Having a social media presence is arguably mandatory for brands in today’s fast-paced and increasingly connected world. However, simply creating profiles and just setting them live isn’t enough. You have to engage and really listen to how people are talking about your brand on all these different channels. A well-run social media strategy requires time and cultivation. 

Social listening involves using a software suite that monitors how current and potential customers talk about you and your products across the internet and social media.

Social listening is one of the best things you can do to understand your audience. Social media accounts are living, breathing entities that are in constant dialogue with your customers. This means they are a treasure trove full of easily-accessible, real-time customer feedback that you can use to inform your marketing strategies. 

In the past, before this strategy was called social listening, I would advise clients to visit their Amazon store, or fan-run forums to see how customers were talking about their products or brands. At that time it was a far more manual process. Today, the process is far easier. In this post, we’ll discuss how social listening suites allow you to stay ahead of your customers’ needs and desires. You’ll be able to understand what they wish you’d do better, what you’re excelling at, and what they wish you’d do next.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is when you track and analyze how your customers (or potential customers) talk about you online. Maybe they’re singing your praises, sharing frustration about a product or experience, or asking how your product compares to another they’re considering. This also includes how people are discussing your industry.

Social listening must consider consumer sentiment throughout the user journey: awareness, acquisition, support, and advocacy. It should track direct, indirect, and brand-specific mentions. However, as I always say around here, tracking is great, but what you learn from it is more important.  

These mentions are then compiled to provide insights into prominent themes uncovered during analysis. These insights provide a starting point with clear action items for the design and execution of marketing and customer experience (CX) strategies across your various channels.

Social Listening is “analyzing how people talk about your brand, products, and industry, and using that information to define marketing and CX strategies.”

Social Monitoring vs. Social Listening

There’s some nuance to deciphering the difference between social monitoring and social listening. 

Social monitoring involves tracking what your customers are saying about your brand on social media and responding to them. It shows that your brand cares about its reputation and customers and is something that all businesses should consider deploying. It is, unfortunately, somewhat reactionary. 

Social listening takes things further by adding industry insights. 

As a simple example, let’s say you’re a mortgage company. Social monitoring would uncover that people are upset about increased monthly payments for a recent refinance quote. Social listening would note that the fed is raising interest rates to combat inflation and that mortgage rates are climbing. This analysis should look for strategy shifts and include competitors’ actions to combat this overall trend. 

A brilliant way to illustrate the difference between the two comes from Sprout Social, “Monitoring addresses the symptoms, and listening reveals the root cause.” 

Why is Social Listening Important?

Social listening gives you valuable insight as you plan and refine your customer experience (CX) and marketing strategy. This intelligence can assist before launching a new product by looking early at industry trends and competitive products. By having things like term volume, competitor offerings, and pain points at hand, you can better map out your launch and how to best position your product. 

Beyond that, once you’ve launched, you can continue to monitor how your brand and products or solutions are discussed in forums, product reviews, or social media. Coupling this with industry trends will allow you to drive a feedback cycle that will output new products or upgrades. Your customers are already discussing what the next firmware or product release should look like. Ensuring that they feel heard will continue to keep them as customers and advocates. These insights can all drive content decisions. Your marketing material will seem as though it’s tailored directly to your customers’ needs. 

Identify Customer Pain Points

Customers are talking about your product or those similar to it across the internet. As you can imagine, a lot of that chatter is about customers’ pain points when using a product or service. There’s a forum for virtually any topic you can think of where people discuss why something isn’t working. If your product is sold on an online marketplace, there are likely review sections where people rate setup, long-term reviews, or initial impressions. 

All of this data should be tracked and analyzed. From there, use the analysis to answer customers in those online properties. You should also create new content that helps customers overcome these issues. Examples include new product page copy, new setup guides, video walkthroughs, and/or FAQs.

Discover Product Feedback

Similar to the pain points you may uncover with social listening, you’ll also find lots of feedback about your product. This can be good or bad. You can use this feedback to overcome new customers’ purchasing objections to drive adoption. 

This also helps you keep existing customers happy by adding their feedback to upcoming firmware releases, ensuring that new products have what they’re asking for and keeping them in your ecosystem.

Learn From Competitors

Tracking your competitors is another important tenet of social listening. Keeping an eye on the competition and what people say about them will keep you ahead of their offers, appraised of their new products and innovations, and allow you to learn from their successes and mistakes. 

Social listening can also let you see how users compare like companies: which they like more and why.

Stay Up to Date on Industry Trends

As you start to let this all sink in, you’ll likely realize that social listening is most impressive when you think about its scope. We’re talking about tracking a ton of branded and non-branded terms that are important to your business. These can be company terms, competitor terms, and industry terms. For the latter, tons of websites, YouTube channels, Twitter channels, etc., already cover your industry. They often write about the latest trends, whether new products, technology, supply line issues, or other small details that can impact your business and place in the industry. It behooves you to keep an eye on these important issues.

Find Potential Influencers to Work With

While you’re following those Twitter and YouTube channels for industry insights, you can also identify important influencers in your industry that you might want to collaborate with to help get your brand and products in front of your target audience.

Influencer marketing campaigns are a great way to get industry experts talking to their passionate followers about your products. 

Help with Crisis Management

If something goes wrong for a company, the word can get out quickly these days. And if that company isn’t actively listening for its brand name, it might have a full-blown crisis on their hand before it can craft a response. I’ve had this happen to clients. 

Having social listening in place should allow a company to learn about cascading negative sentiment before it becomes a full-blown crisis. This extra time could allow a problem to be addressed quickly or for a response to be crafted until it is fixed. 

Social Listening Tools

There are a lot of available tools out there that you can use for social listening. Prices range from affordable to ‘Enterprise.’ These are some of the main tools we use.

Sprout Social

Here at Portent, we’ve used Sprout Social for a number of clients over the years, and they’re always the first company that we recommend to clients who are looking for a good place to start their social listening journey. 

As a bonus, they integrate with our next recommendation, Hubspot, if you’re in their ecosystem. We’ve been recommending them for a literal decade now:

Hubspot

The beautiful thing about Hubspot is how it integrates with its already powerful suite of solutions. If you’re already using their CRM or marketing automation, you should definitely look at investing in social listening from Hubspot. 

If you want to explore more options, check out Hubspot’s post about social listening tools.

Example of Social Listening

So what does this all look like in action? Let’s start with a hypothetical company that recently started selling super-niche racing paddle boards (to be honest, I prefer outrigger canoe racing, but it’s even more niche). Let’s call this company FastrBORD.

FastrBORD has only been selling its board for six months, and its social media properties have been around for nearly that entire time. So let’s quickly note that if we were just starting them off with social monitoring of their owned properties, we’d be missing out on a whole lot of information. Social listening would actively track industry terms and trends for the Standup Paddling (SUP) community. This information would then be turned into content that can be used to promote FastrBORD. This can help identify the hot and current topics folks are interested in. Rather than guessing, we can use this data to write the right content. 

Plus, FastrBORD can see what people are saying about the competition. Are their boards better built? Do they last longer? How do people see FastrBORD when stacked against the competition? Are people winning with FastrBORD? You can even identify trusted voices in the community speaking about the brand positively and then reach out to them to see if there’s an opportunity for an influencer campaign.

How to Start Social Listening

The simplest way to start social listening is to admit that you need it (and you do). Yes, this is a blanket statement, and I’m being a bit flippant here. But imagine for a second a brand that you connect with. One that treats you right, one that really speaks to you. One that always seems to get the right press. One that has a product set that is a notch above the rest. One that deals with a crisis with aplomb. They are likely monitoring their space in the industry, its trends, and the competition. They’re using social listening to make timely, informed decisions to attract, keep, and continually ‘wow’ customers. 

Now, imagine your company with social listening. You’ll need to start by gathering up keywords, industry and company terms, competitors, brand jargon, and an idea of what this data will inform. Once you have this all at hand, you’ll need to get this information into your platform of choice. Each platform will have onboarding guides and best practices to follow. From there, you can run your initial audits to get an initial baseline to plan your next steps!

Wrap-Up

Market research doesn’t have to be hard, and it certainly doesn’t have to be something that happens only periodically. Social listening allows you to better understand and drive higher engagement with your target audience. You’ll be empowered with timely insights into what your customers are talking about and be alerted to any potential issues with your products, services, or larger industry issues that could affect your business. 

There is a social listening tool for nearly every budget, so I highly encourage you to investigate a platform sooner than later. Trust me; you need these insights, so get out there and start listening!

The post What Is Social Listening & Why It’s a Gold Mine of Insights appeared first on Portent.

If your Twitter feed is anything like mine, then it’s been inundated with hype about AI chatbots and how they will make our lives as organic search marketers easier. GPT-4 just released, and Google is still assuring us their offering is coming, so I don’t anticipate the torrent of headlines to stop anytime soon.

Contrarily, I think AI chatbots will actually make our jobs harder for a few reasons:

• AI chatbot results mean we’ll suffer more zero-click results.
• ChatGPT won’t help Bing take significant search market share from Google
• Writing content the hard way (by real people, with real experience) is more necessary than ever.

This isn’t to say that AI chatbots can’t do anything useful for us. Tactically, using AI chatbots for things like content outlines and writing non-essential text will save us time. But they can only do so much.

The question on everyone’s mind is, how will AI chatbots impact the search engine landscape and our subsequent strategies? While some people are worried that AI chatbots will result in the fundamentals of SEO and content marketing being thrown out, at a high level, they will actually make those core principles more important than ever.

What is ChatGPT & How Does it Work?

ChatGPT and its kin are conversational text generators, and they’re pretty good at it. They should be if it takes billions of sequences of text and millions of dollars to train. 

Fundamentally, AI chatbots like ChatGPT cannot think. They are just like other software that mechanically output data in response to some input. What is notable about them is how well they imitate a real person’s response. 

ChatGPT belongs to a family of neural networks called Large Language Models (LLM), and they are typically trained with two major steps – unsupervised training and supervised training.

In the unsupervised training step, an LLM will be given an incomplete sequence of text (sentences and code) and asked to predict the next word or symbol. This is how it learns what natural language looks like and how it “knows” anything. Since the text it’s trained on is from the web, it is very good at repeating text that has already been published.

In the supervised learning step, the language model is tasked with generating several answers to a prompt, and humans tell it which answers are the best. Also called a “fine-tuning” step, this human feedback specializes the model for certain tasks. For example, ChatGPT can respond to prompts for writing an email, but a model with a lot more of its human feedback geared toward email could perform better at the task.

A large language model specialized for web search might be fine-tuned on prompts that are questions people type into the search bar, while the responses are good summarizations of the pages that appear in the top search results.

What AI Chatbot Results Look Like in The SERPs

Bing has already allowed some users to see chatbot results in SERP, and they look like this on desktop:

After expanding the box, we can see that it has a few other features: links to citations, prewritten follow-up questions, and a link to expand the feature to the whole screen:

Presumably, this feature will only show on search results where Bing thinks it will help users, instead of all of them when it’s finally opened up to everyone. A lot like a direct answer or featured snippet result.

If a search result doesn’t have the feature, Bing provides a link in their “Scope Bar” to take the user there directly:

Google doesn’t have any public previews yet, so we’ll have to rely on what they’ve shared to get an idea of what’s coming:

Google’s preview isn’t from their final release, so it probably isn’t complete. However, we can expect that they want it to act like an extended featured snippet.

AI Chatbot Results Mean More Zero-click Keywords

Contrary to a lot of fears about featured snippets, I find that featured snippets bring in a lot of traffic. Why wouldn’t they? The snippet is large, at the top of the page, and includes a prominent link to the source page. With a little bit of investigation and copywriting, it’s totally doable to get featured snippet results.

The real zero-click results are the ones that come from the search engines themselves. Both Google and Bing have knowledge graphs made up of facts they’ve scraped from other websites. Knowledge graph results don’t link to sources and deprive websites that rank below them of valuable clicks. Search engines love them because it keeps users on their site because, hopefully, the user will search for something else that will generate ad results.

Will AI chatbot results be more like featured snippets or more like zero-click results? I’m betting on them being more like zero-click results, but I want to be wrong.

Organic Attribution is Important for Traffic

Wanting attribution in AI chatbot results makes sense for marketers. The search engines trained their large language models on our content, so they could at least cite their sources. 

Bing’s ChatGPT results do link to sources, including pages not already in the top ten positions, but they aren’t immediately visible on the SERP.

So I expect Bing to deliver some clicks to us but not many, provided they choose us as a source.

With Google, their preview screenshot didn’t show any attribution links, but they did make a vague allusion to continuing to give brands traffic from AI search features:

No promises and nothing specific. I think we’ll hear more about ad formats in Bard (Google’s upcoming AI chatbot) before organic attribution.

This is a big problem for organic search marketers because search engines are reneging on the informal arrangement they imposed on us.

The better content we produce, the better results search engines can display to users. If users are satisfied and keep coming back, then they will click on more ads. Search engines need marketers to enhance the value of their products. In return, the search engines give us some traffic, so we’ll continue to stay in business and keep delivering content to them.

If AI chatbots can summarize our content and cut us off from the traffic that sustains us, we’ll be in a very bad position.

ChatGPT Won’t Make Bing Competitive

Historically, Bing’s problem when competing with Google is that it tails whatever Google is doing. Whenever Google comes out with a new feature, Bing presents their own months to years later. Even their snippet design is like Google’s from a few years ago:

Google 2019:

Bing today:

With so much hype around Bing adding a ChatGPT-based feature to their search engine, we should expect to see more traffic coming from Bing to our websites. Many marketers hope this will happen because it might help dislodge Google from its monopoly position in web search.

Unfortunately, users aren’t rushing to Bing like it’s a Black Friday sale. Looking at a few of the websites I work on, Bing traffic has increased but not as much as expected from a revolutionary new feature.

Here are some screenshots from Universal Analytics from the last six months, year over year:

Traffic has been up, but not to Google-killing levels. News about ChatGPT in Bing started in January 2023, but their big ChatGPT announcement didn’t come until March 5th, which is when search interest peaked. Bing also had a significant algorithm update beginning January 18th, so we might see the effects of that or both. Either way, traffic from Bing needs to be several times larger before it becomes an important traffic channel.

I think a major problem holding Bing back is its design. Not just because they are tailing Google but because they don’t take it as seriously as Google. Here are the organic results for “vacuum cleaner.” Where does Bing want us to focus our attention?

It’s a mess. Each feature on this SERP is screaming for the user’s attention, and it shows they follow a different design philosophy from Google.

It’s disappointing that Bing doesn’t seem like it’s going to take a much bigger chunk of the search engine share. At Portent, we’ve always said that diversifying your traffic sources is a good idea for managing risk. 

For many of my accounts, roughly 90% of their organic traffic comes from Google. What if Google wipes it out after an algorithm update? Where are they going to get their qualified traffic from instead? Bing’s 5% and DuckDuckGo’s 1% aren’t going to cut it. Not every brand can make video or social platforms their primary source of traffic, and Google’s dominance puts them in a risky situation.

The sooner Google’s monopoly ends, the easier we’ll all be able to sleep.

AI Chatbots Raise The Floor for Content Quality

Many brands are excited at the prospect of using AI chatbots to write their content because it’s fast, and their pricing is cheap compared to a human writer. 

The problem with adopting this content strategy is that their competitors can very easily do the same thing. Since AI chatbots only “know” what has been published before, they will all be drawing from the same pool of information to repeat. I’m expecting search results to flood with pages all saying the same things in various ways.

How will the brands who are using ChatGPT to write their content have a competitive edge over everyone else using the same writer? They won’t.

Additionally, if search engines are using the same class of technology to answer user queries directly, why would users read their AI-generated content instead? They’re also failing to differentiate themselves from search engine content. 

Even further, what incentive do search engines have to rank a brand’s AI-generated content over what the search engine produces? History has shown that Google prefers to rank its own products in organic search where it can. In a sea of undifferentiated content, Google will probably rank itself higher than anyone else on average.

As the capabilities of large language models advance, the content quality floor for viable content in organic search will rise. The next key question brands will need to answer before they publish a new page is, “is this content better than what an AI chatbot could produce?” If the answer is no, then that page is not likely to rank in the top 10 results anywhere.

Google Search is still meritocratic to some degree, so there must be a way to stand out from the crowd of AI-generated content. Fortunately, the answer has been around for years, and it’s known by many names but mostly as “10x content.”

Google basically agrees with the principles of 10x content, but they call it E-E-A-T. They have also anticipated the homogenizing effect AI-generated content will have in organic search and are already advising their search quality raters on how to differentiate superlative from average:

This table and other advice gleaned from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines are going to help guide us out of the oncoming AI-generated content swamp.

The Winning SEO Strategy Hasn’t Changed

While AI chatbots are creating new challenges, the strategy for achieving success in organic search is the same as the old one: have real people provide new information based on real experience that goes beyond the core answer to a user’s query. 

Focusing on this fundamental strategy for high-quality content also addresses the three problems I listed at the beginning of the article:

• Search engines won’t show zero-click results on queries where users clearly prefer our content.
• We’ll be able to get more traffic from whatever search engines are available. Even video and social because the formula applies to them too.
• Real people with real-world experience can outperform AI chatbots because only they can bring new information to the web.

The post AI Chatbots Make Organic Search Marketing Harder, Not Easier appeared first on Portent.

With the rise of TikTok and Instagram Reels, short video content is everything when creating social media content—and that’s why you should use it in your advertising.

 If you’re a B2C brand already advertising on platforms like Meta, then TikTok is the perfect way to expand your social media advertising strategy to tap into TikTok’s giant user base (with over 1 billion active users). However, if you’re a B2B brand currently advertising on LinkedIn, TikTok ads may not be the best fit depending on your business’s goals and target market.
But be quick with your decision-making! American brands may run out of time to test TikTok ads if, “Congress passes a new bill that could be used to ban TikTok and other technology products that pose a threat to American national security interests.”

What Are TikTok Ads?

If you’re familiar with Meta, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and Snapchat ads, it’s time to meet the newest addition to the advertising platform family: TikTok ads. 

TikTok has a variety of ad types to work with. Some ad types are similar to advertising platforms you may already use like Meta, and some ad types are new to spice things up and add variety to your creative. TikTok ads have multiple campaign objectives to meet your business goals, which will help you decide if advertising on TikTok is right for your brand.

Types of TikTok Ads

If you’ve runads on Meta before, or any other social media advertising platform, you will find very similar ad types on TikTok, like video ads and even image ads. 

Let’s dive in and take a look at all of the different ad types TikTok has to offer:

In-Feed Video or Image Ads

The most common TikTok ad type is in-feed ads. In-feed ads are the most cost-effective for companies to create and run. You can easily utilize video assets that you’ve already created for Instagram stories or reels, or you can create new video content that is specific to TikTok. 

Typically, these ads look organic as users scroll down their feeds and are usually about 15 seconds long. If you are selling e-commerce products, this is where you can collaborate with influencers or record an employee talking in a video to add a more relateable feel to your ad content. You can launch in-feed ads using TikTok’s self-service auction advertising platform.

TopView Takeover Video Ads

The next kind of ad type is TopView ads. These ads capture the user’s attention because they appear at the top of people’s ‘For You’ page when they first open the TikTok app on their phone. With this format, videos can be up to 60 seconds long, offering a great viewing experience with no other ad competition while your TopView ad is playing. 

This type of ad is very similar to when a pop-up ad takes over the full screen of a website, and you have to exit the pop-up before you can carry on. TopView ads require a higher budget than in-feed ads because they have a more powerful impact in raising awareness in impressions.

Branded Hashtag Challenge Video Ads

With a branded Hashtag Challenge Ad, you can encourage your target market to actively participate with your brand’s message. Hashtags play a major role on TikTok since they help users find videos that they are interested in and can join conversations or build communities around hobbies they enjoy. Branded Hashtag Challenge ads can give your brand the opportunity for the hashtag challenge to go viral on TikTok for additional brand awareness.

Spark TikTok Account Video Ads

Unlike in-feed ads, Spark ads are a new ad type that uses posts from your brand’s TikTok account or branded posts made by other creators that have given you the authorization to use their content. Spark ads allow your brand to build up trust and credibility with your audience through utilizing already-made organic TikTok content. Spark ads drive more engagement because you can incorporate organic video features like Duets, Stitches, or Stickers.

Branded Face Filter Effect Video Ads

If your brand wants an out-of-the-box way to advertise on TikTok, then you can use Branded Effect ads! This ad type lets you tell your brand’s story through augmented reality (AR) filters. AR filter effects have become increasingly popular on apps like TikTok and Instagram. 

With this ad type, you can invite other TikTok users to engage with and share your brand story by using your Branded Effect. Branded Effect ads can come in handy at all stages of the marketing funnel and they give your brand increased awareness by making your Branded Effect searchable on the app.

Promote: Boosted Organic Video Ads

If you want to take a more subtle approach to advertising on TikTok, you can use TikTok’s ‘Promote’ feature to boost your organic brand posts on your TikTok account for extra visibility. This feature is very similar to boosting a post on Facebook or Instagram. 

This feature is also the most cost-effective option, besides using in-feed ads, because you can boost a post for a small amount of money, and you can pick and choose which posts you want to boost instead of creating a whole new campaign. This feature can be very beneficial because it can help more people discover your TikTok videos, guide them to your website, and improve your chances of gaining followers.

Search Ads (New!)

TikTok is now entering the paid search advertising market. Like the market leaders, Google and Microsoft, TikTok will allow advertisers to bid on keywords and phrases. This means you may have access to better targeting options than previously available – dimensions like interests, behavior, or demographics.

While it remains to be seen how effective this new advertising platform will be, search ads may be a great option if TikTok’s other ad offerings aren’t a good fit for your business.

How Much Do TikTok Ads Cost?

TikTok ads are fairly cost-effective because you can tailor how much you want to spend to your brand’s advertising budget. TikTok allows you to have a flexible marketing budget for businesses of all sizes. 

TikTok ads typically have a CPM of about $10 and a CPC of about $1, depending on your campaign objective. TikTok ads also require you to spend a minimum of $50 a day at the campaign level and a minimum of $20 a day at the ad group level. You must spend about $500 minimum when running tests or planning your budgets.

Are TikTok Ads Effective?

A new advertising platform brings new opportunities for brands. Depending on the type of brand you have, TikTok ads can be a very effective way to advertise and get out in front of and grow your target market. You might even reach a new audience that isn’t on the typical social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram!

Pros of TikTok Ads

These days, people’s attention is spread across more and more social media apps. So instead of having all of your eggs in one basket, it’s important for brands to diversify their social media channels. Particularly for small businesses, social media can be a great avenue for advertising. 

Let’s take a look at some of the pros when it comes to advertising on TikTok: 

Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing has become an increasingly popular way to advertise on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more. TikTok’s Creator Network gives brands the tools they need to easily collaborate with influencers and promote their products or services in a very indirect, doesn’t-look-like-it-is-coming-from-the-brand not-annoying way.

Targeting options

If you’re tired of Facebook’s boring interest-based audiences that have been impacted by Apple’s iOS14 update, now is your chance to utilize TikTok video engagement behavior, creator audiences, hashtags, and so much more. Facebook could never!

Unique tools, analytics, and insights

Access to TikTok advertising also gains you access to exclusive tools and analytics through TikTok’s Creative Center. You can find inspiration with TikTok’s ad library and see what competitors are running for ads. See what’s trending on TikTok through hashtags, songs, creators, videos, and more. 

If you don’t have an in-house video editor, TikTok also has creative tools and an audio library so you can easily create new content that will thrive as TikTok ads.

Opportunity to go viral

If your brand, product, or service has a special razzle dazzle compared to other brands in the space, you will also have the opportunity to go viral and earn fame organically or through paid advertising on TikTok. 

There are a lot of eyes looking at TikTok’s huge amount of trending and viral content. If your brand, small or enterprise, is not already on TikTok, you are missing out on the chance to increase your brand awareness, grow your audience, increase website traffic, drive more conversions, and generate ROI.

Cons of TikTok Ads

All great new platforms come with their own set of challenges for the platform and the users. 

Meta has faced multiple challenges with their community regarding data privacy and brands being transparent with their customers. TikTok has also been a trending topic in the news lately. 

Using a new advertising platform also means there is a learning curve for anyone who hasn’t done this before. The nice thing about TikTok’s advertising platform is that it looks very similar to Meta, LinkedIn, and Twitter ads since it is separated by campaigns, ad groups, and ads. The learning curve comes for optimization decisions, algorithm changes, audience targeting options, and making top-performing ad creative. We’ve all heard the best way to learn is by doing…so test out TikTok ads for yourself ( if it makes sense for your brand).

New Data Privacy Concerns

Since TikTok is a newer social media platform in general, they are not as developed as other platforms like Meta when it comes to connecting an API or connecting to GA4. There are also concerns around data privacy, with TikTok being owned by a Chinese company and the possibility of the Chinese government having access to users’ data. This has been a current topic of discussion in the news since the US is considering banning TikTok altogether.

TikTok Ads Are Not a Great Fit for Every Business

If you are advertising a B2B product or service, TikTok ads may not be the best fit. Right now, TikTok ads cater to B2C brands, with the overall average age of TikTok users being lower than other platforms. E-commerce brands and brands that work with influencers–this is your time to shine. B2B brands may want to wait until more targeting features are rolled out so they can accurately reach their customers like you can on LinkedIn ads.

How to Decide if TikTok Advertising is a Good Fit For Your Business

Are your competitors already advertising on TikTok? Is the product or service you are advertising trending right now, or does it have the opportunity to go viral? Does TikTok’s advertising solutions work with your marketing goals? If so, you can tap into your target audience and get in front of competitor brands by advertising on TikTok.

Ask yourself these three questions to help determine if advertising on TikTok is right for your business:

1. Is Your Target Audience on TikTok?

Once you create a TikTok advertising account for free, you can create a draft campaign, walk through the ad group settings, and pick your audience details to see what your estimated audience size looks like. You can also utilize other tools and resources TikTok offers, like case studies and the TikTok ad library, to see if similar businesses are already advertising on TikTok.

2. Do You Have a Product That Works Well With a Visual Medium?

It is best practice for businesses to use TikTok for organic posts and paid advertising. By using both methods, your content will have the opportunity to go viral or become a new trend, especially if your content is aesthetically pleasing.

3. Do You Have the Resources?

When planning your advertising strategy, set your strategy up for success by allocating some of your budget to tests. The best way to learn if TikTok ads are right for you will be by testing it to see how it goes. Create a hypothesis to test with your marketing strategy and see if TikTok can help you achieve that goal or prove your hypothesis wrong.

Examples of TikTok Ads

You can see what kind of ad creative performs best on TikTok by looking through TikTok’s case studies of successful campaigns.  With TikTok’s Creative Center, you can customize your creative search by location, industry, campaign objective, and more.

Let’s look at some examples of TikTok ads to spark some inspiration:

Influencer TikTok Ad

Influencer TikTok ads have a lot of power when it comes to advertising on TikTok. Because TikTok has a large creator network of influencers, when brands work with influencers to create their ads, it gives the ads more of an organic feel and it builds brand awareness and credibility with new customers when an influencer is speaking about the product or service. 

Here is an example of an Influencer TikTok ad for a bedding product:

E-Commerce TikTok Ad

TikTok users are more likely to buy something after hearing about it on TikTok, especially when it is at a more affordable price point. Since e-commerce products are so visually appealing, like clothing, makeup, skincare, and more…that makes TikTok the perfect choice for advertising your products and getting in front of your target audience. 

Here is an example of an E-Commerce TikTok ad for a clothing brand:

TikTok Ads for Apps & Games

Since TikTok is already a mobile-first platform, it is a great place to advertise mobile apps. A lower average age range on TikTok means more app downloads for games and other apps, depending on your target audience. With app and game ads, it is important to address the needs of your customers in the ad. 

Here is an example of a TikTok ad for a social app:

Wrap-Up

If you are a B2C brand…then meet your new favorite advertising platform! TikTok ads make it easy for brands to connect with influencers, create trending or viral content, and tap into a new audience. 

If you are a B2B brand, it may be best to wait until they expand their tools and add new targeting options. Search ads may offer the kinds of targeting options that make TikTok attractive to B2B brands. Keep an eye out.

If you are interested in increasing your brand awareness and content engagement, then TikTok is the right advertising platform for you. Give it a try and see how it goes! You can also reach out to Portent for all of your social media advertising needs.

The post Should Your Business Advertise on TikTok? appeared first on Portent.

If you’re involved in SEO or content strategy in any professional capacity, chances are you’re familiar with tools like semrush and ahrefs. And if you’re familiar with tools like those, you’re probably familiar with the wide variety of metrics they provide, or at least a selection of them.

Some are straightforward and ubiquitous—we’re all familiar with search volume and keyword difficulty, and at this point, chances are that your clients are as well. What’s not straightforward, however, is how this data is gathered and if or why you can trust it. Because these two extremely powerful tools have risen to prominence, there hasn’t been much use in questioning them, as unanswered questions will bring about little recourse. 

But, it’s important to understand how these metrics are being calculated, the margin of error presented throughout doing so, and the confidence you should have in trusting these numbers or, more importantly, presenting them to clients. At a glance, it seems that being presented with these metrics without any analytics work is a cheat code for reporting. Still, it’s important to understand what they’re actually telling us—and why that isn’t always what we think it is. Estimated traffic is a handy guideline that can tell us a lot about the state of our content, but it is most definitely not an accurate representation of the organic traffic that a page receives.

To understand estimated traffic, we must first understand the underlying principles of the two main determining factors: search volume and keyword difficulty.

How is Search Volume Measured?

In days past, search volume was a straightforward and accurate statistic that you could get directly from Google. We’re talking about days before GDPR and privacy agreements, and things were a little simpler. You could see accurate data in Google Keyword Planner because Google had the data (and remember that it still does), and there was no obvious reason not to share it with you. The more you understood about the demand for whatever you were working on, the more likely you were to be successful in the execution of its campaign, and the more likely you were to return and spend more dollars on ads.

The problem was when SEOs got the hang of wrangling this data. They could now clearly identify the most lucrative and in-demand topics and skew all of their efforts toward dominating SERPs for those items or concepts. This means that effectively, whatever query in a big list of semantically related concepts was listed as having the highest search volume, you could be more or less sure that that would be targeted relentlessly by marketers. So, Google decided to obscure that information, which they do now largely through clustering and bucketing.

What about Keyword Difficulty?

In the old days, before the prevalence of paid third-party tools, “keyword difficulty” was not a unified statistic by any means. However, there’s always been one equation (with some variation, of course) that could be used to determine—or better said, to get a rough idea of—the competitive difficulty of a keyword and how hard it would be to rank. 

This formula involves:

• The quality/authority of the pages already ranking 
• The backlink profiles of those same pages
• The search intent of the query itself, and
• The total number of pages currently ranking 

It is interesting to note here that by semrush’s own admission (or rather, omission), the number of results is not candidly stated as a factor that’s taken into account when calculating keyword difficulty. That being said, all of the other factors previously mentioned are present in that list.

Keyword difficulty, put simply, is an extremely useful stat. It’s also extremely imaginary.

It’s unlikely that there is a perceptible difference in the effort that it would take to rank for a keyword term with a KD of 87 rather than 83, though if you take these statistics as gospel, you will believe as much. These metrics are not so much a map as they are a compass, they won’t show you exactly where your goal is, but they will point you in the right direction (and sometimes, just as importantly, point you away from the wrong one).

The Good and Bad of Estimated Traffic Share

Now that we’re on the same page about the two factors above, we can examine how they come together to create the sometimes misleading—and often inaccurate—statistics of estimated traffic. Let’s examine a client example, using semrush for this particular example. 

Below are the largest estimated drivers of traffic on a page level:

We’re given not only the estimated pageviews of each page (and many others should you continue to scroll) but the overall traffic share of the website as a whole. This means that, according to semrush, the /featured page will account for a whopping one-third of all traffic driven from organic search to the site in a cumulative 150,300 unique pageviews. We see a large dip into the second place position, as the figures pretty much level out in terms of traffic for the next several pages.

Now let’s compare these figures to the actual data gathered from Google Analytics:

First, the good news. The top organic traffic driver, as estimated by semrush, was correctly identified. This is impressive and means that there might just be some method to this madness. That is, unfortunately, all the good there is to see here.

Now, the bad news. Look at those traffic discrepancies—yikes. Semrush estimated close to a 10x higher unique pageview count from the period of January (the most recent complete month) than what was actually recorded by Google Analytics. Additionally, the estimated traffic share was almost exactly 2x higher as compared to what actually happened.

This is problematic for a few reasons. The first is that many clients have subscriptions to these tools and monitor them with some degree of regularity. It is going to be a deflating reporting call if you crush them with the news that, despite what they’ve been told, a page is actually only generating 15% of the pageviews that they’ve been told to expect by other sources. Of course, if a client is monitoring third-party tools and not a reporting dashboard, that’s really out of our control—but it doesn’t mean they won’t be disappointed or surprised.

The second reason is that this means that according to all of the factors that semrush measured in this instance, human behavior has actually differed greatly from what it should have been on paper. Go figure.

So, How is Estimated Traffic Share Actually Calculated?

Well, the answer is relatively complicated in nature but can be understood rather straightforwardly. A basic summary of the breakdown is as follows:

First, semrush took inventory of all the keyword rankings for every page of the client’s site that it has on file and noted their last known ranking position. Then, it estimated a clickthrough rate based on the percentage that it algorithmically finds likely for a query within that vertical. 

As an example, if the client site ranked #4 for a certain keyword, semrush would calculate that the site would receive an assigned percentage of the total search volume registered for that keyword. 

You can see that through each step of this process of estimation, the calculation becomes more estimated than known and, therefore, more tenuous as a whole. It’s like a game of telephone with data, in which the person who started the game was guessing in the first place.

So the calculation probably looks something like this:

[Estimated Search Volume] x [Estimated Clickthrough Rate] = [Estimated Traffic]

Let’s look at an example scenario:

1,700 x .13 = 221

Total estimated monthly traffic for example keyword = 221

This example is then replicated over and over for every keyword ranking that the page possesses according to whatever tool you’re using. While 221 pageviews is a relatively low number by itself, once this calculation is applied for over a thousand keywords, the sum of estimated traffic can quickly get out of hand and detached from reality. 

Estimated traffic is not, in fact, estimated traffic. It’s more realistically projected traffic according to the current status and rankings of a website’s associated keywords. It is not going to give you accurate traffic information—far from it—but it can be used as a divining rod to understand the state of your keywords and their resulting organic traffic. Think of it more as a rough temperature check on how your content is performing rather than an exact measurement. 

Estimated traffic share is not an inherently bad number to look at; we just need to understand its limitations and use it accordingly.

But Wait, The Data is Still Useful

One of the best ways to use estimated traffic to our advantage is to check if there is a disconnect between estimated traffic share and a site’s Google Analytics data. This information can be a helpful way to identify upcoming trends or possible issues that need attention.

For example, if a page is performing great in estimated traffic but poorly in GA data, there are a couple of potential insights we can gather:

Potential Insight #1: The page is increasing in strength, and traffic will increase soon (though not likely to the level projected by third-party tools) 

It’s not uncommon to see third-party tools catch onto trends before they’re reflected in analytics data. If you make optimizations to a piece of content, tools will often catch the spike in rankings (from page eight to page three, for instance) and reflect that in the estimated traffic data. In reality, moving up from page eight to page three will still leave you with close to zero organic traffic, but if the trend continues, your GA data will reflect it eventually.

Potential Insight #2: The content is underperforming in terms of CTR 

If a page has strong rankings and high estimated traffic but still gets a low share of the site’s organic acquisition, you might have a problem with SERP appearance. Seeing a high estimated traffic (or traffic share) for a URL that just isn’t performing well can be an indicator that meta titles and descriptions need to be rewritten to appear more appropriate for related queries in SERPs.

Potential Insight #3: The page is ranking for a lot of unqualified traffic

If a page has high estimated traffic but isn’t actually performing well, examine the keywords it’s ranking for. If many keywords aren’t appropriate for the search intent that would lead to the page in organic search, people aren’t going to click through. This is a good opportunity to evaluate the content of the page and potentially rewrite aspects of it to omit the unwanted keywords and replace them with something more appropriate to the page that has a higher likelihood of driving traffic.

Conclusion

Traffic estimated by third-party tools is, at best, usually inaccurate. At worst, it’s a complete misunderstanding of the way human behavior affects organic search performance and a mischaracterization of the way the various factors above culminate. But within its core is a helpful statistic that can be taken as a thermometer check of your content’s performance, give insights as to how and why it’s working, and do the same for what’s not. Just don’t take it as fact.

The post How SEO Tools Estimate Organic Traffic and Why You Should Take them With a Grain of Salt appeared first on Portent.

Performance Max (or PMax) is a new type of advertising campaign in Google Ads that is becoming increasingly relevant in the world of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. As online advertising becomes more complex and fragmented, PMax campaigns use machine learning and automation to optimize ad delivery and bidding strategies across multiple Google networks and platforms.

As a Senior PPC Strategist at Portent, I have been able to launch and test PMax since its inception in 2022, improving performance for my clients along the way. In this blog post, I will cover the top PMax optimization best practices that have proven to be the most effective in my day-to-day work with clients. Since implementing these strategies with one client, we have increased our ROAS 3x since launch!

Whether you are a seasoned PPC advertiser or new to Google Ads, these best practices will be helpful for readers looking to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and tactics in online advertising.

What Are Google’s PMax Campaigns?

PMax campaigns are a campaign type in Google Ads that aim to maximize the performance of a specific advertising goal, such as a purchase or form fill, across different Google campaign types, networks, and platforms.

The goal of PMax campaigns is to use machine learning to optimize ad delivery and bidding strategies in real-time, allowing advertisers to target the right audience and serve the most effective ads at the right time and place. PMax campaigns also offer various targeting options, including audience targeting, demographic targeting, and location targeting, to help advertisers give Google the correct signals to reach their desired audience.

There are many pros and cons to PMax campaigns. For instance, PMax campaigns offer more control over ad creation and targeting compared to Smart Shopping campaigns. While Smart Shopping campaigns automatically generate and display ads based on a product feed and machine learning, PMax campaigns allow advertisers to create and customize their ad assets and choose their own targeting options.

PMax campaigns can target audiences across a wider range of Google properties, including YouTube and the Google Display Network, while Smart Shopping campaigns were limited to the Google Search and Google Display Networks.

While Google PMax campaigns offer several benefits, there are also some potential drawbacks to consider.  Some of those include:

1. A lack of transparency in where ads are shown and what campaign types receive what percentage of impressions and clicks can make it difficult for advertisers to understand and optimize their campaigns fully. 
2. PMax, while possible for goals beyond e-commerce, may not be a good fit for lead gen strategies as there are limited case studies proving its effectiveness. 
3. PMax campaigns require a significant investment in ad creative and may not be as effective for all types of advertising goals or industries.

For more information on whether PMax is the best campaign type for your business, read the Pros and Cons of Google Ads Performance Max Campaigns.

6 Best Practices to Optimize PMax Campaigns

You need to do many things before launching your PMax campaigns and Google Ads account in general. Our 6 best practices ask that you identify your top target markets and personas before diving into the campaign setup. Your feed is also a critical component of PMax success that isn’t editable in Google Ads. With our 6 best practices, your PMax campaigns will be up and running with a profitable ROAS in no time!

1. Feed Optimization

To talk about PMax Optimization, we need to start at the foundation of effective shopping ads, your Google Merchant Center Feed. The quality of your product feed determines whether your products appear in relevant search results and how effectively they compete against other products. A well-optimized feed can improve your click-through rates, conversion rates, and, ultimately, your return on investment. 

How to optimize your feed:

• Ensure your feed contains accurate and up-to-date product information, including product titles, descriptions, images, and pricing. 
• Verify that your feed meets Google’s technical requirements, such as using the correct format and including all required attributes. 
• Regularly monitor and adjust your feed so you can stay competitive and relevant in an ever-changing e-commerce landscape. 

There are third-party tools, such as Feedonomics, GoDataFeed, and Data Feed Watch, that can make it easier to manage and update your feed. Overall, feed optimization is a critical component of a successful Google Shopping advertising strategy.

2. Create Effective PMax Asset Groups

As you assess the strategy of your shopping ads, you need to define your different audiences. These audiences, in turn, will impact the creative strategy, including the images, headlines, and other assets you create to draw their attention. 

An asset group is a collection of assets centered on a theme or related to a specific target audience. Each asset group in a campaign can target any listing group from your product feed.

There are many reasons to differentiate your PMax asset groups within a campaign.

1. Specific ROAS by Product Category 
2. Product Type Organization
3. Budget (To Manage Large Product Groups)

Once you decide on your audiences and create your PMax asset groups, you can begin crafting the audience assets and choosing which of your products to target.

3. Add Audience Signals

By adding audience signals to your PMax campaigns, you can reach people who are most likely to be interested in your products and tailor your ads to them. Audience signals such as custom segments, customer match, affinity audiences, and in-market segments can help improve your ads’ relevance and effectiveness. 

Signals you can add to your campaign include:

• Custom segments that you create based on the keywords people search for, the websites they visit, and more.
• Remarketing lists include people who’ve visited your website, engaged with your YouTube channel, provided their contact details, and more.
• Interests include in-market segments, life events, affinity segments, and more.
• Demographics include age, gender, parental status, and more.

We strongly recommend uploading a customer match list using your company’s first-party data. This provides the strongest signals for Google to learn who your target market is. You need a minimum of 1,000 matches to use the audience in your PMax campaign.

By adding audience signals, advertisers can improve the performance and efficiency of their PMax campaigns, ultimately leading to a better return on ad spend and increased revenue.

4. Optimize Creative Assets

Optimizing creative assets is essential for maximizing the effectiveness of PMax campaigns. To truly take advantage of these benefits, it’s important to have compelling and relevant ad creative that resonates with your audience signals you provide by asset group. 

Google lists out their PMax asset requirements and specs here.  Effective creative should be visually appealing, clearly communicate your product or service, and include a clear call to action. 

Additionally, testing and iterating on different creative elements, such as ad headlines, images, and descriptions, is important to see what resonates best with your audience. PMax reports on the “Performance” of each asset with these rankings:

• Low – the asset is low performing when compared to all other assets of the same type across properties.
• Good – the asset performs well enough against all other assets of the same type.
• Best – the asset is one of the highest performers of all assets of the same type on one or more properties.

Until enough data is available to assign a performance label, an asset’s default status is ‘Pending.’ We recommend using these signals to replace low-performing assets and test new creative.

Google also creates automatically generated video content with headlines, descriptions, and images provided. These videos often appear to be low quality and do not match the branding of the company. There is no way to opt out of the videos being generated, so we strongly recommend that you upload a 10-15 second general branded video to every asset group.

Regularly reviewing and optimizing your creative assets can help ensure that your ads are achieving the desired performance and that you are getting the most out of your advertising budget.

5. Exclusions

PMax provides very few insights and even less control over campaigns. If you go into Google Ads and click on Reports > Other > PMax campaign placement, you can find what percentage of impressions go to “Google Owned and Operated” placements and what other websites and apps your ads are served on. 

We recommend working with Google support or your Google rep to ad exclusions to campaigns if a low CTR is observed. These exclusions include:

• Placement Exclusions
• Mobile Apps
• Content Exclusions
• Website Categories: News

6. Check Insights for Reporting

To continue to optimize your PMax campaigns, check the “Insights” tab within Google Ads. This will provide you with insights such as top search terms within your PMax. If you see terms that are not relevant to your products, reach out to Google Ads Support to request a negative keyword list application for your PMax campaign. You can also use these search terms to optimize your headlines and descriptions in your asset groups! 

Date ranges for the Insights page can be viewed week-over-week (last 7 days) or month-over-month (last 28 days). Check Audience insights to see which audiences are converting at higher rates. Focus on segments labeled as ‘Optimized’ to learn the new audience segments that automation discovered for you that you may not have known about before to help inform your broader business strategy. You can use these optimized audiences to your advantage and apply them to your search, display, and other non-PMax campaigns.

Wrap Up

Google is slowly releasing more data and control to the advertiser. Until that time, don’t sit idly by; take control of all the components of PMax you can optimize. When optimizing, start at the foundation of your marketing strategy by optimizing your feed. Once past that point, solidify your goals and how you want to divide your products into campaigns. From there, plan out your audiences and create audience signals as well as assets tailored to each audience. 

Finally, you want to regularly check the performance and insight report on your PMax campaigns. With this data, you can optimize both PMax and other campaigns to see the impact on your ROAS and ROI. With these PMax best practices, you can gain greater control over your shopping ads strategy!

The post Top 6 Performance Max Campaigns Best Practices appeared first on Portent.

Updated 2/22/23 to include new information.

On-page SEO is more than a checklist of factors that you need to optimize and maintain. It’s the gateway to getting your content in front of users, growing your brand, and maintaining a loyal customer base.

In this blog post, I’ll explain what on-page SEO is, why it’s important, how it differs from off-page SEO, and demystify which factors to consider when making on-page SEO optimizations.

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO is the process of optimizing various factors of a web page to improve its rank in Google and other search engines. It includes optimization of headers, title tags, meta descriptions, and other crucial on-page factors that appear directly on the landing page and within the HTML source code (more on this later). 

Why Is On-Page SEO Important?

On-page SEO improves the quality of your web pages so that search engines can understand them and rank them higher in search results. If a page shows up in search, it is more likely to increase traffic and even help with conversions. Additionally, on-page SEO optimizations help improve user experience and content accessibility.

On-Page SEO vs. Off-Page SEO

Although both are important for rankings and search visibility, on-page and off-page SEO each solve for different SEO factors. 

On-page SEO focuses on optimizing factors directly on your website. Those factors, such as H1-H6 header tags, title tags, meta descriptions, image alt text, etc., are easier to control and maintain.

On the other hand, off-page SEO focuses on factors outside your website and involves optimization tactics such as link building, guest posting, brand mentions, and so on.

How to Improve On-Page SEO

To improve on-page SEO, you need to familiarize yourself with the on-page factors search engines look at to understand the content of a webpage.

Let’s get to know on-page factors that impact SEO.

1. Conduct Keyword Research

Keyword research is the process of discovering what keywords and phrases your target audience uses to search for the topic you want to show up for in organic search results. The goal of keyword research is to find keywords that can drive traffic to your website.

For instance, had I not checked to see what else people are searching for in relation to the keyword “on-page SEO,” I might’ve missed the fact that folks are frequently searching for an on-page SEO checklist:

Tips for keyword research:

• Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, Semrush, etc.
• Choose 1-3 primary keywords to target per page.
• Pay attention to search volume and difficulty metrics.
• Align keywords with search intent.
• Analyze competitor keywords.
• Bonus: target long-tail keywords whenever applicable.

2. Write Content with E-E-A-T in Mind

E-E-A-T is an acronym coined by Google that stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust. While it’s not a direct ranking factor, the quality of E-E-A-T helps Google determine if the content can be trusted.

Tips for E-E-A-T first content:

• Reference first-hand or life experience. 
• Showcase subject matter expertise (e.g., use data, research, etc.)
• Establish yourself as a credible source by siting high-quality content
• Include accurate, useful, and up-to-date information.

3. Use H1-H6 Header Tags

H1-H6 header tags are HTML elements that create a visual hierarchy of a web page, which helps users and search engines quickly scan and interpret the content of a web page. 

Maintaining hierarchy through header tags is a crucial aspect of on-page SEO. You’ll want to start with a single H1 tag, followed by H2 and H3 subheadings. The page structure should look something like this:

If additional header tags are needed, continue to use the rest of the H4-H6 tags in the same hierarchical order.

Tips for header tag optimization:

• Include the H1 tag above all other subheadings.
• Apply no more than one H1 tag per page.
• Use H2-H6 subheadings to break up heavy copy.
• Incorporate target keywords naturally.

Bonus: make sure your headers pass the blank sheet of paper test.

4. Write Captivating Title Tags

Title tags provide a brief web page summary and help users and search engines understand what the page is about. They appear in search results, browser tabs, and social media posts.

A title tag is an important on-page SEO factor and should be added to all pages you want search engines to find and rank. We also know that search engines like Google use the title tag as a minor ranking factor, making it much more valuable for on-page optimization.

Tips for title tag optimization:

• Keep them between 50-60 characters. Any longer, and Google will truncate them. 
• Include target keywords. Preferably at the beginning of the title tag.
• Consider the user. Show them you have what they’re looking for. 
• Be descriptive. Check to make sure the title tag reads well on its own.

5. Write Enticing Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions appear in search results below the title tag. Though they’re not considered a ranking factor, they’re an essential aspect of on-page SEO as they help improve click-through rates.

Meta descriptions hold valuable real estate in search results and can help drive clicks and traffic. 

Tips for meta description optimization:

• Keep them under 160 characters for regular pages. 
• Include target keywords. Google is more likely to bold them.
• Use them as an extension of the title tag. Include additional context you couldn’t fit there.
• Explain the value of the page. Consider what the user is trying to accomplish.

6. Use Clean URLs

Clean URLs are easy to read and understand. It’s important to review URLs before publishing a web page because most Content Management Systems (CMS) will auto-generate the URL based on the title of a web page.

For instance, if I didn’t override the URL for this blog post, our CMS would’ve used:: https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/on-page-seo-guide-how-to-optimize-landing-pages-for-search.htm

Instead of: https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/on-page-seo.htm 

Not only is the auto-generated option long and wordy, it also becomes truncated in search results:

Tips for URL optimization:

• Keep URLs word count to a minimum.
• Use hyphens to separate words. Using anything besides hyphens is a bad practice.
• Use lowercase letters.
• Incorporate target keywords.

Important: if you update URLs retroactively, remember to set up proper redirects!

If you want to check and see how your title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs will appear in the SERPs before adding them to your site, check out Portent’s SERP Preview Tool.

7. Add Image Alt Text

Image alt text, which stands for “alternative text,” is the text used to describe a non-decorative image used within the body of a landing page. 

Image alt text helps search engines understand and index images properly. It’s also imperative for users with screen readers because it improves the image’s readability. 

Tips for alt text optimization:

• Keep your description under 140 characters – about the length of a tweet.
• Write an accurate and concise description of the image (think stock image names).
• When applicable, use target keywords to reinforce the page’s relevance.

8. Include Internal Links

Internal links are the links that point from one page of your website to another. Since older pages typically have higher page authority, linking new pages to older content helps search engines find and rank them. 

Tips for internal linking optimization:

• Use descriptive anchor text, avoiding generic text such as ‘‘as mentioned here,’ ‘see in this chart,’ and ‘this link.’
• Ensure the content you’re linking to is relevant.
• Link blog posts (and other highly trafficked pages)  to product and/or service pages.

9.  Include External Links

External links are the links from other websites you may link to within your content. Using external links may help establish the credibility of your content, which, if you recall from earlier, is important for E-E-A-T. 

Tips for external linking optimization:

• Link to credible sources (e.g., third-party data, original research, etc.)
• Use external links sparingly (link to your content whenever possible).
• In your CMS, set external links to open in a new window so that the user doesn’t accidentally exit from your website.

Advanced On-Page SEO Factors

Some aspects of on-page SEO are more complex than others. And while you can learn to make the more advanced on-page optimizations on your own, those opportunities tend to be more complex and should be addressed by someone with a deep understanding of Technical SEO. 

In this section, I’ll cover the most common advanced on-page SEO factors we run against. However, instead of providing tips on optimizing them, I’ll share a few resources from our Portent blog. Should you need additional support, feel free to contact us! We’re here to help. 

10. Improve Page Speed

Page speed is the amount of time it takes to fully display the content of a landing page. It’s an important ranking factor, as websites with faster page speed have better user engagement and higher conversion metrics. 

Page speed can be impacted by many factors, such as redirects, image quality, CSS and JavaScript files, etc. 
To learn about your page speed performance, check out Google’s Page Speed Insights to better understand your mobile and desktop performance.

For more information on page speed, check out our blog post: How Page Speed Affects Conversions

11. Target Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are short pieces of text carefully extracted by Google to provide a concise and direct answer to the user search. They’re displayed at the top of organic search results and come in several formats, such as paragraphs, lists, and tables.

Disclaimer: to qualify for a featured snippet placement, your landing page must first rank on the first page of Google’s organic search results. 

For more information on featured snippets, check out our blog post: How to Compete for Featured Snippets in Google.

12. Use Structured Data Markup

Structured Data markup is a form of metadata that helps search engines understand what the page is about. You can describe many types of content with structured data, such as articles, recipes, events, products, reviews, videos, etc. Some rich snippet types are only available to pages that use this markup. Google lists their supported rich snippet types here. 

The different types of data you can mark up can be found at Schema.org – “collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.” This resource can take the guesswork out of what Google and other search engines expect when structuring your data. 

For more information on structured data markup, check out our blog post:  Introduction to Schema Markup for SEO

To Recap

Now that you know what it takes to keep your on-page SEO in tip-top shape, you’re ready to optimize your content! I’ve provided the information in this post in a quick-reference checklist below to help you get started optimizing your landing pages.

On-page SEO Checklist

Use the following checklist as a starting point to evaluate the essential on-page SEO factors on your landing pages.

1. Conduct Keyword Research: use keyword research tools, target no more than three primary keywords per page, pay attention to keyword metrics, align keywords with search intent, and analyze competitors. 
2. Write Content with E-E-A-T in Mind: reference first-hand experience, showcase subject matter expertise, establish yourself as a credible source, and include accurate information.
3. Use H1-H6 Header Tags: include the H1 tag above all other subheadings and no more than once per page; use H2-H6 subheadings to break up the heavy copy and incorporate target keywords.
4. Write Captivating Title Tags: keep them between 50-60 characters, include target keywords, consider the user, and be descriptive. 
5. Write Enticing Meta Descriptions: keep them under 160 characters, include target keywords, add context that compliments your title tag, and explain the page’s value.
6. Use Clean URLs: keep URL word count to a minimum, use hyphens and lowercase letters, and incorporate target keywords.
7. Add Image Alt Text: keep them below 140 characters, write accurate and concise image descriptions and (when applicable) use target keywords.
8. Include Internal Links: use descriptive anchor text, link to relevant content, and link blog posts (and other highly trafficked pages) to product and/or service pages.
9. Include External Links: link to credible sources, use links sparingly and set links to open in a new window. 
10. (Advanced) Improve Page Speed: read Why Page Speed Matters
11. (Advanced) Target Featured Snippets: read How to Compete for Featured Snippets in Google

(Advanced) Use Structured Data Markup: read Introduction to Schema Markup for SEO

The post On-Page SEO: How to Optimize Landing Pages appeared first on Portent.

In today’s business world, you likely already know what a quarterly business review is. However, I find that too often, people either don’t do them right or they don’t do them at all. If you aren’t having an honest conversation with your clients about how work is going or if it continues to be the right work, you may be setting yourself up for failure. 

In my 11+ years of agency experience, whenever a client is unhappy, the first question I ask is, “When was the last time we had a QBR?” It’s an important time to break out of the day-to-day and standing meetings. QBRs give you the chance to pull back from the minutiae and look at the big picture. Taking the time to do this will ultimately benefit both you and your clients. 

What Is a Quarterly Business Review (QBR)?

A QBR is a company or group’s chance to analyze its work from the previous quarter. By looking at the work’s impact on hitting existing goals, a company can determine what challenges they encountered and what opportunities they found. The plan for the next quarter should use these insights.

Why Are QBRs Important?

I get a lot of questions here at Portent, and:  “What defines a good quarterly business review?” is probably near the top. Another version of this question is, “Do we need to have QBRs?” I have only one answer: “Damn right, you do!”

Showcase Value

So, why are QBRs so important? Because a good QBR shows value. Value in work done. Value in the relationship. Value in the time and money that you’ve spent! Your teams have dedicated countless hours working hard to deliver on the client promise, and now is your time to highlight the fruits of your labor. 

Plus, you never know who might show up to your QBR. If a Director, VP, or C-suite stakeholder who rarely attends your weekly meetings should participate in this meeting, invite them! We’ll get into tailoring your QBR for a broad audience later.

Note: If a project or phase is ending, and you want to report on how things went, you should consider running a post-mortem or retrospective. 

Track Overall Success Metrics

QBRs are also a critical time to reflect on the work. How did your strategy and tactics perform?  Let your audience know if something went well and why. Did something fall flat on its face? Tell your audience why it didn’t work and what you learned.

Early-Warning Signals

Was there a project delayed or depreciated due to roadblocks? Use your QBR to bring light to these issues. You were hired to do something; if something is in your way, be frank about what you need to complete the work.

Alignment (or Realignment) on Goals

Finally, these business reviews are a time to evaluate the project’s scope. If your team realizes that a small or large pivot is needed, this is the time to say so.

What to Include in a QBR?

Over the years, we have tweaked what to include in a QBR. Though we have adjusted our language to describe the work, the ultimate goal is to report on what we did and how it went. Our new presentation format contains the following steps:

1. Executive Summary
2. Goals
3. What We Learned
4. Next Steps
5. Roadmap
6. Appendix

1. Executive Summary

At Portent, we start our QBRs with a high-level summary of essential topics. If we have something to celebrate here, we’ll say it. If something didn’t go as expected, we’d mention it here too. Don’t bury the lead in the 20-40 slides that follow. And please, please ensure that the main takeaway of the QBR is bolded for emphasis.

2. Goals

In this section, we use two slides to reaffirm the goals that we are working on for our clients. The first slide shows our high-level goals in plain language. We may have specific KPIs that may fall under each category, but this section is for your daily contacts and high-level ones. 

Our second slide explores how we can affect these goals as a marketing agency. For example, increasing leads for your sales team is something we can only partly affect. We can’t control how a client’s sales team qualifies leads. We can, however, influence conversions. So for clients with goals we can’t influence directly, these two slides are critical to ensuring they understand what we can affect and how we help them meet their goals.

3. What We Learned

In the “What We Learned” section, our team looks at our roadmaps, projects, and initiatives to see how they performed. We describe projects important to your work. You should identify them by name, when the project ran, what you did, and why you did it. 

We highlight this project information in our first slide:

As a follow-up, the next slide presents the supporting data. Ideally, you’ll have a graph line going straight up and to the right. But we’re looking for any data that shows why we’re highlighting this project. We’re big advocates for data visualizations here. So whether the data indicates a clear win, a near loss, or something that needs additional time, show it here.

Finally, it’s time to discuss the takeaways from this project. Deliver your observations and what you and your team learned from your project. However, you must include an explicit “so what” and “what’s next” here.

Instead of saying, “Bounce Rate went down,” consider saying, “Bounce Rate has decreased since we deployed our new content on these pages. We must continue this project and recommend revamping an additional 20 pages.”

4. Next Steps

With the information from your learnings section, it’s time to present your next steps. We break these down into three sub-sections, what we’ll keep doing, stop doing, and start doing.

Each current process or project should have its slide, and you can combine like topics if you recommend keeping, stopping, or starting them as a whole.

1. What We’ll Keep Doing

As mentioned, our “What We’ll Keep Doing” slides highlight your successes and why they’re essential. For these slides, call out:

• What did we do?
• Why was it successful?
• Why will we keep doing it?
• How will we keep doing it?

Bolding the one phrase that you want people to remember from this slide.

2. What We’ll Stop Doing

In your “What We’ll Stop Doing” slides, it’s time to be honest partners and call out what didn’t work. Whether the work was a legacy holdover that the client was working on or something you recommended, if it isn’t working and you need to pivot, here’s your chance to say so. For these slides, we suggest the following information:

• What did we do?
• Why wasn’t it successful?
• What will we do instead?

Again, bold the one phrase you want people to remember from this slide.

3. What We’ll Start Doing

Use the “What We’ll Start Doing” section to call out net-new suggestions based on learnings or as pivots away from tactics in the “What We’ll Stop Doing” section. For this section, the process looks like this:

• What do we want to do?
• Why do we want to do it?
• How will we do it?
• Bolding the one phrase that you want people to remember (are we making this clear enough?) from this slide.

5. Roadmap

This section can and should incorporate items from your Next Steps part of the presentation. I’d say that this can be a high-level snapshot of the work you’d like to do in the next quarter. You may have a more tactical, existing roadmap, but you can paint in broad strokes for this broader audience.

6. Appendix

Depending on how you run your presentation, you can add or remove this section. We use this section to link to data that would otherwise crowd out important messaging.

Again, with attendees ranging from in-the-weeds to once-a-quarter, some may demand a complete explanation, while others may be content to move on.

How to Prepare for a QBR?

While there are many ways to prepare for a QBR, at Portent, we encourage our teams to be proactive in planning these meaningful discussions. 

Previously, we’d ask folks to come to these meetings ready to talk about what they’d done in the past quarter. The hope was that discussion would spark ideas in others and that a beautiful freeform, brainstorm session kind of jazz would happen, with folks layering on their parts. Sometimes, it works that way, and it’s lovely. And… sometimes it doesn’t. Especially once remote-first and hybrid work became the new reality. So now we do it a different way. Now we have our team fill out a spreadsheet before we meet.

One Month Out – Ask Your Team to Fill Out Their Notes

About a month before your QBR, send a notes spreadsheet to your team. Ask them to fill in their What We Learned and Next Steps sections. These ideas and topics don’t need to be fully fleshed out, but each team member needs something to bring to the brainstorming session.

Three Weeks Out – Hold a Brainstorming Session & Assign Slides

You should hold your brainstorming three weeks out, provided you have a completed spreadsheet. I’d highly suggest you look at the sheet in advance. If it’s not ready, do not hold your brainstorm: you’ll waste your time and your team’s. 

Once prepared to meet, ask that your team read their ideas out loud. The idea here is to have people in different areas recall all the work they did in the past quarter. Though teams may operate in their silos, the reality is that there’s a ton of cross-team collaboration that happens. 

As an example, most PPC campaigns have analytics or content support attached to them. And that same campaign may have an organic counterpart. If so, is there a way to highlight this as a larger, holistic initiative in one series of slides? Look for common themes here and dig in! If an initiative worked in one area when it didn’t work in another, can you and the team determine why? Do you need to shift resources from one channel to another? 

Once you have your ideas fleshed out, determine who will create these slides and assign them. Again, using the PPC/Analytics example, you can have your PPC specialist as the primary slide creator, with your analytics team completing them by creating supporting graphs or images. 

Two Weeks Out – Schedule Internal Delivery Date & Practice Presentation

Schedule an internal slide delivery date. We typically ask that our teams deliver their slides to the account manager two weeks before the final presentation. Ensure that your team’s slides are rooted in the client’s vocabulary, and tie tightly back to your client’s goals and KPIs. Don’t just add sexy numbers. Show your client the “so what?”

Next is your internal team presentation, which is your chance to give your QBR a dress rehearsal. Your team should be prepared to speak to their sections. We also suggest involving senior leadership or other stakeholders from your agency or company. These additional eyeballs provide an objective perspective that ensures your presentation delivers on your company’s promise. Implement any final feedback following this meeting.

One to two Days Before the QBR – Send Your Presentation to the Client Early

Send your deck to the client contact. Sending it early serves two purposes. First, it allows you to ensure that you have covered all angles. Your primary stakeholder may ask that you cover additional topics or clarify existing ones.  Second, should you be presenting remotely, they’ll have it if your connectivity goes down.

Day of the Presentation

You will likely want to schedule 90 minutes for the presentation. The first 60 will be for the QBR itself, while the remaining 30 will allow plenty of time for Q&A.

That’s All, Folks…? – Send Follow Up Notes & Assign Tasks From Roadmap

You’re not done just yet. Be sure to see if your client has any edits to the presentation. Within a week, it would be helpful for you to update your deck and send them the final PDF for their records. Don’t forget to assign all tasks from your roadmap.

QBR Best Practices & Advice

If you take nothing else away from this article, please take note of the following advice to create an engaging QBR presentation. This is your chance to say the things you need to say. If things are going swimmingly, let people know what you did and why it worked! And again, if something is getting in your way, DO NOT be shy in identifying what it is.

Have an Opinion

As we like to say around here if you’re showing numbers or a graph on a slide to someone, you better have either a “so what” or a “why does this matter” statement attached to it. Your QBR is your chance to be honest about progress and the road ahead. Even if your “hot take” may be unsettling for some, you are the expert here. Say what needs to be said.

Executive Summary = TL;DR

Again, don’t shy away from showing your cards right at the top of the presentation. Summarize what went well and what didn’t. Some QBRs can reach up to 90 slides, so call it out in bold if you need your client to hear an all-encompassing theme or issue. Remember, have an opinion, and don’t bury the lead.

Have Fun

If you’ve built enough trust and rapport with your client leading up to your QBR, you should give yourself a little free reign to have fun with your presentation. Don’t go overboard, but if your gut tells you that one animated gif or funny photo will get the point across, give it a try. You might just see a smile or two.

Portent’s Free Quarterly Business Review Template

Ready to up your quarterly business review game? Check out Portent’s QBR Slide Template to get started!

Final Thoughts

In my experience, I’ve found that sticking to this schedule and format has made for some transcendent QBR conversations. The “What We’ll Stop Doing” and “What We’ll Start Doing” sections allow you and your client to discuss what fine-tuning your relationship needs, and you’ll both be better for it. 

Moreover, don’t forget to take credit for the beautiful work you’ve been doing. Your Quarterly Business Review is the perfect time to show the value you bring to your client.

The post How to Perform a Quarterly Business Review (QBR) in 2023 (w/ template) appeared first on Portent.

Statements of Work (SOWs) are a critical part of client work at any agency and play a big role in how projects play out. Here at Portent, we used to use a template-based SOW for our web development clauses but with this approach our development team ran into issues such as improper scoping, vague functional requirements, and occasional feature creep.

To combat these frustrations, our team realized a couple of years ago that we could apply the principles of component-based design, a powerful development ideology for creating websites and web apps, to our SOWs to create better protection for our teams, prevent scope creep, and be more organized.

In this article, we’ll cover why development SOWs are so important, problems with template-based SOWs, and how you can apply the concept of component-based design to create component-based SOWs that can improve the working relationship between your developers and clients.

What is an SOW?

Statements of Work (SOW) are essential for setting up a successful business relationship. They provide details of the scope of work, timeline, and the expected deliverables from all parties involved.

In this article, we are focusing on SOWs that have a development scope for website build projects.

Why It’s Important to Get SOWs Right

When SOWs are done correctly, they are an effective tool for managing expectations and ensuring that everyone involved is on the same page about the project and their respective roles.

When a SOW is not done correctly, it can lead to miscommunication and frustration between client and agency. If the SOW is too vague or does not properly cover the specific project requirements, it can lead to misunderstandings, scope creep, and delays.

The importance of getting SOWs right cannot be overstated. They are a fundamental first step of the business relationship and the bedrock on which the project starts. As such, SOWs should be comprehensive, clear, and specific, with lots of attention to detail.

Problems With Template-Based Development SOWs

For a long time, we used a template-based approach for our development SOWs. Template-based design and development is a method of breaking the website into a number of unique pages (or templates). 

For example, common templates may be:

• Homepage
• Blog hub
• Single blog page
• Services page
• Default internal page

While it is a simplified, easy-to-understand, and relatively uncomplex method, on some projects, it exposed us to vague requirements, scope creep, and scope underestimates.

For instance, let’s say a project calls for 10 templates. How can we properly scope the level of effort required for each template? What if a single template ends up being made up of 15 unique components? And another comprises of 10 unique components? With 8 other templates to account for, you can see how the complexity could explode rather quickly. Additionally, multiple templates often share multiple components, so there is less precision in scoping template-based development resources.

This is why at Portent, we shifted the way we write the development section of our SOWs. By looking at these problems through a developer lens, we created a new approach that is based on component-based design and development practices; This new method is a major step forward from previous iterations of development SOWs.

What is Component-Based Design?

For those unfamiliar, let’s first touch on what component-based design is. Component-based design is a software development method which emphasizes the compartmentalization of an application into individual, self-contained components (or blocks). The components are designed to be loosely coupled, meaning that they can be swapped out or rearranged without disrupting the overall application.

The idea behind component-based design is to allow developers to create an application solution that is adaptable to future changes and easy to build upon. Rather than starting from scratch, developers can reuse existing components and customize them to fit the application’s needs. This helps to reduce development time and cost while encouraging code reuse and flexibility.

Component-based design is increasingly popular in web development as it allows developers to create complex and dynamic websites quickly.

Component Examples

While we won’t dive into a ton of detail about components, the visualization below depicts a handful of components as broken down from the Portent homepage. Components can be:

• Main navigation
• Search icon/field
• Cover block
• Logo array
• Card with media, text, and CTA
• Buttons
• Carousel of content with image, text, and CTA
• CTA banner
• Blog post card
• Ebook card
• Footer navigation
• Social sharing icons

How to Apply Component-Based Design to Your Development SOWs

The benefits of component-based design for software development are apparent, so why not put that logic into our SOWs? Compared to the template-based approach, a component-based methodology for our SOWs is an obvious upgrade.

1. Break Down the Project into Components

First, create a list of all the common, known components for our project. For example, all websites need navigation, search, cards, and some kind of cover or hero component.

Next, define as many additional components that are specific to the client’s requirements. These could be things like a testimonial carousel, a comparison table, and/or a Google reviews component. It’s OK if you’re not able to define every single component in the SOW, as this can be finalized during the technical requirements phase early in the project.

However, be sure to specifically scope any complex, resource-intensive components as part of the components list in the SOW. Most components will be approximately the same level of effort, but some may break that mold. An appointment scheduler, a carousel with varying views depending on mobile or desktop display, and tabbed content are all examples of components that should be defined as a requirement in the SOW so they can be properly scoped by your team.

2. Establish the Max Number of Components

If you haven’t done many component-based design and development projects, you may be asking yourself how many components should a site have? The answer is it depends. Based on my experience at Portent, small to mid-sized sites will have 15-25 components, whereas larger to enterprise-grade sites will have 30-50 components.

All websites will have overlapping components or components that are necessary based on the nature of what is being built. Things like navigation menus, search functionality, content cards, buttons, and maybe CTA banners are examples of heavily reused components.

3. Define Functional Requirements

In addition to our clearly defined number of, or range of components, any additional functionality requirements are defined as a clear list of deliverables.

Some examples of functionality requirements that need to be defined alongside the number of components could be:

• User dashboard
• CRM integration workflow
• Custom event calendar and registration system integration (API)
• Google Maps location finder

Benefits of Component-Based Development SOWs

With a component-based approach for development SOWs, there is naturally more protection for your team, built-in guardrails for feature creep, and it’s more precise and organized.

Protection / Safety Net For Your Team

Component-based SOWs create a safety net because they provide a framework for creating and managing the scope of a project. By breaking a project down into components and specifically defining the max number of components, the scope of the project is clear. This builds protection into the SOW for your company for any large changes being asked for by the client once the project has started.

Avoid Scope Creep

Another advantage of component-based SOWs is avoiding scope creep. Scope creep is the gradual and unplanned expansion of a project’s goals and requirements beyond the original agreed-upon plan.

With our component-based SOWs, the deliverables list is agreed upon by both parties prior to the start of the project and serves as the basis for the entire project. Once the project is underway, any changes to the agreed upon list of deliverables must be discussed, negotiated and agreed upon before proceeding. This ensures that all parties are aware of any changes to the project scope and are in agreement on how to proceed. Avoiding ambiguity avoids scope creep.

Better Organization

Organization and precision are a natural result of a component-based approach to development SOWs. We’re getting more detailed with our list of components which further defines the project’s requirements. With all the primary functioning elements defined in the development section of our SOW, it creates a great resource for the development team and clients to reference throughout the length of the project.

Conclusion

At Portent, we adapted our approach to development SOWs by implementing component-based design techniques because it just made sense from an organizational, functional, and protection basis.

As always, be sure to heavily involve your dev team or team lead on all development-based SOWs. They should have an integral role in scoping functional requirements as well as breaking down approximately how much each component will take to develop.

We see the integration of component-based design techniques into development-based SOWs as a step forward for all parties involved: clients, the agency, and the development team.

The post Avoid Scope Creep in Web Design With Component-Based SOWs appeared first on Portent.

An editorial calendar is an important piece of the content production puzzle. It houses all of the planning, production, and publishing deadlines for each piece of content that lives on your site. 

Using an editorial calendar to plan out your content ahead of time gives you more room for unexpected events, helps you define your marketing objectives early on, and makes it easier to measure results. At Portent, we create and use editorial calendars for our clients all the time as an essential part of our content strategy. 

In this article, we’ll walk through the importance of using an editorial calendar, how it differs from other calendars, and how to create your own (and keep it updated)!

What is an Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a living, often collaborative document that provides a long-term timeline and publishing schedule for all sorts of content. In content strategy work, editorial calendars come in handy when we envision the marketing strategy for a client or campaign and the deadlines for the execution of related content.

This content could be blog posts, social media posts, videos, and other branded content. By existing as a collaborative document, the editorial calendar is continuously updated by team members, so the latest status of each content piece is accurate. 

Editorial Calendar vs. Content Calendar

An editorial calendar is similar to a content calendar in that they both keep track of the status of projects. However, an editorial calendar gives you a long-term view, perhaps stretching over an entire quarter, while a content calendar looks at a day-to-day view of accomplishing publishing goals.

Why Do You Need an Editorial Calendar?

Editorial calendars offer many benefits to content marketing teams, such as keeping team members aligned on strategic goals and tracking produced content. Not only do sites need to publish fresh content to stay competitive, but it’s also important to know when older content ages out and needs to be updated; an editorial calendar helps with both.

The Big Picture for Content Strategy Planning

While on-the-fly content can be beneficial to keeping up with fleeting trends or breaking news for your business, planning out content far in advance around seasonal and recurring topics keeps you on track to meet your content strategy goals. For example, if you want to rank or trend for back-to-school topics, it’d be best to plan and publish content in mid-late summer so that you get in on valuable traffic. 

Editorial calendars are especially helpful when it comes to planning and creating a content hub and the subsequent spoke pages that come along with it. Since spoke content can be plentiful, keeping track of key dates for each post will help you keep track of what content you’ve already covered and what’s next in line.

Another aid in planning content we’ve found is the creation of content hubs to fill gaps. By utilizing an editorial calendar for this approach, it becomes easier to keep track of the spoke pages attached to a hub page and when they were published.

Organization and Tracking Progress

On a team with multiple people, it’s easy for projects to get lost in translation. Having a content manager oversee these projects can help. By keeping track of progress updates in an editorial calendar, the whole team gets visibility to the owner of a particular content piece and what stage it is in. In our template, progress tracking is often color-coded or sorted via a drop-down menu; but you can use whatever formatting you prefer.

Editorial calendars also tell us a lot about past work that has been done; by sorting content via publish or refresh date, we can see if any content may be out-of-date and in need of updating.

Better Collaboration

Working out of a living document means your content team as a whole has access to the status and links to content pieces at any time. When team members are on the same page, communication and collaboration are easy. That means fewer messages back and forth about deadlines and progress and more focused meetings on strategy and goals.

Consistent Content Creation Timelines

By getting your content planning done ahead of time (such as planning for Q4 as you enter Q3), you have a timeline you can lean on without having to come up with fresh content ideas and turn them around in one week’s time. This gives your team some breathing room to plan out individual work depending on the content pieces assigned to them in advance.

Avoid Duplicate Content

Just as you can take a look back in time to see which content pieces may need updates, you can also use an editorial calendar to ensure you’re not duplicating your efforts. Including article titles, funnel stages, key dates, and even keyword information in the editorial calendar allows you to keep a clear record of all the content you’ve created.

During the topic ideation process, it’s not uncommon to find yourself brainstorming topics you’ve already covered, but thanks to your editorial calendar, you might find that those new ideas could fill a gap that was left open the last time you addressed them.

How to Create an Editorial Calendar in 10 Steps

Now that you’ve learned the importance of using an editorial calendar, we can get into the details of creating one that works best for you and your team.

Step 1. Establish Content Goals

Only you and your team can really determine your specific content goals, whether that’s building brand awareness, capturing a featured snippet, generating demand, etc. Whatever goals you decide on, it’s important that you spend the time to solidify these at the beginning of this process since your goals will ultimately narrow down the topics and type of content you will want to work on.

Step 2. Choose a Format/Platform

At Portent, we prefer to set up our editorial calendars using a template we created in Google Sheets. However, plenty of other tools could work for you and your team, such as calendar apps, digital whiteboards like Mural, project management tools like Asana or Trello, or designated content calendar software. 

Your choice of platform should come from what allows you to format the calendar to your specifications and what’s easiest for your team to manage.

Step 3. Determine Content Workflow

Another more personal piece to the puzzle is determining your workflow within the editorial calendar. How many rounds of edits and feedback does a single piece of content require on your team? Do you have subject matter experts (SMEs) that need to review work? Do you work in-house and can get approval same-day, or do you work at an agency and need to pass off content for client approval?

Once you know the steps required to get a piece of content across the finish line, you can build out columns in your spreadsheet, create tasks in your PM tool, etc. You’ll also get a better idea of how far out you need to ideate and plan content.

Step 4. Topic Ideation & Prioritization

Once your template is squared away, the creative part can finally happen. Now you can begin the process of topic ideation to fill in your editorial calendar with new content ideas. This task generally entails keyword research, competitor analysis, and possibly developing a content hub strategy to fill any content gaps.

 
Make sure you prioritize your list of new content ideas before adding them to your editorial calendar. This ensures that you’re working on content ideas that will give you the greatest return with the least amount of effort first. It is crucial that you have a solid content strategy before moving on to the ideation phase, so if you aren’t yet zeroed in on your goals there, pause on this step until you are.

Step 5. Identify Content Details

In your editorial calendar, it’s important to have all the essential details for each piece of content readily available and all in one place. 

Different types of content will require different pieces of information, so some fields in the calendar may be blank for some pieces while others are filled in. Although many fields will stay consistent for all content types (owner, publish date, links to content, etc.).

These are the content details we recommend including space for in your editorial calendar.

• Title
• Owner/Author
• Publish Date
• Refresh Date
• Content Type
• Funnel Stage
• Target Keywords
• Metadata
• Distribution Channel 
• Live URL

Step 6. Include Distribution Plan

We also need to know where a piece of content is going to be published once it makes its way through each step of the editorial calendar process. Will it appear on the website only? Be promoted on social media? Be guest posted on any other sites? Whoever is in charge of publishing the content will need access to any channel or platform that you share on.

Step 7. Create Copy Briefs

For content pieces like blog posts, you’ll need to create copy briefs before production can begin. It’s likely easiest for the blog post owners to own the copy briefs as well, but ownership and completion should be based on your specific team’s capacity.

Step 8. Assign Tasks

Once your editorial calendar is planned out far enough as you see fit, you can start assigning work to your team. When an owner is attached to each project, collaborators will know who to talk to to get their questions answered.

Step 9. Measure Success

Congratulations! You’ve made it through the process for a piece of content. Now you can use the editorial calendar to monitor how each piece is doing over time and when it might be time to give it a refresh. For example, you might notice the bounce rate increasing for a certain piece of content over time or pageviews decreasing, which could be an indicator that your article is no longer answering the most popular query for that topic and that it should be rewritten.

Step 10. Update the Editorial Calendar

Sometimes, the greatest challenge that comes with using an editorial calendar is keeping it updated along the way. It might take some getting used to adding it to your team’s workflow, but in the long run, it will help keep your team organized and well-informed on progress. After all, one main purpose of the editorial calendar is to cut down on the miscommunication (or complete lack thereof) surrounding content work and project status.

Free Editorial Calendar Template

If you think the spreadsheet method is the right choice for you and your team, take a look at our free template to use as a guide for creating your own editorial calendar. The good news about starting from a template is that you can save time and still customize it to your liking.

Other Editorial Calendar Examples & Tools

There are many other editorial calendar templates that also do a great job of organizing work. Take a peek to see what other examples might be a good fit for your team:

• Spreadsheets
  • Hubspot
  • Gather Content
• Project Management Tools
  • Kantree
  • Trello

Wrap-Up

Editorial calendars can provide a single source of truth for your team while offering up a new, streamlined way of collaborating on content projects. Try out a template that could work for your team to see the benefits of organizing all of your content projects in one place, whether that’s a spreadsheet, project management tool, or curated software.

Download Portent’s Free Editorial Calendar Template

The post How to Create an Editorial Calendar (w/ Free Template) appeared first on Portent.

If you’re reading this, it’s too late. The news of Google Optimize’s untimely and eventual demise has cascaded across digital marketing channels and communications. Google Analytics’ exclusive AB testing platform for website and application optimization will have an expiration date, leaving CRO strategists and their clients in a mild panic to pivot.

Before you start to consider a drastic change in conversion rate optimization strategy, do not fret. Google has afforded practitioners and stakeholders time to build an exit strategy that should help make a transition less abrupt.

This blog post will help you understand what’s happening with Google Optimize in 2023, a brief timeline of what’s ahead, what you’ll need to consider most for your continued CRO strategy, and how to prepare for the sun to set on the platform this Fall.

We’ve Come to the End of the Road, Google Optimize

If I could turn back time, if I could find a way, I’d make Google break the news to all users who rely on Google Analytics and Optimize earlier.

At the time of publishing this article, Google announced it will sunset Google Optimize on September 30th, 2023. Eight months seems like a long time to shut down a pillar of the Google Analytics suite for many, and in some ways, it is, but we’ve learned that time can move fast.

Don’t be caught completely off guard by what’s ahead in the coming months. We can help provide some perspective on how to anticipate the changes Google Optimize and GA4 have in store.

Still, I Can’t Let Go

The impact of sunsetting Google Optimize will be felt heavily across a majority of websites. Convert.com discovered that 59% of around 280,000 domains they sampled use the Google Optimize snippet. Once deprecated, CRO teams and their clients should get comfortable with using a new testing platform that will affirm design changes in the name of optimization.

As a practitioner in the CRO space, I will fully admit that while our team plans to adopt a new testing platform to integrate with GA4, I plan to use as much Google Optimize as possible between now and its retirement. I will also fully anticipate a lot of challenging questions to come my way from those I work for.

As a client, stakeholder, or agency you should be inquiring about your CRO strategy teams’ plans with the news of Optimize’s deprecation.

Breaking Up is Hard To Do

The inevitable question we all will be faced with is, “What should we do?” or “What’s the plan?” One important thing to remember when discussing these questions is that time can be on your side as long as you have a plan in place to make a smooth transition to a new tool or strategy.

Think of All That We’ve Been Through

To make a successful jump to a new AB testing platform, a CRO team and clients/stakeholders should work together to have a plan in place for Google Optimize’s timeline. Here is a simplified example roadmap that can jumpstart that conversation and provide a foundation to collaborate on overcoming the challenges of Google Optimize’s depreciation.

Teams should also know that Google is allowing current users of Optimize in 2023 to continue testing and experimentation until it sunsets in September.

Can’t We Give Our Love Another Try?

For strategists looking to prolong their use of Google Optimize for at least the first half of 2023, there are a few details to keep in mind:

• Optimize will remain free for GA4 users from now until the sunset date of September 30th, 2023.
  • Optimize features come with no additional cost within GA4.
  • Users that renewed UA360 through H1 2023 will be able to review their tests and experiments on Optimize 360 until September 30th.
• Clients and practitioners should know that they can still use Optimize 360 with UA360 or Optimize via GA4 integration until the planned sunset date.

Come On, Everybody, Let’s Start Anew

Marketers who choose not to adopt a new AB testing tool lose the opportunity and potential to effectively optimize return on investments to digital marketing campaigns. A bigger risk of discontinuing AB testing entirely is eliminating the chances to remain competitive in your market. Any brand can earn traffic from organic and paid channels, but the most valuable audiences and customers are won with a CRO strategy and its AB testing platform to optimize a landing page and the customer journey.

Google’s “Optimize sunset” email on Monday, January 23 expressed that they “understand the value of A/B testing for marketers and will be sharing new ways to bring experimentation at scale to businesses in the coming weeks.” They also expressed that they are “excited for the vision for A/B testing within Google Analytics 4.”

While there are no further details of what testing within GA4 could look like compared to our experience with Google Optimize, now is not a time to wait and see. Veteran digital marketers may recall the early 2010’s when Google Analytics UA tried integrating testing within the platform with “Content Experiments.” The testing and reporting tool proved to be clunky and rudimentary at best before Google Optimize became the tool of choice to integrate and use for the past 5 plus years. 

But Don’t Look Back in Anger

Not only will the news of Google Optimize’s retirement be a stressful time for digital marketing strategists to overcome, but there will be exciting things ahead for how CRO is shaped for the future! Tools and testing methodologies used by countless UX teams and their optimization strategies are within your reach to explore!

You Might Find a Better Place to Play

Continued use of a testing platform is a must for your digital marketing strategy. Forecasts suggest the market is growing more competitive as budgets are reassessed and tightened. Despite any challenges ahead for CRO, there is optimism from Google and the UX community that can make adapting to the climate easier.

Google promises “new opportunities” that await teams using GA4 after Optimize is deprecated. Google also ensures that they want a more seamless experience for users of GA4 to integrate with their AB testing platform of choice. Use the example roadmap from earlier to start finding out what that new test strategy looks like and how it will complement your optimization initiatives.

Use this opportunity to explore UX research as part of your digital optimization strategies as well! Portent is more than familiar with UX research methods that can lead to meaningful improvements to a digital strategy. Learning more qualitative information about visitors’ experiences on your websites in a research environment has valuable insights that can’t be gleaned from quantitative AB testing that lead to no statistical significance.

And for That, I Say Thank You, Next

So, what happens next in finding your own successor to Google Optimize before it sunsets? We can recommend a few tools that may be suitable for your future CRO testing endeavors.

VWO

Great for: Growing Small Businesses and Self-Starters

Widely recognized and praised, VWO came right out of the gate as one of the first testing platforms to offer a free version! For small businesses and strategies that heavily relied upon Google Optimize’s pricetag, the VWO Testing Starter Plan was a sight for sore eyes. “​​The plan will be free for users for up to 50k tested visitors a month and available for $199 a month for users for up to 100K monthly tested visitors.”

Optimizely

Easily one of the most recognizable tools in the CRO strategist world, Optimizely is now capitalizing on the opportunity to offer Google Optimize users a discount for platform and migration services. For power users with development experience, Optimizely offers a “full stack” solution that will satisfy some of the most complex AB testing strategies.

Great for: Enterprise-Level Businesses and Strategy

Convert

Great for: Exploring a Powerhouse Platform to Try

Convert is another comprehensive solution for CRO strategists that want the ability to test to their heart’s content with fewer limitations to the number of concurrent tests or designated conversion goals. The platform is also offering a 15-day free trial, which will be handy if you’re planning to try at least a couple of tools out in your search for a Google Optimize replacement.

Dynamic Yield

Great for: E-commerce and Large Scale, Comprehensive Analytics

Dynamic Yield is one of the most highly rated and premium “Experience OS” environments in the market that prides itself on being the best cross-channel data merging platform. to best understand user data across numerous experiences like e-commerce or lengthy lead nurturing funnels. Expect some premium pricing to go with premium support and interface.

Yet, I Know I’ll Think of You Each Step of the Way

I hope this blog post will give you everything you need to start a digital marketing and optimization life without Google Optimize. You are now equipped with the knowledge of how Google Optimize will ride off into the sunset, a roadmap to plan and implement a new AB testing tool, and some alternative strategies to explore in the wake of these sudden, big changes to CRO strategy.

Portent’s CRO team is hard at work preparing for these big changes. If you’re lost, you can look and you will find that our team is ready to help you with your optimization needs for 2023 and beyond.

I hope navigating Google Optimize’s sunsetting treats you kind. I hope you have all you’ve dreamed of. I’m wishing you joy and happiness in your continued CRO testing endeavors.

The post Google Optimize is Leaving on a Jetplane. What Now? appeared first on Portent.

Sometime back in 2011 or 2012 (my memory is hazy), I read a headline saying, “Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines Leaked.” Maybe it was this Search Engine Roundtable article. At the time, I had no idea there was a quality rater program, and reading their stolen handbook was exciting, like I was getting an exclusive behind-the-scenes look into their processes.

This excitement didn’t last long. The Search Quality Rater Guidelines (SQRG) is a dry document that’s 176 pages long. Also, Google started releasing these guidelines to the public in 2014, so it’s not really exclusive any longer. 

Despite this, SEOs should be reading it and keeping up with new editions. Although it doesn’t point to any specific ranking factors or algorithms, it does tell us what types of problems Google is trying to solve right now. 

What are Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines?

The Search Quality Rater Guidelines are a handbook for Google’s roughly 16,000 contractors from around the world who review live and experimental search results. These Quality Raters score result pages according to page quality in terms of E-E-A-T and how well it meets the needs of the user’s query.

The guidelines are publicly available in PDF form, and Google recently published an overview document that summarizes the SQRG. 

The SQRG is written for regular people who have signed up for the Quality Rater Program as a part-time job, not digital marketers. It contains instructions for researching the websites and authors for the rated pages, examples of how to score various pages, and guidance for specific types of content. 

The Search Quality Rater Program

How does Google know if their algorithm updates will improve search results before they go live? Google uses a multi-step process to make any improvements, and the Quality Rater program plays a key role in evaluating potential updates:

1. Ideation – Google engineers will comb through data to find areas of Search that need improvement and ideate systems and features that will address them.
2. Development – Other engineers will research technical solutions and code systems to implement the change in search results.
3. Quality Raters – Search results generated by the proposed algorithm update will be shown to the roughly 16,000 Quality Raters along with live search results. The raters will score both without knowing which results are experimental. If the experimental results get roughly as good or better scores than live search results, then the proposed algorithm update can graduate to live user testing.
4. Live User Testing – Google will randomly show users results generated by the proposed algorithm update. If real users respond well to the experimental change, then it will be incorporated into Google Search for all users.

Basically, the Quality Rater Program is a quality assurance process for potential changes to Google’s Search algorithm. If Quality Raters don’t find that an experimental change improves results, the experiment goes back to Google engineers to work on it again. This allows Google to see if real people agree with how their algorithm interprets pages. 

Quality Rater Scores Do Not Affect Live Rankings

There have been a lot of rumors over the years that Google uses the Search Quality Rater Program to demote low-scoring pages. However, Google has stated many times that the scores raters assign to the pages they review aren’t used in live rankings. It just isn’t possible for Google to use this program to change live results at scale.

Another argument against rumors is that while 16,000 Quality Raters can review a lot of web pages, they can’t review them all. Google states that they have hundreds of billions of pages in their index. Assigning human reviewers to all of them isn’t possible, so it’s really the work of machines to attempt to review so much content.

Overview of Google’s Search Quality Guidelines

Google updates the SQRG about once a year. The latest update was in December 2022, and it adjusted the E-A-T formula a little by adding another E: Experience. 

Overall, the latest changes are consistent with how Google usually updates them. They want to clarify how Quality Raters should research and interpret search results to get better-quality data. As Google’s systems advance in understanding content, they want raters to dig deeper and think harder to adequately check their work.

E-E-A-T

The overview we gave in our previous blog post, What Is Google’s E-E-A-T & Why Is It Important for SEO?, still matches what Google wants raters to understand about Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. 

The major change is how Google frames Trustworthniness as dependent on the rater’s interpretation of Expertise, Authority, and the new one, Experience. 

Google’s guidance is to look at the page being reviewed and see if it has relevant trust factors. For example, online stores should have a secure payment system, visible customer service contact information, and a reputation for good customer service. Product reviews should appear to be honest and written to help the user make an informed buying decision instead of just pitching the product.

Google also provided a table that breaks down the differences between Experience, Expertise, and Authoritativeness:

Experience vs. Expertise

The difference between experience and expertise comes down to this:

Experience is judged by how much first-hand, practical experience the author has regardless of their profession or training. For example, anyone can give trustworthy advice about the safest way to slice tomatoes if they have sliced a lot of tomatoes.

Expertise is judged by how much theoretical and practical knowledge an author has due to experience and training in their profession or vocation. A medical doctor is going to have more trustworthy advice about food allergies and other life-or-death topics than someone who didn’t go to medical school. 

Your Money or Your Life

Topics that could seriously affect the health or overall well-being of the reader are classified as Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) topics. This includes health and medical topics, but it also applies to websites that give financial advice. 

Very importantly, websites that collect personal information, such as credit card numbers in checkout forms or contact information, are also YMYL. So, if you sell anything online or use the web to direct customers to your brick-and-mortar store, you are YMYL. 

Google recommends their Quality Raters have the highest amount of scrutiny for websites in YMYL spaces. This is important for Google’s reputation because its rankings are like an endorsement. Consumer trust in Google Search would significantly drop if following directions on top-ranking pages caused serious harm to users.

Businesses should definitely read through the SQRG to see what it takes to get the highest scores because Google’s ranking algorithms are probably looking for the same things.

1. Page Quality (PQ) Rating

The first rating is for the overall page quality of the search result and doesn’t involve search intent. Quality Raters are asked to investigate the website, the author, and their reputation to help assess E-E-A-T. Google recommends doing this research by searching for who is responsible for the content and seeing how they are talked about in the news, reviews, and on social media. 

The investigation process that raters go through is very similar to what your customers will search for when deciding if they should buy from you, so the reputation of your business is very important.

Quality Raters are also asked to determine the purpose of the page they’re reviewing and how well the page content succeeds. A recent addition to this section is this table that outlines how the raters should judge purpose and execution:

This table is very helpful for content creators to understand what “high-quality content” means. Note that there is no mention of word count or content length in the table. Google thinks effort, originality, skill, and accuracy are what primarily go into content that is valuable to a Google Search user.

Given the E-E-A-T of the page, the reputation of the creator, the page’s purpose, and its execution, raters then give a Page Quality rating to the page. Google uses a scale from Lowest to Highest with graduations in between, like Medium and Medium+.

Lowest quality pages are untrustworthy, deceptive, harmful to people or society, or have other highly undesirable characteristics.

Google really wants to filter out harmful pages from their search results. If an experimental change accidentally ranks harmful pages highly, they rely on their raters to find them and mark them as such. We should assume experimental updates that boost too many harmful pages have to be worked on before going live.

If the E-E-A-T of a page is low enough, people cannot or should not use the MC (Main Content) of the page. If a page on YMYL topics is highly inexpert, it should be considered Untrustworthy and rated Lowest.

Raters should fail pages if the E-E-A-T is too low for YMYL queries. Since businesses are automatically YMYL, assume that if a rater would give your pages a Lowest rating, Google is already trying to do that with their ranking signals.

Highest quality pages serve a beneficial purpose and achieve that purpose very well. The distinction between High and Highest is based on the quality of MC, the reputation of the website and content creator, and/or E-E-A-T.

Google very much wants to release updates that position the highest quality pages on the top of the SERPs. Here, Google tells raters what that means: content that benefits users and does it well from high E-E-A-T websites.

2. Understanding Search User Needs

Google serves search results all over the world in a lot of languages (80+), and they naturally have to make sure their systems understand search intent in all of them. 

They do that by providing some context to raters about the search result sets they review. Each rating task comes with these data points:

• Query – The exact wording that generated the search result set.
• Locale – Which country the hypothetical user is searching from and which language they are using.
• User location – A more specific location of the hypothetical user. It can be a city or state.
• Device – Desktop or mobile. This isn’t given specifically, but the guidelines ask the raters to think about which results are appropriate for the user’s device implied by the search results.

Given the query’s context, the raters are asked to figure out what is most likely the users’ search intent. 

Google also gives the raters a broad classification of intents to consider:

• Know – When the user is researching something or trying to get a quick answer or definition.
• Do – The user is trying to accomplish something or interact with a website. This includes buying something, so transactional intent is categorized here.
• Website – The user is trying to navigate to a specific website or page. Brand searches usually have this when the user doesn’t know the URL.
• Visit-in-Person – The user is trying to get to a specific location or business. We usually call this “local” intent.

After figuring out what the intent behind the query is, raters then judge how well the page they’re reviewing addresses the query.

3. Needs Met (NM) Rating

Finally, raters are tasked with reading the page or search feature and making a subjective determination of how well the result matches the query. 

While the Needs Met rating depends on the Page Quality rating, they are different. Raters are asked to ignore the query while determining Page Quality. This reflects two goals of Google Search: differentiate between high and low-quality pages, then match queries to the most relevant pages.

Each result gets a Needs Met rating on a scale from Fails to Meet to Fully Meets, also with graduations in between.

It’s very hard for a page to get a Fully Meets rating because the intent of the query needs to have high certainty, and the result must be the “complete and perfect response or answer” to the query.

The other Needs Met ratings are straightforward:

A rating of Highly Meets is assigned to results that meet the needs of many or most users. Highly Meets results are highly satisfying and a good “fit” for the query. In addition, they often have some or all of the following characteristics: high quality, authoritative, entertaining, and/or recent (e.g., breaking news on a topic).

Highly Meets pages should have all of the characteristics of high Page Quality rated pages but also actually answer the query in a satisfying way.

A rating of Fails to Meet should be assigned to results that are helpful and satisfying for no or very few users. Fails to Meet results are unrelated to the query, factually incorrect (please check for factual accuracy of answers), and/or all or almost all users would want to see additional results.

Fails to Meet criteria are also obvious, but there are still a lot of pages out there that are basically fluff text with keywords thrown in. What’s surprising is how many brands expect content like this to perform.

The rest of the guidelines provide more details about how to perform rating tasks with lots of examples.

Why are Search Quality Rater Guidelines Important for SEO?

Anyone who touches the Organic Search channel of their brand needs to be familiar with the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. Google is essentially saying to us, “this is what we want our ranking algorithms to sort out, now and in the future.” This knowledge is invaluable for reviewing our own websites and explaining why our content performs well or takes a massive visibility dive after a core algorithm update.

While reading the SQRG, assume that Google Search is attempting to reach similar conclusions about content quality as the Quality Raters. Google isn’t necessarily performing the same research process or reading the same things.

Clues About Google’s Ranking Signals

There is no such thing as an Experience score or E-E-A-T score. Instead, Google has multiple overlapping scores that can be categorized as E, E, A, or T. The E-E-A-T label is for explaining how Google defines quality in a way that most people can understand.

What the Search Quality Rater Guidelines do is give us a clue about which aspects of a web presence Google analyzes. For example, there could be systems that read user reviews about a business on Google Maps, Yelp, etc., and then see what they indicate based on star rating, specific complaints or acclamations, and customer service – all generating individual scores used in ranking.

More Than Content and Backlinks

Years ago, a winning SEO strategy was to crank out a lot of low-quality content and pay someone to create thousands of spammy backlinks. I should know; I got my start in agencies that used this strategy and did some of this myself.

After reading the SQRG all those years ago, I realized the jig was up. Google was going to reach a point where SEOs could no longer fake it, and there were no more shortcuts to high rankings. The recent Helpful Content Update is evidence of this trend, and we should expect to see more like it.

Right now, it’s not enough to have middling content and an okay backlink profile. To be competitive requires having superlative content and business practices and having backlinks, brand mentions, and reviews that prove this. 

For businesses, this means we can’t just ask for the user’s credit card number on our landing pages. Our content has to have a beneficial purpose by helping them confidently make that buying decision.

The Big Picture

Ultimately, Google wants to show search results that make their product better, so users keep coming back. Google is an advertising company first, and if only around 1.59% of searches result in an ad click, they absolutely have to maintain its monopoly over web search.

By providing better search results for Google to display, SEOs are an important part of Google maintaining its ad revenues. This means the publicly available Search Quality Rater Guidelines are part of a tacit agreement between SEOs and Google: if we make their product better, they will send us some qualified traffic instead of relying entirely on Google Ads. 

The post Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines for SEO in 2023 appeared first on Portent.

Searching online for resources to perform a social media audit will most often produce results that focus heavily on reviewing organic content, engagement, and social listening analysis (I prefer this outline from Hootsuite as a good jumping-off point). Less easy to find are the guidelines for performing a paid social media audit, which is equally—if not more—important.

At Portent, we perform social media audits (both paid and organic) for a variety of reasons. Before we start working with a new client, as a consulting service and as a regular part of ongoing management. These audits help inform strategy and take stock of what is working in the channel as a whole when it can be easy to get stuck reviewing performance by platform.

Performing a paid social media audit can be time-consuming, but the tools needed are simple: access to the ad accounts, pixel, and Google Analytics (or a similar reporting platform). When we perform a social media audit, we always work our way through a version of this checklist:

1. Account Security
2. Analytics Infrastructure
3. Campaign Structure
4. Ad Set Structure
5. Audience Targeting and Exclusions
6. Ad Set Placements and Delivery
7. Ad Creative
8. Landing Page Review
9. Competitive Analysis

The above categories can provide a wealth of information and insights into your paid social media efforts. However, just as every social media strategy is different, every social media audit will be different as well. In this post, I’ll focus on four of the most important areas to audit, and how to get started.

Analytics Infrastructure

The analytics infrastructure of a social media ad account includes the account’s tangible makeup: the Facebook pixel and events, the catalog, and any connected apps.

We rely heavily on Google Tag Manager at Portent, which has the ability to view pixel changes in preview mode. If you do not currently use a tag management system, Facebook has a few features in the platform that can help to debug any errors you see across the infrastructure stack. One of those is the Facebook Test Events Tool, which allows you to click through different sections of your site to ensure events are firing.

Once you troubleshoot your existing properties, you should look for gaps in event tracking. For Facebook, we recommend adhering to the available Facebook standard events as closely as possible. If you identify gaps in your tracked events, Facebook also provides an Event Setup Tool, which allows you to create events directly from the platform. Just keep in mind that creating events this way reduces the control you have over features like pixel fire order and double-counting since you can only edit those in a tag management tool.

After reviewing the analytics infrastructure of your social media accounts, it should be free of errors and back-end discrepancies.

Campaign + Ad Set Structure

The campaign and ad set structure of the ad account should be reviewed next. For all platforms, we address the following questions:

1. Do campaign objectives map to end business goals?
2. If not, are campaigns grouped into specific touchpoints in the customer journey?
3. Are campaigns and ad sets structured to be free of audience overlap (both within a platform and between platforms)?
4. Are the campaigns structured to allow maximum automatic optimization (for example, using Facebook’s campaign budget optimization or LinkedIn’s lifetime pacing for campaign budgets)?

Manual optimization and testing will always be a part of managing an ad account. Ensuring that campaigns are structured to increase efficiency and minimize redundancy provides cleaner test results and easier optimizations. Facebook outlines this practice in its Power 5 playbook.

Landing Page Review

While not directly in the ad account, ad destination pages are an often overlooked part of a paid social media audit. We recommend analyzing landing pages in two categories:

Relevancy

When a user clicks through from an ad, they should have a seamless experience with essentially no surprises. Does the landing page map back to both the creative style and call to action in the ad creative? Is the landing page appropriate for where this user is in their customer journey? The landing page for each piece of creative in the account should be tailored for experience relevancy.

Quality

The landing page where paid traffic is sent should be of high quality. Not only will a large volume of users be visiting this page, but there is an additional investment behind getting them there. Concentrating on page speed, accessible content, and action-focused design will greatly improve the success of your ads. For those looking to convert users, we like The 7 Principles of Conversion-Centered Design from Unbounce.

In Other Words

If you are completing your first paid social media audit, this will give you a great place to start. And as I mentioned earlier, auditing your accounts should be a regular part of your social media management efforts; we recommend reviewing this checklist in-depth at least once a quarter.

The post How to Easily Perform a Social Media Audit in 2023 appeared first on Portent.

Keywords are a seemingly inescapable aspect of the SEO world. SEO professionals (myself included) encourage clients to focus on more meaningful metrics besides the humble keyword ranking, but the fact remains that ranking well in Google for keywords with significant search volume will (usually) result in traffic to your site.

Of course, keeping track of keywords isn’t free. Whether you spend your time manually checking rankings or your money on a keyword rank tracking solution, you have to limit how many keywords you track per page and per website. So, that begs the question, “how many keywords should you track?”

Are you ready for this one? It wouldn’t be an SEO article if it didn’t have the following sentence:

“It depends.”

Start With Keyword Research

Unfortunately, keywords don’t materialize out of thin air or come to us in a vision. Even more, you can’t just assume you know what keywords people use to search and what you should be ranking for. That’s why you should always start with keyword research.

There’s plenty of information out there on how to perform keyword research successfully, but I’ll outline some of my preferred steps and best practices below.

Which Pages Rank for What?

I’m not the first Portentite to recommend starting keyword research by looking at what you already rank for. I like to go straight to Google Search Console (GSC) as soon as I get my hands on it. Despite the evidence that Search Console data is quite unreliable, it does come straight from the search giant itself, so we can’t ignore it.

Hop into your site’s GSC Performance section to see a table of queries that domain ranks for.

Conveniently, this section defaults to show which queries got your site the most clicks over the past three months. This gives you a great idea of what Google thinks your site deserves to rank for and, if you click the Pages tab, which pages are ranking.

From this starting point, go forth and research keywords! Again, I’m not going to break down that process in this post, but I can point you to a couple of great resources we already created. Our CEO, Ian Lurie, wrote this timeless guide for doing keyword research that doesn’t suck. Want more help with Search Console? How about a walkthrough from former Portentite George Freitag? Finally, check out this post on how to take your keyword research to the next level.

Choose Landing Pages

Once you’ve identified the keywords you want to rank highly for, assign them to appropriate landing pages. In all likelihood, you will have already identified your target pages while performing the keyword research.

The number of target organic landing pages will directly influence the answer to our main question about the appropriate number of keywords to track.

How Many Keywords Should You Track?

You’ve decided which of your pages you want to optimize as organic landing pages, but how many keywords should you optimize each page for?

At the bare minimum, one; some pages may have a singular focus that answers only one query. It’s easier for pages to rank if they focus on one topic, so you should focus on two or three primary keywords per page that are reworded variations. Targeting four or more keywords is difficult because there is limited space in the title and meta description tags to target them. With a range of keywords per page determined, we can estimate how many keywords we’ll track.

1. Take the number of organic landing pages you’ve chosen
2. Multiply that number by the range of keywords per page (1-4) to get your range, or
3. Multiply the number of organic landing pages by 2.5, the average of the range.

For example, let’s say you’re working on a services site with five unique offerings and three blog posts that you want to target as landing pages. Between these pages and your homepage, you should expect to track 9-36 or about 22 keywords on average.

Of course, rules of thumb are meant to be broken. We work with a manufacturing client that offers ten unique manufacturing products. Without including their blog-focused keywords, we’re tracking 62 keywords for their site.

Other sites might not be as cut and dried. We’ve worked with a major news publishing site that often ranks 1st for extremely high-volume keywords due to its backlink profile and industry authority. We actively track over 200 keywords for them, most of which don’t directly correspond to a static landing page such as a product or service page.

Or, if you’re dealing with a site for a 20-year-old digital marketing agency run by some of the biggest nerds in the industry, you might end up with nearly 500 keywords on your tracking list so you can keep an eye on all the various blog posts you’ve published over the years.

How To Track Keyword Rankings

Although I did mention it as a possibility, you’re probably not going to want to manually track keyword rankings by doing a Google search every day (from the same machine, using a private browsing window, at the same time of day, etc.) and looking for your site.

Fortunately, there are plenty of options available for keyword tracking.

STAT

We love our Vancouver neighbo(u)rs to the north! Their robust tool allows you to set up keyword tracking for desktop and mobile, specific locations, different languages, and tons of other features. They also archive HTML snapshots of the SERPs for the keywords you track so you can see how your site and your competitors showed up in Google results.

Ahrefs

Another favorite of ours is Ahrefs, a true Swiss army knife for digital marketers. Rather than specifying which keywords you’d like to actively track, Ahrefs updates daily with all keywords that your tracked sites rank for. You may not be able to keep tabs on that ambitious keyword you’d like to rank for but never have, but it’s still incredibly comprehensive.

Google Search Console

This is a great free option, but you get what you pay for. We already saw how you can use Search Console to identify what you’re already ranking for in Google search. However, the platform only shows your average ranking for a given keyword over a period of time. That means if you spent weeks ranking 80th for a term but suddenly jumped to 2nd, your 28-day average ranking will be in the 70s.

There are, of course, dozens of options out there; these are just the few that I recommend.

What to Watch for in Rank tracking

You’ve done your keyword research, assigned terms to target landing pages, and signed up for a monthly subscription to your tool of choice… so now what? Should you sweat over every movement in the rankings, no matter how small? (No.) Should you be worried if all the keywords a single page ranks for plummet 50 positions? (Probably.)

The easiest way to stay on top of your rank changes and have peace of mind for your site(s) is to set up position change alerts. For example, STAT allows you to create custom alerts based on position movement. My most used alert is “If the number of keywords in the top ten falls by 5%”. The difference between a first- and second-page result is significant.

Still, alerts aren’t going to catch everything. We SEO practitioners here at Portent check in on our clients’ keyword rankings at least once a week, making sure nothing has fallen precipitously and celebrating with our clients when we see a huge win.

Of course, fluctuations are to be expected. Google is notoriously capricious, and you may find your rankings undergoing a single-day jump or a back-and-forth oscillation.

Find Your Goldilocks Number

I’ve given you a framework for estimating how many keywords to track, but anyone in digital marketing can tell you that our rules aren’t so much set in stone as they are written in chalk until someone comes along and hoses down the sidewalk.

You may find that you prefer to track far more or far fewer keywords than I’m recommending. Maybe you don’t bother tracking rankings at all! As long as the tracking that you do is valuable to you and your client, the exact number doesn’t matter.

The post How Many Keywords Should You Track for SEO in 2023? appeared first on Portent.

Content marketing is a never-ending quest for meaningful user engagement and first-page search engine rankings.

However, maintaining earned rankings is often difficult. To ensure your blog, product pages or videos are performing well; you should perform a regular content audit. 

Audits can highlight underperforming content, spark ideas for editorial calendars, and give you insights about what content resonates best with your users.

But what is a content audit, why is a content audit important, and how often should you audit your content?

Keep reading to find out.

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit evaluates the qualitative performance of a website’s content over a specific length of time. Audits typically analyze data from an analytics platform, SEO tools, and social media reports. Often, audits cross-check if content abides by in-house style guides and brand guidelines. Editorial-focused audits may also evaluate word count, keyword focus, spelling, grammar, and voice and tone.

How Often Should You Audit Website Content?

The type of content you audit determines the audit frequency and evaluation metrics you use. At a minimum, we recommend an annual content audit; however, content in some stages of the user journey requires more frequent audits than others.

Awareness Content – Audit Every 6 Months

Awareness content, such as blog posts, needs time to mature and draw user engagement. A brand-new blog post can take upward of three-to-six months to begin ranking on Google within the top three pages—if it ranks at all. During that time, much of the traffic going to awareness content is likely being driven by social media, paid advertising, or existing users. Six months is generally enough time to know if your content is going to perform organically or if it needs adjustments to achieve the goals you’re setting.

Common audit metrics for awareness content include:

• Pageviews (segmented by organic/social/paid)
• Unique Visitors
• Time on Page
• Bounce/Exit Rate
• Social Shares
• Comments
• Backlinks

Consideration Content – Audit Every 3-6 Months

Consideration content, like a how-to guide for your product or service, is often among the most popular content on your website. Quality consideration content can lead to fast user conversion, so you should keep up-to-date on its performance. Auditing this content every three-to-six months gives you time to respond and adapt to shifts in users’ behavior or needs. If you’re auditing every three months, predictive analytics may shore up shallow data pools and empower you to make better-informed decisions.

Common audit metrics for consideration content include:

• Pageviews (segmented by direct/organic/social/paid)
• Unique Visitors
• Time on Page
• Bounce/Exit Rate
• Assisted Conversions
• Backlinks
• Trust Flow
• Social Shares

Conversion Content – Audit Quarterly

Choosing how often to audit a conversion page is tough. If you have an e-commerce website and earn thousands of conversions per day, you’re going to have an easier time evaluating content performance than a manufacturing firm that converts once or twice per week. To accommodate both scenarios, we recommend a quarterly audit of your most important conversion content. This timeframe often gives enough data to spot data trends. Conversion content can also be audited monthly, depending on how long the user’s conversion timeline is and how much data you have.

Common audit metrics for conversion content include:

• Pageviews (segmented by direct/organic/paid)
• Unique Visitors
• Time on Page
• Bounce/Exit Rate
• Goals/Conversions

Retention Content – Audit Annually

Retention content, such as a tips-and-tricks guide or previews of upcoming products, often has low engagement metrics because the target audience is current or prior customers. To ensure you have enough data, perform an annual audit.

Common audit metrics for retention content include:

• Pageviews (segmented by direct/organic/social/paid)
• Unique Visitors
• Time on Page
• Bounce/Exit Rate
• Assisted Conversions
• Conversions/Goals
• Backlinks
• Social Shares

If you’d prefer to audit all of your content at once instead of segmenting it by user journey, we recommend performing either an annual or quarterly audit. Each option has benefits and drawbacks.

An annual content audit is beneficial because you’ll have a full year’s worth of data, which lets you discover clear patterns in user engagement and content performance. This data can empower your content team to identify content that needs updates or a rewrite or enables you to change the direction of your content entirely. However, because you’re only performing this audit once a year, you’ll be behind the curve on adapting to industry trends or user whims. Annual audits work well for companies with long, intricate content strategies.

A quarterly audit limits the breadth of data you’ll operate with but allows swift modifications to industry changes, early performance metrics, or consumer demands. Quarterly audits work well for websites with ample visitors and frequent content updates.

How SEO Influences Your Content Audit Frequency

Your SEO goals also affect how often you should audit your content and the metrics you should evaluate. The three most important evaluation metrics are backlinks, target keywords, and keyword rankings.

Backlinks

If you’re performing a quarterly, six-month, or annual audit, backlinks can give you a great idea of how well your content will rank organically as it matures or gets updated. The more backlinks from reputable websites your content earns, the more likely your content may rank well on search engines. You can also create an off-page SEO strategy to earn backlinks on underperforming pages to help bolster their value.

Target Keywords and Keyword Rankings

If you use a keyword tracking tool like Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz, or STAT, you should include the most relevant keyword rankings in your audit. Any content that doesn’t rank for its target keywords should be nominated for edits or removal. Content that performs well for its target keyword or is rapidly gaining keywords can transition to a target for your off-page SEO campaign.

Remember that keyword growth is a long-term plan. Audits every one to three months will show a clear keyword growth pattern, but don’t get scared if your content isn’t ranking within the first three months. However, if you perform a bi-annual audit and notice your content still hasn’t started ranking, then it’s time to take a closer look at the content to determine a cause.

Content Audit Next Steps

After your audit is complete, what’s next?

Prioritize the Results

Depending on the audit metrics you use, you’re going to be swimming in an overwhelming amount of data. The first step is to comb through the audit results and begin segmenting your content into four update priority level categories:

• High: this should be updated within the next two weeks
• Medium: update in the next month
• Low: update in the next three months
• None: leave the content alone

Build a Content Calendar

After the audit results are prioritized, begin building an editorial calendar. The calendar should show how the content will be updated and when the updates are due.

Set a Date for Your Next Audit

Once the editorial calendar is complete and you’ve started to update your high-priority content, plan the next audit so you can monitor the changes you’re making.

Final Thoughts

Good content marketing strategies require more than just rolling the dice and hoping your content ascends the search query throne. A regular content audit helps fortify your ranking content against pesky challengers from page two. And when you’re the sly usurper trying to dethrone the reigning king, an audit better equips your content for the SERP battle ahead.

The post How Often Should You Perform a Content Audit in 2023? appeared first on Portent.

Digital marketing is an invaluable resource for any nonprofit that wants to optimize its advocacy, fundraising, impact, and stewardship. 

Here’s why. 

In 2021, online donations grew by 42 percent compared to 2019.  

Online giving in 2021 contributed 17.8 percent of total fundraising for small nonprofits (less than $1 million), 11.3 percent for medium-sized nonprofits ($1–10 million), and 11.1 percent for large nonprofits ($10 million-plus).² The following chart breaks down total fundraising percentages by common charity sectors.²

Overall, online fundraising revenue for large nonprofits increased by 9.8 percent in 2021 compared to the previous year. Medium-sized and small nonprofits saw an 8.7 percent and 3.9 percent increase in online donations, respectively.² 

Plus, the average one-time donation in 2021 increased from $111 to $125, with a 23 percent retention rate, and the average monthly donation increased from $24 to $25, with a 60 percent retention rate, compared to 2020.¹ If these figures sound enticing to you, then let’s get started on building your online marketing plan and strategy.

What You’ll Learn In This Guide

Most small and medium-sized nonprofits we’ve worked with know they should be doing digital marketing. Still, they’re reluctant to dip their toes into the dark, unknown waters because they don’t know where to start, how to optimize their current marketing efforts, or if the investment will pay off.

This guide unravels the mystery and teaches you the concepts, processes, and tools necessary to set up and optimize your organization’s digital marketing strategy.

I don’t want to bore or overwhelm you by diving into the minute details about how to complete each tiny step throughout the process. This post would be colossal and unreadable if I did. Instead, whenever we discuss a task you should perform, you’ll find hyperlinks to the resources you need to learn how to perform the recommended process.

I also want to cleanse the angst about the costs associated with digital marketing. All marketing tools recommended in this guide are free or offer discounts to 501c(3) organizations.

In the following chapters, you’ll learn about:

• Analytics
• Content Strategy
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)
• Paid Social Media
• Search Engine Optimization

One more note before we dive into the nuts and bolts. If you’re setting up your company’s digital marketing services for the first time, I recommend starting with the Analytics section and then working your way through the guide in order.

The preamble is complete. Let’s get started!

Google Analytics for Nonprofits

An analytics program is the foundation your digital marketing strategy is built upon. With analytics data, you can accurately measure who is visiting your website, what they’re doing, and how effective your marketing efforts are.

I recommend you use Google Analytics (GA) because it is the easiest analytics platform to understand and is free. Plus, GA is the most commonly used analytics platform, so there is a chance somebody at your organization has prior experience with it.

Step One: Get Google Analytics

If you already have a Google Analytics account set up, go ahead and skip to Step Three: Establish Goals in Google Analytics. Otherwise, your first step is to sign up for Google Analytics.

After you’ve created a GA account, you should set up your website as a “property” in Google Analytics so you can begin collecting data about your website’s visitors. Afterward, you’ll need to create your first GA “reporting view.” Views let you analyze the data you’re collecting. And last, you must add the analytics tracking tag to your website.

Optional Step: Join Google for Nonprofits

Google for Nonprofits is Google’s way to level the playing field for nonprofit businesses. The program offers free Google platforms, like G-Suite, Google Ad Grants, and the YouTube Nonprofit Program. Google also provides in-depth tutorials that show nonprofits how to get the most out of each Google service.

Step Two: Learn Analytics Terminology

After you’ve signed up for Google Analytics and set up your account, the next step is to begin exploring the tool. While you do this, you’re presented with a lot of new terms and concepts. Loves Data put together a comprehensive Google Analytics Glossary to learn the terms you’ll see in GA.

Step Three: Establish Goals in Google Analytics

In analytics-speak, a “goal” is synonymous with a website conversion: any kind of meaningful action a user can take on your site. This engagement could be a video view, pledge signature, contact form fill, newsletter subscription, etc.

Most non-profit websites create goals focused on three things:

1. Convincing people to give money to the cause — donations;
2. Convincing people to give time to the cause — volunteering; or
3. Connecting with people who need your organization’s help.

Each path needs to be mapped to a goal in GA to understand how effectively your website achieves these objectives.

The simplest way to do this is to configure a “destination goal” in Google Analytics to understand how many unique visitors make it to a thank you page after giving money, filling out a form, or supplying contact information. The destination goal, combined with content performance KPIs, can paint a vivid picture displaying how users interact with your website.

If you don’t have a thank you page, you can use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to set up event tracking that will serve as your goal data. Step four explains what GTM is and how you can use it to supplement GA.

Step Four: Set Up Google Tag Manager

Tag Manager puts the power of analytics deployment in the hands of marketers instead of developers or IT. Google Tag Manager is free and allows you to ensure GA is set up to measure all content on your site. It also helps you set up event tracking for all form fills and link clicks on the site.

Note: If you choose to deploy GA via Google Tag Manager, make sure to remove any previous instance of the GA tracking script you installed on your site back in Step One. This removal prevents you from seeing duplicate visits. If you choose not to deploy GA via GTM, then leave the tracking script in place.

In the nonprofit world, it’s vital that small marketing teams hold all the keys to the kingdom in terms of enabling tracking, which Tag Manager accomplishes. If they don’t, getting outside developer help can get expensive quickly.

Through GTM, you can:

1. Track clicks off to third-party sites where the conversion occurs; or
2. Observe form submissions on any page, even forms that don’t submit to a thank you page.

Learn how to perform both of those methods in this Google tutorial.

Thank you pages and GTM tracking cover the essential conversions. But you should also know how visitors engage with off-site content that leads up to donation and volunteer action. If you’ve embedded a YouTube video explaining what your non-profit does, GTM allows you to send events to GA around plays and completions of that video. This correlation helps you know what content resonates with users.

If you have printable resources that visitors can share to spread the word about your cause, you can track usage of those with the aforementioned link click tracking.

The last thing to consider is tagging your campaigns. Many nonprofits have email lists and social media followings that they’ve spent years gathering and rely on for annual giving seasons. Properly tagging links from those emails and social media posts to your website using UTM parameters will let you know how effectively they drive revenue.

For a broader list of things that can and should fall under the banner of goals from an analytics perspective, check out this article on analytics goal tracking on Portent’s blog.

Step Five: Keep Learning

Google Analytics is a robust platform that can revolutionize how well you understand your website users. If you’d like to learn more about how to best use Google Analytics, I strongly encourage you to register for Google’s free Analytics Academy. The program has a variety of self-serve courses for people of all analytics knowledge levels.

Step Six: Implement Additional Analytics Tools

One area where GA lacks is in providing a visual understanding of how customers are engaging with a page layout, which is useful when you evaluate how to optimize existing content. Hotjar is a great tool for visual mapping, as it allows for comprehensive heat mapping, hover mapping, and scroll mapping of your content. And again, it’s free with some reasonable limitations (you can only heatmap up to three pages at a time on the free plan).

Back to table of contents

Content Strategy for Nonprofits

Content strategy helps determine what message your website communicates and how. With content strategy, you can plan your website around the needs of your users. This approach lets your online platforms cultivate a positive and enriching experience that simultaneously helps people and achieves your company’s goals.

In the context of content strategy, “content” means anything on your website that communicates an idea to a user. Here are a few common content types:

• Landing pages (products, services, donation forms, contact us pages, etc.)
• Blog posts
• Resource guides
• Images
• Videos
• Podcasts
• Accountability reports

In the following steps, the term “content” references all types of content your nonprofit might produce.

Step One: Determine the Objective of Your Website

Your website should have clearly defined expectations and goals, such as increasing donations, building brand awareness, and getting people to volunteer. Every content strategy decision you make should further these goals.

If you don’t know what your organization is trying to achieve with the website, now is the time to define it. We suggest reading the goal-setting guide by Lucidchart if you want a template or ideas for how to establish your website’s goals and objectives.

Step Two: Evaluate (And Fix) Your Navigation

The navigation and sub-navigation should accurately reflect your website’s content and the user journey you’re trying to create. If you want examples of how to build a user journey map, HubSpot has an excellent guide.

The navigation should also relate to the goals you established in step one. For example, let’s say you run an animal adoption shelter and the website has four goals:

1. Adopt homeless animals
2. Acquire donations
3. Attract volunteers
4. Build community awareness about pet-related issues

Your navigation should present the opportunity for users to interact with all four objectives. It should have labels for open adoptions, a donation icon, a call out for volunteers, and an “about us” or “how we help” section. Below is an example from the Humane Society showing how their navigation approaches this scenario.

If your navigation does not reflect the goals established in step one, if it doesn’t accurately capture your existing content, or it doesn’t help people find the information they’re looking for, then I suggest you fix the navigation.

First, learn how to decide what goes in the navigation. Next, learn how to write descriptive navigation labels. Last, ensure your navigation is mobile-friendly and responsive.

Step Three: Be Intentional With Hero Images

Hero images set the mood and theme for a given page. On your homepage, the hero should emphasize what your brand does, a current promotion, or a long-term goal. The image should be brand or campaign relevant, easy to understand, and emotionally persuasive.

On a landing page, such as a volunteer sign-up, event announcement, or blog post, the hero image should emphasize the subject matter being discussed.

Below is an example of how a hero image emphasizes what the Environmental Defense Fund does while also promoting a campaign.

The simple, emotional image works incredibly well from multiple standpoints. The polar bear is walking between thinning ice sheets and just barely making it, symbolizing it needs help. The bear’s face points directly at the Give Now button. The button itself is bright blue and easily distinguishable. Plus, because the image is static, rather than a video or carousel, this scene is the user’s sole focus when first visiting the page.

Step Four: Use Descriptive Labels

Descriptive calls to action, anchor texts, or navigation labels are vital to the success of your website because they show users what to expect upon clicking a link or button. By setting clear expectations, the copy leaves no room for interpretation, and users can navigate your website with minimal frustration.

When you write an interactive label, perform a quick test. If you wrote the copy on a blank piece of paper and showed it to a stranger, would they understand what you are talking about? Is it descriptive enough that they would understand the context and have reasonable expectations about the content to follow?

Step Five: Set Up a Donation Platform

Online donation processing is among the more challenging aspects of running a nonprofit. A quality, customizable payment processing platform that integrates into your existing content management system (WordPress, HubSpot, Drupal, etc.) is a lifesaver for small-to-medium nonprofits.

An embedded platform increases conversions during the donation stage because users stay on the same domain and can donate through multiple trusted methods, such as PayPal, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. Some platforms also allow you to receive donations in foreign currency and harvest donor data, letting you personally thank donors or send annual donation reminders.

I recommend Donorbox for small-to-medium organizations. The platform is robust, reputable, and has quality customer support. Plus, Donorbox is free to use for the first $1,000 you collect each month. The platform charges a 1.5 percent fee on donations after $1,000.

Below is an example of how the Donorbox payment form can look, via one of Portent’s pro bono clients, Rise Up School of Dance.

Step Six: Optimize Your Donation Page and Form

The donation page and experience should be simple and focused only on donations. Keep events, programs, and other non-donation-related content off the donation page.

Below is an example of a great donation form and experience.

This form and page accomplish eight crucial donation form best practices:

1. The “Donate” hero image clearly identifies where users are and the purpose of this page.
2. The form pre-selects a donation amount, which can improve form performance and increase the average donation.
3. The form lets users choose if they want to donate once or set up a recurring donation.
4. The form requires only necessary information.
5. The copy tells users how their donation is being used and emphasizes the donation is tax-deductible.
6. The page offers social proof with a Charity Navigator Badge.
7. The sidebar includes additional donation formats, in case users want to donate in more ways than cash.
8. After a user completes the form, they are directed to a Thank You page.

If possible, ensure your donation form meets the eight best practices in the above list. If you’d like to go further in optimizing your donation form or landing page, check out this guide.

Step Seven: Use Visually Distinct Donation Buttons

Donations are the bread-and-butter of every NGO, and users expect to be able to locate a donation button from any page within a few seconds. The industry standard is to have the donation button in the top-right navigation. You should also make the donate button a bright color to clash against the rest of the design.

Step Eight: Evaluate (And Fix) Your Footer

The purpose of the footer is to provide easy-to-find information, boost organic search results, and build internal links. The footer navigation shouldn’t be a catch-all spot to plug extra links you want to promote. Instead, it’s important to keep this section of your website clean, concise, and readable.

The footer should be home to hard-to-find content and commonly expected information, such as contact options, careers, brand partners, testimonials or awards, and social media profiles.

Below are two examples of nonprofits that have clean, optimized footer navigations:

For more in-depth information, the Nielsen Norman Group has an in-depth guide on how to optimize your footer.

Step Nine: Create User-Centric Content

Creating content your users care about is a never-ending step. To remain relevant in search results and maintain your user’s interest, you need to publish high-quality content on a regular basis.

High-quality content always focuses on a user’s need and achieves the following three attributes:

1. Answers an argument or question: It provides a clear, definitive answer to a question or argument a user has.
2. Prescriptive and tactically actionable: The content should have at least one tactical takeaway that can be executed by the intended audience, such as signing a petition, volunteering, or donating.
3. Self-contained: The prescriptive action or answer must include all necessary information so that the reader can act or deliver that answer without additional research. If you have existing content that could clarify an answer, you should link to it. Ask yourself: Could the reader comfortably act on your advice without using Google?

How you decide what content to produce should depend on two things:

1. Your website objectives and business goals
2. What your users want from your website

Ideally, you should blend both options when making content.

For example, if you want to increase dog adoptions, you’ll create a page for each adoptable dog. On that page, write about the dog’s personality and answer common questions people ask in person. Also, provide multiple photos of the pooch, and let people know when and where they can meet her. Last, include links to resources about the adoption process and the lifestyle people should be prepared for if they adopt a dog.

Content production can be a long and tricky process, but it’s necessary if you want to provide a positive user experience. When you’re ready, the following guides will walk you through content ideation and creation:

• Hubspot’s Guide to Content Creation
• How to Fill an Editorial Calendar
• The Best Content Research Tools

Step 10: Monitor Your Content

The last step is also one that never ends. You should evaluate your content’s performance on a regular basis to know if it’s performing to your expectations. The first step is to choose content KPIs to evaluate. Next, determine how often you want to audit your content. Last, update any underperforming content, so it better abides by the high-quality guidelines in step nine. If the content can’t be updated, remove it from the website and set up a 301 redirect to a relevant page.

If you have existing content and want to check its performance, try Animalz Revive, a free tool that syncs with your Google Analytics data to highlight blog posts and other web pages that suffer from content decay (stale, stagnated, or out-of-date content) and should be updated.

If you want to dive deeper into content strategy, here are two more of our favorite resources:

• Upgrade Your Blog to a Content Hub for Better UX
• The Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide to Content Strategy

Back to table of contents

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) for Nonprofits

PPC advertising is a crucial tool to drive user engagement, increase donations, and build brand recognition. PPC allows nonprofits to target potential donors, volunteers, or advocates while they browse search engine results, explore a website, or watch a video.

Step One: Sign Up for a Google Ads Account

Sign up for Google Ads, formerly known as Google Adwords. It’s free, and Google has the most robust paid advertising platform around.

If you’ve never used Google Ads or any PPC platform, I suggest enrolling in Google’s free paid advertising academy, which teaches newcomers everything they need to know about Google Ads.

Step Two: Sign Up for Google Ad Grants

As previously mentioned, nonprofit businesses are eligible for the Google Ad Grants program. You should sign up for it. Small-to-medium nonprofits may not even eclipse the $10,000 per month the grant provides, effectively letting you run a PPC campaign for free.

There are terms and conditions which you must agree to, and there are strict guidelines you must abide by if you use this program (e.g., quality score requirements, CTR requirements, click cost ceilings).

Step Three: Download Google Ads Desktop Editor

In 2021, nonprofit spending on digital ads increased by 19 percent compared to the previous year.¹ Most digital ad spend went to direct fundraising asks, accounting for 52 percent of all budgets.¹  Branding, awareness, or education advertising made up 32 percent of ad budgets, and lead generation consumed 15 percent.¹ 

Every dollar earned and spent online should be part of a larger plan.

Before allocating any money to a campaign, you need to ask yourself one question: what is the goal of this specific campaign?

For most nonprofits, the best goal is to efficiently acquire direct leads to a donation or volunteer page. Hopefully, this exposure introduces new potential members or donors to your organization.

If you choose this goal, the ads you run should show users why your organization is important, how it affects causes they care about, and encourages them to keep in touch to get more involved.

Step Five: Learn PPC Lingo

Much like Analytics and SEO, PPC has its own lingo, and knowing common phrases will make creating ads and going through Google Academy significantly easier. Below are the most important terms for you to know.

Metrics

CPC: cost per click (cost divided by clicks)

CTR: click-through rate (clicks divided by impressions)

CVR: conversion rate (leads or conversions divided by clicks)

CPA or CPL: cost per acquisition or cost per lead (cost divided by leads or conversions)

Impression Share: your visibility or “share of voice” (impressions divided by total search volume)

Other Key Terms

Campaign: a collection of ad groups that has a daily budget assigned to it. These are typically differentiated systematically by keyword category (for example)

Ad group: a collection of keywords and the corresponding text ads which are eligible to show to users when one of those keywords is triggered by a user’s search query

Quality Score: a measurement of a keyword’s quality (ranging from 1-10) that directly factors into how much you pay for a click

Ad Rank: a value assigned by Google in an auction that determines your ad’s position on a SERP (or if it shows up at all)

Bid Strategy: an automated bidding option offered by Google. There are several; advertisers can choose those that make the most sense based on their campaigns’ goals

Step Six: Brainstorm Keywords

After you’ve determined the campaign goal, your next step is to consider which phrases people will most likely search for that are relevant to your organization and can result in a lead.

I recommend you work your way from the bottom of the funnel to the top. Users who search for your organization’s name are typically the most likely to convert, so start with these branded phrases.

After accounting for branded search terms, take a look at your website and use your main category pages (navigation categories, core product or service pages, etc.) as starting points. Each of these categories can be its own PPC campaign. Plus, you can evaluate the organic keywords that are directly relevant to each category to get inspiration for your paid keyword strategy.

For example, let’s say you run a local food shelter and need more volunteers. Your website has a volunteer page, which contains all the information users need to sign up for volunteer work. You can create a PPC campaign focused on keywords potential volunteers might search for, such as “food shelter volunteer.” The ads would send users to the volunteer page on your website and hopefully get new sign-ups.

Step Seven: Verify PPC Keywords

Once you have a list of initial keyword ideas, use Google Ads’ keyword planner to determine if those terms are searched for in volume. Ideally, you want to target keywords that have high volume and low competition scores. Afterward, you can sort the chosen keywords into ad groups and campaigns, which you can then add to your Google Ads account and expand upon.

Before you move to step eight, read this keyword volume guide by WordStream. The resource delves into everything you need to know about keyword search volume, which is relevant for PPC and SEO.

Step Eight: Add More Keywords

After you’ve determined the base keyword list, including branded terms, you’ll want to move up the funnel and expand your keyword selection to target concepts tangentially relevant to your organization.

Consider what phrases apply to your user demographic but are not directly related to your nonprofit. If you want to target users who are interested in food scarcity but don’t currently volunteer, you might research the keyword volume for terms like “hunger statistics in Seattle,” and then build campaigns around the results.

Keep repeating this process until you’ve exhausted your keyword opportunities or surpassed your target budgets.

If you want a more in-depth look, read WordStream’s guide to researching and developing a PPC keyword strategy.

Step Nine: Choose Destinations for the Ads

If you have a great website with robust content and high conversion rates, it’s feasible to use topically relevant pages on your site as landing pages for your PPC campaigns. However, if your site is lacking content specific to a campaign topic, then you should consider developing a custom PPC landing page.

Unbounce has a good guide you should read if you are interested in developing custom PPC landing pages.

Step 10: Choose Your Ad Types

The ad format directly affects click-through rates, conversion rates, cost per lead, and cost per acquisition. Which format you choose and how much budget you dedicate to each method depends on four factors:

1. Online advertising budget
2. Campaign goals
3. Keyword volume and competition
4. Remarketing efforts

For display advertising, like banner and video ads, how much money a nonprofit spends to earn a donation depends largely on the organization’s size, reputation, and recognition.

Instead of the industry jargon term of cost per lead, let’s consider your goal to be the cost per donation, which refers to how much a nonprofit has to spend on online ads to generate a single donation. The following chart shows the average cost per donation by industry and ad type.

The significant difference boils down to budget, industry, and name recognition. Smaller nonprofits have less recognition and smaller budgets to raise awareness; consequently, users often perform more research before donating to the cause. Whereas large nonprofits already have an established trust factor, bigger budgets and require less scrutiny.

Budget-wise, large nonprofits spend four times more than small nonprofits on digital ads. Small nonprofits invested $0.02 per dollar of online revenue, while large nonprofits invested $0.08 per dollar.¹ 

For small nonprofits, text and search ads are best used to build brand awareness or remarket to users who have previously interacted with your website. Check out PPC Hero’s guide for more information about remarketing purposes and strategies.

If your campaign goal is to target high-intent users who are looking for a specific cause or nonprofit, you’ll want to use search ads because the conversion rate per donor will likely be better.

Small nonprofits also likely have small search pools with limited keywords and low to moderate keyword volume. I recommend that small nonprofits (and some medium-sized) max out their budget on the best search keywords and search campaigns. Despite the average cost of $46 per conversion, the conversion rate will likely be higher because the leads are more qualified and lower funnel. 

If search alone proves to be too cost-prohibitive or if you’re competing in an extremely competitive space, a blend of display and search ads can be a viable solution.

After you’ve optimized your search opportunities, use remarketing to target users with display ads.

Step 11: Write the Ad Copy

Once you plan your campaigns, make sure you write ad copy that speaks directly to the terms present in each ad group. The copy should be concise, convincing, and have a clear call to action, so the users know what to expect if they click your ad.

If you use Google Grants, you must maintain a high CTR threshold, so ensure your ad copy is relevant and direct. Read this Google ad copy best practice guide by Unbounce and Portent’s blog post on ad directness to ensure your ad copy is in tip-top shape.

Step 12: Publish the Ads and Monitor Results

Publish the Google Ads campaigns that you want to run. Once your campaigns begin generating impressions, clicks, and (hopefully) leads, you want to analyze and optimize the campaigns.

Does one specific campaign have lots of clicks but no leads? Consider decreasing this campaign’s daily budget, changing its bid amounts or bidding strategy, altering keyword match types, or pause a keyword that’s wasting money, and so on. Eventually, you should see your conversion metrics improve and your profitability increase.

As you bound further down the optimization burrow, read the following blog posts for more PPC strategies and techniques:

• Why Your Average Cost Per Click is So High and How to Fix It
• Improve Your Quality Scores With These Simple Tips
• 6 A/B Tests for PPC You Have to Try
• Funnel-Based PPC Account Strategy: An Overview

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Paid Social Media Advertising for Nonprofits

Paid social media advertising is a powerful way to introduce your brand to a pool of new but relevant users. You can use paid social to target users who fit your target demographic or interact with your company’s social media profile by using personalized and interactive creative content.

Although PPC and paid social use similar strategies, PPC is a “push channel,” while paid social is a “pull channel.” Unlike PPC, which targets people’s intent and pushes them toward taking action, social media users aren’t actively looking for a certain nonprofit or want to learn about a specific cause. But you can pull users toward your brand by serving them the right creative at the right time. Using this tactic, you can convert these users into new donors, volunteers, or advocates.

Step One: Choose What Social Media Platforms to Use

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are the best social platforms for nonprofits to use for paid advertising.

What type of content your users find engaging is the most important consideration when you choose a social media platform because each platform is tailored for specific content. We suggest you chat with your donors, volunteers, and staff about what content they want to interact with and then decide if you have the resources to produce that tailored content.

While you’re doing this research, here are a few pros and cons to keep in mind for each social platform.

Facebook/Instagram Pros

Both platforms have a huge audience, and frequent users — Instagram has more than 1 billion users, and 2.23 billion people log on to Facebook monthly. The content you publish is longer lasting than Twitter. Emotional or eye-catching photos and videos tend to perform best on Facebook and Instagram. The platforms are easy to use and familiar to most people. And Facebook provides lots of free resources for nonprofits to get started.

Facebook/Instagram Cons

Organic reach has fallen dramatically compared to what it used to be. For a nonprofit that doesn’t already have a presence on Facebook, it will be difficult to build an audience without putting ad dollars behind the account.

Twitter Pros

Easy to communicate with users. Twitter has lots of daily users, and it’s growing in popularity. Plus, with hashtags and trends, it’s easy to find trending topics and join relevant conversations.

Twitter Cons

Tweets age out after a few minutes because so much content is being published to a user’s timeline at once.

If you want more information about the types of social media ads and how each platform uses them, read Hootsuite’s social media advertising guide.

When deciding which platforms to use, keep brand persona consistency in mind. The brand should feel similar across each social channel, including the account name, imagery, and tone and voice. Although the content is unique on each platform, users should be able to follow your different accounts and still tell that the content comes from the same company.

Step Two: Determine Platform Goals

Before you dive into developing a social media strategy, you should determine what your main goal for each platform is, such as customer service, community building, lead generation, event promotion, etc. The strategy doesn’t need to be the same for every platform, nor does each platform need to get equal attention. However, your chosen goals should influence your decisions in the following steps. Buffer provides a great overview of common social media advertising goals and metrics that you could consider. Check out their guide if you want to dive into this subject further.

If you choose to use and advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need to get your profile verified and sign additional terms and conditions. Both platforms have different ad guidelines for companies that promote ads on topics of “national importance.” Because most non-profits are mission-based, following these guidelines is crucial. Without verification, your ads could be denied because your account isn’t approved to discuss certain topics.

Step Three: Get Verified

If you choose to use and advertise on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll need to get your profile verified and sign additional terms and conditions. Both platforms have different ad guidelines for companies that promote ads on topics of “national importance.” Because most nonprofits are mission-based, following these guidelines is crucial. Without verification, your ads could be denied because your account isn’t approved to discuss certain topics.

Step Four: Sign Up for Facebook Charitable Giving

Another resource to take advantage of during the early stages of your social strategy is Facebook’s Charitable Giving program, which lets users donate to your organization directly from Facebook profiles or feeds. The program also lets Facebook users set up fundraising campaigns on their personal profiles for your organization.

Step Five: Sign Up for Instagram Donations

After you’re approved to use the Facebook Charitable Giving program, you should set up Instagram’s donation button and stickers, which let users donate up to $2,500 through the platform.

Step Six: Set a Realistic Budget

Unfortunately, unlike PPC, nonprofits don’t get free advertising money each month from social media platforms. It’s important you establish a realistic campaign budget to make your money stretch its furthest and get the most value from every cent.

There are a lot of guides to read about establishing social advertising budgets. Buffer provides a great guide about how to run a social campaign with a $100 budget. Medium-sized nonprofits with more advertising money and content resources should read Hootsuite’s guide, which helps you plan out all the budget considerations you’ll encounter.

Step Seven: Establish Your Campaign KPIs

Think back to the platform goals you established in step two. Now, before you begin building each campaign, you should determine how you’ll measure if those goals are being met.

To figure out the nuts and bolts of KPIs, I recommend reading Unbounce’s excellent guide on establishing and measuring social media campaign KPIs.

Step Eight: Determine What Content to Promote

Step one advised thinking about the types of content you’d promote for each platform. Now, it’s time to create that content and put it to use.

I encourage you to mix different media types for your social media content. Most of your posts should incorporate blog posts, educational resources, as well as images and videos to tell personal stories about your community and your nonprofit’s impact.

If you have a consistent content production schedule as part of your content strategy, you can resurface that content on social media and alleviate the amount of content you’d otherwise need to produce. If you don’t have a steady stream of content being produced, you’ll need to develop content specifically for your social platforms. Refer back to the research you did in step one, alongside the KPIs you’ve established, to help decide what content you should produce.

Step Nine: Make Fast, Mobile-Friendly Landing Pages

Mobile users, particularly those engaging with social media content, expect landing pages to load almost instantly. If the page takes more than four seconds to load, 38 percent of users will abandon the journey and rarely return.

Mobile page speed is also more important for paid social campaigns because advertisers pay for impressions and link clicks. When users abandon the page before it loads, advertisers lose money without users ever seeing the landing page content.

It’s crucial that any landing page your social campaign uses is optimized for mobile, including site speed. Wordstream has a guide that will teach you how to design and optimize a mobile landing page. And although I’ll discuss site speed more in the SEO section, if you want to skip ahead and get started early, Portent’s ultimate guide to site speed will cover everything you need to know.

Step 10: Create the Campaign Plan

After you identify the content you want to build and promote, the next step is to plan your campaign. Before you write the ads, make sure you know the following information:

Campaign Title: Make sure you have a campaign title to discuss the campaign both internally and with users.

Identify a Campaign Team: Know who is going to manage posting, monitoring, and tweaking the campaign content.

Campaign Budget and Length: To stay within budget and hit your KPIs, you must have an idea of how long your campaign should go on. Here are a few tips on choosing campaign length in case you’re not sure where to start.

Content Schedule: Know what content you’re publishing, when you’re publishing it, and whom you’re targeting. Also, know which landing pages are paired with your scheduled content.

Step 11: Write the Ads

There are several schools of thought on how to write great social media ad copy. Below are a few resources to get you started:

• 9 Tips to Write the Best Facebook Ads Ever — WordStream
• 7-Step Social Media Advertising Strategy to Better Performing Ads — Sprout Social
• 10 Tips for Writing Social Media Ad Copy That Converts – Portent

Nonprofit organizations must also be aware of the language they use on social media. Social users are not afraid to provide positive or negative feedback to a nonprofit that stands for specific values. These comments or reviews can hold a lot of sway over users that are considering engaging with a small nonprofit. To maintain consistent language use across platforms and minimize the risk of user blowback, make sure to do three things with every ad:

1. Follow your organization’s voice and tone guide
2. Tailor ad copy to the best practices of each platform
3. Be clear and concise with your CTAs

Optional Step 12: Choose Hashtags

If you choose to use hashtags in your social posts or paid social ads, the most important concept to keep top of mind is hashtag relevancy. It is better to use one hashtag that is extremely relevant than 20 that are not. If popular or trending hashtags are not relevant to your campaign, service, or industry, then don’t include them in your ads or posts.

Optional Step 13: Consider Using a Content Management System

Managing social media campaigns for multiple platforms can take considerable amounts of time and resources. If you plan to advertise or promote content on more than one platform, consider using a content management system, such as Hootsuite, Buffer, or SocialOomph. These programs help manage and maintain your social media channels in one location, and many companies offer free basic accounts. Business software site Capterra has a good guide on social media CMS if you’d like to learn more.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Nonprofits

Optimizing your website and its content for search engines allows people to discover your organization when they search online for relevant queries. SEO for nonprofits is practically the same as SEO for any other organization, except that local-focused nonprofits should double down on their local SEO efforts.

Your ultimate SEO goal is to appear in the top three Google search results for search queries relevant to your cause or brand name. You want to aim for the first three Google results because they get 75.1 percent of all clicks, with the first result getting an average click-through rate of 31.7 percent, which is 10x more likely to receive a click than a page in the tenth position.

Without proper SEO, websites generally struggle to get discovered unless somebody searches with a site-specific or branded query. But a full-throttle SEO campaign is resource-intense and never-ending. Instead of tackling all 200 ranking factors, I suggest you focus on the following eight areas of improvement. These tasks are among the most important ranking factors and can significantly improve your website’s chances of ranking well:

1. Secure your site with HTTPS
2. Make your site mobile-friendly
3. Improve page load speed
4. Produce quality content
5. Include the correct schema markup
6. Promote your site on social platforms
7. Establish a strong local SEO strategy
8. Earn quality backlinks

You can learn the high-level concepts for most of these ranking factors with a beginner-friendly SEO guide from OptinMonster. In the steps below, I’ll walk you through what you need to do to establish a strong foothold in SEO and set yourself up for success by implementing these steps.

Step One: Sign Up for Google Search Console

Sign up for Google Search Console (GSC), a free tool from Google to monitor Google traffic and search engine rankings and discover any technical website errors. Search Console also lets you submit any new web pages, sitemaps, and robots.txt to Google’s web index. It’s an invaluable SEO tool.

There are a lot of features, tips, and tricks to Search Console. You can learn the ins and outs of the tool from Backlinko, which has one of the most comprehensive and user-friendly GSC guides available. Ahrefs also has a great GSC guide in case you want a second option.

Step Two: Learn Common SEO Terms and Concepts

SEO is full of niche terms and concepts. Moz has a great guide that covers the most important SEO terms you should know.

Step Three: Secure Your Website with HTTPS

HTTPS is a must for any website with forms, e-commerce, donations, or other privacy vulnerabilities. Plus, HTTPS is a vital SEO ranking factor.

If you don’t have knowledge of website encryption and server configuration, setting up HTTPS can be a bit intimidating. The multi-step process requires coordinating with different parties, and a lot of the steps simply sound confusing. Fortunately, SmashingMagazine has a robust guide to swapping your website from HTTP to HTTPS. Portent does as well, if you want more information on HTTPS migration.

Step Four: Optimize for Mobile

Mobile traffic continues to overtake desktop traffic for most websites, which means nonprofits must provide an excellent mobile experience. 

In 2021, mobile users made more than half of all web traffic to nonprofit websites, with 54 percent of users visiting on a mobile device and 46 percent on a desktop computer.¹ 

However, despite mobile visitors providing more total site traffic, desktop users continue to out-donate mobile users. The average donation made on a desktop device was $75, while mobile users donated an average of $46.¹

The difference is often attributed to user intent (why someone visits your website) and an unsatisfactory mobile experience. Designing a seamless mobile experience for users is crucial for SEO and satisfied donors and volunteers. 

In September 2020, Google implemented its “mobile-first indexing” rule. The rule means that Google’s web crawlers look at a website’s mobile experience before its desktop experience and then rate the website accordingly, with mobile being heavily weighted. 

Below are a few different guides that cover everything you need to know. Some of the guides have varying strategies, but all of them are viable, so choose which ones best align with your resources:

• Mobile Optimization Learning Center — Moz
• Mobile SEO: The Definitive Guide — Backlinko
• The DIY Mobile SEO Guide: How to Be Mobile-First in 2020 — OptinMonster

When you’re done with the changes to your website, remember to double-check if your site is mobile-friendly with Google’s free tool.

Step Five: Increase Site Speed

Now that your website is mobile-friendly, the next task is to make sure everything loads fast, particularly images. As we discuss in the social media section, mobile users are impatient and bounce from websites that take more than three seconds to fully load.

Portent’s ultimate guide to site speed will cover everything you need to know, starting with the basics and transitioning into more advanced techniques.

Step Six: Sign Up for Moz Keyword Explorer

SEO tools are invaluable for an SEO campaign, but they’re generally expensive. We suggest you sign up for Moz Keyword Explorer because they offer a version of the tool that lets you search for keyword volume and difficulty for a few keywords every day, for free.

If your organization is diving deeper into its SEO efforts, we suggest you either purchase a subscription to MOZ or consider similar SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush. Both tools also have free versions, but you run into the paywall faster than with Moz Keyword Explorer.

Step Seven: Perform Keyword Research

Keyword research determines what words, phrases, and topics people search for online. You’ll use this information to determine what content to write and how you write it. Learning how to do keyword research for the first time can quickly get overwhelming. Fortunately, keyword research is a bit like riding a bike; once you’ve done it once, it’s easier the next time.

Backlinko has the best keyword research guide I’ve read. It’s up-to-date, beginner-friendly, and covers almost everything you need to know. Give yourself at least two hours to read the guide and perform your first round of research. If you don’t like the Backlinko guide, Moz also has an excellent option.

While you read the guide, keep in mind that you’ll also want to focus on local keywords to target people directly in your community. These folks will use location-focused keywords, such as “animal shelter near me” or “at-risk teen mentoring in Seattle.”

In addition to the techniques and strategies you’ll learn in the Backlinko or Moz guides, I recommend you perform local keyword research using a local-focused tool such as Bright Local or Grepword’s hyper local tool. Neither of these tools is completely free, but Bright Local does offer a free trial, and Grepword’s basic plan is $15 a month. Both tools provide insights about niche, local keywords, and their search volume, which many of the larger keyword tools don’t track.

Below are two additional free keyword research and SEO tools to help you:

• Answer The Public — Learn what people search for online and how they phrase questions.
• CanIRank — Dissolve the convoluted aspects of keyword difficulty and discover how difficult it is for your website to rank for a term.

Step Eight: Identify Where to Incorporate Keywords

After you’ve decided on the keywords you want to use, you need to either write copy using these terms or strategically insert the keywords into existing content. If you’re adding keywords to existing content, you should have identified those pages in the keyword research stage.

There are two crucial rules for inserting keywords:

1. The keywords must appear natural. Don’t force a keyword into a sentence where it doesn’t naturally fit. It’s obvious to readers and search engines, and neither will appreciate it.
2. Avoid keyword stuffing. Don’t shoehorn keywords repetitively in the copy. Doing so can negatively affect your site’s search rankings, or cause your content to be removed from search listings altogether. There is no rule of thumb for the number of times a keyword should be used. Again, the goal is to make sure the writing sounds natural.

Step Nine: Monitor Your Results

The reason digital marketing is successful is that you can monitor everything. Data is King. But to ascend to the throne, you need to collect that data and understand it.

You’ll combine what you learned about Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track if your SEO efforts are successful. The best SEO metrics to monitor are:

• Impressions
• Organic Sessions
• Organic Conversions
• Organic Click-Through Rate
• Pageviews
• Time on Page
• Bounce Rate
• Topic and Keyword Rankings
• Share of Voice
• Backlinks
• Page Load Speed
• Number of Pages Indexed
• Crawl Errors
• Moz Domain Authority

Read Portent’s blog post, How to Measure SEO Performance: Vital Metrics & KPIs to learn more about these metrics, how you measure them, and why.

Step 10: Build Backlinks

Backlinks (when somebody links to your website from theirs) from authoritative websites are a positive ranking factor and help people discover your content and brand. Generally, nonprofits have an easier time earning backlinks because people are more willing to link to nonprofit sites than for-profit business sites.

Link building is an enormous part of the SEO industry, and there are dozens of different tactics to try. I linked two of my favorite guides below, but you likely won’t need to put much effort into acquiring links beyond the following three steps:

1. Ask local news organizations that cover your cause, events, or organization to provide a link back to your website. A link to the home page, about page, or cause-focused content are often the best options.
2. When you publish a high-quality blog post or educational resource, ask other websites that discuss similar topics to link to your blog article.
3. Produce quality content that follows the steps in the content strategy and SEO sections. If you invest your time and resources to make useful, quality content and it begins ranking for relevant keywords, you’ll naturally acquire backlinks.

Link building guides for more information:

• Off-Page SEO 101: The Essence of Ninja Marketing
• The Noob Friendly Guide To Link Building — Ahrefs

Optional Step 11: Set Up Google My Business

If your nonprofit organization services the local community, you need to sign up for a Google My Business (GMB) account. GMB is a free tool from Google that improves local rankings and visibility on desktop and mobile.

The platform lets you manage how your business appears in Google’s Knowledge Panel sidebar. Through GMB, you can display your nonprofit’s name, physical location, and hours. It also lets you monitor and reply to user reviews.For setting up GMB using best practices, I recommend HubSpot’s beginner-friendly GMB guide. Afterward, look at Google’s advanced tips to optimize your local online presence further.

Optional Step 12: Give Your Developer Our SEO for Developers Guide

If your organization has access to a web developer, Portent has a comprehensive guide for developers to execute on the SEO needs you’ll bring them. If you don’t have a developer and are running into technical roadblocks when trying to implement my recommendations, you might find some solutions in the guide, too.

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And That’s A Wrap

At the beginning of this guide, you may have been reluctant to dip your toes into the previously murky waters of digital marketing. You still might be, and that’s O.K. After all, digital marketing requires a lot of time—a resource nonprofits always need more of.

But if you decide to dive into the deep end, I hope the steps you read illuminate the depths of what you need to accomplish to build a digital presence from the ground up. And if you have the resources to implement the techniques and strategies I discuss, please dedicate that time and energy. The investment pays off, and you’ll be in a better position to fight for the causes you care about. If you don’t have the resources to set up your NGO’s digital strategy, contact us. Portent provides pro-bono work for one to two nonprofit organizations each year.

Quick and Dirty Resource List

Analytics

• Sign up for Google Analytics
• Set up your website as a property in Google Analytics
• Create your first Google Analytics reporting view
• Add the analytics tracking tag to your website
• Configure a Destination Goal in Google Analytics
• Get Google Tag Manager
• Track third-party conversion pages in Google Tag Manager
• Enroll in the free Google Analytics Academy
• Sign up for Hotjar

Content Strategy

• Define your website’s goals
• Create a customer journey map
• How to decide what goes in the navigation
• How to write descriptive navigation labels
• Make sure your navigation is mobile-friendly and responsive
• Learn donation form best practices
• Optimize the footer
• Hubspot’s Guide to Content Creation
• How to Fill an Editorial Calendar
• The Best Content Research Tools
• Choose content KPIs to evaluate
• Determine how often you want to audit content
• How to set up a 301 redirect

PPC

• Sign up for Google Ads
• Join Google Ads Grants
• Enroll in Google’s free paid advertising academy
• Download the desktop editor program
• Use Google Ads’ keyword planner
• Understand keyword volume
• Read the PPC keyword research guide
• Learn how to create PPC landing pages
• Learn remarketing techniques
• Discover PPC ad copy best practices
• Publish the Google Ads campaigns
• Why Your Average Cost Per Click is So High and How to Fix It
• Improve Your Quality Scores With These Simple Tips
• 6 A/B Tests for PPC You Have to Try
• Funnel-Based PPC Account Strategy: An Overview

Social Media Advertising

• Sign up for Facebook’s Social Good program
• Learn more about each social media platform and the types of ads you can use
• Build a brand persona
• Learn common social media advertising goals
• Install Instagram’s donation button and stickers
• Determine ad budget — small nonprofits
• Determine ad budget — medium-sized nonprofits
• Establish and measure social media campaign KPIs
• Choose the campaign length
• Design and optimize a mobile landing page
• Improve your site speed
• 9 Tips to Write the Best Facebook Ads Ever
• 6 Tips for Writing Social Media Ad Copy That Converts
• 7-Step Social Media Advertising Strategy to Better Performing Ads
• Choose a social media CMS

SEO

• Sign up for Google Search Console
• Learn how to use GSC from Backlinko and Ahrefs
• Learn SEO terms and concepts
• Swap your website from HTTP to HTTPS
• HTTPS migration guide
• Moz Mobile Optimization Learning Center
• Mobile SEO: The Definitive Guide — Backlinko
• The DIY Mobile SEO Guide: How to Be Mobile-First in 2020 – OptinMonster
• Run Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
• Implement steps from the ultimate guide to site speed
• Sign up for Moz Keyword Explorer
• Backlinko keyword research guide
• Moz keyword research guide
• Bright Local’s keyword research tool
• Grepword’s hyper local tool
• Answer The Public keyword research tool
• CanIRank keyword research tool
• How to Measure SEO Performance: Vital Metrics & KPIs
• Off-Page SEO 101: The Essence of Ninja Marketing
• The Noob Friendly Guide To Link Building — Ahrefs
• Sign up for a Google My Business (GMB) account
• Understanding Google’s Knowledge Panel sidebar
• HubSpot’s beginner-friendly GMB guide
• Google’s advanced GMB tips
• A Developer’s Guide To SEO

Sources

Studies cited in this guide:

1. 2022 M+R Benchmarks Study

2. Blackbaud 2021 charitable giving report

The post How to Build Nonprofit Digital Marketing Plans and Strategies in 2023 appeared first on Portent.

We often think of audits as something to do at the start of our work in an account during the onboarding process. In this post, I’ll lobby for the benefits of more consistent quarterly or semi-annually audits as a way to step back from the day-in, day-out management grind to find gaps in performance or areas for expansion to help boost overall performance.

For the account manager, this can be difficult. Difficult to find the time. And difficult when you are already so used to what is in the account. At Portent, we solve this by having different account managers less familiar with the client conduct the audit and present it to the owner as a fresh set of ideas.

However you are conducting your audit, here are some helpful tips to help elevate your Google Ads account.

What Is a Google Ads Account Audit?

Google Ads audits are an in-depth review of the account setup, performance, and opportunity gaps. The PPC landscape is changing rapidly, and new performance data flows daily. This means there is always something new to do. If you don’t stop for a health check at regular intervals, it can be hard to see the forest through the trees as you work to develop a strategy, not just manage an account. 

How to Conduct a Google Ads Account Audit

Google Ads has shifted over the years. Ten years ago, account managers spent significant time managing keyword bids manually. Over time, Google has become more and more automated. This is a good thing! Automation frees up time to think and work strategically while spending less time doing busy work. With that time, here are some areas to focus on when auditing an account that will help you develop and improve your paid strategy. 

[Step 1]: Review Goals

Take stock of what the goals of the account are. Is it leads or transactions? Are there specific ROAS targets? You cannot audit an account effectively without understanding the KPIs and goals the account is aiming for. 

Be realistic. Your account may have several goals. Everyone’s goal is to make more money. But driving revenue might be the end goal when there are softer goals along the way, like brand awareness, traffic, or driving high-funnel MQLs. 

Optimizing to just a few low-funnel goals like transactions will falsely tell you as you audit that some areas of the account are underperforming when they are just aiming at a different goal.

[Step 2]: Review Conversion Tracking

Once we have goals and KPIs to support those goals, start your auditing by reviewing your Google Ads conversion tracking setup. Does your tracking empower you to gauge where you are being effective and where to optimize? 

Some things specifically to audit are:

How is the account recording conversions? 

To future-proof your conversion setup and ensure you accurately track conversions, you should use the Google Global Site Tag. Importing UA goals from Google Analytics will become impossible in Summer 2023.

Are you tracking all actions on your landing page?

If your goal is form-fills on your landing page, tracking that is obvious. If there are other potential actions on the page (phone calls, video plays, newsletter sign-up, etc.), you should be tracking those as trust signals to Google that people are engaging with your landing page and, therefore, their click had some value.

Do you know the value of your conversions?

If you know that a form fill is, on average, worth about $100, tell that to Google. Assign that as a value. And for the other actions I mentioned above, assign relative values. A newsletter sign-up is very likely worth less…but not zero. Decide what these actions on your landing page are worth so Google’s automation can know what you know and deliver more value. 

Advanced conversion setup

If you can provide Google with closed-loop reporting, meaning going beyond tracking a lead and following that lead through a sale, your account should have offline conversion tracking. Google also has a feature called Enhanced Conversions that helps track conversions more accurately using first-party data. Check your conversion actions for availability to enable it. 

Accurate conversion data powers everything in your account; many parts to follow will be difficult to implement effectively without it. Once you have your tracking tightened up, it’s time to look in the account for optimization opportunities. 

[Step 3]: Identify Areas for Optimization Within the Existing Account

Account optimization is an ongoing and neverending process. Because of that, it can be hard to commit to larger daily wholesale changes. Audits can help with that. Here are a few areas to look for those larger, extra impactful optimizations. 

Campaign Budget Optimization

Budget distribution and utilization have a significant impact on overall performance. Is your account spending the right amount? 

We often take the budget we are given as law. Instead of taking what you are given, review the data and advocate for the budget to deliver the most value. You may not be able to get more budget immediately, but if you can make a compelling data-driven argument for a budget change, the decision-makers should listen. 

To make that argument, look at metrics like

• Search Lost IS (budget)
• Display Lost IS (budget)
• Conversion metrics like Cost/Conversion and Conversion Value/Cost
• Campaign Budget Simulator 

Beyond your overall budget, review whether the best-performing campaigns are getting the right f budget. Does the budget limit some high performers? If your low-funnel campaigns are converting well, but are limited, look to advocate for more budget rather than stealing from top-of-funnel campaigns. When optimizing budget, we do not want to steal from Peter to pay Paul, but instead, advocate for a healthy budget distribution between strategies that maximizes return. 

Ad Group Relevancy

Within each ad group, it’s important to review the relevancy between the keywords, ad copy, and final URL landing pages. Over time during ongoing management, this can often get blurred. Strong Ad Groups result in strong Quality Scores.

Each ad group should contain a centralized theme with core keywords, ads, and landing pages relating to a singular theme.

If you can identify multiple themes within any of those segments (keywords, ads, landing pages), your ad group should probably be broken up into smaller groupings.

Keyword Match Types

Within each active ad group, it’s worth looking at not just individual keyword performance but keyword performance grouped by match type. Segment your keyword by match type to better understand how much spend is being distributed between match types and their relative performance. Are you relying too heavily on a match type that is underperforming?

Search Term Report

As you review your keyword match types, review the search term reports by ad group. Are they clean? Are the search terms triggering your ads appropriate for the keywords in your ad group? Are you cannibalizing other ad groups or strategies? 

This is also a great place to find new keywords, potentially entire ad groups, and negative keywords. Look to make larger changes from trends (like developing a new negative keyword list that can apply to many campaigns) rather than just finding one-off optimizations. 

Landing Pages

Auditing landing pages is an entirely different activity than auditing the Google Ads account, but an important one. Depending on landing page performance and Quality Scores, you may uncover a larger project when taking a closer look at your landing pages. 

For this audit, look at a few specific things to start understanding if you need larger changes. 

The Content

Landing page messaging should match not just your ad copy but the user intent of the person searching your keywords. If that user searches informationally and the landing page messaging is a very low funnel (Get a Demo Now!), they may be put off. To increase conversion rate and engagement, align your user intent, landing page messaging, and call-to-action.  

Ask yourself:

1. What do we want the user to do?
2. What does the user want to do based on the ad they clicked?
3. What on the landing page makes it easier/harder for them to do this?
4. What information does a user need to make that decision? 

Another good technique is doing user research, even ad hoc, among third parties. Ask others to look at the page and get feedback on whether it is clear, appears trustworthy, and where they think they should click next. To get more scientific, use a tool like Usability Hub to run actual user research.

The Design

Determine if the design of the page helps or hurts the bounce rate. The page should be easy to read, the colors should have correct contrast, and the page should follow web accessibility guidelines. 

The Page Performance

Page speed and some aspects of the backend page infrastructure will affect the conversion rate. Run your page through tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to learn where the page needs help from a developer. 

Again, auditing landing pages is its own practice. But an impactful one on your Google Ads account performance. Look here for more landing page best practices.

[Step 4]: Look for New Opportunities

As you finish auditing what is already in the account, shift focus to what the account is missing. This is often the hard part for an account manager who spends time in the account daily. 

Utilize the marketing funnel

A trap during day-to-day management is to shift too much attention and money to the strongest CPA or ROAS campaigns. That will drive the best results in the short term, but it needs to be more scalable. Your account should target users throughout the entire marketing funnel. 

Have a plan. Lay out the marketing funnel (awareness, interest, desire, action) and where your campaigns fall into each. Understanding how your campaigns and landing pages align with your budget, so using a full-funnel approach will yield better results. 

You should look for opportunities to fill in the gaps during the process. You may learn that 90% of your budget is going to very low funnel spending, and you need to expand higher in the funnel. This may lead to tests into video, Discovery Ads, Performance Max, display prospecting, and more. 

Keyword Research

Doing a deep dive keyword research exercise is a great way to uncover new opportunities. The keyword landscape is changing all the time. You may find new keyword opportunities in your account through the search term reports. Still, you will likely find more new opportunities outside of using keyword research tools or while doing competitive research. 

Use Analytics

Google Analytics should drive many of our optimization decisions. It can provide much deeper insights into the site and fuel larger PPC decisions that will affect the long-term direction of the account. 

[Step 5]: Collaborate with the Full Marketing Strategy

Similarly, the account should have a full-funnel approach as we look outside the world of Google Ads. PPC does not work in a vacuum. Talk with your client, stakeholders within the business, and the other digital marketing teams. 

Interviews with salespeople and product managers can help you understand what customers are looking for and how they search for things. You may uncover new keywords, ad copy ideas, or issues with your CTA. All of which will inform your PPC strategy and budget investment overall. 

Work with the SEO and Content team. Organic and paid share the same SERP. Collaborate so you can blend your strategies into one cohesive search strategy. PPC and SEO can work together to own the SERP or supplement each other at times when, for example, the CPC for a keyword is too high, so developing new organic content to rank can help the business. 

Final Thoughts

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, especially if the account you’re managing is one you’ve owned for years. Deep dive audits are a great solution to this problem as you aim to keep the larger strategy in mind and find new things to test continually. 

Let us know if you are looking for a fresh set of eyes for your account. Sometimes a third party can be just what an account needs to innovate and avoid getting stale.

The post Google Ads Audits: Why They Matter and How to Conduct Them appeared first on Portent.

Website content is very much alive and requires ongoing maintenance. Even if you think your content is in tip-top shape, there are tons of benefits you can glean from an audit.

But before we dive into reasons why you may need a content audit, let’s start with a quick recap of what a content audit entails..

What is a Content Audit?

A content audit is a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of website content that helps us better understand what’s working and what may be hindering content performance.

A content audit may look at behavioral trends, organic search visibility, and social engagement. An audit could also shed light on things like content relevance, accuracy, and readability. 

Content audit findings help determine content opportunities and the steps to take toward content optimization.

When to do a Content Audit?

A content audit may feel like a heavy lift, especially for websites that have large content inventories. That said, a content audit may unveil opportunities that could help regain your competitive edge, improve user engagement, and generate more leads and sales.

And while we encourage our clients to do content audits regularly, there are several instances where content audits are an absolute must. 

Your Organic Traffic is Down

Many reasons can contribute to a dip in organic traffic. The rise of new and existing competitors, internal website changes, and Google algorithm updates are amongst the most obvious.

And while some traffic variation is expected, major traffic losses over long periods of time can be detrimental to your business. 

To better understand why traffic may be down, take a look at your Google Search Console (GSC) and see if you can spot any major drops in impressions (how often your site appears in Google’s search results) or average rankings.

Once you’re in GSC, go to Performance then Search results. Then, select Total Impressions and Average Position, leaving Total Clicks and Average CTR unchecked. Next, change the date range to display a comparison period over the last three months. This time frame will help you identify glaring red flags.

From this view, you’ll be able to analyze what search queries are responsible for the dip in your organic traffic and the landing pages associated with them. If certain pages are not ranking as well as they use to, you should run them through a content audit.

GSC aside, you can use tools like STAT, Ahrefs, or Semrush to monitor changes in your keyword performance. While these tools are not free, they’re a phenomenal resource and a huge time saver.

Your Content is Out of Date

Google prefers useful and relevant content. Having fresh and up-to-date content on your website plays a big role in this. If you haven’t updated a piece of content in over two years, keyword rankings and organic traffic will start to dwindle. 

Content updates are especially important for websites that want to be authoritative in their space. To be authoritative, you must be relevant. And to be relevant, you must have an ongoing conversation about what content you need to update or retire.

Updating older content can be more beneficial than creating new content. Even if the older content isn’t ranking well for its target keywords, there’s a good chance it’s ranking for something, and you’re not starting from scratch. Older content may also have backlinks, which give content credibility and a competitive edge. 

But don’t just take my word for it. Check out our study on the benefits of refreshing old blog posts. Whether you rewrite the content from scratch or make minor updates, content edits can help you rank better in organic search.

You’re Out of Content Ideas

It’s not entirely unusual for companies to feel as though they’ve said all there is to say about their brand, product, or service. After all, how much content could you possibly produce about air conditioners?

If you are struggling to come up with new content ideas, content audits can help you get a better understanding of what you’ve written about. Once you have this information, spotting content gaps becomes much easier. 

You’re Adding a New Product or Service

When adding new product or service pages, you should be mindful of how these pages flow with the rest of your site ecosystem. Regardless of whether this update is core to the entirety of your business model or another variation of something already existing, you need to ensure that the new information fits in flawlessly.

If you don’t quite know where to start, think about the user journey and ask yourself the following questions:

• When visitors arrive on the new landing page, how are they getting there?
• Does the path make sense? Or do you need to add more copy to help the pages flow together?
• If a visitor arrives on the page from organic search, are the contents of the page sufficient enough for them to take action?

To answer these questions fully, you must thoroughly understand your content inventory and should, therefore, start with a content audit.

You’re Going Through a Site Migration

Whether you’re finally moving your site from HTTP to HTTPS, experiencing subdomain or subfolder changes, moving to a new server, or undergoing a site redesign, you should always start with a content audit.

The key to a smooth site migration is planning. Before you start, you must know what you’re going to migrate and when. A content audit is your opportunity to get organized and eliminate any redundant or trivial content on your site. 

Think of the site migration as a move from one house to another. Tossing random belongings into a box may help the move go by faster, but this approach will result in more work in the long run. 

Your Competitors are Outranking You

New content from your competitors can emerge overnight. Yesterday you were ranking first for a target keyword, and today, a competitor you didn’t even know existed is outranking you.

Competitors get ahead because they do their research. In other words, they audit you. And once they know what’s worked well for your site, they have an easier time competing with you.

You must beat them at their game to keep your spot in SERPs. First, you’ll need to do a content audit of your website. Then, you’ll want to run the same audit for your competitor. While this can be a manual process, tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush mentioned earlier can cut your labor by half.

In doing so, you’ll have a better understanding of what they’re doing that you’re not and how to fill the most glaring gaps.

You Established a New Voice and Tone

Think of your voice and tone as your brand’s personality. It’s how you express your value proposition, and it’s key to the type of audience you want to attract.

If you’re a law office, or a hospital, your tone and voice will likely be assertive and informative. Most importantly, it will be the exact opposite of, say, a comedy club.

We’ve seen brands get overly caught up in their product or service, neglecting their voice and tone. Sometimes, it could take months to years before a company has a clear direction. Does that sound familiar? If so, check out Portent’s Tone of Voice Generator tool.

Once you have a clear direction for your voice and tone, you’ll need to do a content audit to ensure you use a consistent voice and tone throughout the site. If there’s one thing that’s more important than content quality, it’s content consistency.

Don’t let your audience think, “wait, what did I just read?” 

Final Thoughts

In summary, a content audit should be an ongoing part of your content strategy efforts. Your content should never be stagnant or more than two years out of date. And it must be audited anytime you add a new product or service to your website.

An audit is especially important when making significant changes to your site. And through it all, your content should always have the same look and feel.

So iterate on your current work and leverage old content topics to create new ones. If you don’t, know that your competitors will find a way to use your top-performing content against you.

The post Why You Need Content Audits in 2023 and When to Do Them appeared first on Portent.

On the heels of the news that Google is postponing the retirement of Universal Analytics for 360 customers until 2024, I can’t help but feel a little vindicated. It validates a lot of chatter among analytics professionals (myself included) in the industry that feel Google Analytics 4 (GA4) was launched half-baked. GA4 is still undeniably missing vital functionality for marketers and product owners to make decisions about their apps and websites.

Today, though, we’ll look at possible feature additions that could bring GA4 up to snuff and assuage some organizations’ fears about adopting it.

Unburying Event Parameters in the Interface

One of GA4’s greatest strengths is its new event-based data model and the ability to attach rich parameters to any custom events you send into the platform. But, as of my writing this, the parameters are buried in a drop-down menu in the interface instead of accessible in the main report data tables.

The ability to click on an event name and get a table with the event name and an event count with parameters, similar to how custom dimensions are laid out, would be a powerful way to bring this data to the forefront and play to GA4’s strengths.

Add Date Range Granularity Options Back to Charts

Part of what made charts in Universal Analytics powerful is that you could easily toggle between date range granularities – hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, etc. – in the top right corner of each chart.

In GA4, charts will automatically default to daily granularity if you’ve selected a week or month’s worth of data in the date range selector. Choose anything more than that, from 90 days up to a year, and the granularity changes to weekly. You’re locked into those views even if it would be helpful to see the data another way.

Make Page Path the Default Dimension for the Pages and Screens Report

Historically, the biggest challenge in analyzing Universal Analytics’ content performance was that Page Paths/URLs containing query parameters would generate a new row in the report instead of rolling up performance for each page under a single row. 

GA4 seems to have largely solved this problem, but now the page path dimension is hidden in the Pages & Screens report. For analytics and marketers working on sites with very similar Title Tag templates, Page Titles can often be a misleading way of viewing content performance.

Create More Connective Tissue Between GA4 and BigQuery

Again, one of the inherent advantages of GA4 is the ability to warehouse the raw event data in BigQuery. And while GA4 purports to offer unsampled reporting in their interface, several reports are still subject to thresholding due to high cardinality. 

Thresholding, like data sampling in Universal Analytics, sows seeds of mistrust in the data with stakeholders, which is a huge non-starter for companies of all sizes when considering an analytics tool. 

In those instances, it would be amazing to be prompted to view the same data in BigQuery and analyze that in Looker Studio to overcome some thresholding warnings in seconds.

Liberate Attribution Model Comparison from the Advertising Section

Businesses of all sizes are getting more sophisticated around attribution and incrementality discussions to evaluate the performance of marketing channels. While GA4 took one big step toward solving this by allowing you to change your default attribution model on the property level, it still buries model comparison tools deep in the advertising section of GA4.

Model comparison functionality was also cordoned into the Multi-Channel Funnels section of Universal Analytics, which kept it from widespread adoption (and even broader awareness) for years. It deserves better!

A massive improvement would be a way to toggle model comparison whenever conversion counts are present in a reporting table.

Provide a Public Roadmap for GA4 with Upvoting/Downvoting Features

The proposed additions above would solve many problems I have with GA4 and get the product out of its way, in my opinion. 

But the largest issue people have with the rollout of GA4 and the sunsetting of Universal Analytics is that Google has done a terrible job communicating what they’re working on to improve the product and why. This gives the perception (whether true or false) that Google isn’t listening to its core user base in making development decisions on GA4.

Even with Google Marketing Platform partners like us, there’s been very little communication outside of a monthly newsletter around feature additions.

Google could solve this today by going public with its roadmap and letting the end users have a say in building features. Otherwise, agencies like us will be left defending an indefensible product.

The post Things I Wish Google Would Do With GA4 appeared first on Portent.

This year marked my seventh year with Portent. We’re a different agency now: we’ve expanded our services and grown our team. Yet, what still brings me the most joy each fall is reflecting on the lasting partnerships we’ve built with some pretty amazing client contacts and celebrating the KPIs we’ve helped them achieve. 

Portent is still growing after 27 years, while maintaining its focus on teaching and partnership with brands, because of the clients like you who test, learn, laugh, and collaborate with us. 

We take pride in being an agency of consultants that share our honest opinions about digital marketing trends, as well as the pivots and roadmap ahead for websites. 

This year, the brands we work with brought us more requests for site migration support, information architecture research, social customer experience plans, content hub strategies, competitive keyword research, paid media and landing page optimizations, event strategies, and YouTube influencer management. We’ve also learned more about GA4, Looker Studio, and new tools we can utilize to provide closed-loop analytics for organizations. All in all, it’s been a challenging year, which we love!

As we approach the holidays, know that we’ll be by your side to help you end the year strong and prepare for 2023. We look forward to: 

• Celebrating progress toward your annual business goals
• Seeing your holiday Zoom backgrounds 
• Brainstorming and setting new KPIs together for your digital strategy
• Swapping stories about time with family and friends
• Sharing recommendations that will improve your performance in Q1-Q2 2023
• And, talking about our favorite holiday traditions

We hope when you think of your Portent team this season, we are like that cousin you’re excited to catch up with, who will tell you if you have some food in your teeth yet also help you strategize how to sneak one of each type of dessert. 

From all of us at Portent, thank you for your continued partnership and for allowing us to create positive change in your digital strategy and drive success in your business. We wish you a very happy holiday season. 

The post A Thank You From Everyone at Portent appeared first on Portent.

The one topic I’ve seen Google and SEOs disagree on the most is the best place to host content – subdomains or subdirectories. SEOs say subdomains aren’t optimal, and Google says it doesn’t matter because they can read and understand your content wherever it is. Google even put out a video to clarify the matter, but no one was satisfied with their answer.

So what’s the disconnect? While it’s true that Google has no problem understanding content on subdomains, SEOs say that content doesn’t perform as well in Google’s search engine. Google disagrees and says that subdomains aren’t a problem, yet the SEO industry continues to publish case study after case study that refutes Google’s claim.

We should host our content on our primary domains – unless we have a very good reason not to. Even if Google turns out to be correct, and it doesn’t matter for performance, organizing your content in subdirectories on your primary domain is the better decision for your infrastructure and long-term SEO.

What’s the Difference Between a Subdomain and a Subdirectory?

If you’re given the choice between hosting a blog for your website at “blog.brand.com” and “www.brand.com/blog,” will the choice matter? Is there a big difference between putting “blog” at the beginning of a URL instead of the end?

There is a difference, but it’s subtle and goes back to the early internet.

Subdomain

In the early days of the web, a single server could host multiple services and they would be assigned to different subdomains. It was conventional for system administrators to host additional services on subdomains, like “mail.brand.com” for the email server or “ftp.brand.com” for filesystem access. 

Even “www.brand.com” is a subdomain, but we don’t usually think of it that way because the service we use most of the time is the website, but it does have a purpose. 

Subdomains should be used to organize services that are separate from each other but still part of the entity that owns the root domain (“domain.com”). They’re still used this way, even for separating websites owned by the same brand.

Subdirectory (or Subfolder)

Subdirectories, also called “subfolders,” were originally for allowing users to navigate a website according to the file structure of the server hosting the website. Now, most websites store their content in a database and display it to users through a content management system, so the server’s file structure is irrelevant. 

Organizing URLs like a directory as if there were a file structure is still useful because it lets users know “where” they are on a website. It also communicates to users that the content on any given URL is closely related to the subdomain they are on. For example, if the URL for a blog post was “www.brand.com/blog/guides/10-best-blue-widgets” a user could infer that this URL goes to a blog post, in the Guides category, about blue widgets.

The Debate: Subdomain vs. Subdirectory

The debate between using subdirectories or subdomains for organizing content isn’t really about what helps users understand a website. It’s mostly about what will yield the most organic search traffic on Google and other search engines. 

SEOs want to know if a brand’s content is split between two (or more) subdomains, will Google treat the subdomains as separate sites or a single one? 

How Google handles the situation is important. If Google treats subdomains separately, then ranking signals related to expertise, authority, and trust might not be shared between them. 

Based on experiences like this, many SEOs think Google does treat them differently in a way that makes subdirectories generally better for performance.

Google’s Point of View

Google has always treated content separated by subdomains in a way that suits their needs. 

As far back as 2007, Google said that they treated subdomains as separate for one aspect of ranking. However, they found that it led to people abusing how Google handled domain diversity in the SERPs. 

This video by Matt Cutts from 2012 explains why they had to adjust that approach to prevent abuse:

Later in 2017, John Mueller recorded a video stating, “Google Web Search is fine with using either subdomains or subdirectories.” After verifying each subdomain in Search Console, they will be crawled as if they were one website.

The problem with this answer is that it doesn’t address the original question: What’s best for SEO – subdomain or subfolder?

People want to know if separating content by subdomain will make a difference in their rankings, but Google wants us to know that Google’s needs are taken care of either way. But, they also want us to understand that Google doesn’t have a preference and that we should do what’s easiest. I disagree with Google on both points, and I’ll get to why.

SEOs’ Point of View

SEOs want to know three things:

• If Google treats content organized by subdirectories differently than content separated by subdomains
• If there is different treatment, which systems distinguish between them and how they work
• Which configuration is ultimately better for rankings, traffic, and revenue

For the first point, Google wants us to think they treat it all the same, but then they will post stuff like this:

I take this tweet to mean that multiple systems inside of the major parts of Google Search (crawling, indexing, ranking) treat subdirectories and subdomains differently depending on what Google’s needs are. Their helpful content classifier is just one of those systems.

Google doesn’t want us to know which systems do what and how because it makes them vulnerable to abuse. If the Helpful Content Update had a strong impact on rankings, many SEOs would begin testing to see if their content worked better on one domain or several, just like the domain diversity problem Matt Cutts discussed.

Due to Google’s secrecy, the second point is generally not answerable. Someone would have to pick a specific part of Google and determine how to test its reaction to using subdomains to reach a conclusion.

For the third point, many SEOs have consolidated their content into one subdomain and found their overall performance improved. Due to how many case studies have come out, it’s widely believed among SEOs that using subdirectories to organize content is better than subdomains.

From the list of case studies Rand posted, three stand out to me as the most compelling.

The first case study is from Jesse Heap of Janssen. He saw a 40% increase in sessions after moving a blog from a subdomain (blog.pinkcakebox.com) to a subdirectory (www.pinkcakebox.com/blog). 

This type of migration is commonly recommended for company blogs but they rarely limit their changes to just the URLs the blog uses. Usually, marketers will take the opportunity to change the design of the blog or clean up old content, or make some other improvement that doesn’t isolate the URL change. 

Based on the before and after snapshots on Archive.org, the only change Jesse made was migrating the blog, which makes this case study notable. 

The second case study is from Johannes Beus at Sistrix. Using their proprietary SERP visibility metric, they found three clear examples of large brands moving a section of content from a subdomain to a subdirectory with a subsequent improvement in organic visibility. 

The third case study is from Timo Reitnauer of iwantmyname, with an example of moving a blog from a subdirectory to a subdomain – the opposite direction people usually go with a migration. After six months, they found their initial decrease in traffic never improved. 

One factor involved was Google launching their update that gave ranking bonuses to websites using HTTPS, and their new CMS didn’t support HTTPS at the time. However, that update didn’t appear to be big back then. 

The other factor was changing CMS. This migration wasn’t as clean as the example with Pink Cake Box. If iwantmyname didn’t design their new blog as well as their previous one, then a worse design could explain the performance decrease.

Taken with lots of anecdotal evidence over the years, SEOs have good reason to believe that subdirectories tend to perform better than using several subdomains. 

Impact of Subdomains & Subdirectories on SEO

Deciding where to host your content isn’t just about what it communicates to users and how Google treats it in its algorithms. There are also practical day-to-day SEO concerns to consider.

Link Authority and Backlinks

Where would you rather host your content, on two domains with 1,000 backlinks each or one domain with 2,000 backlinks? Which setup would you rather maintain years down the line?

If you’re investing in link building for content that lives on a separate subdomain, you must ensure that the subdomain redirects its URLs after it’s retired. I frequently see great backlinks pointing to forgotten legacy subdomains in clients’ broken backlinks. 

Suppose there are multiple URLs on a subdomain that you need to redirect to several other URLs. In that case, the redirection isn’t as trivial as setting up a DNS record to blanket redirect everything to a single URL. That legacy subdomain must have a web server attached that can handle all those specific redirects. 

International Subdirectories

International websites are usually implemented in three ways: ccTLDs, subdirectories, and subdomains. Subdomains have no upsides over the other two options. ccTLDs aren’t optimal either, but at least they contain a strong signal about how they want to target international users.

Google’s recent update to their URL structure advice in Search Essentials doesn’t even mention subdomains, which is curious.

Using a subdirectory strategy for international websites is something I see more brands using every year. I think they realize the benefits of having everything in one place: one CMS, one development team, better content parity, and easier management of hreflang tags.

Mobile Subdomains

Creating a subdomain to host the mobile version of a website isn’t as popular as it once was, and it’s becoming rarer every day, but they are still out there. 

Wikipedia is a popular example of a website that hasn’t adopted responsive design. They also use subdomains for their international strategy, so they must maintain a mess of subdomains like en.m.wikipedia.org and fr.m.wikipedia.org. 

The future of the web is responsive and mobile-first. It’s the easiest and simplest way to adapt to modern internet usage. Brands that disregard this tend to tack on mobile subdomains that plague their technical teams with problems like:

• Wasted crawl budget and canonicalization issues
• Server-side device detection and redirect handling
• Maintaining content parity between mobile and desktop sites
• Shrinking content and navigation to fit mobile screens

There is no reason not to use responsive design at this point.

Cost

How many websites do you want to pay for? How many web applications do you want your engineers to maintain? Every subdomain you add to your website introduces another hosting environment to your technology stack and all the business concerns that come with it.

A new subdomain could mean additional costs for any of these:

• 3rd party hosting or subscription fees
• Additional SSL certificates or a wildcard certificate
• Developer hours for the subdomain CMS
• Additional colocation space or network hardware

You would also have to manage the subdomain’s login credentials, analytics, security, and webmaster consoles. These headaches add up fast if you have regulatory compliance to worry about.

When to Use a Subdomain? (Occasionally)

There are a few cases where a subdomain makes the most sense for your brand outside of technical necessity. Usually, it’s for a sub-brand or a product substantially different from what the brand normally sells.

If your content satisfies most of these criteria, then you should probably use a subdomain:

• The content or branding isn’t different enough to justify an entirely different domain
• Users would be confused if they navigated between the two content experiences
• The content sells a completely independent product or is part of a portfolio of products

Google itself is pretty good at this. They have developers.google.com, assistant.google.com, cloud.google.com, store.google.com and the list goes on. Each subdomain is an aspect of Google but independent and hosts its own thing.

Another valid case for a subdomain is content that will never need to be indexed by a search engine. Paid landing pages, customer portals, and company intranets are all good examples. 

Customer support and user community sections can stay separate. I don’t think investor information, careers, and user-generated Q&A content will help the sales website rank because the content isn’t relevant to its KPIs.

For example, Getty Images has its Careers (careers.gettyimages.com) and Investor Relations (investors.gettyimages.com) sections on subdomains. The audiences for these sections probably aren’t relevant to selling stock photo licenses.

When to Use a Subdirectory? (Most of the Time, Sometimes With a Reverse Proxy)

The best way to avoid dealing with the subdomain question is to start with a website or CMS that does everything you want on one domain. I often find brands that try to tack on the functionality later because they don’t foresee an upcoming need.

Begin with an infrastructure that will do everything you need. If you need a blog or eCommerce experience, choose a CMS with those built into the app. Or you could even use an extensible CMS, like WordPress or Drupal. Shopify has a lot of SEO quirks, but it’s relatively solid and comes with a few site speed improvements out of the box.

Suppose you already have a website and do need to add functionality your existing infrastructure doesn’t support. A few common additions brands need to make are:

• Their blog
• Ecommerce
• Customer support
• Technical documentation

Usually, the easiest way to attach these to an existing site is to host them on a separate server and map it to a subdomain. However, putting them in a subdirectory is straightforward with a reverse proxy.

A reverse proxy is a way to make other servers accessible through a subdirectory instead of a subdomain. They do a lot more, but their purpose for SEO is mostly that.

Suppose you were adding a blog to your PHP website and hosting it on WordPress. Typically, the easiest way to do this is to map blog.brand.com to the server hosting WordPress, but given how the SEO chorus says, “use a subdirectory!” you ask your engineers to invoke a reverse proxy. 

With that reverse proxy, you can host the blog at www.brand.com/blog, and the reverse proxy will reroute all requests in the /blog subdirectory to the WordPress server instead of the PHP server. 

From Google’s point of view, /blog is part of the www.brand.com website even though that subdirectory serves content from a different server. 

Google Will Keep Its Secrets

I think the major reason Google won’t give us a straight answer about how they treat subdomains is that no single person knows. For a Google spokesperson to begin to answer the question, they would need knowledge of all the parts of Google Search that “care” about subdomains, then investigate each part to see what it does. 

Supposing they did that, how much could they say publicly? It’s vital for Google to prevent abuse by not letting the public know too much about how its systems work. 

I don’t think we’ll ever get a satisfying answer from Google about the topic. Hopefully, they advance to the point where it doesn’t matter how our content is organized, and case studies no longer show a preference. Until then, subdirectories are probably better for your situation.

The post Subdomains vs. Subdirectories: Which Is Better for SEO? appeared first on Portent.