Five common mistakes small businesses make with their online presence

Please note, this is content written in association with Single Platform.

All small businesses need to know how to create a consistent online presence. 54% of small businesses currently have a website, but this isn’t nearly enough if you want to create an effective web presence in order to approach potential customers.

Often small business owners can feel overwhelmed when trying to explore the most suitable online opportunities. So to help out, here are some of the most common mistakes they can avoid in 2017.

1) Ignoring local SEO

97% of Internet users search for local businesses online, which means that a business cannot afford to ignore local SEO and its potential benefits.

Local SEO helps you attract customers who perform searches for a particular location, such as “sushi in NYC”. By optimising your site for local queries, you are helping customers discover your business and your services. Therefore reaching a new audience that’s interested in the most appropriate search results for the particular area.

The best ways to boost your local SEO are:

• Verify your Google My Business listing: Google My Business connects your business with customers. Once you verify your page you can update your NAP (name, address, phone), add the right categories for your business and a relevant description. This helps customers find more information about your business, increasing the chances of attracting more visits.
• Embed a Google Map in your website: A Google Map that links to the Google Plus local listing allows your business to offer all the required information to its customers.
• Optimize meta tags and page content for local keywords: It can be beneficial for a business to add the city and the state in the title tag and the meta description to increase the clicks derived from local search results.
• Use consistent contact information across your online profiles: It is important for every business to maintain a consistency on its contact information on every online source, from its site, to its social networks, or Google My Business and Yelp.

2) Not having an accessible site for the modern connected user

As modern connected users become more demanding, businesses should ensure that they pay special attention to mobile optimisation, site speed, and overall usability.

According to a survey from Google, 72% of mobile users consider it important for a website to be mobile-friendly. In fact, a mobile-friendly website increases the chances of conversion and similar results occur when focusing on optimal site speed.

Even a 1 second delay in a website’s loading time can lead to a lost conversion of 7%, while 40% of users will abandon a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. This makes it imperative for a business to measure the performance of its website to examine the best ways to reduce its loading time.

Google has also recently introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in an attempt to increase the number of fast mobile web pages and help users enjoy their mobile experience without the frustration of slow loading pages.

Wired saw a 25% increase in click through rates from search results after implementing AMP, while Gizmodo noticed that 80% of its traffic from AMP pages was new.

As modern users become impatient in a fast-paced world, an accessible website should be a priority for a small business, improving the customer experience and beating the competition on important issues that are frequently ignored, although they still affect conversion.

3) Not taking advantage of customer reviews

Online reviews have become an important part of consumers’ purchasing decisions, with 88% of them trusting reviews as much as personal recommendations. The more reviews a business has, the higher the chances of earning trust among new customers.

Small businesses should encourage reviews as they serve as the best social proof when they are highlighted in a website. It’s important to find the best time to ask for them, while it may also be useful to incentivise consumers for each review with the right rewards.

Even the negative reviews can be helpful and every business should embrace them, building a trusting relationship with the prospective customers, while working towards improving its performance.

As online reviews still count as fresh content for a website, they can also contribute to an improved SEO, with review signals accounting for 9.8% of the total ranking factors that define a page’s position on search results.

4) Not joining up their data between online, offline and mobile

There is a growing challenge for small businesses expanding their online presence to come up with the best way to measure the effectiveness of their efforts.

It’s not just about examining the ROI for online marketing, now it’s more important to explore the best method to combine the data between online, offline and mobile marketing. This allows businesses to get a better understanding of how they should allocate their budget, finding what works and what can be improved.

The inability to combine these data sets leads to incomplete conclusions, which may turn into missed opportunities for increasing sales.

5) Not communicating with their customers

It’s vitally important for a business to understand its audience, as this will guide it towards future commercial goals.

A business with a good online presence pays attention to its customers and listens to their needs to become genuinely helpful. There’s more chance of increasing sales when businesses seek authentic relationships with existing and prospect clients.

The goal of building an online presence is to get closer to where the customers are and build meaningful, tangible engagement. Two-way communication between the business and the customer, all the way from initial user experience to any method of contact, should be measured and analyzed to prove the value and effectiveness of all touchpoints.

This will help businesses optimize every key point of engagement, helping to improve and iterate, to get maximum value from each.

These mistakes may be common, but they can all be fixed with a series of small steps in the right direction. And if a small businesses is feeling too daunted by these steps, there are companies devoted in helping them strengthen their SEO, such as Single Platform, a leading specialist in making it easy for local businesses to stand out online.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/01/23/five-common-mistakes-small-businesses-make-with-their-online-presence/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/156265210944

How to Become a Marketer Who Thinks Strategically

One of the greatest challenges a new marketer will face is getting into, and staying in the right mindsight.

By its very nature, marketing is highly tactical. There are countless ways to engage your audience.

Unfortunately, most of the tactics tend to be done in a vacuum without any thought to strategy.

They’re reactionary, which can bring diminished results and less-than-desirable returns.

In the B2B space, only about a third of marketers actually have a documented strategy to drive their business forward.

That’s why more than half are struggling to create marketing campaigns that actually engage an audience and produce a substantial return. Those diminished returns tend to drive marketers back to traditional channels like banner ads.

But even display advertising without a strategy isn’t necessarily going to perform the way you want it to.

To get the best results, you need to take a proactive and strategic approach to your marketing. Here’s how you can start thinking like a strategic marketer.

See Beyond Urgency

If you’re constantly in reactive mode, chasing fires and responding to things as they come up then your resources will remain tapped. You’ll never have the opportunity to plan ahead or develop campaigns based on research.

I hear about this all the time with brands who suddenly realize that a holiday or promotional opportunity “snuck up on them.” They scramble at the last minute to put together email campaigns, promotions, social initiatives, display ads, and even direct mail campaigns.

The first step toward strategic thinking is to get your mind out of urgency/emergency mode.

Without proper planning, you wind up with last minute marketing efforts – like this mattress company that tossed together an offensive commercial to promote their product on 9/11.

Marketing must be considered a strategic imperative if you want to actually see results. Reactive tactics are not a strategy and are much riskier when the time isn’t taken to research and measure potential outcomes.

Strategic marketing looks months ahead of the current situation, planning well in advance so you have time to research, plan, create assets, review and deploy effectively.

Take the Time to Calculate Risks

Throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks is not strategic thinking. That’s just hoping you’ll get lucky with results, and it’s incredibly wasteful especially if you have limited resources.

Strategic marketers look forward and can often see the repercussions of their plans more clearly than tactical marketers. They also don’t charge blindly forward because an idea sounds good. They take the time to carefully consider the downside of every action.

“What happens if this or that happens after we execute. Can we live with outcomes X, Y or Z?”

Weighing the risks of campaigns and potential outcomes provides insight into next steps. This makes it that much easier to pivot to another brand in the strategy rather than scrambling to find a solution when the single tactic doesn’t perform as expected.

Be Capable of Execution

I’ve met my fair share of strategic marketers that have impressed me with creative prowess. Among them have been some of the most creative minds, yet struggled tremendously with executing the ideas they developed.

Strategic marketers don’t overthink or worry incessantly about outcomes. They’re not afraid to pull the trigger once their strategy is constructed. They recognize that no strategy is 100% sound, and change is likely.

You need to have the confidence to pull the trigger and know that no strategy is perfect. Becoming a strategic marketer means never procrastinating.

Get your strategy developed and don’t be afraid to execute it.

Just remember that once a strategy is executed, the cycle begins again. There’s no finish line.

Be Willing to Detach From Your Ideas

The most effective strategic marketers I’ve met have always been able to see  beyond their own brilliance. They cut through the fat and are willing to discard their own ideas when better ideas come from outside, and they’re willing to consider the ideas of others – no matter how crazy those ideas might seem.

Don’t get caught up in your preconceived ideas and plans. A smart marketer knows to leverage the skill and brilliance of others through group ideation and brainstorming to fuel more robust marketing strategies.

Rob Carpenter from Hitshop shared with Moz how his team takes content brainstorming and ideation to the next level:

When we think we have a good idea, we use Publicate to flesh out an idea by compiling all of the content out there for that specific topic (especially those that rank for the key term we are aiming for). In Publicate we can add notes to each piece of content we curated on what elements of the post we could expand on, and what we can say differently. We also mark which posts we want to link to and quotes to include in our piece. This step is extremely important for helping us create not just ‘good, unique content,’ but content that is 10x better than what is currently available.

Make Decisions Based on the Data

In my opinion, data is the heart of business. It should be at the center of decision making for any kind of business or marketing strategy. It provides insights to answer key questions, while raising other questions you may not have considered.

Later, that data will help change the direction of your strategy. Initially though, that data is necessary to create the strategy.

Strategic marketers rely on a lot of data to build their long-term strategies. This could include:

• How long audiences engages with certain topics
• Which products are abandoned most often
• What are top products during different seasons
• How long does it take the average prospect to convert
• What type of content or advertising do prospects respond to best
• How can audiences be segmented for the best engagement with email marketing
• How does the consumer respond to direct mail campaigns post purchase compared to the same campaign used on prospects that have not yet purchased

Find the data to answer your most important questions, then identify the data you have and use that to start building your strategy. Leverage it to define your goals and the tactics you’ll use to reach them. A strategic marketer can use the data and information they compile through research to work out the costs of campaigns and define whether the efforts are justified.

Your data is a key part of risk assessment – something every marketing and PR campaign needs. It’s a loop that constantly feeds back to the beginning, using the data to establish then continue to drive the strategy forward

Know the Target and Create Goals

Anyone can set a marketing goal, but the most strategic marketers set goals that are realistic, achievable and are based on business goals.

Like these organizational goals for B2B content marketing compiled by CMI and Marketing Profs based on survey respondent data.

Setting goals might sound simple, but it’s something of a mix of art and science. Like anything, it takes practice. That comes from constantly refining existing goals, refocusing, pivoting and a willingness to try some weird stuff.

How do you set goals for something as fluid and changing as a marketing strategy? Practice. And find someone who has been doing it for a while and apply what they’ve learned.

Shanelle Mullin, Content & Growth at ConversionXL, shared some smart advice with Kissmetrics on creating goals for your marketing strategy.

The key to setting achievable marketing goals is to spend time evaluating your current position. Many startups set lofty, unattainable goals and end up discouraged, which can be detrimental in the early days. On the other hand, some startups set easy, insignificant goals and end up missing out on growth potential.

Take the time to really understand your growth levels to date. If you run a popular blog and traffic has increased by 8-10% for the last four months, you know that a 12-15% month-over-month increase in blog traffic is a challenging yet attainable goal. Don’t be the startup that shoots for 20% or the startup that considers anything above 8% a win.

In terms of what types of goals you should be setting, it depends heavily on what stage your startup is in. Early on, focus on engagement goals and collecting feedback to validate your product or service. Later on, focus on growth metrics. There are no universals when it comes to metrics, unfortunately. What’s important is that your core goals are tied to major business objectives.

The single most important thing to remember about marketing goals is to stay focused. Choose 1-2 core goals that impact the bottom line and 3-5 supporting goals. Anything more than that will distract you from what’s most important (as will changing goals too often).

When you identify those primary and secondary goals, you can break them down into milestones that will help define the roadmap of your marketing strategy. That map plays a major part in defining the tactics you’ll use along the way.

Follow the Course; Don’t Chase the Glitter

Ideation and brainstorming are a critical part of creating a marketing strategy, but that doesn’t mean that every idea is going to pan out.

Likewise, your research is likely to reveal what competitors and other businesses are doing to market themselves.

With all the options and potential ideas, it’s pretty easy to get lost in transit without a mapped plan.

I liken it to steering a ship; if you spin the wheel every time an a glimmer on the horizon catches your eye, you’re going to zigzag across the ocean and never really get anywhere.

Even with a documented marketing strategy, it’s easy to get off course trying to do the next big thing everyone things is a trend for the year. Experimenting is OK, but not at the expense of your plans.

The most successful marketers know to stick to their strategy, and work those experiments into that strategy.

Establish Your Measurements for Progress and Success

Effective marketing goes well beyond ideation and deployment. Success isn’t automated, and as I mentioned there’s no such thing as a perfect strategy.

More often than not you’re going to have to make changes on the fly and refine your strategy. Knowing when to do that, and why, comes from constantly measuring the performance of your campaigns.

Just like you use data to form the basis of your strategy, you’re constantly using data and analytics to monitor the health of your marketing campaigns.

Know what success looks like, and identify how you’ll measure that success as part of a marketing strategy.

Document Your Strategy

It continues to surprise me how many marketers don’t document their marketing strategy, instead choosing to fly blind from memory.

There’s a lot that can go wrong when your strategy isn’t documented.

It’s more than just a roadmap detailing what you do to get to the next step. It’s a living document that ties together a lot of moving parts, and a lot of people. Some of what would be included in a sound documented strategy…

• Who the audience is, and how to reach them
• The tactics to be used
• The USP(s) to connect with the audience
• Who is involved, who is responsible for what aspects of the strategy
• How marketing materials are distributed, or where the audience is engaged
• How success is measured
• Conversion strategies used
• Promotions, pricing and incentives
• Communication requirements and reporting

There’s a great deal more that can and should be included, and that’s a lot to be floating around – especially with multiple people or teams involved. With all the moving parts, lacking a documented strategy invites error and mistakes.

Conclusion

Among all the aspects of being a strategic marketer, there’s one thing that remains consistent: looking forward.

If you want to think like a strategic marketer, you have to look beyond now.

Don’t get caught up in the urgency. Plan ahead, look to the future, and develop a rolling strategy that is built around proactive outbound and inbound practices, rather than the reactive deployment of tactics.

What mental practices have you tried in order to think strategically?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/oUh-YoJ7wDU/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/156140918939

Five most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

Welcome to our weekly round-up of all the latest news and research from the world of search marketing and beyond.

This week, Amazon is wooing Prime subscribers with a new, exclusive credit card, brand interest in Snapchat may not be as high as it seems, and the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo is on the up-and-up, reaching a record of 14 million anonymous searches in one day.

Amazon unveils new credit card exclusive to Prime members

Since the launch of Amazon Prime as an express shipping service in 2005, Amazon has continued to add benefits to its exclusive subscription service in a bit to retain existing subscribers and lure new ones.

The latest of these is the Amazon Prime Rewards Visa Signature Card, a new credit card exclusive to Amazon Prime members, which offers a hefty 5% cashback on all Amazon purchases, as well as a 1-2% cashback on other types of purchase, and a $70 gift card to new cardholders once they’re approved.

Al Roberts covered the news for ClickZ this week, looking at how Amazon is aiming to outdo major retail rival Costco with the new card, in its bid to become the go-to retailer in the U.S. and elsewhere.

More brands sign up for Snapchat, but not all are active

Snapchat is currently preparing to make an Initial Public Offering that could be the largest in the social media space since Facebook’s in 2012.

But although Snapchat has made a number of moves to tempt businesses into marketing on its platform, such as adding ecommerce features, redesigning its Discover platform to appeal to publishers, and adding Facebook-like audience targeting, a new report by research firm L2 has revealed that many businesses still don’t know what to do with Snapchat.

According to L2, many of the brands that are signed up to Snapchat have “struggled to produce content for the platform”, and the amount of active brands on Snapchat dropped from 70% to 67% between January and October. Al Roberts reported on the news for ClickZ this week and assessed whether Snapchat will be able to build up the momentum to challenge Facebook’s social media dominance.

Why the world’s major brands are making the switch to their own web extension

To date, more than 550 of the world’s largest brands have applied for their own Top-Level Domains, or TLDs – the part of a URL that appears after the dot (e.g. .com or .net).

Given the sizeable application fee of almost $200,000 USD, it stands to reason that most of the brands using these TLDs are big hitters like Apple, Google, Walmart and Nike, using them to create more simplified and memorable navigation that harks back to the days of Windows 2000. Tereza Litsa looked at how the new extensions work, and what the benefits are for both marketers and consumers.

Image by felixart05, available via CC BY-ND 3.0

eBay to launch authentication service for high-end merchandise

eBay is one of the web’s foremost ecommerce pioneers, facilitating the purchase of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods every year. But one of its biggest sources of friction relates to the sale of counterfeit goods, particularly high-end and luxury goods such as jewellery, fashion and handbags.

For years, eBay has offered a Verified Rights Owner programme which lets brands report suspected fakes, but late last week it announced that it will be launching a new programme, eBay Authenticate, which is specifically targeted at sellers of luxury items. Due to roll out later this year, eBay Authenticate will allow high-end sellers to have professional authenticators evaluate their items for an as-yet unspecified fee. It also promises, subject to certain terms and conditions, to refund buyers twice the cost of the original item if merchandise they purchase is found to be counterfeit during the eBay Authenticate process.

DuckDuckGo hits 14 million searches in one day

The privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo yesterday announced two major milestones to its blog: at the end of last year, it surpassed a cumulative total of 10 billion searches served, with more than 4 billion of those carried out in 2016 alone. And earlier this month, DuckDuckGo reached an all-time high of 14 million searches in just one day.

DuckDuckGo hailed this news as a success for the spread of privacy online, pointing out a Pew Research Study which reported that 40% of users believe their search engine shouldn’t retain information about their search activity. It’s definitely a huge achievement for a small, independent search engine like DuckDuckGo, which doesn’t retain any information about its users or sell it on to advertisers, and whose features are largely community-created and crowdsourced.

Its presence mostly spreads by word of mouth, and yet DuckDuckGo’s traffic is growing faster than ever, which could indicate that more and more people are starting to take an interest in privacy and anonymity online.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/01/20/five-most-interesting-search-marketing-news-stories-of-the-week-11/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/156128490819

Seven ways to elevate your personal and professional SEO performance in 2017

According to research from Borrell associates, SEO spending is forecast to reach $79.27 billion by 2020. However, the problem that many marketers face is actually elevating the importance of SEO within their organizations.

In 2017 it is essential that SEO professionals secure the buy-in they need from their business leaders so they can accomplish their professional goals.

Understanding how to do this will not only help the brand succeed, but it will also build your reputation as a marketer, paving the way for a successful future within the industry.

This year we witness the rising importance of the micro-moment, the new mobile index, and the growing importance of machine learning and automation in the marketing process.

Understanding this potential and the direction of the industry can help you establish yourself and your business within this changing field, laying a firm foundation for a strong brand moving forward. Here are seven ways you can elevate your SEO performance on both a personal and professional level.

Seven ways to elevate SEO performance

1) Communicate the importance of SEO within your organization

To elevate your personal and professional SEO performance, you must begin by establishing the importance of optimization to others in your organization.

My company, BrightEdge, regularly monitors the impact of organic search on website success and has found that 51% of traffic to your page originates with organic. Additionally, 83 percent of the traffic from search engines is from organic instead of paid.

Brands that want to drive performance need to focus resources and budget on SEO, and as a marketer, you need to promote this channel.

Invest your time and resources in improving performance in this segment so that you can begin to demonstrate both your own competence and the importance of digital marketing to your brand as a whole.

2) Optimize your human capital

The marketing world continues to mature and professionals need to be prepared to evolve alongside it. Within digital marketing, we continue to see a convergence of different marketing disciplines as the former silos begin to come down.

For example, content writers work more closely with SEOs and paid search and organic teams better understand the value that the other has to offer.

You want to maximize your human capital to take advantage of these trends. Look for new hires that have multiple skill sets and understand a few different marketing disciplines.

Similarly, find ways to train your existing team members on other marketing strategies, such as in-house training sessions. The better the team can function as a whole and create unified campaigns, the greater the success will be, which will help boost your value and reputation.

3) Nurture your own skills

Given the speed with which marketing continues to change, marketers must also be attentive to their individual skills. For you to advance professionally, you will need to navigate the hybrid atmosphere of modern digital marketing.

This means taking advantage of the variety of online resources available to help you learn about different aspects of marketing, such as analytics, SEO, writing, or social media. Attend a few webinars, follow key blogs, or even take classes to improve your credentials.

Taking the time to prepare yourself for modern marketing will help you stand out within your company, improve the success of campaigns, and position you for an even brighter future.

4) Find ways to break down internal silos

Breaking down the silos that hinder your organization’s performance requires not only hiring people with cross-specialty skills and expanding your own abilities, but also actively working to break down barriers between groups at your organization.

Do not be afraid to lead the initiative to start working with people from other teams. Get to know those who work in other departments through lunches or regular meetings, work on coordinated projects together, and develop integrated campaigns.

This cooperative effort will allow your organization to create more advanced campaigns and thus strengthen the brand’s efforts.

5) Invest the time, resources, and energy in analytics to gain a full view of your work

To effectively market to your prospects, you need to have a clear view of your performance and progress at every stage. You want to have a complete view of your metrics, understanding how your content and campaigns perform at every level, from keyword ranking to the impact on revenue and share of voice.

Look at how different aspects of your campaigns perform, such as paid search, organic and SEO, and social media efforts. The more complete your understanding of the marketing landscape, the clearer the picture will become of how you should move forward.

6) Use data to build a strategy centered around the customer’s needs

In the modern marketing world, we need to focus on the importance of the customer-centric approach and the growing roles that machine learning and automation are likely to play as the digital industry continues to mature. As a marketer, you need to produce strategies and campaigns that understand the unique needs and interests of your target consumers so that you can then produce the material needed to engage prospects.

The emerging technologies will play a large role in helping you better understand the search landscape so that you can more effectively reach them through your campaigns.

As you bring in the data from your analytics monitoring, use it to start creating a customer-first strategy. Watch the types of devices that people use when accessing your content, how that impacts their behavior, the paths they take to reach the conversion stage, and how various marketing efforts impact outcomes.

This will help you be more effective and create and optimize content that people actually want to read and is set for success, instead of just content that you want to produce. This will make your efforts more effective, providing lift to the organization and elevating the importance of SEO.

7) Understand how to speak to the C-Suite

For you to elevate SEO importance and performance on a personal and professional level, it is vitally important to know how to speak to the C-Suite and other leaders at your organization. They prioritize the specific metrics that will clearly indicate the impact of your marketing efforts on the organization as a whole.

They are less interested in seeing keyword rankings as they are in seeing share of voice, revenue from organic campaigns, and your success within the competitive landscape. Use reports and visuals that easily and clearly communicate your progress and the direct benefit to the company.

On a personal level, work on cultivating valuable meeting room traits, including confident speaking skills and effective storytelling abilities.

This will allow you to engage with the leaders of your organization and help them understand the value of what you have to offer.

The marketing industry continues to mature as consumers, marketers, and the technology involved become more sophisticated. From a personal and professional level, this offers you the chance to elevate SEO and the importance of your own role.

As we venture into 2017, now is the perfect opportunity to take advantage of the ideas above to set yourself and your organization up for a great year.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/01/19/seven-ways-to-elevate-your-personal-and-professional-seo-performance-in-2017/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/156091416734

How to Get Your Boss to Invest More Money in Content Marketing This Year

Content marketing has come a long way over the last 10 years.

More and more companies have come to realize the tremendous return and savings from investing in inbound marketing like blogs, white papers, and video.

Still, there’s a surprising number of businesses that either don’t leverage content marketing at all or have fairly slim content budgets.

While some 88% of marketers are using content marketing to reach their audiences, only about 30% see their campaigns as effective.

That can create a problem when it’s time to try new things, launch new campaigns, and venture into new content formats.

Getting management to invest in more content is a difficult, especially if the company struggles to create engaging content and produce effective campaigns.

If the value of or return on the content isn’t readily apparent, you’ve got a challenge to win over your leadership when it comes to content marketing.

To get them to buy in, you need to be well prepared with a smart plan that makes them see additional content marketing as a worthwhile investment they can’t live without.

Here’s how to do it.

Build a case for content marketing

If content marketing is already a part of your strategy, you’re halfway there. I run into countless marketers who try to sell leadership on content after visiting a workshop, only to be shot down.

Thankfully, you don’t have to get that initial commitment as your boss is already behind content marketing to some degree. I hope at this point you’ve got some data to prove that content marketing is working in your specific business and industry to back up your claim that a greater investment is needed.

Regardless of the size of the investment or how lofty your goals are, you need to put together a solid pitch and presentation. It shouldn’t be a casual or passive ask.

Keep these points in mind when you’re preparing your pitch:

Education is still important

Just because your boss understands content marketing doesn’t mean they understand it to the extent you do. They may see the value in blogging but may feel video is costly with minimal return because they don’t understand it.

Basic education on the formats and channels you propose to expand into should be a large part of your pitch.

You can’t expect leadership to invest more in something they don’t understand.

Focus on the value

Make sure you’re expressing the value of the investment, just like you do when highlighting the value proposition when selling something to your consumer audience. This way you’re not stuck on the technical aspects of content marketing expansion.

Focus on things like education, relationship building, teaching, and entertainment—things that make for stronger relationships and greater return.

It’s also a good time to show how your content strategy aligns with company goals. For instance, give examples of how to use content to boost relationships, resulting in a greater customer LTV and revenue lift.

Back it up with data

It’s not always easy to show the ROI or effectiveness of content marketing, but pull the data, and find a way to present it. This could include content metrics such as:

• Increased on-site time
• Content drawing in new traffic that moves fresh leads into the sales funnel
• Increased opt-ins from prior content offer campaigns
• Sales and revenue traced back to email campaigns

Leverage the content marketing metrics and data you have to show that your current efforts are moving the needle.

You can also use data from outside sources. This can come from case studies as well as research, trends, and benchmark reports in the industry that support the type of content marketing you plan to expand into. That data shows that it’s not just you who is planning to expand—it’s a direction the industry is headed.

Showcase a competitive analysis

A smart way to sell an expanded content strategy to leadership is to show what the competition is doing (and what they’re not) with an analysis of your competitor’s content marketing efforts.

Part of selling the value of your proposed campaigns is detailing how it will put the company ahead of major competitors to grab more market share.

Performing competitive content analysis takes significant upfront time, but doing so will help you set a realistic content strategy that will allow you to compete, and eventually overtake, your competitors online.” Corey Eridon writing for Hubspot.

Rather than copying their efforts, show—while speaking to company goals—that what you’re doing (and what you plan to do) will help outpace competition.

Align with company goals

Demonstrate why content marketing makes sense for your business and how the company (and customers) will benefit.

This can include goals such as:

• Greater brand visibility and increased brand awareness
• Improved thought leadership
• Increased frequency and volume of qualified leads for the sales team
• Reduced cost of customer acquisition
• Improved customer satisfaction/delight
• Reduced customer churn

Alignment between marketing and company goals is critical. Be prepared to make your case and provide research to back up your claims that your proposed strategy and the tactics you’ll use will help the company meet current goals.

This is a good opportunity to circle back to the competitive analysis and present case studies in which other brands have used similar tactics to accomplish their own objectives and engage their audiences.

Be ready for objections

You’re likely to come across objections when making your case for a greater investment in content marketing. With an existing investment in content, you’re not likely to get a hard no, but you should still be prepared for some pushback and the need to negotiate.

For leadership, everything comes down to the bottom line. If you want the dollars you’re asking for in your budget, you need to be prepared to counter the objections that may arise.

Here are some of the most common:

• People don’t want to hear more from us (we’re not interesting enough)
• Let’s just move resources; limit old campaigns to run new ones
• We don’t have the budget for it
• We’re giving away too much
• We don’t want to hire more people

For cost and resource related issues

Make sure you clearly lay out how to get around resource limitations. If you don’t need to hire anyone or the costs can be minimized with strategic outsourcing, showcase that in the proposal.

Don’t just discuss how much the expansion of your content marketing will cost. Be sure to include details of how much they can save. Circle back to your existing data that highlights things like:

• Reduced customer acquisition costs
• Increased volume of leads through organic search and content
• Reduced load on service teams through top-of-funnel content
• Improved velocity of lead closure through the strategic partnership of sales and content marketing

All of it equates to savings, providing a greater return on the initial investment.

The “We’re Not Interesting Enough” argument

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, your prospective and current customers will have questions. They face issues every day in their businesses. Every issue, question, and concern is a content opportunity that can turn your business into a hero, solving problems while asking for nothing in return.

Counter this argument by presenting common questions and concerns from your customers and showing how your company can create content to solve their problems.

The “Move Resources” argument

Sometimes management might suggest turning off other campaigns in order to test new ones. When you want to fill a container faster, you don’t turn off one tap to turn on another.

You turn on multiple faucets to let more water in.

Use your data from previous campaigns to show that virtually every campaign has some ramp-up time, necessary to gain traction to see a return. Shutting down or limiting existing campaigns to move resources would actually cost more when you factor in revenue and leads lost in the interim.

The “Giving Too Much Away” argument

This is the point of content marketing: give away vast amounts of value-rich information in order to create a winning experience for your audience. It’s the only way to build your brand as a trusted, reliable thought leader.

All of that content has a tremendous influence over purchasing decisions. When customers feel you have their best interests at heart, they are more likely to buy from you.

Even if you share the bulk of your knowledge, your customers won’t go to great lengths to learn how to do it all on their own. They’ll still need you.

This is where you make the case that limiting the amount of information you share only provides competitors with an opportunity to be the better resource.

Conclusion

When you make your presentation, you should have a strategy to showcase your vision, including the expected results. Have a plan ready that shows how serious you are about the expansion of your content marketing.

Even if you are presenting a pilot program, detail its implementation, ownership, ways content is created, cost allocation, distribution, promotion, and the measurement of its success against company goals.

From there, all that’s left for you to do is to make your case and ask for the investment. With a detailed pitch outlining a solid content marketing plan, you should be able to overcome any objections your leadership may have and get them to buy into growing your marketing efforts.

Have you ever tried to convince your boss to invest more in content marketing? How did you do it?

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Building your SEO strategy in 2017: what’s most important?

If you’re wondering what factors to consider as you build your SEO strategy for 2017, links are still the top-ranking factor for Google’s algorithm with content close behind. And high CTR is still at the core of the rankings pack as well.

Earlier this year, Andrey Lipattsev, a Google Search Quality Senior Strategist, fielded questions about the top ranking factors for Google. Lipattsev said, “I can tell you what they are. It is content. And it’s links pointing to your site.”

Recent Study Put Links to the Ranking Factor Test

A recent study by Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting put links to the ranking factor test. And links emerged as powerful as ever.

Previous research by Moz and Searchmetrics found a high correlation when comparing high SEO rankings and external links. However, data from other ranking factors were close behind links.

For example, the Moz study found the number of external links to be rated at 0.30, but the Moz authority rated at 0.28, and the page authority at 0.37.

How could links be so vital to SEO efforts and not have a significant statistical edge on other ranking factors? Enge wanted to know why, and he found that the Moz and Searchmetrics studies used commercial search terms, and evaluated each SERP individually.

“Based on consultations with a couple of experts (Paul Berger and Per Enge), I did a different type of calculation, based on the Quadratic Mean,” Enge explained.

Different varieties of search terms were also employed in the Stone Temple Consulting study. Long tail commercial terms, commercial terms, and informational keywords were used to test the power of links.

The results of the new study certainly matched Google’s announcement, crowning links king of ranking. Links per ranking URL rated at 0.39 with domain and page rating far behind at 0.27.

Links are Still Powerful Amid Hundreds of Google Ranking Factors

Did you know Google uses around 200 ranking factors to rank websites? This may be a lot for SEOs to take in all at once. However, focusing on links is still best practice.

Several digital marketing firms compiled hundreds of Google ranking factors, and they may be useful to your SEO efforts, says Entrepreneur contributor Eric Siu.

“While it can be worthwhile for business owners to be at least familiar with some of the topics here, this infographic can be a valuable resource to share with those on your team who are managing your site’s day-to-day SEO operation.”

In fact, out of those 200 ranking factors in Google’s ranking algorithm, three of the most essential encompass links.

1. The number of external links you receive is important. Some of the top SEOs say external links are simply invaluable to your ranking power, according to Moz.
2. Anchor text of external links affects ranking. Links with SEO focused anchor text needs to be relevant to the target page.
3. The links need to be of good authority. For example, your links need to be from a reputable news source or academic journal.

Links have always been a valuable aspect of an SEOs strategy, and many SEO agencies focus on building relevant links to get first page search results on Google.

Building Relevant Links is an Important Ranking Practice

Building links is certainly an essential SEO practice, but Google is still dealing with the manipulation of SERPs via economically minded marketers. However, your link building strategy needs to encompass relevancy, according to Search Engine Land.

Incorporating relevance and trustworthiness into your link building strategy is an essential part of your ranking efforts. The first step in this strategy is to identify resources and publications for inbound links.

Here are two key aspects to incorporate into your link building strategy, according to the best SEO practices of 2016 by Forbes.

• Identify respectable links. When searching for respectable links ask yourself: Do people trust this site? Does this site use citations? Is the site refined? Is the site a household name?
• Focus on relevancy in links. In order to optimize rankings, SEOs need to find relevant links within the industry they are marketing. Match content and links up as perfectly as possible to keep rankings moving in a positive direction.

Link building is important, and it may be as essential as ever, according to Google’s announcement. And SEOs still need to combine links with powerful content too.

Google Identifies CTR and User Experience as Major Ranking Factors

Links and content are certainly at the top of your SEO strategy. However, Google identified CTR and user experience as major ranking factors. Increasing one will certainly increase the other as well.

Google utilizes CTR data to indicate a sites ranking value, according to Google engineer Paul Haahr. Haahr also added that Google runs A/B tests with SERPs. This could increase or decrease a site’s ranking by a few spots, and has no relevancy to links or SEO.

Essentially, the higher CTR you have, and the more user experience your site receives, the higher the Google rankings.

A study on CTR by Moz found that, “The more your pages beat the expected organic CTR for a given position, the more likely you are to appear in prominent organic positions.”

Rankings and CTR are certainly codependent. Keeping visitors on your site is one important element in the Google ranking equation. Here are a few tips to optimize your CTR and user experience.

• Bucket brigades. Using bucket brigades is one great SEO strategy to increase user experience, according to Backlinko. These are simply words and phrases that keep people engaged.
• Better content title and descriptions. Emphasizing fast results is what Google is all about, and your content title and description need to reflect that. Giving Google browsers the sense of speedy information will increase your CTR.
• More value in your subheadings. Including benefits in your subheadings will also enhance your CTR and user experience. A more powerful subheading will intrigue your audience to stick around and see what the content has to offer.

Your 2017 Strategy: What Else?

Knowing that you must continue with outreach, content, and CTR optimization as your foundation, what else should you consider for your 2017 strategy? A Forbes article describes three steps to jumpstart site traffic in 2017: Real Time Videos, Augmented Reality Gaming, and Google Penguin.

If you keep your site safe from Penguin while focusing on building a real time video strategy with an augmented reality component, watch your site’s visibility sky rocket! It’s time to combine the old with the new to have your best year ever!

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/01/18/building-your-seo-strategy-in-2017-whats-most-important/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/156037356419

Five proven SEO strategies for retailers to use in 2017

Optimizing your ecommerce site for better rankings should be a top priority for any growth-focused business owner.

Being on the first page is no longer enough to generate enough traffic, CTR, and sales, for 2016 and 2017, the main goal should be to rank 1 and I will tell you why.

In 2011, a research conducted by Optify and published by Search Engine Watch showed that “websites ranked number one received an average click-through rate (CTR) of 36.4 percent; number two had a CTR of 12.5 percent; and number three had a CTR of 9.5 percent.”

This report illustrates vividly the value of holding the number 1 spot in search results.

In the article below, I will be sharing five proven SEO strategies for retailers to rank their ecommerce sites in 2017.

1) Use LSIs

Among the best practices for SEO in 2016 and 2017 is the use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords. LSI’s keywords are phrases or words closely related to the main keyword or phrase of your page or content.

Adding these keywords to your web pages will improve your SEO for a variety of search terms. Bear in mind, visitors will always use different or a combination of terms in search engines but optimizing your web page with LSI’s allows you to rank easily for closely related keywords.

For example, when optimizing a coupon website for keywords, LSI’s such as promotion codes, discount codes, discounts and deals can be sprinkled over the content in your coupon offers or category description.

Finally, there won’t be a need for LSI’s on a squeeze page with no content but for product description and large e-commerce stores like Amazon, LSI’s will surely get on the good side of search engines.

2) Write Long Descriptions For Products and Pages (1000+) and Sprinkle Keyword 3 – 5x

According to SERP data from SEMRush, longer content tends to rank best in Google. This is because search engines (Google) wants visitors to understand the value on your page, more content on your web pages allows search engines to crawl and provide value to web users.

I understand it is impossible to write up to or more than 1000 words for every page on your e-commerce site (don’t sweat it) simply write in-depth 100 words for products or category pages.

After writing your in-depth descriptions, include your main keyword at least 3 times in your descriptions. Doing this, give signals to search engines as to what the page is about.

For example, if your web page is about “Winter Skips” then you need to include that exact phrase at least 3 times in the fully written description.

Avoid poorly written or duplicate product descriptions (many retailers are guilty of this crime), hyperlink properly to internal pages or related items.

3) Use Neuromarketing Hacks To Maximize Page CTR

There is no point stressing out the need to include your main keyword in your page’s title tag. But do you know adding a prefix before your main keyword can actually skyrocket your CTR from search results?

Prefixes or Click Magnets such as “Cheap”, “Buy” and “30% Off” can increase your CTR and help you show up for long tail search queries. It is advisable to use prefixes for every product page as visitors punch in more precise queries such as “cheap winter skips” or “Nordstrom deals”.

Bear in mind, Google presumably uses organic CTR as a ranking signal according to Paul Haahr, well if they don’t, more click-throughs = more sales so you don’t lose in any way.

For example, almost every page with title tags on ChameleonJohn contains click magnets such as “30% off”, “Free Shipping” or “Up to 60% off” which generate more clicks (since we all like discounts).

For optimal results, include creative (and appropriate) click magnets into your title tags and descriptions tags and put longer phrases in description tags since you have more room for words to gain more clicks and sales.

4) Use Date Modifiers For Coupons

For businesses in the coupon industry, best practice will be to include date modifiers (2016, 2017) on each coupon page to show visitors that the coupons are fresh. For example, Kohl’s coupon page shows the last updated date including an expiry date for each coupon offer.

This allows search engines to crawl in-depth, provide comprehensive search results and rich snippets for visitors.

5) Implement Product Review Schema by Displaying Rich Snippets in Google

Rich snippets were first launched in 2009, they offer a way of adding more information to a search listing which could be in form of a star rating of a review or price of an item.

Webmasters can markup web pages with Schema.org making ecommerce sites eligible for displaying rich snippets in search results. Using structured data markup allows search engines to crawl and display page content comprehensively even though Google does not guarantee rich snippets for every website.

For clarification purposes, rich snippets do not affect site rankings but the use allows for comprehensive search listings for visitors, an increased CTR and indirect SEO benefits such as easily indexable web pages and detailed metadata.

Laurynas Skupas is the co-founder and CEO of ChameleonJohn

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2017/01/17/five-proven-seo-strategies-for-retailers-to-use-in-2017/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/156000718444