Structured data implementation promises to enhance your website's SEO value and attract new customers. It is no longer a practice that can be ignored as businesses become savvier every day when it comes to the latest trends in digital marketing. It continues to evolve the way we search for information and access information by identifying key snippets of information on a page for our knowledge.

If you are unfamiliar with structured data, also referred to as schema, we're here to get you up to speed. This article will help you to understand what structured data is, the importance of schema markup in SEO, the implementation of data structures, and how to identify any schema errors currently on your web pages.

What is Structured Data?

Structured data is any information that is structured or organized to help search engine crawlers understand the data. By using the appropriate schema markups, Google can immediately identify business information, product information, people, addresses, contact details, and more. Using structured data correctly will also illustrate how all of that information relates to one another in a hierarchical structure.

You will often hear structured data and schema markup used interchangeably, although they are not the same thing. When we use the term schema markup, we are referring to the process of using a markup language in our HTML to appropriately tag and organize all of the content on a web page. This process makes our data structured for better visibility.

Like any programming language, there are strict rules for us to follow. Schema.org is the official organization that determines and creates the rules that all webmasters must follow when properly implementing structured data. Google then uses those rules to create a format for the appropriate tags to use and when to use them for you to enhance the appearance of your search result on one of their search engine results pages.

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Why Should I Implement Structured Data on My Site?

Before you find yourself scared off by the technical aspects, know that the importance of schema markup in SEO cannot be understated. Structured data benefits all parties involved by making it easier to identify and read key elements of information that you offer on every webpage. If you're unsure of what this means, take a look at this search result:

Before we click on a webpage, we can already learn a significant amount of information just from the snippet. We see how this page relates to the navigational hierarchy of the website, it is marked up with a review schema, and it also features schema markup that shows pricing and inventory information.

Your average search result usually contains only a title and a meta description. This enhanced search result is known as a rich snippet or a rich result and exists because of the structured data implementation. Not only does it potentially save us a click by giving us the key details, but it also tells Google's search crawler how to understand and classify that information for us. The better Google can understand your website, the more trust it has in it, which can ultimately boost your rankings.

In addition to this, a rich result is larger, contains more valuable information, and offers better visibility than your average search listing. The traffic that enters your website from a rich result is also likely to be of higher quality as they've already gained additional information to help them determine their level of interest in your content.

Structured Data Can Also Provide Knowledge Graphs

While rich results will benefit every website owner, structured data implementation can also help Google create knowledge graphs for higher-ranking results. Whenever you search for a keyword or business on Google, the top results generally feature what's known as a knowledge graph on the right side of the page. This provides a massive preview of the site along with relevant information.

This can provide your audience with the knowledge they need including a brief about blurb, contact information, social media profile links, your home page link, and much more. Google will also try to provide them with related businesses that users search for to help audiences better understand where your brand lies in the industry.

In summary, structured data implementation makes the internet a more organized, informative place. By helping Google understand your site, you significantly improve your SEO value and stand out significantly among your competitors. Your audience will thank you for the easily accessible information, as well.

Who Can Benefit from Structured Data?

Every business or website owner will unquestionably benefit from enhancing their pages with rich results. If you take several search results across a variety of topics on Google, you are guaranteed to see rich results near the top of every search engine results page. While those webmasters are certainly implementing a variety of SEO practices to enhance their ranking, the evidence is clear that Google's algorithm highly favors those who properly utilize schema markup according to their structured data guidelines.

While structured data implementation should be a core component of everyone's SEO strategy, it can potentially be more beneficial for small-to-medium-sized businesses that may or may not have the ability to correctly perform their schema markup. This can be due to lack of knowledge or ability, lack of time or resources, or lack of budget to hire a search engine optimization expert. This provides the perfect window for you to take advantage of the competition's weaknesses.

A smaller business with a lower profile will stand out significantly with an excellent SEO strategy and rich results on every website page. It lends an air of professionalism, trustworthiness, and authority that provides an excellent first impression to first-time visitors. In addition to this, these happen to be the components Google's search algorithm looks for when choosing the results to rank highest.

If you are on the fence as to whether or not implementing structured data is worthwhile, or SEO in general for that matter, it's time to take the leap. SEO services are affordable and undoubtedly one of the most worthwhile investments you can make to improve your business's online presence. Studies support this claim with rich results pages boasting higher clickthrough rates than those without.

Where Can I Learn How to Implement Structured Data?

Schema.org offers a “Getting Started” page that educates you on the basic principles of schema markups and microdata. This includes descriptions of the alternative formats as well as the vocabulary used to tag key information. This document is not for those who are completely unfamiliar with coding and assumes that you have some basic knowledge of HTML as a website owner and operator.

From there, you can utilize their document library to understand the preferred hierarchy model and the full list of schema vocabulary you can use to mark up a webpage. You can also quickly search for specific articles to immediately identify how to mark up that specific article of information.

There are three formats for implementing structured data: microdata, JSON-LD, and RDFa. While you can learn about each on the website, know that Google's preferred format is JSON-LD, which greatly simplifies the process of marking up a page. You can essentially apply your markup language anywhere in the HTML of a page without much issue.

Choosing the Right Structured Data for the Page

If you've had an opportunity to take a peek at the list of schema vocabulary, you may be overwhelmed. While it's easy to go overboard with the intent of marking up every piece of content, it's better to focus on the primary goal for the page.

When beginning structured data implementation, start with the primary reason that the webpage exists. If you are marking up a product page for example, then the “Product” schema is the most important factor for this page. Remember that Google’s search crawler uses this language to determine what content exists on a page. If you get carried away with markups that are not focused on the product, you may confuse the algorithm. This can harm your rankings.

When you need to use more markup tags, remember to follow the recommended hierarchy. If you think about how other search results appear when using structured data, the hierarchy generally might look something like this:

• Thing
• Organization
• Educational Organization
• College or University

For a product schema, it may look something like this:

• Thing
• Product Name
• Product Image
• Review
• Aggregate Rating
• Pricing
• Brand

You can use the Schema link provided above and follow the links to see how a hierarchy should follow. The final link then takes you to all of the available attributes that you may potentially use to markup a page based on the primary topic you selected.

The exact structured data you should use depends entirely on the page's subject matter. You will need to research the required and recommended attributes before beginning the markup process. Countless types of pages could exist depending on the focus including Product, Review, Article, Offer, Business, Place, Person, Creative Work, Event, and much more.

If you are struggling with how to approach implementing structured data markup, Google once again simplifies the process by offering its Structured Data Markup Helper. You simply select the primary data type of the page, enter your URL, and click Start Tagging.

Your webpage will appear along with a column listing the potential items available for tagging on the right side. Click the content you want to tag, choose the appropriate tag, and repeat this process for all items you wish to markup. When you are finished, simply select Create HTML to have this tool generate your code for you. You will then need to add this HTML code to the existing code on the webpage.

How Do I Know If I Used Structured Data Correctly?

If you utilize the documentation made available by Schema.org, you should already be off to a great start. However, Google Search Console simplifies the process of identifying markup errors. Log in to your Google Search Console account and navigate to Search Appearance. This will show you your total number of results along with the current number of errors.

You can then sort through every error by page and view a description of each schema markup error that is present. You should then continue to follow through by selecting Test Live Data, which will take you to Google's Structured Data Testing Tool. This then provides an in-depth examination of your schema markup code and pinpoints the problems exactly.

The test will flag errors in either red or orange. Red indicates any markup tags that are required or are present with existing issues. This is usually caused by an incorrect entry somewhere in the markup tag. Flagged items in orange do not represent vital errors, but rather recommendations to enhance the appearance of your rich results.

Any time that you remedy existing errors or otherwise change the schema markup of a webpage, be sure to resubmit your website for indexing through the Search Console. This advises Google to crawl your website once again and update search engine results pages with the fixes to your HTML and snippet appearance.

Additional Schema Markup Tips to Know

Now that you've grasped the essentials of schema markup and structured data implementation, there are a few things to keep in mind. You should only apply schema markup tags to content that users see and interact with on the web page. You do not need to and should not tag elements that exist only in the HTML code.

However, you may tag hidden content that exists on a webpage. While this won’t apply to many users, there are niche scenarios in which hiding content is necessary to improve the user experience. An example of this is minimizing the amount of content shown on screen when a user visits a page from a mobile phone with a small screen. Developers may choose to hide some of the content behind a “Read More” button to improve the user experience. Because the content is not being hidden for malicious or unethical purposes, it is acceptable to tag this content for your SEO. However, know that it is never acceptable to hide irrelevant content to mislead consumers or manipulate the search algorithm.

An additional tip to note is that your schema markup should always be a true representation of the content. We raise this point as there may be scenarios in which a page on your website ranks highly for a term that is separate from the page's focus.

An example of this is ranking for a product on your home page, which focuses on your business. While it may occur to you to use a product markup to further boost this ranking, it goes against Google's guidelines. You would still need to utilize the local business markup to represent the on-page content. If your pages are ranking for keywords unintentionally, you will need to address this in your SEO strategy.

Finally, be sure to implement the same schema markup language on all versions of your site including Accelerated Mobile Pages. This will ensure that the benefits gained from structured data are consistent and present a better browsing experience for your mobile audience.

Tracking Your Rich Results Performance

After marking up your website pages and remedying any errors, you can easily keep track of the benefits gained from your efforts by using Google Search Console. By navigating to Performance > Search Appearance, you can view clicks, impressions, and Google ranking positions for each rich result. Use your tracked dates to compare newer figures to previous ones without schema markup language.

Google Search Console will further segment your rich results by general search queries, product snippets, review snippets, and videos. You should expect to see an increase in all metrics over time.

Conclusion - The Strategic Value of Structured Data Implementation is Significant

Effectively organizing the content throughout your website benefits your online presence in myriad ways. Google's search crawler has a significantly easier time classifying and presenting data to search engine users when using schema markup tags. This results in rich results that present your audience with key information that not only drives your clickthrough rate but the quality of your website traffic.

Utilizing structured data is also an effective way to immediately make your local business stand out significantly from the competition. Maximizing the impressions gained by demonstrating organization, trustworthiness, and professionalism will help you stand among even larger online businesses.

All of these benefits work together to ultimately boost your overall search rankings. Your average search engine results page demonstrates that pages with rich results take priority over those without. Combine this with a consistent SEO strategy and regular content marketing and your website ranking will climb noticeably over time.

A link-building campaign is a marketing strategy that focuses on building navigational links that direct users to a website. Website owners attempt to gain these links from other websites through content marketing, social connections, or by providing something else of benefit to the public.

However, you won't make the most out of gaining those links if your website doesn't utilize effective SEO practices. In this guide, we'll walk you through the technical SEO checklist you need to know to increase the impact of your next link-building campaign.

Why Should I Use a Link Building Campaign?

Improving your site's SEO value is a proven way to increase your ranking in search engine results pages. The most common way to do this is by improving the quality of on-page content. This includes using relevant, high-volume keywords, providing sources for arguments or claims, and providing proof of your qualifications regarding the subject matter.

However, Google would begin to factor in not just the quality of on-page content, but how many sources link to that page for reference. Google would see a high number of links pointing to a page as a sign of trustworthiness and value. This would then go one step further by separating backlinks as high quality or low quality.

A low-quality link will hurt your site authority. That's because a low-quality link comes from a domain that's seen as untrustworthy, spammy, or otherwise malicious. If you've ever had an obscure blog link to your site along with a host of additional link spamming, you might be familiar with this.

Conversely, high-quality links come from other sources that are highly ranked and favorite by Google's algorithm. Because that domain possesses trust and authority, you can gain referral value any time one of those domains links its users to your domain. Therefore, a link-building campaign can prove highly beneficial to multiple parties as everything can gain something of value for their website.

You can maximize the benefits you gain from a link-building campaign by implementing key technical SEO tactics. This will ensure that the new traffic you receive explores as much of the content on your site as possible.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a subsection of SEO that focuses on optimizing your site in a way that makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index it. By this, we are referring to loading speeds, optimizations for different devices, repairing broken links, and much more.

If your link-building campaign is successful, you are going to receive plenty of first-time visitors to your website. However, first impressions mean everything. If your website is filled with errors that make your website miserable to navigate on a mobile device, for example, those users are going to bounce away and avoid your site going forward.

Furthermore, neglecting to fix errors on your site hurts your quality score. When your site has a low-quality score, other site owners that link to your site can see this when they perform a backlink audit. Because site owners won't want to link out to low-quality sites, they'll likely remove the link and disavow your domain from any future link-building efforts.

How to Improve Your Link Building Campaign?

Now that you're caught up on what you need to know, let's get into some examples of what you can start doing now to improve your next link building campaign:

1. Optimize Site Speed for Desktop and Mobile

Loading speeds are vital for improving the quality of your website. Not only is speed an essential factor in Google's site quality scores but it's statistically proven to change how users engage with your site. The ideal benchmark for loading times is anywhere between two to five seconds. However, each second that passes significantly increases the bounce rate, with a five-second load time having a bounce rate of 38% on average.

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Whatever your load times are for a LAN-connected home computer, consider that a visit from a mobile device will likely increase that time due to the unreliability of wi-fi or 4G connections. This means that if you're not already, you need to be taking extra lengths to ensure that your website loads reliably for all users.

To gain insights as to how you can improve your site speed, be sure to utilize Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Review your list of errors and implement the necessary changes to enhance the overall performance of your site. You can also check out our previous tips for speed optimizations here.

2. Optimize the Efficiency of Your Site's Security Layers

The security of your website is another factor that highly impacts user retention. However, what you may not know is that your existing SSL certificate may be having a notable impact on your site loading times.

For starters, your website needs an SSL certificate to benefit your ranking. The SSL (secure sockets layer) certificate ensures that any data transmitted between the user and the domain remains confidential. Most website builders simplify the process of obtaining this to make the internet more secure.

In addition to this, a website without security is shown to noticeably increase the bounce rate. Not only are users afraid of insecure connections, but most web browsers will also now flag a site and attempt to direct users away before they have a chance to access your domain.

There are three different types of SSL certificates. The type offered for free by many website editors is known as a domain-validated certificate. This is the least secure type of encryption and is meant for smaller sites that generally don't exchange any sensitive information.

The second is an organization-validated certificate and provides additional security layers to protect information captured from customers. This is important if you're attempting to gather contact details from your visitors for marketing purposes.

The final type is an extended validation certificate and provides the highest level of encryption available. You will want this for your website if your business solicits highly valuable information including payment details or background information about the visitor.

Not only is your site security necessary for protecting consumer information, but the quality of your SSL can also improve your site performance overall. You'll want to use a tool like SSL Server Test or DigiCert's SSL Certificate Checker to run diagnostics. If these tests return any errors, you will need to consult your certificate provider for more information. If they are unable to resolve the problem, look into upgrading your certificate with a different provider.

3. Optimize Your Page URLs

This is a simple adjustment to make, but an important one to ensure that every page URL maintains its value. Before publishing a new page or article, always take efforts to optimize the URL slug. Be sure to eliminate the date of publishing from your URL to avoid making any standout content appear old or irrelevant.

Utilizing this practice is also useful as it affords you the freedom to make updates to content without needing to redirect to new pages. You can then continue to reap the benefits of the SEO work you've done previously on all existing pages. It also eliminates the potential of any navigation issues or page speed impairments caused by too many redirects.

In addition to this, avoid creating temporary page URLs whenever possible. If your business utilizes frequent or recurring campaigns, you can update this page every campaign cycle with the relevant information without the need for creating temporary pages that won't carry SEO value after their use expires. If creating temporary pages is unavoidable, choose a page to be a permanent part of your navigation and use similar content on both pages.

4. Run a Backlink Audit and Resolve Any Issues

Now that we've run through our technical SEO checklist and resolved off-page errors, it's time to examine our existing backlinks. Run your domain through your backlink audit tool to determine your existing number of backlinks, errors occurring with those links, and the number of toxic backlinks that you need to address.

It's possible that if you make changes or updates to your site, it can impact existing links to your domain and result in a 301 redirect or a 404 page not found error. Not only does this null any value you would otherwise obtain from the link, but it can also actually lower your value overall. If your audit points out any navigation errors, pinpoint the problem, and correct the navigation issue as soon as possible.

Second, use the audit to create a list of every low-quality link and get to work on addressing them. Google first recommends that you reach out to the webmaster of each domain and submit a formal request that they remove the link to your website. If you do not receive a prompt response, or if they take hostile action such as ransoming your link, you can submit a disavow list to Google.

To disavow these toxic backlinks, you will need to compile a list of the domains you wish to disassociate with. Refer to your site report within Google Search Console and include reference to any attempts made to have the link removed by the webmaster. It's best to do this regularly and as soon as possible as it can take Google several weeks to respond to your request. After successfully disavowing a domain, they will no longer be able to impact the quality of your website through backlinks.

5. Capitalize on New Visitors with Internal Linking

Internal linking can also provide SEO value to your domain and should be part of any solid SEO strategy. Search engine crawlers navigate and map out websites by following links. When you associate one page with another, you are helping crawlers understand how one page's content relates to another. Likewise, a page on your site that has value and links to another page will help it to understand that the new page is also valuable.

This works similarly for new visitors. When your link-building campaign gets new visitors to your site, you don't want them to simply stop on that one page. While that boost in value to the referred page is great, a boost in value to multiple website pages is even better. Make sure to take advantage of every opportunity you have to refer your new visitors to relevant content that would be of interest.

Methods of doing this can include linking to blog articles that support statements made on the page. If you are running a promotion for a product, link them to the actual product page to help them learn more and get them closer to converting. You can also link to your About page or any pages that help show off your authority and credentials as an expert in your industry. Finally, link to pages immediately related to the page in the navigational hierarchy. This helps with organization and encourages visitors to explore without the fear of understanding how to get back to their original location.

As a final note, internal linking should not just apply to the backlinked page. Make sure to exercise internal linking throughout your website whenever possible to bolster your site's SEO value and increase your user retention.

6. For On-Page Content, Focus on EAT

If you've spent any time researching how to improve your search engine optimization strategy, you may have seen the acronym EAT. This stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Not only are these all factors into how Google assigns a quality score to a page but it is also the best way to earn the trust and respect of your visitors. You can learn more specifics from Google direct by reading their evaluation guidelines, specifically section 4.5.

EAT essentially mandates that website owners publish informative content that is backed by evidence and/or scientific data. The author of the content should be someone with experience or expertise in the field and be ready to share sources to validate claims. Finally, the content should always be relevant to the core subject matter of all other content on the website.

EAT impacts page quality scores, site rankings, and user engagement in mutually beneficial ways. When new visitor navigates to your site, they want to engage with content that is trustworthy and backed by experts in the field. When they can trust the source, they can confidently learn something new and make informed decisions when purchasing a product or service. If a visitor can trust a brand, they are more likely to convert and more likely to share content with their peers online. All of this then results in higher quality impressions, which Google accounts for when determining the quality of a website.

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Why does this matter for link-building campaigns? Content built around the principles of EAT is the type of content that others want to backlink. Website owners may want to educate their audience on matters they are either unequipped to speak about. The alternative is that they may currently lack the reputation that more famous and trusted industry experts possess. While new visitors may not yet trust the new website, they can trust the proven source. In turn, it creates a positive impression when the writer goes through the effort to research and provide high-quality sources.

By providing EAT-centric content, you give other website owners natural motivation to backlink your website. Your quality content provides SEO benefits to both you and the link sharer, and you gain a quality backlink, as well. If you're unsure of how to create content worthy of a backlink, try some of these suggestions:

7. Consider Guest Blogging for Other Sites

This works well if you have the knowledge, experience, and credentials worthy of creating shareable content. Most website owners will be eager for new content that they don't have to write themselves and can provide value to their audience. By taking the time to write an excellent article for another site, you get the opportunity to establish your brand in front of a new audience and to gain that valuable backlink.

Approaching others to guest blog is a great way to start forging your network of associates online. Those you connect with can potentially return the favor and feature content on your site, as well. It's a nearly-free and effective way of ensuring quality backlinks and improving the quality score of your domain.

8. Try Creating and Featuring in Round-Up Posts

A round-up style blog post is any post that collects excerpts or statements from other trusted sources around the web. Many websites practice this type of post to gather reviews, opinions on a social matter, or helpful tips on something that the reader is trying to learn. Simply mentioning the trusted source in your article can help drive further engagement.

As long as the content is valuable and your domain is trustworthy, these sources will likely be more than happy to take the backlink. Likewise, if you have credentials and authority on certain subject matters, you can volunteer to feature in another site's round-up posts to gain a backlink to your site. Because a round-up post is a compilation of information from a variety of sources, the time investment is negligible, but the benefits can add up quickly.

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9. Use Open Graph Tags for Social Sharing

Social media is one of the best platforms for sharing links online, making it a mandatory part of any great link-building campaign. With this in mind, you should utilize Open Graph tags to enhance the quality of your link preview on social platforms.

Open Graph tags allow you to qualify certain components on your website to control how it previews when shared on social media. Without these tags, the platform attempts to do its best with the content it locates, often resulting in an unsightly mess that's unpleasant for the users you are attempting to attract.

There are a variety of Open Graph tags available, but there are several that are mandatory to improve your social sharing. The first is a tag that identifies your title. This will ensure that the title of your webpage appears in clearly visible, bolded font. Another is an image tag that allows you to designate the exact image you want to appear in the preview. A third is the description tag, which allows you to provide a brief meta description of what the content is about.

In addition to these, you can also use Open Graph tags to identify the page URL, the language of the content (using the locale tag), and the content type (e.g. article). While you can manually create these Open Graph tags in the header, most website editors feature a social tab in the settings, where you can edit your social metadata.

By taking control of how your link appears, you give yourself the best opportunity to generate clicks from that shared link.

10. Create Custom Goals and Conversions to Gauge Campaign Success

Finally, you will want to utilize Google Analytics or an equivalent tool to create custom goals and conversions for your link-building campaign. This enables you to get a better idea of how users engage with your website after clicking a backlink, and whether or not you're getting the results you need.

A link click alone simply adds another number to your overall web traffic for the day, week, or month. However, analytical tools can help you keep track of what channels are used to access your website. You can decipher valuable information from this including which backlinks are more valuable as well as additional interests that the visitor may have.

By setting custom goals, you can utilize the information you gather to make improvements to your site and your link-building campaign. You could set a custom goal of increasing the average user session to a certain time frame. If visitors are bouncing from the backlinked page sooner, you know to focus on making the content on that page more engaging.

You can also set a custom goal of getting a user to visit X amount of new pages after visiting the linked page. Using the data gathered, you can begin to rethink your approach to internal linking in a way that makes additional pages on your site more appealing to your visitors.

Your overall goal with your link-building campaign may be to reach X number of sales with new and returning audiences. However, by creating step-by-step goals and micro-conversions, you can get a better understanding of how well your website fares at each stop of the process. This can make your pathway to success less daunting and provide a clearer illustration of what causes a visitor to exit the sales funnel prematurely.

Implement These Technical SEO Tactics to Improve Your Link Building Campaigns

By adhering to this technical SEO checklist, you not only enhance the potential effectiveness of your next link-building campaign but improve the quality score of your website overall. A high-quality website will help you to collect valuable backlinks, attract new audiences, enhance your brand's reputation, and keep new and returning customers engaged.

In summary, you can enhance the benefits of your next link building campaign by:

• Optimizing your site speed and improving mobile-friendliness
• Upgrading and optimizing the SSL Certificate protecting your website
• Optimizing page URLs and keeping promotional pages a permanent part of the navigation
• Properly disavowing toxic backlinks
• Use internal linking for improved site navigation
• Focus on the EAT principle
• Take control over social sharing
• Enhance your campaign monitoring by setting goals and micro-conversions unique to your business needs

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

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

Google's Goal to Improve the Internet

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

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

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

How to Improve Page Speed Score?

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

1. Use a Minimalistic Theme

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

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

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

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

2. Cut Down on HTTP Requests and Redirects

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Defer Javascript

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

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

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

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

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

4. Enable Browser Caching

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

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

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

5. Utilize GZIP to Compress Your Files

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

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

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

6. Optimize Your Images without Reducing Quality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

8. Utilize Lazy Loading

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

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

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

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

9. Optimize and Minify Your CSS

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

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

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

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

10. Purchase a Better Hosting Plan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COPPA - Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

Truth in Advertising

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

Examples of areas examined closely by Truth in Advertising include:

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

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

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

Truth in Healthcare Marketing Act of 2017

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

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

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

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

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

The FTC Green Guides

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

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

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

The Protection of Consumer Privacy

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

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

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

Read Copyright Laws Before Using Content

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

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

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

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

Disclose Relationships with Influencers

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

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

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

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

Allow Consumers to Share Honest Reviews

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

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

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

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Make Sure Your Campaigns Do Not Break Marketing Laws

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

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

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

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

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

Is Your SEO Strategy Leading to a Traffic Increase?

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

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

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

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

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

Does Your Web Traffic Lead to Conversions?

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

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

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

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

How Cost-Effective is Your SEO Strategy?

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

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

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

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

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

Are You Seeing an Increase in Sales?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Set a Defined Goal for Your New Campaign

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

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

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

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

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

2. Align Your Goals with Audience Intent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Bid on the Right Types of Keywords

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Utilize Analytics for Continuous Optimization

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

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

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

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

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

5. A/B Test Your Ads & Landing Pages

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

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

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

Image Source

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

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

6. Use the Right Network to Reach the Right Audience

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

A. Search Ads

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

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

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

B. Display Ads

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

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

C. Shopping Ads

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

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

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

7. Remarket to Those That Engage with Your Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Build Lookalike Audiences

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

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

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

Conclusion: A Sustainable PPC Strategy Aligns with Customer Intention

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

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

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

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