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.

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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

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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.

Even if you have the best SEO experts on board, keyword cannibalization can still happen to you.

Now what is keyword cannibalization, you may ask?

It is a common term used when different pages on a website target similar or same keywords and compete against each other to hamper the organic performance of the site.

Let’s take an example to understand this further. Suppose your website has two web pages about “on-page SEO.” If you can get more overall organic traffic by combining the two pages into a single page, it means it’s a cannibalization problem. The presence of those two pages is hurting your organic performance.

Put simply, when your content competes with itself, your rankings get negatively impacted. If you take a look at the current scenario, keyword cannibalization is something that is happening to even the best of us.

However, the good news is – you can identify and fix it!

In this post, we’ll discuss how to identify keyword cannibalization on your site and fix it. It will help you stop your own content from eating up your traffic. Let’s dive right in.

Why Is Keyword Cannibalization Not Good for SEO?

Before we discuss how to identify and correct keyword cannibalization, let's see how it's bad for SEO (search engine optimization).

Basically, you compete with yourself for ranking in Google when you cannibalize your own keywords.

Suppose your site has two posts that are on the same topic. Now, Google will not be able to differentiate which post to rank higher for a specific query. Also, crucial factors such as CTR and backlinks will get diluted because of the presence of multiple posts. This will, in turn, lead to lower ranking for both the posts.

Another scenario where keyword cannibalism can take place is when you optimize posts for focus keywords that are almost the same. For example, you write two articles about how to build a content strategy. The first post is titled ‘How to build a content strategy to boost SEO growth?’ and is optimized for the focus keyword ‘content strategy.’ The second post is titled ‘How to Build a Content Marketing Strategy?’ and is optimized for the focus keyword ‘content marketing strategy.’ You give these posts a slightly different angle but they are still very similar. In such a case, Google will face difficulty in determining which of the two posts is the most relevant.

How to Recognize Keyword Cannibalization on Your Site?

It's actually easy to spot keyword cannibalization on your site. You can detect such an issue in an exhaustive SEO audit of your website.

Without any further ado, let's discuss three easy methods to identify keyword cannibalization on your site:

1. Use Your Website Search Widget

Before starting to write a new post for your site, conduct a search for its main keyword in your website search widget. It will help you check if it appears elsewhere.Even if you are not working on a new post and just want to see if some keywords are competing with each other, you can use the search widget to search for them.

2. Make Use of the SITE:ā  Command

The SITE command helps you detect your indexed pages. To use it, all you need to do is enter site: yourwebsite.com in Google's search bar.But why are we talking about this command in this postThis is because when you add key phrases/search terms in quotes to the SITE command, you can view the content within the domain you enter.Open Google and enter this in its search bar site: yourwebsite.com + "keyword" (check the image below as an example).

The result of such a search will be a SERP containing all the URLs of that particular domain that are indexed and have in common the very keyword that you have quoted.

Now all you have to do is analyze the search results and see if you are competing with yourself for ranking in Google.

3. Use Google Search Console

You can check for keyword cannibalization if your site is registered on Google Search Console.

Here are the steps you need to follow to check for it:

A. Login into your Google Search Console account, select the property and go to the section “Search results.”

B. Set the date to last 28 days and press the New + Button. You will see a dashboard.

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C. Select “Query” and enter the keyword you want to check for keyword cannibalization.

D. After the Query is selected, you can scroll down and look for the pages.

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How Do I Fix Keyword Cannibalization?

If you find that you do have a cannibalization issue, don't worry. There are a few things you can do to fix it. Let's discuss them one by one.

1. Merge Similar Content Pages

When you check for pages with the same target keywords, you may come across different content pages that serve the same purpose. If you find such pages, you can consider merging them.When you merge pages with similar content, it boosts your SEO, simplifies your website, and may help the merged page rank higher in the SERPs.

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Note: You may also come across two pages that cover the same topic but target separate audiences. If these pages are performing well, then you don't need to make any changes to them.

2. Remove Outdated, Irrelevant Content

In case your website has a lot of outdated content pieces that no longer hold relevance, it's time to do away with them entirely. You also need to remove content that is not as high-quality as your recent posts.

Why do we recommend that you remove these kinds of posts?

It's because these posts may be cannibalizing other content on your website and may be chomping down on the ranks of your new posts.

3. Improve Internal Linking

You can also set up a decent internal linking structure to assist Google in determining which article is important. Here's what you need to do:

Link from posts that hold less importance to the ones that hold the most importance. This helps Google in determining which post it should show the highest in search results.

The bottom line? Internal linking can also help tackle keyword cannibalization. This is because it convinces search engine algorithms to rank your preferred content over other posts on your website.

4. Optimize For Different Keywords Instead

If you don’t want to merge or delete posts to tackle your keyword cannibalization problems, you have the option to keep your content as well. All you need to do is optimize it for other keywords instead.

This way, you boost your SEO efforts as well.

Check this example to understand what we are talking about.

Suppose you have two high-quality, informative articles on your website – one is titled “Step-Wise Macrame Craft Projects” and the other is titled “15 Fun and Easy Craft Projects.” Both of these posts are optimized for “craft projects.”

Now, if you look closer, the second post is more relevant to individuals searching for “craft projects.” So, what you can do is, take the first post and optimize it for another keyword, like “macrame.”

The result? You now have two great, non-competing posts that can show up in Google for two completely different keyword searches.

5. NoIndex Duplicate Content

You can also noindex duplicate content. You can do this for pages that hold importance for your business but which you don't want to rank for.

When you noindex such pages, they become invisible to search engines but stay on your site.

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How DashClicks’ White Label SEO Services Can Help You?

Are you a digital marketing agency that lacks the required time or expertise to provide the best SEO services to your clients? If yes, then you can think about hiring white label SEO services for your clients. You can partner with DashClicks, a reputed white label agency with over a decade of experience in the industry. When you hire these services from DashClicks, you get to impress your clients and get their website ranked at the top spot for multiple search terms in various search engines including Google, Bing, Yahoo, etc.

The panel of experienced professionals at DashClicks will deliver only the best results to your clients and help them tackle keyword cannibalization, here’s how:

• DashClicks uses professional SEO tools to research keywords and track keyword usage.
• After DashClicks’ team chooses the best keywords for your clients, they add them in the Analytics app. This app then helps track monthly rankings at any time.
• At the time of setup, DashClicks will perform an initial website audit for your client that will check for any existing keyword cannibalization issues.
• You can also provide a list of keywords you want your client’s website to rank for. DashClicks will pursue this request and also suggest alternatives or improvements based on the professionals’ recommendations.
• DashClicks also confirms topic selections that go along with your SEO subscription plan.

The bottom line? You can choose and trust DashClicks' white label SEO services to be the extension within your business that helps you grow and scale.

Wrapping It Up

We all make the mistake of pushing similar blog posts when it comes to producing content for a select range of keywords. Hence, it's crucial to know how to spot and correct keyword cannibalization. It stops your content from competing with itself and boosts your rankings.

Now that you are armed with the right tips and tricks, you can easily identify and fix keyword cannibalization on your site. Because rankings change all the time, it's best that you conduct a cannibalization checkup once in a few months. All the best!

Digital agencies are facing a tough time worldwide because of increasing competition. Though it's a lucrative business, you need to be careful about the quality and price of your deliverables.

Here are seven foolproof hacks to make your digital agency more productive and cost-efficient.

1. Clear up the Mess

When creativity meets loads of work, clutter is inevitable. Soon, this clutter may evolve into a messy situation that will suck all creative energy out of you and cause confusion. It makes things harder to find and causes extreme frustration, especially when you have a deadline looming ahead.

To ensure productivity, you must tidy up your desk and keep it minimalistic and clutter-free. Also, ensure the same for your office as well. Remember, less is more unless we're talking about efforts!

Pro Tips:

• Set aside 5 minutes to declutter your desk.
• Clean the surface, and put all the things in small cardboard boxes.
• Make it a habit; soon, it will take less than five minutes.

2. Allow More Natural Light to Filter Through

The color temperature of light revitalizes the human body. Research shows that an adequate amount of light is crucial to mental and physical well-being. And while good lighting boosts mood and energy levels, a lack of it may aggravate depression and lead to other deficiencies in the human body.

The nature of lighting directly affects mood, concentration, appetite, and many other aspects of human psychology and physiology. Bright natural sunlight is also associated with higher energy levels, heightened emotions, and creating a relaxing and calming environment.

So, arrange some natural light to filter through your workspace and try to keep the desks near windows. You can also use a natural light & air inlet system. Installing custom-fitted skylights, decorative glass door panels, and windows are also a good idea.

3. Boost Team Productivity With a Project Management Software

A project management software can make your life easy, no matter where your team works. It can speed up tasks, keep things transparent, streamline internal communications, reduce distractions, and help you manage the workflow easily.

The best feature of a project management software is that it allows you to assign and track tasks. It also allows team members to envision how their daily tasks connect to team goals. It makes prioritization of work easier, so team members can optimize the available time to meet priority deadlines.

Pro Tip: We recommend the DashClicks Projects App, easily the best project management software for agencies by a long shot. The white-label project management app provides the easiest and most effective ways to manage your projects, teams, customers, and more.

4. Improve Your Workflow Through Project Templates

Marketing templates work like magic, especially when performing intricate tasks. Templates are everywhere, from conception to execution. For example, a marketing template can help you create content, run campaigns, organize events, and launch products. All you need to do then is simply choose the right one that works for you!

A well-designed project management software allows you to manage your campaign without following multiple e-mail threads to get the latest updates. An agency collaboration template will give you a bird's eye view of the project and progress along various aspects.

Here is an example of a campaign management template. It helps you coordinate different cross-functional tasks to hit your goals more easily.

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5. Use Automation Tools

Most agencies work with automation tools to speed up recurring tasks and manage workflow. With automation tools, you can finish most daily tasks in a matter of hours that might otherwise take days or weeks to complete.

DashClicks' white-label platform is created specifically for agency owners who want to scale their businesses. The platform boasts dozens of powerful automation tools such as InstaSites and InstaReports which can instantly produce bulk professional websites using niche templates and create performance reports within seconds, respectively.

With manual tasks like website creation and report compilation now dedicatedly carried out by automation software, your experts can focus their attention on what's most important scaling and growing!

Besides website building and client reporting tools, the DashClicks white label platform also brings you many resources to gain education and access a single dashboard to monitor campaigns.

Here are some of the most powerful and effective marketing automation tools the DashClicks platform offers. You can use these apps to streamline your marketing processes and manage your campaigns more efficiently.

• The DashClicks ecosystem helps you experience next-level marketing and automation software to boost and scale your agency business.
• Easily scale and generate more revenue for your agency through our white-label fulfillment services.
• Create in-depth performance reports in seconds to help close deals faster through the InstaReports app. These reports also contain valuable insights to improve your campaign.
• Leverage the power of automation when managing leads and deals within your sales pipelines with the help of the Deals app.
• Create a well-designed, 60-page custom website in seconds from hundreds of niche-based templates using the InstaSites app and save tons of time and effort.
• Make tracking analytics a cakewalk. Monitor and report on all your marketing campaigns in one place with the marketing reporting software.
• Projects, the project management app, helps you manage your projects, teams, customers, and more.

6. Outsource Business Services

Outsource the services you don't specialize in and reap the rewards of upselling and its low-hanging fruits. For example, if you are an SEO agency, your clients might be interested in social media marketing or paid Google and Instagram advertising as well.

You can easily outsource these services from the DashClicks fulfillment center and deliver the best results to your clients. It would be a win-win situation for both your agency and your clients as you would generate a new revenue stream, and your client would not have to look elsewhere for these digital marketing services. DashClicks offers fulfillment services at the most affordable rates, so agency owners all around the world can benefit from them.

7. Arrange Productivity Workshops

Lastly, arrange regular productivity workshops and training sessions for your employees to coach them about global best practices. Every dollar you invest in training will bring you its rewards in improved productivity and high employee morale, so don't skip it!

Final Words

Following these tips for a productive digital agency will help you in many ways. DashClicks shares a lot of valuable educational resources that will help you improve your processes and reduce operating costs. We also conduct specialized coaching programs for digital agencies, so even solopreneurs can function as an agency without hiring any professionals.