Execute Website Analysis with BrightEdge Integration

How do I use Google Analytics?

You'll want to use Google Analytics to:

1. Improve your site
2. Better understand your demographics
3. Help with budget and resource discussions with the c-suite

1. Improve your site. You want to use Google Analytics throughout your marketing campaigns. Before you begin to run any new campaigns or begin a new SEO strategy, you will want to get a baseline of how your site performs. This will help you better understand how your campaign and strategies impact your actual site performance.

Your baseline should include a solid understanding of your traffic rates, bounce rate, and conversion rates. As you begin to make improvements, use Google Analytics to track your progress. You want to watch and see how these rates change as your campaign progresses. This will tell you how people respond to your content and how well your changes are improving your online presence.

As you build out your site and your campaigns, you can also see how well people respond to the material. If people click on ads but then bounce quickly from the landing page, you know that the alignment between the two should be reworked to ensure that the landing page answers the needs of those who had clicked on the ad. Pages that do not do a good job of encouraging people to move into different areas of your site can be reworked to build their ability to engage with the audience.

2. Better understand your demographics. You can also use Google Analytics to better understand the demographics of your customers. If you operate largely in one geographic region, for example, you can see how well you appropriately target this area with local SEO. If you operate a large, multi-national company, you can see which areas of the world bring in the most traffic and conversions. This can help you better target your ideal customers.

If you are not reaching the people that you believe will be interested in your product, you can adjust your strategy. If you discover that an entirely new segment of people seem to respond well to your site and appear interested in your product that you had not previously discovered, you can now begin to create marketing materials especially targeted towards them.

3. Help with budget and resource discussions with the C-suite. Google Analytics can also provide valuable insight when it comes to tracking ROI for your different campaigns and creating budget presentations for your c-cuite. You can use the data to track the impact of the different parts of the site on your revenue with the different attribution models. This will allow you to begin to assign a value to your different campaigns and strategies. When it comes to speaking with leaders of your organization about the importance and impact of your different efforts, you will have concrete numbers to show them, which can bolster arguments for greater investment in online marketing.

Google Analytics data can provide you with a variety of different valuable data points. When this information is combined with BrightEdge for SEO insight, it can help you take your site to the next level.

Google Image Ranking Factors To Be Aware Of

What is the value of ranking on Google Images?

When it comes to optimizing content, people often end up focusing almost exclusively on their text-based content. In reality, ranking highly for images that you use throughout your site can also help to increase your traffic rates and the popularity of your brand.

When people click through from the Google Images, they are spreading your brand reach and reputation. They help to enhance the performance metrics of your site, which in turn can boost your rankings in the regular SERPs.

Leverage Data Cube To Find How You Rank For Images

How are Google Images selected?

Google wants to show the user unique images that align with their query. This means that Google Images will not be displaying stock photos and will want to avoid showing the same picture more than once, even if it appears on different sites.

For the same reason that duplicate content hurts the user experience on the standard SERPs, having multiple copies of the same picture will similarly be negative for Google.

Google will look at the content of the page where the picture appears as well as the picture itself in an effort to understand what the picture contains and how well it relates to different queries.

Remember that Google’s spiders cannot actually ‘see’ images themselves, so they rely on tags and markups to understand the image and know where it belongs in the Google Images.

How do I get my picture on top of Google Images?

To ensure optimal performance in Google Images, you will want to keep the following guidelines in mind:

1. Find a balance between maximizing the aesthetic quality of the image and maintaining a fast load time to optimize for Google. Google wants to focus on high-quality images, but those that load slowly will also be ranked poorly because of the poor user experience.
2. Make sure the images you want to rank for are completely unique. As previously mentioned, Google does not want to display duplicates. Images of your products at work, your customers, your services, or any other photo taken by the brand itself are the optimal images to choose.
3. Use a comprehensive labels on the image for it to appear in images. Google spiders will be crawling as many details as they can to learn about your image. This means using alt tags, title tags, and image names. When possible use your targeted keyword and explain how the image ties into the topic.
4. Use schema markups to draw attention to the image. This will make you eligible for any rich snippet options while also helping the search engine understand the image so it can be displayed at the proper times.
5. Track your progress using the BrightEdge Page Reporter and Google Webmaster Tools. With the webmaster tools, you can look at search analytics and filter by image searches to see your success within this exact category.

Ranking highly for images on image search can be a valuable means of drawing traffic to your page and giving your page a boost. Keep these guidelines in mind as you add your images as see how visuals can work for you.

How Does Google Analytics Work?

Google Analytics works by relying on a small bit of Javascript Code that is placed on your website This code is activated when visitors arrive on your site. It allows Google to record important information about your site so that you can better understand your site visitors and build your business.

The code that you place in your website will look at three main sources of data and information. It will use:

• First party cookies
• The HTTP request that the browser sends
• The browser and system information of the user

Through these data sources, the code will track certain information about the person visiting your website. It will help you understand everything from the geographic location of the user, the language in which they view your site, and the pages they visit on the website. The information that the Google tracking code collects will then be sent over to the Google Analytics servers to be displayed in the reports that you can view.

Google wants to help businesses thrive online because when the websites provide a solid user experience, it benefits the people who browse the site. This helps them feel satisfied with the results that they received from the search engine. In turn, this makes them more likely to visit the search engine again, which makes Google happy.

To help brands improve their websites and ability to engage customers, Google has created Google Analytics. When you place the Analytics code in your website, you have access to a free platform that provides in depth information regarding the behavior of your site visitors and what interests them.

These Analytics can help you make business decisions. You will get to see what customers engage with best on your website, what pages do not help customers, and where your site can improve. You can also take this information and integrate it into your BrightEdge platform account, helping you create an even more in depth analysis of your site performance. This information will make it easier for you to improve your site and therefore grow your business.

Integrate BrightEdge And Google Analytics

Is Google Analytics important?

Google Analytics offers brands a host of valuable information that can help you manage your digital presence. You can learn about the demographics of your site visitors - including their geographic location and language - how people engage with your site, including the bounce rate - how people arrive on your page, conversion rates, and even Google tracking attribution models to help you better understand the success of different parts of your buyer’s journey.

These data points can help brands make business decisions and keep their customers happy. For example, you can take the engagement rate of your page, including your bounce rate and conversion rates, to better understand how well your material engages visitors and addresses their needs. If you see a high bounce rate and low conversion rates, then you will want to go back and analyze how well this content aligns with the needs of these important buyer personas and what needs to be amended to better engage them.

Similarly, you can look at information regarding how people arrive on your page to see the impact of various marketing strategies, including social media versus organic SEO. When combined with the data from the BrightEdge platform regarding your keyword rankings and your position on the SERP, you can start to gain a more complete picture of how your SEO efforts directly impact the success of your site.

Using Google for attribution

You can also use Google Analytics to begin tracking attribution. Attribution attempts to calculate the impact of various marketing channels and efforts on the final revenue collected from a particular customer. Different attribution models weigh the different stages of the buyer’s journey differently. You will want to select the attribution model that makes the most sense for your business. For more information on the different attribution models, click here.

You can then use your attribution models to gain a better understanding of how customers move through your content as they progress closer to conversion, what material has the biggest impact on conversions, and your ROI. You can also calculate ROI for different marketing methods, which can help you clearly demonstrate the value of these different channels, in turn allowing you to advocate for more budget and investment.

Google Analytics will help you better understand what customers want to see from your site and how you can do a better job of answering those needs so that your site engagement grows and you see more success for your organization.

Why is a Cross-Functional Team Important?

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.

How To Create a Social Media Content Strategy?

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.

How Do I Choose A Blog Topic?

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?

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?

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?

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!