Today, the most successful strategies can be seen taking an integrated approach. The biggest example of such a strategy is the integration of both your SEO and PR (public relations) efforts.

Now, you may wonder ā SEO is about rankings, while PR is about the management of a brand's image. What can they possibly do together?

Well, as digital marketing strategies continue to evolve, the lines between the actions and objectives of different teams have started to blur; SEO and PR are no exceptions to this. Both can work hand in hand to expand the online impact of one another.

In other words, here's what we are talking about:

When it comes to moving ahead in the competitive business landscape, online presence and performance are both top priorities for a business. Therefore, pairing your SEO content strategy with your PR efforts can definitely work as a winning combination. When SEO and PR work together in tandem, every message of your brand can capture attention, resulting in greater online visibility, increased brand awareness, and a potential boost in sales.

In this post, we take a closer look at how both SEO and PR can work together and how a solid SEO PR strategy can benefit your brand. Let's begin:

What is PR?

PR is the set of strategies and techniques associated with managing how information about a company or an individual is disseminated to the media and public in general. The principal goals of PR are:

• Maintaining a brand image.
• Disseminating crucial company events or news.
• Putting a positive spin on any negative event.

PR can occur in the form of a company press release, social media posting, news conference, interview with journalists, and much more.

Image Source

Also, do you know what PR professionals are skilled in?

Creating content that captivates the audience, generates buzz, or becomes newsworthy.

What is SEO?

SEO, short for search engine optimization, refers to the optimization of websites and pages so that they are easily found via Bing, Google, and other search engines.

Simply put, SEO is when you take steps to help a content piece or website rank higher on Google.

Why Is Digital PR Important for SEO

You may already know about traditional PR (newspapers, television, magazines, and radio). But in this post, we are going to talk about the importance of digital PR to SEO.

Digital PR tries to build and establish a trustable brand reputation online, which gives a push to your SEO efforts too. After all, both PR and SEO are about developing authority in some or the other way.

Here’s more on how digital PR benefits SEO:

• Digital PR helps SEO by offering opportunities for valuable mentions and backlinks across multiple channels and mediums. A vital key to increasing organic search rankings is high-quality links, and PR can help provide the same.
• PR also increases awareness of your brand, management, offerings, and company. This, in turn, helps build a solid reputation and authority for your brand.
• When your PR campaign is successful, the trust and authority you gain through it passes to your site. Google takes note of this because the search engine always wants to show its searchers trustworthy, high-quality sites in SERPs.
• Digital PR concentrates on social media and influencer outreach, often resulting in links back to your brand and offerings. The result of it all? You reach more people and build your audience. It can increase your SEO and rankings as well.

Image Source

How SEO and Digital PR Can Work Together?

Now that we have established how digital PR can benefit your SEO, it's time to double the impact. For this, you need to look for ways to integrate SEO into your PR activity. Here are some SEO PR tactics that help do the same:

1. Use Keyword Research

Something that forms a huge part of an SEO strategy is keyword research.

What is it really?

It is the process of identifying those phrases or words that individuals are searching for. The ones you choose are linked in some specific way to your brand, its offerings, etc.

Keyword research and usage helps a brand produce content that holds relevance to their audience. This, in turn, helps increase the chances of the brand's website achieving a higher ranking in the SERPs.

Now the catch here is, you can provide a list of your research keywords to your PR professionals so that they integrate them into their content too. This way, you utilize keyword research to integrate SEO in your PR activities.

2. Concentrate on Earning High-Quality Links From Digital PR Campaigns

Developing great digital PR campaigns demand effort and time on behalf of your PR team.

The good news is, with every effort your PR team makes, you can let your SEO soar too.

How?

One SEO PR tactic you can follow is to focus on gaining high-quality links from your digital PR campaigns.

Links that result from these campaigns, such as the ones included in renowned news sources, lead back to the landing page of your site.

These links help strengthen your brand's authority, resulting in increased rankings on SERPs.

Interestingly enough, digital PR is a clear winner when you talk of link building tactics. Take a look at the pie chart below:

Image Source

3. Request Links

A lot of times, when a blog or a news site mentions your events, offerings, management, or brand, they may not include a link back to your site.

If you notice this, you can ask your PR team to contact these blogs and sites and request them to include a link back to your landing page.

But how will you if someone mentions an element of your brand in their content?

It's fairly simple. You can use Hootsuite or Social Mention for the same. Or, you can set up Google Alerts (ideal for small businesses).

4. Collaborate on Content

To integrate SEO into your PR activity, bring both your SEO and digital PR teams together to collaborate on content. It will enhance both your brand's image as well as boost rankings.

How, you may ask?

For instance, both the teams can work on creating interactive content, and then the PR team can get in touch with influencers to help spread the word about your brand's offerings.

Image Source

5. Focus On Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO is another important element of a solid SEO strategy. It is linked with the actions you take outside your site in a bid to improve your SERP rankings. An example of such an action is link-building.

The great thing is, you can obtain better links by combining your PR knowledge with SEO.

For instance, PR teams often build relationships with famous bloggers and social media influencers with a huge following. Your PR professionals can encourage these bloggers and influencers to share links to your site with their subscribers, dedicated fans, and followers. These links can make your website appear more trustable and authoritative to the search engines, which will, in turn, lead to an increase in your rankings.

Analyze Your SEO PR Activity

Tracking, measuring, and analyzing your SEO PR activity is important to know if you need to re-strategize. It also helps see what's working for your brand.

To check if your tactics are working or not, determine which KPIs and metrics you will track. Select the ones that shed light on what you should know and also help in making improvements to your future campaigns.

Examples of such metrics include:

• Keyword rankings
• Backlinks
• Organic website traffic
• Number of referring domains
• Click-through rates (CTRs)
• Domain authority

Now, the question is, how can you obtain these metrics? Use a free online tool called Google Analytics.

We also recommend that you use DashClicks' Analytics app. It helps you monitor and report on all your marketing campaigns in a single place. You can easily check granular data insights on this best-in-class white label reporting software.

DashClicks White Label SEO Services

Are you a digital marketing agency that lacks the time or the resources to provide result-driven SEO services to your clients? If yes, then you can consider hiring DashClicks' white label SEO services. If you choose these services, you can get your client's site ranked at the number one spot for different search terms in Google.

Wrapping It Up

So far, it's easy to see how SEO and PR can work together as teammates when it comes to gaining positive results for your brand. Ensure you utilize keyword research, focus on building backlinks to your site, and collaborate on content marketing efforts to combine digital PR and SEO. It will help you expand your audience and increase your rankings on SERPs.

Lastly, don't forget to analyze your results. This will help you know what's working and what needs re-strategizing. Good luck!

The digital marketing industry is rapidly growing, but agencies are still striving hard to survive, retain their clients and expand. There can be numerous reasons behind that.

Digital agencies in the US registered the highest revenue growth in 2021 since 2000. Among the many challenges, the major ones include a shrinking team size trend and more and more businesses switching to in-house marketing.

To counter this, many agencies are opting for automation. With effective automation processes, you can easily overcome the negative impacts of a shrinking workforce.

The Current Trends in the Digital Marketing Industry

Agencies are also experiencing an increased demand for more specialized services, and to meet these demands, they need the right tools to grow and offer a variety of services to their clients.

As an agency, you can't afford to shoot in the dark, as precision, data-driven marketing, and automation have become the industry watchwords.

Social listening becomes an extremely important strategy in the scenario.

Brands have been using social media to market their products and services for a long time because of a spurt in social media usage around the globe. Many brands use social media listening tools to get insights about market trends.

Social media listening tools are also used to formulate content strategy, conduct a comparative analysis, monitor campaigns, boost brand growth and find influencers.

With social listening, agencies can add value to their deliverables and get powerful insights to attract new clients.

Image Source

In generic terms, social media listening has revolutionized the industry by focusing on customer-generated media across different social platforms. Businesses are doing it to forecast market trends and improve their marketing campaigns based on what customers are saying about their brands and products.

It has emerged as a wonderful strategy to analyze social media sentiment and design a robust strategy.

How to Use Social Listening to Grow a Digital Marketing Agency?

As an agency, you can support your existing clients with social listening. You can minimize their efforts and tell them what to do. An in-depth, comprehensive social listening analysis can open the floodgates of valuable data businesses can use to boost their sales and branding.

A mere half an hour of social listening can provide you with so much marketing data that you can gather a lot of input to formulate a robust marketing strategy for your clients. They would be happy to see the quality and relevance of this data.

The Scout Agency's director of social media, Britanny Fryman, says they have registered triple digits growth year after year just by practicing social media listening.

Here are some useful tips for using social listening to grow your digital marketing agency:-

1. Embrace Changes With Dynamic Strategies

The pandemic has shown us how to survive by being agile and flexible.

The market dynamics are constantly changing, and so are the customers' needs. As an agency, you can ensure your success by proactively uncovering those changing needs for your clients through social listening.

It had become even more pronounced during the pandemic when people changed their priorities, and their social conversations provided deep insights into what they were thinking.

To stay ahead of the competition, you should constantly eavesdrop on social media.

L'Oreal, the famous cosmetics company, uses social listening to fuel its product development cycle, according to its senior VP of global open digital innovation and business development, Esohe Omoruyi.

In 2011, L'Oreal needed clarification on which hair product to develop next. The three obvious options were ombre, splat, and tie-dye. They used social media listening to know the most promising trends. Their modus operandi was simple. They performed comprehensive research on YouTube and gathered user-generated content to understand what customers thought about these products.

Image Source

They also invited influencers to help them decide which product to focus on. Finally, with the help of social media listening, and analysis of Google Trends, they went with the Ombre Hair Oil trend. The result was the development of the product L'Oreal Feria Wild Ombre, which became a massive success and is still popular.

Ingredient, the famous food marketing agency, uses social media listening to know what customers are talking about, to stay ahead of the competition, and for lead nurturing.

2. Expand Your Capabilities

Businesses worldwide are using social media listening to get deep insights about their audience and boost their product marketing strategies.

The trend is quite popular in the food and beverages, cosmetic, electronics, and apparel industries.

Pro Tip: You can use DashClicks' white-label fulfillment services to expand your capabilities without hiring an additional workforce. For example, if you specialize in SEO, you can offer content marketing, paid advertising, and social media account management services and diversify your portfolio.

Please watch this video to know more -

3. Create High-Quality Content That Resonates

Since content marketing is extremely effective and the lifeline of marketing campaigns for various businesses, it is crucial to create content that resonates.

Most companies fail at content marketing because they cannot produce high-quality content that their audience loves. 51% of customers are likely to unfollow a brand if it provides irrelevant content.

It has become even more important post-pandemic because people have very less attention span online. Social listening goes one step ahead in addition to your clients' owned channels. It helps you closely monitor your customers' trends and the hashtags they use.

You also know their pain points and how they relate to your brand. It provides a wholesome understanding of how an audience perceives a brand and what they expect. Brands also track mentions of their clients, so they can get accurate data to build their content strategy.

High-quality content is educational and entertaining, and it makes life easy for your target audience by adding value to help them achieve their objectives.

4. Do Performance Tracking of Marketing Campaigns

The success of a marketing campaign is crucial to the satisfaction and retention of clients and, ultimately, an agency's growth. Shallow metrics like engagements and impressions may not be enough to understand what your audience loves.

Image Source

Many businesses have started investing in social listening to improve their campaigns because it provides rich information about their campaign performance and helps them track conversations online.

Social Listening is a boon, especially for large and massive campaigns where tracking becomes almost impossible.

5. Stay Ahead of the Competition Through Social Listening

You can use social listening for various objectives, including product innovation and avoiding potential crises. With the help of social listening, you can identify market trends early on and prevent a possible disaster. It gives you an edge over your competitors.

You can use social listening to monitor brand sentiment to avoid any potential disaster and negative market trends. You can also reduce the impact of negative rumors that can hurt your brand by proactively crafting marketing messages to your clients.

Tips to Grow Your Digital Marketing Agency Using Social Listening

Here are a few tips for growing your agency with social listening:-

• Use social listening consistently and religiously.
• Identify patterns and be ready to go deeper.
• Choose a mix of small and big sample sizes.
• Educate your clients about the effectiveness of social listening and convince them to embrace it, even if it is against their existing views
• Expand social listening to different categories and brands
• Capture the keywords your audience is using.
• Practice transparency with your clients
• Include the trivial things as well in your reports

Final Words

With increasing competition and the fast pace at which market trends change, agencies face multiple challenges. To stay successful and expand your client base, you must evolve your marketing strategies to grow your business against all odds. Use automation wherever necessary, given the shrinking workforce. You can use DashClicks' white-label automation tools for that. Social listening is a powerful practice that every brand should embrace. It can do wonders for your business if you're using the right tools and processes.

Have you ever experienced a sudden drop in SEO ranking?

You've struggled so hard to rank your pages at the top of the search engines and now you sit and watch your hard work going down the drain.

The huge organic traffic drop from Google is due to the Google Algorithm Update (also termed as a Google Core Update).

The thing is, Google makes major modifications to the search algorithms and systems many times a year. The reason it keeps updating its search algorithms is to simply offer more authoritative and relevant content to its searchers.

In this post, we'll discuss what you should do after a Google Algorithm Update. You will also learn the best practices to follow in case you see huge fluctuations in Google SERP positions and a drop in organic traffic from Google.

Let's dive right in:

How to Check if A Google Algorithm Update Has Affected Your Website?

Before you start taking steps to recover your site after a Google Algorithm Update, you should wait for at least a few weeks for the update to completely roll out.

We say this because Google can also decide to reverse the modifications in the update. If this happens, your site can recover without you having to take any measures from your end.

In case your site doesn’t get recovered, here are the initial steps you should take:

1. Add your website to Google Search Console and SEMRush to monitor the change in SERP positions for your keywords.
2. Create a list of pages that show a decline in traffic and SERP rankings.
3. Jot down the keywords you have lost, or those which went through an unexpected drop in SERP rankings.
4. Now, search the primary keyword of every web page and check which site gained a better SERP ranking.
5. Create a list of all the winners and losers in the Google Algorithm Update.
6. Also prepare a list of all the mistakes and differences you can find. This will help make further evaluations or any necessary improvements.

Analyzing Drop In Your Google Organic Traffic

After you gather all the above information, you need to analyze the following:

1. Check what the winning web pages contain that your web pages don’t.
2. Check if they have outbound links to stuff you don’t.
3. Check what elements you don’t have.
4. See which Schema and links you don’t have.
5. Conduct a content gap analysis.
6. See if you need to add more relevant videos or images.
7. Check content via NLP and look for missing entities.
8. Look for missing ‘Related Queries’ or ‘People Also Ask’ queries from Google SERPs.

After this analysis, you can take the necessary steps to tackle the issues you have recognized with your website after the update hit.

Use Google Search Console

An amazing tool you must use when a Google Algorithm Update happens is Google Search Console.

Why?

This is because you can easily know when the update hit your website and how severely it affected it. Google owns this tool, so the data you will get is accurate.

Plus, here’s also some useful information you can get from the tool:

1. The amount of time it takes a user to load your content.
2. The number of people who are searching your site.

Tip: Learn how to use Google Search Console for SEO and you are set!

Use DashClicks' Analytics App

If you want to monitor and report all your marketing campaigns in one place, then you can choose DashClicks' Analytics app. When you use this app, you get a bird's-eye view of all your marketing campaigns.

The best thing about the app is that you can track your keyword performance and also view granular data insights.

Reasons for a Dramatic Drop In Your Google Rankings and How to Fix It

Different reasons can be behind an unexpected, dramatic drop in your Google rankings, such as:

1. Low-Quality Pages

The algorithm will recognize low-quality pages on your site, if, for instance, the Google Core Update that hit your site is content-related.

If the algorithm recognizes pages on your site that it considers low quality, it may demote those pages and your site rankings may then see a decline.

To recover from a content-related update, you must go through your site and delete low-quality pages that can hamper your site rankings.

Tip: We recommend you conduct a complete website content audit every month to eliminate thin content web pages. The audit will also help you recognize worst-performing pieces that you can improve.

2. Link Rot

Over the course of time, the backlinks pointing to your site begin to lose their power. This is called Link Rot.

Image Source

We suggest you build new links to your website in a consistent mannerāthis will prevent Link Rot.

3. Your Site Was Manually Penalized

Your site receives a manual penalty when Google (either its algorithm or employees) reviews your site and deems it violates Webmaster Guidelines.

You can check Google Search Console for manual penalties. Here's an example of a manual penalty:

Now, what to do in case you receive a manual penalty?

Manual penalties are mostly link-based. See if you have received the penalty for unnatural outbound or inbound linking practices and accordingly solve the issues. For example, if a lot of spammy links point to your site, do all you can to remove them.

4. Your Rivals Got Better

Sometimes, your website can see a decline in rankings and traffic even when you think the links and content are extremely good.

Why does this happen?

This is because your competitors got better.

If your rivals are building more valuable backlinks and content than you, there is an increased likelihood of them moving ahead of you in the SERP positions.

We suggest you keep a consistent check on your competitors to know what they are up to. Check what they have that you don't. If you notice that some stuff is missing, take steps to incorporate it on your site right away.

5. You Lost Crucial Backlinks

Your site may be suffering from link loss and hence, causing a drop in your rankings. Use SEMrush to check all the links you have built so far. This will help you identify any crucial backlinks your website lost.

All you need to do is enter your domain URL and select Link Building > Backlink Analytics.

Image Source

If you see that your website has lost a crucial backlink, try to recover it if you can.

But, how to recover it?

If the site is operational, email its owner and request them to embed your link again.

6. Technical Changes Were Made to Your Website

If certain technical modifications were made to your website but not carried out correctly, you would see a potential drop in your site's SEO rankings.

Examples of such technical modifications could include:

• Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to help your website pages load in a more efficient manner.
• Migrating your website to a new and improved web host.
• Transitioning to premium add-ons and plugins.
• Performing technical SEO.
• Redirecting an aged domain to your website.

If such technical changes have been made to your site, check if they have been correctly carried out so that they don’t hamper your rankings.

Here are some tips you can follow in this regard:

• In case you change your hosting, ensure you fix the DNS records in order to point to the right hosting. People and search engine crawlers will be able to access your site only after you execute this step.
• Your developer can forget to allow Google Bot to crawl your website. So, ensure you check this.
• Check if media-rich images that were helping SEO are still there or have been removed.

How to Recover from a Google Algorithm Update Hit?

Here are some crucial steps you need to take to recover your site from a Google Algorithm hit:

1. Check Google Search Console and identify any technical issues or any other related issues. If you find certain problems, you can go ahead and start fixing them for your site to function to the best of its abilities.
2. Ensure links pointing to other pages aren’t pointing to irrelevant or broken pages.
3. Join some SEO communities and discuss an SEO strategy that can help you counter the update. These communities may also provide you with algorithm-specific information, helping you figure out why your site suffered a hit.
4. Check if the sites you are linking to aren’t flagged as suspicious and spammy.

DashClicks' White Label SEO Services

If you are a digital marketing agency, you can use DashClicks' white label SEO services to get your client's site ranked at the top spot for multiple search terms in Google.

When you hire these services from DashClicks, the fulfillment is carried out by SEO experts. Hence, in the end you get to deliver only the best results to your clients.

Wrapping It Up

Leaving your site at the algorithm's mercy is not something you should do because then it will only result in decreased ranking and traffic to your site.

Whether the update is focused on a specific niche or is a broad core update, you need to take specific actions to tackle it. You can always recover your site from Google updates if you carefully follow the steps we discussed. After you make the necessary tweaks to your internal linking, site content, backlink profile, etc., ensure you check your web pages to see which ones went up. This will help you update your editorial/writing guidelines for future use and reference.

As a marketing agency, survival has become quite difficult due to the growing competition and constant pressure of delivering value to your clients. In order to achieve this and build a solid brand, you need to have a robust inbound marketing strategy in place. In the absence of a thoughtfully planned marketing strategy, you can be tempted to do everything that seems logical under the sky.

Businesses are under huge pressure to sell; however, aggressive paid advertising techniques do not always seem to work. People get irritated soon and choose to stop viewing ads that frequently appear online and annoy them.

Inbound marketing is based on relationship building, and it involves sharing interest-based content to attract target audiences. This is a soft yet highly powerful marketing approach as it involves serving relevant content to those who are looking for it.

Furthermore, it works for all the stages in the customer journey, right from awareness to conversion and "repeat sales."

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is a set of practices aimed at attracting the target audience of a business. It helps the prospects move forward in the sales funnel through the desired and informative content. It is extremely powerful as it offers real value, builds trust-based relationships, and accelerates the process of conversion.

Why Makes Inbound Marketing So Effective?

As discussed above, inbound marketing attracts potential customers through engaging and informative content. So, instead of interrupting them with outbound calls and messages, businesses adopt a value-based approach that is based on a marketing blueprint. It prioritizes buyer persona and their needs and prepares a smooth road map to conveniently push the customers down the sales funnel. With inbound marketing, you attract customers when they are interested in the products and services you sell, increasing the conversion percentage.

Inbound marketing is based on the following crucial elements.

A. Blogs, articles, and answers on sites like Quora and Reddit

B. Search engines

C. Company website

D. Social media

The Inbound Marketing Methodology

To convert a customer, first, you need to attract them through blogs, videos, and other types of high-quality content pieces. We also utilize keywords in text-based content so that the prospects can reach you through search engines.

Social publishing is also enormously popular to attract new customers, who are complete strangers to your brand. The next step is conversion, wherein you get the desired action completed by those prospects. We use forms, calls to action, and landing pages to convert them.Once a prospect shows interest in your products and services, they become leads. Later, we follow up with them using our robust CRM, email, and other workflows till they become paying customers. To make them lifetime customers, we use surveys, smart content, and social monitoring. The happy customers stay loyal to your brand for a long time and even become brand ambassadors.

How to Create an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy?

An effective inbound marketing strategy has to be data-driven. You need a lot of information about your target audiences, such as their buyer's journey and its various stages. You also need to conduct market research to know the market trends and demand patterns. And then, you finally need to set your inbound marketing goals.

Steps to Creating an Effective Inbound Marketing Strategy

To successfully implement content marketing, you need to create an effective and sustainable strategy. Here are a few steps to create a powerful inbound marketing strategy.

1. Understand Your Client's Target Audience

In order to make a robust inbound marketing strategy, first, you need to identify the potential customers that best match your client's products and services, and for this, you need to build a buyer persona.

The next step is to craft effective and persuasive content to target those customers.

The buyer persona of a customer usually includes the following elements -

• Interests and behaviors of a customer
• Demographic details (e.g., age, occupation, gender, marital status)
• Current needs, pain points, and emotional state
• Objectives, goals, and lifetime aspirations

People vary in terms of their physiological and psychological orientations, so it is better to build multiple buyer personas.‍

Pro Tip: You can use surveys and on-the-spot feedback to learn in-depth about your customers and their needs. Since needs are dynamic, you need to keep yourself updated about the current market trends.

2. Use Customer Journey Mapping

It is a critical step that most businesses tend to skip. You need to document everything that influences customers' buying decisions at different stages of their journey.

The below graphic summarises things you need to know at every stage in the customer journey -

The answers to these questions will help you craft and use relevant messaging to boost your campaigns.

3. Conduct Market Research

It is considered the principle of inbound marketing strategy formulation. Some popular techniques that businesses use for market research are as follows.

• Feedback forms and follow-ups
• Online surveys
• Communities & focus groups
• Direct feedback
• Using the sales team to get customer feedback

Image Source

4. Set Relevant and Measurable Goals

Identify the different goals you need to achieve from multiple streams of digital marketing, SEO, email marketing, and video marketing. The key performance indicators that you have already defined can be considered as your inbound marketing goals. Set SMART goals, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.

Inbound Marketing Strategies to Implement

Here are some of the most effective inbound marketing tactics to implement in your campaigns. Remember, you should have a dynamic approach.

1. Create Informative and High-Value Content

Create high-value and informative content that effectively addresses the pain points of your customers and re-purpose it to suit the different marketing channels.You can create educational videos, blog posts, reels, ebooks, infographics,Ā  podcasts, picture messages, whitepapers, and fillable templates.

2. Track Your Performance

You can track your performance using different auditing tools such as the DashClicks Analytics app, etc. Performance tracking will provide you with critical information regarding your best-performing content, high-traffic sources, and your brand positioning compared to your rivals.

3. Optimize Your Content

If you successfully optimize your content using the relevant keywords, you will become the darling of search engines; we mean it! It will not only help you attract your target audience but also build a noticeable online presence and powerful brand. To achieve this, you need to first perform advanced keyword research.

Avail of Dashclicks fulfillment services to optimize your content with the best keywords.

Use the Right Metrics to Prove the ROI of Inbound Marketing

Adopt a data-driven marketing approach. You will need the relevant KPIs for that.

Here are some of the inbound marketing metrics you can track -

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Subscriber Growth
• Engagement
• Click-through rates (CTR)
• Acquired backlinks
• Cost per click (CPC)
• Open-rate
• Views
• Lead quality
• Traffic to lead ratio
• Lead to customer ratio

Here are some of the metrics you can try for your Google Ads campaign Metrics For Your Google Ads Campaigns

Final Words

Grabbing the eyeballs of prospects has become extremely difficult in the wake of increasing competition. Inbound marketing helps boost brand awareness, build trust, and build a powerful brand that sells.

To succeed in inbound marketing, you need to outperform your competition. Tracking inbound marketing performance becomes a tedious task when you use a number of channels for your marketing campaigns.

The number of activities involved in inbound marketing campaigns can get intimidating for marketers. DashClicks' white-label automation tools can make life easy for you while running and tracking inbound marketing campaigns.

International trade is flourishing, so it is obvious that businesses are exploring overseas markets for expansion. To sell your products and services globally, you must implement robust International SEO strategies.

Agencies are receiving a surge in demand for international SEO Services. Native English speakers make up 17% of the world’s population, but English is a dominant language on the Internet. So, most of the keywords come from the English language. However, it also means that you must catch up on the remaining 83% of the global market.

Your choice of keywords should depend on the country you are targeting. In the US alone, people speak more than 350 languages, Spanish being the second most popular language after English. So, if you want to target diverse demographics, you must consider including other languages as well in your SEO game plan.

This article will discuss all aspects of international SEO, so you become familiar with the best practices, global SEO considerations, and steps necessary to formulate an international SEO strategy.

What Is International SEO?

When your target audience is scattered across different countries and continents, you need to go beyond your regular SEO strategy to encompass all of your prospects. It involves fine-tuning your content to specific countries and audiences with the help of technical SEO. Sometimes, it can be too complex, depending on your target country.

Let’s discuss why international SEO is so crucial in the present times.

Why Is International SEO Important?

Any digital marketer will tell you that SEO depends on many things, which is why mastering it is crucial for your online success. The diversity in the real world makes it even more complex. Leveraging this diversity can make you the undisputed leader in the online space.

Image Source: Moz

Traditional SEO aims to improve the overall website performance, but if you want to target untapped global markets, you should also be aware of international SEO best practices. Luckily, you can quickly and easily rank on SERPs by implementing international SEO because the competition isn’t that fierce.

Fundamentals of an International SEO Strategy

While formulating an International SEO strategy, you should consider the following elements.

A. Target Audience

Like any digital marketing strategy, you need to focus on data first because most successful strategies are data-driven. Google Analytics will help you tremendously in this endeavor.

Begin by identifying your target audience — where they are located and which language(s) they speak.

Image Source: I Que Lab

However, you should ensure that your business operations and target audience are compatible. For example, your strategy can backfire if you are targeting French-speaking people in France and other countries but don’t have French-speaking staff to offer customer support or handle sales queries. Similarly, if you target Chinese audiences but can’t set up an office there because of diplomatic hassles, it will not work.

B. Market Research

A quick Google search can give you a good idea about your target audience, but you cannot use it for professional purposes. If you are serious, you should conduct thorough market research to understand your audience deeper. Learn about their habits, preferences, financial condition, family values, culture, lifestyle, social orientations, legal obligations, and specific needs, if any. Together, these attributes will help you craft better marketing messages and formulate winning strategies.

C. Language

Marketers should refrain from trying to simplify language issues, especially when they are dealing with international audiences. Your SEO heavily depends on it. You should also not go by the official languages of any particular country. For example, the official languages of Canada and India are French, English, and Hindi, respectively, but people speak dozens of languages in both the countries. In some Southern and Eastern states of India, the natives don’t even understand the official language. It would help if you kept that in mind while formulating an international SEO strategy.

D. Keywords

Keywords are highly affected by language conflicts and variations. Never commit the mistake of trying word-to-word translation of the keywords into a different language. People don’t always use the linguistic equivalent of a particular search query in their language. Also, remember that there can be many cultural and local variations to a single language. Hence, you should perform due diligence and devote some time to dedicated keyword research before finalizing your target keywords.

International SEO Best Practices To Follow

Here are some of the international SEO best practices you should follow to get the best results:-

1. Website Structure

The biggest consideration while performing international SEO is having dedicated URLs, especially if you target multiple languages and diverse communities. A well-oriented website structure helps audiences and search engines identify specific web pages’ language.

This is more of a necessity than a result-driven luxury, as search engines can impose a duplicate content penalty if you don’t comply. Google may flag your localized content as duplicates of your original content if the site structure is not taken care of.

Image Source: Moz

Here are the three options you can choose from:-

i. Top-level domain (e.g., www.example.ae)
ii. Subdomain (e.g., www.ae.example.com)
iii. Subdirectory (e.g. www.example.com/ae/)

You can choose your site structure according to your client’s website and business. For example, the top-level domain, such as www.example.ae, can quickly rank on top because of its peculiar structure. But it can be a bit pricey and difficult to manage.

Image Source: Search Ministry

You can also try subdirectories and subdomains according to the strategic priorities of your client. The rules are flexible for international SEO, so you can choose according to your needs and your client’s preferences.

2.  Href-lang Tags

Website developers use these tags to inform search engines about the language and the country your website is created for. Relevancy of content is an important factor for a search engine to index and rank a website, and these tags are designed to help search engines determine it.

Image Source: Moz

If you want to reach the right audience according to their language, you can use Hreflang Tags while performing international SEO.

Here is how you can implement these tags:-

• For the English language: <link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.example.com/” hreflang=”en” />
• For American English: <link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.example.com/en-us/” hreflang=”en-us” />
• For New Zealand English: <link rel=”alternate” href=”https://www.example.com/en-nz/” hreflang=”en-nz” />

You need a separate link ‘rel’ and alternate variant to connect to each variation. These lengthy variations can slow down your website. So, implement them only when you have the necessary skill set. The better alternative is to use a website translation tool that automatically fixes these tags.

3. More Content Creation

When doing international SEO, be ready to embrace increased competition and boost your content volume. Since you will penetrate a different market, you need quality content from scratch. Shortcuts would not work here as your website is the only source of information for a foreign audience.

4. Language Consistency

Don’t skip or leave things out when translating your content from the source website. If you do that, it may look inconsistent and incomplete and not cast a good impression on the visitors reading your content in a different language.

Also, avoid using multiple languages on a single page. It does not bode well for your user experience. Ensure to include the navigation menu, footer, user-generated content, image alt tags, etc.

5. Translating Metadata

Since metadata is an integral aspect of SEO and international SEO, you should also translate it along with the rest of the website. These elements are just as important for search engines as visible content on your landing pages. However, you should avoid literal translation in metadata and use extensive keyword research to make it sound natural and native.

Image Source: Aleyda Solis

6. Localization

It is also an important factor that determines the success of a website. It includes the design, language, and cultural elements directly affecting user experience.

It should include removing culturally offensive content and creating additional content that matches the target audience’s interest. You should also pay attention to navigation, media components, and website design.

The ultimate objective of this practice should be to achieve better engagement and add relevant and optimized content for search engines. It will help boost traffic from the intended global audiences.

Final Words

Google is consistently trying to eliminate language barriers across the globe, and digital agencies would do better to implement international SEO. It would help if you had the right tools and expertise to develop your website in different languages to reach a broader audience for your clients. International SEO offers a great upsell opportunity for agencies, and they should grab it at any cost.

Your marketing report is crucial to the success of your business. It provides deep insights into your business and answers some of the toughest questions. Some of these questions are as follows.

 
• How Successful Your Previous Marketing Campaign Was?
 
• How Can You Persuade Your Client to Approve More Budget?
 
• How Would You Justify This to Your Client?
 
• What to Do if You Are Not Getting the Expected Results?

Your marketing report provides you with key insights into the campaign. It gives you a clear picture of your business's performance and the measure you need to take to do to grow it. This information is equally valuable for the key stakeholders, including your marketing team.

This article will discuss what to include in your marketing report and what you shouldn't. By the end of this article, you will also learn how to save time through automation.

What Is a Marketing Report?

A marketing report displays data from different sources but is more than just a bundle of aimless data. Your marketing report would be relevant if it shows where you stand and helps you meet your business goals. It presents data using the desired KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to achieve this. The more closely your KPIs and OKRs track your performance, the more relevant your marketing report is.

Normally marketing reports provide insights into the following:

 
• Business Goals
• Different Ad and E-mail Campaigns
• Desired Results
• Marketing Strategy
• Promotion Campaigns
• Market Research and Analytics Data

As explained above, your marketing report should aim to provide you with the crucial data you need to make important business decisions and modify your strategy.

It includes sorting, filtering, and arranging data. We can easily eliminate 80% of the irrelevant data and use the most useful metrics to generate an effective report. It also proves that you only need a small amount of crucial data to make a decision.

Loads of data and unnecessary metrics will only create unnecessary confusion.

So, as a basic rule, you should determine the report's purpose first.

Generating a report becomes easier when you have a distinct purpose and well-defined objectives.

You can easily filter the information that will shape your marketing strategy. The lonely numbers are not going to help you. Every data set that you provide should have a specific purpose. Secondly, the report should compare two sets of numbers, so we can measure the performance and take necessary action to improve it.

5 Things You Must Include in Your Marketing Report

Let's dive into the five crucial things you should include in a marketing report to make it useful for your stakeholders.

1. SEO Data and Website Analytics

Your marketing success depends on your website traffic and the actions visitors take on your website. You can refer to your website analytics and SEO data to get these insights. The traffic numbers give you a clue about the size of your reach, whereas the actions they perform on your website tell you what you need to do to convert them.

You can further split the traffic numbers into the following three metrics.

A. Unique Visitors

These are the number of individuals visiting your site. For example, suppose someone visits your site four times for different purposes, and another person visits your website two times. In that case, it indicates that you received six website visits with two unique visitors.

B. Paid Traffic vs. Organic Traffic

The source of traffic is also an important metric as it tells you how paid and organic campaigns are performing individually. You can focus on those sources where ROI (return on investment) is more.

C. Blog Traffic

If you have a blog, you must know the number of subscribers, monthly readers, and visitors per day. Once you have all the website stats, you can add a little context to each data set.

Here are the benefits of using these metrics -

• Identify Traffic Patterns - These numbers would help you to study traffic patterns and how the pattern changes on a weekly and monthly basis.
• Identify Performing and Non-Performing Assets - These insights will help you identify the pages with the most visitors. Additionally, you'll also know which pages are consistently receiving traffic. You can easily achieve more success if you increase your efforts on these pages.

Carefully examine the underperforming pages and figure out what you need to change on these pages to make them perform better.

SEO Data Points

SEO stats provide you with deep insights into your website visitor behavior.

• Average Site Duration - This metric indicates engagement on your website. It also tells you if your site matches the intent of the visitors or not.
• Pay Per Click - This metric tells you whether paid advertising is effective for your website.
• Page Rankings - This is a crucial metric that tells you how visible your website is on SERPs (search engine result pages.)
• Attribution - This metric tells you the source of your traffic. It becomes crucial when you have a diverse range of traffic sources and would like to compare the campaigns you are running to bring traffic.

Google Analytics is the source where you can get all this information.

Pro Tip: If you use DashClicks, you will get access to the Analytics app, which brings a diverse range of analytics data from different sources and third-party software programs. Moreover, you can access all the relevant data on a single dashboard. It saves you a lot of effort and time since our white-level platform has several powerful automation apps to make life easier for the agency owners.

2. Campaign Goals

As discussed earlier, marketing is responsible for ensuring the success of your business. Therefore, it becomes crucial to set and measure campaign goals. These goals provide a perspective to your marketing team, so they can figure out the actual numbers to compare different metrics.

To achieve this, you should have a good understanding of your goals. A good marketer easily understands how different campaign elements can fit into a bigger picture to make it meaningful.

Goal setting may include the following items -

• Monthly Revenue Targets (Or Annual Budget)
• Traffic Targets (Split Data by Sources of Traffic)
• CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) Score
• Inbound Leads With Their Sources
• The Conversion Rate on the Website (Given the Entire Marketing Funnel)

Together, the above data and metrics provide a specific reference frame through which you cannot only tweak your marketing strategy but also know what your teams are doing and how they're doing it.

3. Prospects, Leads, and Customers

We have discussed a lot of metrics above, but it is only useful once it translates into money in any business.

So, we further split our traffic into engaged contacts, marketing qualified leads (MQLs), and new sales qualified leads (SQLs).

A. Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) - These are those prospects with a high level of engagement and who are ready to speak with salespeople. Sometimes, you have to nurture marketing-qualified leads into sales-qualified leads through several meetings, touchpoints, and imparting product education.

B. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - It is a metric that tells you the cost of adding a new customer.

C. Cost Per Action (CPA) - You expect your prospects to perform various actions, such as signing up for a trial, form submission, and downloading an eBook or gated content.

D. Attribution - It tells you everything about leads and their sources. This metric also helps you know where the quality leads are coming from, so you can focus more on those sources and eliminate the rest.

There are various ways to identify MQLs and SQLs, some of which are as follows.

• Tracking Engagement
• Visitor Tracking on the Website
• Forms SubmissionsE
• Event Signups
• Webinar Attendees
• Free-Trial or Newsletter Signups

4. Data Interpretation

Lonely numbers are useless. You need to add some context and support your data through stories to make the data more relevant and useful. Wrong data interpretation might lead to incorrect assumptions, and you should avoid that at all costs.

For example, a traffic dip can happen for many reasons, such as a long vacation, public holidays, or website issues.

The right interpretation of data is also crucial for your peers, executives, and your bossā€”it provides clear explanations of why there are fluctuations.

5. Social Media Stats

Suppose social media is an integral part of your marketing efforts. In that case, you should always include social media metrics in your reports that track your performance against brand awareness goals and conversions from social media campaigns.

Businesses heavily use Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook for conversion and brand awareness. So, you can use their analytics for the purpose. Social media platforms provide you with lots of insights and analytics so that you can measure your campaigns' effectiveness. These insights include likes, shares, retweets, impressions, number of followers, and engagement. With the help of this data, you can also find relevant information about audience demographics, ad performance, and virality.

Things Not to Include in Marketing Report

Ā You should not include the following things in your marketing report.

1. Jargon

Avoid jargon and the terminology used by the people in your industry at all costs. It can be confusing for everyone.

2. Irrelevant Metrics

Avoid all sorts of metrics that are unrelated to your core values or business goals. For example, Google Analytics provides you with vast SEO data that contains a lot of information on search engine rankings, their variations with keywords, bounce rate, etc., and most of it is useless.

3. Graphics or Charts That Contain Non-contextual Information

To make their report attractive, marketers sometimes load it with unnecessary graphs and charts containing much non-contextual information. Without an appropriate context, your audience may not interpret the information included in the graphics. It needs to be clarified.

4. Irrelevant Data

Marketers use platform-specific analytics and analytics from several third-party tools. It might contain excessive data. According to the experts, 80% of the data provided by the analytics tools is irrelevant. It can be confusing for a naive person and even experienced decision-makers. So, avoid it.

Final Words

Report generation is a tedious task. You can use the tips in this article to compile a professional marketing report useful for decision-makers. Yet, manually generating reports can be time-consuming, wasteful, and tiring. DashClicks' InstaReports is a powerful automation tool that simplifies the report generation process. Agencies find this tool highly useful. With this reporting tool, you can generate professional marketing reports in seconds. The tool fetches information from numerous third-party software and DashClicks' Analytics app.