How to Determine which Marketing Channels to Focus on?

Which marketing channels should your brand be working on?

When it comes to building a strong digital presence, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to look at all of the different channels that need to be considered in a digital marketing plan. Businesses should consider the benefits of paid ads, SEO and content marketing, social media marketing, guest posts, influencers, and more. 

Rather than trying to take advantage of every opportunity available, brands need to prioritize the channels that work best for them and focus their efforts on the areas that will give them the best ROI. Consider these suggestions as you begin to narrow down your list of targeted platforms.

• Know your audience
• Monitor the competition
• Carefully track your success on different channels

1. Know your audience. To begin identifying the topic channels, carefully analyze your audience. You need to know where your customers live online and what matters the most to them as they work towards a buying decision. Consider which platforms they use the most within social media and the channels that they use at the different phases of the buyer's journey.

Speaking with your existing customers can be helpful for this step, as they can help you better understand what they wanted to see from companies as they got closer to making a purchase and what encouraged them to go with your business.

As you improve your audience insight, begin outlining the important channels at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

2. Monitor the competition. You also want to make sure you keep a close on the competition. Running competitive analysis on their websites can give you insight into the channels and strategies where they focus their efforts to gain success. This can help you gain additional information about the channels and platforms that mean the most to prospective customers as they get closer to making a purchase.

You can also use your competitor analysis to see if there are any gaps within your strategy that you need to close. Monitor your site for shortcomings, such as keyword gaps or a lack of particular types of content including images which can be corrected to build an improved website.

3. Carefully track your success on different channels. You also want to carefully track the success of your different marketing channels. Understanding how customers interact with you throughout their buyer’s journey will help you see which channels and platforms had the most influence over the customer as they prepared to make a purchase.

A quality site report, such as the one offered through our BrightEdge platform, can also enhance your ability to see your conversions and traffic by channel. You can see how customers and visitors land on your site, empowering you to make better decisions about the channels that matter the most to your target customers.

As you collect a variety of data and information, use it to begin to prioritize your marketing channels. Direct your efforts to your most important areas, continuing to monitor and measure your progress throughout your campaigns. Prioritizing your marketing areas will help you build your organization and get the best possible ROI from your marketing resources.

How to Optimize for an International User Experience?

Create the optimal user experience for international customers

As an increasing number of businesses sell to customers outside of the United States, organizations need to understand how to create the best international user experience on their website. Customers around the globe want to interact with brands that they feel understand their unique situation and genuinely want to help. The best way to create this impression lies in taking the time and effort to build a strong international user experience.

Know the local search engines

To get started, you want to know where your customers live and the prominent search engines in those locations. Although Google dominates most locations around the world, a few countries in particular do have their own search engines. China, for example, is dominated by Baidu, Russia with Yandex, and South Korea with Naver. 

Knowing the search engines that you need to optimize for will help businesses expanding overseas create the best possible content.

Understand how to use hreflang tags

Hreflang tags help you send clear signals to Google about which versions of your content should be displayed for people in different countries and who speak different languages. The tags allow you to designate particular website versions for the different languages and countries, which helps the search engine better understand how different pages relate to each other. This ensures that your international customers receive the website version most applicable to them and their needs. 

Work with native speakers

As you create content for your audience in different countries, working with native speakers in that country should rank highly as an important step. While people can certainly learn to speak other languages fluently and translate material, creating content customized for people in that country tends to work best with them. 

Native speakers will help you understand how local customers articulate their pain points, as it might differ from a direct translation from English. They can help you understand better how to target these prospective customers and create material that will interest them.

Many search engines also prefer to see content that has been written by a native speaker, as it will sound more fluent than anything that was simply translated.

Create content specifically for that audience

Remember the importance of creating content that is tailored to an audience. 

Work with local people to understand the pain point as it relates specifically to this country. Create content that speaks directly to their obstacles, buying process, and needs before deciding to move towards a purchase.

To help you create content targeted towards the audience in this specific country, track the social media conversation and trends within the country. This will help you better understand rising topics of interest for your target customers, empowering you to create content that will matter to them.

Working with an international audience requires organizations to place themselves in the position of their customers and the new culture and language they have to consider. The better they understand the importance of creating a user experience tailored towards this country and the needs of the locals in the region, the easier it will be to build an effective digital presence internationally.

How to Create a Worthy Whitepaper?

What should a successful whitepaper entail?

A whitepaper can provide valuable benefits for brands who want to build a strong digital presence. By taking the time to create longer pieces of content, your organization can showcase their knowledge, insight, and expertise. It also provides a great gated item.

Quality whitepapers can provide tremendous assets for brands interested in engaging potential customers. The key, however, lies in knowing how to create whitepapers that add value and will encourage leads to engage with you. Here are a few ideas to get started on your whitepaper development.

Look at your website

Begin by looking at your website. This will help you identify the types of content and the topics that matter the most to your readers. See which pages get the most interest from your customers. You can also look to see if there are any topic clusters that customers appear to pay attention to.

Conduct keyword research and monitor social media trends

Although your whitepaper likely will be gated and not posted and crawled like a blog post, you still want to keep keyword research in mind. Keyword research helps you better understand what customers look for online, so you can see the topics that matter the most to them. 

Similarly, social media trends can help you capitalize on topics of rising interest within your target audience. You can use these insights, along with the information you gathered from your website analysis, to form a list of topics that you want to use to develop a whitepaper.

Create a strong opening that will pull in customers

Once you have identified a popular whitepaper topic, create material that will immediately pull in the audience. Now that they have turned over their contact information in exchange for your content, prove to them that it was worth it. Focus on creating a strong and engaging opening that encourages them to read on.

Develop high-value professional content

The content itself should focus on providing genuine value. Remember the goal of your whitepaper is to convince this lead to continue engaging your organization. You want to build yourself up as the authority in this field. The whitepaper should reflect that goal.

With the length of a whitepaper, you have more room to dive deeply into the topic at hand. Provide more information and analysis than you would in other forms of content, such as a blog post. Use this space to let the reader know that downloading your material was worth the effort.

Demonstrate how you can help

Bring your whitepaper to its conclusion by demonstrating how you can help. Continue to position your organization as an authority they can trust as they navigate their pain point. Encourage them to build their relationship with your organization as they move forward.

Create an outstanding landing page

Once again, remember that your whitepaper itself will be behind a gate and not indexed like standard website content. Your landing page, however, will be exposed. That page offers you the opportunity to entice people to download your new whitepaper. 

Create a landing page that incorporates your important keyword while also creating a short, to-the-point argument that demonstrates the value prospects will experience if they download your whitepaper. Consider using A/B testing as you create your landing page to help you find the best combination.

Whitepapers help organizations build a reputation as an authority while also providing excellent opportunities to collect information from leads. Taking the time to create outstanding whitepapers can help build your business.

How to Fix Index Bloat?

The importance of reducing index bloat

When it comes to being discovered online by prospective customers, websites want to make sure that their sites have the best possible digital presence. This includes ranking highly on the SERPs for relevant queries.

Unfortunately, sometimes index bloat can disrupt SEO plans and make it harder for brands to create the user experience they wanted.

What is index bloat?

Index bloat occurs when Google accidently indexes pages they were not supposed to. Consider an ecommerce site that has filter options for people searching for a particular type of product. When you click on the option to sort by color, for example, you automatically generate a new webpage. This new webpage, however, does not actually contain any new content and you do not want to have it indexed separately by the search engine. 

Index bloat can also come from situations such as poor site migrations from HTTP to HTTPS, expired content, or even poorly organized page archives.

Why is index bloat a problem?

Index bloat can cause a variety of problems for sites from an SEO perspective. To begin, it can drain crawl budget. Google decides how much and how often to crawl a particular site based on its popularity and perceived value. Draining the crawl budget can result in Google missing out on indexing pages of the site that have considerably more value for your target audience.

It can also confuse Google about the value of the content on the site, making it appear as though the site actually contains a lot of duplicate content. The search engine might also not always know which version of the very-similar pages it should rank for a particular query.

How do I monitor my site for index bloat?

You can monitor your site through Google Search Console and the Google search engine itself. On the search engine, make occasional searches using the site: operation, which will allow you to search only your domain. You can use this command as site:example.com to see how many pages Google claims to have indexed on your site. You can also monitor your indexing through Google Search Console.

Use these two tools to regularly watch for sudden increases in the number of pages indexed. Dramatic increases provide a good indication that something is likely amis with your indexing.

How do I fix index bloat?

Once you uncover a problem of index bloat, you want to work as quickly as possible to resolve the problem. There are a few different strategies to consider.

• Robots.txt and NOFOLLOW for links
• Meta Robots NoIndex tag
• Pagination
• URL removal

1. Robots.txt and NOFOLLOW for links. You can use a robots.txt file to disallow certain pages from the Google spider. This tells Google that you do not want these pages crawled. However, if the page is linked to from another page that does get crawled, you might end up with your page being indexed, despite the disallow order.

To prevent this problem, use a NOFOLLOW anywhere in your site where you link to a page that has been disallowed through robots.txt.

2. Meta Robots NoIndex tag. The ‘noindex’ robots meta tag provides search engines with very clear guidance about which pages should not be indexed. By using this tag, you prevent the indexing of the page and tell Google to deindex any page that had previously been indexed.

3. Pagination. If you have multiple pages that list products, for example, you will want to use pagination markup to make it clear to Google that these pages have a relationship. This tells Google that the pages are not duplicates of each other and encourages Google to reduce the indexing of the subsequent pages, which can help reduce bloat.

4. URL Removal. If you need to get a URL deindexed immediately, you can use the Google Remove URL tool. This will get the page deindexed quickly. However, you will still need to take action to make it clear that the page should not be indexed with one of the previous suggestions or it could end up getting indexed again in the future.

Preventing crawl bloat can help protect your SEO efforts and create an improved user experience for leads and customers. As you monitor your site, consider these strategies for ridding yourself of any unnecessary bloat moving forward.

How to Understand Performance Navigation?

Guide your audience with proper navigation

When customers arrive on your website, the navigation you provide has an immediate impact on how well they can move around your site and their likelihood of making a purchase. When customers can clearly see how to navigate the site and click to other content that might interest them, it provides excellent encouragement to entice that person to further engage.

A well-constructed website navigation also makes it easier for users and search engine spiders alike to discover all of the pages on your website, ensuring that nothing is overlooked or forgotten.

Quality navigation demonstrates how all of the different pages of your site intersect, helping users and search engines to understand the level of depth you have to offer while also guiding visitors to other pages that might be relevant to their needs.

How to construct a quality site navigation

Site navigation should make sense. You want to think of the pages of your site that best can be grouped together. For example, you may have product pages and blog topics that can be tied together through links, even though they deal with different aspects of consumer nurturing.

Creating content hierarchies can help to organize material into firm categories can help to demonstrate the depth of your content. As you construct these hierarchies, make sure that they contain links between the different categories to help potential customers move between your site areas.

Your site should also contain clear menu and other site navigation options for customers to use as they move around the pages. A site map should simplify the customer’s understanding of where they are in the site and what else they can find on your domain. Breadcrumbs can also help customers see how the page they are on connects to the rest of the site and helps them find the content they want.

Remember the importance of nurturing leads through the funnel

Create your site navigation to encourage people to move through the buyer’s journey. For example include CTAs at the bottom of your site content that make sense based on what customers have just read and where they might want to go next.

Track customer movements

As people visit your site, track how they move through the pages so that you can see how they navigate. Compare this to how you have set up your site navigation and make sure that you provide customers with the most convenient system for moving throughout your website.

Improving your website’s navigation can help you encourage people to further engage with your content. This, in turn, can increase your ability to build a relationship with them and turn them into a lead and then a customer. Use the tips above to think carefully about how you organize your site and what you want it to encourage customers to do.

How to Understand and Prevent Click Fraud?

Artificial clicks are preventable

When it comes to paid advertising, one of the most common forms of promotion lies in PPC ads. With PPC ads, companies create an ad and then pay based on the number of clicks the ad receives. These types of ads can appear on a variety of different platforms, particularly search engines, where they can be displayed at the top of the search results. Brands appreciate the power of PPC marketing to help get their brand’s content to the top of the SERP, even if they struggled to get their organic content to rank that highly.

However, sometimes these ads can be susceptible to a type of fraud known as click fraud. With click fraud, artificial clicks are generated for a particular ad, so that the brand has to pay for the click without receiving the opportunity to genuinely engage with a potential customer. Those who engage in click fraud might do it for several different reasons.

1. They might want to waste a competitor’s budget to force them to spend money unnecessarily.
2. Many campains set daily maximums, which indicate the most the organization should pay per day. Therefore, clicking on the ad incessantly at the start of the day can run out the daily budget much faster, leaving more open room for competitors to move in to promote their own ad.
3. It can even be the result of a disgruntled customer who wants to force the company that they feel ‘wronged’ by to spend unnecessary money.
4. Sometimes, unscrupulous ad publishers will also click on the ads that appear on their site to generate more income for themselves.

Whatever the reason may be, uncovering and preventing click fraud can help brands save money and avoid gathering irrelevant data from their PPC campaigns.

Fighting back against click fraud

Many major search engines, including Google, have taken steps to try and sort out click fraud to avoid charging brands for clicks that were not genuine.

Google’s anti-click fraud system works to sort through clicks and uncover potential false clicks before the ad owner gets charged. The search engine giant also conducts manual reviews of clicks to further verify that the clicks occurring on ads come from true searchers.

Finally, Google will also receive a particular case if you gather evidence that specific clicks arrived through an ad to your site through a fraudulent means.

What can brands do to reduce their click fraud problem?

To personally look after the clicks your own website receives through PPC does require a bit of research. To track this information, you will need the IP addresses of the visitors who come to your site.

You can use this data to look for repeat visitors that might have suspicious origins. Depending upon the platform where you host your ads, you might be able to secure information regarding the time when that particular IP address clicked on your ad as well as the time when they completed an action on your website. High levels of ad clicks from a certain IP address with low levels of action may indicate click fraud.

If you find your brand has been hit with high levels of click fraud, you can try to use social media to reduce the problem. PPC ads on the social channels, which target ads based on demographics rather than keyword searches, can make it harder for competitors to find the ads and can offer a bit more protection.

Additionally, if the fraudulent IP addresses tend to come from certain areas, such as particular countries where you do not do a lot of business, you can also consider blocking those regions from your ad targeting.

Finally, if you uncover specific IP addresses that are guilty of click fraud, you can also block those addresses specifically on many PPC platforms.

Click fraud makes it harder for brands to accurately engage with their targeted audience. It can result in a waste of money and drained marketing budgets. Understanding what the search engines do to combat this problem, as well as what marketers themselves can do to protect their websites, can help combat this problem.

How to Understand and Utilize E-A-T?

Master E-A-T for better rank

As the internet continues to mature and the amount of content available online grows, Google has begun to increasingly focus on using the E-A-T acronym to identify the top quality content and the websites offering it.

E-A-T stands for ‘Expertise’ ‘Authoritativeness’ and ‘Trustworthiness’ and it describes the features that the search engine tries to identify in the websites and the content they rank highly for on the SERP.

As Google increasingly looks to these important features, websites will need to think about how they establish themselves as the source to go to for answers. Simply aligning keywords within content no longer provides significant lift in SERP rankings. Instead, brands need to demonstrate that their website as a whole provides the leadership and answers that customers can rely on.

Here are what brands need to keep in mind as they work to boost their own website.

• Expertise
• Authoritativeness
• Trustworthiness

1. Expertise. Google wants to identify the experts in particular areas. If the author of a particular article has credentials and experience that helps to establish them as a trusted expert in the field, then Google wants to display this person’s content to those making relevant searches.

To build a reputation for expertise, brands should focus on creating content that demonstrates they are the ones to listen to in the field. Any relevant credentials of the author should be included, keeping in mind that Google recognizes that what makes an ‘expert’ varies widely depending upon the field.

The content itself should also align well with user intent and be built to anticipate the next potential questions of customers. Let them know that they have found a source of information that can solve their problems.

2. Authoritativeness. Building authority around your website and your brand focuses on credibility. You want to demonstrate to Google and potential readers that your website is credible and ready to help people solve their problems.

Building backlinks from other reputable sites can help establish your place in the industry. You can also help get your main content authors to publish guest posts on other authoritative resources within the industry.

Creating original research and publishing it can also demonstrate through thought leadership and your place at the front of the industry.

3. Trustworthiness. Google also wants to know that the sites it recommends to readers can be trusted. Building this trust centers around showing that your website has been built for users. Using HTTPS to provide additional security will help to establish your brand as a trustworthy one. Focusing on content and headlines that revolve around providing information and helping users - rather than trying to attract clicks through ‘click bait’, and citing sources and linking to information that supports what you say will also contribute.

Building the E-A-T reputation of your site can help to demonstrate to Google and users that your website should be trusted when it comes to providing information and solving pain points. See how optimizing your site for these factors can help build your reputation and increase your website’s visibility.

How to do A/B Testing for your Site?

Utilize A/B testing and get to know your audience

A/B testing provides brands with valuable insight regarding what leads and customers want to see from your website. It provides brands with an excellent means of maximizing the the clicks and engagement they get with their content.

There are a wide variety of factors that influence whether or not someone is going to click on a particular piece of content. Seemingly simple criteria, such as the placement of a call-to-action, the phrasing used in the lead magnet, or even the image selected to go along with a gated item request form can all impact the likelihood of someone completing the call-to-action and being a lead or customer.

A/B testing provides brands with a means of testing the arrangements and criteria that matter the most to their customers. You can see what your particular customers respond to best and use that insight to build your leads and fuel your growth.

Building an effective A/B test can help you across your marketing campaigns, including creating better ads, improved landing pages, building email engagement, and even boosting purchase rates.

• Know what you want to test
• Identify a particular goal you want to achieve
• Determine what your sample size or test duration will be
• Interpret your results and take action

1. Know what you want to test. One important first step in creating an effective A/B test lies in picking a single variable to test. If you try to run an A/B test on two versions of the content that have enormous differences between them, it will be harder to know exactly why a particular piece of content performed better than another. Instead, you want to pick a single feature to test. This might be the placement of a CTA button or the image paired with a download form, for example.

As you prepare to run your A/B test, you should have a firm control and variable. Your control will be how the landing page, ad, or other test piece of content looks now. The variable is the adjusted version that you want to compare to the original.

2. Identify a particular goal you want to achieve. Next, you want to identify your goal with running this test. Do you want to boost click through rates or conversions? What will be a significant enough difference in the results for the two pieces of content to warrant making a change?

3. Determine what your sample size or test duration will be. Now, you want to determine exactly how big you want your test to be. For example, you might want to show two different versions of an ad to 1000 customers. If you test a landing page, it can be harder to determine the number of people who see each version, so you want to consider how long you want to run the test.

Make sure that the people who receive both versions of the content come from similar enough populations to warrant comparison. If you are testing two versions of an email message, for example, you do not want to have one version go to your segmented list for medium-sized businesses while the other goes to the large businesses.

4. Interpret your results and take action. After the test has been run for enough time to collect relevant data, you now need to collect and interpret your results. Look back on your goals with the A/B test and see how the results turned out. See what the test results indicated about the preferences of your customers.

Use this insight to make a decision regarding the version of the content you should move forward with. If you did not get statistically significant results, then consider modifying another area of the test and creating a second A/B test to boost the content’s performance.

A/B tests provide valuable insight regarding what customers want to see from organizations and what they respond to when online. Use the insight from these data-driven tests to make the best decisions for your content.