The post-holiday sales slump is all too real. Find out why sales slow down and how you can not only overcome the loss of revenue but also how to convince your target audiences to spend their money after perhaps over-spending during the holidays.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Ranking well in search results is not the end of the line. eCommerce brands still need to work hard to convince users to click-thru to their websites. These 5 essential structured data elements should be present on every eCommerce website and will provide social proof to the user, a better understanding of each page for search engines, and a better “curb-appeal“ for each search listing.
I’ve tried hard to implement a bold and experimental culture when it comes to marketing at Mailshake. I don’t see failure as a bad thing; it’s fear of venturing into the unknown that I want to discourage.
Basically, my philosophy is this: Try it. If it doesn’t work, change your approach or do something different. Fail fast.
We tried a lot of different marketing tactics in 2018. Most failed, a few worked well, and a few more were home runs.
That’s usually the reality of marketing. It’s also why I decided I needed to branch out and ask some of the best marketers I know to share some of their home runs in 2018.
Here’s the advice they gave me. I’m sharing it here so that you can implement these tactics for yourself in 2019.
1. Building relationships with tools in our space
Content is synonymous with digital marketing, to the point that nearly everyone is investing in it to some extent. This means standing out and getting results from content has never been harder. You need creativity, skill, and, perhaps most importantly, strategy. I learned this firsthand at Mailshake:
At the beginning of the year, we didn’t have a lot of traction in our marketing efforts, specifically around content marketing. Rather than fight that uphill battle alone, the first thing we did was make a list of all the tools in our space (SaaS for salespeople), organize them by categories (CRMs, proposal software, prospecting, etc.), and write an article featuring them. This gave us an excuse to reach out with some flattery and with a link to their site, which opened the door to other co-marketing opportunities, like guest posting, webinars, and even product partnerships. It really became the bedrock of our marketing efforts in 2018 and was a good reminder that marketing is all about relationships, both with your customers and with other marketers in your space.
You can implement something similar by strategizing and utilizing your content on multiple levels. Don’t just write an article targeting one head term and hit “publish.”
Decide who will read and benefit from the content. Include influencers, and leverage them to help distribute your content, build relationships, and open doors to other marketing opportunities.
2. Updating old content
It’s harder than ever to stand out from the competition when it comes to content, but that doesn’t mean we always have to keep creating new, better content. Sometimes we can actually get great results by revisiting and updating old content.
“One marketing tactic that we saw the biggest results from was simply giving lift to older content. We connected Google Analytics and Screaming Frog, and after crawling the website, we were able to organize the spreadsheet and drill down on blog posts that haven’t been viewed in 3+ years. Then, we sorted them by topic and after reviewing each blog post we’d decide whether it was best to just trash it, merge it with another post or update it with new content, imagery and a fresh title. This strategy is something we work on a little bit each month, because it does take time. However, this allows you to focus more on the evergreen content vs. sharing short-lived blog posts. For example, we’ve updated this blog post on duplicate content checkers over the years, and it continues to be a top performer for us!” – Amber Ooley, Thrive Agency
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Want to implement the same? Grab a list of all your content using a website crawler that can be connected to Google Analytics so you can also gather traffic data, like Screaming Frog or Sitebulb.
Check each URL (by hand), and then decide whether the content should be:
Combined with another post (advisable when you have multiple similar posts that are potentially competing with each other)
Optimized and updated
Ditched altogether
Bear in mind that if you’ve got a long history of content creation, this process won’t be easy, and it will be time-consuming. Be prepared to spread it out over many months if necessary.
3. Using SMS Chat
In many cases, live chat is the platform of choice for customers looking to communicate with a company they do (or are considering doing) business with.
Specifically, 30% of customers expect websites to offer a live chat option. For customers on mobile devices, that percentage climbs as high as 62%.
It’s clear that live chat is an asset, but some companies have seen even better results by taking their chat offline.
“Our best acquisition tactic was actually using our own tool. This past year we created an SMS Chat widget. On desktop, it looks like a live chat. The difference is that messages come in as texts and replies go as texts to the user’s cell phone. This way prospects don’t have to stay on our website to continue the conversation. We have several channels for bringing in traffic, and they all produce leads, but SMS Chat has boosted our sales conversions significantly. We get a lead, we text them back ASAP, and they love it. SMS Chat works on mobile sites, too. Viewers just click a button to start a text.” – Kenneth Burke, Director of Marketing Text Request
Implementing this yourself is relatively simple. Add an upgraded live chat service to your website that encourages visitors to input their phone number and asks their permission for you to text them.
Once the conversation has moved away from your website, you’re in a stronger position to keep it flowing, follow up, and convert more leads into sales.
4. Forming linkbuilding partnerships
There’s so much to be gained from looking at the search results, but most of us aren’t paying them nearly enough attention. Do some digging. You’ll learn who your true competitors are and get new ideas that will help you outrank them and gain more of the clickshare.
Depending on the keywords you search for, you can also discover valuable potential link partners, which can land you a position in the top 10 for high-traffic terms that are too competitive for your own site to claim.
“For us at LiveAgent, the best marketing tactic was to look for top money keywords via an SEO tool, in our case words like “Live Chat Software,” and look for all the variants and who was included in first top 10 results. Then, we pitched all the portals and tried to get a link or partnership going. Whether it was a review portal, blog, or magazine, the exposure led to both traffic increase and improvement in rankings.” – Matej Kukucka, Senior Growth Marketer, Live Agent
To implement this in your marketing strategy for 2019, pick your top money keywords, and, using either a tool or manual search, look at which sites and what content ranks in the top 10 for those terms.
Where appropriate (i.e., when the site isn’t a competitor), approach them with the goal of getting some of your own content onto those sites. If you succeed, you can still appear in the top 10 via a third-party site (even when your own site can’t break onto page one of Google for your top money keywords).
5. Hosting highly-focused webinars
Depending on the topic (and their quality), webinars can be an invaluable onboarding tool for new customers. They can also help with customer acquisition and retention.
“We really invested in webinars in 2018, and as a result they became one of our biggest lead drivers. One of the things that we’ve really noticed is that the more focused a webinar, the better turnout we have. We work with dental practices so topics such as HIPAA, PPOs, and proper phone skills really get a great response. Viewers are engaged during these presentations and stick around for the full hour so they can take part in a Q&A. They finally have somebody at their disposal to answer complex questions that affect their day-to-day!” – Jonathan Bass, Content Marketing Manager, RevenueWell
Thinking about leveraging webinars for the first time in 2019? To start you’ll need a platform to host them on.
You’ll also need to learn how to host a webinar that engages viewers and achieves its aims. And last but not least, you’ll need to promote your webinar so the right people know about it, and actually turn up when you want them to.
6. Leveraging video through guest blogging
We’re viewing more video online than ever before. In fact, one third of online activity is spent watching video.
If you’re not part of this ever-growing trend, there’s a good chance you’re missing out on the opportunity to engage with your existing customers, as well as potential new ones.
“Our best marketing strategy in 2018 would be video marketing through YouTube. Hands down. With little investment and time spent, we focused on inbound strategies like showcasing our video quality through guest blogging and capitalized on our clients’ positive word-of-mouth to drive more people to see our content on the platform. This way, we managed to bring in over 4K new subscribers and 668K new views to our channel in 2018. An 81% and 89% increase, respectively, from our 2017 numbers.” – Victor Blasco, CEO of Yum Yum Videos
Ready to experiment with video marketing? Lucky for you, it’s never been easier to get started. You just need a halfway-decent smartphone, a bit of charisma, and some basic editing skills (or a willingness to learn them). It also helps to learn a little about YouTube optimization.
7. Developing persona-based ebook marketing
Today, written content doesn’t have to be good, or even great, to stand out. It has to be awesome. One way to start producing content that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what your competition is creating is to look beyond long-form blog content and write ebooks.
“At the beginning of the year, our content library consisted of a couple generic ebooks about branding and design. And while they performed well, we weren’t really getting the lead quality we wanted. We wanted to reach out to new audiences, and that required us to dive in and truly understand what mattered to them. Now, our library has grown to 10 ebooks that speak to various industries, such as franchises and real estate, about the challenges and opportunities most important to them.
For example, we published an ebook for marketing leaders at colleges and universities titled “Branding in student recruitment.” Before writing the ebook, we didn’t know much about student recruitment, but the research process helped us get up close and personal with a challenge our clients deal with intimately. Hearing about their experiences gave us a much fuller picture of their day-to-day concerns – and how our platform could help them succeed. That ebook was our most popular one this year, driving hundreds of leads via LinkedIn ads, email nurturing, and blog promotion. As a result, we’ve closed more higher ed clients this year than any other, showing the value of a team-wide coordinated campaign that puts your audience’s unique challenges front and center.” – Karla Renee, Lucidpress
As with all content formats, there are countless people producing average (or less than average) ebooks.
To get results like Renee’s, you need to be much more than average. You need to be producing ebooks that are interesting, professionally written, and targeted at a specific audience – all while bringing something new to the table.
If you can achieve all that, getting into ebooks in 2019 could mean big things for your brand and your business.
8. Optimizing blog content
Writing great, unique, insightful blog content is a start, but for best results you need to be paying close attention to how you’re optimizing that content, too.
“We optimized our website for conversions. We were driving a lot of traffic to our site and had solid organic search engine rankings, but that traffic wasn’t sticking and interacting with our site. We had a lot of great content in the form of white papers, ebooks, case studies, and webinars. Our mission was to pull that content forward and drive interaction through downloads. We looked at our top entry pages and developed specific calls to action on those pages. We looked at the keywords driving traffic to those pages and matched content and CTAs to those keywords. We included the CTA in several places on the page, including links towards the top of the page, bottom CTA image, and a slide-in pop-up that appeared after the user scrolled a third of the way down the page. Here’s an example from one of our most popular blog posts: 21 Powerful, Open Ended Sales Questions. The results have been outstanding. We’ve more than doubled the conversion rate across our site, and inbound opportunities from organic search have grown by 32%.” – Erica Stritch, VP of Marketing at RAIN Group
Want to level up your content optimization in 2019?
Blog post optimization typically starts with long-tail keyword tools like KWFinder and LongTailPro, but it doesn’t need to end there. Try optimizing your content for conversions, too. Be heavier-handed with how you utilize CTAs, and, where appropriate, let keywords that drive traffic to your content influence how you phrase your CTAs.
9. Testing non-traditional social media
When you think “social media,” odds are sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram come to mind – but there is so much more to social media than these “traditional” platforms.
“In 2018, we focused more on non-traditional social media sites, such as Quora and Reddit, to try our outreach tactics and saw a great ROI. Those sites are categorized to be more specific, and they helped us reach our target audience more efficiently than general sites, such as Twitter and Facebook.
It served as a public relations type of function. Earned media and engagement rather than paid. We gave advice to people looking for software solutions that would drive them to our site and also create more brand recognition. We found these people based on specific subreddits they belonged to and/or posts they had made. It takes more time than using an automated response, but having a chance to interact with such a niche target audience group in a more personal way improved our ROI in a very valuable way.” – Mackenzie Jones, TechnologyAdvice
Want to widen your social reach beyond Facebook and Twitter?
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Look at leveraging more community-based platforms, like Reddit and Quora, as well as industry or subject-specific forums.
10. Prioritizing User Experience on the blog
Today’s consumers have high expectations when it comes to online experience. If your site’s not up to scratch, you can be sure you’re not getting the results you could be.
“We doubled down on user experience this year. Focusing on improving our user experience has been incredibly useful in our SEO strategy in 2018 and helped us to triple our traffic as we placed a larger emphasis on the experience of our users, especially mobile users on the site.
We redesigned our theme to make it faster and more usable, keeping mobile users in mind. We focused a lot on performance and reduced our page load speed by 300% as a large drop-off of users were due to a large page size.
Using user data, we are also able to track where in a blog post were the majority of people dropping off and modified the content to have a CTA around that point.” – Jeremy Noronha, SEO Manager, Foundr Magazine
Ready to make UX a bigger priority in 2019?
Pay more attention to how visitors use your site. Look at the pages they drop off on and ask why. It might simply be that you’ve successfully answered their query, but there might also be a problem with the page, or the site in general.
Tools like Hotjar and VwO show how people interact with your site so it’s easier for you to identify issues that are causing visitors to leave and losing you sales.
11. Including CTAs on our top-performing blog posts
Well-written and optimized blog content is great for getting people to your site, but what then?
“Halfway through the year, we noticed that five of our top-performing blog posts made up 80% of our organic blog traffic. We decided to add two CTAs to each of these blog posts to see if we could convert any of this traffic. We used Sumo to design the CTAs, and we A/B tested different CTAs and found what worked best. We now generate daily sales from the visitors to the top five blog posts on our site thanks to our CTAs.” – David Campbell, Marketing Strategist, Right Inbox
Want to get more sales from your content, too?
When someone lands on your site via a blog post, odds are they’ll get the information they need, and leave. This is what we want to stop. While you’ll never “save” every visitor, you can make a big difference to the value your content delivers by being more aggressive with your CTAs.
Include CTAs within your content and alongside it. Don’t be afraid of exit pop-ups, either – after all, if that visitor was already leaving, what do you have to lose?
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So what now?
Remember, when it comes to marketing, there is no one-size-fits-all. There are too many variables to ever say “do x and you’ll get y result.” To get the best results, you need to always be experimenting.
If you’ve got any other ideas for marketing strategies to try out in 2019, I’d love to hear them. Just leave a comment below!
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
The rise of digital marketing, online reviews, and smarter search engines have combined to create a highly competitive environment for all businesses and professions, and legal services are not an exception. Here are six detailed SEO strategies for attorneys to raise the bar on their search visibility and capture qualified clients.
It’s that time of year again! Ugly sweaters abound. The eggnog is flowin’. That cousin you marginally know who lives in the woods and calls himself Wild Mike wants to talk about his hemi F-250. What are you going to do?
Slip off into the other room, curl up by fire, and reflect on the nine biggest online advertising stories of the year.
2018 was one hell of a ride. From major re-brands to data scandals to targeting cutbacks—let’s dig into the headlines that made waves this year.
1. Exact Match Gets Less Exact (Again).
In the good old days of AdWords lore, exact match was just that—it was exact. If you bid on exact match keywords, your ads would only deliver when prospects searched for those exact keywords. But Google has changed the definition of exact match in recent years to include misspellings, plurals, prepositions, conjunctions, and even out-of-order phrases. This year, Google announced that, yet again, exact match keywords would match to even more keyword variants. These could include synonyms, paraphrases, and any results that share implied intent. So, for example, if you’re bidding on the exact match keyword [yosemite camping], the queries yosemite national park ca camping, yosemite campground, and campsites in yosemite will also now trigger your ads.
Not ideal, right? Actually, not as bad as you might think!
WordStream clients saw an increase in click-through rates and conversion rates at a lower cost-per-click after the exact match changes took place. Something to keep an eye on in your own account!
2. Google AdWords Rebrands to Google Ads
Far and away the biggest news to online advertisers this year (and to SEOs generating organic traffic from AdWords-related keywords) was Google’s grand rebrand of Google AdWords to Google Ads.
The new Google Marketing Platform, Google Ads, and Google Ad Manager.
The change was more than an aesthetic one, though. Per Google, Google Ads “represents the full range of advertising capabilities [Google] offers today… to help marketers connect with the billions of people finding answers on Search, watching videos on YouTube, exploring new places on Google Maps, discovering apps on Google Play, browsing content across the web, and more.” And indeed, “Google Ads” better befits that extensive suite of advertising networks than the search-synonymous “AdWords.”
Google Marketing Platform, which integrates the old Doubleclick and Analytics 360 platforms, marries ad creative and analytics in a single location, making it easier for enterprise marketers and agencies alike to “plan, buy, measure, and optimize digital media and customer experiences in one place.”
The new Google Ads is more holistic and more simplistic than AdWords ever was and has shifted the focus of search advertisers toward audience creation, not just keyword strategy. “AdWords” as a concept isn’t exactly dead, though—even the most expert among us still forget the name change from time to time, and when people go to Search for Google Ads-related advice and services, they’re still searching, for the most part, for AdWords-related terms.
3. Responsive Search Ads Hit the SERP
Thanks in large part to machine learning, A/B testing got a heck of a lot easier this year. Responsive Search Ads is Google newest, largest, and most flexible search ad format. RSAs allow advertisers to write up to 15 different headlines and up to four different descriptions—which, collectively, can be arranged in 43,680 different permutations. That’s a ton of ad testing possibilities!
Google then automatically tests different combinations of your search ad copy and, over time, uses machine learning to determine which combinations perform best. Then it serves those combinations to prospects, taking into account the keyword they search for, their device, their past browsing behavior, and a whole host of other signals.
Google’s new Responsive Search Ads can show up to three 30-character headlines, a display URL with two 15-character path fields, and up to two 90-character description fields. That amounts to one more deadline, one more description, and 10 more characters of description text than an expanded text ad. Or, in simpler terms, way more SERP real estate!
4. Expanded Text Ads Expand…Again
The OG expanded text ads were a revelation—search ads grew by 50%, which resulted in a very friendly 20% boost in click-through rate. This August, Google made search advertisers everywhere quite happy by expanding text ads yet again.
The OG expanded text ads contained two 30-character headlines and one 80-character description (imagine we had to work with less than that at one point?!); the NEW expanded text ads contain three 30-character headlines and two 90-character descriptions—effectively taking a cue from Google’s RSA specs. Unlike RSAs, though, the new expanded text ads give advertisers complete control over what copy you’re showing prospects. No automated spacing. Just more SERP real estate.
5. Google Smart Campaigns Arrive for Small Business Advertisers
One of the driving forces behind the AdWords-to-Google Ads rebrand was the desire to make advertising on Google simpler and more intuitive—and Smart Campaigns are tailor-made for that purpose.
Google’s new default ad experience, Smart Campaigns were created to make the new Google Ads a friendlier place for small business owners—advertisers who just want to get set up, get ads live, and get traffic and conversions with as little hassle as possible. Google estimates that Smart Campaigns are three times better at getting your ad in front of the right audience.
Set up is as simple as creating an ad, setting a budget, describing your business’s product and/or service, and kicking your feet back. Smart campaigns are certainly an appealing option for small business owners just trying to get in the market, but advertisers with larger budgets will most likely continue to enjoy having more control over their ad spend.
6. Google Shopping Gets Smart
Google decided to double down on its new “smart” suite by announcing Smart Shopping at Google Marketing Live. Smart Shopping applies the same hands-off ethos of Smart Campaigns to the shopping network.
Once again, the change is all about machine learning and automation. When using Smart Shopping, advertisers merely enter their campaign objective and their budget and Smart Shopping takes care of the rest with automated bidding and ad placements. It does this by pulling product creative from the existing product feed in your Merchant Center account, then serving the most relevant combinations of the creative therein to prospects across Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail. The optimization process takes about 15 days, and Google reports that advertisers who use Smart Shopping campaigns drive over 20% more conversion value at a similar cost.
And, to go with the theme of simplicity, Smart Shopping combines your display remarketing and the old standard shopping campaigns—so you no longer need to manage those campaigns separately.
7. Stories Are Here to Stay
One of the biggest trends on the social side of things going into 2018 was Stories, and as the year went along, it became clear that this trend was more than a trend. Facebook execs on stage at F8 made bold claims portending that the usage rate of Stories would soon overtake that of the News Feed; and in the latter half of the year we saw multiple announcements about the monetization of Stories—most notably that Instagram Story Ads and Facebook Story Ads had either dropped or would drop imminently and that shopping had come to both.
Here’s Mark Zuckerberg talking about the importance of getting Stories right in Facebook’s Q1 earnings call:
“One of the interesting opportunities and challenges over the coming years will be making sure that ads are as good in Stories as they are in feeds. If we don’t do this well, then as more sharing shifts to Stories, that could hurt our business.”
Part of the shift toward Stories has to do with the more overarching proliferation of mobile browsing. Companies want to create the kind of full-screen, vertical browsing formats that cater to mobile users—think Instagram TV, which also dropped this year—and the increased usage of Stories on both Facebook and Instagram shows that mobile users appreciate the innovation.
8. A Year for Data Breaches & Regulations
If you heard the saying “a cookieless world” in 2017, you’d be forgiven for chuckling at how silly and whimsical it sounded. But in 2018, cookies became next-level nefarious to the average user. It all started with Cambridge Analytica, a political data firm that (it came out this year) accessed the private information of over 50 million Facebook users, then used that data to influence an election. From that monstrous breach came monstrous regulations—specifically, GDPR.
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) affected both Facebook and Google Ads advertisers in what’s being called the most important change in data privacy regulation in the last 20 years. Remember that flood of emails you got somewhere around Q3 from a bunch of subscription software companies informing you about their updated security policies? That was GDPR.
The most fundamental change GDPR levied was mandating that companies start asking users for their permission to use cookie-based tracking. This affected Facebook Custom Audiences, RLSAs, and more.
On a similar, albeit less significant note—in October, a data breach at Google compromised the private information of around 500,000 people (not 50 million people, but not no people, either) and forced them to sunset their much-beleaguered attempt at a social platform, Google Plus. Shout out to hackers for the standout performance of the year!
9. Organic SERP Gets Multiple Makeovers
This spring was a season for SERP changes, and Google had SEOs reeling from the tomfoolery. In March, Google released Zero Search Results, a SERP experiment in which they offered…zero search results.
Well, actually, one result, to be more exact. Google eliminates multiple search results for queries that, theoretically, didn’t need them. So if you were coming back from a trip to the West Coast and were wondering what time it was back on the East Coast, you would search “time est” and see this:
Not the worst idea, but as it turns out not too traffic-friendly to the pages that used to be in the index—especially when it turned out that Google still had some work to do when it came to determining which queries only required one result. It lasted about a week; back to the drawing board for now.
Next came More Results.
Google replaced the option, on mobile, to click to the next page of the SERP with the option to merely expand (or elongate) page one. This experiment experienced a bit more longevity—it’s still live today!
And to All a Goodnight!
If you’re looking for a theme here, it’s this (or these): simplicity, cleanliness of data, machine automation, intent-based understanding. Those aren’t just buzzwords—there’s a real shift taking place among the big players—Google, Facebook, Instagram, Bing (kinda)—to understand what users want, and to provide it in an immediate and unfettered manner. Some semblance of control on the user’s behalf is naturally lost in the process; but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Depending on whether or not you want online browsing to continue to get “easier” and more “intuitive,” it might just be a good thing.
Whatever the case: Happy 2019 to all from the WordStream team! Keep on optimizing.
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
![[SPECIAL EDITION] Google News Digest: The Biggest Headlines of 2018](https://cdn.semrush.com/blog/static/media/22/81/2281ab93e0ee8823b4ed78bd6dd9aae3/google-digest-01.png)
Throughout the year, we’ve been reviewing all the biggest Google news to bring you the latest and most impactful information on search, ads and some other Google-related tools and projects. And now it’s time to take stock.