Optimizing is a necessity. It means there is always room for improvement, and the current state is not your final destination. For instance, if you study your business website, you may find that you can optimize it further. However, the real question is why and how to optimize a website.

Below are the benefits and best tips to optimize your website for success!

Benefits of an Optimized Website

Some common benefits of an optimized website include:

A. Organic SEO

Search engines, like Google, consider various factors when determining a website's ranking. Yes, they think beyond keywords. They consider other aspects too ā page load speed, site mapping, metadata, experience on different browsers and screen sizes ā and much more. A well-optimized website nails all these aspects and can quickly secure a high ranking on Google.

B. User Experience

A well-optimized website offers a seamless experience to the users. Your website must have a logical structure, no broken links, consistent displays across all devices, and provide effortless browsing. Remember, a poorly optimized website will push away your users, and your bounce rate will go up. Plus, all your ad spending will go to waste.

C. User Actions

The ultimate aim of many websites is to persuade users to take an action - fill out a form, set up a meeting, make a call, or download something. However, is your website optimized enough to attain this goal? For instance, several websites still depend on those annoying pop-ups to drive more customers or include ineffective CTA that either completely misses or confuses the visitors. An optimized website ensures that the user performs the intended action by including relevant CTAs and zero archaic stuff.

D. Brand Positioning

One of the main objectives of a website is to give a good impression of your brand. We cannot stress this enough, but a well-optimized website gives a long-lasting positive impression. On the other hand, a poorly-optimized website will do the exact opposite.

How to Optimize a Website?

Website optimization has a wide scope, however, you can do so in two simple steps:

A. Analyze

Study your website's performance. Analyze the user behavior and determine what path the user is following and why they bounce to other websites. Look out for broken links, incorrectly named images, and missing pages.

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B. Optimize

Follow these steps:

• Ensure that the on-page optimization is on point. For instance, meta tags and URL slugs should be there.
• Check the loading speed of the pages.
• Make your website mobile-friendly.
• Analyze the backlinks and look for more opportunities.

Tips to Optimize a Website

Some common website optimization tips include:

1. Follow a Holistic Approach

It is one of the most common tips to optimize a website. Don't jump straight into the complexities. Understand all your digital marketing efforts and analyze how they fit with other aspects, such as social media pages. Then, move to auditing your website, examining the on-page elements, off-page elements, technical factors, and user-facing areas.

2. Test Again and Again

Optimization and testing go hand-in-hand. Effective website optimization is based on data-driven results, with the latter based on testing using the correct methodology.

Remember, Website optimization is a continous process. It starts with investigating and then deciding what you want to change. Then, you test/try out new things and analyze the results of the change. The cycle goes on.

3. Analyze the Data

A single slice of data may not be able to offer you much information. However, if you collect and analyze a lot of data, you will get tons of valuable input and may also observe some patterns.

For instance, if a few people visit your site and ignore your CTA, it might not be a major concern. However, if many visitors fail to take action on your CTA, you must make some changes.

Look for pages that get the most traffic and conversions. Then, reverse-engineer those pages' success to get traffic across the entire site. It is one of the most valuable tips for website optimization.

4. Conduct Thorough Keyword Research

There was a time when you could pick up any random keyword and write a 300-word article to rank for it. However, SEO does not work like that anymore; it is much more complicated and refined now.

Use reliable tools to find business-related keywords; make sure they fit your business's ideology and the potential customers' user intent. Try to understand why the user would search for this keyword and what they would look for.

5. Produce Long and Value-Rich Content

SEO experts believe a blog post should ideally be around 1600 words. It can be, of course, more than that.

Before deciding the content length, search the keyword, check all the top 10 blogs in the SERPs, and aim for a word count similar to those blogs.

However, remember length is not everything. The length signifies how much information you are providing to the users. The user should spend a long time on your content and read it to the end. Therefore, ensure your content is also of good quality and has valuable information. It is one of the top tips to optimize a website.

6. Optimize for On-Page SEO

If you are deciding on how to optimize your website, invest in on-page SEO. It will help you optimize your website when developing certain pages. Properly place URL slugs, headlines, subheadlines, and meta tags. Your headline must contain the primary keyword as close to the beginning as possible. The keyword must also be present in the slug and at least one subheadline.

Maintain a keyword density of upto 2.5 percent in the content. Make sure you do not go overboard with the keyword usage, instead, sprinkle the keywords evenly throughout the content and image alt text. Also ensure the keyword is in context with the body text so that Google understands just what you are talking about.

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7. Optimize for Off-Page SEO

Off-page SEO refers to optimizing your website through external aspects like guest blogging, social media activity, brand mentions, and influencer marketing. You should know that backlinks can significantly improve your SEO. However, do not get links from small sites with low authority as it can negatively affect your SEO score. Instead, aim for well-respected publications.

8. Make it Mobile-Friendly

With more and more people browsing the internet through their mobile phones, it's imperative to target those potential customers. Plus, Google also prioritizes mobile-friendly websites and gives them a higher rank. You can choose the route of responsive designs. You can download free WordPress themes with responsive design templates which allow you to not worry about adding any extra code.

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9. Speed up the Pages

If you are thinking about how to optimize your website, you should know that page speed significantly impacts your SEO and conversions. If your website doesn't load in a few seconds, you will likely lose your visitors to another, faster website. Similarly, if the contact form does not get submitted in one go, the user will give up and not submit the form a second time. Take the help of Google's PageSpeed Insights to know how fast your site loads and what pages you must fix to make it even faster.

10. Ensure the Website is Secure

Hackers and spammers are always out for their next target. Therefore, secure your website so that you can continue offering valuable content to your audience without fearing being attacked by outsiders.

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You can take the help of a well-established marketing or white-label agency for this, as they have an army of developers and security enthusiasts to weed off any potential security threats from your website. They also run regular security checks on your website to ensure its safety and uncompromised status.

11. Keep Your Website Updated

You must be wondering how to optimize a website. Well, do not underestimate the power of keeping your website updated. It will improve your Google rankings, increase conversions, and reduce the bounce rate. Remember, no one wants to read an outdated blog and buy products that are not relevant anymore. Every person visiting your website should get only the latest that you have to offer in terms of both solutions and products.

In Conclusion

As a business owner, website optimization should be your top priority for ensuring success. It will help you position your business better than your competitors and allow you to offer a smooth user experience to your visitors. Additionally, an optimized website is bound to have higher ranking in search engine result pages. You can optimize your website by following the above-mentioned tips or hiring a white-label agency to do all the difficult tasks for you, while you sit back and do what you do best, run your business!

Do you know one of the most effective ways to successfully build your business?

It's keeping an eye on your competitors. Yes, you read it right! In order to create smarter marketing strategies, you need to know your competitors really well.

Now, we all know that there are plenty of ways to spy on your competition. You can check their activities on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms. You can even subscribe to their digital newsletters in order to stay abreast with the latest updates and promotions.

But all of these methods are extremely time-consuming and don't offer in-depth data on what your competitors are doing to increase their customer base and build their business.

So here's what you can do instead!

Stop wasting your energy on methods that don't offer enough output and take the route of technology. What we mean is ā use the best tools for spying on your competitors. Some of the tools out there also tell you if your competitors are spying on you.

In this post, we discuss the list of 19 best tools you need for the purpose of monitoring your competitors closely. Let's discuss each one of them in detail.

How Can I Spy on My Competitors?

As you operate in a competitive landscape, it's important to analyze both the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors. Here's a list of the top tools you can use to get a comprehensive view of where you competitors stand:

1. SEMRush

SEMRush is a famous SEO tool that helps you:

• Know about potential competitors
• Gather data on the marketing strategies of other businesses
• Analyze the paid traffic of your competitors

You can also use the tool to improve your current campaigns by recognizing content gaps and researching keywords. SEMRush also helps you perform competitor keyword research.

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As far as the pricing is concerned, SEMRush offers different packages between $119 and $449 a month, based on the number of brands you want to track. You can also check the broad range of add-ons they offer, such as market research tools, leads channel, etc.

2. Ubersuggest

Backlinks are crucial for any winning SEO strategy. Ubersuggest is a free tool that sheds light on how your competitors fare in this regard.

But why should YOU use the tool?

The answer is simple ā To build a foundation for a link building strategy that gets you ranked. Here's how you can leverage the tool for the same:

• Type in your competitor’s URL and click “Search.”
• Choose “Backlinks,” located in the sidebar.
• Go through the overview of the link profile of your competitor. Also check detailed data such as URLs, domain score, referring pages, and anchor text.
• Choose the “Traffic Analyzer View” to view domain score, number of incoming backlinks, and so on.

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After viewing this information, you can also make a list of sites that link to your competitors. Then, you can target these websites to get backlinks to your content as well.

3. Buzzsumo

One of the most popular tools for spying on your competitors is Buzzsumo. It provides you with some incredible ideas for your content marketing strategy by keeping a track of your competitor's content. It shows what content has gained popularity among your competitors' audiences.

Now, how to use it?

Simply open the tool and type in a URL in the search bar. It will display the most popular content for that website. You can even filter down your results by content type, date range, etc.

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After you use this tool and get to know what's working for your competition, you can adapt the same for your own target audience.

4. SimilarWeb

You also require a tool that effectively gauges the overall web performance of your competitors. SimilarWeb is one tool that offers you an overview of your competitor's traffic analysis. With the help of this tool, you are able to find out their monthly traffic, where these visitors come from, and which channels bring in the most visitors.

Here's how you can use the tool to spy on your competitors:

• Open the tool and enter a website of your choice.
• An overview of its traffic will appear. Here, you can check the traffic sources. Looking at the information, you will also come to know which is the most impactful channel for them.

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Another great feature of this tool is that you can compare traffic for different competitors.

5. Fanpage Karma

Fanpage Karma is a tool that allows you to track social media activity of brands on a simple-to-use dashboard. With the help of the tool, you can dive deeper into your rival's social strategy as you get to measure their engagement, response time, growth, and much more.

Another noteworthy feature of the tool is that it allows you to measure the success rate of the social media campaigns of your competitors. You can even view the posts that increased their followers.

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6. Adbeat

Adbeat is one of the best tools for spying on your competition. It helps evaluate the digital marketing strategy of any brand. Here's how the tool can benefit you:

• You can check which ad campaigns of your competitors perform well with their customers.
• You can learn how much your competitors spend on advertising.

The tool is perfect for brainstorming ideas for your future ad campaigns as well.

When it comes to pricing, Adbeat offers a standard package for $249 a month and an advanced package for $399 a month.

They also offer customer-tailored enterprise packages, which they provide to big companies that have specific business needs.

7. PlagiarismCheck

PlagiarismCheck.org is an easy-to-use online checker that helps you know if your rivals copy your content. In other words, you can use this tool to check if your competitors present your writings as their own.

Basically, this tool finds rearrangements in word order, poor paraphrasing, and any indirect matches of your content. All in all, it's a great tool to have in your arsenal.

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8. Copyscape

Copyscape is another effective tool that checks if someone has stolen your content. It even checks if your content is original enough to publish.

If you choose the premium version of the tool, you gain access to more powerful detection. This version even provides extra services like API, private index, batch search, and copy-paste checks.

Another noteworthy thing about the tool is that it scans the internet on a day to day basis and emails you in case it detects copies of your content.

9. Followerwonk

Next in our list is the Twitter research tool called Followerwonk. The tool offers you insights into the kind of audience your competitors have.

Now, you may be wondering how the tool can benefit you?

It lets you access demographic data about your competitor's followers and helps you find new followers. You can also use the tool to understand how to create content that strikes a chord with your customers.

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10. Hootsuite

While researching different ways on how to spy on your competitors, we recommend you use a popular tool called Hootsuite. It is considered as the best tool for tracking social media analytics.

The incredible thing about this tool is that it integrates with more than 35 social media networks. Pretty cool, isn't it?

To use the tool, set up streams and follow your competitor's activity. You can also track specific hashtags and keywords.

11. Moat

Moat Ad Search is a tool that helps analyze the ad creatives of your competitors. You can call it the largest digital-ad search engine.

To use the tool, open it, add a brand, and check and analyze the ads they have used in the past.

Here are the results when you search for Coca-Cola.ā

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Also, when you hover over a particular ad, you can know the dates during which it was active and its dimensions.

Note: The tool also allows you to create deals alerts every time your competitors create a new ad.

12. Sprout Social

When you talk of the most famous social media spying tools, Sprout Social deserves a mention. It monitors your competitors' campaigns and helps you improve your social media strategy.

Here's what you can do with the help of this tool:

• Know the recent changes/trends in your industry.
• Get valuable insights from your rivals.
• Research upcoming trends and sharpen your marketing plan.
• Manage your social campaigns from a single platform.

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When you talk of pricing, Sprout's premium packages start at $89 a month, enabling you to monitor five social profiles. If you need to track more accounts, you can choose their enterprise packages for $149 and $249 a month.

13. Ahrefs

Next on our list of tools for spying on other brands is the widely known tool Ahrefs. You can use it for every aspect of competitor analysis.

It provides you with all this information on your competitors:

• Referring domains
• Domain authority
• New referring domains

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Armed with this information, you can check how long it is taking for your competitors to gain new links. If they are gaining 90 links in a day, for instance, then you can set your own goal accordingly.

14. Kompyte

Kompyte helps you learn about any changes on your competitor's website. It also enables you to know about their ads and digital marketing campaigns.

If you go ahead and register for this tool, you will get an alert every time your competitor puts up a fresh banner, posts ads, or makes even the smallest modification on their site.

Another noteworthy feature of the tool is the hidden updates a feature. It monitors the changes that aren't even visible on your competitor's site. An amazing feature, isn't it?

Note: The pricing of the tool is not known, but you can always request a demo to know more.

15. Ontolo

While looking for effective ways on how to spy on your competitors, consider using a tool called Ontolo. It provides useful graphs and reports to let you easily understand the information it shows.

Essentially, Ontolo is a tool that lays key focus on content marketing. But, it's also a helpful backlink tool. With the help of this tool you can:

• Prioritize your content and get improved results
• Discover authors who link to your content
• Get tips and recommendations for link building opportunities

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16. SpyFu

SpyFu offers you detailed insights into the marketing campaigns of your competitors. For instance, you get to look at their Google Ads activity. This means, you can see every ad variation, every organic rank, and all the keywords they bought on Google Ads.

If you want to get a detailed rundown of your competitor's Google Ads campaign, all you need to do is open the tool and enter the brand you want to analyze.

This helps you check what they are doing correctly. You also get to see any improvements that they need to make.

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All in all, SpyFu offers you some great ideas you can use to improve your advertising campaigns.

SpyFu packages start from $39 a month. They increase according to the number of keywords you need to research.

17. iSpionage

iSpionage is one of the most powerful competitor analysis tools for spying on your competitors. It helps research keywords and examine your competitors' marketing campaigns.

Basically, this tool helps you dive deeper into the marketing activities of your competition. You can use it to obtain data on your rival's paid advertising budgets and check the keywords they are using for their pay-per-click ads.

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When you talk of pricing, iSpionage packages are priced between $59 and $299 a month. Companies requiring advanced competitor reporting features can contact iSpionage for custom subscriptions.

18. Serpstat

Serpstat is a highly reliable SEO competitor tracker tool out there. Top brands such as Shopify and Samsung use it to keep a check on their rivals and hone their SEO strategies.

Apart from this, businesses also use the tool to keep a check on their competitors content strategies. One can even access it to know any upcoming keyword trends.

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As far as pricing is concerned, Serpstat's packages are priced from $55 to $399 a month, based on the number of daily searches you require.

19. KW Finder

KW Finder helps you carry out competitor analysis on the SEO strategies of other brands. All you need to do is type in the domain of a brand, and the tool will present you a breakdown of its top-ranking keywords. This data comes in handy to produce SEO-driven content that helps in getting more users to your website.

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When it comes to the pricing of the tool, packages fall between $29 to $79 a month, depending on the brands and number of keywords you wish to research.

Wrapping It Up

In this day and age, you need to stalk your competitors to find out ways to outsmart them. The tools we've discussed will allow you to keep an eye on your competition more closely. All these tools offer quick and smart insights, giving you the latest data on your rivals. Use the valuable insights you gather from these tools to create a plan that sets your business up for success. Ensure you use a combination of the tools we've discussed to connect the dots and view the bigger picture.

Now that you are armed with the knowledge of the top tools for spying on your competitors, you are in a well-informed position to move ahead in the game.

Get cracking!

Ever wondered why most agencies fail and only a few succeed in digital marketing?

In the agency business, your success lies in your ability to effectively optimize systems and processes. So, first, you must set up the right processes and create templates for them.

The idea is to identify the monotonous processes and create successful internal methods to boost efficiency, reduce human error and wasteful practices and build strong client relationships.

Right agency processes aren’t limited to the systems in place. They also include communications being sent, meeting schedules, and management of systems the agency uses at every level.

It ensures the effectiveness of your digital agency at each level.

In this article, we will discuss the three fundamental elements of a successful agency business, and they are:

• The agency processes
• Building optimal agency processes
• How DashClicks can help you become an effective digital agency?

What Are Agency Processes?

Consider the systems at work in a business, especially the following things.

• How are the communications taking place within the organization and with the clients?
• How do you communicate with your clients and exchange messages?
• How do you share and exchange various documents?
• How do the meetings take place?

So, these are more like the management systems we use in different fields to run operations. These include:

• Methods
• Systems
• Technology
• Human Resources

Furthermore, these elements are dynamic, so the changes have to be regular for consistent improvement.

So, setting up the processes is the desired practice the creative agency will ultimately benefit from.

How to Optimize Your Agency Processes?

Agency business is quite competitive, and if you don’t optimize agency processes, you may soon find yourself in troubled waters. Here are some of the agency process best practices.

In an agency business, your profits and revenue primarily depend on how efficiently you execute your projects and run your processes.

Agency owners confront many things at a time, including resource crunch, lack of time, looming deadlines, wasteful and repetitive practices, lack of coordination among team members, and communication issues within the teams and with the clients.

So, first of all, we need to fix these issues. Identify and eliminate unnecessary processes and ensure a smooth workflow across teams. Remove the friction points if there are any by clearly defining the specific roles of each team member.

Sometimes, employees face annoying operational challenges and complain about repetitive tasks. You can address this issue by developing robust processes.

1. Audit Your Processes and Workflow

You should begin by auditing the processes and workflow in your agency. Meet your team members and discuss the friction points to eliminate wasteful practices that cause unnecessary delays.

List all the challenges, including repetitive tasks in different processes such as client onboarding, reporting, and executing various tasks while running campaigns.

Also, identify the instances where productive time is lost in tos and fros and repetition.

For example, ‌prioritize the issue if more than two persons complain of the same repetitive tasks while running campaigns. Even account managers find themselves stuck because of inefficient practices and repetitive tasks. If it is happening consistently, you need to optimize the process.

2. Set SMART Goals

Setting smart goals in the agency business, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based, is crucial. Goal setting is the best strategy for productivity and success, but vague and unspecified goals won’t help you much as with such goals, measuring or tracking your performance becomes highly impossible.

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For example, if your target is to grow your agency, you should set a specific goal: “I want to reach the $3 million revenue mark by the end of this year.” This goal will motivate your entire team and push them to work harder instead of vague goals such as growing the agency’s revenue.

Your goals should be relevant. Suppose you want to achieve increased visibility for your agency; your goal should be to increase your social media followers, increase traffic on your website and boost engagement on all your social media channels. Just growing your traditional marketing budget and the number of billboards would not serve the purpose.

Last but not least, if your goals are not time-bound, your teams wouldn’t be motivated enough to achieve these goals. Therefore, it becomes crucial to attach a date to your goals.

3. Collect All the Necessary Information From the Client

You should collect all the necessary information from the clients, including project details and company credentials. It saves a lot of time wasted back and forth.

It will give your teams a precise idea of the deliverables and make the onboarding process smoother. A crystal-clear picture of your campaigns will ensure step-by-step progress and client satisfaction.

4. Get the Right Tools

Seamlessly sharing information among team members and establishing robust internal and external communication require the right processes and tools. Slack, Google Chat, and Microsoft Teams can save you a lot of hassle, but nothing is better than using a platform that offers an integrated dashboard.

DashClicks’ white-level platform allows you to have a bird’s eye view of your campaigns, manage CRM, and automate all the communications, including emails and SMSes, during the different stages of the customer journey. Even if you use third-party team management tools like Slack, DashClicks will help you with real-time updates about your campaigns, boosting client satisfaction and helping you establish your agency as a brand.

Here is the software tour of DashClicks that will explain how you can use the different white-label tools and apps to save time and effort.

5. Prioritize Tasks and Provide Creative Briefs to Your Teams

It is important to prioritize tasks and provide creative briefs to your team members. It will increase your efficiency in an agency business if your tasks are prioritized and completed in time.

To avoid confusion, repetition, or duplication of work, you need to assign specific roles to each team member. You should also provide creative briefs to your teams at the beginning of a project. Encourage them to ask as many questions as possible and keep the client in the loop so that everybody is on the same page.

You can build a highly organized agency with minimum wasteful practices if you assign specific roles to your team members and accordingly develop the processes.

It makes each person responsible for their deliverables, deadlines, and quality. You can also create a workflow chart for your organization.

Use DashClicks' project management tool to effectively manage your projects.

DashClicks' white label project management app provides the easiest and most powerful way to manage your projects, teams, customers, and more.

6. Leverage Automation

You can leverage the power of automation and boost your business beyond your wildest imaginations. You know that developing a website is a tedious task. Companies waste a lot of time creating professional-grade websites and writing content.

Apart from that, the websites should be SEO-friendly and offer a good user experience. They should be eye-catching and should download quickly. Businesses have a tough time getting such websites developed by the developers as they waste a lot of time.

DashClicks allows you to create instant websites through its website building automation tool InstaSites. Watch this video to know more about InstaSites.

Similarly, you can create automated reports and save much of your productive time.

DashClicks enables you to create instant reports through its report automation tool InstaReports. Watch this video to know more about InstaReports -

You can customize your reporting to suit your branding and functionality needs.

7. Automate Deals and Manage Sales Pipelines

DashClicks allows you to manage leads and deals in the sales pipeline through its Deals and Inbound Apps. Doing it manually takes time and is prone to human errors.

Deals is a sales pipeline management software that brings automation to life when managing leads and deals within your sales pipeline CRM software. Watch this video to know more about using automations through the Deals app -

With the Inbound app, you can easily manage all your inbound leads across multiple third-party platforms and distribute them to your sales team so they can instantly follow up with prospects.

Watch this video to know more about using automations through the Inbound app -

We have added six new automations recently to the Deals App -

Final Words

DashClicks is a comprehensive platform that can revolutionize your agency processes. Apart from offering you numerous crucial automation, it allows you to share your work between team members. It will help you during the auditing process, where you can identify your team's pain points and wasteful practices.

Many apps and tools included in the platform will make your tasks a cakewalk, saving you enormous time and effort. Employing SMART goal-setting, you can ensure productivity and efficiency. DashClicks' robust reporting tools will help you measure your campaign performance and your team's efficiency effectively.

In the sales funnel, DashClicks will enable you to automate your communications with prospects at different stages in their buyer's journey. Overall, DashClicks offers a platform with indispensable tools for your agency business.

In this age of tools and automation, your sales performance is directly linked to your tools and processes. With lead management automation, you can quickly increase your revenue by 10% within six to nine months.

To clinch more business deals, your sales team should consistently receive an uninterrupted flow of leads. With increasing competition, you can't overlook your lead management anymore. Businesses must fix their lead management processes, from lead acquisition to the time they are transferred to the sales team.

What Is Lead Management Automation?

Lead management automation involves everything that ensures that the leads are sales-ready before they are transferred to the sales team. Therefore, it involves acquiring leads, monitoring your prospects' behavior and online activities, and nurturing them into qualified leads. It's impossible without leveraging tools and technologies in B2C or B2B environments when you deal with a lot of sales data.

The only way to integrate sales and marketing is by leveraging technology because manual processes will not work in the current complex sales environment. It will also ensure that your sales team gets better quality leads without wasting precious time and effort.

To implement this, you need lead management and automation tools like DashClicks that will give you an edge over others. It will help you manage the sales pipeline more effectively, increasing productivity and revenue and decreasing the lead decay rate.

Here is how DashClicks' sales management & automation apps Deals and Inbound can help you!

How Does DashClicks Pipeline Management Work?

DashClicks is a popular sales and lead management software that automates your workflow with deal automations. It enables you to send custom emails and SMS messages to your prospects, taking all the manual burden off your sales team.

Moreover, with DashClicks' white-label platform, you can quickly change deal owners' information and even set reminders.

You can also customize the software so that it automatically triggers InstaSites and InstaReports formation, the other robust automation tools the platform offers to create instant websites and online marketing reports.

DashClicks' automated sales pipeline CRM dashboard lets you gain relevant insights and showcase your leaderboard. Together, it creates a truly transformational experience for your sales team.

The dashboard also enables you to track all deal automation history logs and separate the successful automations from the unsuccessful ones. So, you can retry and skip options and take even more actions.

Strategies to Improve Sales Productivity Using DashClicks Sales Pipeline and Lead Automation Tools

Known for having a direct impact on sales, the lead management and sales pipeline automation tools like DashClicks will not only boost your sales productivity but will also help you craft the right strategy. Here are a few techniques you can try.

1. Use a Robust Lead Tracking Tool

The most tedious and time-consuming task of sales pipeline management is lead tracking. It becomes even more exhausting when you have a high volume of leads from different platforms. Investing in DashClicks will make your life easier while tracking and nurturing leads.

It will help you manage your leads using a single dashboard and track your leads’ position in the sales funnel. It will also help you minimize the “leaks” and “lost leads” during this journey. The software also provides you with crucial data that will help make sales more efficient.

2. Use a Lead Scoring System to Prioritize High Intent Leads

DashClicks, the leading sales lead management software, will help you accumulate meaningful data that will provide you with solid signals about customer intent and interest. It will allow your sales team to identify the leads closer to converting, so they can make a separate list and prioritize them. It will save your salespeople a lot of time and boost conversions. An efficient lead scoring system will also help optimize your sales team's overall performance.

3. Focus On Impactful Lead Nurturing

Nurtured leads are 20% more effective in terms of the sales opportunities they provide than qualified but not nurtured leads. It is no wonder marketers emphasize engaging and interacting with prospects at every stage of their buying journey. Lead nurturing is the surest way to achieve a higher conversion rate. Besides boosting your sales numbers, it also helps increase customer loyalty, which alone pays off in the long run.

4. Maintain Constant and Effective Communication

Automation shortens the lead response time. Lead nurturing helps you understand customers' needs in a crystal clear manner so that you can plan more targeted messaging. DashClicks' sales pipeline and lead automation software allows you to send emails and SMS automatically to your prospects. Right messaging speeds up the process of conversion in the sales funnel.

Here are the four major automations that DashClicks offers –

• Email Automation
• SMS Automation
• InstaSite Automation
• InstaReport Automation

5. Monitor Campaign Performance With InstaReports

Reports are the soul of a digital marketing campaign. DashClicks’ InstaReports automation tool generates professional-grade reports illustrated with easy-to-grasp graphs and charts. These reports provide the insights you need to tweak your campaigns and eliminate the wasteful and unproductive processes and practices.

They also help you assess the performance of your sales and marketing teams. So, you can quickly identify the weaknesses in your sales plan and reprogram it to yield better results.

Final Words

With the advent of automation and a gradual phasing out of manual processes, you can quickly increase your sales team's performance using robust lead management and sales pipeline management software. Furthermore, it eliminates the chances of error when dealing with copious amounts of data.

DashClicks' Deals and Inbound Apps are specifically designed for high-wired sales teams and provide working solutions to the major challenges faced by them on a daily basis. DashClicks' automation tools take all the load off your shoulder by helping you automate lead communication in different stages of their buying journey.  

A conversion funnel is a visual representation of the stages of a buyer's journey. In the funnel, the first stage is when they visit your page, and the last stage is when they make a purchase.

Wondering how to create a conversion funnel? At this time, you may think of going the traditional way to track your customers' journey- The AIDA model.

Let’s briefly discuss the stages of this model to decide whether you should use it for creating your conversion funnel. The AIDA model is based on the 4 classic stages of an individual’s buying process

• Awareness: An individual learns about your brand and becomes a lead.
• Interest: Next, you develop the individual’s interest in your brand’s product.
• Desire: Then, you aim to nudge your prospects to actively wanting something rather than just liking it. You can do this by meticulously placing adverts for repeated exposure or by making proposals.
• Action: Finally, you turn your prospect into your customer by encouraging them to take the desired action.

We use a funnel shape because everyone visiting your site will not become a paying customer of your business.

Based on the above-mentioned model, a traditional-style sales marketing funnel would be something similar to this image:

This funnel is a somewhat unrealistic and rigid way to observe how individuals move through the different stages of a sales cycle. We say this because people often jump back to different stages before they ever decide to make the sale.

Individuals require nurturing before they purchase your product. You need to understand their personalities, needs, and behaviors to turn them into paying customers of your business. For this, you need a more flexible conversion-based funnel than the one we discussed above so that your chances of success increase.

How to Create a More Flexible Conversion Funnel?

Let's now discuss the steps to create a conversion funnel that is a mix of AIDA and some less restrictive techniques.

1. Determine the Journey of Your Ideal Buyer

The aim of a conversion funnel is to create an effective buyer’s journey and increase the number of conversions. You need to identify the below-mentioned things to increase conversions:

• How does the journey of your typical buyer looks at the moment?
• What action do you want your prospect to take (your end goal)?
• How to improve the journey of your existing buyer so that your leads are more likely to become your paying customers?

After you determine your end goal, you can map it out as a conversion funnel, which will help you stay on track.

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2. Set Goals for Every Stage in the Funnel

Visualize that your funnel comprises these three different parts - the top, bottom, and middle.

Determine what you want from every part of the funnel. For instance, you may want to boost your traffic in the funnel's top part, increase the engagement rate in the funnel's middle part, and increase the number of conversions in the funnel's bottom part.

After you set the goals, track the progress you are making and make sure you are achieving the objectives you have set.

Bottom line, spend some time thinking about your overall goals before you create a conversion funnel.

3. Create a Content Plan for the Funnel's Stages

So that your prospects keep moving from one stage to the next, all three parts of the funnel (top, bottom, and middle) need a robust marketing plan.

A. Top

The top part, or the first stage, is about building product and brand awareness. At this stage, you are trying to encourage your prospects to learn more about your business and how your products can benefit them. Therefore, you want to introduce your business and give special attention to your brand story at this stage. To achieve this, ‌use videos, social media posts, short blog posts, and other visually engaging content.

B. Middle

At this stage, you already have the attention of an individual. This is the perfect time to gain their trust and tell them the reasons why they need your product.

We recommend that you concentrate on creating informative, reliable, and valuable content for this stage. Examples include downloads, case studies, and video tutorials.

C. Bottom

The bottom part of the funnel is about focusing on providing your prospects with a reason to sign up for your service, purchase your product, or take some other action you desire.

At this final stage, marketing strategies can include actionable emails, CTAs, and free trials.

4. Generate Content to Create Awareness

As mentioned before, you are trying to create hype around your product and brand at the first stage of your funnel. To create a content strategy for this particular stage, you need to answer some questions such as - Why should a customer care about your business? How do your brand's products provide a solution to their problems? We also recommend that you research your competitors to see what their social media channels, blogs, and landing pages can teach you. Also, check how they reel in their potential customers.

Additionally, here are a few examples of ways in which you can create awareness and develop relatable content for the funnel’s first stage:

• Set up accounts on famous social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Post on a regular basis and engage with followers.
• For your content to rank high in search engine results, optimize it for SEO. This way, the chances of people finding you online will increase.
• Other ways in which you can develop the audience’s interest in your brand are by producing informational guides, hosting interviews, and influencer marketing.

5. Build Interest and Desire

Even though the AIDA model states desire and interest as different outcomes, in reality, they are the same things.

If you want to build desire or interest, you need to generate compelling content. You create some brand awareness, you tell individuals why they require what your business is selling, and they decide they want your product as a result of it.

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Now you may think about how you can create content that helps people move forward from this stage of your conversion funnel. Take a look at a few ideas:

• Create a YouTube video that shows your product in use. Video marketing statistics for 2021 show that 84% of customers claim they got convinced to buy a service or product after seeing a video by a brand. With the help of videos, people can easily imagine how a product can benefit them.
• Create authoritative blog posts that help in educating your target audience. The user is more likely to put their faith in your product and purchase if they find your content valuable.
• Email your prospects carefully curated email content like – customer testimonials or tips and hints that can benefit them.
• You can also think of providing product samples, crafting product guides, or starting a podcast.

6. Encourage Leads to Take Action

Your aim at the end of the funnel - turn a lead into a customer by encouraging them to take the required action. To optimize your strategy for this stage, we suggest the following methods:

A. Incorporate a CTA in Your Content: Adding a Call To Action (CTA) to your content helps clarify the action you want individuals to take. Make your CTA sound urgent as you want customers to take the final step. Emphasize on how the product you offer can provide a solution to their problem and why they must take an action at the moment. Place your CTA somewhere prominent, like the end of a guide post or the top of a landing page.

B. Send Clear and Actionable Emails: Send your potential customers emails that are concise, clear, and actionable. In these emails, you emphasize how your services or products can provide a solution to the problems. Do add a CTA in these emails as well.C. Showcase Customer Testimonials: Roughly 89% of consumers around the world read reviews before purchasing products. So, we highly recommend that you add testimonials to your page. They give your customers the reassurance they require in order to take the final step.

7. Focus On Retaining Your Customers

You need to concentrate on retaining your customers apart from finding new ones. Go through these statistics and you will know why we say this:

• The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60% – 70%.
• The probability of selling to a new customer is only 5% – 20%.
• 44% of millennials have said that they stay loyal to their favorite brands.

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Next, let’s discuss some strategies for retaining your loyal customers.

A. Next-Selling: Next-selling is when you follow up with a customer after they have made a purchase and offer them a similar product with an exclusive offer. The offer can be, for instance, an attractive discount. When you do this, you get a chance to talk to them and make your customer feel valued. Plus, you increase the likelihood of potentially increasing your revenue. Next-selling even offers you insightful data to further create effective funnels.

B. Product Updates: When you update your products based on customer feedback, you inform your loyal customers that their loyalty is valuable to you. You also offer them an enhanced user experience. For instance, you can update a glitch in your app based on the feedback from a user.

C. Loyalty Programs: Loyalty programs are a vital part of a customer retention strategy. You can even use your loyalty program to monitor buyer behavior and customer preferences. When you create this program, think about implementing the following:

• Provide extra benefits and perks
• Use a high amount of personalization

8. Grow Customers

Lastly, look for ways in which you can capitalize on your existing customers. For doing so, you need to encourage them to go ahead and make more purchases from your business. Some strategies that can help in this respect are:

A. Cross-Sell: When you decide to cross-sell, you check the most recent purchase of your customer and show them a similar product that may interest them. Or, at the time of the sales process, you can offer them other items that you think will complement the item they are purchasing at the moment.‍

B. Upsell: Upselling is when you offer a customer a pricier alternative to the service or item they have an interest in. For instance, if a person chooses a free subscription to your service, you can bring to their notice the option of the cheapest paid subscription to your service. A word of caution here - don't attempt to upsell a product that is substantially more expensive than the one the potential customer is choosing to purchase. You don't want the strategy to backfire, do you?

9. Take Care of Funnel Problems

One thing you need to understand is - a perfect funnel simply does not exist. In case your funnel is not performing as expected, it can be due to common errors such as not starting with a clear brand message or adding too many steps in the funnel.

To address funnel problems, you can consider performing some lead outreach. You can ask for feedback regarding website user experience or send out surveys. A useful tip is to always consider negative comments at the time of refining your funnel.

Conclusion

Always consider your conversion funnel as a process that will evolve over time. The needs and wants of your customers will vary over time, and hence, adapting your funnel strategy and goals accordingly is something you must do during those times. In the end, remember, a sure-shot way of standing out and creating a loyal client base is by providing your customers the user experience they want.

Note: We know that a conversion funnel denotes the paths individuals take on their journey, right from landing on your site to becoming your paying customers. However, an important point to note here is having an SEO-friendly web design is crucial for your business to find potential customers. Now, we all know that creating an SEO-friendly, professional niche-based website can take several days. But if you use DashClicks' Sites app, you can make a custom-branded, SEO-friendly agency website in a few seconds. Pretty cool, isn't it?

Marketing to target customers in your specific area can be challenging, especially if you are a small business. You may not have the resources to get in touch with them or the budget to run ads in the local newspaper.

If you are facing the exact same situation, fret not! You can take a few actionable steps to boost your search engine rankings in the local search results.

Here's why we say this:

If you look at the current statistics, 97% of people have conducted a search online for a local business. 28% of local searches result in a purchase.

This means, all you need to do is get your local SEO in order.

In this post, we'll discuss some useful tips to achieve the same.

Implementing these tips will help prospective customers see that you are located near them and they might end up purchasing from you.

Let's begin with these tips.

What Is Meant by Local SEO?

Before we get to the main subject, let's define local SEO first.

Local SEO is an SEO strategy that helps boost the visibility of businesses in local search results on Google.

It can benefit any kind of business serving a geographical area or having a physical location.

Tip: If you carry out a search on Google for any major keywords associated with your business and a map pack (a map with three listings) shows up underneath it, then you can very well increase business growth with the help of local SEO.

14 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO Results

If you want to boost local SEO, it might seem an uphill task at first, but improving it is actually not that difficult.

Take a look at these tips and you will know what we are talking about:

1. Claim Your Google Business Profile

One of the essentials of making your local SEO successful is claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile (previously called Google My Business).

If the latest statistics are to be believed, 46% of the total searches on Google are for a local service or local business. Google Business Profile helps create an online presence for your business. It will display your profile on Google when people search for your business name.

Google Business Profile views can result in a phone call, website visit, or a direction request.

Tip: Learn and implement Google My Business optimization tips to improve your chances of ranking higher in local search.

2. Carry Out Internal Linking

Setting up internal linking holds immense value in giving your local SEO a boost.

This is because when you do internal linking across your pages, Google gets more context about your site. As a result, the less frequently visited sections get a boost in the search engine results.

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3. Start a Blog

The benefit of starting a blog cannot be emphasized enough.

Insightful, informative, and well-thought-out articles keep individuals on your site for longer and help you rank for more keywords.

Even if you look at the latest statistics, companies with blogs generate 67% more leads every month than those without them.

4. Keep a Check on Your Meta Titles and Descriptions

Meta titles and descriptions are also two of the things you need to keep in check in order to stay on top of local SEO.

A meta title is the text shown on the browser tab and search engine results page to indicate a webpage's topic.

Meta descriptions, on the other hand, usually inform users with a brief summary of what a page is about.

These two, when optimized promptly, hold power to convince your potential customers to visit your site. Think of these two as your shop's window on Google. The window has to be enticing enough to persuade people to enter your shop.

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Make sure you have unique titles and descriptions for each page. Incorporate your SEO keywords as well as the location. See if you can add a compelling CTA as well.

5. Ensure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

If you look at the current statistics, 76% of people end up visiting a nearby business within 24 hours of searching for it on a smartphone.

This means your website needs to be mobile-friendly.

If you don't have a mobile-friendly site, then your potential customers will easily get annoyed when they view your website on their smartphones. They will quickly leave the site, and it will negatively affect your rankings.

Take a look at some of the steps you can take to optimize your site for mobile:

• Use bigger fonts for easy readability.
• Ensure intuitive UI.
• Use copy and images sparingly. They should be used just to convey the required information.
• Ensure your site loads quickly.

All in all, if you are looking for ways on how to improve local SEO, making your website mobile-friendly should take high priority.

6. Turn Your Attention to Local Keywords

To move ahead in your journey of becoming a player in local SEO, another step you need to take is to focus on local keywords.

Let's take an example to understand why we say this:

A business delivering packages from one place to another will struggle if it tries to rank for the keyword courier delivery service. Instead, it should focus on local keywords such as courier delivery service in X.

When you focus on local keywords, it becomes easier for you to rank on the first page of search engine results.

7. Assess Your Website's Speed

To boost local SEO, you need to review your site speed and improve it if necessary.

This is because a slow-loading site can drastically reduce the time for which people stay on your website. As a result of this, your site's search engine rankings can decrease.

If you see that you need to improve your site speed, you can always hire a web developer. Or, if you don’t want to take this route, you can do certain tweaks yourself, such as:

• Optimize the size of your images. Decrease image size while maintaining their quality with the help of tools such as JPEGmini or Kraken.
• Decrease the use of web fonts.
• Detect 404 errors, which means “page not found.”
• Decrease redirects.

8. Always Keep an Eye on Stats

Today, we all know about the ever-changing nature of the Google Algorithm. We are also aware of the fact that backlinks can vanish, or our competitors can do a finer job at boosting their local SEO.

All of this points to one major conclusion SEO isn't something that you just do once and forget about it.

In order to stay on top of SEO, you need to keep checking your stats.

For this, use tools such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Bing Webmaster Tools. These will help you check how many people visit your site and help track your rank in the search engines as well.

9. Use Location Pages

Another tip you need to implement to boost local SEO is setting up location pages.

Location pages are a prerequisite if your business has multiple locations in a certain area. Ensure these pages include the following (at least):

• Name, contact details, address
• Store hours
• Testimonials
• Individualized descriptions
• Parking availability
• Promotions
• Google Maps attached to the page

Note: When you have multiple locations, you should create unique content for each one of the pages.

Tip: In case you have a single location, you must create an About Us page possessing local, relevant information.

10. Use Local Business Directories to Your Advantage

Another important tip that falls in our list of how to improve local SEO is:

Get your name, phone number, and address into local business directories such as MapQuest, Yelp, and Foursquare.

Here’s a complete list of things you should include in your company listings:

• Phone number and address
• Business name
• A comprehensive description of your business
• A backlink to your site

This information should be consistent across all directories.

11. Ask for Reviews

Search engines such as Google value feedback from customers. Getting five-star reviews is significant for increasing your presence when it comes to local SEO.

Ensure you ask satisfied customers to leave their feedback on your Google Business Profile.

Tip: Reply to both positive and negative reviews.

12. Keep Tabs on Your Competition

Another step that you must take to boost local SEO is to check what your competitors are doing in search engines.

When you check where your rivals are ranking for different keywords, you can determine if it's going to be difficult or easy to win the search engine ranking race.

Here's what you precisely need to do:

Check the keywords they are using, go through their website, check who is linking to them, and so on.

13. Optimize for Voice Search

We all have seen a rapid increase in the usage of voice search over the years.

Keeping this in mind, ensure you optimize for voice search. In other words, you need to optimize for how individuals ask questions when they speak into their devices.

Here's what we recommend you should do:

Make adjustments to the SEO of your content in a way that it fits a more conversational tone of an individual speaking. This is because your prospective customers will use more long-tail keywords while carrying out voice searches.

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For starters, this is what you can do:

• Use the traditional question starters (when, who, why, how, and what)
• Voice searches are often performed when a user quickly needs a particular piece of information. For instance, your target customer can use voice search to know your hours of operation. So, make sure this information is readily available.

14. Earn High-Quality Backlinks

Link signals are important factors for localized results and local pack results.

But you may wonder, what are link signals?

The backlinks pointing to your website are link signals. It’s critical to get high-quality backlinks to improve your local SEO.

Here’s what you can do to get high-quality backlinks:

• Guest blog on reputed websites that have high domain authority.
• Create content on your site that others would want to link to.
• Email or use social media to engage with local influencers and get them to link back to you.

Wrapping It Up

A local SEO strategy helps you bring in leads, sales, and revenue. From claiming your Google Business Profile to optimizing for voice search, implementing these tips can make your local SEO successful.

In the end, we want you to always remember:

The SEO approach for small businesses that concentrate on a specific city or town needs to be considerably different from that of businesses with a nationwide presence.

So plan and act accordingly. Good luck!