Measuring lead quality is a major challenge for many agency owners. Most salespeople waste a lot of time on weak leads. If your conversion rate is low, it reflects that you are not effectively converting leads into paying customers. Maybe they are still not ready to purchase from you or are low-quality leads.

Weak leads will not help you achieve your business objectives. The advantage of high-quality leads is that they close faster and have a larger average deal size compared to poor-quality leads.

It might frustrate salespeople. Without a lead qualification plan, you will probably lose a lot of sales.

Impact of Qualified Leads on Sales

According to a Somametrics study, qualified leads substantially impacted sales.

A mere 10% improvement in lead quality led to a 33% growth in sales and a 5% increase in net profits. It also led to an 1839% ROI on marketing spend. When the lead quality was further improved by 20%, the increase in ROI on marketing spend and growth in sales saw an increase of 4,044% and 73%, respectively.

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The data speaks for itself! The quality of leads is crucial to your overall success in a business venture.

A drop in lead quality may lead to a sharp decline in sales and net profits.

What's Lead Qualification?

Qualified leads indicate the readiness of a person to buy your product.

The sales-readiness of a customer decides what strategy salespeople should use to convert the prospect into a paying customer.

Likelihood of Conversion

Your sales team's further activities and strategy depend on the results of this process.

They can further categorize these leads into hot, warm, and cold (low-quality ones).

The Benefits of Lead Qualification

The prime benefit of the lead qualification process is to build more effective communication with the prospects. This communication can take place through different channels, such as telephone, email, blog, or social media. The process tremendously contributes to the sales cycle.

It leads to better personalization, which results in a greater likelihood of conversion. It is also helpful in building relationships. Through lead qualification, sales reps can differentiate between hot, warm, and cold leads and prioritize them in their pipeline to build relationships.

To increase the conversion rate, you must clearly understand leads, including their priorities and concerns. Once you develop such an understanding, you may craft messages that appeal to them. It will help you close deals faster, saving you a lot of time, money, and hassle.

According to a study, 50% of prospects will never be qualified to buy your products or services, so wasting your time on them is useless. Instead, you can spend this time on the warm and hot leads who will convert in a fraction of the effort.

Lead Qualification vs. Lead Scoring

Marketers developed Lead Scoring as a process of lead qualification. You can measure and rank a lead's interest level and sales readiness through Lead Scoring. It's usually based on a documented and agreed-upon methodology by marketing and sales teams.

Lead scoring can be done in many ways. You can either assign points or rank them as A, B, C, or D. You can also group them as "hot," "warm," or "cold."

Lead scoring will decide whether a lead should be added to your sales funnel or not. It helps remove the ones with very little likelihood of buying from you. You can prioritize hot leads based on their value to your company. Warm leads need a bit more nurturing, so you can make a strategy to craft messages to increase their interest level and convince them.

Besides that, lead scoring can also be based on many other attributes, such as demographics, psychographics, work information, and their role in decision-making.

These are the vital inputs you need to prioritize your leads.

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3 Ways to Improve the Quality of Your Sales Leads

Here are the three ways to improve your lead quality and overall sales process.

1. Refine Your Lead Scoring System

It would help if you practiced dynamic instead of static scoring to prioritize your leads. The reason behind it is that factors like demographics and psychographics of your prospects keep changing, and for accurate lead scoring, it's crucial to adapt to the changing environment.

2. Commit to Lead Nurturing

According to a 2010 Forrester Research study, companies that performed better at lead nurturing could generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost per lead than other companies.

However, less than 50% of leads are actually qualified in the B2B business environment, and you shouldn't waste your time on sales calls to the rest of them.

Marketers think everyone who has attended a webinar or downloaded a whitepaper is a prospect and should be handed over to the salespeople. You need more information about your prospects before declaring them qualified leads.

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3. Practice Consistent Lead Measurement

According to a HubSpot survey, 56% of B2B companies don't measure lead generation's contribution to revenue. However, it's interesting to know that you can get great insights into the intent of your online leads, thanks to the various measurable elements.

You can use DashCicks' automated sales CRM software to get an overview of your prospects' online behavior in the sales funnel. Consistent lead measurement will accelerate lead generation.

How to Make Sure That a Lead Is Qualified?

There is no way you can judge whether a lead is qualified or not at first glance. For that, you need to get some information about the prospect. Usually, salespeople can directly ask a few questions to the prospect to assess whether it's a qualified lead or not.

How to Get Qualified Leads?

You need qualified leads to boost sales. To prevent your time from being wasted on low-priority jobs, assess your leads at the organization, opportunity, and stakeholder level by asking relevant questions.

Here is a list of 21 questions you can ask to differentiate between qualified and weak leads.

1. How long have they been operating?
2. What is their employee count and turnover?
3. What industry are they in?
4. What’s their location?
5. What customer pain points do you want to address?
6. Have you availed of similar solutions previously?
7. How are you dealing with your existing issues?
8. Is there anything that doesn’t allow you to resolve your issue till now?
9. Are you considering any other solutions to resolve your issue?
10. What are your chief concerns?
11. Do you have any timeframe in mind to implement the solution?
12. When should I get back to you next time?
13. Are you involved in the decision-making process?
14. Is there anyone else who makes such decisions to avail such solutions?
15. Do you keep other stakeholders in the loop?
16. Would they like and approve the purchase?
17.  What is the standard approval process in your organization?
18.  What is the next step once a decision-maker approves a product for purchase?
19.  Would you like to know more about our product? Can we give a demo to show you how our product can help you?
20.  What are your priorities?
21.  Can you update me on your purchase process timeline?

Pro Tip: To ensure you're sending a qualified lead to your sales team, ask as many questions as possible.

A lead can be disqualified for numerous reasons, including if someone is not a part of the decision-making process. However, you can ask other questions and ensure that the organization you're targeting needs your solution and can afford it. If you find an opportunity to sell, you can approach the decision-maker.

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Final Words

Lead qualification is an essential step, and you shouldn't skip it at any cost. It saves time and helps you improve lead quality and the sales process. You should avoid the practice of transferring weak leads even if the sales team is clamoring for it.

Try to gather reliable information on sales opportunities. Talk to your leads and ask probing questions. Documenting the entire process will immensely help you in lead qualification and making it effective.

Nurture the weak leads. Talk to the people who are not yet mentally ready to make a purchase, even though they need your solution and can afford it. Use CRM data excessively to know how to nurture the leads through the right messaging.

Many businesses fail because they have no idea about their overall health, strategic direction, or the ability to achieve their goals. Your success lies in your ability to measure your performance in different areas of your business.

KPI (key performance indicator) is a measurable expression companies use to achieve the desired results in different areas relevant to their daily business activities.

With the help of the correct KPIs, you can solidify your strategic plan and know exactly where to focus. Monitoring KPIs is akin to an annual full-body health checkup of your organization. It helps you identify the loopholes and plug them in.

Cost per acquisition, customer lifetime value, traffic, page likes, followers, bounce rate, search engine rankings, and profit margin are some KPIs businesses use to evaluate their performance in different areas.

Value Added by KPIs

KPIs deliver value by helping you achieve the following things:

• Clarity: It helps you paint a clear picture of your strategy. KPIs provide you with the stats in an easy-to-understand manner.
• Focus: They allow you to focus on essential areas that require immediate attention.
• Improvement: It helps to monitor your progress towards your coveted goals.

The insights you get through KPIs also help you tweak budgets, manage teams, and create new products.

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What Is KPI Monitoring?

To ensure your agency’s growth and success, you need to track your most crucial metrics by KPI monitoring. It tells you where you stand and what you should do to achieve your goals.

It helps you:

• Identify your realistic business goals and achieve them, whether it’s selling products, improving processes, or boosting monthly subscriptions.
• Identify the most feasible options and best practices for your business, such as the best marketing and social channels.
• Optimize the processes and maximize your marketing ROI to improve future campaigns and replicate the success of the most profitable campaigns.

The KPIs You Should Monitor

DashClicks’ dashboard displays almost everything you may need to measure your business’ performance using the most crucial data points. Use your discretion to choose the most suitable KPIs for your business.

Make a judgment call to see which KPI examples apply to your business and track them accordingly.

A. SEO KPIs

SEO is a skill to master, and it needs to be appropriately done over a few months consistently. Otherwise, it won’t yield any results.

It will help if you put in a lot of effort to attract quality leads through SEO. Create quality content that is unique and engaging to win over your competition.

Use DashClicks’ Analytics tool along with Google Analytics to achieve the best results for your SEO campaigns. Here are some of the SEO KPIs you can track:

• Organic traffic
• Time on page
• Landing page visits
• Number of quality backlinks
• Search engine rankings

Monitoring SEO Campaigns

This screenshot explains how you can track your SEO campaign in the DashClicks dashboard. All you need to do is click on the SEO tab from the Analytics app, which you can fetch from the app drawer.

It displays all the campaign data with prominent SEO metrics.

B. Sales KPIs

Low-quality leads are a familiar problem marketers face. You need to align your marketing and sales teams to achieve high-quality leads. It will work wonders if you can also align customer support and the product development teams.

Here are some sales and revenue-related KPIs you should monitor:

• Customer lifetime value (CLV)
• Sales revenue
• Profit margin
• Cost-per-transaction (The average cost of a single transaction)
• Cart abandonment rate (specifically for eCommerce websites)

C. Social Media KPIs

Social media KPIs are crucial for those brands that attract a sizeable clientele from social media. They also have lots of dedicated followers on social media. It’s assumed that social media has a minimal direct impact on sales, as it’s primarily meant for marketing. Google recognizes social media as a significant ranking factor, so along with SEO, it can do magic for your sales.

To achieve these, you need a better performance in social media metrics such as lots of impressions, likes, and comments. It would help if you also had numerous followers and a highly engaged audience. It increases your brand’s exposure and helps more people know about it.

You can pay attention to the following metrics:

• Followers and Page likes
• Engagement rate
• Reach and impressions

How to Monitor KPIs?

Consolidating data from different channels is tedious, but KPI monitoring tools help you do it faster.

Using the DashClicks platform with a single dashboard, you can quickly view all of your campaign data in one place here.

First, go to the DashClicks Dashboard and:

App Drawer in the DashClicks Dashboard

• Integrate with your chosen data sources
• Open the relevant app from the app drawer
• Select the most crucial metrics
• Drag and drop as you wish

Steps to Monitor KPIs for Your Agency

Here is a three-step procedure to use your chosen KPIs to achieve your business goals.

Step 1: Identify the Most Relevant KPIs

Requirements vary from business to business; hence, identifying the most crucial metrics becomes essential to measure your success. For different companies, there can be different relevant metrics such as traffic, cost per acquisition, outbound sales, and leads, etc.

However, CPC, ROI, and campaign performance are the three most relevant metrics for marketers.

The next step is to know just how well you should perform for each metric to meet your business goals. For example, you might need 40 new customers for your premium subscription plan to break even. It entirely depends on your business type and current situation.

Step 2: Identify the Best Marketing Tools

Thanks to white-label platforms like DashClicks, you can easily plug in KPIs and track them via dashboards. For example, with DashClicks' central dashboard, you can access many apps such as Deals, Analytics, Inbound, and Contacts to manage your sales pipeline.

You should consider the following factors before you choose a marketing tool:

1. Pricing: Buying numerous expensive marketing software can be disastrous for your marketing budget. If you sign up for the DashClicks platform, you can get all the necessary tools for a reasonable and affordable monthly subscription fee.
2. Features: Before buying a marketing tool, make sure it’s feature-rich and has the monitoring features you are looking for, such as a central dashboard and split testing, etc.
3. Integrations: Third-party integrations become crucial in certain situations. Also, ensure that the software you’re buying integrates with your existing tools.
4. Users: Check the number of users it allows and if you need to pay a monthly fee for extra users.

Use the trial period to see if the tool works fine for you, including the integrations and user additions.

Step 3: Optimize With Your Findings

Once you’ve set the KPIs, defined your goals, and bought a new tool, it’s time to see whether you can track your performance with the data provided by your software.

Again, there are two scenarios – underperformance and high performance.

1. Underperformance – If you fall behind your KPIs, you need to check what’s causing this to happen. Can an automation drive or additional sales training solve the problem? Or do you need to rework your sales and marketing strategy altogether?
2. High Performance – If you are performing fine, it isn’t the time for being complacent but to get to work! Determine the factors leading to your performance and optimize them to strive for even better performance.

Final Words

Identifying and tracking your most relevant KPIs gives you Nirvana if you want to ensure that your agency is on the growth path. Many businesses fail because they are unable to track whether or not they are on the right path.

Figure out what metrics are game-changers for your business. Is it CPC, ROI, search engine rankings, traffic, or campaign performance?

Then, search for the best tools and platforms online. If you run an agency, a white label platform that offers analytics, sales pipeline management, lead management, CRM, project management, and a single dashboard can be the best option for you.

Avail free trials to shortlist the best platform for your needs and get your team onboarded. Later on, you can also integrate other tools you use.

You can try DashClicks for free. It's specially designed for digital marketing agencies to scale faster and better.

In today's data-driven business environment, data is the new "oil," according to Clive Humby, a British mathematician and entrepreneur. Raw data is useless, so marketers need specific metrics to analyze their businesses and use them to enhance their processes. CRM analytics provides crucial insights directly into multiple areas linked to your business's survival and growth.

Importance of CRM Analytics

Using key CRM metrics, you can manage many areas of your business such as internal workflows, customer experience, ongoing sales, and customer acquisition. Measuring these metrics at the surface level will not yield any results, so you need to dive deep into the CRM data to find ways to boost your revenue.

CRM Analytics You Should Track

Here are 13 key CRM metrics to help you build successful customer relationships and confidently scale your business.

1. Sales Activity Reports

You should track sales activity reports to track whether the MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) shared by the marketing team are converting into sales or not. It will also assess the prospecting tactics used by your sales teams and their effectiveness.

For that, you should track the performance of your emails, etc., using vital email marketing metrics such as open rate and reply rate. If these metrics indicate a dismal performance, you should tweak your email copy.

You can also measure the call to appointments ratio to determine your outbound calls' effectiveness. How many calls turn into meetings indicates your fronters' performance. At the same time, it also tells you the capability of your sales team to convert those sales calls.

Consider implementing an auto attendant to efficiently route inbound calls, helping your sales team connect with the right prospects and improve call-to-appointment ratios.

Pro Tip: AI-powered CRM tools are extremely useful in measuring such KPIs as they help you analyze your prospects' engagement with your brand. They will also suggest what should be your next move.

Pro Tip: You can also use DashClick's Sales CRM software to shorten your sales cycle, automate tasks, and close deals faster with actionable insights.

2. Sales Cycle Duration

A sales cycle indicates the time taken to close one deal. So, it's a rough estimate of the number of days a sales team takes to convert a prospect into a paying customer. The sales cycle largely depends on the industry and product type. Other factors influencing it are product or service cost and stakeholders involved.

Again, identifying the right decision-makers and persistent follow-ups may help shorten your sales cycle. Similarly, contextual engagement and relationship building can also help you in a significant way.

Pro Tip: You can fix many issues related to Sales Cycle Duration using DashClicks CRM. The deals app on our platform will give you comprehensive information about your deals pipeline.

3. Close Rate or Sales Closing Ratio

You can get many sales opportunities through different tactics such as social media advertising, Google Ads, and even organic traffic, but what matters the most is the deals successfully closed by your sales team.

Close rate is a metric that helps you track your sales team's actual performance and the factors responsible for it to take corrective measures. So, this CRM metric is needed to evaluate your sales strategy and identify the factors that lead to lost opportunities.

4. Net New Revenue

Money comes first in a business. If there is no revenue, you can't do business. Net New Revenue is a metric that informs you how much revenue your startup earns. You can periodically track it to check your business's health and your sales team's performance. You can track it every month, once in a quarter, or once a year.

5. Marketing ROI

Marketing may attract an unlimited budget, yet you can be unsure of its impact on your overall sales and profits. Marketing ROI lets you track how your marketing expense contributes to revenue growth. You can easily track it by the number of leads generated against the number of conversions. It helps you decide your marketing spend for future campaigns.

Pro Tip: DashClicks' CRM software and apps will provide insights into your customer behavior. It will also help you refine your target audiences and messaging.

6. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is a crucial metric that helps you project the average revenue you'll earn from a single customer when they stay with you.

You can use the 80:20 rule to target high customer lifetime value. To improve your CLV, you should also pay attention to the customer support and customer experience (CX) you offer. Without that, you will only increase your churn and the number of unhappy customers. It's also directly linked with your branding. If you have a higher CLV, your brand will grow and vice versa. You can increase it by boosting your cross and up-sell and regular subscriptions. If you offer value, your customer would love to buy from you.

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7. Outreach Activity

It's an important metric that helps you track every point of contact your salespeople have with prospective customers. It enables you to measure the effectiveness of your prospecting strategy and provides crucial information about the average sales cycle and average follow-ups required to close the sale.

You should pay more attention to quality here than quantity. So, making 15 well-researched and quality daily calls on your refined list is always better than making 40 random cold calls.

8. Leads by Source

This is the Internet age, and your best leads may not come from your sales department. Brands use multiple online channels and consistently receive genuine inquiries and leads. Tracking those sources will give you a good picture of how marketing channels are helping you in lead generation.

Some might be your website visitors, while others may come from social media and other marketing channels. Identifying the channels offering you the best return on your investment might be crucial to your success. Investment of time and effort also pays you back, just like monetary investments.

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9. Customer Retention Rate

According to a study, acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. According to another analysis by Small Biz Trends, increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-to 95%.

The above stats prove that gaining a new customer is much more expensive than retaining your existing customer. That is the reason brands should focus on retention as much as possible. You should maintain excellent relationships, provide top-notch customer support, and offer an outstanding experience. It will always pay you back many times over.

The formula to calculate the custom retention rate is as follows:

Once you start tracking it, you can further improve it.

10. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The metric is used to measure customer satisfaction. Customers are asked to share their experiences and feelings about your brand on a scale from one to 10. The lowest score is 0-6, whereas 7-8 is considered good. The latter score suggests that the customers passively enjoy your products and services. But a 9-10 speaks volumes about your business and indicates that they can recommend your product to others. With that score, your customers become your brand ambassadors.

11. Rate of Renewal

This metric is highly beneficial for you if you have a subscription-based business model. It represents the number of customers renewing their subscriptions after their expiration date. It also indicates the value you offer your customers and how fast your business grows.

12. Customer Churn

Customer Churn is also a critical metric because it tells you why customers are leaving your brand. Customer churn or attrition represents why customers are unhappy with your products or services and what you can do to plug in these major loopholes. It is as important as new customer acquisition because if you do not arrest customer churn, it will backfire on you.

13. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

It is an important metric that tells you about the feasibility of your business model and whether your business is sustainable in the long run or not. It also tells you which processes you can automate and how to reduce costs in order to decrease the customer acquisition cost.

A high customer acquisition cost can be disastrous for your business. It would help if you revamped your strategy in that case. It also enables you to identify the red flags in your overall strategy to reconsider your costs and pricing, etc. Your expense may include staffing, marketing, software and tools, taxes, third-party partnerships, training, etc.

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Final Words

It would help if you started tracking these crucial CRM metrics to improve your business performance. According to a CRM tool survey, 70% of the businesses saw a noticeable improvement in customer satisfaction.

You can use CRM tools like DashClicks, to improve your company's performance and customer satisfaction. It is equipped with apps such as Deals, Analytics, and Inbound, which bring valuable insights into your business processes. You can access them through a single dashboard.

Sign up for the DashClicks white-label platform for free and improve your business performance.

When sales and marketing get in sync, magic happens. The combination is an elixir for organizations willing to perform better. But how do sales and marketing find a more cohesive path to deliver the business results you want? And, how to forge a stronger partnership between sales and marketing teams?

Businesses have been asking this question for many years now.

Aligned teams can dramatically improve your sales and revenue. Working in sync drives growth increases sales, and allows different teams to work better, together.

Still, teams struggle to work in harmony. Do you know the reason?

The bottlenecks often include office politics and distributed workforces. So, here we will discuss how to forge a better sales and marketing alignment for the best business results.

Why Do You Need Sales and Marketing Alignment?

With endless choices in front of them, the modern customer is already struggling with information overload. Brands also push personal services and numerous product lines to meet people's needs. But, it actually overwhelms a customer.

Together, all these things make a purchase decision much more difficult. Trust factors also play a significant role here as customers can't trust every other brand brandishing the USPs of their products. According to a study, 81% of customers admitted that numerous options and too much information make a purchase decision difficult.

One significant benefit of working with aligned teams is that they help consumers navigate the complex emotional process of making purchase decisions. The marketing department shares these inputs with the sales teams so that they can refine their communication accordingly.

Now, let's discuss their roles.

The Role of a Sales Team

The sales team is directly responsible for converting leads into customers. They build and manage relationships and also work on retention. If the need arises, they also resolve customer issues. Since sales is a multi-stage activity, the salespeople must keep an eye on the entire customer journey and adapt their communication accordingly. That's the reason sales is so crucial for businesses. They are the lifeline of any organization.

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However, a blind focus on sales may backfire, and you may end up ruining your prospects and clients in the long run.

The Role of a Marketing Team

Enter marketing. Marketing takes care of the parts sales often overlooks, e.g., creating awareness, educating about the product, ensuring the quality of leads, and crafting enticing messages.

The customers need to be made aware of your product, and marketing people know precisely what they need to hear. Their job is to craft thoughtful marketing messages to push the prospects down the sales funnel. Without a marketing strategy, you won't have a target audience and, ultimately, no sales.

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So, why do you need to align the two teams?

Reasons Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Crucial

According to a study, nearly 75% of leads never reach the conversion stage when the sales and marketing teams aren't aligned.

This statistic indicates how wasteful misaligned sales can be. Aligned teams achieved a 34% increase in new business revenue. So, even though the ultimate objective of both teams appears to be the same, their playing fields are entirely different.

The marketing team aggressively generates leads, and the sales team leaves no stone unturned to convert those leads. But sadly, both the teams work independently and hence fail to achieve their common objectives.

Here are five significant reasons why aligned teams are so crucial for the growth of your business.

1. Helps Create a Single Customer Journey

Aligned teams collaborate and share their insights about their customers. Otherwise, a major disconnect can happen in their degree of understanding of the customer.

Your marketing and sales teams may be on entirely different trajectories regarding their perceptions of how a customer moves between different stages in the sales funnel.

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This is one of the major reasons why leads don't turn into customers. Customers are smart. They can sense a disconnect between your marketing pitch and your sales process as soon as they interact with your brand.

The results may surprise you when teams are aligned towards a mutually understood customer journey. The collaboration should start right after a customer is first exposed to your brand, i.e., when they hear about it. And it should last till your last communication with them.

2. Helps Different Teams Agree on a Customer Persona

Again, serious disagreements often happen between marketing and sales teams about their perceptions of the target audience. It results in both the teams looking for different qualities in the same customer persona. If your idea of your target customer is unclear, it affects everything from marketing messages to sales plan.

With that said, it becomes crucial to agree on a customer persona. It will allow you to market to them as per their personality traits at each stage of their journey without any disconnect.

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3. Helps You Deal With the Shifting Nature of Markets

Your marketing team will identify people interested in your product. In contrast, the sales team filters this list and focuses on people ready to make a buying decision soon.The driving factors that make a person interested are pretty different from those that make them ready to buy.However, with the changing nature of markets, sales and marketing teams should be flexible about their buyer personas. Customers' pain points keep changing, and if you don't adapt, you won't move even an inch ahead.These dynamic changes in market trends can be overcome by the marketing and sales team collaborating and working in tandem.

4. Helps You in Customer Outreach

Even though both departments are equally valuable, marketing should take precedence. Sales have become increasingly difficult in the past decade, mainly owing to the boom in cold calling, cold emailing, and other forms of unsolicited marketing. People just don't like it.

The best marketing approach is to figure out where your customers usually hang out. This allows you to meet them at their preferred hangout place, whether online or offline. Ofcourse, we are talking about various popular online channels here. Once your marketing team figures that out, they can start a targeted campaign to attract customers.

And once a few interested customers show their hands, your sales team can easily take it from there!

5. Helps You Track Joint KPIs

Even if you hate tracking joint KPIs, the strategy tells you what you need to fix. When the teams are not aligned, they might track different KPIs. For the sales team, KPIs like overall conversion rate and new accounts created are far more critical than lead quality and quantity or advertising results.However, aligned teams can reduce this friction through weekly meetings and daily collaboration. In those meetings, sales and marketing teams can share customer pain points and their preferences and discuss how they can use this data to turn missed conversions into sales.

Final Words

Aligned teams can refine your brand message and make it look uniform, consistent, and professional. If different teams use different terminologies, it may not only sound unprofessional but will also confuse your customers. It will quickly erode customer trust.

Again, it's essential to craft your marketing messages according to your buyer personas and their stage in the customer journey. Targeted marketing also helps you plug in the various loopholes in sales. Any disconnect here will lead to the failure of your entire sales campaign. That's why sales and marketing alignment are often called innovative marketing and should be practiced by every business to succeed.

Website traffic is a vanity metric.

There are countless ways to drive more clicks to your domain. However, it matters very little if those users aren't interested in converting. In these cases, all you're doing is wasting your budget.

Traffic quality is a superior metric regardless of traffic volume. By extracting optimal engagement from each person, you maximize your returns.

We're going to show you the telltale signs of poor traffic. Then, we'll teach you how to improve website traffic quality with several easy-to-implement changes.

Signs of Poor Website Traffic Quality

1. Your Domain Has a High Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate refers to the number of times users visit your site and leave without taking any action.

Your team of SEOs and content writers is doing the job of getting your pages to appear on SERPs. However, something about the on-page content is either actively driving users away or failing to grab their attention.

To analyze your bounce rate, track your website stats through Google Analytics. The guidelines for a high bounce rate vary depending on your marketing goals and your industry. Check out this detailed list of bounce rate industry benchmarks by device and industry courtesy of Content Square.

The other factor to consider is the overall goal for your site. For your brand's main website, a higher-than-average bounce rate is not ideal. Your website should keep users active and encourage them to click on other pages. If they're leaving soon after they arrive, it's likely a sign that your site is finding users that do not have an interest.

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On the other hand, a higher bounce rate for a direct sales funnel is normal. Going straight for the sale is a difficult task, meaning that you should expect more users to bounce than to convert.

Be mindful of your company's goals when analyzing your bounce rate. If the numbers do not agree with your aspirations, then your traffic is likely low-quality.

2. Your Site Has Low Conversion Rates

In marketing, we define a conversion as an event in which a user completes a desired goal.

While a sale is your ultimate goal, your site can have any number of additional conversions to chart the buyer's journey.

What your conversion goals are will once again depend upon the goals for your website. If you're looking to increase your average session duration, you might set goals for the user to click an internal link to another page.

Other examples of conversion goals can be:

• Filling out a form
• Watching a video
• Signing up for an email list
• Creating an account

If your users are not converting, then it may be a sign that your traffic is of low quality. However, it may also be a sign that your webpage design or content is failing to earn that conversion.

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With many of these factors, no one metric will tell the whole story. You must look at underperforming figures in the context of the user's journey. That's why these other factors will play a role in determining if your traffic is not ideal.

3. Your Site Has a Low Session Duration

The average session duration is approximately how long a typical user spends on your domain.

You can quickly determine roughly how long it would take the average user to complete any number of goals. One page of content may take two minutes to read while clicking to read another page can extend that visit to be much longer.

However, a sharp decline in session duration is almost assuredly a sign that the user is not interested. Once again, the users that are discovering your site are not interested in your offerings.

If your average session duration is a little closer to the industry average, then the story may be different. Once again, it may be that your content fails to drive engagement. Without a reason to interact and convert, your sessions are going to consistently fall below expectations.

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Try to look out for low session duration particularly if you're also seeing higher than normal bounce rates.

4. Visitors Find Your Site with the Wrong Keywords

This is one of the most likely culprits of low-quality traffic. Not only will the wrong keywords bring in the wrong users, but it also leads to the other negative metrics listed previously.

Ranking for the wrong keywords may happen by accident. However, you may also be doing so intentionally without realizing it. Many site owners make the mistake of choosing keywords purely by search volume without considering the keyword intent.

Know that there are four primary types of keywords:

• Informational – the user is looking for unbiased information on a subject
• Commercial – the user is looking for more specific data about certain brands or products
• Transactional – the user is looking to purchase a product relatively soon
• Navigational – the user is looking to find a specific URL

Understanding the keyword types and their purpose should be the driving force behind your content.

If you choose to rank for an informational keyword, but your content is tailored toward transactions, you're going to get clicks from low-quality traffic. In this example, the user wanted to be educated, but you served them a hard sales pitch.

Not only does this create a bad user experience, but it may also actually cause users to avoid your brand going forward. Unwanted approaches come across as unpersonable, spammy, and a nuisance. Getting the correct type of content to the correct users is how your website analytics improve overall.

On the other hand, make sure that your content is not accidentally ranking for keywords. When using GA, you can see which page the user visited and which keywords they used to find it. If you spot any red flags, then it's time to examine that content and determine how this particular event happened.

How to Improve Website Traffic Quality?

1. Monitor Your Website Analytics Every Week and/or Month

With tools like Google Analytics, it's much easier to spot issues with website traffic quality.

As long as we know the particular URLs at the source of the problem, we will have an easier time analyzing the direct factors. While minor highs and lows are to be expected, negative trends are something to keep an eye on.

By checking in on your website traffic regularly, it's much easier to identify issues before they become a real problem. This is particularly important if you're using paid campaigns to drive website traffic. Every user that visits costs money regardless of the traffic quality.

In addition to the metrics above, Google Analytics offers a breakdown of all website traffic. It will divvy up the results by real traffic, spam, and bots. You can find this by utilizing the Overview dropdown and clicking on Quality.

Anything in green is indicative of real traffic. You want to make sure that most, if not all, of your traffic fall within this category. Then, you can begin to analyze page-by-page to determine how that traffic is arriving at your domain.

2. Set Up Custom Goals for Your Site

Custom goals are an incredible feature that every website owner should utilize.

Creating your own goals allows you to gain greater insight from your traffic regarding your unique business objectives. It allows you to determine exactly where you're losing the user and what you might be able to do to improve your retention rate.

If a user fails to complete the initial action, it's much more likely that the traffic is unqualified. Meanwhile, if a user abandons your site halfway through the journey, it's more indicative of the content or offer quality.

To set up a goal in Google Analytics:

1. Go to your Admin page.
2. Click on the View column. Then, click Goals.
3. Click +New Goal to set up the custom configurations for that objective.

You should utilize these new goal metrics in conjunction with all other measurements. Doing so paints a more concise picture and allows you to make a more educated guess when it comes to your traffic and targeting.

Generate a hypothesis, develop a new strategy, then test again. You must continue to do this until you begin to see your metrics trending once again in a healthy direction.

3. Improve Your Content Quality

It's possible to attribute low-quality traffic to poor content quality.

This can start as early as the keyword selection process as explained above. If you are selecting the ideal keywords for ranking, your content may fail to meet Google's EAT principles.

Setting up custom goals for conversions (see above) is an excellent way to start gauging content quality. Whether you want users to visit new pages or sign up for an offer, your content is what will do the heavy lifting. Failure to meet these objectives is a red flag that your copy, images, or video need a closer look.

To start improving your content quality:

• Choose the right keyword for your audience. Remember keyword intention when choosing your page topics.
• Refocus existing content to not incidentally rank for the wrong keywords.
• Motivate the audience by providing a call to action. Help them get involved.
• Support your text with high-quality images and video. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
• Offer social proof. Leverage the momentum of your content by including references, testimonials, or research depending on the subject matter.
• Find natural ways to link to internal content. Make it easy for your users to spend more time on your site.

4. Improve Your Paid Ad Targeting

For many brands, paid advertising campaigns are a huge source of new website traffic.

Traffic coming from an ad or sales funnel should almost always be of high quality. If they're already showing interest in your ad, then they should be a qualified user for your website content.

Paid ad platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Google make it easy to learn about your audience. These tools automatically gather data from every impression and click. It knows who is seeing your ads, who's interested, and who you should avoid.

PPC marketers then utilize this data to continuously refine their campaign efforts. The more we learn about the user, the better we can create content that drives conversions. Conversely, misinterpreting the data and presenting ads to unqualified users leads to a wasted budget.

Always be sure to revisit your audience data periodically. Remember that discovery campaigns must be allowed a significant period (at least 2 weeks) to gather sufficient data. Then, utilize this data in both your ad campaigns and your website to attract the right type of traffic.

5. Generate High-Quality Traffic with Remarketing

An effective ad campaign type is known as remarketing. This allows you to re-engage with users that have already shown interest in your brand.

It's far easier to leverage data that you have regarding a previously engaged user than a brand-new one. This is because we have access to analytics that show what that person likes, where we lost them, and what we might do to win them over next time.

This is particularly valuable when it comes to customers that made a purchase. Rather than thinking of each sale as a one-and-done, keep that momentum going and leverage their earned trust to your benefit.

The internet changed the buyer's journey forever. No longer do we need to make a purchasing decision on the spot. Instead, we might engage with a funnel, leave, then come back later.

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That user may be on the fence regarding a purchase. Then, a Facebook ad appears on their timeline once again reminding them of your brain. You catch them at a different time in a different mood, and suddenly they're more open to converting.

Remarketing almost always leads to high-quality traffic. Rethink your strategy to consider new ways to capitalize on previous website visitors or customers, such as:

• Paid ad remarketing campaigns
• Email marketing lists
• Abandoned cart emails

6. Rethink Your Existing Marketing Channels

Finally, it may be time to reconsider whether a specific marketing channel is worth the effort.

Marketing is a continuous trial-and-error process. The more we learn about our audience, the better we are equipped to make smart choices that lead to better returns.

If you've been utilizing a channel, exhausted different types of creatives, and still see low-quality traffic, consider dropping it from your strategy. It can simply be a case of the wrong place or the wrong time. It may also be that it's worth pursuing better-qualified users elsewhere.

We can’t stress enough that analytics is your savior when it comes to determining traffic quality. Don’t just analyze your site through GA, but constantly observe your metrics across:

• Paid ads
• Social media
• Influencer marketing
• Email marketing

Some channels may better suit your particular brand or industry than others. It’s up to you to determine if there’s something you can improve or if that platform’s audience just isn’t up to standards.

Prioritize Website Traffic Quality Over Volume

Low-quality traffic often comes as a result of pursuing volume over quality. When we fail to properly analyze our website and our marketing channels, we end up with traffic numbers that mean very little.

Instead, we must carefully monitor website analytics for signs of poor website traffic quality. Be mindful of:

• Bounce rate
• Average session duration
• Low conversion rates
• Keywords & channels used to find the site

Any one of these can be indicative of problems on the site, within our ad campaigns, or within our SEO strategy. The sooner you identify the problem and its source, the sooner you can weed out your low-quality traffic.

SEO is a marketer's bread and butter.

Cleaning up your content and ensuring your site runs smoothly is vital. However, it's the off-page SEO tactics that often get overlooked.

Not only will it further improve your rankings, but it will also help to boost brand awareness in third-party areas. The more you get people talking, the less work you may have to do in the long term.

First, we'll define off-page SEO, then dive right into our off-page SEO checklist.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to any search optimization tactics that you perform outside of your domain. For a better reference, let’s quickly compare this definition to the two other types of SEO:

• On-page SEO – Actions taken on the web page to improve search visibility
• Technical SEO – Actions taken to improve the UX and help Googlebot index content

Off-page SEO refers to tactics such as backlinks from other websites, social shares, or a citation. All of these happen on other popular websites and exist primarily to drive more users to your domain.

Developing an effective off-page SEO strategy is generally more challenging than the other two practices. You need to figure out ways to effectively use these third-party sources to get those users interested in the content hosted on your pages.

To do this, be sure to follow this step-by-step checklist to jumpstart your tactics immediately.

1. Evaluate Your Backlinks

A backlink is any link found on a third-party site that links back to your domain.

Backlinks can be helpful or harmful depending on the source. This is because Googlebot begins to associate these domains as it crawls a site and follows links to external websites.

If the backlinking site is a trusted, high-ranking one, the link will transfer some of that domain authority to yours by association. Conversely, a toxic backlink from an untrusted domain will negatively impact your SEO over time.

For this reason, you never want to consider black-hat strategies like purchasing links or signing up for shady directories. These tactics are outdated and Google will happily penalize domains that are caught abusing the system. You want to choose high-quality sites that you would proudly think of as an industry peer or partner.

A great tool for checking your backlink profile is Google Search Console. This free platform is a tremendous boon for SEOs and will assist with all aspects of your digital strategy.

Alternatively, if you're already using a tool like Semrush for keyword tracking, you can take advantage of their backlink profile tool.

Whichever you choose, you'll be able to see a complete list of your backlinks, where the link is located, and the score received from that site. The higher the score, the better the quality of the backlink.

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2. Disavow Toxic Backlinks

Whenever you run a backlink assessment, you may be unfortunate enough to see some low scores. These can be from domains you chose to work with or domains that simply happened to link your content.

A low-scoring or “toxic” backlink will negatively impact your SEO. If the referring site demonstrates low trustworthiness and authority, Googlebot may end up associating those bad marks with your brand.

Google’s recommended method for removing toxic backlinks is to do so manually. Identify the domain, take note of the exact URL, and reach out to the site’s webmaster. Be respectful of your request and instruct them to remove the backlink from the page.

Manual removal is the fastest way to eliminate a toxic backlink from your profile. The changes should be reflected in Googlebot’s next crawl.

If the webmaster is unresponsive or unwilling to play ball, you’ll need to file a request with Google. Note that Google recommends this as a last-ditch alternative if:

• Your site exhibits numerous low-quality backlinks
• The links can lead to a manual action on your site

You can follow the step-by-step instructions to properly submit a disavowal here. This may take several weeks as Google needs to manually review each link in each request received.

3. Remedy Broken Links & Redirects

While these fall under the realm of on-page and technical SEO, they can impact your off-page SEO.

You don't want to earn a high-quality backlink, only to lose it due to a broken link or broken redirect. Such errors can reflect poorly on the referring site, prompting them to eliminate the link to your domain in exchange for a better one.

The same can be said for a broken redirect. Whether the link leads to a dead URL or catches the user in a redirect loop, the result is a poor user experience.

Stay on top of your SEO by regularly diagnosing your page URLs and internal links. You can do this with Google Search Console just as you did when collecting your backlinks. Identify the URL in question, locate the error, and take the necessary action to correct it.

In most cases, a broken link can be remedied with simple changes like updating the URL in the hypertext.

For redirects, make sure that the redirect chain never exceeds three steps. If the URL move is permanent, consider directly linking to the new page instead of continuing the redirect.

You should also notify backlinking sites of the change, so that both parties may continue to benefit from the association.

4. Generate New Backlink Opportunities

After you complete your website housekeeping, it's time to look for more opportunities.

The more high-quality backlinks pointing to your site, the better your domain appears in the eyes of Google. The more trustworthy you are, the more likely you are to climb the rankings with your peers.

However, acquiring authoritative backlinks won't come easy. You'll need to dedicate time and resources specifically to social outreach and bridging new connections.

A. Get Involved in Content Marketing

Content marketing is a crucial component of any SEO strategy.

Creating a blog is a great investment as it benefits both your on-page and off-page SEO. The page itself helps build organic traffic by providing helpful how-to guides or authoritative answers to industry questions.

This can lead to shares on social media, forums, and other websites where discussions related to your industry happen.

However, when aspects of your content are particularly striking, other websites may want to use it. If particular facts or statistics serve to supplement a topic or opinion piece on another site, don't be surprised to see a backlink to your URL.

This is a huge compliment as it shows that your peers and/or competitors find value in your work. That trust and authority get noticed by both the users reading that content as well as Googlebot.

Furthermore, having your link in front of a new audience is an ideal way to generate new forms of traffic. The more clicks you obtain from new sources, the more likely you are to climb higher in SERPs.

B. Start Guest Blogging

Some sites may look to outside sources for blog content on their site. The reasons for this can be:

• They lack time or resources to create enough original content
• They are actively looking to network with other high-ranking sites

The viability of guest blogging will likely depend on how well people know you and your brand. For the same reason that webmasters want to avoid low-quality backlinks, they may hesitate to invite articles written by an untrusted source.

That's where it's your job to effectively sell yourself to your peers. Reach out and make an offer that's worthwhile to both parties. An exchange of guest blogs for either site can provide both with fresh content, while also netting both a quality backlink.

The more you build up a portfolio of successful guest blogs, the easier it will be for you to score new opportunities.

Finally, be on the lookout for opportunities to get featured in a round-up article. These won't require you to write a full post, but instead offer a few key points of insight. You'll find yourself featured among a longer list of trusted domains in the industry.

C. Check Your Competitors' Backlinks

If you're stumped on how to find new, worthwhile backlinks, why not look at your competitors?

You can utilize paid SEO tools like SpyFu or Semrush to collect a full list of backlinks by domain.

While it may be a hard sell to steal a backlink out from under a competitor, it's possible with the right content. Take the time to review the linked content and determine if you have content that outperforms the current offering. Be sure to be respectful in your pitch to the webmaster and carefully explain why linking to your content is more beneficial to their brand.

An alternative, and possibly more effective approach, is to look for broken backlinks on those profiles. You're trying to catch competitors that are being too relaxed regarding their off-page SEO.

Reach out to the backlinking domains and advise them of the broken and dead links on their pages. Offer your content as a replacement and see if they take you up on your offer. If your competitor isn't interested in upkeeping their links, then it may as well go to someone like you who needs it.

D. Sign Up for Local Directories

Though they're mostly outdated, the web still has several effective directories available for small businesses.

The most important of these is Google My Business. This is a collection of business profiles hosted by Google to help its users find local brands relevant to the search request.

Your GMB profile will highlight your company within SERPs. Users can browse photos, find your website link, and locate your NAP information with ease. Mobile users in particular may be more likely to contact your business directly from a GMB profile as opposed to visiting your domain.

Regardless, GMB can help to boost engagement and ratings for your brand. It's an invaluable source of traffic that can help smaller companies compete even when it's tough to break through with organic rankings.

Many other directories are still relevant today. Some, like Yelp, cater to all businesses. However, some industries have dedicated listings.

Examples of popular directories include:

• Google My Business
• Yelp
• Facebook
• Foursquare
• UberEats
• Yahoo!

Be sure to check for any industry-specific directories available to you at both the national and local levels.

E. Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Active on Forums

Our final tip is an old-school tactic that still works today. It's successfully helped many brands find their audience and generate a much-needed surge of engagement.

We recommend popular forum sites like Reddit or Quora for this purpose. Both are resources for users to ask questions and receive no-nonsense advice from registered or anonymous users.

One thing you don't want to do is mindlessly plug your brand in inappropriate places. Instead, actively get involved in the community discussion. If you notice users complaining about a particular problem, find a way to naturally segway your brand as the solution.

Likewise, if you find users parroting false information or bad advice, use your expertise to course-correct. It's acceptable to cite your occupation and qualifications when providing better data. This helps you stand out as an industry authority, while simultaneously appearing genuine to your audience.

The goal here is to gain a new following through honest, sincere interaction. Become an active member of the community and watch as new users start to visit your website.

5. Develop a Social Media Strategy

Social media continues to change the way we see and use the internet.

Approximately 4 billion people globally use some form of social media today. For this reason, more and more brands, both in B2B and B2C, are turning to social networking.

Like forums, social media provides a way for brands to ingrain themselves in a community. You get to be a part of the conversation and hear exactly what your customers are saying. It provides a constant feedback loop and allows you to quickly respond to customers at a moment's notice.

Social media provides multiple uses. Some brands choose to create free accounts and post on a regular schedule. Creating engaging, dynamic posts helps your brand occupy a portion of the mindshare.

You can gather more data about your audience and cut through the noise by running a paid ad campaign. This allows you to hyper-target specific individuals that appear to be most receptive to your messaging. The journey from ad to landing page, to your website, can provide a supplementary source of traffic that helps to boost rankings.

Likewise, you can choose to promote posts that feature particularly great content. You can create original, high-quality video content or infographics tailored specifically to the platform. You may also combine social media with your content marketing efforts to drive more attention to a great article featured on your blog.

As you build a social media following, you may find yourself gaining exponentially more likes and shares on all of your content. This creates more links pointing to your site and more opportunities to appear higher in SERPs.

6. Influencer Marketing

With the boom in social media, there has also been a substantial rise in influencer marketing.

Sites like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok are all personality-driven platforms. These influencers start as everyday users that happen to create compelling content. As more users begin to follow them for their content, their relative fame and star power increases.

However, social media influencers offer a unique benefit as opposed to a direct brand partnership. Audiences see these influencers as grounded, down-to-earth individuals. This creates a form of trust that is not easily replicated by a company or corporation.

You can still leverage that audience trust to your advantage by partnering with these influencers. Instead of trying to convert new customers with typical sales strategies, you allow the influencer to speak about your brand on your behalf.

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This is typically done by agreeing to pay the influencer a monetary sum in exchange for a set amount of exposure. It's a great way to connect with new audiences in new areas that your other strategies may not reach.

7. Business Reviews

You can never underestimate the power of a business review.

Where consumers hesitate to trust the voice of a brand, they eagerly place their faith in reviews from customers regardless of the rating.

A staggering 98% of consumers look for local business reviews before interacting with them or making a purchase. We want that validation of knowing we will have a positive experience before we take a financial risk.

However, less than half of consumers will leave a review of their own.

Taking the time to solicit more reviews from paying customers is an excellent way to gain more traction online. A primary way to achieve this was discussed earlier, through local directory listings. Keep your GMB and Yelp profiles up-to-date and more customers will leave reviews.

There are also dedicated business review websites you can register with such as the Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot.

Finally, you can solicit more customer testimonials through direct conversation or email marketing. Consider providing some minor incentive to help persuade them. Know that collecting a variety of reviews can be useful in future content creation on and off your website.

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Improve Your Off-Page SEO for Better Rankings

Off-page SEO is an excellent way to connect your brand to new audiences.

It's also a tactic that requires a genuine approach and a willingness to connect with your community and your peers. If you prioritize high-quality content creation, you'll find it that much easier to make these connections.

To quickly review:

• Evaluate your existing backlinks
• Ask webmasters to remove backlinks from untrusted sites
• Get your internal links and redirects in order
• Generate new backlinks through blogs, local citations, forums, and competitor backlink espionage
• Promote your content on social media
• Network with trusted social media influencers
• List your site on platforms that allow for customer reviews

These tactics not only boost your brand visibility but simultaneously boost consumer trust in your authority. As you continue to improve your off-page SEO, results may start to come more naturally with time.