Top Digital Marketing Company “Give a Man a Fish, and You Feed Him for a Day.Teach a Man To Fish, and You Feed Him for a Lifetime. Chinese Proverb?” You don't get to be your own boss when you start a business, the customer is your boss, pays you, and will fire you without notice. A brand is not a logo. You don't get to be Apple, and customers won't stand in line round the block, because you paid some dollar store lackey you found off Craigslist fifty (or fifteen, or five) bucks. Everybody likes to point to Apple, or Microsoft, or any of a hundred brands, everybody points to SuperBowl commercials as to "how its done" except for paying for it or even thinking about the budgets actually paid for branding. All you need is solid market research, the ability to focus on a niche, the ability to question assumptions by testing with users and customers, and enough money to survive until that pays off. Marketing runs on money. However the amount varies depending on the time you wait. Start before you even think about developing a product, your marketing budget can be small. Wait until launch when a hundred decisions are set and friction with the market will send the market budget soaring. A marketing budget is the penalty for ignoring the market, whether through stealth launches and non-disclosure agreements, or thinking marketing is some kind of trick you play on customers, a scam. A marketing budget is never what you can afford to pay. A marketing budget is what the market sets as viable for an offer based on suitability and desirability (although communications skill plays a part). The only way you "set" a budget is through proper market research integrated into product design. It's not what you guess. It's not what a marketer estimates. It's definitely not about what you have left over after dumping everything into development. Social Marketing is not non disclosures all around, and then a stealth launch, and a belated query about how to force feed your mismatched product to a market you never bothered to socialize with before you launched. Design is a human factors skill, not an unwavering belief in your personal sense of style. Marketing could arguably be called an ultimate human factors or design skill. The dotcom meltdown model may not be the right one for your product. Monetization is a bitch. Monetization of something you just gave away free is a clusterfuck. The exceptions tend to prove this rule. Patents without the money and willingness to sue are like bullets without a gun. When is the last time you heard somebody pull a heist brandishing a fistful of bullets? Most of the stuff you read in books about entrepreneurial success is propaganda designed to minimize the role of chance and maximize the illusion of smart decision making by the subject. Which is why many of these big successes sell out, and why they fail and fail and fail again on next ventures. They assume they are successful rather than having to become successful all over. If you can't learn from success, don't count on it sticking around. And a great many people learned a lot more from failure simply because they learned a lot of the wrong things. Not everyone who buys is your customer. And calling freeloaders customers or an audience is delusional. Some people are consumers, they'll buy when you discount then drop you. Or return product and bitch. These are not customers. It is not much different when you call them clients instead. Engagement usually demands a ring. Want attention? Do a backflip. Want customers? Then show how you tailor pants keeps change, your wallet, keys, and personal electronics from getting lost. Attention is valuable. Converting the right kind of attention to a sale is rare. They can get attention, they just don't know what to do with it. Having to monetize something is extremely difficult. What makes monetization impossible is starting out without a damn good monetization step. Everybody wants to monetize after they put the cart before the horse, then gave the cart and horse away for zero. If you can not sell it, don't give it away. Free does not mean you couldn't get anyone to pay for it, even if you used a mask and a gun. Zeroing out price is brain dead. Making it the leading replacement for marketing on the internet. There is a difference for something that was bought, and is now given for Free and zero price because there simply is no other choice. Got a cure for all forms of cancer, tested and proven? Hold a press conference. Something you feel compelled to call a "solution" because nobody who truly understands the problem would ever come to that conclusion on their own? Couldn't figure out the problem the solution is for under threat of torture? Welcome to the tech industry. We don't call our customers "users" like drug dealers do for nothing. "If we only get a half percent market share" usually means the founders think they can get one decimal point to the right (five percent) but are coming out as conservative, when actual results settle out to one decimal point the other way (five hundredths of one percent). Want an investor's attention? Then pitch the founders as well as the product. If "no plan survives contact with reality" then the smart investor funds the people behind the plan, not just the product or offer or guesstimates. Often the projections are only useful in understanding the psyche and culture of the founders and startup. Be adaptable in the face of contrary information, and resilient, not merely "right." Purpose: This document presents information to Drunken Lust Records on it’s digital marketing strategy. Summary: Go Be Happy Now explain the fndamentals of digital marketing and go through a digital marketing audit of Drunken Lust Records, including their website and social media. Specific requirements: Based on an assessment of Drunken Lust Records’s needs we have identified the following specific requirements for the next 12 months: - - Drunken Lust Records Requirements 1 Key Principles: In consideration of the options for the locations of the above, the following specific principles must be taken into consideration. - - - Benefits for Drunken Lust Records Terminology Introduction Your Personal Audit Website 101 Ecommerce 101 SEO 101 Appendix Digital Marketing Strategy What is a Digital Marketing Strategy and Why is it Essential? A digital marketing strategy is no different to any other marketing plan, in fact it’s increasingly strange to have separate plans for ‘digital’ and ‘offline’ since that’s not how your customers perceive your company. However, we’re often required to separate plans for ‘digital only’ to help the transition. These are points which I have used as a guide in creating Drunken Lust Records’s digital marketing strategy and advice to keep in mind when implementing your digital marketing strategy: Start with the customer Build your plan around customer insights and needs - not around your services, products and tactics. Keep it flexible Situations and plans change, especially online, so ensure your strategy is usable by a clear vision for the year and keep details to a shorter term such as a 90-day focus. Set realistic goals Include specific objectives in your plans but keep them practical by basing them on insights from your analytics, so they’re easy for others to buy into. Keep it Simple! “Jargon light” is best Again it helps others buy into what you’re saying. Keep plans up-to-date Review and update regularly. At Go Be Happy Now we advise the use of the RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage) planning system to help create actionable plans using integrated communications to engage and persuade customers based on understanding customers’ needs using analytics and insight. SWOT Analysis: What it is and why it’s Important A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is the study undertaken by an organisation to identify its internal strengths and weaknesses, as well as its external opportunities and threats. Before implementing a digital marketing strategy, you first have to perform a SWOT analysis which will help you decide which marketing strategy you should use to get the best result for Drunken Lust Records. The strategy will help to capitalise on the opportunities using all the strengths. It will also help to minimise and possibly even avoid threats and weaknesses. In a SWOT analysis you should consider the following: Strengths: Brand recognition – Your brand name’s recognition to advertise your service Location of the business – The convenience of customers to visit your business locale Weaknesses: Lack of a strong online presence – increase engagement across your website, online media and social media platforms Opportunities: Increase in demand Social events Branded clothing Offer discounts Threats: Competitor's lower price - Offering better quality or promotional offers may help Changes in consumer choice – Trends are always going to change and this may be a lingering threat for a number businesses Drunken Lust Records Digital Audit Drunken Lust Records Website Audit Page title The page title is too short. ‘Drunken Lust Records’ = 20 characters Between 55 and 65 characters (spaces included) are advised. The title of the page should contain the main keywords and the name of your company/brand. Don't only write a list of keywords, but human-readable sentences describing the page content. Each title should be unique and specific. Avoid stopwords as possible (my, the, a, etc.). If the title is longer than 65 characters, it won't be entirely displayed on Search Engine Result Pages. The title tag must appear at the top of the head tag, just after the meta charset tag.Click here for more optimization tips regarding the Page Title. Meta Description Meta description is missing! Between 140 and 170 characters (spaces included) are advised. The meta Description tag is read by search engines and is displayed in SERPs. This tag describes the page content without being a straightforward list of keywords and must contain the most important keywords of the page. Ensure that each of your web pages has a unique meta description. The meta Description tag should appear after the title tag inside the head tag. Click here for more optimization tips regarding the meta Description tag. Robots.txt
The robots.txt file does not exist. The robots.txt file enables you to authorize or forbid the indexation of a page or a directory by crawlers from search engines. It also permits you to indicate the location of sitemap(s). This file is located at the root of your website. It will be the first entity crawled by search engines robots. The User-Agent fields specifies the concerned robot(s) by the following directives. * means "all the search engines ". The disallow field indicates pages not to index. Each line refers to a page or a directory. Google gives you the steps to be followed to optimize the robots.txt file in this article: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062608?hl=en. SiteMap Sitemap is not defined in the Robots.txt file. Sitemap are files providing search engines with an ordered organization of the linking structure of your website. These files help you to define the importance you attach to each page, their updating frequency and their URL. More importantly, it is the list of all the available pages on your website that search engines should crawled. Written in XML file, a sitemap must not contain more than 50 000 URLs. Read the Google " Learn about " to learn more about sitemaps: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/156184?hl=en. WWW redirection (301) The URL doesn't redirects with or without www. To redirect your web pages to http://www or http:// (with or without www) to avoid duplicate content is essential. Your website has to be reachable through a single address. The redirection should be a 301 redirection (the page is moved permanently to another location) rather than a 302 redirection (the page is moved temporarily to another location). To redirect properly your pages, read this Google tutorial: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en. Link canonical Canonical Url is missing. The attribute link rel="canonical" enables you to avoid duplicate content. A canonical URL corresponds to the favorite version of a set of pages with a similar content (example: a product sheet found in two different categories and thus in two different links). Determine the URL you would like to present to users and indicate it in your tag. This tag is located after the <title>tag in the <head> of your HTML document. To use properly the canonical URL, read this Google article: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en. Alternative text 0/4 images have an optimized alternative text. The alt attribute gives information to search engines about the description of your image (An alternative text). The alt attribute must be defined, so that robots get information about the description of the image in order to index it in image search engines. It can be helpful for impaired people and will be displayed in case of problem with image loading. Place your keywords wisely because this tag is another key to boost your SEO. The length of the textual alternative must be less than 80 characters. Links There are more external links than internal links. 50% of your links are external links, whether 2/4 links. The link juice is related to the ratio between internal links and external links. It is used to detect if the site is a gateway aiming at redirecting the user towards another website. This ratio must be lower than 50%. The more you will add links in a page, the less each link will receive link juice Text/code ratio Text/Code ratio is too low. 1.45% of your page content is text type. The text/code ratio corresponds to the quantity of text compared to the quantity of HTML code in the page. It is used to estimate the richness of the page content. The higher the ratio is, the higher the credibility of the page is. A 15%-ratio minimum is recommended. Improving your text/code ratio will decrease the loading time of your page. Don't forget to ease your code by cancelling comments or useless code.(div succession, line break, white spaces...). Titles H1 Title is missing or empty. H2 Title is missing. H3 Title is missing. Hx titles are not optimized. h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 h6 0 0 0 0 0 0 H1 to h6 titles are used to organize the structure of the page content in relation to their importance. Each HTML document can contain a main title (h1) and less important subtitles (h2, h3) and so on (h4, h5 and h6)... Ensure that the logical order is respected. <hn> are essential in an efficient SEO strategy. Use these tags to integrate your strategic keywords. Keywords density The page has not enough keywords. Your page contains 10 exploitable keywords, and 7 single keywords. The
keyword density refers to the number of times a same word appears on a web page. The keyword density value takes into account the context and semantics related to keywords (text in bold, h1, links…). Ensure that you do not over-optimize your keywords and to not repeat them too many times. High quality texts are better: Think visitors and not only search engines. Doctype The website doctype is missing. A doctype is a compulsory directive at the beginning of SGML and XML documents specifying rules of its syntax. Without doctype, the reading of the document is not optimized, which can lead to unwanted behaviors. A doctype includes the name of the Document type Definition (DTD) that defines the syntax rules used in your page. To use properly the Doctype: Consult this w3schools.com article Charset Charset is missing. Header : (Missing) Meta : (Empty) It is important to define the set of characters used in order to minimize display problems in your texts. The set of characters Unicode with the UTF-8 encoding is advised and enables you to manage all the languages and it is supported by all web browsers. Environment Server Technology is visible. Server : Microsoft-IIS/6.0 Technology : ASP.NET It is highly recommended to hide information related to technologies installed on your web server to ensure protection against the risk of hacking. Avoid disclosing too much information because it reveals known security breaches of the displayed version. ipv6 compatibility Website is not ipv6 ready. IPv4 : 83.138.8.209 - Reverse : 83.138.8.209 The IPv6 protocol is a new version of the IP protocol which is the main protocol of routing packets used on the Internet. The IPv6 protocol will soon replace the IPv4 protocol. Your web server must be prepared for this change. To learn more about this protocol: Read the Google FAQ. DNS DNSSEC is not enabled. Reverse(s) DNS exists. See DNS zone records A DNS server is used to obtain the IP address corresponding to a domain name. DNSSEC enables to secure the authenticity of the DNS response in order to avoid Cache Poisoning attempts. To learn more about DNS servers, consult the Google page: https://developers.google.com/speed/public-dns/docs/using. X-XSS-Protection X-Xss-Protection header is missing. Recent browsers (Internet Explorer, Google Chrome et Safari) have integrated filters in order to detect possible attacks. However, this feature can be disabled. Add the "X-XSS-Protection" in the HTTP header with "1; mode=block" as value (1 to indicate the activation, and mode=block to indicate that the entire page must be blocked if a problem occurs). It will force the execution of these filters. Content Security Header Content-Security-Policy is missing. Implementing a content security policy explains to the web browser which servers are allowed to deliver resources on the page. If the browser makes a request to an unauthorized server, the user will be warned. Https HTTPS is not enabled Https (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) is a secure communication protocol (SSL). It numbers communications between visitor and websites. Https is generally used for online financial transactions or for the consultation of private data, but also for websites that do not collect sensitive customer information. Search engines consider that moving on to https guarantees your credibility. To learn more about how to secure your website with the https protocol, read this Google tutorial :https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en. Page caching The website does not allow page caching. Caching your webpages will decrease their loading time by storing them temporarily on the user's device. The caching delay must be set depending on the page updating frequency. To learn more about caching pages, read this Google article :https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/http-caching?hl=en. Compression Server does not use file compression. Compressing your web pages enables you to optimize their loading time by decreasing the amount of data to be downloaded. This feature must be activated on the web server (gzip). The server compresses the page while sending to the customer, then the browser decompresses the page in order to display it. Inline CSS There are inline CSS in the page. The inline CSS are styles contained in the style attribute =" ": This technique is not recommended because it weighs down your page and slows down the page render. Rather use CSS classes that enables the reuse of styles. Domain length The domain name length is too long. ‘drunkenlustrecords.com’ 22 characters Short and easy to understand URLs to transmit your information are the key of a good user experience. A long domain name has less chance to be memorized by the user. Language Content language is not defined. Lang attribute of the HTML document : (Missing) Lang attribute of the HTTP header : (Missing) The language has to be defined in your page. The defined language has to be the same as the language used on your web pages as well as the same as the same geographical area targeting by the domain name. If your website is multilingual, use a different URL for each translation and make sure that the language of each web page is specified in your HTML code. Open Graph Open Graph is not used. The Open Graph Protocol (OGP: Open Graph Protocol) is a protocol created by Facebook enabling you to define the content of a Facebook page. Fill as many Open Graph tags as you can and define a visual corresponding to the page content rather than a simple logo. Read the Site Analyzer article to integrate properly the Open Graph protocol Twitter card The twitter card is not defined. Twitter Cards are miniatures generated during the share of a link towards your website. They enable to enrich your tweet with metadata like Facebook, Opengraph and Google+ Publisher. Define a title and a description matching with your page content. Add a visual to your twitter Cards: most illustrated tweets are 150% more retweets than tweets without pictures. Google+ Publisher The page is not linked to Google Plus. Add a link tag rel="publisher" to the HTML header of your page to connect your Google+ account to your website. Create a Google+ My Business professional page for your company in order to appear on the right in the Google page results when your company name is searched. Responsive Meta Viewport is missing. The meta viewport tag defines the surface of your browser window. This tag indicates to devices the size of the page to display. It enables to adapt your page to different screen sizes. It is characterized by Responsive Designs. The website has to be Responsive to be indexed in Search Engines. To test if your website is Responsive or not, use the Google online tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?hl=en Marketing Plan For Drunken Lust Records Objectives Increase revenue and decrease costs. Achieve this through increased sales at a low price per user cost. Monthly Budget Allocated Up to €/$500 for the first 3 months. Plan Overview Rather than simply creating a significant budget into paid advertising campaigns (or significant time into free advertising campaigns), the first part of the plan is designed to ensure that the back-end system (i.e. website conversion & lead nurturing) are working at an acceptable level. In that regard, the following 5 step process is recommended for both optimising your conversions, and then increasing the volume of conversions through your website. Naturally, there is a level of overlap between the steps and (depending on traffic level), you may want to put a small budget in place for traffic generation throughout the testing phase. However, don’t put a full budget behind this until you are certain of everything on the back-end of the business to avoid unnecessary waste. Step 1 – Set Up Effective Conversion Tracking Rather than focusing on new traffic generation, the first step is to ensure that your existing visitors are taking the action you want. This may include purchases directly through your site, but also sign-ups to newsletters, social media interactions, and even simply reading of content (tracked via average time spent on your site). At this point, you should also establish targets for each of these (bear in mind that you will never hit 100% for any category). Averages will depend on industry, but start with a reasonably low figure (i.e. 10%) and then gradually move the targets up depending on initial results/ease of achieving. Recommendation – Set up tracking for all aspects of the site Estimated Budget – Free - $/€70/month (depending on tracking option used) Goal : Establish a baseline to compare against Step 2 – Optimise Website to Increase Conversions Once you have established a baseline for your website conversions, it’s time to start making changes. This aspect really depends on which numbers are not as high as you’d like (e.g. if email sign-ups are low, are you incentivising visitors enough to give you their details – consider offering a free e-book, etc.) Recommendation: Test one variable at a time to ensure the change you make is the one that causes the difference in conversion Estimated Budget: Free - $/€5 per day (if you need to run a marketing campaign to generate initial traffic) Goal: Ensure the site converts at an acceptable level Step 3 – Optimise Lead Nurturing System (Convert Browsers to Buyers) Now that we’re confident that the site converts at an acceptable (not necessarily ideal) level, it’s time to look at how to convert visitors that don’t take your premium action (i.e. purchasing immediately). This ranges from split testing email marketing for your secondary metric (testing two different emails against each other to identify highest conversion) and building a social media system/calendar to draw followers back to your site with engaging content for your tertiary metrics. Bear in mind that it is unlikely that a tertiary action taker will convert as highly as a primary or secondary action taker. Therefore, you could set your objective for social media (tertiary) to convert them into email subscribers (secondary) instead of direct purchasers (primary). Recommendation – Split test both email headings and content separately to ensure you aren’t losing out on open rates with higher conversions and to avoid mixing variables. Estimated Budget: €/$10 - €/$300 (depending on lead nurturing system chosen) Goal: Ensure the long-term conversion of non-immediate sign ups Step 4 – Create Touch Points For Bounce Visitors With all on-site systems set up, the final piece of the puzzle, prior to generating increasingly larger volumes of traffic, is to put a system in place that will convert your bounce rate (the rate at which visitors leave your page without taking any action, nor spending significant time on your site). Bear in mind that this is unlikely to convert at a significant rate, but does also account for comparisons with competitors (i.e. have multiple sites open at the same time and leave your site to look at another one). Through systems such as retargeting, you can track visitors to your website through the Google display network to place banners for your site on other websites they visit. While the conversion rates for this are very low, it’s only based on traffic received and one order from this should more than pay for a campaign for a month or two. Recommendations: Put this step in place to shore up an expected bounce rate. If your bounce rate is significant (higher than 40%), refer back to step 1 and put reduce bounce rate as a tracking metric and optimize with this in mind. Estimated Budget: €/$100 per 1,000 visitors/month (average) Goal: Keep your site front of mind/encourage repeat visits Step 5 – Start Small, Direct Response Campaigns Finally, now that your conversion system is fully established, it’s time to start with paid marketing. Which avenue you take depends on what your objectives are and a more thorough breakdown of which audience you can target with which form of marketing, is detailed in the step breakdown section. The most important factor with paid marketing is to start small. Now that you have established that your site converts, it’s time to start focusing on the optimization of your paid campaigns. This includes, but is not limited to the behaviours (for social media advertising) or keywords (for search engine advertising) that you choose, the conversion rates and costs you should expect (vary depending on industry and search criteria) and the results you’re counting as a conversion. This last point is probably the most important in that a conversion does not necessarily have to be a sale directly (although, this is ideal). Once you have established your system, as set out in the first four steps, you should have a good idea of your expected conversions for primary, secondary, and tertiary actions. Following this, you should also have established your ongoing conversions from tertiary to secondary to primary actions. Therefore, even a tertiary action has value if these conversions are acceptable. Recommendation: Start small to ensure your campaign performance is inline with expectations and normal tracked conversions. Then, gradually increase the budget to ensure it holds steady and converts well before swinging for the fences. Estimated Budget: €/$5 per day – unlimited (depending on sector, traffic level desired and conversion rates). SEO Activities for Achieving Goals In order to attract more visitors to your website and to increase it’s ranking, conversion rate, and to improve the ROI of your digital activities, I outlined the below SEO and SMO (Social Media Optimisation) plans. Strategy for Social Media Marketing Analyse your target audience. Firstly, you need to target our audience as per their tastes. Keep in mind the posting time, as more people are using smartphones to use social media these days, and finally what you are posting (it should be relevant; probably an image post of high quality). Post original, relevant content. This requires some outside-the-box thinking. Sharing our knowledge and insights should be a valuable part of our strategy. Will use interactive YouTube annotations to drive ‘likes’. We can use linkedtube.com to add link overlays to our YouTube videos which can link out to a relevant landing page on the Drunken Lust Records website Give away something your visitors want. Another brilliant way to drive likes is to offer something valuable in return for a person’s like. For example, offering discount coupons makes more and more people engage our pages. You can utilise the power of Facebook Ads. Facebook Ads can be very effective at driving likes and traffic to the your page. Integrate the Facebook comment feature. As users comment on photos or videos, that activity is pushed out into our mainstream (profile wall and friends’ News Feeds), which creates valuable viral visibility for our Facebook page. Encourage visitors to tag photos of themselves at your premises. Use tools a like Hootsuite for scheduling posts across your various social media channels. Posting regularly will increase engagement and visibility, thereby increasing follower count. Social media buttons. Of course, with every new social media channel that you join, have button to that page on your website. Research your competition. Researching your competition not only keeps you apprised of their activity, it gives you an idea of what’s working for them, and engaging your shared target market, so you can integrate those successful tactics into your own efforts. Organise online events. Online events play a major role in engaging audiences in various activities. These events capture visitors’ attention and keep them interested in something you can offer them on a scheduled basis. This ensures regular and meaningful traffic to your site. Regular posting. You need to do promotional as well as informational posts on a regular interval of time. Attractive and informative posts should be shared on a daily basis to increase the visitors’ engagement. Reporting to analyze the performance of all your social media channels. This will keep a proper track record of all the social media channels so that will have the proper performance report. Google Webmasters tools allows you to implement a number of activities which can dramatically improve your website's SEO (search engine optimization) efforts. (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/) Google Search Console Google Search Console allows you to ‘Fetch’ your site, which in short announces to Google that you would like them to crawl your site. Once the Googlebot has crawled your site, it issues you with information which is helpful in terms of site traffic, Google index, search appearance, keywords and other important and useful SEO information. Competitor SEO Analysis It’s one thing to improve on your own SEO, but you also need to be aware of your competitions actions, not only so you can compare your progress to theirs, but also so that you can identify any untapped resources. I used a number of tools to analyze your competitor’s SEO efforts. Keywords Unfortunately local websites are often times not large enough to feature in these tools; however, I can see what SEO keywords the three industry leaders are ranking for. This in turn gives me keywords suggestions I recommend you use for your own site to increase your results on SERP. URLS & LInks Understanding and intending to implement canonical URLs to improve links and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication. It’s common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it’s also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. Suppose you want https://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/ to be the preferred URL, even though a variety of URLs can access this content. You can indicate this to search engines as follows: Mark up the canonical page and any other variants with a rel=”canonical” link element. Add an element with the attribute rel=”canonical” to the section of these pages: Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en Furthermore, I recommend that your blog incorporate internal links linking to other pages on the website. Structured Data Markup Structured Data Markup can increase your site’s SEO efforts. SDM is a standard way to annotate your content so machines can understand it. When your web pages include SDM, Google (and other search engines) can use that data to index your content better, present it more prominently in search results, and surface it in new experiences like voice answers, maps, and Google Now. Mobile UX (User Experience) Due to Google’s latest mobile algorithm, and the fact that most sites now receive more than 50% of their traffic from mobile devices, having a mobile responsive website is essential. Your site is deemed mobile responsive, when it: Does not use plugins, which would prevent content from being usable on many platforms. Specifies a viewport matching the device’s size, which allows it to render properly on all devices. The contents of the page fits within the viewport. The text is legible. Website Speed The speed of a website can highly affect bounce rate, so having a slow website can lose you conversions. Many pages, especially mobile pages, redirect users to a different URL, for instance from www.example.com to m.example.com. In order to speed up your website I recommend you avoid having landing page redirects (now or in future website designs). Further recommendations: Enabled compression Minify CSS Prioritize visible content by having the above-the-fold content properly prioritized XML Sitemap An XML sitemap lists URLs that can be crawled and may offer other information such as how often you update, when your last update occurred and it’s importance. With an XML sitemap, search engines can index your website more accurately. Robots .TXT File This file restricts the activity of search engine crawlers and stops them from accessing certain pages and directories. A robots.txt file also locates the XML sitemap. Below is how one should look:User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /wp-includes/ Disallow: /xmlrpc.php Content Marketing Content marketing is also defined as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. The type of content businesses share is closely related to what services or products they provide,i.e., content is king! Keywords The most important element of a successful SEO strategy is picking the right keywords to target. Not only will it inform your wider marketing activity, but also trying to rank for the wrong keywords will cost time and money. Accurate research will let you identify the correct opportunities to aim for, and give you plenty of insight into how to achieve them. Choose the most accurate keywords related to your product, brand or service with a reasonable search volume with a lack of competitors. Look for longer phrases (long-tail keywords). Long Tail Keywords Your website’s content should be optimized for queries people would actually search for,
this is why I highly recommend implementing long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases which are very, very specific to whatever you are selling. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are actually going to buy. Common terms and phrases are more achievable than attempting to force users into adopting new words just to find your website. Start by brainstorming as many potential words and phrases searchers may use, and look at what is actually resulting in visits to your website via your analytics platform. Add additional suggestions via free online tools, including looking at the common results supplied via Google Autocomplete. Watch for growing trends and opportunities via Google Trends. AdWords Keyword Planner I also recommend using AdWords Keyword Planner to determine the effectiveness of short tail keywords. Keyword Tools for Content Ideas I use Keyword Tool Pro to help me identify what questions people are searching for with regard to a chosen keyword. I can then title the content piece with the resultant question, and write an article based on the topic. Website Analytics There are 3 main types of analytics you should concern yourself with, these are, Google analytics, social media analytics, and competitor analysis. Google Analytics Google analytics is a great tool which allows you to track your website's traffic. It is a free tool and uses cookies in order to obtain data. A cookie is a small piece of text sent to your browser by a website you visit. It helps the website to remember information about your visit, like your preferred language and other settings. That can make your next visit easier and the site more useful to you. Cookies play an important role. Without them, using the web would be a much more frustrating experience. Remember, you must have a cookie policy on your website. The Cookie Law is a piece of privacy legislation that requires websites to get consent from visitors to store or retrieve any information on a computer, smartphone or tablet. It was designed to protect online privacy, by making consumers aware of how information about them is collected and used online, and give them a choice to allow it or not. We use cookies for many purposes. We use them, for example, to remember your safe search preferences, to make the ads you see more relevant to you, to count how many visitors you receive to a page, to help you sign up for our services and to protect your data. Devices Overview A device overview enables you to identify which devices have been used to visit your website. Below is a screenshot of what a device overview looks like. Social Value Social value identifies the actual conversions made through your social media presence. Many companies hire a social media manager, however if they are not getting conversions from their social media, then they are not getting a return on investment. In a nutshell this social value option allows you to identify your social media's ROI. New vs Returning Visitors This option allows you to identify your traffic in terms of new visitors vs returning visitors. Referral Traffic Referral traffic allows you to identify which other websites your own website has gained visitors from, in other words, which other websites have referred your site. Behaviour Overview The behaviour overview identifies the behaviour of your visitors to your site. It tracks your site’s page views, unique page views, average time on pages, bounce rate and % exit. A bounce rate is the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page. A rising bounce rate is a sure sign that your homepage is boring or off-putting. Acquisition Overview An acquisition overview is an overview of where your site acquired its traffic, be it from referrals, direct, organic searches or through social media. This will help you monitor the effectiveness of your affiliate marketing programs, word of mouth, SEO or social media efforts. Affiliate Marketing Affiliate marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts. Audience Overview The Audience overview gives an overview of the demographics of your audience- the languages they speak, their location, what operating systems they’re using and more. PPC Pay per click (PPC), also called cost per click, is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked. Pay-per-click is commonly associated with search engines. The two main types of PPC you should be familiar with are outlined below. Google Adwords FaceBook Ads Google Adwords With Google Trends, I can identify which terms are being searched, where in the world they’re being searched, and related search terms. Display Planner Display Planner is a Google AdWords tool that provides ideas and estimates to help you plan a display network campaign that you can add to your account or download. Display Planner generates ideas for all the ways you can target the Display Network. Targeting ideas are based on your customers’ interests or your landing page. They include keywords, placements (websites, videos, mobile apps, mobile app categories), topics, interests (affinities, in-market segments), demographics (age, gender), and remarketing. Each idea comes with impression estimates and historical costs. Think of these estimates and statistics as a guide to help you plan your Display Network campaign, rather than to project future performance. You can find Display Planner under the Tools tab in your Google Adwords account. Google AdWords Competitor Analysis I recommend analyzing your competitors Google Adwords efforts. Ad Preview and Diagnosis Here, I can view the top performing ads, and draw inspiration from them. I recommend running an ad preview first, to assess your competition, in order to create an ad with a high quality score, which will save money and increase effectiveness. Through this you can decide which related keywords are too expensive for you, not that relevant to your posts and the market is oversaturated. Data will always lead the way, and there’s no arguing with Quality Score. Quality Score Your Google AdWords’ Quality Score is information that you can assess the effectiveness of your landing page, expected CTR (Click Through Rate), relevant and good ad copy and bid estimates. I recommend having the time running from 7am - Midnight. Incorporate the most relevant, pinpointed keywords in my ad copy. I recommend not having broad keywords such as “Ireland”, “Dublin” “Buy” etc. Furthermore, I recommend a generous daily budget, all to increase your Ad Quality Score. Google Trends With Google Trends, I can identify which terms are being searched, where in the world they’re being searched, and related search terms. Google AdWords Google Trends Keyword Planner Part 1 Keyword Planner Part 2 Keyword Planner Part 3 Ad Copy Quality Score Ad Preview and Diagnosis AdWords Competitor Analysis Display Planner Ad Copy When choosing a Keyword, I recommend looking for High Competition and High Avg. Monthly Searches, yet still within budget, specific, and of course, relevant. So I recommend making things easier, by selecting to show with the highest ‘Avg. Monthly Searches’. Clicks ÷ Impressions = CTR (Click Through Rate) A/B Testing I recommend A/B testing landing pages. This is done through testing certain design changes and then measuring whether they increase engagement. Understanding your customer and understanding what they want from visiting your webpage. Does your website make sense to new audience of your target market? Furthermore, learn from successes as well as failures in the digital space. PPC Proposal for Drunken Lust Records Scope of Project Objective We have gone through your business model function and analyzed its process and user action with your offered services, and, according to this, we are suggesting the best digital marketing services that best suits with your business model function. Pay Per Click – Google AdWords Advertising We have researched on some keywords (search query) that are best suitable to your services. Please have look some below tightly themed keyword list and with this in mind, I recommend you prepare more business keywords with new tightly or relevant ad groups for your search network campaign: Optimization for Search Campaigns Create themed wise ad groups & make them more relevant according to your services Create ad group wise negative keywords list Create tightly themed ad groups with relevant ad copy Use ad-extensions that will show on the Google search engine with your ad-copy, eg: site links, callout extensions, etc. Manage business keywords bid Do ad-scheduling; Ads show on day & time basis Put bids on mobile devices Do keyword research through SQR (Search Query Report), add or pause business keywords, or add negatives as well through SQR Drunken Lust Records USPs (Unique Selling Points) You can use the following USPs in our ad-copies: Free Consultation Professional Trainers Knowledgeable Coaches Personalize Training Stress Management Coaching High Quality Services Remarketing Remarketing allows site owners to track users who have both visited a category of your site, and then left without converting to a sale. It then displays relevant ads on websites they visit after leaving your site. Remarketing Process in Google AdWords: Standard remarketing: Shows ads to your past visitors as they browse, Display Network websites, and use Display Network apps. Dynamic remarketing: Shows dynamic ads to past visitors with products and services they viewed on your website as they browse Display Network websites and use Display Network apps. Remarketing for mobile apps: Shows ads to people who have used your mobile app or mobile website as they use other mobile apps or browse other mobile websites. Remarketing lists for search ads: Shows ads to your past visitors as they do follow-up searches for what they need on Google, after leaving your website. Video remarketing: Shows ads to people who have interacted with your videos or YouTube channel as they use YouTube and browse Display Network videos, websites, and apps. Benefits of Remarketing Ability to target users who have already shown interest; reclaim users who have previously abandoned a shopping cart Ability to keep your brand in a user’s mind as they browse the web; higher conversion rates from ads. Efficiently spend your budgets on highly qualified visitors versus the general public Remarketing Tools Google AdWords Retargeting- Google is the big daddy when it comes to online advertising, and the Search Engine has retargeting features too. If you’ve used Google AdWords for regular campaigns, it’s just a matter of enabling retargeting to get started. AdRoll AdRoll works with advertising partners like Facebook Exchange, Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, allowing you to reach 98% of sites on the Internet. AdRoll is an official Facebook partner and provides one of the best and easiest-to-use platforms for customer retargeting on Facebook, especially the news feed ads. Facebook Remarketing Remarketing on Facebook usually has a lower cost per click when compared to remarketing on search engines. The reason for the lower cost is that Facebook traffic is supposed to be less targeted than search engine traffic. AdRoll is the top retargeting platform, making retargeting simple and profitable from various sources like: websites, Facebook, twitter and mobile device. In Facebook Remarketing, you can create your custom audience with Facebook’s custom audience targeting features. This feature offers targeting audience their own mail id database. Website 101 Does The Site Have a Compelling Email Opt-in? Need a compelling incentive to have visitors opt-in. In general, email newsletters are not a good opt-in incentive, that's just not compelling enough: "Sign up for our newsletter" is code for "We know you get loads of email, but if you subscribe here we'll fill your inbox with even more email you don't want to read". You could test using a discount coupon – but save your profit margin, you can do better than that! Recommendations Offer the visitor something that solves a problem they have, ideally directly related to your business. "Free Guide to XYZ": guides, checklists and cheat-sheets are great. They must actually provide genuine value, but they don't have to be very long – in fact it's better if they're quick to consume. Then start offering them valuable advice and building your credibility with them through their inbox via your autoresponder sequence Does The Site Have a Clear, Obvious Purpose and Visitor Benefits? The first thing visitors look for is something to let them know they're in the right place. Usually this a clear statement of purpose, or visitor benefits. "What's In It For Me?" Make the website purpose very obvious and clear via a tagline or headline what the site was about.Furthermore, have a tagline or headline front and center so that visitors know what they're looking at. Does The Site Have a Strong, Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)? After a clear purpose, the next thing to look for is the Call-to-Action. What action should I take? What does the site want people to do? A strong, clear call to action (CTA) is needed, e.g. Book Now, Add to Cart, Contact Us, that stands out from the page content and tells the user what to do next. Recommendation: ensure every page on your site has at least one clear, strong call to action that stands out visually from the rest of the page content Does The Site Have a Quality "About" Page? The About Page is the 2nd most visited page on a website – after the homepage – and crucial in building trust with a potential customer. A good About page typically includes photos of the business owners/staff, names and a bit of background. Stay away from generic text that could be copied and pasted onto a competitor's site. You're asking people to trust you with their hard earned cash, so you have to include more information than that. Recommendations: Include details of why you want to serve your particular customers and what you do for them Include the business owner and staff photos Include your street address and photos of the business location Does The Site Load Quickly? Recommendations: WordPress sites need caching to be enabled Reduce your image sizes Move to a better hosting company Does The Site Have Good Design Aesthetic? It's somewhat subjective, but most visitors recognise a professional design when they see it, even if they can't articulate the details and it's a big factor in generating online sales. Visitors will spend money on a site they trust and design aesthetic is crucial in building that trust. Recommendations: If you can, get a professional designer to tweak your site design Reduce the number of fonts, colours and textures Does The Site Have a Responsive Design? Recommendations: If your site is not responsive, it's past time for an upgrade. Start looking for a responsive theme or talk to a web design company. Ecommerce 101 Tactics on how to promote your online store I’ve broken it down into 6 sections and headers for each ecommerce marketing tactic so you can pick and choose what you’d like to read. I’ve also added potential costs, time it will take to implement and level of importance below each tactic so you can get an idea of which might be best for you to focus on first. You’ll find the following sections in this guide: Ecommerce Marketing: The basics Ecommerce Marketing: Website optimisation Ecommerce Marketing: Social media marketing Ecommerce Marketing: Website design Ecommerce Marketing: Content marketing Ecommerce Marketing: Extra marketing tactics Ecommerce Marketing: The basics 1. Research your market Honestly, the best thing you can do for promoting your online store – or any business online – is to research your market. I don’t just mean try to find stats on everything – genuinely go out and online stalk your target customer. Find out what they really want and what their current options are. Where can you find them? Look into forums, Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Twitter and search for groups that have an interest in your products. Get to know their problems and perspectives and it’ll make it much easier to connect with them in the rest of your marketing. Another great tip for finding these groups is to go onto competitors social media and look into the customers they have already following them. Finally, make sure you search online for your products. Have a look at the competitors products and price points; even the ones on Amazon. How does your product compare? Be as brutally honest with yourself as you can. If your product is 10x more expensive than one on amazon, it simply MUST have a good reason for being so. And you must have seriously good ecommerce marketing to back it up. Which brings me to tip 2. 2. Find your USP It’s something too many online stores I’ve seen fail to do – check out your competition and tell me a reason a customer should buy from you and not them. Your USP is your ‘unique selling proposition’. It can be as simple as ‘you’re the cheapest’ or ‘you’re the highest quality’. Whatever it is, you must be the best at it and your website should scream it. If you’re the most expensive, there simply has to be a reason for it. Get certifications, lots of reviews/social proof and make sure your design and imagery is super high quality. Don’t scrimp and save if this is your angle – if you want to be the most expensive you need to prove there’s a reason for it. The first impression a customer gets when they see your brand anywhere should be your USP. 3. Don’t be all things to everybody This follows on from your USP – don’t try to be everything. It will only serve to muddy your promotional messages and people will be put off. This ecommerce marketing tactic will make you the number one choice in your target market’s eyes – which is much better than being number 20 in everyone’s. Specialise in one area – and do everything you can to be the best at that one thing. You’ll start to be known for it, which is great for word of mouth as well as your brand in general. 4. Compare your website to your competitors Checking out your competition shouldn’t be scary (although I know it can be intimidating). The truth is, if you don’t keep an eye on it, it could be the end of your business. Your customers are checking out your competition online – so it’s a good idea to make sure you know what you’re up against. Use the weaknesses in your competitors brands to your advantage; and highlight them in your content. If you think they have a better, more trustworthy looking website and your sales are dipping – you’ll know it’s time to invest in an upgrade. 5. Highlight the benefits of your products, then the features This is incredibly important for any business. When you’re writing your content in any of your ecommerce marketing materials, highlight the benefits of buying that product. Think about insurance adverts; they don’t call attention to the features of that type of insurance at first – they start with the emotional benefit. The security you’ll feel when you have insurance. They show happy, people with no care in the world. They’re easing a ‘pain point’. Get to know your customers pain points and highlight how you ease them. 6. Research your customers needs Your customers should be at the forefront of your business; I like to think they own the business, not us. So finding out what their true feelings are about your products and what they want should be at the core of everything you do. Join forums where your customers are likely to be. Look up Quora and follow interests they’ll be following. Like pages on Facebook similar to yours and see what customers are asking and saying. The more you listen, the better you can tailor your products and your message to your customers. Ultimately, the best message wins in any promotional activity. And the best message is always the one that talks directly to the customers needs. 7. Go above & beyond expectations Word of mouth is the most effective ecommerce marketing tool you can use – it can increase the effectiveness of your marketing by 54%. There’s multiple ways of encouraging word of mouth marketing – but the simplest is to go above and beyond what’s expected of you. Offer something amazing – then deliver something even better. Whether it’s as simple as a bag of sweets to say thanks in your delivery, amazingly fast responses to queries or even something secret your product does that you don’t mention until it arrives – it will help get your customers more excited about your product and your brand. It shows you genuinely care, and people love to buy from ecommerce stores that care and deliver more value than a competitor. 8. Survey your target customers Getting to know your customers exact needs is incredibly important. You can run a free survey using survey monkey – you can even pay a little extra to get them to send your survey to your target customers. What you could stand to learn here is invaluable. I can’t stress this enough. Getting to know the exact problems your customers deal with on a daily basis in regards to your products can help you to know exactly what to highlight in your promotional activity, no matter what it is – adverts, product pages, blog articles – everything should scream “our products will help you fix your issue”. Find out what really bugs your customer about their current supplier, you can turn lot’s of these things to your advantage when selling you products. Your customers are a gold mine of information that could turn your ecommerce marketing efforts viral. 9. Follow up with your customers Like my previous point, your customers are a complete goldmine of information. Following up with customers who have bought from you already can help you achieve multiple things: You can get genuine feedback as to what you can improve If you do it personally, you can develop a stronger relationship with your customer and increase recommendations You can ask for a review which can insanely increase your chances at a new sale with someone else You get a chance to reach out and help a potential unhappy customer before they badmouth you online 10. Test, review, improve Whatever you choose to do with your ecommerce marketing, make sure you track the results. That way you’ll have something to review later and you can decide on how successful your efforts were. Something that works for one shop, might not work well for yours. Track your results on your ecommerce marketing efforts, increase investment and time into the ones that work and either stop or change your tactic with methods that aren’t performing well enough. 11. Design your website from a customer’s point of view This is a powerful mindset shift, and if you can make it – it will make a HUGE impact on your promoting your online store. You’ve got to get out of thinking ‘what do I want from my website’ and into the thinking of ‘I’m a customer – what do I want to see?’. First thing’s first – the most important thing when someone first comes to your website is that you reassure them they’ve clicked on the right place, it should scream it at the top of your home page. Secondly – make your content easy to find. Especially if it’s the answer to a customer’s question. Are prices important to your customers? Put them on the browse pages – don’t make them have to click through to each item to figure out how much it is. Design your site to be easy for your customers to use – and sales will soar. 12. Make life as easy as possible for your customers If you’re looking to increase sales through promotion, make sure your landing pages and buying process is as simple as possible. Something as simple as reducing the amount of times your customer has to enter in their home address can increase sales – as well as making your landing page very relevant to an ad. (Side note – if you aren’t aware, a landing page is simply the first page someone enters your website at). Not only does this help drive up sales, it can even reduce the cost of your adverts on some platforms like GoogleAds. 13. Do your keyword research I can’t tell you how important it is to do your keyword research and focus on driving customers to your website for certain terms. If you don’t focus on anything – don’t expect to get any traffic from Google. Too many people are doing SEO and content marketing out there, and if you’re not doing it right – then you’ll be left dead in the water in terms of customers coming from search engines. Think about it like this – when did you last do a search where you clicked below the top 3 results? Went onto the next page? As internet users we’re lazy, and we want answers to our queries instantly. Make sure you research a term you want your website to be found for; such as “dog treats online”. You can use Google AdWords free keyword planner to find out information about how many people are searching monthly for each term. They’ll also give you an idea of similar terms you may not have thou
ght of that might be drawing even more traffic. Once you’ve decided which term you’d like to appear for, make sure you optimise your home page text for this term. I’d also recommend researching terms used for each of your product pages so you can optimise the text on there too – if you optimise enough product pages, you should see a great impact on the numbers coming to your website. 14. Write more content on your product pages I know it can seem like a complete bore to write text for every individual product on your website – it’s possibly even intimidating if you have hundred or thousands to do. But it is completely vital that you do this – for both driving more customers to your website and getting them to buy when they get there. Online, no customer who visits your website knows who you are or whether you’re trustworthy. Your job as an online store owner is to ease their fears about making a purchase with you. If they land on a page with nothing but a small image and a title,they’re going to struggle to feel confident that your product is the right one for them. Think about the questions people might be asking before they buy; is this a reputable brand? What benefits & features does this product bring to the table in comparison to another? Is there a warranty? What’s their return policy if I don’t like this? Set about answering as many questions as possible and you’ll end up developing a great product page that will bring in sales – and traffic too. 15. Optimise your product titles & text As long as you have at least 300 words on your page, it’s time to optimise it for the keyword you want to be found for. The best way to do this is to install something like Yoast as a guide, or you can sign up to the POP Content email list if you don’t have wordpress for a complete guide. Basically it’s about making sure your keywords appear in the right places on your page – not too much and not too little. You want your text to appear natural, but at the same time you want Google to be able to figure out what your page is about. Currently, I’d recommend getting your keyword content to around 1% if you can. 3% or higher can be suspicious, but lower than 0.5% could be too low for Google to know what the page is about. Make sure your title tags (H1s and H2s) contain some keywords if possible too – it doesn’t have a huge effect, but every little bit helps to make your website more legitimate in Google’s view. 16. Make your product URLs search engine friendly Similar to ecommerce marketing tactic 11, making sure your urls are search friendly can bump you up a little in the search engine rankings. Make sure your urls contain the keywords you want to optimise for and use dashes between each word (Google reads ‘-‘ as a space in urls). 17. Add Google Analytics Google Analytics is completely free to use and can help you figure out lots of useful information about your website. Things like: Where your traffic is coming from How your customers are finding you Where they go when they’re on your website Where they leave your website It can help you to gauge which ecommerce marketing activities are working well for you and which aren’t. For example, you might see about 300 people visiting per month, but no sales. When you review your traffic, you might notice a big spike from Twitter, but they’re not buying. This could be an indication that your marketing efforts aren’t quite right – or that you need to invest time elsewhere. This is just an example, Twitter might produce lots of sales depending on how you use it. Analysing where your best leads come from and where you’re not doing so well could save you so much time and money, that this is a hugely important step for your ecommerce marketing – not to be ignored. Plus it’s free! 18. Add Google Search Console Here’s another free hidden gem. A lot of online store owners have Google Analytics – but not Google Search Console. If you’re serious about getting traffic from searches, this is a great tool to have. It will help you (or your developer) clear up any pages that aren’t working well, tell Google how you want to be shown in search results and help you track where you’re getting links from. 19. Connect the two to find out what Google thinks your website is about If you connect your Search Engine Console & Google Analytics you can get some amazing data back. You can literally form a picture of what Google thinks your website is about – and where it’s placing you in search results too. It’s something I personally check on a weekly basis. 20. Tell your own personal network This ecommerce marketing tactic is incredibly helpful but is missed a lot. In the early stages of opening your online store, no one will be around. Not only this, when a new customer finds you online, it’s going to make your business look a lot more legitimate if your Facebook page already has a few hundred likes. I’d highly recommend a quick video for extra shares – it’s a bit more exciting than a text or image post. 21. Use emotive content to bring in followers on social media When people use social media they spread the news about things that are interesting and that they like. If you can use your social media content to make them laugh, cry or shout – you’re much more likely to get noticed (and shared) online. Some of the most ‘liked’ pages on Facebook and Twitter simply put out consistently hilarious posts – not images of products. Offer great content to your network, and they’ll reward you with more likes and follow you more closely. If you do it well, not only will customers follow what you have to say more closely – they’ll develop a closer relationship with your brand and be there to support you when you do run an offer or promote your products. 22. Get involved in the right twitter conversations Getting involved in Twitter chats can boost the number of followers you have but also gets people engaged with you. Afterall, 100 engaged fans is much better than 1000 followers who clicked then ignored you completely. I’d recommend getting involved in chats that your potential customers could be in. 23. Automate promotion on social media – carefully One thing I don’t like on social media is spam and automation – and it’s not something you want to apply to everything. Basically, social media is all about being social (shocking, I know). And it’s not very social (or good ecommerce marketing behaviour) to blast out your products & offers, annoy all your followers and not respond to anyone. However, being a busy ecommerce store owner doesn’t leave a whole lot of time to be sitting on social media all day. Twitter is chocked full of so much content, that if you post out an article once, it’s unlikely that more than about 4 people will see it. If you have ‘evergreen content’ (content that is basically amazing and will be relevant and useful to your audience for a long time) you can pop it into Tweet Jukebox and it will tweet it out at random, as frequently as you like (up to 100 tweets per day). You can test out times that work best for you using this method too. I wouldn’t recommend tweeting more frequently than once every 30 minutes – I recommend only tweet every 3-4 hours – as you don’t want to spam people’s feed and annoy them. Secondly, you can use automation tools like Hootsuite to schedule posts; so for example, you don’t want to post lots of the same thing on Facebook – it’s not like Twitter. But you do want to remember to put your latest content out onto your social media channels (like LinkedIn, Google+ & Facebook) when it’s released. By using Hootsuite you can schedule it all in one place, to avoid you having to log in and repeat the same actions on all the different channels – which is a great little time saver. Plus you can schedule your posts to go out at whatever optimum time you find people interacting with your posts, so you don’t have to remember to log on at that particular time of the day. 24. Follow the 80/20 rule The 80/20 rule is about how often you tweet/post about your products and offers versus how often you post useful, interesting stuff to your followers. Basically 80% of the time you want to increase the number of followers you have by posting completely non-promotional but awesome content – either from your website or from others. As long as your target audience will love it, it’s a good idea to post it. They’ll love your brand more for doing this. The other 20% of the time you can post about your latest product and offers. And guess what? Since you’ve been so generous with great content before hand – your followers are much more likely to be all ears when you let them know about your new offerings –because they’ll start to like you. 25. Start a Facebook Group If you know your niche well, starting a Facebook group can be a seriously effective ecommerce marketing tactic. Page posts rarely get seen in news feeds these days – Facebook wants you to pay for the privilege. Groups are a great way to get your posts actually seen in newsfeeds. On tops of this – they’re a lot more interactive. Members can post what they like, and people can have full discussions. The best thing to do is develop a Facebook Group built around your target audience rather than your products. And don’t be tempted to blast out lot’s of ads. Just get people talking – share genuine tips and advice, and get people to share their experiences. The more you do this, the more approachable and likeable your brand becomes. And when you become more likeable – people are much more likely to trust and buy from you. You could even offer a free sample when people sign up to encourage your first 100 members. 26. Be personal – not faceless – to build up customer loyalty People react better to faces than logos; our eyes are naturally attracted to images of people. So when you’re creating your profiles and pages – don’t be faceless, it’s a sure fire way to make your brand fade into the background. Add a face to your cover photo, get your face out there on Twitter instead of your logo – people will be much more likely to engage with you. Adding a video to a pinned tweet or post is even better – people can more easily relate to you that way and will feel better about sharing your stuff! 27. Follow your competitors This is an odd ecommerce marketing tactic, but seriously useful. Following you competitors let’s you keep track of their marketing activities – which is no bad thing. Being aware of what you’re up against is the first step to beating it after all. Keep an eye on your competitors social media activities. They’ll give you: Ideas of what works with your target market Ideas on where you can be better (when you see them doing rubbish stuff) Customers to poach (if you see someone complaining, you can jump in and offer your store as an alternative) 28. Follow DIY marketing blogs If you’re trying to get ahead with your ecommerce marketing, believe or not – things change fast. You need to stay ahead of the curve if you’re hoping to have continual success online. Obviously, this is an extensive list of tactics – but who knows what the future holds? Facebook could be blown out of the water tomorrow. Pinterest might become the next ecommerce platform. You need to stay on top of your game, and the best way I would suggest is to follow some good online marketers blogs or social media. They’ll be the ones educating themselves daily on what’s working – and they’ll pass the relevant knowledge onto you if they’re worth their salt. Check around before you jump in and follow anyone in that space however. Believe me, there’s a lot of nonsense, rubbish content and half truths in the online marketing world. 29. Start a quirky YouTube channel This ecommerce marketing tactic could help your store go viral – if you’re willing to invest the time. If your product could be turned into something interesting on a YouTube Channel, you can definitely increase your traffic and sales by getting on camera. Check out the hydraulic press channel here . These videos get shared all the time – simply because it’s interesting to watch. There’s even a few spin off YouTube channels from this ones success. As long as the main content is good, your video will be watched and shared. 30. Test different benefits headlines on Twitter Whatever content you’re writing about your products, whether on social media or your ecommerce store, it’s great to highlight the benefits of your products. But which ones matter most to your customers? You can use something like Twitter to test out which benefits work the best – simply add a few different headlines along with your link to your product, and get them into a tweet jukebox. You should be able to later review your stats on Twitter analytics to see which benefits caused the most clicks to your website and voila! You now know the best benefits to highlight on your promotional material. 31. Run an engaging competition Competitions can drive a lot of followers and likers to your social media accounts, that’s for sure. Running a competition gives you a unique opportunity however – you can use it to get your customers engaged with your brand. If you run a competition where they have to create some form of content – such as the ice bucket challenge – it can really get things going viral, as well as providing you with some amazing ‘social proof’ of people using your products, you can then use on your product pages. Incentivising customers to get involved with your products can not only get you more shares on social media, it can build a unique, memorable and fun relationship between your customers and your brand. Ecommerce Marketing: Website design 32. Focus on good imagery I’ve seen a lot of ecommerce stores in my time ruining their chances of a sale with this one flaw – bad imagery. Remember – online customers have never seen your product in real life. You need to give them every opportunity to get to know the product as much as they can through a screen. You can write all the good articles you like, but if you have bad images – no one’s going to take the leap to buy. On your product pages, make sure you have good clear images, fairly large if possible, at least 300 x 300 pixels or more (don’t make people have to click to make them big enough to see). And make sure you have multiple images; show the size and maybe even the product being used. You want to build up the confidence your customer has in your product, so the more information and imagery you can provide – the better. As long as you have a semi decent smart phone, a good plain white or black background and learning how to focus on your product properly with your phone is all you really need to boost your store’s conversions with images. 33. Title your images properly Search engine’s can’t see your images – they figure out what they’re about by reading your images meta title and alt tags. You can use this to your advantage by optimising your images with the keywords you want to appear for online. Much like the url optimisation (see tactic 16) you’ll want to make sure you use dashes in place of spaces in your image titles. Also remember – alt tags are meant to be used by the visually impaired (a computer can read out what the alt tag says about the image to describe it to someone who can’t see it well). So although it’s good to use keywords for your SEO, use them sparingly and only where they are relevant. 34. Use a lot of images As said previously – your customer’s can’t see your product in real life to pick it up, see the size, touch & feel. Unfortunately, they only get to use one sense – sight. Using multiple images on your product pages only serves to help them trust their buying decision, making them more likely to make a purchase and less likely to return something – for being the wrong size etc. Show your product from a few different angles and even how it might appear when they arrive. Anything that helps to give your customer confidence in what they’re buying will help encourage sales. 35. Make sure your website is responsive If you aren’t aware, a responsive website is one that changes size according to the device you’re using. The design makes sure you can see and use the website well on phones, tablets & computers. It’s becoming more and more important these days; just check your analytics to see how many people are using their tablets and mobiles to browse your website. If your website isn’t working well on mobile – your customers will find a competitor website that does. Not only do you risk losing customers after they click onto your website – you even risk lowering your traffic in general. Google uses “responsiveness” as a factor when it decides where to rank your website in searches. If you don’t have a responsive website, you’re giving yourself 2 major issues – less web visitors and less sales (something I doubt you want). Now’s the time to get it done. Don’t panic about having to spend thousands to sort it out either – there’s plenty of online platforms that will do a decent job for free. This whole website is built on a free responsive theme – granted I do know more than an average person about websites. But there’s some seriously good options out there that don’t have to cost the earth, so there’s not much excuse these days not to get your ecommerce store responsive. 36. …and fast The speed of your website is very important. On average, we won’t wait more than 3 seconds to load a website. Not only that but, according to Kissmetrics: “79% of web shoppers who have trouble with web site performance say they won’t return to the site to buy again and around 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online.” On top of this glaring fact that website speed is very important to get shoppers to your site – it’s also yet another ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithms. Which means, like responsiveness, you’re hit doubly hard if you don’t speed up your website. 37. 38. Use video Using video is a step up from imagery. If there’s not a lot between you and a competitor – I’d definitely get going with videos. You don’t have to do anything too fancy; get a cheap setup on amazon and film your products properly. A good smart phone is all you really need. It gives your customers the chance to get to know your products even more, and they’ll be more convinced of your authenticity as a store if you have real videos of the products. 39. Establish trust – eliminate fears This is the most important lesson you need to learn if you want have success with ecommerce marketing. If you want people to buy from you, they have to trust you. No matter how amazing your product is, if your site looks dodgy – people won’t be willing to take the risk and give you their credit card details. You can build trust multiple ways: Pay for a decent design – or make sure your cheap/free design looks the part Use reviews throughout your website – it’s the closest thing to word of mouth you can get online. Using reviewers faces, or even better – video – is the ultimate trust building review Highlight licences you have (if you have/need any).. Especially if other competitors don’t – it will make you look more trustworthy than them. If you can get or have certificates in anything related – highlight these too. Whether it’s an award for top seller, or a certificate in ‘canine nutrition’ – if it will help to add authority to your brand it can only be a good thing. Respond to public questions quickly & professionally. If people check up on your social media channels, they’ll feel assured if they see that you’re responsive and polite – and a real person is behind the brand. 40. Don’t overload your customers – keep focus on 1-3 products max on your site Unlike this document, when you’re selling online – you don’t want to overload your customers. Too many options often results in no decision – which basically means less sales for you because your customers are overwhelmed with choice. Here’s a quote from a paper at the American Psychological Association about consumers: “…they’re 10 times more likely to make a purchase if they choose among six rather than among 24 flavors of jam.” Simply put, when you put too much on display it can make customers feel overwhelmed. They start to feel concerned that they’ll make the wrong choice, and regret not getting something else later – and the chance of making that bad purchase decision and feeling regret puts them off purchasing anything at all. Focus on just 1-3 products on your home page, and your customers will have a much happier experience. You will avoid overwhelming them and they’re much more likely to quickly figure out who you are and what your brands all about. Let them decide where they want to browse; don’t display lots of items before they’ve decided what they want to buy. Ecommerce Marketing: Content marketing 41. Write shareable articles Search engines like Google want to make sure they show the best results to their users – after all, none of us would use Google so much if it was rubbish at answering questions. It figures out the ‘best results’ using a number of factors. One of those factors is how much a website is shared on social media. This is one of the great things about content marketing – not only does it build up trust with your customers, it also is the only way to truly rank well in search engines these days. Writing ‘shareable’ stuff needn’t be a guessing game either: Check out your competitors articles See what articles are shared the most, and by who Write articles even better than theirs about the topics they’ve written (I can’t stress how important it is to write content actually worth reading – if you don’t, you might as well just delete your blog and stop wasting your own time) Send them to the same people that shared your competitors articles and ask them to critique and share if they like it too 42. Write ‘How to’ articles How to articles are really popular online and are a great addition to your ecommerce marketing efforts. You can get a decent amount of traffic from them; and the great thing is, if you right them for your target market, you’ll be driving lot’s of customers directly to your website. Genuinely useful content goes a long way to building up a good reputation for your ecommerce store and helps tremendously with driving your target customers to your website. 43. Write articles on individual products Writing articles about individual products is a great way to introduce them to your customers and search engines. A couple of internal links (links from one page to another in your website) can help the search engine ‘spiders’ to gauge what your new products are all about. Not only that; but if someone does a search for your type of product and you’ve written a long article about it (and chosen good keywords) they’re more likely to arrive at your website than someone else’s if you have better content. More is often better when it comes to content length and SEO. 44. Edit the articles to attract search engines Once you finished writing your articles, you can make them even more attractive to search engines. Using tips I’ve mentioned earlier make sure you: Optimise your page titles (placing your keyword closer to the beginning of your title can help – but it’s more important that it’s an attractive title that people want to click) Write h1 or h2 tags containing keywords if you can Pop a couple of keywords into your article (above 0.5% and below 3% is a good amount) Make sure your url contains your keywords Make sure you have a meta description written (see free guide for more details) My best advice I can give you is to ignore these factors until you’ve finished writing. Write the article as best you can, thinking about how useful it will be to your customers. Once you’ve finished, go back and edit in keywords here and there – it will keep your content natural and ‘shareable’ first and foremost which is most important. 45. Promote those articles on social media Half of the battle with content marketing is creating brilliant content. The other half? Promotion. Promoting your article is just as important as making it as brilliant as possible. The thing is, even if you wrote the best guide in the world, if no one notices it – it’s not going to do anything for you. First thing’s first with promotion – social media. Get onto Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest – wherever your target market is – and get involved in the conversations. Once you’ve got to know that particular platform (you don’t want to just dive in and spam people – that’s the easiest way to get your ecommerce store blacklisted) start posting out your articles in places where you think they’re relevant. Break the ice and get involved in conversations (without asking for anything in return) and build trust with the community. Then when you reach out for help – people will want to help. Simply ask for their feedback and ask them to share it if they found it useful. The trick to sharing your articles on social media is not to be deceptive or spammy – it’s to be genuinely useful to the right audience. 46. Start an email list Some people browse about, but aren’t quite ready to buy. Whatever the reason might be, they’re potential customers you won’t want to miss out on. You can start an email list with something like mailchimp really easily and completely free of charge. If you offer something in return for their email address – such as future exclusive discounts – you should be able to capture a few customers that you might have lost previously. Once you have their emails – don’t spam them. A weekly email with your latest article or a discount will suffice – if you’re like me, you’ll know that it leaves a bad taste in your mouth when you’re constantly bombarded with emails. The reason you want to keep in touch is so that when they do decide to make their purchase, they’re much more likely to remember your website as your brand will still be fresh in their memory, even if it’s months down the road from when they were browsing. 47. Reach out to influencers & bloggers You can do a couple of things once you know which bloggers you’d like to write about your products: Ask if you can sponsor a post or offer a free amount of your product in return for a review & backlink (backlinks are VERY important for SEO) Forge a relationship in general – since you have mutual interests – before asking for a post about your product Offer a cross promotion deal – see tactic 62 below Offer an affiliate deal – see tactic 71 below 48. Do some online PR PR is a great way to drive new customers to your website and build great quality backlinks to your online store. It’s an essential part of any ecommerce marketing strategy. There’s a lot to PR, but you can do a surprising amount on your own if you have the time. Definitely enough to make a big impact on your ecommerce marketing results. 49. Build up your backlinks Backlinks are still the number one factor in your search engine rankings – need I say more? If you want to rank well for searches in your area, get backlinks – quality ones. Bad backlinks can damage your online store, so make sure you do it the right way. Any ecommerce marketing strategy needs a good back link plan. 50. Answer FAQs – and turn them into articles Imagine every customer question as a road block between them seeing your website and making it to the checkout. Is this website trustworthy? How true to size is this product? What does it look like in real life? Can I return it if it doesn’t suit me? How will this make me feel better? It’s your job to assure your customers when they get to your website that they’re safe buying these products and they’re the right thing for them. If you start to get questions from customers – or if you collect questions from your surveys – use them to make an FAQ page. FAQ pages are amazing for lots of reasons – not only do they help assure a customer who may have a concern before making a purchase, if you have a heat map installed or you use page analytics in Google analytics, you can even start to figure out which questions are most popular – and start to react. If there’s a question that keeps being looked at, figure out if there’s a way you can make it more clear elsewhere on the website. If people are concerned about returns policies – highlight them on your product pages. Chances are, some customers will have left before checking your FAQs, so you’ll be gaining sales by doing this. Do your keyword research and find out how to best phrase your keywords – but ultimately – answer questions better than anyone else and search engines will reward you with traffic. (As long as you write them correctly & work on promotion so they notice the content) 51. Answer questions on forums Forums are a great place to position yourself as an authority in your space. Answer questions and just leave your website in your signature if you can. The more knowledgeable you seem in your space, the more likely people will trust you and want to check out your online store. If someone asks a question that you’ve answered with an article, you can even post it as part of your answer and get a great backlink. Don’t spam the forums though – you want these guys on your side after all. With ecommerce marketing, or any content marketing really – always give before you take. 52. Use & encourage user generated content Is any kind of content your customers create about your product. It’s shown just before the reviews, so it adds a lot of “social proof” and makes buyers feel a lot more comfortable buying their products. Seeing so many different, real photos of happy customers is one of the best ecommerce marketing tactics you can take. Another giant plus is, if you can get customers to generate this kind of content – obviously you need their permission to put it on your website – but they’ll usually be so excited to be featured on your website that they’ll spread the word online and off about your online shop. Possibly even on Facebook, Twitter etc. Increase conversion rates, more exposure to new customers, shared more on social media, better relationship with current customer. That’s 4 giant benefits in one action. 53. Leverage your passion & personality against the big guys More often than not, if you’re opening an online shop – you’re going to be up against a giant competitor of some kind or other. Don’t be afraid. Content marketing can seriously level the playing field. You have something they don’t. You’re not a giant marketing department – you’re a passionate business owner with a dream. Passion shines through in content and it will win. If you’ve spent years learning about your product and getting to know your customers you’re at a much bigger advantage than the big guys. If you’re the one writing your content and not a marketer you’re at a huge advantage because you actually know this stuff. You know your products inside out and you can answer customers questions better than any marketer. After all, if their worth their salt they’ve been studying marketing for years – not your products. Use your face on social media, be personable in communications and show your customers you really know your stuff. There’s nothing wrong with marketers – obviously we can help guide you, show you how to edit content better and promote it properly – but ultimately – you’re the one with the passion, personality & knowledge to leverage yourself into a good place in the market. Take charge of your ecommerce marketing and simply get help and education where your skills are weakest. 54. Write gift guides & include your product as well as others Gift guides are a great way to get your content out there in a shareable way. A great idea is to not only include your products, but other similar stores products too. For example, you could offer to feature a non competing company’s products or services gift vouchers in your gift guide as long as they help share it on social media. If they do, it gains you even more exposure to your target audience. If you can include 4+ other stores, it can really help drive your target customers to your website, as well as helping out your fellow businesses. What’s more, is might even do the same for you in the future – and include your products in a gift guide of their own! Getting others on board to help you spread the word about your online store is a major goal for your ecommerce marketing – and this tactic ticks all the boxes. 55. Don’t forget to encourage reviews Social proof is a top priority in ecommerce marketing. Nearly 63% of consumers indicate they are more likely to purchase from a site if it has product ratings and reviews. I can be honest with you in that I know when I buy online, I’m always looking for reviews – they help answer questions and give you an unbiased opinion on a product. So what can you do to encourage reviews? Ask for them – it might seem a bit overwhelming to ask every person who buys to write a review. If you’re at this stage, it’s a good idea to implement an automated email system to help. Try to aim for a certain amount of time after their product has been delivered – a few days at least. Often a simple reminder email can be enough to get a couple of reviews Reward people for reviews – offer a discount off their next purchase or enter them into a prize draw. People do love free stuff, and it’ll be worth it in the long run for you if you can make more sales Make it really easy for people to leave reviews – obviously you don’t want to encourage competitors to leave bad reviews – but making the process as simple as possible can infinitely help encourage reviews, especially for those less tech savvy customers 56. Use ‘you’ Language Using the word “you” and not “our customers” or “most of our fans” or even “guys” can seriously benefit your online store. Words are powerful – and You is among the most powerful words you can use in your ec
ommerce marketing efforts. Write your content as if you are talking directly to one target customer. Just one person. Because although you’re talking to many different types of people – the one you have to convince is your customer. And they’re not in a room looking at your website with thousands of other website visitors around- they’re looking on their own at their desk/sofa/bed/bus stop/anywhere. Keeping the conversation personal is a far more effective way to sell online and anywhere else. It makes us prick up our ears and pay attention when people are talking directly to us and not just blasting out messages to the world. It also makes it easier to write the right kinds of things. When you’re not focusing on pleasing everyone, and you’re just having a natural conversation (albeit to yourself online) it becomes more obvious which benefits and features of your product you should be pointing out. You’re not here to convert people who aren’t interested into customers. You’re here to convert your interested target market into customers. Focus on them – and they’ll reward you with more sales. 57. Use their language to entice them to buy In tactic 8, I told you to survey your customers. Not only does this help you figure out if your products are viable – it helps you learn how to sell to your customers. Using your industry terms isn’t the way to convince them they need your service. Your customers have problems and they use specific language to describe those problems – and potential solutions. Even if you survey just 5 people – you’ll get a much clearer idea of how your target customers talk about your product. You can almost parrot back their words on your product page. We introduced this service or product just for you. When a product page talks directly to your issues, you are far more likely to buy that product. Your ecommerce marketing efforts are going to be much more effective if you use your customer's language. 58. Guest blog on good authority websites Guest blogging is when you write a blog for someone else’s website. It’s a good idea because it allows you to get your brand in front of a new audience as well as a good backlink to your website. The key to it is to find the right blogs and develop a good relationship with the website owner. Check out tactic 47 to find out how to find a blog with a good domain authority. Good blogs are often being pitched lots of different articles, so you need to make sure you pitch the right idea to them. Check out their content, and make sure you pitch a few titles of articles you think would fit in well with their audience. Make sure you write something good – if it’s really good stuff you might be asked to write for a different blog in your industry. Remember to include a bio about yourself with a link back to your website in your guest articles. 59. Don’t be bland, take a stand & be yourself You don’t want to spend hours writing articles for them never be seen, right? The best way to avoid this is to write articles that are worth reading. The worst kind of article is something rehashed, completely blandly, because of too many company policies stopping your blog having any genuine original material or opinions. Opinions are worth reading. People want to know what you really think in your area of expertise. It’s not breaking news that you agree with what all the said experts in 2014. If you strongly disagree, and you show facts that back you up – be controversial. It’s the kind of things that will actually get your article read and spread on social media. If you notice a lot of people in your industry only giving half the story – be the first to tell the whole story. If you don’t, someone else will and they’ll get the customers and SEO boost for it instead of you. If you’re thinking of posting an article – Google what’s out there first. If you can’t contribute anything better; it’s unlikely your post will get noticed. Save yourself a bunch of time and do your searching before you start typing. The great thing if you’re going up against a large competitor is that you won’t have millions of company policies banning you from saying this or that – take advantage of your freedom and take a stand. It’ll get you noticed. 60. Track your promotions properly with unique urls Here’s a great tip – if you’re running any kind of advertising campaign for your online store you can track the exact results with unique urls. Let’s say you have an offer on a popular blog – you can create a unique link for that advert such as “www.yourwebsite.com/blog-offer”. Doing this ensures you can track your different ecommerce marketing activities properly – so you can monitor what’s working and what’s not. That way you can quickly figure out what to keep investing in and what’s not worth a penny. If you set up goal tracking in Google Analytics, you should even be able to monitor not just the traffic, but the number of sales you’re making from that particular ad. Just pop goal tracking onto your thank you page after they complete checkout. 61. Interview influencers in your market Interviewing an influencer can be an awesome way to drive great traffic to your website. If you can find someone who’s being trusted and followed by thousands of your target market, interviewing them creates a strong link between you and the influencer. In a customer’s mind, you’re instantly seen as being at a similar trust/authority level. Not only does it instantly build a lot of trust – and therefore make people more willing to buy from you – but if you publish an interview, whether it’s on YouTube or a blog, your influencer will more than likely help you spread the word and promote that content – which instantly gets your brand & ecommerce store in front of many more of your target customers. Of course to do this, you’ll likely need to build up a good authority in your industry first so that the influencer sees it’s worth being interviewed by you. Or the other quick option is to simply pay the influencer for an interview. If you do go the payment route, just make sure you’ve optimised your website well for conversions already – the last thing you want is a bunch of good traffic to get to your website and only 1 or 2 sales. It’s definitely an effective ecommerce marketing tactic if your store is ready for it. 62. Use cross promotion with another shop or service in your industry Cross promotion is an amazing way to build up a good reputation and your SEO online. It’s simple really – there’s other businesses looking to promote themselves to a similar target market to you out there. They might be selling something slightly different – but you can work together to achieve mutual benefits. What you can do is, reach out to these people and collaborate on few articles and offers. They need relevant links to them and so do you; so by working together, either guest posting on their blog, running a collaborative offer or interviewing each other etc. you can both reap massive rewards. You get double ecommerce marketing points for this too. Not only will Google like the fact that you have lots of relevant links to your website, the other businesses will help to promote your articles and get them in front of a new, very relevant audience. 63. Do a collective list article with guest experts Much like cross promotion, if you can get a bunch of experts in your field to get involved in a list article, it can seriously benefit your ecommerce marketing. The idea is that people really like list articles – you just have to see the success of buzzfeed to know that. They’re a bit easier to digest, you can skim through them and read what you want and ignore whatever’s not relevant to you. So when your target market sees something like “5 tips to ...” they’re going to want to read it. Much more than usual boring stuff they see online that’s not relevant to them. Not just that, but if you have a seriously long list with lot’s of guest experts – they’ll help you to promote your article. Featuring in an article that says they’re an expert can only be a good thing for them after all. Make sure they’re experts with a good domain authority (see tactic 47) and a decent following on social media, if you can – this will ensure an extra traffic and SEO boost! Ecommerce Marketing: Extra marketing tactics 64. Add a few products to Amazon, eBay etc. You may never have thought about adding your products to any of these ecommerce websites; after all, you’ll make more money if you don’t have to sell through someone else. However, using these avenues to sell a few of your products can do something unexpected for you – it can give you great exposure. Some customers won’t search Google for your products – they’ll search directly on these shopping sites. So if a couple of your products feature here, it’s a great way to get your brand in their homes. Plus stores like Amazon already have great automated methods of getting reviews and suggesting your products to the right people while they’re browsing. Firstly, ensure you name your product effectively using keywords your customer will be searching for (see tactics 13 & 57). Then ensure you fill out your product descriptions as effectively as possible. More is better when it comes to product descriptions. Make sure to make a backlink to your website if you’re allowed to on the platform too. Once everything’s set up, the final step is to make sure once you sell through one of these avenues, to offer that customer something extra when they go to your website to buy next time. Simply add a little offer leaflet in with their package when you send it off. You want them to buy again, but hopefully through you (so you can make more profits – and hopefully get recommended to more customers). Whether it’s 15% off or free delivery if they buy through your site; grab their attention and use the delivery opportunity to turn them into a repeat direct customer. 65. Join a meetup and share tips with other entrepreneurs Joining a business group can be a really effective way for you to learn how to grow your online store faster – a problem shared is a problem halved after all! You can learn a bit faster about what ecommerce marketing tactics are working (and what isn’t) for other entrepreneurs so you don’t have to make the same mistakes. Plus they might have ideas you’ve never thought of! You can join LinkedIn groups or Facebook groups online or meet people in person through local ‘meetups’ – it’s a lot easier to share tips in person so Meetups is a great way to find similar people in your local area. Join in, browse the groups in your local area and share your experiences with like-minded people! 66. Reach out to bad reviewers tactically Sometimes a bad review will come in – no matter how amazing your product and service is, it is going to happen. Sometimes people are just in a foul mood and want to be mean. Look at your bad reviews as an opportunity to shine. It is much better to approach your bad reviewers with care & kindness – as people we all know some people are just out there to be negative and mean. This is your golden ecommerce marketing opportunity. If someone sees a bad review about your services, they know some people can be unreasonable, but if they see your response as being amazingly open and kind, you can turn that bad press into good press; and more customers! Not just that – often if people feel like they’ve been hard done by a faceless company, they will lash out. But as soon as you approach them personally and apologise, they can actually feel bad and more of a personal connection with you. Some of them could even become your next brand advocates! People love to check out reviews before they buy; and if they see that you’ve been nothing but gracious when people have been overly harsh, it will only make them want to buy from you more. The other thing is – if you treat bad reviewers badly – it can have the complete opposite effect. You can put off new customers completely because you’ll come off as aggressive. If you have nothing nice to say – say nothing at all! 67. Put a link to your website in your email signature Super simple, but a step that’s often forgotten when you’re first starting out – get your website noticed more and pop it into your email signature! Not only will this gain you a little traffic boost and up your ecommerce marketing game, it just looks far more professional. 68. If you have a bricks and mortar store – promote your online site there too If you’ve just taken your store online and you already have some loyal customers in real life, these guys can be a complete godsend when it comes to boosting your ecommerce store. Promote your online store to your current customers – maybe you can offer them reserving products there to pick up in store. You’ll not only encourage more custom online,they will likely spread news of your store through word of mouth – the most effective type of marketing you can find. Your current customers can offer you some great insight into what’s working well and what isn’t too – so pay attention to their feedback! 69. Automate an email sales funnel Email sales funnels are amazing. It goes something like this: Customer is browsing your site, signs up to receive offers later, but leaves because they’re unsure they want to buy They receive an email about your services and your USP (or some other benefit) A couple of days later they receive an article or video on your services A couple of days after that they receive an email A couple of days later they receive an amazing discount offer What you’ll find is often by making these email funnels super relevant, you’ll capturing more sales and new customers. They do take some time and investment to create; but once they’re setup, you can pretty much just leave them running and the ROI can be amazing. They’re like a cheap 24 hour salesman. It is something I would recommend setting up after you’ve optimised your website well first though, by making sure you have sufficient traffic, the right message and your checkout system is working well etc. 70. Delegate the right things (if you can) Running a successful business of any kind, especially something as big as an ecommerce store, is going to take a large number of skills. From accounting, marketing, logistics, product development and fulfilment – there’s so much going on that it’s impossible for one person to manage it all. The trick to it is to delegate well – delegate things that will help you grow and that other people are more skilled at than yourself. For example, if you’re really bad with the accounts, when you get enough profits coming in – hire an accountant. If you hate social media marketing, get a social media marketer on board. If you can’t face ecommerce marketing -get someone like POP Content to help. The thing is, you will likely have some major companies competing with you who have a lot of money and people. If you want to stand a good chance of competing, you need to get talented people on board doing the right things for you; and invest in the right areas of ecommerce marketing. 71. Try out affiliate marketing Affiliate marketing is a method of online marketing where people write about your products, or make videos etc and encourage others to buy them. You’ll get more links and traffic to your website from real customers. The catch? If someone from their link buys your product, you give them a share of the profit you made. You set the terms and decide how much they get, so it won’t end up costing you more then you get out of it. It’s completely win-win. They make a bit of money and you get more customers. You can either seek out particular bloggers currently in your market and strike a personal deal with them directly, or try out a website that can help set it up for you and reach lot’s of affiliate marketers already set up like ShareASale. 72. Sponsor events Sponsoring events that your target market are interested in, can really help boost your sales – which has got to be your biggest goal in ecommerce marketing! Not only does it get you recognition as a trustworthy brand in your target market, it can even get you some very reliable, relevant and trustworthy backlinks to your website which can result in a major boost in organic traffic to your website. You can easily search Twitter for sponsorship opportunities, or go straight to Google, search for relevant organisations & reach out to them directly. 73. Get an SSL Certificate An SSL certificate gives your online store customers security when they buy from your store online. When a store has one, you’ll either see a green bar or padlock in the url bar at the top of a web page. It means payment information is secure – I honestly would never buy from a website that didn’t have this. Not only can it build up trust in your online store and therefore increase sales, it can also give you an SEO boost – Google likes to show secure sites to it’s users. The costs can vary, but if you’re an online store it’s so important that I’d recommend getting the best one you can. Usually your hosting provider will offer SSL certificates, so that’s the best place to start browsing for one. Ecommerce Marketing: Conclusion Let me leave you with this. Ecommerce marketing, much like any kind of online marketing, is ultimately all about serving your customers. Serve one customer exceptionally well and they’ll likely tell 2 more. Put them at the forefront of every aim you have and you’re likely doomed for success. SEO 101 A step-by-step SEO Tutorial for beginners that will get you ranked every single time SEO In One Day SEO is simply not as hard as people pretend it is; you can get 95% of the effort with 5% of the work, and you absolutely do not need to hire a professional SEO “expert” to do it, nor will it be hard to start ranking for well-picked key terms. Of all the channels we’ll be discussing, SEO is the one that there is the most misinformation about. Some of it is subtle, but some of it is widely spread and believed by so-called SEO consultants. How Google Works In order to understand what we need to do for SEO let’s look back at how Google started, how it’s evolving today, and develop a groundwork from which we can understand how to get ranked on Google. First, we're going to reverse engineer what Google is doing, and then simply follow their rules, picking the right keywords, and get your sites ranked. The Early Days of Google The idea for PageRank — Google’s early ranking algorithm — stemmed from Einstein. Larry Page and Sergei Brin were students at Stanford, and they noticed how often scientific studies referred to famous papers, such as the theory of relativity. These references acted almost like a vote — the more your work was referenced the more important it must be. If they downloaded every scientific paper and looked at the references, they could theoretically decide which papers were the most important, and rank them. They realized that because of links, the Internet could be analyzed and ranked in a similar way, except instead of using references they could use links. So they set about attempting to “download” (or crawl) the entire Internet, figuring out which sites were linked to the most. The sites with the most links were, theoretically, the best sites. And if you did a search for “university,” they could look at the pages that talked about “university” and rank them. Google Today Google works largely the same way today, although with much more sophistication and nuance. For example, not all links carry the same weight. A link from an authoritative site (as seen by how many links a site has pointing at it) is much more valuable than a link from a non-authoritative site. A link from Wikipedia is probably worth about 10,000 links from sites that don’t have much authority. The purpose of Google is to find the “best” (or most popular) web page for the words you type into the search bar. All this means is that you need to make it clear to Google what your page is about, and then make it clear that you’re popular. If you do that you win. In order to do that, you’ll follow a very simple process that works every single time with less effort than you probably think is required. Gaming the System Google is a very smart company. The sophistication of the algorithms they write is incredible; bear in mind that there are currently cars driving themselves around Silicon Valley powered by Google’s algorithms. If you get too far into the SEO rabbit hole you’ll start stumbling upon spammy ways to attempt to speed up this process. Automated software like RankerX, GSA SER, and Scraperbox, instructions to create spam or spin content, linkwheels, PBNs, hacking domains, etc. Some of it works very short term, but Google is smart and it is getting smarter. It gets harder to beat Google every day, and Google gets faster at shutting down spammy sites every day. Most don’t even last a week before everything you’ve done disappears and your work evaporates. That’s not the way you should do things. Instead of Internet-based churn and burn we’ll be focusing on building equity in the Internet. We’re going to build authority and get traffic fast, but we’re going to do it in a way that doesn’t disappear or cripple your site in the future. On-Page SEO The first step in getting your site ready to rank is making it clear to Google what your site is about. For now we’re going to focus our homepage (your landing page) on ranking for one keyword that isn’t your brand or company name. Once we do that and get that ranking we can branch out into other keywords and start to dominate the search landscape, but for now we’ll stay laser focused. Keyword Research The first thing you need to do is to figure out what that keyword is. Depending on how popular your site is and how long it’s been around, the level of traffic and difficulty you’ll get from this effort may vary. The Long Tail There’s a concept you need to be familiar with known as the “long tail.” Think of Amazon. They probably have a few best-selling products, but the majority of their retail revenue comes from a wide variety of things that aren’t bought anywhere nearly as often as their best-selling products. Similarly, if we were to rank the popularity of the songs played in the last 10 years, there would be a few hits that would garner the majority of plays, and an enormous number of songs that have only a few plays. Those less popular products and songs are what we call the long tail. In SEO this matters because, at least in the beginning, we’re going to go after long tail keywords - very exact, intention-driven keywords with lower competition that we know can win, then gradually we’ll work our way out. Your site isn’t going to outrank ultra-competitive keywords in the beginning, but by being more specific you can start winning very targeted traffic with much less effort. The keywords we’re looking for we will refer to as “long-tail keywords.” Finding the Long Tail In order to find your perfect long-tail keywords, you’re going to use a combination of four tools, all of which are free. The process looks like this: Use UberSuggest, KeywordShitter and a little bit of brainstorming to come up with some keywords Export those keywords to the Google Keyword Planner to estimate traffic level Search for those keywords with the SEOQuake chrome extension installed to analyze the true keyword difficulty Don’t be intimidated - it’s actually very simple. For this example we’ll pretend like we were finding a keyword for this document (and we’ll probably have to build out a site so you see if we’re ranked there in a few months). Step 1: Brainstorming and Keyword Generating In this step we’re simply going to identify a few keywords that seem like they might work. Don’t concentrate too much on culling the list at this point, as most bad keywords will be automatically eliminated as a part of the process. So since this aspect of the document is about growth hacking, I’m going to list out a few keywords that would be a good fit: Growth hacking Growth marketing Internet marketing Growth hacking guide Growth hacking book Book about growth hacking What is growth hacking Growth hacking instructions That’s a good enough list to start. If you start running out of ideas go ahead and check out keywordshitter.com. If you plug in one keyword it will start spitting out thousands of variations in just a few minutes. Try to get a solid list of 5–10 to start with. Now we’ll plug each keyword into UberSuggest. When I plug the first one - “growth hacking” - in, I get 246 results. Clicking “view as text” will let you copy and paste all of your keywords into a text editor and create an enormous list. Go through that process with each keyword you came up with. Now we’ll assume you have 500+ keywords. If you don’t, try to start with something more generic and broad as a keyword, and you’ll have that many quickly. Ideally you’ll have over 1500. Step 2: Traffic Estimating Now that you have a pretty good list of keywords. Your next step is to figure out if they have enough search volume to be worth your while. You’ll likely notice that some are so far down the long tail they wouldn’t do much for us. For example, my growth hacking list came up with “5 internet marketing techniques.” We probably won’t go after that one, but instead of guessing we can let Google do the work for us. This will be our weeding out step. Google Keyword Planner The Google Keyword Planner is a tool meant for advertisers, but it does give us some rough idea of traffic levels. Google doesn’t make any promise of accuracy, so these numbers are likely only directionally correct, but they’re enough to get us on the right track. You’ll have to have an AdWords account to be able to use the tool, but you can create one for free if you haven’t use AdWords in the past. Once you’ve logged in, select “Get search volume data and trends.” Paste in your enormous list of keywords, and click “Get search volume.” Once you’ve done so, you’ll see a lot of graphs and data. Unfortunately the Keyword Planner interface is a little bit of a nightmare to work within, so instead you’re going to need to export your data to excel with the “download” button and play with it there. Now what you’re going to do is decide what traffic you want to go after. This varies a bit based on how much authority your site has. So let’s try to determine how easy it will be for you to rank. Go to SEMrush.com and enter your URL, looking at the total backlinks in the third column. As a general rule (this may vary based on how old your site is, who the links are from, etc.), based on the number of links you have, this is the maximum level of “difficulty” you should go after. Number of Backlinks:Maximum Difficulty <30:40 <100:40–50 <1000:50–70 1000+:70+ Go ahead and sort the data by difficulty, and eliminate all of the stuff that is too high for your site (don’t worry, we’ll get those keywords later). For now you can simply delete those rows. Exact Match One important thing to note is that Google gives you this volume as an “exact match” volume. This means that if there is a slight variation of a keyword you will see it if the words are synonyms, but not if they are used in a phrase, so the traffic will be underestimated from what you would expect overall. Now with that disclaimer sort the traffic volume highest to lowest, and from this data pick out five keywords that seem like a good fit. Here are mine: growth hacking strategies growth hacking techniques growth hacking 101 growth hacking instagram growth hacking twitter Mine all look the same, but that may not necessarily be the case. Keyword Trends Unfortunately the “keyword difficulty” that Google gives us is based on paid search traffic, not on natural search traffic. First, let’s use Google Trends to view the keyword volume and trajectory simultaneously. You can enter all of the keywords at the same time and see them graphed against each other. The ones I’m most excited about are purple and red, which are “Growth hacking techniques” and “Growth hacking Twitter.” Now we’ll take a deeper look at what the competition is like for those two keywords. Manual Keyword Difficulty Analysis In order to analyze how difficult it will be to rank for a certain keyword, we’re going to have to look at the keywords manually, one by one. That’s why we started by finding some long-tail keywords and narrowing the list. This process gets a lot easier if you download the SEOQuake Chrome extension. Once you’ve done that, do a Google search and you’ll notice a few changes. With SEOQuake turned on the relevant SEO data of each site is displayed below each search result. The Google Index: This is how many pages from this base URL Google has indexed Page Links: The number of pages linking to the exact domain that is ranking according to SEMrush’s index (usually very low compared to reality, but since we’ll be using this number to compare it wil be somewhat apples to apples) URL Links: The number of pages pointing to any page on the base URL Age: The first time the page was indexed by the Internet Archive Traffic: A very rough monthly traffic number for the base URL Looking at these we can try to determine approximately what it would take to overtake the sites in these positions. You’ll notice that the weight of the indicators change. Not all links are from as good of sources, direct page links matter much more than URL links, etc., but if you google around and play with it for a while you’ll get a pretty good idea of what it takes. If you have a brand new site it will take a month or two to start generating the number of links to get to page one. If you have an older site with more links it may just be a matter of getting your on-page SEO in place. Generally it will be a mixture of both. Keep in mind that you’re going to optimize your page for this exact keyword, so we have a bit of an advantage. That said, if you start to see pages from sites like Wikipedia, you will know it’s an uphill battle. Here are a couple of examples so you can see how you should think through these things, starting with “Growth hacking techniques.” Entrepreneur.com is definitely a big name, and “growth hacking techniques” is in the title explicitly. This will be difficult to beat, but there are no links in the SEMRush index that point direct to the page. (By the way, I wonder how hard it would be to write an article for entrepreneur.com — I could probably do that and build a few links to that easily, even linking to my site in the article). Yongfook.com, have never heard of that site. 206 total links, not much traffic, this one I could pass up. It does have quite a bit of age and “Growth hacking tactics” in the title explicitly, so that would make it tough, but this one is doable to pass up after a while. Alright, so quicksprout is relatively popular, a lot of links, good age, lots of traffic, a few links direct to the page but not a ton. But the word “tactics” doesn’t even appear here. This page isn’t optimized for this keyword, so I could probably knock it out by being optimized specifically for “growth hacking tactics.” Let’s jump down a ways to see how hard it would be to get on the front page. 17 total pages indexed? Created in 2014? No links in the index, even to the root URL? This one’s mine. I should be able to front-page easily. So this looks like a good keyword. Now we just have to get the on-page SEO in place and start building a few links. On-Page SEO Now that we have our keyword selected, we need to make sure Google knows what our site is about. This is as simple as making sure the right keywords are in the right places. Most of this has to do with html tags, which make up the structure of a webpage. If you don’t know html or understand how it works, just pass this list to a developer and they should be able to help you. Here is a simple checklist you can follow to see if your content is optimized. On-Page SEO Checklist ☐ Your keyword is in the <title> tag, ideally at the front (or close to the front) of the tag ☐ Your keyword is close to the beginning of the <title> tag (ideally the first words) ☐ The title tag contains less than the viewable limit of 65 characters (optional but recommended) ☐ Your keyword is in the first <h1> tag (and your page has an <h1> tag) ☐ If your page contains additional header tags (<h2>, <h3>, etc) your keyword or synonyms are in most of them ☐ Any images on the page have an <alt> tag that contain your chosen keyword ☐ Your keyword is in the meta description (and there is a meta description) ☐ There is at least 300 words of text on the page ☐ Your keyword appears in the URL (if not the homepage) ☐ Your keyword appears in the first paragraph of the copy ☐ Your keyword (or synonyms — Google recognizes them now) is used other times throughout the page ☐ Your keyword density is between .5% and 2.5% ☐ The page contains dofollow links to other pages (this just means you’re not using nofollow links to every other page) ☐ The page is original content not taken from another page and dissimilar from other pages on your site If you have all of that in place you should be pretty well set from an on-page perspective. You’ll likely be the best-optimized page for your chosen keyword unless you’re in a very competitive space. All we have left now is off-page optimization. Off-Page SEO Off-Page SEO is just a fancy way to say links. Sometimes we call them backlinks, but it’s really the same thing. Google looks at each link on the web as a weighted vote. If you link to something, in Google’s eyes you’re saying, “This is worth checking out.” The more legit you are the more weight your vote carries. Link Juice SEOs have a weird way to describe this voting process; they call it “link juice.” If an authoritative site, we’ll say Wikipedia for example, links to you, they’re passing you “link juice.” But link juice doesn’t only work site to site - if your homepage is very authoritative and it links off to other pages on your site, it passes link juice as well. For this reason our link structure becomes very important. Checking Link Juice There are a number of tools that let you check how many links are pointing to a site and what the authority of those pages are. Unfortunately none of them are perfect — the only way to know what links are pointing to your site is to have crawled those pages. Google crawls most popular pages several times per day, but they don’t want you manipulating them, so they update their index pretty slowly. That said, you can check at least a sample of Google’s index in the Google Search Console (formerly known as Webmaster Tools). Once you navigate to your site, In the left-hand side select “Search Traffic” then “Links to your site.” There’s a debate raging over whether or not this actually shows you all of the links Google knows about (I’m 99% convinced it’s only a sample), but it’s at least a representative sample. To see all of your links, click on “More” under “Who links to you the most” then “Download this table.” This, again, seems to only download a sample of what Google knows about. You can also select “Download latest links” which provides more recent links than the other option. Unfortunately this doesn’t let us see much as to the value of the links, nor does it show us links that have dropped or where those links are from. We’d recommend SEMrush, which is free for most purposes we need. Link Structure HTML links look something like this: <a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword”>Anchor text</a> Where http://www.somesite.com is the place the link directs you to, the title is largely a remnant of time gone by, and the linked text — think the words that are blue and you click on — is called the “anchor text.” In addition to the amount of link juice a page has, the relevance of the anchor text matters. Generally speaking you want to use your keyword as the anchor text for your internal linking whenever possible. External
linking (from other sites) shouldn’t be very heavily optimized for anchor text. If 90% of your links all have the same anchor text Google can throw a red flag, assuming that you’re doing something fishy. If you’re ever creating links (like we’ll show you in the future) I only ever use something generic like the site name, “here” or the full URL. Internal Structure Generally speaking you don’t want orphan pages (those that aren’t linked to by other pages), nor do you want an overly-messy link structure. A footer that feels like a sitemap or “recommended” pages, allows you to specify anchor text, and pass link juice freely from page to page. Unfortunately it’s impossible to draw such a web without it becoming a mess, so you’ll just have to imagine what that actually looks like. We have just one more thing to go over before we start getting those first links pointing to our site. Robots.txt, disavow, nofollow, and other minutia### Most of SEO at this point is now managing stuff that can go wrong. Robots.txt Almost every site has a page at url.com/robots.txt — even google has one. This is just a plain text file that lets you tell search engine crawlers what to crawl and not to crawl. Most are pretty good about listening, except the Bingbot, which pretty much does whatever it wants no matter what you tell it. (I’m mostly kidding.) If you don’t want Google to crawl a page (maybe it’s a login page you don’t want indexed, a landing page, etc.) you can just “disallow” it in your robots.txt by saying disallow: /somepage. If you add a trailing / to it (e.g. disallow: /somepage/) it will also disallow all child pages. Technically you can specify different rules for different bots (or user agents), but it’s easiest to start your file with “User-agent: *” if you don’t have a need for separate crawling rules. Disavow Google will penalize spammy sites, and unfortunately this causes some bad behavior from bad actors. Say, for example, you wanted to take out a competitor. You could send a bunch of obviously spammy links to their site and get them penalized. This is called “negative SEO,” and is something that happens often in highly contested keywords. Google generally tries to pretend like it doesn’t happen. In the case that this does happen, however, you can “Disavow” links in the Search Console, which is pretty much saying, “Hey Google, don’t count this one.” I hope you’ll never have to use it, but if you hire (or have hired) a bad SEO or are being attacked by a competitor, that is how you combat it. Nofollow A link can have a property called “nofollow” such as this: <a href=”http://www.somesite.com” title=”keyword” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>. If you want to link to somebody but you don’t want it to count as a vote (you don’t want to pass link-juice), or you support user-generated content and want to deter spammers, you can use a nofollow link. Google says it discounts the value of those links. I’m not convinced they discount them heavily, but other SEOs are so they seem to deter spammers if nothing else. Redirects If you’re going to change a URL, but you don’t want its link juice to disappear, you can use a 301 redirect. A 301 will pass a majority of the link juice. Importantly, Google views www.somesite.com and somesite.com as different sites. So decide on one, and redirect all of one type to the other. Canonical URLs If you have two pages that are virtually the same, you can add something like <link rel=”canonical href=”https://www.someurl.com/somepage”> to say “hey, treat this page as if it were that page instead, but I don’t want to 301 it.” And with that, we’re ready to build our first links. Link Building Link building is where SEO really starts to matter, and where a lot of people end up in a world of hurt. The best way to build links is to not build links, by this i mean, when you don’t have to ask for them, they just flow in from press, customer blogs, etc. We’re going to create them in legitimate ways and not hire somebody in India to do so. That is a recipe for disaster, and I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen that take down a site. Web 2.0 is the easiest way to build high quality links are what SEOs call “web 2.0s.” That’s just a way to say “social sites” or sites that let you post stuff. Now tweeting a link into the abyss won’t do you anything, but profiles, status pages, etc. do carry some weight. And if they come from a popular domain that counts as a link. Some of the easiest are: Twitter (in your bio) Github (the readme of a repo) YouTube (the description of a video — it has to actually get views) Wordpress (yes, you’ll have to actually create a blog) Blogger (same here) Tumblr Upvote-based sites (HackerNews, GrowthHackers, Inbound.org, Reddit, etc.) If nothing else you can start there and get a half dozen to a dozen links. There are always big lists of “web 2.0s” you can find online, but keep in mind if you’re going to build something out on a blogging platform you’re going to have to really build something out. That’s a lot of content and time, but you have to do it the right way. I recommend that you should only build a half dozen to a dozen Web 2.0s. Expired Domains Another way to get link juice is by purchasing an expired domain. This is more difficult to do, but there are a lot of options such as expireddomains.net. (Google “expired domains” and you’ll find dozens of sites monitoring them.) You’ll want to purchase a domain that has expired and restore it as closely as you can to its original form using an archive. These sites likely have some link juice to pass on and you can pass it to yourself. Link Intersection Another way to find places you can build links is by using a link intersection tool. These find sites that link to “competitor a” and “competitor b” but not to you. Theoretically, if they link to both of your competitors, they should be willing to link to you. Moz, Ahrefs, LunaMetrics and others have link intersection tools that work quite well. Now that we have a few basic links flowing, we’re going to work on some strategies that will send continual links and press, eventually getting to a point where we don’t have to build any more links. Your First Drip of Traffic — Becoming an Authority Site As you’re probably learned at this point, a site that converts very well but has no traffic flowing to it still converts zero traffic. We’re going to fix that. This section takes a lot of time and effort, and in the beginning you’ll likely wonder if you’re doing anything at all. Remember that class in college that is so difficult it’s the point where most people give up, effectively weeding out the people who aren’t ready to major in a specific subject? Well this is the weeder-out chapter of growth hacking. Take a Long-Term View The reason so many people stumble on this step is the same reason people stumble on so many steps that take a little effort under time — losing weight, investing, etc. In the beginning you’re going to have a little seedling of traffic, and you’ll be looking up to those who have giant oak trees, thinking, “I must be doing something wrong.” You’re not doing anything wrong. The traffic starts as a trickle before it becomes a flood. But don’t worry if you’re a startup. Our goal is to get enough traffic that continuing to do this effort will be sustainable (meaning we won’t die before we start to see the rewards), but at the same time we’re building equity in the Internet. The type of traffic we want to build is the type that will compound and will never go away. We want to create traffic today that will still give us a little trickle in five years. Combining hundreds (or thousands) of little trickles, our site that converts, and a great product we will create a giant river. Future chapters will go into depth on the networks we need to drive traffic from, so in this chapter we’re going to focus on traffic that’s network-agnostic. Traffic that we can’t get by tapping any specific network. Just to give you some idea of scale, I’ve seen this process drive over 500,000 visits per day, though the build up to that level took almost a full year. What could you do with 500,000 visits per day? Monitoring Alerts To start we’re going to use the keywords we found in the SEO chapter, and inject ourselves (and our company) into the conversation wherever it’s taking place. To do this we’re going to use software called BuzzBundle. BuzzBundle This software lets you do a few things: Constantly monitor all mentions of a specific topic, competitor, or keyword across multiple locations on the internet (from Facebook groups to Quora questions to blog posts) where comments are available. It allows us to leave a constructive comment that references our product or company. Disclaimer: This is not the SEO comment spam you’ve seen. This step takes thought, effort, and a real human who understands what they’re typing. I don’t often say this, but you cannot effectively automate this step without it becoming spammy. If you’re trying to replicate the automated SEO spam you’ve seen on various blogs and sites this will probably work, but you’ll get banned, your clickthrough will be a fraction of what it could be. Productive Commenting We’re not going to fire up some awful software to drop spun mentions of garbage onto various comment sections online hoping that brings us SEO traffic. Our comments must do two things: Be contextual. We are only going to talk about the topic presented in an article or tweet, and only mention our company when it naturally fits in. Contribute to the conversation. I should learn something or have value added to my life by reading your comment. If you do these two things a few changes will take place: First, you’ll notice that people click on your links because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. Second, people will respect your company because you’re a thoughtful person who likes to contribute. Appendix Google Analytics Devices Overview Below is a screenshot of what a device overview looks like. New vs Returning Visitors This option allows you to identify your traffic in terms of new visitors vs returning visitors. Referral Traffic Referral traffic allows you to identify which other websites your own website has gained visitors from, in other words, which other websites have referred your site. Behaviour Overview The behaviour overview identifies the behaviour of your visitors to your site. Acquisition Overview Audience Overview The Audience overview gives an overview of the demographics of your audience- the languages they speak, their location, what operating systems they’re using and more. Google Trends With Google Trends, I can identify which terms are being searched, where in the world they’re being searched, and related search terms. Display Planner Display Planner is a Google AdWords tool that provides ideas and estimates to help you plan a display network campaign that you can add to your account or download. Google AdWords Competitor Analysis I recommend analyzing your competitors Google Adwords efforts. Ad Preview and Diagnosis Here, I can view the top performing ads, and draw inspiration from them. I recommend running an ad preview first, to assess your competition, in order to create an ad with a high quality score, which will save money and increase effectiveness. Through this you can decide which related keywords are too expensive for you, not that relevant to your posts and the market is oversaturated. Data will always lead the way, and there’s no arguing with Quality Score. Quality Score Your Google AdWords’ Quality Score is information that you can assess the effectiveness of your landing page, expected CTR (Click Through Rate), relevant and good ad copy and bid estimates. Can you spot what’s missing?…time’s up! Yes, there’s no call to action! Furthermore the headline could be improved upon, to something someone might actually search for and click on, perhaps ‘How to Lose Weight?’. Keyword Planner Part 1 Keyword Planner Part 2 Keyword Planner Part 3
Top Digital Marketing Company Digital marketing audit ─ Hermes Procurement Consulting / Hermes Procurement Blog Contents About us 3 Benefits of a digital marketing audit? 3 Who needs a Digital Marketing Audit? 4 What are the tangible benefits? 4 Hermes Procurement audit 5 Existing visibility and rankings 5 Marketplace visibility 5 Keyword suggestions 7 Link evaluation 7 Brief website synopsis 8 Website structure 10 Page speed/performance 11 Desktop Optimization Suggestions 12 Website link profile 12 Domain score 13 Page link metrics 13 Backlinks 13 User Experience (UX) 13 About us Top Digital Marketing Company is a digital marketing agency with offices in London and Dublin. Our honest and transparent digital marketing work speaks for itself. We deliver a personal, passionate & tailored service to each and every one of our clients, big or small, based in London and Dublin. We strongly believe that there’s no merit in a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach to SEO or SEM. Our digital marketing methods are innovative and always anticipate the intent of your customers and search engines. If you want clear, honest and tangible results online with the opportunity to learn how they’re achieved then get in touch now to see how we can help. Benefits of a digital marketing audit? Slash your digital marketing budget. Eliminate fraud and waste. Optimize ROI. Beat the competition. Identify opportunities for cost-savings, performance improvement, and competitive superiority with a comprehensive digital audit. As digital budgets have skyrocketed in recent years, digital marketing operations have become unwieldy, inefficient, and vulnerable to competition. Save Money: reduce waste and leakage due to misaligned tactics, mis-matched vendors, and resource gaps Optimize ROI: adjustments in staff composition, vendor selection, and marketing mix can yield more output at lower cost Beat the Competition: detailed planning roadmaps provide clear strategies for market differentiation and superiority. Digital marketing operations are complex ecosystems that are managed by a combination of full-time staff and vendors. Consider all of the pieces: Advertising & Promotion: digital media (search, display / banners, classified, mobile, digital video, lead generation, sponsorships), organic search marketing, content marketing, social media, email marketing Websites: copy, images, video / animation, landing pages, microsites, customized experiences, search, live chat, blogs Technology: marketing automation, content management, analytics, and data management Vendors: even mid-sized digital marketing operations often have 10+ vendors involved in maintenance and optimization Who needs a Digital Marketing Audit? Any senior executive who has a vested interest in an organization's digital marketing performance is a candidate. Our clients cluster around the following executive types: Boards of Directors entrusted by shareholders to guide companies through digital transformation CEOs who are increasingly dependent on digital strategies for corporate performance CFOs benchmarking their company's performance and ROI against the competition Business Unit Executives conducting strategic planning CMOs who are setting budgets and requesting increases Entrepreneurs who need to identify cost-effective digital marketing options Investors who are evaluating new ventures in marketing technology and digital advertising What are the tangible benefits? A digital marketing audit uncovers opportunities for cost savings AND performance optimization Objective and independent analysis from an experienced firm with no conflicts in the marketplace A comprehensive digital marketing framework for organizing resources, measuring performance, and understanding the digital ecosystem Competitor and best-practice benchmarking to guide resource allocation and set expectations across the organization A digital marketing strategy roadmap for corporate planning, execution, and organizational alignment Hermes Procurement audit Existing visibility and rankings We run local and national and international search for google.co.uk, google.com and google mobile. Prior to any ranking report creation, we review the client website to ascertain the business type potential audience and business niche market and targets. Rankings in SEO refers to a website’s position in the search engine results page. There are various ranking factors that influence whether a website appears higher on the SERP based on the content relevance to the search term, or the quality of backlinks pointing to the page. Every search engine gives different weights to these ranking factors which is why when you enter the same search term in different search engines you will generally get different results. SEO Keyword ranking metric measures your search engine rankings for targeted keywords and analyzes changes in that ranking over time. It's a well-accepted fact that the top 3 keywords receive the majority of clicks in search results, with the lion's share going to the first result. The keywords extracted for Hermes Procurement Consulting are based on keywords taken from the website as well as derivatives searches. When reporting, we can group keywords by priority, theme and traffic potential in line with client requirements. Marketplace visibility Total number of keywords: 247 Total 2 keyword phrases: 9 Total 3 word phrases: 2 Total 4 word phrases: 0 Total ranking keywords: 0 Keyword suggestions Your SEO keywords are the key words and phrases in your web content that make it possible for people to find your site via search engines. A website that is well optimized for search engines "speaks the same language" as its potential visitor base with keywords for SEO that help connect searchers to your site. Keyword suggestions based on the keyword “procurement consultant” and ranked by search volume. Search volume is the number of searches that are expected for a keyword within a certain period. Link evaluation Looking at the link profile for Hermes Procurement Consulting over time we see: Brief website synopsis The Hermes Procurement Consulting website is running wix. The website is mobile friendly and passes all required tests. How your website is displayed in search engine results: Your site has a Google index of five results. This infers that the website is quite small and not content rich. Website structure Most of the website structure is straight forward based on a Wix configuration with permalinks. The website suffers from and is impacted by the following: No canonical tag is set. A canonical link tag is an HTML element that helps webmasters prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the ''canonical'' or ''preferred'' version of a webpage as part of search engine optimization. ##(More info needed) Your meta description (“Procurement Consulting Services and Blog”) is 40 characters — average. Most optimal 160 - 300 characters. Meta descriptions are useful because they often dictate how your pages are shown in search results. For optimum effectiveness, meta descriptions should be 160-300 characters long. Your meta descriptions should be concise and contain your best keywords. Make sure each page of your website has its own meta description. ##(More info needed) - how to. We see your page implements HTML headings but <H1> through <H3> headings do not appear. This should be corrected. H1 (1), H2 (0), H3 (3), H4 (0), H5 (0), H6 (1). You can include keywords in your headings. The initial heading (<H1>) should include your best keywords. Using only one <H1> heading per page will strengthen your SEO. 2 images without ALT. We suggest adding ALT text to your images so that it's easier for search engines to index them. Search engines don't physically see images the way people do. ALT text is an option that allows you to specifically describe the image. ALT text attaches a description to your pictures so that they show up in Google™and other search engine's image results. ##(More info needed) - how to. 4.49% — ouch! Your websites ratio of text to HTML code is below 15%. We suggest adding a lot more text to your website. The text to HTML ratio is not a direct ranking factor for search engines but there are many factors related to the ratio that indicate best SEO practices and thus may indirectly result in higher search rankings. This page does not utilize Microformat markup. Microformat is a markup that is used to structure the data that is being sent to search engines more effectively. You can validate your markup with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. ##(More info needed) Your page does not utilize Schema.org markup. You can validate your markup with the Google Structured Data Testing Tool. Using markup data on your web pages is a powerful way to increase your visibility to search engines and gain higher click-through rates, which may in turn lead to better rankings. ##(More info needed)- how to We have detected that this page has Twitter Cards, but we could not determine their types. You can validate your cards with the Twitter Card validator tool. With Twitter Cards, you can attach rich photos, videos and media experience to Tweets that drive traffic to your website. ##(More info needed) - how to, link to twitter validation It seems that this page does not have an AMP version. If you are a publisher, you should think about creating Accelerated Mobile Pages, which is an easy way to make your pages load instantly on any mobile device. AMP is a way to build web pages for static content that render fast. AMP HTML is HTML with some restrictions for reliable performance and some extensions for building rich content beyond basic HTML. - ##(More info needed) - how to Activate CDN. A content delivery network (CDN) optimises the delivery of your website to visitors. A CDN is especially useful if your website receives visitors from various geographic regions. ##(More info needed) - how to. Secure your domain. Additional popular top-level extensions are available to order for your domain i.e hermesprocurement.co.uk Enhance your page titles. Your selected page title is not an optimal length at 36 characters. A page title that is too short is not descriptive enough to be effectively ranked in search results.##(More info needed) - how to do. Improve the page description. The description of your website is too short at 40 characters. ##(More info needed) Enhance your page content. Your homepage has a small amount of content, containing 11 words. Provide more content to encourage visits. Your website should contain at least 500 words. ##(More info needed) Integrate a Facebook Like button. With social media, you can extend your reach enormously. Integrate a Facebook Like button to allow visitors to show that they like the page. ##(More info needed) Integrate a Twitter button. Use a Twitter button to extend the reach of your website.##(More info needed) Page speed/performance Scores should be above 85/100 in order to be sufficient. Slow loading websites are likely to suffer from reduced ranking capabilities. Your website's page speed score for desktop is: medium, 74/100. The website's page speed score for mobile is: good, 96/100. Desktop Optimization Suggestions Enable compression. Compressing resources with gzip or deflate can reduce the number of bytes sent over the network. Enable compression to reduce their transfer size by 160.7KiB (69% reduction). Properly formatting and compressing images can save many bytes of data. Optimize images to reduce their size by 88.3KiB (42% reduction). Leverage browser caching. Setting an expiry date or a maximum age in the HTTP headers for static resources instructs the browser to load previously downloaded resources from local disk rather than over the network. Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content. Your page has 2 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page. None of the above-the-fold content on your page could be rendered without waiting for the following resources to load. Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources, or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML. Prioritize visible content. Your page requires additional network round trips to render the above-the-fold content. For best performance, reduce the amount of HTML needed to render above-the-fold content. The entire HTML response was not sufficient to render the above-the-fold content. This usually indicates that additional resources, loaded after HTML parsing, were required to render above-the-fold content. Prioritize visible content that is needed for rendering above-the-fold by including it directly in the HTML response. None of the final above-the-fold content could be rendered even with the full HTML response. Minify JavaScript. Compacting JavaScript code can save many bytes of data and speed up downloading, parsing, and execution time. Minify HTML. Compacting HTML code, including any inline JavaScript and CSS contained in it, can save many bytes of data and speed up download and parse times. Website link profile The link profile for a domain will have a substantial impact on a websites ability to rank. Whilst on the site SEO and content quality are imperative, link equity is also vital in the role of organic ranking contribution. It is highly recommended to link build, through high quality and diversified domains. ##(More info needed) - how to. Domain score A score of 0/100 is the weakest score for a domain. The target for Hermes Procurement Consulting should be 30/100 within the first six to twelve months. Your current domain score is: 0. Page link metrics Page link metrics refers to the number of inbound links, linking domains, and linking C blocks that point to a specific page. Basically getting more links to your website will increase that pages rankings. Your current page link metrics score is: 0/100 This would need to be increased to no less than 40/100. Backlinks A backlink is an incoming hyperlink from one web page to another website. The more backlinks you have pointing back to your site, the more popular it will be. Google also determine backlinks by quality, therefore you should strive to get higher quality sites linking back to your site. You have 0 backlinks. User Experience (UX) I’d recommend you utilise a company logo: A logo is a combination of text and visual imagery that serves two purposes. It tells people the name of the company and it creates a visual symbol that represents your business. Some logos have powerful symbolic association connected to people's memory A Phone number and email should be at the top of every page The site should focus more on the work that you do Main header should be about the core value proposition you offer your customers Limit stock imagery as much as is reasonably possible The initial view of your site or your hero section, should have a CTA ##(More info needed) whether that be a free quote etc. The Sub-header area should go straight to the services you provide, but do exclude the in depth descriptions, if people want to know more, they'll click through Colours: stick to three main colours from your primary colour palette Pre-footer: add a video (screen) with a blurb on the right about the history/longevity of your company and the great services you provide Footer: we’d recommend having a black background with white text including every page on your site, contact details and social media Menu: don’t emphases your blog. Most of your traffic will come from your blog, so you want your CTA (call to action) and have the user focus on purchasing your services hence having them be more prominent than your blog Move most of the ‘about us’ on the home page to an individual ‘about us’ page Have a ‘Why choose us’ strip on the homepage Use H2 and H3 tags throughout the blog posts Have a request a quote form. This should only incorporate the essential fields: name, email, phone, so that you can contact them and arrange a time to discuss further Social media: Push for customers to leave positive reviews if you can Include more blog posts and less CTAs Include more pictures of your services Setup a facebook pixel and install it on your site so that you can target Facebook ads at people who’ve visited your site. Likewise a google tracking pixel. Spend more time replying to users that post using your service relevant # Direct message though and industry leaders/influencers and have them promote your services in return for a fee Use sector relevant # I’d recommend doing a Youtube ‘how to’ content. 3 minute videos are sufficient. You can then post these on your sites blog and on social media