In this episode of Whiteboard Wednesday, i.e. episode 12, Chad Kodary, CEO of DashClicks, discusses efficiently outsourcing digital marketing services. So, if you are a marketing agency looking to offload all the hard work instead of doing it in-house, read on.

I’ll also discuss how to use an outsourcing partner efficiently. To begin, you can do the following:

• Scale-up fulfillment
• Focus on the front-end of your business, i.e. sales
• Let a white labeled company like DashClicks handle all the back-end work

It will keep your hands free to focus more on sales and revenue for your agency. So, first and foremost, let’s talk about why agencies cannot scale.

Here at DashClicks, we provide white label fulfillment services. DashClicks is a white label platform for marketing agencies and your clients. Thousands of agencies use our platform and white label fulfillment services, and we’ve been doing this for a long time.

How to Scale Up Efficiently?

We’ve seen a lot of trends, and one of the biggest trends that we’re shocked to see here at DashClicks is the number of agencies failing to scale. Why does it happen? Why do agencies fail at scaling their fulfillment and their services?

There can be different reasons for that. So, let's discuss how to avoid those issues and scale up efficiently.

Disadvantages of Using Multiple Vendors

The first reason most agencies fail at scaling and creating scalable fulfillment is that they use multiple vendors. For example, someone uses DashClicks for SEO services and other white label fulfillment partners for their Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and content requirements.

The drawback of such a practice is that it leads to chaos as different vendors have different processes, contact persons, and schedules. Such a matrix leads to a management disaster that can drive you insane. Furthermore, it prevents scaling, especially if you have numerous clients. This system may collapse if you have 50-100 clients.

Imagine your team members interacting with a dozen teams and white label partners. It makes it very difficult to keep the data streamlined and organized in one place.

Reporting is another issue that you might confront. Imagine outsourcing on-page SEO, off-page SEO, backlinks, and directory listings from several freelancers on Fiverr, UpWork, PeoplePerHour, etc.

The entire practice may become inefficient if you put 50 clients through these processes.

The Takeaway: Never fall into this miserable matrix of using multiple fulfillment partners. This process is not sustainable.

Experience the Difference With DashClicks

At DashClicks, we offer all fulfillment services in-house. We don't source it from the marketplace. Instead, we have full-time employees and trained teams to take care of your campaigns. It ensures reliability, timely delivery, quality, accountability, and robust communication. The entire DashClicks ecosystem is designed to help you scale faster.

We are already past the experimental stages and have a proven track record of solid white label fulfillment partnerships with agencies. We have built a system that ensures your success.

What makes this entire ecosystem conducive to the success of agency business? It’s fast and hassle-free, and has the following advantages:

• Allows you to order white label fulfillment with the click of a button
• Enables you to automate the onboarding process
• You speak to one team through the Slack workspace
• Sign in to one reporting dashboard in DashClicks to log in to the platform
• Your clients get their own client dashboards where they can see their reports

Apart from that, there is no need to deal with different freelancers when you use our platform. It increases your overall efficiency.

Source: Ep. 12 ā 05:33

Disadvantages of Using Freelancers

There are many disadvantages to using freelancers. They disappear suddenly, citing different excuses, and they may steal your clients. And that's not the way you would want to scale up your fulfillment partnerships, especially at the beginning.

The most efficient way to do it is to get it all done by one vendor. They will produce quality results and help you maintain consistency. The most significant advantage of using reliable white label partners is that they will help you scale, whether you add five or 100 clients.

The Takeaway: You can use freelancers in an emergency, but you shouldn't make it a long-term strategy. It's not a sustainable practice.

Scale Your Way up Using a Single Dashboard

While choosing a white label service partner, you need to ensure that you can offload all of your customers. They should have one dashboard to log into, so you can easily manage and track all your projects, quickly.

Life becomes more manageable when you create a system that can do things consistently to scale your business. On the flip side, management becomes a nightmare with multiple vendors, and you are always busy firefighting. So, hiring a reputed white label fulfillment partner is a winning solution for your business. With just one team to speak to, you can save almost 70% of your productive time.

Benefits of Having One Point of Contact

When you order fulfillment services from DashClicks and get onboard for the first time, you get a 30-minute onboarding call with your account executive. You'll interact with the DashClicks team using Slack Workspace. You can also give its access to your employees.

We assign a dedicated account executive and a client success rep to your account. They will help deliver your work with our fulfillment teams on the back-end.

Our trained teams are always at your service removing all the hassles of hiring, recruiting & staffing, payroll, vacations, software expenses, and equipment. We'll manage all the stuff for you, so you can focus on just one thing ā€” getting clients. This is the best thing about outsourcing from a white label fulfillment partner.

An Amazing and Powerful Dashboard

Secondly, our dashboard is fantastic. This is a blessing for both agency owners and their clients. You can check analytics and results right on the dashboard. Apart from analytics and reporting, you also get a built-in CRM, automations platform, and many other features in the dashboard.

Our analytics app offers cross-channel reporting and supports multiple integrations such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, call tracking, Google Analytics etc. You can do these integrations with the click of a button.

Source: Ep. 12 ā 10:34

Leverage Our Expertise & Robust Processes

We have been doing this since 2009, so we know how to deliver digital marketing services. We specialize in many digital marketing services such as Facebook Ads, Google Ads, search engine optimization, content marketing, social media posting, and directory listings.

Our teams have provided these five core services for the past 13 years. As a result, we have successfully built a solid process around these.

Very few people know the importance of processes in successfully running an agency business. To deliver outstanding results month after month, itā€™s extremely important to streamline your processes.

Final Words

We are not talking about your efficiency at the front end of the business. To produce quality results at scale, you need to have robust processes in your fulfillment department. To achieve that, you should avoid the following:

• Missing tasks
• Not making and working on a schedule

The inability to make a routine and stick to it is also responsible for the failure of many businesses. Along with energy and resources, you should also have a winning strategy and robust processes.

To explore DashClicks’ incredible features, create an account today and go to your dashboard. You’ll be amazed at the level of automation it offers.

We’re super excited to speak with you, so feel free to discuss the challenges you’re facing or ask away ‌questions‌.

See you in the next episode of Whiteboard Wednesday. Have a fantastic day!

Crawling and indexing your web pages is a critical component of any SEO strategy.

To achieve these goals, marketing specialists utilized a free tool known as Google Search Console. This application monitors your website to track health errors that directly impact performance and search engine rankings.

When analyzing your website, you may encounter something known as an index coverage issue.

This article will explain what indexing issues are, why they occur, and what you can do to fix Google index coverage issues moving forward.

What Are Index Coverage Issues?

To better explain an index coverage issue, let's first explore how the indexing process works.

To manually submit your site to Google Search Console, you will need something known as an XML sitemap. This site map lists all of the pages present on your website along with their corresponding URLs.

Otherwise, Googlebot will periodically attempt to crawl your site by following links on and off of the domain.

Crawling is the process Googlebot uses to discover a URL and read the content on the page. Once it reaches the URL, it begins the process of indexing the data.

Indexing is the process in which Googlebot attempts to understand the content. It does this by checking for keywords, analyzing headlines, reading content, and following internal and outbound links. The better it can understand a page, the more accurately it can “grade” a URL for search rankings.

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With this information in mind, let's answer the initial question.

An index coverage issue happens if something prevents Google from properly crawling and indexing a URL.

You can identify an index coverage issue by checking your Google Search Console Index Coverage Report for one of four status notifications.

The Four Index Status Codes and How to Fix Them

When the indexing process is complete, each URL will feature an index coverage status. You can find a full list of these statuses courtesy of Google here.

Valid

Ideally, all of your URLs will have the “Valid” status.

This means that Googlebot was able to successfully index the webpage without any notable issues.

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You will only receive a notification if you did not include this URL in your sitemap. If you intend to index a page, always be sure to properly list it within the XML file.

Warning

If a URL displays the “Warning” status, it can indicate several things.

First, know that the Googlebot did index the page despite the warning. You will need to check the reasoning for the status of the report for greater details. The two types of warnings are as follows:

• Indexed, though blocked by robots.txt – Googlebot indexed the page despiting blocking it with your robots.txt file. This typically occurs when an external website is linking the blocked page. In this scenario, Googlebot still follows the outside link to the page and indexes it.

• Page indexed without content – Google was able to index the page, but some factor is preventing it from reading the actual content. You can refer to the coverage section of your report for more information.

How to Fix Warning Status Indexing Issues?

A. Indexed, Though Blocked by Robots.txt

If you intend to block the URL from further indexing, you must add a ‘noindex’ meta tag or header on the page for the HTTP response. Your meta tag should look like this:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex>

If you instead wish to add an HTTP response header, Google recommends the following:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

(…)

X-Robots-Tag: noindex

(…)

Furthermore, Google instructs us to not add the blocked URL to the robots.txt file. If you attempt to block using this method, Googlebot cannot check the page for the appropriate ‘noindex’ tag.

B. Page Indexed Without Content

This warning only occurs in rare circumstances. The most common culprit is accidentally publishing a webpage to your site that has zero content to read.

However, pages can also receive this warning if you are using a practice called cloaking.

Cloaking is the act of using technical processes to show Googlebot one type of content while showing your users something different than what is indexed. Cloaking is against Google guidelines and can prevent your website from appearing in any search results.

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If you receive this warning, but cannot find a discernible cause, check with your development team for a possible hack. After addressing the problem, you can resubmit your website to Google for proper indexing.

Excluded

The ‘excluded’ response code typically appears by user choice.

Your SEO team may choose to prevent Googlebot from indexing a page for several reasons. The most common is having multiple versions of one page with duplicate content. To avoid penalties, you may exclude a page from the indexing process.

If you do not wish to exclude a URL, check your coverage report for one of the following messages:

• Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag – The URL has a meta tag or response code instructing Googlebot to avoid indexing the page.

• Blocked by page removal tool  – An authorized website user blocked the URL with a URL removal request. These requests will expire after roughly 90 days.

• Blocked by robots.txt – A robots.txt file is blocking the indexing process.

• Blocked due to unauthorized request (401) – Googlebot was unable to continue the crawl after receiving a 401 authorization response put in place by the website owner.

• Crawled, currently not indexed – Googlebot crawled the page but has yet to index it. In most scenarios, the indexing will follow soon after.

• Discovered, currently not indexed – Googlebot identified the URL but stopped short of crawling to prevent site overload.

• Alternate page with proper canonical tag – Google recognizes this URL as a duplicate of an existing page. The other page has a canonical tag prompting it to avoid indexing.

• Duplicate without user-selected canonical – If two pages have duplicate content, and neither has a canonical tag, Googlebot will attempt to differentiate the two. This URL received the non-canonical tag.

• Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than user – Google sees your canonical tag but thinks this URL should be the one to receive the tag.

• Not found (404) – Googlebot found this URL organically only to receive a 404 error.

• Page with redirect – Googlebot will not index redirect URLs.

• Soft 404 – The URL leads to a page with a soft 404 not found message.

• Duplicate, submitted URL not selected as canonical – This URL is likely one of the multiple pages that contain duplicate content. However, none of these pages has the canonical tag.

• Blocked due to access forbidden (403) – The URL features restricted access prompting Googlebot to provide credentials. This almost always results in an incorrect error response on your site.

• Blocked due to other 4xx issue – This applies to an error caused by any other unnamed 4xx code.

How to Fix Excluded Status Indexing Issues?

1. Excluded by noindex' Tag

If you meant to use a noindex' tag, this code requires no response.

If you wish to submit the page for indexing, simply remove the noindex' tag from the page.

2. Blocked by Page Removal Tool

Avoid using URL removal requests and instead, use the robots.txt directive. Make additional attempts to crawl the URL for indexing before the request expires.

3. Blocked by Robots.txt

If you meant to block a URL from indexing, remove it from the robots.txt file and use the noindex' tag instead.

Otherwise, simply remove the URL from the robots.txt file.

4. Blocked Due to Unauthorized Request (401)

Remove the authorization requirements you have in place to access the page. More importantly, look into how this URL was discovered and address any related issues like broken or toxic links.

5. Crawled, Currently Not Indexed

Check the date of the last crawl. If it was recent, allow Google more time to index the page. Typically, no action is necessary.

6. Discovered, Currently Not Indexed

Google likely rescheduled the crawl. No action is necessary but check back to ensure that the site is properly indexed soon.

7. Alternate Page with Proper Canonical Tag

You added a canonical tag to a page with duplicate content. If this for some reason is incorrect, remove the canonical tag from the other URL and add it to the correct one.

8. Duplicate without User-Selected Canonical

Your site has more than one page with duplicate content. Select the most valuable one and add the canonical tag.

9. Not Found (404)

If the page no longer exists, meaning the 404 is intentional, no action is required.

If the page does exist at a new URL, you must add a redirect to the new location.

10. Page with Redirect

Google does not index redirects. No further action is necessary.

11. Soft 404

If the page no longer exists, make sure it returns a proper 404.

If you do not mean for a 404 to appear, you need to update this page with appropriate content for proper indexing.

12. Duplicate, Submitted URL Not Selected as Canonical

If you wish to index this as the URL, you will need to use the canonical tag. Google will index this page and prevent the other duplicates from being included.

13. Blocked Due to Access Forbidden (403)

If you wish to index this page, remove all restrictions preventing users and Googlebot from accessing the page.

If you intend for the page to be this way, be sure to utilize the noindex' tag as described earlier in this article.

14. Blocked Due to Other 4xx Issue

You will need to investigate the particular URL to understand its behavior. Be on the lookout for the 4xx status code and investigate what needs to be done to correct the issue. These errors range from 400 to 451, making it difficult to diagnose with a quick tutorial.

Error

The error code appears on your Coverage Report when Googlebot is unable to crawl the pages that are eligible for proper indexing.

The types of error codes are as follows:

• Server error (5xx) – This occurs when the website’s server is unable to fulfill the request to access the URL at the start of the process.

• Redirect error – One of a few direct errors occurred. This prevents Googlebot from reaching the desired URL for indexing.

• Submitted URL blocked by robots.txt – You blocked this page from indexing using your robots.txt file.

• Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ – This occurs when you ask Google to index a page that has the ‘noindex’ tag.

• Submitted URL seems to be a Soft 404  – Googlebot crawled the page and found it to be a Soft 404.

• Submitted URL returns unauthorized request (401) – Authorization requirements prevented Google from crawling and indexing the page.

• Submitted URL not found (404) – You asked Google to index a URL that no longer exists.

• Submitted URL returned 403 – Something on the page is preventing anonymous users from gaining access. This is usually regarding a login issue.

• Submitted URL blocked due to other 4xx issue – One of the many 4xx response codes not previously listed prevents Google from indexing the URL.

How to Fix Error Status Indexing Issues?

1. Server Error (5xx)

5xx errors are most commonly a firewall issue. It can also be caused by a DoS protection protocol you have in place to prevent excessive requests to the server. Because Googlebot is making many requests in the indexing process, your security may be halting progress.

You or your hosting provider will need to examine which part of your website’s security is stopping Google. With the correct configurations, the indexing process should be allowed to go on without issue.

You can learn more about server errors from Google here.

2. Redirect Error

There are multiple types of redirect errors. The first step is to identify which one your website currently has.

• Redirect loop – Your redirect chain is taking the user back and forth between the same URLs. You need to check your redirect chain and make sure that the user ends up at the correct URL.

• Chain is too long – If you need to redirect users, you should always point them from URL A to URL B. If you receive this error, your website is redirecting Google too many times, causing it to abandon the crawl. Eliminate unnecessary steps in the chain to resume normally.

• Redirect URL exceeds max URL length – Google has a limitation on how many characters belong in a URL. If you receive this error, look into how you can update the URL or move the content to a new one.

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• A bad or empty URL in the redirect chain - Google recognizes that one step in the chain is preventing normal navigation. Revisit your redirect protocol and make sure that each step points to the right destination.

If you have any more questions or concerns regarding redirects, Google recommends that website owners utilize Lighthouse for these types of errors.

3. Submitted URL Blocked by Robots.txt

If you wish to block a URL from indexing, you should not use robots.txt. Instead, use the noindex' protocol on the page.

If you mean for this page to be indexed, remove it from robots.txt and avoid using any unnecessary tags. Then, resubmit the URL for indexing.

4. Submitted URL Marked noindex'

If you wish to index this URL, you need to remove the noindex' protocol you have in place.

5. Submitted URL Seems to be a Soft 404

If you receive a soft 404 error, you can take one of the following actions depending on the situation.

If the page no longer exists, utilize a true 404 status code to indicate this.

If you moved the content to a new destination, submit the new page for indexing and remove the soft 404 page from the website.

6. Submitted URL Returns Unauthorized Request (401)

You must remove any authorization requirements if you want Googlebot to crawl the page.

7. Submitted URL Not Found (404)

You cannot submit a nonexistent URL for indexing.

If the content exists and you mistakenly used an old URL, update your sitemap with the correct URL.

8. Submitted URL Returned 403

Remove any restrictions that are preventing anonymous users from gaining access.

If you intended to restrict access, utilize the noindex' protocol for this URL.

9. Submitted URL Blocked Due to Other 4XX Issue

As we explained with similar exclusion errors, there are over 50 potential 4xx errors. Read the status description carefully to gain insight as to how you can correct the issue. See if you can replicate the issue or identify the problem using Google's URL inspection tool.

Address Index Coverage Issues Quickly to Protect Your Rankings

Google Search Console is a great boon for helping you publish your website updates quickly. The more you utilize best SEO practices, the more likely you are to see positive gains in SERPs.

Indexing issues are not uncommon. Fortunately, many of them are easily correctable with Google offering many solutions to get you back on track. Healthier websites equate to more satisfied users.

Understanding how Google responds to certain protocols also allows your SEO team to perform actions in your favor. This can protect your rankings as you experiment with website changes.

As long as you stay on top of these notifications, your website should always remain under control. Regardless of website length, utilizing these coverage reports will better serve you in keeping your website healthy.

Content is king.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates would push this sentiment in 1996 with that very title.

We consume that content daily through text, images, video, and live streaming. A popular form of content among these channels is the blog post.

If you've ever interacted with digital marketing, you understand the power blog posts can have on SEO. But, what exactly is the ideal blog post length?

The answer isn't objective. However, let's explore the factors that dictate appropriate blog post length. With this knowledge, you'll be able to supercharge your SEO in 2022.

Why Does Blog Post Length Matter for SEO?

When Google ranks a piece of content, it considers multiple factors. Among these are:

• Quality
• Trustworthiness
• Authority
• Backlinks from external sources
• Page clicks
• Bounce rate
• Time spent on page
• Length

When we refer to length, we are referring to how well the content serves the needs of the reader. With that in mind, appropriate content length can vary greatly depending on what the blog is attempting to discuss.

As a general rule, longer articles tend to be more valuable for SEO.

Let's say that two websites are writing about how to develop a technical SEO strategy. One blog post is 500 words in length. The competitor's article is 2,000 words in length. In all likelihood, the longer article provides more valuable information as the increased length allows for greater coverage.

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A longer blog post also allows for more keyword opportunities. Writers can not only highlight primary keywords but create additional headlines and paragraphs that delve into secondary or tertiary keywords related to the topic.

With greater information available, Google is better able to understand what purpose the blog post serves so that it can serve it to the ideal audience.

Blog Post Quality vs Blog Post Length

Blog post length becomes more variable regarding the user experience.

When someone searches for a topic or question on Google, they expect to get a thorough answer. If the subject allows for a deep dive with supporting information, it should be included to make a longer, better-quality blog post.

On the other hand, you might fall into the trap of padding a blog post purely for length. While it might provide more opportunities for “keyword stuffing,” it makes for a poor user experience.

Google has also improved its understanding of content padding. If your blog post contains unrelated fluff, duplicate content, or too many instances of a keyword, it can harm SEO.

All of this serves to illustrate the point that content quality matters more than raw blog post length. If you can expound more on the topic to better serve the reader, you can and should provide a better user experience. With an improved UX, you'll see increased benefits to your SEO.

Likewise, if their topic does not warrant 3,000 words, do not stretch the material to help SEO.

Google provides fully-detailed guidelines of how it rates every webpage here. You can better serve your SEO strategy by practicing these guidelines as opposed to focusing on length.

Be aware that the more succinct and effective your answer, the more likely your blog post is to achieve the coveted position zeroā  at the very top of SERPs.

How Long Should a Blog Post Be?

You now understand the critical factors that go into determining a blog post's SEO value.

However, is there an educated estimate of the ideal blog post length?

In prior years, the often-quoted word count minimum was 500. This length allows you to provide bite-sized educational value to an audience without running into thin content warnings from Google. Anything less than is unlikely to positively impact SEO.

In 2021, HubSpot ran a study on its most-read blog posts and found 2,100 - 2,400 words to be the sweet spot.

Meanwhile, SEO company Yoast explains that articles should exceed 1,000 words for better results.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, marketing veteran Neil Patel and his team warn to avoid exceeding Google's cap of 10,000 words. Even 5,000 words or more may offer diminishing returns.

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These different findings seem to corroborate what we shared above regarding how audiences receive different types of content. Some companies find more success with quick, lean content on social media, while others fare better with well-researched, academic blog posts.

Determining the Right Blog Post Length for Your Site

The most effective way to determine how long your blog posts should be is to experiment and measure. This is a golden rule you should practice for all digital marketing channels.

It's best practice to create a content calendar and plan out all of your blog posts in advance. This allows your SEO team to research ideal topics based on your keywords. The research will also allow them to look at similar, competing articles and their respective lengths.

Several metrics will indicate whether your blog posts are performing well. Keep an eye on:

• Page clicks
• Shares
• Average time spent on page
• Clicks to other pages/blog posts
• Bounce rate
• Subscriptions

If short-form posts are not gaining the desired results, try to select topics that allow for greater blog post length. Your readers may be looking for more detailed articles that offer additional knowledge and insights.

At the end of the year, examine your top-performing blog posts. If they have a similar length in common, this may be the sweet spot you want to aim for regarding word count.

Finally, you can always ask your core audience what type of content they want to see. So long as you are striving to provide the best user experience, the issue of content length will typically resolve itself.

Conclusion - Focus on Blog Quality Over Blog Post Length

If you're looking for an actual number, 1,500-2,000 words will likely get the most traction with Google SERPs.

However, the length of your articles will not positively impact your SEO if they do not serve the reader. You should not attempt to pad your blog with fluff simply to meet an imagined quota.

Brands have found success in digital marketing when writing short, 300-word articles. Likewise, many brands dominate the top rankings with regular 2,500-word posts. What matters is how loyal your audience is and how well your content serves their needs.

Finally, you should seek out your own ideal blog post length by experimenting with different types of blogs. Utilize free tools like Google Analytics to track key metrics that are direct indicators of user engagement. The more your audience interacts with and shares your blogs, the more likely they are to improve your website rankings.

Running a digital marketing agency, scaling it, and keeping it profitable is no child’s play. With increasing competition, things are getting even more nutsy in the market.

It requires a strategy, mindset, and a specific course of action. This article will discuss all these and many other proven tactics that we implement at our very own DashClicks and Social Agency.

It includes a brief itinerary of the Social Agency. It’s an interesting story that will motivate you to succeed. It also includes the things that we learnt along this journey — what to do and what not to.

The Synopsis of the Article

The article covers:

1. How We Started “Social Agency”: A Chronology?
2. Personality Traits and Mindset You Need to Succeed
3. How Did I Make My First $4000 in Sales?
4. Prospecting & Sales: Core Concepts & Best Practices
5. The First Step: How Do You Get Multiple Calls Booked on Your Calendar?
6. Prospecting Streams That Worked for Us
7. Prospecting Tools to Use
8. What Is Sales?
9. What’s a Value Ladder?
10. Our Core Service Offerings
11. Our Sales Team Structure
12. The Communication Paths We Used to Sell
13. The Contract Terms We Offered
14. Our Monthly Price Offerings
15. What Is Fulfillment?
16. How Do Most Agencies Operate?
17. Top Reasons Why Most Agencies Fail
18. Our Fulfillment Retention Measures
19. Core Strategies: The Whiteboard Session
20. The Right Prospecting Strategies
21. Make Your Life Easy With Deal Automations
22. How to Scale?
23. The Proven Sales Strategies
24. How to Close More Deals?
25. How to Use an Irresistible Offer?
26. How to Become a Seven-Figure Marketing Agency?
27. Questions & Answers

In this article, we’ll try to decode everything I did that made us a successful, profitable, multi-million-dollar revenue-generating digital marketing agency.

So, if you’re pumped up, and if that sounds like something you’d like to learn about, read on.

I’ve split this presentation into two sections to set some context.

The first half is more like a slide deck presentation, chronological in order. It’ll be more of a full-blown whiteboard session in the second half of this presentation. In this session, I’ll go through the core strategies that we implemented in our marketing agency that got us to over $100k a year in sales and, later on, over a million dollars a year in sales. Soon, it expanded to a multi-million dollar corporation.

We have our fantastic team members, Daniel Matthews and Gil Golan from our dashboards team, here in the session. They will also answer your questions.

How to Make $100,000 in Sales in 12 Months?

If I lost everything and had to start all over again from scratch, this is what I would do to get $100,000 in sales.

Source: Chad's Webinar 06:13

My name is Chad Kodary, and I'm the CEO of two multiple seven-figure marketing companies DashClicks and our retail agency Social Agency, which has been running since 2009. So, let's begin with a chronology of how the Social Agency was launched and how things unfolded to make it a multi-million dollar company.

Source: Chad's Webinar 06:53

1. How We Started “Social Agency”: A Chronology?

To understand the future, we have to start with the past. So, let’s go ahead and take the time machine back to 2009 to see how it all started.

On September 13, 2009, I started my digital marketing agency Social Agency. I started my marketing agency from a bedroom in my parents’ house.

I was about 21 years old when I started my marketing agency. This was almost 12 years ago. So, you can see I had no experience doing this. I jumped into this industry with no training or formal education in digital marketing.

I started from scratch, and this is where I think most of you are today.

Personality Traits and Mindset You Need to Succeed

I want to set some expectations for everybody, fast-forwarding almost 12 years later. If you’re getting into this industry or starting your own business, remember, the first thing is to eat & breathe it. Your business drive should embody everything you are — including all of your traits. You become the brand, the visionary, and the creator.

So, unless you’re ready to take this head-on, this article is not for you. This post is specifically for entrepreneurs, people who want to start a digital marketing agency, and people looking to build a successful career in this industry.

Source: Chad's Webinar 09:43

How Did I Make My First $4000 in Sales?

From this desk in 2009, I made a whopping $4000 in sales annually the entire year.

I sat at that desk, working every day for 10 to 15 hours. I sweated days, weekends, and nights and made about $4000 in my first year in business.

Most of you may think it was a failure earning just $4000 a year, but to me then, it was not. I was laying the foundation of an ambitious startup.

Four years later, on August 2, 2013, I moved into my first office, a shared office.

Source: Chad's Webinar 11:07

I shared it with one of my good friends.

On October 20, 2014, I opened my second office.

Then, we hired multiple people, and expanded our operations into sales and a fulfillment team. Those were the two main avenues that we were focused on.

Source: Chad's Webinar 11:47

Source: Chad's Webinar 12:08

On October 16, 2016, we opened another office and expanded again. We hired more people and took our sales to the next level.

Source: Chad's Webinar 12:23

We opened up our first call center, which you can see in the picture below on the bottom right. We had probably about 20 to 25 employees in this office at this time.

Source: Chad's Webinar 12:51

Let's fast forward again on February 9, 2017, I had a dream. I woke up in the middle of the night and started mocking up what we know today as DashClicks. This was my first wireframe and my first mockup. Imagine if DashClicks looked like this today; that'd not be very pleasant. And, that vision became a reality.

Source: Chad's Webinar 13:03

On October 1, 2018, we launched DashClicks v1, which looked like this.

Source: Chad's Webinar 13:26

Fast forward once again, almost ten years later, from that bedroom seat in 2009, on July 1, 2019, I was out of the country, and I got a call from one of our partners. He said, “Chad! The office next door just moved out, and I think this is the expansion time.”

This was the time to break down the wall and double up, precisely what we did. We broke down the wall to the next-door office and took the space. We hired more people, built more offices, and expanded our business again. We took chances, and I can tell you from this 10-year journey that looking at making big moves and taking chances is part of being an entrepreneur.

Source: Chad's Webinar 13:32

Today, I have a growing business. I’m making money, I’m my own boss, I have thousands of customers, full-time employees, ample office space, a dream car, and a dream wife.

And I’m not saying this to brag because I want you to go back in time again and look at where I started. I’m simply showing you that your dreams can become a reality, and I am living proof of that.

I went from being home at mama’s house as a 21-year old making four thousand dollars a year annually to a successful entrepreneur speaking on stages in front of hundreds and thousands of people at conferences.

In 2019, I made $1.64 million from sales.

Keep in mind that results like these will not happen for you unless you work for them.

Pro Tip #1: Take risks. Everything that I’ve done until today or that you’ve seen in the last 12 years is the result of taking chances, bold steps, and calculated risks. During this time, I was working and taking big shots. I made big moves and took big gambles, which got me to where I am today.

I want the same for you now.

Pro Tip #2: Hire full-time employees instead of highly-paid freelancers.

Pro Tip #3: Capitalize your prospecting framework to create a multi-stream automated lead generation approach.

2. Prospecting & Sales: Core Concepts & Best Practices

Here are some of the core concepts and strategies you need to understand to succeed in the agency business. It covers all aspects of prospecting & sales. It will also include tips on how to retain your clients for a long time. So, let’s begin with prospecting.

A. The First Step: How Do You Get Multiple Calls Booked on Your Calendar?

This is where it all begins. First, let’s understand that prospecting is the first step in your sales process which consists of identifying potential customers, aka prospects.

The goal of prospecting is to develop a database of likely customers and then systematically communicate with them to convert them from potential customers to paid customers.

Let me show you how we used to prospect in Social Agency. We had multiple prospecting streams.

Pro Tip: The more fishing lines you have out in the ocean, the more fish you will catch. It is as self-explanatory as that.

B. Prospecting Streams that Worked for Us

Here are the prospecting streams we used at the Social Agency.

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Source: Chad's Webinar 21:32

Here are the streams that worked the most for us.

Source: Chad's Webinar 21:50

C. Prospecting Tools to Use

Here are the prospecting tools that we used.

Source: Chad's Webinar 22:13

Here are the prospecting tools that worked the most for us ā CRM system, InstaSites, and InstaReports.

Source: Chad's Webinar 22:22

Here is the following framework that is known as sales.

Source: Chad's Webinar 22:33

D. What Is Sales?

Here is the basic definition of sales that will clear misconceptions.

Source: Chad's Webinar 22:51

E. What's a Value Ladder?

It's crucial to rise up the value ladder in order to survive and stay profitable in the long run. Companies that don't rise lose their appeal soon.

Source: Chad's Webinar 23:03

F. Our Core Service Offerings

Here are our core service offerings. SEO, directory listings, and website design were the most sold and in-demand of our services.

Source: Chad's Webinar 23:59

G. Our Sales Team Structure

Here is our sales team structure. Fronters are the people who make the first contact and set appointments. They can be telecallers, whereas closers are the sales reps who close the deals. Focus on the fronters here.

Source: Chad's Webinar 24:15

H. The Communication Paths We Used to Sell

Here are the communication paths we used to sell. Phone calls worked the best.

Source: Chad's Webinar 24:29

I. The Contract Terms We Offered

Here are the four contract terms we offered. The 6-month contract worked the best.

Source: Chad's Webinar 24:47

J. Our Monthly Price Offerings

Here are our monthly price offerings. The $699 per month package was the most popular.

Source: Chad's Webinar 25:16

K. What Is Fulfillment?

Fulfillment is the latest concept in the agency business. Most agencies specialize in one or two streams such as SEO or social media. However, the clients may need various other services. White-label fulfillment comes as a life-saver for such agencies. It allows you to accommodate more clients and bigger portfolios without expanding your core teams unnecessarily.

Source: Chad's Webinar 25:33

L. How Do Most Agencies Operate?

Most agencies are busy with their daily grind and hardly have the time to review their strategies. So, they can never think out of the box, which is a crucial step to succeed. It also involves making big moves. You can't achieve that without right partnerships and strategies.

Source: Chad's Webinar 26:13

M. Top Reasons Why Most Agencies Fail

Here are the top reasons why most agencies fail. Setting impossible expectations is the major one.

Source: Chad's Webinar 27:00

N. Our Fulfillment Retention Measures

Here are our fulfillment retention measures. Setting proper expectations helped us the most in retention. In fact, unrealistic expectations are responsible for a majority of the churn that happens.

Source: Chad's Webinar 27:28

3. Core Strategies: The Whiteboard Session

Now, we will discuss the strategy part in whiteboard format.

A. The Right Prospecting Strategies

Secrets to success are simple – a phone and good communications skills. Use prospecting methods like InstaSites and InstaReports and start fishing on the phone. You can start with as low as $200 to get your foot in the door. Introduce yourself and hook the people with what you have to offer.

Book 5 to 10 appointments each day, add them to your CRM system, and start making your sales pipeline. Keep it simple. I did that for months and years. Doing it consistently will surely help you get good results.

Source: Chad's Webinar 42:58

B. Make Your Life Easy With Deal Automations

Deal automation can make life simple for you. Create deal automation on the first stage and automatically build an InstaSite when a new deal gets created. Send the website access through email or SMS to your prospect.

It will hardly take one or two hours.

C. How to Scale?

Now, it’s time to scale. So, instead of making 150 calls a day, you’re going to make 200. You can go from 7 to 14 scheduled calls a day. You can also use InstaSites or InstaReports to get people on your calendar. If they become interested in the Instasite, send them the link.

You can add, “By the way, I’d like to have one of our website activation specialists join you on a call so they can show you the website. It’ll only be a 20 or 30-minute phone call.”

You can give them an approximate time frame, whatever it is. The website expert will walk them through the website, and if you do it right, they are highly likely to ask for access. You can say, “The website design itself is completely free. Just let me know, and I’ll schedule a day and time. What day and time is good for you?”

That’s where your scheduling system comes and you can use Calendly. Just create a free calendar account on it and jot down all your scheduled appointments.

Aim to get five appointments everyday on your calendar.

You cannot sell anything if you have no one to sell to. So, if you have no appointments on your calendar and nobody to speak to, you won’t make any money.

Nothing else will work if this part doesn’t work, including sales.

D. The Proven Sales Strategies

I turned over millions of dollars in revenue in my digital marketing agency with these strategies. So, these are proven and tested. My name is Chad Kodary, the CEO of DashClicks, and I’m excited to help you in your entrepreneurial journey and get you a ton of revenue. However, I would recommend you take baby steps in the beginning.

First of all, you need to have your calendar all filled up. We usually have five to ten scheduled calls on our calendar every day. It gives me immense happiness when I have a calendar full of scheduled demos every morning.

But, if you think that this is not your cup of tea and you can’t pick up the phone and do cold-calling, or you can’t work on weekends and non-working hours, this webinar is not for you.

This webinar is for serious entrepreneurs who can do what it takes and get it done. This is what you need to do.

You should have at least five to ten calls booked on your calendar to get into the sales mode. This is called a calendar full of leads.

To be in the “beast mode,” you should start selling the big things that involve collecting credit cards and processing transactions.

Receiving payments feels like ecstasy for an entrepreneur, akin to getting high on a drug. But, it doesn’t make you tired. It makes you rich and happy. It builds up momentum.

I have a team of people for prospecting. They book calls on my calendar, and I do what I enjoy the most – sales, all day long. However, you should start selling only when you have at least 100 leads.

You can move to the sales environment from prospecting, which is step two.

So, here we are at step two – selling the website. We’ll next discuss how to close a deal.

Many people have their calendars filled up, but they can’t close the deal. And it’s a widespread problem. If that’s you, here’s how you can help it.

E. How to Close More Deals?

If you’re not closing deals, you need to dissect your sales structure. Ninety percent of the time, you don’t have a good offer. That’s the primary reason you’re not able to close the deal.

In the rest 10% of the cases, you might have a great offer, but you’re not an efficient salesperson. Still, you manage to close tons of sales.

It emphasizes the fact that your actual offer is exceptionally crucial.

You can be the worst salesperson in the world. Still, people may want to buy from you.

But, entrepreneurship is not for you if you’ve got a deep-rooted belief that you are a lousy salesperson and can’t do cold calling.

You can afford to be a lousy salesperson if you have an excellent sales offer. You’ll sell like crazy.

During the Black Friday sale at Walmart, they give away five T.V.s out of their inventory (like 3000) in their warehouse for a hundred dollars. All of Walmart is filled up. People join the rampages to get a $100 TV, where only five are available. It happens because the offer is so good that it attracts everyone, which is the secret to closing a deal.

You also need to make sure that your offer is not the same as everyone else’s offer.

It has to be unique and creative.

You can sell them a website that’s excellent and fun to use. You’ll make $300 for each website, which will be great.

You can sell it for a slightly higher price, but I don’t recommend going over $500. If you want to do it on a bigger scale, I recommend you start creating a bundle of products and services. Your bundled sweet spot is $699. That’s where you should be, so you want to make an offer with this in mind.

The best offer that got us the most revenue is $699 a month. In this deal, the client gets a website with our InstaSites tool, which is also SEO friendly. Besides that, you can also charge a one-time setup fee of $199.

So, you get $900 in the first month.

You can run your client’s credit card every month for $699, and you’ll get this amount for the next six months as it’s your deal.

F. How to Use an Irresistible Offer?

In this deal, you’re leveraging an enticing offer, and that’s the website. Your client gets a $5000 website for free, and they just pay $699 a month for SEO.

The website is free as it comes with the bundle offer. Bundle offers make things appealing. Imagine getting an Internet connection with your house phone as a bundle offer. Now split the two, and most people won’t buy the house phone.

They will prefer an Internet connection, but when they know that they might have to pay $180 a month just for the Internet instead of $100 as a bundle, they’ll go for the bundle offer.

That’s why companies create so much hype around bundle offers and use heavy promotion.

The offers attract as they’re only for a limited period of time. You can’t say “no” when you get a $5000 website virtually free of cost with the SEO bundle offer for just $699 a month and a setup fee of $199; you just can’t say “no.”

So, you can not only sell everything, but you can port it to a fulfillment company like DashClicks. Allow us to do the heavy lifting and focus on profit and revenue generation.

If you hire DashClicks’ white label SEO fulfillment services, you just need to pay $225 a month ($199 a month for SEO and $25 for Instasites,) and pocket the $699 a month you get from the customer.

So, DashClicks will take care of everything, and you’ll earn a 70% margin on the fee. Not a bad deal now, is it?

That’s insane when you try to scale your business. For example, you can hire more fronters and sales reps and 10x your revenues every month.

It’s not difficult to multiply your sales every month. I’ve done it every single month for years. At one point, I was handling the sales alone, and I used to close more than ten bundle sales every month. I added sales reps to close even more deals. It’s known as the stack effect.

I’ll also discuss how to close more deals and consistently and predictably grow your digital marketing agency with enough paying clients to call it a real business.

G. How to Become a Seven-Figure Marketing Agency?

Do you know what needs to be done to scale a seven-figure marketing agency or even a six-figure marketing agency?

You need to set up a strategic value ladder that’s proven to work It will not only change your life, but also impact others’.

You should also have the ability to keep clients for years if you want to turbocharge your business. A good company also generates many jobs, which is always a good factor.

Clarity on the services you’re offering and knowing how to sell and scale them will help you scale your digital marketing agency.

Book a Call With My Team

If all of this sounds exciting and try-worthy to you, I want to become your partner, and I want you to book a call with my team.

You can call us on +1 (866) 600-3369 to know the killer strategies to succeed in agency business and partner with us.

It will be a 30-minute private zoom strategy session to see where you’re stuck and how we can help you.

After this private zoom strategy call, I’m sure you’ll get some clarity.

And wait, did we tell you that your zoom strategy consultation call is free?

You don’t need a credit card for this call, so put your wallets away. This is not a paid call. This is a 30-minute call, and it’s free!

Refresh the page, and you’ll see that only a couple of appointments are left on the 12th. I’m available for the next two weeks.

The objective of this call is to:

1. Analyze your agency strategy
2. Know your mindset and your external and internal beliefs
3. Know the limiting beliefs that are preventing you from hitting six-figure revenues
4. Get more clarity around your core offer and the value ladder you’re on

We believe that you should be able to grow your agency from zero to $100,000 within 12 months. And there is no reason to doubt that.

You’ll not be able to do this if you don’t have clarity. I will help you get that clarity. So, if you’re interested in partnering with me and learning more about what we have to offer and how everything works with our partnership, schedule a call with us today.

Strategies for Selling Just the Software

Looking back to the time when I was selling these bundles, we didn’t have DashClicks, so I was mostly freewheeling on the back of my sales skills and the limited offers that we had then.

But now, with DashClicks, you can create an even sweeter option in that bundle. So, with a basic SEO plan, you can also offer a free website, an InstaSite, and free access to a sales marketing and automation tool.

So, now you get a CRM system and unique sales tools. In 90% of cases, you don’t need to be a good salesperson. You just have to have a reasonable offer, and you’ll make it all look good. You can build your whole marketing strategy around it.

Website structure is critical for a superior user experience and better search rankings.

Few things deter quality visitors from using your site than frustrating navigation. If a potential customer cannot identify critical information quickly, they're going to bounce away to a competitor.

Defining how to structure a website is the first step to marketing success. But, what goes into a quality structure?

If you're struggling to earn new clicks and need some tips to shake things up, you're in the right place. We'll define the different types of structures you can use and explain how to build a solid foundation for SEO best practices.

What is Website Structure?

Website structure is a term that explains how we organize webpages and their content on the domain.

A quality structure sees website owners carefully grouping related content for classification purposes. Users then should be able to navigate to and from content with an intuitive sense of progression.

Before we dive in too deeply, be aware that there are four primary ways of structuring a website.

Hierarchical Structure

We list this first as it is the most common website structure and likely the style you're currently using.

A hierarchical structure follows the pattern of moving from a broad category to more specific ones. Think of any modern website you visit and how those developers segment certain types of content to certain sections of the website.

For example, when a user visits the DashClicks site, everyone arrives on the same home page.

Immediately at the top of the site, you see a navigation menu that separates the core content into four specific categories. You can then follow the main category into smaller sub-categories down the line. The navigation ends up looking like this:

The Home page always serves as the top of the hierarchical tree and then branches downward. However, the branches can exist separately to distinguish each type of content from one another.

The hierarchical structure is popular as it is the only real solution for medium to large websites. Even if your new website is on the smaller side, choosing a hierarchy early on will futureproof your site as you add new pages and content.

If you were to eventually add a blog, a store, or even a native help center, you would continue to follow the same hierarchical structure you already have in place. Users will already understand the pattern and be able to discover new content without it having any impact on the experience they’re accustomed to.

Linear Structure

A linear website structure is ideal for a site that exists to promote one general product, service, or offer. Think of your standard landing page or sales funnel.

With this structure, the user is only moving in a line from Point A to B. Of course, your site can have more than one or two pages, but the content is always directly related to the page that came before.

For example, a user clicks on an ad that leads to a website focusing on lead generation. The user fills out the form on page one and then automatically gets redirected to page two. This makes the structure look like this simple formula:

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However, you can add more steps to the linear structure as necessary. Instead of leaving users with a thank you/confirmation, you could instead ask them to book an appointment, creating a new page in the sequence.

In either scenario, the user is always meant to move forward and does not need to provide a pathway away from this linear structure.

A “Webbed” or Network Structure

This type of structure technically breaks the rules we just established for traditional website planning.

Instead of having rigid segmentation of your content, users can quickly access any other page from their current URL at any time. This can work for brands that have a smaller website promoting products, services, or ideas that directly connect.

However, this structure also works great for eCommerce sites. Users can be viewing a product in one category segment, but quickly access links to related products or items from unrelated categories. This is often tailored to the user based upon prior browsing history or data pulled from other users with similar behaviors.

Database Structure

This final style only applies to websites that must produce sensitive data that's only meant to be viewed by a specific user.

Examples of database structure sites would be banking, loan companies, social media platforms, etc. When a user logs into their account, that website provides content specifically tailored to that user. This is as opposed to the prior models which see all users viewing the same content regardless of how they choose to navigate.

This type of structure is advanced as it requires sophisticated programming to properly display the correct data. However, it's important to be aware of when understanding how different websites are planned and developed.

Why is Website Structure Relevant for SEO?

Website structure impacts SEO both regarding the user experience and how well Google understands the content the site offers.

Site Structure and User Experience

If a user can find quality information and engage with the website, then you are providing a quality user experience. Google cares about the UX enough to consider it a primary ranking factor for SERPs.

A quality user experience can be defined by the following qualities:

• Optimal loading times
• First input delay (how long it takes a user to act)
• Visual stability (does the site behave as intended?)
• Mobile-friendliness
• HTTPS
• No intrusive interstitials (no popups or elements that prevent users from engaging)

With these factors in mind, we know that Google makes inferences about our website structure based on user behavior.

If a user searches for a term and clicks on our website, they should be able to find the information they need within three clicks. If the user is frequently clicking links while spending little time on each new page, it can be a sign that the structure is flawed.

What can prove worse for SEO is an increase in bounce rate based on poor website structure. If users are clicking on navigational links, but quickly leaving without engaging, Google recognizes this. It may stop serving your pages as a result as they do not seem to properly match the user intent when they search for specific keywords.

Impacts on Technical SEO

Google regularly crawls websites on the internet to properly index the content.

During this process, Googlebot follows the website structure you have in place. It will attempt to move from the home page to each page following each pathway.

As it moves from URL to URL, it begins to form associations based on the structure.

Let’s say that a landscaping business has a page dedicated to “irrigation.” This keyword can serve a variety of purposes, which makes it hard to match content to the user intent by itself.

Google then crawls the brand’s website. It follows this pathway using the site’s hierarchical structure:

Home > Services > Irrigation

Because Googlebot crawled this pathway to completion, it now better understands the relationship “irrigation” has to other pages on the site.

It is then able to properly classify your irrigation page as a service URL for your brand. It can then better serve that page as a result to users that are searching for an irrigation service, not necessarily facts about irrigation itself.

Image Source

With this in mind, we can begin to understand why having a poor website structure will negatively impact our SEO. Properly segmenting the content on a site ensures that Google can effectively crawl each page and properly index the content.

That means that Google serves the web page to better-qualified users, which then leads to improved SEO and search rankings.

Keyword mapping, page crawling, and matching search intent are all SEO factors that directly root themselves in your website structure. If you want to ensure that your pages rank well, you must begin web development with a solid foundation in place.

Creating an SEO-Friendly Website Structure

The first part of this article described the “what” and “why” of quality website structure.

Now, we need to understand the crucial steps that go into building a strong foundation from the start.

Start Compiling a List of Essential Keywords

Let’s face it – keywords are pivotal for helping any webpage rank on Google.

Keywords are how users find our websites. They’re also what Google looks for to match page content to the user’s search intent.

You’ll want to create a preliminary list of any keywords that tend to get results. A great place to start is by entering any terms relevant to your industry into keyword planner tools like SEMRush or Moz Keyword Explorer.

Another ideal strategy to consider is examining the core keywords of your competitors’ website pages. Try to get a solid understanding of how they structure their websites, particularly the ones that are in the running for the top rankings.

During this step, you’ll like gain a preliminary idea of which pages you’ll want to create for your site based on certain keywords. You don’t necessarily want to go after the terms with the most clicks, but rather ones that will best suit the true intent of each page.

Certain keywords may have a lower search volume but can exhibit a much higher engagement rate because they match the user’s search intent.

Visualize the Structure and Begin Categorizing

Next, you’ll need to determine which keywords are worth pursuing and which best match the functional needs of your website.

It helps to come up with clear category titles to help with compartmentalization. Let’s call back to the example we used earlier – the new DashClicks website.

Our team created a hierarchical structure by categorizing all content into five distinct categories:

• Platform – any pages related to platform software & tools
• Fulfillment – any pages related to white label fulfillment services
• Solutions – any pages related to customer use cases
• Resources – any pages related to support and education
• DashClicks – any pages about DashClicks as a business

From these major categories, we can then add individual pages or even create sub-categories that fell underneath that umbrella. These segments also prove broad, yet descriptive enough to allow for future additions without making changes to the structure.

The pages we chose to create underneath those hierarchies are a result of two major factors:

• A functional need (explaining or offering something of value to the user)
• Keywords with matching user intent (users that search this term want the type of content we will offer)

Creating a hierarchy may prove simple or complex depending upon the number of pages your website needs. A basic site may only need sections to describe a company and its services, while large eCommerce sites need unique categories for every type of product.

Take all the time necessary to nail this foundation down. Plan not only for what you have now but anything that you could potentially offer in the future.

Make Sure Navigation Steps Logically Help the User Progress

Once you get an idea of the core categories you want to use, pay close attention to the path of navigation.

There’s a rule that’s been long perpetuated online known as the “three-click rule.” This commonly held belief explains that the average user loses interest if they cannot find the ideal content within three clicks on your domain.

However, many studies have been held that directly challenge this belief. Among these is a study by Center Centre – UIE that found no correlation between clicks and user satisfaction. The Nielsen Norman Group corroborates this with similar findings.

This widely held belief may lead to an unnecessarily broad browsing experience where more detailed-focused categories may serve users better.

Regardless of which side you fall on, we can agree that the navigation should intuitively make sense to users. So long as the categories make sense and the pages fall under appropriate hierarchies, users will likely prove satisfied.

Instead, what alienates users is unnecessarily complex or dysfunctional navigation. Users should never feel lost when moving too far away from the landing page. They should understand how to easily move forward or backward from any given page on the domain.

Reflect Navigation with Clean URLs

Examining page URLs is a great way to test the cleanliness of your site's navigation.

A quality URL should provide users with key clues that indicate where they are on the site. Let's take a look at yet another example from our website:

dashclicks.com/platform/apps/analytics/

This is the URL that appears in the browser when you visit the DashClicks Analytics page. From this URL, we can understand that the user followed this pathway:

Home > Platform > Apps > Analytics

Notice that the categories become more specific as you progress to the result. At any point in the process, the user should understand where they are and why that particular content was placed where it is.

If they want to check out a different app, they know to go one step back. If they want to go back home and check out something else, they can revert to step one or simply click the logo at the top of the page.

Make sure every URL follows this setup. Try to avoid unnecessary characters or strings that offer nothing to the end-user.

Utilize Internal Linking

Internal linking is a great SEO strategy that can reinforce connections between pages in a category.

This can provide users with quick ways to discover similar content, but it can also teach Googlebot more about the website. If we refer back to our Analytics page as an example, we can see examples of effective internal linking.

Because this page teaches users about the Analytics software, we can infer that users may also want to learn about the other software. That's why we include a direct link to each other app so that users can take the next step with just one click.

Avoid linking to additional pages unnecessarily. Your website is there to inform, not to overbear the user with sales pitches. Help Google better understand the content, and they'll help deliver results organically.

Utilize Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a secondary way of highlighting the user's navigation on a website.

Many websites utilize breadcrumbs by placing them just above or near the title of the current page. The breadcrumbs show a pathway similar to what your page URL should show.

By using the breadcrumb, you can provide quality internal links that help users jump back to any previous page in the path. This provides a better user experience as it allows them to always be one click away from a previous page.

This type of breadcrumb applies to hierarchical structures. However, you can also utilize attribute-based breadcrumbs when applicable. This is primarily reserved for eCommerce sites that show users exactly how an item is listed under categories and subcategories.

Finally, you can use history-based breadcrumbs that keep track of the user's actual clicks. This can help improve the UX by tailoring the site to their experience rather than sticking to the rigid structure.

Fix the Main Navigation Menu to the Header and Footer

Just like with internal links and breadcrumbs, providing quick navigation at all times makes for a better user experience.

High-ranking websites will often fix the header, meaning it scrolls with the user and remains in the viewport at all times.

When you attach the main navigation menu to this header, the user can click around to new pages much easier.

Likewise, adding a navigation menu to the footer calls users to click on another page once they finish consuming the content. This can keep users on the site for longer and provides more space for detailed menu layouts.

The footer can also lay out the hierarchy for additional categories that do not necessarily need to go into the main menu. This applies to less commonly clicked content like legal documentation, privacy policy, and similar pages.

Create an XML Sitemap

To further assist with creating an SEO-friendly structure, Google encourages the creation of sitemaps.

A sitemap, most commonly an XML file, is a document that lists all of a website's pages and corresponding URLs.

When you submit a sitemap to Google Search Console, you are helping Googlebot understand which pages of your website to crawl. With this in mind, you can use your sitemap to omit certain technical pages or define key pages with canonical tags. This can help in scenarios where you find yourself getting flagged for duplicate content.

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Telling Google which pages to crawl will also make better use of your monthly crawl budget. The more updates you make to the site, the more frequently you will need to crawl to index those changes.

Overall, a sitemap helps Google to more accurately portray the health and status of your website and its structure.

Monitoring Your Website Structure

Use Google Search Console to Crawl the Site

As with any SEO strategy, you'll want to actively monitor your website for structural health concerns.

Google Search Console will crawl your website regularly either automatically or by manual request. Whenever it completes the crawl, it will generate descriptive reports.

Within your report, you can see how many pages are indexed and which are not. If Google is unable to index a page, this indicates an error on the site.

These errors can result from a variety of factors. It can be something as simple as broken links, which are easily fixed by updating the link or editing the URL. However, continued issues may indicate a structural problem with your hierarchy.

Use the reported data to guide changes in your website design or structure.

Monitor User Activity within Google Analytics

Google Analytics is another free tool that can provide you with 24/7 updates regarding your website activity.

This tool can tell you everything you could ever want to know about a given page including:

• Clicks
• Bounce rate
• Average session duration
• How they got to the page
• Other pages clicked
• Actions are taken on a page

Understanding user behavior is an excellent way to measure the qualities of a site. Regarding structure, you'll want to be on the lookout for red flags such as high bounce rates or low session duration.

These negatives generally occur when a user is unsuccessful in finding the content they require. This may be a result of having low-quality content on the page.

However, if your research shows that you have content users want, but no one is clicking, you may need to revisit your site structure. Finding opportunities to make that content more accessible and visible through improved navigation and internal linking can help to improve your SEO and search rankings.

Quality Website Structure Provides a Quality User Experience

Creating a strong foundation for the website benefits the user first while offering SEO benefits as a bonus.

The type of structure you choose depends entirely on the complexity of your content and how you're using it to communicate with customers.

For most brands, a hierarchical structure will not only support you now but futureproof your content for years to come. Plan your keywords, compartmentalize the content, and establish clear pathways to and from each URL.

Finally, always monitor any changes or activity on your website if you want to improve your SEO. You cannot obtain better rankings overnight but through continued testing and mindful changes that ultimately improve the user experience.

Your website requires attractive, high-resolution images. Nothing turns off a user more than seeing a sterile page accompanied by a wall of text.

Writers can create the best content in the world, but it will often go overlooked without a bit of spice.

Image optimization is crucial for providing a quality user experience.

Beyond aesthetics, image optimization also directly impacts your Google search results. If you've been struggling to gain traction in the rankings race, this guide is a great place to start.

Below, we’ll discuss the following:

• What is image optimization?
• Why is image optimization important?
• How can I check my site for health errors?
• How to properly optimize an image?

What is Image Optimization?

Image optimization is the process of delivering an image of the highest quality possible while maintaining a smaller file size.

An image contains data just like any other form of content or media. The higher the resolution of an image, the more data that file contains. You will not only notice this with the increase in file size, but you can also see it with your eyes.

For example, an image that's 144p will feature minimal detail. You'll still be able to make out the broader image, but the colors will appear dull and blurry. It can be an eye-strain to look at a low-quality image on modern high-resolution screens.

Conversely, a 4K image is robust. You can see nuance in the coloring, shadows, and even fine details that you might otherwise only notice up close and in person. The downside is that such a detailed image generally has a large file size. Tools like image extender can be helpful when you need to resize or enhance images for different formats without losing quality.

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Why Does Image Optimization Matter?

Image optimization directly impacts your ability to host high-quality images without negatively impacting the user experience.

In other words, if you were to upload a 4K image to your home page without any optimization, a few things are going to happen.

• The average loading time for this page will increase significantly as it struggles to load the image.
• Because the image is in its native state, it will likely take up a significant portion of the page, disrupting the flow of your page design.
• The time to load may be long enough that the server request times out. The image may not load for the user or the page might not load altogether.

It may occur to you to avoid using high-quality images to avoid these issues. However, the better images you have, the more well-received it is by your audience.

Image Quality vs Audience Retention

We prefer images for several reasons. Experts explain that our minds process visual information 60,000 times faster than standard text. Images tend to stick in our brains longer than a few paragraphs. Another useful photo editing feature is the ability to change backgrounds effortlessly, which can help create more engaging visuals for your content. With advancements like ai photo editing, users can now achieve stunning results with minimal effort.

However, when we pair images with text, we end up getting better results all around. When users recall the visual cue, they are better able to remember the data associated with it.

This means that our company content becomes far more effective the minute we apply even one image. Dominating that mindshare is essential when it comes to improving our marketing results and sales.

Therefore, leveraging an AI image generator to produce higher-quality images increases the likelihood of making a lasting impression on audiences.

Impact on Page Speed

When it comes to technical SEO, image optimization is crucial.

As explained above, the first and most notable impact an image has is on load times. If the page or the image itself takes too long to load, your bounce rate will increase. This has a direct negative impact on your rankings.

A Pingdom website study found that the average loading time for a page is just over three seconds. When your load time surpasses this, your bounce rate skyrockets.

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The study finds that your bounce rate can reach nearly 40% by the time you hit 5 seconds of waiting. Unoptimized images will easily cause your page to exceed this limit.

Impact on Web Hosting Resources

Every website goes live on the web thanks to a service provided by your web host.

Depending on your hosting plan, your website may be using a shared server that meters how much bandwidth you may use. If the amount of data on your website regularly causes you to exceed the allocated bandwidth, you'll need to consider upgrading.

However, most brands, particularly small businesses, tend to stick with the cheapest plans due to having a smaller site. It's ultimately a waste to upgrade to a private, dedicated server when it's ultimately unnecessary.

Instead, using best practices to optimize images and host media on external servers will yield better results. Your site health will improve without the need to pay for increased server capacity.

How Can I Check for Image-Related Health Errors?

Because image sizes directly correlate to page speed, that's where we want to start.

Google wants your site to load faster for users. That's why it offers everyone its free PageSpeed Insights tool.

You can monitor every page on your website simply by entering the URL and clicking Analyze.

This will bring up all errors found on the webpage that are negatively impacting the loading times. Among these, you will find a metric titled Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which explains how quickly all content on the page loads.

Green means everything looks good.

Yellow indicates that the content is acceptable but could be improved.

Anything in red indicates that the page requires urgent attention.

PSI will also provide more detailed reports so that you know exactly where the errors lie. If you should switch your image to a different file type, it will notify you. It also shares the expected time savings you can expect after applying each optimization.

Finally, clicking the dropdown on the error will provide you with a brief explanation of how to go about correcting the error.

PageSpeed Insights is something you'll want to bookmark as it can help you with everything from image optimization to minifying scripts. It costs nothing to use and will never lead you astray when it comes to making proper updates.

Alternatively, your SEO team can use SEMRush to not only monitor image health but virtually every on-page or technical SEO issue.

How to Optimize Images for the Web?

The good news here is that optimizing images is a relatively simple task that anyone can accomplish.

It requires very little technical knowledge with no coding or web development skills required.

Use the Correct Image Format

There are numerous image file types you can encounter depending on the tech used to create the image or the software used to process it.

When it comes to general website use, we only need to consider three of them at any given time.

• JPEG – This is the most popular image format available. It features excellent compression efficiency, meaning you get a smaller file while still maintaining quality.

• PNG – If you see an image that isn’t a JPEG, it’s likely a PNG. This utilizes a different compression process that allows for better quality. However, because it holds more information, load times are usually longer than the alternative.
• SVG – This file type is for vector image files. Without getting too technical, a vector allows the image to scale to any size smaller or larger without losing any quality.

The question is - how do you know when to use each file type?

JPEG is the standard for photographic images. This is due to the universal compatibility with any photo-editing tools. It provides excellent quality and allows you to make any changes to your headshots or business photos with ease.

SVG is often the go-to choice for graphics, logos, and patterns. These types of images are typically less detail-intensive. Meanwhile, the ease of scalability makes your job so easy you'll find it hard to go back to using anything else.

However, that doesn't mean that PNG doesn't have its uses. In some cases, you may require the higher quality that the file type can provide. The more busy the graphic is, the more you may want to lean on the PNG. Just be wary of your load times before you upload too many.

Compress the Image File

In many cases, converting the image to the proper file type will be enough to do the job.

However, if images are still impacting load times, consider further compressing the file.

There are two primary methods for compressing an image file to reduce the size.

• Lossy Compression – Eliminates inessential pixel data from the original image
• Lossless Compression – Eliminates redundancies in data and preserves the original image

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While it seems like a no-brainer to utilize lossless, there are pros and cons to each method.

Lossy will reduce image quality, but yields a much smaller file size. This is our primary goal when trying to improve page speeds. You can also adjust the compression intensity to configure how much detail you're willing to lose.

Lossless preserves full quality. However, that means there are limitations to how much it can reduce the file size.

It's best to determine the best action on an image-by-image basis.

If the image can fare to lose some quality while benefiting from faster load times, use lossy.

If quality is essential, or if you only need slight compression, use lossless whenever possible.

Kraken.io may be the best paid option due to providing several professional compression options. It starts as low as $5/mo., but limits you to just 500 MB. Realistically, you're looking to use at least the BASIC plan at $9/mo. Which provides 2 GB.

When it comes to free options, there's JPEG-Optimizer. This allows you to manually set your desired compression levels but exclusively focuses on the one file type.

Finally, Tiny PNG allows compression of both JPEGs and PNG files on both free and paid plans. The free option limits you to just 5 MB, while the $39/year plan upgrades you to 75 MB.

Use Plugins Supported by Your CMS

Platforms like WordPress also provide users with a marketplace of third-party tools.

Some of the tools mentioned above like Tiny PNG have a WordPress plugin so that you can automatically track your images without leaving your website's back end.

A much more popular option exists called Smush. It offers lossless compression and can process up to 50 images simultaneously. Speeding up your webpage could be that easy.

Plugins will vary depending upon your CMS. Popular platforms like Shopify also feature alternatives like TinyIMG SEO & Image Optimizer on the Shopify App Store.

Perform a search for “image compression” or “image optimization” where your CMS plugins are found. We would recommend avoiding anything too new and sticking to apps that already have a strong history of reviews and updates to avoid issues with your images or site health. You can also contact a WordPress development expert to run a quick check of your image libraries and link to a much more effective plugin that won’t break your website.

Use a Content Delivery Network

A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is an external network of servers that helps deliver content to the end-user faster.

Normally, your website server delivers your rich media to the user from the same point regardless of where they are in the world. This can result in unnecessary latency the more that the content needs to pass through additional servers.

A CDN eliminates that slowdown by caching the data in servers all over. Then, when a user goes to visit a page, their browser can pull the cached data from a server closer to their immediate proximity.

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CDNs work to make the internet as a whole faster and more accessible for everyone.

Many popular web hosts now offer content delivery options including BlueHost and Cloudflare. Check with your provider today to see if you can set up a CDN for your content for a small additional monthly fee.

Further Optimizing Images for SEO

After converting and compressing your images, be sure to run another PageSpeed test.

If your page speeds are looking good - congratulations!

However, there's still a bit more we can do on our back end to benefit your website's search result rankings. These tips are best practices for SEO and should be utilized any time you add a new image file to a page.

Always Include Alternative Text

Alternative text, also known as alt text or alt tags, is a short description that appears when the image cannot load.

Including alt text benefits the reader, but it also allows Google's search crawler to understand the image file.

Adding alt text is simple regardless of which CMS you are using.

When you are in the editor mode on a web page, click on the image in question. A menu will appear that shows details about the image including resolution, file type, a caption field, and an alt text field.

Your alt text needs to be short, descriptive, yet to the point.

Here is an image we can use as an example:

We want to explain what’s in the image as well as the context if possible. Here we have DashClicks CEO Chad Kodary speaking to the audience welcoming them to our marketing education YouTube channel.

A poor example of alt text would be:

“Man speaks to the camera in front of a monitor”

A better example would be:

“DashClicks CEO Chad Kodary welcoming the audience to YouTube marketing education channel from office”

While both descriptions are accurate, the latter helps Google better identify key details for proper classification. We may even have an opportunity to throw in a keyword like “marketing” as long as it’s relevant to the image.

As always, the better Google’s search crawler can understand the content, the easier it will be to categorize and rank the page.

Give Your Image Files a Proper Name

Though it doesn’t get seen by users, Google also needs a proper file name for the image.

It’s easy to upload a file and completely forget this step. That’s why you end up with files titled “IMG_00024581.jpg.”

Instead, take a few seconds to rename the file something like “Technical_SEO_Infographic.jpg.” This is short, descriptive, and gets the message across effectively.

Accurately List the Number of Images on Your XML Sitemap

An XML Sitemap is an important SEO tool that helps Google’s search crawler identify and crawl the essential pages on your website.

A sitemap lists URLs, shows the last date you made edits, and can even allow you to hide certain pages from the crawler. This can help your SEO in several ways such as avoiding duplicate content or overusing your monthly crawl budget.

However, you can also dictate the number of images you can find on a page within the sitemap. When the crawler sees that there is an image on the sitemap, it knows to look for that image on the page. It then confirms the image, classifies it based on the content and alt text, and includes it as a ranking factor.

Make Sure Your Images Are Responsive

A responsive image is one that automatically adjusts its dimensions to suit any screen size or device.

Whether someone is looking at the image on a 4K monitor or a mobile phone, the image should clearly appear without negatively impacting other aspects of the UI.

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One way to make sure your images are responsive is to utilize SVG files as we discussed above. Many modern CMSs will also automatically scale images for desktop, tablet, and mobile.

If none of these apply to you, then you'll need to get more technical with your cascading style sheets.

Cascading style sheets (CSS) is the coding language that defines how the different elements of your page should appear on a screen.

You can use CSS to either:

• Define specific rules for specific screen sizes
• Set responsiveness rules to make the image automatically adjust

This requires some coding experience and knowledge, and you may need to enlist the help of an expert.

If you're interested, you can learn more about CSS and responsive image rules here.

Optimize Images for the Web the Right Way

Image optimization is essential for helping your website stand out positively.

Not only does it make a lasting impact on users, Google actively seeks out images and related site health errors to factor into your search engine rankings.

Thankfully, optimizing images is a relatively simple process that takes little time to achieve.

Make sure you're using the correct file types, look into compression tools, and switch to a CDN if your web host provides this feature.

Finally, don't forget to edit your images on the content side by adding alt text, file names, and appropriate responsiveness rules to your CSS.