There are numerous ways of knowing what elements of SEO are vital for driving your digital marketing campaigns to success. The same methods can be used to identify the less-exciting and inarguably boring SEO chores and find a way of dealing with them.  There are many online tools available that can be used to perform these tedious activities:

1. SEO Analysis Automation: (Estimated Time Savings - 2 Hours)

SEO analysis is an utterly complex task that can prove to be extremely challenging, especially for those who are taking the first steps in the world of SEO. The boring task can be better handled by using one of the many tools designed for the same.

SEO analysis involves carrying out an in-depth analysis of a website or a webpage on several key performance parameters.

One of the most favored SEO analysis tools is SEMrush. It is designed to quickly detect on-page SEO issues and also offers top recommendations and solutions. Users can even analyze the optimization effects of their content for specific keywords and key phrases.

2. Keyword and Backlink Monitoring - (Estimated Time Saving - 30 minutes)

Keyword monitoring and keeping track of the backlinks of website figures are among the most monotonous tasks associated with SEO. You might have to spend a lot of your valuable time doing these boring tasks which might seem to be inane but are nevertheless a crucial component of the whole SEO strategy. However, you can manage it better with tools designed for the purpose.

SEMrush is a highly recommended SEO automation tool that can spare you several hours of tedious monitoring activities. The tool comes with a comprehensive and user-friendly dashboard that can collect and collate information in a systematic manner. You can access all the data you need from one convenient place. The dashboard collects and presents all the vital data you need for monitoring backlinks, keyword rankings, and activities related to your brand on the social channels.

3. YouTube SEO Optimization (Estimated Time Saving - 60 minutes)

If your entire focus is on improving critical business metrics such as website management and content, and if you are suddenly burdened with the additional task of YouTube SEO optimization, it can extremely frustrating. Don’t fret and worry about the problem. You can tackle it smoothly with TubeBuddy. It is an automation tool designed to deal precisely with such boring SEO tasks.

TubeBuddy is a chrome extension that can be downloaded to optimize as well as promote all the videos posted on your YouTube channel. The tool scouts through files to find topics that are trending and performing well. The input can be used for creating titles and tags that can get immediate attention from users and help you boost your search engine rankings.

You can also use TubeBuddy for A/B testing. The results can be applied to test your content and make appropriate changes for maximizing clicks on your YouTube videos.

4. Competitor Analysis Automation (Estimated Time Saving - 60 minutes)

It is not easy to carry out competitor analysis but you have to do it anyway to keep track of what your nearest competitors are up to and create appropriate responses to neutralize any advantages that they might be enjoying at your cost.

Some of the areas that need extra attention are link-building and lead generation. These are the tasks that are vital for the success of your marketing campaigns.

However, the sheer tediousness of these tasks can create a sense of complacency. There is no need to get disheartened though. You can carry out competitor analysis in a smarter and more efficient manner without losing focus on the more critical tasks on hand.

Competitor Analysis from SEMrush is one of the best tools available for the task. It helps create detailed reports that can be used for analyzing critical details such as traffic data. Competitor Analysis can be used for obtaining traffic data from any industry regardless of its location. It also allows you to get a clear idea of the most important marketing strategies of your competitors.

Besides this, you can also get information about their traffic sources, targeted audience, and lead generation sources as well.

5. Social Sharing Automation - (Estimated Time Saving - 60 minutes)

The brilliant piece of content you have created will gain in value only if it reaches the targeted audience and creates the right buzz on social channels. That’s why social sharing is a key element of digital marketing. But it can take a lot of your time if you have to work on making the content go live on the channels that matter to you the most – one piece at a time.

The best solution to this problem? Research and pick the best social media scheduling tool for automating social sharing. Buffer is a reputed brand in this regard.

This popular social media automation platform is being increasingly used by marketers to schedule posts automatically across various social media networks. It has a fantastic and highly useful ‘Posting Schedule’ feature. It allows you to share content at the time when your audience is most likely to access and read them and that too on a consistent basis.

You don’t have to keep flipping between tasks to post your content on social channels or wait for the appropriate time. Buffer does it like a boss!

6. ‘Relevant Term’ Search Automation - (Estimated Time Saving - 30 minutes)

Your SEO efforts will be successful only if you write for the user. Many marketers do the terrible mistake of writing for the search engines which is certainly not recommended. If the content is valuable, the search engines will rank it is the simple mantra of SEO success.

The best way of connecting with readers is through engaging content and to create such content you must know the relevant terms that resonate with your readers. These terms help your content stand apart and can create the attention your brand needs for making an impact. You must also make sure that Google identifies these terms as relevant to your content. This will assure a good ranking on search engines.

However, finding the relevant terms is a time-consuming task and can stress your team out. It may take several hours of hard work which can affect other tasks that are of a more critical nature. The best way of dealing with the problem is to use tools to find those relevant terms.

There are many such tools available and the one that’s extremely popular among marketers is SEMrush. It is designed to help you find the most relevant terms for specific topics. The process involves using a program to see a list of related terms by entering a keyword you want to use for your content.

The list can also be sorted out on the basis of the volume of search, long-tail keywords, and the value of those keywords.

7. Looking for Backlink Opportunities (Estimated Time Saving - 120 minutes)

Choosing backlinks can be a tough task as it not only involves searching for such opportunities but also requires making a decision on accepting a specific backlink or not. There are many aspects involved in choosing backlinks for your website.

The most important thing is to know who owns and site and is involved in its running and management. The owner is the deciding authority on choosing to link back or denying the request. A lot of time needs to be invested in backlink prospects which can affect other areas of your website management process.

Searching for the right backlinks can be an extremely tedious and time-consuming task. You have to find the details of the website owner, begin communication through email, and hope for a favorable response. The worst part is that all that time spent can yield zilch results if you don’t get the desired response. That’s why marketers rely on automating the backlink search process.

One of the hot favorite tools for searching for backlink opportunities is SEMrush. It is a popular tool for finding backlink prospects. It works in an amazingly simple way too.

In Conclusion

The list of tools we have provided here is a well-researched one but it must be noted that these tools must be used smartly with your other SEO strategies to drive up website visibility and ranking. These tools can save you loads of time per week that can be used to focus more sharply on the other critical and creative areas of your SEO. Why don’t you try them out? Share your experiences with us on how much time was saved and how it made a difference to your optimization outcome.

The post 7 Boring SEO Tasks That Can Be Automated To Save You Time appeared first on RELEVANCE.

An extremely popular and effective way of attracting visitors to your website is using the paid traffic approach. So what exactly is paid traffic and how does it work?

In paid traffic, you get visits from those customers whom you have paid for advertising promotions. You can access paid traffic services from diverse platforms such as search engines, social media platforms, and media networks. The most commonly used forms of paid traffic are:

• PPC or Pay Per Click advertising which utilizes Google Ad Words.
• PPA or Per Acquisition Advertising
• Cost per Thousand (CPM)

While Google AdWords and Facebook are two of the most commonly used and reputed platforms for generating paid traffic to websites, there are many other paid traffic options also available that can deliver the desired outcome.

Still not clear about how paid traffic actually works? With its popularity rising in the digital marketing space, and with so many people willing to try to use this marketing option, it is a wise decision to join the bandwagon?

We will soon find out!

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Paid Traffic Decoded

To many nascent businesses looking to establish their online presence, the term paid traffic might appear as a confusing phrase. It may take different meanings for different businesses. To some, paid traffic means the flow of visitors from their pay per click advertising efforts, while to others it may mean traffic coming in from banner ads and other types of paid advertising.

To make things simple, paid traffic can be defined as any website traffic that has been acquired through commercial means. Some examples of paid traffic are website banners, pay per click adverts, and YouTube advertising. However, it is important to understand that all types of paid traffic are not the same.

Let’s have a closer look at two of the most commonly used forms of paid advertising:

• Paid Ad Traffic
• Pay Per Click Traffic

Paid Ad Traffic

In this type of paid advertisement, traffic is generated by getting users to click on advertisements, banners, pop-ups, and videos. Advertisers are charged for a specific number of impressions (generally around 1000). This is an affordable form of advertising but the format does not come with any traffic or clicks guarantee. Paid Ad Traffic is also known as CPM or Cost Per Mile.

Key Features

• It can be much more profitable if the converting advert rate is high.
• There is a high element of uncertainty as businesses may spend heavily and yet not achieve the desired results
• This is not the preferred choice of businesses as there is no guarantee of conversions or traffic

Pay Per Click Traffic

PPC is an extremely popular type of paid traffic and on an entirely different model than other forms of paid traffic. Advertisers are assured of a better ROI if the price they have agreed to pay is good.

Key Features

• Payment has to be made only for visits received
• Advertisers can get detailed information about the performance of their PPC ads
• Offers optimization possibilities
• Makes it possible to reach a highly targeted audience
• The budget can be fully controlled

Paid Traffic Sources - The Advantages

1. Easy To Set Up And Use

Paid traffic can help nearly all types of businesses across diverse sectors improve their conversions. One of the key reasons for its wide preference is that it be can set up quickly and initiated instantaneously. You can practically start getting traffic to your website within no time as paid traffic offers much faster turnarounds and immediate results.

2. Boosts Exposure Massively

Paid traffic allows the targeting of a wider pool of users. PPC networks offer third-party display networks which means your ad can be shown on countless other websites as well taking the exposure potential to another level altogether.

However, Pay per Click traffic also has some downsides.

Paid Traffic Sources - The Disadvantage

The biggest disadvantage of using paid traffic ads is that it can cost you lots of money. If you are not sure how to do it right, there is a good chance that you will lose all that money you have invested in the campaign.

There is also the element of fraud that advertisers have to deal with. Billions of dollars are lost every year by advertisers to PPC frauds. However, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, security features have improved tremendously. Advertisers can deploy fraud detection tools to mitigate the instances of fraud in their PPC campaigns.

Now that we have covered a wide ground about paid advertising campaigns, let us look at how it fares in comparison to organic traffic.

Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic

You can attract traffic to your website in a variety of ways. Search engine optimization (SEO) is certainly one of the most popular and proven ways of boosting traffic flow and enhancing the ranking of your website on leading search engines.

Your ranking on search engines can be improved by creating unique and interesting content, by doing guest posting on popular websites, creating quality backlinks, on-page SEO, and so on. All these may cost businesses lots of money but the money is well spent in most cases as the quantum of traffic increase resulting from such efforts is substantial.

How SEO Works

Results from SEO are not visible immediately. It may take a few weeks to some months before you can enjoy the benefits of SEO efforts. It is definitely a long-term thing because once traffic starts rolling it, it remains steady for a pretty long time and also grows at a regular pace. If you are willing to wait for the results to show up, SEO can be a cheaper option.

However, its implementation is a complex task and requires the involvement of digital marketing experts. SEO also takes a lot of persistence and patience. If you miss out on any key element in the SEO implementation chain, it can adversely affect the outcome of your campaign.

Conclusion

Now that we have covered all the key aspects of paid advertising and organic advertising, let’s try and answer that all-important question: Is PPC worth the effort?

To provide a straight answer – YES!

We have seen that there are various types of paid traffic options with ad traffic and pay per click marketing leading the field. Both these methods are capable of generating a lot of traffic and can be great for your business. However, you will have to keep your eyes wide open and look out for fraud.

It is advisable not to purchase a paid ad on a CPM plan as there are many robots in use, constantly viewing the ads, and wasting the impressions. It is very difficult to get genuine clicks through CPM.  Of course, the fraud instances can be mitigated and even prevented completely if the ad network invests in some high-tech fraud detection tools and systems but that’s wishful thinking.

Your choices are:

• Continue buying impressions and hope to get clicks
• Opt for a different type of paid traffic

Frauds are as prevalent in PPC as they are in paid ad traffic. The mischief mongers (maybe a competitor) make use of fraudulent clicks by repeatedly clicking on the ads. You will lose money as you are charged per click, and gain nothing.

While there are no available solutions to stop paid ad traffic frauds, you can take some measures to stop PPC frauds. You can block specific users from seeing your ads by adding IP exclusions to your campaign on platforms such as Google Ads. It is an effective way of preventing deliberate and repeated clicks on your ads. The drawback is that it is a complex process and time-consuming as well. Your option? Choose an automated way for a faster solution.

There are software systems available that can monitor and block fraudulent clicks automatically. You need not put in your time and effort monitoring such unwanted clicks. This is a highly recommended solution for businesses running pay per click ads and wants protection from fraudulent clicking.

The post Are You Contemplating Using Paid Traffic Sources For Your Website? appeared first on RELEVANCE.

• Strategic Analysis
• Content Creation
• Ideation
• Content Optimization
• Distribution
• Measurement of Various Performance Metrics

In your content marketing experience, you must have noticed that these tasks demand additional resources and of course, your valuable time.

Would you not love it if you could achieve greater efficiency, find a way of creating quality content faster, and that too without putting in as much time and effort as you are currently doing?

Yes, there is a way you can do all these and more. Technology has helped marketers perform tasks that are critical for hitting their goals but with relatively less effort. With the availability of powerful and user-friendly content marketing toolkits, marketers can perform multiple functions with one kit, saving them time, effort, and other valuable resources as well.

SEMrush is one of the best and among the most reputed content marketing tools that can take the guesswork and the heavy-lifting away from your content marketing process. SEMrush helps you manage every step of your workflow by combining creativity and analytics.

Let’s now see what SEMrush content marketing toolkit is all about and how it is different from other popular tools available for the same or similar functionalities.

SEMrush offers a suite of tools that can help content management professionals manage their tasks better and create engaging and powerful content that can assist in establishing a quick and meaningful connection with their audience.

As a marketing professional, you obviously want to create more impactful campaigns and improve on your previous ones. This toolkit is designed to help you do improve your existing content plan and create new content that can drive a higher level of engagement while boosting all other key performance metrics as well.

SEMrush content marketing tool can be used to:

• Find a topic
• Create a plan
• Write an article
• Optimize it
• Analyze mentions
• Measure the impact
• Revise and Improve

Find a Topic

Your content must be around a trending topic relevant to your domain. So, the first step would be to find a topic. SEMrush makes it easy for you with the Topic Research tool. Simply enter the topic based on which you would like to create the content and you will receive reams of ideas and tips that can help you generate engaging content.

SEMrush includes all vital metrics including keywords, recent articles, related searches, and the kind of questions that were posted in order to find the answers they were looking for.

The Topic Research tool is designed to:

• Provide insights into the topics that interest the audience the most
• Filter the data based on the country, regional, or city
• Help discover the most popular topics and recent article titles for the target keywords.
• Provide information about the related questions that people are asking

The Topic Research Tool also helps find the best topic ideas, the trending topics over a specific time frame, headline input, and the ability to create SEO-optimized templates.

Create a Plan

Now that you are armed with a list of topics to drive your future content, an editorial plan is an obvious necessity. SEMrush Marketing Calendar Tool is what content marketers rely on to ensure that the project is completed within established deadlines. The tool also helps them oversee the various aspects of the project in real-time.

The key features of the Marketing Calendar Tool are:

• Assign colors to individual campaigns, mention tasks, and tag them for quick access
• Share the calendar with others in the team to get ready access to information on all tasks
• Changes made by team members in the process can be displayed in real-time
• Information can be filtered on various parameters

The marketing Calendar tool from SEMrush is the best way to ensure that the team is working as per assigned timelines and no deadline is missed. The notification feature alerts the team to an approaching deadline two days ahead of the scheduled date.

The SEMrush Calendar makes it easy to fine-tune due dates with its click and drag feature. Project statuses can be quickly reassigned and updated. It is a great tool for the project team as it helps infuse a high level of transparency and visibility into campaigns.

Write An Article

This is the most important step in the content marketing process. You can draw readers to your website and make them perform the appropriate marketing action only by writing an interesting and engaging article. It’s not an easy thing to do but with the SEO Content Template from SEMrush, you don’t have to worry about getting it right.

SEO Content Template provides the right tips to create new content with the specific aim of boosting your SEO. You can create templates easily and export them quickly too. All you have to do is enter keyword/s to generate the template best suited for your needs.

With the SEMrush SEO Content Template, you can:

• Create fully optimized content based on specific recommendations
• Build links to your new content to boost SEO
• Track competitor's content activity
• Get accurate input on text length and readability
• Get a list of websites for backlinks building

Optimize the Article

After you have created the content, the next most important thing to do is optimize the article.

You might have some of the best writers to create killer content and expert marketers to make sure it reaches a wider audience. However, getting your content to rank within the top 10 results on Google is a huge challenge. Raking on the second or later pages is not an option if you want to hit your goals. So how do you go about it? SEMrush has the answer.

With the SEMrush SEO Writing Assistant, you can get high-quality content in no time. You can use the services of a writing assistant to get traffic-driving content. The process is simple. The writing assistant helps content creators create texts that are unique and search-optimized in just a few clicks. This can be done right in the Google document or WordPress account.

The SEO Writing Assistant can be used for:

• Ensuring that the content has a strong sense of your brand's tone
• Make sure your copy is optimized
• Enhance the quality of your article before it is published
• Making the article readable
• Assessing the SEO quality of your article

The content can be checked for SEO friendliness on key metrics such as readability, length, linking, target, and semantically related keywords. It also comes with features like plagiarism check, and even checks the tone of voice of the content to make sure it syncs with your brand voice.

You are required to choose a combination of keywords to allow SEMrush to create a list of recommendations for your text. At the same time, it is not prudent to rely merely on keywords when Google algorithms are constantly changing and evolving. SEMrush will ensure that semantically related words are used in content with your top target keywords. This will help search engines understand the context of the article.

Analyze Mentions

You must find a way of tracking the performance of your content to assess whether you are moving towards your goals or if some fine adjustments are needed to achieve the end result of your content strategy.

SEMrush offers a wide range of tools to measure your results of your accurately, quickly, and efficiently. These tools can be used for measuring:

• Blog Posts Performance
• Effectiveness of Keywords
• Visibility Trend
• Referral Traffic
• Social Media Traffic

SEMrush Content Platform is the best way of tracking performance both on your own as well as on third-party websites and that too within no time. You can find new resources that mention your brand, industry, and your competitors, and measure the potential of new content based on metrics like authority score, traffic volume per month, and potential reach.

Measure the Impact

Any content marketing strategy is incomplete without monitoring the impact of your moves across various components of the campaign. You must have a clear picture of what influences the reputation of your brand and what kind of positioning is needed to maintain and improve your brand image.

Experts suggest that it is necessary to assess all your content by running a regular content audit. It is a reliable way of tracking the impact and the influence of your content marketing strategy on your brand’s reputation. It will also help you understand which type of user-generated content your story produces.

SEMrush Content Platform makes it remarkably easy to track the performance of up to 50 articles, including even those published by your competitors.

The SEMrush tool allows a view of the number of shares received by articles across various social media platforms. You can add target keywords to the content and track their ranking on Google’s search engine result pages. The tool also provides information about the potential reach of content and the estimated referral traffic.

Revise and Improve

Content can be revised and the quality of content improved for better impact, reach, and outcome. You must know what your audiences prefer through analytics and choose the approach that best suits your content marketing goals. This job can be made easy using SEMrush content platform.

The Content Audit tool can assist in analyzing thousands of articles in no time. They can also be segmented into specific groups for future consideration and updates.

The Content Audit tool considers data from Google Analytics, backlinks, and social shares to measure the performance of the articles. It allows access to all content metrics in one convenient place and helps track content performance accurately. 

Conclusion

Content Marketing is one of the most powerful and extremely effective marketing techniques. But getting it right is not easy. You must not only have a systematic approach but also have access to a powerful content platform.

SEMrush offers one of the most comprehensive digital marketing toolsets, delivering much more than what is expected from a purely SEO toolset. You can give your content marketing efforts a clear and definitive push with this popular and reputed content marketing platform.

Take your content marketing to the next level. Try it FREE!

The post Why SEMrush Content Marketing Platform Is Your Best Bet For Your Content Marketing Needs appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Keeping pace with Google algorithm updates have now become a way of life for digital marketers. Every time a new update is announced, they get down to restructuring websites for clients almost instinctively, knowing well that if they don’t, the rankings might plunge southwards and set off a series of events that can adversely affect current business and future prospects.

Those who have been keeping a close watch on these updates and related developments say that one aspect that has not changed much despite all the updates is on-page SEO. This, despite the fact that every on-page SEO task is aimed at benefitting the end-user.

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The more time they spend there, the greater is the value of that web page.

This on-page SEO cheatsheet aims to help you understand the core factors that one must focus on for better results. When done right, the takeaways are better rankings, enhanced search traffic, and the other positive offshoots of these benefits.

So what are the factors you should focus on?

Creating Content That Drives Search Traffic

“When we create something, we think, ‘Will our customers thank us for this?” – Ann Handley

All those groundbreaking technologies and jazzy tools have not been able to dislodge content as the most vital factor for any business. But merely offering quality content is not enough. Successful content marketing involves publishing relevant content that has the power to drive the right traffic. Keywords are of course important but you can create a powerful impact by using specific keyword phrase components constructed using long-tail anchor words.

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Long-tail searches from customers or readers indicate a sense of urgency and a need to search for the exact thing they are looking for. Traffic emerging from such searches can enhance your stature among search engines because your content will be viewed as something that aims to solve problems by offering the right solutions.

You must aim to create content that is:

• Practical and valuable
• Offers interesting insights
• Aware of what’s going on in the user’s mind
• Easy to share
• Optimized
• Created to solve problems of readers

Custom content attracts readers and helps create a sense of deep trust and reliability. That’s why experts say that such in-depth and meaningful content is what companies should focus on to achieve their digital marketing objectives.  What the reputed B2B marketing strategist said about content merits recall here:

“Content is the reason search began in the first place.”

Leveraging The Power of Meta Tags

Over the years, Meta tags, and the way they are used has undergone major changes. Many might think that they have lost some punch but Meta Tags still can play a key role in on-page SEO. Let’s find out how to use Meta Tags to make your content search engine friendly.

Title Tags are synonymous with the title of your web page as they offer previews that can help readers make a decision. Use short and descriptive titles that are different from the content on the page.

Meta Descriptions are used by search engines to identify the context of your content so that it can be connected to the relevant audience. There are a couple of things you must remember while writing Meta descriptions.

• Keep it short and relevant
• Avoid stuffing keywords
• On-page SEO can be improved by using Latent Semantic Indexing

Focusing On Boosting Site Speed

The speed at which a visitor gets to read the content on a website is one of the key metrics of SEO and a huge indicator of the user’s experience. You can always run a check on what your site speed is using one of the numerous tools easily available online for the purpose. However, site speed score often simplifies things more than it should probably do creating a false sense of security.

In any case, measuring speed is a tricky thing because you must first know what you are measuring and what the best possible reading for that particular matrix is so that corrective actions can be taken if needed.

“Just because you can measure everything doesn’t mean that you should.” – W. Edward Deming

It is important to understand that Google will only penalize websites that are excruciatingly slow. Site speed is more important from a user perspective. That’s why site speed must be optimized based on user experience. But yes, slow site speed can affect businesses such as ecommerce stores.

[bctt tweet="For a good on-page SEO experience, site speed matters as it affects rankings." username="relevance"]

Site speed can vary when the same website is accessed from a desktop and a mobile device. Any speed check that you run must show the site speed of your page in the ‘excellent’ range for all devices.

Does the site speed show a lower than the desired result? You can easily resolve the problem by using search engine content delivery networks. You might have to spend some money but it will pay you great dividends sooner than later.

Code Optimization and Others On-Site Technical

This is a technical thing but if this can be done, it can help achieve your on-page SEO objectives.

Here’s what you should be doing:

• Make sure all JavaScript to be placed bottom of the page remains there
• Use canonicals where needed. Use a canonical tag in your header point out the original page that should be considered for ranking to Google if there is a duplicate page too.
• Add title tags to href tags and use descriptions to describe the same.
• An obvious thing to do is to make your website responsive and mobile-friendly (Believe me, some people still need reminders on this!)
• The site map submitted to Google must be updated frequently

Great on-page is a fine combination of understanding of the needs of customers and trying to solve the problems they generally face and doing accurate keyword research with the best available tools. Some reverse engineer tricks can help you find the exact keywords your customers are using. Your content must be crafted using these vital inputs to achieve a rich, high-value, and informative article that can resonate with your readers.

The post The On-Page SEO Cheat Sheet appeared first on RELEVANCE.

If the keywords that are driving your traffic is not to be found or if your website ranking is plunging southwards for no apparent reason, you must take immediate corrective steps to restore normalcy. There are a few ways of doing this but the most important thing to do at this juncture is to accurately identify the keywords or the pages that fell.

To be able to do this, you must know which keywords responsible for driving traffic and how it impacted the overall ratings of your website. The drop of a keyword or its variation can be a major setback. Here’s what you can do to set the repair task rolling.

The 2 Key Tools To Your Rescue

Google Console Search and Google Analytics are the two key tools that can come to your rescue in such situations. We will start with Google Analytics.

Begin with the Acquisition tab and go to Overview and Organic Search. Select Landing Page and then choose the Conversion Item from the drop-down list that shows up at this stage. When you set the Secondary Dimension to Acquisition and Source, you can filter the pages by Google in a convenient manner.

You must have a fair idea of the date around which you lost the keywords as there is a date range field to be filled. You can also choose a comparison period option.

After you have done this, go to Google Search Console and then to Performance and Pages. Enter the date range or the comparison dates you had earlier set.

Look for the page that got an increase in conversions and search for the same in Google Search Console. You will get a list of keywords and the date they started ranking on Google. You can easily find conversion and traffic gains/losses data here.

Make a Proper Diagnosis

Now that you have covered the first critical part of the analysis, let’s come to the other equally important part and that is diagnosing the problem. It is imperative to find out what caused the pages to fall or why the keywords were lost. This could have happened because of various reasons. By identifying the exact cause, you can ensure that you don’t suffer the same hassles in the future.

Diagnosing the cause of lost keywords is not easy as every website has its own specific issues. However, there are some guidelines that can serve as a starting point. You can get a fair idea of what the reasons are by looking at these points.

• Where was the traffic coming from?
• Is your content appearing as stale now?
• Was there at attack launched from any of the links pointing to your page/website?
• Was the loss limited to single page traffic or was it deeper (Whole website/few categories)
• Are other keywords still driving traffic to the page?

You will also have to find out other details like page speed, content quality, and user experience of the pages that show up for the main keywords and phrases.

Hacking of your website could also be the reason for losing keywords and pages? Check if your website was compromised and if yes, what was the impact. Another possible reason could be poor link building strategies. If you are not careful and do not take a measured approach to link building, it can affect the security of your website and web pages adversely.

Some of the high-risk areas that can result in the building of bad links are:

• The network of private and possibly fraudulent bloggers
• Paid links
• Banner ads and advertisements that run on the website
• Badges and certificates

It is equally important to run a few checks on your website to detect any changes in the website layout. At times, it becomes necessary to optimize more media types to gain ranking.

Have You Migrated To A New Server?

Migrating to a new server can also result in a possible loss of keywords and pages. To avoid this, it is important to have a proper redirect plan. The same applies when you carry out any structural changes to your website. Links, tags, and XML sitemaps must be updated to prevent any drop in rankings.

Please remember that search engines will be indexing everything including your old and new websites. If you do not have a proper redirect plan in place, it is very likely that you will get penalized for duplicate content.

Are You Being Penalized By Google?

A sure sign that your website is suffering from a Google penalty is when your site experiences a drop in rankings on Google but continues to have a steady ranking on other major websites. The penalty must be removed and the problem fixed and the best way to get started is the Google Search Console account.

You can start with the notifications from Google or any warnings in the menu message. Google will share details of how and where the compliance with their guidelines has been tinkered with. Not only that, but you will also be offered solutions on how to fix the problem.

Other Reasons

Sometimes, the drop in search engine rankings is not due to any of the above-mentioned reasons or the outcome of anything associated with the website. Google makes some changes to the search engine results based on user behavior in specific areas and topics. Such changes may affect your rankings, especially if your content is static and has not been updated recently.

Are you experiencing a dip in ranking and loss of traffic despite doing everything right? You can be almost sure that your competitors have decoded your strategy and have managed to be one-up on you. The right way to overcome this problem is to go into deep analyzing and monitoring mode and get a deeper understanding of the social media strategy, link building techniques, and content marketing strategy of your competitors.

Conclusion

It is important to note that there is no quick-fix way of increasing your website traffic and improving search engine rankings. The strategy to fix the problem must be arrived at by making a proper diagnosis and identifying the reasons why you are suffering a dip in ranking or losing pages. Keep an ear to the ground so that you remain current with the latest developments and best practices that can boost your visibility online and help you achieve your goals.

The post Recovering Lost Keywords and Organic Traffic appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Content marketers and writers do have to confront this puzzle quite often - What is the ideal length of an article in terms of words and paragraphs?

Long Copy = Deep Research? Not Quite!

Yes, the length is an important factor and often puts other aspects into the background such as the core purpose of the copy, the intent of the content, and the audience it needs to address. For some reason, nearly every conversation with a client begins with word count and page length. Is it because of the popular belief that longer articles rank better? Do search engines believe that pages and pages of content indicate exhaustive and deep research entailing long hours of hard work that deserves a high ranking?

You have to agree that there is a strong belief among many people that a longer copy makes the content more rank-worthy. What can this misconception be attributed to?

Content marketing experts point out the presence of numerous studies around the word count subject but none of them provide any firm closure to the debate in the real sense. There are a lot of loose ends which means the confusion persists.

Relevance Matters More Than The Length

Many factors come into play while determining the right length of the content but the ranking of a page is not driven by its length alone. The objective of a page and its contents should be to provide the necessary information required by the visitor to achieve their objective of visiting that specific page.

In some cases, all they might need is a quick, crisp answer to a particular query and in other cases, they might require a detailed and in-depth explanation about a particular topic or subject. Going by this reasoning, the length of a content page does not hold as much importance as the quality and relevance of the information provided.

Google has made it implicitly clear that the needs of the user must take topmost priority and must be adequately addressed before anything else.

The focus should be on assisting the human visitor and not on supporting a search bot.

Is There a Proven Word Count for Best SEO?

If you believe that there is some formula by which search engine ranks an article based on its length then let it be clear that there is none. There are no Google guidelines that a specific number of words must be used for an article or page to rank high. The search engine algorithm is simply designed to rank pages based on its ability to satisfy the query of a user. There is no such rule that a content page with 2000 plus words will rank on the top search pages of Google, guaranteed! No.

Word count or volume is rarely a deciding factor according to many experts.

[bctt tweet="The number of words of a copy is, without a doubt, the wrong way to measure its utility to the readers." username="relevance"]

This has been confirmed by none other than John Mueller, Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google in one of his tweets some time back.

“Word count is not indicative of quality. Some pages have lots of words but say nothing. Some pages have very few words that are very important and relevant to queries. You know your content best (hopefully) and can decide whether it needs the details.”

There is also this trend of piling on words on a content page simply because your top-ranking competitor did it. Some marketers fear that they will be seen as providing lesser information if they do not match the same word count and page length as that of their competitors.

This again is not true! John tweets to set the record straight:

“Having the same word count as a top ranking article is not going to make your pages rank first, just like having a bunch of USB chargers isn’t going to get you to the moon. But, I’m still tempted to buy some of those USB chargers.”

Correlation Between Word Count and Ranking - Is There Any?

However, despite reassurances coming from the right places, a lot of people still believe that there is a correlation between word count and ranking. For instance, it the content length of the top pages for a specific search term is around 2,000 and more, they would see it as a definite sign that any page that has less than 2,000 words will not be considered for top ranking.

While this is understandable, it is definitely not the truth. The longer pages might be ranking well but the length of the content has nothing to do with the rank.

It is the quality of the content and its relevance on these that’s making these pages soar high on the search engine rankings.

It is also possible that it is the link profile of these pages that are driving its rankings.

What Determines the Length of a Copy

Logically speaking, the length of content should be directly proportional to the subject matter and the query it aims to address. Shorter content will do better than longer ones in places where there is no need to stretch the pages.  For instance:

For content that seeks to address the query such as the metro station near me will be significantly less than that which addresses the question about the history of Wimbledon.

“Content should be factually accurate, clearly written, and comprehensive.” – Google’s SEO starter guide accurately captures the picture.

To make it more clear, comprehensive here means complete. The content should include everything necessary to address its core purpose. At the same time, it should be free of fluff and inane sentences and descriptions which hardly adds any value to the overall content.

Marketers have come up with a really practical explanation of why content must not be built around a fixed word count. A piece with a suggested word count runs the risk of becoming diluted and straying away from its stated objective. It may be assumed in such cases that the writer will try to fill the paragraphs and pages with a random volume of words with the sole purpose of reaching the word count, thus sacrificing the quality and crispiness of the content in the process.

Will that make a good reading material? Obviously no!

Will it provide the requisite information in the right manner? No again!

The Consequences of Fluffing:

• It affects the manner in which the copy will rank for the targeted keywords
• The keyword theming of the page will go astray with unwanted content making its way into the pages
• A page that was supposed to be crisp and relevant to the topic will lose its punch as other concepts are introduced to add to the length
• The ability of the page to rank for the targeted keywords may get severely affected

[bctt tweet="Word count should never be the target. Delivering the message home is what writers and marketers should aim for." username="relevance"]

Purpose Over Word Count

Ask yourself what is the real purpose of the page you intend to create. Is it intended to provide information? Is it created to encourage visitors to explore other pages on the site? Is it for performing some transactions? The purpose of the content page will decide the length of the content.

When you provide visitors reliable and accurate information based on the purpose for which they visit the page, you can achieve the objective of ranking higher than your competitors in organic search results.

User Intent

User intent is another factor that will decide the length of the content of the page. What is the user looking for while landing on a specific page? If you know the answer to this and create content (regardless of the length) to satisfy their needs, your page will be a winner by all counts. The visitor is a busy individual who is unlikely to have the time and the patience to browse through a length description when a relatively crispier one would more than suffice.

A note of caution here: Making a page long does not help the visitor who comes for a purpose. It is more important to serve that purpose and achieve better rankings. And when you do that remember one more thing. Search engine optimization is of course about ranking high but it is more about converting traffic. Remember that while writing the copy.

Copy Length and Conversion

Is there a connection between copy length affects conversion?

While it’s a proven fact that reams of text might be off-putting for readers in some context such as a product description page, other types of pages might necessitate long copies to help visitors achieve their objective and complete an action.

The clear verdict, therefore, is that there is no right word count or best word count for SEO.

[bctt tweet="Word count can never dictate a copy length, its objective should." username="relevance"]

The copy length should be such that it meets the needs of the user and also encourages conversion at the same time.

Some Interesting Research-Based Data

Here are some interesting observations based on extensive research of what the ideal length should be for various posts. Be warned that these are ideal representations based on the research of a large number of such posts and should not be viewed as the best practices. You can use these suggestions as a testing point for your posts wherever it is possible for you to use them.

Source

Tweets:

Tweets with less than 100 characters have a higher engagement rate

Facebook:

Facebook posts of around 40 characters get a higher rate of engagement. Posts with more character count generally grab lesser eyeballs.

Paragraphs:

Opening paragraphs with around 40-55 words resonate better with readers.

URL Domains:

Short and easy-to-remember domain names work best. Limit it to 8 characters for easy recall.

Hashtags:

6 characters define the perfect hashtag according to research. Avoid using special characters, don’t start with digits and no slangs, please.

Subject Lines:

Subject lines get the best click rates if they contain around 39 characters.

Title Tags:

Limit your title tags to less than 60 characters; 55 is the ideal number.

Blog Headlines:

Are you surprised to learn that the first 3 and the last 3 words of a headline are usually read? Don’t worry about the length but 6 words headlines work best for blogs.

LinkedIn Posts:

Limit the posts to 16-25 words for business marketing and 21-25 words for consumer marketing. At least, that’s what the trend says.

Blog Posts:

Blog posts that can be read under 6 minutes have a better engagement rate than those that can be read under 3 minutes. The ideal word count? 1600!

YouTube:

After researching the top 50 YouTube videos, it was revealed that the short ones are more popular with the average length being under 3 minutes.

Podcasts:

Attention can be retained for around 20 minutes only and that’s why the average podcast length should be around 20-22 minutes.

SlideShare:

6 minutes is the best time length for SlideShare.

It is important to understand that the post lengths and word counts mentioned for various sites are based on research by diverse agencies and sources. What works for others may not deliver the exact same results for you. This is undoubtedly some valuable data and can be used as a reference point for your needs.

To wind up, here is one from John Mueller again:

“Some low quality pages are unsatisfying because they have a small amount of main content for the purpose of the page. For example, imagine an encyclopedia article with just a few paragraphs on a very broad topic such as World War II. Important: An unsatisfying amount of main content is a sufficient reason to give a page a low quality rating.”

The post Ideal Word Count for SEO - Fact or Myth appeared first on RELEVANCE.

In business, one of the toughest challenges is to build strategies to outclass your competitors.

Launching a business is not all the difficult. All newbie entrepreneurs know this.

But the new entrants also know that the competition in the market today is fiercer than ever before.

So how do you gain an upper hand over your competitors?

To create a product that is better in value than what is available in the market is an answer.

But this only is the first step.

You need to go further.

You must let the consumers know what value the product offers to them and in what manner it is unique.

The best bet to learn the tricks of the trade is to understand your rivals’ strategies.

Is spying on your competition an unscrupulous act?

The word spy might sound like that in the first instance.

The answer however is no.

Spying in this context simply means keeping an eye on your rivals’ digital marketing strategies.

And knowing what their content is about.

Just like in any sporting event, competition is a good thing. It allows you to grow and improve. You are likely to make a product better than what is now available for consumers – and this certainly is a worthy outcome.

Improving your commerce to get better results makes good business sense.

By monitoring how your competitors operate, you understand their strengths and weaknesses.

You will get to know what works and what does not.

A good example is a content.

You may be wondering what makes your rival’s content so unique and different from others.

With literally thousands of pieces of information available on the internet, visitors are spoilt for choices.

They will scan content in a jiffy to get what they are looking for. If they do not, they will move over to another site.

A research study has revealed that an average visitor hangs on for just 10-20 seconds on a website. The attention span is low, so you need to make your content gripping, to be able to hook a visitor in a short span of time.

To make their websites persuasive and compelling, successful businesses adopt the following tactics:

Make content valuable and relevant

Visitors type keywords on Google or Yahoo to search for specific information. If they find content on a website irrelevant, they will move on to the next result.

Keep it short or concise

Web visitors have no patience to read a long story. They prefer precise information in a concise format.

Adhere to the subject

Web visitors like content that adheres to the subject and does not stray.

Make the content free of grammatical and spelling errors

It would be very unprofessional if the content has spelling and grammatical errors.

Write with expertise and authority

It is a fact that consumers like content written by trusted experts before making a purchase.

Focus on the audience

Your goal is to convert visitors to customers. Write with the right audience in mind.

Make use of graphics, images, and videos

Media, such as images and videos, enhances a website’s visual appeal.

The truth is your rivals are spying on you too.

If your ranking on SERP is high, your competitors would like to know how you are achieving it on search engines and social media.

A few tricks to monitor competitor web traffic

The basic objective of SEO is to stay ahead of your adversaries - but in a manner Google considers safe.

And just like in a war scenario you must know their strategies.

If you are smart enough, a number of tools allow you to monitor competitor search traffic on Google and other search engines.

But first, you must identify your competitors.

This you can do through keywords.

The search engines will surprise you by providing names of companies who are most likely your strongest threat.

Set up Google alerts to monitor your rivals

The internet is always robust, alive, and kicking. It is constantly abuzz with the latest information.

This can make garnering the right information a challenge.

To stay ahead of the competition you need vital information at the earliest possible time.

A smart way to do this is by leveraging Google Alerts.

You can tweak Google Alerts so that you get emails based on your search phrases/terms.

Here are a few approaches to sharpen your search:

1. Search for brand names

Let us say you want to gain insight on coffees sold in India online.

All you need to do is type on the Google Alerts page, “Coffee’, “India”, “Online”, and “Arabica”.

You are delivered with a string of alerts with information on various brands across the country.

2. Refine your search strings

Searches on Google can return a plethora of information. You can use a different combination of keywords to refine your search results.

You can use words that relate to specific brands to catch mentions and alerts for updates from multiple brands.

3. Filter by content type

You can choose sources such as news, blogs, web, or video, the region, and also the frequency, such as once a day or once a week.

4. Customize the type of updates you want

The choices are endless. You can get more relevant information. For example, you can type in the name of your competitor and keywords such as “new launches” or “hiring”.

You will learn a lot about your competitor’s plans to expand and insight into new products.

There is no doubt that setting up Google Alerts is a smart idea. It will offer you a competitive edge by providing you with the latest information on your rivals’ plans.

Keyword Competitor

Are you overwhelmed by the term Search Engine Optimization (or SEO in short)?

If yes, it is not surprising because most are finding it tough to put into practice.

But keep in mind the following:

• SEO is not as thorny as you think.
• You can always leverage the competition to your benefit.

Would it not be great if you were able to influence your competitor’s weakness to climb a notch above in your business standings?

This is the splendor of this game.

The trick to tapping into this is via competitive intelligence.

Competitive intelligence or corporate intelligence is all about garnering and analyzing information about your competitors to your business advantage.

It contains actionable information from diverse sources collected ethically.

It is not simply ‘know your enemy. Rather, it is an inclusive exercise wherein you discover the finer points of your competitor’s business strategies.

Whether you are a digital marketer or an online entrepreneur, understanding competitive intelligence is a must.

Using tools for competitive auditing

Conducting competitive audits has become imperative in today’s keen business environment.

But keep in mind the following.

Just because a business is competing for similar keywords does not necessarily mean they are your resolute competitors.

You must take into consideration a few other factors as well.

• Which segment of the market they are in
• The locations they are selling products in
• At what possible prices are they selling their products

Your primary objective must be to find out what is working for other businesses that are in the same domain as you are, so that you can make those strategies work for you as well.

So it is no surprise that successful marketers go the extra mile to understand their target audience.

Yet, most businesses fail to successfully understand their target market.

But why understand the target market?

The answer is straightforward.

Have you not heard of this common adage in the world of digital marketing?

“If you try to sell to sell to everyone, you will end up selling to no one”.

Targeted marketing simply means focusing your promotional or message on the right market – the people most likely to buy from you.

By learning to identify your target market, you will ensure that your brand advertising reaches out to the right persons in the most cost-effective way.

[bctt tweet="Demographic is a marketing lead. You must use channels, language, and data to reach out to each demographic in a tailored manner." username="relevance"]

By making use of certain analytical tools, smart marketers leverage the power of target demographics to run effective marketing campaigns.

Once you get adequate information about a particular group of consumers, you can commence developing unique marketing campaigns and marketing strategies relevant to that demographic.

Here are a few online tools you can use to identify your target audience.

Google Analytics

Google analytics converts your assumptions about your target audience into trustworthy facts.

One of the persuasive advantages of Google Analytics is it is free.

It is a very effective tool that helps you track your marketing efforts by providing you with inclusive information.

A key reason for Google Analytics’ effectiveness is it works well with Google platforms like YouTube, Google Ads, and Search Console.

In order to track your marketing efforts, you must use this tool correctly.

With a little expertise, you can get plenty of insights into what competitors looked at on your site and for how long.

Google Analytics can provide you with engagement reports that will allow you to see how long users from your rivals were on your site.

Facebook Business Page Insights

Most of us know Facebook Insights is an authoritative tool to track user interaction. But it also helps you to track the active users your competition has.

Keeping an eye on your competitors on Facebook is a clever idea.

Not only will you understand their position in the market, what they do, and what type of their posts earn the most likes and responses, but you will also get opportunities to learn from them and stay updated on the latest innovations and developments.

Here is how Facebook monitoring will help you.

• You can compare others’ success (or failure) - If you want to know how good your progress is, you must also evaluate how the rest in your industry are doing.
• You can learn from your competitors’ mistakes - If you keep a constant eye on what others are doing, you can avoid the blunders they make. Importantly, you can craft and refine your social media strategy and continuously tweak it to suit the present marketing environment.
• You can avail customer intelligence at a low cost - You can follow the ads and campaigns of others and then go through the responses of customers, including complaints if any. Armed with such invaluable knowledge, you can refine your customer support strategy to get an edge in the market.

Brand24

If you are keen that your online business thrives, it is imperative that you know what the general public is saying about your products and services.

A great way to do it is by making use of Brand24, a social media listening tool that keeps an eye on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

To make the most of this tool, you must get to know all the functionalities and how to power them to your advantage.

• The very first step is to register with Brand24.
• You can also sign up for your 2-week free trial.
• Once you are logged into your personal account, the next step is to create several projects for monitoring specific brands/products.
• You can create a number of projects with different sets of keywords.
• You can even split your keywords into different groupings so that you can monitor your brand for one project and use the other to monitor the brands of your competitors.

Mention

Mention is a wonderful tool that specializes in monitoring different types of business activities on the web. It can reach out to billions of sources, a boon for businesses that want myriad information.

You can even leverage this platform to tap influencers who can provide traction to your business.

Summary

• Competitor analysis helps you analyze the limitations and drawbacks as well as the strengths of your competitors.
• This can be a protracted process, but the rewards are worth the effort.
• With competitor analysis, you are armed with information that can give you an edge over your rivals.
• You can take advantage of their weaknesses and learn from their strengths.

The post A Few Approaches to Spy on Your Competition appeared first on RELEVANCE.

1. Look at all the emails you’ve received in this week alone.
2. Open your promotional or social media tabs and look at all the email alerts your email server has sorted out of your inbox for you.
3. Then hold your breath and open the spam folder (though maybe promotional and the spam filters are merged in your email provider) and look at all the people in the world who have your email address and are using it to send out whatever they feel like.

Okay, now what?

After five years of utilizing a primary email address, you can have outfitters, health food stores, political campaigns, social media platforms, colleagues, loved ones, streaming subscriptions, doctors’ offices, insurance companies, and four dozen other entities sending you hundreds of emails a week.

So with that in mind it is obvious people will be very sensitive with their time sifting through emails. So what’s the best way of making a real connection with your audience through email?

Behaving like a human being starts a beneficial chain of events that leads to healthy interactions and a healthy relationship between you and your audience; it’s all about making sure every link in that chain is handled through best practices.

PICTURED: A slice of a typical Gmail account’s promotions tab where gyms, concert venues, outfitters, and more fight like vultures for a piece of the pie.

Email acquisition

In the course of acquiring emails, of designing the first action in the email marketer-subscriber relationship, and in encouraging future email growth, it’s important to make the lead feel like their information, privacy, time, and opinions are all taken into account (which they should be whether the lead feels it or not) exactly the same way as if the action was being taken in person.

There’s nothing more repugnant than the feeling that the person you’re dealing with is just trying to get your information and, once having obtained it, immediately turns around and sells it, abuses it, or extorts it for their own gains.

Think of a situation where someone behaved this way in public, for example the old comedic portrayal of the used car salesmen, and you’ll realize it’s a bad place to find yourself as a marketer.

Aside from the fact that it is legally in your enterprise’s best interest to behave in a humane manner, it’s also likely to boost your ROI beyond unregulated automations or constant blasts.

Legal compliance laws do matter

For example if you have it in mind to do some marketing overseas, under the European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), one must “provide recipients requests for consent that are separate from commercial email messaging”.

The EU anti-spam and data protection laws are very strict. They involve more stipulations like the one mentioned above and it’s worth having any marketing team go over them to be certain you’ll not be found guilty of a 20 million euro fine… Essentially the European lead must tell you “I want you to email me”.

However, this strikes at a broader point, which is that while American law doesn’t require consent to be given, unsolicited emails will still trigger a sort of “righteous indignation,” leaving the lead saying “I never signed up for this,” or “I didn’t agree to receive these,” even though laws do not require them to.

This is not how one should start a relationship with one’s customers.

The case for consent

It may seem like an unnecessary step to add a confirmation email to your email funnels, but for several reasons, it’s a good idea.

For starters, as my colleague from Relevance details in an article he wrote on unsubscribes: “When you measure the wrong things, you produce the wrong results”. Adding people to your email list simply because you have their email address - perhaps due to them going through your checkout process, or bringing in a list from a different operation you control - is going to mean your list is filled with unknown unknowns, and known unknowns.

What I mean is you’ll never be able to tell if this or that content strategy is accurately reporting because of any number of dead-end, cold email addresses who never agreed to have anything sent to them, never had any interest in your product, or was never expecting any emails.

How can I get around this problem?

Adding a confirmation email to your signup sheet is a splendid way around this. You can make doubly sure that every email address on your list is worth your time and effort, because the lead took two steps to ensure they would hear from you. Some other benefits are:

• You avoid sending to spam traps - email addresses that were once owned but have since been converted into a place to capture unsuspecting and uncompliant marketers through their electronic solicitations.
• You meet the standard of email marketing compliance for the EU and Canada (stricter than the US) and therefore are free to market there without needing to be concerned about fines.
• You can personalize the first links in the chain to make clearer your policies for honoring unsubscribe requests, what your email list will deliver, and how you hope to have a long and prosperous e-friendship with the lead.
• Finally your reporting, statistics, and ROI tracking data will be more actionable, as lemons won’t be corrupting your data with large amounts of un-opens or bounces.

Is this all really worth my time?

Sufficient to make major publications like eData Source write about them, spam traps are a real concern for the careless, if ethical, marketer.

Pristine trips, they write, are email addresses that have never been used and are spread around by ISPs across blogs and forums in the hopes of catching an online solicitor.

This is critical because, as they continue to warn, “ISPs are now monitoring both your IP level reputation and your domain level reputation and are scoring and controlling your inboxing based on these reputations.” This can include, they say, going so far as to stop your emails from ever even reaching the subscriber if your reputation scores rise too high.

Consent not only protects you from all manner of both private and public internet policing, but also ensures that your subscribers feel like they are receiving a meaningful correspondence rather than a coupon sheet. It also gives you great content marketing opportunities.

L’offrande

Now that you have a list full of consenting subscribers, eagerly, or mildly-eagerly awaiting the offer, you can play several marketing cards. Knowing they are interested in your products or services, you can send them emails full of your products, content, and services, but with a nice little personal touch. You could…

• Make every email include personal recommendations based on the subscriber’s browsing and purchase history.
• Include offers for their birthday.
• Talk to them about what’s going on in your organization, and what cool new specials, product releases, or instore events are coming up.
• Change the template and content of every email you send to make sure they understand you’re an exciting merchant, etc. who cares about their time and interest.

Write a message concerning what you think about each product, and be honest. Write a message concerning your thoughts on each service. Take a leaf out of the book of not-for-profit content marketers and add in some outside content to beef up scientific claims, quality assurance, etc.

If asking someone to click out of your email to another website is an unsettling thought, then maybe this strategy of real person-to-person marketing isn’t for you, which is fine.

You don’t have to pursue this course, nor am I stating it is the only course. It’s just simply that – a course; an option.

Tell me more about this option

There are benefits, in that you can make a much broader case for your product or service. Consider the following example.

An email turns up in your inbox which you more or less expected that’s offering you an anti-aging moisturizer; one that’s supposed to turn back time on your skin. It’s a bold claim, but it’s a product you were considering buying. Which one would you be more likely to buy off the email copy alone?

• “Are you waking up every morning with more wrinkles, fine lines, or crow’s feet? Don’t you wish you could go back in time to your twenties when your skin had that youthful radiant glow? TURN BACK TIME! You can get FAST RESULTS, and look 20, 30, or 40 years younger! Order now for FREE SHIPPING and 35% OFF!”

Or…

• “Hi Sharron, at Get Healthy Skin Now, our flagship product is called – x – and we’ve been selling it steadily for five years. People have told us it really does work to reduce the appearance of wrinkles, and you can check out Amazon to read what they have to say. We have a 60-day money back guarantee because we also understand that everyone’s skin is different, and we don’t particularly like the idea of selling you something that doesn’t work for you”.

I can’t sit here and tell you which one of these messages is going to be more effective, because they both have their season. However #2 is probably going to appeal far more because of the agreeable, personable tone taken by the marketer.

People are generally leery of internet marketing claims and anything that will settle their nerves increases the chance they’ll convert.

At the end of the day, email marketing depends on what is being marketed, but choosing to build and encourage an amicable relationship between marketer and subscriber has a host of benefits and might allow your conscience to rest a little easier.

The post Why Behaving Like A Human Being Is Actually A Winning Strategy For Email Marketing appeared first on RELEVANCE.

Identifying who your competitors are and knowing what they are doing to keep their business on the right track is crucial for your business. It is equally important to know what strategies they are using at present and what business tactics they are likely to employ in the future to keep pace with the ever-changing market landscape and dynamics.

"Keeping track of who your competitors are, what people are saying about them, and what they are saying themselves can help you differentiate your business and stay ahead of trends that could impact your business," says Michele Levy, an independent brand strategy consultant

Ask any business consultant and they will rank competitive analysis as one of the key activities that any business must perform relentlessly. Given the easy availability of sophisticated business tools and data assimilation processes through Artificial Intelligence, competitive analysis is no longer as complicated and time-consuming as it was in the past.

By using the various resources available to them, organizations can create a structure for competitive assessment, gather pertinent information about their business rivals, and develop strategies based on the output of such research to stay ahead of the curve.

Competitive analysis is not only about understanding how your rivals are managing their business but also about knowing about the mistakes they are making so that you can avoid them proactively and save your enterprise from possible setbacks. Contrary to a school of thought, there is nothing negative about competitive analysis - it is definitely not spying or infiltrating the activity areas of your rivals.

It is simply a way of empowering your knowledge of the industry, analyzing the pros and cons of the processes, and determining how you can do fill those gaps and deliver better and more efficient results.

Key Benefits Of Doing Competitive Analysis

Helps You Understand the Market Better

Competitive research can help your organization get an accurate idea of the trends happening in the marketplace that you could have possibly missed otherwise. The ability to identify trends and predict future movements can be a huge asset for any business.

Enhances The Marketing Processes

When you introduce a product or service in the market, your customers are concerned with one key aspect - how it is going to make their life better. If they choose to buy a competitor’s brand, it obviously means that they are doing a better job of highlighting the benefits and adding value to their product/service. Competitive research can help you understand customer behaviour better and provide a closer view of your competitors’ strategies. You can tweak your approach accordingly and win over your lost customers and add newer ones.

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Helps Discover Gaps

Competitive research data can help you identify the gaps in the market, such as some potential places that no competitor has cared to serve as yet. You can cash in on the opportunity, fill the gaps, and thus explore a new market for your brand.

Creates A Plan For Your Business

When you get detailed data about competitor activities and market performance and trends, you will be able to create a powerful strategy that can serve as a roadmap for the future.

Competitive Analysis - How To Do It

These are the steps involved in a comprehensive competitive analysis:

• Know who your competitors are
• Find out the products and services they offer and know if you are in direct competition with them
• Analyze their sales and marketing strategy
• Find out if they are achieving great results with their current strategies
• Evaluate their content strategy
• Discover the level of engagement they are able to achieve with their content management
• Find out how they are promoting their marketing content
• Have a closer look at their social media strategy and the platforms they are using to market their content

When you finally decide to go for competitive analysis, you will have to make a decision about doing it on your own using the in-house team or hire the services of a professional firm or consultant. Let’s analyze both options.

The Benefits Of Hiring A Consultant

• They bring to the task their unique expertise in information gathering.
• They will have access to tools and technologies you never knew existed.
• With hundreds of such analyses under their belt, they know how to get it right in a systematic manner.

The probable downside of hiring an external consultant is that there could be compliance issues with senior managers. Articulating what you want to know might be difficult at times as there will be a vast difference in the approaches of your in-house experts and a professional researcher.

The Benefits Of Doing The Research In-House

• Since you would understand your business better and inside-out, you will know the competitive factors that require close tracking.
• You have access to a constant stream of data in real-time and the authority and convenience to generate more if needed.
• The managers are likelier to accept suggestions and recommendations from an insider than an outsider.

The downside is that doing serious research and data gathering and crunching about competitive intelligence is a specialized field. It could take months (or probably more) for you to develop an in-house team that’s as good as a consultant who specializes in this field.

Some organizations take the middle road approach by hiring the services of a consultant to initiate the project and provide updates on a quarterly basis while the in-house team handles the day-to-day tracking part.

Whatever option you exercise for your competitive analysis needs, you will have to follow a specific process involving definite steps. These are:

• Identifying your competitors
• Categorizing them
• Doing a detailed analysis of their systems and processes
• Knowing their strategies, such as market positioning and others
• Looking at their pricing policies and shipping plans
• Analyzing independent customer reviews
• Looking at their social media presence and reputation

Identifying Your Competitors

As mentioned earlier, every business has a competitor, or, in most cases, multiple competitors fighting to grab a larger share of the same market. There are many ways of identifying your top competitors. You will be able to identify your local competitors quickly, but in today’s global marketplace, you will be up against hundreds of businesses that are selling the same products and services that you are offering.

A simple online search will help you get the names of the leaders and other key players vying for the same set of audience and buyers. It is a good idea to look for the digital footprints of your competitors by analyzing the social media space, online news websites, threads and review sites, online communities, and other similar places. Cast as wide a net as possible to get the names of as many competitors as possible so that your counter-strategy can be crafted based on more extensive data.

Unveil your competitors’ marketing secrets. Just enter their website and get a customized report from SEMrush. It’s free.

Categorizing Your Competitors

When you are done with collecting names and details of a large number of competitors, the next step is to categorize them. While some of them will be in direct competition with you, others might be competing with you in an indirect manner. Categorizing your competitors will help you create a focused strategy.

The main competitors are those who are in direct competition with you, with the same or similar line of products/services and targeting the same audience/market. The other competitors could include a wider field offering a different version of products or ancillary products/services aimed at a different set of audience altogether.

Analyzing Their Systems And Processes

This step includes having a closer look at their website details, such as the manner in which they have displayed their products, product descriptions, photographs, call-to-action methods, social media positioning, and blogging strategies. The analysis can also include a close look at other commonly employed strategies, such as website optimization for mobile phones, customer support systems, approach to the display of marketing banners, brand promotion methods and frequency, etc.

Understanding Market Positioning Plans

Identifying the competitors’ market position plans can not only provide input on their tactics but can also help in their proper categorization. You will be able to know how they are positioning their products/services differently and benefitting from the strategy. Are they successful in sending home the message that they are unique? Are the customers buying this argument? The answers will help you unravel the secrets to market positioning and provide the ideas to position your brand in the best possible manner to maximize sales and profits.

Understanding The Pricing And Shipping Moves

Your brand may have great value in terms of quality and performance but if the pricing is not right, you may face a tough time in a competitive market. Knowing how your competitors are pricing a similar product can help you understand how to get your pricing right and get the consumers on your side. It is important to mention here that selling your product at a lower price than your competition does not guarantee better sales. Your buyers are looking for specific features and benefits in a product. If you provide these and more, they will be more than willing to shell out a few more dollars.

Shipping strategies also play a key role in the success of a brand. Do you know what kind of shipping policy your competitors are using? A logical shipping price can do wonders for your online sales while minimizing cart abandonment episodes. Yes, shipping costs often force customers to let go of a brand at the last point of sale. Peek into the shipping pricing plans offered by your competition and create one that can steal a march on them. Companies are using ideas such as giveaways, loyalty programs, gift cards, hefty discounts, and free exchange for an extended period to win over customers.

Analyzing Independent Customer Reviews

Are customers happy with the other brands? Independent reviews by customers about the products and services of your competitors can provide you with an accurate view of how their brands are doing. Have a look at all the places where customers are likely to post impartial reviews. These include social media channels, blog sites, online review sites, and others. Based on the downsides pointed put by customers, you can attempt to fill in the gaps and try and convert them to your brand.

If many reviews point at a high level of dissatisfaction with the competitor brand, you can move in quickly to provide the alternative they are looking for. Look for the reasons why customers are unhappy with the competitor’s brand. Is it about quality, performance, packaging, pricing, delivery, post-sales issues, or something else? You can try and get those buyers to move away from that brand and go for yours by promising to deliver an enhanced buying experience and a better product.

Looking At Their Social Media Presence And Reputation

With companies having a growing presence on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, businesses are looking for every possible chance to outshine their competitors on leading platforms. To achieve this, they need to look at the competitors' activities on these channels and take appropriate actions.

Do your competitors have a large following on these platforms? Do they have a positive view of critical areas of their business such as support, pricing, quality, and information-sharing?

The upside is that if a competitor is doing well on social media, you too can take advantage of the positive response of the customers for the niche you are targeting. You can identify the areas they are doing well in and put more effort into improving your efficiency in those areas. This can be done by having a relook at your existing strategies or choosing a different approach altogether to achieve your expected goals.

Here Are A Few Things You Should Be Focusing On:

• Overall Social Media Plan and Presence
• The SM channels they have a presence on
• Their interaction with the client base
• The frequency with which they post content on these channels
• The kind of content they are posting
• The areas of business they are highlighting

Your competitive analysis cannot be complete without a SWOT Analysis. Unless you have a closer view of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of your competitors, you cannot craft the right strategies to steer ahead of them.

Your SWOT Analysis Must Include The Following:

• The activities of your competitors in the areas of content marketing, social media marketing, product promotion, etc.
• The key areas where your competitor is having a lead on your brand
• The weak links of your competitor’s marketing strategy
• The areas where your brand has some advantages over your competitor
• The possible areas where they can do better than what they are doing now
• The opportunities in the market that your competitor has identified and you have missed

By doing this, you can ensure a better position for your company/brand. It will also help you in identifying and exploring areas for improvement of your business.

You must establish a point of reference before you start the exercise of competitive analysis. The data and other information assimilated through the process can be analyzed by marketing experts and a powerful strategy can be chalked out based on the input received from various stages of the competitive analysis.

SEMrush is one of the top market research agencies specializing in competitive analysis. With their unique and detailed approach, you can get an insight into the strategies of your competitors across several key parameters. SEMrush offers an industry specific database that can provide you all the information you need to understand what your competitors are up to. Their services are being utilized by more than 5 million users worldwide.

The post Why Competitive Research Is Important And How To Do It Right appeared first on RELEVANCE.

• Ranking for chemical-free sunscreen,
• Is not the same as ranking for chemical free sunscreens under $15

At the end of this article you should have an expertly curated keyword list to boost your e-commerce platform.

But why are keywords so important? Let’s ask Shopify, one of the most commonly used e-commerce stores, and one which likely hosts some of your own websites.

“Every time someone does a search, the search engine must decide which handful of results to display from hundreds of thousands of possible pages. It's up to the search engine algorithms to determine the best and most relevant matches for every single search. This is why it's so important to choose your keywords carefully, so that the search engines can match and display your site in the search results to the most relevant keywords searches”.

PICTURED: This chart shows a breakdown of traffic flow onto each page of a Google search result. As you can see, the returns from getting your page onto the 1^st, 2^nd, and 3^rd pages represent a king’s ransom in the overall population of searches. Image source, Shopify, Chitika.

Why is keyword research necessary for e-commerce

To answer that question let’s look over 5 different ways e-commerce platforms can generate traffic. They could…

1. Publish posts of content on social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook, or owned media platforms like blogs or podcast channels
2. Try and publish articles and content on other websites to generate a healthy distribution of backlinks
3. Take out paid media campaigns like native or banner ads, or those on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram
4. Use email marketing software to send newsletters and other broadcasts to a subscriber base
5. Put some of their products on Amazon as well, with proper links going back to the original site

There are other ways, these are only some.

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Here’s how you know SEO gives you something these methods cannot

What a proper SEO and keyword optimization strategy gives you is the ability to connect with members of your audience who don’t know you exist but that need your goods and services.

One simple reason explains this phenomenon – people who are looking for to buy a product or service you offer are looking for it.

Audience members looking at paid, shared, or owned media campaigns are not necessarily the people who are going to convert into paying customers, readers, subscribers, etc.

Someone who Googles “chemical-free sunscreens under $15” is in fact looking to buy chemical-free sunscreens under $15.

They’ve already taken a meaningful action towards converting, i.e. seeking out the product they want.

Making sure your keyword and SEO strategy get you in position to be found by these seekers, is exactly why keyword research is so important for e-commerce stores – because it allows you to access the most profitable kind of audience.

Many of the other reporting tools in SEMrush are capable of reporting on your competitors as well, and maximizing your spying efforts is easy with SEMrush.

Some things to make special note of when making a keyword strategy for e-commerce

Look for keywords that are specifically used in purchases within your niche.

For example…

• You could try and rank for “chemical free sunscreen”
• Or you can try and rank for “chemical free sunscreen under 15 dollars”

You can make attempt at this by entering this long-tail keyword into the meta-description on your store page.

The next thing you’ll want to do is get out a pen and paper and begin to keep track of which keywords produce what results. These results could include…

• Keyword difficulty
• Search volume
• Cost per click
• Competitive density
• Conversion Ratio

These are important to keep track of because certain keywords will rank higher with certain criteria, but perform worse under others. For example questions – questions are searched a lot, but usually convert very little. This is because most search engines produce answer boxes before the top ranked page which just gives you the answer to the question without requiring the searcher to actually visit the website.

PICTURED: A Google answer box to the question, “Donald trump age”.

You won’t want one of these boxes appearing when people try and search for your product, so try not to attack any keywords which produce one when entered into Google.

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With that in mind, let’s build a list and strategy!

4 Steps to building a list of e-commerce keywords

1) Your first step should be to create your seed list of keywords.

This list is the collection of keywords you hope to rank for above all others, that represent the ideal descriptions of your business as a whole or the product you want to sell as well as those which can easily be expanded to include specific tails or questions.

In order to help you genesis a seed list of keywords, it would help to understand all the different kinds of keywords.

• Question – “How to clear up acne?”
• Broad-based – “Acne medication.”
• Long-tail – “Organic acne medication for under $30 dollars ”
• Location-specific – “Dermatologist near me”
• URLs – www.acneistheworst. biz

Picking a good keyword is often about finding a keyword that someone would likely search for in all of these different scenarios.

2) Your second step should be to enlist the help of keyword planning tool

You can use one of the following keyword planning tools to come up with additional keyword ideas as well as test them in real time.

1. Google Keyword Planner has been one of the most trusted and well-known keyword analysis tools among digital marketing and SEO professionals for a long time. The main purpose of using the keyword planner tool is to access the average monthly search volume of relevant keywords. This helps you determine the profitability of your targeted keywords or key phrases. Here is a screen shot of the Google Keyword Planner dashboard.

2. Answer the Public is a question-based keyword research tool which provides a long list of prepositionally or alphabetically sorted keyword suggestions. This tool is also helpful to generate topic and content ideas. Here is a picture of me searching for the keyword “chemical-free sunscreen”.

Finally you can also just use Google searches to generate a field of possibilities. Simply type in your seed keyword, and scroll down to the bottom of the page.

PICTURED: Google automatically generates 8 possible alternatives to the keywords you entered. Try using to researching these keywords in SEMrush to see how productive they are.

Take your ideas from step one and combine them with your ideas generated in step 2

3) Your third step should be taking your list from the first two steps and researching the keywords with SEMrush.com

SEMrush is a keyword planning tool, one of several premier options available on the market today. It allows you to genesis a powerful keyword research and implementation strategy to ensure you are getting the most out of your keywords, and the largest chunk of search engine traffic you can.

Take the list you made earlier to SEMrush and research the quality of the keyword

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What can I learn from SEMrush research?

Well for example, the following slide is from the “organic research report” that you can generate for your domain at any time.

PICTURED: In the organic research report generated free of charge for Beekeepers Naturals, an organic hive products company made through Shopify, the SEO/content/marketing manager can see what keywords are being generated naturally from searches, how they are performing, where the website ranks on the organic keywords in regards to the rest of the internet, and much much more.

You can scroll down to see the various keywords and the metrics you could use for success. For example they rank 4^th for keyword “bee pollen”.

PICTURED: This is the domain overview report – similar in that you can see all kinds of important statistics about where your domain is popular, how much your paid traffic strategies are costing/contributing and more.

These are a few of the functions that help deliver the valuable data needed to create an effective keyword strategy whether your plan is a broad and inclusive one, or a narrow and specific one.

PICTURED: What you have going on in this screen capture is the keyword magic tool in action. It can help you with brainstorming keywords to try and rank for by giving you a more detailed picture of what potential your keyword has. The descending list of keywords in the slide is a list of generated suggestions which SEMrush feels might improve your ranking.

This is where you can take your keyword list to task and see what potential it has for e-commerce. You can take a seed keyword, in this instance “Bee pollen supplements” and see what people are naturally expanding and including in their searches.

4) Your final step should be taking your list that’s been curated with SEMrush, expanded and enhanced therein, and implementing it for a while and see what happens.

 In the meantime…

The other truly important advantage with SEMrush and with keyword planning tools in general is that they allow you to spy on your competitors.

How to use SEMrush for spying and reconnaissance

Why is spying on your competitors important? Your competitors are different people with different ideas, and normally, different guesses on what the best keywords are to plan for.

You both might be planning to utilize a similar set of keywords, resulting in a competition for rankings on search engines between the two of your e-commerce platforms. However, if your competitor’s strategy is a little bit more well-researched and implemented, it could mean the loss of thousands in revenue.

At the end of this chapter you’ll be the bonafide James Bond when spying on your competitors.

To best describe the impact of properly researching your competitors, imagine if you will this scenario…

• Two armies of equal size approach each other in wartime with the intent to conduct battle. Army A utilizes reconnaissance planes to scout Army B. The planes gather information on the troop strength of Army B, how many pieces of artillery they have, how they are deploying their forces, and where their formation is weakest.
• Army B has no reconnaissance aircraft, and therefore cannot divine whether Army A plans attack or defend, whether Army A has any armored vehicles, heavy munitions, or artillery pieces, and which of their flanks is most vulnerable.

In this scenario, there can be only one outcome. Army A will win as near as makes no difference, every single time these two armies meet for battle.

Spying continued…

Returning to reality, let’s look at other reasons why keyword research should always include research into your competitors and their strategies.

• Along with your personal keyword strategies, a lot of keyword research is done through looking at organic keywords like in slide 2. These represent how people are stumbling upon your platform with their own ideas. See if your competitors have any organic keywords that are doing well for them, steal them, and then see if they work for you.
• We all have different patterns of reasoning and thought, and since keywords are a bit of a lottery, as well as the capacity to be really specific, it’s important to see what other ways people are coming up with to describe your niche products and services.
• If for over the same keywords, you are unknowingly battling a much larger e-commerce platform, or a much larger number of e-commerce platforms than you thought occupied your niche, discovering so can help steer you into your own avenue of success rather than bashing your head against a brick wall trying to outperform superior competition.

Here’s how you can go about spying on your competition.

PICTURED: Here’s slide three again. In the domain overview tool, you can analyze your competitors’ domains in addition to your own. All the research you’d receive on your own keyword performance, you can gather from your opponents’ as well.

PICTURED: Here’s slide 2 again, and as you can see, the organic research report also has a function to see the organic keywords for your competitors. This way you can see how customers are finding their own ways onto your competitors’ pages and try and direct them to your own instead.

PICTURED: Finally, in this new slide, you can see SEMrush’s backlinks reporter. For novices, backlinks are links to your domain that exist on other domains. In the image, the domain in question is www.beekeepersnaturals.com and the top-ranking feeder link, also called backlinks, are found at www.articles.mercola.com and www.toronto.startups-list.com

Like the other two tools above, you can enter the domain of the competition, and see where their most productive backlinks are placed. Why would this be helpful to know?

• There is a whole field of content marketing called shared media, and it means the traffic and exposure one can accrue for their product, brand, content, or platform from spreading their content on other publications of note, like newspapers, review blogs, and e-commerce platforms like Home Depot or Amazon.

In summary, you can see where your competitors are getting published, and seek publication in the same places.

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In Conclusion

There’s a lot to gain from tools like SEMrush when trying to establish a keyword strategy for your domain’s SEO. Get creative and be patient and spy on your competitors are some good lessons to take away, especially the spying part.

The post How To Use SEMrush To Conduct The Perfect Keyword Research Your E-Commerce Store appeared first on RELEVANCE.