As the owner of a startup company, you might have too many things on your To-Do List. The primary challenge is to achieve the desired return on investment within the given budget. The second biggest challenge is to let the world know about you and your products and services. If nobody knows about you and your services, it is impossible to conduct business, and in the modern digital ecosystem, search engines are the best place to begin it.

When you optimize your website for search engines, you let people know about your brand and how you can solve their problems and answer their needs. It also increases the visibility of your website on search engines. No wonder SEO is so crucial for startups!

Apart from increasing visibility on search engines, startups are supposed to do several other things to survive, such as market research, strategic planning, revenue generation, competitor analysis, brand building, etc. However, search engine optimization is at the core of everything. Before you do anything, you need to help people find your business online and build your brand.

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4 Reasons Startups Can't Ignore SEO Anymore

No wonder SEO is termed as the soul of digital marketing. With billions of searches being performed on different search engines, search dominates the digital marketing landscape. It is the primary source of traffic for most brands because most of the searches are performed with commercial intent.

Therefore, your visibility on search engines should be at the bottom of your marketing plan, and everything else, such as revenue generation and brand building, is associated with it.

Here are a few reasons startups can't ignore search engine optimization:

1. A Powerful Element of Marketing

Ā After Google's launch in 1998, search engines became the primary tool for navigation of the World Wide Web. In the 21st century, online search has become an integral part of our day-to-day activities. These searches connect brands with customers globally. So, SEO can connect your brand with your clients on the lowest budget.

For example, when you search for water sports worldwide, you'll come across a listicle by Pandotrip, and the first entry introduces you to diving in Jellyfish Lake, in Eil Malk Island, Palau. Without search engine optimization, it could have been indeed challenging to know about this exotic water sports destination.

To sum up, you cannot do without SEO. If you cannot rank on the top slots on the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), try to get yourself mentioned in a top-ranking listicle or directory, and they will promote your business. A well-planned SEO strategy will improve your search engine rankings and online visibility.

2. SEO Helps You Scale Your Business on a Shoestring Budget

SEO makes the digital marketing landscape democratic. It means that search engines don't discriminate among small, medium, and large enterprises and provide you equal opportunities to appear in the search results. However, you need to be strategic in your SEO approach since the scale of the challenge is massive, especially for startups.

Startups don't have the marketing resources like the more prominent organizations and established businesses. It becomes challenging for them to compete with the existing players on the first page of search results. However, with a strategic approach towards content, on-page, and off-page SEO, you can gain search engine visibility similar to these top players. With the best SEO practices and knowledge of SEO fundamentals, you can earn the top slots with the popular keywords in a few months.

It will allow you to establish your brand identity and promote your products and services without spending heavily on advertising. Focusing on long-tail keywords is considered among the best SEO practices as it is easier to rank on these keywords. Apart from that, you get highly targeted traffic that boosts your conversion rate with long-tail keywords.

3. SEO Allows You to Collect Behavioral Data of Your Customers

With more than 66% of the global population accessing the Internet in 2021 and almost 93% online experiences starting with search, the world is becoming digital with an overwhelming intensity. Most of our decisions are based on data and technology these days. When you wish to fly abroad, you compare different airlines' prices, convenience, and safety online. You subconsciously decide which airlines to choose based on your online interactions and perceptions.

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We also call it branding. Data constantly surrounds you through streaming videos, social media posts, blogs, user reviews, news, ad clicks, and branded content. It instantaneously helps us decide which brand to choose. That's why brands have a compelling need to increase their online presence and learn from their customers' behavioral data. The behavioral data can help you analyze the past, current, and future trends and accordingly adapt your SEO strategy.

The overwhelming data available on the Internet provides you with numerous opportunities to target new customers and serve the existing ones with better products.

Look at the overwhelming data produced on the Internet every minute. As a startup, you should maximize this data for strategy formulation and business growth.

4. SEO is Affordable Yet Brings Enormous Opportunities to the Table

The startup’s journey is characterized by a bumpy ride, cash crunch, confusion, lack of experience, and enormous challenges. In such a situation, search engine optimization comes to your rescue by helping you position your products and services and target the right audience. When you identify and use the popular keywords in your niche, you make your brand more searchable, so your target audience can easily find you organically.

• Let Your CMS Support Your SEO Strategy

SEO allows you to generate more traffic and leads virtually free of cost. All you need to do is find time for SEO and work systematically and strategically for a few months. You also need to figure out how to use your favorite content management system to implement your SEO strategy or select the best CMS for SEO based on your needs, leveraging robust SEO tools and features (such as customizable meta tags, clean URL structures, and integrated analytics) that it provides.

• Set Up an Analytics Account

The next step is to set up your analytics account and learn about the user behavior on your site. You will get enough insights to improve the right features on your website.

• Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

If you can generate leads through organic traffic, it will drastically reduce your marketing budget. You can complement your strategy with the right social media platforms, blogs, video hosting sites, and other tools to market your brand.

SEO is a low-cost option compared to the other paid marketing options such as Google Ads, social media ads, and purchasing leads from third-party vendors.

SEO Tips for Startups in 2022

Since SEO in digital marketing is the oldest online marketing practice, SEO for startups can be challenging. First of all, you need to define your SEO goals and objectives as it's an ongoing process and continues as you add more content to your website.

Start with the primary keywords people use to find businesses and products similar to yours. Focus on long-tail keywords initially and come back to short-tail keywords when you start ranking for the long ones. Here are a few SEO tips for startups in 2022:-1. Start with an SEO Strategy: Determine your goals and expectations from your website and build a solid SEO strategy accordingly.

2. Set Reasonably achievable goals: It's crucial to set short-term and long-term goals for your startup if you don't want to get caught up in the daily grind. For example, if you are looking for quality traffic for conversion, don't waste your time and money on general traffic and clicks.

3. Allocate a reasonable budget for SEO: Many startups don't allocate a specific budget for SEO, so their SEO activities become inconsistent.

4. Begin with your SEO practices right from building your website: Many startups implement SEO on poorly built websites, whereas SEO starts from a functional, user-friendly website that offers an exemplary user interface and user experience.

5. Make your website load faster: Minimize unnecessary elements and make your website load more quickly. It's a crucial Google ranking factor impacting user experience.

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6. Focus on local SEO first: Local SEO is like claiming your physical existence on Google, the king of all search engines. Go to Google My Business and add all the necessary details to help people find you and know about your business.

7. Create a mobile-friendly website: Since mobile searches account for more than 70% of the overall search volume, focus on building mobile-friendly websites. Ensure that your website is fully functional on mobile devices and offers a seamless experience.

8. Spend time on competitive research: If you want to stay ahead of others, spend time on competitor research. Analyze their keywords, links, and other practices. It will save you time and money.

9. Target keywords with commercial intent: Don't work hard on every keyword suggested by your keyword research tool. Focus on the keywords with commercial intent and suitable for achieving your conversion goals.

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10. Publish high-quality content: Use analytics tools such as Google Analytics and Buzzsumo to discover high-quality content. It should solve your prospects' problems and answer their needs and wants. Engaging content can lead you to the top of search engine result pages quicker than any other technique.

11. Hire white-label SEO services if confused: You can hire white-label SEO services if SEO seems overwhelming. This way, you'll save time and money and leverage the expertise of SEO professionals at an affordable cost.

Conclusion

Launching a startup is not for the frail and faint-hearted people. It is often a rollercoaster ride with challenging terrains. Initially, you need to invest a lot of time and money to survive. You face unpleasant situations and challenges almost every day, from tactical and operational to strategic front. And there is no way you can stop them unless you quit.

However, with strategic planning, you can make your life easy to a great extent. It is crucial to avoid the rush and make hasty decisions. If a strategic step, a partnership, or a tool can make your life easy, don't hesitate to grab this opportunity.

Search engine optimization is a proven strategy to promote a startup and sustain its growth. It's a worthwhile investment that keeps on paying rich dividends for a long time. Compared to the cost of the paid campaigns, it is virtually free of charge. If you don't have the required SEO skills or can't afford to hire numerous SEO experts for your agency, you can employ white-label SEO services from DashClicks and reap its unmatched rewards.

Digital marketing is all about understanding human behavior and accordingly developing robust strategies. To succeed in your digital marketing campaigns, understanding customer psychology is essential. If you cannot understand customer behavior and psychology, even the most expensive paid campaigns cannot bring results for your business.

What is a Marketing Strategy?

According to Aha, you need a precise marketing strategy to ensure the success of your business. It's essential to create a long-term plan to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage in a predefined market. It includes aligning your organization around how you will reach your target audience, explaining the benefits of your products and services, and encouraging the audience to become your customers.

Marketing is exceptionally crucial for the survival and growth of your business. These are the two significant aspects of a successful strategic marketing plan:

A. The selection of the best marketing techniquesB. The knowledge of how you can implement these techniques for marketing your business

This blog post will discuss the five most powerful digital marketing strategies brands can use to produce the best ROI.

1. Set a Goal and a Budget

You are more likely to achieve success in your marketing campaign strategy if you have specific and measurable goals tied to it. You should also set a specific budget for it to evaluate your performance.

Always set SMART goals, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound. These five factors decide the dynamics of success.

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You should choose up to 5 KPIs to evaluate your performance, which includes traffic, leads, and direct revenue. You can put aside a 7-8% budget of your total revenue for your online campaigns.

Moreover, it would be best if you focused on achieving your goals and not the goals themselves. You should create a plan and a process for reaching your goals.

KPIs should be used to track and monitor your performance and to know where you stand regarding your goals.

2. Leverage Influencer Marketing

High ROI primarily depends on your campaign performance. Building influence is the key to supercharging your marketing strategies. Influencer marketing is a powerful and effective strategy that achieves a return of $6.5 for every dollar spent. Some top-performing brands also reported earning up to $18 per dollar spent.

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Therefore, for achieving better results in a limited time frame, influencer marketing is getting popular among small business owners.

Here are some of the most rapidly growing customer acquisition methods.

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Following are the steps to create a successful influencer marketing campaign.

A. Identify Your Target Audience

With the growing number of social media users and communities, influencers are also increasing in leaps and bounds. Every influencer targets a particular demographic and psychographic segment. So, first, identify your target market. It will help you to choose the right influencer.

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B. Define Your Goals and KPIs

Knowing your goals is the key to success while choosing the right influencers. Also, identifying the KPIs will make it easy for you to track your campaign. You can set several goals to ensure sales, and some of these goals can be as follows:

• Increasing leads
• Increasing brand awareness
• Increasing referrals
• Becoming a thought leader
• Increasing customer value of your products
• Growing your social media presence
• Building a community
• Earning media value

C. Choose the Right Social Media Platforms

Apart from the major social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, numerous emerge every year. All of them have specific target audiences and interest groups. You can tap the following social media platforms for influencer marketing.

• Instagram
• Facebook
• TikTok
• YouTube
• Twitter

Instagram is a popular social media platform where you can find numerous influencers according to different niches. These influencers create and post content for their target audience with a high engagement level. There are different segments where influencers dominate the social media space, such as fashion, meditation, yoga, beauty, health & fitness, travel, business, making money online, lifestyle, minimalism, animals, gaming, relationships, etc.

Find influencers whose audiences match yours. Only then you'd be able to derive some benefit from such partnerships. Also, don't stick to any single platform; instead, go for multiple platforms to explore various opportunities to tap new audiences.

D. Consider the Types of Influencers

You can find all types of influencers in the social media space, including small and big influencers. Here we have listed four prominent types of influencers in terms of their followers.

• Nano influencers (1K–10K followers)
• Micro-influencers (10K–100K followers)
• Macro influencers (100K–1M followers)
• Mega influencers or celebrities (1M+ followers)

The top benefit of using small influencers is that their engagement rates are pretty high even though they have less reach than the mega influencers. Another advantage of collaborating with small influencers is that they charge much less than big influencers.

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So, you can simultaneously collaborate with multiple influencers and increase your reach. Sometimes, small influencers enjoy a highly engaged audience, but they don't experience working with brands. It might be one of the reasons why they exercise so much influence.

Their audience and friends have a high degree of trust in them, so you can hire them to build trust. Do some research, check their content and engagement levels, and ask for recommendations from brands before you shortlist influencers. You can use direct messaging and post comments on their feed to reach these small influencers.

E. Create Great Content

Last but not least, great content leads to great results. When you collaborate with an influencer, share your product with them to exhibit it in front of the camera. Unique unboxing experience often entices the prospects.

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Apart from that, you can use promotions and discounts. Promote your influencers' posts about your products. Don't forget to use the popular hashtags to boost sales and conversion.

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Brands can showcase their influencer generated content on website, like embedding Instagram feed on website. This improves authenticity of your brand, get more likes and followers, increase public testimonials and brand credibility.

F. Track Your Campaign

To run a successful, influential marketing campaign, you need to regularly track your campaign. Choose the metrics based on your KPIs. For example, to track the reach and engagement of the influencers' posts, you can use metrics such as page views and clicks. The tools you can use to track these metrics can be UTM code and Google Analytics.

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3. Focus On a Single Social Channel

Since social media is vast and powerful, it could be unproductive and overwhelming to focus on multiple social media platforms at a time. Nobody has the time and resources to focus on multiple social media platforms.

Here is the 12 step strategy suggested by Social Media Merkato to champion one social media platform:

• Define target audience
• Create buyer persona or customer avatars
• Research influencers using BuzzSumo
• Identify the social media platforms used by your audience
• Also, consider your competitors’ favorite social media platforms
• Address your audience’s pain points through your content
• Create your pillar content or content bank
• Engage with your audience and nurture relationships
• Publish consistently and regularly
• Focus on getting more followers
• Automate social sharing using tools like Hootsuite
• Track your performance and tweak your strategies

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4. Leverage Email Marketing

Email marketing is still the most effective go-to marketing strategy for various brands, especially for revenue generation.

Here are a few ways to build your email list:

• Create a content strategy to drive organic traffic and clicks
• Capture visitors’ email addresses through popups
• Offer valuable resources and tutorial videos in exchange for email addresses of the visitors
• Ask people to subscribe to your email list using a banner in your business signature
• Tools like the Designhill Email Signature Generator can be a great help to build your email list using banners links and call to action.

5. Focus On SEO and Content Marketing

Content marketing has the immense potential of driving sales for your business. Let's discuss how content marketing fits into your overall digital marketing strategy. Content marketing acts as a double-edged sword. Apart from attracting prospects and visitors, it also helps you move them through a marketing funnel for maximum conversion and ROI.

The same is true for SEO which is extremely useful for increasing your visibility on search engines and driving tons of traffic to the website. Learn how to optimize your blog post for SEO to drive targeted organic traffic.

Content marketing aims to provide the appropriate information to the prospect at the right time during the customer journey to help them move ahead in the marketing funnel.

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For example, pricing information is needed once the prospect is aware of the product and its features. It is required in the consideration stage in the marketing funnel. So, the pricing page of a product helps the prospect make an informed decision.

Here is the pricing page of BuzzSumo:

So, content is any piece of information that helps you move the prospect in the marketing funnel. Many people confuse blogging with content marketing, but content marketing is much broader in scope. You can use our content marketing checklist to ensure that you are on the right track.

Conclusion

There are many digital marketing strategies you can try, but in this blog, we have listed the five most powerful strategies that can be the game-changer for your digital marketing campaigns. We sincerely hope that through these five strategies, you will be able to increase your ROI and ensure the success of your campaign.

If you know any other marketing strategy that is equally powerful, please mention it in the comments. Share this post with your friends to achieve even more success with their campaigns. If you need a platform to monitor all your campaigns in one place, and improve your performance, sign up for free for the white-label platform at DashClicks.

Planning is the essential element of success, and the sales process is not an exception. You can’t succeed in a job as demanding as sales without a strategic sales plan.

A well-conceived plan drives more sales and helps you assess your current performance. So, you may quickly know where you are and where you should be. And the most crucial part of the whole process is how to achieve your sales targets.

This article will discuss how to create a sales plan that actually works and boosts sales.

What is a Sales Plan?

The sales team uses a sales plan as a strategy document that brings the entire team together to achieve predetermined goals and revenue targets. It helps them focus on the big picture so that the team members can collaborate, work as a team, employ the required resources and sync their activities. Here, the ultimate goal is to achieve the best results in a stipulated period.

So, a sales strategy plan will generally include:

Sales Planning and Strategy Making Process

Sales planning isn’t limited to creating a strategy document that the sales team can refer to once in a while to get the sales direction. On the flip side, it is a high-level strategy document that ensures that the sales targets are achieved consistently and with a high degree of certainty. So, it’s primarily data-driven and offers a practical approach considering all the obstacles in the way.

To create a sales business plan, you should do the following:

1. Identify your business goals and set sales targets accordingly to ensure a steady revenue stream
2. Collect and analyze the previous years’ sales data and identify trends, inconsistencies, and major issues
3. Identify the metrics to measure your sales performance
4. Do an honest evaluation of where you are and where you want to be
5. Use SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, and Threat) analysis to identify the obstacles and how you can capitalize on the existing opportunities
6. Do realistic sales forecasting in light of the past trends and demand in the market
7. Make a list of the gaps you need to plugin
8. Make a plan to capitalize on the missed opportunities
9. Collaborate with marketing and product teams and involve them in the sales strategy-making process

Once your strategy doc is ready, you need to review and update it every year to maintain your sales performance. Make sure you stick to your sales planning process.

The Benefits of a Sales Plan

The biggest challenge for a business is not to let the sales dry up, as a steady cash flow is a prerequisite for the very survival of a business. It is also the ultimate objective of a sales business plan besides the secondary goals of organizing and motivating the sales force. So a sales plan is never an option; it’s a must-have for the sales teams.

Salespeople can be efficient and at the top of their game, but they are not planners. So, unless everybody is held responsible for their tasks, you can’t achieve desired results. A written plan infuses accountability into the team members. A sales plan also promotes diligence and allows the teams to execute their best ideas.

It also helps keep everybody on the same page and work in sync with different teams. The workflow becomes smooth and efficient when you have common priorities and targets.

With a sales plan, you can ensure that you achieve your sales and revenue goals within the stipulated time. Without a sales plan, there’s a high likelihood that your team members may feel purposeless, directionless, and lazy. A well-laid-out plan motivates the stakeholders and allows you to track your performance and tweak your tactics accordingly.

How to Write a Sales Plan?

A sales plan is created for the common folks responsible for achieving their sales targets. So, it shouldn’t be too formal. A sales plan should outline everything you need to document to run your business successfully. You can tag a deadline to it. The period can range from a month to a year. The most important sections of a sales plan are as follows.

1. Goal-Setting

Goal setting is the most effective technique to achieve high productivity and success in life. However, unrealistic goals can be counterproductive and even lead to failure. So, you should set smart goals – realistic goals, yet they push the individuals to perform at their best.

When you focus on SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) sales goals, you don’t just chase numbers; you build a feasible process that you can replicate over and over again.

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It doesn’t mean that you should remain in your comfort zone. SMART goals help you stretch your capabilities, yet it keeps things doable.

2. SWOT Analysis

SWOT is the abbreviation for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. The SWOT analysis adds more certainty to your sales plan. The success of your business depends on your sales performance, and the prime reason most businesses fail is that their sales dry up and they run out of cash to remain afloat. SWOT analysis helps you address the core issues responsible for inconsistency in sales. On the flip side, you can use your USPs and other strengths to boost sales and find a wider audience for your products and services.

3. Your Strategy

The best sales strategy is to differentiate your product from others, and you need a documented plan for that. Another approach to boost sales is to position your products and services. It means that you should focus your advertising messages toward a specific audience and position your product that serves a particular purpose. The sales will pick up once you differentiate your services from your competition.

You can ensure consistent sales if you successfully address customers’ needs at every sales funnel stage. So, while making a sales plan, you should ensure that the customer needs are prioritized everywhere. Rest assured, this would be a foolproof plan that will not disappoint you.

Your sales plan should be balanced and incorporate both inbound and outbound tactics. These days outbound strategies work only in limited instances, but they can be convenient when your organic presence is insufficient. Similarly, inbound strategies ensure consistent traffic and sales.

4. Your Tactics

Fancy ideas are good to try, but a sales plan shouldn’t be based on that. So, be realistic. You need to use measurable benchmarks to achieve specific goals. For that, you need to be data-driven. If you can’t quantify something, it can’t be performed in a given time frame. So, set smaller yet realistic goals. Achieving small goals builds momentum and puts you in the right frame of mind to achieve the bigger ones.

You can also use tools to get actionable insights and specify your goals. According to Statista, the sales forecast for the global jacket and coat market was estimated to be around $94.5 billion in 2021. In 2016, it was just $81 billion. So, the premium jacket brands can quickly increase their sales targets by at least 5% this year.

Another benefit of having a realistic sales plan is galvanizing your entire team around your business goals. Setting a 50% higher sales target for the next five years looks fine, but that may not motivate your teams now.

Tips to Create a Sales Plan

1. Align your plan with company goals
2. Be research and data-driven
3. Involve team members in the goal-setting process
4. Use easy to understand language
5. Screen your facts and data
6. Tie organizational goals to individual goals
7. Revisit your goals regularly
8. Split it into tactical plans
9. Track previous data
10. Keep your ROI analysis-ready

A sales plan needs to be informal and easy to understand so that everybody can follow it. It serves as a guidebook that everyone can refer to for direction, and it should be kept flexible to accommodate changes in the external environment.

A. Align Your Plan With Company Goals

No organization can succeed with vague goals. That’s the reason we put so much emphasis on goal setting. However, before setting company goals, you should make sure that the entire leadership in your organization is on the same page. Lack of clarity may lead to confusion and chaos during the execution phase. The leaders must believe in the goals they set for the company entirely to motivate their team. Set achievable and tangible goals, and your body language will reflect them.

B. Be Data-Driven

You should find ways to cut through the excessive “noise” in the field of marketing. Otherwise, you’ll end up shooting in the dark and waste your energy on the wrong prospects. Study trends and data related to your niche and determine your ideal customers. Because of the dynamic nature of markets, the demographics and psychographics of our target audience keep on changing. However, most of us never adapt to these changes and keep on chasing the wrong prospects. On the flip side, you tend to ignore the rising new customer segments. When you are data-driven and use statistics to guide you, you are unlikely to commit such mistakes.

C. Involve Team Members in the Goal-Setting Process

One significant benefit of involving the team members in the goal-setting process is to see the big picture where the attainment of company goals becomes their milestones. The leadership must decide the objectives and key results for the organization. Once they do that, you should share this critical information with other team members, especially those tasked with its execution.

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It will allow them to discuss and explore what they can contribute towards the team goals. Invite suggestions from your teammates and let them contribute according to their strengths and expertise. You’ll be surprised to know how efficiently you can galvanize your team to achieve your business goals. A Gallup study suggests that team members are 3.6 times more inclined to engage when they are made part of the goal-setting process.

D. Use Easy to Understand Language

When you use easy language, you can swiftly convince the masses. Avoid using jargon and acronyms that only a few people can understand. Business jargon can be particularly complex. How would you react if some use the phrase “blue-sky thinking“? You may be tempted to use more words than you need to express yourself. But using more words can reduce clarity and flow, and people may find it difficult to understand. Use plain language and tie your company objectives to individual performance.

E. Screen Your Facts and Data

Since marketing and sales rely too heavily on facts and data, we must deal with the numbers carefully. A slight mistake can lead your marketing plan to fizzle out. Accuracy can be a game-changer. So, take your time to dig into the datasheets and screen everything from facts and figures to projections before writing your plan on paper.

F. Tie Organizational Goals to Individual Goals

People are generally invested in their performance and success. Therefore, the best way to bring about the best performance from your team is to tie the organizational goals to the individual performance. If there is a gap between these two objectives, you will hardly achieve significant results. You can reach it by employing this two-way approach.

1. Making the goal-setting process a collaborative effort where employees are equally involved in it along with the company leadership
2. Communicating with the employees in a way that they see personal growth in achieving organizational goals
3. Let the employees fully understand the objectives and take ownership of the tasks assigned to them

G. Track Your Team’s Progress

Too often, the management doesn’t track their goals along the way. The usual course of action includes:

• Briefing the team about the organizational objectives.
• Setting a time frame.
• Measuring the achievement at the end of the stipulated time.

It is not a good practice, and it can often lead to disappointment if you observe that the team is far behind its targets. The usual excuse cited is the lack of time. But, it’s devastating when you see that your expectations weren’t met at the finish line. So, the best practice is to periodically track the team’s progress and how it’s faring against the goals initially set.

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H. Split It Into Tactical Plans

Since sales comprise several tasks, splitting those tasks into smaller tactical units is crucial. This way, you can achieve it quickly without disrupting the overall flow. Some of these tactical tasks can be as follows.

• Account executives and sales representatives
• Sales operations
• Sales management
• Customer service and support

Get in touch and collaborate with the concerned teams and departments such as marketing, sales, & customer support, etc., to ensure that your sales plan is on track at different tactical levels.

I. Track Previous Data

You can successfully mirror past performance and plans to achieve your future sales targets. It’s crucial to gather insights as well. You can use the past data and stats to spot your mistakes and how you can correct those mistakes. For example, if you failed to achieve the sales number the last time, you can dig into your data sheets and figure out why that happened. It will allow you to view your errors from a different perspective.

J. Keep Your ROI Analysis-Ready

With the sales plan and projections, you also need to present detailed cost analysis and ROI to your stakeholders. It builds confidence and prevents any disagreement in the future over the proposed budget. It’s applicable for any investment in tools or software or addition in human resources.

Sales Strategy Template

You need a sales plan template before you write your sales strategy. A strategic business plan template allows you to incorporate and record every detail of your sales plan and make it user-friendly. Initiate your sales planning by using the sales plan template given below. You need to follow the prompts as the sections are already designed to enter the required information.

However, you need to make sure that the language you use is straightforward. There shouldn’t be any ambiguity or complexity because it can lead to confusion afterward. Apart from that, you should also not use jargon that cross-functional teams may find difficult to understand. You can use different content formats to fill in the information, such as text, spreadsheet, graphics, screenshots, and charts.

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The business plan template is flexible, so you can quickly adapt it to suit your business requirements.

Some of the sections in a sales template are as follows.

A. Executive Summary

An executive summary is a formal and brief document about your sales plan. It provides the reader a bird’s eye view of the entire sales plan and the strategies that you are going to use. Apart from that, it also gives you vital information about your sales and revenue goals, time frame, and strategies you will employ. Your executive summary should not be more than two pages.

B. Business Goals and Revenue Targets

Most of the business goals are inspired by revenue targets. Therefore, the revenue projections are a crucial part of a sales template. Your strategy isn’t complete unless the target revenue figures are classified in your template for different categories.

C. Review of Past Performance

The best way to minimize the number of errors is to revisit your past performance. Conduct an honest analysis of the mistakes that caused you to fail and lose track and the strengths that led to positive outcomes. This practice can alone put you on track to success in sales.

D. Specific Strategies

It’s crucial to mention the sales strategies and playbooks you will use. It brings transparency and makes sure that everybody is aware and on the same page about the sales strategies to be used. It also helps in a fair analysis and making strategy tweaks if something doesn’t happen according to your expectations.

E. Customer Avatars & Segments

Identifying customer segments and making buyer personas is the key to identifying revenue generation streams. Over time, new customer segments keep on emerging, and if you can keep track, you can successfully tap them and generate another revenue stream. You can also do it through referrals, upsells, and sales renewals.

F. Workforce and Resources

Sales can’t function in isolation. You need to provide relevant information to the cross-functional teams. In this section, you can add the summary of inputs you need for the sales process. It may include the tools, software, and human resources. Mention the current resources and proposed inputs, and justify why you need that.

E. Action Plan

The simple formula for achieving success is setting a goal, arranging the inputs needed,

and attaching a deadline. You also need to develop strategies and related tactics. It is referred to as the action plan. It also calls for assigning tasks and responsibilities to the team members recruited to implement the sales process.

Here is how an action plan looks like.

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F. Sales Tools

This section should add all the tools you need to accelerate the sales process and make it smoother. It may also include AI tools that automate various sales tasks to avoid unnecessary delays in the process. Listing sales tools is an excellent way to collaborate with cross-functional teams to know the processes, workflow and bridge the gaps.

G. Performance Metrics

Measuring the performance is as important as the sales process itself. So, the last section is meant for performance metrics. So, this section highlights how you will track your organizations’ sales performance. You can also add links to the resources or tools you are using.

This section may also include report generation and storage. It should also highlight how you interpret the report and assess the team performance.

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How to Sell Your Sales Plan?

Now that you have created a brilliant sales plan, you need your stakeholders and managers to buy-in. Your sales team is all pumped in and ready to dive in. Your management wants you to develop a plan with high chances of success, and you desperately need stakeholder buy-in. To achieve this, you need to get ready for a powerful presentation.

Still, your proposed plan may or may not be accepted by the management. The management may offer a budget that can be less than you asked for. Maybe they have some other thing in mind that you don’t know about yet. In that case, you would have to update your plan and manage to work with the existing resources.

Conclusion

It’s impossible to achieve your sales targets without a sales strategy plan. The key is to identify the major roadblocks and challenges and work your way up to overcome them. Once the implementation hassles are resolved and bottlenecks cleared, your sales plan will become a set of instructions and a to-do list that you can follow smoothly. It makes things easy to organize. What are your biggest challenges while making a sales plan? Let’s know in the comments.

There are several reasons why a landing page wouldn’t work. One of the reasons can be an unsuitable offer. Your hard work in creating irresistible expanded text ads will go down the drain if these ads are not supported by matching landing pages.

Therefore, it is crucial to optimize your landing pages. Make sure that they are not underwhelming and match in tone and design with the ad, so a user is impressed and goes through it.

The landing pages should be fine-tuned and consistent. If a visitor finds any inconsistency, there can be an expectation mismatch. As a result, they might get put off, leave your landing page unimpressed and go back to the search engine result pages. It is a marketer’s fiasco as you pay the advertisement platform to send these visitors to your landing page, only to bounce back as the landing page disappoints them.

A mismatched offer will not appeal to a visitor regardless of how powerful your ad copy is or how impressive your landing page design is. Make sure that your landing page carries an appealing offer along with some enticing benefits for your audience. It will push people to click on your call-to-action button. An attractive layout, typefaces, images, colors, and a natural person for chat support can be a big plus for an enhanced conversion rate.

The next most crucial step to ensure success with the above measures is to do A/B testing. It should be an ongoing process to hire a full-time guy for that. Regularly tweak your copy and design and cull the bad ones to see how the conversion rate soars.

4 Crazy-Effective PPC Landing Page Tips

We will not discuss these measures today that yield results in the long run. Instead, we will discuss four killer techniques and best practices for PPC landing pages that will help boost your conversion rate quickly. These are proven tips from the experts that work like magic.

1. Write Brief & Compelling Copy

People don’t read; they scan. So, make sure that you aren’t throwing an encyclopedia of information in front of a visitor. So, your ad copy should be compelling yet brief. Leverage bullet points to convey your message with more clarity.

Here are ten tips for writing an excellent ad copy.

• Show the customers how you can solve their problems.
• Use emotional triggers to generate sales (Fear, Anger, Excitement, Disgust & Love, etc.)
• Move away from features, focus on benefits (Comfortability, Faster approach, Effects, & Precision, etc.)
• Leverage FOMO (Fear of Missing Out, a deadline, etc.)
• Avoid generic and typical salesy language. Use specific calls to action.
• Use relevant keywords in your headline and description.
• Help the user decide within seconds.
• Keep your navigational funnel shorter and help users complete your CTA as quickly as possible.
• Use the power of suggestion. End your ad copy with persuasive but straightforward language.
• Do A/B testing of your ad copies and keep on testing.

2. Honeytrap Bots with “Honeypots”

Honeypots are used as software code snippets that you can embed into your landing page form to ward off unwanted spambots.

Sometimes, bots land up on your landing page when you expect to see leads and waste your precious time and money. The most common method to deal with such bots is to use CAPTCHA, which can badly impact user experience. Most people don’t get it correct the first time.

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So, while it's effective in keeping the spam away, it may also prevent otherwise serious prospects who might otherwise have converted easily.

How Does the Honeypot Technique Work?

Honeypots capitalize on the idiocy of the bots. For example, you can create a hidden field in addition to the actual field on your form. The aim is to trick the bots into filling this additional field too. Human prospects can't see that. So, when you receive leads, filter the ones that have completed the hidden field.

The code you can use on your PPC landing page looks like the one below.

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This code can create a hidden email field apart from the actual email field on your form. You should include a “display: none” CSS rule, as it will keep it hidden from the actual humans’ eyes.

You can also make your job easy and dive right into the place where leads land up if you use a WordPress plugin  Contact Form 7 Honeypot. Google Ads allows you to filter the IP addresses of these spammers forever.

You can exclude these IPs by navigating to the Settings tab in the campaign.

Then go to Advanced Settings>>IP Exclusions>>Manage IP Exclusions>>Edit

All you need to do is paste the list of IP addresses of these spammers into the given field. The upper limit of the bots you can flag for the exclusion is 500 in a campaign.

3. Manage Negative Reviews

Before we discuss it further, let’s understand the dynamics of customer reviews. The people who leave reviews on your website are either the most ecstatic or the ones who are incredibly frustrated with the overall experience. A tiny segment of highly delighted customers may not boost conversion.

What makes it worse is that it takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience.

The satisfied customers generally won’t leave any reviews. So the most visible reviews are most likely from frustrated customers. If you are paying for the ads, you can hurt your prospects by allowing unfiltered negative reviews on the landing page. These negative reviews might immediately change your customers’ decisions and send them back to the search engine results pages.

A prevalent technique to build trust on your PPC landing page is to curate social proof that showcases the excellent customer experience with your products or services. It’s the affirmation that every new customer needs. So, you can’t filter all reviews, but allowing all of these reviews unfiltered can devastate your marketing.

Remember, you are paying for every click in Pay Per Click ads, and allowing substandard reviews to remain on your page can be suicidal.

Many people tend to jump quickly and post a negative review even if they cannot understand something. People hardly contact businesses to resolve their issues or seek an explanation. When new customers happen to see these horror stories on your landing page, they leave your page to look for alternatives elsewhere.

Look at this positive review.

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But a few negative reviews might send the customer into a tizzy.

The negative reviews that you can see in the above screenshot form only 7% of the total Amazon reviews for the product “SAMSUNG Galaxy S20 FE 5G,” but they are enough to convince new visitors not to buy this product.

So, beware of posting unfiltered customer reviews where you decide to send the paid traffic. However, you can publish these reviews elsewhere, such as a separate testimonial page, and test it as a site link extension.

4. Create a Landing Page That Loads Quickly

Google loves pages that load quickly and reward them with higher rankings. The same is true for paid accounts and ad ranks. The account will not perform that well if it loads slowly. Furthermore, it will also increase its average CPC. If your website takes more than 3 seconds to load, most visitors will likely abandon it. It also decreases the trustworthiness of your site.

Improving the landing page speed shouldn’t be a one-time activity. Instead, you should make intelligent and subtle changes frequently. PageSpeed Insights is a tool you can use to check your page speed.

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Google will return the page speed score and the “how to fix links” and tweaks you can make to different elements to achieve blazing fast page speed.

However, you can first implement these alternatives.

1. Resize your images and optimize them for the web. You can use various free tools available online.
2. Limit of use of rich media (videos, HD images, gifs). You can also use Gzip, a software application for file compression.
3. Reduce the number of plugins you use
4. Optimize your code (Minimize CSS, JavaScript, and HTML)
5. Reduce page redirects

You can use Moz Pro to identify and fix page speed issues.

Pro Tip: You can create effective PPC landing pages through DashClicks’ white-label PPC services. This way, you can save the time and money you’d spend on hiring an additional PPC guy.

Conclusion

The four techniques mentioned above can drastically improve your landing page performance. Paid advertising can be risky if you aren’t cautious, and these small measures can change your game. Do you know any other technique that can improve landing pages quickly? Let’s know in the comments.

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Entrepreneurship provides you with the required freedom while minimizing the mounting uncertainty in the job market. That is probably why there has been a surge in the number of people opting for entrepreneurship instead of taking up a full-time job. However, not many entrepreneurs can sustainably run an SEO or a digital marketing business. Just one lapse on your part, and you start losing clients.

Success Mantra: Use the right approach and maintain direct and clear communication with your clients to succeed as a digital agency and maintain profitability.

This article helps you with the step-by-step approach to launch your SEO agency and take your startup from zero to a digital powerhouse.

How to Start an SEO Business From Scratch?

So, you've finally decided to launch your digital agency; let me start by saying congratulations! You are among the daring few who take the plunge and create job opportunities for many others. The journey is indeed challenging in the beginning. However, as you move ahead and start learning things, your online business will gradually become more manageable and start sailing smoothly. We have created a checklist to help you successfully start and run your dream business.

The Ultimate Checklist for Your SEO Company

Since digital businesses operate in a dynamic ecosystem, you might always feel the hesitation to take the first step.

Here is the 14-point checklist you can use before launching your SEO business to avoid surprise outcomes. It will help you start, foster, and scale your SEO or digital marketing agency:-

1. Manage Your Cash Flow
2. Learn SEO and Business Management
3. Complete the Legal Paperwork
4. Setup Your Payment Methods
5. Keep Your Invoice Templates Ready
6. Build Your Buyer Personas or Customer Avatars
7. Choose A Niche
8. Decide on the Services Your Agency Will Offer
9. Choose Your Payment Method
10. Build a Professional Website
11. Perform Local SEO of Your Website
12. Start Offering Local SEO Services First
13. Build Your Agency’s Brand
14. Fix Your Logistics

1. Manage Your Cash Flow

It is not a good idea to instantly quit your job to start your agency. You shouldn't quit your day job until you maintain the required cash flow that matches your regular income. Apart from the cash flow, you should also ensure that you have an adequate loyal client base to survive as a business. You will reach this stage when you become proficient in SEO services and successfully gain the trust of your clients.

Understanding various financial concepts is crucial for any business owner, including knowledge about a "voided check". A voided check serves numerous functions in bookkeeping, payroll set-ups, and direct deposit arrangements. Learning how to obtain such checks and their specific purposes in your finances could minimize unforeseen cash-flow interruptions as you get your agency off the ground.

2. Learn SEO and Business Management

Like any other business, you will need business acumen to run an SEO agency. You will also need some training and education. To save your money in experimentation, you can refer to many online resources and books on successfully running your agency business.

Here are some books you can refer to:

A. Starting an Online Business and Internet Marketing 2021

Guide to Setting up an E-Commerce Website, SEO, and Digital Marketing Strategies. By S. K. Holder

B. Change. Adapt. Rock.

The Ultimate Digital Marketing Book for Your Online Business

WildRock Public Relations and Marketing

C. The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap: How to Build a Million Dollar Digital Marketing Agency

Joshua D Nelson

You can also refer to Google support docs and online journals such as Moz, Quicksprout, DashClicks Blog, Neilpatel.com, Search Engine Watch, HubSpot, WordStream Blog, Search Engine Journal and Social Media Examiner.

How to Learn SEO?

SEO is not as complicated as some people try to make you believe. If you do things the right way and precisely in the same manner as Google wants it, you'll soon see your efforts being paid off. Moreover, if you follow basic Google instructions, you can achieve 95% of the results with just 5% effort.

Refer to Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide if you want to learn the basic guidelines to rank for the chosen terms without any external help.

To master SEO, you need to learn the following things:

1. Review and audit of your website content or structure
2. On-page and off-page SEO
3. Google Analytics (to identify UX signals)
4. The technical aspects of website development include redirects (301, 302, and 404, etc.), hosting, JavaScript, error pages, etc.
5. Keyword research
6. Content development based on user intent
7. Management of paid campaigns
8. Link building

Pro Tip: Launching an SEO company can be challenging. To create a wildly profitable 7-figure marketing agency, you can join our Elite agency coaching program "DashElite." As an Elite Program member, you get access to multiple white-label software programs such as DashClicks Platform, InstaReports Premium, and InstaSites Premium.

The Elite Agency Coaching Program DashElite

Apart from that, you'll also get access to our courses and training programs such as Dash University, DashElite vault of training programs, downloadable files, recorded accountability calls, and much more.

DashElite Agency Coaching Program

DashDay Organized by DashClicks

3. Complete the Legal Paperwork

Hire a legal expert and learn all the legal implications and specific regulations related to starting a digital agency. Determining your business structure before launching your business will help you understand how you will be filing your taxes to the IRS. You have several options, such as forming an LLC or establishing a sole proprietorship. If you decide to form an LLC specifically, seeking assistance from legal experts or utilizing resources from a reputable company like LLC University can be invaluable for understanding the process. Also, create your SEO contracts.

It is a crucial step because it states various terms and conditions of the contract and makes them legally binding. Beyond the legal aspects, it also serves as an agreement that includes the expectations from both parties. It also details how you will run your campaigns, including granular details of the processes involved in the ownership of assets and how long the contract will last.

4. Setup Your Payment Methods

Today, various payment methods are available that you can use. For overseas transactions, you can choose automated clearing houses or SCH transfers. In this method, clients can electronically transfer money directly from their bank account to your business account based in the US. You can also allow your clients to pay through credit cards.

This method is quite popular because it involves little hassle. After all, the client needs to set up the payment-related details only once over a secure network, and you can complete the transfer in a minimum number of steps. Additionally, for online payments, you can also try different online payment services such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, Alipay, and PayPal. However, you should choose the payment method at your client's convenience.

5. Keep Your Invoice Templates Ready

An invoice serves as proof of transactions with your clients. It streamlines your accounts and ensures that you get paid as per the terms mentioned in the contract. Your invoice should include a detailed description of the itemized charges for different services your agency offers. You should also add the due date and payment methods permissible. Moreover, attaching a number to each invoice makes tracking convenient.

6. Build Your Buyer Personas or Customer Avatars

Buyer persona mapping is a crucial step of digital marketing, where you create fictional but realistic profiles of your target customers. These profiles reflect the characteristics of your ideal customers, such as their demographics, income, lifestyle, motivations, goals, personality attributes, psychographics, and attitudes.

It helps you understand your clients, their pain points, goals and aspirations, and the objectives they want to achieve through digital marketing. We can divide buyer personas into two significant categories: demographics and psychographics.

Demographics have to do with physical attributes, such as location, age, gender, profession, financial status, etc. Psychographics refers to the behavior and psychology of an individual, so it deals with motivations, perceptions, preferences, brand affinities, attitude, buying patterns, etc.

Buyer personas are also known as customer avatars. Hereā€™s an example:-

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Customer avatars help you decide your positioning as an SEO agency. The most crucial utilization of buyer personas is its usage in crafting content for different stages in the sales funnel. So, a customer avatar can be extremely useful in nurturing and converting leads.

7. Choose A Niche

Not choosing your preferred niche is a crucial mistake most agencies commit. As per common logic, the wider your net is, the more fish you're going to catch. However, it doesn't work in a business where choosing your niche is essential.

Most of the agencies with loyal and growing customer bases are those that don't position themselves as "full-service digital marketing or SEO agencies."

If you position your agency that offers niche-based services, such as SEO agency for roofers, plumbers, or electricians, you're likely to attract customers faster. You can't sell your services to everyone, at least when it comes to positioning.

It's also helpful in scaling as you can easily set up the processes and scale them up. An SEO agency for small agencies may sound more appealing to real estate businesses than a full-service SEO agency.

Here are a few tips for choosing your niche:-

• Choose an industry you have served earlier
• Learn industry jargon to connect with your audience
• Use social circles and referrals to attract new customers
• Do market research for better prospecting and lead generation

8. Decide on the Services Your Agency Will Offer

Do you want to focus your services around SEO, or would you like to expand your services and offer paid ads, web designing, and social media marketing as well?

Now, let's discuss the pros and cons of choosing SEO as a core service.

Choosing SEO as your core service has many advantages. First of all, to succeed as an agency, you should go for the contracts with recurring monthly payments and consistent services, and SEO does just that. Your clients need constant optimization till their website starts ranking on the top with targeted keywords.

You might need web design services only once or twice, but SEO is a recurring service that you'll need consistently for a long time. It also has more flexibility so that you can upsell your clients.

When you get your first few clients and successfully retain them for a few months, you can now think of expanding your services. Paid advertising, social media, email marketing, and web designing services can be your options, and you can offer these services to your existing and new clients. This way, you will generate new business while successfully maintaining your cash flow.

9. Choose Your Payment Method

Here are four methods SEO agencies use to charge for their services.

• Monthly retainer: The client pays a monthly fee in exchange for SEO services.
• Fixed-price: The client pays a fixed charge for specific SEO services in such contracts.
• Project-based: The client pays a set fee for the entire project. Usually, these are small projects like link-building, etc.
• Hourly: Many agencies and established freelancers charge hourly fees for their services. It’s more prevalent in SEO consultancy etc.

10. Build a Website

A website is an absolute must-have for newbie agencies. It doesn't matter if they have built a highly professional website or just an essential website. To start with, you need to have a clutter-free website that provides all the relevant details about your services.

A professional and quick-loading mobile-optimized website is a must for conversions. It will help users enjoy a better user experience and help you rank higher on Google. A well-built website is also a must for user engagement and a lower bounce rate.

So, design a website according to your specific niche and add visual and text-based content to persuade and convert a visitor.

Pro Tip: Use Sites App by DashClicks to create a conversion-focused niche-based website. With this tool, you don't need to know coding to develop a professional website. These template-based websites are specifically designed for different niches to convert maximum visitors and provide ample information about your services.

11. Perform Local SEO of Your Website

To make a lasting impression about your proficiency in SEO, try to rank your website for the keyword - "SEO agency or SEO business or service + your location." This way, you'll also generate qualified leads you can nurture and convert. However, you might have to negotiate initially, but as your reputation and confidence grow, you can smoothly sell and quote your rates.

A successful SEO campaign is valuable for a business as their very survival may depend on their visibility and search engine traffic. So, as soon as you start getting clients, you'll have to hire a team, and then you'll be able to charge accordingly.

How to Create a Business Profile on Google?

For that, you can first create a Google My Business account and optimize your Business Profile on it. You can follow these steps to create your GMB profile and add your location on Google.

• Create your business profile on Google by creating a Google My Business account
• Follow their instructions and verify ownership of the business
• Add accurate and up-to-date information about your business
• Add your logo, opening and closing time, products and services, and images of your business premises and products.
• Ask your customers to leave reviews on your business profile
• Respond to customer reviews with courtesy and sincerity to keep your profile engaging and active
• You can also publish posts on your Google My Business profile and update your audience about products, events, and special offers using the GMB dashboard

12. Start Offering Local SEO Services First

Before you launch an SEO business, start offering local SEO services first. It's comparatively easier to achieve local SEO results than national or global SEO. Furthermore, you can offer it to virtually any business in town.

It will build trust and help in word-of-mouth publicity that youā€™ll badly need in the initial stages. It includes Google My Business setup and optimization, creating Facebook pages and local link building & listing, etc.

13. Build Your Agency's Brand

It’s a bitter truth that you can’t grow your agency beyond a point unless you work hard on its branding. Your brand defines why your customer should choose you over others. It’s a significant differentiation factor that is a prerequisite for an agency to survive and thrive in the long run.

Choose your SEO business name and logo, so people can easily recognize your business. Creating other branding assets such as a business card, a professional website, lead magnets will also be helpful.

Your banding assets should be based on the following factors:

1. Value proposition: What do you offer that others don’t?
2. Audience: Who exactly is your audience?
3. Personality: What emotion should your brand evoke, and how should they perceive it?

14. Fix Your Logistics

Save time spent on unnecessary things as your focus should be on delivering quality services, best results, and client satisfaction. You can hire an accountant for tax filing etc., use invoicing software, and get a multi-currency account to save your time.

It will be a great idea to leverage AI-based agency tools to save time and improve processes. For example, generating reports is a time-consuming and tedious task, and it eats up the precious time of your SEO managers.

Pro Tip: You can instantly generate professional SEO reports using AI-based tools such as InstaReports.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some FAQs startup owners will find useful:-

How Do I Offer SEO Services?

Here are the seven steps to market and sell your SEO services and attract more clients.

1. Develop SEO packages with different USPs
2. Work hard to build your brand and invest in it
3. Prioritize your own website’s SEO
4. Try to establish yourself as a thought leader
5. Get as many client testimonials as you can, including video testimonials
6. Leverage cold emailing
7. Focus on lead nurturing through content marketing and phone

How Do You Become an SEO Freelancer?

Here are the ten steps to becoming an SEO freelancer.

1. ‍Learn SEO best practices
2. Offer free services to your friends and relatives
3. Make a portfolio of your previous work
4. Get references, reviews, and testimonials
5. Launch your website
6. Optimize your website for popular keywords and promote it
7. Leverage social media and YouTube
8. Leverage the best SEO tools for better performance
9. Use job boards, freelance sites, and cold calling for projects
10. Hire white-label services for the services you’re less proficient in

How to Scale Your Business?

Once your processes are set up and you’re on track to perform and deliver results for your clients, it’s time to scale your business. The best way to scale your business is to leverage white-label digital marketing services. It allows you to expand your services and serve additional clients with the same team size and resources. What’s more, you stay profitable as an agency.

What Are the Risks of SEO?

It’s crucial to understand the risks associated with SEO as they can be disastrous.

1. Making sweeping changes in a website
2. Making small or large tweaks and testing those changes
3. Receiving and providing backlinks
4. Changing the URL Structure
5. Poor or no doorway pages
6. Buying expired or available domains
7. Disavowing neutral and non-toxic backlinks

Further Reading:

7 Steps To Launching Your Own Digital Marketing Agency

20 Most Common SEO Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2021 and Beyond

Conclusion

Starting an SEO business isn’t easy. It tests your willpower and persistence. There is no wonder the failure rate is so high. According to a study conducted in 2019, the failure rate of startups was a whopping 90%. If you’ve decided to launch your own SEO business, these stats shouldn’t deter you from taking the plunge. If you follow all the things in this checklist, you’re poised for success.

You can quickly move mental mountains, but if you need any further assistance ranging from coaching, software to completely white-label solutions, DashClicks can be your best partner. We have assisted thousands of SEO agencies worldwide to succeed in the changing digital landscape, and if you want to be the next, contact us today.

It is crucial for you to increase traffic to your website to succeed as an online business or digital marketing agency. It works in multiple ways and benefits your business by increasing brand awareness, sales, and revenue.

However, it is easier said than done. If you are running an online business and have ever tried to bring traffic to your agency website, you must be aware that it hardly works without a clear strategy.

It would help if you kept on doing a/b testing to check what works and what doesn't. This article will discuss different tactics and strategies to boost traffic on your agency website so that more and more people can find you through organic and paid searches. But before we discuss that, we would like to share some significant SEO mistakes that could cost you traffic.

What are the Major SEO Mistakes That You Should Avoid?

Here are some serious mistakes that will neutralize all your efforts to improve SEO and site traffic:-

1. Slow Page Speed

Slow page speed is not only bad for customer experience, but it also negatively affects your rankings. Google has added page speed as a significant ranking factor. There are several steps you can take to boost the speed of your site, such as optimizing the graphics and design elements on your website and removing unnecessary code. You should also work on your page redirects. When you speed up your site, you immediately see its benefits, such as increased engagement and improved search engine ranking.

2. Duplicate Content

Avoid similar content on multiple pages of your website. Google will not immediately penalize your site because of the presence of duplicate content, but it can hurt your SEO ranking. Google is committed to showing the most relevant results to searchers, so make sure that every page on your website has unique content.

3. Stuffing Keywords Unnecessarily

You should get rid of this old-school SEO practice if you want your website to rank high and attract web traffic in 2022. It is no longer recommended, and it may lead to a severe drop-in ranking. Occasionally sprinkling relevant keywords is not a deplorable act. Keyword stuffing refers to deliberately inserting short tail or long-tail keywords that don't look natural and negatively affect user experience on your website. According to Google, you should find a balance between creating valuable content for your readers and optimizing it for search engines. Google generally flags any repetition of long-tail keywords used deliberately.

4. Building Poor Quality Backlinks

Contrary to old-school SEO practices, a few backlinks from authority websites are far better than numerous backlinks from websites with low domain authority. The focus should be on quality rather than quantity while cultivating backlinks. A few backlinks from news and magazines sites, *.edu domains, and reputed websites like Wikipedia are better than dozens of links from ordinary websites.

5. More Pages With Poor Quality Content

Contrary to popular belief, more pages don't mean that they will receive tons of traffic. If your pages lack quality content, it will bring down the overall SEO ranking of your website. Always create a website with a sitemap to organize your content. It will make it easier for you to focus on quality rather than waste your time creating hundreds of pages with poor-quality content.

6. A High Bounce Rate

Besides irrelevant content that doesn't match the search query, a high bounce rate also signals a lack of engaging elements on a web page that capture visitors' attention. So, the first step to fix a high bounce rate is utilizing site elements to engage and capture users' attention and add content that increases site time.

7. An Unresponsive Design

If a website isn't optimized for mobile and has an unresponsive design, it is less likely to rank high on search engines. A responsive design ensures that the website looks perfect on all devices. Previously designers used to make different versions of a website to fit in various screens, but that is no more in practice now. Some of the elements may not be visible on mobile screens if the website is designed for desktops. As a result, you may miss potential leads and sales.

Some SEO tactics change with corresponding changes in Google's algorithm. However, creating high-quality content that adds value and answers users' queries is an evergreen tactic to rank high on search engines.

A good user experience is another essential requirement to rank in organic searches and attract search traffic. Sometimes, agencies don't have experienced SEO professionals on rolls. In that case, outsourcing white label agency solutions can be the best way to lead to high customer satisfaction and client retention.

How to Drive Traffic to Your Agency Website?

As an agency, your journey to earning profits starts from getting found online and goes through the funnel, converting visitors to leads, and finally converting those leads to paying customers. Driving traffic is, therefore, a crucial factor for the success of an online business. When you get traffic, you get new visitors, lots of eyeballs, and potential buyers. So, let's begin with the first step, and that is to get found by customers online.

Here are a few popular tactics to drive traffic to your website:

1. Advertising (Google, Facebook, Instagram, & Twitter, etc.)
2. Using social media to promote your content
3. Mixing different content formats (such as short-form blogs, news articles, long-form blogs, infographics, videos, and podcasts.)
4. Writing irresistible headlines
5. Fixing On-Page SEO (Metas, title tags, etc.)
6. Targeting long-tail keywords (to bring the desired and specific type of traffic)
7. Leveraging guest blogging
8. Implementing schema microdata and internal linking
9. Trying email marketing and posting on LinkedIn
10. Interviewing experts and thought leaders in your industry

How to Get Found by Customers Online?

People go to search engines to fulfil a need or to solve a problem. They type in a search query on a search engine or a social media site to find a solution for their concern, and the search engine returns relevant results. That is how they see the link to your website. You can employ several strategies to get found online and ultimately increase search traffic to your website.

The leading tactics marketers use to boost online visibility are as follows:

1. Search Engine Optimization and local SEO to generate traffic from organic searches
2. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) to drive paid search traffic
3. Organic traffic through social media channels
4. Paid social media traffic through advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms

How to Get Targeted Traffic to Your Website?

You cannot drive organic traffic to your website unless you appear on top in organic searches. You need to research keywords that are relevant to your niche to achieve high rankings. To start with, you can target keywords with low competition so that you can rank early on.

The second step is to create high-quality content that offers value to your users. Headlines and titles also play an essential role in attracting web traffic to your site and getting clicks from users.

Once users come to your website, you can use internal linking to guide them to visit other parts of your site that might be useful for them. It would help if you also had quality backlinks from authority websites to rank higher on search engine result pages (SERPs). It sends a signal to search engines that your website is a trustworthy and authentic source.

Besides quality content that is optimized, here are some of the factors that affect your SEO ranking:-

• User experience on your website
• Relevant and quality content that solves users’ problems
• Faster loading pages
• Backlinks from high domain authority websites
• Site structure
• A responsive design
• Mobile-friendly SEO practices
• Web server and mail server issues
• Domain age and authority

Pro Tip: If you have expertise in content or backlinking, better outsource website design and SEO from pioneering white-label services such as DashClicks. This way you will save a lot of time and money. SEO experts usually charge around $100-$150 per hour for various SEO services, and a startup agency may find it exorbitantly high. You can contact DashClicks SEO fulfillment services today and get this done at a much cheaper rate.

How to Attract Customers Through Content Marketing?

Content marketing is not new. It has been prevalent for many centuries now. However, it was commonplace in other non-digital forms such as street art and print media, etc.

It is the simplest and most affordable form of marketing in the modern era. According to Inbound Writer, you can generate a lead through content marketing with an average cost of $143. In contrast, the cost of generating leads through outbound marketing is $373, which is twice as much.

You can create custom content through blogs. Blog posts offer 434% more indexed pages and twice as many indexed links. It clearly means that blogging provides you with more opportunities to attract potential clients than any other form of content on the web.

To attract more web traffic through content marketing, you can follow these tips:

1. Make Your Content Easily Navigable

Create relevant content for your target audience. Create various content pieces and make them sticky so that the customer can find a link to similar or related articles on the same page for further information. Use targeted keywords in your content, but don't stuff them. You can also add keywords in the right places to boost the visibility of your content, and these places include the URL, H1 tags, main title, first paragraph, and, if possible, the subheadings. You can also use them in image file names and meta descriptions.

2. Create Shareable Content

Offering value to the reader is the best way to create shareable content. Here are some of the features that make content shareable.

A. Be Informative and Helpful

People love to share informative and helpful content. It means that besides providing the required information to the reader, it should also resolve frustrating issues they are facing.

B. Supersede a Popular Theory

The second most effective way to create shareable content is to create content that disproves or supersedes a popular theory and promotes some offbeat idea. People love to share ideas that are against common beliefs and views.

C. Spread Kindness, Generosity, and Humanity

Use emotions, create humanitarian content, and show that you care for your audience. You can also use nostalgia. People love to share such content.

D. Follow Current Events and Trends

Current events always generate curiosity and have the potential to make your content shareable.

Use attractive graphics, images, and memes, and don't try to sound salesy. You can use your content to ask your visitors to buy from you. Always focus on quality rather than quantity because that's what makes a difference.

E. Use Content Repurposing

Repurpose your content and use it over and over again. You can convert a blog post into a podcast, a video, infographics, and a slide deck presentation. You can break the slide deck content into small chunks and use them on your social channels as posts. So, a single piece of content can be published on different platforms for an amplified reach, and a wider audience will consume it in their preferred content format.

F. Focus On Long-Tail Keywords

Focus on long-tail keywords in your blogs because they are responsible for 50% of the Internet traffic. The prime reason you should focus on long-tail keywords is that it's easy to rank with long-tail keywords. Furthermore, you receive the desired traffic through these keywords as they reflect a high purchase intent.

Long-tail keywords point to precise intent, allowing you to target specific demographics and increase conversion rate. Besides that, the competition is comparatively much lower in the case of long-tail keywords than short-tail keywords.

Long-tail keywords are effective in all the stages of the sales funnel, including the initial stages. If you sprinkle long-tail keywords throughout the body of the post, they help you keep your brand top of mind throughout the buyer's journey.

Pro Tip: Again, if SEO and keyword selection seems to be a Herculean task, don't do it yourself. Doing it poorly will not benefit you or your client, and it may increase the churn rate. Hire a white-label SEO fulfillment service today and get this done by experts at a fraction of the cost of hiring SEO experts.

How to Get Paid Traffic to Your Website?

Advertising is one of the best methods to attract visitors to your site. The people who click your ad have a high buying intent because they look for the same products and services you are selling. You only pay when the user clicks on an advertisement, so you can constantly refine your campaign if you are not getting quality leads.

Google offers rich metrics to evaluate the effectiveness of your PPC campaign so that you can judiciously use your marketing budget. If you are looking for immediate exposure, especially when you are not ready to attract visitors through organic search, PPC can be one of the best online marketing strategies.

It's hailed as the best tactic to drive instant traffic when you have new products and services to promote, even if your brand is already known and established.

A. Research of Your Target Audience

Paid advertising allows you to optimize the campaign after receiving the campaign data for even better results. To initiate a successful PPC campaign, you need to research your target audience in terms of their location and their expectations when they are looking for your products.

B. Research the Keywords

It's crucial to discover the keywords that your buyer personas might be using to locate your business and look for similar products.

C. Choose Different Themes

Themes can inspire your keyword selection and content creation. So, choosing a few will be pretty helpful.

D. Determine a Unique Selling Proposition (USP)

It's crucial to determine a USP for each product or theme for continued improvement through A/B testing. Create different versions of 100-character ads for each USP to highlight various features of your product.

E. Create a Conversion-Focused Landing Page

You need a user-friendly and conversion-focused landing page and a flexible ad budget to ensure your success at conversion. The budget should be flexible as you might need to stretch it when you see that your ads are working and successfully increasing visitors to your site.

Pro Tip: If creating a professional landing page is not your cup of tea, and you feel you need external assistance, better use the Agency Website Tool, save time and see your conversion rate soar.

How to Get Traffic Through Social Media Marketing and Facebook Advertising?

Focus on the social media channels where your audience spends their time. Create a Facebook page where you can regularly update your services, products, and offers. Engage with your audience through polls, surveys and questionnaires.

Perform influencer marketing on social media to promote your services. Research your target audience according to demographics and other personal characteristics such as age, buying habits, location, attitude, etc. It will help you design tailor-made ads.

Do A/B testing consistently for the paid advertisements to spot the best performing ad versions.

Keep track of the changing preferences of your target audience and design your ads accordingly. Update your Facebook page by adding new information.

Try to build relationships on social media and create communities on it. Remember, people don't go to social media to spend money or buy something. The prime objectives of social media are to join communities with shared interests and goals, catch up with friends and relatives, participate in conversations and share your thoughts, etc.

Conclusion

If you want to know what to choose between SEO and PPC, you must be aware that you might need to wait for some time to rank on the first page of Google, especially for your targeted keywords that will drive business and attract targeted customers to your website. So, until you work on your website content to organically appear on top of SERPs, it is desirable to use PPC and social media advertising to drive traffic, convert visitors and make sales.

Ideally, a marketer should aim at different strategies, i.e., SEO, PPC, and social media. However, your marketing strategy shouldn't be based entirely on the sales numbers. Brand building and gaining trust should also be on your to-do list.

These two factors can be crucial in the long run for driving consistent business as they influence the purchase decision of your customers.

Your marketing strategy should also strive to achieve a loyal fan base that you can count upon to sell your products and services.

Last but not least, you may need to hire SEO experts to implement various SEO tips mentioned above, which many agency owners simply can't afford. Hiring white-label services have become a trend in the US. Many smaller agencies, solopreneurs, and content marketers use these services to offer core SEO services to their clients. You can also use it as a strategy to scale your business and increase your revenue.