Sale is a process that starts from the point when a visitor visits a website or comes across a brand to the final stage of making a purchase decision. Businesses have been using the concept of a sales funnel to manage their sales processes efficiently and swiftly.

However, the process of lead nurturing and sales is not as simple as it sounds, and that might be the reason why businesses are moving away from the concept of a sales funnel. Do you also think that a sales funnel sounds too mechanical and mathematical?

What is a Marketing Funnel?

Moving from the awareness stage to the purchase stage is a long journey, and it is dotted with several unexpected events and gaps. It is never a swift journey, and the simplistic concept of a funnel can't describe it. Yet, it offers an excellent visual description of the entire process and helps you to understand and implement a marketing strategy in a better manner.

This article will try to describe the funnel concept and how it can be successfully employed to increase conversion and sales.

Image Source

Making the buying decision isn't the end of the funnel. Often it goes beyond the purchase stage to post-sales follow-ups, cross-sales, and retention.

The process begins with attracting visitors to your website, and to make this possible, you should work on your website SEO, content, offline promotion, and backlinks.

However, as the lead progresses and moves forward in the funnel, it needs a more personalized outreach. You may directly make a phone call or arrange a product demo, to begin with.

To complement a well-crafted marketing funnel strategy, high-quality free templates design can significantly streamline your content creation process. By utilizing these templates, you not only save time but also ensure that the visuals adhere to a professional standard, enhancing the appeal at each stage of your funnel.

What Works and What Doesn't?

We will discuss two examples to explain the difference between a successful sales process and an unsuccessful one. Jeff runs a gift shop. He is not a savvy businessman, so he bought a list of toy buyers from the market and handed it over to his outbound sales team. The team had a tough time closing sales from the list as most of the buyers were either not interested or not fit for the products. He had to shut down their outbound sales operations as the conversion rate was less than 1%.

On the other hand, Robert runs a digital marketing agency. He created a website first and worked very hard on its SEO, local SEO, and content marketing. The right kind of optimization led to massive traffic from search engines.

Image Source

He created a sales funnel and developed content according to the various stages in the funnel. His content marketing team developed useful, attention-grabbing, and engaging content for the users and attached it to his landing pages to feed the funnel. These were white papers, user guides, templates, eBooks, articles, and tutorial videos.

They created the content to inform and educate the readers about his company's digital marketing services. It also answered various questions.

He successfully created a community through social accounts and shared his content on social media channels. He developed an opt-in system on his website to collect leads. His sales team didn't have to work hard for sales as conversions started raining. It had an apparent reason, and these were the high-quality leads obtained through opt-in forms. The customers were engaged by informative blogs, videos, and infographics.

Image Source

The leads were further nurtured by email marketing, product demos, and question-answer sessions. So, the rejection rate was pretty low, and the sales team didn't have to put in too much effort to convert.

This example best sums up the narrative of the sales funnel.

Why Do You Need a Marketing Funnel?

Every marketer needs the buyer's journey completely mapped into an actionable plan to create the right kind of content and implement the right strategy at each stage of this journey, which can best be done with the help of a sales funnel.

It helps you to make the efforts in the right direction and achieve the best possible results. It also enables you to identify the right tactics to implement at the right stage of a buyer's journey.

Image Source

Marketing funnels may sound too scientific and mechanical, but they can help you save the time, effort, and money required for conversion. Using funnels is the best-known way to increase your marketing ROI.

Using sales funnels is also one of the most effective tactics to divert leads in bulk into the sales process and nurture them to achieve maximum conversion. It reduces manual effort, uncertainty, and cost involved.

How to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel?

Here are the steps to create a marketing funnel that will work for you and help you achieve your business goals.

1. Understand Your Audience and Behavior Patterns

A sales funnel that is built for conversion will work best if you know your audience.

Source

It should be built in a way that you can quickly achieve your business objectives. You can use numerous methods to understand your target audience. Some of these methods are as follows:

1. Taking feedback from your existing customers
2. Social listening
3. Surveys
4. Web analytics

Apart from understanding your audience, you should also know their online behavior. It includes how the visitors interact with your website and the content in it. Knowing your audience's online behavior will help you design your funnel and add or remove various stages.

Source

For example, if you have an engaging blog section on your website that attracts massive traffic, you could make it your top-of-the-funnel tactic. That means you should try to divert more and more visitors to your blog section through paid advertising, SEO, backlinks, and social media. It would help redirect visitors to your specific product pages for conversion rate optimization from the blog section.

So, to make a practical buyer journey map or funnel, you should try to understand your audience's online behavior first.

2. Determine the Number of Stages in Your Funnel

Understanding your audience and their online behavior will help you in identifying your buyer's journey. Journey mapping is an essential step that enables you to build your funnel and determine its various stages.

According to each stage, you can create your content strategy and employ other marketing tactics to move your audience in the desired direction. Thus, building a funnel and deciding its various stages becomes a crucial step that improves your sales process, minimizing time and money.

Various Stages in a Sales Funnel

Let's delve deeper into how to decide the different stages in your sales funnel through the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, and Action) model. You can also club the "interest" and "desire" stages as the consideration stage.

Image Source

A. Awareness Stage

It is the first stage of a buyer's journey because a buyer needs to be aware of your brand before even considering your product. The purpose of this stage in the sales funnel is to attract more and more people and make them aware of your products and services. In this stage, your prospect first hears about your product or the brand and gets to know what it is all about and how it can be helpful for him. It is important to note that not all people in the awareness stage are supposed to go to the last stage of the funnel, i.e., the purchase stage, and the number of people will continue to decrease as we move down the funnel.

B. Interest Stage

It is the stage when the customer is already aware of your product but not too interested. So, marketers should focus on generating interest and curiosity by creating engaging content. To generate enthusiasm about your products and services, you can try paid advertising and social media. It can also be explained as a stage in a buyer's journey when a customer at a retail store looks at some product with interest and enthusiasm. In the meantime, the sales assistant comes and asks, "May I help you?"

C. Desire Stage

In this stage, the customer is already exposed to paid search and social media content about your brand. He has also gone through compelling ads that generate desire. So, it falls under the consideration stage. Most customers would like to do comparisons online.

People tend to know the best option available in the market in that specific product category. So, at this stage, most of your marketing efforts should be directed toward creating content that helps people understand the value your product offers and why your product is better than the alternatives available in the market. The content created for this stage should be so compelling that it creates a buying intent and directs the customer to the next step of the purchase. If your content fails to do that, the customer would leave the funnel and go to your competition.

D. Action Stage (Bottom of the Funnel)

The action stage is the final stage of your sales cycle where your customer already has the purchase intent, and your job is to help them close the deal. So, at this stage, all your efforts should be directed to get the sales closed. You should help them find the right product with the right attributes the user needs and a smooth checkout process. It also includes allowing them to use their preferred payment mode to avoid any problem in this last and crucial stage.

Tip: The other valuable action stage tactics can be newsletter signup, webinar signup, signup for a demo, etc.

3. Add Marketing Tactics to Each Stage

Your funnel can be long or short, depending on your needs and target customers' online behavior. So, once you determine the various stages in your funnel, it's time to think of the best tactics you can apply at each stage.

Image Source

Here are some tactics that you can try according to the stage in your buyer's journey:

A. Top of the Funnel (ToFu)

At this stage, you can try various strategies directed at increasing awareness among the masses. Indeed, very few people know about your brand at this stage because it is comparatively new, and people need to learn more about it and its features.

i. Social Media Marketing

Increasing traffic on your website should be a prime concern at this stage. So, invest in social media marketing to increase traffic from social media, which might be the low-hanging fruit for you.

ii. Influencer marketing

You can also try influencer marketing which has become a trend these days. However, you should identify the reach of the influencers you want to rope in and verify whether their audience falls in your niche. You should also check engagement levels on their posts.

Image Source

iii. Paid advertising campaigns

Running paid advertising campaigns is extremely important in the initial stages because many users won't reach using the organic methods. This method is fast and precise when you are desperately looking for customers in the initial stages.

iv. Blog Posts and Other Types Of High-quality Content

Organic search traffic is essential these days, and you can get it by creating quality content like blog posts and videos. According to a study conducted by Content Marketing Institute, blog posts, podcasts, videos, and eBooks are the most effective content types in the early stages of a buyer's journey.

73% of the respondents believed that blog posts and articles were the most effective content types, whereas 57% favored podcasts against 54% who thought it was video content. An impressive 56% of the participants believed that eBooks were the most effective.

Image Source

v. Search Engine Optimization

An SEO technique is also quite effective in pulling organic and referral traffic to your website, so you can't ignore this proven evergreen technique.

vi. Videos and Podcasts

As evident from the above study, marketers should also experiment with videos and podcasts, which are the most famous content formats people love to consume these days.

vii. Giveaways, Contests, Promotions, Early-Bird Discounts

Hosting giveaways and contests is also a prevalent and proven technique to attract organic traffic from engaged audiences.

Middle-of-the-Funnel

While the general tactics at the top of the funnel include creating informative content in different formats, have you ever wondered what should be your tactic during the middle of the funnel?

Content marketing is an effective tactic here as well, but at this stage, you will need different content to engage your customers so that they don't leave the funnel, or else all the efforts you made in the first stage will go to waste.

i. Create Unboxing and Trial Videos (By Influencers and YouTubers)

Have you seen those unboxing or trial videos people watch before they buy the actual product?

People at this stage want to get the touch and feel of the product. They trust influencers, so it would be an added advantage if an influencer does it. Furthermore, they also trust the "honest" review of an influencer.

Image Source

So, you may easily guess how important such content can be for a buyer in the consideration stage, where people are more likely to compare your products with other products before they make a final buying decision. Positive input from an influencer can change the game at this stage.

ii. Product Reviews

Product reviews are also critical at the final stage of a funnel. These reviews decide whether we are going to purchase a particular product or not. You might have experienced it on online shopping sites such as Amazon that even a single negative review that genuinely highlights a problem in the product or seller's services might change your purchase decision at the last minute. And vice versa is also true.

Image Source

Therefore, product reviews are also a powerful form of content that can help you build trust in the middle of the funnel.

iii. Case Studies

Case studies also serve as a compelling form of content, which is quite effective in the consideration stage, especially in B2B businesses. People love to know how your products and services have benefited people and their businesses. They might also be interested in getting more profound insights into how you work so that they can make informed decisions.

Image Source

iv. User-Generated Content

User-generated content about a particular brand or product is also a powerful form of content as it acts as social proof and helps you build trust in your brand.

Image Source

v. eBooks

eBooks are also among the most effective types of content formats. eBooks and white papers are not only engaging but highly informative and educational.

These content types provide in-depth information about your products and services, how they work and how they can benefit you.

Image Source

You should also invest in content marketing and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) of your website.

It will engage your visitors and hook them for a long time. With CRO, you can divert the website traffic to the desired product or service pages from blog posts and home pages.

C. Bottom-of-the-Funnel

You can identify the last stage with very high purchase intent, where a slight push in the right direction may lead to a purchase.

Here are some of the marketing tactics that can help you in the final stage of the sales funnel:

i. Limited Period Discounts and Offers

Since this is a stage when customers are ready to buy the product, they might be looking for a slight push regarding limited-time offers and discounts. Such tactics work wonders while closing sales.

ii. Remarketing

Remarketing is highly effective in converting the customers who have visited your website once or interacted with your brand in any manner whatsoever but left without buying anything. Remarketing has a high conversion rate.

Image Source

iii. Free Trials and Free Demos

Offering free trials and demos can also be an excellent step to get the customers to use your products and services and then decide for themselves whether they need it or not.

Free trials have a great advantage. When people start using your product, it becomes easy to convince them to buy it or recommend it to others.

iv. Use Deadlines

Fear of missing out (or FOMO) is also a prevalent tactic that marketers employ to close the sale. You can use the deadlines in your ads to prompt your customers for instant purchases. In the example below, fashion brand ASOS uses FOMO and announces 20% off for 24 hours only.

Image Source

The Final Stage - Beyond Conversions

Most marketers have this wrong notion that the utility of a sales funnel finishes when a lead is converted into a paying customer. It's a big marketing fallacy, and we shouldn't fall into it. For a salesperson, who has been in the industry for a long time, this can be an entirely wrong notion.

Conclusion

Customer retention is more important than customer acquisition because, in the long term, repeat customers are much more profitable for a business than fresh customers. So, the most effective sales funnels don't end with a purchase. You should also have a post-purchase relationship with your customers.

So, you can add one or more post-purchase stages in your funnel for customer retention. The chief objective of adding these stages into your funnel is to retain the customers and keep them happy and delighted rather than making the sales a lousy and one-time activity.

Facebook has miraculously transformed from a seeding stage startup at a Harvard University dormitory to a $720 billion global business within 15 years.

The most prominent social media platform has changed many things, including human habits and digital marketing.

For marketers, Facebook has turned out to be the elixir of life. Many small businesses, retailers, and eCommerce companies depend on Facebook to generate leads, engage, and expand their audience.

Tools like Facebook Messenger bot and Facebook Spark AR act as a magic wand for the marketers, providing them unmatched opportunities to increase visibility, boost sales, generate revenue, and achieve growth.

However, pump-priming is still the most challenging part.

Here is a seven-step formula to succeed with Facebook as your chosen marketing platform. Read on to attain the highest leverage from this almost omnipotent marketing channel.

1. Set Intelligent Goals

A robust marketing strategy begins with setting the right goals. You can build a Facebook strategy blueprint to make sure that you are on the right track. To ensure that you are on track, you can measure your success using Facebook's inbuilt analytics.

However, it would help if you did a little homework to ensure that you can achieve your business objectives through Facebook.

According to a 2018 SproutSocial study, the primary business goals as revealed by participating business owners were:

• To boost brand awareness (34%)
• To enhance community engagement (21%)
• To multiply sales and lead generation (11%)

Here is a list of common business objectives people have while using Facebook for marketing. These goals are divided into three major categories, viz awareness, consideration, and conversion.

Maybe you haven't yet decided on your business goals. This study can be a great source of inspiration while setting your goals. If you have already set your business goals, see how you can adjust them in light of these survey results.

How to Achieve Your Goals?

Let's discuss some common business goals and how you can achieve them using Facebook:

A. Improve your sales process:

Sales and conversion are considered the most challenging business processes, but you can crack the code with better targeting. Just increasing the number of prospects you target isn't enough, as poor targeting leads to frustration, disappointment, and wastage of precious time and resources.

Better targeting improves the sales process and ultimately increases both the quality and quantity of sales. With a well-planned Facebook marketing strategy, you can swiftly reach your target audience.

A big mistake people make is that Facebook being the most prominent social platform will automatically yield results even in the absence of a strategy ā which is entirely false. You should concentrate on what you specialize in and use Facebook to reach out to a larger audience.

B. Increase the marketing prowess of your company

You can use Facebook to nurture customers and increase awareness. Facebook brings additional resources to help you know more about your brand, social conversations about your brand, mentions, competition, and people's perception of your brand. The software used for this purpose is a social listening tool, an ultimate source of customer intelligence.

C. Get industry updates and competitors' insights

Competing with your rivals is an essential part of survival in the brutal business world. If you are constantly worried about keeping pace with your competitors, you can use social media monitoring tools. These tools enable you to track, listen and report on social conversations about you, your competitors, or the industry. It is also referred to as social listening. Strong social listening capabilities will help you in effective strategy-making and right goal setting. Social listening also helps in better engagement and customer satisfaction.

D. More efficient recruiting

Social recruiting is growing globally despite numerous procedural difficulties involved, as social media is emerging as the best place to find top talent quickly. You can find out which social networks your employees use to increase your reach. It will help you to hire a quality workforce.

E. 360-degree growth

Facebook can also help in areas you might have never thought about. It can help you reduce employee churn rate, minimize ad spend, and increase acquisition to stay competitive, lean, and agile.

Address your Facebook marketing strategy, and you'll be able to increase targeting and social selling. It will also assist you in achieving other goals, such as getting customer insights and opinions and controlling ad spend.

F. Tracking and measurement

Social tools such as Sprout Social Analytics can help you track and measure your Facebook campaigns. The tool speeds up data collection and distribution, so you can focus on your core objectives, such as paying attention to useful KPIs, strategy making, and boosting ROI.

2. Know Your Facebook Audience

Since determining your audience is a crucial part of the strategy formation, spend time to get your current audience breakdown. There are many social media tools that you can use to get a clear picture of your social demographics. It will provide you the necessary insights into the platform users and how they use it.

You can also use Facebook Page Insights for this purpose. If you hire white label services, you can have a dashboard to get insights into your audience's demographics and behavior patterns. You will get detailed information, which you can use in different types of campaigns.

3. Engage Proactively With Your Audience

Social media channels are all about conversations and engagement. The chief objective of a social channel is to encourage conversations, discussions, and sharing. That's why it's referred to as social media. The users are so closely interwoven through conversations that they form a community.

As a brand, you can hold industry chats and discussions to draw the attention of users. These can be your customers or an altogether different audience. When some exciting and meaningful conversation is going on, people love to participate in it. Humans' social tendency is to find communities where they can participate in the activities and discussions they are interested in. You can also act as a community for them by filling up the vacuum.

Twitter already acts as a hub for corporate customer care. Almost all major brands offer customer care through Twitter, and people straightaway jump to Twitter to seek customer care or support, especially if it is urgent.

For example, suppose somebody is stuck at the airport because of an incorrectly issued ticket, a canceled flight, or an unconfirmed ticket. In that case, Twitter is the best place to straightaway contact the airlines and receive instant support.

You can't anticipate engagement to happen by itself. You should take the initiative to engage audiences by reaching out to everyone. Until it happens, you will not be able to engage a wider audience.

For example, Nike is a brand that's best known for its social media engagement. It uses social media in the best way possible. It has more than 93 million Instagram and 33 million Facebook users. With the kind of social engagement it enjoys, it's undoubtedly a champion among the top brands on social media.

There is a lot that other brands can learn from Nike's success. Nike doesn't talk about its shoes or other products on social media; instead, it focuses on athletes, sports teams, sports events, and fitness freaks.

Nike ropes sports celebrities and brand makers to successfully draws attention toward them. The sports shoe brand mainly uses Instagram as Facebook's algorithm prefers to show posts from friends and family, pushing down the posts from businesses in the feed.

Its Instagram account is at the heart of its social media presence as it attracts and inspires people with HD images of athletes in action and clips of people doing fitness workouts. They also use filters with their popular hashtags, i.e., #justdoit.

You can try it on Facebook, too, as the technique is equally effective there.

Post at the Best Time on Facebook

With the increasing content and unpredictable algorithms of Facebook, businesses are struggling to find the best time for posting for maximum visibility and engagement. Here is a chart that Sprout Social has published to help companies to choose the best time to post.

Image source

Types of Facebook Posts

To engage your audience on Facebook, you can do the following things:

1. Conduct polls
2. Ask questions
3. Hold  a caption contest
4. Fill in the blanks
5. Ask your fans to share their “how-to” tips and tutorials on your products
6. Ask for ideas
7. Have a quiz or ask “did you know” questions

4. Schedule Your Facebook Content

Content is king, and it is no less true about social media content. To engage audiences, you have a choice to post different kinds of content, including stories, posts, status updates, and short videos. To drive engagement from Facebook content, you should create your posts to inspire, educate, connect, converse, and make the reader smile.

Selling requires less effort when you have an engaged audience. People also prefer links in your posts to get further information about the topic. They love visual content, so they seek more videos, images, and graphics. According to a study, to succeed in Facebook marketing, you need to implement the following tactics:

1. Use more videos in your posts
2. Have a proper budget for advertising
3. Should have a data-driven strategy
4. Should have access to audience insights

You can use Facebook's Page Controls to schedule your posts right from your page. Scheduling and planning your posts offer a host of advantages for marketers. You can also find gaps and missing topics in your posts using Facebook Page Controls and other third-party tools.

5. Determine Your Facebook Ads Strategy

Paid tactics become inevitable when growing your audience, promoting your brand, or increasing its visibility. However, it's true that even with paid tactics, it can't happen overnight. However, Facebook advertising is a more robust and faster method to reach out to your audience and achieve your marketing goals.

With a click-through rate of nine percent, advertising on Facebook brings impressive results. However, it is easier said than done. You need to build your brand and work very hard to showcase it through your ads.

A. Increase Your Brand Awareness

While planning your Facebook ad campaigns, you should focus on two critical things -- cost-effectiveness and relevance. However, you should make sure that you stick to your weekly or monthly budget not to waste your advertising dollars on useless clicks. With ineffective and poorly set targeting, your ad budget can shoot up quickly. When you're targeting a sizable audience on Facebook, it becomes imperative that you choose your audience carefully.

To avoid this, keep your target specific and narrowed down. However, initially, it doesn't happen that way. First, you need to target a broader audience, and based on what works best; you should keep on filtering it. There is no magic formula here. You have to keep on experimenting and learn from it. Ultimately the more relevant your Facebook ads are, the better results you will achieve.

Build custom audiences and target customers according to your content. Facebook also allows you to create lookalike audiences which is a great advantage for marketers. This way, you can create audiences that might look similar to your target audiences but can be your potential customers.

Similarly, while retargeting, you should also show something new apart from the recognizable content, such as an image that your website visitors might have seen. So, you can add an offer or a deadline to your ad content.

B. Keep Facebook Ad Content Fresh

Nothing can be as annoying as a stale and boring ad being shown repeatedly. As a marketer, you should make sure that you display fresh content updated or repurposed every week. It will give it a new perspective and make it look fresh. To make your content look fresh, you can discuss new features, attributes, and uses of your products or services. You can also discuss its benefits for an entirely new audience.

Ad content is typically stacked with your family and friends' feed on Facebook. So, it can become even more annoying if it is dull, repetitive, and boring. Think about the intrusive commercials during your favorite show or YouTube video and imagine if the same ad is shown repeatedly. Ad content is crucial because it diverts traffic to your intended landing pages. So, you cannot afford to put stale content in your ads as it won't likely excite your prospects.

It is also a good idea to document your core metrics, i.e., metrics and data crucial for your campaign's success. These metrics can be as follows:

• Impressions: If your ad has visibility issues, review the image and content in the ad and analyze how you can drive more impressions.
• Click-through Rate: Click-through rate is an essential metric for attracting traffic to their website. So, if traffic on your website is not good, fix the CTR issues first.
• Cost to Acquire: If you want to control your ad spend and minimize your ad budget, start tracking cost-to-acquire against weekly or monthly goals.

6. Encourage Employee Advocacy

Encouraging employee advocacy is another effective technique organizations implement to achieve their business goals and reduce their marketing budget.

What is Employee Advocacy?

According to Christina Newberry, the blogger at Hootsuite, you must consider an employee advocacy program, especially if you are an organization with employees working for you. According to her, it aids in extending your business' organic reach using social media by engaging your employees. In simple terms, it means promoting your business using your employees.

So, employees should provide information about any product or campaign in a storytelling format to engage audiences vigorously. Or they might share brand content which could be helpful for people in similar fields. So when an employee provides a glimpse into the business culture of an organization, showcases new technology, or shares brand insights, it's known as employee advocacy.

What's the Benefit?

According to a report, 54% of people trust a regular employee, whereas only 47% trust a high official such as a CEO or MD. Again 68% of people trust what a technical expert says in a company. The message to the marketers is clear. It would help if you involved your employees in promoting your business as it brings a high degree of brand trust.

Image source

4 Steps to Building an Employee Advocacy Program on Social Media

A. Create a positive, happy, and engaged workplace culture

When employees love their jobs, they become brand ambassadors of their organizations. First of all, we need to inculcate a high trust culture in our organizations because it drives employee workplace recommendations. For that, you must differentiate your company by taking different steps such as:

1. Identify your company as a trendsetter and industry disruptor
2. Focus on service and quality
3. Show support for employees when needed
4. Position your company as an industry leader
5. Give back and do lots of social welfare

B. Set goals and KPIs for your employee advocacy program

Employees regularly post about their work and company on social media, but there's neither planned nor organized. To run a successful employee advocacy program, you should set clear goals and KPIs to measure and track the exercise. You can align your advocacy program with one of your primary business goals. The social media metrics you can track include a share of voice, website traffic, or leads. At the end of the campaign, you can prepare a report and show the return on investment because of the advocacy campaign.

Reebok uses the hashtag #FitAssCompany to inspire its employees to post using the hashtag. The entire social media exercise reinstates Reebok's passion to assisting employees and customers achieve their fitness goals. It also showcases the company culture through an attached picture.

C. Engage employees in the advocacy program

Employee advocacy programs can be best run by the regular employees and not the top bosses. These employees should be enthusiastic social media users who are passionate about the brand they are working for.

Engage them and communicate with them the campaign goals. They will likely suggest to you the resources needed. Choose employee advocacy leaders and inform them that this would be an ongoing process and not a one-time activity. So, it shouldn't fizzle out after the initial spurts of activity.

D. Make advocacy rewarding

When you ask your employees for a favor, you should also return the favor in the best way possible. Apart from the visibility and credibility (as a subject matter expert) that these employees achieve by participating in employee advocacy activities, it would help if you also offered some internal incentives.

You can announce small rewards like gift vouchers, travel packages, bonuses, cash awards, branded T-shirts and hats or movie tickets, etc. However, it can be even more fun and engaging if you turn the entire exercise into a game.

For example, you can run an employee advocacy campaign with a hashtag, create a leaderboard and pit them against each other to perform even better. The leaderboard will tell you who is getting higher engagement and clicks for the hashtag.

You can reward some or all of the employees participating in the employee advocacy program by distributing prizes and encouraging them to do even better. In the meantime, allow them the freedom to do it their way.

7. Measure and Analyze Your Results

We have identified specific metrics during the goal-setting stage, so it is time to measure and track those metrics to ensure that your Facebook marketing campaign is successful. It would help if you also calculated the ROI at this stage to plan future campaign spend.

It would help if you also used Facebook analytics to know the audience growth, page impressions, video views, link clicks, and content performance. Last but not least, it is crucial to measure your performance against your competitors. Your campaign success largely depends on these factors, so you shouldn't ignore it.

Conclusion

Facebook is a huge marketing channel that can be highly effective for marketers if appropriately utilized. In this article, we have tried to curate most of the tips and techniques that work. Try to implement these tips and let us know in the comments how they work for you. Don't forget to add a few more tactics you have tried in your own campaigns that you think have turned out to be a game-changer.

PPC advertisers invested over $10 billion in 2017 and $106.5 billion in 2019. Search advertising is projected to reach $132 billion by 2022.

It will equate to more than 92 miles or 148 km tall tower of money if $100 bills are stacked on top of each other.

Global PPC ads are increasing every day, leading to tremendous growth in the paid advertising industry.

So, for all those who think PPC is a waste of money and SEO is the only thing that works, this can be an eye-opener.

It's akin to pump-priming, where you invest in paid advertising when you have little or no organic search presence. It's also useful when you want to reach out to a larger audience.

Businesses also take it as a classic “spend money to make money” tactic. PPC or paid advertising helps you see quick results and helps you boost brand awareness, and build email lists.

A PPC agency should know everything about your business and consumer buying behavior. An agency's job is not easy, and they burn the midnight oil experimenting, evaluating, and tweaking campaigns to help their clients achieve their objectives.

This article will provide you with insights into finding the right agency for your PPC campaigns. First, let's discuss the prerequisites of a successful campaign.

The Prerequisites of a Successful PPC Campaign

Before we discuss the nitty-gritty of choosing the right PPC agency for your campaigns, do your homework and set your campaign goals. Define your sales targets, assess the lifetime value, and justify the agency pricing accordingly. You shouldn't pay more than the lifetime value of a customer to the agency. So, let's dive in and see how to do the homework.

Set SMART Goals for Your PPC Campaign

However, you must know your goals to reap the benefits of paid advertising offers. SMART goals ensure a successful paid advertising campaign. They will also help you run your campaign smoothly, removing the potential red flags.

Here are the SMART goals explained:

• Specific: Your goals should be clear and well-defined to run successful campaigns. Vague goals will translate into ambiguous results.
• Measurable: Your campaign goals should be measurable. It’s necessary to assess and scale the performance of a campaign.
• Achievable: The campaign objectives shouldn’t be unattainable. The best results come when you have realistic and achievable goals tied to a timeframe.
• Realistic: Setting unrealistically high goals is not a good practice as it leads to negative sentiments when not achieved. Furthermore, setting up realistic goals and achieving them triggers a chain of successful events that lifts your morale and encourages you to achieve even more significant accomplishments.
• Timely: Make sure your goals are attached to a timeframe. In the absence of a timeline, you can’t set milestones.

Image source

The magic lies in planning as it helps you achieve more in less time, and that's the chief idea behind setting SMART goals. So, create SMART goals for each of your PPC accounts. You can also try goal tiers.

Make sure that the agency you approach can share PPC campaign benchmarks for your industry. You can adjust those benchmarks with your goals.

Use the Right Keywords to Find an Agency

How do you search for a PPC agency? Do you use keywords like Best B2B PPC Agency or something similar to that?

Before you start searching the web this way, keep your goals right in front of you. Make sure these goals are specific and clear.

Most businesses have goals that we  can categorize into this three major types:

• Boost brand awareness
• Increase site traffic
• Generate leads

Achieving sales targets is one of the most common PPC campaign objectives these days. So write down the specific sales targets along with the time frame to drive the maximum output from your campaigns.

Image Source

For example, your sales target for the year is $600 000 per year. It means you should achieve a sales target of $40,000 per month. Suppose you would like to reach 25% of your sales through PPC campaigns. It means you should earn $10,000 of sales per month through PPC. If the cost of your product is $500, you need to sell 20 products to achieve your sales target.

When you are ready with these calculations, share them with your agency.

Assess the Lifetime Value Of a Customer

To see the true worth of a PPC agency, assess the lifetime value. You can figure out these numbers and share them with your agency to check if they can achieve it.

Always remember - a little bit of bargain and negotiations, in the beginning, can prevent a lot of hassle afterward. They should have a clear idea about your expectations from paid campaigns so that everyone is on the same page and there is no expectation mismatch.

Image Source

At a deeper level, your goals may look like the following:

• Attracting more qualified leads to your sales funnel
• Boosting sales of a specific product or type of products
• Increasing the traffic on a landing page
• Building brand awareness

The idea is to reach a well-thought-out contract between you and your PPC agency.

However, you should be too concerned about it initially, as you can discuss the specific metrics and KPIs with your PPC agency afterward.

How to Assess Your PPC Agency?

After defining your specific goals, it is time to assess your B2B PPC agency. It is a common misconception that all PPC agencies are equal. They have their unique strengths, and they specialize in different things.

The aim is not to pit one against the other, but you should know what you are looking for.

These characteristics are essential to identifying the right agency for your needs. Here are some of the characteristics you should look for:

1. Data-Driven, Analytics, and Result-Oriented

Most business owners are enthusiastic about PPC as it ties revenue generated to ad-spend directly. So, an agency's success depends mainly on its ability to use data and analytics.

It's crucial to know how to use data to explore fresh ideas and find ways to improve ROI on your paid campaigns. Data-driven agencies use their existing knowledge and learned information about your target market to run highly successful campaigns.

Don’t forget to ask the basic questions such as:

• The tools they use to measure critical PPC metrics
• Do they share data and campaign results with the clients?
• Will they provide independent access to analytics and reports?
• Details of the entire analytics report they offer

2. Armed With Data Assets Gathered From First-Party Data Sources and Strategic Partnerships

First-party data becomes extremely important to gather insights about consumer behavior and crucial campaign metrics. The agencies collect this data with time and experience. Smart agencies know how to use this database to understand consumer buying behavior and predict campaign outcomes. Some agencies may also allow you to tap into the vast first-party data they have from their previous clients. It will help you in developing an effective strategy.

Image Source

Apart from that, social media and leading search platforms that they partner with also provide new changes and updates. It is the first-hand information that you can use, and hence it's advantageous to use this in-depth insight in your campaigns.

3. Knowledge of Local Search

The trend of local searches using mobile phones is getting prominence, and more than 82% of mobile users use search engines like Google to find nearby businesses. Near me  is the most popular search term when people are looking to eat out, try shopping, contact healthcare and other services.

An interesting study reveals that 76% of those local searches end up in an in-store visit by the searcher on the same day.

Source: Think With Google

Getting featured in local searches and inviting local traffic is crucial for your business. So, choose an agency with expertise in local search, and it's applicable for both paid and organic marketing.

Since agencies don't publish such information on their websites, it's imperative to ask such questions directly.

During your interaction with their sales team, you may ask questions like:

• What’s your approach to local paid search objectives?
• Can you share an example of your local PPC work?
• How do you use, promote and measure location-based keywords?
• Is it OK to use bid modifiers for location-specific queries?

4. Core Capabilities of Mobile Optimization

Mobile devices are getting more popular than ever. Over half of the search ad clicks come through these portable devices; designing creatives and writing copy for mobile devices has become extremely crucial.

It's crucial as most of us are proficient in designing ad creatives and writing lengthy copy for desktops. It needs to be mobile-focused now as we need shorter and more powerful messages and creatives that are suitable for mobile devices.

However, mobile optimization goes beyond copy and ad creatives. You also need to understand the changing social algorithms. While you can't expect this information on their website, you can very well ask them about it directly.

5. Expert in Different PPC Channels

Every industry and niche has its own favorite PPC channels, and it entirely depends on its target audience and end goals. Some agencies have expertise in paid search campaigns, while some excel at every aspect of social media campaigns, from consulting to designing and managing them. Each campaign is different, and so is each PPC agency.

Image source

So first, figure out what kind of a PPC agency you need. It includes PPC channels as well.

If you need help with design and ad copy, too, go for a completely hands-off PPC project. In that case, you should find an agency that also does the design and copy in-house.

You should discuss all these things in your first meeting, so there is no surprise afterward. As far as expectations are concerned, both parties should be on the same page.

6. Strong Keyword Research Skills

It’s the most underrated but the most crucial skill for a PPC agency. It’s recommended, therefore, that the agency you hire uses commercial-intent (transactional) keywords.  Keywords like “Buy iPad Air Now” or “Is MailChimp GDPR compliant?” are the keywords with a high level of buyer intent.

Apart from conversion and sales, there can be numerous objectives of a PPC campaign. Building email lists, growing brand awareness, driving traffic to a specific landing page, and adding more leads into your sales funnel can be some of these objectives.

Your PPC agency must understand the different purposes of the campaign and how to achieve them using advanced keyword research.

Image Source

Again, you need to do some investigation to know their proficiency level in working with different keywords. Questions probing their modus operandi and how they find the keywords to target and the keyword research tools they use can do the trick. You can also ask questions about their keyword strategy.

7. Well-Versed in All Things Digital Marketing

PPC advertising is a subset of the superset of a broader digital marketing strategy.

A competitive PPC agency must, therefore, also be familiar with other streams of digital marketing. You can't run effective marketing campaigns just by running PPC ads alone.

Sometimes, you need to create a powerful and engaging landing page, while you may also need to create an ebook, a white paper, or a cheat sheet to be used as a lead magnet.

For this, you must have competitive content marketing and web designing teams. Digital marketing involves a big picture, and you need to arrange the bits and pieces to achieve your bigger goals.

8. Easy Interface, Single Dashboard, and Automated Report Generation

Some leading agencies, especially the white label services, allow you to manage your PPC campaigns from a single dashboard, making things quite transparent and easy to understand and analyze.

Hiring a white label PPC service will save you from the hassles of finding the right agency and sharing your first-party data and campaign objectives with them. White label services have seasoned and well-rounded PPC professionals with rich experience and expertise in driving results from Google Ads campaigns.

For example, DashClicks' Google Ads integration allows you to manage your PPC campaigns from a beautiful single dashboard. It also offers granular level reporting for campaigns and ad sets for better analysis and decision making. It allows you to analyze multiple data sets to figure out the best-performing campaigns and ad sets.

In-depth Instant White Label Reports

Now, you can get the crucial KPIs with the click of a button with the DashClicks' InstaReports feature. The beautiful reports generated by the tool provide you with data in the most understandable format, where you can easily find the top-performing metrics within seconds. There is no need to go in for tedious manual reporting and data-digging. InstaReports provides you the analysis and snapshots integrated into a single hub.

Since PPC campaigns are crucial to your success as a business, hiring white label services can be a game-changer for you.

To get free access to the dashboard and see how it works, open the Google Ads Fulfillment Service page and click on the Try Now for Freeā  button on the top right corner.

Things to Remember Before You Start Working With a PPC Agency

Now that you have zeroed in on your PPC agency, it's time to go into your new partnership.

But, before you decide to kickstart your project with your agency, you need to discuss and assess a few more things.

1. What is Your Budget?

Your budget is the next most important thing you should assess after the selection of the agency. You should know how much cost per acquisition you can afford. That simply means the money you can toss to acquire one paying customer.

To understand this, let's discuss the typical pricing structure of an agency.

• Pay Per Lead

Pay per lead is performance-based pricing. You may think that it's an ideal pricing structure as you don't have to pay a single penny if your agency cannot produce results.

However, it has a flip side, too. The agency's income depends on the number of leads they generate. So, the focus shifts on quantity away from quality resulting in low-quality leads that are not ready to buy.

It can't be a good deal for you.

Your sales team will have a tough time converting those poor leads. So, if your agency offers this pricing model, communicate to your agency what you would consider a qualified lead.

• Flat Monthly Rate

It is the most common pricing model, where you pay a flat monthly charge for the services offered by your agency, so overall, it's a feasible pricing structure.

• Percentage of Ad Spend

When you choose this model, your agency charges you as per your total advertising spend. It's highly transparent and incentive-oriented, but it also has a flip side. The agency may want you to spend more instead of reducing the ad spend, which is a core objective of paid advertising.

So, it's better to discuss these things beforehand to make sure that you and your agency are on the same page about the metrics you want to track. To steer clear from the delusion created by the jargon, focus on two major metrics, i.e., cost per acquisition and ROAS (return on ad spend).

• Hybrid

You can also go for a hybrid model, i.e., a combination of two pricing structures. It allows you to combine a flat monthly rate with a percentage of ad spend.

As it's obvious, no pricing model is flawless,Ā  but with a better understanding of these, you'll be able to decide which pricing structure will suit you the best and will also remain in your budget.

2. Set Well-Defined and Measurable Goals and Share Your Expectations With the Agency

We have already discussed it in the beginning. Your expectations are crucial in your relationship with your agency, as most contracts meet a dead-end when the expectations are not met.

So, share your goals with your agency and attach a timeframe to them. The most competitive agencies develop a strategy based on your expectations, and it becomes a win-win situation for both parties.

If you haven't penned down your plan, objectives, and expectations, conduct a brainstorming session with your team and do it. Don't forget to communicate the outcomes of your meeting with your agency.

3. Share Data From Past Campaigns

Collect the first-party data you have from your previous agency partnerships or campaigns. Make sure that the data is clean and is well-presented.

Share this data with your agency.

It is the best way to help them learn the various aspects of the campaign - including your target audience's behaviors - and what worked and what tanked.

This practice will make things easier for your agency, and they won't have to start from scratch.

4. Ask For One Point Of Contact

Having a point of contact is incredibly useful in an agency partnership to avoid confusion and to-and-fro. It minimizes wasted time and miscommunications with people moving in circles.

It's good to have an entire team working on the project, but there should be a dedicated person to handle communications. It would make things transparent and quicker.

A. You'll get prompt answersB. If someone is absent or on leave, you can leave the message for them, or else the most closely related person would answer you on their behalfC. No need to chase different people for different tasksD. Minimum wasted time

5. Be Ready to Act-On Agency's Advice and Suggestions

You should immediately act on the advice of a PPC agency if they ask you to revamp or improve your home page or landing page. They are the experts, who know their job, so never ignore their suggestions or advice. If your sales or conversion is being affected due to a poorly designed landing page, you should improve it as soon as possible.

Or, if they want you to change the headline, slogan, CTA, or ad copy, it's time to hire a good copywriter and do it.

And last but not least, don't hesitate to ask the questions you need to ask. Even if you have a long list of stupidā  questions, ask them anyway. It's their job to answer them and satisfy you. Yes, there can be a problem if you don't ask questions.

How to Find the Right PPC Agency?

With the increasing landscape of digital marketing, there is no shortage of PPC agencies. Agencies are growing like mushrooms all over the world. So, choosing the right one from hundreds of agencies becomes extremely difficult.

As a thumb rule, you should start finding the PPC agencies with expertise in your industry or niche. It's crucial to achieve the best results.

Image Source

Prepare a list of your expectations and requirements with your next B2B PPC agency before you even start your hunt.

You can compare them on the parameters such as their areas of specialization, pricing, and why they are the best fit for you. And before taking a final decision, consider the negative aspects as well, if any.Ā  If there's a red flag, skip the agency.

Keep on rejecting the options that don't match what you need.

Now, it's time to shortlist at least five or six agencies and have a telephonic conversation with them. Ask as many questions as you can, and simultaneously, let the agency understand your needs.

Make notes of the essential aspects of your conversation so that you can compare them afterward.

Conclusion

Remember, the result of your digital marketing campaigns will depend on your strategy, website, b

Potential customers are searching for a service or product like yours on the internet right now.

The goal of keyword research is simple ā it helps you convert as many of these potential customers as possible.

Another goal of keyword research is to attempt to be listed as high as possible in the search results for a particular phrase or word. Doing so helps a business move ahead of its competitors.

Hence, we cannot emphasize its importance enough.

Conducting keyword research means finding phrases and words (also known as keywords) which people use in Bing, Google, YouTube, and other search engines.

This kind of research affects every other SEO task you undertake, including content promotion, searching for content topics, and much more.

Keyword Research: The Most Important Benefit

One of the most significant benefits of keyword research is it helps businesses familiarize themselves with the search intent.

Search intent is a term used to describe the purpose behind conducting an online search. It has become increasingly important because search engines such as Google are prioritizing user experience' above anything else.

When you gauge the intent behind the phrases or keywords that people use for searching information, you can create improved content strategies and produce targeted content that brings traffic to your website.

Let's discuss the types of search intent:

1. Informational: Internet users with informational intent want to search for more information on a subject. Users use informational keywords to update or educate themselves regarding a particular topic. An example of an informational search is “types of loans.”

Image source

2. Transactional: An internet user carries out a transactional query with the intent to buy a service or product. A transactional query doesn’t always imply a purchase but depicts the user’s readiness to make a conversion.

3. Commercial: When the user has not yet made up their mind regarding which product or service to choose, they use this type of query, which may not lead to a sale directly. A majority of commercial queries display results that help the user in making a decision regarding a purchase.

4. Navigational: A navigational query helps locate a website or pages when the user enters brand keywords rather than typing the target URL in the address bar. For example – “Gmail login” is an example of a navigational query.

Now that you have understood search intent, you may wonder how to do keyword research for SEO. There are many ways to do it, the most important of which we will discuss in this guide. Let’s start:

1. How to Research for Keyword Ideas?

How can one come up with keyword ideas? It is not as difficult as you may think.

First, you have to brainstorm a comprehensive list of topics that your potential customers are likely to be interested in. For instance, if you run a digital marketing agency, think of topics related to your business that people will search for.

Some of these topics would be:

1. Content Marketing
2. Blogging
3. Social Media
4. Website traffic
5. Email marketing

Note: These topics cannot be termed as keywords yet.

Once you have prepared the list of topics, follow these steps:

A. The “Searches Related To” Section

The “Searches Related To” section that appears at the bottom of Google’s search results proves helpful in finding keywords. For example, one of the topics you listed was “email marketing.” Now, head over to Google and search for the same. Scroll to the bottom, and you will find a heading “Searches related to email marketing.”

Under this heading, you will find 8 keywords that are closely related to “email marketing.” These keyword ideas are presented to you straight from Google. Hence, the search engine is crystal-clear in its message that several people are searching for these 8 keywords. So, it is best that you utilize it to your advantage.

Insider Tip: Click on one of the keywords in the ”Searches Related To” section, then scroll to the bottom of the search results. You have a new keyword list ready with you!

B. Wikipedia Table of Contents

Were you surprised by the word “Wikipedia”? You are certainly not alone. A lot of people don’t know, but Wikipedia is an excellent source of finding keyword ideas. Industry experts have curated its content and organized it into categories, which we certainly can use to our advantage.

These are the steps you need to follow to search keyword ideas on Wikipedia:

1. Open Wikipedia and enter a broad keyword such as ‘tea.’
2. Now, its Wikipedia page will open.
3. Scroll and look for the ‘contents’ section that lists the subtopics
4. The subtopics listed here are excellent keywords that will be difficult to find elsewhere.
5. You may also spot “See also” when you click one of the subtopics. For instance, if you open the subtopic called ‘Chemical Composition’ on the Wikipedia page of tea, you are shown – See also: Phenolic content in tea and Health effects of tea. When you click on any of the two links, you are presented with another table of contents.
6. The subtopics listed on this page can also be used as another set of keywords. Interesting, isn’t it?

C. Use YouTube and Google Suggest

Take the topics from your list and enter them into Google one by one. Now, check the terms that Google is suggesting every time. These terms can be great additions to your keywords list. Remember, if Google is giving you suggestions, it means that lots of people are actually searching for those suggestions.

Do the same thing with Youtube and Bing to get a ready list of keywords.

D. Search for Famous Topics From Forums

You can always search for forums where your potential customers hang out. All you need to do is search phrases in Google keeping this structure in mind:

• “Keyword” forum
• “Keyword” forums
• “Keyword” board

Once you locate a forum, check the sections the forum is divided into. Each one of these sections is a potential keyword that you can use.

2. How to Find Keywords with Keyword Research Tools?

You can search keywords without a tool, but tools tend to make the whole keyword search process much easier. Let's discuss some excellent recommendations:

A. The Google Keyword Planner

The data you receive from the Google Keyword Planner is accurate because it comes from Google itself. Unfortunately, this tool is created to help businesses with their Google ad campaigns. However, this tool is also an excellent source of keyword ideas and enables you to find search queries with lots of searches.

B. Keyword Surfer

Keyword Surfer is yet another tool that helps in keyword research. It is a free Chrome extension that allows you to gain insights into the estimated search volume and CPC in the search bar itself. You will also be able to check different keyword ideas along with associated data.

Image Source

C. SEMrush

If you want to invest in a paid keyword tool, look no further than SEMrush. All you need to do is type in your competitor's URL in Google and view the keywords they rank for. You can then use the exact keywords for your website. A brilliant time-saver, isn't it?

D. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest produces keyword ideas from search suggestions on Google.

Just enter a term in the tool, and it will get you long-term keywords. It also provides you data on every keyword such as CPC, search volume, etc.

Image Source

Now, you may wonder what is a long-tail keyword and why use it? We will discuss it in the next section.

3. How to Know a Keyword’s SEO Difficulty?

75% of searchers don’t go past the 1st page of the search results. It is important to know if a keyword is too competitive to rank for. You may find it difficult to get past the third page of Google if you use an extremely competitive keyword.

On the other hand, a keyword that doesn’t have too much competition provides you a good chance to reach the top 3. So, let’s find out more about a keyword’s SEO difficulty so that you can make the best decision in selecting your keywords:

A. Types of keywords in SEO

At the time of keyword research, you must be aware of the different keyword types to get the desired benefit. Let’s discuss the different keyword types:

a. Short-tail keywords

Short-tail keywords are phrases that contain only two to three words. They have a high search volume and hence, are very competitive. Users use these keywords at the starting stages of research when their search intent is not very clear.

For example, “running shoes” is an example of a short-tail keyword.

b. Long-tail keywords

This type of keyword has lesser search volume as compared to a short-tail keyword. It is composed of more than 3 words and tends to be longer than other keyword types. Specific in nature, these keywords clearly state the search intent.

It is also important to know that long-tail keywords are less competitive as compared to short-tail keywords. For instance, “running shoes for summer” is an example of a long-tail keyword.

These types of keywords have high conversion rates. Let’s see how:

People who are searching for long-tail terms tend to be much further in the buying cycle. For instance, consider a keyword – “paleo diet.” Someone searching for a “paleo diet” is perhaps trying to know more about it. This means they don’t have any intention of purchase.

But if a person is searching for a “paleo diet supplement,” which is a longer version of the term, they are more likely to be closer to making a purchase. Therefore, the traffic from these keywords tends to convert well.

c. Short-term fresh keyword

Short-term fresh keywords are the ones that have been recently hyped on social media or have been in the news. In other words, these are the keywords that are currently trending. A fresh keyword can get more organic views. But once the hype is over, be ready for a harsh fall.

In 2018, an instance of a fresh keyword was “The Avengers: Infinity War.” Think of any newest blockbuster for an example of a fresh keyword in the current year.

d. Long-term evergreen keyword

Evergreen keywords are those keywords that are relevant regardless of time. If you use long-term evergreen keywords in a content piece now, you can rest assured that people will search for this content even after 2-5 years. When you do this, you get consistent traffic over the years.

Some examples of evergreen articles are:

• 10 Ways to Soothe A Crying Baby
• How to Make a Dog House
• Top 10 Ways to Enjoy Apples

While producing good evergreen ideas, you may feel a lot of them are already covered, that too in excess. At this time, you can search for long-tail keywords which do not have super-high competition but do have volume.

Tip: Try to keep your evergreen pieces based around the keywords you want your website to rank on.

e. Customer-defining keyword

When you reach the stage of keyword research, you already know about your target audience. You are aware of whether they are females, males, kids, etc. If you are targeting a particular group, make sure your content is clear in addressing them. For instance, a customer-defining keyword can be “video games for kids.” When you use these keywords, it draws people from your targeted category and builds credibility for your business.

B. Check Websites on First Page of Google and Export Their Organic Keywords

You must know a faster way of evaluating the competition level of a keyword. To do this, search for your keyword in the search bar of Google. Now, check the sites that rank on the first page. If you see uber authority sites such as Wikipedia on the first page, you should reconsider using the keyword. On the other hand, if you see a few smaller blogs on the first page, it means you can try to hit the first page too with the help of this keyword.

How To Check Organic Keywords on SEMrush?

In case you want to check the best keywords of your competitors, visit the Organic Research Tool in SEMrush. When you use the tool, you get one step closer to the top of the SERPs. Here’s how to use the tool:

1. Go to Organic Research Tool in SEMrush

2. Enter the URL and click on the search button

3. Check the keywords from the list and include the suitable ones in your SEO campaign

CanIRank

Interestingly enough, there is a complete tool called CanIRank dedicated to keyword difficulty. It evaluates the competition level of a keyword relative to your site. For example, once you enter the keyword “CRM” into the tool, it will look at the first-page competition of Google compared to your website’s authority. It will then give you a “Ranking Probability.”

4. How to Select Keywords from the List of Keywords

Now that you have a keywords list, you may want to know which keywords to choose from it. There isn’t a tool that tells you the same; hence you need to consider a few factors to choose the right keywords.

A. By Checking Search Volume

Short-tail keywords can have hundreds of monthly searches. On the other hand, long-tail keywords have relatively low search volumes. Ensure you use a keyword that has reasonable search volume. Refrain from using keywords that nobody is searching for.

B. By Estimating Organic CTR

The number of Google searchers who click on an organic result has gone down. This is because featured snippets give you an answer right away without the need to click anywhere. It is also because Google is packing more ads in the search results as compared to before.

So, knowing about search volume isn’t enough. You need to estimate organic CTR to get a complete estimate of the number of clicks you will receive from the first-page ranking on Google.

Organic CTR is the percentage of searchers who click on a search engine result.

So, to estimate organic CTR, look at the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) by entering your keyword. If there are already several things on the first page, like a featured snippet and many Google ads, then it is understandable that you will not get a lot of clicks even if you rank number one.

C. Analyzing Keyword Trends

Google Trends is the best way to see if your keyword is slowly dying or growing fast. Add your keyword in Google Trends, and you will be able to see its “interest over time.” If it is growing, you can go ahead with the keyword as it is likely to reward you with increased traffic over time.

5. Helpful Tips and Strategies

Now that you are aware of the basics, it is time to know some advanced tips and strategies. Let’s start:

A. Use Barnacle SEO

Let’s suppose you have discovered a “perfect” keyword and achieved a rank in the top 3 for it. You may think that your work is done. However, the keyword can provide you more traction with Barnacle SEO.

Barnacle SEO is a practice where you use the authority of another site for ranking on the first page. For instance, suppose that “voice search SEO” is your best keyword when it comes to conversions and the post you write about it ranks in the top 3 for this keyword. But this means you have only one spot in the SERPs. In an attempt to take more than one spot on the first page, you can create a YouTube video that is optimized for this keyword. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

B. Find Niche Keywords

Some websites offer you scope for discussion on topics that are associated with your niche. One of the best examples of such websites is Reddit. It helps you discover the potential keywords that you have not yet added to your list.

To find keyword ideas on Reddit, head over to the website and search for a broad topic your potential customers will be interested in. Then, select a subreddit where you think your potential customers are likely to be hanging out. Keep an eye on threads that have plenty of comments to get keyword ideas.

C. Use Google Search Console for Keyword Ideas

The Google Search Console can provide lots of keyword ideas. For this, you need to log in to your GSC account and go to the “Performance Report.” This report displays those terms that provide the most clicks from Google search.

As a next step, sort the list by “Impressions” and check keywords that get loads of impressions,  but not necessarily clicks. Choose one of these keywords to produce a piece of content that is optimized around it.

Why do this?

This keyword that you choose is what people are searching for. Plus, you already know that Google considers your website a good fit in the search results. Now, you can publish content that is highly focused on this specific keyword and you are all set!

D. Optimize Content Around Synonyms and Closely Related Terms

Don’t stop after you optimize your page around your target keyword. To get more search engine traffic, optimize it around synonyms. For instance, if you have created a post on your main keyword – “search engine visibility,” you can add variations of the keyword in the post, too. For instance, add “SEO visibility” to your post. Doing so gives you an opportunity to rank #1 for the keyword and its variations.

E. Search for ‘Shoulder Keywords’

So many people only optimize their websites around those keywords that are very closely related to what they are selling. This can be a huge mistake because product keywords are highly competitive. There are tons of keywords your target audience is searching for when they are not looking for what you are selling. These are called “Shoulder Keywords.” These are the keywords that are not directly associated with what you are selling, but are the ones your potential customers are searching for.

Hence, you can use shoulder keywords to publish fantastic pieces of content and when your customers notice it, they are more likely to purchase from you in the future.

To understand this better, let’s take an example. Let’s suppose, you offer a marketing analytics tool. So, apart from optimizing around “analytics software” and “marketing analytics tool,” you can also publish content around shoulder keywords, such as “how can analytics help optimize your website,” “marketing analytics benefits,” and so on.

Bottomline

With a ready list of keywords, you can focus on the right topics for your website. This will, in turn, help you achieve short-term as well as long-term gains.

So, now that you know how to do keyword research for SEO, it’s our turn to ask – which keyword research method did you love the most? Which tools will you definitely use?

If you are an agency and want to offer the best results to your clients, you can always consider hiring result-oriented white label SEO services from DashClicks. It is hassle-free, time-saving, and affordable!

The two most prevalent methods of business promotion and lead generation in digital marketing are:

A. Investing money in paid advertisements

B. Implementing inbound and content marketing

These strategies serve both purposes:

A. Creating awareness about the products and services

B. Lead generation and conversion

So, these can be used in various parts of the sales funnel.

Paid Advertising vs. Content Marketing

Both paid advertising and content marketing have their pros and cons.

Paid marketing brings quick results, whereas content marketing requires patience and time, as it drives results in the long run.

Image Source

Content marketing builds an audience that is likely to convert and become your customers in the future. Both of these strategies are successful in their domains, but they also have various cons.

If you try paid advertising, you need to have enough money to get noticeable results. On the flip side, while implementing content marketing, you need to invest time and effort.

It would help if you also had lots of patience as you would see results through content marketing in terms of conversion in a long time.

Why Do You Need to Implement Cold Email Marketing?

So, is there a way to generate quick leads, which is cost-effective as well? You can try cold email marketing, which works for many businesses and freelancers.

Image Source

Email marketing is quite common, but there is a slight difference between cold email marketing and email marketing. In email marketing, you get the opt-in form filled in by the user when they visit your website, and you get their permission to send them emails.

Image Source

The objective of email marketing is to engage users and do business with them. Whereas in cold email marketing, we send an email to a stranger without seeking their permission. Cold email marketing has the following features.

1. High Open Rate

But why would you send a cold email? There are many reasons behind it. According to a study based on the analysis of 20 million cold emails, it was found that these were quite effective. The cold emails had an open rate of 53%, and that's a considerable number because the writer sent them to millions of people.

That is even higher than what you'd achieve through paid ads, and it's a remarkable achievement for a marketer. Secondly, cold pitching yields results faster than any other campaign. People can get results within a week. It is even faster than inbound marketing.

The average time needed is six to nine months to drive any significant result with inbound marketing. With cold emailing, you can start doing business with your prospective client within a few days.

2. Scalable

Cold emailing is scalable. You can potentially send an unlimited number of cold emails. If you do it properly, you can add hundreds of people every day to your email list.

Image Source

With cold email marketing, you can easily reach out to as many as 1000 to 15,000 people in a day because it has endless possibilities.

3. It's Free

The best feature of cold email marketing is that it's mostly free. All you need is to have access to an email account. However, you may need to invest in a few tools like Quickmail that will make your life easier.

The biggest problem while performing cold email marketing is to find email addresses. Email Address Finder is a tool that you can use along with an Email Open Tracker and Reverse Email Lookup. These tools can be a bit costly. However, the good news is buying these tools isn't a must. You can very well achieve the same results by using free tools along with some manual work. However, doing it manually may be a bit time-consuming.

The Legality of Cold Email Marketing

You receive hundreds of junk emails every day that include get-rich-quick schemes and other fraudulent offers, most of which are spam. So, people confuse cold emails with spam emails which is not the case.

So, cold email marketing is not necessarily illegal. Even though spammy and illegal cold emails are commonplace, sending out cold emails is considered legal globally.

However, you should make sure that while sending cold emails, you don’t use the following:

1. False headers
2. Deceptive subject lines
3. No option to opt-out or unsubscribe

There is a law against deceptive subject lines and false headers, known as the CAN-SPAM Act.

The objective of this act is to respect the privacy of the recipients and prevent businesses from cheating or deceiving them. It applies to all types of emails, even the emails sent as part of email marketing. If you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, cold email marketing is 100% legal.

How to Make a Prospecting List?

Prospecting is the next most important thing, and you should invest a significant chunk of your time in making your prospect list because it will pay you off tremendously. The success of your email campaign will also depend on the quality and length of your email list.

Image Source

During prospecting, you develop a list of targets and contacts to send your cold emails to. The more exhaustive and targeted your email prospecting list is, the more success you're likely to achieve with your cold email marketing campaign.

Here is the five-step process of prospecting:

1. First, figure out what your target audience is.
2. Then, find out the related keywords that define your target audience.
3. Perform screening and filtering of prospects.
4. Identify decision-makers.
5. Find out the email addresses of the decision-makers.

A. Defining Your Target Audience

Instead of taking a general approach, you should first try to determine your target audience.

You can further filter your audience to a set of people in a particular niche or people with a certain quality or a trait, such as educational level or income.

Image Source

Coming up with the right target audience is extremely important for success in cold email marketing. Furthermore, your success rate is bound to increase with personalized emails. With general targeting, it's not possible to personalize those emails.

B. Finding the Keywords That Define Your Audience

After defining your target audience, you should try to figure out keywords that people use to find such an audience. You can use a keyword tool such as Ubersuggest or Google Keyword Planner for this purpose. For example, if you are targeting business process outsourcing units, you can use keywords such as:

• Business offshoring services
• Knowledge process outsourcing centers
• Business process outsourcing companies
• Remote outsourcing centers

You can use your creativity and secondary information to research the most searched and popular keywords:

C. Perform Screening and Filtering Of Prospects

While screening your prospects, have a look at their websites and other features such as financial strength and business model, etc., so that you don't end up wasting your time on an unintended audience. If their businesses are in nascent stages and cannot earn any revenue, there is little chance that they would even care about the services you offer.

D. Identify Decision-Makers and Find Their Email Addresses

The next most important step after you shortlisted the businesses you need to target is identifying the decision-makers. Usually, you can find it on the "About Us" page on the website and also in the "Team" or "Leadership" section. However, the best place to know the decision-maker is Linkedin.

A decision-maker can be an MD, CEO, CMO, CFO, or CTO, etc.

You cannot start your cold emailing campaign unless you know the correct Email address of your prospects. This is where an email verifier becomes indispensable, ensuring the email addresses you’ve gathered are accurate and active. You can either use an email finder app or try it manually.

You can consider the following email finder apps:

• Octoparse
• Find that.email
• Clearbit
• Clearout
• AeroLeads
• Snov.io
• LeadGrabber MF
• Email Hunter
• Voila Norbert
• FindThatLead
• Uplead
• Norbert

Many of these apps are available as Chrome extensions and extensions of popular CRM and other digital marketing tools.

It is not difficult to use these apps. All you need to do is enter the prospect's name and company URL, and the app will try to find the email address for you. Most of these tools offer a free trial but upto 50 free email lookup addresses are free. For extensive use, you can buy their subscription.

If you do not want to invest in a tool or app, you can use the manual approach to try different email variations and check it on Google.

Image Source

You can see here that for an imaginary prospect Jane Doe, who works for Deloitte US, there can be different email variations.

According to the screenshot, Deloitte US uses seven other email formats, the combination with the first name's initials and second name, i.e., jdoe@deloitte.com, was used 29.8% of the time. So, you can try this variation along with two others on top, i.e., janedoe@deloitte.com and doej@deloitte.com.

If you choose the wrong variation, don't worry, you'll receive mail from "MAILER-DAEMON" or a "Mail Delivery Subsystem". You can filter such emails out later on.

How to Write Highly Effective Cold Emails?

Here is an example of a very successful email format that the sender claims had earned him $10,000+ in freelance writing income.

Image source

To write such cold mails, you should remember the following things:

1. Personalized

The email addresses the recipient by their first name, and their company name is also referenced in the second sentence. So, the cold email has an element of personalization.

2. Highly Specific, Brief, and to the Point

The email directly talks about the reason for reaching out. So, without any fluff, it helps the prospect to decide whether to continue reading the mail or not.

3. Attention-Grabbing

The sender introduces himself and provides relevant social proof by mentioning that he has been featured in major international magazines such as Forbes and the Huffington Post, and his blog has millions of subscribers. Since he was pitching for writing projects, all of these act as attention grabbers.

4. Specify How You Can Help

The sender has specified how he could help the recipient, giving them different options to choose from. Being specific about your services also helps you write highly engaging emails.

A 5-Step Process to Write an Effective Email

Here is a 5-step process to write effective cold emails that bring quick results:

1. Tailor the Message to the Recipient

Personalization involves taking time to understand your customer and deep-diving into their mind. It is possible only through empathy mapping. So, instead of getting tone-deaf about your messaging, personalize it according to the likes and interests of the recipient.

Personalization comes with the understanding of the human mind, so it involves getting into the thinking process of an individual, what they want and what motivates them. Once you develop that "theory of mind," your homework is done.

The purpose of your email should also be pretty straightforward, even if it sounds like seeking help. According to various studies, people feel motivated to help others when you address them as uniquely qualified. If your story makes sense, they would be more than eager to help you.

With personalization, you cut the crap and don't talk about things that don't make sense or are said with little or no homework.

2. Validate Yourself

When you interact with a stranger or receive an email from someone you don't know, you have a natural curiosity to know about that person.

Image Source

Mentioning a familiar friend can help minimize that stranger feeling. If you have the authority, social status, or credibility to qualify for the quick camaraderie, say it.

"Rare similarities" like a shared hometown, strange hobbies, or being part of the same group can also help you connect instantaneously and ward off that stranger feeling.

3. Help Your Audience Alleviate Their Pain

According to various studies, people tend to go overboard to get rid of pain than to acquire pleasure. So, if you have done your research about your audience's pain points and want to offer some relief from it, explain it.

You can use social listening to know the most significant pain points of your prospects. It will simply surprise them and delight them, and in turn, they will also be willing to return the favor. Or, you can help people with something they want or connect them to someone they would like to meet.

4. Keep It Short and Actionable

Keep people's needs and wants in mind and craft a short but power-packed email with a compelling offer. Short emails have a higher chance of being read than long and cold ones that can be annoying. Your emails should request explicit, specific action to get a higher response.

The best way to do it is to keep its tone conversational, just like someone introduces himself at a party and immediately grabs the guests' attention.

Reading your email out loud will immensely help. It will likely be read with enthusiasm if it sounds natural, cordial, friendly, and pleasant. Ask instead of suggesting or instructing people. So, the way you talk to them matters a lot.

5. Be Appreciative, Express Gratitude and Vulnerability

Being slightly submissive and showing vulnerability is a highly effective persuasion skill. It doesn't mean you should bow down like what people did in ancient times before majestic kings.

But, when you approach a stranger for a favor, it pays to express gratitude and a little bit of vulnerability, to make them feel that they are a good person and in a position to help someone in need. While approaching them, could you give them a feeling of power and status?

Conclusion

Experts warn against using a template as it can be annoying, cold, and boring. It may not have the pull required to engage the readers because it lacks personalization and often carries a formal tone. That's why we have refrained from suggesting any template. The tips and tricks offered above will stimulate readers and help you engage with them. Cold email marketing is not really "cold" as it sounds. It all comes down to the value you offer, the personal touch in your language, friendly tone, and brevity of the content.

Google algorithm updates are considered something that marketers are always wary of. So, every time Google rolls out an algorithm update, they become nervous and have no option but to roll with the punches. However, Google releases hundreds of minor adjustments and a few significant tweaks to its algorithm every year.

In this article, we will discuss your ideal strategy in the wake of such updates so that it does not affect your traffic and rankings. We will also explain how you can use past algorithm updates to understand the current trends and deal with them.

In the past decade, the core objective of Google algorithm updates was to prevent manipulation of search engine algorithms by unscrupulous companies, so only the relevant sites may appear on the top SERPs resulting in a better search experience for the users.

What Are Google Algorithm Updates?

Now that Google has taken search experience to the next level, the search engine not only wants its users to get relevant results for their search queries, but it also wants them to be happy with the websites appearing on top of SERPs.

The focus of the previous updates used to be:

1. Up-to-date, unique, and relevant content
2. Trustworthiness of the website
3. Link quality
4. User experience (download speed, ease of navigation, and glitch-free checkouts, etc.)

It usually affects how a web page ranks on Google.

Google also wants to make sure its users love the content and their overall experience on the website.

So, all the authoritativeness and the backlinks are useless if the website doesn't offer a good user experience. So, for better or worse, The focus is now shifting towards user experience.

It's crucial to know since we want our readers not just to be ready for a particular update to be rolled out in the future but any algorithm update that Google may announce in the forthcoming years.

Apart from the regular algorithm updates, Google announces some sweeping updates every year to prepare proactively and update their websites accordingly.

A Brief Overview of Previous Google Algorithm Updates

Let's discuss some significant algorithm updates that changed many practices and changed the landscape of SEO across the web world.

1. Google Panda Update

The first serious update that shook the web world was the Panda, which Google announced in 2011. It was aimed at penalizing poor-quality content that offered very little value and was overstuffed with keywords.

Now, let's discuss the context of this update. Google announced this update at a time when most companies engaged in content farming. It was all about poor-quality content created for search engines. It mainly was irrelevant, least helpful for the users, and keyword stuffed. The aim of writing such articles was to game the search engine algorithms to win top rankings. As soon as Google decided to deal with this sneaky practice, Panda was rolled out to penalize those sites.

The timeline for the Panda algorithm update indicates that Google targeted thin content, high ad to content ratio, and various other quality issues. Google rolled it out in a phased manner in different countries, and finally, in September 2012, Panda #20 was announced, which was a significant update, affecting 2.4% of the queries.

Again in May 2014, Google announced a major Panda update that affected 7.5% of English language queries, and with these updates, Google almost tackled duplicate and poor quality content. Digital marketing teams across the globe started creating high-quality content that offers real value to the users. With this, the nefarious practice of keyword stuffing took a back seat and was replaced with the natural inclusion of relevant keywords.

2. Penguin Update

Google announced the Penguin update just a year after Panda was first rolled out in 2011, but its aim was entirely different. It was launched to deal with another significant menace in the web world— artificial link building used as a “hack” to win top ranks.

You must be familiar with the fact that Google has been taking backlinks as a sign of authority, popularity, and trustworthiness of a site since its inception. It openly uses it as a ranking signal.

Some unscrupulous webmasters decided to take advantage and started using it as a hack to rank on top manipulating Google's love for backlinks. Low quality and spammy backlinks led to reduced search results on Google as low-quality websites started ranking high. Google took it head-on with the Penguin update and started penalizing the sites involved in this practice. Soon a significant shift happened, and business owners and webmasters started tracking their links and removing low-quality, irrelevant and spammy links.

3. The Hummingbird Update

Google announced the Hummingbird update to provide a better experience to the searcher by showing the related results. For example, if someone searched for “small business,” Google will use different search intents to show the results. So, the results may include websites offering small business loans, business consultancy and networking services, small business ideas, small business trends, and government websites that connect entrepreneurs with lenders. For example, if you run a cake shop, you can optimize your website for the following keywords:

• Cakeshop
• Bakery
• Cupcakes
• Cheesecake
• Birthday cake
• Vegan bakery
• Italian bakery
• Sweetshop
• Pastry shop

Even though the results don’t look like an exact match to your queries, they are relevant and valuable for the searcher. So, this up-date expected marketers to focus on related keywords as well apart from the main keywords.

How to Proactively Prepare Yourself Against Future Algorithm Updates?

If you want to keep your website “update proof” and don’t want to lose out on traffic because of every damn update, the best strategy is to learn from the past updates.

Here are a few tips you can proactively use to protect your website against any future algorithm updates:

1. Understand the Basics of Google Algorithm Updates

You can understand the central objective of Google update, and to a great extent, it was explained by Ben Gomes, Google’s Vice-President of Engineering, “our goal is to get you the exact answer you’re searching for faster.”

So, relevancy, accuracy, and rapidity are what Google wants to achieve with these updates. It makes understanding the search intent of the user essential. Marketers should focus on relevance and user experience, and it will cover almost everything Google expects from your website.

So, let’s begin with user experience. First, check how long it takes for your website to load. Have a look at the navigation. Is it user-friendly? Can you get to the sections you need to go in a maximum of three clicks? Are too many ads bothering you or preventing you from seeing the content on your web pages?

The recent changes made to Google’s algorithm point that sites with poor user experience will also get penalized regardless of other factors that might have propelled them to the top ranks.

2. Optimize UX

As per a shocking study by Google, as page load time increases from one to 10 seconds, the bounce rate of a mobile site visitor may go up by 123%. So, if you are serious about retaining visitors to your site, you should minimize the page load time.

Reducing the number of ads, especially near the critical navigation buttons, is also a good way of optimizing the UX. It would help if you kept in mind that users won't close the three random ads and would instead close the website and move to another site.

How to Identify That a Google Algorithm Update Has Affected Your Site?

Here's a checklist you can follow to determine whether your website has been affected by a recent Google algorithm update:

1. Track Google Updates

Keep on tracking Google updates and find out if there have been any recently. Most Google algorithm updates that occur almost daily are industry-specific and their effect only in specific industry verticals. Their objective is to improve the search results. Specific algorithm updates are also referred to as core updates on the flip side, and these updates happen several times a year.

If you want to know about the latest algorithm updates and how they can affect your website, check out Moz’s list of Google algorithm updates. The following screenshot explains the updates that happened in 2021 and how they impacted search results. For example, the latest update was detected by many SEO tools in February 2021, and it was named “Featured Snippets Drop.” Its likely impact was that Google Search started showing featured snippets less often (SEL).

2. Wait For the Dust to Settle

Don't panic as soon as you sense an update taking place. Let the dust settle down, which takes around a week. It would help if you didn't react to things in the meantime. Once the data stops fluctuating, you can initiate the repair. You can refer to Google Analytics and Google Search Console after that and take cues from these channels.

3. Check Google Analytics

Now it's time to get back to Google Analytics and Google Search Console and choose different date ranges to see any traffic fluctuations. To access Search Console via GA, go to Acquisition > Search Console

Sometimes, this fluctuation can be due to an external factor such as running an email or any other promotion campaign, or a big event or holiday, so you should choose a broader date range.

If you see an overall decline in your traffic or a sharp drop in your organic sessions or leads, it can be due to a Google algorithm update.

4. Check It Across Different Landing Pages

Log in to Your Site's Google Analytics Account > Go to Acquisition > Search Console > Landing Pages

If traffic drop is sitewide, it could be due to an algorithm update.

Similarly, you can also check it across different devices.

Acquisition > Search Console > Devices > Click on Mobile

Usually, a sitewide traffic drop is a strong indication that your website has been affected by an algorithm update.

5. Perform the Preliminary Assessment: Check Google

There is another method that you can try with ease. If you feel that your website has been affected by an update, check the search landscape on Google. Also, check the current position of your website as compared to your competition:

a. Is there a significant change in the positions?
b. Which site is ranking at the position your site used to rank before?
c. Are you still ranking but in no-click search results, snippets, or paid ads?
d. Compare the rankings of your web pages to those that are now ranking well. Compare the keywords you are targeting versus them? Find out if they are using any keyword variations or content strategies?
e. Have they implemented any specific landing page strategies you haven’t tried so far which may help you boost your rankings?

6. Check Your Backlinks Profile

Sometimes you may notice a drop in traffic due to the presence of spammy links. As Google may penalize your site anytime if they detect spammy links, it's essential to check your backlink profile regularly. You can use Google Search Console for auditing your backlinks. You can also manage your backlink profile and improve the overall health of your backlinks through GSC.

Here is the step-by-step process of checking your backlink profile using SEO SpyGlass and Google Search Control:

A. Get the comprehensive list of your backlinks

Open SEO SpyGlass and enter your domain name. SEO SpyGlass provides a comprehensive list of backlinks as it uses its own index to find backlinks.

For better results, you can sync your Google Analytics and Google Search Console account with SEO SpyGlass. To do this, put a tick in front of the Enable Expert Options line, and click Next.

You can also turn it on using the “Preferences drop-down” menu of the tool.

Once Google Analytics and GSC are connected to the tool, it will start retrieving the backlink data. However, the process may take some time.

B. Identify potentially harmful backlinks

Google ignores occasional bad backlinks, but an overwhelming number of suspicious backlinks may attract a manual penalty. Here is how to identify toxic backlinks.

In the tool, Go to Backlink Profile and then click the Penalty Risk section from the drop-down menu. On this screen, the tool will provide you with the estimated penalty risk for the backlink domains.

A backlink with a penalty risk of over 70% is considered a harmful and high-risk backlink. These are marked red, and you should remove those backlinks.

C. Remove toxic backlinks

The best option to remove toxic backlinks to your website is to disavow them. You can do it with the help of the Google Disavow tool. Google wants you to use this tool to inform them that these backlinks should be ignored when assessing your site for ranking purposes.

To do it, create a “disavow” file where you can collect all the toxic links and submit this file to the Google Disavow tool.

If you are using SEO SpyGlass, select the backlinks you want to remove and choose the Disavow backlinks option by right-clicking on it.

Export the file from the tool and submit it to the Google Disavow tool as we did it previously.

You may not notice any immediate impact of this activity on your backlink profile, but Google will soon start ignoring these backlinks.

You should frequently do a backlink health check for your website and remove toxic and harmful links this way.

7. Keep Google’s Resolution and Mission Statement in Mind

As emphasized above, Google wants to offer the best user experience and exact search results faster. So, if you notice a drop in rankings or traffic, check whether your website provides:

a. Excellent user experience
b. Great and compelling content
c. Excellent usability

8. Use External Google Algorithm Update Trackers

To keep yourself abreast with the latest Google algorithm updates, you may refer to the following trackers.

A. Moz Update History: This list is maintained by none other than SEO guru Rand Fishkin’s Moz. It’s a comprehensive and up-to-date list of algorithm updates so that you can identify the trend.

B. Google Webmaster Central Blog: Monitor this resource to stay updated on the latest algorithm updates, straight from Google.

C. SEJ’s Google Algorithm History: Search Engine Journals’ Google algorithm history provides you a sneak peek into the latest as well as previous updates. You can also see the updates using filters such as the year an update happened.

D. Twitter: After Matt Cutts, the most reliable source of getting information about algorithm updates and Google’s “insider information” is Twitter. Apart from Google, you can follow the likes of:

a. Danny Sullivan: @dannysullivan and @searchliaison
b. John Mueller: @JohnMu
c. Barry Schwartz @rustybrick
d. Marie Haynes @Marie_Haynes

E. SEO Tools: Apart from that, you can use the following tools to track Google algorithm updates:

a. Mozcast
b. SEMrush Sensor
c. Rank Ranger Rank Risk Index Tool
d. Accuranker ‘Grump’ Rating
e. Algoroo
f. Penguin Tool

How to Recover If Your Website Has Been Penalized by a Google Algorithm Update?

If you feel that your site has been penalized following an algorithm update, here is the step-by-step approach to recover and reclaim your lost rankings:

1. Audit Your Website and Find Its Cause

As explained above, check all previous updates and trends through update trackers, and identify what might have gone wrong. There can be several reasons for a penalty, such as —— duplicate or poor quality content, spammy and irrelevant backlinks (backlinks from other niches and industries), keyword abuse, poor navigation, poor user experience, and site usability issues, etc.

Visit Google Webmaster Tools to identify such issues and how to fix them.

2. Make Algorithm-Friendly Changes

Once you identify the possible reasons for a penalty, make algorithm-friendly changes to reclaim your lost rankings. You can remove low-quality spammy backlinks, remove duplicate content, add high-quality content and improve user experience on the site.

3. Improve the User Experience on the Site

You should also pay attention to user experience and related issues such as:

A. Site load speed
B. Poor navigation where it becomes difficult to access the content you are looking for
C. Too many ads that may annoy a visitor
D. Bad layout and website design

FAQs About Google Algorithm Updates

1. What is a Search Engine Algorithm?

The search engine uses a complex system where data from its search index is retrieved to instantly deliver the best possible results for a search term or query. Search engines use algorithms and various ranking factors to return web pages ranked by relevance on their SERPs.

2. How Many Google Algorithm Updates Happen Every Year?

Google changes its algorithm about 500 to a few thousand times per year. However, there are only a few significant updates. Minor updates may not affect your website immediately, but there is always a pattern and trend behind these updates. Therefore it’s crucial to keep an eye on these changes to prevent any penalty.

3. Why Should You Track Google Updates?

If you are a business owner or an SEO expert, you should keep track of small and significant changes that could impact your website so that you can change your SEO strategy and tactics accordingly.

A Google algorithm update can either boost or hurt your:

• Rankings on SERPs and overall visibility
• Organic traffic
• Leads and conversions
• Revenue

4. What Is the EAT Concept in SEO, and How Is It Related to Search Engine Rankings?

EAT is a popular acronym in SEO that stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

The EAT concept is quite important as, according to Google, it helps them measure the relevance of a website and decide whether to rank it higher or not.

So, always try to publish content written or compiled by an expert and is well-researched. If an authority writes it, it will boost trustworthiness.

For example, have a look at this Therapytribe blog. TherapyTribe is an online directory of psychiatrists, and the content it publishes is created by certified mental health and psychiatry professionals.

What are Bulimia, Anorexia, & Eating Disorders? The article is written by Emily Mendez, M.S., Ed.S., a certified psychotherapist and an expert in mental health and substance abuse cases. It increases the trustworthiness of the website for the website visitors.

The websites with unverified and shallow content are often penalized by Google as the information provided in those websites can be potentially harmful to the readers.

Conclusion

Dealing with thousands of minor and a couple of major algorithm updates every year is not a cakewalk. Still, if you have the right tools such as keyword density checkers, backlink finders, and Google algorithm update trackers mentioned above, it will help you puzzle it out.

Apart from that, tools such as Mozcast, SEMrush Sensor, Rank Ranger Rank Risk Index Tool, Accuranker’ Grump’ Rating, and Algoroo will also be handy.

If your website is affected by a Google algorithm update, go to Moz or SEJ’s trackers mentioned above and study the past algorithm updates to figure out its exact reason.

Use Google Search Central, which was previously known as Google Webmasters’ Tool, to find ways to fix it. You can find many tools and useful study material on GSC. Use it along with the tools listed above, and soon you’ll be on your way to reclaiming your lost rankings and traffic.

If you are an agency and don’t have the required tools and expertise in it, you can hire result-oriented white label SEO services from DashClicks for your clients. It is not only affordable but hassle-free and time-saving too.