gregalbuto

M Posted 7 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

Why track social media? Social infiltrates and impacts nearly every aspect of the modern consumer's life. Forty-one percent of users report that they use the social media platforms to keep in touch with friends and family, 40 percent say that they use it to get their news.

Not only does it impact social relationships and the spread of news but retail as well. Forty percent of people in the same report also said that they use social media to follow their favorite brands, and one in four report that they have purchased a product they saw on social media.

The rise of social media has driven marketers to consider carefully the importance of using these platforms in marketing campaigns as a means of engaging users. Considering that 77% of Americans have at least one social media account, its ability to reach target consumers should be clear.

As marketers work to build a social strategy, however, you want to make sure that you understand how to appropriately track social media with the rest of your strategy and know how to measure your results. It is only through this careful analysis that you will be able to accurately determine the success of your efforts and know how to modify and improve them moving forward.

How to use & track social media in conjunction with the rest of your marketing strategy

Social media can provide a powerful means of learning more about your target consumer and capitalizing on new trends and opportunities. The constant conversation and the use of trending topics to track social media can give brands insight into what their customers are most interested in at that moment, which can complement standard keyword research. Producing content that speaks to these trends while they are popular can help brands increase their rankings and grow their reputation.

You can also use social media to get another window in the strategy and content of your competitors. Track social pages to see what they produce and what the target audience responds to best. You can see what types of material gets shared and promoted within your sector and develop a strategy that will help you position yourself better against your competitors.

Finally, social media can be used to promote content and build personal relationships with users. You can let your followers know when you publish new material and make it easier for them to share interesting content with their own connections.

In an era of constant communication, customers rely heavily on personal relationships with brands they do business with. The ability to track social media and provide a platform for people to speak with their favorite brands directly helps to nurture this connection between customers and brands. This boosts loyalty and helps customers feel as though this brand truly cares about them and their pain points and wants to help.

To build this strong social media strategy, brands also want to take the time to establish their tracking metrics.

Measure & track social media success

There are a number of social KPIs you can monitor, both on and off the platforms themselves. Knowing what you want to accomplish from your social media strategy will help you determine which metrics matter the most to you. Here are a few ways you can monitor your strategy.

Track social media metrics in platforms

You can track social media platforms and a number of different metrics that will lend insight into how people respond to your material and your profile overall.

• Track social engagement with the content you post. Look at how many likes, shares, comments, and other types of engagement your material receives. This will help you see how people respond to your content and how well it captures their interest.
• Look at how people engage with your profile in general in response to your posts. See how many followers you have on your profile and the rate at which that number grows. When people interact with your content and profile, that activity automatically appears on the feeds of their connections. This means high engagement numbers will get your profile in front of even more people, and encourage interested people to engage with you further.

Track social on your internal site

The key to your social media profile is to generate traffic and attention to your site and capture more leads. Track social media activity on your site to help you better understand how the social platforms impact your buyer’s funnel.

• Track social traffic sources on your website. This will give you a better idea of how people find your content. If, for example, you see a considerable amount of traffic coming from your social media pages, you know that your content has attracted the interest of many people who follow your brand. As you track social media clicks, check also the bounce rate that occurs from these users. This will provide valuable insight regarding not only if your content headings catch people’s eyes, but also how well the content itself engages them.
• As you see your traffic start to generate on your site, you can then see how well these new visitors follow through with the rest of your sales funnel. Analyze the percentage of your social media visitors that become leads and how many of them then progress through each stage of the buyer’s journey through journey maps.
• Look also at the percentage of social traffic who end up making purchases and how large those purchases are. This provides insight into the quality of the leads you gather through social media and the ROI they provide your business. You can then start to gather data about the financial benefit of your efforts, which will then influence future strategy decisions.

Track your position on the SERP

Finally, in addition to seeing how your social strategy helps you build relationships with people on the platforms and generate traffic for your site, you also want to track how your social efforts impact the rest of your SEO. Namely, you want to see if your social media efforts have helped your page improve in the SERP rankings.

Keep in mind that Google reports that they do not track social media signals, specifically. However, marketers have noticed that sites receiving large amounts of traffic and quality engagement numbers tend to see higher rankings--and social media can help you in both areas.

As you promote content on social media, mark this event on the BrightEdge platform. You can then determine if your content sees growing traffic and engagement numbers following promotion. You will also be able to see if this increased engagement then helps to lead to higher rankings.

Boosting rankings can help your material earn more clicks, and therefore more revenue.

Social media can provide you with a powerful means of engaging with prospective customers and building personal relationships with them. No brand, however, wants to waste time and money on efforts that do not bring in a discernible ROI. Learning how to track your social strategies both within the platform, on your site, and on the SERPs can help you better understand your progress and make the optimal decisions for your brand moving forward.

maspillera

M Posted 7 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

You want to build a website that keeps people engaged. You want to achieve the lowest possible bounce rate. Encouraging people to click around your site and decide to enter your sales funnel is a must and, most importantly, you want to inspire users to become paying customers.

Learning how to improve the website engagement metrics on your website can help you not only better interest your readers, but also improve your SEO.

Google and other search engines look at the bounce rate on your site. A bounce rate refers to a single page session, when a user clicks on your page, but then leaves without engaging further with the site. This means that they do not click on any extra elements on the page, fill out forms, or click onto other pages. A user will be counted as a bounce if they:

• Click off the page
• Click back to the SERP
• Close the browser
• Follow an outbound link
• Stay inactive on the site and then time out the session.

Improving the duration people stay on your site can help you build your SEO while also building bonds with users and encouraging them to enter your sales funnel. High bounce rates are a negative signal to Google for rank. Thus, better website engagement will grow your SEO and your business.

What is a good bounce rate?

On average, a bounce rate below 60% is good. It means that 40% of the people who arrived on your website engaged with the site. The range is really everything in between. Let's look at the factors to consider.

Before we can begin to discuss what qualifies as a ‘good’ bounce rate, we must first examine all of the ways that bounce rates can vary due to outside factors.

For example, the type of page will have a big impact on the bounce rate. Contact pages that supply phone numbers and addresses, for example, are generally high-bounce pages. People click onto the page to view the contact information for their business of interest, and then they click off. This page will likely have a high bounce rate across all websites, without that high bounce rate indicating anything negative about the site.

Similarly, you must also consider the industry and the type of content that this site focuses on providing. A site that offers recipes for people will have a higher bounce rate overall than a site for a real estate business. A recipe site expects people to open the page, follow the recipe, and click off. While they may have a few people click on related recipes or links to a blog from the page, they will be significantly outnumbered by those who simply digest the recipe and move on.

On the other hand, real estate sites do not expect people to look at a single house and click off. They work to engage people interested in browsing real estate properties within a designated area. Real estate professionals may also look to engage readers with content that helps them understand lending options or what to look for in a good real estate agent.

A very high bounce rate above 90% for a paid traffic source can seem very discouraging and could be an indicator that the campaign targeting needs to be narrowed. However, advertising should usually be measured by ROI of the traffic that does convert to business value.

To know a good bounce rate for your particular site, your best point of comparison will be other brands within your sector. As explained above, looking at average bounce rates for all websites could easily provide you with very misleading information.

Fortunately, Google makes it easy for brands to see the bounce rates within their industry. Use the benchmarking feature within Google Analytics to better understand the stats for your specific industry. You can then start to see how you compare. This will give you a great starting point as you prepare to work on keeping people on your page and engaged with your site. As you make changes, compare your progress with this initial benchmark to see the impact you have.

How do I increase website engagement metrics on my page?

To build stronger website engagement, you need to find ways to keep people on the page and generate interest in what you have to say. This will help encourage more people to enter your sales funnel, lower your bounce rate, and build website engagement across the site, which will in turn boost SEO.

To increase website engagement, try the below steps:

• Create a clear page design
• Add visual features that encourage interaction
• Implement site search
• Open outside links in new tabs
• Supply readers with internal links
• Optimize your menus
• Provide a personalized experience

1. Create a clear page design. A clean design is easier for people to read and digest. They are able to absorb more information and gain a better appreciation of what you have to say. Reduce clutter, use lists, bullet points, and other features that allow readers to focus on the aspects of the page that matter the most to them, helping them see how well you understand their needs.

Most of all, decide how the page and content fits into the site and what the next step should be and make a clear call-to-action to the visitors in the top, middle, and bottom of the page.

2. Add visual features that encourage interaction. Create an exciting page that encourages people to actively interact with your content. Using images, videos, and carousel helps to inspire people to click around your site and build a bond with your brand.

3. Implement site search. Site search is an essential site. In terms of building website engagement, site search allows power users and high-intent visitors to navigate straight to the content they're looking for. You can also integrate your site search into your analytics suite to get insights on the types of products, services, and topics your site visitors are interested in.

4. Open outside links in new tabs. To build website engagement with people on your site, you want to encourage them to remain on your site. Offering external links can play an important role in building a positive experience for the user and help them find the information that will best fit their needs. You want to make sure, however, that in clicking on these links, they do not end up disengaging with your site. Allowing the link to take your visitor off your site and onto the external site reduces the chance for them to come back and learn more about your brand and what you have to offer. Make sure all external sites open in a new tab so the user has plenty of opportunities to continue to engage with you.

5. Supply readers with plenty of internal links. Throughout your content, offer ample internal links. These links will help people find other content that you have produced that supports the ideas that this particular visitor has expressed an interest in reading more about.

6. Optimize your menus. BrightEdge Research shows that menus drive a significant portion of clicks to interior pages. Make sure your menus are well organized, not overwhelming, and feature popular content from the rest of the site.

7. Provide a personalized experience on your site. If your site has the capability to track return visitors, take advantage of this ability to provide users with a more personalized experience. Remember visitors when they come and suggest content to them that they might find interesting based on passed material they downloaded or read. Let them know you remember them and their pain points and that you've vested an interest in helping them.

Building a highly engaging site that encourages people to remain on the page can drive business for your organization and help you to grow your online user base. Improved website engagement metrics can indicate that you meet the needs of the users and that they appreciate what you have to say. This is the first step towards bringing more people into your sales funnel and driving people towards becoming paying customers.

enewton@brightedge.com

M Posted 7 years 3 months ago

t 9 min read

Given that the top three positions on the SERP secure 52 percent of the clicks, the importance of ranking content as highly as possible cannot be underestimated. Although marketers do not know the exact list of factors that Google considers and how they are weighed, Google has given us a good idea of various important criteria.

We know, for example, that the reputation of the site as a whole is heavily considered. Consider how quickly major domains, like The New York Times or BBC, can get a page ranked even before they have had the chance to gather large amounts of backlinks or even traffic. The reputation of the domain and brand carries weight.

Given the importance of domain reputation, paying attention to the content across your domain can help influence the SEO of individual pages. To build your cross-domain SEO, content pruning and building content clusters can help you establish your site as a reputable authority on particular topics.

As you look at improving your on-site SEO, here is what you should know about content pruning and nurturing content clusters.

What is content pruning?

Content pruning is the process of determining which pages do not provide value for users or the website and deleting them to create a stronger focus on the higher quality pages. It involves evaluating the old content on your site and looking to see which pages are poor quality and might even be harming the reputation of the domain as a whole. These types of pages do not perform well, do not rank well, and do not do a good job of meeting the expectations of users or search engines.

When you do go through the process of content pruning, customers who end up clicking on the URL of one of the deleted pages will find themselves rerouted to a higher quality page that then does a better job of meeting the needs of the user.

The goal behind this type of strategy is to help Google better focus on the best pages the site has to offer. This will ensure that the dilution of the poor- quality pages does not drag down the success of the domain as a whole.

What is a content cluster?

A content cluster describes a grouping of content that focuses around a particular topic or overarching idea that matters to your target audience. For example, at the top of the pyramid, you would have content that addresses a critical topic more generally. Clustered together with this topic will be information that relates to the overarching topic and can be internally linked. This type of content focuses on more specific elements of the topic, diving deeply into the material and providing critical value.

Using a content cluster helps to establish your site as an authority on the subject. You develop an impressive library related to this particular subject, making it clear to search engines and readers that you know valuable information about this topic. It also helps to organize the content so that Google can understand more easily how the content relates. Visitors to your site also find it easier to find other content that might interest them. Some of BrightEdge's content clusters include, SEO Case Studies, SEO Webinars, SEO White Papers and POVs, and SEO and Marketing Quizzes.

Creating content clusters also helps to build semantic links between related types of content. This further boosts the domain’s authority within Google, and semantic keywords help the search engine giant better understand content published.

How do I prune my content and develop my own content clusters?

To better organize your content and to take advantage of content clusters and pruning your content, you should begin by running a content audit. This first step remains essential because it will give you a good idea of precisely what types of content you have and how each piece performs and relates to the rest of the material on your website.

You can generate a list of all the indexed content on your site either through Google Webmaster or by performing a Google search precisely of your website. By typing ‘site:’ before your domain, you can then pull up a list of all the pages within your domain that Google has indexed.

Armed with the list of your pages, you can then start to analyze your existing content. Gather helpful information, such as the topics covered, the amount of traffic going to the page, its role within your buyer’s journey, how the page links to others within your site, and the number of external backlinks you have pointing at particular pages. This information will help you determine the value and quality of each individual page.

Start to organize your cluster

Now take a close look at your highest-performing pages and examine how they could be organized. Look for overarching themes or topics that seem to apply to several different pages and can start to form your clusters.

Next, perform keyword research oriented towards your target audience. You will start to compile lists of topics that matter the most to your target audience. You may have slightly different clusters that different buyer personas prioritize. Start to group these keywords and topics into your broad, overarching ideas that will form each cluster.

Examine your clusters closely to see how well they are organized. The pages within a like cluster or content silo should connect to each other well through internal links and reading recommendations that will encourage visitors to continue to engage with the site.

Determine also which content clusters have been well filled-out and which ones remain weak in terms of content quality and quantity. These gaps should be prioritized as you move forward with your content reorganization.

Begin pruning the poorest-performing content

Examine the pages of your site that had the lowest-performing statistics. Determine if this material could be modified and see improved rankings and performance. You also want to check to see if this low-performing content fits well into any of your content clusters. Content that does not fit into any of your clusters and is low performing will likely be material you end up deleting.

Try to figure out why your lowest-performing content has not been putting up the numbers you want to see. For example, does it not align well with the target audience? Is it poorly written? Is it very out-of-date? The answers to these questions will help you determine if the content is worth trying to save.

The content that you do end up deleting should be handled correctly to ensure that it does not hurt your SEO or user experience. Even if content performs poorly and doesn’t fit in well with the clusters you want to create on the site, you might still have people who follow old backlinks or otherwise end up on the now-deleted page. Make sure the material has a permanent 301 redirect and takes users to content that is the most likely to answer their needs.

Building your domain as an authoritative resource within your industry can help elevate the SEO for all your individual pages. As you perform your content audit, consider how content pruning and building content clusters can help you create the site that will help drive your site forward.