One of the great things about the internet is how you learn how to use it better by using the internet.
Yup.
But given how much information there is out there, it can be nice when someone curates it for you and just gives you the best of the best.
Here are the go-to internet marketing resources we’ve used to learn the trade and that we heartily recommend to others. Bookmark this page because we will update it as we find new ones.
Note: Here’s a video covering the same material as this article, in case reading detailed posts isn’t your cup of tea.
Take a moment to think about why your business has a website in the first place. Your site is not a static brochure that you tell people to go look at; it is a lead-generation machine. Your business’s site should be working for you, bringing in leads, and making your job easier (certainly not harder!). So how do you make your website into an effective tool for churning out valuable leads?
That’s where website analytics tools enter the picture. Website analytics can help you make sure that the site is doing its job — bringing in more clients/customers (or donations/volunteers if you are running a nonprofit). Secondly, analytics can help you identify ways to fine-tune your website so that it can do an even better job. Here are some of the questions that analytics can answer for you:
Your online store needs to work hard for you. You want every potential customer coming through those doors to leave with something. And if they don’t make a purchase — you’ll want to retarget them with relevant content and products. But how can you improve your in-store experience? How can you increase your conversion rates fast — when you’ve only get a few hours, days, or weeks to play with? Here are some quick and effective ways to improve your conversion rates STAT.
Seriously — data is at the heart of every good CRO (conversion rate optimization) strategy, especially in ecommerce. Get to grips with your web analytics and keep pushing for deeper insights. The best way to spend time with your data? Open your data dashboard and investigate the following:
Armed with data that answers these five questions, you should have a pretty good idea of things that you need to focus on. Start by addressing ‘problem pages’, and then replicate strategies that worked on highly converting pages.
You need this same data-driven attitude when it comes to evaluating your marketing campaigns, especially paid ones. Don’t forget to put your in-store conversion rates in context with where your traffic is actually coming from. A store reliant on organic search vs. a store mainly getting traffic through Facebook or Instagram ads will look very different from a data perspective.
Kill the carousel.
The ruling from Peep Laja’s CXL blog is pretty damning: “conversion killers”. It’s been consistently found that scrolling carousels and image sliders are bad for conversions. They confuse users, dilute the brand voice, and create a user-experience nightmare.
A static hero image is a much better way to tell your brand story in an engaging visual way. If, like most people, you struggle to come to a decision on things like this: change your hero image every now and then to spice things up. A seasonal banner or a refresh of your visual identity is always a good idea, as long as you keep your branding consistent.
Confusingly, an image gallery on a product page is actually a good idea — so keep slideshow content to product pages only.
Many businesses we talk to shun Google AdWords because they don’t want to pay for traffic. We generally find that’s because they tried AdWords halfheartedly in the past without following The 10 Commandments of Google AdWords. Oddly enough, though, they’re often willing to pay an SEO agency like us to help them earn organic traffic.
But guess what? Earning clicks from SEO and paying for clicks using Google AdWords are not opposite approaches. The best approach is to use the two, organic and paid traffic, to inform and improve each other. AdWords lets you gain clicks to your website fast, while SEO takes longer and can benefit from the lessons you learn in your AdWords campaigns first.
In this video, we discuss how to use SEO data from Google Search Console to create more strategic Google Ads.
Thanks a million to Social Media Breakfast Madison for hosting us yesterday to speak about “How Should I Be Using Analytics?”
If you need a re-cap or if you missed it, you can check out the video below.
If you’re looking for the slides, you can find them here.
Please share this blog post with anyone you think would find it useful.
Your local business should have a blog; it demonstrates expertise, builds trust with potential customers, and helps you rank higher on search engines.
Maybe you added a “Blog” section to your WordPress site, but there’s nothing living there except the default “Hello World” post. Maybe you started out writing a post every week, but it’s fizzled out because you couldn’t maintain that posting schedule. After all, when you’re running a local business, you’ve got much higher priorities than writing articles, right?
Maybe you never even bothered with the whole blog thing, and you haven’t touched your website since your nephew set it up for you last year. Whatever your situation, we want you to understand that blogging is actually crucial for your business.
This is a guest blog post from our partner Tingalls Graphic Design in Fitchburg, WI. Check them out for inexpensive, great-looking websites!
Ask many small business owners about online ads, and you might hear something like this:
“I tried AdWords, but it just didn’t work for me.”
Or worse still, perhaps they bought ads from Yelp and received little to no return on ad spend (ROAS). Then they threw up their hands despairingly and concluded that Internet ads are no good.
(Protip: Never buy Yelp ads.)
Here’s the thing: most people don’t use AdWords correctly because, admittedly, it’s not 100% intuitive without some understanding of Internet marketing and search engine traffic. Even when you do have a working knowledge of those things, it’s not always simple to maximize AdWords to its full potential.
But on the other hand, if you do use AdWords correctly, it can be a terrific channel. Here’s how to do it right. If Charlton Heston were here today, these are the commandments he would have for you.
It’s not enough to throw up an ecommerce store on a platform like Shopify or WooCommerce and wait for customers and their dollars to roll in. You need to think through how people will get from where they are on their computer to your site so they can even consider buying your products.
Here are our top suggestions for paid ad and organic SEO strategy for ecommerce stores.
You shouldn’t spend money on digital marketing unless you have the proper analytics set up to measure the results. But what if customers aren’t buying something directly from your website like they would on an e-commerce store?
For local businesses, a conversion is usually when a lead contacts them. This can be through:
Luckily, it’s possible to track these website actions. Yes! It can be done with the power of an amazing free tool called Google Tag Manager (GTM).
If Google’s algorithm is proprietary, how do SEO professionals know what factors can help a business optimize for top rankings in the search results? There are a couple different ways.
We can:
Here’s a talk I recently gave at PechaKucha Madison on this subject. It’s a neat format, 20 slides in 20 seconds apiece, that forces you to be concise.
Huge thanks to Wegner CPAs for hosting us at their Wake Up With Wegner event at the Sheraton on John Nolan Drive. We spoke on “How to Measurably Grow Your Business Through Online Search,” touching on pro tips, strategy and tactics for SEO, Google AdWords campaigns and Google Analytics set up and tracking.
Here’s a video re-recording in case you missed or would like to brush up.
What does it take for a hair salon in Madison, WI to appear on the first page of Google?
We analyzed the top known local search engine optimization (SEO) factors to let the businesses currently ranking lower what it would take to earn a spot higher up on the first page.
Here’s an indication of the kind of monthly search volume a phrase like this gets according to Google’s keyword planner: 1300 per month! That’s real money every single month of the year for those who go after it.
Here’s an overview video in which we discuss how ranking higher for popular search engine queries can grow your business. We also describe the top ranking factors SEO companies target to make gains.
Here’s the SlideShare presentation about local SEO we gave on Dec. 14 to SCORE in Madison.
It’s worth questioning whether manual search engine submission is still worth doing. Here’s some information that calls into question the need to manually submit your site to Google and Bing:
“You don’t need to submit your website to search engines because search engines have evolved beyond the point of needing to be directly notified when a new website, or page on a website, is created.”Source: http://www.seomark.co.
uk/submit-website-to-search- engines/#ixzz4T0imBPfD “Since 2001, not only has search engine submission not been required, but has become virtually useless.”
Onsite optimization makes a big difference to your SEO because search engines crawl your site and glean keyword information directly from it. Keyword research is step 1 in a local SEO campaign, and onsite optimization is step 2.
Once you know what keywords to target, you can evaluate your website to see if they are included in strategic places in your website’s HTML. Sometimes this means re-vamping your existing web pages and sometimes this means changing your website structure by creating new pages on your site to target specific keywords.
Your website is one of the few places on the web where you have absolute control over your content online, so we want to take advantage on your home turf!
From the business owner’s perspective, Google Analytics is in the category of incredible stuff that’s free. By placing a short snippet of code on your site, you are able to see how many people come to your website, how they found you (like from SEO or SEM), and what they did once they arrived. Speaking in pre-Google terms, this would be a costly enterprise software suite, not a free service, which it now is.
Now that we have the proper gratefulness for “GA,” let’s talk about what metrics a business owner should focus on in the busy and complicated-looking interface.
Most business owners would avoid setting up shop to sell things people don’t want, yet they regularly plop content and pages on their website with hardly a thought for what their customers want. Keyword research should be your roadmap; let the search data guide how you create your website, from your regular pages to your blog posts. It’s now possible to know the demand for what you offer before you even create it!
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