If you're on a mission to conquer Google search rankings, you already know you're at the mercy of Google's search algorithm. What you may not know is that your page loading speed has a profound impact on how much a search engine values your website. This includes the loading times for both the desktop and the mobile versions of your pages.

If you're struggling to improve your page speed and tired of seeing your bounce rate climb, read through these tips below to discover how you can start winning the page speed race.

Google's Goal to Improve the Internet

To better understand the intent behind Google's search algorithm, take a look at their mission statement: Our company mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.ā  Within this statement, we can extrapolate a desire to discover and collect accurate, meaningful information that any person can access at any place in the world with any device.

However, we as website owners are the only ones that can control how optimized our website is. For this reason, Google puts the pressure on us to improve by heavily factoring your page loading speeds and mobile-friendliness into your search rankings. Even if a site is loaded with killer content, it won't rank high if it's bulky and cumbersome. This matches up with public impression, as 40% of consumers will bounce from your site if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

In addition to this, you can't afford to neglect your mobile visitors, either. Google created an initiative known as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). This happened because, even now in 2021, over 50% of web traffic on Google comes from a mobile device. For this reason, AMP imposes a set of guidelines that requires web developers to make mobile sites just as fast and responsive as their main counterparts.

How to Improve Page Speed Score?

Now that you understand Google's rationale for factoring page speed and mobile-friendliness into your site score, let's examine what you can do to start improving today.

1. Use a Minimalistic Theme

A theme is generally the starting point for any website, especially when you're using simplified builders like WordPress. This determines the layout of your site, the color, the structure of content, and the navigation. While that sexy theme you chose seems to fit your brand's personality perfectly, there's a chance it could be bloated and impairing your loading times.

Certain themes feature certain graphical design choices or items that a simplified theme would not have. With every additional item on-page, there is more data to load when opening your site. This extra data can add full seconds to the loading time even before you start adding content, images, videos, and links to your pages.

However, a more robust theme does not necessarily mean worse performance. Each theme is created by a unique web developer. This developer may or may not be more skilled and better able to optimize features of a theme to account for load speed. For this reason, you should perform speed tests on your site when implementing a theme to see the actual results before making a decision. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights are excellent for this.

As a rule of thumb, you can't go wrong with a more minimalistic theme that features fewer assets to load, lightweight code, and a simplified CSS stylesheet. Don't fall into the trap of believing that your site needs to have flashy features galore to get the job done. Provide your visitors with excellent content and a site that delivers that content faster than any of your competitors. Your rankings will thank you for it.

2. Cut Down on HTTP Requests and Redirects

Continuing from lightweight themes, you should seek opportunities to minimize the number of HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) requests your site sends when loading. An HTTP request occurs when a web browser sends a request to the server to access information on a website.

Essentially, a new visitor enters your domain in a browser. Then, the browser begins to request data including text, images, and videos from the server. The server responds to this request and sends back the data for the browser to download. After the request completes, the site will fully load on the visitor's device. If an HTTP request fails or is unresponsive, it may continue making attempts to access the server until the request is met.

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The speed and efficiency of these requests depend upon upload and download times. This means that your website host impacts how efficiently these HTTP requests are handled. However, we have no influence over visitor connections, leaving us with the choice to cut down on these requests as much as possible.

Using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights (mentioned above), Google Search Console, and Google Analytics allow you to run regular audits of your domain. They will assist you by pinpointing every error on your website, while also providing recommendations to remedy problems and further optimize your pages.

It's important to audit your website as the issues affecting your load times will be unique and depend upon file size, file quantity, HTML, CSS, and your website host. You can then utilize Google's help library to learn more about specific issues that are discovered. Google will classify each issue by severity. Certain issues require immediate resolution, while others are suggestions for optimization that you should consider.

To further simplify HTTP requests, understand that every new file adds a new request. The more requests that take place, the more time it takes to transfer data from the server. Also, the larger the files, the longer it will take for the browser to download each file. You will learn strategies for optimizing files on your site further on in this article.

3. Defer Javascript

A very simple way to improve page speeds is to assign the Defer attribute to your javascript. There are generally three types of languages that make up your average website: HTML which controls the structure, CSS which controls the style, and javascript which makes the page interactive and dynamic.

However, a browser must identify, fetch, and load any javascript each time a user accesses a site. This means that precious seconds elapse while the attempt is made to grab and download the script to finally load the webpage. This means that if a user is accessing your site from their mobile phone with a slower data connection, they just see a blank screen for what seems like an eternity. While slower connections may be out of your control, the visitor will simply bounce away and find another site.

Fortunately, you can alleviate this common javascript issue by assigning the Defer attribute to the request. While this is a complicated topic for non-developers, it effectively allows the HTML and CSS of your site to load immediately, while still waiting to execute the script. This solution can shave seconds off of your load time without any additional optimizations.

An alternative method is to assign the Async attribute to your javascript. While Defer waits for HTML to finish, Async will continue downloading java while parsing HTML but pause HTML to execute the script. Either solution will allow your website to load in the most efficient manner possible without delaying any elements as a result of waiting on something else.

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You can check out the tutorial on how to implement Defer or Async here.

4. Enable Browser Caching

Now that we've explained how a browser must request and download files, wouldn't it be nice if you could utilize a visitor's hard drive space to improve your speed? That's exactly what browser caching does.

By enabling browser caching on your website, you make it so that a visitor does not need to make repeat HTTP requests if they previously visited your site. Those elements are placed in temporary storage on the visitor's hard drive, which then loads the files instantly on future visits. Users, however, should keep an eye on the state of their device's storage and clear cache on the computer regularly.

You can generally find the option to enable browser caching in your website editor settings, though the process will vary depending on your platform. You should look to enable both browser caching and object caching to improve your load times. This data typically gets stored anywhere between one week and one month. However, if a user deletes their browsing data, their browser will need to execute the HTTP requests once again.

5. Utilize GZIP to Compress Your Files

Compression is the process of reducing file size for faster downloads and uploads. Different compression software offers varying results, with some often causing some small loss of data, while more powerful tools can provide lossless compression. File compression is used everywhere and is necessary for optimizing website load times.

GZIP is the industry leader for file compression and can help you compress all content on your website. This essentially takes larger files, finds a way to decrease the file size by abbreviating repeated segments, transfers the smaller file, then decompresses the file on the other side to its normal size. According to Pingdom, this can improve your load times by as much as 15%.

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While GZIP is incredibly fast and efficient, it's not the only tool available. You will need to look into the various plugins available to you depending on your website builder platform. Make sure to enable HTTP compression, and check out how reduced your file sizes are as a result of this easy change.

6. Optimize Your Images without Reducing Quality

With how incredible camera technology has come, image file sizes can be enormous. While showing off that incredible quality to your audience is desirable, remember the impact that the HTTP request will have on your page loading times.

For this reason, optimizing images is one of the easiest recommendations we can give if you want to improve your page speed. You should aim to compress your image file size as much as possible, while still delivering the best quality possible. Factors that can influence this include the image file type you use and choosing to resize an image whenever possible.

PNG and JPG are the two most commonly used image file types on websites. The former is closer to lossless compression while the latter generally results in some loss. Look to resize those larger images to an acceptable size that still captures the quality. Then, save your edited image as one of these two file types.

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Google's website performance tools mentioned above will also provide you with opportunities to further optimize images throughout your site. After making your images lean, your GZIP compression tool will be able to further compress these elements whenever possible for even faster requests and speedier load times.

7. Use External Hosting When You Can't Reduce File Size

In some cases, you may feel that your large image or video file is necessary to include on your website. We're confident that you know what's best for your brand, but there's still more you can do to lessen the impact it has on your site quality.

Your website server only provides you with a set amount of storage space. Unless you're paying for premium web hosting, you're likely sharing that space with other domains that pay for the same service. If you upload your media directly to that server, it's going to result in a laggy, miserable experience that takes forever to load anything.

Instead, take advantage of other platforms online to host your media-related content for you. A perfect example of this is to upload all of your videos to a branded YouTube account. YouTube handles the file hosting, while you simply need to copy the embed code onto your website page. Whenever a user accesses that video on your website page, the YouTube player is handling the request, not your web host.

There are countless hosting tools available to you online depending on your needs. For videos, YouTube is the go-to choice, but Vimeo and Wistia also work well. For photos, check out Google Photos, Imgur, or Flickr.

8. Utilize Lazy Loading

There are two primary ways to load content on a web page. Eager loading is the act of loading and preloading all of the resources available on a site whether they are currently in use or not. Lazy loading allows your site to load files in segmented chunks based upon navigation or actions taken on a web page. Lazy loading is recommended for content that appears above the fold or that is currently within the visitor's viewport.

Think of a home page that might feature a dynamic banner with content along with the main navigation bar. The rest of the page further down contains images, text, and videos that the visitor is currently unaware of. Because we know the visitor will take a moment to consume the content that immediately appears above the fold, we delay loading of the content further down to prioritize faster loading of the initial content.

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While lazy loading is not always a necessary strategy, you should consider it for any media-heavy pages that exist on your website. This way, you can still include those high-quality images to support your content without causing your visitors to bounce away because of painfully long load times.

You can learn more about how to apply lazy loading as a strategy by reading up on the developer documentation here.

9. Optimize and Minify Your CSS

Your CSS, or custom style sheet, is the code used to properly render the look of your website within a browser. This controls fonts, sizes, colors, page formatting, and much more. The more you add to your style sheet, the more that the browser needs to load.

We just discussed a strategy for improving CSS load times with the lazy loading strategy above. This effectively creates a priority system and tells a browser what styles it needs to load first. However, this alone isn't enough if our CSS code is outdated, repetitive, or messy.

Your ability to optimize your CSS will depend on your skill and experience as a developer. In many cases, there is generally a way to reduce your sheet size by condensing code snippets, while eliminating redundant lines that essentially tell a browser to load the same styles more than once. A browser by default will read through the sheet top to bottom. It will need to work through those redundancies before getting to the next lines of code, consistently creating unnecessary additions to your load times.

Though it will take longer to build, you can wait to minify your CSS after you build your sheet. After you know that your code is functional, you can then begin to eliminate unnecessary text to create a simplified version of the same sheet. You can check out this help article here to see some examples from experienced web developers.

10. Purchase a Better Hosting Plan

Finally, you may need to consider upgrading your hosting plan if your site speeds are still adversely affecting your score. As with most things in life, you get what you pay for, and that cheap web hosting option you signed up for might not be providing the storage and bandwidth you need to get the job done.

Shared hosting is the most common hosting option used by site owners as it's cheap and will generally get the job done for your basic website. However, if you've been continuously optimizing and adding content to your site, you're likely seeing an increase in visitors. This means a higher volume of requests that can seriously impact page speed. Getting slammed with requests without the server power to support it can make it impossible to access your site temporarily.

When shared hosting isn't cutting it, you're left with two options: VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting or a dedicated server. The former is a step-up from shared hosting but still requires you to share a server with some sites, while having a dedicated server gives your website exclusive resources.

VPS hosting sees you sharing a server with a few other websites. However, unlike shared hosting, you receive a dedicated segment of resources that are exclusively yours on that server. You are responsible for honoring the terms of agreement for that space and will not have to worry about other websites impacting your performance. However, you still face some restrictions with this option.

Using a dedicated server gives you free rein to use all of the resources available. No other websites are being hosted and you have access to huge amounts of bandwidth and storage space for all of the content hosted on your site. However, these benefits come with the most expensive costs as a result.

Closely examine what you need for your website and choose the best plan for you. If your site evolves and you find your server struggling to meet demands, consider upgrading to see how it impacts performance.

Conclusion - Optimization is the Key to Winning the Page Speed Race

While improving your website speed is challenging, and most likely will require the help of a skilled developer, you can't afford to ignore it. In addition to how important it is in Google's search algorithms, consumers will not respect your time if you waste theirs. Optimizing your page speed will force you to closely examine your website strategy and focus on what you need to drive traffic and conversions.

Remember - simplistic themes are generally the way to go. The fewer files and the less data a browser needs to download, the faster your pages will load. You can also defer javascript and utilize lazy loading tactics to ensure that users always have access to the content in their viewport. Minifying your style sheets will also improve the time it takes for your content to appear on the screen. If you can't part with a larger file, host it on an external server and have them provide the bandwidth.

Finally, consider upgrading your hosting plan if your web traffic is putting a strain on the server. Sometimes, the only solution to a problem is to gain access to more resources that can work in your favor. In conclusion, page speed is a significant factor in successfully doing business online. Start employing these tactics and start winning the page speed race today.

When researching the latest marketing campaign strategies, don't make the mistake of overlooking the strict legalities in place when it comes to advertising. While many common mistakes will simply result in a flag or ad takedown, other mistakes can cost you thousands in penalties. Violations can even cost you to lose your professional licenses when applicable.

Fortunately, education regarding these laws is readily available and not all may necessarily apply to your business. Below, we'll tackle some of the most important regulations that you should be aware of and follow before creating your next digital marketing campaign.

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

The CAN-SPAM Act defines the FTC’s obligation regarding electronic messaging as follows: “defining the relevant criteria to facilitate the determination of the primary purpose of an electronic mail message.”

In other words, the FTC mandates that all businesses must clearly disclose the purpose of any emails to consumers and be explicit in their messaging in the headline, subject, and body of any content. The business must also provide the recipient with a legitimate method to opt out of any marketing and honor those requests appropriately.

The easiest way to ensure that your business never violates this act is to always be completely direct and truthful when it comes to any email marketing campaigns you employ. You need to express to the consumer somewhere in the email that this is an advertisement, provide only accurate details regarding the products or services advertised, and disclose any information that the consumer should know. This includes the domain address of the sender and the physical location of the business.

If you are ever unsure if your email messaging falls under this, consider the intent of the email. If it is being sent to inform the consumer of a promotion, a special deal, or any of your products or services that could result in a business transaction, the email is commercial. Therefore, you must fully comply with all regulations.

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If the email is transactional, such as an order confirmation message or receipt, then your email is not necessarily classified as commercial. Nevertheless, all information found within must be accurate and explicitly educate the customer with accurate data.

You can follow the link above to the Federal Trade Commission's website to review every protocol in detail to ensure that your messaging is not in violation of this act. Failure to comply with all regulations can result in a fine of $43,792.

Though CAN-SPAM is specific to the United States, most countries around the globe feature their own version of email marketing and consumer privacy laws. If you are outside of the country, be sure to research the mandates as set by your government.

COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

COPPA is an act enforced by the Federal Trade Commission that regulates data collection for advertising from individuals under the age of thirteen. While this particular act applies only to the United States, countries worldwide feature similar privacy protection laws. However, the age will vary depending on your country.

The most common way that businesses deal with the COPPA act is by asking users to disclose their age whenever creating an account with them online. Users younger than the age of thirteen are generally not allowed to create an account. Others may not do this as they believe that their products or services are not marketed to younger persons.

However, taking the latter approach can potentially be risky as you are entirely subject to the ruling of the FTC. The Act targets businesses that actively promote material directed at individuals under the age of thirteen. This idea is ambiguous as to what can be defined as “directed.” It also can apply to businesses that generally target wide audiences as opposed to strictly targeting adults. You can review an extensive list of definitions regarding this act from the government here.

If you so much as suspect that your business must comply with COPPA, be sure to do the following:

• Disclose to your customers on the website how you collect data about children and how it is used. Every website should contain a Privacy Policy outlining this. However, additional efforts should be made to connect with parents regarding this matter.
• Provide parents the ability to regulate and review data collection from within their accounts. Many websites require a parent to also make an account when creating an underage account so that parents can easily monitor any activities and data collection on the website.
• During account creation, ask for parental consent before beginning any type of data collection from an underaged person.
• Demonstrate on the site your ability to successfully secure information about underaged persons and maintain confidentiality.
• Never entice an underaged person with prizes or free goods for more information.
• Make the effort to remove any data you have about underaged persons when it is no longer useful for your business purposes.

COPPA also applies to businesses located in other countries that target United States users.

Truth in Advertising

Truth in Advertising is a series of laws set by the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers from false or harmful information in commercial advertising. Any business found guilty of perpetrating fraud is subject to asset seizing and freezing, serious financial penalties, and/or a federal lawsuit that can result in significant jail time. You can learn more specific details from the FTC here.

Examples of areas examined closely by Truth in Advertising include:

• FTC Green Guides for environmentally-friendly goods
• Fraudulent health and wellness claims
• Funeral marketing and the protection of vulnerable consumers
• Fraudulent and deceptive practices concerning gift cards and virtual currency
• Promoting goods with fraudulent or misleading endorsements
• Any claims about a product or good lacking legitimate scientific evidence

The FTC has also found it necessary to inform users of unlawful conduct in regards to global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Effectively, it is the business’s complete obligation to present strictly factual information to consumers regarding any advertisement, purchase, or interaction otherwise.

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While these policies are broad and cover a lot of territories, the rule of complying is simple: do not lie to or mislead your customers under any circumstances. While it may not necessarily be your obligation to educate customers about certain matters, you can never promote or advertise a product or service without supporting factual and scientific evidence even if you, yourself, choose to believe otherwise.

Truth in Healthcare Marketing Act of 2017

The Truth in Healthcare Marketing Act of 2017 exists to protect consumers from any marketing or business practices that misrepresent a person's legitimate medicinal expertise. In other words, an individual or business may not sell products or services under the guise of being a medical professional if they do not possess the appropriate training, qualifications, and licenses.

This marketing regulation should generally only apply to healthcare providers that solicit medical services. If you are a healthcare specialist, run a medical clinic that offers health and wellness services, or offer PA to MD bridge programs, you must disclose the necessary qualifications as determined by your state.

For example, when marketing prescription medications like semaglutide tablets, healthcare providers must be transparent about their qualifications and ensure all claims about the medication's effects are supported by scientific evidence.

The Act also mandates that healthcare providers cannot promote or sell medical practices or products that are not fully supported by medical and scientific evidence. Failure to adhere to this policy could result in major penalties including a permanent suspension of medical licenses to practice.

While the healthcare provider themself will almost certainly be well-educated regarding federal and state policies for healthcare and patient privacy, your average marketer may not be up to speed. If you are providing marketing services for a healthcare professional, be sure to educate yourself regarding healthcare policies and privacy acts. Be sure to work with your client to ensure that you fully disclose qualifications and studies when necessary in any marketing materials.

The FTC Green Guides

Areas concerning environmental marketing terms fall under the Truth in Advertising rules mentioned above. The Green Guides are rules provided by the FTC to guide brands on how to properly define and utilize terms for their products or services that concern the environment. You can find details from the FTC here.

These guides cover a vast amount of terminology, so you will need to review these guides for yourself before making any types of claims. You will also want to double-check any terminology you wish to use to ensure that your version of the definition complies with the definitions determined by the FTC.

As with most advertising regulations, simply avoid making any unsubstantiated claims about the environmental-friendliness of your products or services. You should research terms or phrases such as “recyclable,” “renewable,” “non-toxic,” or “free-of” before including them in your marketing.

The Protection of Consumer Privacy

This section entails another subset of laws that regulate how businesses can utilize data that they collect from their customers. This applies to transactional information, data regarding finances and debts, personal browsing data and security, and COPPA, which was discussed previously above. You can learn more about the FTC's approach to protecting consumer privacy here.

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Where it can get tricky is that these laws will apply to your business if you do any type of business with people that live in a location. That means, for example, that a United States business that interacts with European customers must still comply with European law regarding consumer privacy. An example of this includes the General Data Protection Regulations which dictates how much data you can save from consumers, while also complying with requests to erase it.

You can learn more about the various consumer privacy laws by state using this informative guide. Depending on how strict the state regulations are, you may need to provide consumers with the right to access their personal data, the right to correct any personal data, or the right to delete any personal data. You must, however, always disclose what information is collected and what isn't through a Privacy Policy on any business website.

Read Copyright Laws Before Using Content

It should go without saying, but you cannot use just any content you find on the internet to advertise or promote your business. All content including images, videos, or text is considered the private property of the owner unless otherwise dictated for public use. For this reason, you are likely already using or looking into royalty-free websites for your images, videos, or audio.

However, many businesses commonly overlook the fine print when downloading content from these sites for use. In many circumstances, the content may only be available for use for editorial or informational purposes. The issue arises due to confusion over phrases such as “creative commons” and “public domain.”

Public domain content applies to any content that no longer has copyright or was created by the U.S. government for public use. You may utilize public domain content for any purpose including commercial use.

Creative commons websites will generally feature a variety of content that can either be free to use, free to use but with restrictions, or copyrighted. The first is similar to the public domain. The second will depend on the restrictions put into effect by the owner and may prevent you from using it in marketing. The last point fully excludes you from using it unless you gain permission from the owner either through mutual benefit or by paying for a license to use it.

Disclose Relationships with Influencers

A common digital marketing strategy is to build relationships with influencers that can endorse and help sell your products or services. However, the FTC has mandated that businesses and influencers must disclose their relationship with one another for consumer knowledge. You can find full guidelines from the FTC on how to approach this here.

To quickly summarize the guidelines, any influencer you compensate for promoting your product must visibly disclose their status as a sponsored influencer. You can quickly satisfy this requirement by tagging a product or service post with “#Ad”. You can also say things like “Sponsored by” or “product provided by…” when creating your promotional content.

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Influencers must then follow the same marketing regulations described by the FTC as you would yourself. In this sense, the influencer is seen as an extension of the business and you will be liable for any violations of any policies put into effect for consumer protection. This includes making unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of a product or providing false information about what the product or service actually provides. They also cannot be an influencer for a product they have not used themselves, but this can be a little more difficult to prove in some situations.

If you attempt to work with influencers for marketing purposes, it is your responsibility to educate them and ensure they comply with all of the rules. Failure to comply with these rules will result in penalties against your business. As a general rule, influencers will be keen to behave responsibly as their reputation depends upon positive relationships with brands online.

Allow Consumers to Share Honest Reviews

Last, but not least, all consumers must be afforded the right to post their honest reviews of your brand. This means that you cannot unlawfully prevent someone from leaving a review about your business on a directory, social website, or other platforms. While you can and should select positive reviews for your website or advertisements, you cannot penalize a consumer or impose a contract that prevents them from providing a review.

If a user does happen to leave a negative review that you find harmful or dishonest, you must follow the rules set out by the platform. You can choose to engage in honest interaction by replying to the post and addressing criticisms in a public manner. If the user is unwilling to delete their review, you can write to support and discuss the issue directly. Try to provide proof of any false claims and ask to have the review removed. If your claim is legitimate, the support team may be able to remove the negative review of your business.

You can learn more about the exact details concerning the Consumer Review Fairness act here.

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Make Sure Your Campaigns Do Not Break Marketing Laws

While managing your marketing campaign strategy is no task, do not allow your brand to inadvertently break any laws regarding fair and ethical advertising. Even accidental violations can result in hefty financial penalties. Bigger violations could have even larger ramifications that alter your ability to do business forever.

This document is by no means a comprehensive list but should serve as a starting point to bring awareness to how heavily regulated the advertising industry is. Start by considering your business industry and the audience you directly market to and begin your research regarding the policies and regulations that apply to your brand.

In all cases, make every effort to demonstrate honest and ethical practices and a commitment to good faith concerning consumer interactions.

Selling a business on the benefits of SEO sounds easy in the short term. You can climb the search rankings, get more traffic, and make more people aware of your brand. However, the patience of many business owners can run thin when they aren't able to see a direct correlation between SEO and sales.

Does a great SEO strategy lead to an increase in sales? While there may not be a clear-cut solution to answering this, here are four questions you can answer for yourself right now to determine the impact of your search engine optimization efforts.

Is Your SEO Strategy Leading to a Traffic Increase?

The primary reason that businesses implement an SEO strategy is to see an increase in their organic search rankings. As the SEO score of your website improves, search engine algorithms place a higher value on your domain, therefore, placing you closer to the top of search engine results pages.

A study by Ahrefs indicates that the first result on a search engine results page gets the most traffic just under 50% of the time. If Google relegates your domain to the second result page, there may be only a 0.78% chance that someone will click on your link. Ranking even further back makes it statistically unlikely for you to receive any web traffic from organic searches.

Comparatively, the clickthrough rate for a paid search advertisement with Google Ads is only about 3.17%. Even if it takes some time for your website to climb the rankings, the boost in web traffic as a result of SEO is undeniable.

It's the logical conclusion that if a strong SEO strategy leads to an increase in rankings, then it will also lead to an increase in sales. You can only deliver your sales pitch if a customer walks into your store in the first place. The more you improve your search rankings, the more opportunities you have to convert prospects into paying clients.

However, there is much more that goes into a sale than web traffic, which leads us to our next question:

Does Your Web Traffic Lead to Conversions?

While an increase in web traffic allows for more prospects to interact with your business, can we prove that it leads to a rise in sales? The truth is that web traffic in many ways can be seen as a vanity metric. Many inexperienced marketers have a habit of selling business owners on the promise of seeing this boost in clicks, but ultimately receive very little return on their investment.

This is because SEO efforts that lack a comprehensive marketing strategy to support them do not necessarily qualify your leads. In other words, 1,000 new visitors a month may sound great but ultimately matters very little if all or most of those clicks are from customers that aren't ready or equipped to purchase.

With this in mind, let's revisit our statistics regarding paid Google Ads. The average clickthrough rate is just 3.17%, but the average ROI is about 8:1. This is because a paid ad better matches the search intent. If a user clicks on a paid link as opposed to an organic link, there is an intent to purchase loaded within the click. In this sense, the volume of traffic does not matter nearly as much as getting traffic that is already highly qualified.

For this reason, you should be setting up multiple types of conversions on your site to monitor what your traffic is doing after you get them to visit your website. This can include clicking on promotional videos, filling out forms, or clicking on call-to-actions. These micro-conversions can give you a better understanding of how to further improve your site in a way that coincides with your SEO strategy to ultimately provide you with traffic that actually leads to sales.

How Cost-Effective is Your SEO Strategy?

Even if an SEO strategy is generating more traffic and sales, it's not worthwhile if you're spending more than you're earning.

Thankfully, SEO is one of the most affordable marketing strategies you can implement to increase your traffic and conversions. Tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console, which can detect website issues and help correct them, are free to use. A strong SEO strategy primarily will cost you the initial time investment. From there, it's a matter of upkeep and producing quality content to keep your site fresh.

With that said, no marketing strategy can be called a worthwhile investment if it's not getting you results. If your marketing team is reporting increases in vanity metrics like traffic but does not have a proportional amount of conversions to match, your current SEO strategy simply isn't cutting it.

Fortunately, the cost-effectiveness of your SEO strategy is incredibly easy to measure. First, determine what your primary goal is when implementing your SEO plan. In our case, we are focused on sales, but others may primarily be focused on traffic and brand awareness. You can then view traffic origin by channel and see exactly how many clicks come from organic searches.

You can also track which keywords were used to perform those searches. Your analytics will then provide you with the volume and average cost-per-click for each keyword used to discover your site. Understanding and utilizing these metrics appropriately will allow you to customize your SEO strategy in a way that better helps you to achieve your unique business goals.

Are You Seeing an Increase in Sales?

After asking all of the previous questions, you are now left to ask whether or not your business is seeing more sales as a result of your SEO strategy. The truth is, there is no way to decisively attribute new sales to actions taken by an SEO specialist.

However, this is not unlike offline sales. While your advertising may get consumers in the door, it is ultimately up to your sales personnel to implement a sales strategy that drives your audience to become customers. Likewise, improving your SEO can get more qualified visitors to your website, but you still need to implement a solid strategy that will reliably convert those leads into sales.

The best way to approach SEO is to understand that it is a long-term investment. By planting and nurturing those seeds now, it provides the potential to bear fruit reliably over time. Business owners often make the mistake of passing over SEO in favor of strategies such as paid ads as PPC campaigns can give an immediate boost in numbers that feel more rewarding at the moment. However, paid ads will cost more and will stop providing you with sales as soon as you stop paying.

An SEO-optimized website will always be there to provide benefits for your business as long as you maintain it. Google will continue to rank your website highly for years to come so long as it's fast, mobile-friendly, and complete with content that is relevant to those using the search engine. It's a low-cost marketing strategy that requires a minuscule investment that can ultimately pay dividends down the line when implemented in a way that aligns with your business goals.

With that in mind, don't make the mistake of dismissing SEO if you don't immediately find your website at rank one on Google with a boost in sales to back it up. Remember that your competitors are also implementing their own SEO strategies to achieve the same goals that you are. If, over time, you are still not satisfied with the ROI on your SEO plan, take a close look at your website analytics to see how you can improve and tailor your strategy to drive the types of conversions you need to see.

Conclusion - Your SEO Plan Can Make You Money with the Right Approach!

By asking the right questions, you should be able to get a better idea of whether or not your existing SEO strategy is making you money. More importantly, you can determine what types of results your plan is earning you, while also identifying the areas where you need to improve.

Search engine optimization can have both a direct and indirect impact on your level of website traffic and sales. If it wasn't effective, then website and business owners wouldn't put forth the amount of time and effort they do into ensuring that their website is sleek, fast, and loaded with engaging content. However, getting there is not something that will happen overnight, and you will need to account for how long it will take to connect your content to the relevant audience.

In the meantime, ensure that your strategy accounts for the basic elements of any great SEO strategy. Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to locate areas where you can improve. You can also rapidly detect errors on your site with the help of Google Analytics and Google Search Console. The latter can also help you crawl and index your website faster so that the latest optimized version of your site is always active in SERPs.

Next, always remember that content is the king of marketing. Whether we're discussing organic or paid marketing, compelling content is the key to reeling in clicks and driving them to convert. Uploading fresh, educational content can also drive more organic search clicks to your website, while also giving you material to share on social media for additional impressions.

Finally, be sure to do extensive keyword research and ensure that your SEO strategy is focusing on the ones that make the most sense for your goals. While aiming to rank for the sexiest relevant keywords might seem appealing, the competition may be too fierce and result in an ROI that just isn't worthwhile.

In this regard, don't discount alternative options such as long-tail keywords, which innately tend to attract users that are already browsing with the intent to buy. While ranking for these may net you a lower search volume, you'll be spending less to compete and gain more qualified visitors at the same time.

Your SEO plan will help your brand make money, but it requires constant commitment to evaluate and improve. With time, dedication, and a little creative thinking, SEO can be your greatest ally for long-term marketing success.

A sustainable PPC strategy is the difference between achieving your business objectives and failure. Paid advertising networks on Google, Bing, Facebook, and other platforms allow even small businesses to successfully drive conversions in a world where major brands generally dominate organic search rankings.

Whether you're a professional marketer or a business owner, simply signing up for a PPC account won't be enough to help you stay competitive. Take the time to get familiar with your platform of choice and use this guide to aid you in developing a sustainable PPC strategy that will push your conversions and profits to new levels.

1. Set a Defined Goal for Your New Campaign

Every paid advertising campaign that you invest in should have a defined goal before you begin. These goals depend on numerous factors including how new you are to digital marketing, whether or not you have an existing audience online, and what your plans are for expansion.

Establishing a well-defined goal for you and your team is the bedrock of any successful strategy. Understanding your objective helps you understand how you will need to engage with your audience and what type of content you should attempt to curate both in your ads and landing pages. Common reasons for running PPC campaigns are:

• Brand discovery and awareness
• Sales and conversions
• App downloads
• Remarketing

You are not necessarily limited to running one type of campaign at once. For example, you might utilize a discovery campaign to bring in first-time customers while using a more sales-focused campaign to capture conversions from those that have already expressed interest in buying. However, you will want to be sure not to mix these segments of your audience and confuse your messaging. If you've never used PPC platforms before, stick with one defined goal and attempt to gain mastery before taking on bigger challenges.

By defining your goal, you can now make smart decisions when moving forward with your PPC strategy. This brings us to our next step -

2. Align Your Goals with Audience Intent

You won’t get far with your PPC strategy if you’re attempting to achieve your goal by marketing to an audience that isn’t aligned with your efforts. Every customer interaction with a business can generally be summarized in several steps often referred to as the Buyer’s Journey:

• Awareness – The individual is just learning about your business and its products or services. They may have a problem that you may be able to solve, which leads to

• Interest – After learning about your brand, the individual may express interest in your products by visiting your landing pages or subscribing to a list to learn more. That interest in your solution to their problems leads to

• Desire – The individual may now be looking closely at your deals and comparing with competitors as you provide a legitimate solution to a real problem they’re facing. The desire for your product leads to

• Action – The individual has decided that they are ready to purchase with the brand that offers the best product/service and the best offer.

As you can see, where your audience is along this journey should dictate how you want to go about marketing to them. If an individual has only just discovered your brand during the awareness stage, you wouldn't want to jump right into the hard sell as you would during the action stage. You would want to provide the user with the opportunity to learn more about your services so that they can educate themselves to make a smart purchasing decision.

If you're a brand that's currently focused more on generating immediate sales and conversions, then you will want to create a PPC strategy that focuses on audiences that express a desire to engage or make a purchase.

After you align your goals with an audience that matches your intention, you need to know how to target those individuals directly. A great place to start is by bidding on the types of keywords that are pre-loaded with the audience intent that matches your campaign strategy.

3. Bid on the Right Types of Keywords

It's natural for a brand to want to rank for the most popular and most commonly searched keywords that relate to your industry. For example, an HVAC company would love to be the number one ranked result on Google for HVAC or HVAC services. However, these types of keywords are guaranteed to be highly competitive and therefore expensive, pricing out many smaller businesses.

However, you can still scoop up valuable keywords for your campaign by understanding the intent behind the search. There are generally three types of keywords entered into a search engine every day:

• Navigational – Expresses an intent to go to a defined location. The user may not remember a direct URL. This can include searching for brand names, products, services, or anything else related to a brand they may have in mind. These keywords are useful if your brand is already popular and well-defined.
• Informational – This type of keyword helps users find content that educates or informs them about a topic. These generally take the form of questions using words such as “where,” “when,” or “how.” The key here is that the intent is to learn, not to spend. Informational keywords are great for ranking educational content on your site that can promote awareness, but they are not the keywords you would pursue necessarily for chasing immediate sales.

• Transactional  – This type of keyword is loaded with the intent to purchase. A user might enter the words “buy” or “sale,” but may also search in terms of a product or service. Examples of this would look like “best local landscaping service” or “professional men’s watch.” These are deemed transactional as the keyword seems to imply that the user is already interested in purchasing that product or service.

Understanding the types of keywords and why users search for them is key in helping you to tailor a sustainable PPC strategy. Your focus should not just be to chase the most common keywords but to research keywords that fall under the type that aligns with both your campaign goals and the audience intent.

A discovery campaign focused on building brand awareness would prioritize informational keywords. Users are not at the action stage of the buyer's journey and simply wish to gain more information. You can then bid on informational keywords that your audience is using and ensure that your website or landing page has quality content that provides them with the resources they need. Users then feel rewarded for discovering valuable content, which then establishes your brand as an authority, and drives success for your PPC campaign.

Likewise, a conversion-driven campaign would highlight transactional keywords that users type when they're already committed to spending cash on a product or service. Your ads and landing pages should match the intent of these keywords and prioritize hard-selling your products or services with great offers that they can't turn away from.

Finally, you might also consider bidding for long-tail keywords for your PPC campaign strategy. Long-tail keywords are phrases that consist of three or more words and have a highly specific focus. Many new marketers will make the mistake of ignoring these keywords due to their low search volume. However, the hyper-focused intent behind using them makes them well-aligned with campaigns driven by conversions.

Because the user is motivated enough to highly-define their search, there is a great chance that they are also motivated to purchase if they discover your ad. Additionally, the low volume equates to a low bidding cost, making it a cheap, but potentially worthwhile investment to consider in your PPC strategy.

4. Utilize Analytics for Continuous Optimization

PPC campaigns are unique in that while they are paid, you only receive a charge whenever you receive clicks from your impressions. Whether you are using Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or another PPC platform, they want your campaign to perform otherwise they do not receive payment.

Because of this, your PPC platform of choice will provide a suite of analytical tools that you can use to track your campaigns in real-time. Both Google Ads and Facebook Ads will monitor countless metrics including click-through rate, clicks, impressions, cost-per-click, and much more. You can elevate your PPC strategy further by using tools such as Google Analytics, which will tell you everything you need to know about how a user spends time on your website or landing pages.

Utilizing these types of reports can tell you what keywords or channels your audience uses to find your brand. After arriving at your site, you can also track how long they spend on a page, how engaging your content is, and even information regarding the audience's demographics and interests. These are all powerful resources as this information is necessary to continuously refine your campaign and further improve your return on investment (ROI).

While certain tools like Google Analytics feature paid subscriptions, all of these platforms offer free versions that effectively provide all of the analytical information a business needs to run a successful PPC campaign. Social platforms with paid ad features will offer built-in analytic tools to help you optimize performance and ad spend automatically.

However, be aware that it can take weeks for your PPC campaign to gather enough information to take appropriate action. Making changes to your advertisement or landing page too soon into a campaign will disrupt the algorithm and cause the learning process to take that much longer. You must give your ads an appropriate amount of time before considering changes. After you've gathered enough data, you can begin A/B testing new variations of ads and begin to eliminate the ads that do not generate worthwhile results.

5. A/B Test Your Ads & Landing Pages

It's great to aim for a home run out of the gate, but results like that are anomalies when it comes to PPC campaigns. Most PPC strategies will account for the time it takes to test and refine the sales copy and appearance of your advertisements and landing pages.

With the help of your PPC and website analytics tools, you can gain an approximated idea of what type of content is performing well with your audience and which isn't. To gain more specific insight as to what your audience truly enjoys, you can begin to A/B test certain aspects of your campaign. A/B Testing allows you to present two variations of the same ad or website page to your audience.

Each page will feature similar content but feature a slightly different URL for easy distinction. Your PPC platform will then direct new traffic to either variation depending on the split that you designate (usually 50/50). As users interact with both page variations, the algorithm will gather analytic data and automatically push traffic to the page variation that performs the best. After you gather enough data to decide, you can eliminate the poor-performing variation from your campaign.

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Common things that you will want to A/B test with a PPC campaign include the ad copy, images, videos, headlines, call-to-actions, or the sales copy itself on the landing page. Your first landing page draft may be filled with excellent, informative copy, but A/B testing may prove that your particular audience is more receptive to a succinct, direct sales approach. Similarly, recording a 1-2 minute video and uploading it can often do more in driving conversions than 2,000 words of content.

A/B testing is not a one-and-done step and should be continuously employed to gather further insights about your audience. The more informed your team is about your target audience, the better you will be able to refine your campaigns and create a sustainable PPC strategy for all campaigns moving forward.

6. Use the Right Network to Reach the Right Audience

There are several types of PPC ads on different networks. Choosing the right type of advertisement to employ is another step to helping you better connect with the right audience.

A. Search Ads

The first type of advertisement is a search ad. Users will bid with competitors for certain keywords that will return their domain as an advertised result on search engine results pages (SERPS). The bidding competition ultimately determines the price you pay any time your ad gets a click.

A search ad is most effective for audiences that are already at the buying stage of their journey. If the user is willing to click on a paid business ad when performing a search, they're likely looking for a high-quality brand that can help them solve a problem. If you're looking to drive conversions with your campaign, search ads are the way to go.

Take advantage of your ad space to demonstrate brand authority, give direct information about what you wish to sell, and provide a high-quality image of the product or service.

B. Display Ads

Display ads are located on a different network than search ads and are great for generating general brand awareness. A display ad can be on any website on the internet that opts into Google's display network. Your ads will only appear on screen whenever the user meets a variety of targeting parameters that you designate.

Because display ads focus more on building awareness, they're not necessarily the best suited for driving immediate conversions. You should expect to spend more and settle in for a longer campaign cycle with the benefit that your brand can be seen by users all over the internet. After building more brand awareness, you can shift your campaign focus to more aggressively pursue actual sales.

C. Shopping Ads

Shopping ads are similar to search ads in that they highly target those who are motivated to purchase a product. This is highly popular among e-commerce brands and is a highly effective way of securing conversions from online shoppers.

Using Google's Merchant Center, you can upload your products including images, pricing, and description. You can set targeting parameters to target only those users that express interest as well as qualifying income. Because users get a direct visual of the product and the necessary information, shopping ads have extremely high clickthrough rates when compared to other ad types.

Choosing the right type of advertisement to run falls in line with everything outlined in this article thus far. Every decision you make regarding your PPC strategy should align your goals with your audience's intent. Because we outlined our goal as our very first step, choosing the right type of ad network to use should be simple whether you're looking to boost your brand awareness or drive immediate sales.

7. Remarket to Those That Engage with Your Content

Remarketing is an additional type of PPC campaign that allows you to re-engage with users that abandoned the sales journey before converting.

The traditional buyer's journey was thought of as a funnel. The top of the funnel is the widest to grab as many potential buyers as possible. As the sale process continued, the funnel would filter out less-qualified buyers until you're left with only the most worthwhile prospects. However, the sales journey seems to be much less direct, especially with modern changes in online shopping.

It's difficult, if not impossible, for us to know the exact motivations of a user when visiting a website or landing page. However, we can gauge an approximation by examining when a user stopped engaging with our advertisement.

As an example, we will say that a new user visited your page, added an item to their cart, but never followed through with the checkout process. We can assume that they must have an interest in the product, but maybe hesitated when it came to the pricing, shipping, or some other part of actually making the purchase. Our next sales pitch should naturally be different than if we were approaching someone that never heard of the brand before. This is why we utilize remarketing.

Utilize your analytics and metrics to determine how your audience interacts with your content and which stage of the sales process is causing you to lose them. This allows you to hyperfocus your new advertisements to better suit their needs and secure the conversion. A great way for you to do this is by setting up micro-conversions to track along the way.

8. Set Up Micro-Conversions to Gauge the Effectiveness of Your Strategy

While the end goal for every business is to secure a sale or a conversion, you can benefit yourself by establishing smaller goals to keep track of along the way. Let's look at an example of what a typical buyer's journey might look like after clicking on one of your advertisements:

Read About the Product > Fill Out a Form to Gain Promotional Discount > Add Product to Cart > Enter Billing Information > Complete Purchase

While the primary conversion is the purchase, we can designate several of these steps as a micro-conversion to track our successes. If a user makes it past the form step, we still are better off as we managed to obtain valuable contact information as a result of our advertisement. You can then utilize their contact information and general interest in your product to add them to your list for a remarketing campaign.

Understanding what micro-conversions have higher rates of success can also help you to take a closer look at what parts of your PPC strategy require optimization. If your audience is not completing your form, then you need to improve your on-page content or make the form simpler to fill out. If the user is adding the product to their cart, but not completing the purchase, you may need to sweeten the deal, adjust pricing, or improve the checkout process in some way.

Creating micro-conversions as separate goals is invaluable for helping you to both improve your existing campaigns and to better prepare for future remarketing campaigns. The better you can understand the behaviors and thoughts of your audience, the better chance you have at creating a sustainable PPC strategy that you can lean on for future sales.

9. Build Lookalike Audiences

Finally, be sure to leverage all of the valuable data you've collected about your audience to create lookalike audiences. A lookalike audience is a brand-new audience that demonstrates the same behaviors, interests, and search habits as your existing audience that led to conversions.

Taking advantage of lookalike audiences gives you a leg up on all future PPC campaign efforts as you already have an idea of buyer wants and needs, based upon previous experiences. This saves you valuable time and campaign funds by taking advantage of all the testing and analysis you've done previously. Giving yourself every advantage is exactly how you can develop a sustainable PPC strategy in the competitive marketing world online.

Platforms like Facebook and Google make it extremely easy and convenient to create lookalike audiences. Again, it is in their interest for you to be a successful client as you only pay when audiences engage. By helping you to engage with new customers that previous research proves to be highly qualified, you should find your lookalike audiences to be high-converting users from a much earlier point than when you first began marketing with PPC.

Conclusion: A Sustainable PPC Strategy Aligns with Customer Intention

The key takeaway for developing a sustainable PPC strategy is to employ tactics and tools that align with audience intent indicated by their web browsing behaviors. Every action a user takes including the type of keyword they use to search can inform you whether they simply wish to educate themselves or if they're ready to purchase.

By establishing a clearly defined campaign goal and aligning that with your audience intent, you can begin to choose the campaign type that is best suited for that purpose. You can then use your understanding of your audience to use your budget effectively and bid on the keywords best suited for your business goals.

After building out your initial campaign, leverage all of the powerful analytical tools at your disposal. It is easier than ever to instantly gather all of the traffic data you could ever need to optimize and improve your campaign performance. You can use that analytical data to A/B test your ad copy, landing pages, and more. You can also set up micro-conversion goals to better understand the behaviors of your audience members.

Finally, be sure to leverage all of the hard work and research you've done thus far to give yourself up a leg up in future efforts. Lookalike audiences allow you to utilize your data to begin marketing to high-value prospects. This continuous optimization and improvement are what you need to develop a sustainable PPC strategy moving forward.

Optimizing your website for success has never been easier thanks to the power of the internet's number one analytics tool - Google Analytics. It is estimated that as much as 53% of all websites use the platform to reach their business goals.

While most users may be able to navigate Google Analytics at the elementary level, there are countless tools available for tracking goals, analyzing user behavior, and increasing your level of user engagement.

If you've had an opportunity to poke around the platform and are ready to take your experience to the next level, then continue and learn how to navigate Google analytics like a pro and start gaining an edge over your competition.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is an analytics tool developed by Google to help users monitor and analyze their website traffic. It provides invaluable insights including the number of unique visitors, geographic locations, demographic information, time spent on individual pages, and traffic sources.

While other alternatives exist including Chartbeat and Semrush, Google Analytics is unquestionably the industry leader thanks to its accuracy and ease of use. Creating an account is also absolutely free.

However, a premium version of the tool does exist called Google Analytics 360. This subscription will cost businesses $150,000 a year for the additional reporting features and tools. Thankfully, unless you're managing a large-scale enterprise or corporation, the free version provides everything a website owner needs to have mastery over their domain.

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Why Should I Use Analytics for My Website?

Attempting to create and operate a successful website for your business is like attempting to travel to a foreign location without a map. Though it's technically possible for your journey to be a success, you will undoubtedly waste valuable time, money, and resources without a reliable guide pointing you in the right direction.

Google Analytics allows you to tag any material you create for marketing so that you can gather actionable information about your audience in real-time. If your analytics reporting determines that certain website pages have a high bounce rate, it's a sign that the content or layout of your page is low-quality and unengaging.

Demographic insights can tell you the age, gender, and average income level of those who most frequently visit your website. You can then utilize this information to create and optimizing future website content and marketing campaigns to capitalize on those visitors and create conversions.

Not only will Google Analytics automatically track all of this data and more automatically, but it also offers the ability to create countless custom goals and reporting so that you can tailor solutions that fit your business's unique needs.

How to Navigate Google Analytics Like a Pro?

Now that you understand the importance of having a website analytics tool on your side, it's time to take a look at how you can start improving your website reporting today.

1. Start Crawling and Indexing Your Site with Google Search Console

For those that are new to managing a website, the concept of web crawlers might be brand-new. Google Search Console is a tool that's separate from Google Analytics but is necessary if you want to gain reliable data from the latter.

Crawling is what a web crawler, also called a spider, performs to grab and index all of the information from all websites across the web. Search engines like Google use their crawler to index information along with its search algorithm. This is how the search engine can rank websites and provide you with the best search results possible.

You can manually submit the latest version of your website to Google Search Console so that it crawls and downloads the most recent information. This same tool will also help you in remedying existing issues with your sites such as URL structure, duplicate content, page speed, and mobile performance.

You can access Google Search Console here by logging into your existing Google account. From there, you will need to select the domain you wish to crawl and index. If you have yet to submit your domain to Google, you will need to verify ownership of the site before proceeding. You can add a new domain by clicking on + Add Property when searching for a property.

After completing that step, you can begin the process by clicking on Fetch as Google underneath a section titled Crawl. Make sure to do this for all versions of the site. After the Google Search Console finishes fetching data, be sure to index it.

If Google Search Console detects any issues with your site health, you will need to take steps to remedy each one. Failure to optimize your site in this regard will almost certainly cause any actions taken as a result of Google Analytics to be in vain.

You can also submit a sitemap to Google Search Console to potentially improve its ability to properly read and index your entire site. You can learn more about that topic here.

2. Implement Google Tag Manager to Track Your Marketing

Google Tag Manager is an essential feature within Google Analytics that allows you to easily track events on a given website page. This will provide you with a short code snippet that you can paste into the header and body of the page without needing to edit or modify any lines of code. Many modern website editors provide a field for you to paste this without ever needing to access the HTML.

The power of Google Tag Manager is the ability to sort captured data automatically so that it only reports the information you want to see. You can access GTM here.

While it can be easy to get overwhelmed with all of the tools and dashboards associated with Google Analytics, allowing them to work together harmoniously will give you the best results. In the Tag Manager, simply select the same domain you are managing through Google Analytics. Then, you can click the box that says New Tag to start tracking new events.

You can also find your existing tags by selecting Tags within the column on the left-hand side. Examples of events that you can track include conversions, completing a form, downloading a file, link clicks, video plays, scroll tracking, and much more. By aligning your business goals with the right events, you'll be able to know exactly how your site is performing and make adjustments as necessary.

Learning Google Tag Manager will not just be beneficial for your core website, but can benefit any additional campaigns you run when creating new landing pages or sales funnels.

3. Get Comfortable with All Types of Google Analytics Reporting

Google Analytics offers a treasure trove of reporting options so that you can keep your eyes on what’s happening with your site both in real-time and in the long term. Those primary types of reports include:

• Real-Time
• Audience
• Acquisition
• Behavior
• Conversions

4. Real-Time Reporting in Google Analytics

Real-time reporting will provide insights regarding your web traffic each moment that it happens. This type of data allows you to utilize actionable data and make changes to your website and campaigns immediately. Real-time reporting allows you to review visitor locations, the origins of the web traffic, custom event goals, goal conversions, and what pages users are spending time visiting.

For all of these, you can view what active visitors are doing on your site at the moment or within the last half hour. Not only are the insights invaluable, but real-time reporting offers the added benefit of allowing you to catch errors in your campaign early. Whether there's an issue with your Google Tag Manager, your content, or a page loading correctly, you can solve the problem before it has a lasting impact on your marketing results.

• Audience Reporting

Audience reporting refers to any data that Google Analytics can determine about the types of users visiting your website. When multiple users happen to share similar attributes, you can consider that segmented group one type of audience. By observing the actions and behavior patterns of different types of audiences, you can determine which types of audiences are more worthwhile to pursue.

The Audience tab allows you to gain reporting based upon age, gender, interests, geographic location, behavior, technology, and device types. You'll be able to filter unique visitors from returning ones, determine which types of devices are being used to visit your site, and even compare your website's data with competitors in your industry.

Audience reporting data is invaluable as it allows you to tailor future campaigns to your audiences based on how they interact with your content. This makes Google Analytics one of your greatest allies in building remarketing campaigns that can help push buyers that are on the fence to become paying customers.

With audience reporting, however, it's important to note that while this data is valuable, it is ultimately a general assumption. There is no definitive way for analytics tools to know exactly why a visitor came to your site. You will still need to utilize strategies such as A/B testing to explore new ways of engaging with your audience. However, these insights give you the target you need to aim for rather than aiming in the dark.

• Acquisition Reporting

Acquisition reporting within Google Analytics allows you to take a deep dive into exactly how your website acquires visitors. You can access a snapshot of your traffic through the Overview subsection found underneath Acquisition.

This will show you the top channels used to access your domain whether it be through organic keyword searches, social media, or direct navigation. You can also easily view statistics such as bounce rate, average session length, or conversions for your various custom goals, which we will cover later in this article.

Your Acquisition Reporting is further segmented into closer looks at the following:

• Channels (The method used to access your site)
• All Traffic (The top traffic sources from all channels)
• All Referrals (Websites and social media links to your site)
• Campaigns (Visitors from ad campaigns using UTM parameters)
• Keywords (An analysis of keywords used for organic and paid search)
• Cost Analysis (The costs per session)
• Social (Activity from social media including referrals and conversions)
• SEO (Impressions, Clicks, Ranking, Clickthrough Rate, etc.)

The Acquisition reporting tab provides you with comprehensive data that can positively impact every aspect of your digital marketing. From optimizing on-page content to improving site health to improving your overall search rankings, Acquisition reporting through Google Analytics will allow you to operate your website like a professional.

While all of Google Analytics' tools will improve your game, spend time getting familiar with each column and metric available in this section of the platform. These insights will allow you to create highly personalized campaigns and advertisements that push for better conversion rates than your initial discovery efforts.

• Behavior Reporting

The Behavior Reporting section is invaluable for learning exactly how your visitors spend time on your website. This will not only cover the basics such as time spent but will demonstrate the behavior flow of your visitors.

Behavior flow is a term used to describe how a visitor moves from one page to the next on a website. An example of a behavior flow would be as follows:

Home Page > Services Page (2nd Interaction) > Service A Page (3rd Interaction) > Contact Page (4th) Interaction

If significant portions of our audience follow this behavior flow, we can deduce that something about our content is driving visitors to learn more about a specific service before inquiring how to contact the business. We could then look into link clicks or form submissions within our events to determine if any further action was taken beyond this page navigation.

Gaining a visualization of your audience's behavior flow can give you a greater understanding of how your content impacts the user's choices. This is tremendously advantageous when you are attempting to funnel users to specific sections or your site to trigger specific events or goals.

Behavior reporting will also give insights such as time spent or bounce rate for every page. If users are spending more time on a page, it's a great sign that our content is effective and keeping audiences engaged. To contrast this, a high bounce rate on a page means that we need to improve the content on a page to avoid losing visitors at that point in the sales process.

Finally, Google Analytics also features an Event Flow visualization that can help you track a visitor's journey when engaging with a flow of events as opposed to pages. This is a highly important tool if you happen to be running a campaign on your site that requires users to participate in events within a sequence. A multi-page form would be an example of this as it includes engaging with form fields, following links, and submitting the data upon completion.

When you gain a mastery level of knowledge over your audience, you can cater your website and campaigns to suit their needs while still reaching your goals.

• Conversions Reporting

The point of Conversions Reporting is to help you determine if and how your website is helping you to drive conversions. A conversion can simply be a sale (the end goal) or any other custom, predefined goal you set for your website.

Not unlike the behavior and event flows, Conversions features reports that can help you visualize your goal path and the actions users take on their journey to fulfilling that goal.

The most common strategy for tracking goals is to push users to a confirmation page any time they complete a goal (making a purchase, completing a form, etc.). In your Conversions reporting, that page will display a high goal success rate. However, Google Analytics allows you to create as many steps in that goal as you would like so that you can track performance at each step and learn when users abandon the conversion. An example of a multi-step conversion might look like this:

Add to Cart (Step 1) > Enter Shipping Information (Step 2) > Enter Payment & Billing Details (Step 3) > Review Your Checkout Info (Step 4) > Complete Purchase (Goal)

As a general rule, it's easier to drive conversions with as few steps as possible. However, this is not always possible. With Conversions reporting, you not only track when users reach the finish line but can count your wins at each step. If large numbers of users are abandoning the process as step 3, for example, there may be ways we need to improve that part of the process.

Familiarize yourself with Conversion reports to help guide you in achieving your various business goals. In this way, Google Analytics can become your greatest ally when it comes to increasing your sales.

5. Set Up Your Custom Goals in Google Analytics

Now that you've gained familiarity with the wealth of reporting options available, it's time to set up your own custom goals in Google Analytics. This elevates your data from simply being informative and helps you to visualize how your business goals and needs match up with how visitors engage with your brand.

As we briefly described above, a goal can be an act of any kind that you wish for a user to perform when visiting your website. You can begin the process of creating custom goals by navigating to Admin > All Website Data > Goals.

Google Analytics features an intuitive setup process that walks you through the goal creation process step-by-step. It even features pre-built templates for common goals that other Google Analytics users frequently employ. These templated goals include actions like payments, account creation, contact inquiries, or media plays. If one of these suits your needs, you can start there. Otherwise, go to the bottom and click Custom.

Next, you’ll need to select the type of goal you want to set up within your Google Analytics account. Your goal will fall under one of four umbrella categories including:

• Destination (Track when a user arrives at a designated place on your site)
• Visit Duration (Set a goal for how long you wish for a user session to be)
• Pages Visited Per Session (Set a goal for how many pages you want a user to interact with)
• Events (Assign a specific action as an event and track every time a user performs it)

It may take testing for you to create custom goals that accurately define what you need for a user to accomplish. With the help of all of the reporting options available, your initial goals may provide insight into what you need to do when creating new goals, so that you can further optimize website performance.

Remember from above that you can track all of this data in real-time, make corrections on the fly, and gain a horde of in-depth data that can help to push conversions further. When using Google Analytics, you set your goals, watch how the data lines up with your goals, and continuously optimize aspects of your website and campaigns to keep pushing the numbers in your favor.

6. Don't Forget About the Demographics and Interest Reports

Finally, you should know that Google Analytics offers Demographics and Interests Reports that can further improve your insights about your visitors. However, this feature must be manually enabled to take effect. To do this, find the Audience while selecting your domain. Then click on Demographics > Overview. You can then find a blue button that to click that says Enable.

After this, you're all set. This process is not instantaneous, and it may take several days for your new data to populate in the dashboard.

This reporting feature will show you valuable personal data regarding the audience that is visiting your website. However, a key feature is that it also shows the other interests that these users have that may or may not be related to your brand. The more well-rounded the visualization of your potential customers is, the better equipped you are to create campaigns tailored to their wants and needs.

7. Finally, Track What You Want with Custom Reports

If there's anything left to learn from what Google Analytics has to offer, it's that there is no one-size-fits-all solution for every business. For this reason, Google Analytics also offers you the ability to create customized reports to track the metrics most critical to your unique goals and success.

To create a custom report within Google Analytics, find the Customization section within the left-hand column. Then, click on Custom Reports underneath it. You can create new reports by clicking on + New Custom Report and even categorize them by clicking + New Category. There are four major types of custom reports, including:

• Explorer (A line graph with a data table – the basic report you should be familiar with now)
• Flat Table (A general table that allows you to custom sort your columns and rows)
• Map Overlay (Contains a geographic map that’s color-coded to represent key metrics)
• Funnel (Generate a graph of your funnel steps and see which were completed by users and which were not)

You can also take advantage of the Google Solutions Gallery by clicking on Import from Gallery. This allows you to browse and select countless custom reports generated by other business owners and marketers like yourself. While these custom reports were made by the user for their needs, you may find other like-minded individuals who already created exactly what you need.

Custom reporting exists primarily due to the sheer amount of data available within Google Analytics. While all of it is extremely valuable, it only is so in the correct circumstances. By setting up a custom report that better aligns with your business goals, you can save countless hours by sorting out that data automatically and capturing exactly what you and your partners need to see. This allows you to examine the data with purpose, rather than manually clicking through the data each week or each month.

Navigate Google Analytics Like a Pro for Website and Marketing Success!

Google Analytics dominates the market for website analytics for great reason. For zero cost, you have access to countless intuitive tools and reporting features that can automatically track exactly what happens on your website, how your audience engages, and then use that data to improve in every area.

The moderate time investment of learning Google Analytics is worthwhile as it can single-handedly be the deciding factor in making better content for your website and improving steps on your website to achieve more conversions. You can also quickly sort that data by creating custom goals and custom reports so that you can capture and use that information with a purpose.

In addition to setting up your Google Analytics account, don't forget to crawl and index your website with Google Search Console to improve your site health. Failure to do so will completely undermine any marketing efforts taken with the help of this incredible tool. Also, be sure to set up your Google Tag Manager on any site where marketing actions are taken so that you can more easily track your events and conversions.

Now that you're familiar with everything that Google Analytics has to offer, the only thing left is to analyze your domain and start testing these features for yourself. With time and application, Google Analytics will become a critical ally for your business success just as it has been for countless others to date.

If you want to boost your popularity in search results, improving your meta descriptions is a great place to begin. Compelling, keyword-focused snippets will tell your audience exactly what your content is all about and what they're missing by not clicking.

Below, we're going to provide you with proven tips for how to write compelling Meta descriptions that will boost your rankings. With a few key adjustments, you can expect to see a surge in web traffic and discover for yourself that dominating Google search results is possible for anyone.

What is a Meta Description?

A meta description is an attribute of HTML that describes the content on a web page.

Whenever you enter a keyword or phrase into a search engine, a list of results will appear. The main clickable link features the headline. Below this, you will find the meta description. While the meta description serves a variety of purposes, it effectively acts as advertising copy to win users over to your website versus the other results.

You must manually enter a meta description either through HTML or by using built-in tools offered by your CMS (content management system). You can generally find the place to enter your meta description under your SEO settings along with your topic and URL. Meta descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters, and you should aim between 120 and 150 characters.

Why Do Meta Descriptions Matter?

It may surprise you to learn that the meta description is one of the few things that does not directly impact search rankings. By that, we mean that crawlers are focusing on the content, tags, and links featured on the page itself. So, why do meta descriptions matter when it comes to rankings on search engine results pages?

Meta descriptions play a significant role in clickthrough rates. If given the choice between a result with an attractive description and promising information versus a boring description that's unclear, users will always choose the carefully crafted one. What Google is interested in are the pages that more users are choosing to engage with. When more people click on a website, Google weighs this into consideration, they can more easily determine which websites have a higher quality of content and are more deserving of higher rankings.

Whether or not a meta description directly impacts the search algorithm directly or indirectly is inconsequential. The ultimate goal when seeking higher rankings is to get more clicks and a well-crafted meta description is proven to achieve just that.

How Do I Write Compelling Meta Descriptions?

Improving the quality of your meta descriptions is not difficult if you know what works best. Start employing the key suggestion below if you want to start boosting your rankings the right way.

1. Provide a Succinct Description of the Content

Your meta description should always help to describe exactly what the reader will find when they click on your link. This is not an opportunity to misdirect or deceive users into clicking through by making false promises. Google's main priority is to help users find the most pertinent and valuable data that relates to their queries. Being dishonest with your descriptions will adversely affect your website. Those types of clicks will also negatively impact your bounce rate.

Instead, explain to the user what's waiting for them on the other side of the link. Remember that you have between 120 and 150 characters. Focus on the highlights, make use of your primary keyword, and trust that your content is worth viewing.

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2. Inspire Intrigue with Your Meta Descriptions

Even though you must describe the content accurately, that doesn't mean you need to give away all of the most valuable material right away. Just as you would do with any other form of marketing, you want to give away just enough to inspire interest without giving away the entire product. The meta description naturally lends itself to this concept due to its naturally short length.

Let’s look at an example. If someone is searching “how to draw” and your result is on the first page, what sounds more appealing?

Example A: “Anyone can learn how to draw whether they are talented or not. Drawing is a skill, just like reading or cooking, or playing soccer. Sure, some people seem to…”

Example B: “Here is where you’ll find every single one of our how-to-draw lessons! It’s a massive drawing library! You’ll find lessons for young and old kids.”

These meta descriptions come from actual search results. The first is a result that's relegated to page four. It appears that the webmaster failed to create a meta description, leaving Google to retrieve its snippet from the actual on-page content. While it is still relevant to our search, the snippet features vague statements that don't compel us to learn more.

The second meta description is from our number one result. Even though it's not the most eloquent description, it tells us exactly what they're promising. By clicking their link, you're not only going to learn how to draw, but you will gain access to an entire library that accommodates all age groups. The description is unquestionably better, and we can assume that their clickthrough rate is quite high as a result of their ranking.

Use this premise to highlight the value you're offering to the user with just one click of your link.

3. Use Your Primary Keyword in the Description

Not only is a meta description another opportunity to incorporate your target keyword, but the entire phrase will also be highlighted in bold to grab the user's attention. When competing with other results, you always need to focus on doing what you can to pull eyes to your link. A user is far more likely to skim past results without a bolded keyword or phrase than ones that have them.

However, this does not mean you should pack keywords into your description. Always keep in mind that you have limited characters to work with, and stuffing keywords into that space seems obvious, off-putting, and makes your text read poorly. Google is also not fond of keyword stuffing, so it's best to avoid this practice no matter where you are typing.

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4. Every Meta Description Must Be Unique

Duplicate content always makes a poor impression. At worst, it can result in penalties that lower your SEO score. At best, it makes your brand appear lazy, negligent, and uninspired.

Take the time to review your website and check for any pages that might share identical meta descriptions. Consider rephrasing the duplicate ones either manually or through an online tool to make them 100% unique. Revise each description to reflect the content that the user will find on the page and avoid overgeneralized descriptions that fail to do this.

Though there are circumstances in which experts can argue for allowing an auto-populated description, writing your own each time you create a page or post an article is the best way to avoid this problem.

5. Focus on Value

Writing a meta description should be similar to writing short-form ad copy. In that regard, you should take advantage of the opportunity to promote value to your audience. If you're providing a special offer, a promotion, an opportunity for free materials, be sure to highlight this in the description.

A great way to do this is to make use of value terms or phrases such as “the most popular,” “the best available,” or “highly-rated.” Consider that users have already expressed interest in your offerings by searching for the keywords you are ranking for. Take advantage of that innate interest by demonstrating the value you offer over your competitors.

6. A/B Test Your Meta Descriptions

A/B testing will always serve as an excellent way to see what works with actual numbers to support it. Instead of writing a description and calling it a day, work with your team to create two or more variations of a description for each page.

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This will allow you to explore different methods of advertising your content. It may surprise you to see how a slight variation to a sentence or the inclusion of a new keyword can attract more clicks.

Set your initial meta description and allow that page to run long enough to gather data with Google Analytics. It will generally take several weeks to gather enough input to make an actionable decision. Then, change only the meta description and leave the content on the page the same. Test your new description and see what earns you a better clickthrough rate.

Not only will this research boost the performance of that single page, but you can also use the knowledge gained from A/B testing to craft better meta descriptions in the future that appeal to your unique audience.

Conclusion: Begin Writing Compelling Meta Descriptions Today!

Meta descriptions may not be a direct factor in Google's ranking algorithm, but it nevertheless has a tremendous impact on your site's SEO value. It is your opportunity to advertise your content, intrigue the reader, and entice them with your unique proposition value.

Effective keyword usage will also support a clear description by highlighting the exact phrases the user is searching for. Including unique meta descriptions for each page will also provide each of your website pages with an opportunity to demonstrate its own, unique value. If you ever have any doubts about the right direction for your meta description, always defer to A/B testing and allow the analytics to speak for themselves.

By staying conscious of these tips each time you create a new page or write a new blog post, you, too, can boost your rankings.

One final tip - take time to search for topics that interest you. Study the top results and consider how those brands take advantage of our proven tips as well as the unique things they do that are unique to their style. To be the best, you need to learn from the best. In doing so, ranking your site at number one can become a real possibility.