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5 Major Reasons Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Crucial for Skyrocketing Growth
5 Major Reasons Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Crucial for Skyrocketing Growth

When sales and marketing get in sync, magic happens. The combination is an elixir for organizations willing to perform better. But how do sales and marketing find a more cohesive path to deliver the business results you want? And, how to forge a stronger partnership between sales and marketing teams?

Businesses have been asking this question for many years now.

Aligned teams can dramatically improve your sales and revenue. Working in sync drives growth increases sales, and allows different teams to work better, together.

Still, teams struggle to work in harmony. Do you know the reason?

The bottlenecks often include office politics and distributed workforces. So, here we will discuss how to forge a better sales and marketing alignment for the best business results.

Why Do You Need Sales and Marketing Alignment?

With endless choices in front of them, the modern customer is already struggling with information overload. Brands also push personal services and numerous product lines to meet people's needs. But, it actually overwhelms a customer.

Together, all these things make a purchase decision much more difficult. Trust factors also play a significant role here as customers can't trust every other brand brandishing the USPs of their products. According to a study, 81% of customers admitted that numerous options and too much information make a purchase decision difficult.

One significant benefit of working with aligned teams is that they help consumers navigate the complex emotional process of making purchase decisions. The marketing department shares these inputs with the sales teams so that they can refine their communication accordingly.

Now, let's discuss their roles.

The Role of a Sales Team

The sales team is directly responsible for converting leads into customers. They build and manage relationships and also work on retention. If the need arises, they also resolve customer issues. Since sales is a multi-stage activity, the salespeople must keep an eye on the entire customer journey and adapt their communication accordingly. That's the reason sales is so crucial for businesses. They are the lifeline of any organization.

The Customer Jouney and Sales Cycle

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However, a blind focus on sales may backfire, and you may end up ruining your prospects and clients in the long run.

The Role of a Marketing Team

Enter marketing. Marketing takes care of the parts sales often overlooks, e.g., creating awareness, educating about the product, ensuring the quality of leads, and crafting enticing messages.

The customers need to be made aware of your product, and marketing people know precisely what they need to hear. Their job is to craft thoughtful marketing messages to push the prospects down the sales funnel. Without a marketing strategy, you won't have a target audience and, ultimately, no sales.

Role of Marketing Team

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So, why do you need to align the two teams?

Reasons Sales and Marketing Alignment Is Crucial

According to a study, nearly 75% of leads never reach the conversion stage when the sales and marketing teams aren't aligned.

This statistic indicates how wasteful misaligned sales can be. Aligned teams achieved a 34% increase in new business revenue. So, even though the ultimate objective of both teams appears to be the same, their playing fields are entirely different.

The marketing team aggressively generates leads, and the sales team leaves no stone unturned to convert those leads. But sadly, both the teams work independently and hence fail to achieve their common objectives.

Here are five significant reasons why aligned teams are so crucial for the growth of your business.

1. Helps Create a Single Customer Journey

Aligned teams collaborate and share their insights about their customers. Otherwise, a major disconnect can happen in their degree of understanding of the customer.

Your marketing and sales teams may be on entirely different trajectories regarding their perceptions of how a customer moves between different stages in the sales funnel.

The Customer Journey

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This is one of the major reasons why leads don't turn into customers. Customers are smart. They can sense a disconnect between your marketing pitch and your sales process as soon as they interact with your brand.

The results may surprise you when teams are aligned towards a mutually understood customer journey. The collaboration should start right after a customer is first exposed to your brand, i.e., when they hear about it. And it should last till your last communication with them.

2. Helps Different Teams Agree on a Customer Persona

Again, serious disagreements often happen between marketing and sales teams about their perceptions of the target audience. It results in both the teams looking for different qualities in the same customer persona. If your idea of your target customer is unclear, it affects everything from marketing messages to sales plan.

With that said, it becomes crucial to agree on a customer persona. It will allow you to market to them as per their personality traits at each stage of their journey without any disconnect.

An Example of Buyers' Persona

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3. Helps You Deal With the Shifting Nature of Markets

Your marketing team will identify people interested in your product. In contrast, the sales team filters this list and focuses on people ready to make a buying decision soon.The driving factors that make a person interested are pretty different from those that make them ready to buy.However, with the changing nature of markets, sales and marketing teams should be flexible about their buyer personas. Customers' pain points keep changing, and if you don't adapt, you won't move even an inch ahead.These dynamic changes in market trends can be overcome by the marketing and sales team collaborating and working in tandem.

4. Helps You in Customer Outreach

Even though both departments are equally valuable, marketing should take precedence. Sales have become increasingly difficult in the past decade, mainly owing to the boom in cold calling, cold emailing, and other forms of unsolicited marketing. People just don't like it.

The best marketing approach is to figure out where your customers usually hang out. This allows you to meet them at their preferred hangout place, whether online or offline. Ofcourse, we are talking about various popular online channels here. Once your marketing team figures that out, they can start a targeted campaign to attract customers.

Create Your Outreach Plan

And once a few interested customers show their hands, your sales team can easily take it from there!

5. Helps You Track Joint KPIs

Even if you hate tracking joint KPIs, the strategy tells you what you need to fix. When the teams are not aligned, they might track different KPIs. For the sales team, KPIs like overall conversion rate and new accounts created are far more critical than lead quality and quantity or advertising results.However, aligned teams can reduce this friction through weekly meetings and daily collaboration. In those meetings, sales and marketing teams can share customer pain points and their preferences and discuss how they can use this data to turn missed conversions into sales.

Final Words

Aligned teams can refine your brand message and make it look uniform, consistent, and professional. If different teams use different terminologies, it may not only sound unprofessional but will also confuse your customers. It will quickly erode customer trust.

Again, it's essential to craft your marketing messages according to your buyer personas and their stage in the customer journey. Targeted marketing also helps you plug in the various loopholes in sales. Any disconnect here will lead to the failure of your entire sales campaign. That's why sales and marketing alignment are often called innovative marketing and should be practiced by every business to succeed.

How to Know if Your Website's Traffic Quality Is Poor & How to Fix It
How to Know if Your Website's Traffic Quality Is Poor & How to Fix It

Website traffic is a vanity metric.

There are countless ways to drive more clicks to your domain. However, it matters very little if those users aren't interested in converting. In these cases, all you're doing is wasting your budget.

Traffic quality is a superior metric regardless of traffic volume. By extracting optimal engagement from each person, you maximize your returns.

We're going to show you the telltale signs of poor traffic. Then, we'll teach you how to improve website traffic quality with several easy-to-implement changes.

Signs of Poor Website Traffic Quality

1. Your Domain Has a High Bounce Rate

Your bounce rate refers to the number of times users visit your site and leave without taking any action.

Your team of SEOs and content writers is doing the job of getting your pages to appear on SERPs. However, something about the on-page content is either actively driving users away or failing to grab their attention.

To analyze your bounce rate, track your website stats through Google Analytics. The guidelines for a high bounce rate vary depending on your marketing goals and your industry. Check out this detailed list of bounce rate industry benchmarks by device and industry courtesy of Content Square.

The other factor to consider is the overall goal for your site. For your brand's main website, a higher-than-average bounce rate is not ideal. Your website should keep users active and encourage them to click on other pages. If they're leaving soon after they arrive, it's likely a sign that your site is finding users that do not have an interest.

Lower Your Site's Bounce Rate

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On the other hand, a higher bounce rate for a direct sales funnel is normal. Going straight for the sale is a difficult task, meaning that you should expect more users to bounce than to convert.

Be mindful of your company's goals when analyzing your bounce rate. If the numbers do not agree with your aspirations, then your traffic is likely low-quality.

2. Your Site Has Low Conversion Rates

In marketing, we define a conversion as an event in which a user completes a desired goal.

While a sale is your ultimate goal, your site can have any number of additional conversions to chart the buyer's journey.

What your conversion goals are will once again depend upon the goals for your website. If you're looking to increase your average session duration, you might set goals for the user to click an internal link to another page.

Other examples of conversion goals can be:

  • Filling out a form
  • Watching a video
  • Signing up for an email list
  • Creating an account

If your users are not converting, then it may be a sign that your traffic is of low quality. However, it may also be a sign that your webpage design or content is failing to earn that conversion.

What Is a Good Conversion Rate?

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With many of these factors, no one metric will tell the whole story. You must look at underperforming figures in the context of the user's journey. That's why these other factors will play a role in determining if your traffic is not ideal.

3. Your Site Has a Low Session Duration

The average session duration is approximately how long a typical user spends on your domain.

You can quickly determine roughly how long it would take the average user to complete any number of goals. One page of content may take two minutes to read while clicking to read another page can extend that visit to be much longer.

However, a sharp decline in session duration is almost assuredly a sign that the user is not interested. Once again, the users that are discovering your site are not interested in your offerings.

If your average session duration is a little closer to the industry average, then the story may be different. Once again, it may be that your content fails to drive engagement. Without a reason to interact and convert, your sessions are going to consistently fall below expectations.

Factors Contributing to Lower Average Session Duration

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Try to look out for low session duration particularly if you're also seeing higher than normal bounce rates.

4. Visitors Find Your Site with the Wrong Keywords

This is one of the most likely culprits of low-quality traffic. Not only will the wrong keywords bring in the wrong users, but it also leads to the other negative metrics listed previously.

Ranking for the wrong keywords may happen by accident. However, you may also be doing so intentionally without realizing it. Many site owners make the mistake of choosing keywords purely by search volume without considering the keyword intent.

Know that there are four primary types of keywords:

  • Informational – the user is looking for unbiased information on a subject
  • Commercial – the user is looking for more specific data about certain brands or products
  • Transactional – the user is looking to purchase a product relatively soon
  • Navigational – the user is looking to find a specific URL

Understanding the keyword types and their purpose should be the driving force behind your content.

If you choose to rank for an informational keyword, but your content is tailored toward transactions, you're going to get clicks from low-quality traffic. In this example, the user wanted to be educated, but you served them a hard sales pitch.

Not only does this create a bad user experience, but it may also actually cause users to avoid your brand going forward. Unwanted approaches come across as unpersonable, spammy, and a nuisance. Getting the correct type of content to the correct users is how your website analytics improve overall.

The 4 Types of Search Intent

On the other hand, make sure that your content is not accidentally ranking for keywords. When using GA, you can see which page the user visited and which keywords they used to find it. If you spot any red flags, then it's time to examine that content and determine how this particular event happened.

How to Improve Website Traffic Quality?

1. Monitor Your Website Analytics Every Week and/or Month

With tools like Google Analytics, it's much easier to spot issues with website traffic quality.

As long as we know the particular URLs at the source of the problem, we will have an easier time analyzing the direct factors. While minor highs and lows are to be expected, negative trends are something to keep an eye on.

By checking in on your website traffic regularly, it's much easier to identify issues before they become a real problem. This is particularly important if you're using paid campaigns to drive website traffic. Every user that visits costs money regardless of the traffic quality.

In addition to the metrics above, Google Analytics offers a breakdown of all website traffic. It will divvy up the results by real traffic, spam, and bots. You can find this by utilizing the Overview dropdown and clicking on Quality.

Google Analytics Website Traffic Overview

Anything in green is indicative of real traffic. You want to make sure that most, if not all, of your traffic fall within this category. Then, you can begin to analyze page-by-page to determine how that traffic is arriving at your domain.

2. Set Up Custom Goals for Your Site

Custom goals are an incredible feature that every website owner should utilize.

Creating your own goals allows you to gain greater insight from your traffic regarding your unique business objectives. It allows you to determine exactly where you're losing the user and what you might be able to do to improve your retention rate.

If a user fails to complete the initial action, it's much more likely that the traffic is unqualified. Meanwhile, if a user abandons your site halfway through the journey, it's more indicative of the content or offer quality.

To set up a goal in Google Analytics:

  1. Go to your Admin page.
  2. Click on the View column. Then, click Goals.
  3. Click +New Goal to set up the custom configurations for that objective.
Set up a Goal in Google Analytics

You should utilize these new goal metrics in conjunction with all other measurements. Doing so paints a more concise picture and allows you to make a more educated guess when it comes to your traffic and targeting.

Generate a hypothesis, develop a new strategy, then test again. You must continue to do this until you begin to see your metrics trending once again in a healthy direction.

3. Improve Your Content Quality

It's possible to attribute low-quality traffic to poor content quality.

This can start as early as the keyword selection process as explained above. If you are selecting the ideal keywords for ranking, your content may fail to meet Google's EAT principles.

Setting up custom goals for conversions (see above) is an excellent way to start gauging content quality. Whether you want users to visit new pages or sign up for an offer, your content is what will do the heavy lifting. Failure to meet these objectives is a red flag that your copy, images, or video need a closer look.

To start improving your content quality:

  • Choose the right keyword for your audience. Remember keyword intention when choosing your page topics.
  • Refocus existing content to not incidentally rank for the wrong keywords.
  • Motivate the audience by providing a call to action. Help them get involved.
  • Support your text with high-quality images and video. As the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.
  • Offer social proof. Leverage the momentum of your content by including references, testimonials, or research depending on the subject matter.
  • Find natural ways to link to internal content. Make it easy for your users to spend more time on your site.

4. Improve Your Paid Ad Targeting

For many brands, paid advertising campaigns are a huge source of new website traffic.

Traffic coming from an ad or sales funnel should almost always be of high quality. If they're already showing interest in your ad, then they should be a qualified user for your website content.

Paid ad platforms like Facebook, Instagram, or Google make it easy to learn about your audience. These tools automatically gather data from every impression and click. It knows who is seeing your ads, who's interested, and who you should avoid.

PPC marketers then utilize this data to continuously refine their campaign efforts. The more we learn about the user, the better we can create content that drives conversions. Conversely, misinterpreting the data and presenting ads to unqualified users leads to a wasted budget.

How Target Audience Analysis Will Help?

Always be sure to revisit your audience data periodically. Remember that discovery campaigns must be allowed a significant period (at least 2 weeks) to gather sufficient data. Then, utilize this data in both your ad campaigns and your website to attract the right type of traffic.

5. Generate High-Quality Traffic with Remarketing

An effective ad campaign type is known as remarketing. This allows you to re-engage with users that have already shown interest in your brand.

It's far easier to leverage data that you have regarding a previously engaged user than a brand-new one. This is because we have access to analytics that show what that person likes, where we lost them, and what we might do to win them over next time.

This is particularly valuable when it comes to customers that made a purchase. Rather than thinking of each sale as a one-and-done, keep that momentum going and leverage their earned trust to your benefit.

The internet changed the buyer's journey forever. No longer do we need to make a purchasing decision on the spot. Instead, we might engage with a funnel, leave, then come back later.

How Remarketing Works?

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That user may be on the fence regarding a purchase. Then, a Facebook ad appears on their timeline once again reminding them of your brain. You catch them at a different time in a different mood, and suddenly they're more open to converting.

Remarketing almost always leads to high-quality traffic. Rethink your strategy to consider new ways to capitalize on previous website visitors or customers, such as:

  • Paid ad remarketing campaigns
  • Email marketing lists
  • Abandoned cart emails

6. Rethink Your Existing Marketing Channels

Finally, it may be time to reconsider whether a specific marketing channel is worth the effort.

Marketing is a continuous trial-and-error process. The more we learn about our audience, the better we are equipped to make smart choices that lead to better returns.

If you've been utilizing a channel, exhausted different types of creatives, and still see low-quality traffic, consider dropping it from your strategy. It can simply be a case of the wrong place or the wrong time. It may also be that it's worth pursuing better-qualified users elsewhere.

We can’t stress enough that analytics is your savior when it comes to determining traffic quality. Don’t just analyze your site through GA, but constantly observe your metrics across:

  • Paid ads
  • Social media
  • Influencer marketing
  • Email marketing

Some channels may better suit your particular brand or industry than others. It’s up to you to determine if there’s something you can improve or if that platform’s audience just isn’t up to standards.

Prioritize Website Traffic Quality Over Volume

Low-quality traffic often comes as a result of pursuing volume over quality. When we fail to properly analyze our website and our marketing channels, we end up with traffic numbers that mean very little.

Instead, we must carefully monitor website analytics for signs of poor website traffic quality. Be mindful of:

  • Bounce rate
  • Average session duration
  • Low conversion rates
  • Keywords & channels used to find the site

Any one of these can be indicative of problems on the site, within our ad campaigns, or within our SEO strategy. The sooner you identify the problem and its source, the sooner you can weed out your low-quality traffic.

Ultimate Off-Page SEO Checklist to Appear Higher in SERPs
Ultimate Off-Page SEO Checklist to Appear Higher in SERPs
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SEO is a marketer's bread and butter.

Cleaning up your content and ensuring your site runs smoothly is vital. However, it's the off-page SEO tactics that often get overlooked.

Not only will it further improve your rankings, but it will also help to boost brand awareness in third-party areas. The more you get people talking, the less work you may have to do in the long term.

First, we'll define off-page SEO, then dive right into our off-page SEO checklist.

What is Off-Page SEO?

Off-page SEO refers to any search optimization tactics that you perform outside of your domain. For a better reference, let’s quickly compare this definition to the two other types of SEO:

  • On-page SEO – Actions taken on the web page to improve search visibility
  • Technical SEO – Actions taken to improve the UX and help Googlebot index content

Off-page SEO refers to tactics such as backlinks from other websites, social shares, or a citation. All of these happen on other popular websites and exist primarily to drive more users to your domain.

Developing an effective off-page SEO strategy is generally more challenging than the other two practices. You need to figure out ways to effectively use these third-party sources to get those users interested in the content hosted on your pages.

To do this, be sure to follow this step-by-step checklist to jumpstart your tactics immediately.

1. Evaluate Your Backlinks

A backlink is any link found on a third-party site that links back to your domain.

Backlinks can be helpful or harmful depending on the source. This is because Googlebot begins to associate these domains as it crawls a site and follows links to external websites.

If the backlinking site is a trusted, high-ranking one, the link will transfer some of that domain authority to yours by association. Conversely, a toxic backlink from an untrusted domain will negatively impact your SEO over time.

For this reason, you never want to consider black-hat strategies like purchasing links or signing up for shady directories. These tactics are outdated and Google will happily penalize domains that are caught abusing the system. You want to choose high-quality sites that you would proudly think of as an industry peer or partner.

A great tool for checking your backlink profile is Google Search Console. This free platform is a tremendous boon for SEOs and will assist with all aspects of your digital strategy.

Alternatively, if you're already using a tool like Semrush for keyword tracking, you can take advantage of their backlink profile tool.

Whichever you choose, you'll be able to see a complete list of your backlinks, where the link is located, and the score received from that site. The higher the score, the better the quality of the backlink.

Advantages of Backlinks

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2. Disavow Toxic Backlinks

Whenever you run a backlink assessment, you may be unfortunate enough to see some low scores. These can be from domains you chose to work with or domains that simply happened to link your content.

A low-scoring or “toxic” backlink will negatively impact your SEO. If the referring site demonstrates low trustworthiness and authority, Googlebot may end up associating those bad marks with your brand.

Google’s recommended method for removing toxic backlinks is to do so manually. Identify the domain, take note of the exact URL, and reach out to the site’s webmaster. Be respectful of your request and instruct them to remove the backlink from the page.

Manual removal is the fastest way to eliminate a toxic backlink from your profile. The changes should be reflected in Googlebot’s next crawl.

If the webmaster is unresponsive or unwilling to play ball, you’ll need to file a request with Google. Note that Google recommends this as a last-ditch alternative if:

  • Your site exhibits numerous low-quality backlinks
  • The links can lead to a manual action on your site

You can follow the step-by-step instructions to properly submit a disavowal here. This may take several weeks as Google needs to manually review each link in each request received.

How to Disavow Backlinks in the Google Search Console?

3. Remedy Broken Links & Redirects

While these fall under the realm of on-page and technical SEO, they can impact your off-page SEO.

You don't want to earn a high-quality backlink, only to lose it due to a broken link or broken redirect. Such errors can reflect poorly on the referring site, prompting them to eliminate the link to your domain in exchange for a better one.

The same can be said for a broken redirect. Whether the link leads to a dead URL or catches the user in a redirect loop, the result is a poor user experience.

Stay on top of your SEO by regularly diagnosing your page URLs and internal links. You can do this with Google Search Console just as you did when collecting your backlinks. Identify the URL in question, locate the error, and take the necessary action to correct it.

In most cases, a broken link can be remedied with simple changes like updating the URL in the hypertext.

For redirects, make sure that the redirect chain never exceeds three steps. If the URL move is permanent, consider directly linking to the new page instead of continuing the redirect.

Redirection Loop

You should also notify backlinking sites of the change, so that both parties may continue to benefit from the association.

4. Generate New Backlink Opportunities

After you complete your website housekeeping, it's time to look for more opportunities.

The more high-quality backlinks pointing to your site, the better your domain appears in the eyes of Google. The more trustworthy you are, the more likely you are to climb the rankings with your peers.

However, acquiring authoritative backlinks won't come easy. You'll need to dedicate time and resources specifically to social outreach and bridging new connections.

A. Get Involved in Content Marketing

Content marketing is a crucial component of any SEO strategy.

Creating a blog is a great investment as it benefits both your on-page and off-page SEO. The page itself helps build organic traffic by providing helpful how-to guides or authoritative answers to industry questions.

This can lead to shares on social media, forums, and other websites where discussions related to your industry happen.

However, when aspects of your content are particularly striking, other websites may want to use it. If particular facts or statistics serve to supplement a topic or opinion piece on another site, don't be surprised to see a backlink to your URL.

This is a huge compliment as it shows that your peers and/or competitors find value in your work. That trust and authority get noticed by both the users reading that content as well as Googlebot.

Furthermore, having your link in front of a new audience is an ideal way to generate new forms of traffic. The more clicks you obtain from new sources, the more likely you are to climb higher in SERPs.

B. Start Guest Blogging

Some sites may look to outside sources for blog content on their site. The reasons for this can be:

  • They lack time or resources to create enough original content
  • They are actively looking to network with other high-ranking sites

The viability of guest blogging will likely depend on how well people know you and your brand. For the same reason that webmasters want to avoid low-quality backlinks, they may hesitate to invite articles written by an untrusted source.

That's where it's your job to effectively sell yourself to your peers. Reach out and make an offer that's worthwhile to both parties. An exchange of guest blogs for either site can provide both with fresh content, while also netting both a quality backlink.

The more you build up a portfolio of successful guest blogs, the easier it will be for you to score new opportunities.

Finally, be on the lookout for opportunities to get featured in a round-up article. These won't require you to write a full post, but instead offer a few key points of insight. You'll find yourself featured among a longer list of trusted domains in the industry.

C. Check Your Competitors' Backlinks

If you're stumped on how to find new, worthwhile backlinks, why not look at your competitors?

You can utilize paid SEO tools like SpyFu or Semrush to collect a full list of backlinks by domain.

While it may be a hard sell to steal a backlink out from under a competitor, it's possible with the right content. Take the time to review the linked content and determine if you have content that outperforms the current offering. Be sure to be respectful in your pitch to the webmaster and carefully explain why linking to your content is more beneficial to their brand.

An alternative, and possibly more effective approach, is to look for broken backlinks on those profiles. You're trying to catch competitors that are being too relaxed regarding their off-page SEO.

Competitor Backlink Analysis

Reach out to the backlinking domains and advise them of the broken and dead links on their pages. Offer your content as a replacement and see if they take you up on your offer. If your competitor isn't interested in upkeeping their links, then it may as well go to someone like you who needs it.

D. Sign Up for Local Directories

Though they're mostly outdated, the web still has several effective directories available for small businesses.

The most important of these is Google My Business. This is a collection of business profiles hosted by Google to help its users find local brands relevant to the search request.

Your GMB profile will highlight your company within SERPs. Users can browse photos, find your website link, and locate your NAP information with ease. Mobile users in particular may be more likely to contact your business directly from a GMB profile as opposed to visiting your domain.

Regardless, GMB can help to boost engagement and ratings for your brand. It's an invaluable source of traffic that can help smaller companies compete even when it's tough to break through with organic rankings.

Example of Google My Business Listing

Many other directories are still relevant today. Some, like Yelp, cater to all businesses. However, some industries have dedicated listings.

Examples of popular directories include:

  • Google My Business
  • Yelp
  • Facebook
  • Foursquare
  • UberEats
  • Yahoo!

Be sure to check for any industry-specific directories available to you at both the national and local levels.

E. Roll Up Your Sleeves and Get Active on Forums

Our final tip is an old-school tactic that still works today. It's successfully helped many brands find their audience and generate a much-needed surge of engagement.

We recommend popular forum sites like Reddit or Quora for this purpose. Both are resources for users to ask questions and receive no-nonsense advice from registered or anonymous users.

One thing you don't want to do is mindlessly plug your brand in inappropriate places. Instead, actively get involved in the community discussion. If you notice users complaining about a particular problem, find a way to naturally segway your brand as the solution.

Likewise, if you find users parroting false information or bad advice, use your expertise to course-correct. It's acceptable to cite your occupation and qualifications when providing better data. This helps you stand out as an industry authority, while simultaneously appearing genuine to your audience.

The goal here is to gain a new following through honest, sincere interaction. Become an active member of the community and watch as new users start to visit your website.

5. Develop a Social Media Strategy

Social media continues to change the way we see and use the internet.

Approximately 4 billion people globally use some form of social media today. For this reason, more and more brands, both in B2B and B2C, are turning to social networking.

Like forums, social media provides a way for brands to ingrain themselves in a community. You get to be a part of the conversation and hear exactly what your customers are saying. It provides a constant feedback loop and allows you to quickly respond to customers at a moment's notice.

Social media provides multiple uses. Some brands choose to create free accounts and post on a regular schedule. Creating engaging, dynamic posts helps your brand occupy a portion of the mindshare.

How Does Your Company Benefit From Using Social Media?

You can gather more data about your audience and cut through the noise by running a paid ad campaign. This allows you to hyper-target specific individuals that appear to be most receptive to your messaging. The journey from ad to landing page, to your website, can provide a supplementary source of traffic that helps to boost rankings.

Likewise, you can choose to promote posts that feature particularly great content. You can create original, high-quality video content or infographics tailored specifically to the platform. You may also combine social media with your content marketing efforts to drive more attention to a great article featured on your blog.

As you build a social media following, you may find yourself gaining exponentially more likes and shares on all of your content. This creates more links pointing to your site and more opportunities to appear higher in SERPs.

6. Influencer Marketing

With the boom in social media, there has also been a substantial rise in influencer marketing.

Sites like YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and TikTok are all personality-driven platforms. These influencers start as everyday users that happen to create compelling content. As more users begin to follow them for their content, their relative fame and star power increases.

However, social media influencers offer a unique benefit as opposed to a direct brand partnership. Audiences see these influencers as grounded, down-to-earth individuals. This creates a form of trust that is not easily replicated by a company or corporation.

You can still leverage that audience trust to your advantage by partnering with these influencers. Instead of trying to convert new customers with typical sales strategies, you allow the influencer to speak about your brand on your behalf.

How Influencers Affect Search Engine Rankings

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This is typically done by agreeing to pay the influencer a monetary sum in exchange for a set amount of exposure. It's a great way to connect with new audiences in new areas that your other strategies may not reach.

7. Business Reviews

You can never underestimate the power of a business review.

Where consumers hesitate to trust the voice of a brand, they eagerly place their faith in reviews from customers regardless of the rating.

A staggering 98% of consumers look for local business reviews before interacting with them or making a purchase. We want that validation of knowing we will have a positive experience before we take a financial risk.

However, less than half of consumers will leave a review of their own.

Taking the time to solicit more reviews from paying customers is an excellent way to gain more traction online. A primary way to achieve this was discussed earlier, through local directory listings. Keep your GMB and Yelp profiles up-to-date and more customers will leave reviews.

There are also dedicated business review websites you can register with such as the Better Business Bureau and Trustpilot.

Finally, you can solicit more customer testimonials through direct conversation or email marketing. Consider providing some minor incentive to help persuade them. Know that collecting a variety of reviews can be useful in future content creation on and off your website.

7 Simple Ways to Get More Online Reviews for Your Buisness

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Improve Your Off-Page SEO for Better Rankings

Off-page SEO is an excellent way to connect your brand to new audiences.

It's also a tactic that requires a genuine approach and a willingness to connect with your community and your peers. If you prioritize high-quality content creation, you'll find it that much easier to make these connections.

To quickly review:

  • Evaluate your existing backlinks
  • Ask webmasters to remove backlinks from untrusted sites
  • Get your internal links and redirects in order
  • Generate new backlinks through blogs, local citations, forums, and competitor backlink espionage
  • Promote your content on social media
  • Network with trusted social media influencers
  • List your site on platforms that allow for customer reviews

These tactics not only boost your brand visibility but simultaneously boost consumer trust in your authority. As you continue to improve your off-page SEO, results may start to come more naturally with time.

Content Marketing ROI: The Best Tools, Methods, and Metrics to Measure Content Success
Content Marketing ROI: The Best Tools, Methods, and Metrics to Measure Content Success

Before we begin, let's consider the following stats:

In a survey of companies using content marketing in their arsenal of digital marketing tools, 74% of companies said that content marketing helped increase their marketing leads, both in quantity and quality.ā  (Curata)

Content marketing provides almost six times higher conversion rates than other digital marketing methods.ā  (ABG Essentials)

Content marketing is highly effective, as we all know, but just how do you measure its ROI to convince your boss to ask for a budget increase or to generate a report for your client!

There is no formula to measure content success. However, there are a few things you can focus on to evaluate your content’s performance:

  • Define the goals you want to achieve
  • Set their KPIs
  • Track those KPIs

Now, your digital marketing goals can realistically be achieved by content marketing, such as increasing traffic, establishing trust, generating leads, and boosting lead velocity rate (LVR).

You should set goals and track KPIs for each piece of content you produce, including the repurposed content. For example, if you created a podcast and a video using a blog post, you can measure ROI on all three content formats.

Now, switch to the ideal frequency.

Almost 37% of content marketers measure the success of their content every week, while 26% do it every day.

What Is Content Marketing ROI?

Content marketing ROI is a crucial metric that justifies the spending on content marketing efforts compared to the monetary gains.

In general, we can understand it with the help of the following formula.

ROI Formula

How to Calculate the ROI?

It isn't easy to calculate the ROI on content marketing because the metrics marketers use can't be directly linked with monetary gains. For example, page views, social engagement, and Time-on-Page have no direct bearing on the sales and business profits, but they surely contribute toward that.

Further, they don't apply to every content marketing channel. For eg., a podcast doesn't have anything equivalent to pageviews.

However, you can establish a relationship between a metric and measurable results such as leads and sales using data. For instance, you can calculate the average page views it takes to generate a lead or close a sale.

Still, different people may have different perceptions about these metrics as far as their contribution to sales is concerned. For example, for some marketers, the number of email subscribers and ebook downloads can be more important than page views and Time-spent-on-page.

So, here is a simple technique to calculate the ROI of your content marketing efforts.

List all the monthly-spend on content marketing, such as:

  1. External workforce cost (Agencies, experts, freelancers)
  2. Regular headcount
  3. Media spend
  4. Spend on technology (software, tools, subscriptions)

Simultaneously, you should also consider the returns such as visitors and leads, and calculate their dollar value in sales and profit. You can quickly establish it with the help of metrics such as traffic and lead conversion rate, etc.

You also need information about the sale rate, overall profit, and average selling price.

Here is an illustration that explains how you can calculate your content marketing ROI.

An Example Showing How You Can Calculate Content Marketing ROI

Below, we tell you the 4-step process for measuring content success.

4-Step Process for Measuring Content Success

Before we dive into measuring content marketing ROI, you need to understand how marketers measure content success. When measuring content marketing ROI, it's essential to follow this 4-step process.

Step 1: Determine the Objectives of Your Content

Andrew Becks of 301 Digital Media says that the choice of metrics for tracking content performance should match your goal.

For example, direct sales and conversion should be the ideal metrics to track for an eCommerce business.

For a software tool or subscription-based service, tracking customer lifetime value (CLV) is more appropriate.

Choosing your yardstick to measure success is crucial irrespective of your industry or content type. According to Ollie Roddy, former Marketing and Business Development Manager of Catalyst Marketing, your content's success largely depends on the goal it's supposed to fulfill. If you are writing SEO articles, measuring your Google ranking for the targeted keyword is the perfect yardstick for performance measurement.

But, if you are writing content to answer questions and engage customers at different stages in the buyer's journey, you should measure conversion rates. So, tracking is directly related to the goals set by you.

Step 2: Set KPIs for Each of Your Goals

KPIs are the metrics marketers choose to measure their campaign performance. For example, bounce rate and Time-on-Page are the metrics that indicate the engagement level on your website.

Similarly, improved search engine rankings and a high number of inbound links are directly linked with organic traffic.

Marketing KPIs According to Specific Channel
KPIs at Different Stages

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Pro Tip: KPIs from social media engagement, user behavior, and SEO impact are all you need to measure your performance against any goal.

According to Brandon Andersen of Ceralytics, since ROI is directly linked with finance, your goals must be specific and measurable. If these aren't measurable, you can't assign a monetary value to them. Metrics such as likes, impressions, and shares are vague as they don't tell you much in regards to their monetary value.

For example, you can calculate an inbound lead's average value using this simple formula.

ROI (Revenue) Formula

However, it's not always as simple as that. Businesses these days consider various other things apart from leads such as unique sessions and visit-to-signup as even more crucial KPIs for calculating content

ROI.

The most important KPIs to track are as follows:

  • Leads
  • Visit to Sign Up
  • Sessions
  • Unique sessions
  • Bounce Rate
  • Page Views

Jonathan Aufray, co-founder and CEO of Growth Hackers, lists the following three (non-monetary) metrics for tracking:

  1. Traffic stats (volume and other vital stats such as demographics)
  2. Leads generated (through email signups)
  3. Sales

You can measure brand awareness through impressions and clicks. For conversions, determine which content piece specifically triggered sales.

Pro Tip: The best metrics to track ROI are the ones that are related to earning more money.

The metrics such as lead magnet downloads, unique visitors, and conversions are all relevant while measuring the return on your content investment. The idea is to include everything that leads to earning a paying customer.

Step 3: Measure Your KPIs

Restrict yourself to conversion rates, especially if you want to track sales. But there are various other ways you can measure revenue growth through content marketing. Organic rankings and brand awareness are also crucial to track for your campaigns.

Metrics also change with the platform you use. So, CPC has become a crucial metric for Google Ads, LinkedIn campaigns, and Facebook Ads.

As discussed above, to increase organic reach, you need to increase backlinks by posting quality content. But how do you know the quality content is infact working? You can do this by simply measuring your KPIs.

Marketers use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and SEMrush for measuring campaign performance.

However, the most convenient option is to use a single dashboard rather than using several third-party tools. You can use DashClicks' automation dashboard to measure and track your content marketing performance.

Step 4: Measure Your Progress and Adapt as Needed

Most successful marketers conduct periodic reviews of their content marketing strategies. It ensures that your efforts are paying off. It also provides you an opportunity to learn, change, and adapt to achieve even better results.

For example, let's say you published two articles within a fortnight, and Google indicated incoming traffic growth. You'd think the former article is the one responsible for this traffic. But Google tells you another story. It says your latest article brought you so much traffic.

In the review stage, you will analyze why your recent article became so popular, while your old post struggled to turn any heads. It will provide you with some valuable insights that you can use in your future articles.

Conducting reviews regularly will also help you determine the tactics and trends that yield better results than others, and help you achieve your goals.

To improve your content marketing campaigns, DashClicks provides you with the following metrics:

  1. Campaign Insights
  2. Custom date-based reporting
  3. Multiple integrations
  4. Real-time reporting
Track Content Marketing Metrics With DashClicks

Are You Ready to Start Driving ROI for Your Content Marketing Efforts?

While calculating content marketing ROI isn't an easy task, you can use the calculation methods described above and the 4-step process for measuring content success. You can also gather essential information to be used, such as visitors, leads, and sales, using the DashClicks dashboard.

Boost ROI on Your Content Marketing
Why CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other
Why CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other

While CRM and marketing automation may sound similar, there is a vast difference in how they work and the benefits you can drive through each.

The prime difference between the two is that they serve two entirely different purposes. While CRM is an essential tool that assists you in sales, marketing automation is mostly used for various marketing tasks and outreach.

Integrating them in your operations can have magical effects on your business. It will improve your customer experience as well as business capabilities.

So, let’s dive deeper into their usages and differences, and how you can use both in combination for the best results.

What Is A CRM?

CRM, or customer relationship management, is a tool many industries use to manage customer contact and relationship data. It’s focused on sales and the existing relationship a business enjoys with its customers.

For example, if a customer has a savings account, a personal loan, a credit card, and health insurance from a single bank, it would be their existing relationship with the bank.

So, a CRM is a tool that tracks and manages customer relationships throughout the entire sales funnel.

6 Steps to Create a CRM Strategy

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What Are the Benefits of CRM Software?

The most significant advantage of using a CRM is that it increases your chances of converting prospects to loyal customers.

Here are some significant benefits a CRM offers:

1. Streamlines customer data, i.e., name, address, and phone number (NAP.) for easy tracking and organization. It enables everyone in your organization to access and use customer information for better customer support and lead generation.

2. CRM also saves your time by reducing the routine tasks that consume more time.

3. It also improves customer engagement by ensuring consistent, personalized, and targeted messaging.

4. You can use CRM to identify increased sales opportunities by tracking your customers’ buying patterns. You can use this information to get insights into themes and trends that can help you identify new sales opportunities.

5. CRM also enables centralized sales to progress tracking across your entire organization, which is vital to pushing the prospect down the funnel. It will also help you identify areas of improvement, bridge gaps, and assign leads to salespersons.

6. Have you ever seen highly personalized communications from brands you buy from? CRM helps you do that.

For example, a customer browses sports shoes on Amazon or any other eCommerce site and soon receives personalized emails or messages about offers and discounts on selected sports shoes. It’s possible because of a robust CRM that tracks everything. Today, even AI is being used along with CRM and other marketing tools to closely predict what a customer has on their mind.

How to Personalize Your Communications?

Many CRM platforms provide tools for personalizing your messaging to customers. It boosts lead conversion. An Infosys study reveals that 86% of consumers reported that personalization influences their buying decisions in a big way. There are many ways you can personalize your communications, such as:

  • Adding customers’ names in your emails
  • Target campaigns based on their buying behavior
  • Sending emails based on where they are in their customer journey

Things You Can Achieve With a CRM Software

You can achieve the following with the help of a CRM software:

  • Increased engagement
  • Increased customer satisfaction
  • Increased sales

You can easily drive sales through CRM by tracking the customers’ stages in their buying journeys.

CRM Software Provides 360 Degree Customer View

What Is Marketing Automation?

Marketing doesn’t work in a straight line. There are various steps and aspects, and automation allows you to automate and streamline critical marketing tasks and workflows.

Automation covers everything from lead generation to segmentation and lead-nurturing. Marketing automation also facilitates account-based marketing and customer retention.

The primary purpose of marketing automation is to speed up processes and eliminate repetitive, manual, and time-consuming tasks.

Marketing automation is also used to create targeted marketing campaigns for individuals using targeted content. The result is a better customer experience.

How Does Marketing Automation Work?

With marketing automation, you can save time by automating vital marketing tasks. When you free up your resources and eliminate wasteful activities, you can utilize your time and money to implement other targeting strategies.

What Are the Benefits of Marketing Automation?

With marketing automation, you can achieve a high conversion rate, improve workflow, boost productivity, create custom content, and enable personalized buying journeys. The most significant advantage of marketing automation is that it helps you generate high-quality leads, faster.

What's Possible With Marketing Automation?

How Do CRM and Marketing Automation Work Together?

We have discussed the benefits of both CRM and marketing automation. What if, we combine both? The combined strengths of the two can do wonders to your marketing campaigns. Marketing automation supplies detailed info to your CRM, so your entire team can get actionable insights about your prospects and existing customers.

It’s crucial to understand the difference between the two, so you can figure out why it’s best to integrate them.

Marketing automation facilitates lead generation and nurturing, while CRM is a sales tool and doesn’t serve your core funnel marketing needs. But, when you integrate the two, you can do the following:

  • Build a relationship and engage your prospects. It also helps you push them down the funnel using targeted content before sending them as a hot lead to sales. This, in turn, minimizes the uncertainty and pressure on the sales team.
  • Use detailed and closed-loop reporting aided by micro-analysis to see what’s working and what isn’t.
  • Improve lead quality.
  • Help sales reps understand the entire customer history and their behavior from when they come to your website as a visitor, until they become interested in your product.
  • Send targeted messages to support and nurture leads.

Key takeaway: When we combine marketing automation with CRM, it becomes our biggest marketing & sales weapon. It ensures a consistent flow of leads and sales.

DashClicks’ white-label platform offers CRM and marketing automation through its apps, such as:

  1. Deals App: It helps you manage leads and deals within your sales pipelines CRM software.
  2. Projects: Our white-label project management app provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, etc.
  3. Inbound: Helps you manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms. You can also share these leads with your sales team so they can follow up and convert them.
  4. Contacts: DashClicks’ unique contact management CRM software helps you manage your contacts easily.

What’s more, you can access all these apps through a single dashboard! So, no need to open multiple tabs and repeat logins.

Enhance Your Capabilities With DashClicks Game-Changing Software

Why Do CRM and Marketing Automation Need Each Other?

CRM and marketing automation are the two most essential tools businesses use to grow in the digital ecosystem. Marketing automation can’t replace CRM, but it sure can help increase the efficiency of your sales department. It reduces the tedious and repetitive manual tasks such as emailing and calling the prospects.

Content marketing automation helps you craft engaging content for different stages in the buyer’s journey. And it’s proven that care automation improves customer support. Together, they can help generate qualified sales leads for your fledgling business.

Case Study:

How SmartBear Software increased inbound leads by 200% using marketing automation and CRM together?

SmartBear Software is a B2B cloud software development company. The business owners decided to take advantage of technology and deploy marketing automation and CRM as an integrated process to boost their sales.

The plan was simple but effective. According to Keith Lincoln, VP Marketing, SmartBear, the management chose three objectives:

  • Easily implemented
  • Scalable
  • Can integrate with the new CRM system

After finalizing the vendor, they called in a third-party engineer to implement the software. The consulting engineer introduced specific training programs for the in-house employees to speed up the learning curve. The modus operandi led to the automation solution functioning within a work week.

The initial days were challenging and full of implementation hassles and struggles. So, the engineer suggested that the teams go slow and keep their activities limited to running a few email campaigns. However, soon the systematically designed training sessions started yielding results, and the teams quickly learned how to implement lead-nurturing and handle a high volume of leads in different segments.

Soon, they also integrated automation with their webinar platform, adding to their outreach armor. The results proved the efficacy of combining CRM and marketing automation, and their efforts paid off. Lead volume skyrocketed to 200%. In the meantime, 80% of total leads generated came from an automated software trial download campaign. The leads generated through this trial download campaign generated 85% of SmartBear’s total revenue.

How CRM and Marketing Automation Work Together?

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Final Words

The absence of CRM and marketing automation software integration may lead to many missed opportunities for your business. A marketing automation system is used mainly to automate marketing tasks, such as sending personalized messages to prospects based on their various stages in the buyer's journey. It can be a total game-changer and open the doors to a plethora of new opportunities for you!

The nature of integration will depend on the business needs. So, you should have a system where you can combine the best features of both types of tools. Or else, you can outsource digital marketing services from an agency that integrates both the systems into their services. DashClicks offers a white-label platform for agencies of all kinds and sizes where you can use our CRM and various automation apps together.

Further Reading: Does Your Organization Really Need a Marketing Automation Platform?

High Rankings & Low Traffic: How To Fix It
High Rankings & Low Traffic: How To Fix It

Organic traffic is paramount for any business that hopes to survive online.

After spending months (or even years) learning how to improve your search engine ranking, you finally made it. Your brand is now on the first SERP page and may even be closing in on the top spot.

There's only one problem: high rankings are not leading to higher traffic.

This is, unfortunately, not an uncommon occurrence. The upside is that we understand the most frequent culprits and can show you how to fix low traffic.

Problem #1 - Your Content Does Not Match the User Intent

Many rookie teams make the mistake of simply selecting keywords based on search volume. This tactic fails to address the unique reasons a user may have for using a specific search term.

To better understand this, know that there are four primary types of keywords.

Four Primary Types of Keywords - By Search Intent

1. Informational Keywords

This clue is in the name for this keyword type: information.

The internet user that types an informational keyword into a search engine is looking for educational content. They want to see sites that answer questions of “why” or “how.”

Let’s pose an example and say that a user performs a search for “how to fix GPU error.” This person is looking for proven, actionable data that can better help them understand their problem. They may be likely to click on content from a tech website or some type of PC specialist.

The key here is that the user is looking for information so that they might solve their predicament. They are not looking for specific products or aiming to pull out their credit card.

2. Commercial Keywords

This is often the next logical step in the buyer's journey.

A user may utilize commercial keywords when they start to look for specific products, services, or brands that may be of help. Let's look at examples of this type based on the imaginary user from the above section.

The user found information that led them to believe their GPU issue cannot be fixed. Now, they must seek out someone or something that can help them replace their product. They then search for some of the following:

  • NVIDIA vs AMD
  • 3080 reviews
  • NVIDIA products

While still looking for information, the user's buying journey is starting to get more brand-specific. They need to understand more about the topic at hand so that they feel equipped to make smart purchasing decisions.

3. Transactional Keywords

Transactional keywords are more closely related to the hard sell. The user is already set on spending the cash. They simply need to find the right web page to help them do this.

For more explicit examples, let’s once again return to our imaginary user. They’re now searching for terms like:

  • Buy NVIDIA 3080
  • GPU best deals
  • GPU for sale

4. Navigational Keywords

Navigational keywords demonstrate a more direct intention. With this, the user is looking to head to a specific domain or webpage.

If we wanted to watch video content, we’d likely do so in one of two ways:

  • Enter YouTube.com into the search bar in a browser
  • Search “YouTube” within Google, then click on the top result

The latter is an example of a navigational keyword. There is little room to question intention as the user is being explicit in their search.

How Misunderstanding User Intent Leads to Low Traffic?

It is possible to rank your webpage for keywords that do not correctly line up with user intent.

The problem is that while you may achieve a 3rd place spot, users will still skip over the listing. If your content does not help the user with their needs, there's no reason to visit your website. Even if a user does blindly click on your result, they're going to bounce away when they realize the result isn't suited for them.

In other words, you wouldn't want to present transaction-focused content to someone who is looking for information. Conversely, someone looking to make a purchase now does not necessarily need more information to help them out.

How to Fix It?

Always be sure to carefully factor in user intent when selecting keywords for your organic rankings. Popular SEO tools will frequently identify intent for you, making this process that much easier.

As long as your content helps the user with their needs, you can expect your traffic and conversions to climb appropriately. This should remain among your top go-to tips for higher traffic.

Higher Quality Leads With User Intent

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Problem #2 - No One is Using Your Top Keywords

Small businesses often do not have the money or manpower to compete with juggernauts in the rankings. Because of this, they require alternative keyword solutions.

One strategy brands use is to get hyper-specific with their content. Instead of aiming for keywords with high search volume, they shoot for terms with lower search volume, but a potentially higher conversion rate.

This strategy is often effective when there is a demand for your very specific niche.

However, getting too specific with your keyword choice can be a double-edged sword. If this is you, then you're likely ranking high for keywords that no one is using in their searches.

How to Fix it?

This one is easy to fix as you can monitor search volume with any SEO tool. Keywords can ebb and flow with use, but if a term is consistently yielding minimal searches, it's time to switch it up.

That doesn't mean you should abandon low-volume terms like long-tail keywords. Take a close look at your audience, particularly if you're in a small niche, and discern what they want to see.

Click-Through Rates Increase With More Specific Keywords

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Use that information to generate a list of ideas for possible search terms. Then, carefully consider the average search volume before devoting time and resources toward new types of content.

Problem #3 - Your Meta Content Fails to Engage

If you improve your search engine ranking, you merely earn the right to pitch your content. It's still up to you to convince users that your result is more worthwhile than the others.

Each search result features a variety of meta content. The most obvious of these is the meta description, which provides a brief preview of the on-page content.

Other examples include the page title, date of publishing, and schema markup elements. The number of features available to use hinges upon the type of content you are looking to present.

There's an easy way to identify if this is your problem. Perform a search for your ranked keyword and compare your result to the competitors. There's a high chance that the other meta descriptions are simply more compelling than what you have to offer at this time.

How to Fix It?

Let's break it down piece by piece:

1. Meta Description

A great meta description consists of about 155 characters. Google will abruptly cut off longer text, muddling your message to the user.

Think of your meta description as a teaser to whet the appetite. It should explain exactly what the user will find on a page without giving everything away up front. You can further entice users by placing a call to action at the end of your teaser. Make your content impossible to pass up.

Perfect Meta Description Length for Mobile & Desktop

Finally, try to use the keyword in the meta description. If Google finds a word that matches the user keyword, it will appear in bold. Don’t hesitate to use any tactics you can to draw more eyes to your result.

2. Title

The title is the headline of the search result. This is the primary linked text users will see below the URL.

Like meta descriptions, keep your title within the character limit (60 characters). Anything longer gets abbreviated with ellipses, once again, diluting your message. In rare cases, hitting this limit can be a challenge, so be sure to highlight the main point of the content in the title as best as you can.

Finally, take the opportunity to brand your content. End all titles with your company name, like this:

High Rankings & Low Traffic: How to Fix it | DashClicks

Whatever format you choose, be sure to keep it consistent across all of your web pages.

3. Date

Most content will receive a publishing date by default. We recommend that you remove this if possible.

The reason for this is that dating your content is not ideal for long-term results. Users want to see up-to-date content. The further away a user gets from the posting date, the less likely they are to click.

Skip the dates when possible to keep your content evergreen.

4. Schema Markup

Schema is a search engine language that helps Googlebot better understand your on-page content. When utilized effectively, you can present vital data to users on SERPS before they even get to click.

This language can provide users with product information, prices, phone numbers, dates, and much more. You should carefully select key points to highlight without making things appear too cluttered.

Schema Markup SERP Result Types

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You can learn more about Schema and where to start here.

Problem #4 – Losing Out to Featured Snippets

Google is always looking for new ways to get users high-quality information quickly. One strategy they use to do this is the featured snippet.

A featured snippet is an excerpt of text pulled from one of the top search results. The text effectively provides an answer to a question prompted by the keywords used in the search. Some SEO experts will refer to this as position 0.

Not only does position 0 grant first-look advertising, but it also takes up a considerable portion of the page. This is a significant issue for competitors even when you’ve secured a spot on page one.

Position 'Zero' on SERPs

Studies estimate that 67.6% of clicks all go to the top 5 results. For traditional search result listings, that is about the number you would expect to see in your viewport.

However, with the rise of new smart features like the featured snippet, People Also Ask, or the local 3-pack, SERP real estate is even more scarce. A competitor's featured snippet takes up significant space and effectively dominates the mindshare of your would-be visitors.

How to Fix It?

To make your search result more attractive, be sure to utilize all of the tips mentioned previously in this article.

However, there's only one way to tackle featured snippets directly - try to claim the snippet spot for yourself.

To do so, carefully analyze the competitor's content. This not only applies to the snippet itself, but the rest of the content found on that particular web page. It's virtually a guarantee that their content is well-written, concise, and structured to perfection in the eyes of search crawlers.

A primary goal is to answer the question featured in the snippet head-on. Utilize your unique expertise and insight to provide truthful, actionable information to the user. Avoid unnecessary fluff or examples.

You can further help Googlebot identify information for your snippet by utilizing effective headings and subheadings. Utilize the question being asked as the head itself, then promptly answer that question in the first few lines of the body.

Furthermore, users and Google alike are quite fond of listed content. If possible, keep data concise by utilizing bullet points or numbered lists.

There's no guarantee that you'll secure the featured snippet. However, attempting to do so will naturally guide you to create better content overall.

How to Rank in Google's Featured Snippets?

Utilize These Tips for Higher Traffic

Capitalizing on organic traffic is a neverending battle. Not only are thousands of competitors vying for the same keywords, but Google is also constantly changing its ranking algorithm.

However, you can depend on these elements to forever remain a constant when curating traffic-worthy content:

  • Match your content to the user intent behind the keyword
  • Avoid overusing hyper-specific terms with low search volume
  • Always treat your meta description details with the utmost care
  • Create and structure content that quickly satisfies users and search crawlers alike

Finally, the content on your site is never a one-and-done endeavor. Allowing a webpage to stagnate leaves your content feeling dated while competitors are on the move. Monitor your keywords and search volume, and update content as necessary to keep generating organic results.

No results found.

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Unlimited Sub-Accounts

Unlimited Users

All Apps

All Features

White-Labeled

Active Community

Mobile App

Live Support

100+ Tutorials

Unlimited Sub-Accounts

Unlimited Users

All Apps

All Features

White-Labeled

Active Community

Mobile App

Live Support

100+ Tutorials