Every successful marketing campaign is driven by real-time data and analysis. However, it quickly can become a nightmare to track your data across a variety of accounts, platforms, and tools employed by your business or marketing agency.

Microsoft's Power BI application promises to alleviate this exact issue and simplify the process of marketing data collection and reporting. By downloading their free application, you can start integrating all of your information sources in one place for either you, a small team, or your entire organization.

What is Power BI?

Power BI is a collection and visualization software that allows you to integrate and gather data from a variety of local and online sources to create robust and dynamic reports. The software provides users with the ability to import analytics from roughly 150 unique data sources to create clear visualizations and powerful insights to guide your business activity.

While many of these sources are integral to a successful marketing campaign, it can be difficult for the untrained individual to necessarily make sense of the figures available. When you use Power BI, you can create a central goal for your report, draw in data from the relevant sources, and outline them in a way that allows for a clear understanding for both your team and your clients.

Power BI exists across three different services including the desktop application (free for all Windows users), the cloud service (for paid members only), and the mobile application for reviewing reports on the go. The desktop application is all you truly need for creating new reports, but the cloud service allows you to quickly share your projects with everyone else in your network.

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For paid plans, the cloud service will run you $9.99/month and grant you 10GB of storage and up to eight data source refreshes per day. Their Premium plan costs $20.00/month per user, grants 100TB of shared storage, 48 refreshes per day, and offers additional modeling and visualization tools including advanced AI and dataflows. Finally, Microsoft offers an enterprise-level plan at $4,995/month for the entire organization. You get access tool on the platform, maximum benefits, and the ability to share seamlessly across your entire team. You can learn more about pricing and benefits here.

Finally, Power BI can draw in data for your reports from a variety of sources including:

• Microsoft Excel
• PDF, CSV, Text
• IBM Product Suite
• Azure
• Amazon Redshift
• Salesforce Products
• Google Analytics
• Adobe Analytics
• LinkedIn
• Twilio
• Quickbooks
• Zendesk
• Zoho
• And much more (nearly 150 sources in total)

How Can I Use Power BI?

Getting started with Power BI is effortless. Simply head over to this link and click the “Download Free” button. On newer Windows machines, this will provide a notice asking you if you would like to open the Microsoft Store on your desktop. Do so, then click to download the application.

If you wish to start out with a paid membership or upgrade your existing plan, you’ll need to navigate to the pricing link given above in the previous section. Click “Buy Now” and follow the steps on the screen to purchase your monthly subscription. You will require a Power BI account, which can quickly be created so long as you have an existing email associated with a Microsoft account. A Microsoft account is free and can be used to log in to a variety of applications and services both locally and online.

After you download the desktop application, you’re ready to get moving. Additional features may or may not be available depending upon your active monthly plan. There is currently no free trial available to test out the additional features only offered with paid subscriptions.

How to Create Marketing Reports with Power BI?

Microsoft's Power BI is relatively straightforward, so let's dive in and know the critical steps to creating marketing reports using Power BI.

Let's begin with how to import data in Power BI:

1. How to Import Data in Power BI

With Power BI installed and open on your computer, you should have your first untitled blank report open by default. The screen should appear something like this:

To get started, you will need to import data from at least one source. You can select from one of the pictured sources or click on “Get data from another source.” For future reference, you can also import additional data by clicking on “Get data” in the top menu pictured below:

After clicking this button, you’ll receive a list of common data sources, but can access more by clicking “more.” This will provide you with the full list of possible services you can connect with Power BI for your reports. You only need to connect one source but have the ability to connect as many as you would like.

2. Create and Manage Relationships Between Data

After you integrate the data for your report into Power BI, you need to establish relationships between data points. These relationships form the basis of how you want to model your data for presentation. You can do this in one of two ways. The first is to select the “Modeling” tab from the top menu. From there, you can select “Manage Relationships” to start pairing related metrics. You can also quickly create new columns and tables to perform automated calculations based on the data you select.

The second is to select the Model button from the left-side menu. This looks like three modules with lines running through to indicate their connection.

In this menu, you can verify that the characteristic attributed to the metric is correct and easily connect or disconnect two or more properties. To create a relationship, drag and any fields you want to connect between two adjacent tables. To delete relationships, right-click and select “Delete.”

Power BI offers many tools and options for modeling your data, which you can learn more about by taking Microsoft's free, quick training course here. The entire module takes roughly an hour and provides examples and practice problems to verify your knowledge of the platform. Ensuring that you understand how to model your data appropriately is the foundation for creating dynamic and impressive reports for your team and clients. There are few more Power BI courses available online to exile your career in Power BI as a marketer.

3. Choose a Visualization for Your Data

A visualization option is an image or graph that takes your data, the relationships, and presents it in an easily digestible manner for your audience. Examples of visualization options include tables, pie charts, bar graphs, line charts, or waterfall charts. You can find the list of visualizations within one of the collapsible menus on the right side of the screen.

You can get access to additional visualizations with paid plans. Users can also import custom visualization files from trusted developers. If you want to learn more about how you can start creating your own visuals for Power BI, check out this tutorial from Microsoft here.

4. Further Testing and Customization

After importing your data, establishing relationships, implementing visualizations, and adding notes, you can make additional customizations to finalize your report. Head over to the “View” tab to select from a variety of colorful themes that can enhance and personalize your presentation. You can even test how your reports view on mobile devices to ensure that your team or clients receive the best experience no matter where they interact with your report.

This menu also allows you to create custom filters and bookmarks that users can interact with as they move through your report. This can highly key data points that you want to stand out and help users more readily find the metrics that are most pertinent to their needs.

The “Insert” tab also features customization options that may prove useful in certain scenarios. From here, you can add text boxes, create custom buttons to trigger events or change pages, or add images to augment your visualizations. There is also a “Smart Narrative” option that utilizes AI technology to automatically write summaries for you based on the data in a selected visual.

5. Exporting Your Data

When your report is ready to share, you can just as easily export your data as you imported it. Simply move over to “File” and select “Export” from the list of options. You can save your custom report as either a Power BI file to be used exclusively in this application or as a general PDF that can be viewed with a variety of software.

If you’re on a cloud-based plan and wish to share your work with your team, you can select “Publish” to push your report to Power BI services. Any users that operate in the same workspace will be able to discover and view any new reports that come from your desktop.

Use Cases for Power BI in Marketing

Now that we've covered the basics of how to create a customized report in Power BI, let's consider how this tool can augment and improve our marketing services.

As we know, the work of a marketer in 2021 is powered by and driven by automation and analytics. If you research any guides or tutorials on how to improve your SEO, PPC campaigns, enhance your website, and so on, you'll be pointed to a wide variety of analytics tools and software that automatically track user activity and gather data in real-time. As you may have noticed, nearly all of these resources are featured as possible connectors within Power BI. As a result, you'll have an easy time creating reports for the following:

Track Your ROI for Keywords and Organic Search

Google Analytics houses much of the data that is relevant to your SEO and organic search campaigns. You can track important data such as your ranked keywords, daily web traffic, search volume, page clicks, and much more. By integrating your Google Analytics data into Power BI, you can quickly compile select data points into tables and graphs to create beautiful, dynamic reports.

Not only will this simplify the process of choosing which data to analyze for your team, but your personalized reports will make your agency look like you're on top of the game when presenting to your clients. You no longer need to worry about scrambling to gather or access the relevant data, as you can save models as templates and reuse them for monthly reporting.

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Compare Results for Paid Advertising Campaigns

Likewise, you can integrate a variety of online services into Power BI that you may be using to create PPC campaigns and launch new landing pages. Your Power BI reports can focus on a variety of focal points. This could include the numbers behind your A/B testing to help you push for a specific creative or page variation or your average ROI between an existing campaign and past campaigns.

Because there is no limit to the number of connectors you can have in place for a given report, you could even create a report that compares the ROI for organic marketing efforts versus paid ones. These types of reports can provide valuable insights such as which strategies deserve more focus and get results. However, it can also highlight problem areas that require more attention. Without the ability to gather these metrics in one easy-to-read visualization, even the best marketing team can fall guilty of letting these issues spiral before they become unmanageable.

Be Better Prepared for Client Presentations

No matter how well your team prepares for a weekly or monthly presentation with your clients, their minds inevitably operate on a different wavelength than your team. As a result, you find yourself dealing with awkward moments when a question arises that you don't have the answer to. You know you have the analytics available, but it takes time to sort and process the data to come up with an expert response.

By integrating all of your data into Power BI and modeling the relationships upfront, you can more readily sort through your client's analytics in a dynamic manner. You won't need to have your team dedicate as much time understanding the data as your new reporting software has already completed that work for you. As a result, you can provide more valuable insights than normal in real-time. This helps your team appear one step ahead and allows you to tackle problems with your clients in real-time and formulate a game plan for the days and weeks ahead.

Sell Clients on Additional Services

Marketing analytics does not only benefit active services but can be used as case studies to reinforce your sales efforts. When you're able to connect analytics regarding a client's organic or paid marketing efforts, you can compare it to other reports you have for clients that are receiving improved results with the additional services you're attempting to sell.

Power BI makes it easy for you to delete relationships and remove metrics that might reveal private or sensitive data that would harm the privacy of your customers. Utilize the tools available to compare the relevant metrics, and allow the numbers to make the argument of how certain tools, strategies, or services might get the desired results at an additional expense. This is a powerful way of converting both existing customers and prospective clients.

Power BI for Marketers - Improve Your Reporting Efforts!

All of your agency's marketing efforts are driven by analytics and reporting tools. It's not enough to simply gather a list of figures, but you need to ensure that your reports outline the data in a manner that guides your team's strategy. Power BI offers a complete package solution by allowing you to integrate nearly 150 unique data sources that your marketing team is already using to get the job done.

Even with the free plan, your connected data sources will refresh up to a minimum of eight times per day, granting you more than enough leeway to ensure that your reporting is always correct and up-to-date. If you're a much larger business that demands even more data and reporting options for a wide array of clients, you can share Power BI between several users on your team for a slightly upgraded fee per person.

With zero cost to entry and how simple it is to connect your data, there's no reason not to experiment with Power BI and determine if it's a good fit. However, because this is a Microsoft product, it will only really be of benefit to teams using PCs. Don't worry if you're a Mac family, as there are a variety of alternatives available online if Power BI doesn't suit all of your marketing needs.

If you work in marketing or digital sales, you need to utilize marketing funnels. It is an entirely automated process that effectively functions as an around-the-clock sales device for your agency or business. The funnel provides carefully curated content that nurtures your prospects as opposed to cold selling.

Because the sales funnel is now such a staple, experts provide us with numerous options to more efficiently create, test, and manage our funnels. Here's a list of 9 AI marketing funnel tools that will revolutionize the way you market your brand online.

1. DashClicks

DashClicks is a SaaS (software as a service) platform that promises a complete package of solutions for digital marketing agencies. Included in this is a complete CRM for tracking your leads, deals, and existing customers. You can also use software applications included in every subscription to quickly build websites and landing pages with their drag-and-drop web builder.

A huge benefit that DashClicks offers over other platforms is its Inbound software application that offers integration with other marketing platforms including:

• ClickFunnels
• Instapage
• Facebook
• Google Ads
• Kartra
• CallRail
• PhoneSites
• ManyChat

Even if you prefer to utilize one of these other platforms for your initial funnel build, DashClicks allows you to instantly integrate your campaigns from any of these platforms. After integrating your sales funnel, you'll be able to automatically create new contacts from leads, create new deals from every interaction, and create automated actions such as email follow-ups depending on where the contact lies within your sales pipeline.

DashClicks offers three tiers of paid plans, but you can access the basics you need for your new funnel campaign with the free plan. This includes 500 contact records with a data import utility, one Inbound campaign with built-in reporting and lead freshness tracking, analytics tools, a customized dashboard with a white-labeled domain, and much more. Their paid plans range from $97/month for their Pro plan to $597/month for their highest-tier plan.

Image Source: DashClicks Leads CRM Dashboard

The major benefit of this platform is your ability to get all of the automated tools you need to enhance your funnel performance all within one account under one subscription. In addition to these marketing funnel tools, you'll get everything an agency could ever need including a form builder, 50-250GB of file storage, reputation management tools, dedicated support, and much more. They even provide a dedicated fulfillment store including website page creation and content marketing at additional costs, so that you can rely on a team of experts to build your new sales funnel for you.

2. SendPulse

SendPulse is a multi-channel marketing automation platform that optimizes communication with customers through email, SMS, web push, and messenger bots. SendPulse combines these channels to improve customer reach and engagement. Pricing starts at $6.40/month for a subscription plan. Also, you can pay for each email separately at a rate of $32 per 10,000 emails on a pay-as-you-go plan. There’s also a full featured 7-day free trial.

The free plan of SendPulse offers an opportunity for smaller businesses to start with their marketing and automation or to test out the platform’s basic functionalities before subscribing. Features include:

• Sending 15,000 emails to 500 subscribers each month.
• Basic automation with 5 flows and 1 event.
• 3 chatbots with 10,000 messages per month.
• CRM with 5 users, 2 sales pipelines and 2 boards.
• Intuitive visual builders for emails, websites, forms and workflows.
• 1 website or bio link page.
• Pop-ups.
• Unlimited web-push notifications for 10,000 subscribers.
• Sending 12,000 transactional emails per month.
• Template libraries for emails, websites, forms and workflows.
• Detailed statistics reports and analytics.

However, even if SendPulse's free plan generously allows for a good number of emails, bots and subscriber count, users are limited in their ability to add more without upgrading their plan. Additionally, many advanced premium features are not included which may limit marketing strategies.

SendPulse’s paid platform offers far more extensive features and capabilities. Paying users can enjoy the advantages of multi-channel marketing with unlimited numbers of emails and higher subscriber limits. The platform also provides access to advanced marketing automation, where users can automate marketing campaigns across multiple channels based on user behavior. Additionally, there’s the opportunity to use advanced segmentation, behavioral variables and event tracking for improved personalization of marketing efforts. This robust nature of the SendPulse paid platform makes it a reliable tool for growing businesses and marketing teams to communicate and engage with their customers more effectively.

3. ClickFunnels

ClickFunnels is one of the most popular sales funnel management tools among marketers and for great reason. This is a sales platform dedicated exclusively to building beautiful landing pages, collecting and tracking new signups, and seamlessly integrating payment solutions for immediate transactions.

Within the ClickFunnels platform, someone with zero HTML or CSS knowledge can quickly create multi-step sales marketing funnels that automatically walk prospects through the sales process. You can begin building from a variety of pre-existing templates or start from a completely blank page for full personalization. It also provides the option to create pop-ups with varying triggers, built-in timers, email marketing followup, and even SMS messaging with an additional integration.

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The basic ClickFunnels plan begins at $97/month and includes an unlimited contact book with the ability to create up to twenty unique marketing funnels. They offer two additional plans at $297/month and $2,497/month that offer unlimited campaigns, unlimited website pages, and email. The most expensive plan will also get you access to twenty-seven unique payment integrations, and the ability to use up to twenty-seven custom domains.

ClickFunnels also offers the powerful benefit of including built-in A/B testing tools, which allow you to test out new content and features within the same sales funnel. You can automatically pivot traffic to the best-performing pages and make optimizations as you go.

Finally, the platform offers all users access to support options and training tools. You can quickly access a library of resources for any particular issue you're facing with your sales funnel. Alternatively, you can quickly connect to a live chat and speak with an agent that will walk you through the solution for your sales funnel issues.

4. Systeme.io

Systeme.io is a powerful choice for marketing funnels due to the number of features being offered for no cost. Their free plan grants you the ability to create three sales funnels with up to ten total steps, a blog, a membership site, and much more. You'll gain the ability to send unlimited emails, unlimited file storage space, and the ability to add up to 2,000 contacts.

Systeme's free plan also grants you the following features, but limits them to just 1 per item:

• Automation Rules
• Workflows
• Tags
• Email Campaigns
• 1-Click Upsells
• A/B Tests
• Order Bumps
• Custom Domains

If you're looking to explore different options for your marketing funnels, Systeme.io offers all of the essentials to get started and then some. If you require a larger contact list or wish to create even more marketing funnels with these AI tools, you can upgrade to a paid plan which ranges from $27/month to $97/month. The most expensive plan grants you 15,000 contacts total as well as unlimited access to all other features.

In addition to the no limits offered with the highest-tier plan, you can migrate existing sales funnels into the Systeme.io platform. Finally, a team representative will meet with you one-on-one to coach you through all of the features and tools available to ensure that your marketing funnels are a success.

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While that covers the core features offered for marketing funnels, Systeme offers more with your membership plan including a drag-and-drop website builder that requires no coding knowledge. Rather than pay for additional memberships from other platforms, you can quickly create a beautiful website for your business or agency in addition to your next sales funnel. Within this membership site, you can create online courses for your members and easily regulate webpage access by membership tier.

5. HubSpot's Marketing Hub

HubSpot is one of the largest platforms available for marketing, sales, and customer service. It offers a vast number of free tools for anyone that signs up and furthers those benefits for subscribers. Rather than simply scaling membership fees behind certain limits, HubSpot tailors each of its plans to better suit the size and scope of a business with its Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans. These range from $45/month to $3,200/month for large-scale operations.

Before we look at the paid plans, we'll go over the vast offerings you can get access to at no cost at all. Simply sign up for a free membership and gain access to the following:

• Create up to 20 landing pages
• 2,000 email sends per month
• Simple website audiences for any 2 supported integrations
• Create standalone, pop-up, embedded, and collected forms
• Segment submissions into 5 active lists or 1,000 static lists
• 1 automated form follow-up email
• 10 custom properties
• Basic live chat and chatbot
• Ad retargeting
• Ability to work through the HubSpot mobile app

This free membership grants marketers access to several new tools generally not offered by platforms without a monthly subscription. The caveat is that nearly all of these features will come with HubSpot branding. You cannot customize your branding or place your landing pages on a custom domain. Nevertheless, it's great for your basic needs and allows you to test out the platform with zero investment.

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If you're ready to upgrade and take ownership of your marketing funnels, you can do so with their Starter plan. You'll gain five times the number of contacts, access to more lists, reporting dashboard, email reply tracking, three automated emails, and 1,000 custom properties.

The biggest selling point for HubSpot is the ability to not only create and manage sales funnels, but to manage all other aspects of your business including sales, operations, and customer service all from one platform. The company takes the approach of offering each Hub as a separate membership so that business owners can select only the services they need to get the job done.

Its Sales Hub also starts at $45/month and can take the leads gained from your landing pages and begin the process of auto-creating contacts from submissions and assigning them to a sales representative and their own respective deal in a sales pipeline. Additional subscriptions will also grant you the ability to create and automate tasks, integrate payments, create custom goals, host videos and documents, and much more. While the vast array of tools available is impressive, some platforms offer similar tools for less of a cost overall.

6. Wishpond

Wishpond is an increasingly popular platform that focuses primarily on digital advertising, landing pages, and marketing funnel creation. While it does offer some basic features through its free version, those members will be limited to just 200 leads total, which doesn't amount to very much even for a smaller-sized business.

Its paid memberships range from $44/month to $199/month with the ability to expand your total lead contact list to one million upon request. That paid membership will grant you access to all of the essential tools you need to get the job done. This includes a drag-and-drop web builder for landing page creation, an online form builder for easy lead collection, email marketing, automated follow-ups, payment integration, and appointment scheduling.

Wishpond is also built for integration with Shopify stores, making it an excellent solution for eCommerce businesses. Its built-in reporting software not only tracks the quality of leads but provides day-to-day breakdowns of order activity. You'll also be able to set up additional email and SMS triggers based upon rules set by you and your team when actions are taken on your landing pages or website.

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While Wishpond offers the core features you need for marketing funnels and presents them well, its main drawback is that other platforms offer these same features for less. Platforms asking for more generally offer more core features to support your campaigns. In addition to this, there is currently no way to manage or post from social accounts directly from the platform.

If those issues aren't a dealbreaker, then Wishpond is a platform we can recommend due to its clean user interface and intuitive marketing funnel tools.

7. Instapage

Instapage is one that we would consider a direct competitor to ClickFunnels as both platforms are fully dedicated to the marketing funnel. However, while ClickFunnels provides a variety of solutions for different aspects of the sales process, Instapage promises a more in-depth landing page builder that might be more attractive to certain businesses.

For many business owners and marketers, the basics are all that's needed to get the job done. This is in no small part because your average business person will not know anything at all, or at least beyond the basics, of HTML or CSS coding and formatting. However, these simple web builders generally only feature very basic templates and lock their additional template library behind the most expensive plans.

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Instapage provides users with the best of both worlds by granting them the same ease of use as other building platforms, but without sacrificing the vast number of options. This includes hundreds of templates and layouts to work from, thousands of fonts, color schemes, and a built-in stock photo library. For those more technically inclined, Instapage still also supports third-party HTML, CSS, and Java.

Like ClickFunnels, you'll be able to conveniently A/B test various aspects of your funnel in real-time to get the most conversions possible. You'll be able to view reports of activity-based upon your content and make the necessary changes to improve underperforming areas.

If a dynamic builder is a high priority, then we highly recommend Instapage over other competitors. The downside is that you will still need to make use of other tools to manage other aspects of the marketing funnel and sales process. Instapage's primary concern is to help you deliver beautiful landing pages that perform and not much else.

8. Exceed.ai

Exceed.ai is a virtual sales assistant that can assist in qualifying the leads that you funnel through your landing pages. In the past, your team would need to contact every lead to determine which were worth pursuing. Now with the help of automated AI, you can eliminate that tedious work by having your leads speak with this sales assistant first.

The platform currently does not list public plans but instead shifts its pricing to the size and scope of your business. The AI is used for both marketing and sales and will communicate with all of your visitors as though it were a real person operating on your team.

This AI tool utilizes information provided by your company to assist in answering general questions from leads, gathering CRM data from your existing prospects, and providing a determination to the individual as to whether or not they qualify for the offer listed by your marketing funnel. For example, if the lead must meet a certain income quota to qualify for your offer, the AI chatbot will inform users that they do not qualify and eliminate the task from your plate entirely.

Image Source: Exceed.ai

Likewise, the AI assistant can continue the marketing and sales process by performing basic tasks such as scheduling appointments on your calendar. All of this collected data then appears in your CRM. If you are utilizing automation tools in conjunction, those leads and appointments will automatically be assigned to your sales representatives.

9. Akkio

Last, but not least, in our list of AI tools for successful marketing funnels is Akio - an automated conversion prediction software that converts your existing conversion data into an accurate prediction model.

Similar to Exceed's virtual assistant, Akkio provides what they call augmented lead scoring that compiles your historical marketing and deals data into a spreadsheet, and utilizes AI processing to predict future results. As with all predictive models, the tool becomes increasingly accurate as you feed it with more data to analyze. As a result, Akkio promises to combat the issue of customer churn, so that you can focus your resources on the leads that are most likely to convert.

Rather than dedicating staff to manually read spreadsheet after spreadsheet of lead data, experiment with Akkio at only $50/month to determine if this AI tool works for your marketing funnel needs. They also offer a free trial and a 20% discount for those who elect to pay in a lump sum annually.

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Utilize AI Tools for Successful Marketing Funnels

Artificial intelligence has forever changed the way we handle marketing and continues to improve with each passing day. The internet is filled with a variety of software and platforms that can assist businesses and marketing agencies with every aspect of funnel marketing from landing page construction, to lead qualification, and to appointment scheduling.

Each platform listed provides you with high-quality features you can use to get started with building your next marketing funnel. Depending on your needs and the tools currently used by your team, these recommendations can serve either all-in-one solutions or specific tools for hyper-focused purposes. Additional tools such as Facebook Ads, Exceed, and Akkio serve to augment the qualifying and nurturing aspects of your marketing funnel so that you can maximize your conversions and ROI.

Regardless of which tools your business chooses, it's important to note the power of the marketing funnel and how it can boost your profits. Investing in these tools will grant you a foundation for success that will serve you well into the future as AI continues to advance and change the way we advertise.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, eCommerce sales grew by a staggering 31.73% in 2020 from the previous year. While global circumstances were a direct influence, online sales continued to grow another 9.1% by Q2 of 2021. A Statista study also reported that nearly 10% of surveyed buyers made an online purchase for the first time during this period. In 2024. 37% people are making 3 to 5 online purchases each month.

While online shopping was already a growing business, it's grown apparent over the past two years that digital sales are a vital component of a successful business strategy. Whether you're new to the eCommerce world or looking to develop a lasting strategy, we've got you covered.

Below, we're going to outline tips you can use as a simple strategy to scale your eCommerce business now and start prepping for the busy 2021 holiday season.

How to Scale Your eCommerce Business for the Holidays?

Growing a business is a bit different from scaling a business. When you grow your business, you invest in the resources, so the business grows in size, but you don't necessarily make any profit.

On the flip side, when you scale a dropshipping business, you boost revenue without adding any resources. The overheads remain the same in this case. For an eCommerce business, it's crucial to find ways to increase sales and revenue.

Here are some innovative ways to scale your eCommerce business, especially during the Christmas and holiday season ahead, without spending a fortune on your resources.

1. Work on Your Brand Reputation and Social Proof

Your reputation whether it be through direct interactions or through word-of-mouth references accounts for a lot. This applies to eCommerce sales just as much as it does to brick-and-mortar businesses. Nearly every consumer (92%, to be exact) looks for some form of nonpaid and nonsponsored referral or recommendation before committing to a purchase.

Consumers are fairly self-aware of what types of products and services they are interested in buying. You can even begin to identify the intent to purchase from the types of keywords used to locate web pages through search results. At this point, your average person is merely looking for the support and validation they need to confirm that committing to the transaction is the correct choice. Whether or not they know the person recommending the brand seems to be irrelevant.

If you're looking for a minimal to no-cost investment that can help you scale your eCommerce business, look into boosting your brand reputation online. This can be done through a variety of methods. You should begin by collecting and posting previous customer reviews and opinions throughout your website and eCommerce store. Having reviews listed on every product or service page about that particular item is effective in helping customers make a purchasing decision. They may not fully trust your self-advertising, but they'll trust another buyer that has no stake in your business success.

Another method, one that we highly recommend, is to ensure that your business is listed on online directories. Directories are sites such as Yelp, Google My Business, and Bing Places. Local listings should be a part of any local business strategy, but they can help your eCommerce store as well by boosting your site's SEO value.

Individuals surfing the web can discover businesses through these online directories by searching for specific keywords, products, or industries. Your listing shares your website, physical location (if you have one), contact details, hours, products, services, and much more. Search engines like Google will recognize this information and compare it to the information listed on your business website. As long as your directory profiles are up-to-date, optimized, and contain the same accurate information listed on your site, it can build trust and boost your SEO efforts. The better your SEO value, the higher ranked your eCommerce business will be in SERPs.

Stay on top of these reputation management tools and take action to respond to customer reviews both positive or negative. Interacting with customers indicates a proactive response from your business and demonstrates that you care about the buyer experience. Taking the time to understand and remedy issues expressed by customers can also help to influence these customers, or the directories, in removing negative reviews from your reputation. By cultivating a 5-star status for your store, more visitors will be inclined to become customers.

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2. Analyze Your Inbound Marketing Strategies

Many marketing agencies make a fortune off of promising X amount of new traffic to your eCommerce store. However, what many business owners fail to realize is that web traffic by itself is simply a vanity metric. If you receive one hundred new visitors, but all of them quickly bounce away from your site, then the metric amounts to very little. While earning that traffic is part of the equation, your inbound marketing needs to lead to conversions.

The best way to gain a critical analysis of your website, the user experience, and the content you provide is to utilize free tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These will help you to quickly analyze and identify any existing issues with your website. While improving your site to be fast and responsive on all platforms is on the technical side, Analytics will allow you to test out a variety of content on your core business pages and product pages.

Ensure that the type of content on the page matches the intent of the user. For example, someone arriving at your home page or about page is generally looking to gain information and learn about your brand but is not at the stage yet where they're committed to making a purchase. On the other hand, your product pages should supply key information about a product, but the viewer is much closer to adding an item to their cart and completing the transaction.

Google Analytics can also assist you in A/B testing any content that you share on a given page. This will allow you to freely experiment with alterations in headlines, call-to-actions, images, or video content, while naturally directing traffic to the better-performing version. This is key for scaling as it allows you to extract better results from the traffic you're receiving without wasting more of your advertising budget.

Finally, any strong SEO strategy should also involve the addition of a blog on your website. While blogs are common on general, informational websites, eCommerce stores make the mistake of thinking that a blog doesn't fit into their marketing plan. Blog articles further assist your customers in learning more about your industry, products, and services, and, ultimately, make your brand a trustworthy authority. At the same time, SEO-optimized blog content contributes to your keyword and overall search rankings, which effectively pulls more, better-qualified visitors to your eCommerce store.

Investing in SEO and content creation is one of the lowest-costing, most effective long-term marketing strategies for your business. Stay ahead of your eCommerce competitors by developing a strategy, continuously testing your content, and regularly updating your website with high-quality material.

3. Improve Customer Service with Live Chat Automation

A scaling, growing business equates to a higher volume of customers. A higher volume of customers means more questions, inquiries, and general issues that may arise. Because scaling involves growth with minimal additional costs or spending, you need solutions that can help you stem the inevitable tide of incoming customer service pressures. This is where solutions like automation or even choosing to outsource ecommerce customer support come in, ensuring that your team can focus on more complex issues while routine inquiries are handled efficiently.

That's where smart automation enters the scene. Chatbots are no longer a new invention either, and a large share of initial interactions you have with businesses online are handled by automation. While not all customers will be ready to settle for a robot as opposed to humans, many businesses already found a place for automation within their customer service plan.

The top use cases reported by business owners for chatbots included providing quick answers to inquiries at 37% while resolving complaints, problems, or questions was around 35%. Your chatbot is able to instantly greet customers, identify the nature of the inquiry, and direct the individual to the right resources. Many basic interactions can be resolved with a response pulled from a content library based upon frequently asked questions. Even if the customer still requires human interaction, the chatbot effectively funnels out simple problems and quells the effects of customer churn.

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Integrating advanced technology into your eCommerce strategies can drastically reshape operations. For example, using ai for dropshipping is revolutionizing how businesses manage backend processes such as inventory management, marketing automation, and customer service efficiency. By adopting AI technology, eCommerce entrepreneurs can anticipate demand peaks and trends by analyzing historical data patterns with precision. This not only streamlines order fulfillment but also enhances personalized customer experiences—a critical component in light of increasing competition each holiday season.

As you integrate these tools, don't overlook the importance of a well-functioning eCommerce platform. For example, hiring specialists such as Shopify or WooCommerce developers ensures your site delivers a seamless and engaging shopping experience. This includes customizing features to improve user interaction, streamlining the checkout process, and ensuring the platform runs smoothly during high-traffic periods.

However, while automation may help your task management, does it positively impact your customers? A study suggests that an overwhelming 84% of customers base their purchasing decisions on their takeaways with customer service. A great experience might sway their decision to buy from you, but a negative interaction will almost definitely push them away.

Be mindful of how you use chatbots and automation. While technology seems to be slowly taking over this department, many people still quickly reach frustration points when they don't receive human interaction. Use the chatbot to identify issues and direct the user where they need to be. Ensure that your sales and support teams are well-trained and prepared to deal with issues and that they respond swiftly. Finally, ensure that you have enough personnel on your team to deal with the rise of customer issues as you begin to scale.

4. Apply to Become a Google Trusted Store

While there are a variety of sites that support your brand's reputation with reviews, none might be more valuable than Google Customer Reviews. This is because customer reviews and testimonials can appear right beside the search result for these stores without needing to ever click on a link. Not all eCommerce stores receive this benefit, and you must apply to Google to see if you are eligible to receive this certification.

To do this, you will need to find the Google Merchant Programs located in the settings of Google Merchant Center. This is where you can find a variety of business shopping programs such as Shopping ads and Local inventory ads. Simply select Enable, and Google will provide you with a survey you will need to embed on your website.

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Users will then have the option to participate in the survey when they visit your website. These questions will help Google learn what customers think about the service you provide and determine whether or not your operation is up to standards. The entire process can take up to three months, but you'll be rewarded with a Google Customer Reviews badge that you can then post on your site as social proof.

From a marketing perspective, this badge serves a similar function to licenses or certifications granted by external organizations. Because the badge granter has no affiliation with or motivation to promote your brand, customers are more likely to trust the badge provider, and, in turn, your eCommerce store as a result. Compare this to an online store that has no badges, certifications, website security, and poor customer reviews.

If you are unsuccessful in obtaining your badge, you will then have an indication that aspects of your service must be improved. In either scenario, applying is completely free and the feedback you receive for your eCommerce store is invaluable.

5. Boost Your Reach with PPC Campaigns

While pay-per-click advertisements are not a zero-cost marketing solution, they do provide you with considerable control over your budget and what you spend per month. Facebook advertising generally provides the cheapest solutions, while granting a wide reach, but Google and Amazon shopping ads are also highly effective at targeting buyers that already plan to buy. Partnering with an Amazon PPC agency can further optimize your campaigns, ensuring you’re getting the most value out of your ad spend.

To get the most out of your PPC campaigns, you'll need to ensure that you're tracking shopping results in either Google Analytics or in the Facebook Ads center via the Pixel. This will notify you of where your buyers are coming from, what they're buying, and your overall ROI for the ad spend.

Google also provides you with the ability to purchase ad extensions that create rich snippets for products or services within search engine results pages. These snippets provide you with additional opportunities to create intrigue and sell your goods. Competitor comparison extensions can allow your product result to appear next to your direct competition and highlight your superior prices or features with ease.

Finally, use the Ad Center on the platform you're using to keep a close eye on what you're paying per click for your right amazon keywords research chosen. Google Ads can especially become quite competitive, leaving you bidding and paying far too much for premium advertising if you're not careful. In these instances, it's essential to work closely with your SEO experts and determine which keywords might provide an effective, alternative strategy. Longtail keywords especially are overlooked due to their low search volume but are effective at targeting consumers with strong buyer intent.

6. Boost Customer Retention with Customer Accounts & Rewards

Every quality eCommerce store features the option to checkout as a guest or login with an account. This serves several purposes, but a primary one is to encourage customers to commit to shopping with your brand.

This may initially seem counterintuitive as adding more steps between a buyer and a purchase generally lowers conversion rates. However, those that create accounts are more likely to convert than those shopping as guests. This means that the returning traffic you receive is of a higher quality than the unnamed traffic that might visit your store.

However, you never want to bar users from making a purchase from your store without an account as this just equates to a lost sale. Instead, consider prompting users to make an account after making a purchase. They're likely to already feel strongly about their decision and you can take advantage of the opportunity by listing out the benefits your business provides with an account. You might consider offering member benefits such as free shopping over X dollars spent or guaranteed monthly discounts.

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You can also provide a one-time signup coupon or offer as an incentive to get the account created. With the email in your store's system, you'll be able to maximize your marketing efforts and create targeted email campaigns that are unique to that buyer's interests and needs. This is the best way for an eCommerce brand to get even more out of customer's that already decided that they enjoy your store.

Making an account isn't a guarantee that they will return, however. Work with your team to create solutions that actively reward your customers and make them feel positive about returning to and continuing to buy from your brand. This can include regular promotions for account owners and early-bird access to sales or new products. Some brands also offer a point reward system for every dollar spent that they can convert into discounts down the line.

7. Find Ways to Reduce Shipping Costs

A significant challenge that's unique to eCommerce stores as opposed to brick-and-mortar is the logistics expenses. While physical locations still deal with shipments, your store is responsible for safely packing, transporting, and delivering every item to and from your warehouse. The problem is that shipping costs were already climbing and the state of the world in 2020-2021 has significantly compounded the problem. Reports indicate that these inflated costs are here to stay.

An effective way of dealing with this is to outsource your product distribution to a company that specializes in logistics. While you'll still need to pay regular premiums for their services, they'll likely be able to save you money in the long-term that you would be spending on supplies, the labor of packing yourself, and shipping costs. Using asset management software can further streamline your operations and reduce overall expenses.

The costs continue to climb when dealing with international shipping as a result of customs, additional taxes, and foreign regulations. What's worse is that unless you're an expert in international freight, shipping, and inventory management, mistakes can result in delays that not only hurt you financially but hurt your reputation with the customers that are waiting on their goods. Thankfully, these shipping providers understand your plight and generally offer special rates to businesses that provide an expected amount of business every month.

By reducing logistics complexities and improving shipping efficiencies, businesses can save significant costs. For eCommerce owners aiming for seamless management through technology, explore the best logistics management tools to streamline operations. Identifying the right software ensures not just operational efficiency but also enhances customer satisfaction by timely and accurate delivery tracking.

Using advanced methods to manage eCommerce logistics can help significantly cut costs. By tapping into AI consulting for logistics optimization, businesses can enhance their operational efficiency and tackle the increasing shipping expenses tied to online sales. These improvements grant businesses a competitive edge, enabling seamless service delivery crucial for scaling.

By managing your logistics costs, particularly the cost of pallet racking systems, you can significantly improve your storage efficiency and business profitability. These racking systems are essential for effectively handling inventory which directly impacts scaling and operational processes.

An alternative way to combat rising shipping costs is to work it into the price of the product. Customers that are seasoned in shopping online generally expect to pay a bit more for the convenience of having an item delivered to their home. With the right marketing, you can promise a quality product to your customers with the convenience of fast, reliable shipping. Efficient business storage can support this strategy by ensuring that inventory is organized and readily available for quick fulfillment. With the cost worked into the product instead of a hefty, added charge, your audience is likely to find this to be a great deal. Just be mindful to do your research and do not inflate costs to a point where you're no longer competitive with your rivals.

8. Utilize Opportunities to Upsell and Cross-Sell

Your marketing strategy works and the customer is in the process of moving the item from their cart to a shipping package. Since the intent to spend is already there, there's no better opportunity to encourage the buyer to add on just one more thing.

Salespeople have been utilizing strategies to upsell and cross-sell for an eternity and the strategy should be no different when it comes to your eCommerce store. Cross-selling is simply suggesting products that add to or enhance the item they've already selected. This is generally reserved for items that are of a similar price or cheaper than the item they want. It's an easy psychological trick as if someone, for example, is already spending $20, then an additional $5 on the same credit charge is no real issue.

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Alternatively, the upsell is a final opportunity to upgrade the customer's original purchase to a more expensive model or variation. The same concept applies here in that the buyer has already overcome the struggle with the purchasing decision. Because they're committed to spending a certain sum of money, it's easier to justify spending a bit more on a product that's superior, but similar to the one that they selected on their own.

The key to a strong upsell or cross-sell is to present the opportunity without being singlyĀ overly assertive with the customer. Simply adding an upgrade option and a brief description to a cart before payment is one example of a strategy that works without getting in the way of an otherwise clean checkout process. You take advantage of the chance to sell, while the customer still feels empowered to make their own decisions.

As with any sale, a strong value proposition will speak for itself. Do not overly rely on the additional sales, but welcome them and look for opportunities to improve these conversion rates whenever you can.

Conclusion - Start Scaling Your eCommerce Business Now to Be Ready for the Holidays!

Whether you're prepared or not, online shopping is the way of the future. More shoppers than ever are making online purchases for the first time and the forecast shows no signs of this trend slowing. While it hasn't entirely replaced the need for brick-and-mortar stores, online sales present a powerful, cost-effective way to scale your sales and reach customers all around the world.

However, eCommerce is a highly competitive world for this same reason. With this in mind, you need to give your store every advantage available to compete against not only smaller stores but against juggernaut distributors like Amazon. Collaborating with an ecommerce website development company Elogic can provide the necessary support to streamline operations and boost site functionality, ensuring a competitive edge as you scale. Start by building up your reputation online by listing yourself only as many directories as possible. Keep your details up to date and work with those who leave reviews to resolve issues and maintain a sterling reputation.

Take advantage of advertising platforms such as Facebook, Google, Amazon, and others to feature your products on web pages and search results at the budget that you set. The more intelligence you gather about your audience, the better you can refine your advertisements to target a variety of persons at different stages of the buyer's journey. Platforms like Google can even award your eCommerce store with a trusted store brand so long as you provide excellent service that meets their standards.

Maximize the ROI gained from those that click your ads and visit your website by ensuring that you utilize SEO best practices at all times. Not only does this involve mapping out keywords for your web pages and creating dynamic sales content, but it also involves adding a regularly updated blog to your website. This blog can focus on the news, product updates, or serve as an educational resource for your customers to learn more about your industry. Frequent, high-quality content boosts your SEO, and, therefore, boosts your overall search rankings over time.

Finally, maximize the returns you get on the sales you are receiving by upgrading to a more efficient, cost-effective logistics process. Leave these processes to experts that can reduce costs and offer discounts to businesses like yours that deal in high volume. When customers are ready to purchase items for those partners to ship, take advantage of opportunities to upsell and cross-sell additional goods that can improve your results and assist with scaling.

With dedicated practice and the use of powerful analytics tools to test your strategies and content, your eCommerce store will inevitably scale and grant you the additional profits every business is looking for during the holidays and beyond.

Your agency's website is one of the most powerful tools you can use to market your brand online. However, a well-designed website also needs to support SEO best practices in order for you to get the best results possible.

In this article, we'll outline how to create an SEO-friendly website for your digital marketing agency. You'll learn some of the best practices to implement when designing each page and provide the tools you need to get the job done efficiently and affordably.

How to Create an SEO-Friendly Website?

Creating an SEO-friendly website is no rocket science. According to Moz, satisfying search intent is the primary goal of Google, and therefore it should be the primary goal of SEOs. It is followed by user experience. So SEOs should focus on creating a fast and responsive website that answers user queries in minimum steps.

You can also use our Sites Tool to make a professional and SEO-friendly website. These websites are specifically designed for digital marketing agencies to convert more clients. You don't need any developers to create a website when you use this tool.

Here are some of the proven tips to develop an SEO-friendly website:-

1. Focus on Improving Your Website Speed

A fast, responsive website is one of the most important things for a marketing agency to possess. Digital marketing and advertising is an extremely competitive field that grants users hundreds, even thousands, of unique options. If any of your pages take longer than a couple of seconds to load, then you've already lost to your competition.

Studies indicate that conversion rates can drop by as much as 20% as page loading speed increases from 0-5 seconds. Compounding this negative result is the fact that Google's search ranking algorithm utilizes page speed and responsiveness as a ranking factor. Faster websites generally demonstrate lower bounce rates, greater retention time, and, therefore, rank higher than slower websites.

Fortunately, there are many solutions to ensure that your agency's website remains lightweight and quick. You should be certain to utilize Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to diagnose any speed-related errors that are impacting your website. It's as simple as entering your URL and allowing Google to render a list of errors and suggestions for optimizations.

Many modern website builders and CMSs feature built-in tools and plugins that help to improve loading times. This can help you to implement “lazy loading,” which describes the process of deferring the loading of content that is not immediately visible in the user’s viewport. This allows the website to load critical content first while loading additional images, videos, or texts later or as necessary.

A second tip is to compress images to an appropriate size that allows for faster rendering without compromising quality. Seldom is a full-size, high-resolution image imperative for general viewing, especially when those images are commonly viewed from a mobile device. Stick to image formats such as JPEG and PNG for faster rendering. The former generally allows for slightly higher quality at the cost of some speed, while the latter is built for maximum efficiency.

Finally, be sure to minify any HTML, CSS, or Javascript located on your website. When a browser attempts to communicate with a server and access your site, it reads each line of code one by one. The more information there is to process, the longer it will take to load the content.

We mentioned above how “lazy loading” can communicate which assets are vital to load immediately to a browser within these lines of code. However, you can further improve your speed by making sure to eliminate any redundancies in the code or chunks that are dead and no longer being used. This can commonly happen if you used a third-party tool at one point but are no longer relying on it. Even if your developer initially needs to write the code in a specific way to ensure functionality, they should take efforts to minify it as much as possible afterward.

For even more tips on how you can improve your page loading speeds, click here.

2. Keep it Mobile-Friendly

Another important Google ranking factor in addition to page speed is mobile readiness and responsiveness. More than half of the entire world’s web traffic now comes from a mobile device, whether it be a cellular phone or tablet. However, because these machines are generally less powerful and rely on 4G, 5G, or Wi-Fi connections, your website needs to accommodate this.

Google once again can be our ally as we can use Google Search Console to check our domain for any health errors. Included in this free error report are factors that are negatively impacting mobile performance. It will also include direct feedback as to what you can do to correct the unique errors that are affecting your website’s performance.

To avoid mobile-friendliness issues when designing your site, be sure to implement media queries in your CSS. A media query essentially identifies the content on your website that you wish to load based on the device being used to access it. This can greatly improve load times and performance by eliminating the process of loading unnecessary data that won't actually be used during the mobile experience.

With this in mind, you should tailor the appearance and layout of content to fit smaller viewports. This includes further optimizing images, condensing content (or temporarily hiding some of it via lazy loading), or eliminating media outright to keep the mobile design minimalistic and fast. A simple design and theme are essential for getting the most out of your mobile performance.

3. Optimize Your URLs and Meta Descriptions

The content on your website, your page URLs, and even your meta descriptions all assist Google's algorithm in understanding the purpose of your website. The better it understands the information on your website, the more confidence it has, and the more likely it will share your domain as a search result to inquiring search engine users.

In accordance with SEO best practices, you must manually optimize the URL for every page on your website. URLs should follow a consistent, organized structure, make sure of the primary keyword, and be free of any unnecessary characters and clutter. The poor URL structure will often contain dates, numbers that reference the page or post, and other unwanted characters that make it difficult for both the user and Google to read. However, an optimized URL might look something like this:

www.dashclicks.com/blog/best-seo-practices-in-2021/

This made-up website URL tells us everything we need to know about the specific page we are visiting and the pathway taken to get there. The use of “www” and “.com” are standard, necessary protocols, with our domain name taking center stage. Then, we describe the pathway by indicating that the active page is under our “Services” category. Finally, “Local SEO” describes the primary content and keyword for that page.

If you were to further optimize the rest of the URLs for this website, you would want to follow a similar structure to keep things uniform and efficient. If you utilize web pages that contain similar content for desktop and mobile viewing, be sure to address the primary version of the page with a canonical tag. This tells Google to only crawl the primary web page, which avoids a penalty for duplicated content.

Meta descriptions also communicate the content on a page to Google and the user. These are the brief descriptions that appear underneath a website on a search engine results page. You must manually enter an optimized meta description for each web page, or your CMS will like auto-populate the field with an excerpt it finds on-page.

While there is no “limit” on meta description length, Google will truncate anything longer than 160 characters. This cuts your idea off mid-thought and generally looks less appealing than a clean, concise description. Try to keep your description less than this character limit. Additionally, a meta description should help communicate what a person can expect to find when clicking the link. It should not be clickbait, dishonest, or misleading. You should use it as your opportunity to advertise and intrigue your potential visitors.

You can learn how to write the perfect meta description here.

4. Protect Your Website and Your Users

Yet another ranking factor for Google is upgrading your website from the HTTP protocol to HTTPS. This is the process used between your website server and a browser to access and download information. Google promises to elevate the rankings of websites that feature an encryption protocol over those that do not.

HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) is the standard protocol used across the web. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) indicates that an encryption protocol has been added to the process. This is done by purchasing an SSL certificate to protect any data transferred between your website and the end-user.

You can upgrade your website to HTTPS by purchasing an SSL certificate for your website. This verifies ownership of the domain and ensures that any data transmitted is being sent to the correct server. It also encrypts any data being sent to protect it from threats online. There are a variety of SSL certificates to purchase depending on the size of your brand and your needs, but a basic SSL certificate will suffice for most small businesses. eCommerce websites will want to consider purchasing a more sophisticated SSL certificate to protect sensitive data used in financial transactions.

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5. Feature Keyword-Optimized Content

When most people think of SEO, they think of keywords and keyword ranking. Featuring keyword-optimized content throughout your entire website is a foundational component of any strong SEO strategy.

After you design your website, you will need informational content for users to consume. This content should concisely describe your brand, your various services, your unique value proposition, and anything else that can assist the reader in making informed decisions as a consumer. The average word count is roughly 500-700 words per page, but more will work to your benefit so long as the content is of high quality. The longer the content, the more opportunities there are to use keywords and describe your business.

Not only is this information empowering for your visitors, but it also helps Google understand the nature of your business. Marketers use keywords that exhibit high search volume and match the content with consumer intent. Focusing on the right keywords and ensuring that your content falls into the hands of the right kind of consumer is key to boosting the amount of content on your site.

After you're satisfied with your core web pages, you need to consider adding a blog to your website and integrating it into your SEO strategy. Rather than bloating your pages with excess content that distracts, expand your keyword strategy by writing information articles for your blog. This allows you to create additional content that focuses on a variety of topics that are relevant to your industry. Because blogs serve to inform and educate rather than sell, this can help to build trust between you and your audience and establish your brand as a reliable authority.

6. Use Internal Linking

Internal linking is another vital SEO strategy that serves to keep visitors on your website for longer periods of time. Any time that a page links to another page on the same website, it's known as an internal link.

Internal linking should be implemented naturally and suggest content to visitors that relates to the content on the page that they are visiting. For example, you may want to direct users from one service to additional related services that can help with the topic at hand. Additionally, you can sprinkle notes in blog articles that address issues or topics that are immediately relevant to the products or services you offer.

Internal linking also serves the purpose of helping Google crawl and understand your website better. When you manually create connections between pages, Google's web crawler will follow those links and process those additional connections. The more relevant data it receives, the more confidence it has in using your website as a search result for keyword-related topics.

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7. Build Up Your Backlinks

While an internal link connects two pages within the same site, a backlink is whenever another website links back to a page on your website. Backlinks are incredibly valuable for your SEO and can noticeably boost your rankings when implemented correctly.

When you build a brand-new website, it starts with no previous relationship with Google's search algorithm. Even when you utilize best design and content practices, it takes time and consistency to build the authority and confidence you need to progress upward through the ranks. However, a backlink from a website that already has authority and confidence with Google can help to boost the SEO value of your own.

You can think of a quality backlink as a vote of confidence from peers that consistently utilize best SEO practices. Google understands the nature of those websites and the brand. When that website backlinks to yours, Google then assumes that your brand is tangentially or directly related to the subject matter by association. From a user perspective, that trusted website also directs its traffic to your webpage. The more incoming traffic to your website, the better your results will be when it comes to your SEO efforts.

With that said, building backlinks requires more outreach and effort than other strategies. You will need to connect with webmasters and look for opportunities to bring your brands together. A common method of doing this is by writing guest blogs for other websites, which then allows you to boost your own website and online profiles naturally. This calls back to our reliance on high-quality, keyword-rich content that provides legitimate value to consumers. If your marketing team offers the ability to build monthly backlinks to your site, the impact on your SEO will be significant.

Get an SEO-Friendly Website for Your Agency Today!

With these tips in mind, you might be wondering where to start when it comes to building your website. DashClicks' brand-new platform offers marketing agencies the ability to create a fully-branded site instantly when you sign up and utilize our Sites application.

Every paid account owner is eligible to select from a variety of templates to use as their new agency website. These websites are low-cost, lightweight, and complete with everything your business needs to hit the ground running. When you select from our list of existing website templates, you get the following immediately:

• A 15-page website hosted by Amazon Web Services
• A ready-to-go SSL Certificate
• SEO-friendly content for every page that features your personal branding
• Personalized branding throughout the site – upload your assets and get moving
• Built-in contact forms and call-to-actions
• Daily website backups to protect you from losing any data
• Drag-and-drop web builder (no coding knowledge required)
• Built-in website analytics to track visitor activity

Among these pages includes a ready-to-go blog page, which you can use to start creating high-quality, informational content that's relevant to your industry. Simply create a new entry, start writing, and post at any time. The easy-to-navigate menus also simplify the SEO process by giving clear fields to customize your URLs, meta descriptions, search images, and more. These sites are built to be lightweight, fast, and mobile-ready for every new agency.

All you need to do is update your DNS records, point them to the new website, and your new website will be updated with your custom domain. After purchasing your new site, it's yours forever. We can provide ongoing SEO support by providing the strategies mentioned above and more, including content creation, backlink building, on-page hygiene, and keyword research.

Build SEO-Friendly Websites for Prospects

In addition to claiming your new website, a membership will grant you access to our InstaSites application, which allows you to instantly create similar websites for your prospects. You can modify these websites to your liking at any time and only need to purchase when you successfully convert your prospect into a customer.

Our InstaSites selection features well over 200 website templates that span 60+ unique industries. These sites use the same technology that allows you to automatically personalize each site with the prospect's name and branding. Our easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor requires no coding knowledge and allows you to make some final editing touches that can secure the sale.

The number of pages included varies based upon the template, but each includes all the SEO-friendly content a site needs to get started immediately. These sites utilize the same system and processes as our agency websites, making it convenient and simple to get your clients moving. It makes your workload easier, and the speed and quality are guaranteed to impress any prospect.

If that's not enough, our InstaReports software allows you to instantly create reports for your prospects that explicitly outline site health errors with their existing site. Quickly compare these issues with the immediate conveniences offered by our ready-to-go websites and start securing more deals than ever before. Our platform offers everything a marketing agency needs to improve its online presence, secure new clients, and fulfill services all in one location.

Conclusion

Creating an SEO-friendly website requires strategy and commitment to see the job done correctly. Each page not only needs to be well-designed for a high-quality user experience but also needs to be fast and responsive for mobile devices. You can look into addressing these issues immediately by utilizing free tools mentioned above, such as Google PageSpeed Insights and Google Search Console.

Improve the security of your website by purchasing an appropriate SSL certificate that meets your brand's needs. Google promises an SEO ranking boost for site owners that utilize HTTPS and protect their visitors according to their own standards. Not only do you receive this direct boost, but a secure website is immediately visible to visitors and establishes the trust you need to acquire new and returning visitors.

You can further boost your site's SEO value by ensuring that each page is complete with high-quality, keyword-rich content. You can continue supporting your core website pages by investing your time into a blog that features informational or newsworthy content that interests visitors and is relevant to your industry. When building this content library, be sure to utilize internal links whenever possible. Then, begin your commercial outreach to connect with other website owners that can provide you with valuable backlinks over time.

Finally, note that building an SEO-friendly website is not a one-and-done process. Google's algorithm changes almost daily, and this varies from having minimal to substantial impacts on how a website's health and value is ranked. Continue to monitor your website regularly, utilize Google's free tools to check for errors, and implement the necessary changes to ensure that each page is healthy and SEO-friendly. With consistent practice, any new digital marketing agency website can work its way to the top of search rankings.

Site speed is definitively a ranking factor for your site in Google search results. It also affects the user experience, audience retention rate, and, ultimately, your conversion rate.

To what degree does a fast or slow page impact your sales? In this article, we will dive into why and how site speed is impacting your conversion rate and what you can do to stop losing valuable business online.

Why Google Made Site Speed a Ranking Factor?

Google’s mission statement provides a clear-cut vision for how they go about selecting factors to rank websites on their search engine. It goes as follows:

“Our company mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

As technology rapidly changes and improves, so, too, does the way we browse and access information daily. The devices and connections that people have access to, however, are not consistent around the world. While one visitor on the west coast may have access to lightning speeds with Google Fiber, others might be in a remote location where they’re limited to strict data caps.

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In addition to this, users are no longer restricted to LAN-line desktop computers. According to a study based on five trillion website visits in 2020, 61% of that traffic was from mobile.

While providing your users with a speedy, satisfying experience was always important, the challenge has grown because of how audiences engage with content online. Because these new devices rely on more lightweight technology and variable connection strength, we need to rethink the way we optimize websites and deliver content to the public.

Google recognized this and decided to encourage webmasters to make improving the user experience for all users a priority. Website developers would now need to prioritize optimizing both desktop and mobile versions to provide their audience with useful information in a fast, user-friendly manner.

But, you’re not on your own to figure out how to improve your site. Google provides helpful tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights to help website owners bring their user experience up to par.

Does Site Speed Impact Conversion Rate?

We know that site speed is a factor when it comes to your overall search rankings, but does it have a direct impact on conversion rate? Let’s take a look at how sites of varying load times change user behavior.

From the moment a user clicks on your website link search engine results pages, you’re on a timer. A study by Pingdom discerned that the bounce rate of visitors nearly doubled when a page load time moved from two seconds to three. The bounce rate continues to nearly double with every second that you add to your page load speed. With that in mind, the average load time across all sampled websites was just over three minutes.

However, that number drastically changes when browsing by mobile. Google reports that the average load time for a single mobile page is as long as 15.3 seconds. That’s a long time to ask a customer to wait for every page on your website when they are attempting to gather information or make a purchase. You likely do not need to consider anything other than how frequently you, yourself, bounce from a page in favor of a quicker one.

With that in mind, you can’t expect your users to convert if the average load time of your website is unable to keep people browsing. The numbers back this up. A popular study performed by Walmart demonstrated almost a 90% decrease in their conversion rate as page load speeds increased from one to five seconds. When you consider that most web traffic comes from mobile devices, which already happen to be slower on average, slow speeds will not help you when it comes to driving sales.

Your online sales process works under the same principles as an in-person sales interaction. If a customer can quickly locate a better experience with another business, they will do so. If your website makes it more difficult than necessary to access information or complete checkout, users will quickly bounce away to a competitor’s website.

All of these statistics support Google’s reasoning for utilizing site speed as a ranking factor. While a load time that’s greater than five seconds will drastically increase your bounce rate, Google will also rank your site lower than your competitors. The further you are down the rankings, the less likely it is for your audience to access your website at all, let alone become a conversion.

What Can I Do to Improve My Site Speed?

The good news is that optimizing your average website load time is a doable task for all website owners. Most slow-to-load websites feature common problems that can be resolved by adhering to the best practices for SEO. If your Google PageSpeed Insights test is reporting errors and a less than adequate loading speed, here are some of the things you can do to make things faster:

1. Place a Greater Emphasis on Image Optimization

The more content you have on a page, the more requests a browser needs to make with the website server. A large number of high-resolution images will require the visitor’s device to download a large amount of data before the content can appear on the screen. However, your images won’t just load slow, but they will delay the appearance of other content on the page unless you take action.

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While you may be proud of that high-pixel image taken from an expensive camera, you generally want to use a compressed format such as PNG or JPG. PNG image files will generally provide the fastest loading times. However, JPG is still advisable for situations where you truly need to maximize the image quality without adding too much strain on your site’s server.

For image content such as icons or special widgets, try to use something lightweight such as CSS sprites, which can effectively condense those HTTP requests into one request for all of them. You ultimately want to reduce the number of HTTP requests as well as the amount of data that needs to be exchanged with each request.

2. Enable Browser Caching on Your Site

Each time a user visits your site, their browser must make every HTTP request available to download all of the files present on the page. However, you can improve the experience for returning visitors by enabling browser caching on your site. You may have experienced this while browsing the web yourself when you receive a prompt asking for permission to temporarily store your information.

By allowing browser caching, you can take advantage of a small amount of space on the visitor’s hard drive to temporarily cache your website assets. This means that the visitor’s browser will not need to complete every single HTTP request on every subsequent visit. This not only improves load times for that specific visitor but will ease the stress on your website server and improve performance for all of your web traffic.

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3. Avoid Redirects Whenever Possible

Avoiding redirects is not always possible, and, in some cases, is not advisable. You may need to redirect users to the mobile version of your site or to alternate page versions that utilize the upgraded HTTPS protocol. However, too many redirects are a guarantee to increase your website load times across the board.

You must address any additional navigation that exists on your website. Look for opportunities to simplify any redirects and create a direct page-to-page pathway. Each redirect step adds another HTTP request for the page. As we explained above, our goal is to reduce the number of HTTP requests to be as low as possible without sacrificing quality.

4. Host Large Files on an External Server

When it comes to large files you want to host on your website such as videos, you should never upload the data directly to the page. This is a tremendous amount of data to download and upload and it will kill your average page loading speed.

However, videos provide tremendous marketing value and we want you to use them on your website. The alternative is to host these types of files on an external server and let their server power pick up the additional strain. The most popular video platform available is YouTube, which allows you to easily embed and share your content anywhere on the internet. An alternative such as Vimeo also works well and both provide free accounts to all users.

You can also do this for large, high-resolution image files. Take advantage of file storage sites such as Google Photos, Imgur, or Dropbox. You can also employ what’s known as a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare to deliver media and save bandwidth.

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5. Use Lazy Loading for Busy Website Pages

There are two approaches when it comes to website loading. The default method is sometimes referred to as “eager loading” and it involves attempting to load all files on the website at the same time as soon as possible. When a webpage has a high amount of mixed content including text, images, and video, eager loading can result in unnecessarily long load times.

“Lazy loading” is an approach that allows you to defer the loading of certain content while prioritizing the loading of others. For example, we can use lazy loading to load the content that’s immediately in the viewport, while deferring any text or media that’s hidden further down. We can expedite the loading of the content users will see immediately, while the deferred content loads afterward. This gets users on-page and engaging with your website sooner without the need to cut out important material from the website.

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You can also utilize placeholder images or videos until the data is needed. Let’s say that you added a video to your webpage. When a user accesses the page, they send an HTTP request to download the data. However, the user never actually watches the video content. As a result, you increased your load times by wasting data that was not necessary. Instead, you use a lightweight placeholder file until the user triggers an action indicating their intent to watch. You can then signal that individual HTTP request at that time.

While implementing lazy loading can be tricky if done manually, many popular website editors such as WordPress feature easy-to-use lazy loading plugins. You can install this on your site, review opportunities to minimize load times and the number of outgoing requests at any time.

6. Minify Your Javascript

Javascript is necessary to make your web pages dynamic and interactive, but it makes up a hefty amount of the page weight. You can reduce the impact that your Javascript has on load times by compressing your Java files and reducing everything into one single file. This way, the server only needs to comply with one script request as opposed to several.

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You should also look for any opportunities to remove redundant or unnecessary lines of code. If you are no longer using a third-party feature, remove the dead code. If there’s a way to express something in fewer characters, remove the unnecessary spaces and characters to reduce your overall script size. Even if you need to create your original code in long-form initially, seek to minify it after you’ve tested it and know it’s working properly.

In the same vein of lazy loading and prioritizing what’s in the viewport, you can assign a preload attribute to certain resources in the Java file. This tells the server to prioritize loading these features first even if they do not come first in the script.

Conclusion – Faster Site Speed Leads to a Better Conversion Rate

Your website speed directly impacts your conversion rate as any page that takes longer than five seconds to load exponentially increases your bounce rate. Users demand the ability to interact with a website and its various elements regardless of the device they are using or the strength of their connection. Because so much modern web traffic comes from mobile devices, your website must be lightweight and agile.

By ensuring that your pages are accessible to everyone, you make it easier for those visitors with buyers’ intent to convert. You may even wish to prioritize the optimization of pages with high conversion value such as checkout pages and product pages. However, improving your average loading speed sitewide will offer a boost in your Google search rankings. The higher you rank, the more opportunities you have to boost your conversion rate even further.

You can learn exactly how to fix website errors and improve your site speed using tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights. You will want to minify any CSS or javascript code on your website and reduce the number of HTTP requests to be as low as possible. Use external delivery sources to host large media files such as images and videos. Finally, get rid of any dead or broken links and reduce your number of redirects. Be sure to use Google Search Console to crawl your website after these updates.

There are several additional ways you can boost the speed of your website that you can learn about in our previous article here. Most of these optimizations are simple to implement and greatly impact your site quality. Give yourself a leg over the competition and boost those conversions by giving your audience a lean, fast user experience.

When it comes to boosting SEO, most of what we do is based on extensive testing and research. However, Google broke this norm in August of 2014 when they informed the internet that they will be utilizing the HTTPS protocol as a ranking signal for their search engine results pages.

With that said, website owners need to know the best practices for HTTPS when purchasing and adding their SSL certificate. In this guide, we'll go over the advantages of having HTTPS, how HTTPS impacts SEO, and what you can do to maximize your security benefits.

What is HTTPS?

HTTPS is the secured version of HTTP or Hypertext Transfer Protocol. When a user visits their site, their browser submits an HTTP request to the website server to download the data for browsing. HTTP is so commonly used that browsers now automatically assume the protocol and allow you to simply type a domain into the URL field.

HTTPS encrypts the data transmitted between a browser and the website server. This protects any sensitive data from online attackers, phishing scams, and more. HTTPS websites must go through an authentication process, which adds authority and trustworthiness to your site in the eyes of the user when compared to an unsecured website.

Websites that require better security for themselves and their users integrate either an SSL or TLS certificate. SSL, which stands for Secure Sockets Layer, used to be the primary form of encryption online. TLS, Transport Layer Security, is now the industry standard and provides better performance and security for website owners. Nevertheless, you can expect to hear most individuals use “SSL” colloquially when referring to either.

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The SEO Advantages of Having HTTPS on Your Site

HTTPS is not only an enhanced extension of the HTTP protocol but also offers a variety of SEO advantages for your site. These factors can influence your site's quality score both directly and indirectly.

1. Google Will Boost Sites That Use HTTPS

Though the initial boost was much smaller, Google could potentially boost your rankings by as much as 5%. Additional studies may have determined that the boost isn't quite that large, and may ultimately serve as a tiebreaker between a site with HTTPS and one without. However, it's important to note that Google reserves the right to provide more weight to HTTPS as a ranking signal at any time.

With that said, businesses of all sizes can still benefit from the small boost that a secured website provides. This may be especially significant for small, local businesses where your competitors may or may not have the ability or funds to upgrade their websites to the HTTPS protocol. Even if the boost does amount to simply being a tiebreaker, it will push you over competitors that opt to leave their site unsecured.

It is important, however, to stress that HTTPS by itself will not prove to be significant. You still need to create and implement a solid SEO strategy that includes remedying crawl errors, eliminating duplicate content and URLs, optimizing site speed, and improving mobile-friendliness. You should view HTTPS as a small, but important step that provides more important benefits beyond the promised ranking boost.

2. Browsers Flag Unsecured Sites

This isn't so much a benefit as it is helping your website to avoid any penalties. Popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Safari will automatically flag any websites that lack the HTTPS security protocol. This shows a user a warning screen that informs them that their data may be vulnerable when accessing your site.

This matters for your SEO and site rankings as it is effectively telling users to steer clear of your website. It's easy enough to identify when a website is secure by the green lock icon that appears next to a URL. Users will likely bounce from your unsecured website and look for an alternative that features the security icon.

3. Track Your Referring Channels

Link-building campaigns are a powerful way to boost traffic to your website and increase its SEO value. Whenever you earn a backlink from a website, you will want to track the amount of referred traffic from that link. However, because HTTPS protects user data, you won't be able to track referrals if you stick with HTTP only.

On the other hand, using HTTPS for your site allows you to track referral data from HTTP or HTTPS websites. The security encryption on your website will secure data from any source and allow you to monitor your analytics as intended.

4. Online Security Promotes Consumer Confidence

This is the flipside of eliminating the unsecured site warning that browsers give to sites that neglect to use HTTPS. Not only will you avoid that warning, but consumers can easily identify a secured website. First, some browsers will still add the prefix protocol to a URL. This will look like this:

https://www.dashclicks.com

However, most browsers now understand the protocol and do not require users to input this, nor do they necessarily display it on screen.

The second sign is a lock icon that is located immediately to the left of the URL. When the lock is closed, the site is secure. A lock that is open with an exclamation point indicates that the website uses SSL, but there are errors present that may cause data to become unsecured. If you are not using HTTPS, this lock will not appear at all.

By having this logo of trust next to your domain name, visitors can browse with confidence. This means that they may be more likely to spend time on your website. They will also feel more inclined to engage with features on your site designed for conversions such as forms or shopping. They know that your website is backed by a security system and are therefore more comfortable with sharing sensitive data.

You will further boost this confidence by providing a Privacy Policy disclosure somewhere on your website. This is a requirement for websites and will explain to users what type of data you collect, what it is used for, and how long you store it.

Tips and Tricks for Using HTTPS

Purchasing and integrating a new SSL certificate on your site provides additional hurdles you may need to overcome. It's important to be aware of these errors or else you will end up like countless other websites that pay for HTTPS only to have a broken lock indicator next to their URL.

To avoid this, be sure to use this checklist of tips and tricks to ensure that you're getting the most out of your new website security.

1. Choose the Right SSL Certificate for Your Site

There are three primary SSL certificate types to consider for a single domain.

The first is known as Standard Validation and is the most affordable option available. This will allow you to enable the HTTPS protocol and include a lock icon next to your URL. This option requires you to go through a verification process that proves ownership of your domain. It provides a basic level of security and is recommended for sites that do not exchange sensitive data such as those in financial transactions.

The second type is known as Extended Validation. This verifies ownership of the domain and confirms the registry and ownership of the business. This is a more expensive security option but provides a higher level of protection that's recommended for sites that exchange highly sensitive information with consumers. This will show the HTTPS protocol, the lock icon, and the business name in a green bar to the left of the URL. It will also indicate the region that the business is registered in brackets.

The third type is known as Organization Validated. This works similarly to Extended Validation but goes through additional efforts to vet the entire organization that owns the domain. The organization name will appear next to the security indicator and provide an added level of security and trust for those that visit the site.

The type of SSL certificate you choose is ultimately inconsequential when it comes to your SEO. However, choosing the cheapest option from an unreputable source is not always a wise business decision as it can cause SEO issues in other ways. You will need to consider what you need based on the size and scope of your business.

More importantly, you need a heightened level of security to protect customers that exchange sensitive data or make financial transactions with you online. It's your responsibility to protect the confidentiality of your customers. Keep these factors in mind and purchase the right SSL certificate for your business's needs.

2. Make Page Speed Optimization a Priority

Site speed and mobile friendliness are already major factors when it comes to your site's SEO score. This is important to note because with HTTPS comes added security layers that can potentially increase loading times on site pages that are secured. A website that already features poor optimization and long load times will be worsened when upgrading to HTTPS.

For this reason, make sure to have your affairs in order when it comes to page speeds. You can utilize Google's PageSpeed Insights tool to check the health of your website and look for opportunities to boost your speed. Otherwise, the negative impact of poor load times will likely undo any positive benefits gained by the act of switching to HTTPS.

If you follow best practices and address any errors found by Google, then the issue lies with your SSL certificate provider. You will need to reach out and explain your speed issues to remedy the problem. As long as your website is passing PageSpeed tests, you should have no issues with the HTTPS protocol. If the problem persists, you may need to switch to a different provider for your website security.

Another strategy that some websites use is to implement HTTPS only on the pages that handle sensitive data. This would include checkout and payment pages within your storefront. You may have experience in using online stores that redirect to separate HTTPS pages for this purpose. However, we recommend addressing outstanding SEO issues on your site before resorting to this. You want your website to be prepared for the future if SSL becomes a sitewide standard.

3. Redirect HTTP URLs to HTTPS

This is a multi-step process but is necessary to ensure that your visitors head to the new, updated version of your website. First and foremost, you will need to tell Google Search Console to crawl the HTTPS version of your website. This process will mark the secured version of the site as the primary one, ensuring that those pages are the ones that appear in search engine results pages.

Note - You will also want to back up the existing version of your website if any errors occur throughout this process. This will protect you and ensure that no data is inadvertently lost in the process.

All of the URLs on your website will currently point to the HTTP version. This includes pathways to images, videos, and files that exist on your website. You will need to manually go through every URL and update these links to the HTTPS version. If you cannot rewrite the URL for every link, you should also create 301 redirects that push visitors to the HTTPS version if they attempt to access the original HTTP version.

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4. Update Your Sitemap, Robots.txt, and Disavow File

You'll also want to make it as easy as possible for Google's search crawler to download and understand how your website changes. You will need to change all URLs to the HTTPS version. The Robots.txt file should also be updated to ensure that it is not preventing Google from crawling the updated pages. Failure to do so will block you from obtaining the benefits of securing that page.

Likewise, you'll want to carry over the data you have regarding disavowed URLs. If you do not do so, those disavowed domains can find a loophole and begin backlinking to your domain using the updated protocol. Resubmit your file to Google to carry over your list.

You will essentially need to repeat these sorts of tasks for every aspect of your website. This includes updating internal links to direct to HTTPS versions. You will also need to update tracking tools you use such as Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, and Facebook Ads. By addressing all of this as soon as possible, you will preserve the SEO work you've completed thus far and make the transition to your new site go as smoothly as possible.

5. Perform a Manual Website Test for Errors

If you've gone through the checklist and taken every effort to make your transition a success, test things out for yourself. Navigate to the HTTPS version and begin exploring everything as if you were a first-time visitor.

Ensure that there are no broken links or links that direct to outdated page versions. Click every link and check for your security icon next to the URL. Make sure that no images or videos are broken on any pages. Test any filters to ensure that the updated page versions populate correctly. Finally, test any forms or checkout pages with test submissions to ensure that your company can carry on business as usual without unwanted interruptions.

Conclusion - Switching to HTTPS is Tricky, but Doable for All Website Owners!

Switching to HTTPS has several positive impacts on your SEO and will help future-proof your website. It's expected that Google will increasingly weigh website rankings based upon website security, so it's advisable to implement HTTPS sitewide.

The initial implementation of your SSL certificate is simple, but the process that follows can be tricky if you're not prepared. Create a checklist using these talking points and work with your team to prepare. You will need to take manual efforts to update your URLs and redirect users to the new version of your website. This also includes updating mixed content sources for images and videos.

You'll also need to update your sitemap, Robots.txt, and disavow files to ensure that you carry on the benefits of your SEO work thus far. After you complete these updates, instruct Google Search Console to crawl the HTTPS version of your website as soon as possible.

Some small potential drawbacks can occur by switching to HTTPS. However, by following Google guidelines and following the best practices for SEO, your website should be able to handle the changes that come with this upgrade. As a result, you will see continued results for your SEO efforts and the promised recognition by Google for securing your site for others.