In digital PR, we rely heavily on the media. Working with news stations, editors, journalists, and reporters is an essential part of our job. How we work with the media—the information we give, the assets we provide, and how we respond to their questions—can make or break the coverage and links we get during each campaign.

If you can master even the basics of working with the media, you can get decent coverage for your projects. If you go above and beyond, you can even get the coverage of your dreams. And if you miss the boat on even the basics, that coverage may never come. Here are some essential tips for media relations to help you spread the word about your brand and get great links along the way.

Contact the Right Person

You should be reaching out to the contacts most relevant to your story. Building media lists will help you keep track of the reporters you want to target. If you created a report centered around personal finance, reach out to reporters that cover personal finance. Pitching someone that covers entertainment won’t get you any coverage. On top of that, you’ll probably annoy the entertainment reporter, who could easily block you or mark your email as spam, so when you do have something relevant to them, they won’t ever receive it. This could overall ruin your potential relationship with them, which is the opposite of what you want to do!

Build Relationships

In digital PR, building and maintaining relationships is one of the main focuses of your job. Nurturing your relationships with media contacts will help you recognize what topics each contact covers, assess how and when you should pitch them, and it can make your name more recognizable and familiar to reporters.

Read the articles your media contacts are writing about and familiarize yourself with their work. Follow reporters on Twitter and engage with their posts. Doing those two simple things will help you write more targeted pitches and get your name in front of reporters outside of an email pitch. If you consistently respond to a journalist’s Twitter posts and they see your name on the platform, it will ring a bell for them when your name shows up in their inbox. This association can give you a higher chance of them opening your email.

Personalize Your Communication

In line with contacting the right person and building relationships, personalizing your communication will prove to reporters that you actually know who they are and what they cover. Journalists are often aware of when they receive an email that’s part of a massive email blast, and it’s not something they appreciate. Your email will get tossed in the trash folder pretty quickly when a reporter senses this—especially if you haven’t done your due diligence about their beat. To ensure that your message is personalized, consider addressing your contacts by name and mention an article they’ve written or a Tweet they recently shared. These two actions can communicate to reporters that you know who they are and what they cover.

Keep Your Pitches Concise

Your email pitches will tell reporters about your campaign. When you’re excited about a campaign, it can be easy to go overboard and give reporters a lot of information—sometimes, it’s too much information. No one wants to read a six-paragraph email, especially if they’re a reporter with limited time. Make sure to keep your emails as concise as possible. Cut it down to a brief introduction, a short description of your campaign, and a few short bullet points that are relevant and interesting to the person you’re pitching. Your pitches should be scannable, so anyone reading it can quickly glance over and know what it’s about. Utilize bullet points, bold important words and statistics, and keep your sentences short and sweet! Your pitches should give the most pertinent information in the shortest possible way.

Have a Media Kit

When sending email pitches, always include a link to a media kit. Your kit can contain original graphics, data, and other relevant assets reporters might use when covering your campaign.

Giving them a media kit upfront makes it easier for the reporter, as they won’t need to ask you for assets and wait for your response. Instead, they have everything they need to begin writing their story immediately, saving them time and allowing them to tell the story they want to tell.

Be Available for Interviews

Some outlets request an interview, so make sure you have someone available for such requests at any time. They should be able to respond at a moment’s notice, whether it’s for a live interview or providing quotes via email. Some reporters are looking exclusively for interviews, and if you can’t give them one, they’ll move on to someone who can.

Respond Quickly

The media is fast-paced, and everyone wants to be the first to cover a story, putting a lot of pressure on journalists and reporters to get things written quickly. Responding to them as fast as possible will help them get what they need to publish their coverage sooner. If you don’t respond promptly enough, reporters might follow another lead from someone that responds to them faster than you do. You can’t afford to wait a day, or even hours, to respond if you want to get the best coverage. You need to respond immediately.

To give yourself an extra edge, include your phone number in all of your pitches and be prepared to answer your phone at all times (don’t put it on silent!). It may be quicker for a reporter to give you a call so you can chat rather than going back and forth by email.

Make It Easy

The bottom line is to make things as easy and painless as possible for the media. We rely on them for coverage and, if we want to get it, we can’t make it difficult for them to do their jobs. Practice the tips mentioned above, and you’ll be well on your way to earn the coverage (and links!) that your project deserves.

The post How to Work With the Media in Digital PR appeared first on Portent.

As the holiday season approaches, online campaign planning is in full swing. And while a lot of time goes into paid campaign planning, we can’t forget about the user journey that happens after a lead comes in through a paid source.

In this post, organic team lead Kat Shereko and I will share our insights on what tactics B2B and B2C businesses should be taking to optimize their on-page experience and improve conversion rates.

Before the Holidays: 6 Ways To Prep Your Content

If you start to see Halloween decorations emerging in your local grocery stores, you’re already behind the ball on your prep for this year’s holiday season. According to the National Retail Federation, 40% of people start holiday shopping before Halloween – which means your holiday prep work should be done well before that.

A lot goes into content prep for the holidays, and above all else that work can be very time-consuming. However, with a little bit of strategy and a lot of prep work, you can have your content ready for the next holiday season in no time!

1. Audit & Refresh Evergreen Content

Like clockwork, at the end of each year you should be auditing your evergreen content – think guides, resources, blog posts, anything that would likely be deemed as out of date in the new year.

If you organize your content in an editorial calendar, you can start by revisiting all of the content published or updated in the last year. If, however, your content inventory isn’t up to date, you can do a quick search of your website using the site:domain.com operator and identify content that may be out of date mentions of the year in the title or the paget.

At Portent, we’d be looking to update our long-form guides and best practices published on our blog. To do this, we’d do the following search:
site:portent.com/blog “for 2021.”

And if you have a lot of content, we recommend completing a sitewide search using a website crawler like Screaming Frog, or equivalent, so that you can swiftly filter through the noise (e.g., exclude publishing date, include all in-text mentions, etc.).

2. Update Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Updating your evergreen pages like articles, guides, resource pages, etc., is only half the battle. Although frequently rewritten by Google, title tags and meta descriptions require an equal amount of yearly maintenance.

Before the new year hits, you should have all of your current title tags and meta descriptions reviewed and ready to be refreshed. To tackle this project, you can also do a site search or run a sitewide crawl for all metadata and audit from there.

Need a crash course on how to write title tags and meta descriptions for search engines standards? Check out our guides:

• How to Write a Great Title Tag
• How to Write Meta Descriptions

3. Reuse URLs From Last Season’s Campaigns

A New Year doesn’t mean a new URL… at least not when it comes to holiday landing pages. Before creating a brand new landing page, take a look at the archived or unpublished holiday landing pages from the previous year and see if you can repurpose them.

Repurposing an old URL is beneficial because that page might’ve acquired natural backlinks from years past. And if the page is properly updated, you can leverage that accumulated link equity to help your new content perform better in organic search results.

Need help determining the value of an old URL? Plug your URL into Moz Link Explorer to learn how many domains are currently linking to that page:

Pro-tip, don’t include the publish year in your URLs – this way, you can hang on to that link equity without needing to set up redirects.

4. Test Promo Codes & Special Offers

Promo codes and special holiday discounts are no longer a perk; they’re an expectation. Users know to shop around to get the best deal, so you might as well make sure that deal is coming from you.

If you cannot automatically apply the promo code at checkout, you need to spend some time QAing the code through the checkout process. Make it obvious where the code should be added and show the discount rate immediately after the code is entered.

After all, there’s nothing more frustrating than having a discount code that doesn’t work.

5. Update GMB Listings to Include Promos & Seasonal Campaigns

If you have a local product or service offering, don’t forget to take advantage of your Google My Business (GMB) account by including your holiday promotions in your GMB posts. While there’s no guarantee that the GMB profiles for your local stores will rank better because of the added promotion, mentioning your specials within the listing may increase engagement, or better yet, improve foot traffic to your physical stores.

6. Upload Product Inventory to your Google My Business Profile

At this year’s Google I/O conference, Google announced the Shopping Graph, part of an initiative from the platform to bring more information about online products directly into the search results. During the holiday season, it’s vital to consider Google’s push into eCommerce search results. Thanks to several tools and software services, live product inventory can be displayed directly in search results and on your local store’s GMB profile. When users know exactly what’s locally available, they don’t have to wait for it to be shipped by USPS. The local store becomes an invaluable part of their holiday shopping plans.

Check out the Pointy from Google platform to set up your online product catalog through your store’s POS app on Google My Business.

During the Holidays: What Tests Should You Implement?

As the holiday and seasonal traffic to your website increases, it’s a good idea to consider monitoring page performances to optimize conversions across the funnel that ultimately benefit your business model and customer satisfaction. Conversion rate optimization strategists are your heroes in this stage of the process. They should be equipped with the tools necessary to effectively and efficiently discover opportunities to improve the customer journey and experience. Google Optimize is Portent’s instrument of choice when it comes to A/B testing and analysis.

Creating a Testing Strategy

It’s paramount that when approaching a testing strategy, you’ll need lots of ideas for your areas of focus for conversion rate optimization to experiment with. The potential for increased traffic to your pages speeds up the learning process for your A/B tests. As a result, you’ll need to be prepared to make changes to your website based on these learnings and begin new tests more frequently.

If there is a budget for more qualitative data needed for conversion rate optimization during the holiday season, there’s a great opportunity to recruit people for candid feedback via user testing. You can often incentivize participation in these tests with discounts or gift cards. In exchange, you’ll gain valuable insight into more opportunities for A/B testing from the audiences that matter most to your business goals. As a bonus, you’ll improve the customer experience on your website.

A/B Testing and Optimizations

Once you’ve created your list of pages and elements to test, you’re ready to begin sending these pages out to test to a broader audience to experience. You’ll have tests that conclude elements on your website need changes/improvements, and publishing those changes is crucial before beginning the text next in line. Before you can allow these tests to run, there are a couple of things that a good strategist should consider:

Be mindful of the traffic being brought to the site through your various channels of marketing. Consider the kind of voice/tone/appearance they will be familiar with before arriving at the page and elements being tested. For example, is the experience on a paid landing page consistent with the imagery and verbiage used in the campaign they were brought in from?

Experiment with messaging and copy that will ultimately encourage more visitors to take action and convert on your website. Focus on the time or theme of the season/holiday, the value propositions, or urgency.

This can seem overwhelming at first, especially if you’re new to the world that CRO strategists navigate day in and day out. We’ve been there. With repetition, you’ll be able to improve your website and the customer experience in the future. Build your experiment, gather insights and feedback from user testing, and analyze test results to best inform your next optimizations.

After the Holidays: How To Keep the Momentum Going

We hope the focus and hard work that your teams will put into the holiday season are rewarding and fruitful. Beyond one of the busiest times for your website, you and your teams will still need to act on everything learned from optimizations to content strategy. Here are some of our best recommendations on how to keep the momentum.

Focus On Customer Retention

Successful strategies and results can strengthen remarketing campaigns, such as retargeting for paid advertising, newsletters, and other email marketing promotions.

One way to uncover some of your best strategies and set reasonable expectations for the impending season is to set up forecasting reports for your KPIs. Take these past seasonal performances and compare them year over year to better understand what to expect and prepare for the coming holidays this year and years to come. This way, you can show up along with or before your competitors.

Landing Page Optimization

Pay close attention to results and insights from A/B tests and experiments you run. Analyses from other tools like user testing, heatmaps, and recordings can provide insights into optimizing your page for future campaigns. These learnings will also help develop a roadmap of changes you can make to your landing pages after one of the busiest seasons of your website.

What To Avoid During the Holiday Season

Sometimes we are so caught up in what we have to do to prepare for testing and optimization during a holiday season; we need reminders about what we shouldn’t do. Our teams stay as organized as possible during some of the most critical seasons so we can test and optimize efficiently and effectively. Here are just a few best practices we keep in mind for this special time of year.

Avoid Website Redesigns, Overhauls, or Migrations

One of the last things your website would want to do with a seasonal rush of visitors is to make wholesale changes to the experience. Retailers plan and execute their floor sets in advance of a holiday season, so make sure that if you are making your biggest changes to a website and its pages, it’s in either advance or afterward.

Avoid cross-contaminating A/B Test Audiences

Put simply, avoid running tests where a single-use session will experience two tests at once. Depending on how long of a season you’ll have to test, you may be interested in running tests simultaneously. Our best recommendation is to avoid doing this, but we recognize the advantages of collecting as much insight as possible to make optimizations sooner. Multiple experiments within the same website should also be executed such that messaging or appearance will not contradict the experience on other pages in a customer journey.

Avoid Rearranging Highly Used Features

Do your best to avoid publishing changes to the way visitors will navigate your website. Whether it’s through navigation menus, product hierarchy, categories, or FAQs, your current and potential customers need to retain some familiarity with your website and keep from getting lost on their journey.

In Conclusion

As the holiday season approaches us, yet again, we hope this guide has helped you in preparing your teams for how to start and conduct your Content and CRO plans. Before the season kicks off, nail down your content strategy with thorough prep work. While you’re in the holiday season, leverage CRO to test and implement the small, impactful changes to your page that increase your conversions. Last but not least, take the time after this season to focus on remarketing and making larger changes to your pages based on the learnings you’ll earn along the way.

Have a wonderful holiday from all of us at Portent!

The post Content Strategy & CRO Tips To Prep Your Content for the Holiday Season appeared first on Portent.

The surge in online shopping last year meant holiday shopping—and advertising—exploded, with early promotions and free shipping driving consumers to fulfill their wish lists online. Between November and December last year, online revenue rose 50% to $1.1 trillion.

As a result, the paid media landscape changed significantly. Facebook posted a 31% growth in advertising revenue in Q4 2020, with ad spend increasing across the Facebook suite of apps. On Instagram, ad spend was up 33% year over year, driving CPMs up by 10% from 2019. Google Ads (including search, display, and YouTube) also saw significant YoY Q4 increases, up 23%.

With holiday promotions starting earlier and earlier each year, our e-commerce clients are already beginning preparations for the shopping season. Now more than ever, though, Q4 is proving to be a hugely valuable time for B2B advertisers too.

In this post, PPC team lead Tim Johnson and I break down the steps your B2B business needs to refine your paid media strategy, stay competitive, and drive results during a holiday season typically dominated by B2C retailers.

Last Year’s B2B Holiday Shopping Trends

It’s no surprise that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on the retail industry. Mandated lockdowns and social distancing kept shoppers out of stores and pushed them online. In fact, a recent McKinsey study found that most product categories saw a 15 to 30% growth in online shopping.

These shopping trends had massive implications for B2B entities, too. Now, 70-80% of B2B decision-makers prefer remote human interactions or digital self-service vs. in-person. As a result, digital transformation is more important than ever.

In order to keep up, B2B businesses invested heavily in their online presence last year, with more than half of marketing budgets being allocated to website development, and broader digital marketing efforts falling closely behind.

These trends show no sign of slowing down this year. Plus, when we weigh some of the updates to tracking that have impacted paid channels in 2021, there are new considerations that can influence marketing strategies moving into the holiday season.

Factors Affecting the 2021 Paid Media Landscape

The IDFA update that rolled up with the latest iteration of iOS14 in April has had big impacts on Facebook advertising in particular, but loss of tracking for users that opt out of the new framework has limited audience sizes and end-to-end visibility on LinkedIn, too. You’ve likely found remarketing audiences have been particularly affected—this is definitely something to keep in mind for upcoming holiday campaigns. Recycling old customer lists or custom audiences from last year may not yield the same reach in 2021.

It’s also important to remember that the holiday advertising timeline may look a bit different after last year. With 2020 holiday promotions beginning as early as October, we can expect advertisers to launch seasonal campaigns long before Black Friday rolls around.

What B2B Marketers Should Consider When Developing a Holiday Strategy

In order to stay competitive during the holiday season, here’s what you should keep in mind.

Campaign Goals

While most e-commerce advertisers are preparing to ramp up their spending in Q4, factors like buying habits have a big impact on end-of-year budgets for B2B brands.

This is a great time to reconsider your campaign strategy and goals. If seasonality impacts buying decisions for your target audience, traditional demand generation may not be the most effective or impactful campaign objective. Instead, shift budget and focus on acquiring new users at the top of the funnel or nurture existing prospects.

Landing Page Experience

With your campaign goal in mind, crafting a dedicated landing page for your campaigns specifically for the holiday season can help you retarget users down the line more effectively and increase conversion rates. If you’re unsure where to start, check out this blog post on conversion rate optimization for PPC landing pages.

Calls to Action

As you consider your goals and landing page experience, consider what you are offering to users. If your objective is lead generation (contact us form), consider shifting to offer something of value like a white paper or free download in exchange for an email address that you can use for future targeting. This type of self-sustaining content is helpful to a user. And if your content truly is useful, they will remember you later when you need them to.

Ad Creative

Given the influx of competition across channels during the holiday season, ad copy and creative will be crucial factors within your control that can have an impact in the auction.

Take a look at creative performance from last year’s campaigns as well as more recent ads. Powering creative optimizations with your own data as well as best practices from Facebook and Google are the most effective guideposts for developing a holiday ad creative strategy.

Steps to Approach Your B2B Holiday Strategy

With user intent and consideration in mind, here’s how you can approach your B2B holiday strategy development from the ground up.

1. Targeting

On social media, remember that impacts to tracking related to the most recent iOS14 update might mean previous targeting strategies could use a refresh. To expand your remarketing pools, think about incorporating intent signals like video view percentage, page engagers, and more.

In search, don’t rely on your same old high intent keywords. Look to great new audiences aimed at the top of the funnel, like custom intent and custom affinity audiences.

2. Ads

Mobile-first ad creative and landing pages are more important than ever. Make sure your ad experience considers users that are browsing on mobile devices, particularly during a season where consumers are generally away from their desktops!

Personalize your ad experience and drive consideration with ad formats like Conversation Ads on LinkedIn. These direct-response ads can be an effective way to drive users towards content like e-Books, whitepapers, and more.

3. Budgeting

We’ve found that many of our B2B clients’ budgets scale back at the end of the year in response to a slowdown in their sales pipeline. With this in mind, stretch your budget further in a highly saturated auction space by prioritizing top and mid-funnel objectives and targeting.

After the Holidays: Tips for Keeping Your Campaigns’ Momentum

As business gets back to normal following the holidays, don’t lose the momentum you are building. As budgets shift back towards lead generation, use your new audiences to drive early returns and get ahead of your projections.

Retargeting

Continue to engage your new users with more useful creative and content as you slowly work them through the marketing funnel. Create audiences that segment users based on their recent interactions and create a unified strategy across your advertising platforms.

Customer Lists

If you have been able to grow your email list, update your customer lists on Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Updated lists will perform better when looking to directly retarget or create lookalike/similar audiences to continue your prospecting strategy.

Analyze and Improve Ad Creative and Copy

Learn from your new creative messaging. Look closely at engagement metrics, user sentiment signals on social, and any A/B tests you had running. There may be learnings you can apply to your old lead generation efforts to improve them in the new year.

Make the Most of the Holidays

For some B2B brands, taking the holidays off seems like a safe decision, especially with all the COVID concerns out there. No matter what your industry though, there is always more we can do to learn and prepare for the future. These changes in online trends don’t appear to be going away soon, COVID or not. Taking a good look at your past holiday strategy and seeing how you can add in some of these tactics to prepare for a strong start to 2022 and beyond seems like the real safe decision.

The post Preparing your B2B Holiday Strategy: PPC and Paid Social appeared first on Portent.

Updated September 2, 2021 with new information and best practices.

It’s no mystery that Facebook advertising is a valuable tool for e-commerce marketers. From Facebook catalogs to Instagram shopping, there’s a lot to know when it comes to maximizing your performance with Facebook Ads Manager. That’s where we come in! Keep on reading to get a full breakdown on how to set up your Facebook Ad account, determine key campaign metrics, and tips and tricks for developing a full-funnel campaign strategy.

1. Set Up Your Facebook Ad Account With a Strong Foundation

With more than 2 billion active users on Facebook and more than 1 billion on Instagram, you can attract new and existing customers to your products with a click of a button. Let’s start with the basics; setting up your Facebook Ad account for success.

Step 1: Set Up The Facebook Pixel

Do you want to effectively measure, optimize, and build audiences for your ad campaigns? That’s where the Facebook pixel comes in. With the help of a developer, or if you are able to do it yourself, adding this piece of code to your website is essential for e-commerce campaigns where conversions are everything. The setup process is simple. All you (or your developer) have to do is place the Facebook pixel base code on all pages of your website, and voila! Now you are one step closer to maximizing your Facebook campaigns.

Step 2: Set Up The Facebook Conversions API

Apple’s iOS 14 update is having a significant impact on social media advertising. That’s why Facebook launched the Facebook Conversions API. This tool gives you a new, more private way to collect advertising data using server-side tracking rather than browser-side tracking. You can also gain additional insight into who is interacting with your business. The Conversions API works with the Facebook pixel to help improve the performance and measurement of your Facebook ad campaigns. And although this tool is optional, it is highly recommended as we move into a post-iOS 14 update world.

Step 3: Add Standard Events

Now it’s time to add standard events. What are standard events you might ask? Standard events are predefined actions that Facebook recognizes and supports across ad products. (You can find a few examples of standard events below.) When you add them to your Facebook pixel code and Conversions API, you can log standard events, optimize for conversions, and build valuable audiences. These events are essential for developing an upper-, middle-, and lower-funnel campaign strategy later on.

Step 4: Create Custom Audiences

Once you have your standard events set up, this will allow you to create custom audiences. To set up a custom audience, you have to choose an audience source, standard event and determine the number of days you want to retain that audience. For example, you can create a custom audience based on people who have initiated checkout in the past 30 days. From here, you can create another custom audience based on people who have purchased in the past 30 days. Now, you can create an abandoned cart audience targeting people who have initiated checkout but haven’t made a purchase yet. Having the ability to create custom audiences will benefit your campaigns by allowing you to confidently remarket customers and bring in highly qualified new customers.

Step 5: Create Lookalike Audiences

It doesn’t stop at custom audiences! You have now opened the door to creating lookalike audiences modeled off of website KPIs and engagement. You can create a lookalike audience by taking a custom audience, selecting a location, and audience size. For example, you can build a lookalike audience from people who have already purchased from your site. Then, you can use that lookalike audience to find people similar to your current customers to increase sales. Lookalike audiences take the guesswork out of finding a highly qualified audience and help increase campaign performance with higher-than-average click-through rates compared to interest-based audiences.

Step 6: Add a Facebook Product Catalog

As you may know, Facebook and Instagram Shopping are huge for consumers, but also for businesses. Make it easier for your customers to shop your brand’s products with the help of a Facebook product catalog. A catalog is a container that holds information about the items you want to advertise or sell across Facebook and Instagram. This tool opens the door to tagging products on Facebook and Instagram posts, which can also be used when advertising. You can create catalogs for different types of inventory like your e-commerce products and manage catalogs in Facebook’s Commerce Manager.

2. Determine What Metrics You Want To Track

Once your Facebook Ad account is set up for success, now it’s time to define which metrics are relevant for your campaign goals. We’ll cover the importance of cost per purchase, purchase conversion rate, purchase conversion value, average order value, and return on ad spend below. These metrics will help measure campaign performance and give you the ability to make thoughtful optimizations.

Cost Per Purchase

First, we will look at cost per purchase. This metric will measure how much budget has been spent and divide that by the number of purchase events tracked by the Facebook pixel or Conversions API on your website. To put it simply, cost per purchase will help you determine if you are getting purchases at an efficient cost.

Purchase Conversion Rate

Next, we will look at the purchase conversion rate (or result rate on Facebook). This metric will measure the percentage of website visitors who purchased something from your online store in a set period of time. The purchase conversion rate will help you determine how your campaign, ad set, and ads are performing in terms of getting people to convert on your website.

Purchase Conversion Value

Getting conversions is great, but how much are customers actually spending when they make a purchase? The total value of website purchase conversions will measure how much customers spend when they purchase on your website.

Average Order Value

How much do customers spend on average? There’s a metric for that! Average order value measures the average amount a customer spends from each purchase. You can calculate this by dividing revenue by the number of conversions.

Return On Ad Spend (ROAS)

Return on ad spend is an essential metric for determining the success of your campaign. To calculate ROAS, you can take the total revenue generated from your Facebook ads and divide that by your total ad spend. For example, let’s say you spent $40,000 in one month on Facebook ads, which generated $100,000 in purchases for your business. That’s a 2.5X ROAS ($100,000/$40,000), which means for every ad dollar you spend, you get $2.50 in revenue.

3. Look At What Your Competitors Are Up To

What are your competitors doing that you aren’t? How can you differentiate your campaign from your competitors? Here are two ways you can increase your competitiveness in the e-commerce space.

Facebook Ads Library

Research competitors with Facebook’s Ad Library! This free tool is a great place where you can search for ads that are currently running across Facebook and Instagram. Simply search for your competitors in the search bar, and all of their active ads will appear for you to look at. It’s that easy!

Competitor Organic Social Posts

Another cost-effective (FREE) way to research your competitors is by looking at their organic Facebook and Instagram posts. They are putting it all out there for you to see, so you might as well take a look!

4. Consider Ad Content For All Stages Of the Funnel

Now that you have your campaign metrics nailed down, it’s time to work on your campaign strategy for all stages of the funnel. From prospecting to retargeting, give your target markets a customized experience that will lead to higher conversions.

Top Of Funnel Ad Examples

Prospecting audiences are crucial for getting your brand awareness out there and building up your retargeting and lookalike audiences. With Facebook’s broad demographic, location, and interest-based audiences at your disposal, you can go as broad or as segmented as you want. Lookalike audiences will also come in handy here. Find a qualified audience by modeling a lookalike audience from people who have already converted on your website. The possibilities are endless!

Middle Of Funnel Ad Examples

You’ve reached out to new customers, now it’s time to drive consideration. Not everyone is ready to convert after seeing one ad. It takes love and nurturing (and persistence) to drive conversions. This is where you can utilize your Facebook pixel to create custom audiences and retarget middle-of-the-funnel customers. Try basing a custom audience off of people who have engaged with your Facebook and Instagram accounts or engaged with your catalog and shopping products. These people may be familiar with your brand but haven’t bought from you before. Targeting middle-of-the-funnel customers will help keep your products top of mind and drive them to the bottom of the funnel.

Bottom Of Funnel Ad Examples

High-value conversions typically happen once a user interacts with your brand over multiple touchpoints. This could involve platforms outside of social media like programmatic display and Google search. For social, you can utilize custom audiences and retarget customers based on website visitors, abandoned carts, initiated checkout, past purchasers, and more. At this stage, you will also want to make sure to exclude any users that became customers during the earlier stages to create a customized ad experience for the lower funnel.

5. Test Different Audience Sizes

Once you have your audience targeting strategy built out, now it’s time to test different audience sizes. This is an important tactic when using lookalike audiences since you can choose an audience size between 1-10%, depending on how similar you want the audience to be to your original custom audience. Here you can do testing to see which lookalike size will perform the best. Testing audience sizes can also be done at the upper-funnel level with demographic, location, and interest-based audiences to see if a broader or more narrow audience will perform the best for your campaign.

6. Leverage Facebook Dynamic Ads

Customers love a personalized experience, and there is no better way to give them that than with Facebook dynamic ads. Facebook dynamic ads automatically show the right products to people who have expressed interest in your website. Simply upload your product catalog and set up your campaign one time, and it will continue working for you for as long as you want; an easy way to find the right people for each product.

Facebook Ads + E-Commerce = Perfection

Facebook advertising and e-commerce brands go together like peanut butter and jelly. With a solid Facebook Ad account and a variety of tools at your disposal, it’s never been easier to maximize your potential with Facebook Ads. Your new and existing customers are waiting! Start driving conversions today.

The post 6 Ways To Maximize Your E-Commerce Facebook Ad Performance appeared first on Portent.

For those that have been managing campaigns on Facebook, you may remember the push for automation that Facebook was focused on in 2019. For those that have started on the platform after automatic placements, just know that you couldn’t talk to a Facebook representative without hearing about implementing the audience network and consolidating your ad sets. This was known as the Power 5, and while some of this is still relevant, it can be challenging to know what aspects of automation should be incorporated into your strategy and how to scale your account once you’ve incorporated basic best practices. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the tactics we have used across our client accounts to increase their ad spend while maintaining KPI efficiency.

Where to Start Scaling

With brands that have struggled to scale in the past or aren’t seeing their desired return from increased investment, I always start with the following items. Most commonly, they are looking to drive conversions, but the following is relevant for upper-funnel KPIs as well.

1. Set Your Target KPIs

This is an absolute requirement for working towards increased ad spend you can stand behind. The goal of this process is to increase ad spend while your KPIs stay consistent, not to improve the performance of the KPI MoM or YoY. While hopefully the latter also occurs, it is not the primary focus.

2. Build a Campaign Map

Review the overall account structure. Was it originally built to prioritize automation? For a budget 5x less than the current goal? For limited creative resources? With little to no brand awareness? If the answer to any of those questions was yes, you might need to do a bit of restructuring. As a visual person, I always start by building a campaign map (I prefer to use Lucidchart, and you can read more about that here). This map should be built with growth in mind, even if you will be implementing it in phases. Below is an example pulled from the previous link.

3. Map Your Upper-Funnel Content Streams

I recommend building out the top of the funnel and working your way down. The most important part of campaign mapping for scale is to have clear differentiators between campaigns and audiences. If what you build out is too similar, it may work in the short term but be difficult to scale due to overlap. The best way to do this is to build out your campaigns into clear content streams. Segment your audiences into groups based on the content most likely to appeal to them so you can tailor their experience with your brand. Think location, age, and known areas of interest.

I want to clarify that this is the opposite of segmenting your audiences into specific groups and serving them all the same ad creative for testing purposes. Scaling is about using customization to reach new audiences that return your target KPIs, not drilling down to determine which audience returns the highest KPIs.

4. Map Your Lower-Funnel Content Streams

By using this tailored approach to upper-funnel content, you have an opportunity to expand your retargeting beyond general platform and site signals. For example, instead of creating one retargeting audience for everyone that has watched your videos, you can create individual audiences for each video.

As with the upper-funnel streams, it is important that the ad creative served to these audiences is tailored to their experience. Additionally, how you build out these audiences depends on size. When I mentioned that this might be a multi-phase launch, this may be an area that comes later.

5. Testing

There is no one-size-fits-all model for scaling your ad account, but testing is important regardless of industry or business model. Without the dedication to testing and the creative resources to act on your findings, scaling while maintaining KPIs will be challenging. As a rule at Portent, we give all tests at least seven days to deliver before making significant strategy decisions.

Scaling in Practice

One of our clients—a documentary streaming platform—came to us with aggressive growth goals and, as such, needed a concrete way to scale efficiently and quickly. They offer a large variety of programming genres, resulting in a wide range of ‘products’ that appeal to many different types of users. Prior to building out this strategy to scale, we had been squarely focused on driving conversions at a specific CPA within their budget allotment. The strategy relied on using lookalike audiences based on top-performing signals and delivering creative that was proven to be most popular across a wide range of viewers. We went from one overarching account structure that looked like this:

To a structure that we duplicated many times:

As you can see, these are very similar, and both rely on some automation. The major difference is that by splitting the content streams and removing some of the automation, ad relevance increases significantly.

We implemented this strategy for our client in mid-May and saw results within the first month. Looking at July performance, our target CPA was down 49%, our spend was up 97%, and our traffic was up 181%. Testing is easier because we know exactly who we are creating content for, and where to dedicate our creative resources each month.

Final Thoughts

Although the example I gave was for a media company with clear content streams, scaling Facebook campaigns is replicable across multiple industries with a bit of brain power.

As I mentioned, scaling typically takes a significant investment into tailored ad creative production. It’s possible to execute without it, but your results will likely plateau and decline over time. Building out your campaigns according to this structure not only increases reach, it increases relevancy.

Scaling also requires significant investment in the top of the funnel. Each time you launch a new content stream, there will be a data collection period required to build out the (typically) more profitable lower funnel audiences. Keep in mind that this may require additional investment up front before the return is realized down the funnel.

The post How to Scale Your Facebook Ad Accounts While Maintaining Efficiency appeared first on Portent.

Maybe you’ve heard the rumblings about the WordPress update that brought Gutenberg to life, or maybe you’ve just opened up your site to find that the editor looks a little different. In either case, your new best friend is here! If you’ve yet to be acquainted, we recommend getting the 4-1-1 on what Gutenberg is. Regardless of familiarity, Gutenberg is likely here to stay, but don’t fret! We’ve put together this guide to help you get started with navigating a brave new world.

What is Gutenberg?

“Gutenberg” is the nickname given to the newest iteration of the WordPress editor that was built into the v5.0 update. Unlike the previous “Classic” editor, Gutenberg allows for full customization capabilities to create a page or post’s layout all in one place. Where Classic more closely resembled Microsoft Word in editing capabilities, Gutenberg focuses on building each new page using blocks—hence its description: “block editor.” Although it might seem overwhelming at first, the block editor will ultimately save you time, and its powerful customization options allow for greater creative freedom.

How Does the WordPress Block Editor Work?

Gutenberg provides a wide range of content and media blocks that can be modified to create a new layout with each page or post. Elements of a page, such as headings, paragraphs, buttons, images, and even columns, are now part of the Gutenberg Blocks arsenal, and each comes with options to modify them. Customization includes most basic style needs, such as background colors, font colors, component width, and a whole arrangement of others. Think of it as the game Tetris, except you get to customize the blocks that fill the space—and, you know, there’s no timer.

Getting Started With Gutenberg

The new block editor might feel like you’re stepping into an empty new home at first, but once you get the hang of it, things will really start to come together. From here on, we’ll provide a tutorial on how to set it up and get going; then, we’ll take a look at some pros and cons.

1. Install and Enable Gutenberg

Getting started with Gutenberg is as easy as updating your WordPress version to version 5.0. Unless you have another page builder plugin installed, the new block editor becomes the default without any additional activation. Just update, and you’re off to the races!

How To Disable the Block Editor

Let’s say you need a specific page or post to keep the Classic editor. For example, it could be that this particular type of page isn’t ready for the update or that you are still working up the courage to tackle the new editor. Regardless of why, it’s definitely possible! To get back to that familiar feel, just use the Classic Editor plugin, developed and maintained by the WordPress team. Once you’ve activated the plugin, you’ll be able to select the default editor for all users and will additionally be presented with the option to toggle between the classic and block editor on each page or post. We want to warn you that the Classic Editor plugin listed above has a shelf life. While the date isn’t set quite yet, the WordPress team makes it pretty clear they’re aiming to end support eventually.

2. Create a New Post

Creating a new page or post has remained consistent between the WordPress updates. In your WordPress dashboard, you can either hover over and select New > Page or New > Post from the top navigation bar. You can also follow a similar path in the left-hand navigation by selecting Page > Add New or Post > Add New. Once your new post is created, it’s block editing time.

3. Insert New Content Blocks

You have your editor open. It may feel a little strange and a little exciting, but all around, it basically just looks like an empty whiteboard. From here, you have a couple of options to add in some new blocks; you can either click the (+) up in the top left-hand corner to open up the sidebar list of blocks or the (+) to the right-hand side to open the list of available blocks. The top (+) button opens up a sidebar that lists the blocks in combination with a short snippet about it, while the in-page button opens a quick drawer that only provides the list. Select your first block from either, and it’ll automatically be added to the beginning of your new post.

Reusable Blocks

There will be times when you’re creating a new post where you’re recreating certain blocks with the same content and style that you’ve already used before. This could include things like banners, specifically styled CTAs; you name it! Instead of reconfiguring the same blocks over and over again, Gutenberg offers the ability to create reusable blocks to quickly perform what’s essentially a big copy-paste. To get started, put together the desired block or blocks, add in your content, and select the block(s) you want to include. From here, open up the additional options in the toolbar (the three vertical dots) and click “Add to Reusable Blocks.” Name your new block, and voila! You’ve created your first reusable block.

Adding your new block to a post is just like adding in any other block—the main difference is that the reusable block will be listed under a new tab labeled “Reusable.” Click on that tab after you’ve opened the sidebar to find your fancy new creation.

Custom Blocks

“Well, what if I just found a cool plugin that gives me this exact block I want that isn’t available in Gutenberg right now?” you ask. And to that, I say, “Nice! Let’s add it!” Just like any other part of the WordPress experience, there’s always a possibility that a plugin exists with extra features, like new blocks to add or edits to the current blocks. And just like any other plugin, these can be added through the WordPress plugin library or via uploading a zip file. It may be good to note that some of these plugins create their own category in the Gutenberg sidebar that you’ll need to switch and search through, but all in all, they can be added to the post by following the same steps as other blocks.

Common Types Of WordPress Content Blocks

Posts are often built using the same recipes, and the Gutenberg development team seems to have made sure to try to account for this. Headings have been broken out into their own blocks, while paragraphs are also a stand-alone block. Images and other media, such as video and audio, have also been divided into individual block types. If you need a combination of media and text, another block that features images inserted into paragraphs has been included with the list of default blocks. Alongside those, buttons, hero sections, and various other bits and bobs are also included as separate customizable blocks. There’s a broad range included; all it takes is a quick search in the blocks sidebar.

Pros and Cons of the Gutenberg Block Editor

Congrats, you’ve made it through the tutorial! With the rollout of the editor attached to a WordPress version update, the shift from the Classic editor to Gutenberg is on the horizon for every WordPress site. It can sound a little scary at first, but we’ll go over some of the benefits and drawbacks of the update to hopefully help assuage any anxiety.

Advantages Of Using Gutenberg Block Editor

The biggest benefit of Gutenberg is that it’s truly a game-changer. Pre-built blocks allow for quick layout creation regardless of your comfort or ability with development. Anyone can fully customize the presentation of a page using the editing sidebar in combination with the block library, so you don’t have to rely on a developer to make that cool header you’ve always wanted without much hassle. It’s also a huge plus that repetitive blocks can be saved to be reusable.

Disadvantages Of Using Gutenberg Block Editor

While Gutenberg has many plus sides, the downside is that there’s a lot to cover. The learning curve is definitely very present, so updating a site that had previously been using the Classic editor can be a bit of a pain. There’s quite a bit to learn, but we’re hopeful that this tutorial can at least offer you a boost.

Our Top Tips For Using Gutenberg

With all that being said, the biggest tip we can offer? Experiment, and experiment a lot! Gutenberg is incredibly customizable right out of the box, and there’s always something new to toggle, adjust or expand. If it seems difficult to set up one block the way you’d planned to, start searching around, and you might find that there’s a different block that does the exact thing you’re looking for. Explore the customization options available to each block and tinker with the possibilities because they can truly feel endless. Congrats on the update, and welcome to Gutenberg!

The post How To Start Using Gutenberg Editor For WordPress appeared first on Portent.

Updated August 24, 2021 with new information and data. Since this article was originally published in September 2020, the amazing Simo Ahava has since devised a method to measure Core Web Vitals in Google Analytics (both Universal Analytics and GA4). We’ve added a section toward the end of this post showing our adaptation of his method specifically for Universal Analytics.

Welcome to the second installment of the Field Guide to Reporting on Web Vitals! In Part 1, we covered:

• What Core Web Vitals are
• Why they matter
• What tools you can use to measure them

In this post, we’ll outline three solutions to integrate Core Web Vitals into your reporting. To illustrate this solution, we’ll use Google Data Studio (the Portent dashboarding tool of choice) and Google’s Universal Analytics.

How to Report on Core Web Vitals in Google Data Studio

We recommend two methods of pulling Core Web Vitals data into GDS to create a comprehensive and automated web vitals report: the Chrome UX GDS connector and PageSpeed Insights.

Chrome UX Reports GDS Connector

The Chrome UX Report GDS connector is a free, open-source connector. The Chrome UX report (aka CrUX) “provides user experience metrics for how real-world Chrome users experience popular destinations on the web.”

With this connector, we get access to:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• First Input Delay (FID)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• First Contentful Paint (FCP)

To use this connector, go to Data Studio and select “Create” at the top lefthand side, and then “Data source.”

Search for “Chrome UX Report” and it will appear at the bottom. Click into the connector.

Enter the origin URL of choice, and then click “Connect.”

This connector only accepts origin URLs like “https://www.portent.com,” and does not accept full URLs, such as “https://www.portent.com/blog.” For additional information on how to input URLs, Google has provided an excellent resource for details about the Chrome UX connector.

After you create the data source, it’s ready to use and configure in Google Data Studio.

Here is a sample slide of how we recommend visualizing and reporting on the Core Web Vitals metrics, with five reporting elements called out.

This sample slide focuses on Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). The five reporting elements are what help bring context to understanding CLS, and how it is trending on our website over time:

1. Last Month. This is a sideways 100% stacked bar chart that displays “Poor CLS,” “Needs Improvement CLS,” and “Good CLS.” I’ve set the date range to “Last Month,” and included each metric’s percentages for clarity. You can also mouse over each individual section to get a pop-out box of the metric name and result.I’ve also color-matched these to the Search Console report, for visual continuity.
2. Change Over Time. This is a 100% stacked column chart, set back as far as we have available data for the metric. This timeframe will vary from metric to metric (for example, the Largest Contentful Paint metric only goes back as far as September 2019.) The data reads from left to right, with left being the earliest data available, and right being the most recent. This chart allows you to see where improvements are being made and how. The metrics here are also “Poor CLS,” “Needs Improvement CLS,” and “Good CLS.”
3. Device Type. While seeing Core Web Vitals as a whole is useful, it’s also critical to understand that these metrics may behave very differently on desktop, mobile, and tablets, and therefore score differently. Having a “Device” filter allows you to see where these metrics are most impacted. The “Last Month” and “Change Over Time” charts are 100% stacked charts so that they are responsive to this filter.
4. “Good” CLS and “Poor” CLS compared YoY. We picked the “Good” and “Poor” metrics to highlight in the scorecard, with “Last Month” as the date range, and YoY comparison data underneath. This will tell you at a glance how your website ranks and how the metric has changed compared to the previous year.
5. Definitions. Core Web Vitals each measure a specific aspect of a user’s experience with a web page. We’ve used this section to reiterate what that measurement is, and what is considered “Good,” “Needs Improvement,” and “Poor” as it relates to each metric.

This format is repeatable for all three Core Web Vitals metrics, and First Contentful Paint. These are the first four pages of the report:

PageSpeed Insights via the URL Embed Tool

The second data source we recommend using in this web vitals report is PageSpeed Insights. To achieve this, we have embedded PageSpeed Insights measuring “Portent.com” in the final page of our GDS report:

To embed this report in GDS, click on “Insert” in the top navigation bar, and scroll down to “URL Embed.” Draw a box on the GDS slide where you want PageSpeed Insights to appear. In our report, we’ve dedicated most of the slide to the embed box for maximum visibility and ease of use.

After placing the box, you can define the URL of the embed. Simply replace the below URL with the URL you want to measure:

“https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=portent.com”

Embedding a URL into GDS functions as if you’re on the PageSpeed Insights page, except that it’s accessible in your GDS report, supplementing the Chrome UX Web Vitals data.

While the previous month’s Chrome UX data is available beginning the second Tuesday of the month, PageSpeed Insights are available to you all the time. It gives you an instant pulse check on all metrics and how they measure in real-time.

This report aggregates mobile and desktop separately, so remember to toggle between the two and see how they compare. This report defaults to mobile first, so you’ll need to toggle to see desktop:

PageSpeed Insights also outlines specific opportunities and diagnostics to give you tangible actions to improve your Core Web Vitals scores.

How to Report on Core Web Vitals in Google Analytics

As you’ve just read, reporting on Core Web Vitals in Google Data Studio is really straightforward. But it has two major drawbacks:

1. There’s no way to get page-specific data in the GDS connector. If you’re trying to troubleshoot the most problematic pages on your site from a Core Web Vitals perspective, that presents an issue.
2. There’s no way to contextualize your performance on Core Web Vitals alongside its larger effect on your site’s user experience over time. If you want to know how CLS, FCP, or FID is impacting a user’s engagement with content or their conversion rate, you’re out of luck.

That’s where Simo’s new Google Tag Manager template comes in.

Customizing the Core Web Vitals Event Tag in Google Tag Manager

Once you’ve gone to Simo’s site and followed his step-by-step directions including the variable and triggers, you’ll want to set up a Universal Analytics event tag with the following settings:

1. Name your Event Category “Core Web Vitals.”
2. Use the {{DLV – webVitalsMeasurement.name}} Variable as your Event Action.
3. Use the {{Page Path}} Variable as your Event Label.
4. Use the {{DLV – webVitalsMeasurement.valueRounded}} Variable as your Event Value.
5. (a) Enable overriding settings in this tag.
   (b) Under Fields to Set, type in Field Name “transport” and Value “beacon.”

After this is configured, we’ll look at how to unpack this event data in Google Analytics itself.

Analyzing Core Web Vitals Data in Google Analytics

When you’ve published the tag in Google Tag Manager, you can go and watch the data stream into the Realtime > Events report in Google Analytics, shown below.

This shows you that Core Web Vitals information is being collected for each of the three main metrics (Cumulative Layout Shift, First Input Delay, and Largest Contentful Paint) and which pages those are being collected on. But it still doesn’t show you the values of those metrics.

For that information, you’ll need to go to the Behavior > Events > Top Events report. Here, you can see the same event information available, but with the Total Value and Avg. Value of the events.

Remember the scale of the Core Web Vitals values to understand how your site’s (and individual page) performance stacks up.

Lastly, you can build segments from the Core Web Vitals data to apply that context to other reports in GA: campaign, content, and source reports.

Here, we’ve built a segment looking for sessions that contain LCP values per hit at or over 2500 milliseconds (>=2.5 seconds) to which pages we need to improve.

Benefits of Each Data Source

Using these solutions, you have access to Core Web Vitals in your reporting in an automated and refreshable format.

The benefit of the Chrome UX report is being able to see trends in Web Vitals and change over time. PageSpeed Insights provides you with real-time measurement of your website and tangible action items to improve your Web Vitals scores. And looking at Core Web Vitals within the context of Google Analytics adds a new level of insight that you can take action on in your marketing.

Ultimately, using all of these sources in tandem and building a Core Web Vitals dashboard will help you get a better baseline understanding of which metrics you may need to improve, thus positioning your website for a smooth transition when Core Web Vitals become a ranking factor in the Google SERPs.

The post Field Guide to Reporting on Core Web Vitals: Part 2 appeared first on Portent.

As marketers, our job is to make recommendations to our clients, but we can’t base them on intuition alone. Besides making educated hypotheses on what could be harming usability or causing friction on a site, CRO strategists need a way to see whether our recommendations will positively impact conversions and usability before implementing changes directly on the site. Luckily for us, we have the opportunity to support our recommendations with data using Google Optimize.

This guide will walk you through the basics of setting up Google Optimize, what it can do, and a few things to keep in mind as you start testing.

What is Google Optimize?

Google Optimize is a free testing tool that can help you create and monitor your experiments to help you accomplish your business goals. Whether you are curious if users will be more inclined to purchase if a CTA is red or provide proof to your boss on why you restructured a landing page, Google Optimize can help you prove your points and make your case. There are many reasons to use Optimize, and many things it can do for you.

What Google Optimize Can Do

Within Google Optimize, there are three different types of tests and two site customizations you can use to improve user experience and conversion rates, depending on your needs. In this post, we’ll talk through testing and personalization (we won’t be talking through site banners).

A/B (Split) Tests

An A/B test, also known as a split test, is the most basic and most used test you can perform in Google Optimize. An A/B test allows you to test the risk and reward of a desired change by splitting your audience and presenting two versions of your site: an original version to one group and one with a variable to test to the other group. Optimize will then measure which group had a more successful interaction between the original and the variant, so you can learn whether or not to implement the change directly on your site.

For instance, if you are considering updating a header on your page, you could test your original against the new copy to see whether it can aid in conversion. If you run this test and there is no clear winner, it indicates that the problem lies elsewhere, thus inspiring your next test.

A/B Tests are typically the best fit for most websites, but there are instances where you may want to create more complex test methods.

Redirect Tests

A redirect test uses the same framework as an A/B test. It still allows you to test two versions of web pages against each other; the only difference is that instead of creating a single change within the test page using Optimize’s visual editor, you simply add the URL of the variation experience. Optimize will then redirect the test audience from your control page to the variation page.

Redirect tests are a great option when variation experiences require more edits than are recommended within the A/B test editor (around 60 lines of code), like when you’re testing a new form format. Some CRO professionals will use redirect tests to compare the performances of two distinctly different pages. While this is great for reducing the risk of introducing a new page layout, we offer a word of caution that it can be difficult to identify why the winning page was more successful.

Multivariate Tests

A multivariate test helps you determine the best performing combination of variants. Using a multivariate test is typically the best fit for sites with very high traffic or baseline conversion rates. For example, let’s say you wanted to test which headlines or images to use on a page, and you have two options for each. Instead of setting up an A/B test, waiting for the results, and then iterating on your findings, you can test which combination of headings and images performs the best all at once. This testing format is great because it can speed up testing, but remember that it requires very large sample sizes in each experience, and exponentially increases the complexity of analysis. This is varsity-level testing.

Multi-Page Experience

A multi-page experience is similar to a classic A/B test, but it allows you to create a variant across multiple pages of the site to test a change throughout the user journey consistently. For example, if you wanted to test whether referring to the checkout process as a “cart” or a “bag” helped nudge users to convert more, you could change the CTA on product pages (“Add to Cart” vs. “Add to Bag”), and then change the corresponding title on the checkout page to see which verbiage was more successful.

Personalizations

Personalizations are a bit different than the rest of the test options in Optimize. Think of this option more like a marketing technique, similar to targeted ad campaigns that aim to show the right content to the right visitors at the right time. Personalizations allow you to show a set of changes to your website to display in front of anyone meeting your targeting conditions. Unlike the other test types, personalizations do not use variants and can run forever.

Personalizations can be a stand-alone option if you solely want different users to have different experiences on your site (for example, show a unique phone number when a customer visits from outside your sales area, or add more context to a form if users arrive there from a specific referrer). Still, personalizations can also pair with the findings from other types of tests. If you find that the variant outperforms the original page on a site, you can use personalization to deploy this updated version while the development team changes the site.

How to Use Google Optimize in Four Steps

Now that we’ve talked through what Optimize can do, let’s talk through the how. To run tests in Google Optimize, you must first create an Optimize account and install the Optimize script on your website. We recommend setting up Google Optimize via Google Tag Manager (GTM) for the fastest, most consistent deployment across your site. Once you are up and running, you can start building your tests with these four steps.

1. Create an Account and Add a Container

I’m going to hand you off to Google for the nitty-gritty of setting these up. Google Support has a great guide for setting up your Optimize Account and connecting it to your Analytics Account (a crucially important step for measurement). Once you get into your Google Optimize account, it will prompt you to add a container. This hierarchy is similar to Accounts and Properties within Google Analytics. Once you have your container, it’s time to install Optimize on your website. We recommend that you install Optimize with Google Tag Manager. This will allow flexibility in how and when Optimize is deployed. For example, you can easily pause the tag if you take a break from testing.

Once you have everything set up as described, you will want to go into the preview mode in GTM and make sure your tag works where and how you intended.

Once you confirm that the Optimize tag is firing correctly in preview mode, publish the tag to your live site. Once done, you’re set to create your first experiment in Google Optimize.

2. Set Up Your Test (Create Experience)

Once you are set up in Google Optimize, it is time to select the upper right button “Create Experience” to set up your test and choose parameters.

First, name your experience something that has not been previously used, and be sure to include information that will distinguish it from other tests you may run. Underneath the name, you will include the URL of the page you will be testing, called your editor page.

Next, you will select which type of test you would like to create between A/B, Multivariate, or Redirect.

Create Variant (or URL)

Once you are in your new experience, the first step is to set up the change you want to make on your site by selecting the blue “Add variant” button. Next, choose a name (we will call it “Variant 1”) and select “edit” next to your new variant.

This is the part where you can start making changes to your site that you want to test against the original. The editor allows you to change copy, element order, style colors, and more in a few simple steps. Other more complicated changes could require some help from a developer. At this stage, you will also determine what proportion of test visitors will see the variation experience. We recommend a 50/50 split.

Select Your Audience

Once the variant is set that you would like to test, the next step is to determine who will see the experience. You can set it to appear to all users who visit your site or customize it so that only certain users encounter it. For example, you can specify that only people in certain locations or from certain devices will participate in the experiment.

Choose the Objective

When it comes to choosing an objective or what you want to measure, there are two options. You can either choose from a list of your current Google Analytics Goals or create a custom objective. Custom objectives are useful when the goal of your test doesn’t correspond to a GA goal. For example, you can select a specific event on a webpage, like whether someone clicks on a “Next Step” button to measure whether a change you made on a page influenced a user to start a form on that page.

Determine Test Duration

When we set up tests, the duration will depend on the site’s typical traffic. If it is low, you may need to run a test longer to collect enough useful data. As a rule, we recommend you choose pages for tests that average at least 1,000 pageviews a month over the last three months. This will ensure that your experiment gets steady traffic and can complete in a matter of weeks, not months. If your site doesn’t get the traffic needed for a typical test duration and you don’t want to run a test for months, there are other A/B test strategies for low-traffic sites you can try.

For most sites, the sweet spot for running tests is between two and four weeks. A minimum of two weeks allows us to account for any cyclical nature within the week. A maximum of four weeks allows us to limit the introduction of too many other variables. If you plan to run your tests to statistical significance, we recommend using a tool like the Pre-Test Analysis on A/B Testguide to determine exactly how long your specific test needs to run. Make sure to do this before you start your test.

Semi-Pro Tip: If there’s a page that absolutely positively must be tested quickly but it’s low traffic, consider whether you could use paid ads to drive the right kind of prospects to this page at a higher pace.

Finalize Settings

Before you launch your test, select your desired settings. First, check that Optimize is correctly installed by clicking the “Check Installation” button. If you’ve set Optimize up correctly, you’ll receive a little green indicator that shows you that you are good to go. Next, we recommend turning on email notifications so you can receive updates about the experience without logging in to check in as often. Depending on your testing needs, select the percentage of visitors to your site who will see the experiment. For speed, we recommend that 100% of your traffic can see the experiment (they will be split based on the variant weight you assigned earlier).

Then, choose an event where the test gets triggered between pageload, continuously, or on a custom event. Pageload is most common and the default option. Continuous activation is a good option for tests on dynamic pages as it will apply the variation’s changes to newly matching elements as they load. A custom event can be used when the event helps determine the test’s audience. For example, if you have a multi-step form and want to determine the influence of a change to the second step, you could trigger your experiment on the “Next Step” button.

3. Launch and Monitor Performance

Once all of the variants, targeting, and settings are in place, it is time to push the shiny “Start” button you have been eyeing. But just because all you need to do now is wait does not mean your work here is done. It is imperative to monitor your test’s performance throughout the experiment to ensure that nothing is broken, that your variant is not creating a worse experience for users, and know when to pull or extend the test’s duration.

Google Optimize makes it very easy to monitor results within the tool. Within the container under the “reporting” tab, you can view the data in various ways. At the top, you can view the sessions over time broken down by each day. This view is important for making sure data is being collected and that there are no alarming drops in numbers. We recommend clicking “View full chart” rather than just peeping in at the thumbnail. We once had a test we let run for four weeks, were checking it weekly, and missed that it had broken ten days in. That was unlucky timing.

The thumbnail:

The full chart:

4. Analyze the Results

After your test has been running long enough, you can often (not always) start to see a pattern. One way to see how a test is performing is by looking at the “Probability to be Best” section under “Reporting.” If the percentage is 80 or above, it indicates a strong likelihood of becoming the winner over time. In this example, the probability to be best was 100% for our variant, which allowed us to have enough data to implement the variant on the live site.

In some cases, it is helpful to dive deeper than the Probability to be Best to understand the data. Luckily, Optimize does some of this work for you by providing the data that directly compares the performance between the original and the variant. In order to do so, Optimize calculates the modeled conversion rate, which calculates how your variants have performed against a selected objective over time.

There are two ways that Optimize displays the modeled conversion rate. One is in a box and whiskers plot, while the other is in a chart.

There are a few indicators to consider when looking at performance. First, it is important to note whether the blue and black dotted lines diverge. Below is an example of a variant that outperformed the original page, where the lack of overlap shows a clear winner.

Once you find whether a variant helps or hurts your site, it is time to implement the successful change or go back to the drawing board to hypothesize other variants to test.

Tips to Consider When Using Google Optimize

Although you are probably ready to start testing, there are a few things to keep in mind when running experiments in Optimize that could save you in the long run.

Avoid Cross-Contamination

One thing to be aware of is potential cross-contamination within your tests. If you run more than one test at a time, avoid this by making sure that your audiences and targeting do not overlap, and that you run one variant at a time. Otherwise, you could end up with unhelpful data, wasted time, and an empty pocket, even if your variants would have been a hit. When we have needed to run two tests on one site at once, we combatted this issue by displaying each test to two different markets to avoid overlap.

Expect Failure

One thing you can expect from testing is that you are probably going to fail a few times. There are often times where you will break a test or even just receive disappointing data that shows your variant was not successful. Just know that part of the job is to learn by trial and error. The best way to combat this is to expect and embrace it.

Reach Out to Specialists for Technical Support

One of the ways to limit failure and avoid wasting time and money is to ask experts for help. In some cases, the technical aspects of setting up a test or analyzing complex results can be beyond your expertise. We recommend working with a dedicated CRO or development team to lean on when it comes to creating variants, selecting audiences, and even managing strategies. Not only will they make sure your tests are running smoothly, but they can help ideate future tests to identify areas of improvement on your site.

And there you have it. You’re now armed with the information needed to set up and use Google Optimize, and some best practices along the way. Happy testing!

The post Getting Started With Google Optimize appeared first on Portent.

The days when PR was a handshake and a well-placed logo on a celebrity are gone. Now that we are all slaves to the search engines that run our world (mostly kidding), our brands compete in a digital landscape that is constantly changing. Sometimes it feels like going into a sword fight blindfolded.

How do you outsmart your competitors on a battlefield that Google arbitrarily controls and slants when it sees fit? The answer is with a ninja.

Off-page SEO is the mercenary of the PR world: it’s stealthy, it’s quiet, and it’s powerful.

Whatever the reason you want to build your business’s authority on search engines—whether you’re a startup just entering the market, hitting a plateau in your SEO results, or you’re launching a new product— expanding your off-page SEO (think of it as digital PR) can get you seen. Even if you’re already ranking on page one for key terms in the SERPs, off-page factors are a critical part of keeping you there. Moz even came out and said that off-page factors make up more than 50% of Google’s algorithm, so it’s important to pay attention. Digital PR and link building are some of the best tools to proactively drive both organic and referral traffic to your site, build domain authority, and meet your audience where they are living and engaging on the web, building brand awareness in the right places at the right time.

Digital PR is not easy, though. The landscape is always changing —it takes a lot of strategy and quite a bit of chutzpah to get your foot in the door anymore. And the search engines are watching.

When off-page SEO is done wrong, penalties can cost your site dearly.

Here’s one ninja’s summary of what it takes to master your digital PR strategy:

The Four-Pronged Attack

While it is not necessary to engage in all four of these strategies, they are all powerful solutions for different reasons. Things to consider when deciding on your approach are:

1. Staffing
2. Time investment (how soon do you want results)
3. Your company’s goals and needs (i.e., product launches, site rebuilds, overall authority growth, etc.)

Digital PR

WHAT: Your off-page SEO specialist would promote your product or website launch to relevant media outlets and journalists across the globe, or just your backyard (depending on your goals), aiming for coverage of your site or product landing page. They may also answer HAROs on behalf of the brand to gain coverage, including mentions of your brand and links back to your site.

WHY: This can potentially drive traffic to your site in a short amount of time, gain awareness for your brand in relevant spaces across the web, and quickly grab the attention of a wide audience, increasing your domain authority (and therefore, your organic visibility) as media outlets link to your content.

Content Promotion

WHAT: This is a large-scale team effort. Your off-page SEO specialist ideates and produces data-driven or evergreen content (like a tool), the page is designed, copy is written, and then published by a developer on your site. The off-page SEO specialist then promotes the piece of content to journalists and media outlets, in hopes of gaining media attention, coverage, and relevant backlinks to your site.

WHY: Much like digital PR, this tactic can result in referral traffic to your site in a short amount of time. Evergreen content (like a calculator or tool) can be promoted indefinitely, and content like this builds your authority as a thought leader in your industry, providing useful content for your site visitors. These pieces are also highly shareable. Newsworthy, data-driven content is more commonly a one-off, meant to get the media’s attention for coverage across several verticals at once. Both types of promotable content build authority and increase your site’s organic search traffic.

Local Link Building

WHAT: Building links to the local pages on your site on other URLs can be time-consuming and arduous. Searching the web for target directories, resource pages, listings, etc., and reaching out to them requesting a citation, is a good way to build links to local pages. This is the bread and butter of off-page SEO. Your strategist would write articles for media outlets and publications on tangential topics to your industry, and link to your site content as a resource in a contextually relevant, keyword-rich article.

WHY: If your site has location-based pages, this is a must. Building links to these pages increases visibility to users searching the web. This is a natural way of earning backlinks to your site (when it’s done right). Relevant, well-written articles that link to your site as a source boost your authority in your industry. When a relevant site with a high domain authority links to you, some of their link equity is passed on to you, slowly increasing your site’s ability to rank in organic search.

Link Reclamation

WHAT: Most sites that have been around for a while have links pointing to them that no longer work. Whether you’ve gone through something as big as a migration, or just taken down a blog post, links pointing to your site can get lost in translation and end up returning a 404 error. You can solve this quickly by redirecting the page, but you lose some valuable link equity in doing so. Another solution is to reach out to the referring site and let them know the link is broken, and offer a replacement link, asking them to fix it. It is time-consuming and a bit arduous, but restoring link equity and fixing links can be a productive use of time if you have the right kind of brand.

Over the years, we’ve found, in general, that product pages don’t really work well for this, and charitable causes and nonprofits do extremely well. We like to evaluate each scenario case by case and only engage in this tactic when we feel it’s productive.

WHY: Broken links are not helping your site. You’ve lost all equity from the original referring link. This is bad when you are looking at hundreds and thousands of broken links. Redirecting still loses link equity. Fixing these links at the source is ideal.

A Note About Guest Posting

Back in the day, guest posting moved mountains. Even in 2019, this was the case. But Google’s algorithm has caught up to this tactic, and it’s giving less and less authority to guest posting links. We’ve found that the needle barely moves anymore, and the effort isn’t really worth it (it’s incredibly time-consuming, involving multiple parties, and can take months to land live links). In our experience, there are tactics that are much more effective and less risky (when done wrong, guest posting can result in penalties).

The Skills that Pay the Bills

Like any good ninja, there is a special set of traits that every good off-page SEO specialist has in their arsenal. They are…

A Natural Salesperson. Your off-page SEO specialist has mastered the elevator speech. From promoting newsworthy content to pitching tangential content linking to your company’s site to discriminating editors, they’re convincing. Let’s just say they could sell a ketchup popsicle to a lady wearing white gloves.

Resilient. Your off-page SEO specialist is tough as nails. Digitally knocking on doors all day, getting rejected, failing, and picking up the pieces, going back to the drawing board, repurposing dry content, and starting over again. Your ninja lets failure be their fuel for greatness.

Researcher. Your off-page SEO specialist does their homework. They’ve researched your competitors, analyzed where they’re getting coverage, and gone after it themselves. They’ve found all the journalists that are covering your industry and have dug until they found every single one of their emails. They know your site and know how to pitch it. They are able to dive deep into data sets and create additional content that they can promote for you.

Persistent. Your off-page SEO specialist doesn’t give up. Ever. If someone mentions your company, They’ll pursue a link. If one editor turns them down, they find another. They follow up religiously on every email they send.

Well-written. Since the majority of your off-page SEO specialist’s communication is by email, they must know how to craft the perfect one. They have mastered the subject line. Their grammar and writing skills are top-notch. In the digital battle, the email, after all, is mightier than the sword.

The Battle They Must Face

Digital PR is challenging—your off-page SEO specialist has Their work cut out for them. These are just some of the issues they face:

Burnout. Being rejected for a living is not easy. The wins make it worth it, and the resilience of the off-page SEO specialist is key. They need to be able to get back on the horse over and over again, while continuing to be innovative and responsive.

Lack of Control. The media can be fickle and unpredictable. You may have the perfect piece scheduled to launch, and a storm wipes out all the power in Texas, or the princess of Wales announces triplets, and you’re sunk trying to compete with that. The good news is that resilience and persistence pay off, and over time, you will have more wins than losses if you keep at it.

Lack of Linkable Content. Some websites are flat-out easier to link to than others. When content is thin, overly promotional (salesy), or doesn’t provide clear value and authority on your given subject, trying to promote it and building links to it can be dicey. The media simply doesn’t like linking to overtly promotional content. So if your website is thin on content, content strategy should come before any link-building efforts (like local link building or link reclamation) are pursued. Luckily, content promotion can stand on its own because you’re creating great content that won’t be thin.

Time. Digital PR is a major time investment. It usually takes an average of six to twelve weeks of hard work to see significant improvements in organic search traffic and keyword rankings, although, with bigger, large-scale, and consistent content promotion, your site can potentially see gains more quickly. As a rule, you should invest in digital PR for at least six months to a year to create the momentum necessary for success and to allow the links your off-page SEO specialist builds to positively impact your site. As a wise ninja might say: It is a slow, but fruitful (and necessary) endeavor.

When You Should Consider Digital PR for Your Business, a Summary

Digital PR is a powerful marketing tool. Again, whether you’re a startup facing down well-known competitors, a veteran in the market who is starting to see a plateau in your SEO results, or somewhere in between, digital PR can take you further.

But it’s not easy. Be sure you have a team that:

• Has mastered the art of the pitch
• Has the tools to be successful
• Has the time, energy, and resiliency to go to battle for your brand —hard, every day.

A final caution: Google is always watching, and when off-page SEO is done wrong, penalties can be costly.

Go into battle well-armed, my friends.

(Ninja Vanish!)

The post Off-Page SEO 101: So Much More Than Link Building appeared first on Portent.

I’ve been running analytics at Portent for the better part of seven years now, but my first digital marketing job was in PPC. In fact, paid search is largely to blame for my current addiction to data. It’s a very accountable channel. You put a dollar into the ad platform and, with a fair amount of certainty, you can tell how many dollars you got in return.

In PPC, many of your campaigns perform under your complete control: account structure, ad text, bids, budgets, landing pages, and targeting. When you have all those controllable factors dialed in to the fullest, your focus starts to wander to external factors: customer behavior, the economy, heck, even the weather. But those things are amorphous and tough to predict.

The one external factor that you can get tangible data on and respond to in an agile way is what your competitors are doing. In Google Ads, the Auction Insights Report gives us deep insight into who is bidding against us and how they might be cutting into our precious impression share.

Back in 2018, PPC Hero’s Rachael Law wrote about how to generate Auction Insight data in Data Studio and get it out to Excel for analysis. In this post, we’re going to expand on that technique, but stay in Data Studio for the graphs! We’ll also address how to talk to clients and stakeholders about how increased competition can impact performance.

Building a Competitor Report in Google Data Studio

You can get up and running with Google Ads data in Google Data Studio in seconds. Here’s how to do that:

1. Go to datastudio.google.com. (Agree to their terms of service if you’ve never been there before.)
2. Click on + Create, then Data Source.
   
3. Search for the Google Ads connector and click on it.
   
4. If you do this from the same login where you have access to Google Ads accounts, you’ll be able to see a list of MCCs, Sub-MCCs, and accounts. Drill down to the account you want to use until you reach the Overall Account Fields. Click that, then press Connect.
   
5. You’ll then see a list of fields – dimensions and metrics – that are standard to every Google Ads data source. From here, click Explore.
   
6. Think of Explore in Data Studio as a place to stage dashboard elements before you’re ready to make them into a permanent report. A table element will automatically populate, and you can drag and drop dimensions, metrics, and filters.
   
   Here I’ve added Auction Insights – Domain and Week as dimensions. I’ve also dragged in Impr. share and Overlap rate as metrics. Lastly, I’ve added Campaign and Search keyword as filters.
7. The table is a good starting point for doing some analysis, but you can also experiment with charts and pivot tables to more readily spot trends in the data.
   
   
8. Once you’re satisfied with the visualizations, you can click the Share button in the upper right, and either copy it to an existing Data Studio report or create a new report.
   

Analyzing the Competitor Report

For the rest of this post, we will stick with the chart format and walk through what to look for in the impression share trends over time.

NOTE: In the chart, your domain will always be shown with no domain label next to it. If you can style that line in bold, it will be easier to distinguish from the competitor sites.

Coinciding Dips and Spikes

In week 12 of the example below, Competitor 1 (blue) jumps significantly at the same time that our domain (pink) sinks. For the next two weeks, they stay higher, and our impression share doesn’t recover.

This could be because they increased their budgets or their bids, but either way, this gives us a specific competitor to call out when we talk with our stakeholders about performance in our weekly updates.

Domain Dropouts

Also, in week 12, Competitor 5 (green) dipped out of the auction altogether. As big spenders increase their bids and budgets, it’s not uncommon to see newcomers pause their campaigns either temporarily or permanently to mitigate paying high CPCs.

These are prime opportunities to regain impression share in a less crowded auction. Unfortunately, Competitor 1 gobbled up most of the empty space left by Competitor 5.

Seasonal Shifts

In the two previous examples, we were looking at a very short 5-week window. That might not be a great indicator of how the auction is year-round. When we open it up to a 52-week lookback, things change dramatically.

Our domain has unique promotions during the moving season (late Spring through Summer) when we make our most revenue and profit. So, our loss during the off-season is not necessarily our competitors’ gain. They’re fighting over impressions for ultimately fewer clicks and conversions, while we’re content to sit back and wait for the peak time of year to make our push.

It’s important to watch for the times when we expect major seasonal shifts and ensure we can get to our spot this year when it matters most.

How to Talk About Competitor Trends With Your Boss

There are so many nuances that can impact paid search performance even before competitors are taken into consideration. But when you start showing these charts to your stakeholders, you’ll inevitably get questions about the consequences of impression share data.

Here are all the things to bear in mind in both positive and negative scenarios.

When impression share is down:

• Costs may go up – either overall spend or CPC-wise.
• Average position/top of page rate may go down.
• CTR may go down – particularly on mobile devices, where only one ad might show up above the fold.
• Many new competitors might be entering the auction on your existing keywords—watch them to make sure they aren’t just a temporary opponent.
• One or two competitors might be flooding the auction with aggressive spend—pay attention to how long they can sustain high rates of spend before recommending a shift in our budget to compensate.
• Our keyword list might have expanded—often, impression share is lower on keywords where our domain is new to the auction.

When impression share is up:

• Our spend may still go up—we might have had to raise budgets or bids to regain that share.
• Our spend may also go down—if several key competitors drop out of the auction at once, it may not cost as much to maintain our position.
• Our keyword list might have gotten smaller—as we decide to focus on the most profitable terms for our account.
• CTR should go up—particularly on mobile devices if we’re able to maintain a high top of page ad position.

What Should You Do in Response to Competitive Data?

There are many other considerations aside from just spend and ad position to look at when mulling over competitor data. For instance, how certain competitors write their ad text can affect their CTR and Quality Score over time. Drops in impression share may signal a need for a refresh in ad text ourselves to put something new and click-worthy into the marketplace.

Whatever you tell your stakeholders about this data, make sure to include the potential business impact above and recommend a plan of action. Ask yourself a series of questions you can anticipate:

• Should we increase or decrease the budget?
• Should we increase or decrease bids?
• Should we pause a keyword or campaign?
• Should we try a new ad text?
• Should we try new landing pages?

Always come prepared to answer the “so what?” to make the most of this competitive data now, and in the future.

The post Keeping an Eye on the Competition With Google Data Studio appeared first on Portent.

When I was a consultant, one of the first things I would ask a potential new client is if they’ve had an audit performed on their website. On more than one occasion, I was provided with a printout of the audit from a tool, usually proprietary, that just listed a bunch of stuff without much in the way of context, or consideration for how the client operates, or their short- and long-term goals.

This is not uncommon. Hell, search for “seo audit” and other permutations of the term, and you’ll find ads from companies offering free SEO audits or software companies like SEMRush and Ahrefs advertising their audit capabilities. Does this make them worthless? Of course not. They can actually be a pretty decent barometer of your site’s health, and can be used in various ways to effect change (as we’ll soon see).

But can it truly have the same impact as good ol’ fashioned manual work performed by expert SEOs chained to a radiator in our basement? Well, let’s just say you should call the police soon, ‘cause they’re not feeding us and I can’t keep doing this much longer.

I mean no, of course not. Let’s find out why.

First of All, What is an SEO Audit?

An SEO Audit is a thorough examination and analysis of your website to uncover issues that can impact its ability to rank well in search results. They’re typically performed at the start of every new engagement and serve as the first step toward developing recommendations for clients. They can be comprehensive and include everything from technical SEO to content performance to linking, or they can be broken down into individual audits based on need.

Why Do I Need an SEO Audit?

The same reason you need someone to diagnose a problem with your car before they start working on it. Sure, you could take the car in and say “fix it,” but the lack of blinker fluid (hehe) is nowhere near as pressing as the brake pads that are so worn down the last thing you’ll hear before you go careening into the back of that semi-truck that just hit its brakes is the high-pitched squeal that portends your doom.

Manual vs. Automated SEO Audits

So we’ve established that your website is like a car. You know something is wrong, so you bring it into a shop. In this metaphor, an agency or consultant is the shop, and your intrepid SEO is the mechanic. Have you ever taken your car to a mechanic to get a weird rattle checked out only to have them tell you that your serpentine belt is starting to wear and your filter needs to be changed, and maybe you should also replace those wheels since you’ve had them for more than three months and hoo boy we’re coming into the rainy season and you don’t want to go skidding off a cliff?

This is sort of what an automated SEO audit does. It highlights all the things wrong with the website without prioritizing what should be addressed first. Agencies and consultants that rely on these to make recommendations see everything as a priority, when that is rarely, if ever, the case.

A manual audit, however, takes into consideration two important things:

1. How real live human beings use a website.
2. How to prioritize recommendations.

This isn’t possible with an automated SEO audit, unless the tool you used has gained sentience. And if that’s the case, you likely have much bigger problems on your hands. These tools primarily focus on the data and often pretty colors arranged in green, yellow, and red to indicate your website is about to explode. What they don’t provide are insights. What does the data mean? Which issues should be prioritized? How do you actually improve?

You can’t answer these questions without having an experienced SEO draw out the necessary insights and apply them to the website’s strategy. This is the foundation of manual auditing work. Automated audits look at websites through a very narrow lens. They don’t factor in human behavior. They don’t consider what the data truly means, especially within the context of the business’s wants and needs. And most importantly―at least from an agency perspective, where every dollar counts―they can’t prioritize. An SEO can take the insights uncovered from a manual audit, assign weight to each, and ensure the client gets the best bang for their buck.

Relying on automated SEO audits is a surefire way to miss out on critical opportunities that can only be uncovered via due diligence and an understanding of what the data these reports deliver actually means.

When Should You Rely on an Automated SEO Audit?

Does this mean these automated reports from SEO tools are worthless? Of course not. In fact, they’re actually pretty great as a form of triage―addressing common problems (especially for websites that publish a lot) and staying on top of lower priority but still necessary issues. To continue the car metaphor, think of it as a routine oil change. You’re topping things off, maybe giving the interior a quick vacuum and getting rid of that pesky tire inflation warning light that refuses to turn off even after you’ve filled the damned things with air.

Depending on the tool you use, you can have weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly reports sent to your inbox that contain a total number of 404s uncovered during the most recent crawl. Leveraging this automated process, although not perfect, can help you stay on top of issues that can compound over time, leading to more efficient manual audits in the future.

How Often Should You Perform a Manual SEO Audit?

How often you perform manual SEO audits depends on the nature of your business. At Portent, we perform a manual SEO audit at the start of every new client engagement. This is non-negotiable, as it sets the stage for and prioritizes a roadmap of work that needs to be done. Beyond that, a manual audit cadence will depend on the size of your site and your budget. A good rule of thumb is to perform a comprehensive manual SEO audit once a year, before site migrations or redesigns, or, if your website is particularly large, once every quarter.

One Final Note…SEO Audits Should Also Be Educational

It’s not uncommon for a business to know they need SEO but not have the knowledge necessary to perform it on their own. While it feels great to work our magic and show stakeholders improvements in their rankings and traffic, I believe it’s essential to educate them on not just what we’re doing, but why we’re doing it. How this is approached can vary, but simply saying, “You have a bunch of broken links and they should be fixed,” is doing them a disservice. Knowledge is power. By educating them on every facet of your SEO audit, you have a more informed stakeholder, and a more informed stakeholder is a happy stakeholder.

The post Manual vs. Automatic SEO Audits appeared first on Portent.

In the first three parts of this series about how to do local SEO, we’ve scaled the local search microcosm, explored user intent, and gathered relevant data. By working through each of these steps, we’ve constructed a powerful, data-backed local SEO strategy. So, what’s missing?

*summons wise mentor voice*

“The answer has been inside you all along, my fellow marketer.”

*cue John Williams orchestra to emphasize the magnitude of self-discovery*

OK, OK, but seriously, you need to look at the state of your own website to make some final decisions about your local SEO strategy. By “the answer has been inside you all along,” I’m talking about an understanding of what makes your content, products, and services unique.

Read Your Website Content

You’re reading this blog post, which already means you’re one step ahead of other marketers. Because you’re reading the content! Yay you! It never fails to surprise me that marketers will forge ahead with an entire keyword strategy, but not take the time to understand the content backing those keywords.

Here’s an example of two very different snippets of content about the same core keyword. Both of these lawyers want to rank for the keyword “car accident attorney” but have organized their content differently.

Content Piece #1
At Gnarls Barkley & Co, we’re committed to helping people get back on their feet after an injury. The experienced team at our Springfield, MO, personal injury law firm helps people who have experienced devastating car, truck, and bike accidents. When tough medical, legal, and insurance challenges arise, our team is here to hold all parties accountable.

Content Piece #2
A car accident can result in disastrous consequences for a person’s overall health and finances. If you or a loved one has been seriously injured in a car accident, the attorneys at KK Slider Group in Springfield, MO, can help. We work with anyone who has been impacted in a personal injury case, including passengers, drivers, and pedestrians.

Both pieces mention car accidents, our target keyword. However, Content Piece #2 references more details about an actual car accident. After reading the content, I would say that Content Piece #1 is focused more on “personal injury lawyer,” and Content Piece #2 is more focused on “car accident lawyer.”

Typically, we see these differences in content when a client’s website doesn’t have specific service pages. Comparing local SEO requirements for the two law firms, we gain an understanding of what’s missing for Gnarls Barkley & Co.:

So—if a client has requested rankings for “car accident attorney,” and this keyword is in demand, then the highest priority is better content. Technically, we could try to emphasize “car accident attorney” in Content Piece #1, but we should avoid squeezing in keywords where the content will read awkwardly.

When reading the content of a website, look at its overall purpose. If that purpose is different from the keywords that should be marketed, recommend more relevant content. Don’t try to “make it work” with the requested keywords and compromise the quality of the existing content.

Making Final Decisions

Choosing the right keywords for a page is tricky. In the previous example, I looked at the content used by a competitor and compared it with another website’s content. This same practice can be used when trying to make a decision around two similar keywords.

When two keywords are similar, and you’re trying to choose the right one, you can search for both terms and compare the SERP between the phrases.

Keyword #1: personal injury attorney, SV 50
Keyword #2: personal injury lawyer, SV 50

Google’s Keyword Planner lumps these terms into the same search volume.

Technically, Google’s database sees “lawyer” and “attorney” as semantically similar. They are considered to be the same term. But in highly competitive environments, the SERP for extremely similar keywords can be very different. It’s important to understand how competitors describe themselves and how that contributes to overall strategy.

I used the GS location changer extension in Chrome to change my location to Springfield, MO. This allows me to examine the state of the SERP in the local market for both keywords:

Keyword #1: personal injury attorney

Keyword #2: personal injury lawyer

For “personal injury attorney,” a law website that ranks first has a CTA question (“Injured in Springfield, MO?”) as well as “Personal Injury Law Firm” in the title tag. Meanwhile, for “personal injury lawyer,” we see that the first result is an online directory, followed by a website with “personal injury lawyer” at the front of the title.

This information leaves us with a few major takeaways:

• “Personal injury attorney” has law websites in positions #1 and #2
• “Personal injury lawyer” has more law websites featured in the top five positions (but not in #1)
• No law websites ranked in the first five positions for either keyword are using the term “attorney”

Ultimately, it looks like “personal injury lawyer” is the correct choice to remain competitive. This might be a case where I’m putting the egg before the chicken—the two websites ranking for “personal injury attorney” probably have positive ranking factors beyond using “lawyer” in the title tag. However, if the keywords are essentially viewed as the same, and you’re stuck in a hard-to-make decision, small factors like the title tag in the SERP can provide some additional detail needed to move forward.

For an even deeper dive on comparing your site to competitors, check out José Fausto Martinez’s excellent post on Share of Voice Ownership.

Making It Count

In SEO, the concept of “finishing keyword research” is a myth. It’s the equivalent of making pizza from scratch one time and telling your friends you’ve converted your home into a pizzeria. Even when all aspects of the local search microcosm, user intent, keyword data, population data, content, and competitor SERPs have been examined, the journey has only just begun.

Keyword research is an ongoing process because Google releases 3-4 major algorithm updates every year, with hundreds of smaller updates in between. The SERPs are in constant fluctuation, as are user intent and demand. In SEO, it’s vital to monitor new keyword rankings and opportunities on a monthly basis.

The best SEO campaigns utilize a keyword tracker to monitor ranking progress. In local SEO, some campaigns also incorporate a local rank tracking tool that scans keywords in proximity to the business listing.

This gif from LocalFalcon reports how rankings in a specific radius have improved over time for my keyword, helping me get a better sense of whether progress is being made. Proximity is a major ranking factor for the Local Pack, so it’s important to account for it during reporting.

Here are a few providers of local rank tracking tools:

• PlacesScout
• Local Falcon
• Local Viking
• Bright Local

This is an up-and-coming feature in the local SEO industry, and new providers with a proximity-based tool are announced every few months.

Perfecting Your Local SEO Strategy

In this series of posts on how to do local SEO, I’ve laid the groundwork for a solid local SEO strategy:

1. Orient the business within the local search microcosm
2. Determine user intent based on the services provided and marketing goals
3. Gather data about demand in the local market
4. Confirm your website’s relevance in terms of content and competitors
5. You’re never done (keyword research is forever)

I get the sense that because local SEO is “smaller,” some folks think of it as a simpler SEO strategy. But I’ll say it—downplaying the intricacies of local SEO is complete bunk. Much like in the short film Powers of 10, concepts can reach vast complexity at both the macro and micro levels.

We’ve worked through a multitude of considerations for local keyword research, yet we’ve only just embarked on this journey. Finding keywords and understanding how they connect to the website is an excellent first step, but it’s still just a first step.

Whether you’re executing a local SEO strategy for a corporation with 200 locations or trying to help your favorite restaurant get more customers, local SEO requires plenty of patience, context, and empathy. Thank you for reading these posts, and please feel free to reach out if you ever have questions about anything local SEO. I’m grateful for the opportunity to help small businesses and community members connect, and in the process, make the Internet just a bit more cozy.

The post How to Do Local SEO, Part Four: Strategy appeared first on Portent.

Updated July 29, 2021 to feature new information and best practices.

If you’re new to pay-per-click (PPC) or search engine marketing (SEM), you may have seen the Quality Score (QS) phrase thrown around multiple times, or have even seen the metric in your Google Ads interface. So, what is Quality Score? It is Google’s (or Microsoft Ads) way of looking at your historical data and letting you know whether or not your ad quality is getting more or less attention than your competitors at the keyword level.

What is Quality Score?

Quality Score (QS) is a metric in Google Ads, Bing Ads (now Microsoft Ads), and other platforms that combines historical performance and relevance of your ads, keywords, and landing pages to a user’s search query. QS is graded on a 1 through 10 ranking scale, with 10 being the best.

Quality Score can also be a helpful warning signal when there are particular ad groups or campaigns in a PPC account that need to be optimized; as a rule of thumb, the better your QS, the better your ads perform.

QS is comprised of several things, such as expected clickthrough rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. Whenever your ad competes in an auction, Google evaluates these factors. Your score is then combined with your maximum cost-per-click bid to establish your Ad Rank. Ad Rank determines where/when an ad appears in the search results.

To improve ad position for a given keyword, advertisers are presented with two options: increase the maximum cost-per-click bid, or improve the QS of the keyword.

In Google Ads, the QS for each keyword can easily be viewed. After logging into an account and navigating to the keywords tab, hover over the eligibility text (eligible, not eligible, limited) in the status column of your keyword.

The Difference Between Quality Score and Ad Rank

When taking into account the quality of your ads for optimization opportunities, Google looks at the same metrics for QS to determine Ad Rank. However, Ad Rank does not factor in QS to determine an ad’s position in the ads auction. As mentioned earlier, factors such as ad relevance, expected click-through rate, and landing page experience all play a role in determining ad position. These factors are also paired up with bid amount and Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of the auction, and the context of the user’s search. Google defines QS compared to Ad Rank as, “Quality Score is an aggregated estimate of your overall performance in ad auctions, and is not used at auction time to determine Ad Rank.”

Instead, QS is referred to as a diagnostic tool to determine and improve low-quality ads.

Why Is Quality Score Important, and What Does It Influence?

Quality Score is a reflection of the health of your campaigns and influences overall account performance. PPC managers looking to rank in the top positions in the search results while not paying a premium should focus on achieving a higher QS.

QS directly influences:

• Actual cost per click (CPC): Higher QS allows you to bid for top positions, so achieving a high QS can help stretch your PPC budget.
• Ad position and top of page bid estimate: High QS can lead to higher ad positions which will help clickthrough rates.
• Cost per conversion: By paying less per click, advertisers tracking conversions could see significant decreases in the cost they pay per conversion.

The Three Main Factors That Determine Quality Score

When looking for areas to improve ad quality, Google determines your QS with three main factors: the expected clickthrough rate of your ad, the relevancy of your ad, and the landing page experience a user would go through when the ad is clicked. Let’s break that down further.

Expected Clickthrough Rate

The expected clickthrough rate is the likelihood of your ad being clicked on when shown to a user. It takes into account your keyword performance in past ad auctions based on ad position. An average or below-average grade may indicate that you’ll need to review your ad copy or landing pages.

Ad Relevance

Ad Relevance is how closely the content of your ad matches up with the user search intent. For example, let’s say you’re searching for running shoes on Google. Ads displayed are for a variety of athletic shoes that are directly or closely related to your query. The relevancy for these ads are average or above average based on the query. However, if an ad for “mens oxford dress shoes” displayed in the SERP, the ad would likely receive a below-average rating since it’s not providing content related to running shoes. It’s important that users find what they need or are looking for quickly, and writing high-quality and relevant ads is the best way to stay competitive.

Landing Page Experience

The landing page associated with each ad and keyword should be relevant to the search query, useful, and user-friendly. In the running shoe example, let’s say our specific query is “running shoes for plantar fasciitis.” A landing page talking about the revolutionary benefits for medical grade insoles of a brand new running shoe would serve as average. But factor in fast page speed and solid user experience so information is easy to find, and you’ve got yourself an above average rating. Crunchy load times and confusing landing page experience with unrelated content is wasting a user’s time, and you lose money on that ad interaction. Every second counts, and as cliche as it is, time is money.

Other Factors That Determine Quality Score

While you observe your QS grades and optimize ads, remember there are more ad quality factors besides what is graded by QS. Here are some other areas of quality to consider that may affect your ads.

Historical Click-Through Rate (CTR)

This is based on historical clicks and impressions built up over time. If people who see an ad click on it at a high rate, that indicates to Google that the ad fulfills a searcher’s need. Remember, this is based on impressions for EXACT searches of your keyword, so changing match types won’t impact that QS.

Keyword Relevance

The ad should match the user’s search intent. When the keywords you bid on closely relate to the ad triggered, there is a better chance they will relate to the user’s search query.

Geographic Performance

This refers to how well the ad performs in the geographical targeted region. Your ad for towing services could perform outstandingly in Reno, Nevada but perform worse in Las Vegas, likely due to factors like competition and bidding. Consider breaking campaigns out by region if you see higher performance in one area over another.

Targeted Devices

This takes into account how well the ad performs on different devices, such as laptops, tablets, and mobile devices. When talking about landing page experience, mobile landing pages vs. desktop landing pages can sometimes be incredibly confusing. Just visit any government-built website on mobile vs. desktop. Page loads are slow and navigation is borderline impossible. Click the wrong button and you lose all the progress you made filing a form. Make sure your landing page is friendly for any device.

Factors That Are Not Components of Quality Score

When talking about QS, and ad quality, you’re going to end up looking at Ad Rank. That’s an entirely different performance metric to consider, however, there are mutual factors at play that don’t directly affect quality score grading.

Maximum CPC Bids

In the ad auction, your maximum CPC bid and QS are averaged out alongside the relevancy of the search query to determine how your ad is ranked. It goes without saying that high-ranking ads have high clickthrough rates.

Search Query Relevance

Contrary to prior belief, the search engine results don’t always get it right. Ads showing for “Men’s Dress Shoes” when the search query entered is for “Women’s Dresses” doesn’t exactly scream “click me.” Keep your accounts organized with match types like phrase or exact matches.

Ad Extensions

When you’re talking about different offerings or sitelinks in an ad, you take up half of a user’s phone. When your ad is one of three results above the fold, the probability of that ad being clicked on increases drastically. So make sure you have your callouts, sitelinks, or any other relevant ad extensions filled out and enabled to run. That’s free real estate!

Quality Score Formula: How Is Quality Score Calculated?

Taking into account everything that goes into QS, we have to look at the WEIGHTED value of each factor. Google has confirmed that landing page experience and expected clickthrough rate have more weight than ad relevance when determining QS.

The chart below depicts how Google determines the weight of each of these three factors:

And the formula used to calculate Quality Score is simply:

1+ Landing Page Experience Weight + Ad Relevance Weight + CTR Weight

This reverse-breakdown is beautifully written by Brad Geddes in a guest post on Search Engine Journal.

What Is Considered a Good Quality Score?

When trying to figure out a good QS, here is our rule of thumb; If you’re targeting keywords with high intent for clicks or conversion, 8-10 out of 10 is excellent. 7 out of 10 if you have low search intent keywords and 3 or higher if you’re targeting competitor keywords.

Tips to Increase Your Quality Score

First and foremost, always pay attention to ad copy and keyword targeting. Some keywords may need a little more love and attention to thrive, so don’t be afraid to break some keywords off into single keyword ad groups in order to increase those quality scores and better cater ads to users who search for them.

Additionally, make sure your landing pages are optimized. They should be quick to load and provide useful information that contains copy relevant to your targeted keywords, and you should see improvements in a matter of weeks.

And be sure to check out this post, with additional tips to improve your quality score.

The post What Is Quality Score and How Is It Used On Google? appeared first on Portent.

Something people in the search engine optimization space often repeat is, “make sure your website has a good link structure.” Rarely does anyone explain what that means. We’re often told that a good link structure is very flat, so that any page isn’t too many clicks away from the homepage. But why is that valuable or useful?

Flat site structures are good for users because they can get anywhere on the site fairly quickly no matter which page they land on, but there is also an algorithmic reason for having a flat structure. Generally, flat websites distribute more PageRank to important pages than deep websites because they are close to the homepage.

What makes the homepage special for PageRank is that most websites receive backlinks that point to their homepage more than any other page. If the homepage receives the most PageRank from the rest of the web, then most of that PageRank is distributed to the pages the homepage links out to. Pages that are one click away from the homepage tend to have the second-highest amount of PageRank, and the pages they link to tend to have the third-highest PageRank, and so on.

What do we do if we’re working on a website that doesn’t have a flat link structure? If we have an important landing page and it’s four or five clicks away from the homepage, then we’re going to have a harder time because of how little of the external PageRank is being shared with it.

To help pages like this rank, we’re going to need to reroute how PageRank flows on the website a bit using some internal PageRank optimization strategies. This guide contains best practices, reporting, and an implementation process to get the most out of the PageRank flowing into our websites.

A Short Primer on PageRank

PageRank was Google’s first breakout algorithm. Named after Larry Page, it was a culmination of his and Sergey Brin’s original research at Stanford to extract something useful out of the link structure of the web. They found that pages that receive links from pages that receive a lot of links tend to be of higher quality.

Incorporating this quality signal in their results gave the Google search engine an early edge over their established competitors. But why would the link structure of the web have anything to do with quality? People tend to cite, recommend, and share content they found to be useful. Organizations with editorial policies like newspapers, governments, and schools will pay closer attention to whom they link out to, so vetted links indicate higher trustworthiness and authority.

How PageRank works is pretty interesting from a mathematics and computer science point of view, but we don’t need to get into all of the specifics. Pages tend to have high PageRank if they receive links from pages with a lot of links, and those pages receive links from pages with a lot of links, and so on.

Whatever PageRank looks like today is probably very different from Google’s early research and patents. The calculation method, how links are weighted, and which links are included are definitely different. Google has a patent for PageRank that depends on the position and context of links, a patent for a “seeded” PageRank, and how Googlers used to talk about topical PageRank.

This article will talk about modeling PageRank over single websites instead of the whole web, and using the classic formula. Is that useful at all based on what we know? Anecdotally, I have found this approach useful and have had success with it. This leads me to believe that whatever link-based signals in the production algorithms are affected by local link structure, and classic PageRank is a pretty good compass for improving that local link structure.

Strategies for Improving Link Structure

In general, the way to improve a page’s position in the link structure of the site is to link to it from pages with higher PageRank, or link to it from lots of smaller pages.

Here are some strategies to do that:

Strategy 1: Create Big Links

We want to find instances where a few small changes will have a huge impact. One “big” link from a higher PageRank page can put a page over the edge and onto page one of SERPs.

• Is our target landing page important enough to warrant a spot in a global navigation? Some pages, like key product and service pages, are passed over when the main navigation was decided on. Adding them will distribute more PageRank and help users find them easily.
• Maybe it makes sense to add it to the homepage or another tier-one page with a contextual link.
• HTML sitemap pages are a great place to add pages that need more link love. Since HTML sitemap pages tend to be linked by every page in the footer, they accumulate a significant amount of PageRank.

Strategy 2: Create Lots of Small Links

Enough small improvements build up, and so does PageRank. We want to add links to many tier-three and below pages in a way that’s relevant and useful.

• Create content hubs by linking to a target page from any other related page. Connecting relevant content through links will also help with relevance and direct users on the site.
• An easy way to find pages to add to a hub is to search for things like “topic site:domain.com/blog” in Google. The site: operator results will surface pages on your site.
• Add a sidebar for trending or top content to your blog to get links from every other page in the blog section.
• Add a related content section to your blog posts to automatically crosslink pages about the same topic. Some plugins for this allow you to choose which links appear on a page.

Strategy 3: Place Links on Pages With High External PageRank

Some of our pages are naturally going to receive links from other sites, and we can distribute that incoming PageRank to our other pages.

• Create an inventory of pages with lots of external links and refer to it when optimizing your content.
• See a guide to this in the next section.

Strategy 4: Make More Pages Count

An often overlooked way to improve the link structure of the site is to make key pages indexable. Many SEOs are still adding noindex tags to pagination pages, tag and category pages, and faceted navigation pages in an effort to reduce “thin content.” These pages have a very important role on the site and should be indexable in many cases.

• On sites with hundreds of pagination pages, a blog post might rely on a pagination page that is 25 clicks away from the homepage for its only internal link. Category, tag, and author pages are effective ways to provide an alternative click path that is much shorter. So long as tag and category pages are well-formed and useful as navigation for users, they should be indexed.
• The number of possible combinations of filters and options in a faceted navigation can explode, causing a crawl budget problem. Some SEOs handle this by making every filter unindexable, but they are unnecessarily limiting how many viable landing pages they can use.
• By carefully controlling which filters are indexable in a faceted navigation, the number of combinations can be kept to a crawlable level while providing URLs that can act as landing pages. For example, if a subcategory for men’s running shoes has a color filter, the filter URLs for black shoes and green shoes should be indexable, but the URL for black or green shoes does not. Similarly, filter URLs for black shoes and sort ordering or price don’t need to be indexable either.

Strategy 5: Take Advantage of Your Other Websites

Big brands tend to have more than one site they own, and they are often overlooked for optimizing PageRank. Common examples are investor relations websites, career subdomains, websites for parent or subsidiary companies, and external blogs.

• Find ways to add links to these websites that are useful and relevant to your users, such as adding links to the footer navigation, or creating a hub of subsidiary brands.
• One website that does this well is J2 Global with its portfolio hub.
• Something Amazon has done for a long time is add almost all of their brands to their footer with a tagline in the anchor. This is an extreme example, and they definitely have enough PageRank to pass around, but most brands could get away with listing a few of their siblings.

How to Check Internal PageRank Distribution

Before we start changing our links around, we need to know if there are any pages with a problem. We want to know if the pages we think are important are receiving a commensurate distribution of internal PageRank. To do that, we will need a way of calculating PageRank over just the pages in our website and not the whole web.

Portent has a proprietary crawler called RainGage that we use to analyze our client’s websites. One of the features Matthew Henry built is an internal PageRank modeling tool that calculates the PageRank score of each crawled page using a formula very similar to what Google described in the classic patent.

Unfortunately, RainGage isn’t a public tool, so not many people get to use it. Other commercial tools calculate PageRank in a similar way, but the most accessible one is Screaming Frog.

Estimating Internal PageRank With Screaming Frog Link Score

Screaming Frog has a metric like PageRank they call Link Score. It is fairly easy to get, but the feature is hidden away a little. They have a guide to Link Score here. To get Screaming Frog to show Link Score for URLs in a crawl, you have to run Crawl Analysis after the crawl completes.

Internal PageRank distribution is primarily determined by the link structure of the site. Our important hub pages tend to appear in the main and footer navigations of our website, causing them to receive links from every other page on the site. If you look at your link score report, you’ll probably find that the pages in your global navigations have the highest scores. We’ll call these the tier-one pages.

Pages that receive links from tier-one pages or a sidebar navigation somewhere tend to be in the second tier of PageRank distribution. Tier-two pages tend to be subcategory pages or hub pages not important enough to make it into a global navigation.

Tier-two pages tend to link to tier-three pages—those pages that are the better-connected leaf pages in the tree structure of the site. They look like products, services, blog posts, industry pages, and whitepaper pages that are part of the primary user journeys of the site.

Bottom-tier pages tend to be those relegated to receiving links from pagination pages: blog posts, product description pages, press releases, whitepapers, webinars, data sheets, etc. Since they only receive links from pagination pages or tag pages, their link scores are going to be pretty low.

Creating a Content Inventory With Link Score

To see how our pages are positioned in terms of internal PageRank distribution, backlinks, and conversions, we’re going to add data to our list of URLs and Link Scores. This inventory will help us later when looking for pages that need their internal links improved, or have good internal or external PageRank they can share.

1. Export the Internal pages report from Screaming Frog, load it in your favorite spreadsheet program, and pare it down to the link metrics you care about.
2. Next we need some idea of external PageRank for the URLs on our domain. Go to Ahrefs (or a similar tool) and export the Best Pages by Incoming Links report.
3. Join the columns for URL Rating (Ahrefs’ approximation of external PageRank), referring domains, and dofollow links to our table using vlookup, index-match, or any other lookup function in your spreadsheet app. You can also sum the dofollow and nofollow links from Ahrefs, as nofollow is now just a hint to Google.
4. Go to Google Analytics and export a landing page report with traffic (sessions or users), conversions, conversion rate, and revenue if available. Join those to the inventory we’re constructing. Use a date range that’s appropriate for your purposes or representative of the performance of your pages. I’m using one year of traffic here.

We’re going to use this inventory sheet to find instances of:

• Pages with higher conversions or revenue, but low Link Score. We’ll be creating links that point to these pages.
• Pages with low conversions or revenue, but high incoming PageRank from outside the website (high URL Rating, referring domains, and backlinks). We’ll be creating links on these pages to spread the external PageRank out to other pages.
• Pages with low conversions or revenue, but high Link Score. We’ll be creating links on these pages to share their internal PageRank with other pages.

Improving PageRank With Internal Link Creation

As you find opportunities to add individual links, having a way to keep track of them is pretty handy. I’ve been using a spreadsheet template to keep track of the links I want to place on the sites I work on. Here is a template you can use.

The process I use with this spreadsheet generally follows these steps:

1. Find a page that needs a boost to its internal PageRank. Refer back to the content inventory we made in the previous section to find good candidates. Alternatively, I’ll work on sets of pages according to campaign, season, or priority.
2. Get a list of the page’s target keywords. If you’ve already done keyword mapping or have a ranking report, then refer to that. Otherwise, put the page’s URL in Google Search Console and see which keywords it receives clicks from and could rank better for.
3. Find pages to place links on. Refer back to the content inventory for the pages with high internal PageRank or high external PageRank to see if any are relevant to the page you want to point links to. Doing a Google search for “topic site:domain.com/blog” will find blog posts on your domain that are relevant to your page’s topic.
4. Figure out placement for the link. The context of a link is something Google has been looking into for a while. Google’s Reasonable Surfer Model patent indicates Google has been looking into ways to assign weights to how links pass PageRank based on how likely a user is to click on them. Google has likely also looked for ways of identifying when a link probably isn’t useful to users, so link to the page that makes sense to users and helps them out.
5. Determine an anchor text for the link. Google uses anchor text to determine what a page is about, but they recommend using a “reasonable anchor text.” For us, that means the anchor text in our links should describe the page, support rankings of our target keywords, and help users know what they will find on the page. This is often not the same text as the keywords we want to rank for.
6. Determine what content needs to be added or rewritten. Sometimes the text of pages needs to be reworked a little to make a link fit into it. Adding a description of how text needs to change to the spreadsheet is very helpful for anyone I pass the implementation off to.

Organizing the links you want to create like this also helps with getting approval, and tracking when the links go live to see if implementation correlates with performance gain.

Don’t Bury Your Landing Pages

Ideally, creating links to improve internal PageRank distribution shouldn’t be necessary. We would have already identified which pages need to rank the most and placed them in the information architecture of the site appropriately.

However, not every website is optimized like this from the get-go, and we’ll need to guide them in the right direction over time as sections are added and reworked.

Hopefully, going through this process will prepare you for when the time comes to redesign your website, and you’ll be able to recommend a site structure that favors the most important landing pages.

The post Internal PageRank Optimization Strategies appeared first on Portent.

MozCon was back on the virtual stage this year, bringing next-level tactics and strategy to stay competitive in today’s rapidly evolving search landscape. Members from Portent’s organic and client partner teams—Cristi Zuk, Evan Hall, Harmony Huskinson, José Fausto Martinez, Naomi Thalenberg, and Travis McKnight—attended three days of tactical sessions for search marketers. Here are their favorite takeaways.

From the Medic Update to Now: How the E-A-T Ecosystem Has Transformed Organic Search

Presented by: Lily Ray, Amsive Digital

See Lily’s presentation deck

I get the distinct impression Lily Ray has been delivering this presentation in multiple forms over the years due to how well she got to the heart of the matter. Google wants to return content that won’t lead to users being harmed, and they are doing this by classifying queries at risk as Your Money or Your Life queries.

How Google has been treating these queries over the past few years and what the result looks like is difficult to describe with just abstractions like Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Lily’s treatment of Google’s motivation, what’s losing, and who’s winning is so lucid that this video is a must-watch for your digital marketing team (if you have access to it).

The implications of what Google has been doing since the Medic update reach further than just search. Multiple Google products are incorporating their Knowledge Graph and E-A-T-based approaches, such as YouTube, News, Discover, and the Play Store. I think that in a few years we’ll see E-A-T get incorporated into Ads somehow, but probably not enough to impact their bottom line.

E-A-T principles are probably in practice in some form with the other big tech companies, as most of them have their own knowledge graphs and comprehensive web indexes. Just like how the general public didn’t know much about SEO ten years ago, people will be pretty familiar with knowledge graphs and their implications ten years from now.

Classic SEO practices don’t guarantee high rankings – Distance from perfect, optimized and relevant content, and fast page speed are all still required, but the goalposts have moved. There are a lot of brands doing the right things in SEO, but will still lose traffic in E-A-T-oriented core algorithm updates. It’s extremely frustrating when it happens, even if they aren’t doing anything wrong!

YMYL queries deserve content that meets higher standards – Ranking well for queries that affect a person’s health or wealth means having high scores for rankings signals that are sometimes based on subtle things. Google needs to see evidence that our content is written by qualified people, with correct information, verifiable claims, with a beneficial purpose for the reader.

Authors need to be known and credible – Websites that hide, invent, or rely on unqualified authors tend to suffer in algorithm updates. We need to let readers know who our writers are and why they should trust their expertise on a topic.

Reputation counts and it’s not just reviews – People talk about brands and authors, and Google can identify those mentions in reviews and off-site content. Fly-by-night businesses, ripoff artists, and grifters aren’t going to last long in the SERPs. Conversely, ethical businesses will be favored, but they need to get people to talk about them.

Correct information and sourced claims matter – Expert content is going to perform better for YMYL queries because it’s more likely to be researched and backed up with references. A machine is never going to know what is true, but it can determine when there is a consensus.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is a collection of facts about entities, but they have no way of verifying them in the world. The next best thing is to see what the consensus is among the websites they trust. Publishers with too many claims outside the trusted consensus aren’t going to do well, especially if it’s health-related or just plain against common sense. Our cited sources had better be truthful too.

Informational content can’t have too many affiliate links and sales CTAs – It’s no secret that Google has been at war with affiliate marketers for a long time. Almost everything they publish is meant to push sales through a sales funnel, and they are struggling post-Medic as a result. Most brands are not too different from affiliates, just less extreme in their salesiness. Content for YMYL queries needs to be focused on benefiting the user more than it benefits our conversion funnel, and Google is tolerating less commercial content on informational pages.

Mastering 3 Click + Engagement Signals for Higher Rankings/Traffic

Presented by: Cyrus Shepard, Moz

See Cyrus’s presentation deck

Earlier this year, Cyrus wrote an excellent article on Moz entitled 3 Vital Click-Based Signals for SEO: First, Long, & Last where he explored clicks as a ranking signal through the lens of a Google Patent surfaced by Bill Slawski. His article blew me away because I somehow missed Bill’s article on the topic, and I’ve been thinking about the meaning of a different piece of Google research about click data for a long time. These three click metrics are posed to drive the conversation about click data far past clickthrough rate and “pogo-sticking.”

Cyrus continues to impress with his presentation by taking ideas from his article, acting on them in live tests, and sharing the results with us in a way that will inspire us to attempt the same.

Patents aren’t necessarily in production – It’s always good to disclaim whatever takeaways we derive from reading Google’s patents and research with this important point. These documents merely tell us which problems were important enough to invest resources into investigating. Nothing in a patent is guaranteed to be the best approach to solving a problem or live in Google Search.

Snippet text helps us get the first click – How our pages appear in the SERP impact how frequently users click on our results, which has been known for a long time, but how often we’re the first result to be clicked is what we should aim for. Standing out and telling users we have what satisfies their intent is the way to be the first click more often.

The snippet experiment most people are going to talk about will be how Cyrus put “GOOGLE GUARANTEED” in a meta description just to see what would happen. It was an amazing success, but a dishonest tactic isn’t going to work in the long term. However, he did illustrate how important it is to figure out what your user hook is. For Cyrus’s users in the experiment, it was trust.

On one website I worked on years ago, the best hook was a free trial offer, and putting “free trial” in the meta description of my pages got more clicks. My conversion rate was a tiny bit better too, and I like to think it was due to having a consistent offer from snippet to CTA button and through the signup funnel.

Get long clicks by keeping people on the site – Google’s patent assumes that users who click and stay on a site a while before returning to the SERP were reading the site or deriving value from it. Cyrus’s experiments were putting a video and related article links at the top of the page. I’ve seen videos work; Cyrus didn’t.

The related article links worked for Cyrus, and I think that’s due to users finding something they wanted to read. It could also be that users who navigate into other parts of the site are less likely to navigate backward back to the Google SERP. I’ve seen success with longer sessions through conversion rate optimization. Users going down the sales funnel stay on the site longer.

Satisfy the query to get the last click – Users tend to click around several results to find or compile the answer they’re looking for. Being the last result they clicked indicates that your page helped complete the user’s search session. Putting FAQ content on a page is one way to comprehensively answer a query, and Cyrus experimented with FAQs inspired by the People Also Ask questions, but that’s not always necessary.

Even though Cyrus’s PAA experiment was successful, merely answering the People Also Ask questions doesn’t guarantee a circumspect answer. Making sure an expert is either writing, outlining, or consulting on the article is better. As an expert, they are going to have a better idea of what it is users need to know before they can move on to completing whatever is spurring their query in the first place.

To Post or Not to Post: What We Learned From Analyzing Over 1,000 Google Posts

Presented by: Joy Hawkins, Sterling Sky

See Joy’s presentation deck

Google Posts—they’re like the hybrid child of social media and SEO, and everyone seems a little confused about what exactly to do with them. Well, Joy Hawkins is here to shine her unwavering, evidence-based light of truth on the Google post conundrum.

Here are a few questions Joy answered by looking at more than 1,000 Google Posts from a wide variety of industries (lawyers, landscaping businesses, and more):

Question: What types of GMB posts perform the best (have the highest CTR)?
Answer: Offer posts. They had a CTR of 3 clicks across 299 posts.

Question: Should GMB posts have a title?
Answer: Yes. Posts that included a title received twice as many clicks.

Question: Should GMB posts include emojis?
Answer: Yes! GMB posts with emojis received double the clicks and a higher conversion rate as well.

And, most importantly:

Question: Are GMB posts a ranking factor?
Answer: No.

Joy’s study concluded that posting on GMB does not impact rankings. However, GMB posts should be viewed similarly to schema implementation in Local SEO, as GMB posts can be included in justifications in the Local Pack.

Taking Charge of Your Indexability: How to Optimize and Prioritize Your Technical Work

Presented by: Areej AbuAli, Women in Tech SEO

See Areej’s presentation deck.

Areej AbuAli dropped some real talk at her 2021 MozCon Session:

“Let’s all make a pact to drop the 100 page audits.”

They’re bulky, they’re overwhelming, and they complicate the implementation process. So, how does an SEO practitioner make the leap from mega documents to digestible recommendations?

The answer lies in prioritization. Decide what to share based on two factors:

1. SEO Impact
2. Technical Effort*

*don’t just assume this, ask the development team

It comes down to making the implementation process as straightforward as possible and reporting on organic leads (not traffic or impressions or nebulous visibility statistics).

What’s hard: Convincing stakeholders, meetings, proving with the data
What’s easy: Making the recommendation

Side note: our content and SEO recommendations at Portent are always framed around impact and technical effort. We always try to provide recommendations as realistically as possible, so this was validating to see from Areej.

Areej left us with this statement: “It’s okay to feel overwhelmed when working on something new…” Truly, this is a constant struggle for anyone and everyone involved in an SEO project, and I appreciated her transparency about this as an industry leader. I’ve been there, and I’m sure you have as well.

Internationalization Errors: How to Go Global Without Losing All Of Your Traffic

Presented by: Jackie Chu, Uber

Jackie’s internationalization talk really highlights a lot of the important factors many sites don’t consider when implementing Hreflang. Let’s start with my favorite quote from Jackie’s presentation: “Hreflang 101: Simple in concept, but not in execution.”

Seriously, Hreflang is one of the most complex elements in SEO. Do all sites need Hreflang? No, and as Jackie shared in her presentation, if we are going to go international, we need to create distinct localized web pages.

Consider creating international pages if you say yes, to the following questions Jackie asked:

• Can you create truly localized content per region?
• Can you create unique URLs for all versions of that content?

Did you know that Hreflang can have language and country?

Hreflang can include language and country. However, language is mandatory, and the country is optional. Hreflang should always have language first, then country if you decide to include it. For example, hreflang = “en-us”

Another takeaway for me was that Chinese is the only Hreflang that should be using four-letter lang codes. Simplified Chinese (Used in China and Singapore): hreflang = “zh-Hans”
Traditional Chinese (Used in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macao): hreflang = “zh-Hant”

I highly recommend following Jackie on Twitter; she’s always sharing some great insights! Here’s a link to the Internationalization checklist that Jackie shared to check your international content.

The Ultimate How-To Guide to Faceted Navigation

Presented by: Luke Carthy, LukeCarthy.com

Luke promised that at the end of his presentation, the unthinkable would happen. That SEO and Faceted Navigation would become best friends. They did!

Faceted Navigation can sometimes become an issue for e-commerce sites because of the thousands, millions, or billions of URLs that can be generated through filter options. Billions of URLs is really bad!

So how did Luke convince us that SEO and Faceted Navigation can become best friends? Well, with memes, pugs, and balance, he told us the following:

• Learn your site’s taxonomy (seriously do it!)
• Don’t use filters that already exist as categories
• Don’t allow more than one option of the same filter to be indexed
• Set up a max of indexable filters (usually it’s two)
• SEO + Faceted Navigation = ✨ Besties ✨

I love it when presenters share how they use some of the common SEO tools out there. Here are my notes on how Luke uses the following:

Google Analytics – Look at your site’s parameterized URLs to find what filters are the most popular and use your site’s search to find what possible filter queries are being searched for.

Google Search Console – Look at what parameters are frequently being excluded, which can be found in the Coverage section “Crawled – currently not indexed.”

Luke Carthy is an amazing consultant that dropped tons of knowledge during a 30-minute presentation. Don’t forget to follow Luke’s Twitter account to stay up to date on all things e-commerce!

The Cold Hard Truth About CTR and Other Common Metrics

Presented by: Britney Muller, Data Sci 101

In this talk, Britney challenged the audience to consider what data we should be rethinking. As digital marketers, we’ve become attached to certain metrics, such as traffic, CTRs, and bounce rates. However, if we challenge ourselves to think deeper about data and what it truly means, we may discover unique opportunities to reach our goals.

For example, a decline in website traffic might actually be a good thing if the traffic loss is to a page that does not serve a business need and does not inspire conversions.
Similarly, an increase in bounce rate might indicate that users are finding information faster and spending less time completing a task. A higher bounce rate could mean an improved user experience.

In conclusion, data is all about context. Sometimes our biases about the data and metrics we use to measure success may lead us astray. Common metrics are multifaceted and require a certain degree of skepticism.

The Content Refresh: How To Do More With Less

Presented by: Kameron Jenkins, Shopify

Over time, your content decays due to algorithm updates, competitors, out-of-date information, and website updates.

Decaying content poses a risk to companies that generate inbound leads and revenue. Most marketers forget that refreshing old content can be equally as important as producing new content.

To start refreshing your content, look for posts that have lost traffic and term rankings over time—ideally, look at data over at least six months to spot trends. Prioritize which content you’ll start with by conversions, trending topics, and business priorities. To begin executing on refreshing content, consider the following:

1. What are the table stakes?
   1. Which queries did the page lose the most positions for?
   2. Are there opportunities to consolidate the page with other content that is ranking well?
   3. Are there additional internal links you can add to this page?
2. What will give you a competitive advantage?
   1. Look at original research – is there data your company has you can use to inform the page content?
3. What will maximize conversions?
   1. Are there CTAs the page is missing? Ensure the CTAs have clear and compelling messaging that is highly relevant to the content on the page.
   2. Try multiple placements of CTAs and be mindful of what stage of the funnel the user is in.

In conclusion: when it comes to content, there is no finish line. Content requires maintenance and constant iteration.

The Science of Purchasing Behavior: How to Use It Effectively to Attract & Convert More Prospects Into Customers

Presented by: Flavilla Fongang, 3 Colours Rule

The general theme of Flavilla’s talk is that marketers can do a better job speaking to customers by creating content, particularly advertisements, that directly appeals to how the brain processes information.

The human brain has three main control rooms:

1. Neocortex — the rational brain, which controls imagination, consciousness, and abstract thought.
2. Limbic system — the emotional brain, which controls judgment and behavior.
3. Reptilian — the instinctual brain, which triggers fight or flight and survival reactions.

Although each section of the brain responds to marketing stimuli, the reptilian brain is the target that controls our strongest actions and impulses, which is why Flavila suggests targeting most conversion content toward it.

To determine what type of reptilian content you should produce, Flavilla recommends asking yourself three questions:

1. Are you targeting client/customer retention or acquisition?
2. Are you expanding your current market share or adventuring into a new market?
3. Are you able to develop a campaign with an 80% brand push, 20% product push ratio?

Once you’ve answered those questions, you should be prepared to target the reptilian brain for your intended audience using at least one of the following techniques:

1. Diagnose the user’s pain — this triggers the user’s self-centeredness.
2. Use contrast in visual content or anecdotes — establishes clear winners in the brain.
3. Create tangible benefits — demonstrate the value of your offer.
4. Harness the user’s emotion — the reptilian brain is drawn to negative emotion, but you can also appeal to positive emotion by tapping into the user’s perspective, such as a hero image that has a bunch of people looking at the product.

Why Marketers Should Think More Like Investors To Drive Content Results

Presented by: Ross Simmonds, Foundation Marketing

Ross makes an interesting and poignant argument about diversifying your website’s content portfolio, much like a stock market portfolio, to mitigate loss from different trends like seasonality, search engine updates, or user behaviors.

His most valuable statement is that marketers should be investing more into their content but guessing less. Don’t let your content strategy get caught up in a swirl of memes and trends and then watch, flabbergasted, as your content’s performance drops 40% once the hype dies out.

Like a stock investment, every type of content has a risk associated with it. Some investments are conservative, where you’ve validated the growth-focused content concept with research and you’re positive it has good SEO fundamentals. These plays are smart, but usually they don’t move the needle much.

Other plays are bombastic and focused on exponential growth, where your content can “go to the moon” if the right levers are pulled. Unfortunately, it’s equally likely that this content will explode on takeoff and never reach orbit, causing you to lose all of the resources invested into its creation.

Ross argues that content marketers should be making smart and risky plays alike to compete in the marketplace. Perform the due diligence about an idea, but then iterate on it until you have options for a safe play and a YOLO option.

And ultimately, he recommends that marketers are bag-holders for their own content. Instead of always looking for the next best idea, go back to basics and update your old content. Let it grow and let it thrive. These are often the least risky plays of all, but have the opportunity to provide respectable growth.

Build for Search: Modern Web Dev that puts SEO 1st

Presented by: Dana DiTomaso, Kick Point

In her talk, Dana proposed that the standard development approach, called the waterfall process, is not great for modern dev projects. She recommends instead, using what she called an “agile-ish” process that fixes a lot of the issues with the waterfall approach.

The Waterfall Process

In the waterfall process, tasks flow downstream, and all design-related tasks are fully completed before dev starts.

Problems with the Waterfall process:

• Budget can get eaten up too soon because of pacing.
• Dev comes in too late, and you find out that features or designs that were planned/promised can’t be coded.
• Or, sometimes problems don’t come up until coding starts.
• Not everything can be envisioned.
• Dev takes a while and decision makers wander off and re-think things (i.e., designing for mobile-first, etc.).
• QA takes forever and is demoralizing.

The “Agile-ish” Process

Instead of using a Waterfall process, Dana suggests using an “agile-ish” process that allows elements of the process to occur in tandem, fixing a lot of the issues with Waterfall. It allows the developers to get involved early on, but doesn’t bog them down.

In Agile-ish, you create a content plan for the site before any design occurs. Starting with target keywords for each page, and then identifying what the call to action will be on any given page, provides direction for copy and ensures that the design can support the page/content needs.

Mapping Out Content

To make the planning process easier using agile-ish, Dana suggests using the Gather Content Tool. It provides an interface where you can map out the content that will be on each page. This helps make it very clear what the purpose of each page/section is, and leadership can understand what is needed (i.e., testimonials).

Building Microcopy Into Site Planning

The Gather Content Tool also facilitates building microcopy into site planning. Once you have the “blueprint” for the site, you can start building the admin part of the pages even BEFORE you build wireframes.

At this point, there are no more surprises—because all the content is already planned out—and it is less likely that things will have to be redesigned or re-developed down the road because the front and back end requirements don’t align.

Now that everyone knows exactly what the website will look like and will require to develop, it is a lot easier to price and plan, because you know exactly what will be involved.

Once those steps are complete, you can tackle wireframing. Dana suggests presenting and reviewing wireframes in batches, and once each batch is approved, it can move on to development.

Develop an SEO Checklist

Lastly, developing an SEO checklist upfront so that you can explain these things early in the process will make it much more likely that the site will be built with these things in mind.

Example SEO checklist items:

• Txt.robots
• Canonicals and pagination (and maybe hreflang)
• Sitemap recommendation
• H1s/H2s etc.
• Accessibility requirements
• Schema requirements
• 404 and search page design
• Site speed (test early and often)

In summary, using an agile-ish process keeps the momentum going and helps everyone stay involved. Using an agile-ish approach:

• Leads to quick wins
• Allows for building in phases, where things are more visible up front
• Builds trust due to the open and more integrated process

Beyond the Basics: Awesome SEO Tricks for Uncovering Advanced Insights from Your SEO Data

Presented by: Rob Ousbey, Moz

In his talk, Rob Ousbey shares tips and tricks for how you can make your most time-consuming SEO tasks faster in order to dramatically improve your business.

He focused on three areas, providing tips for each:

1. Link Building
2. Content Ideation
3. Insights

Tip 1: Find Link Opportunities by Starting With a SERP

Digital marketers know that link building/acquisition is important, but it can be time-consuming to find domains to get links from. Rob recommends looking for the domains that frequently link to the top 10 ranking pages for a term you’re targeting and to discover new potential link sources.

He shares a tool that can help save so much time doing this, called the Moz Link Opportunity Finder. This tool is a prototype that requires you to either have a Moz Pro Customer account, or to create a free community account.

You can access the tool in the Moz Lab.

Tip 2: Find the Hidden Gems of Content Ideas on Your Site

Ideating content ideas can be time consuming, but Rob suggests grouping similar keywords that a page ranks for, and look for opportunities where the page could be split up to create new, better-targeted content.

For example, if there is high SERP overlap between two keywords, you can target them on the same page. But where there is low SERP overlap, split the page and target the keywords separately.

To save time on this task, you can leverage the “On Page Keyword Grouper” from Moz, which is also located in the Moz Lab.

Tip 3: Tag Up Your URL Lists for Deeper Insights

Rob suggests that instead of doing technical analysis at a page level, you can aggregate your data to the level of site sections or page types, to find the root cause behind problems.
Rob built this Regex URL Tagging Tool that can speed up this process. Note: This tool is not associated with Moz.

Lastly, Rob offers a couple bonus Tips:

• Try tagging your competitor’s top URLs for content ideas.
• Try tagging your GA data to get category-level insights.

Final Thoughts

That’s a wrap! Those were our top takeaways from MozCon Virtual 2021. Our team is invigorated and excited to apply the new skills and ideas they learned to our everyday practice at Portent.

The post Our Favorite MozCon Virtual 2021 Sessions appeared first on Portent.

Updated July 20, 2021 to feature new information and best practices.

Creating a digital marketing strategy from the ground up is an exciting proposition, even if it may seem daunting at first. Fear not, though. I’ll walk you through some of the important questions and answers you’ll want to have on hand as you begin crafting your marketing strategy.

The Marketing Basics

Before you start thinking about your marketing strategy, you’ll want to create a marketing plan. There are a few pieces of information you need to gather first.

1. Take a moment to think about your offering. Depending on your organization, you may have a product manager who can tell you all about your company’s products: their features, advantages, and benefits (FAB).
2. Once you have these in mind, see if your company already has vision and/or mission statements. These are the lenses through which your company has chosen to view its position in the marketplace.
3. And before you go any further, define the problem that you’re trying to solve for your customers, and make sure you’re solving for the right problem! Do the research.

What Is a Marketing Plan?

Think back. When you and your company set about creating something, you likely ran some level of market analysis. This should have identified an opportunity to create something new or a way to do it better than existing products, services, or companies. Your marketing plan is how you’ll take your brand and its solutions to a group of potential customers.

It starts when you set a target audience for your product or services. Next, you will determine who would most benefit from your unique proposition. Lean in hard here. Learn as much as you can about these customers (do the customer research and find out the questions they ask—more on this later) and craft a message that gets to the core of why you believe you are unique in the marketplace. Be genuine as you match your mission to your customers’ needs. If you do it right, they’ll buy into your vision before they’ve even purchased a single product.

What Is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

With your mission and unique solution in hand, now it’s time to determine how you will take these to the right customers. First off, be sure that you have an idea of who your customers are and what a typical user journey looks like for them.

Once you know this, you can start to research where and when to target your customers. You’ll need to find out where they spend their time; what social media platforms, forums, and video sites do they frequently visit? What questions are they asking once they’re there (remember: solve for the right problem)? From there, you will determine if the business requires brand awareness building, a quick-close once they land on your site, or more likely, a bit of both! Keep in mind that you may need different campaign strategies for different customers/personas.

And if you’re looking for more information, we’ve got a ton of marketing strategy resources to help you out.

What Makes a Good Digital Marketing Strategy?

A good digital marketing strategy is built on a variety of components that allow you to define, track, and evaluate your efforts. Let’s dive in.

1. Start With the Marketing Stack

Whenever I bring on a new client at our agency, I try to ensure they’re familiar with Portent’s Digital Marketing Stack. It’s broken down into a few key components that you should familiarize yourself with. I highly recommend reading our guide in-depth, but I’ll also give you a quick synopsis. To start, I’ll begin at the top of the Stack. Keep in mind that we’ll need a solid base for all of these channels to lean on, so please don’t skim past the infrastructure or analytics sections. So let’s start with the areas that most people think of when it comes to Digital Marketing.

Marketing Channels

At Portent, we break these down into three main areas: Paid, Owned, and Earned. These channels are where you will interact with your customers. Having the right channel mix is important, as is having a message and relevant content that advances them along their path as they transition through the marketing funnel stages.

Paid channels include platforms where you’ll spend money to inform or attract users to your site, like:

• Search Advertising
• Remarketing
• Display
• Programmatic
• Social Advertising

Owned channels are those that you wholly control, including your:

• Website
• Social media accounts
• Customer email lists

Earned media are the fruits of your digital labor and/or passive attention that you may garner (be intentional on how you present or outreach yourself to these outlets):

• Organic search listings (SEO)
• Digital PR through news media outlets
• Social media mentions, interactions, and comments
• Citations and links from other websites

Site Infrastructure

If you’re starting from scratch, it’s vital that your website infrastructure is robust and fast! If you’re creating a new marketing strategy that will rely on a legacy website, do your best to ensure that it can be brought to a place where it’s not hindering your user journey; slow, unresponsive sites that don’t quickly provide the right experience will cost you customers and will rank behind competitors who do. To excel here, you’ll need a site that is:

• Speedy
• Stable
• Secure

Analytics

Once your infrastructure is in order, it is vital that you are tracking all of your digital marketing efforts. You’ll need an on-site analytics platform, something to track off-site data, as well as a big ‘ol data warehouse to store it all. You’ll get bonus points from me if you’re combining all of the data into an interactive dashboard like Google Data Studio, which should allow you to succinctly track the efficacy of your efforts. Having your analytics properly tracking all of the right metrics allows you to make a plan, measure your work, and adjust your strategy.

2. Understand Your Business Goals

With your amazing website and analytics tracking in place, where should you start when it’s time to create and maintain marketing goals? Start with a North Star. Just as your campaigns will have a universal truth that customers will identify with, you need a guiding vision for your strategy. What business change are you looking to make? Are you looking to drive sales volume? Consider goals that measure visitors or changes in revenue. If you’re looking at increasing campaign efficiency? Your goals should focus on improving conversation rates or driving down your costs per acquisition. Be sure to identify and track any secondary or assisting KPIs that underpin the primary ones.

Re-Evaluate Any Pre-Existing Goals: Do They Need to Be Changed?

Things in the marketplace can change at a rapid pace. Business objectives can also shift as your organization’s priorities change. An emerging business that may once have sought to push sales as they fought to capture market share may eventually find that their niche product has been commoditized. In this instance, it makes sense to consider switching from lead or sales KPI to one that measures profitability. We see leadership changes all the time at our companies that bring new goals. Embrace these opportunities and consider pivots to your marketing strategy.

3. Define Your Target Audience

While sitting down to consider who your audience is, don’t fret. You or members of your organization already know who you’re trying to reach. Check with your product managers and sales managers. As I mentioned earlier, they should already have loosely identified a customer type and defined what problem you’re trying to solve for them. We highly recommend creating user personas and identifying what their user journeys may look like.

Who Are You Trying to Reach?

You’re trying to reach customers who would stand to benefit from your unique solution to a problem. Keep in mind that while your solution may not be unique in the marketplace, your connection to the customer and their affinities should be. You can gain insight into what messaging and content will appeal to potential customers by determining what data you have access to that tells you who they are, what their problems are, what they search for, and how they search for it.

What Do You Know About Your Target Audience?

Take anything you may know and throw them together: demographics, age, technology preferences, buying habits, and websites they shop or visit. Take this data and combine them on a visual “Customer Persona” board.

What Don’t You Know About Your Target Audience?

You know who your customers are, but do you know what questions they’re asking about their problems? Have you already done target research or focus groups? If you don’t have the resources to run these, you may have to rely on some informal sources. Check your reviews on Amazon or those for similar products and see what customers are loving or wanting. Amazon also allows customers to ask questions about products. If you’re in the B2B or SAAS space, check your forums or those of competitors. Sales managers also have a great handle on who your ideal and highest converting customers are and what questions they’re asking every day. Heck, do some old-fashioned keyword research to find these questions. AnswerThePublic and Google can tell you what people are asking about, and they also provide related queries.

4. Reach Your Target Audience

It’s simple: be where your customers are and have a piercing insight that they can instantly identify with. What’s that look like in practice? As I touched on earlier, you’ll create a multi-channel approach that provides a customer with sticky entry points at any part of the journey. To start, you’ll need to know:

1. Who your ideal customers are
2. Where do they spend their time, and can you reach them there? Example demographic considerations:
   1. Instagram or Facebook for ‘boomers
   2. Tik Tok for anyone who would inaccurately consider someone 35+ as a boomer
   3. Affinity-based websites (i.e., sports fans vs. home and garden readers)
3. What are their buying habits?
4. Where are they in the buying process?
5. How many times can you interact with them?
6. How do you deliver value along the way?

With this data, you can start to create your targeting plan.

Let’s set the stage: You’re selling a killer solution to a problem. This problem is typically encountered by users that match a certain profile. You’ve created a user persona that fits this profile. You’ve named that persona Karl.

If you’ve done your research right, you’ll have a ton of information that you can use for targeting Karl. Your demographics and affinity data should allow you to, as an example, customize programmatic, display, or paid social ads directly for people like Karl. The target audiences available to these platforms are astonishingly detailed, so they’ll be able to find Karl at his favorite online destinations throughout his upcoming user journey. Karls’s problem has reached a tipping point and he needs a solution. He did a web search last week on Google. Let’s look at how you potentially provide value to him before this search, once it happens, and once he finds your website.

Before The Search (Awareness)

While you can certainly target based on raw demographics (Male, female, 25-24), you can definitely get more detailed with your campaigns. If your product or solution has leading indicators, you might be able to target Karl based on a life event or related search. For example, let’s say you sell a product that every new homeowner will need, like, I dunno, a garden hose(?). You can potentially target someone based on the fact that they did a search for a mortgage provider or moving truck. Karl did those searches last week and isn’t even aware that he needs the garden hose just yet, but there are your ads, right on his favorite football blog’s website and in ads on his connected TV (programmatic, video). He’s also starting to see the hose ad on Facebook (social). This is, of course, just one specific example, but you can get very creative to reach a person before or at the moment they become aware that they have a problem.

During The Search (Research)

Here’s your chance to shine! Karl’s in the process of researching what he’ll need to solve the upcoming problems his new situation will bring. At this point, you’ll need to know what he’s searching for, and you’ll have to show up in these unbranded searches. Again, do the keyword research and ensure that your brand and product show up for the relevant terms. To do so, you’ll need to invest in compelling, authoritative, and informational content that should be a one-stop shop for anyone looking for solutions for a potential problem. This interconnected content references its position in the journey by linking to both the root topic as well as finer, next-step considerations, or related topics. If done right, you can curate a sticky experience that compels users to keep clicking and researching (Be sure to read up on content hubs).

Also consider paid search here and how it’s supplementing your search traffic. If you’re already ranking, great! You might still need to appear in paid search listings. Google is in the business of selling ads, and a number of them appear before any organic listing.

Keep in mind that as you build up content, you’ll likely have pages or destinations that are better suited for different searches, both paid and organic. These can be:

• blog posts
• detailed how-to guides (including videos, Youtube or on-site)
• buyer’s guides
• product pages
• category pages
• affiliate sites (e.g., Amazon)

All of these pages should be designed for one or more of the following outcomes:

• Answer their questions and emerge as a trusted resource
• Get them more information about a topic and keep them on the site
• Get their information
• Create a retargeting pool
• A purchase

Here’s how you could utilize a few of these page types:

Blogs. These should be informational and targeted and answer a few specific questions well. As a result, your brand will emerge as a trusted resource. You will make them want to read more and continue on to related articles, and category/product pages. You can get their information with a newsletter sign-up, and in turn use that information to create a retargeting pool.

Category Pages. These related groupings of your products should be broadly informative and helpful in that each product type is explained in general terms. It should link to product pages and also link to content that educates consumers about how the category solves problems. Product comparisons and broad pricing should also be included. You’ll once again establish your brand as a trusted resource by answering the questions they may have about a product or service. And linking to product pages will funnel your users toward a conversion while collecting their contact information will build your retargeting lists.

Product Pages (Organic). Ideally, these pages should address multiple buyer types. Quick buyers might quickly skim the top of your page for a product description, reasons to buy, a few common questions with answers, before looking for the purchase option. Additional information should be included for more scrutinous types who are looking to be convinced. Keep in mind that your users can navigate away from this page, so at least curate how they can find their way to more information. This could be as simple as breadcrumb navigation to the category page. These pages should convince your customers that your product or service can solve their problems, and move them to make a purchase. And then you’ll have their contact information for future marketing efforts.

Product Page (Paid). Depending on the intent of the search ad or the copy/creative of a display ad, this page should be designed to match. An ad with a “Buy Now” message behooves itself to quickly educate, differentiate, and sell. An ad with a “Learn More” CTA might lead to a different page layout that tries to educate now, while setting you up for an opportunity to sell later. The desired outcome here is the same; establish your brand as an expert, get your customers’ information via a newsletter sign-up or perhaps some gated technical content, and then have that information available for future retargeting.

Consideration

At this phase, your customer is getting close to making a purchase! It’s possible that they’ve got you on the shortlist of products or services. Maybe they had found you previously via search. If they didn’t purchase then, hopefully, you got them to sign up for a newsletter that you’re using to stay in touch as you coax them along. Additionally, you probably also added them to a retargeting pool. Using this you can bid them up in paid search, and show next-step ads to them across multiple platforms including display, social, and programmatic. In a perfect world, these retargeting campaigns lead to landing pages that are separate from your original entry points. These new landers should present your argument for why they should sign up now and pick you over your competitors!

Purchase (and Continue to Delight!)

If your prospect purchases from you, you’re not done. It’s time for add-ons and additional purchases. Keep in mind that you now have a new list to prospect from for future transactions: current customers. Better yet, stay in touch to see what they love and what they find themselves wanting. This can go back over to your product team for the next cycle or product launch. You can even use this list to exclude customers from paid searches for products they already own, and to target for those they don’t! A customer who has a product that is nearing the end of a subscription or product life should suddenly be hearing from you and seeing your ads popping up!

5. Determine What to Measure and How

Your marketing plan will be looking to move the needle for a group of stakeholders. Often, I’ll see my clients come to us looking to drive more leads or more transactions. But how do we do that? We create a strategy by which we determine the content we’ll need to drive the right people to. Once we have it, we track how well that content is working for us. We’ll track keyword rank and backlinks to see if search engines and people like it. Once customers are on our pages we switch to tracking engagement metrics. We’ll track time on page, scroll depth, and other data to verify how people are using it. Note: Google can see this activity via Google Analytics. If people are linking to a page that they find to be a valued resource, it’s likely to rank well. Finally, if our new content is doing a good job of telling the right story to the right people, we’ll see that desired increase in leads or transactions.

The interplay between these pages is also pivotal here. Track the entrance paths for your transactions. Using your web analytics, you can see which channels or campaigns lead to what pages. Does the search intent match the landing page? If not, how is that page converting? Is there a better page to route this traffic to? Google Analytics can tell you where a user originated, what pages it saw, whether it converted, left and came back, or dropped off completely. Use the data to confirm your plans and/or to refine your strategy.

Presenting Your Marketing Strategy

Presenting your strategy to your stakeholders is an important final step. Start by reiterating the original business needs or requirements you were asked to fulfill. Next, illustrate who you’re targeting and why you’re targeting them in particular. Next, lay out how your creative vision will be presented to this audience at various stages, and why it will resonate with them. Next, you’ll need to present the metrics that you’re tracking that will confirm that your strategy is working. For example, you may want to mention that you’re planning that your display and programmatic will garner X amount of impressions, at Y cost per CPM. You’ll need to state what your expected clickthrough rate will be. From there, you’ll be tracking the effectiveness of your landing pages. How long do people stay on your pages? Do they navigate out and view additional pages? What’s the conversion rate expectation of your page? If you have these things, you can determine the expected purchase or lead volume.

And once you have your strategy approved, be sure to revisit your goals often. If one of the variables in your equation ends up being off, you’ll need to pivot quickly. Example: If you’re not getting enough traffic to a page, can you eke out more conversions by ensuring that customers are pleased by the experience? Are they rage-clicking or not finding the information they’re expecting? Revise as needed, and don’t be afraid to make necessary changes.

The post Marketing 101: How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Portent.

In the world of paid search marketing, increasing click costs year after year is a common trend in many verticals. The behemoths with the biggest media budgets continually spend whatever they need to fend off competitors and maintain their dominant impression share metrics. Other competitors continually fight to maintain their presence with refined targeting and robust optimization throughout their accounts. However, even with the highest keyword quality scores, the best click-through rates on record, and the most robust automated bidding strategies, such optimization may not be enough to counteract the realities of increased costs for competing in a given industry.

For many advertisers, this is a grueling reality. As efficient as paid search is at driving leads or transactions to low-funnel users, increases in click costs can be unsustainable. Many risk being slowly squeezed out of their market without another tactic outside of their paid search account to help them counteract these click costs.

If you feel like you’re in the same position as the advertisers I mentioned above, you need another tactic that increases your conversion rates and, thereby, increases your business’s bottom line. Because, even with increased click costs and less click volume, you can potentially be more successful at acquiring revenue and growing your business if you’re able to increase conversions from your paid search campaigns with higher conversion rates.

So, if you’re not able to adjust anything within your account itself to do that, how do you accomplish this? Enter: conversion rate optimization (CRO).

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) allows you to find ways on-site to improve user experience and generate more conversions through consistent testing on your landing pages. This process gives you the ability to methodically make changes outside of your paid search platform to steadily increase your conversion rates. With better conversion rates, you’re able to counteract intensified competition and increased click costs in paid search.

CRO starts out by collecting data on current user behavior on your landing pages and in your conversion funnel to find areas or components that perform sub-optimally. For example, you can analyze user activity data through a heat map or a click map. You could also conduct interviews in a focus group or automate user surveys. The point is that you want to start by understanding what specific things your potential customers see as obstacles in their path to conversion and where they experience unnecessary friction.

You then hypothesize why something, in particular, is not working as well as it should and design an alternative to test that hypothesis. This is called an A/B test. You then deploy that test through a CRO tool (e.g., Google Optimize) and split the incoming traffic between your existing version (A) and your alternative version (B). Over time, you’ll witness the difference (or lack thereof) in conversion rates between these two variations. Once you reach statistical significance on a given test, you keep the winning version with the better conversion rate and make that permanent. Then, you analyze more data to develop your next test in an effort to increase conversion rates further; they’ll improve over time even if optimization and targeting in your paid search account remain relatively static.

A Brief Proof of Concept

We have a B2C lead-focused client at Portent we’ve worked with for several years now. One of our primary initiatives heading into the 2nd quarter of last year was to develop and execute a full-scale CRO strategic plan. Over the course of the year, we collected on-site user data through a variety of tools, conducted user surveys, analyzed the trends we saw, developed numerous A/B tests, and continued optimizing both our landing page and our conversion funnel experience. After 12 months, here is what we saw:

Form Fill Conversion Rates

• 2019 Conversion Rate: 30.1%
• 2020 Conversion Rate: 32.2%
• CVR Improvement: +2.1 points (+7%)

With these improvements on site, we were able to bring down our average cost per lead from our paid search campaigns even as click costs increased 5% year over year.

Fight Back Against Increased Costs and Win

Robust A/B testing (and multivariate testing, if you want to get fancy) on your landing pages and conversion funnel can and likely will lead to actionable insights that then lead to permanent changes that directly improve your conversion rates. That’s the essence of conversion rate optimization in a nutshell, and it can help you counteract high click costs in paid search. We know because we’ve done it, and it works.

Ultimately, this all leads to more revenue and more profit. When you Increase your conversion rates, you generate more leads, more transactions, and more business. Being able to increase your revenue intake can then lead to increased marketing budgets, which allow you to increase your paid search volume against competitors who were previously crowding you out, thus easing the impact of higher click costs further. You may even be able to invest more in high-funnel or brand awareness marketing efforts as well to really grow your visibility.

So, if you haven’t considered CRO yet to help your paid search account, now is the time!

The post Combatting Competition With Better Conversion Rates appeared first on Portent.

Guided by the compass of the local search microcosm and armed with the blade of user intent, we can now bravely delve into the cave of local keyword data. This is part three of my series on Local SEO, and today we’re really doing it! We’re grabbing a trusty spreadsheet and compiling the phrases to optimize, track, and rank in a local market.

There are four types of data to consider when completing local keyword research:

• Search Console and Local Analytics Traffic
• Population, Dialect
• Keyword Planner
• Other Tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.)

We’ll gather data for an HVAC company in Texas, considering how each type of information fits into the local search microcosm and how it contributes to an overall strategy.

Search Console and Google Analytics

Data from Google should never be ignored. Google Analytics and Search Console are immediate assets for better understanding how users find a website on search engines.

Because Google Analytics is transitioning from an old platform (Google Analytics 3) to an updated version (Google Analytics 4), I’ll provide information about accessing location data on both versions.

Google Analytics 3

Google Analytics 3 includes information about user locations under Audience>Geo>Location. Be sure to filter the segment to “Organic” and set the date range to anywhere from the last 3-6 months. At this point, you’re gathering the data to get a sense of what’s successful, so a quick check is all that’s needed.

Generally, Google Analytics data reports on the larger community, lumping the smaller suburbs together.

Google Analytics 4

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) uses a different data gathering method than Google Analytics 3, so the numbers will be slightly different between platforms.

GA4 location data is accessible under Demographics>Demographic Details. Then, you need to configure the data by clicking “Add Comparison” to insert two Conditions:

First, filter to Organic traffic by selecting “User Medium” and “organic” for the Dimension value.

Then, click “Add new condition,” and for this example, select “Texas” for the region.

Finally, select “City” from the dropdown on the dashboard (it defaults to “Country”) to view the locations in the defined region. Now, we can filter traffic to the organic user medium in GA4 and see how many users are visiting from a specific region.

From this data, we can see that the Houston and Dallas communities deliver the most traffic to our site, which makes sense. They have high population density, therefore more people to drive numbers and engage with the site as a whole. But are national rankings driving this traffic or local queries?

If you have local landing pages, you can also use Google Analytics to understand which of these pages are receiving the most traffic. Local pages are a more specific metric than general location data because it’s unlikely for a local landing page to garner national rankings. To learn more about why people visit from these cities, we can dive into Search Console’s query data.

Search Console Keyword Data

Search Console provides performance data under “Search Results” about the average position, impressions, and clicks for a keyword.

Two factors should be considered when reviewing local query data in Search Console:

1. Keyword Type
2. Location

Sorting by keyword type helps us transform raw lists of data:

• Ac repair mckinney
• Mckinney air conditioning
• Furnace frisco
• Plano hvac repair
• Austin heating and cooling services
• Garland ac repair
• Heating Arlington
• Emergency boiler repair Richardson

Using specific formulas in Google sheets, we can organize the data into frequency and traffic for each keyword:

The “SC Frequency” column tells me how many times the phrase repeats on my master list. So, phrases containing “furnace” repeated 122 times across all locations. If variants of a phrase like “furnace” appear more often, theoretically, this should mean the site has been locally recognized for “furnace.” Frequency data adds context around which terms are delivering high volumes of traffic—the website generally performs better for “furnace” terms than for “air conditioner” terms.

Once keyword groups are prioritized, we can then use the same formulas to group Search Console query data by location, sorting it into geographic “buckets” where the website is ranked. This time, we’ll look at the total number of clicks that location received in the last 3-6 months, as well as the average position.

Search Console location data is useful because it considers engagement directly from user queries rather than general location. Unlike Google Analytics, it doesn’t just tell you how many people visited from the Dallas area; it includes any user who actively typed “Dallas.” When we put this data together, we start to get a clear picture of how and where users are finding the site.

In this example, traffic is spread relatively evenly across three populous cities in Texas (Austin, Houston, Dallas). It’s not surprising that places with more people also bring more people to the website. But if the client says Dallas is their top priority, and it’s almost at parity with the other locations, then I know the current keyword strategy isn’t working. A keyword strategy is driven by what’s working and what needs help—the selected keywords should consider both of these factors.

By setting data-based expectations, the keyword research starts from a place of context in the local search microcosm. With Google’s data, we understand how the specific website functions in the specific context of the local market, rather than trying to guess with generic volume data.

Population, Dialect

Population data is important to an organization’s overall location targeting strategy. As an important part of the local search microcosm (it’s the “location” part of this framework), the website’s location strategy aligns user behavior with marketing priorities.

For example, a Texas HVAC company might share these target locations as a high priority for rankings:

• Dallas, population 1,331,000
• Houston, population 2,310,000
• San Antonio, population 1,508,000

These locations are all major metropolitan areas. But where are the Google My Business profiles verified? When we check, all of the locations are in suburbs near those requested cities:

• Plano, population 259,841
• Katy, population 20,202
• Schertz, population 41,199

So, do we target the major metropolitan regions with 1+ million people (exciting to the stakeholders), or do we select the lower competition suburbs (easier to rank)? Well, that’s going to be up to you, the marketer. By gathering the data, you can lead an informed discussion with stakeholders to determine which strategy makes the most sense based on competition, current traffic, and user intent.

As for dialect, understand the different ways that people search for a region. For example, a series of cities in Idaho are all grouped together and referred to as the Treasure Valley—Boise, Meridian, Nampa, Eagle, Star, Kuna, Caldwell, and Middleton. In some instances, it would make sense to focus on Boise for primary location targeting. In other scenarios, the website is in a less competitive market, or users simply type “Treasure Valley” next to those keywords. In these scenarios, we can use Google’s Keyword Planner to get data for location queries used in specific regions.

Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is invaluable because the data comes directly from Google. It’s also one of the only tools out there that provides search volume data for states, counties, cities, and other regions. Most other keyword research tools can only filter by country, leaving marketers with limited context around regional differences in queries.

While the Keyword Planner is extremely useful for local SEO, it wasn’t developed for this purpose. It’s a feature for Google Ads customers, which means it’s tricky to access and only provides complete data if you’re actively managing an ad campaign. Typically, an organization invested in local marketing has some ads running, which makes the tool accessible. If anything, the fees associated with keyword research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush (covered in the next section) are comparable to a small advertising budget (as little as $100/mo) on Google Ads. Running a few ads is really just a perk in addition to accessing this invaluable local keyword research tool.

When using Google Keyword Planner, data can be viewed from four location-based perspectives:

• Location/general query
• Location/local query
• National/general query
• National/local query

User queries are diverse. Sometimes they’ll include the location (“hvac services Dallas”), but that depends on the circumstances. Sometimes, they’ll look for a local service from another city entirely (think real estate, typing “houses for sale San Diego” from your home in Idaho), but that also depends on the circumstances. Until you look at each perspective, local keyword research is a meaningless numbers game. And again, it’s less about X people search for this service and more about what people are actually doing.

Location/General Query

Google Keyword Planner is unique because it allows you to select a specific region to see how people search for that term.

With Google Keyword Planner, we can select any number of cities and suburbs in a cluster to see how many people are typing a specific query and its variations. In this example, I’ve selected HVAC services in McKinney, TX, and Dallas, TX.

Now, we can see exactly how many people are searching for this term and similar queries in those specific locations.

In this example, it looks like users in Dallas and McKinney are typing “hvac near me” more often than “hvac services” on its own, so it would be important to emphasize the location near the keyword. “Dallas hvac services” will have more impact than using “hvac services” on its own.

However, none of the queries in the screenshot above represent users who include the location in the query itself. All of these queries are from people who (correctly) assume that Google will automatically localize their search results.

Location/Local Query

Sometimes, when users need a service, they specify their location or where they want to receive that service. A person in search of a dentist near their kid’s school might type “Plano kids dentist,” even though they live in Frisco.

Keyword research should reveal how users most commonly phrase a query.

These results tell us specifically how many people in the areas of Dallas and McKinney include “Dallas” or “McKinney” in a search query. The list includes variations of how people search for the service as well, whether it’s {city keyword} or {keyword in city}. We’ve confirmed that regionally, people like to include the city (HVAC in Dallas, 170 SV) or “near me” (HVAC near me, 170 SV) when they look for HVAC services.

National/General Query

Google’s Keyword Planner can also be used to compare user intent at the local level with user intent at the national level. By understanding how people search for HVAC services across the United States, we gain information about whether user behavior in the Dallas area is unique or statistically similar to the general population.

By comparing local and national data, we can see that nationally the same number of people type “ac repair” and “ac repair near me.” Meanwhile, in Dallas/McKinney, slightly more users search for “ac repair” and don’t include “near me.” Insights like these contribute to the decision-making process for keyword prioritization, content strategy, and location targeting.

National/Local Query

Lastly, selecting a country (in our case, the U.S.) on Google’s Keyword Planner can be used to determine how many people are typing “Dallas HVAC services” outside of the greater Dallas area. These users might be moving to Dallas, are searching from out of town, or are random marketers writing a blog post about local SEO.

Here are search volumes for people who include “Dallas” in their HVAC queries across the U.S.:

Let’s compare this national data to the local data for these types of searches in Dallas/McKinney.

At the national level, “Dallas hvac services” receives 140 searches per month. At the local level, “Dallas hvac services” receives 30 searches per month. This means that around 78% of searches for “Dallas hvac services” happen outside of the greater Dallas area.

So, how do these four types of data from the Keyword Planner come together? We now know that:

• For HVAC terms, users like to include the location or “near me.”
• Users in the Dallas area type “ac repair” on its own more often than including their location.
• People outside of the greater Dallas area actively search for “ac repair Dallas,” and similar terms.

To finalize our strategy with this local keyword research for an HVAC company in Texas, let’s gather additional context from some popular SEO tools.

Other Tools

There are dozens of proprietary keyword research tools out there, from tools that generate volume data directly in the search results (Keywords Everywhere) to tools that pull data directly from Amazon (Soovle). For the sake of brevity (thank you for your endurance through this journey), I’ll only cover some of the most popular tools in the industry:

• Ahrefs
• Semrush
• KWFinder

We’ll consider how each tool is useful to local keyword research and how it can round out the details of a stellar local SEO strategy.

Ahrefs Keywords Explorer

Ahrefs Keyword Explorer is known for:

• Estimating how many backlinks it takes to rank for a keyword
• Providing a timeline for the ranking history of a keyword

Typically, these features are examined from the perspective of a national or international campaign. In a high-stakes national ranking environment, large organizations will execute a detailed SEO campaign with a robust off-page and on-page strategy. In local SEO, budgets might not allow for that level of investment, which means we need to be strategic about using this tool and not getting lost in all its details.

What does Ahrefs tell me about local rankings that population data and Google tools can’t?

First, it presents a different story than Google’s Keyword Planner. Not worse or better. Just different.

Ahrefs doesn’t have the same level of data as Google’s Keyword Planner; it’s not showing volumes for our target term, “dallas HVAC services.” Despite this initial lack of detail, some useful keyword ideation can be found within the tool’s “Search Suggestions” feature.

From this feature, we can see that the tool is recommending the singular version of the keyword we entered—“dallas hvac service”—rather than “dallas hvac services.” We gain some insight from this minor difference; what’s the difference in a user’s thought process when they type “service” rather than “services”? The suggestions also point to something that should have been obvious in Google Keyword Planner but was not:

HVAC is a B2B term

The Ahrefs “Search Suggestions” feature is smart and immediately signals to us that the keyword “hvac” isn’t used by homeowners. Any phrases related to “air conditioning” have been relegated to the “Parent Topic” category on the right. We receive a clear picture of the user intent for this phrase by seeing “dallas hvac contractors” and “dallas hvac companies” as B2B terms.

Semrush

Marketers developing a national SEO strategy typically rely on the Semrush Keyword Magic Tool, but other Semrush features include resources that are uniquely beneficial to local SEO.

Semrush’s “Organic Research” filter provides data for the Local Pack.

When we select this filter, we only see terms for our website that appear in the Local Pack.

Terms in the Local Pack:

• Hvac dallas
• Dallas hvac tx
• Hvac companies in dallas
• Dallas hvac service

Terms not in the Local Pack:

• Hvac jobs in dallas
• Diy hvac maintenance
• Hvac technician jobs dallas tx

The difference in user intent between these terms is clear (wanting a job vs. wanting to hire a company). Using this data, the SEO practitioner can refine keyword strategy specifically for rankings in the Local Pack.

KWFinder

Besides the Keyword Planner, this is one of the few tools out there that includes your location in a search. Developed by Mangools, KWFinder closely resembles the features of other keyword research tools but is filtered to a local community.

I’ve placed the data in a sheet to compare it to the data in Google’s Keyword Planner.

These are close similarities in volume! Google is one of the primary data sources for KWFinder, but the tool has slightly lower volumes because it doesn’t group close variants for a term. Google’s Keyword Planner often takes terms like “hvac service” and “hvac services” and lumps them into one search volume, making it difficult to get a clear picture of search patterns.

Ultimately, KWFinder is a good option for businesses in need of an affordable tool that combines the location data of the Keyword Planner with the analysis of traditional tools like Ahrefs or Semruush.

Wrapping Up

Local keyword research isn’t a “plug and play” exercise. It’s a cave of trials, and as we’ve gone through this exercise for a Texas HVAC service provider, we’ve begun to understand that:

• Through Google Analytics and Search Console, we know the website ranks equally across three major cities in Texas, but we should probably choose one of these as a starting point.
• Through population research, we know the website could more easily achieve rankings in low-competition Texas suburbs (e.g., Plano) with high populations.
• Through Google’s Keyword Planner, we know the website will see the most success if we emphasize the location to align with user behavior in and outside of Dallas.
• Through other tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, we know that HVAC is a B2B term, and most rankings for it are in the Local Pack.

While data-driven keyword research might look like a bunch of words and numbers, those aren’t really the point. Local SEO is a journey through the local search microcosm, and the data is just another piece of that framework. Use the local search microcosm to ask the right questions and use keyword data from these tools to answer those questions.

Traffic, population, and keyword volume data can answer questions for a campaign, but it can’t reflect the final decisions made by users and search engines. To conclude our adventure through local SEO and keyword research, we’ll pull it all together. The local search microcosm, user intent, and keyword data all contribute to a robust strategy, but they don’t consider how this data will actually apply to the website itself.

Part four of this series will cover some final pieces of context, from what competitors are doing to how your website presents its content.

The post How to Do Local SEO, Part Three: Local Keyword Data appeared first on Portent.

Back in 2014, when we founded the analytics practice at Portent, reporting to our clients looked a lot different than it does today. We had an Excel spreadsheet template with pivot tables and macros, but entering data into them was a completely manual process that tied up our practitioner teams for the entire first week of the month to deliver.

We needed a different solution: One that allowed us to automate data pulls. One that allowed us to add narrative context to the data. One that allowed us to evolve our reporting as new platforms and technologies became available.

We tried several reporting tools between 2014 and 2016: Domo, Funnel.io, and a few others whose names I don’t recall. They were solid, but we couldn’t get the team to adopt them for several reasons. They didn’t natively connect to all the data sources we needed to integrate. They didn’t offer enough white-labeling options. They weren’t user-friendly enough to make small changes without breaking reports.

Then in Summer 2016, Google Data Studio (GDS) went into beta and everything changed. Not necessarily because GDS was the end-all-be-all at that time. It wasn’t. There were bugs and feature gaps that made it annoying to use at first. But we learned a lot trying to onboard several other platforms before it, and GDS was enough of a blank canvas to fashion it to improve adoption in the team.

Survey Your Reporting Stakeholders

Asking your business stakeholders – internal and external – what they want to see in a report sounds like a given before you start a major reporting initiative. It wasn’t for us. At the time, we thought designing by committee would mean we never finished what we started. That was a mistake then, and it’s a mistake now.

Here are some questions you should ask in a stakeholder survey:

• How often do you reference reporting? (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly)
• How helpful are the reporting meetings you have?
• What format do you like to receive reporting in? (e.g., email, spreadsheet, interactive BI tool)
• How helpful is the commentary in the reports? (e.g., more or less narrative)
• Are we reporting on the right metrics? (e.g., which KPIs are most important)
• Are we reporting using the right segments? (e.g., audiences, campaigns, channels, sources)
• How often do you share reporting with others?
• How well does our reporting convey the value of our work?

Ask a combination of the rating scale and open-ended questions so that you can get enough qualitative feedback to design from and enough quantitative feedback to understand how your reporting is improving over time.

Center Reports on Answering Business Questions

One sure-fire way to lose faith with your clients and internal teams is to provide reporting that doesn’t answer our customers’ questions about the data.

That’s why the first thing in our newest reporting template is a headline in the form of a question:

What question does this dashboard answer?

Under the question, we include a subheading that describes where the data comes from and what assumptions are baked into the numbers by default:

A year-over-year look at product page performance from Google Analytics.

Starting your reports here will make sure the rest of what you build suits a specific purpose and that everyone is on the same page about what they’re looking at before they see a number.

Build Reusable Components, Not Entire Dashboards

One early problem with report templates we created years ago is that they weren’t easy to modify when a new type of data became available or when a client asked for a different layout.

We could’ve avoided those pitfalls by using atomic design principles. Atomic design encourages, nay requires, you to start with small standardized components that can be assembled into groups that can become widgets and then entire dashboards.

Think of it as a library of report building blocks with an inherent style guide.

The template shown below may look like a fully-formed dashboard page. Still, it’s just a bunch of reusable atoms assembled into groups: A chart, commentary block, dropdown filter, heading, input field, label, pie, scorecard, sparkline, table. Each atom has design, spacing, and typography rules implied, but also allows for flexibility of use.

Context Is Everything in Reporting

Shareability of reporting hinges on dynamic context that can follow trends in the data as the client or team interacts with the date ranges in the dashboard. Data without context is almost useless.

To that end, our text narrative lives in a Google Sheet data source with columns for which pages in the report we’re explaining and the date ranges for which those narratives are relevant.

But text narrative isn’t the only form of context. Context also comes in the form of competitive benchmarks and goals. Recently, we’ve begun integrating those pieces into our dashboards to answer the business question: “Is this performance good?”

Report Delivery Should Be Malleable

A reason we’ve stuck with Google Data Studio over the years is it allows for ease of delivery in the formats our reporting customers are used to working with.

Not only can we link clients directly to the interactive dashboard (which is updated 24/7), but also snapshots in time that can be downloaded via .PDF, scheduled for email delivery (and piped into Slack channels from there), embedded via HTML in team intranets, and easily exported to .CSV for spreadsheet addicts.

Evolving Reports Over Time

The hallmark of a good data organization is how you evolve. Iterate on your reports often and incorporate the best modifications your team makes into the main reusable template. Even if the opinions of leaders drive your initial designs, individual contributors will always come up with the coolest innovations in how they apply the template.

Share your works in progress early and often with clients. Don’t be afraid to launch a new version of your report 75% baked. They will provide feedback as you’re building to make sure you don’t paint your templates into a corner.

Most importantly, don’t be afraid to challenge your assumptions about what reporting should be. The tool you use can be anything – GDS, Power BI, Tableau. The design you use should serve you and your clients instead of the other way around. When nothing is sacred in reporting, anything is possible.

The post Building Report Templates That Stand the Test of Time appeared first on Portent.

Content marketing is among the most nebulous parts of digital strategy, especially for B2B companies. Most savvy brands invest time, money, and energy to fine-tune their product pages, white papers, case studies, and blog posts by squishing together SEO and paid advertising to fabricate conversion opportunities.

If the stars align, those marketing efforts succeed and it feels glorious. But when the cosmos sneer at your goals and nothing seems to work, even a paltry ROI feels unattainable.

Fortunately, a user-centric content strategy can keep conversions churning when your normal marketing efforts fall flat. This strategy is called “self-sustainable content marketing.”

Self-sustainable B2B content marketing helps your brand market its services by tapping into how people learn and share information within their organization. Compared to lead-generation content marketing, which trots customers down a classic awareness-through-conversion funnel, a self-sustaining strategy provides users with the information they need when they need it to make them reliant on your brand.

This strategy relies on targeting individual contributors with content that teaches them how to solve day-to-day problems, answers their questions, or resolves internal arguments. These contributors then pass the information “up” to a manager, or laterally to colleagues, until the content — and the brand that made it — gets in front of a decision-maker.

At Portent, we call this technique “upwardly mobile content,” and it’s among the best ways to avoid common pitfalls in B2B content marketing while growing your brand awareness and influence.

How to Create Upwardly Mobile Content

Upwardly mobile content isn’t a magical elixir that repairs every content marketing issue you encounter, but the strategy comes close if you execute it well.

The downside is that creating truly upwardly mobile content requires a lot of work, often from multiple stakeholders, and tracking the strategy’s success often comes down to word-of-mouth or assisted conversions.

With that caveat in mind, there are three tenets to self-sustainable, upwardly mobile content that you can use to set yourself up for success.

1. Answer User Questions and Resolve Their Arguments

Your first objective is to research common questions or arguments individual contributors or managers face when talking to their colleagues or superiors, and then provide a clear, definitive answer that they can use to resolve their struggles.

These contributors and their problems should be crafted as a persona of your brand’s ideal customer.

To build this persona and determine what questions or arguments you must answer, you’ll need to perform user research. Here are five types of research to consider:

• Talk with your company’s sales team to learn the common questions or struggles potential customers discuss
• Analyze social media comments on your brand’s profiles and your competitors’ profiles
• Research public forums like Quora, Reddit, and specialized message boards to see what relevant topics and troubleshooting issues people discuss
• Perform a SERP analysis to see what questions people ask and what content already exists
• Survey your existing customers

2. Provide Prescriptive, Tactically Actionable Content

After you know what problems your target users have in their day-to-day work life, the next step is to create relevant content that helps them solve those issues. The trick here is to make sure your content always has at least one tactical takeaway that can be executed by the intended audience.

For example, let’s say your brand offers video conferencing and collaboration technology to healthcare professionals. Through your user research, you discovered that users are struggling to share files through similar platforms without violating Electronic Medical Records or HIPAA policies. Fortunately, you know the solution and write a blog post about it. You ensure all of the content in the blog post is relevant to your target user’s problem. Plus, in your content, you also give users step-by-step directions to ensure they can execute on your recommendation.

This effort sears your brand into the user’s mind as a reputable resource for similar problems. When users share the solution with colleagues, your brand’s recognition increases. If decision-makers decide to change platforms, your brand may naturally join the RFP candidates.

3. Be Self-Contained: Don’t Force Users Back to SERPs

The most frustrating part of trying to solve a problem is when you need to explore multiple websites or pages to cobble together a solution. Don’t make your users do more work than absolutely necessary. The actionable answer you provide to their problem must include all necessary information. This empowers the individual contributor to act or deliver that answer to their superiors without additional research.

While you’re making content, a good test to determine if you need to add more resources is ask yourself if the reader can act on your advice without using Google. If the answer is no, then consider expanding on the ideas you present or providing additional resources to the user, like an embedded video or links to a white paper on the topic.

If you want a perfect example of self-contained content, take a gander at my digital marketing guide for nonprofits. The guide contains step-by-step instructions about how to set-up and strategically use every digital marketing channel. When granular instructions were necessary, I linked out to relevant resources so users wouldn’t need to search for that information. It allows users to bookmark the content and consistently return to it while they solve their marketing struggles.

The Final Trick to Self-Sustainable Content

Ultimately, self-sustainable content is a method to help your audience with the challenges they face in their day-to-day work. The better you solve their problems, the more they like your brand and sing its praises to decision-makers.

So, when your content efforts are in a rut, put your conversion goals on the backburner and focus on the user’s problems instead. You may be surprised at how fast those conversion anxieties disappear.

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