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7 Google Analytics Reports That Show How Your Blog is Really Performing

Posted on 07/09/2019

When you log into Google Analytics, what do you look at?

Chances are you see something like the image above that shows you how many people are currently on your blog.

Well, that was easy to guess because that’s the report Google Analytics gives you once you log in. 😉

But which reports do you look at on a regular basis?

I bet you look at two main reports…

The “Audience Overview” report and the “Acquisition Overview” report.

Sure, every once in a while, you may dive into your top pages or the specific organic keywords that drive your traffic. But even if you do that, what are you actually doing with the data?

Nothing, right?

Don’t beat yourself up over it because most content marketers just look at reports and numbers and do little to nothing with the data.

If you want to figure out how to grow your blog and, more importantly, your revenue from your blog, there are 7 reports that you need to start looking at on a regular basis.

Here they are and here is how you use them…

Report #1: Cohort Analysis

What do you think is easier to accomplish… get new visitors to your blog or getting your visitors to come back?

It’s easier to get people to come back to your blog, yet everyone focuses on new visitors.

I bet less than 99% of your blog readers turn into customers or revenue, so why not focus on getting those people back and eventually converting them?

Before we get into how to get people back to your blog, let’s look at how many people are returning to your blog.

Within the Google Analytics navigation, click on “Audience” and then “Cohort Analysis”.

Once you land on that report, you’ll see a graph that looks similar to this:

Under the “Cohort Size” drop-down menu, select “by week”. Under “Date Range”, select “Last 12 weeks”.

Once the data loads, you’ll see a table that looks something like this:

What this table shows is the percentage of your visitors that come back each week.

On the very left it will always show 100%. Then in the columns to the right, you’ll see week 1, week 2, week 3, etc.

This shows the percentage of people who come back to your blog each and every week after their first visit.

For example, if this week you had 100 people visit your blog and in the week 1 column, it shows 17%. That means of the initial 100 people, 17 came back. Under week 2 if you see 8%, that means of the initial 100 people, 8 people came back in week 2.

Naturally, this number will keep getting smaller, but the goal is to get people back as often as possible. That increases trust, social shares, potential people linking to you, and it even increases the odds that the visitor will convert into a customer.

The average blog reader needs to come back 3.15 times before they turn into a customer. That means that you need to retain readers.

Just think of it this way: If you get thousands of new people to your blog each and every single day but none of them ever come back, what do you think is going to happen to your sales?

Chances are, not much.

You need to look at your Cohort Report and continually try to improve the numbers and get people coming back.

So the real question is, how do you get people to come back?

There are 2 simple ways you can do this:

Start collecting emails – through free tools like Hello Bar, you can turn your blog readers into email subscribers. Then as you publish more content, you can send an email blast and get people back to your blog.
Push notifications – by using tools like Subscribers, people can subscribe to your blog through their browser. Then every time you release a new blog post, you can send out a push and people will come back to your blog.

These 2 strategies are simple and they work. Just look at how many people I continually get back to my blog through emails and push notifications.

Report #2: Benchmarking

Ever wonder how you are doing compared to your competition?

Sure, you can use tools like Ubersuggest, type in your competitors URL, and see all of the search terms they are generating traffic from.

But what if you want more? Such as knowing what percentage of traffic your competitors are getting from each channel. What’s your bounce rate, average session duration, or even pageviews per channel?

Within Google Analytics navigation, click on “Audiences” then “Benchmarking” then “Channels”.

Once you do that, you’ll see a report that looks like the one above.

Although you won’t have specific data on a competing URL, Google Analytics will show you how you stack up to everyone else within your industry.

I love this report because it shows you where to focus your time.

If all of your competitors get way more social traffic or email traffic, it means that’s probably the lowest hanging fruit for you to go after.

On the flipside, if you have 10 times more search traffic than your competition, you’ll want to focus your efforts on where you are losing as that is what’ll probably drive your biggest gains.

The other reason you’ll want to look at the Benchmarking Report is that marketers tend to focus their efforts on channels that drive the most financial gain.

So, if all of your competition is generating the majority of their traffic from a specific channel, you can bet that channel is probably responsible for a good portion of their revenue, which means you should focus on it too.

Report #3: Location, location, location

Have you noticed that my blog is available in a handful of languages?

Well, there is a reason for that.

I continually look at the location report. To get to it, click on “Audience” then “Geo” and then “Location”.

This report will tell you where the biggest growth opportunities are for your blog.

Now with your blog, you’ll naturally see the most popular countries being the ones where their primary language is the one you use on your blog.

For example, if you write in English, then countries like the United Kingdom and the United States will be some of your top countries.

What I want you to do with this report is look at the countries that are growing in popularity but the majority of their population speak a different language than what you are blogging on.

For me, Brazil was one of those countries. Eventually, I translated my content into Portuguese and now Brazil is the second most popular region where I get traffic from.

This strategy has helped me get from 1 million visitors a month to over 4 million. If you want step-by-step instructions on how to expand your blog content internationally, follow this guide.

Report #4: Assisted conversions

Have you heard marketers talk about how blog readers don’t convert into customers?

It’s actually the opposite.

Those visitors may not directly convert into a customer, but over time they will.

But hey, if you have a boss or you are spending your own money on content marketing, you’re not going to trust some stats and charts that you can read around the web. Especially if they only talk about long-term returns when you are spending money today.

You want hard facts. In other words, if you can’t experience it yourself, you won’t believe it.

That’s why I love the Assisted Conversions Report in Google Analytics.

In the navigation bar click on “Conversions” then “Multi-Channel Funnels” and then “Assisted Conversions”.

It’ll load up a report that looks like this:

This report shows you all of the channels that help drive conversions. They weren’t the final channel in which someone came from but they did visit your blog from one of these channels.

In other words, if they didn’t visit or even find your blog from one of these sources, they may not have converted at all.

Now when your boss asks you if content marketing is worth it, you can show the Assisted Conversions Report to show how much revenue your blog helps drive.

The other beautiful part about this report is that it tells you where to focus your marketing efforts. You want to focus your efforts on all channels that drive conversions, both first and last touch.

Report #5: Users flow

What’s the number one action you want your blog readers to take?

I learned this concept from Facebook. One of the ways they grew so fast is they figured out the most important action that they want people to take and then they focused most of their efforts on that.

For you, it could be someone buying a product.

For me, it’s collecting a lead and that starts with a URL.

But I found that people interact with my blog differently based on the country they are coming from.

In other words, if I show the same page to a United States visitor and from someone in India or even the United Kingdom, they interact differently.

How did I figure that out?

I ran some heatmap tests, but, beyond that, I used the Users Flow Report in Google Analytics.

In your navigation click on “Audience” and then “Users Flow”.

Within the report, it will break down how people from each country interact with your blog and the flow they take.

I then used it to adjust certain pages on my blog. For example, here is the homepage that people in the United States see:

And here is the homepage that people from the United Kingdom see:

The United Kingdom homepage is much shorter and doesn’t contain as much content and that’s helped me improve my conversions there.

And of course, in the United States, my audience prefers something else, hence the homepages are different.

The Users Flow Report is a great way to see how you should adjust your site based on each geographical region.

Report #6: Device overlap

Blog content can be read anywhere and on any device. From desktop devices to tablets to even mobile phones.

The way you know you have a loyal audience isn’t just by seeing how many of your readers continually come back, but how often are they reading your blog from multiple devices.

For example, you ideally want people to read your blog from their iPhone and laptop.

The more ways you can get people to consume your content, the stronger brand loyalty you’ll build, which will increase conversion.

Within the navigation, click on “Audience” then “Cross Device” and then “Device Overlap”.

I’m in the B2B sector so my mobile traffic isn’t as high as most industries but it is climbing over time.

And what I’ve been doing is continually improving my mobile load times as well as my mobile experience to improve my adoption rates.

I’m also working on a mobile app.

By doing all of these things, people can consume content from NeilPatel.com anywhere, which builds stickiness, brand loyalty, and then causes more assisted conversions.

A good rule of thumb is if you can get the overlap to be over 6%, you’ll have a very sticky audience that is much easier to convert.

That’s at least what I can see with all of the Google Analytics accounts I have access to.

Report #7: User Explorer

To really understand what makes your blog readers ticket, you need to get inside their mind and figure out what their goals are and how you can help them achieve each of those goals.

A great way to do this is through the User Explorer Report.

Click on “Audience” and then “User Explorer”. You’ll see a screen that looks like this:

This shows you every user who visits your site and what they did. You can click on a client id to drill down and see what actions each user performed on your blog.

From there, you can click on a time to see exactly what they did each time they visited:

What I like to do with this report is to see how the most popular users engage with my blog. What are they reading? What pages are they spending the majority of their time on? What makes them continually come back? How did they first learn about my blog?

By comparing the most popular blog readers with the least popular, I am typically able to find patterns. For example, my most loyal blog readers typically find my site through organic traffic and then subscribe to my email list.

Then they keep coming back, but the key is to get them to opt into my email list.

That’s why I am so aggressive with my email captures. I know some people don’t like it, but I’ve found it to work well.

So I focus a lot of my efforts on building up my organic traffic over referral traffic and then collecting emails.

Look at the patterns that get your most popular users to keep coming back and then adjust your blog flow so that you can create that pattern more often.

Conclusion

Yes, you should look at your visitor count. But staring at that number doesn’t do much.

The 7 reports I describe above, on the other hand, will help you boost your brand loyalty, your repeat visits, and your revenue.

I know it can be overwhelming, so that’s why I tried to keep it to just 7 reports. And if you can continually improve your numbers in each of those reports, your blog will continually grow and eventually thrive.

So what Google Analytics reports do you look at on a regular basis?

The post 7 Google Analytics Reports That Show How Your Blog is Really Performing appeared first on Neil Patel.

How to Work with Affiliates to Boost Your SEO

Posted on 06/18/2019

For merchants in the e-commerce space, having great Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can make or break your profit margins. After all, you have to get traffic to your site and product pages no matter what, and there are only two ways to achieve this: either you pay for it (ie. Google AdWords) or you get it for free, which entails doing SEO well. In the long run, great SEO will return months, if not years, of unpaid traffic which will free up more budget for other aspects of your business.

Of course, achieving great SEO is easier said than done, and there are many (many!) posts across the internet to help boost your rankings in various ways. But one thing a lot of these write-ups miss is how affiliate marketing can help with your SEO. We always like to say that working with affiliate reps is an effective way to outsource your marketing team, and there are ways to work with your reps specifically on SEO-related activities. Here are 4 ways to work with your affiliates to boost your e-commerce SEO.

1. Create authoritative, evergreen content.

Generating content is just table stakes for any e-commerce business, especially ones that have an affiliate marketing channel. If your blog posts or images or videos are dull and uninformative, even if affiliates share it, it won’t get any traction. Content is still king, and good SEO always starts here. If you do nothing else to boost your SEO, at least create good content.

Specifically, create authoritative and evergreen content. Let’s break these two adjectives down:

Authoritative content means it comes from an expert. For us, we’re experts at all aspects of affiliate marketing (eg. our guide to getting affiliates via Instagram). But that’s a given. A more practical approach is to think about it this way: it’s information you can’t get anywhere else, usually because you generated it yourself. For example, if you mine your client data and come up with industry benchmarks, that is useful and unique information. It’s inherently authoritative and sure to garner attention, and better yet, links.

Evergreen content means it will still be relevant years from now. This is tough since the pace of technology and the internet runs so fast, but it’s also industry specific. A comprehensive guide on SEO might need to be updated every year, but a guide to identifying trees will probably last forever. Think about content in your niche that can last, and they will pay dividends as they continue to bring in more links, and traffic, that will boost your SEO score year over year.

2. Generate important backlinks to your product pages.

Here’s a crazy stat: according to ahrefs.com, a whopping 91% of content on the internet gets no traffic from Google. Not a single visitor! And they surveyed about a billion web pages. One of the main reasons?

That’s right, over half the pages that didn’t get any traffic had zero links pointed at them. We’ve known for decades now how important backlinks are to getting traffic to your site, but now we know that not having them can be a death sentence for your product pages.

Building a stable of high-quality backlinks might be the most helpful SEO boost that your affiliate reps can produce. And the beauty is that it’s built right into what affiliate marketing is: they have to link back to the products that they are marketing on your behalf. And each one of those links not only directs traffic to that page on your site, but adds to the overall authority of your website (more links generally equate to higher authority) which means a higher ranking on Google’s search results page.

A few tips on making the most out of these backlinks from your affiliate reps:

Make sure that the anchor text they use is descriptive. Instead of making the text a generic “click here,” urge your reps to link back to your pages with significant keywords. “Highly rated and recommended iPhone cases” is the type of phrase that should be underlined in blue.
Dissuade links from “low quality” origins. Not all links are created equal. Make sure your reps are linking to you from within well-written and compelling content and not, say, from the comments section of some random blog. If they want to link from these “low quality” places because they might be good for conversions, ask them to use no-follow links that won’t ding your site:

Utilize Google Search Console to manage your links.

Logging into your Google Search Console will provide an easy way to check out which sites are sending you the most backlinks and the top linking text that’s associated with this traffic. It’s a great, free way to keep tabs on the state of your backlinks.

3. Social media’s correlation with, or causation of, SEO boosts.

Google doesn’t disclose what goes into their special sauce of how they rank websites on their search results page. Sure, we know the broad strokes of what matters for SEO, and we might even know the smaller details. But we don’t really know everything, especially how much certain aspects are weighted against each other.

The impact of social media likes and shares is one of those hotly contested aspects in SEO circles. Ostensibly, we all know that lots of social media activity is correlated with a boost in rank. But many experts argue that this increase is a side effect of simply having more backlinks when content is shared hundreds or thousands of times over. Then again, Hootsuite conducted a quite thorough investigation of their own and concluded that social media activity alone is enough to boost rank, regardless of backlinks (the entire post is quite fascinating if you’re into this sort of thing). But then again, Google’s official stance is that no, it doesn’t.

We’re not here to resolve this debate. But one thing is clear: leveraging social media can only benefit your SEO, regardless of whether it’s correlation or causation. And to that end, working with your affiliate reps to leverage their individual social networks will seriously impact your SEO and ranking. Some tips in this effort:

Encourage your affiliates to create great content. Not only should you lead by example and create content to be shared, you should always allocate some time and effort to assist your reps in creating amazing content that features your product or service. Once they do, make sure you ask them to use your hashtag, tag your business, list you in their YouTube video/channel keywords, and add a linkback in the post description.
Go on their podcast or vlog. Many social media Influencers may be reluctant to inorganically talk about or link to your products. Even before you establish a partnership relationship with them, ask to appear on their podcast and/or vlog to discuss a subject that would engage their followers. It’s a more organic way to have a reason to link back to your site as well as increase brand recognition.
Encourage resharing/reposting. A good piece of content shouldn’t be a one-and-done situation. After all, a post today will only reach a fraction of any affiliate rep’s social circle. Remind them of, or help them schedule out, resharing and reposting. Today, three days, a week, a month, 3 months, 6 months, a year.

4. Dominate the top of Google (and voice search).

It’s tough for a single company to own the top spots on Google’s search results page for a given query (that’s not their own brand name), but it can be done much easier if you tag-team the effort with your high profile affiliate reps. Here’s an example of what we mean:

A search for “red cellphone battery cases” resulted in links for Mophie, Mophie on Amazon, and Mophie on eBay. That’s some excellent SEO done by Mophie’s team; they own 3 out of the 4 top spots not with their own domain, but with the assistance of others.

Likewise, optimize around the keyword phrase of your choice and work with your affiliates with high-profile sites to create content that will similarly own the top spots. You can’t copy and paste a blog post, since Google abhors duplicate content, but similarly authoritative and evergreen posts can help.

And another benefit of this tactic? You’ll have optimized to show up on voice search results, since 75% of the spoken results on Alexa, Google Home, and Siri come from results that rank in the top 3 for that query. A couple of additional tips here as well:

Make sure your affiliates optimize their content to encourage a paragraph becoming a Featured Snippet.

Google tends to pull a 45-word paragraph from a highly ranked page to feature as an answer to queries, especially if the query is a question (ie. “how do I…”) and the paragraph is a direct answer to that question. Thus, it’s beneficial to tell your affiliates to add concise Q & A sections to pages that are already ranking highly. And again, these Featured Snippets are often pulled for voice search answers.

Finally, encourage basic SEO. If your affiliate reps are creating a lot of content for you, it’s a good idea to run an SEO bootcamp to help them understand the importance of title tags, descriptive alt text for images, ideal length of posts, and the like. As we started with, your reps can be considered your outsourced marketing team. Help them help you!

Your business can exponentially increase your SEO by working closely with your affiliate reps who operate their own sites and own social networks. With intelligent utilization of backlinks, quality content, social media, and tag-teaming your best keywords; you have a much better chance of rising to the top of Google than acting all on your own.

How to Increase Online Sales: The Complete Checklist

Posted on 06/17/2019

What if there were a method—even a process—that you could apply to increase website sales? Wouldn’t that be swell? Well, there is.

I’ve turned it into a checklist.

This method works across all categories; it doesn’t matter what business you’re in. Take your website, assess it for any item on the list, make improvements, and your online sales will increase.

Start with measurable goals

Before we get started on the checklist, make sure you have actual, measurable goals in place (e.g. sell boots, get subscribers).

If you don’t have a single focus for your site, it’s very difficult to achieve results.
You cannot systematically improve what you cannot measure (or won’t notice it when it happens).

Start with specific goals and make sure your web analytics software is tracking those goals.

Personal opinions do not matter (much)

There’s no shortage of opinions in the world. Sadly, most are misguided, even incompetent. People see the world from where they are and think everybody else is like them—”But I never click on ads!”; “Nobody shares their email!”; “I think it should be blue!”; and so on.

You are not the world. You are not your customer. Hence, you can’t draw conclusions about user behavior based on your personal preferences. It’s natural to want to, but try to resist. Instead, focus on evidence-based marketing.

The internet is not in its infancy anymore. We’ve had many, many years to test, try, and see what works online. There are entire frameworks for testing programs, reams of academic research, and mountains of data.

The following checklist is a summary of key elements that will help you get more online sales (or whatever conversion you’re after).

Increasing sales online: the checklist

Here it is:

Create buyer personas.
Drive relevant traffic.
Design a great site.
Create compelling value propositions.
Understand buying phases.
Reduce friction.
Focus on clarity.
Eliminate noise and distraction.
Engage visitors.
Add urgency.
Follow usability standards.

Now let’s look at each item individually.

1. Create buyer personas.

The more people feel that an offer is right for them, the more likely they are to take it.

Let me prove it to you. Let’s say you want to buy new running shoes. First, list:

Your gender;
Age;
Weight;
Where you normally run.

Now, would you rather buy running shoes that are suitable for all runners, or ones specifically designed for your gender, age group, weight, and type of use? That’s a no-brainer.

Your goal is to identify customer groups—their needs, wants, requirements and use cases. Buyer personas are essentially a specific group of potential customers, an archetypal person whom you want your marketing to reach.

Buyer personas help you better target your offers, making them more likely to resonate—and helping you win more online sales. (Image credit)

Optimizing your site for buyer personas diminishes the egotistical point of view and gets you to talk to users about their wants and needs. People care about themselves and answers to their problems, which is why buyer personas are so critical for marketing success.

Essentially, it’s about knowing whom you’re selling to, their situation, what they’re thinking, their needs, and their hesitations. If you know the exact person you’re selling to and the problems they have, you’re in a much better position to sell to them.

How to build a buyer persona

The truth is that most companies have only the faintest idea what lies behind the buying decision. We presume an awful lot. The buyer persona is a tool to help you see deeper into the buyer’s thinking.

Use customer interviews to map out different personas. Your personas will dictate every word and every image on your site. Your website layout, navigation, and general user flow should all come from personas.

2. Drive relevant traffic.

This is about two things:

Targeting the right people;
Communicating the right message.

It’s almost impossible to sell people things they don’t need or want. If you sell laptops and somehow get me to your site, I won’t buy one. I already have one. What you offer is not relevant to me at that moment.

A key ingredient of high conversions is relevant traffic. If you stop wasting resources that drive irrelevant traffic to your site, you will increase sales. As a marketer, one of your constant jobs is finding the right marketing mix:

The right media. Where to advertise/promote, free or paid;
The right message. What to say;
The right offer. How much money for what.

If you get the media right and the traffic is relevant (i.e. people are genuinely interested in what you have to offer), you’re instantly doing better.

Next, you have to figure out which value proposition works best for this audience. This is when you go back to Item 1 and customer personas.

Learn why people need your product, which problems it solves, and reflect it back to them. When your target group feels understood, magic happens.

3. Design a great site.

In a nutshell: Beautiful design sells better than ugly design. Beautiful does not mean laden with bells and whistles—often, it’s quite simple. Beautiful design looks great and works well.

BMW, Apple, and Nike don’t throw millions at design for fun. They know it sells better. In fact, design (how it looks and how it works) is a key reason people buy from them.

How do you know if your site is ugly?

If you built your site yourself—and you’re not a designer—it sucks. Get a new one.

If you use cheesy stock photography—like customer service people with headsets or suits shaking hands—the rest of your site probably sucks, too. Don’t use the “women laughing alone with salad” style:

If you had a freelancer build it who charged you $2 per hour, it sucks. Quality craftsmanship always comes at a fair price—no matter what country they’re from.

The more you know about something, the better you’re able to tell the difference. Have you seen The Devil Wears Prada? There’s this scene where Anne Hathaway’s character mocks the fashion people who think two identical belts look “so different.”

Be it dogs, fashion, or web design, you have to spend years analyzing them to separate the good from the bad, and know exactly why. (If you want to commit to a feature-length explanation of this concept, watch Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?)

I’ve seen too many butt-ugly websites that their respective owners thought looked great. Yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder—to an extent. But, mostly, it’s not. Your site either is ugly or it isn’t.

There are exceptions, like Craigslist, but those are outliers. Craigslist started when butt-ugly was the standard, and later made bare-bones design its “thing.” If they started that way today, nobody would use it.

Visual hierarchy and user guidance

Your website design has another important role—it communicates what’s important and what the user should do next.

Every page on your site should have a most-wanted action, the number-one thing you want people to do on that page. This is where visual hierarchy comes in.

Look at this screenshot:

Now, what was the order of your eye movements? What did you notice first, second, last? The first two were probably the headline (“It’s all coming together”) and the image, followed by the explanatory paragraph and call to action (“Sign up Free”).

It’s not a coincidence. They wanted you to see those thing in that order. And what’s equally important is what you didn’t notice—the navigation and other secondary information that’s less important.

4. Create compelling value propositions.

A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered. It’s the main reason a prospect should buy from you (and not from the competition).

In a nutshell, a value proposition is a clear statement that:

Explains how your product solves customers’ problems or improves their situation (relevance);
Delivers specific benefits (value);
Tells the ideal customer why they should buy from you and not the competition (differentiation).

Your value proposition should be the first thing that visitors see on your homepage, but it should also be visible at all major entry points to the site.

If your main landing pages (homepage, product pages, etc.) don’t have a value proposition or users don’t understand it (see Item 7), you’re losing sales.

I’ve written an extensive post on creating value propositions along with a bunch of examples. You should read it.

Optimizely does it well:

What is it? A website experimentation platform.
What’s the benefit? Outperform competitors.
Who’s it for? Marketing and product teams.

5. Understand buying phases.

Let’s say you surf the web and come across this site:

What stands out is that they go straight for the sale—asking you to register right away. But they’ve give you zero information about who they are or why you should register.

Understanding buying phases is all about understanding how people work. Largely, customers fall into three groups:

People who have a problem or need but don’t know it;
People who are researching different options, comparison shopping;
People who have made a decision to buy.

Depending on your industry, there may be a few additional groups. Use customer interviews to learn about the different phases your buyers are in.

You have to sell differently to each group. The first group is pretty much hopeless. It’s difficult to sell them anything since you need to sell the problem first.

The other two groups—those researching and those who have made a decision—warrant added attention.

People who are researching

In most niches, these people form the majority. The main question you need to answer is “Why should I buy from you?”

If you don’t have a compelling value proposition, you’re going to lose. If you don’t make it clear how you’re better or different from the competition, you’re going to lose—especially if you’re not the cheapest.

Humans don’t like to think. They like to compare products by looking at a couple of simple parameters, like price and maybe something else (e.g. for web hosting, server space).

If people can’t understand the differences between your product and that of your competitor, they’re going to choose based on price: “If it’s all the same, why pay more?!”

Do this:

State your advantages and differences on your homepage and product pages.
If you sell mass-market products (e.g. Sony TVs, Dell laptops, Gucci perfumes) and you’re not the cheapest, clearly communicate the added value of your higher price.

Researchers are looking for information to help them decide. Your job is to give them what they need to feel good about buying. If you rush the sale—ask for a sign-up before they have enough information, you will scare them away.

Here’s a good case study for burying your sign-up or buy button. One company removed the sign-up call to action from the top of their homepage, and signups increased 350%.

People who have decided

After conducting their research, some people will come back for the transaction. They’re looking for clearly visible call-to-action buttons (e.g. “Add to cart”) or links with trigger words (“Sign up”).

Your job is to make sure those are easy to find. Conduct “think out loud” usability testing to test it.

6. Reduce friction.

Whenever you ask people to commit to something, there’s friction. It’s impossible to remove all friction from a business transaction. You can only minimize it.

Friction includes all the doubts, hesitations, and second thoughts people have about giving you money for a product.

Is it really worth the money? Will it break? Can I trust this site? Will it work? What if it doesn’t fit? Is this a scam? Is it the right choice for me? Will she like it?

The way to convert an infidel to a believer is to address all doubts and give them full information—so they can convince themselves.

Elements that add friction:

Long and/or complicated process. These are “get a quote” forms with 10 fields, 3-page applications, etc.
Websites with horrible usability. People don’t understand how to buy or can’t find any contact info.
Anonymous site. No names, photos, phone numbers, or physical address is visible. If you’re trying to hide, you must have something to hide.
Ugly, amateur website. See Item 3!
Insufficient evidence. You make a bunch of claims but don’t back them up.
Insufficient information. A chair: 2 feet tall, black, $5,000. There are thousands of sites provide hardly any information about the products they sell. Research says 50% of purchases are not completed due to lack of information.
FUDs. Fears, uncertainties, doubts. The way to overcome these is to address those FUDs in your sales copy. Interview your customers to find out what they are.

One classic way to boost credibility is to use testimonials:

Credible testimonials are with full name and photo, from celebrities and people like your buyers. Anonymous testimonials are not believable.

Fitness sites are easy examples. People are skeptical that any fitness program actually works. “No one can achieve those results in three months,” you can imagine everyone saying.

So, programs like Beachbody (which includes P90X) add tons of testimonials with real people and plenty of visual evidence. They make a point on their homepage to highlight that customers’ results are legitimate:

Make a list of all the FUDs that your target group have, then address them with evidence.

Social proof is powerful. Show impressive numbers, like how many happy customers you’ve got. Nobody wants to be the only idiot buying your stupid product.

Basecamp doubles down on this concept, offering a weekly counter with testimonials and a multi-year growth chart on their homepage:

7. Focus on clarity.

People won’t buy what they don’t understand. In fact, people fear what they don’t understand. Racism and xenophobia come from the fear of the unknown.

Whatever you’re selling, the buyer is a human. It doesn’t matter if it’s your granny or a top executive from IBM. They’re all humans. If the text (or video) on your site is easy to understand and written compellingly, your conversions will go up.

Years ago, a friend of mine blogged about an email he received. I think it’s a good example of what NOT to do.

Hi Deniss,

My name is […], Senior Director of Feedback Management at [..]. I wanted to let you know about some information that could impact on your role at […]. A recent […] study, “Customer Feedback Management: Leveraging the Voice of the Customer to Amplify Business Results,” revealed that companies successfully leveraging Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs accomplish quantifiable year-over-year performance gains including increased annual revenue and higher customer satisfaction ratings.

[…] I will be hosting a webinar, based on the study’s findings […]

I hope you’ll be able to join us for what is sure to be an informative webinar that will yield valuable take-aways for your organization!

You can avoid jargon by using the “friend test.” Read the text on your website out loud and imagine it’s a conversation with your friend. If there’s a word or a sentence you wouldn’t use, re-write it.

What does this company do?

Pretty clear, isn’t it. No fancy-schmancy stuff. You don’t need big words. You need to be clear. If the text on your website isn’t fun to read and takes effort to understand, you’re doing it wrong.

Same goes for video. Here’s a good example of a clear presentation by Nest:

It’s a thermostat! This could be the most boring technical video of all time. But it’s not. And it worked. Nest became so popular that Google bought it in 2014 for $3.2 billion.

8. Eliminate noise and distraction.

There’s an adage for outdoor billboard design—it’s ready when there’s nothing left to remove. In a way, this also applies to websites.

The more choice you give people, the harder it is to choose anything. When there are too many options, it’s easiest to choose nothing at all. There’s tons of research to confirm this. In addition, more choices make us unhappy.

If you have a ton of products, you have to provide great filters to help people narrow down their options.

Noise and distraction aren’t just about how many products you have. It’s about how busy your layout is, how many competing design elements there are, how many things—in total—ask for user attention.

The “rule of noise“

The closer you get to closing the sale, the fewer things you should have on your screen. Once users get to the checkout, you shouldn’t have anything on the page that doesn’t directly contribute to the conversion.

Look at the Amazon checkout screen. No sidebar, no menu, no related products. They just really want you to click the “Place your order” button:

Identify a single-most wanted action for each screen, then make sure the important stuff stands out. Don’t have anything in the layout that isn’t absolutely necessary. Simple works.

9. Engage visitors.

What’s your conversion rate? 1%? 3%? Even if it’s as high as 5%, that means that 95% of visitors don’t buy anything. They came to your site—maybe even through paid advertising—bought nothing, and left.

Now what? Have you lost them for good? Not necessarily. In many cases, the best way to increase online sales is to avoid one at first. Remember buying phases? Instead of asking for money right away, engage users and, ideally, collect their email address so that you can keep talking to them.

As a general rule, the more expensive and/or complicated the product, the more time people need to make a decision. If you’re selling cars or computers, it’s unlikely that someone will buy one online on their first visit. This is why you should get their email first, add value, prove your expertise, get them to like you, etc.—all before you ask for the sale.

Beardbrand wants to sell you products to manage your facial hair. Even with an inexpensive product, they still go for an email first, asking users to go through a quiz funnel on their homepage:

While email is the best way to go, you might also go for

Social media follow (Twitter, Facebook etc.);
Immediate product trial;
Sweepstakes (“Enter to win!”).

Buzzsumo lets you just enter any topic or domain to see their product in action:

10. Add urgency.

Urgency is a powerful motivator—if done well. All of us have seen something like this:

There are three ways to create urgency:

Quantity limitations. “Only 2 tickets left at this price!”
Time limitations. “Early-bird pricing ends July 1!”
Contextual limitations. “Get a gift now for Father’s Day!”

As long as the reason for the urgency is believable, it will work. Too many marketers abuse it and add urgency to everything. OpinMonster, for example, suggests that there’s a time-limited offer any time you visit their pricing page:

When it makes sense to use it, it will produce a ton of results.

11. Follow usability standards.

If your site is difficult to use, people won’t use it. Nobody will bother to figure out stuff. The best websites provide a seamless experience—everything is intuitive; people don’t have to think.

Luckily, it’s not the 1990s or early 2000s anymore, when usability was awful. Check out these fantastic usability checklists for different sections of your website.

Compare your site against all of them and make necessary corrections.

Conclusion

More than a decade ago, Jakob Nielsen proposed a formula based on four variables:

Business results;
Visitors/traffic;
Conversion;
Loyalty.

Business results, the formula suggested, were the product of the other three variables: B = V × C × L.

If you want to double your results, you can either double the number of unique visitors (very expensive), double the conversion rate (possible, but increasingly harder), or double repeat purchases.

As Nielsen foresaw:

Whereas we might aptly call the period 2000–10 the conversion decade for website usability professionals, 2010–20 will be the loyalty decade.

That prediction has held up. If you want to increase website sales right now, focus on conversions or driving traffic. If you want to increase sales online in the long run—well past 2020—focus on loyalty.

Rural Local SEO: A Marketing Package Strong on Education

Posted on 05/23/2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

Can your marketing firm earn a profit dealing with low-budget customers in backwoods?

Could you be ignoring a source of recommendations, promotion, and expert complete satisfaction if you’’ re primarily concentrated on landing bigger customers in metropolitan areas? Customers in least-populated locations require to record every consumer they can get to be practical, consisting of residents, brand-new next-door neighbors, and passers-through. Standard Local SEO can go a long method towards aiding with this, and even if plan offerings aren’’ t your company ’ s common method, a basic item that highlights education might be precisely what ’ s required.

Today, I’’d like to assist you explore your chances of serving extremely little and rural town customers. I’’ ve gathered a sample spreadsheet and a lots of other resources that I hope will empower you to establish a top quality however bare-bones regional search marketing plan that will work for many and might substantially benefit your firm in some impressive methods.

.Whatever in small amounts.

The linchpin essential to the rural client/agency relationship is that the requirements of these organisations are so exceptionally moderate. The competitive bar is set so low in a small-town-and-country setting, that, with couple of exceptions, customers can make a strong regional revealing with a pared-down marketing strategy.

Let’’ s be truthful– lots of organisations in this situation can squeak by on a site style plan from some huge webhosting company. A couple of minutes invested with Google’’ s non-urban regional packs vouch for this. I’’ m personally disappointed by independent organisations ending up being dealt with like numbers due to the fact that it’’ s so antithetical to the method they run. The regional hardware shop doesn’’ t put you on hold for 45 minutes to respond to a concern. The regional farm stand doesn’’ t path you overseas to purchase treasure tomatoes. Couple of town organizations remain in service for 150 years by overpromising and under-delivering.

Let’’ s presume that numerous rural customers will have some type of site. If they wear’’ t, you can advise some sort of giveaway or cheapie option . It will suffice to get them positioned someplace in Google’’ s outcomes, however if they never ever move beyond this, the optimum conversions they require to remain in organisation might be missed out on.

I’’ ve concerned think that the small-to-medium regional marketing company is the very best suitable for the small-to-medium rural brand name due to the fact that of shared work principles and a comparable method of working. Both entities require to endure monetarily and that indicates playing a really clever video game with a spending plan on both sides.

It’’ s a concern of arranging a firm providing that provides optimum worth with a modest financial investment of your time and the customer’’ s loan.

.Building a square offer.

When you handle a significant customer in a big town or city, you take out all the stops. You dive deeply into auditing business, its market, its properties. You take a look at whatever from technical mistakes to innovative strengths prior to starting to construct a method or carry out projects, and there might be lots of months or years of work ahead for you with these customers. This is all totally proper for huge, financially rewarding agreements.

For your rural lineup, prepare to scale method back. Here is your working strategy:

.1. Arrange your very first 15-minute telephone call with the customer.

Avoid the entire problem of needing to lollygag around waiting on a hectic small company owner to submit a type. Set up a consultation and have the customer be at their business in front of a computer system at the time of the call. Validate the following, ultra-basic information about the customer.

. NameAddressPhoneURLBusiness design( single place brick-and-mortar, SAB, and so on) CategoryAre there any other services at this address?Main products/services offeredIf SAB, list of cities servedMost apparent search expression they wish to rank forYear developed and year they initially took business onlineHave they ever understood a charge on their site or had Google inform them they were getting rid of a listing?Finally, have the customer (who remains in front of their computer system at their workplace )look for the search term that ’ s the most undoubtedly essential and check out off to you the names and URLs of business ranking in the regional pack and on the very first page of the natural outcomes.

And that ’ s it. This fast session yields a charge of $25 if you pay yourself$ 100/hr.

. 2. Make a one-time financial investment in composing a bare-bones guide to Local SEO.

Spend less than one working day assembling a.pdf file or Google doc composed in the least-technical language including the following:

. Your briefest, clearest meaning of what regional SEO is and how it brings clients to regional companies. Inspiration here . An introduction of 3 crucial company designs: brick &mortar, SAB, and home-based so the customer can quickly recognize which of these designs is theirs.A total copy of the Guidelines for representing your service on Google with a link in it to the live guidelines.Foolproof directions for developing a Google account and producing and declaring a GMB listing. Program the procedure detailed so that anybody can comprehend it. Inspiration here . A list of leading basic market citation platforms with links to the kinds for getting noted on them. Inspiration here and if the customer can strike a minimum of a few of these, they will be off to a great start.An introduction of the function of evaluation acquisition and action, with a couple of easy pointers for making evaluations and a list of the leading basic market evaluation platforms. Motivation here and here . A summary of the function of constructing offline relationships to make a couple of online linktations. Inspiration here . Hyperlinks to the Google My Business online forum and the primary Google assistance platforms including their telephone number( 844.491.9665), Facebook , Twitter , and online chat . Inform the customer this is where to go if they experience an issue with their Google listing in the future.Links to significant independent service associations as an assistance automobile for rural and little services like AMIBA , ILSR , and Small Business Saturday . Inspiration here . Your firm ’ s total contact details so that business can remember who you are and engage you for additional speaking with down the roadway, if ever essential.

If you pay yourself $100 an hour’, purchasing producing this guide will cost you less than$ 1000.00. That ’ s a modest quantity that you can rapidly make back from customers.Ideally, the inspiring links I ’ ve consisted of will offer you a huge head start. Prevent covering anything fashionable (like some brand name brand-new Google function) so that the only time you need to need to upgrade the guide in the future will be if Google makes some significant modifications to their standards or control panel.

Deliver this property to every rural customer as their standard training in the bare fundamentals of regional marketing.

. 3. When and fill it out advertisement infinitum, develop a competitive audit spreadsheet.

What you desire here is something that lets you promptly complete the blanks.

For the competitive audit, you ’ ll be accumulating your customer ’ s metrics versus the metrics of business they informed you was ranking at the top of the regional pack when they browsed from their area. You can create your own metrics, or you can make a copy of this design template I ’ ve produced for you and contribute to it/subtract from it as you like.

Make a copy of the ultra-basic competitive regional audit design template– you can do so right here

You ’ ll notification that my sample sheet does not dig deeply — into a few of the more innovative or technical locations you may check out for customers in harder markets. With couple of exceptions, rural customers simply put on ’ t require that level of insight to complete.

Give yourself 45 focused minutes filling out the information in the spreadsheet. You ’ ve now invested 1 hour of time with the customer. Let ’ s offer that a worth of $100.

. 4. Transfer the findings of your audit into a customized report.

Here ’ s another one-time financial investment. Invest no greater than one workday developing a.pdf or Google Docs design template that takes the fields of your audit and provides them in a legible format for the customer. I ’ m going to leave specific formatting as much as you,’however here are the areas I would advise structuring the report around:

. A side-by-side contrast of the customer vs. rival metrics, bucketed by subject (Website, GMB, Reputation, Links, Citations, etc) An extremely fundamental description of what those metrics meanA clear suggestion of what the customer ought to do to enhance their metrics.

For example, your area on track record may appear like this:

The charm of this is that, once you have the design template, all you need to do is fill it out and after that invest an hour making smart observations based upon your findings.

Constructing the design template needs to take you less than one workday; so, a one-time financial investment of lessthan$ 1,000 if you are paying yourself $100/hr.

Transferring the findings of your audit from the spreadsheet to the report for each customer must take about 1 hour. We ’ re now up to 2 overall hours of effort for a distinct customer.

. 5. Standing out at worth.

So, you ’ ve now had a 15-minute discussion with a customer,provided an initial guide to the essentials of regional search marketing, and provided a tailored report filled with your observations and their to-dos. Lots of companies may stop and leave the customerto translate the reportby themselves.

But you won ’ t do that, since you put on ’ t wish to lose an extraordinary chance to develop a company relationship with a service. Rather, invest another hour on the phone with the owner, reviewing the report with them page by page and enabling a couple of minutes for any of their concerns.This is where you have the possibility to provide remarkable worth to the customer, informing them precisely what you believe will be most useful for them to understand in a real mentor minute.

At the end of this, you will have ended up being a remarkable ally, somebody they rely on, and somebody to whom they will believe in referring their coworkers, relative, and next-door neighbors.

You ’ ve made a total financial investment of less than$ 2,000 to develop your rural/small town marketing program.

Packaging up the guide, the report and the 1:1 phone consulting, you have a base rate of $300 for the item if you pay yourself$ 100/hour.

However, I ’ m going to recommend that, based upon the level of regional SEO knowledge you give the circumstance, you develop a rate point someplace in between $300–$ 500 for the bundle. $ 300 might be a reasonable rate for 3 hours of consulting if you are still fairly green at regional SEO. If you ’ re a market skilled, scale it up a bit since, since you bring an unusual level of insight to every customer interaction, even if you ’ re staying with the outright fundamentals. Start offering numerous of these plans in a week, and it will begin amounting to a great month-to-month earnings stream.

’.

As an online marketer, I ’ ve typically avoided plans due to the fact that whenever you dig deeply into a customer ’ s situation, subtleties wind up needing a lot custom-made research study and interaction. For the extremely tiniest customers in this least competitive markets, bundles canhit strike spotArea

. Substantial advantages for your firm.

The customer is going to leave the relationship with a bargain … and likely a lot to do. If they follow your suggestions, it will normally be simply what they required to develop themselves on the internet to the degree that tourists and next-door neighbors can quickly discover them and select them fordeals. Excellent task!

But you ’ re going to leave with some incredible advantages, too, a few of which you may not have actually thought about in the past. To wit:

. 1. Relationships and the causal sequence.

A customer you ’ ve dealt with extremely well on the phone patronizes who is most likely to bear in mind you for future requirements and advise you’. Due to the fact that I ’ ve taken the time to actually listen and address concerns, I ’ ve had companies send me charming presents on top of my consulting cost.SEO companies are constantly trying to find methods to construct genuine relationships. Don ’ t neglect the little customer as a centroid of recommendations’throughout a tight-knit neighborhood and beyond it to their city associates, good friends, and’household.

. 2. Huge information for insights and boasting rights.

If your bundle ends up being popular, a lots of information is going to begin going through your hands. The more of these audits you do, the more time you ’ re costs actively observing Google ’ s dealing with of the localized SERPs. Picture the post your firm can start releasing by anonymizing and aggregating thisinformation, pulling insights of worth to our market. There is no end to the capacity for you to grow your understanding.

Apart from case research studies,’consider the method this bundle can both develop your happy customer lineup and act as a source of customer evaluations. The friendly relationship you ’ ve developed with that 1:1 time can now end up being a font style of extremely favorable portfolio material and reviews for you to release on your site.

. 3. Firm pride from assisting restore rural America.

Have you observed the current wave of struck TELEVISION programs that depend upon reconstructing shabby American towns? Market debt consolidation is frequently pointed out as the root of rural collapse, with independent companies and little farmers no longer able to develop a tax base to support standard neighborhood requirements like medical facilities, fire departments, and schools. Few people rejoice at the concept of Main Streets– long-cherished trademarks not simply of Americana however of shared American identity– ending up being ghost towns.

But if you try to find it, you can see indications of fantastic little business owners joining to buck this pattern. Take a look at efforts like Locavesting — and Localstake . There ’ s a factor to hope in little farming co-ops , the Main Street motion , and people like these who can re-envision a collapsing structure as an independent nation shop, a B&B, or a task training center with Internet gain access to.

It can be a source of expert complete satisfaction for your marketing firm if you provide these brave and hard-working entrepreneur the needed education and a great offer they require to provide themselves adequately on the internet. I reside in a backwoods, and I understand simply just how much a little, strong guidance can assist. If I understand I ’ m contributing to America ’ s rural resurgence story, I feel additional excellent.

. Promoting your rural regional SEO bundle.

Once you ’ ve got your guide and design templates developed, what next? Here are some easy pointers:’

. Develop a’great landing page on your site particularly for this bundle and call it out on your homepage. Wherever proper, develop internal links to it.Promote on social media.Blog about why you ’ ve developed the plan, aligning your firm as an ally to the restoring of rural communities.If, like me, you reside in a backwoods, think about providing at regional neighborhood occasions that will put you in front of small company owners. Don ’ t neglect traditional media like neighborhood message boards at the regional post workplace, and even fliers added to electrical poles.If you’’ re a city slicker, think about how far you ’d need to take a trip to get to the closest rural neighborhood to take part in events.Advertising both off and online in rural documents can be rather cost-effective. There are likewise location of praise print publications, regional school documents, and other publications that invite sponsors. Provide it a try.And, obviously, ask pleased customers to refer you’, informing them what it suggests to your organisation.’You may even establish a recommendation program.

The reality is that your company might not have the ability to live by rural customers, alone. Due to the fact that simply a couple of extremely competitive customers can bring welcome security to your bank account, you might still be targeting the bulk of your projects towards metropolitan business.

But perhaps this is an excellent day to begin looking beyond the junk food franchise, the NY lawyer andthe LA dermatology group. The more one checks out rural business owners, the more one tends to feel sorry for them, and compassion is the very best structure I understand of for constructing gratifying service relationships.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer upgrading you on the leading 10 most popular pieces of SEO news, suggestions, and rad links discovered by the Moz group. Consider it as your unique absorb of things you do not have time to pursue however wish to check out!

The Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing Analytics

Posted on 05/18/2019

Throughout the 20th Century, one of the biggest problems with marketing was that it was difficult to calculate its return on investment.

Is that ad we placed in the newspaper last month really the reason we’re seeing an uptick in store visits? Or, is the billboard on the side of the interstate 20 miles away from our exit drawing in more visitors? It was hard to say for sure.

Today, traditional marketing media like print, television, radio, and billboards certainly still have their place. However, the 21st Century brought us a new, measurable form of marketing: digital marketing.

With digital marketing comes the opportunity to directly track and analyze results using digital marketing analytics. But, that doesn’t mean everyone is tracking their results. Today, only 1 in 4 marketers can prove the impact of their marketing efforts on their business.

Our goal is to show you what you should be tracking, how you should be tracking it, and why tracking is so important. Here is the Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing Analytics.

What You Should Be Tracking
1. Organic Traffic and Keyword Ranking

Search engine and keyword optimization is your way to communicate with search engine algorithms in a way that shows what your website is really all about. Each page you create is a new opportunity to rank for a new keyword and drive new traffic to your website. If you are not driving organic traffic through website pages and blogs, you might be failing to check some of the necessary boxes (either with content or keyword selection).

Benchmarks: This number is going to vary a little bit by industry and product, but across all of our current clients, the average is 40% of all website visits come from organic search. When you are doing inbound marketing at full strength, all of your traffic sources should be increasing, but organic search is the primary indicator of how well you are doing with the content creation piece of the process.

2. New Leads/Conversion Rates

As marketers, we know that when it comes to traffic, more is better, but if that traffic isn’t converting into relevant business leads, then it’s not really doing us any good at all. It’s important to create relevant offers and conversion points that connect with your visitors and potential customers that will help move them from strangers who don’t know anything. A lot of companies miss the mark on this metric by creating content offers that are too company-specific. Be helpful, inform your visitors.

Benchmarks: Sitewide, you should be aiming for 3%–5% conversion rate on all your website visits. However, your individual landing pages should be getting a 15%–20% conversion rate at the very least. Some of our clients’ really popular pages get around a 40% conversion rate.

3. Session Duration

The session duration of an average user on your site is a very telling metric. Creating “sticky” content that encourages visitors to stay engaged, visit another page, or watch a video will help you increase the duration. Measuring session duration is especially important as it relates to your organic visitors because Google is monitoring how effective the search results are. If someone visits your site and leaves in under 20 seconds, that sends negative SEO data to Google.

Benchmarks: Every website is going to be different. Take a look at your Google Analytics data (learn more below) and start working on ways to incrementally increase the average session duration. Can you add more links to your blog post and website pages? Maybe you need to add relevant calls-to-action on your best-performing pages? Or try adding some video that keeps users engaged.

4. Email Open/Click-Through Rates

Okay, so we’ve discussed online traffic metrics. Now, let’s move to email marketing (which still works, by the way). The two most important statistics to track for email marketing are open rates (what percentage of recipients opened an email) and click-through rates (what percentage of people clicked on a link within the email).

Open rates tell you how deliverable your email is (i.e. avoiding spam folders, having attractive subject lines), and click-through rates tell you how appealing your email’s deliverables are (i.e. content, coupons, contest sign-ups).

Benchmarks: Again, every industry is different. But, it’s helpful to aim for at least an 18% email open rate and at least a 3% click-through rate.

5. Video Engagement Rates

Video is one of the most engaging forms of content that you can create. So, you should be creating it. And, if you are going to go through the time and effort to add video to your website, then you should definitely be tracking more than the views.

We hear a common myth all the time that shorter video is better, but just like any piece of content, what matters is the quality of the video, not the length. If you have an awesome, compelling video story that keeps people engaged, they will keep watching.

One of our favorite projects was a “Stories for the Soul” video that was about six minutes long. Conventional wisdom would tell you that people stopped watching after the first minute of the video. But, that wasn’t the case, at all. Our video had an 82% engagement rate overall and 78% engagement rate through the 5:24 mark.

Benchmarks: Measuring engagement rate is less about shooting for a specific number and more about understanding how your audience engages with videos. Do they fall off around the one-minute mark? Will they stay for five minutes if they find it engaging? Are there parts of the video that lots of viewers are re-watching? Without measuring your videos, there is no way to analyze and improve them in the future!

6. Cost per Lead/Cost per Customer

Do you know how much it costs for you to acquire the leads you are getting today? Is it $2,000 or $200? By calculating the cost of your marketing efforts and dividing by the total number of leads/customers converted, you can start to get an idea of the cost per lead/customer. Your cost per lead and customer is going to depend on your business and your average lifetime value of a prospect. You should have a lower cost per lead if your lifetime value of a customer is $2,000 vs. $200,000.

Benchmarks: Again, this number is going to vary a lot by industry, company, and product value. Create a spreadsheet, track your averages on a monthly basis, and look for trends. If there are marketing activities that lead to more customers at a lower cost, then make sure you are doing more of those activities.

These inbound marketing analytics will help you get an understanding of the effectiveness of your campaigns. We love to help companies optimize their inbound marketing process, so if you are looking for help identifying where you need the most help, we’d love to do a free marketing assessment.

7. New Business from New Customers

Not surprisingly, closed business is likely the most important measure of success for marketing and sales. In order to track how many leads are turning into customers, it’s wise to integrate your automation platform with a CRM system to implement closed-loop reporting.

You’ll want to pay close attention to the conversion rate for this metric, the lead-to-customer rate.

Lead to Customer Conversion Rate Formula:
# of customers / # of leads = Lead-to-customer conversion rate

Also, don’t forget to consider the customer’s or account’s lifetime value when looking into closed business. A new customer may be worth more than just the value of the one-time purchase.

Customer Lifetime Value Formula:
Avg sale per customer x Avg number of times a customer buys per year x Avg years a customer will buy from you = Avg customer lifetime value

If your sales team is uploading deal information into your CRM, this should be easy to track and calculate. With this information, you can accurately calculate the return on your marketing investment.

8. Your Marketing Return on Investment (ROI)

Are your marketing efforts worth it? The timeless question. How can you say a marketing campaign was successful if you don’t know if you recorded a return on your investment?

When measuring ROI, you’ll need to calculate your customer acquisition costs for all online marketing efforts. How much does it cost you to acquire a new customer? This includes manpower, technology, and other expenses related to campaigns.

Return on Investment Formula:
(Sales growth – Marketing investment) / Marketing investment

In order to calculate your customer acquisition costs, like the metric above, it’s recommended to integrate your marketing automation solution with your CRM platform.

Keep in mind, if you want to accurately measure marketing ROI, you’ll need to be very diligent recording data and closely tracking the buying journey of a customer. The depth in which you’re able to drill down is dependent on the collection of information. Ideally, you’ll get the correct systems in place and benefit from the ability to truly understand the impact of specific marketing campaigns on your business.

What Tools You Should Use

Now that we know what to track, we need to know how to track it. And there are many tools that you can take advantage of to track and measure your success online. Here are a few that we use along with their specific use-cases:

HubSpot

Because we’re a Platinum Partner with HubSpot, we use it for just about everything. Our website is built on HubSpot, we host our CRM on HubSpot, we send automated emails through HubSpot, and we post on our social media through HubSpot (to name a few).

Therefore, we can track site visits as they turn into leads and from leads to customers, all through one platform, which makes it very easy for us to track specific success from certain campaigns.

You don’t have to build your website on HubSpot to have all these amazing options, though, so don’t fret! If you’re interested in working with HubSpot, they can merge their software with your current website so you can start getting insights and tracking leads without changing your online presence.

But, HubSpot may not be for everyone. Visit their website to learn more about what they can do for you before taking the plunge!

Google Analytics

You’ve probably heard of Google Analytics. In fact, you may have (hopefully) already set up Google Analytics for your website.

Google Analytics is a free tool that allows you to build campaigns, see customer behavior, and measure traffic on your website.

Much like HubSpot, there is A LOT of information you can gather from Google Analytics. Dig in deep to find correlations and patterns with your most successful pages and your incoming leads.

Ahrefs

Remember when we talked about growing your organic ranking at the beginning of this blog? Again, that comes from writing and publishing quality blogs with helpful content.

And the best way to know what people are searching for is by conducting your own keyword research.

We have found that Ahrefs is a great source for not only keyword research, but competitive research as well. They have fantastic tools for finding the difficulty and searches per month for keywords, helping you understand what your competitors’ articles are ranking for, and knowing what news is trending related to your business.

Special Shoutout: Keywords Everywhere, a Google Chrome and Firefox plugin, can really help with inspiration for keywords. It’s a free resource, so you can visit their website and install it now.

Wistia

If you’re producing videos (and you should be), you’ll need a tool to host and share those videos. YouTube may be an obvious choice for video hosting, but other video platforms are worth considering. Like Wistia, for example.

Wistia allows you to gather specific data, like your engagement rate (remember the Stories for the Soul example above?). It also allows for more customization, and most importantly, it can integrate with other marketing automation software (like HubSpot) to automatically trigger actions.

For instance, you can send someone an automated email after they’ve watched 1:30 of a Wistia video.

Special Shoutout: If you have HubSpot Marketing Professional or higher, local video hosting services are now included (with automation built-in!). That means customization, workflow creation, and lead capture technology are all included with HubSpot Videos.

Hotjar

If you want to get even more specific with your website optimization, you can use Hotjar (or CrazyEgg). Both of these tools create heatmaps of your landing pages, so you can see where people are looking on your page.

For instance, if you want to place a lead capture form on a landing page, in a spot where your visitors will actually see it, make a Hotjar heatmap of your landing page. This will allow you to see where visitors first place their eyes, which will indicate where you should put the lead capture form.

Why Digital Marketing Analytics Are Important

Digital marketing analytics can help you…

Better understand your customer. Think about it: You will now be able to know what your target audience is searching for by doing keyword research on Ahrefs. Then, you can use Google Analytics or HubSpot to track their behavior on your website, which will help you better understand their buyer’s journey. Not to mention, you can build in pop-up forms that can give them the opportunity to ask questions while they’re thinking about you on the page, or even chatbots that pre-emptively answer their questions!
Better understand your competitor. By researching your industry to gain a deeper understanding of how you can improve your online presence, you’ll get to know your competitors’ niches, and consequently, your niche!
Prove the value of your efforts. We already said it, but I’ll say it again for those in the back: You can directly track the ROI of your efforts with digital marketing! No more guessing games as to whether what you’re doing is actually working — you can track customers from the awareness stage all the way to the purchase decision.

Good luck on your journey with digital marketing analytics. If you need any help along the way, give us a call.

I Want To Rank Beyond My Location: A Guide to How This Works

Posted on 05/12/2019

Posted by MiriamEllis

Staff at your agency get asked this question just about every day, and it’s a local SEO forum FAQ, too:

“I’m located in ‘x’, but how do I rank beyond that?”

In fact, this query is so popular, it deserves a good and thorough answer. I’ve written this article in the simplest terms possible so that you can instantly share it with even your least-technical clients.

We’ll break rankings down into five easy-to-grasp groups, and make sense out of how Google appears to bucket rankings for different types of users and queries. Your clients will come away with an understanding of what’s appropriate, what’s possible, and what’s typically impossible. It’s my hope that shooting this link over to all relevant clients will save your team a ton of time, and ensure that the brands you’re serving are standing on steady ground with some good education.

There’s nothing quite like education as a sturdy baseline for creating achievable goals, is there?

One hypothetical client’s story

We’ll illustrate our story by focusing in on a single fictitious business. La Tortilleria is a tortilla bakery located at 197 Fifth Avenue in San Rafael, Marin County, California, USA. San Rafael is a small city with a population of about 60,000. La Tortilleria vends directly to B2C customers, as well as distributing their handmade tortillas to a variety of B2B clients, like restaurants and grocery stores throughout Marin County.

La Tortilleria’s organic white corn tortillas are so delicious, the bakery recently got featured on a Food Network TV show. Then, they started getting calls from San Francisco, Sacramento, and even Los Angeles asking about their product. This business, which started out as a mom-and-pop shop, is now hoping to expand distribution beyond county borders.

When it comes to Google visibility, what is La Tortilleria eligible for, and is there some strategy they can employ to show up in many places for many kinds of searches? Let’s begin:

Group I: Hyperlocal rankings

Scenario

Your supreme chance of ranking in Google’s local pack results is typically in the neighborhood surrounding your business. For example, with the right strategy, La Tortilleria could expect to rank very well in the above downtown area of San Rafael surrounding their bakery. When searchers are physically located in this area or using search language like “tortilleria near me,” Google can hyper-localize the radius of the search to just a few city blocks when there are enough nearby options to make up a local pack.

Ask the client to consider:

What is my locale like? Am I in a big city, a small town, a rural area?What is the competitive level of my market? Am I one of many businesses offering the same goods/services in my neighborhood, or am I one of the only businesses in my industry here?

Google’s local pack radius will vary greatly based on the answers to those two questions. For example, if there are 100 tortilla bakeries in San Rafael, Google doesn’t have to go very far to make up a local pack for a searcher standing on Fifth Avenue with their mobile phone. But, if La Tortilleria is one of only three such businesses in town, Google will have to reach further across the map to make up the pack. Meanwhile, in a truly rural area with few such businesses, Google’s smallest radius could span several towns, or if there simply aren’t enough options, not show a local pack in the results at all.

Strategy

To do well in the hyperlocal packs, tell your client their business should:

Create and claim a Google My Business listing, filling out as many fields as possible. Earn some reviews and respond to themBuild out local business listings on top local business information platforms, either manually or via a service like Moz Local. Mention neighborhood names or other hyperlocal terms on the company website, including on whichever page of the site the Google listing points to.If competition is strong in the neighborhood, invest in more advanced tactics like earning local linktations, developing more targeted hyperlocal content, using Google Posts to highlight neighborhood-oriented content, and managing Google Q&A to outdistance more sluggish competitors.

*Note that if you are marketing a multi-location enterprise, you’ll need to undertake this work for each location to get it ranking well at a hyperlocal level.

Group II: Local rankings

Scenario

These rankings are quite similar to the above but encompass an entire city. In fact, when we talk about local rankings, we are most often thinking about how a business ranks within its city of location. For example, how does La Tortilleria rank for searches like “tortilleria,” “tortilla shop,” or “tortillas san rafael” when a searcher is anywhere in that city, or traveling to that city from another locale?

If Google believes the intent of such searches is local (meaning that the searcher wants to find some tortillas to buy near them rather than just seeking general information about baked goods), they will make up a local pack of results. As we’ve covered, Google will customize these packs based on the searcher’s physical location in many instances, but a business that becomes authoritative enough can often rank across an entire city for multiple search phrases and searcher locales.

For instance, La Tortilleria might always rank #1 for “tortilla shop” when searchers on Fifth Avenue perform that search, but they could also rank #1 for “organic tortillas San Rafael” when locals in any part of that city or even out-of-towners do this lookup, if the business has built up enough authority surrounding this topic.

With the right strategy, every business has a very good chance of ranking locally in its city of physical location for some portion of its most desired search phrases.

Ask the client to consider:

Does my location + Google’s results behavior create small or large hurdles in my quest for city-wide rankings? When I look at the local packs I want to rank for, does Google appear to be clustering them too tightly in some part of the city to include my location in a different part of town? If so, can I overcome this? What can I specialize in to set me apart? Is there some product, service, or desirable attribute my business can become particularly known for in my city over all other competitors? If I can’t compete for the biggest terms I’d like to rank for, are there smaller terms I could become dominant for city-wide?How can I build my authority surrounding this special offering? What will be the most effective methodologies for becoming a household name in my community when people need the services I offer?

Your agency will face challenges surrounding this area of work. I was recently speaking with a business owner in Los Angeles who was disappointed that he wasn’t appearing for the large, lucrative search term “car service to LAX.” When we looked at the results together from various locations, we saw that Google’s radius for that term was tightly clustered around the airport. This company’s location was in a different neighborhood many miles away. In fact, it was only when we zoomed out on Google Maps to enlarge the search radius, or zoomed in on this company’s neighborhood, that we were able to see their listing appear in the local results.

This was a classic example of a big city with tons of brands offering nearly-identical services — it results in very stiff competition and tight local pack radius.

My advice in a tough scenario like this would revolve around one of these three things:

Becoming such a famous brand that the business could overcome Google’s famous biasSpecializing in some attribute that would enable them to seek rankings for less competitive keywordsMoving to an office near that “centroid” of business instead of in a distant neighborhood of the large city.

Your specific scenario may be easier, equal to, or even harder than this. Needless to say, a tortilla shop in a modestly-sized town does not face the same challenges as a car service in a metropolis. Your strategy will be based on your study of your market.

Strategy

Depending on the level of competition in the client’s market, tell them they will need to invest in some or all of the following:

Identify the keyword phrases you’re hoping to rank for using tools like Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, and Google Trends combined with organized collection and analysis of the real-world FAQs customers ask your staff.Observe Google’s local pack behavior surrounding these phrases to discover how they are clustering results. Perform searches from devices in your own neighborhood and from other places around your city, as described in my recent post How to Find Your True Local Competitors. You can also experiment with tools like BrightLocal’s Local Search Results Checker.Identify the top competitors in your city for your targeted phrases and then do a competitive audit of them. Stack these discovered competitors up side-by-side with your business to see how their local search ranking factors may be stronger than yours. Improve your metrics so that they surpass those of the competitors, whether this surrounds Google My Business signals, Domain Authority, reputation, citation factors, website quality, or other elements.If Google’s radius is tight for the most lucrative terms and your efforts to build authority so far aren’t enabling you to overcome it due to your location falling outside their reach, consider specialization in other smaller, but still valuable, search phrases. For instance, La Tortilleria could be the only bakery in San Rafael offering organic tortillas. A local business might significantly narrow the competition by being pet-friendly, open later, cheaper, faster, more staffed, women-led, serving specific dietary restrictions or other special needs, selling rarities, or bundling goods with expert advice. There are many ways to set yourself apart.Finally, publicize your unique selling proposition. Highlight it on your website with great content. If it’s a big deal, make connections with local journalists and bloggers to try to make news. Use Google My Business attributes to feature it on your listing. Cross-sell with related local businesses and promote one another online. Talk it up on social media. Structure review requests to nudge customers towards mentioning your special offering in their reviews. Do everything you can to help your community and Google associate your brand name with your specialty.
Group III: Regional rankings

Scenario

This is where we typically hit our first really big hurdle, and where the real questions begin. La Tortilleria is located in San Rafael and has very good chances of ranking in relation to that city. But what if they want to expand to selling their product throughout Marin County, or even throughout several surrounding counties? Unless competition is very low, they are unlikely to rank in the local packs for searchers in neighboring cities like Novato, Mill Valley, or Corte Madera. What paths are open to them to increase their visibility beyond their city of location?

It’s at this juncture that agencies start hearing clients ask, “What can I do if I want to rank outside my city?” And it’s here that it’s most appropriate to respond with some questions clients need to be asking themselves.

Ask the client to consider:

Does my business model legitimately lend itself to transactions in multiple cities or counties? For example, am I just hoping that if my business in City A could rank in City B, people from that second location would travel to me? For instance, the fact that a dentist has some patients who come to their practice from other towns isn’t really something to build a strategy on. Consumers and Google won’t be excited by this. So, ask yourself: “Do I genuinely have a model that delivers goods/services to City B or has some other strong relationship to neighbors in those locales?”Is there something I can do to build a physical footprint in cities where I lack a physical location? Short of opening additional branches, is there anything my business can do to build relationships with neighboring communities?
Strategy
First, know that it’s sometimes possible for a business in a less-competitive market to rank in nearby neighboring cities. If La Tortilleria is one of just 10 such businesses in Marin County, Google may well surface them in a local pack or the expanded local finder view for searchers in multiple neighboring towns because there is a paucity of options. However, as competition becomes denser, purely local rankings beyond city borders become increasingly rare. Google does not need to go outside of the city of San Francisco, for example, to make up complete local results sets for pizza, clothing, automotive services, attorneys, banks, dentists, etc. Assess the density of competition in your desired regional market. If you determine that your business is something of a rarity in your county or similar geographical region, follow the strategy described above in the “Local Rankings” section and give it everything you’ve got so that you can become a dominant result in packs across nearby multiple cities. If competition is too high for this, keep reading.If you determine that what you offer isn’t rare in your region, local pack rankings beyond your city borders may not be feasible. In this case, don’t waste money or time on unachievable goals. Rather, move the goalposts so that your marketing efforts outside of your city are targeting organic, social, paid, and offline visibility.Determine whether your brand lends itself to growing face-to-face relationships with neighboring cities. La Tortilleria can send delivery persons to restaurants and grocery stores throughout its county. They can send their bakers to workshops, culinary schools, public schools, food festivals, expos, fairs, farmers markets, and a variety of events in multiple cities throughout their targeted region. They can sponsor regional events, teams, and organizations. They can cross-sell with a local salsa company, a chocolatier, a caterer. Determine what your brand’s resources are for expanding a real-world footprint within a specific region. Once you’ve begun investing in building this footprint, publicize it. Write content, guest blog, make the news, share socially, advertise online, advertise in local print, radio, and TV media. Earn links, citations and social mentions online for what you are doing offline and grow your regional authority in Google’s eyes while you’re doing it. If your brand is a traditional service area business, like a residential painting company with a single location that serves multiple cities, develops a website landing page for each city you serve. Make each page a showcase of your work in that city, with project features, customer reviews, localized tips, staff interviews, videos, photos, FAQs and more. As with brick-and-mortar models, your level of rarity will determine whether your single physical office can show up in the local packs for more than one city. If your geo-market is densely competitive, the main goal of your service city landing pages will be organic rankings, not local ones.
Group IV: State-wide rankings

Scenario

This is where our desired consumer base can no longer be considered truly local, though local packs may still occasionally come into play. In our continuing story, revenue significantly increased after La Tortilleria appeared on a popular TV show. Now they’ve scaled up their small kitchen to industrial strength in hopes of increasing trade across the state of California. Other examples might be an architectural firm that sends staff state-wide to design buildings or a photographer who accepts event engagements across the state.

What we’re not talking about here is a multi-location business. Any time you have a physical location, you can simply refer back to Groups I–III for strategy because you are truly in the local running any place you have a branch. But for the single location client with a state-wide offering, the quest for broad visibility begs some questions.

Ask the client to consider:

Are state-wide local pack results at all in evidence for my query or is this not the reality at all for my industry? For example, when I do a non-modified search just for “sports arena” in California, it’s interesting to see that Google is willing to make up a local pack of three famous venues spanning Sonora to San Diego (about 500 miles apart). Does Google return state-wide packs for my search terms, and is what I offer so rare that I might be included in them?Does my business model genuinely lend itself to non-local queries and clients willing to travel far to transact with me or hire me from anywhere in the state? For example, it would be a matter of pure vanity for me to want my vacuum cleaner repair shop to rank state-wide, as people can easily access services like mine in their own towns. But, what if I’m marketing a true rara avis, like a famous performing arts company, a landmark museum, a world-class interior design consultancy, or a vintage electronics restoration business?Whether Google returns state-wide local packs or only organic results for my targeted search terms, what can I do to be visible? What are my resources for setting myself apart?
Strategy
First, let’s take it for granted that you’ve got your basic local search strategy in place. You’re already doing everything we’ve covered above to build a strong hyperlocal, local, and regional digital and offline footprint. If Google does return state-wide local packs for your search phrases, simply continue to amp up the known local pack signals we’ve already discussed, in hopes of becoming authoritative enough to be included. If your phrases don’t return state-wide local packs, you will be competing against a big field for organic results visibility. In this case, you are likely to be best served by three things. Firstly, take publication on your website seriously. The more you can write about your offerings, the more of an authoritative resource you will become. Delve deeply into your company’s internal talent for developing magazine-quality content and bring in outside experts where necessary. Secondly, invest in link research tools like Moz Link Explorer to analyze which links are helping competitors to rank highly in the organic results for your desired terms and to discover where you need to get links to grow your visibility. Thirdly, seek out your state’s most trusted media sources and create a strategy for seeking publicity from them. Whether this comes down to radio, newspapers, TV shows, blogs, social platforms, or organizational publications, build your state-wide fame via inclusion. If all else fails and you need to increase multi-regional visibility throughout your state, you will need to consider your resources for opening additional staffed offices in new locales.
Group V: National rankings & beyond

Scenario

Here, we encounter two common themes, neither of which fall within our concept of local search.

In the first instance, La Tortilleria is ready to go multi-state or nation-wide with its product, distributing goods outside of California as a national brand. The second is the commonly-encountered digital brand that is vending to a multi-state or national audience and is often frustrated by the fact that they are being outranked both in the local and organic results by physical, local companies in a variety of locations. In either case, the goals of both models can sometimes extend beyond country borders when businesses go multinational.

Ask the client to consider:

What is my business model? Am I selling B2B, B2C, or both? Which marketing strategies will generate the brand recognition I need? Is my most critical asset my brand’s website, or other forms of off-and-online advertising? Am I like Wayfair, where my e-commerce sales are almost everything, bolstered by TV advertising? Or, am I like Pace Foods with a website offering little more than branding because distribution to other businesses is where my consumers find me? Does my offering need to be regionalized to succeed? Perhaps La Tortilleria will need to start producing super-sized white flour tortillas to become a hit in Texas. McDonald’s offers SPAM in Hawaii and green chile cheeseburgers in New Mexico. Regional language variants, seasonality, and customs may require fine-tuning of campaigns.
Strategy
If your national brand hinges on B2C online sales, let me put the e-commerce SEO column of the Moz blog at your fingertips. Also highly recommended, E-commerce SEO: The Definitive Guide. If your national brand revolves around getting your product on shelves, delve into Neilsen’s manufacturer/distributor resources and I’ve also found some good reading at MrCheckout. If you are expanding beyond your country, read Moz’s basic definition of International SEO, then move on to An In-Depth Look at International SEO and The Ultimate Guide to International SEO. This article can’t begin to cover all of the steps involved in growing a brand from local to an international scale, but in all scenarios, a unifying question will revolve around how to cope with the reality that Google will frequently rank local brands above or alongside your business for queries that matter to you. If your business has a single physical headquarters, then content, links, social, and paid advertising will be the tools at your disposal to compete as best you can. Rarity may be your greatest strength, as seen in the case of America’s sole organic tulip bulb grower, or authority, as in the case of this men’s grooming site ranking for all kinds of queries related to beards.You’ll be wanting to rank for every user nationwide, but you’ll also need to be aware of who your competitors are at a local and regional level. This is why even national/international brands need some awareness of how local search works so that they can identify and audit strong local brands in target markets in order to compete with them in the organic SERPs, sometimes fine-tuning their offerings to appeal to regional needs and customs. I often hear from digital-only brands that want to rank in every city in the nation for a virtual service. While this may be possible for a business with overwhelming authority and brand recognition (think Amazon), a company just starting out can set a more reasonable goal of analyzing a handful of major cities instead of thousands of them to see what it would take to get in the running with entrenched local and digital brands.Finally, I want to mention one interesting and common national business model with its own challenges. In this category are tutoring businesses, nanny services, dog walking services, and other brands that have a national headquarters but whose employees or contractors are the ones providing face-to-face services. Owners ask if it’s possible to create multiple Google listings based on the home addresses of their workers so that they can achieve local pack rankings for what is, in fact, a locally-rendered service. The answer is that Google doesn’t approve of this tactic. So, where a local pack presence is essential, the brand must find a way to staff an office in each target region. Avoid virtual offices, which are explicitly forbidden, but there could be some leeway in exploring inexpensive co-working spaces staffed during stated business hours and where no other business in the same Google category is operating. A business that determines this model could work for them can then pop back up to Groups I-IV to see how far local search can take them.
Summing up

There may be no more important task in client-onboarding than setting correct expectations. Basing a strategy on what’s possible for each client’s business model will be the best guardian of your time and your client’s budget. To recap:

Identify the client’s model.Investigate Google’s search behavior for the client’s important search phrases. Gauge the density of competition/rarity of the client’s offerings in the targeted area.Audit competitors to discover their strengths and weaknesses.Create a strategy for local, organic, social, paid, and offline marketing based on the above four factors.

For each client who asks you how to rank beyond their physical location, there will be a unique answer. The work your agency puts into finding that answer will make you an expert in their markets and a powerful ally in achieving their achievable goals.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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