Why is a cross-functional team important?

Content should ideally be produced by cross-functional teams and their efforts together. This is vital for companies trying to mature in the digital marketing sphere. When brands are able to work together across the different specialties within the marketing department to create high-quality content, they are able to create a stronger voice for the brand and build better engagement with users.

Creating cross-functional teams is an important part of the success of your business. If your team members are able to see that their different job descriptions and duties can come together to create a successful marketing campaign, series of content, etc., your strategies will prove efficiency. Creating a successful strategy and then implementing it with a cross-functional team will prove helpful in the future as well.

Do cross-functional teams work?

Creating an integrated content marketing cross-functional team can be a challenge. Marketing groups tend to be very siloed, with each team member having a particular job that they are supposed to perform. Often times, team members are unable to see why they should contribute their talents to the team as they might not see the relevancy. It's important for the team leader to show how working together in a cross-functional setting will get the job done successfully.

However, breaking down silos is integral to process maturity and will lead to strong marketing strategies and better performing content. Avoiding a siloed strategy and environment will guide your teams members to seek opinions, advice, and to also give input in order to eventually create a better strategy. This, then, creates an overall better outcome for your strategy and campaign.

Collab Your Sales And Marketing Teams For Maximum Success

How do you influence cross-functional teams?

There are several steps you'll want to take before and during your time creating a cross-functional team and environment that works well together. 

• Bring the leaders of the different specialties together and introduce them to the new initiative. Explain the benefits of stretching across borders to create highly-targeted content. You'll want to introduce and build trusting relationships.
• Create joint manuals and guidelines that will define terms and processes for everyone working on the content. These guidelines should also detail editorial notes, such as the voice, tone, and stylistic points that you would like to keep consistent across all content.
• Offer opportunities for those in different departments to get together and work on projects or learn about each other’s specialties. Trainings, seminars, and joint projects can all help the different teams better understand each other, including process requirements, goals and priorities. You'll be able to keep everyone aligned better if they understand eachother's duties and workflow.
• Hold every team member accountable for their part in projects. While working in a cross-functional environment, team members will need to remain on top of their deadlines to ensure no one is lagging behind. Create a calendar with deadlines and team members that are in charge of specific project points. Check in often enough to ensure the team is working toward the end goal and making it there in a timely manner.

What is content creation in social media?

Social media can be a valuable asset in your content creation process. It offers you a platform where you can interact personally with a number of your prospects, thus learning more about them and their likes and dislikes. By creating a social media content strategy, you will be able to turn to your social media followers for insight about everything from popular content ideas to building brand loyalty and increasing reach.

When you put valuable efforts into your social media content strategy, fans will also tell you how much they liked the content you put out. You will be able to see the pieces that had the most success on the platforms by watching the comments as well as the traffic and shares within the platform. Since social media offers potentially millions of visitors, it can be a wonderful place to increase brand recognition and reputation.

You should carefully track the response of your audience to your articles and posts. The topics that receive the most support can be used as guides to create content for social media in future production efforts. You can also listen to conversations that occur both on and off your page and learn more about what interests your users and what they would like to learn from brands in the industry. This will also be useful when developing an editorial calendar.

How do you create a social media content strategy?

When you create content for social media that is successful, popular content, you are able to drastically increase your brand reach. Creating and promoting content that people appreciate will attract likes and shares. In order to do so, you'll first need a social media content strategy.

To begin creating a strategy, you'll need to know who your audinece is and what they're looking for on social media. You'll want to create relevant content that resonates with them. By doing keyword research through a platform like BrightEdge, you can find the keywords to use throughout your social platforms. Before you begin posting, you'll want to create an intent model and content calendar to plan your posts for the future. Once you've tested your content strategy, you can repeat these steps and alter the content to test other topics your audience may be more interested in.

When people promote your content for you, that piece and your brand will then appear on the newsfeeds of all their connections. Great content will help you bring in more followers and will introduce your brand to more people. As your community grows, you will then have an even bigger stage for conversing with prospects and learning about what they want to see from your organization.

7 Steps To Social Media Success

How do I get my content and social media efforts to work together?

Social media and content marketing each influence the other and the overall success of the website. Brands that want to compete will need to understand how to best engage with their followers on the social platforms and employ their content to connect with their community and build their brand reputation.

Conduct keyword and topic research with the BrightEdge Data Cube to identify topics that your social media followers want to see. Research also entails taking a careful look at past social media postings and seeing the pieces of the content that attracted the most attention.

Next, promote pieces designed for your social media audience across the platforms. Once you have a social media content strategy that you think people will appreciate, let people know that it is there. Use engaging photos and useful summaries in your postings so that people have a hint as to the value you offer.

Finally, encourage people to become active within your social media community. Respond to comments made on your page or on an article, invite people to post pictures of themselves with your products or services on your page, and ask open-ended questions to encourage participation. The more your community grows, the more success you will have with your social media content strategy.

Choosing a blog topic can be a difficult task, start by considering your audience and what they want to read. Be sure to research topics and analyze keyword search volume to understand how your audience might search for the blog post you're looking to write. Also remember to choose blog topics you know about and that you know your readers are interested in, your readers will pick up on your knowledge and get more out of what you write. 

Create A Successful Blog Today!

Why do people blog?

An estimated 94 percent of B2B buyers and 81 percent of consumers search online before making a decision about what to purchase. Other studies have indicated that as much as 67 percent of the buyer’s journey takes place online. In other words, your customers are using the Internet and blogs to learn about their options—independently and without direct guidance. Since the Internet has become a primary source of information for customers, failing to have a strong online presence and entice people can be devastating to a business.

Your blog articles and other website content should be designed to guide potential customers from one stage of the buyer’s journey to the next. Your content should nurture your relationships with customers and encourage them to respond to links and calls to action that provide them with content further down the sales funnel. The content you create should be carefully aligned with your ideal customers and should demonstrate that you are able to meet the needs of your readers and effectively build a relationship with them.

How can keyword and topic research improve content production?

Keyword and topic research should drive effective topic development for your website. Once you have outlined your buyer’s journey and customer personas, you should align customer pain points with the content they want to see at each stage of the journey towards a solution. Keyword research, such as through the BrightEdge Data Cube, allows you to see keywords that are related to various topics impacting your buyers. You can then select keywords that have high traffic rates, indicating that they are popular topics and have the best chances of helping you draw new prospects into your sales funnel.

What should you blog about?

If you are having trouble choosing blog topics for your keyword research, consider these tips:

• Look at your past content and uncover topics that have generated the most interest and engagement
• Consider the blog topics that your customers are most likely to ask you about when they reach out to a sales person
• Establish thought leadership by writing about news and the latest developments in your industry

You want to focus on generating topic ideas and content that provide value to your audience by helping to address their needs and concerns. Next, you'll need to optimize your content.

What is considered duplicate content?

Duplicate content is material that appears in the same form in two or more different places. It can arise for a variety of reasons. For example, poor site architecture - where a site accidentally creates multiple copies of certain pages - can result in identical content. If a spam site copies content from another website, that can also result in several versions of a page.

There may also be times when site owners want to purposefully create matching content, such as for content syndication or because they want to include a PDF version of a particular page on their site. These instances need to be carefully handled to avoid duplicate penalties.

Use Canonical Tags To Display Original Content

Does duplicate content really matter?

Google’s main objective is to provide users with high-quality search results. If they return multiple results with the same content, they are providing their users with a less-than-optimal experience. Users would have more trouble finding the sites and content that answer their unique needs if they are given a list of ten sites that contain the same information. For this reason, Google has made it clear that they penalize sites with replicated content.

How can I stop SEO duplicate content?

There are a few ways to avoid replicated content. If you are purposely syndicating content or you would like to have more than one version of a particular page of content on your site - such as an HTML version and a PDF version - using a rel=”canonical” tag can let Google know which page was the original and which one was purposefully duplicated. This will let the search engine know which one should be ranked in search engine results. If you are syndicating content on a site that does not want a rel=”canonical” tag, you can use a NoIndex tag or an attribution link, although these methods are less ideal.

You can also utilize 301 redirects for content or duplicate pages that have been permantely moved. 301 redirects are part of healthy SEO methods. Redirecting your page with a 301 will help you eliminate matching content.

Within your own site, it is a good idea to regularly run a site audit, such as the one offered by BrightEdge, to check for any duplicate content. If you find multiple pages, you can delete the extras or use the canonical tag, depending upon your needs.

Taking the steps to understand and avoid duplicate penalties can help you maximize your content exposure while maintaining a strong reputation with Google and your visitors. It's important, for your SEO health and success, to practice both on page and technical tactics. If your site is being picked up by Google for having reciprocated content, not only will you be penalized then but it can also impact your results in the future. Having successful SEO strategies will keep your site in check going forward. Work to lift traffic and rankings on a regular basis with healthy SEO.

How do I increase conversion rates?

To increase conversion rates, know that it largely revolves around making your site more appealing for customers and encourages them to complete your desired action. Regardless of whether you want to sign up for an emailing list or buy a product, you need to make sure you have a firm understanding of precisely who you want to target and what they want to see on your pages.

Here are 5 ways to increase conversion rates from your websites:

1. Identify your target personas
2. Know where your audience is in their buyer's journey
3. Consider the best offers
4. Consider rephrasing your offer
5. Use psychological principles

1. Identify your target personas. Before you can effectively increase rates by building landing pages or creating ads, you need to understand who will be the most likely to buy your product. You have to know the pain points and obstacles of these potential customers. The better you understand their motivations and hesitations, the easier it will be for you to create content that really engages them. You will be able to create a landing page that promises to help with a specific pain point or objection, improving your ability to convert them.

2. Know where your audience is in their buyer’s journey. What are their pain points and objections at this point? Not only must you have a thorough understanding of who your target personas are, but you also must know what their buyer’s journey looks like and how they progress through it to increase rates. You want to know the platforms they frequent at different points, their obstacles and objectives, and what will encourage them to convert on a given page.

3. Consider the offers that will appeal most to these people at this moment. As you design particular landing pages, you want to have a specific buyer persona and a particular moment in the buyer’s journey in mind. The landing page should be tailored to what people at this stage want to see to entice them to buy. Use all of the insight you have gained regarding your personas and what their journey looks like to create an effective page.

4. Consider rephrasing your offer to produce a good conversion rate. If you have followed steps 1-3 but your find that your conversion rate still does not perform as well as expected or desired, you may want to consider redrafting or rephrasing the offer. You know that there must be some type of misalignment between what customers want to see at this precise moment of the buyer’s journey and what they actually see. In order to increase conversion rates, you'll want to figure out what it is. Perhaps your landing page does not clearly articulate how this offer aligns with what they seek, maybe you offer the landing page too early or too late in the buyer’s journey, or maybe the landing page design doesn't inspire confidence in the audience regarding your ability to help them.

Revisit your most successful landing pages to see if there is anything you've previously done differently on the pages with the highest conversion rates. Study your personas and their journey again, particularly the area of the journey that you target with this landing page to see if any adjustments should be made. Look at the conversion rate over time to see if it's rising, falling, or remaining consistent. Perform A/B testing to help you identify potential problem areas in the design or content that might encourage more people to buy.

5. Use psychological principles, such as group validation. Landing pages can also receive a boost when they help prospective customers begin to understand the appeal from other genuine customers. Endorsements from others, testimonials from real customers, and even images of real customers using your product can all help to encourage potential new customers to convert on your page.

As you make these changes, remember to continue to track metrics on your page. Look at your traffic rate and how that relates to your conversion rate and the revenue you are able to generate. Building a successful landing page that converts a high percentage of traffic requires a considerable amount of thought, but with proper planning it can drive growth and success.

What is a good conversion rate?

A good conversion rate can vary widely depending upon the type of industry you are in and the type of page you run. For example, an ecommerce page will likely expect a higher rate than a B2B organization, as a B2B buyer’s journey is longer and more dependent upon nurturing than the typical ecommerce store’s. The B2B brand will also have to closely examine their rates for smaller, earlier conversions - such as signing up for an email newsletter or registering to receive gated content. This will help them to track customers as they move throughout the more involved buyer's journey.

Conversion rates can vary widely. Typically, you'll see a good conversion rate within the 2-5 percent range. This should be considered average for websites. If your site falls below this, you will want to dedicate time to bringing your conversions higher.

Websites that are well-optimized, however, can achieve rates that are as high as 10-11 percent. While only a few websites will be able to reach this level, this means that brands should not stop working to improve their landing pages if they reach 4-5 percent. They still have room for improvement and more customers that they can bring in.

What is a good conversion rate for Facebook?

When it comes to Facebook ads, the demographic targeting and the ability to retarget does help brands see strong results. The average Facebook conversion rate is above 9 percent, as many of the customers who click on an ad end up completing the desired action.

Brands that have not seen high Facebook conversions should consider the potential improvement they can obtain through retargeting their ads. Remarketing ads allow you to remind people who have engaged with your brand in the past, but ended up not buying anything, that you have something to offer them.

Also pay close attention to the content you post on your Facebook page and how you engage with your audience. Make sure that the content appeals to the people you target with your ads and promotions. Like any other landing page, the page your ad brings prospective customers to should align with their buyer’s journey and their persona.

What is a good conversion rate for email?

A good conversion rate for email can vary depending upon the type of email you sent out. For example, newsletters and standard informational emails might see open and click through rates of around 20 percent, but their rates will be significantly lower than emails that were sent to engage with customers who recently made a purchase or who abandoned a cart. The later two have an average rate of 5 percent.

How do you calculate a conversion rate?

Calculating a conversion rate will help you better understand how many people visiting your page complete your desired action.  A number that is too low indicates that your page has not appropriately engaged the target audience. It may call for changes to the structure and optimization of the page itself if it does not do a good job of encouraging qualified leads to complete a conversion. It might also call for a reorganizing of the entire marketing process, if the leads and traffic you bring in do not align well with who would be interested in buying your product.

The formula to calculate the a conversion is relatively straightforward. You take your number of conversions and then divide that by the number of interactions you had. For example, if you want to calculate the rate from an ad, you might take the number of clicks you ad had divided by the number of impressions. If you want to calculate the conversion rate of a landing page for an email newsletter registration, you might take the number of people who register divided by the rate of traffic.

Many of the platforms that you use for various parts of your digital strategy will help you calculate good conversion rates. For example, if you use Google Ads, they will give you the conversion rate on your ads. The BrightEdge platform can also help you track the rate of particular conversion activities.

As you build your website and begin to optimize it, you want to get a baseline conversion rate in the beginning. This will help you start to better understand how changes you make to your site impact the your rate. If your rate improves, you will have a better understanding of what your prospective customers like and what encourages them to engage. Conversely, if your rates get worse, you will know that your customers do not respond well to the changes you just made.

Tracking conversion rates over time will also help you get a better idea of how conversion activity might vary throughout the year. You might see good conversion rates at particular times of the year, where as they drop off at other times. This can help you gain a better understanding of customer patterns and monitor how these rates align with your revenue rates.

Identifying these patterns can help you maximize your understanding of your website and ensure that your content is ready for prospective customers throughout the year.

Start tracking your conversion rates with the BrightEdge platform!

What is retail marketing?

Retail marketing is the promotion of retail products to a specific audience in hopes of gaining traffic to a website or retail store to increase awareness and generate sales. Retail is currently going through a cosmic shift in retail marketing strategies, focused heavily on digital business transformation. However, as an industry, retail companies are inexplicably lagging behind all other industries.

According to a recent Gartner Digital Business Survey, as few as 3% of retailers are delivering clear results from their digital marketing initiatives. The survey further finds that there is a lack of clarity by retail marketers concerning their objectives. Specifically, they tend to struggle to define goals for the retail channel that are separate from e-commerce initiatives. This leaves us with the question, "how can the remaining 97% of retailers gain clarity and results towards their retail marketing initiatives?" The answer is to listen to the voice of the customer and align retail marketing initiatives with the new digital customer journey. 

In order to understand the retail buying experience it is important to evaluate the following trends that are affecting the retail customer journey.

What are retail marketing examples?

1. The Rise of Omnishoppers

We now live in a new world of "omnishoppers" where 81% of shoppers first learn about a product online before they buy in-store. It is vital to support this new hybrid (online and in-store) shopper with easy access to all the information they need at the moment they need it. While the customer journey clearly begins online it has been reported that up to 88% of online shoppers will continue to make the purchase in-store after making the buying decision online. In order to drive results, marketers in the retail industry should focus on omnichannel marketing strategies.

2. Voice Search

Voice search is on the rise and is expected to reach 50% of the search queries by 2020 according to Comscore, so it could be as large of a growth factor in search as mobile was between 2012 and 2017. This is good news for the retail industry if companies build valuable content that reaches the shopper at this crucial moment. While some shoppers may buy certain consumables through voice search it is unlikely that they will make an entire buying decision for common retail items such as electronics, fashion, and home goods. However, retailers can influence their decision at this moment.

3. Artifical Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the rise in retail marketing. In a recent survey to over 500 marketers, we found that 26% of marketers believe AI is the next big thing in marketing yet only 4% of them have actually implementing AI into their marketing strategies.  This represents a great opportunity for savvy retail marketers to implement AI in their initiatives. AI can help increase your online visibility through clear insights that accelerate the time to results and ROI. Imagine reviewing a prioritized optimization plan put together by an AI-powered virtual data analyst in the morning, and getting your team to work on the most important tasks before lunch.

4. Local Search

Retail Marketers must win the local search results. With digital experiences varying according to location, you can get a skewed view of how your customers experience search locally if you confine your analysis of organic demand (search volume) and content performance (organic ranking) to a single location. You may fail to see the variances in search volume between a metropolitan area and a small nearby town. And using a single-location view of organic performance can hide the fluctuations in ranking across multiple geographies. Learn more about how BrightEdge can help your local optimization efforts here.

5. Customer Reviews

Shoppers have instant access to reviews. For example, Yelp allows customers to leave their impressions and experiences with various businesses, and with over 70 million unique monthly visitors on mobile and 74 million unique monthly visitors on a desktop, the potential impact of this site on consumer behavior is significant. By and large, these reviews have a positive impact on buying decisions and displaying these ads next to a product can increase conversions by 270%.

6. Personalization

Personalization that drives customer loyalty and rewards shopping behaviors is increasingly expected by today's consumer. Retailers have understood the importance of customer loyalty for many years, in fact, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools have been used by stores for over 30 years to better understand their customer's buying habits. While this strategy has been executed for a long time new technologies such as marketing automation have allowed personalization between the store and the buyer to be automated and highly personalized. From emails to the website experience all the way to the in-store customer experience there is a high expectation of personalization that should be incorporated into the overall retail marketing plan. It is now necessary to activate content across every channel at every opportunity. Personalizing the sales experience can increase customer loyalty and engage the shopper at a whole new level. Retailers may be able to stay one step ahead of the competition by engaging customers at every touch point and making use of smart content and smart assets, such as associate-facing applications used in stores or interactive booths or screens for customers to “check in” to their store to earn a reward. Personalize email messages with the shopper’s name in the subject line and body; send personalized greeting cards via regular mail; and provide rewards or thank-you messages for visiting a brick-and-mortar store based on the shopper’s latest purchases or social media checkins. To learn more about this topic, click here.

7. Social Media

Social Media sharing drives quality inbound links as well as traffic, leads, and revenue, making it an important trend for retail marketing. Search engines are increasingly using social media activity such as Likes, Tweets, Shares, and +1s to determine which pages are most relevant for keyword searches, and to provide a personalized search experience. This offers an enormous opportunity for marketers to leverage social media to directly impact content performance, improve search rankings, and increase revenue generated through organic search.

8. Mobile Devices

Retail shoppers turn to mobile devices more frequently than desktop to research. Successful retail marketing includes strategies to deliver an exceptional mobile experience. In order to optimize the shoppers experience on mobile the retail website needs to load quickly. Crawl your mobile domain or main domain (if responsive) with ContentIQ to uncover site errors, such as slow response time or noindex tags. In addition, recent BrightEdge research confirms the first page that ranks for a search query is different on mobile vs. desktop SERPs 35% of the time. Learn more about how BrightEdge can help your mobile retail marketing strategy here.

9. Ongoing SERP Changes

Google has implemented ongoing SERP type changes that can add a lot of value to your retail marketing. From Local 3-packs to Quick Answers there are a variety optimization initiatives that can help capture more of your retail shoppers. 

10. Bounce Rates and Overall Site Performance

Over half of retailers have a bounce rate greater than 40%. This is not good. It is imperative to trim your bounce rate. A one-second increase in page load time can have a 50% impact on mobile bounce rate! Two seconds can more than double mobile bounce rates! Check your page load speed here.

Brands are now standardizing on the BrightEdge platform across key industry verticals, including the retail industry. Customer include Nike, 3M, Microsoft, and Four Seasons Hotels. BrightEdge now works with eight (8/10) out of the top ten largest retailers. To learn more about how BrightEdge can help your retail marketing initiatives contact us today.

Begin your journey toward optimizing your retail site with the industry leader in SEO, BrightEdge!

Budgeting the cost of a blog

The most common blog post cost discussed by most freelancers is around $100 for a basic post, although more technical posts can cost significantly more. When charging per word, writers will often quote from $.10 and up to $2 per word.

There are three main payment systems for the creation of content: pay by the word, pay by the project, and pay by the hour. For most brands, the blog posts they order are pay by the word or the project. Blog post costs can vary widely depending upon factors such as:

• The level of expertise required
• The amount of research needed
• The expected length of the piece

Do you have to pay for a blog?

No, you don't have to pay for a blog. There is always the solution to write the piece of content yourself if you or someone on your team has the time and the experience. Though, writing a well-developed blog can have a positive impact on a website’s success and your cost doesn't go to waste. In fact, one study found that B2B marketers who create a blog will be able to generate 67 percent more leads than those who do not.

However, many professionals struggle to find the time to create effective content. Many businesses find it preferable to outsource at least part of their content production to ensure that they are able to maintain a consistent schedule and high standard of quality. A blog post cost can easily be factored into your budget.

Can I request changes to my paid blog posts?

Edits and revision expectations should be negotiated with writers before placing orders. Most writers should understand that some adjustments may be needed on occasion - particularly at the beginning of the professional relationship. It is a good idea to lay out, upfront, exactly what you want to see in the post to reduce the need for changes and to avoid frustration on both sides. If you do need adjustments made to a post, be sure to ask promptly. Some bloggers will offer a specific number of edits, revisions, or time spent after submission included in their initial quote. Going beyond those revisions would cost you more. You can communicate how many edits and the type of edits the writer is willing to make without additional charges to your cost. Typically, if edits take longer than a few minutes, they won't be included and you'll need to pay the additional fees, whether hourly or per word.

Outsourcing content creation can be very helpful for businesses interested in keeping up with the demands of modern digital marketing. Cultivating a relationship with a writer will allow them to understand your brand voice and goals, creating an excellent opportunity to help your brand grow over time.

An A/B test, also known as a split test, is an experiment for determining which of different variations of an online experience performs better by presenting each version to users at random and analyzing the results. So, what is A/B testing? A/B testing demonstrates the efficacy of potential changes, enabling data-driven decisions and ensuring positive impacts.

Kyle Rush, VP of Engineering at Casper and former Head of Optimization at Optimizely, used A/B testing to increase donation conversions by 49% when he worked for the 2012 Obama for America campaign, helping the Digital team raise $250 million in 6 months. “If you aren’t testing, you don’t know how effective your changes are,” Rush says. “You might have correlation but no causation.”

A/B testing can do a lot more than prove how changes can impact your conversions in the short-term. “It helps you prioritize what to do in the future,” Rush says. “If you have 20 items on your product roadmap and you want a definitive answer as to what will move the needle, you need data. If there’s a feature that is very similar to a feature that did not work in testing, don’t go forward with it.”

“With A/B testing, you have so much more knowledge for what to roll out 3-to-4 years out.”

Used continuously and consistently, testing can improve your user’s overall experience, increasing your conversion rates in the short-term and over time.

Benefits of A/B Testing

1. Improved user engagement

Elements of a page, app, ad, or emails that can be A/B tested include the headline or subject line, imagery, call-to-action (CTA) forms and language, layout, fonts, and colors, among others. Testing one change at a time will show which affected users’ behavior and which did not. Updating the experience with the “winning” changes will improve the user experience in aggregate, ultimately optimizing it for success.

2. Improved content

Testing ad copy, for instance, requires a list of potential improvements to show users. The very process of creating, considering, and evaluating these lists winnows out ineffective language and makes the final versions better for users.

3. Reduced bounce rates

A/B testing points to the combination of elements that helps keep visitors on site or app longer. The more time visitors spend on site, the likelier they’ll discover the value of the content, ultimately leading to a conversion.

4. Increased conversion rates

A/B testing is the simplest and most effective means to determine the best content to convert visits into sign-ups and purchases. Knowing what works and what doesn’t helps convert more leads.

5. Higher conversion values

The learnings from A/B testing successfully applied to one experience can be applied to additional experiences, including pages for higher-priced products and services. Better engagement on these pages will demonstrate similar lifts in conversions.

“We use A/B testing before making any major changes at Casper,” Rush says. “We A/B tested components of a new e-commerce experience before we launched it with our new, premium mattress. The premium mattress is a huge change to our business model so it was testing was important to make sure the launch went well.”

6. Ease of analysis

Determining a winner and a loser of an A/B test is straight-forward: which page’s or app’s metrics come closer to its goals (time spent, conversions, etc.,).

“In the past A/B testing metrics were just raw numbers and you’d have to interpret them to make a decision,” Rush says. “Now services like Optimizely make the decisions for you with stats engines following best practices.”

And while testing services have evolved to include statistical analysis for users of all levels of spreadsheet expertise, the numbers for a comparison of two experiences are underwhelming in their complexity. The clarity of these stats also undermines the highest-paid person’s opinion (HIPPO) that may otherwise be overvalued.

7. Quick results

Even a relatively small sample size in an A/B test can provide significant, actionable results as to which changes are most engaging for users. This allows for short-order optimization of new sites, new apps, and low-converting pages.

8. Everything is testable

Forms, images, and text are typical items for A/B testing and updating, but any element of a page or app can be tweaked and tested. Headline styling, CTA button colors, form length, etc., can all affect user engagement and conversion rates in ways that may never be known if they’re not tested. No idea need be rejected on a conference call; testing and metrics, not emotions, prove what works and what doesn’t.

9. Reduced risks

By A/B testing, commitments to costly, time-intensive changes that are proven ineffective can be avoided. Major decisions can be well-informed, avoiding mistakes that could otherwise tie up resources for minimum or negative gain.

“The most obvious way to use A/B testing is to use it to rule something out,” Rush says. “If you see that making a change could decrease conversions, don’t move forward with it.”

10. Reduced cart abandonment

For e-commerce, getting a user to follow through with checkout after clicking “buy” on an item is a significant challenge, as most potential customers abandon their carts before paying. A/B testing can help find the optimal combination of tweaks to the order pages that will get users to the finish.

“The user experience between checkout and entering a shipping address is the best place to focus on with A/B testing,” Rush says.

11. Increased sales

Any and all of the above-mentioned A/B testing benefits serve to increase sales volume. Beyond the initial sales boost optimized changes produce, testing provides better user experiences which, in turn, breeds trust in the brand, creating loyal, repeat customers and, therefore, increased sales.

How do you perform an A/B test?

1. Go for big easy

Inculcate a culture of experimentation by A/B testing user experience elements that are easy to change but still have big potential impacts. Test changes to optimize your landing page headline and CTAs, adjusting the language to determine the best messaging. A headline change could net a 100% or better increase in conversions. With this quick win, you’ll be enabled and emboldened to do additional testing.

“Get your feet wet and see how it goes,” Rush says. “Keep doing it until you pick it up. The more you do it, the better you get at it. It’s not magic.”

2. Find your sore spots

When considering what to test, look at your sales funnel to determine where you’re losing potential conversions.

“Figure out what the conversion rate is at each stage of the funnel,” Rush says. “Focus on where the biggest drop-off occurs. Optimizing that will make for the biggest impact.”

3. Test changes only where changes are needed

If it ain’t broke, don’t test changing it.

“If a page has a conversion rate of 99%, you don’t have a problem,” Rush says. “But if you open it up to testing, people will find things to nitpick based on their preferences, such as the color. But testing for that is a waste of time.” 

4. Make A and B significantly different

A/B testing can validate a decision to make a change or to keep things as they are, but only if the proposed update is noticeably different from the original (though still within site style guidelines).

“Adding a comma isn’t going to make a difference,” Rush says. “Pick something that is completely different, not just another way to say the same thing. It should be high-contrast but still within brand. If it’s too much contrast, you can always dial it down.”

5. Get ideas from everyone

The hardest part of A/B testing is coming up with what to change and how to change it. With regards to user experience, it’s important to think—and look—outside the box for ideas.

“High-level ideas for changes can come from anywhere,” Rush says. “Not from brainstorming sessions, which may be a waste of time. Ideas have come from my mom based on my asking her, ‘What do you think about this?’ She has a unique perspective, which can be helpful.”

6. Control for time

To prove causality, an A/B test needs control variables, the elements that are kept the same throughout the experiment. One variable to control for is time, i.e., the period during which the test is run. Don’t run tests sequentially: the period for an A/B test must be the same for both “A” and “B” variables so that the user base seeing each version is the same.

7. Run tests in week-long increments

Unless you’re planning to post different versions of your page or app on the weekends, your A/B test should run long enough to ensure a full week of traffic. This ensures you’ll get accurate overall results that account for dips and spikes due to the day of week and time of day. 

8. Always be innovating

A/B testing can optimize your site or app via incremental improvements that yield quick, positive results. But don’t allow short-term successes to supersede real innovation which requires risk-taking and possible failures—but also has the greatest potential for even richer rewards.

Meta tags are important because they impact how your site appears in the SERPs and how many people will be inclined to click through to your website. They will therefore impact your traffic and engagement rates, which can impact your SEO and rankings. Meta tags are an important part of a solid SEO strategy. Although some tags might not have a direct impact on rankings, they do impact how your site appears within the digital ecosystem. Additionally, they could be a factor in many non-traditional search results, like Knowledge Graph, Google image search, voice, and more. No brand should neglect them when developing content.

What are HTML meta tags?

Meta tags are pieces of information you use to tell the search engines and those viewing your site more about your page and the information it contains. Meta tags include:

• Title tags: the title of your page, which should be unique for every page you publish
• Meta description: a description of the content on the page
• Viewport tag: impacts how your content appears on mobile devices
• Robots: can be used to indicate content that you want a “noindex” or a “nofollow”
• Hreflang tags: allows the search engine to identify the language and country you want content displayed for when you have an international audience
• Canonical tags: used to specify the primary or principle version of the page
• Open graph tags: used to specify which assets show up in title and image by default when sharing links on social sites
• Content type: impacts how your page is rendered in the browser

Meta tags have varying levels of importance for brands based upon the type of content being produced and how you want the material indexed. Given that meta tags are pieces of code, it is generally recommended that you do not include tags that you do not need but that any tags that are important for your goals should not be neglected.

How do I use meta tags?

Many of these meta tags, such as the title tags and the meta description length, will impact how relevant your site appears in the SERP.  When users receive their list of results, they will see your site title and a short description of your content -- the meta description. Users scan this information to see if they should click on a particular result. Including your main keyword naturally in these sections can boost your apparent relevance on the SERP, increasing your click-through rate. Since your SEO title tag also appears in the tab for your web page, when users have multiple pages open, this title can help entice the user to click back over to your content and further engage with your page.

With the other tags, including the content type and viewport tags, you will help Google better understand your type of content. Viewport tags will ensure that your content provides mobile users with a smooth, positive experience. Since Google’s mobile update and the recent discussion about the shift towards a mobile-first algorithm, brands want to ensure that their content has been prepared for mobile users in every way possible.

Other tags, including the Robots and hreflang tags, are useful when you have particular restrictions for your content, such as content you do not want indexed or if your content was written specifically for people in certain countries. Filling out these tags will help ensure that your content is indexed appropriately and displayed to the right audience. Since content showing up for the wrong language or country or duplicate content penalties materializing in response to content you did not want indexed will hurt your rankings and reputation, these tags are essential.

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