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SEO Copywriting Checklist

John Parnell — Wed, 30 Mar 2022 13:09:54 +0000

Beth Craig Presents ‘SEO Copywriting 101’

We had the pleasure of attending The Bridge Marketing and County Wire’s very first ‘Wired for Success’ event at Trinity Park – with our very own Head of Content, Beth Craig, delivering a workshop amongst a whole host of expert speakers including Martin Shave (Global Sales Director at Microsoft), Hana Dickinson (Director of The Bridge Marketing), and business coach Jann Richardson. The event was a roaring success – and we couldn’t stand the thought of anyone unable to attend the event missing out on some of the brilliant content delivered throughout the day.

That’s why we’ve put together this blog post – including our very own basic SEO copywriting checklist for business owners. Whether you couldn’t make it to our workshop, want to add to your notes, or are simply in need of a refresher, we’ve got you covered.

Watch it on demand

We’d hate for anyone to have missed out on Beth’s immersive, hour-long workshop in optimised copywriting. Though things aren’t quite the same through a screen, she’s done her very best to recreate an interactive workshop atmosphere in this recreational recording – taking viewers through the seven simple steps needed to take a webpage from the bottom of the pile to the very top of SERPs. You may even get a chance to practice your own copywriting skills throughout – so get your pens and paper (or keyboards) out!

SEO Copywriting Checklist

1. Establishing Your Intended Audience and Brand Voice

The first step in taking a page from the bottom of the pile to first in search involves conducting the research necessary to ensure your final content stays on brand and appeals to the correct audience.

Start your process by completing a generic user persona questionnaire. By filling in this form with the details of your most desired or most common customer, you’ll get to glean some definite information on who you’re targeting with content and why.

To further this, dive into your brand guidelines and any documentation you have surrounding them – particularly where tone is concerned. Consider your brand and its values.

Using the knowledge extracted from the above, you should be able to create a brilliant tone to match your ideal client and keep them engaged – getting all the right points across, whilst staying on-brand and in character.

2. General Research

To get to the top of the SERP, your page needs to be the expert source in the eyes of Google, so research thoroughly. Consolidate and expand your own knowledge on your business, product, or service by reading through your own website and document – but don’t neglect competitor research.

I recommend reading the web pages ranking at the top of the search results pages for similar search terms to what you’d like to achieve.

You should also search general terms related to your industry, product, or service – bolstering your knowledge in every relevant manner.

3. Open Keyword Research Tools

I’m going to introduce you to two key tools for keyword research that will make your life just that little bit easier- Google Search Console and Mangools.

Google Search Console or ‘GSC’ is an online tool that allows users to discover and export data relating to organic search queries tied to a website/page. In simple terms, it helps people with existing websites discover keywords that they’re already ranking for – making it a good place to start. When re-writing content for an existing site, GSC should be your primary source of information. It’s completely free.

Mangools KWFinder is a keyword research tool in which you can find hundreds of keywords with low SEO difficulty. It’s one of the best ways to discover lists of new keywords related to those you’re already aware of. This tool isn’t free – but has a handy 10-day free trial – which provides more than enough time to get your keyword research done!

4. Find and Note Keywords you’re Already Ranking for with GSC

Begin your keyword research process by opening your GSC tab. Search for your website by clicking the three bars in the top left corner of the homepage, followed by search properties. Locate and click on it.

Once you’ve gained access to your site’s overview, click the performance button in the left-hand column. This is where you’ll be able to view all the data you’ll need. As you’ll be completing keyword research and site content on a page-by-page basis, you’ll want to narrow your results down to your chosen page. Do this by clicking ‘new’ and ‘page’ then paste the website page URL within the pop-up field. Ensure the date is set to ‘past 16 months’ to view the most data available.

This process will narrow down the data to show everything collected specifically for that page. Scroll down to ‘queries’ and sort by highest clicks first (if not clicks then search by highest impressions first) – this will reveal the strongest potential keywords.

Note down the most relevant keywords with the highest number of clicks in a notepad or online document. You’ll use them as the foundation of your research.

5. Discover New Keywords with Mangools

You’re now going to take the initial keywords you’ve found through GSC and discover new, related, and potentially higher-performing keywords using Mangools or any other keyword research tool.

Open up the Mangools KW Finder website and ensure you’re on the ‘search by keyword’ tab of the search tool. Here, you’ll be able to insert the keywords you shortlisted in the GSC step, or, if you don’t have any, choose a keyword related to your page that you think would suit it best, for example, if your page is about coffee machines, so you can start with the keyword: coffee machine.

Simply type your keyword into the search form, select the location, and click on the green button “Find keywords”. If you’re a local business or targeting a specific geo region, make sure to specify the location and language. Different locations lead to different results.

Your search will bring up a list of related keywords ranked by relevancy – some of which could trump those on your existing list. Add them to the notes document you started with your GSC results, writing down impression numbers in order to give you a reminder of how each keyword performs.

6. Choose Primary Keyword

You’ll now want to select a primary keyword from your shortlist of Mangools/KW research tool and GSC options – one which best describes your business, product, or service whilst being relevant, and ideally, having a high number of clicks/impressions. Some in your list should jump out to you immediately.

Keep in mind that although the short, impactful keywords here may be appealing with their high impression numbers – that you may be able to combine keywords/terms to create a long-tail keyword.

A long-tail keyword is a phrase typically made from three to five words. Since these keywords are more specific than generic terms, they allow you to target niche demographics. These keywords are also less competitive than generic keywords because they are designed to better reflect how people make queries. With long-tail keywords, you are able to attract more high-quality traffic to your website which is more likely to lead to conversions. Creating a long tail keyword may be as simple as transforming ‘Wedding Flowers’ to ‘Wedding Flowers Suffolk’, or taking ‘Healthcare Recruitment’ to ‘Participant Recruitment for Healthcare Research’. In creating the right long-tail keyword, you’re much more likely to put your website in front of all the right people.

Note down your primary keyword, and perhaps two two three secondary keywords to be sprinkled throughout your content.

7. Heading Hierarchy Research

Headings help users and search engines to read and understand text. They act as signposts for the readers and make it easier for them to figure out what a post or page is about. Headings also define which parts of your content are important, and show how they’re interconnected.

You’re limited to using one H1 heading on each page. This heading should be the name/title of the page or post and include the focus keyword/phrase. After writing your H1 header/title, you can go on to use H2 and H3 subheadings to introduce different sections.

Think of H2 subheadings like the chapters of a book. Within these chapters, you may want to list more specific subsets of information using lesser headers (H3 tags, then H4 tags, etc.) descending in chronological order. It’s rare for most content to get ‘deep’ enough to need to use H4 tags and beyond unless you’re writing really long, or really technical content.

Before writing your heading hierarchy, you’re going to do some competitor research in order to get to grips with what you’re up against and inspire your own heading order. Input the primary keyword you chose in the last step into Mangools SERP checker (with the correct location field selected).

By searching, you’ll discover a list of the top sites ranking for your chosen term – aka your best competitors. We’re going to uncover their strategies – but first, you’ll need to download the Mangools plugin. After you’ve got that sorted, you’re going to select the 3-5 top ranking, relevant URLs and make sure that they align with the end user’s search intent by opening them and skim reading (irrelevant results including eBay, Amazon etc should typically be ignored).

With one of the competitor URLs open and a notepad or google document ready, open the Mangools Chrome extension tool – click ‘on-page SEO’ – ‘Headings’. Copy/paste the site’s headings into your document or write them down. Repeat this process 3-5 times for various competitor websites.

You may also take note of any particularly valuable, informative, or well-written copy found under each of these headings – all of which can be copied into your template doc and used as content inspiration during the body content writing phase if relevant.

8. Writing a Heading Hierarchy

Look through your list of competitor sites and heading hierarchies. Do you notice similarities between headings? What headings are repeated? What ones provide value?

Use the above information to pick and choose the best individual headings for your new page.

And if you’re in doubt, don’t worry. A generic formula along these lines customised to match your business and keyword should work:
H1 – Service/Product (including the focus keyphrase)
H2 – Include more detail of the H1 heading (specialists/locations)
H2 – What is the service//product?
H2 – Benefits of the service/product
H2 – Who may require this product/service
H2 – Process (If applicable)
H2 – Why choose the company
H2 – Customer reviews/
H2 – Contact Form (If applicable)
H2 – FAQs

Look over the headings you’ve selected and continue to work on building and refining a chronological, effective order that will be easy for users to navigate, and allow for good web design where relevant. For example, in most circumstances, it would make no sense to add additional info before discussing the product/service/business itself. Refer to the competitor research for guidance/inspiration.

9. Writing your Page Content

You’re finally ready to start writing your body content! Use your knowledge from research and competitor sites to put together the best, most informative and action-inspiring webpage possible in line with any brand guidelines received.

Word Count

Aim for at least 600 words excluding FAQs – but keep your audience at the forefront of your mind. If your reader would appreciate or be reassured by a significant amount of information, create a page in this format. On the other hand, if your reader is likely to want to make an immediate decision, keep your copy more concise with plenty of CTAs inserted nearer the top of the page.

Keyword Density

Help search engines recognize the main theme of your content by using the primary keyword throughout the copy. As a best practice, use the term two to three times per 100 words to create a 2-3% keyword density. Try to avoid going over this limit to avoid keyword stuffing issues.

Show search engines that the page is closely related to the topic by bookending your copy with a mention of the primary keyword. Try to use the target keyword near the beginning of your first paragraph and within your final paragraph to reinforce what your content is about. This will help make it clear to search engines why your content is relevant.

Phrasing

Writing high-quality content doesn’t always mean producing a super complex webpage.
In fact, it means the opposite. Write your content for an eighth-grade reading level on the Flesch Reading Scale. That means using common terminology (not complex industry jargon) and writing short sentences and paragraphs. Use active voice primarily, and make sure writing is structured with appropriate paragraph breaks (every time the focus of discussion changes within the context of the heading you are working underneath), syntax and punctuation.

Linking Opportunities

Links help search engines connect and understand online content. Add relevant internal links to other pages on your site, and when possible, use the linked page’s target keyword as the anchor text for the link.

Originality

Craft original, valuable content. Don’t copy content that is already published on your site or published on any other sites. Search engines may penalize your site or not rank your page if it has content that is copied or duplicated from other sites.

10. Boost Rankings with Optimised FAQs

Time to round off your document with a set of between 5 and 10 FAQs. FAQs are a great SEO tool – giving you an opportunity to add a huge amount of highly relevant content to your page. They’re a great way to draw in users highly interested in your product or service who aren’t necessarily aware of your business. For example, imagine your car is making a strange rattling noise. Your first port of call is to google ‘Why is my car making a rattling sound?’. The first result is a google snippet explaining that it might be your air conditioning. You click on the link and are taken through to a comprehensive answer from a local garage with a CTA to book an air-con check-up at the end. Sold!

To find commonly searched questions and answers for your page, you can:

(If applicable) open Google Search Console and select the domain you’re working on. Click performance. Ensure your date is set to ‘16 months’ to gain as much data and insight as possible. Click new – query – and add a question word such as ‘why’ ‘how’ ‘what’ and ‘when’ to bring up potential FAQs.

Search some of your keywords on Answer the Public to view FAQs in a mindmap format.

Search your keywords within KWFinder and sort by ‘questions’ in the results section.

Search any of the questions you’ve sourced above in Google, and note any relevant ones appearing in the ‘people also ask’ section in the SERP

Use the knowledge you’ve built during this process to answer these FAQs with between 100 and 200 words of valuable, informative, and original content. Remember, FAQs are SEO tools and should appear in featured snippets – meaning they shouldn’t be blatantly biased towards your business. They should instead aim to effectively answer the user’s query.

Your FAQs will always be placed under an FAQ H2 Header at the very bottom of the page and should be included wherever possible – e.g. service pages and homepages. They’re not typically included on the content not set to rank – e.g. contact us, case studies or meet the team pages.

11. Review

What webpage would be complete without a review? A fantastic way to self-reflect on the work you’ve produced is to read it back to yourself out loud. Do you run out of breath before a sentence finishes? Does what you’ve written really make sense grammatically? Does the tone sound appropriate for webpage, brand, and industry? Would you want to read it?

After you’re happy with the page, you’re ready to upload, sit back, and benefit from the brilliant effects of SEO copywriting! Enjoy!

Book a Consultation

GLO are here to help local businesses understand how they can improve their online presence and generate leads online. We’re a young but informed, results-driven agency who practice what we preach. So for free advice and support, including monthly website analytics reporting on the house, schedule a free consultation. We can’t wait to meet you!

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2022 Digital Marketing Trends

John Parnell — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 14:45:52 +0000

2021 is coming to a close and it has been another year of change. Google (as always) updated many algorithms. Twitter started Fleets and killed it again. LinkedIn started stories and killed it again. Third-party cookies being blocked by Chrome has been delayed until 2023. And who can forget Facebook’s announcement of the Metaverse and name change to Meta?

With the digital landscape constantly changing and so quickly, you would be a fool to make any predictions for 2022, wouldn’t you? Well… We are going to do it anyway, as we want to help you stay ahead of the curve.

(Mark Zuckerberg showing his ‘metaverse’ avatar during Connect 2021 Facebook)

SEO trends 2022

Core Web Vitals

Google’s user experience update around Core Web Vitals started to roll out in June 2021, showing us that Google not only wants to deliver the most relevant result based on the user’s search, but also wants to make sure that websites provide a great user experience. There will be updates to this algorithm and Google will develop new ways to measure user experience.

High-Quality Content

A key part of user experience will be the quality of content that the audience can consume, site-wide. Increasingly, we are seeing pages in Google Search Console that are discoverable but not indexed. This means making every page (including campaign landing pages) valuable.

GLO’s 2022 SEO Tip

If you want to win at SEO in 2022, make sure every page on your website gives a great user experience and provides genuine value to the people visiting those pages.

Rich Media Trends 2022

Google Lens

Websites that have unique images will be rewarded in search results. Google Lens is tech that Google has on all of its Pixel phones and is connected to image search, discover, and shopping results. More and more, we are seeing images pulled into the main search results, not just the images or shopping results. Google understands what users want when they search and can offer richer content as a result.

Google Ads Image Extensions

Likewise, Google Ads is encouraging image extensions to help text ads look more appealing, pointing to the importance of images in 2022.

Metaverse

Similarly, Facebook’s announcement of the Metaverse (which will be highly reliant on rich media), means that now is the time to make sure you are also producing regular video content for your business.

Youtube

Make sure that you are using unique images and video on your website, that you have a YouTube channel, and that content is tagged correctly to help the search engine understand what the content is about.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has had its ups and downs over the years. At first, response rates were high, but over time this declined as the medium was abused and our inboxes became saturated with messages trying to sell us products and services.

End of third party cookies

With the end of third party cookies (in 2023), and search engines and social media platforms constantly changing their algorithms, one of the few constants you can control in your marketing armoury is your first-party data (email addresses, telephone number etc).

Audience Segmentation

There will be more companies turning to email marketing in 2022, so you need to make sure that your content stands out and is better than your competitors. One way to do this is to understand your audience and segment it. Deliver personalised content about what is important to them; make sure your emails bring your audience value and are not just constant sales messages.

Google Shopping

Free listings

When Google Shopping started back in 2002, it was free; it was a way to get more products on Google and take market share back from Amazon. As it became more popular, it then turned into a pay per click only option. In 2020, Google decided to change this back to free (for some placements) in the UK.

Surfaces Across Google

With Surfaces across Google, it’s possible for Shopping results to appear in search, Shopping, Maps, Images, and Lens. We have already mentioned the importance of images and Google Lens in 2022, so if you sell products online, make sure you set up your Google Merchant Centre now.

Social Media

TikTok

Before the 2020 lockdown, most people hadn’t even heard of TikTok, but the perfect storm of isolation and fun, low-quality, vertically-shot video to popular music caused it to become one of the most downloaded apps of all time.

Now, we all know what TikTok is and despite Facebook/Instagram’s attempts to take audience share back with the release of Reels, it continues to be one of the biggest and fastest-growing social platforms, with 1 billion monthly active users.

We remember having conversations with businesses about Facebook and being told, I don’t need to be on Facebook, we are having the same conversations about TikTok today…

It’s a place to grow an audience and share your brand, values and business journey. You don’t need to be funny, able to dance, or to know about popular music – it’s a place to be real and raw.

GLO’s Social Media Tip for 2022

In 2022, more businesses will be adding TikTok to their social media marketing. We advise you to get there before it’s too noisy. And remember, if you are advertising on the platform, make TikToks, NOT ads.

Request a Callback

Are you already applying all of these trends to your digital marketing strategy for 2022? Request a callback or schedule a free digital marketing consultation to get free advice about how you can make the most out of your digital marketing budget for 2022.

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A/B testing for CRO

John Parnell — Mon, 06 Dec 2021 16:10:43 +0000

CRO is an acronym used by marketers referring to conversion rate optimisation – the process of increasing the number of conversions a website receives. There are several types of conversions a business could be aiming to increase; transactional sales, form completions, email signups or the number of visitors creating an account. These are all dependent on the business’s goals.

In order to optimise your website’s conversion rate, you need to understand what your customers’ needs and wants are when visiting your website. Simply asking your customers through surveys doesn’t guarantee any quality feedback that you could rely on. Instead, taking the data-driven approach using analytical tools, such as Google Analytics and Hotjar, enables you to physically see what is and isn’t working, ultimately preventing your conversion rate from increasing.

What is A/B testing?

CRO and A/B testing typically go hand in hand, as optimising a website’s conversion rate requires various testing to be carried out. A/B testing is simply the act of testing two or more variations of pages, content or elements, to help pinpoint what contributes to customers successfully being pushed down the marketing funnel and converting. There’s no correct “one size fits all” way for your website to appear and function to be successful; what works for one company’s website may not work for another. The specific data collected from your visitors is key to understanding where any metaphorical “roadblocks” are along the customer’s journey, enabling you to eliminate them through the process of A/B testing.

But what data should I be tracking?

Within Google Analytics, the ‘pages per session’ and ‘average session duration’ metrics are good to be aware of but need to be approached with discernment. Having a high average session duration could suggest customers are having to spend more time trying to find what they want which leads to frustration and abandoning the site. To ensure this isn’t the case, view and examine your analytics – when visitors are viewing lots of pages, are they resulting in conversions? If not, it might be an indication that there are too many roadblocks on their way to converting.

The two metrics which are essential to track are Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. If there is a high Bounce Rate on a certain page, you can take that as a good indicator of where to start A/B testing. Once you identify the problem and fix it, your Bounce Rate on this specific page is likely to decrease, resulting in a spike in conversions. After all, Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) leads to more completed purchases or sign-ups, depending on the goal, rather than just increasing the traffic that comes into the site.

How does A/B testing work?

Once decided on an A/B testing tool, some of the best being Optimizley, VWO, Omniconvert and Google Optimise, a code needs to be placed into the website in order to gain full control of the site and users’ experience. Now, using any of the website analytical tools previously mentioned, analyse where your visitors appear to be dropping off within your website. Identifying that helps narrow down what pages need reviewing and testing, allowing you to start building the new variations to test against within the A/B testing tool. Having conducted your research prior and identified where your visitors are dropping off, you can build the variations within the A/B testing tool, creating as little as one to as many variations desired.

Tip:

If conducting multiple A/B tests simultaneously, ensure none of them conflicts with one and other. Avoid testing anything which can be viewed at the same time, as although some testing tools do limit each visitor to only see one campaign at a time, others however don’t. Consequently resulting in both test results being contaminated by one and other. So in general it’s good practice to keep the tests separate and prioritise one over the other initially.

The A/B testing tool allows you to decide what percentage of your site traffic are recipients of the test. For example, 100% traffic would equal 50% of visitors seeing the original site, also referred to as ‘the control’, the other half seeing the variant. The delivery is completely random, ensuring there are no biased results depending on external factors.

Before launching the test, there will be an option of setting goals for your tests. This is dependent on what you are trying to achieve. Either increasing conversion rate or something more specific like multiplying click-throughs of a button or being directed to the next stage of the funnel.

Browser cookies track and save whichever variation visitors land on. Though, if a visitor were to delete the cookies’ data before returning to the website or open it on another device, they could potentially view the control or another variation.

Each test should last for a minimum of 1 to 2 weeks, to ensure enough data has been collected and the results have normalised, clearly stating a ‘winner’. Keep in mind that the duration of your test will vary depending on your site’s average number of visitors, especially if you have multiple variations. Low traffic means the test needs to run longer to collect enough data and vice versa. The successful variation needs to be implemented for 100% of traffic until it’s been permanently built into the website.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

When it comes to testing, you’re able to change basically anything that already exists on site which your customers can see. There are some limits though, you’re unable to add net-new pages without adding them to the original website. For instance, if the homepage needed to be completely redesigned, you couldn’t test this without adding the new page variation to the original website. However, using your A/B testing tool, you could redirect a proportion of your visitors to the new page and the others to the original. The other limitation to testing includes the site functions which don’t already exist in the original code. For example, if you wanted to test an ‘Add to wishlist’ function, it would need to be written into the code first, but then be suppressed for a percentage of traffic.

You could test:

Images or Videos
Copy
Call to actions
Buttons
Pop-ups
Navigation
Forms

If you are just starting out with A/B testing then begin with features that everyone can see! Landing pages typically receive the most traffic, so are a great place to start pushing those new visitors down the funnel and further into your site.

Further A/B testing ideas

If your website data isn’t showing you the results you were hoping for in terms of conversions but are unsure of where the issue lies, here are some testing suggestions:

Perfect your checkout – Your visitors are on the home stretch, ready to make a purchase. The checkout should have as few distractions as possible, to ensure your customers make that transaction. Test removing irrelevant content which could persuade the customer to go backwards in the funnel. Display shipping costs upfront as this can be a surprise expense which sometimes discourages the user from continuing. Simplify navigation, so there’s no confusion. Remember to continue showing any price discounts, original price and the new price. This will remind the customer how much they are saving which will motivate conversions.
Experiment with major elements – Large blocks of content can be overwhelming so try hiding parts or breaking them up into smaller pieces. Show/hide banners or images which are pushing important content further down the page. Cyber security logos may be off-putting for customers, so test which works for you.
Auto sort by popularity – Try sorting your product categories by popularity. This may improve the chances of new visitors finding what they are looking for quicker.
Create clarity – Test any call to actions (CTA’s) that have a lot of text vs a short snappy one. Chances are the short one will generate more leads. Any ad copy, headlines or CTAs should be clear and simple to drive a response.

A/B test results: How to identify the winner?

As mentioned earlier, each test should last at least 2 weeks. Your A/B testing tool will have a reports page that provides key information which contributes to deciding when the test should end and what variation won. There will be a metric called ‘confidence rate’ or ‘chance to beat control’, providing a percentage to each variation whether it’s predicted to be more successful than the original ‘Control’. The percentage has to be above 50%, otherwise, it’s a clear indication it has lost. To consider using any of the variations, they need to be at least 90%. Meaning there is little risk of the variation becoming a failure.

Next, a graph will present all the results. Ignoring the first few days, each line should have flatlined and stayed like that for 10 days or so to be able to stop the test.

Combining each of those points plus a sufficient amount of traffic will indicate a ‘winner’ of the test. If the confidence percentage is good but does not receive enough traffic, then let the test run longer, in order to obtain a fair result.

No clear A/B test winners?

Some tests may be trial and error, not all will result in the variant being crowned the ‘winner’ but that doesn’t mean the test was unsuccessful. You have gained more information about your visitors’ browsing habits, which will help guide future tests. But how can you utilise this information to your benefit now? The best way is to analyse the data and create user personas to paint a clear picture of your target audience, which can not only guide your further CRO efforts but also inform your social media posts or email marketing campaigns.

Building a User Persona

Forming one primary persona and perhaps a couple of secondaries from analysing previous reports enables you to build specific segments within your analytical tracking tool to identify what website elements the target audience is using and where A/B testing should be implemented. To give an example, using demographics within your analytical tool, enables you to identify both the age and gender of your key persona. At this point, start to build a new segment within the tool including that information. Take a look at your customer interests and narrow down what your primary persona interests are, then add those to the segment too. Also, key information to incorporate is ‘Geo’. Your key persona’s language and geographic location are valuable in order to target specific regions for future campaigns. You can make the persona segment as specific or vague as desired, depending on your website traffic volume or business goals. Now having built the segment, you’re able to see the pages and elements which are the driving factors of your key persona making a conversion. However, more importantly, you’re able to recognise where they are dropping off within your site which pinpoints exactly what to A/B test to optimise your website for your key persona.

How many A/B tests do I need to run to see an increase in conversions?

The first test won’t magically increase your conversion rate overnight. A/B testing is an iterative process of removing both big and small issues throughout your conversion funnel, creating a seamless experience for customers. Removing a stumbling block in the middle of the funnel won’t automatically make the entire journey clear too. It will take several improvements throughout the funnel until you start seeing your conversion rate increase.

It’s vital to regularly track your website’s data through analytical tools, in order to identify more testing opportunities. Through constant tracking, you will begin to spot behavioural patterns within your data. Completing one test and observing the subsequent data could potentially reveal another page which is now in need of testing. That new issue that arose as a result of a recent improvement proves how necessary observing your website’s data is at every step of the testing process. For example, improving an element on one page and successfully increasing the click-through rate will inevitably lead to more traffic being directed through to the next page. Consequently, the following page to which you have successfully boosted traffic levels, may not have previously received sufficient data to identify any testing opportunities. However, as a result, you may now be experiencing a high drop off rate, clearly showing the need for this case to be tested and optimised to increase conversions.

Here at GLO we continually analyse the data we are tracking to spot patterns and testing opportunities, which in turn help us to optimise our website and offer a seamless experience for our visitors.

Common CRO mistakes to avoid

Now, if you are sitting there feeling slightly overwhelmed or confused after reading the entirety of that information, let’s take a step back and recap. Conversion Rate Optimisation is an ongoing process that involves tweaking elements of your website in order to improve user’s experience and as a result generate more conversions, whether those are sales, form submissions or email newsletter subscriptions. By working on your CRO you can generate more leads via your website as your visitors will come across fewer roadblocks.

One of the best ways to improve your CRO is through A/B testing – the process of testing new variations of pages or elements on a website against the original. To decide what to test, use a website analytical tool to figure out where most of your current traffic is dropping off or start with landing pages that typically receive the most traffic. Some of the metrics that may indicate areas or pages worth testing include the Bounce Rate and Conversion Rate. Run your tests for a minimum duration of one to two weeks and allow the results to normalise – you know which version is your winner when you see one with at least a 90% success rate.

And finally, don’t forget that not all A/B tests you do will have the goal of increasing your conversion rate, especially in the beginning. You could set the goal to measure the number of times a specific element that’s being tested is clicked and therefore pushing those users closer to making a conversion. Furthermore, not all tests will have a clear winner but the data you collect can still be utilised to build a primary persona. This data can help you to understand who your key customer is and constantly ensure any A/B tests are increasing the conversion rate within that segment.

Conclusion

Just like with any optimisation efforts, it is important to strike a good balance between not responding to the data and doing too much to try and fix the issues. Every visitor wants a simple and easy browsing experience. So when it comes to optimising or redesigning your website here are some mistakes you should try to avoid:

Over personalisation – Personalised shopping experiences may be the latest trend but that doesn’t mean a customer’s experience should be 100% personalised. It can be off-putting sometimes for a customer to see actually how much information you know about them, resulting in potential losses. Test what performs best, do visitors want to see suggested items based on what they’ve already viewed or view new products that they may not have considered before?
Having multiple navigation methods – You want to ensure a streamlined experience. If adding new navigational methods, ensure it is easy for a customer to use or give hints on how to use new features.
Obsessing over colour – Of course, some colours are more eye-catching than others but overall it’s not an element to spend too much time worrying about it. Fix substantial problems before testing little details.
Carousels vs Static Images – Carousels that are especially featured on landing pages can bring the site to life and make it instantly more engaging, however, users typically click on the first slide, therefore missing the rest of the information. A/B testing will determine which works best for your users.
Don’t test without any data to back up your decision – This is a waste of time. Randomly testing elements to see if they work better is very time-consuming too. Figure out what content needs to be tested using your site’s data. You should A/B test new content before adding it to the original site in case it damages your conversion rate.
Focusing too much on the landing page – Yes, the landing page is very important! But if you know there are bigger issues further down the funnel, test and fix those first before driving more customers into the funnel.

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The post A/B testing for CRO appeared first on GLO - Generate Leads Online.

How to generate leads with content marketing?

Beth Craig — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:27:26 +0000

If you were to ask a few different marketers, what are some of the best ways to generate business leads in 2021, no doubt the majority of them would mention content marketing.

Online content plays a much bigger role in the consumer journey now, than it did a few years ago. The internet has become an authoritative source of information for buyers and an avenue for marketers to advertise their products. A 2019 study demonstrated that 81% of consumers do online research before heading to the shop to purchase a product. With coronavirus forcing businesses to go digital, and consumers having less opportunity to shop in physical stores, there is a greater reliance on content marketing to satisfy the customer at several different touchpoints.

Similarly, Ofcom 2020 stats show that adults in the UK are spending a record 4 hours a day online, which demonstrates an increase of one hour since 2018. Marketers can use this data to their advantage by moving their target audience down the sales funnel with the use of high-quality, value-adding content that triggers the desired action and is then distributed via channels that offer a high return on investment.

There is no doubt that content marketing is paramount if you’re looking to reach your target audience and build trust relationships with them while adapting to the increasingly more digital “new normal”. Those relationships cultivated through the process of building up your online authority with interactive content, as well as having a carefully planned content strategy that supports your business’s goals are going to help you generate leads with content marketing. In this article, we will guide you through our 7-step guide on how to do this. To apply what you learn in this article, download our Content Marketing Strategy template and follow along!

What is lead-generating content marketing?

Developing and maintaining a competitive advantage that helps the business generate leads and convert them into sales and loyal customers is the main concern of digital marketers. By applying different processes they create a brand image and develop online authority that helps to attract and convert web visitors into leads.

Lead-generating content marketing often refers specifically to digital content and is a strategic marketing approach dedicated to the creation and distribution of valuable, relevant and consistent online content that attracts and retains a specific type of audience. Some lead-generating content, such as coupons, can drive profitable customer action when delivered to the customer at the right time.

At GLO, our content marketing specialists can attest to the fact that generating leads with digital content marketing can be a very successful online marketing strategy when supported by intelligent use and analysis of data. You can easily support your content marketing decisions with data gathered with Google Search Console and Google Analytics, which are both easy to add to your website.

One thing that’s undeniable when you want to successfully generate leads with content marketing is that you need a strategy. As the founder of Content Marketing Institute (CMI), Jay Baer says, “A content marketing strategy is not a nice-to-have, it’s a requirement.”

In this article, we will guide you through the process of writing your content marketing strategy for lead generation so that you can take your customers from the top of the funnel through to conversion. We’ve created a handy Content Marketing Strategy booklet with templates and an interactive Content Calendar to make it easy for you to develop your complete content strategy.

Reasons to add content marketing to your lead generation strategy

Apart from the customers demanding more online content in order to complete their research prior to making their final purchase, and people generally spending more time online, there are other reasons why you may consider adding content marketing to your lead generation strategy.

Content marketing is a form of ‘softer’ selling where you aim to provide a load of value to your web visitors before asking them to subscribe or pushing for a sale more aggressively. It adheres to the ‘Jab Jab Jab Right Hook’ idea, famously coined by Gary Vaynerchuk. This slower approach to marketing to your potential customers works well in the online space as a jab’s content aims to engage and trigger an emotional response while a right hook’s content aims to sell and self-promote. This 3:1 ratio strikes the perfect balance between the two and helps you to avoid a counterproductive result that too many right hooks could easily lead to – let’s be honest, no one likes to be constantly sold to!
Data collected by HubSpot further validates this, showing that 96% of first-time website visitors are not ready to purchase and prefer to carry out their research to compare against the competition. You want to be able to provide them enough ‘jabbing’ content to build up their trust in your business before going in for the right hook.

Promoting products or services to your target audience with the use of interactive content, not only meets their research needs but also has shown to be 3 times more efficient in generating leads, as compared to outbound marketing. Furthermore, 72% of companies surveyed confirm that content marketing increases the number of leads in their business.

Smart allocation of resources with a focus on avenues that generate the best ROI is what most businesses look for. Content marketing can provide this long-term. According to HubSpot, 1 out of 10 blog posts demonstrates a “compounding” quality, meaning that organic search steadily increases traffic to these posts over time. Even big brands, such as Coca-Cola have in recent years recognised the power of creating digital content and are now shifting the majority of their resources towards content marketing and away from TV advertising.

We are not suggesting you follow the big dogs and do what the likes of Coca-Cola are doing – your budget might not stretch that far. But even for those businesses with smaller budgets content marketing doesn’t have to be something that they get to do someday in the future.
A lot of the time when something is successful we assume it’s also pricey. Here’s the surprise! Demand Metric estimated that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing techniques. Learning how to generate leads with content marketing is something that even small businesses can invest in right now.

A lot of the time, those trying to generate leads with content marketing for the first time, find that it’s a time-consuming activity. For those short on time, outsourcing to content marketing agencies can be a better solution and one that may potentially result in much better results. Take one of our clients as an example – after our content marketing team took over Eagle Training’s blog management, we were able to achieve top first page rankings in Google for some of the topics that their target audience was interested in.

Whether you’re going to try to generate leads with content marketing yourself or hand it over to a specialist team, below we dive deep into the steps we believe should be taken to start generating leads through content marketing.

GLO’s 7 step process to generate leads with content marketing

1. Develop a content marketing strategy

If you recall Jay Baer’s quote from earlier – content marketing strategy is a requirement if you’re serious about generating leads via this particular channel. In fact, writing out a strategy for any marketing efforts you are investing in is an important part of the process. Creating amazing pieces of content without a strategy that will synergise your content and lead your web visitors down the sales funnel is frankly a waste of your time.

So how exactly do you write your content marketing strategy? There are a few steps that come into it and involve you putting your thinking cap on. Traditionally, you’ll get your pen & paper out and start jotting your ideas down, but since we are a 100% paperless digital marketing agency, we prepared a downloadable PDF with Content Marketing Strategy templates for you to fill in.

Let’s get started!

A content marketing strategy is not a nice-to-have, it’s a requirement.

Download your Content Marketing Strategy template!

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1.1 Segment your audience and create buyer personas

Remember how we said that the ‘jab’ was the type of content that aims to engage and trigger an emotional response?

Your content marketing strategy will revolve around a lot of jabbing and a few strategically placed, and not so obvious, right hooks. But how can you evoke that emotional response in every single one of your web visitors with the same piece of content?

The answer is, you cannot.

Your audience needs to be segmented into smaller groups of people based on common characteristics and needs they have. From this activity, you can identify your ‘ideal customer’ or in other words your buyer persona. Having a more defined image of who you’re talking to, what they like and don’t like, what keeps them up at night and what their aspirations are, allows you to create content that directly speaks to their specific needs and triggers the emotional response you are looking for.

Most businesses with multiple products or services will find they have more than one buyer persona that when combined represent their entire audience pool. However, if you’re new to content marketing you can focus on just one that you think represents the buyer who is most interested.

So how do you put your buyer persona together? Well, you need data. This may be data you’ve collected in the past or data that you can derive from tools such as, Facebook Audience Insights or Google Keyword Planner. Both are great tools to build a picture of your ideal customer.

Once you have the data, you can put it into a buyer persona template and keep safe to guide any other marketing strategies you and your team are deploying. We’ve got a blank buyer persona template for you in our Content Marketing Strategy booklet.

1.2 Map the customer journey

Stepping into the shoes of your potential customers is important in order to understand what you’re doing well to meet your customer’s goals and where perhaps you’re not delivering enough value or making it too difficult to do business with you.

By understanding your consumers and their needs on a human level you can gain better insights into what it is they might need or expect from you once they’ve interacted with your content at the different stages of their journey. This way you can target their entire experience rather than just do the bare essentials of targeting the right keywords, which we’ll discuss later on. Discovering their unique journeys helps you to strategically choose the right content upgrades and lead magnets.

The easiest way to map your consumers’ journey is to go through it yourself and note down all the different touchpoints that happen on the way. These could include steps such as them landing on one of your blogs, seeing a pop-up about your new lead magnet, subscribing, receiving an email with the freebie etc.
To make it an interactive and flexible process for you and your team, use sticky notes to mould the journey of your ideal consumer.

When you’re clear on the steps your consumer takes and points at which they come into contact with your business, you can put it all into a consumer journey map like the one below.

1.3 Match content to the different stages of your sales funnel

Many businesses and entrepreneurs are already creating content – according to 2019 statistics, YouTube alone gets roughly 500 hours of video content uploaded every minute worldwide. But one of the biggest mistakes content creators make is they fail to move their potential customers down their sales funnel. We don’t want you to be one of those content marketers. Once you’ve mapped your consumer’s journey, use the online sales funnel to decide which content fits your consumers’ needs best at the different stages.

Pushing for purchase when marketing to someone who just became aware of your products or services is unlikely to result in a sale. At the awareness stage users are interacting with your content while gathering knowledge on solutions available to the problem they’re currently facing. By adding an emotional appeal to your content, which can be done with social proof, some of those users might express further interest in your products or services and will be willing to exchange their email address for a free resource that helps them with their problem.

The awareness stage is a great opportunity to find out which of your content benefits your web visitors the most. Another name given to this stage is Top of Funnel (TOF) as it’s where the process of sifting through your web visitors begins so that you can move the interested ones to the next stage – consideration, where you get to turn them into leads. For this to happen, it’s not only the content that needs to resonate with them. You also need to remove any barriers they may face when attempting to sign up.

Having successfully moved the consumer down to the point where they begin to consider your business more seriously by comparing your solution to other solutions, your job is to offer them whatever they need to choose you over your competitors. At this stage, your content marketing strategy may turn to inviting them to a free webinar or sharing an in-depth case study where you demonstrate your expertise. If they bite, they enter the decision stage and may look to you for reinforcement of their decision. If you’re a service provider, you could offer them a free consultation and follow up afterwards by sharing a testimonial someone else left you.

1.4 Identify what lead magnets you need to create

Lead magnets help you gather contact details in exchange for a free resource, such as a free trail or eBook. By growing your email list you get to interact with your target audience and create marketing material that is more personalised, which increases the interaction.

As consumers are becoming more demanding and discerning, it is no longer enough to write a good article and expect those readers to instantly become fans that keep coming back to consume other pieces of your content. Web users are looking for added value in the form of free resources. Being able to download freebies helps them to make up their mind on whether they believe the source is a credible and authoritative one.

But before you go ahead and create your first free resource, let’s consider what makes an irresistible lead magnet.

First and foremost, your lead magnet needs to solve a problem and offer your reader a quick win. Great lead magnets are easily digestible and can be accessed instantly. To help you build trust with your audience, your lead magnets should have a high perceived value and demonstrate your expertise well. To generate leads with content marketing you want your lead magnets to satisfy all of the above.

Recently, marketers have had a lot of luck with interactive lead magnets, such as quizzes, but there are many other freebies that have been working well for years, including checklists and eBooks. The type of lead magnet you decided to create depends on the needs of your target audience. Our Content Marketing Strategy booklet gives you many suggestions of different lead magnets you could produce for your content.

1.5 Put your ideas into a content calendar

If you’ve followed the previous steps, by now you’d know what pieces of content you need to be creating to move consumers down your sales funnel, including the freebies. But one of the factors that helps websites rank high in Google is publishing high-quality content on a consistent basis.

Content creators with many great ideas, and some understanding of how these pieces come together to encourage the consumer to choose their business, may feel confident about their content marketing strategy. But without accountability and a schedule that outlines when these pieces of content are supposed to be published, their good momentum will eventually stop.

Without a content calendar, you risk your sales funnel becoming leaky, with potential leads dropping out before they covert. Creating a content calendar may take you a few hours on the day that you decided to do it, but will save you many hours and headaches in the future. Not only will you know exactly what content needs to be created and published when, but everyone on your team will know too, and will be able to step in if needed. Furthermore, CMI 2021 statistics show that four out of five top performers use an editorial calendar while only half of the least successful do.

In your content calendar, for each piece of content you should make notes on some of the following details:

The title for the piece of content.
Who is it aimed at?
What is your Call To Action?
What content upgrades or lead magnets will be associated with this piece of content?
What other pieces of your content will you be linking to?
When the content is going to be published?
Who is going to create the content?

There isn’t one unified formula to follow when filling out your content calendar. We would advise you to try and create journeys for your web visitors.

So let’s say your buyer persona is interested in one specific topic that you’ve decided to write about.

First, you’ll title it using the types of words this particular type of customer is likely to type into Google to search for the topic you’re writing about. You will learn this from your keyword research.

The next step is to think about the reasons why this person might have been searching for this type of content. Are they just researching or are they desperate for a solution now? What exactly was their search intent?

Based on those findings and assumptions, think about what sort of free resources you could provide them with in exchange for their email so that soon you can interact with them again, using another piece of content. Similarly, think about what other topics could they be interested in and see if you can make content to answer those questions. Then plug it all into your calendar in a way that maps their journey through the sales funnel.

Remember that different pieces of content suit the different stages of the sales funnel. You want to have a mixture of traffic-generating content, such as blog posts, social media posts, videos or infographics, and lead-generating content, which would include your free resources, eBooks, mini-courses, coupons, webinars or free challenges.

Within our Content Marketing Strategy booklet, you’ll find a link to an editorial calendar template we created on Airtable. We’ve filled out the first few fields to show you how to build journeys for your consumers with your content and move them down the sales funnel simultaneously. All you have to do is follow the pattern!

2. Apply SEO to your content

With the content marketing strategy out of our way, we finally arrive at step 2 of our guide on how to generate leads with content marketing.

This step is all about making sure that whatever content you create, you make sure to optimise it for search engines. After all, you are generating content for web users who are most likely searching for solutions in Google.

The type of keywords that will be relevant to your pieces of content will differ depending on the stage of the sales funnel you are associating the content to.
Long-tail keywords, along the lines of “how to generate leads with content marketing” or “what is the best way to generate leads online” might be something you include more in pieces of content that aim at attracting those consumers in the awareness stage.

Someone searching for commercial terms, such as “content marketing agency” or “content marketing expert” is likely to already be in the consideration stage.
Understanding the search intent behind the different search queries will help you stay focused on the most optimal keywords for each piece of content you produce.

To further indicate to search engines, which keywords you’re hoping to rank for you’d need to apply on-page SEO tactics, such as formatting your primary keyword with the use of H1 tag.
We go into a lot more detail on how to produce SEO-friendly content and the various on-page SEO techniques you should apply in our guide on How to generate leads online through SEO?

3. Make your content interactive

Capturing your audience’s attention is key to generating leads with your content. Our attention spans are becoming shorter and shorter. A study conducted by Microsoft all the way back in 2000 showed that the attention span of an average person equalled 12 seconds back then. Around 2015, this dropped to 8 seconds and since then it has been ever decreasing due to the abundance of information presented to us.

Statistics show that interactive content gains two times more engagement than static content. When your audience interacts with your content, it is more likely to be shared and so may have a lot higher reach than content that is static and doesn’t get entice the reader to pass it forward. Similarly, 77% of marketers say that interactive content has a “reusable” value, resulting in repeat visitors and multiple exposures.

Creating a variety of content, whether that is video, podcast, infographics, eBooks or quizzes is the best approach. Equally, within one content piece, such as a blog post, you can use several different types of content to keep the user engaged.

4. Distribute your content via high ROI platforms

Creating valuable, authoritative and interactive pieces of content is one step of the process. The next step is to promote that content.

Distributing your content should be a part of your content marketing strategy. Even if you haven’t been producing long-format content in the past, you may know which one of your social media accounts gets the most engagement and perhaps has generated some leads in the past. That’s the one that is most likely going to see a higher click-through rate when you start sharing links to your content.

If you don’t have any insights into the performance of your social media accounts, it’s something that you’ll have to test and adjust as you go along. However, to start off with, think about where your target audience is most likely to hang out. As a B2B digital marketing agency, more of our content gets seen by relevant users when we post on LinkedIn and Facebook, as opposed to Instagram. Depending on your business and what audience it appeals to, you can predict the social media platform that may work best for you. Pinterest is also a great place to share your work as it can generate a sustainable flow of traffic.

5. Promote your lead magnets with Facebook Ads

When you’ve created your irresistible lead magnets for your content, it’ll be a shame not to promote them to a wider audience. One great way is via Facebook Ads.

For years, Facebook has been collecting data on its members, which you can utilise to target your chosen target audience. Their AI is able to predict the buying habits of their users and knows about their preferences and interests.

With the wealth of knowledge Facebook holds over users all around the world, it makes a great tool for marketers who are looking to advertise to their target audience and generate qualified leads.

Advertising lead magnets via Facebook can work with audiences at different stages of the marketing funnel. Whether you’re trying to increase awareness or hoping to move someone from consideration to the decision stage of your marketing funnel, the audience selection tools within Facebook Ads Manager allows you to do that. You can build audiences based on your buyer personas and further suggestions from Facebook, or simply upload your email subscriber list and retarget to them.

Facebook users tend to like advertising that is more passive and so when coming up with creatives for your Facebook Ads campaigns, be sure to produce something that doesn’t disturb them while scrolling through their news feed, but equally grabs their attention so that they go ahead and subscribe to your email list in order to receive your freebie.

6. Look for guest blogging opportunities & other forms of collaboration

Writing blogs for other platforms that already managed to capture the attention of an audience that is similar to yours is a great way to generate leads with your content. It’s also a great way to secure a backlink that boosts your SEO.

Once again, it’s good to be strategic about your collaborations. First, research different blogs, podcasts, vlogs that your audience might be attracted to, and before pitching to those platforms, think about what evergreen content you could produce to benefit your audience.

Once you decide on the content, create a lead magnet that you can promote within your blog or while on the podcast. This will be the thing that determines how many leads you’ll get from your guest blog. Refer back to the qualities of an irresistible lead magnet and see if you can tick all those boxes. Additionally, make sure your lead magnet is highly relevant to the topic that you’re covering.

When writing your piece of content, you should create opportunities for yourself to talk about the freebie you have. Make your writing sound natural whilst at the same time mentioning something about your lead magnet throughout the body of the blog post. Another great place to mention your lead magnet is ‘Author’s Bio’.
By exposing you to a new audience, and giving you the opportunity to add value to those users with your expertise and the freebie, guest blogging enables you to generate leads with content marketing.

Guets blogging has been around for years. As a content marketing agency, we look for guest blogging opportunities for our clients. Having many Suffolk based clients, we produce guest blogs on their behalf on local directories, such as Suffolk Business Directory and Suffolk Business.

Other forms of collaboration could include being a co-host on a webinar. In recent years, webinars have been extremely popular with online users. In this way, you get exposed to a huge amount of people and connect with them on a more personal and interactive level.

7. Track analytics and insert content upgrades

Just as you need a strategy for any of your marketing campaigns, you need to track the analytics of those campaigns to gain insights on what’s working and what isn’t. Monitoring a few of the different datasets in your Google Analytics will help you make more informed strategic decisions.

By analysing the sources that your content viewers come from, you can determine which platform is generating you the highest return on investment and choose to focus more of your efforts on that particular platform. This goes back to step 4 in our process where we were trying to identify the highest ROI platform to distribute our content on.

Checking how many people viewed your content, and how long they spent on the page gives a good indication as to how interesting and engaging your content is. If, for example, you notice a trend of “How to…” guides performing better than other pieces of content, you can add more of those into your editorial calendar. High-traffic content pieces can easily be made into lead-generating powerhouses by simply adding content upgrades to them. Content upgrades work best as two-step opt-ins as you can hyperlink words within a short sentence in which you present the value of the freebie to then, once they click, send them to a contact form or a pop up where they can sign up. The two-step opt-in process has proven to increase the number of conversions.

Lastly, you want to monitor how many people sign up to get your freebies, which lead magnets are the most popular and bring in the most traffic, as well as where those people come from.

Data shows that out of those practising content marketing almost all (94%) top performers measure their content performance whereas only 60% of the least successful do.

Tracking your analytics gives you a view of the bigger picture and guides your entire strategic marketing process. In 2021, it is not enough for content marketers to know how to produce SEO-friendly content or interactive infographics. They also need to understand how content works across the board. Knowing how it can be leveraged and reused let’s you generate more leads with content marketing.
At GLO, we believe that tracking data and analysing it, allows marketers to derive insights that give them a superpower of marketing agility. This helps them to be more responsive to the ever-changing digital landscape.

Congrats! You made it through all of those 7 steps – we know it’s quite a lot to take in. We can imagine that by now, you either:

A) have your content marketing strategy written up and your editorial calendar filled with many ideas on content pieces that will help you to generate leads

B) have already given up on attempting to do this yourself and would much rather get a content marketing specialist to do it for you!

If the answer is B, get in touch with the GLO team and let us generate leads for you with content marketing.

The post How to generate leads with content marketing? appeared first on GLO - Generate Leads Online.

How to Generate Leads through SEO

Beth Craig — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 19:48:03 +0000

Can you generate leads through SEO?

That’s a question that many business owners think about when weighing up whether search engine optimisation is worth their investment, or whether they should choose a different digital marketing approach.

Whichever method you opt-in for, you will most likely aim to get a consistent stream of qualified leads, at the lowest cost possible. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is often hailed for its super-power to generate business leads with a series of on-going and seemingly intricate techniques. And having seen our SEO experts at Generate Leads Online take many businesses up to the top of page #1 on Google results pages, by following a carefully put together SEO strategy, we can definitely attest to this!

Compared to some of the other online lead generation methods, it is a slow-burning process but the results are worth the wait. So, if you’re thinking of investing in SEO marketing services to generate leads for your business, it’s important you understand what goes into the process of making your website rank well on Google. In this guide, we are going to go through the steps involved in implementing a full SEO strategy and explain how to use SEO to generate leads online.

What is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

SEO can be described as a process of improving your website and online presence to improve its rankings in search engines, such as Google, and drive more traffic to your website. By editing and adjusting different aspects of your website, and using the right keywords, SEO ensures your website shows up in search engines and matches the ‘user intent’ of your dream leads.

How SEO helps your business generate leads?

The higher your website ranks in search engines, the more clicks it’s going to get from users. The more visitors on your website, the higher the chance of some of them becoming interested in your products or services. Eventually, that interest turns into desire and the website visitor becomes a lead, or maybe even a conversion.

Without an SEO strategy in place, it’s very unlikely that your target audience will ever find your website amongst the competitors who are investing in search engine optimisation. Out of the 40k searches that Google receives per second, only a third of those people bother clicking through to the second results page! You really have a small chance of being found via organic search if your website appears somewhere on page 2, or beyond.

For those businesses focusing on a local clientele, SEO lead generation works particularly well thanks to the Google 2014 Pigeon update, which gave those businesses the power to compete in search engines on a local level. Reports show that 72% of consumers who perform a local search visit a store within 5 miles of their current location. Therefore, if you run a business that serves the local area, SEO can be a powerful tool for you. An important aspect of your local search engine optimisation is building out your Google My Business profile. Read our 10 Local SEO Tips to learn how to do it successfully.

Every few years, Google releases another updated version of their search engine algorithm allowing businesses to leverage SEO techniques for marketing purposes. The 2013 Hummingbird update focused on the semantics of the terms users enter into the search engine. What this means is that Google now understands the real meaning behind the words users type in, and what exactly it is that they’re after, which meant that SEO experts had to learn to consider “user intent” in their processes. Since then there has been more emphasis on websites satisfying Google’s search intent requirement in order to rank higher, which comes down to short and long-tail keywords used on your website. Learning about and leveraging the different types of keyword intent allows you to improve the ranking of individual pages on your website and as a result, generate qualified leads for those products or services.

What’s more, contradictory to what many people assume, SEO can result in more conversions than Pay-Per-Click ads, which appear above organic search results. Statistics show 70%-80% of people ignore the sponsored results in favour of organic listings. Although, unlike paid advertising, SEO does not offer the ability to retarget the web users who once visited your website but didn’t convert, ranking well in organic searches may soon win you more leads and conversions than those using PPC retargeting. With more concern over user’s privacy, companies such as Apple and Google have announced big changes that involve blocking third-party cookies. This will make it harder for marketers to set systems in place that track and follow web users when they leave without converting.

70%-80% of people ignore the sponsored results in favour of organic listings

More and more businesses recognise the huge potential of investing in SEO as a lead generation method. So if you don’t want to fall behind, adding SEO to your digital marketing efforts is no brainer. Now, before we discuss how to generate leads with search engine optimisation, let’s look at the different types of SEO practices.

Types of SEO Practices

SEO can be broken down into three types:

You can think of technical SEO as all the things you need to do in order to ‘pay’ for your fast-track entrance onto the search engine results pages. It is all the processes that enable search engines, such as Google to crawl your website and add them to its database.
Once you get onto the search engine you’ll perform the on-page SEO to improve your ranking by satisfying Google’s criteria. This is where most of the lead generation potential lies. However, without technical SEO, your on-page SEO will not bring the best results.
Off-page SEO is the promotion of your business website on other platforms and backlinking it to other respectable sites. This supports your website and helps to bring it up higher in search.

For an SEO strategy to work your search engine expert will ensure that he or she covers all three types of search engine optimisation, and keeps up with the demands of the strategy on-going. Without a sustained effort, even websites at the top of page results will see a drop to lower positions as competition catches up.

12 Steps To Generate Leads Online with SEO

A good search engine optimisation strategy will cover all three types of SEO in order to drive organic traffic and generate you leads online. Our 12-step guide will show you what goes into each type of SEO and how it assists the process of getting leads from organic searches.

Steps 1-6 focus on technical SEO.
Steps 7-11 refer to on-page SEO practices.
Step 12 talks about off-page SEO techniques.

Step 1 – Index your website
Step 2 – Take time to consider the site architecture & crawl budget
Step 3 – Optimise your site’s load speed
Step 4 – Set up any necessary redirects
Step 5 – Check your website offers good user experience (UX) & is accessible
Step 6 – Add structured markup to the schema of your website where relevant
Step 7 – Perform continuous keyword research & optimise for intent match and search entities
Step 8 – Keep on creating high-quality content to assert your authority & build trust
Step 9 – Capture your leads
Step 10 – Assign title tags, meta descriptions & perform image optimisation
Step 11 – Track, analyse & improve your content and rankings on a regular basis
Step 12 – Secure as many high-value inbound links as you can & promote your content

Generate Leads With Technical SEO

It’s important to start with the foundations which are included in technical SEO. The thing about technical SEO is that it’s directly connected with your website design. Here at our web design and SEO agency – Generate Leads Online, when a new SEO client comes to us, the first thing we look at is their website. Very often we end up redesigning their websites before even starting on SEO as this helps us to establish a foundation for a strong search engine optimisation strategy. Similarly, when building websites we suggest designs that take SEO into consideration, even if the client isn’t planning to invest in search engine marketing services with us. We practice holistic web design and this is just one way it’s expressed in our work.

So, let’s look at what technical steps should be taken and how do they help you to get SEO leads?

Step 1 – Index your website

This is like applying for that fast-track ticket to get onto the search engine results pages, which we mentioned above. You’re applying to be added to the database of Google so that they can show your website in searches. You’ll need to create a sitemap of your website and submit it to Google Search Console. Although we’ve put this as the first step, you shouldn’t really index your website until your on-page SEO is done. In this way, you’re giving your website the best chance to rank well from day one. We’ve put this as Step 1 as it is one of the most fundamental things you need to do to connect your website to the search engine. Note that there is a propagation period and it can take a few days or even weeks for it to start showing up on Google.

Step 2 – Take time to consider the site architecture & crawl budget

Websites have a duty to provide accurate information to the user and wow them with the design. But besides what the user can see or read, the design of your website needs to make it as easy as possible for the search engine to detect the context of the website and show it in organic searches to those who are looking for it. For this to happen web spiders crawl your website whenever new content is added. These Google crawl spiders land on your page and tries to index the information they can get to, in order to make sense of it and match it to intent keywords and entities.

It’s important to create a robots.txt file to tell the crawler where to go and where not to go. There is a limited number of times the crawler will attempt to scan your website and if the way you have interlinked the different pages on your website isn’t allowing him to scan the pages you actually want him to scan, he will simply give up and leave those pages unindexed, resulting in them not showing up on Google. Therefore, the architecture of your website and your interlinking strategy should be done in a way that doesn’t waste your crawl budget. Apart from the robots.txt file, adding links from your homepage to all those pages you want to be indexed is another way to optimise your crawl budget.

Step 3 – Optimise your site’s load speed

In the era of instant gratification and short attention spans having a website that loads instantly is very imperative for your on-page lead generation strategy. In fact, bounce rates increase by 50% if your website takes more than 2 seconds to load. The higher your bounce rate the more likely Google will deem it as an irrelevant source of information for users with specific search intent. Over time, despite having a good keyword strategy, your website might rank lower if users are ‘bouncing off’ your page quickly due to load speed issues.

There are a few different things you can do to improve the speed of your website. The simplest ones to try first include, installing a WordPress Caching plugin (or find an equivalent for your CMS), optimise images by compressing file sizes, ensure all plugins are up to date and avoid uploading video or audio files straight onto the website. Every time you apply a speed optimisation technique, run a test on GTMatrix to see if it helped. If you’re still facing issues, an experienced web developer will be able to help you with more advanced methods, which we won’t discuss in this article.

Step 4 – Set up any necessary redirects

If your website is being redesigned or you’re moving some pages to a new URL, those old pages need to be redirected. There are several different types of redirects that your SEO expert can set up depending on the circumstances. Without those redirects, the site crawlers can come across a 404 page, also known as an ‘error page’, which can hurt your rankings. Same can happen to a web visitor who will then, most likely, head back to the search results and go for one of your competitors instead. This not only hurts you but may even help to boost your competitors SEO!

When considering redirects in terms of SEO, one of the most useful redirects to apply is a 301 redirect. It indicates that the content has been moved permanently from one URL to another. The benefit of using this type of redirect is that it passes 90%-99% of link equity to the redirected page. We will discuss the relevance and importance of link equity as part of your SEO strategy later on in our guide.

Step 5 – Check your website offers good user experience (UX) & is accessible

Pages that offer a pleasant user experience rank higher in SERPs (search engine results pages). Google’s aim is to offer users the best experience in terms of speed of finding what they need, the relevancy of the information and the process of finding it. This again points to the idea of holistic web design, which we practice here at Generate Leads Online, whereby pages are designed considering the experience of the user. This determines the layout of the content and what content we provide where. It has an impact on the placement of the buttons and the interlinking we do between pages.

User experience can also be improved by paying attention to small details such as having at least 14px font size, adding subheadings to break down long pieces of text and limiting pop-ups.

With 87% of smartphone users using a search engine at least once a day it’s crucial to ensure your website works well on mobile devices as well. In March 2020, Google announced that they will be switching to mobile-first indexing which means that sites that don’t work well on mobile will receive lower rankings in search engines. Having a website that uses a mobile-first web design approach will help you to satisfy Google’s requirements and may trigger an uptick in the number of inbound leads.

Ensuring that your site’s content is available, and its functionality can be operated by everyone allows you to meet the accessibility requirement and helps your rankings. This can be achieved with clear navigation, site structure, meaningful use of subheadings and image alt text that actually allows a user, who may be visually impaired and relies on assistive technologies that read out the alt text to them, to understand the context of the page.

Step 6 – Add structured markup to the schema of your website where relevant

There are ways to add additional data to the schema of your web pages that offers Google extra information on the content provided. This gives your content a chance to make its way into, what is called, rich results. Those are specifically designed to highlight key information that the user is looking for and appear at the top of search results, often as an image or carousel. In the below example, the structured markup code these three websites used gave Google data on the different elements of these results, such as the images, the names of the organisations providing the recipes, the reviews and the baking and preparation time.

Someone searching for chocolate cake recipes will find these results very useful and is more likely to use one of the three top recipes rather than scroll through the many results that show up below the rich results area.

Using structured data markup does not guarantee you will make it to the rich results but it puts you ahead of the competition who aren’t practising this SEO technique. The structured data markup codes can be generated almost for any piece of content on your website which doesn’t mean that’s what you should be doing. Use it on the information that actually adds extra value to users looking for that information. This is closely related to user intent, which we will discuss further in the next section. If your website is built on WordPress, adding structured data becomes easier with the use of plugins.

One way to take up more space in SERPs and boost your rankings by utilising structured data markup is to add it for FAQs. By targeting the question queries your target audience is searching for, your content may appear in the ‘People Also Ask’ section.
In the video below, Beth, our content specialist explains how adding keyword-rich FAQs additionally improves your position on Google results pages.

It’s important to note that websites that make it to rich results may see a dip in their click-through-rate for some queries since users can get a quick answer to their query without having to go into your website. Knowing this should help you decide where adding structured data markup may result in a boost in your organic search rankings without it negatively affecting your business objectives.

The following three steps focus on the actions you can take directly on each page of your website to generate leads with SEO.

Generate Leads With On-page SEO

A huge chunk of on-page optimisation comes down to your content and how well it’s optimised with the right keywords that match the search intent. A well-thought-out keyword strategy can result in rising numbers of organic search web visitors your business is receiving. Once your content is optimised there are a few technical things you can do in the backend of your website to make it more Google algorithm friendly.

Step 7 – Perform continuous keyword research & optimise for intent match and search entities

To find the best keywords for each page of your website you need to define who your dream leads are. Who is your product or service designed for? What sort of problems does it solve?

Get clear on your target audience segments and speak to that audience within your service pages, demonstrating how you can provide the solution to their problem.

The key is to use the language your audience would use to search for these services so that Google shows them your website when they do use these queries. But how do you know what those are exactly?

The great thing about SEO is that it is based on data. So to nail down what those search terms are you’ll need to perform thorough keyword research. This can be done using various tools.

It’s always good to start with a simple Google search. Type in the search phrase you think your audience would use to find your services and see what comes up. What phrases are competitor websites using? What else comes up in the suggested dropdown?

You can then use other free tools such as Ubersuggest, Also Asked or Google Trends to find other related keywords or ones that your competition is ranking for. Finally, use Google Keyword Planner to see what the volumes of searches and competition levels are for some of the keywords you are considering using. If you choose high volume and high competition keywords, the likelihood of you outranking some of the more established domains is quite low. Rather, focus on high volume, low competition combinations or refine your keyword to go more niche.

It’s best to collect as much data as you can on the potential keywords to use and then narrow down on the ones you are going to focus on – the optimal ones for your chosen objectives. We find gathering your keywords in a spreadsheet and using the filter option works best when narrowing down on your strategy. Your goal is to define groups of keywords for each page of your website, which you believe, based on your research, will optimise the rankings of that particular page in search engine results and drive relevant traffic to those pages.

Before you make your final decision on the keywords to focus on, check whether the user intent behind them matches what your business is offering. When performing competitor audits on Ubersuggest to check what type of keywords your competition ranks for, you might come across some high search volume terms that may seem like an obvious keyword to go for. Just because they’re searched a lot and have relatively low competition doesn’t mean they carry the right search intent for your business. So for example, searching for “apple” will bring up several results of the tech giant Apple, and not many on the fruit apple. It’s important to research the real meaning behind your chosen keywords before you try to rank for them. Your target audience might be using completely different search terms to find what you offer.

99% of all search terms fall under 4 different intent categories: informational, navigational, commercial and transactional. To generate leads with SEO, the content on your product or service pages needs to match the search intent of those looking for such a product or service. In this way, Google will bring up your page in SERPs and expose it to those who are looking for what you offer. If your content doesn’t match the search intent very well i.e. it doesn’t answer their query, users will leave your site after a few seconds, having realised it’s not what they were looking for. This increases your bounce rate and when it happens frequently it tells Google to lower rankings, resulting in less traffic to your website and ultimately fewer potential leads.

Your keyword strategy should include short-tail and long-tail keywords so that you can target different variations of the relevant queries. Long-tail keywords are also useful when trying to capture those who might be browsing the web using voice search devices, such as Alexa. Statistics show that 50% of consumers use voice search daily when searching for businesses around them and those queries tend to be long-tail.

The content on your website can be further optimised for search engines by considering the search entities. Those refer to anything that Google knows about. And the more it knows about, the more it connects the different entities together. For example, if you type in a query ‘current prime minister UK’ it will bring up a knowledge panel for Boris Johnson, the current prime minister in the UK. At the same time if you typed in ‘Boris Johnson’ you’d learn about the role Mr Johnson currently has i.e. UK’s prime minister.

Google’s algorithm constantly analyses the queries people put in and the content websites provide and learns what keywords relate to one another. Viewing the image Google results demonstrates it best. Sticking to our example of Boris Johnson query, when we switch to the images tab, at the top we see several related keyword suggestions, including brexit, eton, london, mayor and nigel farage. These are the keywords Google connects Boris Johnson to. Now, if you were to write a blog post on our prime minister, you could optimise it using these search entities. You could craft your article around these entities to make sure you include them without keyword stuffing. By mentioning them you’ll get Google to trust your content as it’ll see the related keywords being mentioned all together.

Last but not least, all of this keyword research we just explained should be revisited on a regular basis. Keyword trends change and evolve and so should your SEO strategy.

Step 8 – Keep on creating high-quality content to assert your authority & build trust

Content marketing should be at the heart of any SEO strategy. Updating your website with fresh content on a regular basis shows Google you’re active. What’s more is that, when you add valuable content to your website that your audience is interested in, visitor sessions will become longer and bounce rate will decrease. This indicates to Google that your content is useful for your web visitors. The more value your web visitors get from the content you share, the more likely they are to share it themselves. Sharable content indicates to Google that your website is a popular and trusted source that deserves a higher ranking in SERPs. To build up authority, publish blog posts with more than 2000 words so that search engines see that you really know your stuff. It also gives you more opportunity to use relevant keywords within the body of the text. To keep the reader engaged, you can also get creative and break up the text with images, graphics and videos.

So speaking of keeping users engaged with the use of videos, here’s Beth again – this time explaining the benefits of updating your blog regularly.

Publishing blog articles on your website can become a lead generation method in itself. It is a great way to attract potential customers who are somewhere in the middle of your sales funnel. You can use your blog to answer any of their objections or shape their opinion by providing them with the information they’re looking for.

Monitoring your Google Search Console data gives you an insight into the sorts of questions people have about your products or services. Filter through the various question words, such as how, what, where, why to find the sort of questions you could answer in a blog format. Once you’ve got the topic suggestions, follow the keyword research steps again to make a list of short and long-tail keywords worth adding within your main body text, or as subheadings. Just remember what Beth said in her video – try to use those keywords naturally!

Step 9 – Capture your leads

Creating great content that drives quality traffic to your website is one thing. But what is the use of web visitors if you’re not converting them into leads? To keep your marketing funnel going you need those web visitors to take the next step. And the action they take needs to offer you the opportunity to stay connected with them and follow up. Depending on the school of thought, and the industry you’re in, it is believed some consumers will need up to 12 touchpoints before they decide to buy from you. This shows how important it is to capture those visitors.

One way to capture leads within the content you post on your website is to offer a lead magnet. Giving freebies away in exchange for their email address is one of the best ways to capture those consuming your content. This can include free eBooks, downloadable checklists, video tutorials, or in our case, a free SEO audit for which you can apply by filling out the form at the bottom of this article.

This ‘transaction’ process of capturing a lead and providing them with a free resource that expands on the topic your post is about can be automated with the email marketing tool you use. One of the biggest mistakes we see business owners make is capturing the email addresses but never doing anything with them! If you’re going to be capturing leads, make sure you have a process in place that will then nurture that lead over time.

Optimising the conversion rate of your website can be done on other pages too, not just where you post your regular long-format content, such as your blog page. Adding contact forms where it’s likely for users to convert is a good way to increase your conversion rate. By adding a thank you page you can track the number of conversions you get and where they come from.

Our conversion rate optimisation (CRO) guide can help you to understand what else can be done on your website to generate more conversions.

Step 10 – Assign title tags, meta descriptions & perform image optimisation

To ensure you’re making the most of your content on each landing page and optimising the click-through rate from results pages, there are a few technical features in the backend of your website that you can utilise. Start by assigning an H1 header tag to the targeted keywords that relate to the title of the page and the content of that page. You can then assign the H2 tag to any subheadings that contain similar keywords. These tags help search engines to understand the content on your landing pages.

Next, filling in your meta description boxes with great copy that explains to your audience what they’ll find on your landing page helps to increase the click-through rate from SERPs. Use SERP Snippet Optimisation Tool to get the right amount of characters in your descriptions.

Lastly, when uploading images to your website it is good practice to optimise their file size beforehand. This keeps the load speed down. Additionally, you can name your image files using the keywords you’re looking to rank for, which will elevate your SEO game when the website gets indexed.

If you have a WordPress website, installing the Yoast SEO plugin is highly advisable. It audits your SEO efforts and provides you with suggestions on what else can be done to improve the ranking of your pages or blog posts.

Step 11 – Track, analyse & improve your content and rankings on a regular basis

Once your technical and on-page SEO is up and running, the aim is to continually improve it by analysing the data. Keyword research and matching the user intent should be something you do regularly – SEO, in general, isn’t a ‘set it and forget it’ technique. It’s like a muscle that needs to be trained to stay strong.

Every now and then it’s good to run a quick SEO audit using SEO Site Checkup tool to scan your website for any errors and see which of the recommendations are worth implementing. You can also monitor the page load speed with GTMatrix to keep the bounce rate low and improve user experience.

Similarly, using Google Search Console, you can measure how well your website and the content you post is performing. This is where you’ll see data on your search impressions, or in other words how often you appear in search results, for what sort of queries and which of these result in a click.

Analysing this data helps you to make decisions with regards to your next piece of content, or any changes that you need to implement in your keyword strategy or a piece of content you posted in the past that perhaps isn’t ranking so well.

For example, let’s say your blog post is showing up on the first page of Google results for a specific keyword yet the bounce rate from that particular page is high. With more and more people indicating to Google that they didn’t find your information useful, over time your rankings will dip. Rewriting that piece of content to match it to the search intent of those inputting that query is not a bad idea to improve the click-through rate and potentially generate leads. Compare the article against those at the top of the fist page – what do their blog posts have that yours doesn’t? Once you notice what gaps you need to fill, you can rewrite the article and monitor its performance.

You should also monitor the conversions on your website, which can be done using Google Analytics. This will give you insight into where most conversions happen and might suggest little design adjustments on your landing pages to improve the conversion rate.

Generate Leads With Off-page SEO

Finally, in this last step, we get to off-page SEO, which as the name suggests refers to all the search engine optimisation processes done outside of your website. Working on this aspect of your SEO strategy helps to improve the perceived relevance, reputation, trustworthiness, popularity and authority of your website to the search engine crawlers and users themselves. Below we’ll explore how this is done.

Step 12 – Secure as many high-value inbound links as you can & promote your content

Your website’s search engine ranking improves when other platforms or people whose websites are deemed as high-authority ‘vouch’ for the quality of the content on your website. This can be done by creating backlinks from their sites to your site. There are three main types of links:

Natural links are earnt without you having to take any actions. For example, if a blogger with a large following decides to mention your product or store in one of their articles and links your name to your website URL, you’ve earnt a natural link.
Manually-built links can be generated by asking your clients to link back to your website or asking influencers to share your content.
Self-created links are those that you or your SEO expert can create by listing your business on relevant directories. Paying for a press release or guest blogging would also be considered as a self-created link. Some self-created link practices are seen as black-hat SEO and are condemned by search engines so be sure to choose a white-hat SEO agency to help you with backlinking.

Regardless of how you get your inbound links, the ones that matter the most are those with high link equity. Search engines rank pages based on how well they can pass on authority and value onto another website. This will depend on several factors, including how popular that website is, how related the two pages that are being linked are, the authority of linking page’s domain and how many other links the linking page has. All of this increases the link value of the linking page.

As we discussed, as part of your on-page optimisation you can frequently add high-quality content to your website. It’s great to write value-packed blog posts but you’ll only really reap the benefits when you promote that content and drive traffic to it. Social media is one way to get there. Every time you or someone else within your industry posts on Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn and adds a link to your website, a backlink is created and helps to boost your SEO.

By adding high-authority links to your site, specific to your industry, you improve your reputation and drive traffic to your website. With an optimised, user-friendly website (technical SEO) and valuable, easy-to-read content (on-page SEO) the users who come to your website through those backlinks (off-page SEO) find what they need easily and stay on your website, indicating to search engines that you provide the user with value. Search engines, such as Google, will then reward you by ranking your page higher when relevant queries are being searched. The more people see your website in search, the more people are likely to view it and convert, which means your SEO efforts are generating you leads.

Lead generation and SEO

You can see how ALL of the elements of search engine optimisation come together to drive traffic to your website from organic search. The more web visitors, the higher the chance of getting leads.

Marketing your business by following a search engine optimisation strategy that covers all those elements can be a sustainable way to get inbound leads without spending too much per lead. Every investment you make into the optimisation of your website for search engines is going to push it forward incrementally.

Finding an experienced SEO specialist to do it for you will ensure that the strategy is aligned with your business goals, tracked and optimised at all times. Another benefit of paying someone to do your SEO is that it avoids any ‘beginner’ mistakes that can hurt your rankings.

Although the strategies we discussed in the on-page SEO section have the most power to directly affect your ability to generate leads with your SEO strategy, specifically the continuous keyword research and high-quality content that strategically answers the questions of your target audience, these will not yield great results unless backed up with the technical SEO and promoted with some of the off-page SEO techniques mentioned above.

With some of the technology giants behind the famous browsers such as Safari, Firefox and, in a couple of years, Chrome blocking third-party cookies, retargeting to people who have visited your website in the past will no longer be as easily available. Therefore investing in search engine optimisation services ahead of these big changes to ensure your website shows up at the top of results pages in organic searches will put you ahead of the game.

If you’re looking to generate more leads with SEO, apply for our free SEO audit below and let our experienced team where your search engine marketing strategy could be optimised!

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The post How to Generate Leads through SEO appeared first on GLO - Generate Leads Online.

Website CRO Tips | Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:06 +0000

In this Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide, we are going to drill into Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) and provide you with our top 10 CRO tips that can help improve your conversion rate on your website, meaning you will generate more leads and subsequently, more revenue for your business.

The first thing you hear when you start a business is that you need a website. But what is the point in having a website? One thing that is pretty consistent with businesses, whether you are selling something on your website or simply have it up there for informative purposes, is that you want it to be able to help you convert potential customers to paying customers.

At GLO, we understand that in order to generate leads online, you need a website that converts web traffic into customers. Understanding the importance of CRO is the first step in the process. After all, the higher the number of ‘converters’ in relation to web visitors, the higher your conversion rate is. You may have thought to yourself in the past:

“I get a lot of visitors to my website but I haven’t got any enquiries from them.”
“My website is just my online business card.”
“I get all my business from referrals, I don’t need a website.”

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This reminds of a saying from Henry Ford, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right”. I mention this because all the people who believe their website is not there to generate their business more leads are probably right! And the reason for this is most likely that they are unaware of their conversion rate and the ways to optimise it. If the website wasn’t designed with the purpose of convincing people to convert then it’s not likely that potential customers will convert, or even having anyways their customers can ‘convert’ in the first place.

Firstly you’ve got to start asking yourself, what do I want my website to do for me? You may want to sell more of your products, increase subscriptions to your mailing list or get people to enquire about your services. What is the point in having a website if it’s not working to achieve the goals you’ve set for it?

What is a conversion?

A conversion is a point at which a visitor on your website completes a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out an enquiry form or subscribing to your email newsletter. The conversion rate of your website is, therefore, the percentage of web visitors that complete a desired goal (a conversion) out of the total number of visitors.

Micro Conversions vs Marco Conversions

Macro Conversions

Your ‘Macro Conversion’ is the end goal that you are looking to achieve after your website visitor goes through the different levels of your marketing funnel.

It is important to note that this ultimate goal looks different for every business. An e-commerce website will be looking to get a purchase from its visitors. However, a service provider may wish to focus their efforts on getting visitors to request a quote for one of their services.

Micro Conversions

To get to a ‘Macro Conversion’, the visitor may take a series of smaller steps which can be defined as Micro Conversions. These can then be further split into categories, known as Process Milestone and Secondary Action.

Process Milestone

As the name suggests, a process milestone is a significant step on your potential customer’s journey where they take an action that brings them closer to a macro conversion, i.e. your ultimate goal. Some examples of process milestones include a visitor inquiring further about your products and services via live chat or adding products to their wish list.

Secondary Action

Secondary actions are still desired actions taken by the user but are seen as more distant from reaching a macro conversion. An example of a secondary action is a user coming to your website and downloading any free resources you are offering by entering their email address, commenting on your blog posts or signing up to your newsletter. Your website managed to get their attention and create some interest, but it may require a bit more nurturing to bring this particular user to a macro conversion.

What does Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) mean?

CRO is an umbrella term used for all of the tools and methodologies digital marketers use to optimize their sites and campaigns. In this article, we’re talking specifically about website CRO and things you can do on your website to improve your conversion rate.

Traffic may be coming your way via an effective SEO, paid search, social or content strategy, which is great! Unfortunately, the people visiting your site aren’t achieving the goal you actually intended them to achieve in the first place. They’re not converting. It’s time to think about conversion rate optimisation.

Digital marketers track the percentage of web visitors that are converting (conversion rate) in order to assess how well your website is getting web visitors to perform your goals (completing a conversion). Conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is the process of optimising your site to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete that specific action.

This continuous process of tracking the user browsing behaviour and adjusting the website elements accordingly, to get an increased percentage of users to perform your desired actions is known as Conversion Rate Optimisation.

Marketing Funnels & CRO Strategies

Every business has a marketing funnel in place. This is essentially your customer’s journey with you, and it usually includes the following steps: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, Conversion, Loyalty and Advocacy.

Converting a lead will mean something different at every stage of the marketing funnel and so each stage may need a different CRO strategy.

Furthermore, CRO strategies vary from business to business but there are some best practices we can offer you today that can help optimise the conversion rate of your website.

As a business, you are out there to make a profit. Spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a website that isn’t converting is not going to help you achieve that goal. Conversion rate optimisation is an ongoing process that will transform your website into a lead generating tool, helping you earn more revenue.

10 Website CRO Tips – Our Conversion Rate Optimisation Guide

Understanding Your Customer & Adding Value

Develop and express empathy for your target audience. Walk a mile in their shoes during every interaction and step, but go further. What brought the potential customer to this specific page? For the visitor to convert you need to show them you fully understand them. You, as the business owner, most likely do. But your website, as an extension of the business, needs to translate that understanding.

It is a good idea to go back to your buyer personas and make sure you understand who your ideal customers are, what their pain points are and how your product or service solves that issue. This reminds me of when I used to work in telesales (please don’t judge me). Every prospect I spoke to had sales objections, or reasons they’re hesitant to buy the product. If the buyer didn’t have reservations about the price, value, competitors, product fit, relevance to their situation, or their purchasing ability, they would have already bought it. To be successful in sales, reps must learn how to both discover and resolve these objections. This is exactly what you have to do to optimise the conversion rate on your website! These objections could be organised easily in a FAQs section, where you list common objections in a question format and responding in a way that changes their mind or alleviates their concerns.

Once you refresh your understanding of your customers, visit your website as a potential client with a specific problem in mind and observe how easy it is for you to find what you need, and how convincing and encouraging is the value proposition on your website.

Note the places within your marketing funnel where perhaps you could add more value. Would your potential customer appreciate a free downloadable PDF with your ‘Top 10 Tips on how to…[input your expertise]’? Or perhaps showcasing some case studies of how your product or service helped someone else could help you win their trust?

Harness Web Analytics & Behavioural Analysis Tools

To fine-tune these strategies you need real data. You may have a good understanding of how your customers browse your website but gathering data with the use of tools such as Google Analytics will give your CRO efforts more precision. From this information, you can begin to learn about the target audience segments that convert the most. This information helps us to modify the content and user experience to improve the conversion rate for the buyer personas you attract.

You can analyse user behaviour with snapshots, heatmaps and recordings with platforms such as Hotjar or CrazyEgg. This helps you to understand at which point a specific type of customer drops out and can even show you how customers interact with your website. This information will help you rethink your content, web design and how you add value.

Copywriting

Before you even think about changing the design of your website to optimise the conversion rate, you need to focus on your copy. It will be your words that will evoke the emotions needed for the lead to convert. Therefore, catchy headlines are vital to capture their attention fast. You can use a headline analyser to see how those headlines will appear to visitors – many people only read the beginning and end of a headline!

Remember to always start your SEO copywriting with the end goal in mind. What is it that you want the user to do on this particular page? This will make your content more structured and will reveal where you should be putting your ‘Call to Action’ buttons.

You should also always lead with the benefit in mind. How is your product or service helping them to solve a problem? How is it addressing their pain point? If you are still unsure what those pain points are, you should go back to Tip #1.

Optimise for Mobile & Page Load Speed

Each year the number of people visiting websites from their phones vs desktop raises. The percentage went up from 16.2% to 53.3% between 2013 and 2019 and is predicted to keep increasing. What this means is that your website needs to be mobile optimised. You need to make sure the user experience on mobile is just as effective as it is on the desktop.

What’s more, pages on your website need to load fast on mobile and desktop. Slow websites frustrate visitors and negatively impact your conversion rate. A study by Soasta showed a decrease of 20.5% in conversion rate on mobile pages that had 1 second slower experience. That one second could be very costly when is comes to your conversion rate.

Pop-ups

In the digital marketing world, pop-ups are overlays that appear on your screen and draw your attention to something different than you have been looking at on the website. For example, they are often used to get the visitor to sign up to an email list.

Many people find pop-ups annoying but there are many different pop-up types. Some appear the moment you open the site, others after a few seconds and then there are exit pop-ups that would only appear when you’re about to leave the website.

This latter type is considered as one of the most effective ways to keep your visitor happy whilst they’re browsing the website, yet capture them and make a micro-conversion when they’re about to leave.

When considering adding a pop-up to your site, make sure you:

Make it relevant to the page on which it pops-up
Make it easy for the visitor to close the pop-up
Make the design consistent with your branding
Use a compelling CTA
Use cookies. This way you’re not showing the pop-up to those who already signed up or to those who always close the pop-up without reading it.

Strateigic CTA’s

Congrats! You’ve attracted a visitor to your website – we could say this was one of your micro conversions, as if you have a Facebook Pixel, you can use remarketing to show them relevant ads to get them back to your website and to convert in the future.

So they’ve landed on your website, now what? What are you trying to capture next? Perhaps it’s their email address. How and where on the page will you entice them to do that? To lead them through a series of micro-conversions towards a macro conversion you will need to use visible, clear and effective ‘Call To Action’ buttons (CTAs).

This is why the strategic placement of your CTAs is so important. Think about your micro and macro conversions and the behaviour patterns of the visitors in the different stages of your marketing funnel. If they’re not yet at the stage of requesting a quote from you, what else can you do to stay connected with them?

Consider using the language of the prospect and including multiple CTA’s to speak to different audiences at different points in the funnel. Make the CTA buttons stand out by playing with their design, as well as the copy. Benefit-oriented copy, such as ‘Get my free eBook’, ‘Request call-back’ or ‘Stay connected’ perform better than a button that simply says ‘Click here’. And remember to split test your CTAs. Monitor what placement, design and copy work the best and adjust over time.

SEO your Inner Service Pages

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps people find your products and services online from search. However, time and time again I see businesses ‘SEOing’ their homepage for their services and giving very little effort put towards their inner services pages. A customer is a lot more likely to convert if they are displayed the service information they’re actually searching for. Here’s an example:

The customer searches “web design Ipswich” into Google and they click the first link. The website displays the homepage of the digital marketing agencies website which shows all of their digital marketing services, including; SEO, Google Ads Management, Social Media Marketing and then finally has a link to their web design services. In finding this link to the information your potential client was initially searching for, half the amount of searchers may have given up and chosen one of your competitors.

This is why it is important to pay just as much attention to your inner product/service pages as your homepage when it comes to web design and SEO. We pay close attention to getting service pages to rank higher than the homepage for service related searches, to improve the conversion rate. Someone searching for ‘web design’ may have different pain points as someone searching for a ‘digital marketing agency’, so your inner service pages need to reflect this.

Build Authority & Credibility

One way to increase the conversion rate is to build trust with your potential customers. In order to do this, you can add qualifications or trust stamps your business has, such as a high number of good reviews. This helps to build authority and makes you stand out against your competitors.

People trust other customers who took the time to review your products or services. Showcasing testimonials that relate to a particular service or product when the lead is in the ‘Consideration’ stage of the marketing funnel could convince them to move towards conversion. As with almost everything on this list, you can split test the effectiveness of your trust stamps, qualifications and testimonials to optimise your conversion rate.

Live ChatBot

One of the things that can kill your conversion rate is visitors not being able to get the information they came to find. If they become frustrated they will simply leave your website. To keep them from doing this, you could provide extra support with a Live Chatbot plugin.

Adding a live chatbot to your website makes your website visitors trust you and give them an impression that there are real people behind the chatbot 24/7, ready to support them with their queries. It is a cost-effective way of improving customer service.

Providing that extra reassurance is not only convenient for your website visitors when requiring extra information, but could also help them make a decision on whether they’d like to try your product or services. Live Chats are the most popular way for customers to request support. We recommended LiveChat or ChatBot, depending on your need for automation.

A/B Testing

Now let’s not get CRO and A/B Testing mixed up. CRO is about using tools and methods to optimise the number of conversions from your website. Testing is about verifying these tools and methods.

A/B testing is used throughout digital marketing. The glory of digital marketing, after all, is data. It is especially used effectively in paid media campaigns, by showing different variations of an advert to determine which gets the best click-through rate.

For website CRO, A/B testing is a popular method of comparing the effectiveness of two different versions of the same website, by showing different content or designs to visitors and analysing the data in order to find out the version that brings the most qualified leads. It helps you identify what works and what doesn’t.

We have ended our ‘10 Website CRO Tips’ on A/B Testing to show you that with testing, conversion rate optimisation is never-ending and you can constantly test different variations of every one of our CRO tips to get the best results from your website.

Request a Callback

Are you already applying any of the above ideas on your website? Request a callback below to get free advice about how you can improve your conversion rate.

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As a business, you are out there to make a profit. Spending hundreds or thousands of pounds on a website that isn’t converting is not going to help you achieve that goal. Optimising your conversion rate is an ongoing process that will transform your website into a lead generating tool, helping you earn more revenue. It was a pleasure to write our ‘Website CRO Tips’ to help you to survive COVID-19. Please get in touch if you have any questions.

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Best Digital Marketing Agency UK 2020 by Clutch

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:05 +0000

With the digital age growing more and more every year, it’s important to choose the digital marketing agency right for the job. GLO – Generate Leads Online specialises in providing ROI-focused campaigns to small to medium-sized enterprises and clients all around the world, with offices in Suffolk and London. We are very proud to be ranked highly in the UK as a top digital marketing company and are eager to push this forward into the coming years!

“I am thrilled to have been chosen as one of the Top B2B Companies in the UK and Western Europe. It’s been an amazing first year of business and being recognized by Clutch in multiple categories is so meaningful to my business.” “We feel lucky to have worked with so many great people and organisations that have helped our company earn a position as one of the best digital marketing agencies in the UK.”

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John Parnell, Managing Director of GLO – Generate Leads Online

Clutch Top Digital Marketing Agency

Clutch is a B2B ratings and reviews firm which evaluates agencies and consultants to create an expansive digital resource. Their online resources include thousands of company profiles, each featuring reviews from past clients about their experience partnering with the company. Take a look at some of the great things people have to say about our company.

Clutch’s affiliate site, The Manifest, also highlights leading agencies as part of its blog-style site. The Manifest also provides its users with industry-specific news and how-to guides.

GLO’s Clutch Reviews

“The GLO team was responsive, creative and positive with ideas they generated to solve the issues…” – Sue Anderton, Executive Director at The MAZE Group CiC

“…I take comfort in knowing that he’s always looking to be on top of new trends…” – Martin Bright, Director at Fees Free Mortgages

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SEO Tips For Your Startup Business

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:05 +0000

As a company just beginning to start out in business, you need to target your potential clients online, as over 97% of consumers go online to find a business. One of the most efficient ways to do this is by using search engines, such as Google and Bing. Unless the potential customer has already heard of you or been recommended, they wouldn’t be searching your brand name. This is why Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has to be at the forefront of your marketing strategy and an important consideration when planning your business. A startup that implements a strong SEO strategy during developing a business plan is more likely to achieve success through setting the foundations of the business with necessary SEO components.

So how can a startup achieve SEO success from the start? This blog will address how to consider SEO while developing your business plan, and share with you our top SEO tips for your startup.

The most fundamental SEO tips for Startups

Starting a business is not an easy process and it becomes even harder when rapid expansion in on the cards. If you’re just starting up, you need to be there in as many of your potential customer’s touchpoints and digital platforms to advertise your products or the services you are offering, especially social media platforms and search engines. For any startup or small business, a solid SEO strategy is essential to driving growth and brand awareness, therefore these startup SEO tips will help to take your small business to the next level:

Know your target audience
Fix technical issues and optimise your page
Register and optimise with Google My Business
Manage the local business listings and citations
Add schema markup
Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools
Register with Google Analytics

Know your audience to master your SEO efforts

The very first step to developing search engine optimized web content for your business is to know your target audience.

Keywords. Conversion. User experience. Search engine optimization.

What do all of these words and phrases have in common?

They all relate to how you will attract, engage, and convert your target audience.

The crux of any good digital marketing campaign is to identify the specific characteristics of your ideal customers, including geographic, demographic, and psychographic variables. This is very important because you will know who you are selling to and your target market. When you know who your target audience is or will be, it becomes easy to market your products or services, create content and search for the keywords to use among other things. Therefore, you need to research your target audience to make the right choices. The more you know about your audience, the more powerful your digital marketing efforts will become.

Fix technical issues and optimise your page

One of the most common issues that come up when a business fails to incorporate SEO into its startup plan is the emergence of technical SEO issues later on down the road. If you do not know much about SEO or you have very limited knowledge about the subject of SEO, it would be advisable to hire an expert SEO agency, such as Generate Leads Online to do a professional job.

Your website should not have any technical issues like duplicate content, broken links and slow page speed. If these issues are not fixed, they will affect your rankings and traffic to your page, making it hard to benefit from SEO strategies. While Google and other search engines have made big strides in their ability to evaluate sites, technical SEO issues can still create problems that make it more difficult for your site to be properly indexed and to rank well within search results.

In order to combat this issue, it’s important to have the technical aspects of SEO addressed as you begin developing your site and other web properties, in order to avoid costly complications that could be difficult to fix down the road.

Nevertheless, here is a list of several common technical issues that often arise and become more difficult to address the longer they are avoided:

No automated or cohesive process for removing or updating pages without creating links to missing pages, losing authority from external sites that linked to those pages, or redirecting users to irrelevant pages unrelated to the original.
The inclusion of URL query strings for campaign tracking, user filters and sorting operations, customization, and so on, that generate pages with largely identical content but located at different URLs. These should be avoided or addressed using the canonical tag.
Duplicate title tags.
Insufficient original content or excessive duplicate supplementary content on pages.
Links to “infinite spaces” where a virtually infinite number of pages are dynamically created that would be irrelevant in search results.
Poorly implemented or missing .htaccess, robots.txt, and XML sitemap.
Poorly set up analytics that fails to track user actions or loses information about their referral source.
Make sure that your startup game plan addresses the necessity of clean technical SEO during the development process as well as a part of regular site maintenance.

Once the technical issues are fixed, you need to optimize the page by creating quality content by conducting thorough research. Some of the things you need to optimize when creating content are:

Titles.
Meta descriptions.
Alt text and images.
Body content.

Register with and optimise Google My Business

Google Local SEO is a tactic that you need to consider when developing a marketing strategy for your business. It boosts the local search traffic and protects you from online fraud as well.

Google is used when you need to know anything from the best barbecue joint to best salon services in the area. With the help of Google Places all the relevant information like addresses, contact number, website link, reviews and available to the targeted audience in an instant.

It is essential for businesses to get the attention of the customers in the area it operates. With Google Local only the local searches are focused. Searches are limited to the business in a certain locality that makes it a great possibility to been seen by potential consumers.

Small businesses can take great advantage of Google Local SEO without spending any money on print ads or television. With the help of Google Places, you can market and promote your products and services in the target locality in a cost-effective manner.

Manage the local business listings and citations (NAP)

When optimizing your business, you need to understand that consistency and accuracy is very important to avoid confusing people. As a result, your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP) should be accurate to improve your local presence. If you don’t know your accurate NAP, you can look for a service that will distribute your NAP information so that you can update the info on your page.

NAP is critical for businesses wishing to rank well in the local organic search results because search engines like Google take the data into account when determining which companies to show for geo-targeted searches.

For starters, make sure that your NAP is correct – both on your website as well as on other sites throughout the web. Local SEO experts believe that Google and the other search engines cross-reference your NAP information across a variety of websites as a validation that you are a legitimate business. The more “local citations” you can build up with consistent NAP information, the better. In terms of local citations, it’s probably worth listing your business on any reputable directory – especially local directories and/or industry-specific directories.

Add Schema markup

Schema markup is one of the most under-utilised SEO techniques out there. This is surprising because it is one of the most valuable and powerful tools available to search engine marketers in 2021.

Schema markup is code you put onto your website to add context to its content for non-human readers (i.e. Google). It gives Google information in a consistent way that is easier for it to process, which in turn allows Google to serve this content to its users in search results.

Schema markup usually sends search engine signals about the components of a page, including:

Phone number.
Address.
Business number.
Ratings.
Business hours.

Register with Google and Bing webmaster tools

Google’s Webmaster Tools are essential for any strong SEO effort. To understand their full potential, it’s helpful to think about what Google Webmaster Tools’ role is for webmasters: it helps you see your website as Google sees it. The toolset gives you insights into what pages have been indexed on your site, what links are pointing to it, your most popular keywords, and much more.

If you have a website already, you need to register with search engines such as Google and Bing and submit your sitemap. This is very important because you will find out what the search engines understand and know about your search engine content.

Register with Google Analytics

Even though the webmaster tools can offer you a wide range of information from about search engines, Google Analytics offers a lot of information about users’ views. Knowing your users’ views is important because you will know their experience on your website and understand how you can offer them a better experience by improving your content or services. Google analytics should help you find out the following:

The most popular landing pages
The most popular exit pages
The pages that are commonly visited
Major traffic sources on your page

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Top 10 Local SEO Tips & Optimising GMB 2021

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:05 +0000

In this blog post, the GLO team discuss helpful tips to optimise Google My Business listings and illustrate local SEO tips that help you show in the top of Google Maps and help your business rank higher in search engines. Simply put, we’ll help you understand how to maximise your GMB SEO.

As we move into another week of lockdown many small business owners find themselves planning ahead to make sure they stay afloat during this period and come out stronger on the other side of the pandemic crisis. With more time on your hands, this is the perfect time to work smart to retain existing customers and prioritize the tasks that will see you thrive despite the downturn that the economists are expecting.

So what exactly could you be doing right now to help your business during, and beyond lockdown?

The obvious answer is (well to us anyway) – make sure you can be found online.

We’ve prepared 10 tips to improve your local SEO and optimise your Google My Business (GMB) listing. This will make your digital marketing more effective and help your business come back stronger after the coronavirus lockdown.

Google Maps is taking up more of the Google SERP (search engine results pages), especially for local searches. Being the most prominent free feature in search, it has never been more important to optimise your Google My Business location.

Google My Business is the universal marketing platform for Google Maps. Being universal, everyone has the same weapons in their arsenal in order to dominate local searches but not every business is reading our local SEO tips.

A lot of people assume that once you add information and photos to your listing then you are done, which is the opposite of the truth. Google has an algorithm that they use to determine which businesses stay on top of search results, and they always favour the business listings that are constantly updating their GMB.

Sign Up and Claim Your GMB Listing!

The vital first step for maximising your GMB SEO. You may think you’ve got a Google Map listing but until you’ve completed verification, you won’t be able to edit the business information that appears on Google Maps and therefore, you won’t be able to optimise your listing.

In order to claim your Google My Business, you’ll need a Google Account, you can set one up here. Once you have set up your GMB listing, you’ll need to verify it. Google will send a postcard to your business address with a verification code, once you enter this, your listing will be verified and you can start optimising your GMB listing.

Adding Correct Business Hours and Special Hours

Make sure customers know when you’re open for business and avoid negative experiences, such as a customer travelling to your business just to find out it is closed. Many bricks and mortar stores had to close their doors in order to help flatten the curve. Google My Business automatically updated the information for many businesses and marked them as temporarily closed, informing the admins about the change with a simple email. If your business is still able to operate, make sure you didn’t miss that email and that your opening times are up to date on your Google My Business page.

Choosing the Right Category for your Business

A local gas engineer approached us asking why his business wasn’t showing up in Google Maps. We advised him to make sure he added all the relevant categories to his business (you can choose up to 10, with 1 of them being the primary category). He was amazed that such a quick edit would mean that he could start appearing in the local ‘Map Pack’ (normally 3 listings in the maps section in SERP). He was so impressed with the results that he is now one of our clients.

Keep your Content Fresh by Adding Photographs

This helps give a good first impression to new customers finding you through search, sending a clear and positive message. It’s also a good idea to add an exterior photo so that people can recognise your business if they visit. Google reported that businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions and 35% more click-throughs to their websites.

This turns into more customers for you, which turns into more profit for you. Yep, just from adding photos. In order to keep your competitive edge, once you add your base photos, you should be adding new photos every 7 days (latest products, service projects, employees or events).

Ask for Reviews

Gaining Google Reviews is hands down one of the main ranking factors to consider when using GMB, period! Our director of marketing says, “My father’s plumbing business has consistently shown up in the map pack for the last 10 years for a competitive search term, ‘plumber Ipswich’, mainly because he has more positive reviews than his competition”. You might feel awkward asking but asking for Google reviews from your customers is the most effective way to compete in Google Maps. Not only does this increase your rankings but it will also increase your conversion rate, as customers are more likely to choose your business above your competitors.

Another quick tip, ask your customers to use keywords in their review that you’re looking to be found for, for example, “I’d recommend GLO’s digital marketing services, especially SEO & Web Design”. Google will find this information within the 0.40 seconds it takes to show Google Map listings.

Respond to your Reviews ASAP

One of the best ways to recover from a negative review is a well thought out, constructive response, showing customers, your business not only thinks their opinions are important, but you’re always interested in improving customer experience.

People are also a lot more likely to remove their negative review if you respond to it, even if you can’t correct the problem. Responding to positive reviews is important too!

As we mentioned, Google favours businesses that are constantly updating their GMB, so try and be as responsive as possible. We set ourselves a rule to respond to a google review within the hour.

Use the Posts Feature

The posts feature lets you create a single post to add to your Google My Business listing, with an image, an attachment and a button to interact with. This feature is a great way to not only increase your ranking within Google Maps but also increase the amount of search you take up. Posts typically last one week so make sure to update regularly.

Posting at least every 7 days is a good idea. Google is obviously focusing on expanding the capabilities of GMB, as they are constantly adding new features, more recently, different types of posts, such as; Add Offer, Add Update, Add Event and Add Product. Google has even added a section in posts for COVID-19, “Let customers know about any changes to your business due to COVID-19”.

Ensuring Your Citations are Consistent

Ensuring consistency within local citations is very important when trying to rank in the Google Maps section. The term NAP might mean something completely different to you, but to us it means; Name, Address and Phone Number. Ensuring all the business information you post online is consistent with your GMB is essential to building authority within Google Maps. Don’t confuse Google.

If you’ve got a Yell account or Facebook profile with 100 reviews from your clients, ensure these profiles have the same NAP as your GMB listing, as well as all other information. This lets Google build confidence that they are presenting the correct information in search and from trusted businesses. Find the most popular directories to use as local citations at the end of this blog post.

Add Services & Products

This is a GMB feature which allows you to list the services you provide and include keywords that can help your business get found for the services you offer. GMB only allows you to supply 750 characters in your general business description. This feature allows you to add multiple services per category and you can input up to 300 characters per service!

The second feature is products which allow us to upload a picture, price, title and description. Adding your main products helps you to put more links in the Google ecosystem, improve your GMB SEO, and allows more potential customers to find your products.

Combined with the aforementioned updates to Products and Services, GMB really is turning into an online shop window for your business. Searchers have an immense amount of information at their fingertips on GMB, significantly reducing the need to visit your website. I expect to see a crossover with Google Shopping very soon.

Use the Q & A Feature

Google My Business provides an option of asking questions about any business. The problem here is that anyone can answer those questions. Many times their answers won’t give the full picture to your customers. To overcome this, you can add some questions and answers from both sides.

These should be the questions that you think your customers will be most interested in knowing. You can even chuck in a few of those targeted keywords you’re looking to rank for, for example, “digital marketing agency“.

Whether you like it or not, GMB features are becoming more prominent in search. It’s what you do to maximise your GMB SEO that will separate you from your competition.

Setting up things in place that offset the negative effects of unexpected situations, such as the pandemic we are dealing with now, makes businesses stronger and more ready to remain profitable no matter what. As the pandemic has shown us, tending to your online presence and visibility is important to all businesses. As discussed, Google Maps and GMB features are taking up more and more of SERP and it’s never been more important to optimise your Google My Business and implement GLO’s local search tips. Use the time wisely and apply our 10 Local SEO tips to generate more leads online now and beyond the lockdown period.

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Image SEO – Website Image Optimisation

John Parnell — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 12:18:04 +0000

Images should be essential, whether you’re an amateur blogger or your write for the leading marketing magazine. An image can tell a thousand words and can make your article easier to read and understand. The reason that you are reading this article, however, is because images also contribute to your websites SEO and we’ll give you an in-depth explanation how to optimise all your images to improve your search engine ranking and how to use images for the best user experience. Let’s dive into Image SEO.

Why Images are Essential in Posts

When used correctly, images help readers process and understand an article, can be used by illustrating data in a chart or just make an article/post more exciting. It’s recommended that every post should include pictures as visual search is getting increasingly more important, for more information about this, check out Google’s vision for the visual of search. Therefore using images not only make an article more appealing but also could provide you with an increase in traffic. If you have visual content, image SEO should be high on your agenda.
Google’s most recent interface for Image Search was released at the start of August 2019, with features such as filters, metadata and attribution, which shows that Google has increased knowledge about what is in an image and how it fits into the bigger picture.

Selecting the Best Photo to Use

Rather than stock photos, it’s always better to original photos rather than stock photos, for example, your team pictures should be your actual team, rather than everyone in your company looking like models. I’m not saying they don’t already.

The image that you choose should be relevant to the subject of the article and the area of the article it’s positioned. For example, I have used the photo that I took when I was travelling the east coast of Australia to demonstrate the importance of not using stock images and the fact you are reading about it now puts the image into context and is therefore relevant to the article. If you just choose any random photo to complete your SEO plugin’s content analysis, then you need to re-evaluate your SEO strategy. If you have a main image or an image you’d like to rank, then locate it at the top of the page.

Avoid Stock Photos

Even if you don’t have any original photos of your own, you can still avoid using stock photos, there are other ways to find appropriate photos online. As long as you attribute the original photographer, you can source good quality images from Flickr.com. It’s important that you understand what Creative Commons license is attached to the image you are using – there are eight different license categories and not all images on Flickr can be used the same way.

Choosing photos that look genuine is important unless you took them yourself, which is always the best route, and steering clear of obvious stock photos is a must!

GIF’s are getting more and more popular but don’t go overboard, it can make your post harder to read as the movement of the image can distract the reader’s attention and slow down your pages load speed.

How to Optimise Images for SEO

Once you’ve found the optimum photo for your article or blog post, whether it be an illustration, chart or image – the next step is to optimise it for SEO for your website. Here is an Image SEO checklist:

File name optimisation
The correct format
Image display size
Responsive images
Compressed images

File Name Optimisation

The first thing to think about when it comes to image SEO is the file name. Your need Google and other search engines to know what is in the image with even looking at it. For example, the image is of a sunset in Thailand, then the file name should be “Thailand-beach-sunset.jpg, not the original file name such as “IMAG8482”. The main key phrase or keyword should come first at the beginning of the file name, as its the main subject of the image, for instance, Thailand.

The Correct Format

The correct format depends on the image and its application and therefore, there isn’t a best image format to always use. For instance, image formats are used for the following reasons:

JPEG – for larger photos or illustrations (it will give you good results in terms of colours and clarity with relatively small file size)
PNG – to preserve background transparency
WebP – to produce high-quality results with smaller file sizes (you can use tools like Squoosh to convert your image into WebP)
SVG – for logos and icons (with help of CSS or JavaScript you can manage SVG images such as resizing them without loss of quality

CanIuse.com can check whether the format you intend to use is supported by the browsers or devices that the largest part of your target audience use. Now it’s time to resize and optimise your image.

Image Display Size

Images that you use have a major impact on your web pages loading times, especially when there isn’t any need for your image to be that large, for example, if your image is displayed at 250×150 pixels and you’re using an image with 2500×1500 pixels, your whole image still needs to be loaded. The image load time is very important when it comes to user experience and search engine optimisation.

It is important to resize the image to the size you want it to be displayed. WordPress actually helps by providing several different sizes of the image after upload that show depending on the display, however, this doesn’t mean to the file size is optimised as well, therefore you should have the file size as low as possible without being pixelated.

Responsive Images

Having responsive images is an essential factor for image SEO, however, WordPress has made this easy since it was updated to version 4.4, where the platform makes images responsive for you. If you’re not building you website with WordPress, then your images should have srcset attribute, which enables a different image to be should depending on the screen width, which is especially handy for mobile displays.

Compressed Images

It is important for the image file size is compressed to be as small as possible, for web page load speed, user experience and therefore SEO. The easiest way to reduce the size of the image whilst keeping it high quality is by using web tools such as JPEGmini, which can dramatically reduce image size and remove to EXIF (Exchangeable Image Format) data to reduce the file size even further. This is increasingly important in a world of retina screens.

We also recommend using other tools to compress images; ImageOptim, jpeg .io or Kraken.io.

You can test your site with tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest.org or Pingdom.

Adding Images for Optimum SEO

It is very important to add your optimised image to content that is related to it. While Google and other search engines are getting increasingly skilled at recognising what is in an image, you should still provide as much context as possible and therefore fill in all the relevant information.

Image SEO – Captions

Image captions are important in an article as people usually tend to pick them up when skimming through a web page, as well as headings and images. The image caption is the text the accompanies an image stating what’s in the image. Image captions are good for SEO but you should avoid over optimising your webpages and only add a caption when it makes sense to the user’s journey to have one. Not every image needs a caption as they are often the image itself is self-explanatory.

Alt Text & Title Text for SEO

If for any reason the image can’t be displayed, the ‘Alt Text’ or ‘Alt Tag’, which is the descriptive text will be shown in its place. The reasons in which the image can’t be displayed is sometimes because the user has turned off images in their browser, such as Google Chrome or they are using a screen reader due to visual impairment, this ensures that no information is lost.

For search engine optimisation, be sure to add alt text to every image, so that both search engines and people can make sense what’s in the image. The Alt Text should include an SEO keyphrase for that page where appropriate.

Add Image Structured Data for SEO

Once you understand the method of schema markup, you can optimise your website in the search engine result pages (SERPs). Adding such structured data to your pages can help search engines display your images as rich results. Google can also add a badge to the images on your webpage, for example, if you have recipes on your site and add structured data to your images, Goggle can add a badge showing the images belongs to a recipe.

Image attribute is mandatory for SEO so that your images can be crawled and indexed.

XML Image Sitemaps for SEO

Google’s advice and is to include a number of images on the page or post sitemaps:

“You can use Google image extensions for sitemaps to give Google more information about the images available on your pages. Image sitemap information helps Google discover images that we might not otherwise find (such as images your site reaches with JavaScript code), and allows you to indicate images on your site that you want Google to crawl and index.”

Image SEO Summary

As you have seen from this article, image SEO is made up of several attributes. It is just as important to ensure that the image and its elements help towards a good user experience which in turn plays an important role in conversion, as it is for SEO. With Google getting smarter and smarter at recognising element in images, it wouldn’t be a good idea to try and hack the algorithm.

Here is a quick summary and checklist of what you’ve learnt from this post:

Use an appropriate image that compliments your content
Carefully choose a file name with keywords or phrases
Ensure image size matches displayed image
Use srcset attributes if possible
Reduce file size for faster loading
Add a caption only if it compliments user experience
Use image alt text. No need for a title text
Add structured data to your images
Count for images in your XML sitemaps
Provide all the context you can!

The WordPress plugin Yoast can help with SEO!

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