, if you want them to be permanent and visible on your profile, you can add them to the Story Highlights, where they will live as long as you want them to:

YOUTUBE VIDEOS

Age group: 18 – 75 (18 – 44 make up 90%)

YouTube is you. As long as you are unique, fresh, and entertaining. Nowadays, YouTube is a really powerful platform that embraces almost all the niches in this world. And as there are a lot of representatives of your field, you have to stand out and prove that your content is much better and worthy of being viewed.

The things you can optimize on YouTube:

• Hashtags: these are needed on each platform you are going to use and optimize. Remember, hashtags should be relevant to your niche and topic:

• Video itself: it should be of the highest quality in terms of content presented and resolution. People – your potential customers – prefer enjoying nice pictures, compelling commentary and valuable data, so make sure to meet their requirements. Create playlists by topics and add each new video to the appropriate playlist, so that users may find them quickly:

• Transcript: convert your audio into text. This is very useful for users because some of them may be foreigners, or your speech may be difficult to understand. And this works well for SEO. By doing transcripts for your videos, you help Google crawl and index it. Speak with keywords and then transcribe your words. Help Google show your video as an answer to a searcher’s query.

• Translation: if you own or work for an international company, do not be lazy: translate your video into some of the most widespread languages. A wider audience will have the opportunity to understand you and learn more about your product. This will help you to get the highest search result positions in different locations.

And a live video:

• Basic info: here you are limited to 5000 characters. The description box is really useful, so exploit it undoubtedly! What you can type there:

1. Keywords in title, description itself, and tags:

2. Place links to your website and other social media platforms accounts;

3. Links to materials you used for a video;

4. Notes about important events related to your brand;

5. A brief script of your video with the times you mention certain things – people like this a lot;

YouTube has a lot you can optimize.

Make time to care about each of the underlined points below. These will help you get more value out of using YouTube and feature higher on YouTube search:

People like to leave comments on YouTube, whether they are bad or good ones. Be polite with everybody because it helps to increase the level of engagement and shows that everybody is respected at your place.

Do you know that YouTube is the second most popular search engine after Google? According to Global Media Insight, YouTube has more than 2.7 billion active users. If we can’t find what we want on Google, we will jump to YouTube and find it there.

WebCEO understands the importance of YouTube and other platforms in contemporary 2020+ SEO and tries to embrace all the channels you can potentially get some traffic from and optimize your content for. In the WebCEO Rank Tracker Tool, you can easily monitor your YouTube performance with a few clicks, adding it to a list of search engines you can work with. After a fresh scan, you will be able to enjoy a full report regarding your keyword performance on YouTube.

Check your YouTube rankings with WebCEO Sign Up Free

LINKEDIN POSTS

Age group: 18 – 49

LinkedIn is all about being official. Here you present and sell your professionalism. Time to humblebrag and describe why you are a great specialist or why your company is worthy of attention. Don’t be shy!

After filling out the forms regarding your experience and achievements, it will be time to learn how to optimize your posts. If you use a company account, some features of the ordinary posts are not available, for example articles.

Since LinkedIn is more official than other social media platforms you have to present your content thoughtfully. Work on the presentation of your idea a lot, let it be professional, of high quality, and structured so your readers will be compelled to join the conversation and express their opinion regarding a chosen topic. Ask interesting and intriguing questions, challenge readers to take part in your considerations and let them prove whether you are right or wrong. This will bring more engagement. 

You can make your post fully optimized by following the next tips:

• Keywords should be everywhere! Hashtags in your posts make them visible to the users, even if they are not your followers or aren’t connected to you.

• Photos and videos make posts brighter and attract more attention to your content. Be sure to add alt text to your images for better accessibility.

• Articles: this feature lets you share your knowledge with the others and proving that you are indeed a professional in your niche.   

• Share a document: If you have a guide, a PowerPoint presentation or another valuable piece of content, you can easily share it and let the search engines index its content. People will come to you more often knowing you can provide them with well written and useful material. If you don’t want everybody to see and examine your material, you can easily set a limited access to the post;

• Access: in a box under your photo, you have the Access feature. You can decide on who can see the post you are going to publish. If you want to attract as many people as you can, choose “Anyone + Twitter” option, and your post will emerge on your Twitter account as well. 

Make sure you haven’t blocked the comments section and people are able to leave some words regarding your content!

A little BONUS

SlideShare

If you have a lot of in-demand and in-depth content, like presentations, documents, infographics, try SlideShare. It is owned by LinkedIn’s hosting service and is an easy way to spread your content and bring some attention. On SlideShare such features as likes and shares are also available. You can insert links leading to your social media platforms on a SlideShare profile, so people will know where to find you.

PINTEREST PINS

Age group: 18 – 49

Pinterest is all about images. How can this platform be useful for product promotion? All images are supplied with links to their original websites and short descriptions.

Pinterest is a little bit easier than other platforms in terms of content presentation. Let’s dive into it without further ado:

• Images: choose an awesome photo relevant to your business niche, bright and of high quality, and catchy enough for an ordinary user to notice it. Actually, this is the most important part you have to do on Pinterest. Be careful with photos and don’t steal them from other people!
• Title: it’s more than just the name of your image. Write anything you want (relevant to your content of course) to present your image and article to the audience in the most interesting way. The title is also a place for keywords with the help of which people will find your pin.

• Links: there are two places where your links are visible:
  • in the image as you hover a cursor over it, and
  • under the image:

• Description: here you have 500 characters to present your content (be creative!) and interest viewers to learn more. Don’t forget to put keywords in this box.
• Boards are similar to playlists on YouTube with pins replacing videos. This is really useful for followers and beneficial for you because people may observe more of your older pins, which are related to a newer one.

Track Pinterest likes and shares of images on your site with WebCEO Sign Up Free

Step #3: When to Post on Social Media?

[ Choose the right time for your posts ]

Scheduling posts is also an important part of the whole optimization process. A lot of specialists compose their posts in advance, working on each word and preparing respectable material. With a feature for post scheduling, such as on Facebook and YouTube, this process becomes significantly easier.

You can determine the best time for your business to post on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms after reading some articles on this topic.

Why don’t we just tell you what are the best times to post?

The audience isn’t the same everywhere. What may be a great time for one type of audience could be the worst variant for another. Everything depends on your products, your target audience, and its location. Time Zones are obviously extremely important for your performance on social media.

How to find the best time periods for posting?

Trial and error.

Do you remember those words about starting your social media optimization long before the specific campaign you are about to run? This time can be devoted to experiments and gathering statistics. This will help you to determine your audience’s “chill out time”: the time when they are best able to soak in your material. You will learn what times during the day are the “busiest” and the “freest”: when readers enjoy your posts to the fullest and when they just miss them. Besides, at the same time, you can track other types of vital statistics: age and location of the readers.

The frequency of posting: specialists have come to the conclusion that it is better to post more than once a day. However, do not create a huge wave of posts; otherwise you will annoy your readers. 3-4 posts per day are enough to stay visible.

Shares also count and should also be optimized. If you repost something, express your opinion. People follow you for your thoughts and ideas, so even when you repost and share others’ material, your added comment should reflect you.

Twitter, of course, is in a league of its own. On this platform, less is more, and people can express their opinion even in three words. However, it’s okay to be more talkative on Twitter if it’s about your industry.

IN CONCLUSION, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others have become increasingly significant avenues for your content promotion. Experience and hard work matter. If you start a campaign on your own, you will quickly pick up the essentials, improve your skills and work on your social media professionally.

The WebCEO Keyword Research Tool will help you choose the right keywords for your posts and stories so that you will be seen by the right audience!

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization, Part 2 appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Part I: Let’s Conduct Some Research

Social media has taken control of our lives. A large number of Internet users nowadays can’t imagine living without chilling out on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Statistics says that:

• Over 62% of the worldwide population use social media;
• The average time for chilling out on social media is about 2:22 hours per day;
• 71% of customers are satisfied with purchasing goods via social media and would recommend a company or a brand to their closest people.

These are the aspects that make social media platforms an extremely profitable field for promoting products, brands, or services.

Using Social media for business these days is indispensable. Even if you already run a successful website on the Internet, you should still raise awareness about your existence on social media platforms. Your activity there greatly affects your site rankings and can often deliver 25% of your overall traffic.

The problem is how to do this properly. How do you optimize your social media and get more revenue?

Social media isn’t about a single funny post on your profile which, you may suppose, will instantly attract an enormous and interested audience for your content. Let’s be honest: it happens, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. Social media business posts will need to be in the hundreds, if not thousands, and the process consists of: work, strategy, and proper organization.

Social media users have become more capricious and used to various types of content presentation. You will have to devote a lot of effort and spend a lot of time to bring something new and amusing to the public, keep your current and future audiences on your side, and leave your competitors far behind.

And we can’t discuss post optimization without mentioning social media optimization in general. Your posts will shine bright only if you prepare a field for them, a place for growing and living. Don’t wait for fruit to sprout without any effort.

There are several steps you will have to take to make your social media accounts relevant, profitable, and popular.

LET’S CONDUCT SOME RESEARCH!

Step #1: What Is Important to Know About Working on Social Media

[ Prepare your team for hard work ]

91% of small businesses use social media to promote their business.

Social media platforms need the kind of attention you will pay to your own website. Experienced social media marketers can name hundreds of reasons why people should use social media for promoting their goods. We are going to save you time and present only the most essential reasons:

1. Nothing will give your brand a more powerful advertisement and a greater boost than social media.

Your brand’s popularity may rise dramatically in a matter of seconds with a proper marketing campaign. It’s a fact that social networks help attract new consumers, increase authority, and bring trust to your goods, brand and company.

2. You will get the opportunity to widen the circle of your customers.

Social media is undergoing constant development. Developers try to make these platforms the most convenient places not only for leisure, but also for business. By drawing people in day and night, many of your targeted followers will be around at any time to see something you post. Your products will be shown directly to this targeted segment of purchasers.

3. Your brand/company will become recognizable due to constant online visibility.

Social media platforms are awesome venues on which to conduct marketing campaigns, because they leave a record. Posts, shares, reposts – everything stays visible on profiles until a user deletes something. It allows people to take a close look at what your company was in the past and is now. Help potential customers learn about you and get a lot of benefit.

4. Managing social media, you will open a communication channel with your audience.

A modern and mobile-friendly website does not always equal a comfortable place for users to be active in the comments section. On the other hand, social media is designed perfectly for this, and that is why people do not hesitate to readily leave their feedback, like your posts and share them. The greatest thing is that you will be alarmed instantly if there are any actions to take and you can reply to them at any moment, even start a conversation in private messages. Followers appreciate it when their opinion is noticed and considered important.

After analyzing the benefits of social media marketing and how crucial it is, IT’S TIME TO GET TO WORK. Maintaining social media accounts is no easy task!

1. Be ready to work hard and spend a lot of time on brainstorming. Your team should always be aware of the latest trends, people’s interests, and know how to present content on any given platform.

2. Before starting the process of optimization, set specific goals to be achieved. This brings extra motivation and lights the path for you to follow and complete the task.

3. Develop a successful social media strategy. At this stage you should analyze and use your competitors!

Identify your rivals with WebCEO’s Rank Tracking Tool. Click on the Dangerous Competitors tab and enjoy the detailed report. Learn who you are going to compete with, who the most alarming ones are, and eventually get the better of them with the next step.

4. Track your competitors’ social media accounts. Here your real journey starts. Study the history of their posts from top to bottom, the level of engagement and what were and are the reasons of their success. An important task in this phase is to go through their feedback and – especially – complaints. Take this into account while developing your own strategy to avoid any mistakes and stand out decently.

5. BEFORE starting your social media campaign, work on your website optimization. Needless to say that SMO (Social Media Optimization) is a great way to promote your business, however, the SMO and SEO cooperation will bring you more value. Through social media, people get acquainted with your products and even purchase them, but your website is the place where they really start trusting you.

Your site architecture, appearance, content, and other components of on and off page SEO matter a lot because first impressions matter. Make your website as attractive as your social media accounts.

Social Media matters. So does SEO. Take care of your site's SEO with WebCEO. Sign Up Free

Step #2: Where to Run Your Social Media Marketing Campaign

[ Identify your target audience and decide on a few social media platforms ]

Before making any attempt to promote a website on social media, you will have to identify your target audience. A target audience comprises the type of people you produce your product for. They are of a specific age, nationality, location, interest, and lifestyle. Your goal is to identify all those points and use them in your campaign.

“My product is for everybody” – if only. Genuinely all-purpose and everyday goods and services are rare. Coca-Cola used to imply it was the case for them, but there are identifiable demographics who drink soda a lot more or a lot less than others. Your product is made for a certain group of people, so your marketing campaign primarily should be based on the needs of this very group.

There are a lot of ways of identifying your target audience. We’ll outline some of them:

• Analyze your current audience. Gather data regarding you current followers and website subscribers. Knowing who is interested in your products at the moment, you can see right from the beginning who are among those you are going to work for in the future. Their interests and hobbies will help you decide on the direction and theme of your campaign. Google Analytics will help a lot with this:  

• Analyze your competitors’ current audiences. Your competitors promote goods that have similarities with yours, so you will have roughly the same circle of customers. Your task is to learn who is interested in their goods and yours besides the group of people you outlined from your current audience.
• Online Polls and Surveys are easy and fast ways to determine who would buy your goods. You can conduct them on your website, some other websites for a fee, and of course on social media platforms with appropriate hashtags.
• Analyze your own product. You should have determined your target audience at the stage of creating your product. Now think about people who may be interested in this besides those you originally considered. Learn who else may get any benefit from your product.
• Create a persona for your target audience: a general portrait of your target audience presented schematically as a person with a set of characteristics. It will be easier to work on your strategy when you have such a useful picture of potential clients. Here is an example:

After identifying your target audience, it’s high time to choose a platform that fits your campaign the most. However, our advice is to USE ALL AVAILABLE PLATFORMS. More likely than not, your customers spend their time on more than just one platform, and so should you.

Step #3: How to Optimize Your Social Media Profiles?

[ Make sure your social media account is ready to be popular ]

Most businesses maintain between 4 and 10 social profiles.

Social media profile creation is not a big deal: the two main components you have to work on are appearance (well-prepared posts) and optimized profiles. But you can’t start your marketing campaign until you have covered the following checklist:

1. Logo and cover image.

The first thing we do as soon as we enter any website is to look at its architecture and appearance. We look for colors and build a certain picture in our minds. Learning the content comes only after.

Optimize your social media profiles to make them easy on people’s eyes – bright and modern. And most importantly, use your own images! Never use stock photos in your profile nor any of your posts. Spend some time to take your own pictures or design your own cartoons, so people will recognize your style everywhere.

2. Business name.

People should know who owns the page, so place your company’s official name for people to know who they have met.

3. Bio or “About” information.

Present information about your company in a short, yet appealing way. List the essential information with your most important keywords and go to the next step.

4. Niche.

On some social media, you can mention the category (niche) your company performs in. If your company is not popular enough yet, don’t miss this part! Even world-renowned companies like Coca-Cola or Starbucks specify their sphere of activity, so why shouldn’t you? Of course, on some platforms, selecting a category is mandatory.

5. Links to a website and other social media platforms.

Always place a link to your website on your social media accounts! All your marketing goals in social media involve people visiting your website (although some businesses only need to have people call their phone number). After all, most of the information about your company and a full list of your products are on your website.

Some platforms allow you to insert links and even have special boxes for them. Use this chance for sure! Everything is for your followers’ convenience.

5. Make it easy to reach you.

Followers and potential customers will appreciate the option to ask a direct question or write some feedback privately. Make it possible and don’t worry about spammers, you can block them if need be.

Moreover, via non-public messages, you can receive a profitable offer from another company, or a good idea from an interested follower. LinkedIn messaging can produce more business for a company than email itself. Always check your social media inboxes.

6. Take your time to prepare.

If you are planning to start a social media marketing campaign in the future, begin the process of optimization at least a few months beforehand. Start making posts, uploading videos and images in order to gather relevant followers and test the waters of audience reaction to your product.

For instance, on Twitter you should have spent a few months following relevant people, unfollowing those who did not follow back and following more relevant people. Be sure to follow/invite those in your database if you have one.

Take a good look at the screenshots below to learn what social media profile optimization entails:

• Facebook:

• Twitter:

• Instagram:

• YouTube:

• LinkedIn:

• Pinterest:

Summary

If you want to join social media and start promoting your business, only wanting is not enough. First and foremost, social media optimization needs YOU: your time, your creativity, your contribution.

You should begin with research and planning. If you want to create a powerful and pleasing place for visitors, you will have to put yourself into data searching and processing. An accurate examination of your business possibilities on social media platforms and your competitors will clear the road to success.  

Proceed with identifying and analyzing your audience. The right people attracted to the right places in the best case scenario will bring you traffic, recognition and customers. When we are talking about Internet use, there are two places where we all party hard most of the time: on websites we like and on social media. Use these two. Become that very liked website lots of traffic after getting loved on social media. These are two components of your strategy.

And finally: optimize your profiles and then go right to the next step: writing a post on social media.

Start your research with the WebCEO Rank Tracking Tool by identifying and analyzing your competitors!

Find your most Dangerous Competitors Sign Up Free

TO BE CONTINUED…

The post A Step by Step Guide to Social Media Optimization. Part 1 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.

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.

Ecommerce is huge all over the world. Wanting to sell things online is a healthy ambition, with more than just a promise of making you richer. However, because ecommerce is so massive, your competition is going to be just as enormous. You will probably compete against titans like Amazon, and even smaller stores may provide a challenge.

It certainly helps to be an ace businessman – even better when you have an expert business consultant, but it won’t be enough. Your online store will never make it big if it can’t be found on the first page of Google. That’s why ecommerce and SEO go hand in hand – and that’s why we’ve made this giude about how to do SEO for ecommerce websites. Are you excited? Then let’s proceed!

1. Find keywords that sell

In the beginning was the keyword. Where do you start looking for keywords? Try the names of the products you are selling and their categories. There are two requirements your keywords should fulfil:

• Act like a magnet for potential customers;
• Give you a decent chance to outrank your competitors.

Obviously, not all keywords will be up for the task. Some will be too short and too vague to attract the kind of users you need (i.e. buyers). Smart SEOs rely on keywords that both sound specific and are searched in Google often enough to attract a large number of visitors. This awesome breed of keywords is called long-tail.

Where can you find long-tail keywords?

• The first place to look is WebCEO’s Keyword Suggestions tool. Simply type in your own ideas for keywords, and you will see their search volume – the higher, the better. The tool will also display a list of keywords similar to yours. You can even receive a list of searched-for keywords that have the same common root words. Choose the suggestions that suit your goals the best.
• Keyword-finding sites like Soovle and AnswerThePublic offer a wide variety of long-tail keywords, although they don’t measure search volume.
• Big competitor sites like Amazon and Shopify are the ecommerce giants, as they have the largest audiences and more searches on their sites than anyone else in the business. That’s why you can use their search bars to check the auto generated phrases based on what customers usually type in before buying. Here’s an example: let’s say you sell pillows on your site. Go to Amazon.com, type “pillow” in their search bar, and voila!

Once you’ve prepared a list of keywords, it’s time to optimize your site. In order to make your pages rank high, use keywords in these places:

• URLs
• Title tags
• Meta description tags
• H1-H4 header tags
• Image titles and ALT tags
• Product descriptions

Make sure your site’s pages have those places! If search engines can’t scan them for keywords, those pages will sink lower to the deepest bottom of search results. Audit your site with WebCEO’s On-Page Issues tool to avoid squandering your SEO potential.

Also, product descriptions need special care. Each of them has to be unique if you want them to appear in search results; if they aren’t unique, Google will filter them out. The descriptions should also include words and terms that are often used with the page’s subject (i.e. what you sell). And last but not least, write product descriptions in such a way that will convince the visitor to make a purchase after reading.

2. Interlink your store’s pages

To say that ecommerce sites tend to have a lot of pages is an understatement. For example, Amazon’s product selection is measured in hundreds of millions. That’s why online stores must be a breeze to navigate, or else customers will find a more user-friendly place. In order to make your site easy to browse and use, its pages need to be linked between each other in the most efficient way possible.

Most ecommerce sites are structured like this: main page -> product category -> subcategory -> product. As a rule of thumb, the “link distance” between any two given pages shouldn’t be more than three clicks, and this example of an ecommerce site layout follows this rule (even better when you don’t have subcategories). You can make your online store even easier to use if you follow these tips:

• Put a link to the main page on every other page. The best place for it is the store’s logo in the top part of the page. The logo’s ALT tag will be considered as the all-important link text to the home page.
• Create a navigation bar. Online stores benefit the most from navigation bars that collapse into menus, providing users with fast and easy access to product categories.
• Use breadcrumbs. They take little space and help users avoid getting lost on your site. Breadcrumbs for websites look like this:

• Don’t use pagination. Many online stores have pagination, and it’s often generated automatically by the platform used to create the store. However, it isn’t the most user-friendly option because it takes time to load new pages. Instead, make a “Load more items” button that will add more products on the page when pressed. This option is better than infinite scrolling, too.

There’s also the matter of products that permanently go out of stock. Don’t delete pages belonging to such products; they can still be of use. One option is to redirect these pages to their categories or similar products. Another is to replace their content with a message that will convince visitors to keep browsing. The same kind of content will prove useful for your 404 error page.

3. Enhance your site with schema markup

No ecommerce SEO strategy can do without structured data. Why does it matter so much? Structured data helps Google understand the content of web pages better. When a page is marked up with a schema, Google can display additional information about it in search results, which is immensely useful for potential customers. Marked-up pages receive many more clicks from users than ordinary ones, so I highly recommend you learn how to use structured data.

Review schema is especially important for an ecommerce site. It displays customer feedback right in search results, convincing users about the quality of your products.

4. Make your online store secure

How important is online security? You’ve probably heard about the scandal surrounding Facebook and its data leaks. Incidents like this are a disaster for all parties involved: users are put in danger when their sensitive information falls into the wrong hands, and the website’s stock and reputation may tank beyond recovery. Take online security seriously – especially when it comes to SEO for online stores.

Customers must feel safe when they use your website; make it as safe for them as possible. Here’s what you can do to make your site secure:

• Switch over to HTTPS. If you haven’t done this already and your site is still on HTTP, you should see to this as soon as you can. Security isn’t the only reason: when browsers display a page with the HTTP protocol, they mark it as “not secure” next to the URL address bar. Users see that and prefer to leave the page rather than risk their information being stolen.
• Use a content delivery network. Many CDNs have safeguard measures against dangers like cyber-attacks and server failure. Many, but not all! Be sure to choose the most secure CDN you can afford.
• Keep your plugins up to date. If you use plugins on your site, you should update them as soon as their new versions are released. This is because older versions of plugins tend to have vulnerabilities that hackers may exploit to gain access to your site. Of course, that doesn’t mean the newest versions are completely free of holes. But they are still safer because their weaknesses might not be known to hackers yet.

5. Index your ecommerce site’s pages

One of the most embarrassing mistakes you can do is forget to check if your site’s pages are indexed by Google. If they aren’t in the index, they will not appear in search results, period. Naturally, this means customers can’t find you online, and all the work you’ve done on your site will go to waste. Make sure this never happens to you by generating a sitemap of your store and submitting it to Google.

The fastest way to create a sitemap is with WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator tool. If you haven’t made one yet, follow these steps. If you’ve made a sitemap but haven’t submitted it yet, skip to step 6.

1. Click on Settings.
2. Choose Create the sitemap file from scratch.
3. Press Start. The tool will now begin scanning your site.
4. Download the sitemap file when the tool stops scanning.
5. Upload the sitemap file on your site.
6. Return to WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator and click on Settings
7. Choose Submit to search engines the already existing sitemap file.
8. Type in your sitemap’s URL address.
9. Press Start.

Done! Now search engines know about the pages on your site and will show them in search results.

Here’s a very important part: a single sitemap can list up to 50,000 pages. It isn’t rare for ecommerce sites to go above this limit. If your site has more than 50,000 pages, you’ll need to create multiple sitemaps to index everything. Fortunately, WebCEO’s Sitemap Generator automatically creates multiple sitemaps when necessary. Be careful not to miss any when you are submitting them.

6. Make your store mobile-friendly

Mobile Internet has the majority of search queries, and now it’s been reinforced with Google’s mobile-first index. How does this affect SEO for ecommerce sites? Simple: if your online store isn’t mobile-friendly and works fine only on desktop PCs, you’ll miss out on a massive crowd of customers. What can you do to keep them on your site?

• Use a responsive design. A website designed in this way will automatically shuffle and size its page elements around to fit any screen.
• Use large, easy-to-read fonts. Zooming in and out on a mobile screen is easy, but it wastes time the users would rather spend viewing the content.
• Use negative space. The smaller the screen, the worse cluttered pages look on it. Shorter paragraphs are easier to read, and some room between elements will prevent users from accidentally pressing a wrong button or checkbox.
• Avoid using intrusive interstitials. That includes advertisements, banners and popups that cover too much on the screen, making the site unusable. If you need to have interstitials, they should be small and easy to close. Some types of intrusive interstitials are A-Okay: content warning, age verification and “use of cookies”.
• Make sure your redirects work. If your site’s mobile version is on a separate URL, be careful while setting up redirects between them. A desktop web page should always lead to its mobile counterpart, and vice versa.
• Make your website load fast. Users like it when you don’t keep them waiting. Improve your website speed, and they’ll be more eager to look around on your site and become your customers. Page load time affects a site’s rankings, as well.

Run a test on your site in WebCEO’s Speed Optimization tool (in the Mobile tab) and see how well it’s doing.

7. Start a blog on your site

SEO aside, a good ecommerce site must be able to close a sale quickly. If a page takes its time to convince a visitor to buy, it’s not going to work; visitors would rather just get what they came for and move on. That’s why it’s better to leave long-winded descriptions of your products to pages that aren’t directly involved in sales. That’s right: this part of online shop SEO is better suited for a blog.

A blog post with interesting and valuable information can be a prolific source of extra traffic, especially when written by a marketer who knows how to sell her product. Social media may amplify the effect even further, so enable the option to share your posts.

8. Build links to your online shop

Link building does more than just move your website up in rankings. Backlinks bring you users from other sites. They also help you grow your store’s authority and reputation. That’s only if they are quality backlinks, of course. So what can you do to earn them?

• The obvious way: Create valuable content on your website. Google’s goal is to make the best pieces of content easy to find, so only this kind of content gets the most backlinks. Prioritize value for users when you work on your site’s pages, and you are off to a good start. An example of valuable content on an ecommerce site is a discount offer or a tutorial.
• The most powerful way: Share your content on social media. Although links made on social platforms don’t usually pass authority, they get tons of views there – and that means they are so much more likely to become dofollow backlinks on other sites. Social media captures 30% of the time users spend online. Let that number sink in and start using it to your advantage.
• The easiest way: See who links to your competitors and look for opportunities there. You can bring up a full list of your competitors’ backlinks with WebCEO’s Competitor Backlink Spy tool.
• The expert way: Help reporters write articles. Ecommerce, business and online shopping are popular topics, and you can get your site mentioned in some of them. Sign up on Connectively and similar websites as a source to find reporters in need.
• The friendly way: Find unlinked mentions of your store. Use WebCEO’s Web Buzz Monitoring tool to find out who says your good name. If you find a mention with nothing but bare text, contact the person who wrote about you and ask them to include a link.
• The real-world way: Set up listings on business directories. This helps when your store is not just a website on the Internet, but also an actual place where customers set their feet. In this case, you’ll want your store to be easily found online, and that’s where the business directories come in. Create listings on Google My Business and other directories that are relevant to your line of work. Going local can capture an extremely large market of online buyers even if they don’t care where products will be shipped from.

And don’t forget that not all backlinks are good for you. Scan your backlinks with WebCEO’s Toxic Pages tool to keep your website safe from any bad apples.

9. Audit your site for errors

If there’s a niche where you cannot afford to let your users down, that’s ecommerce. Site errors may paralyze your business or even hurt your customers’ wallets. That’s a lot of responsibility on a single website! Fix technical issues of any sort as soon as you notice them.

Find errors on your site with WebCEO’s Site Audit tool. It can help you detect problems ranging from a broken image to server malfunction. Stay vigilant and scan regularly – or use the WebCEO Alerts tool to get emails whenever something on your site breaks.

10. Monitor your rankings and traffic

Since you’ve already done so much SEO for your online store, there’s no point in stopping halfway. Aren’t you curious to know how well you’ve performed? You may have improved your rankings, but they are a fickle thing. Every SEO worth their salt knows that rankings should be checked regularly.

That’s why you have SEO tools. There’s no better way to keep track of the changes in rankings. Boot up WebCEO’s Site Rankings tool, punch the keywords into the Settings and enjoy the view.

Why watch your rankings at all? For one, to feel proud of yourself. If you are driven by more than just optimism, then you might also expect the rankings to fall at some point. It might indeed happen, many times. A drop in rankings is a certain signal to double down on SEO; in a worst-case scenario, it could be because Google gave you a penalty. So spend a few minutes at least once per week to scan your site.

The exact same things can be said about user traffic. Keep an eye on its fluctuations with WebCEO’s Web Analytics toolset.

BONUS Tip. Convert your organic traffic like a pro

Quick refresher: conversion means the users visiting your page AND performing the action you want, like buying. Conversion rates are measured in percentage. For example: number of buyers divided by number of visitors times 100%.

As you can imagine, online stores live or die by their conversion rates. Naturally, you want yours to be at their highest, and that’s a good reason to invest your effort into conversion rate optimization (CRO for short).

Conversion rate optimization benefits any site where users perform money-making actions. In case with ecommerce websites, you want to focus on these points:

• Making your pages more user-friendly. Less headache for users means they’ll be more likely to place an order. Make sure your site displays everything a user would need in the first scroll, especially on mobile devices. By the way, is your ecommerce site mobile-friendly?
• Well-placed, eye catching calls-to-action. Strong colors are encouraged, but don’t overdo it. And if you have special offers? Even better.
• Well-placed user testimonials. Words of praise from other customers will make newcomers feel safer. Their experience is the fruit of your labor – share it.
• Simple forms with few form fields. Less is more, at least at first. If you need a ton of information from your customer to prepare their order (which is often the case), don’t hit them with a dozen fields to fill out at once.
• Use online chat software on your site. If you feel lost, here’s the Top 10 Best Live Chat Software Solutions Compared.

Google Analytics remains the best (and completely free) tool for tracking your campaigns’ conversions. It’s even integrated in WebCEO – and we absolutely recommend connecting your Google Analytics account to your WebCEO project. You will receive the same data faster and in a much more user-friendly interface, plus quick access to other SEO reports for your ecommerce site.

Now you’ve ensured high search engine rankings and targeted visitor traffic to your site. Congratulations, you’ve nailed SEO for ecommerce websites!

Engage visitors on your site and convert this traffic well. Otherwise people will come and go, and Google will think that your site is not relevant enough to the queries that have brought people to your site organically.

Begin Your eCommerce SEO Sign up Free

The post SEO for Ecommerce Websites: 10-Step Guide for Your Online Store appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Content is the common thread tying together SEO and digital marketing. Want your website to be at the top of search results? Make great content. Want to sell something? Make great content. Since that’s where the two goals intersect, it’s clear that superior content is the gateway to greater rewards in each.

And video might just be the winning ticket you were looking for.

Want proof? The most prominent example is YouTube. Video content helped it become a giant on par with Google itself, enough to make YouTube SEO its own thing – to say nothing of all the ad revenue generated there. Video can be packed with more information than any other medium, which makes it such a potent tool in communication. And that’s what SEO, digital business and video marketing are all about: reaching and communicating with your audience.

Need more reasons to start using videos? Don’t worry, we’ve got plenty.

Video Marketing Statistics in 2022

“The 2020s will be the decade of video.” How I wish I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that over the previous decade. I’d have enough to make Elon Musk cry!

Two and some years into the new 20s, how is this prediction holding up? Spoiler alert: very accurate so far. Countless businesses have bet on video content and they did not regret it – quite the opposite, in fact. Numbers can do a great job describing the impact video has had on digital businesses – and, as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.

Here is an infographic: the fruit of Renderforest‘s research on video content and how it has been used by businesses in the 2020s. Below the infographic itself, we are going to highlight the most impressive points.

1. Benefits of video content

Videos are widely used (and that’s an understatement). There are plenty of businesses and marketers to vouch for the benefits. What does the majority say?

Using videos in your marketing campaign increases:

• Return on investment
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Site traffic

Every single thing that matters, as you can see.

85% of businesses use videos in marketing and consider them a vital part of their strategy. What’s more, videos have proven to be especially effective during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to 91% of marketers.

2. Video consumption

They didn’t lie when they said the 2020s would be the era of videos. Halfway and some into 2022, global video traffic is climbing past the 82% mark – as expected. And thanks to such a high percentage, we can see how users prefer their videos:

• 33% of viewers will stop watching a video after 30 seconds. That’s how little time you have to hook them in!
• 25% of viewers finish videos that are over 20 minutes long. Not great, not terrible.
• 75% of viewers prefer horizontal videos to vertical ones.

3. Types of videos

There are many kinds of videos out there. What do businesses prefer? How effective are those preferred kinds at their job?

• Explainer videos: these are used by 62% of businesses, as well as by 82% of B2B businesses. This type of video has an enormous audience: 94% of people who want to know more about the product will watch an explainer video. Also, 93% of millennial viewers love how-to videos.
• Logo animations: they are present in 46% of videos made by businesses, and in 58% of B2B business videos.
• Video ads: they are less common than you’d think. Only 38% of businesses use them!
• Demo videos: these are even less common, employed by 33% of businesses.
• The 3 most popular types of videos are webinars, demos and social videos.
• And the most effective types (as reported by businesses) are informative and entertaining.

4. Videos and platforms

Now, everybody knows YouTube is king when it comes to videos. But what about other places?

It turns out businesses use videos quite effectively on their own sites. Putting a video on a landing page can increase your conversions by up to 80%!

What’s more, having a video on your landing page increases its chances of appearing on Google’s first SERP by 53%. Naturally, that includes homepages.

And here’s my favorite part: videos are effective even in emails!

44% of people are willing to watch a video included in an email. In fact, a video can increase an email’s CTR by up to a whopping 300%.

However, only 25% of businesses use videos in email marketing as of now (partly due to people being cautious about spam in emails, but that’s where verification tools like SPF record checkers come in). Sounds like a powerful, untapped niche you could use!

5. Videos on social media

We’ve seen how effective landing pages and emails can be. But when you want to post a video somewhere, what comes to mind? YouTube first, social media second, right?

Let’s look at the numbers.

• 81% of social media users say videos are their favorite type of content.
• 75% of people are more likely to follow a brand’s page if it has video content.
• For 74% of businesses, their videos receive the most engagement in social media.
• Twitter in particular is going through a video Renaissance of sorts: its video views are 220 times greater in 2022 than last year.
• Lastly, 56% of businesses post at least 5 videos per month on their social media.

Afterword

I think it won’t be long before augmented reality becomes the next booming trend. But for now, video content is king, and these statistics should be enough to convince you. It can be tough to make a good video, but this type of content has the highest ROI – that’s a proven fact.

When you are making a video, have fun! The audience respects professionals who love their work. Enjoy what you do, and the viewers will happily join in for the ride.

Additionally, you can use WebCEO’s SEO content assistant to ensure your video content reaches its maximum potential audience.

The post Video Marketing: The Future of SEO (Infographic) appeared first on SEO tools & Online Marketing Tips Blog | WebCEO.

Can you remember the precise year when SEO started? It was somewhere between 1995 and 2000, near when search engines appeared. 

The TechWyse Internet Marketing agency established their company in 2001. They were standing at the gates of high-quality white-hat SEO because keyword stuffing, link exchange, spamdexing and other black-hat SEO techniques were quite common then. So, TechWyse had a lot of issues to deal with!

We decided to ask DJ Kennedy, CEO of TechWyse, about his experience growing from a small team to one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia Campbell: First of all, I am happy to know that WebCEO helps your business. How long have you been working as an SEO agency?

DJ Kennedy: We established the company in 2001. Since then, we have evolved to be one of the largest Internet marketing agencies in Canada!

Sophia: Wow! Almost 18 years in the market. What is your global mission?

DJ: Our mission is to maintain our legacy as an industry leader and deliver exceptional digital marketing solutions that exceed client expectations. We do this by hiring and developing the most inspired, passionate marketing individuals as part of a creative and collaborative environment.

Sophia: Do you remember your first steps. Did you start with a few tools for different purposes or with an all-in-one SEO platform? 

DJ: We tried a lot of different approaches; now it’s hard to say if it was really worth that. We spent a lot of time on switching between numerous Google Analytics accounts (can you imagine how much time it takes when you have 50 clients’ accounts and more?) and reporting to our clients. Now these tasks are automated so we are focused on creative work, communication with clients, and enlarging our community. 

Sophia: What SEO tools are a must for you? 

DJ: We have a few that we use regularly.  Right now we really like Ahrefs and SpyFu for getting in depth knowledge of a domains back link attribution and also keyword research.

We also love WebCEO and have been using it for many years to gain greater intelligence on our client base.

Sophia: Which SEO tasks eat up most of your team’s time? 

DJ: SEO reporting can be a very tedious task. For every client, you are supposed to run a specific set of reports. For example, a keyword research report, a technical audit and an SEO analysis for a new client.  Also, a report on rankings, a backlink analysis, technical and SEO audits, web analytics and social engagement. 

So you begin with scanning and generating numerous reports. Then you check every report for blank spaces with no data. When all the reports for every client are scanned and checked, you can prepare a consolidated report for each client. And the final touch: select the language of the report. This is important for us because some of our clients speak English and some speak French.

Sophia: So you must enjoy WebCEO’s interface which is translated into 24 languages.

DJ: Yes, this feature is truly important! But the report generation still has many steps. When all reports are put together and designed for each client, you have to send them according to individual schedules. 

Some of our clients receive reports once a month. Other clients may need reporting every week. Some may require specific SEO services in their location like St. John’s, NL. Some might say that once a quarter is enough. So having flexibility is important. 

Sophia: Having such a lot of work, did you ever miss deadlines?

DJ: If you miss deadlines in this business then you are telling your client that you are not prepared.  This is not acceptable. This is why choosing dependable software to help with the repetitive tasks is so important. 

Sophia: What advice can you give to SEO Agencies to avoid the pain of missed deadlines?

DJ: Preparation and organization! This is not as hard as it seems. Split every process into tiny tasks. Assign tasks to every team member. Set deadlines. Track their performance regularly and fine-tune the process on the fly, instead of checking it all on the last day. A task manager is a must for an SEO team! If a task manager can be integrated into an SEO platform, it’s even better. We enjoy WebCEO’s Task Manager feature – so we never have to search for third-party solutions.

Sophia: What was the most remarkable challenge that your SEO Agency faced?

DJ: This question would need another full interview!  This happened a year ago. One of our clients suddenly lost his rankings for a number of keywords and his website’s traffic dropped. This happened because of a link bomb. We detected a lot of inbound poor-quality links pointing to the domain. WebCEO’s Backlink Checker tool made this easy to detect and, what is more important, neutralize this kind of black-hat SEO attack. 

I can tell you for sure that this was the first time when using the Google Disavow saved our skin! It took some waiting afterwards but, eventually, the client’s website got its rankings & traffic back. Now his backlink profile is clean and powerful. 

Sophia: Are there some SEO hacks for gaining high rankings and driving traffic to a website that you can share?

DJ: We do our best in optimizing client sites structure for better rankings, prioritizing the most important pages and bringing more link flow to them with the help of thoughtful on-site interlinking. WebCEO’s Internal Link Optimization is a must for this task.  Using Schema is good form as well!

Sophia: What WebCEO tool really helped your agency grow?

DJ: That’s definitely the Lead Generation button! The button looks simple and prospective customers visiting our website enjoy receiving their free SEO reports. After that, they understand that, with our help, their SEO routine will become much easier. Just in this way, the number of our customers increased 300% in 2015, the year of the Lead Generation button’s introduction, thanks to WebCEO. The lead generation button helped our agency grow financially too. 

Sophia: What tool is a must-have for any SEO specialist?

DJ: Say no more – it’s definitely rank tracker. This is the best way to see the progress of a website. The Rank Tracker report is one of the most important for the client as he can see in what way visitors reach his or her website. When it comes to WebCEO’s Rank Tracking tool, both we and our clients are happy to know how many times their website was featured in snippets, shown in vertical results (Google Places, Images, Videos, Shopping, News) as well as in organic and paid search results. 

Sophia: With so many clients, how do you keep an eye on their profiles?

DJ: As I said before, our SEO team members have assigned tasks and these form their workflow. However, sometimes there are urgent tasks – we receive alerts from the Technical Audit tool, alerts on ranking fluctuations, and we act immediately. Critical SEO errors can result in decreased rankings. We receive consolidated reports regularly, but these alerts are really good when something urgent happens. You only have to check your mailbox regularly.

Sophia: Thank you very much for such a comprehensive interview! We will do our best to make our customers happier still.

DJ: Thank you for such a great service. WebCEO is a nice fit for us. Without the reports rendered by WebCEO, getting to the root of problems would have taken much longer.  We have been delighted to watch the growth of this tool moving at the same pace as the growth of our own agency!

The post SEO Team Grew to One of the Top Digital Marketing Agencies in Canada 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.