SUMMARY

Let’s get straight to the point… you want to make more money, right?

Chad Kodary, CEO of DashClicks will be pulling back the curtains and showing you the top 10 fastest ways he’s managed to add additional revenue to his agencies bottom-line.

If you’re an entrepreneur that loves scaling your company, making more revenue, and growing internally as an individual at the same time… this is for you!

Schedule a call here to get more information about our DashElite private coaching program:   https://bit.ly/chadpartner

Online marketing includes several strategies such as content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and lead generation. However, most digital marketing agencies and startups are proficient in just one or two streams, making it difficult for them to efficiently handle all the varied activities.

It is why many reputed brands are now choosing white label agencies for their marketing requirements. There are many advantages of outsourcing to a white label agency and reselling their ready-made solutions to your clients after branding them as your own.

Some of the primary benefits include:

• It saves you time, money, and effort. It allows you to cut time and cost incurred in recruiting and maintaining experts and training new hires
• It enables you to create new revenue streams for your agency
• It allows you to focus on your core strengths and business activities by taking care of all else

However, collaborating with a white label company can be tricky if, as a business, you are resistant to change, fear losing control, and are inflexible to new ideas and ways of working. But hiring white label services can do wonders for your business, especially if you are facing the following challenges:

1. You Want to Expand Business Services Across Domain

Because of market uncertainties and unpredictable product life cycles, businesses are advised to grow fast and lean, to scale up or pivot. They need to expand if a new business opportunity arrives. However, most companies cannot capitalize on such opportunities because of many bottlenecks, such as lack of staff, infrastructure, and expertise in a niche field.

For instance, you run a digital marketing agency, and you get a bulk order to develop websites and apps. You can't take on this opportunity if you do not have the trained workforce to provide the requested services. A white label agency can help here. You can outsource web and app development to a white label website design agency proficient in it and provide other services your client requires using in-house teams. This way, you can retain the client and expand the contract's ticket size.

2. You Don't Have the Budget to Hire Additional Workforce

Most startups and small businesses have budget constraints. So, they hire only a few employees to run in-house operations. When such a company wins a series of contracts to provide specialized services, it will struggle to meet the requirements with its small in-house teams.

In such a situation, instead of wasting time, effort, and money on running aggressive recruitment campaigns, the company should hire a white label agency that specializes in the needed field. Investing in hiring bigger teams can be overkill for a startup, especially given the market's fluctuating demand.

3. You Can't Deliver the Quality Your Clients Want

Sometimes, you don't have in-house staff to provide the kind of quality service your client seeks in addition to the existing services you provide. For instance, suppose you offer social media marketing services. In that case, your client may also need you to arrange a copywriter to write their website blogs in sync with their social media branding. It can be highly time-consuming and tedious to hire an expert copywriter.

Moreover, it may not be a sensible business decision to hire people for this position permanently when copywriting is not one of your primary services. Remote hiring a white label copywriting service can be the best option in this case.

4. You are Failing to Meet Your Business Goals

Startups often struggle with operations and meeting their business goals and revenue targets. In such a situation, it becomes crucial to keep the company afloat. Though they may be good at running their core business operations, most startup owners find it challenging to identify and plug loopholes. A white label agency can assess the underlying issues and bring in the much-needed fresh perspective. It will help you identify areas that need improvement and implement new strategies to put your business back on track.

5. Your Business is Not Growing

It's a major red flag when a company stops growing. During the pandemic, many companies that were either not growing or were operating at a steady pace with a limited number of clients went entirely out of business and had to pause operations.

It happens when there is a slump in demand or during economic downturns. The situation may aggravate if you don't have a sound strategy in place to face it. As your existing clients leave, your revenues plummet. Partnering with a white label marketing agency is the best way to navigate such sticky situations as it allows you to expand operations and build cash reserves. The support of financially strong clients during lean business periods keeps small businesses afloat.

Conclusion

White labeling is a highly cost-effective business practice. It is also the most feasible solution when your business is struggling with fluctuating demand and market uncertainties. It allows you to stay agile and expand business operations without compromising on client satisfaction and service quality. However, you should do thorough research before hiring a white label agency. It should be competent, experienced, accountable, and have a successful track record of delivering quantifiable results.

With more than 3.8 billion people using social networks globally, social media marketing (SMM) has become one of the most powerful, versatile, actionable, and cost-effective strategies to grow and promote your business. It helps you reach your target audience, create a loyal fanbase, build your brand and boost sales and revenue.

Social media marketing may seem overwhelming, but it is a phenomenal opportunity. 97% of marketers use social media, and 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by leveraging it for their business. However, it's crucial to use social media effectively to achieve business goals. According to Social Media Examiner, out of the 97% of marketers who use SMM, about 85% don't know how to use it for best results.

In this blog, we discuss the 15 most significant advantages of using SMM and share how you can leverage these for optimal business growth.

1. Increases Brand Awareness

Consumers buy brands they recognize. Therefore, boosting brand recognition and awareness is every company's fundamental goal. Brand recognition is measured by people's ability to identify a product by looking at its logo design, tagline, or advertisement. Sometimes, consumers may also recognize a brand via an audio cue, such as iPhone or Nokia's signature ringtones. Using social media is the best way to build a brand in the digital age. It gets your brand in front of a massive audience effortlessly and cost-effectively. They can always see and know about your product even if they don't intend to buy it.

Tip: The branding exercise on social media starts with creating your profile, logo, and cover photos. You need to make sure that the visual elements of your brand are well represented.

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You should know how to place your logo strategically to accentuate your branding. If you look at Pepsi's on Twitter, you'll see it's clutter-free and straightforward. Their logo is visible on the profile picture, and the cover photo has a Pepsi can and their brand color palette. The cover photo connects the logo to the idea of a fresh cold drink for people who love sports.

2. Creates Buzz Around Your Products

Generating conversations and marketing buzz about their brand is every business's ultimate goal. Therefore, if you want people to invest in your products or services, try to encourage discussion around your brand. Social media is the most effective channel to help you create the buzz with minimum or no investment.

Southwest Airlines' marketing strategy relies heavily on social conversations. They use them to reinforce their customer relationships; they accomplish it by being appreciative and attentive towards their customers. When you can stimulate genuine conversations on social media, you receive a great deal of feedback about your products.

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Tip: Use social media to engage with your audience, especially when they comment on your posts. Make them feel that there is a human face behind your brand that they can interact with. It also makes them feel valued.

Share content that can trigger a conversation. Give shout-outs to your partner companies and other companies in your network. Open-ended questions are also a great way to initiate meaningful conversations.

3. Provides Ready Audience

Monitoring social conversations is extremely important to keep yourself abreast of current market trends and know your audience's wants. The act of monitoring such conversations is called social listening. These conversations primarily highlight consumers' pain points and issues they are struggling with. Smart businesses tweak their marketing strategy based on these insights.

Social listening also helps you know the tone and language your audience uses so you can replicate it in your marketing messages.

Tip: Use social listening to know what people are talking about in your industry or niche and build your marketing strategy around it. You can use a social media tool to check the product or brand mentions.

4. Helps You Tell Your Brand's Story

Telling compelling stories can be a game-changer for your brand's image. When you share your brand mission and stories on social media, you can achieve several goals in one go. Compelling brand stories appeal to emotions and communicate enduring values. Craft your brand story to reflect varied elements such as your social media strategy, website copy, and ads. The following tips can help:

• Highlight the advantages: Explain how your product or service can improve your customer’s life. It does not have to be a massive change; even a slight improvement that provides them some relief or adds value to their life will do.
• Infuse emotions: We respond to emotions more strongly than to logic. Therefore, appeal to emotions with your product.
• Connect with your audience: Engage with the people you’re selling your products to.
• Tell the truth: Your audience should believe that your brand story is true, earnest, and worth investing in.

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Tip: Share stories of your customers; make them your brand's mouthpiece. Ask them to share their reviews. Most of them will be happy to get featured. You can select the positive reviews and share them.

5. Allows You to Gather Data From Audience Research

Social media platforms have built-in analytical tools to gather data about audience behavior. It sounds similar to social listening, but it is different. You should focus on a specific product and the keywords your customers are using to search for it. The insights will help you tweak your marketing strategy and improve your campaigns.

Tip: You can get insights about your posts and ads using metrics such as "reach" and "engagement" on all major social media channels.

6. Allows You to Provide Instant Customer Service

Customer service is the key to a thriving business. Investment in customer service pays off as customer loyalty and increased customer satisfaction. More consumers are using social media to enquire about products and seek instant support.

Instant customer support is already prevalent on Twitter, especially among service sectors such as airlines. People ask time-sensitive questions on Twitter and get instant responses from the companies.

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Tip: If you use separate teams to handle social media and customer service, ensure that the communication between them is quick, consistent, smooth, and transparent.

7. Helps Build Customer Loyalty

Brand loyalty is every company's premium asset. Social media allows businesses to build customer loyalty for free. In a world where every business is fighting for attention, people interact with the brands they love. Unsurprisingly, more than half of the customers who follow your brand are likely to be loyal to your brand.

Usually, this is how it works. A social media user follows you. Then they start choosing you over your competition. Finally, they begin to advocate your brand online and become your loyal customer, increasing your website traffic.

Tip: Make every effort to keep your loyal customers engaged and happy. It will reward you many times over in ways you can't imagine.

Reward your loyal customers occasionally by announcing special promotional schemes and discounts. However, be mindful of not violating Facebook's promotional content guidelines. You can collaborate with startups and other businesses that might be interested in giving out merchandise (t-shirts, hats, sunglasses, corporate and fashion accessories, office stationery) to promote their brands. You can also give away your products for free on special occasions, festivals, and events.

8. Sends Referral Traffic To Your Website

After search engines, social networks send the most amount of direct referral traffic to your website. Therefore, you should decide the content and frequency of your posts for optimal results. Use a content calendar and follow a fixed schedule for posting. You can use social media tools such as Hootsuite to find the most effective time to post.

Tip: Use URL shorteners like bitly to shorten your links when posting on social media channels. They save space and look aesthetically pleasing.

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9. Helps You Earn Inbound Links and Improve SEO

Social media has a significant impact on SEO. Google considers social shares, likes, and mentions as a major ranking factor.

Furthermore, a diverse audience views your content on social networks. They can be bloggers, writers, content publishers, or major brands. They can gather ideas from your post, write a new article and link back to you. This way, you earn free inbound links that can improve your rankings against your competition. Both Google and Bing display tweets in their search results. That's why the topics that trend on Twitter also rank on top in Google search.

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Tip: Use social media post scheduling tools such as Hootsuite or CoSchedule to publish content at the most effective time when your audience is most likely to see it. It will help you earn more backlinks.

10. Social Media is Mostly Free and Cost-Effective

Most social media is available to use free of cost. However, you might need to pay for SMM and promotion. For most businesses, organic promotion is enough.

But for paid advertising, decide on a budget before you start your campaign. Social platforms use AI to take care of your ads' performance and provide you with custom-built, targetable audiences. As a result, you get to target the right audiences and start getting better results with minimum investment.

Tip: People use social media for leisure, and they don't like to see promotional content in their feeds. Advertising on social media is not a bad idea, but you should do it professionally by paying for it to look like an ad. Even if promotional, your posts should engage, inform, and entertain.

11. Establishes Your Brand As An Authority

A significant SMM objective is to help you establish your brand as a topical authority. If you post consistently on social media and receive high engagement, search engines start to perceive you as an authority in your domain or on a specific topic. Soon you may acquire the "go-to" authority status for a given topic and start receiving more traffic on your landing pages. Therefore, when you create content, use sources with a high domain authority score.

Tip: You can use Moz's domain authority score to find the most authoritative resources for your content by downloading Moz's free toolbar. A domain authority score of more than 60 is considered good.

12. Allows You to Retarget Your Audience

SMM is incomplete without retargeting, a handy feature of paid advertising on social media. Given that only 2% of customers purchase something during their first visit to your website, you should have a solid plan to target the remaining 98% using a sales funnel. The most popular method to target this audience is to run retargeting ads.

When a visitor comes to your site, the website places cookies on its browser. When they leave without buying and revisit the social media site, the retargeting service starts displaying the ad in their feed. It acts as a gentle reminder and is usually successful in driving conversion.

13. Gives Visibility To Your Cause

Social media allows you to share your stories with the potential for them to go viral. You can use stories to promote your cause, run a campaign, or support your branding efforts. A story that targets emotions and is inspired by other viral stories has a high chance of going viral. You might have seen various viral stories. They use a good plot and emotions ā€” struggle, conflict, heartbreak, or heroic courage ā€” to achieve something big. Such videos have an underlying message that leaves a lasting impression.

Tip: An SMM campaign's objective should be to reach the right people, even if they are few. You should try to make a lasting impression, but don't do something desperate or forced to make your post go viral. Good content goes viral if created with enthusiasm, is well-planned, uses effective storytelling, and is promoted heavily.

14. Drives Conversions

Apart from sending traffic to your website, social media also helps in driving conversions. You can take the following steps to boost conversions through social posts and ads:

1. Add strong calls to action (CTAs)
2. Create engaging landing pages for your ads to prevent customers from bouncing off
3. Announce contests and giveaways frequently
4. Use social ads but don’t post promotional content in organic space

15. Promotes Your Content

Social media is currently the biggest platform to market content. Each month approximately 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages of content globally. You can use both free and paid tactics to promote your content on various social platforms. You can also use content repurposing to increase its impact.

You must take into consideration the following when promoting a post:

1. Its headline
2. It should have a catchy image
3. The time of posting

Use your creativity when writing a message for your posts. The content should be original and appealing. Use storytelling to prevent promotional content from looking like an ad.

Tip: Use this Lightroom Instagram Presets collection to spruce up your images for Instagram and quickly achieve the desired effect.

Conclusion

Much like with other digital marketing strategies, success through SMM largely depends on learning, experimenting, and updating your strategy from time to time. Its benefits and rewards almost always outweigh the time, cost, and effort it demands. Within a few weeks of implementing effective SMM, you will likely see an increase in traffic, conversion rate, brand loyalty, and improved SEO. Furthermore, since it is highly cost-effective, you have nothing to lose. Your competitors are already there on different social platforms leveraging SMM's benefits. You should use it too and make it your own.

Though Google Analytics (GA) can be a nightmare for a novice, if you perform website audits and implement effective technical SEO, it can be the most reliable and effective tool.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics provides an in-depth assessment of a website or app's performance. Its ability to accurately analyze vast incoming traffic data makes it indispensable for marketers who mean business. Google Analytics (GA) integrates with Google's various marketing and advertising platforms, such as Google search console and Google ads.

There are several other tools with similar features. But since GA offers actionable in-depth reports and insights, it is most suitable for a data-driven marketing environment. This blog is an introductory guide to using GA. We discuss the essentials ā setting up your GA account, the various GA dimensions, metrics, GA audience, segments, and reports, and how to navigate through it all.

Is Google Analytics Free?

Google Analytics offers a free version with most of the features a small or medium-sized business might need. However, if you have a large enterprise, you should opt for the premium version ā Analytics 360. It has many advanced features such as attribution modeling, advanced funnel reporting, and roll-up reporting. But it has a high subscription fee. Analytics 360 starts at $150,000 annually.

How to Set Up Google Analytics?

Like other Google products, to set up GA, you need to create a Google account. You then need to register for Analytics. Usually, it has three layers.

• Organization: Bigger businesses run many accounts under an umbrella account known as an “organization.” For example, Microsoft can run many GA accounts, but the organization will remain the same, i.e., Microsoft. It’s optional to choose.
• Account(s): Various users can access GA using their accounts. You can assign up to 50 properties, i.e., websites or apps, to one account.
• Views: There can be two views per property — one with no configuration, the other with a filter to exclude any traffic from your own company, bots, and spam.

Here's how you can set up your Google Analytics account:

1. Create a Google account: Go to google.com/analytics and click on Sign in to Analytics

Begin with creating or signing into your current GA account.

2. Add the website's name and enter additional relevant information in setting up your property field

Create and name your property and enter additional relevant information such as industry, timezone, etc. You can also choose an account to link this property to.

3. Add a view to the propertyĀ

Go to the property, create a view from the menu, name it, select the typeāweb or app, and fill in other necessary information. A property can have up to 25 views.

4. Add your tracking code to your website's <head> section

When creating a property, you need a unique ID and a global site tag to track and collect data. You can paste your global site tag on each webpage you want to "track." Place it right after the opening <head> tag. You'll also have to disclose what type of website it is, i.e., dynamic or static. It will help you to set up the data collection accordingly. For more information on how to install the Google Analytics tracking code, click here.

5. Verify if the analytics code is working on your website

Open the website to check real-time reports. It will show at least one visitor ā that's you; it means your code is working.

Do you need to add the Google Analytics tracking code to every page?

You don't need to add the code to every page of your website. If the website is big, all you need to do is insert the tag to every page template in the header module, and it will apply to all the pages. If you have two-page types, insert the code into two separate header modules, and it will apply to the rest of the pages.

Google Analytics Dimensions and Metrics

To understand and use GA efficiently, you need to be familiar with its dimensions and metrics. Dimensions are standard variables such as browser, location, landing page, device, and customer type. Meanwhile, metrics are quantitative variables such as sessions, page views, conversions, bounce rate, and session duration. The GA reporting format has dimensions as rows and metrics as columns.

Custom Dimensions and Metrics

You can create custom dimensions and metrics using Analytics data and non-Analytics data. You can know more about user behavior and the relationship between engagement and metrics such as pages per session and conversions by creating the following three dimensions:

• Advocate: User who shared your content on social (stage 1 in the sales funnel)
• Subscriber: User who subscribed to your newsletter (stage 2 in the sales funnel)
• Customer: User who paid for premium access (stage 3 in the sales funnel)

What's a Google Analytics Audience?

An audience is a group of people with a common element such as region or age group. Google Analytics provides a few built-in audiences and insights on them based on available visitor data. GA also gives the option to create custom audiences. For example, if your target consumer group is female millennials living in Florida, you can easily make a custom audience that includes female visitors from Florida aged between 23 and 35.

Now you need to create a new audience segment. You can use its data for your reports.

What's an Audience Segment in Google Analytics?

When your data is divided into small chunks, each set is called a segment. You can create segments based on different factors such as users, sessions, and hits.

• Users: Someone who has purchased from your site or has signed up for a program or service.
• Sessions: It includes categorization based on the task performed on a website—for example, all sessions when the user viewed a product page.
• Hits: This segment reveals all the website “hits” of a specific event. For example, you can determine all the “hits” of an instant purchase or an addition to the shopping cart.

Like “audiences,” Google Analytics also allows you to fetch data using various “segments,” which can sometimes be highly granular. It means that you can further split the data according to even more specific variables. A report can use a maximum of four segments at a time.

What are the Different Types of Reports in Google Analytics?

Reporting can be a bit overwhelming in Google Analytics as there are numerous options to choose from. Here are the eight major and very important types of reports and their variations that Google Analytics can generate for you:

1. Google Analytics Real-Time Report

It gives you real-time insights into the website's traffic data. It helps you determine the number of visitors and the particular pages they're visiting. This report also tells you the origin of the traffic as well as location data.

However, real-time reports offer little value for strategy-building. But you can use them to track how much traffic you're getting from a new social media or blog post and gauge the success of a sales event.

2. Google Analytics Audience Report

It carries much more weight than a real-time report. It's essential to review it a few times every week to assess your website's performance accurately.

You’ll be able to find “Audiences” below “Overview.” There are also expandable menus for various metrics such as “Behavior,” “Interests,” and “Demographics.” The best way to learn is to explore each of them and see how they can help you assess the traffic.

3. Google Analytics Active Users Report

“Active users” aren’t the users who are currently on your website. It refers to users who visited your website the previous day and remained active for some time.

You can use this report to analyze data in various ways to make informed business decisions. For example, if your traffic includes more one-day users than repeat visitors, you might be struggling with retention. When visitors don't come back to your site or app ā this report can help you find out why.

4. Customer Lifetime Value Report

As a marketer, you are probably familiar with the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and how it's calculated.

The CLV report tells you how much value each customer is bringing to your business. You can also evaluate the lifetime value of customers acquired from paid advertising compared to those attracted through organic search. You can use this information to decide which revenue channels deserve more attention. It's important to note that the lifetime value is measured only for 90 days.

5. Google Analytics Cohort Report

Cohort analysis is popularly seen as “the single most powerful report in GA.” It groups customers by a common characteristic, such as acquisition date — the day someone first visited your website.

You can find the cohort type, which by default is the acquisition date in GA, in the left-hand column. It is further split by cohort size into the day, week, or month.

The first row contains information about all the customers in that cohort. The rows below show the activity on that day, week, or month. The cohort report will tell you how many campaign goals have been achieved during a specific date range. It also includes additional details such as the customer acquisition date and goal completion date.

6. Google Analytics Acquisition Report

It provides traffic analysis by source. It can be direct, organic, referral, social, email, and paid search.

Go to “All Traffic” on the left column, click on “Channels,” and select a category to see the projections associated with that source.

If you want to see the report in graphics format, click on “Treemaps” under “All Traffic.”

GA also informs you which channel is sending you more referral traffic, so you can tweak your strategy and focus your marketing efforts accordingly. Apart from the traffic source, GA also tells you which landing pages on your website are receiving referral traffic.

7. Google Analytics Behavior Report

The behavior reports given by Google Analytics are immensely useful for marketers. They reveal what actions your visitors take when visiting your website, including the pages they visit. You can obtain these reports from the menu on your Google Analytics dashboard's left sidebar, where you will find various sections and tools.

Site Content

This report helps you audit and update your website content based on the performance of web pages, blog posts, and landing pages.

All Pages

It gives you a page-wise report on the traffic and insights about traffic fluctuations, if any, over a specific period. You can get it by going to Site Content > All Pages. It will also allow you to compare page views between different URLs. If you add a Page Title, you will see each page's name alongside its URL.

Content Drilldown

This report shows your site's structure at the subdomain and subfolder levels. If you have a highly complex website, this report can be tremendously helpful.

Landing Pages

Landing pages report tells you how a visitor first interacted with your website. It informs you of the sources (direct, organic, paid, social) that got visitors to the landing pages. You can add "source" as a secondary dimension. It displays the web pages as seen on smartphones and tablets to help you manage the traffic from portable devices.

Exit Pages Report

It shows the last page a visitor saw before leaving your site.

In addition to these reports, there are several others too:

• Site speed report: It gives information about how quickly your site loads. It also includes a site speed page timings report, which provides a URL’s average page-loading time.

• Site search report: It provides critical information about every website view, including usage, sessions, and search terms used. You can use it for keyword research.

• Events report: It provides information about user interactions with content. To get this report, you need to add a code to your website that tracks the actions you’re interested in.

8. Google Analytics Conversion Reports

Every website has one or more objectives for the visitors. For example, an eCommerce site owner may want its visitors to sign up for its newsletter, create a user account, and/or complete the purchase.

Media companies want visitors to spend as much time on their site as possible to maximize ad revenue. Similarly, B2B websites wish visitors to download educational material such as eBooks or reports or sign up for a webinar. With GA, you can measure all these objectives and do much more.

These goals are called conversions. There are four major types of goal-oriented metrics:

• Destination: You can use it when the goal is to reach a specific page, such as a product page or a thank you page.
• Event: It’s when the goal is to watch a video or share a piece of content on social media.
• Duration: This one is when the goal is to stretch a user’s session beyond a preset period.
• Pages per session: You can use it when the goal is to make a user visit specific pages per session.

Once you've decided on the goals, follow these tips to create, edit and share them:

Overview

If you want to assess your overall goal-wise performance, go to “Overview” and get a report. To drive maximum value from it, you should compare date ranges and/or look at segment-wise goal completions.

Goal URLs Report

You must know where a goal was achieved. For example, if there are newsletter subscription opt-ins on three different pages, the goal URLs report will tell you the visitor signed up for the subscription on which page.

Funnel Visualization Report

It allows you to see sequential goals to help you visualize your sales funnel.

In a sales funnel, a customer journey has various stages and corresponding goals.

The first goal: Visitor visited the product listing page

The “goal before checkout”: Visitor added a product to the shopping cart

The “previous goal” just before the purchase: Visitor clicked “checkout”

The last goal (can be): Visitor arrived at the order confirmation page

Try to determine why visitors are leaving at various stages to increase the conversion rate. For instance, if most users leave the session during checkout, you can alter the process to let them check out as a guest without creating an account. You can also take other measures to lower the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Goal Flow

It provides you with the sessions that led to the final goal. However, in Goal Flow, it doesn't matter if the user completed a particular goal. It shares loopbacks and includes sessions when a user moves back to a previous page or refreshes the current page. It helps evaluate various segments to compare conversion rates.

Smart Goals

This report is for marketers who use Google Ads but don't measure conversions. AI and machine learning help identify the "best" sessions or those with the highest probability of generating conversions. Google then uses them to make Smart Goals. You can use Smart Goals in Google Ads to optimize your advertising performance.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a valuable and multi-feature tool that any business can use to get actionable data. If used smartly, it can substantially boost your website's performance.Ā  There is a lot of information in this article, and you can always come back to learn sophisticated techniques for deeper insights. We wish you good luck on your journey with Google's complex and potent analytical weapon ā Google Analytics.

Google uses over 200 ranking factors to maintain its market leadership and provide users the most relevant search results. With over 5.14 billion searches each day, it's the ultimate dream of an online marketer to achieve high rankings on Google SERPs. But the volatility of Google algorithms makes it difficult. Therefore, you must make good use of top Google ranking factors for consistent and optimal results.

In this blog, we'll focus on leading on-page SEO ranking factors to help you improve rankings. We will also discuss the best SEO practices, features of SEO-friendly content, SEO-friendly website builders, and prerequisites of an ideally optimized web page..

Important On-Page Ranking Factors

If your website is brilliantly optimized, chances are it will rank higher. Since Google bots scan the on-page elements first, on-page ranking factors can be a game-changer for your website or web page's ability to rank.

Here we list the top three Google ranking factors to help you improve your rankings and neutralize the impact of Google algorithm updates and consequent ranking fluctuations.

1. Content on Page

Search engine crawlers work relentlessly to find content that offers users value, making content on-page a strong ranking metric. From an SEO perspective, good content must:

1. Offer a solution to the user’s queries and pain points
2. Be linkable

A. Good content resolves issues, addresses demands

Your website should act as a resource for your audience and customers and supply information to meet the immense demand. For example, WikiHow gives people easy instructions to solve day-to-day problems. Apart from text, you can consider videos, podcasts, images, or gifs to provide solutions depending on the demand.

B. Good content is linkable

If your content is not linkable, search engines may discount all the value it offers. If people can't link to your content, Google algorithms will find no way to assess its rank worthiness. As a result, your website will receive no traffic from search engines.

It frequently happens, especially when you have locked content such as eBooks, educational material, or AJAX-powered image slideshows that can be viewed when the reader is logged in. Search engines can't crawl such content. It can't be reproduced or shared either. Search engines and netizens don't like content that doesn't fulfill a demand.

2. Title Tag

Crawlers scan title tags before moving on to the content on the page. Therefore, title tags are an essential and sensitive on-page ranking factor. They also help bots categorize the web page and index it. To know why title tags are so important and how you can write an appropriate title tag, read this Moz article

3. URL (Uniform Resource Locator)

Since category hierarchy is crucial for SEO, it should reflect in the website URL. For example, https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/google-analyticsĀ  tells us that this HubSpot page is dedicated to Google Analytics (GA) in the online marketing articles category.

Crawlers use this information to assess a web page's relevance. The hierarchy also reflects that the page discusses GA in digital marketing's context, and the page isn't likely a resource that contains GA as a tool. So, if a user is looking for information on GA for online marketing, it's likely that the search engine sends them to this instructional article. It happens before the bots crawl your web page content to know what it is all about.

Now, let's look at a poor URL structure:

http://www.example.com/path/to/80/myfile.html?key1=value1&key2=value2#

This URL doesn't reflect any information hierarchy in the website, making it difficult for search engines to figure out what the page is all about.

Here is another example of a well-crafted and SEO friendly URL:

https://example.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors

It clearly mentions that the concerned page is a learning resource, and it talks about on-page factors under the SEO category.

Tip: The URL structure should help search engines categorize and index the URL as per its relevance. It should also assist you with appropriate anchor text when linking to your content.

Best SEO Practices

Web pages are the real estate of a website. The content on them is the prime reason why the visitors land and stay on your website. So, make sure it's specific and hyper-relevant to the topic. You can use title tags, URLs, content on-page, and Image alt text to state the web page's objective to search engines.

Here is an example of a web page with SEO-friendly content:

https://www.webfx.com/blog/seo/whats-the-difference-between-mobile-seo-and-desktop-seo/

Search engines love this kind of content. Such web pages have the following features:

1. Unique content that has in-depth, relevant, and topical information

2. Well-written, search-engine friendly URL that mentions the topic

3. Images with alt text‍

4. Liberal use of visuals and graphics5. Well-written meta description

Prerequisites of A Properly Optimized Web Page

An SEO-friendly web page should:

1. Have unique, topical content

2. Contain the topic in the title tag, URL, and image alt text

3. Specify the subject and mention related keywords several times in the text content

4. Link back to the category page, sub-category page (if applicable), and homepage‍

Note: This is made easier when you use theĀ best website builder for small business.

Conclusion

To climb the SERP ladder, you need to start from the beginning that’s fixing your on-page SEO. With your website’s on-page elements in place, you can start working on other ranking factors such as search intent, backlinks, domain authority, user experience, and page load speed. If your website is optimized with your target audience in mind, you’ve already won half the battle.

Google uses sophisticated methods to locate, gather, and consolidate vast data to give users relevant results. The search engine is restricted by response time and various other factors when working with these various data types. The search results vary frequently based on factors such as search history, location, interests, and the device used.

Google search results can vary not only on different devices but also on the same device, even when using the same search term. Google also changes the order of search results based on user experience considerations. Therefore, on mobile phones, various elements are removed and replaced by visual elements to avoid distraction. So, mobile SEO can be vastly different from desktop SEO.

Since people spend more than 70% of their internet time on mobile phones, its impact is visible on Google SERPs. Google has also announced its mobile-first indexing policy. So, it's crucial to know the difference between mobile SEO and desktop SEO.

Search Results

With Google's mobile-first indexing policy, search results may vary on different devices. Google gives you results based on search intent, which changes according to the device you use. Therefore, your mobile SEO and desktop SEO need different strategies for optimal results.

Mobile

Since mobile is not as text-friendly as a desktop, you should emphasize the visual elements such as images and videos. That's why test results are shown in big sizes on mobile devices.

To scroll through the search results, a mobile user has to swipe multiple times. With shorter swipes, users feel reluctant to go to the bottom of search results. That's why Google displays the most relevant results on top of mobile search and removes some elements shown only to desktop users. The results may also vary according to the mobile responsiveness of websites. For example, if a website has good content but isn't mobile-friendly, Google will downgrade its mobile ranking.

Desktop

There are no space issues with desktop screens; they can display multiple search results simultaneously. Since they allow users to see a lot more content, they find it easier to scroll through the results and reach the page’s end. So, the generic SERP layout can be different for desktop users. For example, if you search for “what was the civil war,” the desktop results will appear as shown below in the screenshot.

Meanwhile, the mobile results for the exact search will appear something like this:

It clearly shows that visual elements are prominent in mobile search results. There is one more difference in mobile search results. The “people also search for” section immediately follows the Wikipedia result on top, accompanied by visual elements, including battles other than the American Civil War.

“People also ask” is placed below “people also search for” in mobile search. It means visual elements and search intent are crucial for mobile SERP, as smartphone users have shorter attention spans than desktop users.

Click-Through Rate

The placement of the search results in the SERPs is SEO’s ultimate objective, and it’s crucial to figure out how you can help your website appear in the top three results, especially for mobile devices.

Mobile

The click-through rate (CTR) for SERPs drops at a slower pace on mobile devices than on desktops. Several reasons can explain a CTR drop on mobile search results. The results that appear like individualized cards have higher visibility; visual elements such as photos and video thumbnails further boost it. A visually appealing graphic attracts attention even if the result appears lower in the SERPs.

Desktop

Since desktops have bigger screens than smartphones, search results have more space and clarity, allowing you to view several results at one time. But the CTR sharply drops as you go down the page. For example, if the first position has a CTR of 31%, the second will most likely have just 15%. It mainly happens because users can see more results at a time on a desktop.

Search Layout

Search layout also affects your website's SEO. Let's discuss it for both the mobile and desktop versions.

Mobile

Google displays search results differently on mobile phones and desktops. On smartphones, it shows text and pictures with more room for visual elements. That's why you can't see more than 2-3 results on your mobile screen at a time.

Mobile also offers more features than desktop in terms of search results. For example, "knowledge panels" appear on top of mobile devices, whereas they appear to the right on desktops. As a result, the other organic results are pushed down.

Mobile results also have "Interesting Finds" snippets to display relevant web pages that a user can find helpful and exciting. Mobile results also show the site path and the website's name with a favicon. However, it doesn't display the URL.

Desktop

The desktop offers almost all the features that mobiles do, such as featured snippets, people also ask section, knowledge panels, and local 3-packs. However, other organic results don't get pushed down as desktops have enough space to display several listings.

Why are Google search results different on mobile phones than desktops?

User experience is a prime concern for Google, and that's why search results appear differently on different devices. However, it's important to note that it doesn't affect the website rankings. The only difference is the way search results appear.

The search results also vary because people want information quickly on mobile devices. As a result, the search engine has to break up listings and add visual elements like images to make it convenient for users to go through the results and find the most appropriate ones. Desktop users have more time to browse and analyze. Therefore, desktop listings have fewer visual elements and more text-based content because users can spend more time.

Desktop and Mobile SEO Strategies

Given the difference in the search results for both mobile and desktop, you should develop SEO strategies accordingly. But the best practice would be to develop a comprehensive SEO strategy that works for both device types. When you have a device-specific SEO strategy in place, you are more likely to rank higher and attract steady traffic.

Here are a few steps you can take to build an effective SEO strategy for mobile and desktop:

1. Plan a Local SEO Strategy

The best SEO strategy starts with ranking well on local searches. So, focus on the local and "near me" keywords and Google My Business listing.

2. Create a Responsive and User-friendly Design

When you create a responsive design, you optimize your site for all device sizes. You won't have to design different versions of the same website for every device. It's an important Google ranking factor; the better the user experience, the better will be your rankings.

3. Create a Website That Loads Faster

Your website speed is of paramount importance for higher rankings and a better user experience. Therefore, you must remove all elements that can affect its loading time. You can use page speed insights to improve website performance.

4. Focus on Keyword Selection

Research and understand user intent to find the best keywords for mobile and desktop versions. Voice search keywords are also important for mobile users. Use it to see if it works for you.

Conclusion

When forecasting traffic for your SEO campaigns, you must also consider mobile CTRs and search volume. Mobile SEO can be vastly different, as a mobile user is more engaged than a desktop user because of factors such as urgency and accessibility.

However, mobile users are more reluctant to scroll down compared to desktop users. So, if you don't rank on the top spot and haven't optimized your website, you must implement mobile SEO. You should add more visual elements to a mobile site for greater visibility.

Furthermore, it's essential to optimize your mobile site for local SEO, as most searches made using mobile devices are local. Instead of creating and maintaining a separate mobile site, choose a mobile configuration first involving a responsive web design that Google recommends.