How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Google Analytics data is used to support tons of important work, ranging from our everyday marketing reporting, all the way to investment decisions. To that end, it’s integral that we’re aware of just how that data works. In this Best of Whiteboard Friday edition, Tom Capper explains how the sessions metric in Google Analytics works, several ways that it can have unexpected results, and as a bonus, how sessions affect the time on page metric (and why you should rethink using time on page for reporting).

Editor’s note: Tom Capper is now an independent SEO consultant. This video is from 2018, but the same principles hold up today. There is only one minor caveat: the words “user” and “browser” are used interchangeably early in the video, which still hold mostly true. Google is trying to further push multi-device users as a concept with Google Analytics 4, but still relies on users being logged in, as well as extra tracking setup. For most sites most of the time, neither of these conditions hold.

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Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Tom Capper. I am a consultant at Distilled, and today I’m going to be talking to you about how sessions work in Google Analytics. Obviously, all of us use Google Analytics. Pretty much all of us use Google Analytics in our day-to-day work.

Data from the platform is used these days in everything from investment decisions to press reporting to the actual marketing that we use it for. So it’s important to understand the basic building blocks of these platforms. Up here I’ve got the absolute basics. So in the blue squares I’ve got hits being sent to Google Analytics.

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I’ve marked P. So we’ve got page view and page view and so on as you’re going around the site. I’ve also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

The job of Google Analytics is to take all this hit data that you’re sending it and try and bring it together into something that actually makes sense as sessions. So they’re grouped into sessions that I’ve put in black, and then if you have multiple sessions from the same browser, then that would be a user that I’ve marked in pink. The issue here is it’s kind of arbitrary how you divide these up.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I’ve got some examples I’m going to go through. But first I’m going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that’s what they’re trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

So in this example, say a supermarket, we enter by a passing trade. That’s going to be our source. Then we’ve got an entrance is in the lobby of the supermarket when we walk in. We got passed from there to the beer aisle to the cashier, or at least I do. So that’s one big, long session with the source passing trade. That makes sense.

In the case of a brick-and-mortar store, it’s not to difficult to divide that up and try and decide how many sessions are going on here. There’s not really any ambiguity. In the case of websites, when you have people leaving their keyboard for a while or leaving the computer on while they go on holiday or just having the same computer over a period of time, it becomes harder to divide things up, because you don’t know when people are actually coming and going.

So what they’ve tried to do is in the very basic case something quite similar: arrive by Google, category page, product page, checkout. Great. We’ve got one long session, and the source is Google. Okay, so what are the different ways that that might go wrong or that that might get divided up?

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

The first and possibly most annoying one, although it doesn’t tend to be a huge issue for some sites, is whatever time zone you’ve set in your Google Analytics settings, the midnight in that time zone can break up a session. So say we’ve got midnight here. This is 12:00 at night, and we happen to be browsing. We’re doing some shopping quite late.

Because Google Analytics won’t allow a session to have two dates, this is going to be one session with the source Google, and this is going to be one session and the source will be this page. So this is a self-referral unless you’ve chosen to exclude that in your settings. So not necessarily hugely helpful.

2. Half-hour cutoff for “coffee breaks”

Another thing that can happen is you might go and make a cup of coffee. So ideally if you went and had a cup of coffee while in you’re in Tesco or a supermarket that’s popular in whatever country you’re from, you might want to consider that one long session. Google has made the executive decision that we’re actually going to have a cutoff of half an hour by default.

If you leave for half an hour, then again you’ve got two sessions. One, the category page is the landing page and the source of Google, and one in this case where the blog is the landing page, and this would be another self-referral, because when you come back after your coffee break, you’re going to click through from here to here. This time period, the 30 minutes, that is actually adjustable in your settings, but most people do just leave it as it is, and there isn’t really an obvious number that would make this always correct either. It’s kind of, like I said earlier, an arbitrary distinction.

3. Leaving the site and coming back

The next issue I want to talk about is if you leave the site and come back. So obviously it makes sense that if you enter the site from Google, browse for a bit, and then enter again from Bing, you might want to count that as two different sessions with two different sources. However, where this gets a little murky is with things like external payment providers.

If you had to click through from the category page to PayPal to the checkout, then unless PayPal is excluded from your referral list, then this would be one session, entrance from Google, one session, entrance from checkout. The last issue I want to talk about is not necessarily a way that sessions are divided, but a quirk of how they are.

4. Return direct sessions

If you were to enter by Google to the category page, go on holiday and then use a bookmark or something or just type in the URL to come back, then obviously this is going to be two different sessions. You would hope that it would be one session from Google and one session from direct. That would make sense, right?

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you’ve got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that’s some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I’ve got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we’ll see how the time on page metric works out.

I want you to bear in mind that, basically, because Google Analytics really has very little data to work with typically, they only know that you’ve landed on a page, and that sent a page view and then potentially nothing else. If you were to have a single page visit to a site, or a bounce in other words, then they don’t know whether you were on that page for 10 seconds or the rest of your life.

They’ve got no further data to work with. So what they do is they say, “Okay, we’re not going to include that in our average time on page metrics.” So we’ve got the formula of time divided by views minus exits. However, this fudge has some really unfortunate consequences. So let’s talk through these scenarios.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there’s a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

However, let’s think about this next example. We’ve got a page view, event 10 seconds later, except this time instead of clicking somewhere else on the site, I’m going to just leave altogether. So there’s no data available, but Google Analytics knows we’re here for 10 seconds.

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That’s how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven’t triggered an event. So we’ve got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that’s how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we’re on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

So that would make some sense. What they actually do, because of this formula, is they end up with 30 seconds. So you’ve got the total time here, which is 30, divided by the number of views, we’ve got 3 views, minus 2 exits. Thirty divided 3 minus 2, 30 divided by 1, so we’ve got 30 seconds as the average across these 3 sessions.

Well, the average across these three page views, sorry, for the amount of time we’re spending, and that is longer than any of them, and it doesn’t make any sense with the constituent data. So that’s just one final tip to please not use average time on page as a reporting metric.

I hope that’s all been useful to you. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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4 Ways to Help Black-Owned Businesses Survive & Thrive Now

By now, everyone knows that Covid-19 is decimating small businesses across the country; fewer are aware that the negative impact of the pandemic has fallen disproportionately on Black businesses. If you’re a Black business owner, that might not come as news, but for many, the recent New York Times analysis of the impact of Covid-19 on Black businesses came as a real shock.

That analysis also acted as something of a wake-up call. Look just a little deeper than the headline figures, as we’ll do in this article, and you’ll see that the analysis reveals some troubling aspects of the way that we in America do business. Specifically, it shows that the kind of community-based commerce that our country was founded on is in danger of disappearing; instead of buying goods from community stores, shoppers now increasingly buy them online, often from giant corporations like Amazon.

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at why Black-owned businesses have been hit so hard by the pandemic, how they can survive, and what we can do to help. And, if you’re a business owner yourself, we’ll share some resources for how you can bring more attention to your business and drive more sales this holiday season. 

Unbalanced effects

First, let’s take a look at how the pandemic has affected Black business owners. The figures make for sobering reading. In research reported in the NYT, more than 40%of Black business owners reported they weren’t working in April – that is, during the time when businesses were feeling the worst of the pandemic’s economic consequences. Only 17% of white small business owners said the same. These figures come from an analysis of government data by Robert Fairlie of the University of California, Santa Cruz. 

The Times article goes on to sum up the ways in which Covid-19 has disproportionately affected Black businesses, and how this builds on discrimination that these same businesses already face. For example, Black people are more than twice as likely as other Americans to die of the coronavirus, and they are much more likely to be victims of police violence.

From the perspective of someone who works in tech, however, there are also some very interesting implications of these data. Look a little deeper, and you’ll see that the primary way in which struggling Black businesses are seeking to weather this storm is through cutting back on their social media marketing and their budgets for other digital marketing efforts. This makes their businesses less visible and less competitive online.

The shift to digital retail 

Take even a quick look at the way that people in America shop now, and you’ll immediately see that technology has transformed the very basis of retail in our country. Voice search accounted for one in five searches as long ago as 2016 according to Google, and most people will visit one of the huge online marketplaces (Amazon, mainly) to look for items to purchase.

This means that businesses with less technological expertise or smaller budgets are falling further behind those that can afford to spend big on digital advertising. And this, in turn, means that some Black businesses are falling behind their white-owned counterparts in an environment where consumers are moving all their spending online.

In 2020, white-owned businesses still dominate online advertising, and even in niche areas like payment systems, Black-owned businesses tend to offer fewer options than their white-owned counterparts. 

All of these factors affect Black business owners disproportionately. But what is to be done?

4 ways to support Black-owned businesses (or promote your own)

Let’s get one thing out of the way first. Many of the recent guides that purport to tell people how they can support their local Black-owned businesses start by telling them to look online for Black-owned versions of their favorite stores. In my opinion, this doesn’t go far enough. Which brings me to my first point…

1. Embrace a radical shift in the way you shop

The fact is that many Black businesses, and especially the small, community-focused businesses that are most at risk from the current economic storm, do not have websites. This is, in fact, a large part of the reason why they are so vulnerable: research shows that 48% of people start to search for a product on online marketplaces before looking for it on their street.

In practice, this means that supporting your local, Black-owned businesses means a more radical shift than trying to find a Black-owned Amazon. It requires taking responsibility for all of your purchases and viewing each as a political act. 

In other words: to keep these businesses solvent, we will have to change the way we shop. Instead of relying on Amazon searches, we’re going to have to take the time to search for small businesses within our own communities, and consciously choose to make purchases from them instead.

2. Set goals and track your purchases from Black-owned stores

There are plenty of tools that can help you make this shift. The My Black Receipt campaign became popular because people were tired of the lack of support for Black-owned businesses. You can use it to keep track of how many of your purchases are made in Black-owned stores.

There are also sites that will help you to make a spending commitment: You can check out HelloAlice’s database of Black-owned businesses across the US or Charity Navigator’s list of vetted charities and nonprofits dedicated to women’s health, education, and social services.

3. Spread the word about your favorite Black-owned brands

If you are making purchases from these businesses, you should also take a moment to help them out where you can make a difference: Build up their online reputation by sharing your experience on social media, leaving a review, and generally drawing people’s attention to a store that might have little (or no) online presence. Word of mouth will bring them more business and sales and help them thrive.

4. Participate in #BlackOwnedFriday

In May of 2020, there was a huge surge in search interest for Black-owned businesses, and this interest has remained elevated in the following months. 

Google took notice. #BlackOwnedFriday is a Google-led initiative, in partnership with the US Black Chambers, Inc., to encourage American consumers to support Black businesses during the 2020 holiday shopping season. Here’s how you can get involved: 

• If you’re a shopper, check out the ByBlack directory and find a new favorite business to support. Tell your friends about these resources and encourage them to get involved. Use the hashtag to promote the effort on your social media accounts.

• If you’re a Black business owner yourself, add your business to the directory. Follow these simple steps to add the Black-owned business badge to your website. Google is also offering free resources for small businesses who want to improve their online presence ahead of the holiday shopping rush.

The bottom line

If we are all willing to take responsibility for our actions, we might yet save the local, Black-owned community store from destruction. Let’s all do our part this year and commit to changing the way we shop forever. In sum, here are the top four ways you can support Black-owned businesses in your community:

1. Shift your mindset when it comes to where and how you buy
2. Use tools to track your purchases from Black-owned businesses
3. Support your favorite Black businesses with reviews and word of mouth
4. Participate in the #BlackOwnedFriday initiative 

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Location Data + Reviews: The 1–2 Punch of Local SEO (Updated for 2020)

Posted by MiriamEllis

Get found. Get chosen.

It’s the local SEO two-step at the heart of every campaign. It’s the 1-2 punch combo that hinges on a balance of visible, accurate contact data, and a volunteer salesforce of consumer reviewers who are supporting your rise to local prominence.

But here’s the thing: while managed location data and reviews may be of equal and complementary power, they shouldn’t require an equal share of your time.

Automation of basic business data distribution is the key to freeing you up to focus on the elements of listings that require human ingenuity — namely, reviews and other listings-based content like posts and Q&A.

It’s my hope that sharing this article with your team or your boss will help you get the financial allocations you need for automated listings management, plus generous resources for creative reputation management.

Location data + reviews = the big picture

When Google lists a business, it gives good space to the business name, and a varying degree of space to the address and phone number. But look at the real estate occupied by the various aspects associated with reputation:

If Google cares this much about ratings, review text, responses, and emerging elements like place topics and attributes, any local brand you’re marketing should see these factors as a priority. In this article, I’ll strive to codify your actionable perspective on managing both location data and the many aspects of reviews.

Ratings: The most powerful local filter of them all

In the local SEO industry, we talk a lot about Google’s filters, like the Possum filter that’s supposed to strain local businesses through a sort of sieve so that a greater diversity of mapped results is shown to the searcher. But searchers have an even more powerful filter than this — the human-driven filter of ratings that helps people intuitively sort local brands by perceived quality.

Whether they’re stars or circles, the majority of rating icons send a 1–5 point signal to consumers that can be instantly understood. This symbol system has been around since at least the 1820s; it’s deeply ingrained in all our brains as a judgement of value.

This useful, rapid form of shorthand lets a searcher needing to do something like grab a quick taco see that the food truck with five Yelp stars is likely a better bet than the one with only two. Meanwhile, searchers with more complex needs can comb through the ratings of many listings at leisure, carefully weighing one option against another for major purchases. In Google’s local results, ratings are the most powerful human-created filter that influences the major goal of being chosen.

But before a local brand can be chosen on the basis of its high ratings, it has to rank well enough to be found. The good news is that, over the past three years, expert local SEOs have become increasingly convinced of the impact of Google ratings on Google local pack rankings. In 2017, when I wrote the original version of this post, contributors to the Local Search Ranking Factors survey placed Google star ratings down at #24 in terms of local rankings influence. In 2020, this metric has jumped up to spot #8 — a leap of 16 spots in just three years.

In the interim, Google has been experimenting with different ratings-related displays. In 2017, they were testing the application of a “highly rated” snippet on hotel rankings in the local packs. Today, their complex hotel results let the user opt to see only 4+ star results. Meanwhile, local SEOs have noticed patterns over the years like searches with the format of “best X in city” (e.g. best burrito in Dallas) appearing to default to local results made up of businesses that have earned a minimum average of four stars. Doubtless, observations like these have strengthened experts’ convictions that Google cares a lot about ratings and allows them to influence rank.

Heading into 2021, any local brand with goals of being found and chosen must view low ratings as an impediment to reaching full growth potential.

Consumer sentiment: The local business story your customers are writing for you

Here’s a randomly chosen Google 3-pack result when searching just for “tacos” in a small city in the San Francisco Bay Area:

We’ve just covered the topic of ratings, and you can look at a result like this to get that instant gut feeling about the 4-star-rated eateries vs. the 2-star place. Now, let’s open the book on business #3 and see precisely what kind of brand story its consumers are writing, as you would in conducting a professional review audit for a local business, excerpting dominant sentiment:

It’s easy to ding fast food chains. Their business model isn’t commonly associated with fine dining or the kind of high wages that tend to promote employee excellence. In some ways, I think of them as extreme examples. Yet, they serve as good teaching models for how even the most modest-quality offerings create certain expectations in the minds of consumers, and when those basic expectations aren’t met, it’s enough of a story for consumers to share in the form of reviews.

This particular restaurant location has an obvious problem with slow service, orders being filled incorrectly, and employees who have been denied the training they need to represent the brand in a knowledgeable, friendly, or accessible manner. If you audited a different business, its pain points might surround outdated fixtures or low standards of cleanliness.

Whatever the case, when the incoming consumer turns to the review world, their eyes scan the story as it scrolls down their screen. Repeat mentions of a particular negative issue can create enough of a theme to turn the potential customer away. One survey says only up to 11% of consumers will do business with a brand that’s wound up with a 2-star rating based on poor reviews. Who can afford to let the other 91% of consumers go elsewhere?

The central goal of being chosen hinges on recognizing that your reviewer base is a massive, unpaid salesforce that tells your brand story. Survey after survey consistently finds that people trust reviews — in fact, they may trust them more than any claim your brand can make about itself.

Going into 2021, the writing is on the wall that Google cares a great deal about themes surfacing in your reviews. The ongoing development and display of place topics and attributes signifies Google’s increasing interest in parsing sentiment, and doubtless, using such data to determine relevance.

Fully embracing review management and the total local customer service ecosystem is key to giving customers a positive tale to tell, enabling the business you’re marketing to be trusted and chosen for the maximum number of transactions.

Velocity/recency/count: Just enough of a timely good thing to be competitive

This is one of the easiest aspects of review management to convey. You can sum it up in one sentence: don’t get too many reviews at once on any given platform but do get enough reviews on an ongoing basis to avoid looking like you’ve gone out of business.

For a little more background on the first part of that statement, watch Mary Bowling describing in this LocalU video how she audited a law firm that went from zero to thirty 5-star reviews within a single month. Sudden gluts of reviews like this not only look odd to alert customers, but they can trip review platform filters, resulting in removal. Remember, reviews are a business lifetime effort, not a race. Get a few this month, a few next month, and a few the month after that. Keep going.

The second half of the review timing paradigm relates to not running out of steam in your acquisition campaigns. Multiple surveys indicate that the largest percentage of review readers consider content from the past month to be most relevant. Despite this, Google’s index is filled with local brands that haven’t been reviewed in over a year, leaving searchers to wonder if a place is still in business, or if it’s so unimpressive that no one is bothering to review it.

While I’d argue that review recency may be more important in review-oriented industries (like restaurants) vs. those that aren’t quite as actively reviewed (like septic system servicing), the idea here is similar to that of velocity, in that you want to keep things going. Don’t run a big review acquisition campaign in January and then forget about outreach for the rest of the year. A moderate, steady pace of acquisition is ideal.

And finally, a local SEO FAQ comes from business owners who want to know how many reviews they need to earn. There’s no magic number, but the rule of thumb is that you need to earn more reviews than the top competitor you are trying to outrank for each of your search terms. This varies from keyword phrase, to keyword phrase, from city to city, from vertical to vertical. The best approach is steady growth of reviews to surpass whatever number the top competitor has earned.

Authenticity: Honesty is the only honest policy

For me, this is one of the most prickly and interesting aspects of the review world. Three opposing forces meet on this playing field: business ethics, business education, and the temptations engendered by the obvious limitations of review platforms to police themselves.

I often recall a basic review audit I did for a family-owned restaurant belonging to a friend of a friend. Within minutes, I realized that the family had been reviewing their own restaurant on Yelp (a glaring violation of Yelp’s policy). I felt sorry to see this, but being acquainted with the people involved (and knowing them to be quite nice!), I highly doubted they had done this out of some dark impulse to deceive the public.

Rather, my guess was that they may have thought they were “getting the ball rolling” for their new business, hoping to inspire real reviews. My gut feeling was that they simply lacked the necessary education to understand that they were being dishonest with their community and how this could lead to them being publicly shamed by Yelp, or even subjected to a lawsuit, if caught.

In such a scenario, there’s definitely an opportunity for the marketer to offer the necessary education to describe the risks involved in tying a brand to misleading practices, highlighting how vital it is to build trust within the local community. Fake positive reviews aren’t building anything real on which a company can stake its future. Ethical business owners will catch on when you explain this in honest terms and can then begin marketing themselves in smarter ways.

But then there’s the other side. Mike Blumenthal’s reporting on this has set a high bar in the industry, with coverage of developments like the largest review spam network he’d ever encountered. There’s simply no way to confuse organized, global review spam with a busy small business making a wrong, novice move. Real temptation resides in this scenario, because, as Blumenthal states:

“Review spam at this scale, unencumbered by any Google enforcement, calls into question every review that Google has. Fake business listings are bad, but businesses with 20, or 50, or 150 fake reviews are worse. They deceive the searcher and the buying public and they stain every real review, every honest business, and Google.”

When a platform like Google makes it easy to “get away with” deception, companies lacking ethics will take advantage of the opportunity. Beyond reporting review spam, one of the best things we can do as marketers is to offer ethical clients the education that helps them make honest choices. We can simply pose the question:

Is it better to fake your business’ success or to actually achieve success?

Local brands that choose to take the high road must avoid:

• Any form of review incentives or spam
• Review gating that filters consumers so that only happy ones leave reviews
• Violations of the review guidelines specific to each review platform

Owner responses: creatively turning reviews into two-way conversations

Over the years, I’ve devoted abundant space in my column here at Moz to the fascinating topic of owner responses. I’ve highlighted the five types of Google My Business reviews and how to respond to them, I’ve diagrammed a real-world example of how a terrible owner response can make a bad situation even worse, and I’ve studied basic reputation management for better customer service and how to get unhappy customers to edit their negative reviews.

My key learnings from nearly two decades of examining reviews and responses are these:

• Review responses are a critical form of customer service that can’t be ignored any more than business staff should ignore in-person customers asking for face-to-face help. Many reviewers expect responses.
• The number of local business listings in every industry with zero owner responses on them is totally shocking.
• Negative reviews, when fairly given, are a priceless form of free quality control for the brand. Customers directly tell the brand which problems need to be fixed to make them happy.
• Many reviewers think of their reviews as living documents, and update them to reflect subsequent experiences.
• Many reviewers are more than happy to give brands a second chance when a problem is resolved.
• Positive reviews are conversations starters warmly inviting a response that further engages the customer and can convince them that the brand deserves repeat business.

Local brands and agencies can use software to automate updating a phone number or hours of operation. Software like Moz Local can be of real help in alerting you to new, incoming reviews across multiple platforms, or surfacing the top sentiment themes within your review corpus.

Tools free up resources to manage what can’t be automated: human creativity. It takes serious creative resources to spend time with review sentiment and respond to customers in a way that makes a brand stand out as responsive and worthy. It takes time to fully utilize the opportunities owner responses represent to impact goals all the way from the top to the bottom of the sales funnel.

I’ve never forgotten a piece Florian Huebner wrote for StreetFight documenting the neglected reviews of a major fast food chain and its subsequent increase in location closures and decrease in profits. No one was taking the time to sit down with the reviews, listen, fix problems customers were citing, or offer proofs of caring resolution via owner responses.

And all too often, when brands large and small do respond to reviews, they take a corporate-speak stance equivalent to “whistling past the graveyard” when addressing complaints. To keep the customer and to signal to the public that the brand deserves to be chosen, creative resources must be allocated to providing gutsy, honest owner responses. It’s easy to spot the difference:

The response in yellow signals that the brand simply isn’t invested in customer retention. By contrast, the response in blue is a sample of what it takes to have a real conversation with a real person on the other side of the review text, in hopes of transforming one bad initial experience into a second chance, and hopefully, a lifetime of loyalty.

NAP and reviews: The 1–2 punch combo every local business must practice

Right now, there’s an employee at a local business or a staffer at an agency who is looking at the review corpus of a brand that’s struggling for rankings and profits. The set of reviews contains mixed sentiment, and no one is responding to either positive or negative customer experiences.

Maybe this is an issue that’s been brought up from time to time in company meetings, but it’s never made it to priority status. Decision-makers have felt that time and budget are better spent elsewhere.

Meanwhile, customers are quietly trickling away for lack of attention, leads are being missed, structural issues are being ignored…

If the employee or staffer I’m describing is you, my best advice is to make 2021 the year you make your strongest case for automating listing distribution and management with software so that creative resources can be dedicated to full reputation management.

Local SEO experts, your customers and clients, and Google, itself, are all indicating that location data + reviews are highly impactful and here to stay. In fact, history proves that this combination is deeply embedded in our entire approach to local commerce.

When traveling salesman Duncan Hines first published his 1935 review guide Adventures in Good Eating, he was developing what we think of today as local SEO. Here is my color-coded version of his review of the business that would one day become KFC. It should look strangely familiar to anyone who has ever tackled local business listings management:

No phone number on this “citation,” of course, but telephones were quite a luxury in 1935. Barring that element, this simple and historic review has the core earmarks of a modern local business listing. It has location data and review data; it’s the 1–2 punch combo every local business still needs to get right today. Without the NAP, the business can’t be found. Without the sentiment, the business gives little reason to be chosen.

From Duncan Hines to the digital age, there may be nothing new under the sun in marketing, but striking the right pose between listings and reputation management may be new news to your CEO, your teammates, or clients. So go for it — communicate this stuff, and good luck at your next big meeting!

Check out the new Moz Local plans that let you take care of location data distribution in seconds so that the balance of your focus can be on creatively caring for the customer.

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17 Proven Ways to Boost Holiday Sales & Revenue in 2020

For most businesses, 2020 has been a challenging year. If the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively impacted your business and you’re feeling discouraged about hitting your year-end targets, I want to let you know that there’s still hope.

The holiday season is coming in just a few weeks. As a time when consumers become extra enthusiastic about shopping, it is a great opportunity to boost your sales and revenue. In fact, in 2019, consumers spent around $7.4 billion online on Black Friday alone, and 55% of consumers plan to spend the same, if not more, than last year.

So, you can imagine the potential of not only the entire holiday season—but the unique 2020 holiday season that will be more digital than ever due to the pandemic. In this guide, I’m going to share 17 proven tips that will help you to plan out and execute successful holiday promotions so you can give your revenue a boost. I will cover:

• General holiday sale best practices to give you an edge over your competitors and maximize your results.
• Tried-and-true tactics that never fail to attract holiday shoppers to any business.
• Channel-specific strategies for holiday campaigns (paid and unpaid) with pro tips for each.

General holiday tips/best practices

Before we dive into specific tactics and campaigns to run, let’s first cover some general guidelines that will help you stand out above your competitors and boost the success of your efforts.

1. Start preparation now

While July to September is the ideal time for businesses to start preparations for holiday season sales, it is certainly not too late to start now. As a smaller business and equipped with the tips in this post, you still have plenty of time to come up with a campaign or program to boost your revenue.

Here’s what to consider when preparing your business for the holiday season:

• Product inventory: Will you need to stock up on particularly popular items? Bring new items onboard for gift-wrapping or seasonality?
• Marketing strategy: What channels will be most effective in communicating with your audience, and what is the overall message you want your holiday promotions to convey?
• Promotional materials: How will you get the word out? Online ads and social media posts? Print ads or in-store flyers?
• Sales and offers: What can you offer to customers that will appeal to their current desires and needs?
• Budget: Do you have any advertising budget you can use? Will you need to cut back on some tactics from last year? What can you afford to offer discounts on?
• Your customers: What is different about your post-COVID-19 customers? How can you appeal to their adjusted wants and needs?

2. Be COVID-19-conscious

This goes without saying, but it’s still worth noting. 

This year, you will more than likely need to make adjustments to your marketing copy, preferred channels, and offers in order to keep your customers safe and to appeal to their new pandemic priorities. Also, while it can be helpful to check your reports and holiday stats from last year to see top-performing products and channels, popular discounts, product return rates, and more, keep in mind that this year is very different from last, of course.

3. Choose the right marketing channels

Choosing the right marketing channels to promote your holiday campaigns will help you to ensure the time, money, and energy spent are all worth it. It will also help you to better target your audience and cater your messaging, ensuring more success and sales. There are a number of channels to chose from, including (but not limited to):

• Social media: both organic posting and paid ads, such as on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, and more.
• Search engines: Google and Bing Ads, SEO for organic visibility,  and don’t forget your Google business listing where you can post deals and offers.
• Email marketing: you can run a holiday email series, or include holiday deals in your regular newsletters.
• Offline marketing: there’s local newspaper ads, in-store flyers, radio and TV ads, and more.

Every marketing platform is unique and has a different kind of audience, and not all of them are going to be the best fit for your business. Take a look at your marketing metrics from this past year and see if you can pinpoint your top-performing channels. This can help you prioritize the implementation of the holiday marketing tips in this guide.

4. Create unique and seasonal landing pages

Many businesses make the mistake of not creating separate landing pages for their product and service offerings. Not only are campaign-specific landing pages a must (for any time of the year), but it can also be helpful to give your landing pages a holiday theme or flare. Make it clear that you’re offering something special for this specific time.

With a landing page for each product or service, you can provide customers with a clear picture of each of your special offers, and since they will have all of the details and a single call to action on one page, your holiday conversion rates are likely to increase.

There are many landing page builder tools that you can use to create beautiful landing pages for your website. Use a reliable and feature-rich landing page builder tool that is pocket-friendly and provides you with everything to create landing pages for your sale.

Here are some important tips to create high-converting landing pages for your sales:

• The page It must be well-thought-out in terms of user experience.
• Don’t include too much text on your page; just provide the essential details.
• Make the page scannable so your customers can easily identify what’s in it for them.
• Use a suitable call to action, strategically placed on the page.
• Make it crystal clear as to how users can buy & apply discounts.
• Clear the path for your customers so they can complete the desired action in a few simple steps.
• Use countdown timers to add excitement and a bit of a scarcity effect.
• Ensure the landing page is mobile-optimized. Most people use their smartphones to shop online, so this can play an important role in achieving success with your holiday sales.

5. Start early but end later

People go crazy to shop for the holidays and are eagerly looking for discounts and offers, so, you can easily win the match if you start your holiday marketing before the competition does, and even extending your promotions to go on longer than that of your competition. I have used this strategy myself in previous years and it has helped me to generate six-figure results before the official “arrival” of the holiday season. You can use the same strategy to boost your revenue too!

6. Ensure your business can handle increases in demand

Before launching your holiday marketing and advertising campaigns, do a final check to ensure that everything is ready according to the plan and that you can handle a boost in orders and sales. This includes making sure that:

• You have enough inventory so there is no shortage of products, or a backup plan for if you do run out.
• Your staff is prepared and trained for higher demands than normal (packaging, shipping, support, etc.)
• Your website is able to manage sudden high-spikes in traffic. You may need to contact your website host to confirm this.

Must-try holiday tactics

7. Run time-limited sales

Running popup online sales is another way to boost your sales during holiday shopping time. With this method, you increase your discount or offer an exclusive deal just for a few hours, such as by increasing a 45% off discount to 50% off for one hour only. You can even do this 2-3 times in a day and multiple times during the sale. Hostgator uses this strategy to generate millions of revenues during its Black Friday sales. Here are some more tips for using hourly or time-limited sales:

• Use pop-ups and countdown timers to alert users about your limited-time sales.
• Use different discount coupons for each sale to track particularly popular deals or time slots.
• Promote the sale on your website and through social media and email.

8. Create gift guides

To come up with the best gifts for their significant others, children, parents, friends, and relatives, people search on the internet—Google especially.  By creating gift guides, you can help your audience members, attract more customers, and boost your SEO.

Here are some examples of gift guides:

• The Best 15 Christmas Gifts to Get for Your Girlfriend in 2020
• 10 Gifts a Seven-Year-Old Girl Will Love
• 5 Black Friday Laptop Deals You Won’t Want to Miss
• 20 Thoughtful but Useful Gift Ideas for Christmas

Here are some more tips for using gift guides to boost your holiday sales:

• The more specific the guide, the better. Think about age, gender, personality type, hobbies, marital status, and more.
• Use keyword research tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify popular gift guide queries.
• Include your own products or services in the list. Include all of the details and use compelling copy to convey why it would make a great gift.
• Use carousels on social media platforms to showcase the products or services you offer that would make great gifts; or do the same for gifts that come from other sources

9. Offer freebies

Offering something free is a great strategy to boost sales because customers love to get things for free. During the holiday season, people are in shopping/money-spending mode, so offering something free will be like a breath of fresh air to them, and may even encourage them to buy from you! You can give free gift cards, free products, or free shipping to your customers.

Free shipping is almost a must for holiday sales. Consumers are attracted to that kind of offer and chances are, your competitors are offering it, so don’t give them a chance to steal your customers!

If you’re budget-conscious, just make sure you do the math so that your offers are valuable to your customers as well as ultimately profitable for you. You’ll need to calculate your product cost and profit margins to create offers like “Buy 3 and Get 1 Free” or “Spend $100 and get $15 Off.”

10. Run referral discounts

Referral marketing is always a successful strategy but it works really well during the holidays. Encourage your customers to refer your products to someone else (their friends, relatives, etc.) by offering a discount. For example, you can give 10% extra or $20 extra discount if the customer refers you to someone.

This will help you to grow your sales and revenue without costing much, and best of all, your customers are promoting your business for you.

11. Try out virtual reality

As you know, the world is showing unprecedented online behavior due to social distancing. So, if you’re an ecommerce business looking for holiday success, you may want to lean on virtual reality features to enable consumers to tour and browse your products from the safety of their homes. This is a new technology, but being an early adopter can ensure long-term gains. 

Channel-specific holiday tips

The above tactics can help you to increase sales during the holidays and give your 2020 revenue a lift, but how will you get the word out about them? As mentioned in the first section of this guide, there are many channels to choose from, and the best channel will vary from business to business. In this section, I’ll cover tips for the channels that tend to perform well across industries.

12. Create organic Facebook posts

With more than 2.7 billion active users worldwide, Facebook can offer a targeted audience for just about any business. It is great for both finding new and reengaging existing customers.

Facebook offers a variety of sub-channels to reach out to your target audience during the holidays:

• Posts to your Facebook Business Page (you may want to schedule these ahead of time so you can focus on real-time marketing when things get chaotic).
• Facebook Messenger
• Facebook Stories
• Facebook Marketplace
• Facebook Groups
• Facebook Ads (we’ll get to those next)

Pro tip: Start engaging and building your Facebook audience now so you can get the most out of your holiday marketing ideas and efforts. The best way to do this is by being proactive (liking, sharing, commenting on others’ posts and comments) and consistent (regularly engaging to build predictability, trust, and your brand voice).

13. Advertise your products on Facebook

Also, You can use Facebook ads to boost your reach and revenue during the holiday season. Facebook ads are affordable, even for local businesses.

Follow these tips to run effective Facebook ads:

• Install the Facebook Pixel on your website now, so you can retarget visitors during the holiday rush.
• Start creating your promotional collateral now, like physical banners and signs, promotional videos, and ad copy. You may even want to start testing out ad copy so you can ensure you’re running the highest performing ad when it matters most.
• Create and submit your Facebook ads a few days to a week in advance, since Facebook may take more time to review & approve ads as we get closer to the holidays.

14. Leverage Instagram posts and ads

Instagram also has great potential to boost your sales revenue this holiday season. Instagram users are highly engaged, and the platform has been shown to generate ten times more engagement than other social media platforms.

With a proper Instagram holiday strategy, you can see success. Here are a few tips to do that:

• Make sure your Instagram account is a business account. Business accounts come with analytics that will help you to make the right decisions.
• Find influencers with the same target audience to collaborate with. They will help you to get more exposure and sales during the sale.
• Share customer success stories, positive reviews, and pictures of happy customers. The trust factor plays an important role in the purchasing journey.

• Use hashtags to boost your organic reach, spark engagement, join conversations, and show your authority. This includes location-based hashtags, industry-specific hashtags, trending hashtags, and custom hashtags. For your custom hashtag, go for something inspiring and authentic. For example, Redbull uses #ItGivesYouWings, and Coca-Cola uses #ShareACoke for their campaigns and there are thousands of posts on Insta with these hashtags.
• Don’t forget about Instagram Stories, Reels, Instagram Story Highlights, and IGTV. These features can help you to express your brand personality and connect with your audience through the power of video.
• Run Instagram ads. You can run the same ads for both Facebook and Instagram, or create separate ads for each platform. Just be sure to target the right audience and use attractive offers that will incentivize users to engage with your ads.

15. Run a Google Ads campaign

Running Google Ads during the holidays can help you get discovered by and win over new customers. Think about the terms consumers in your target audience are searching for when they go onto Google during this season. For example:

• “best christmas gifts for dads in 2020”
• “carpet cleaning specials”
• “best black friday laptop sales”

…and many others.

Bid on the queries your customers are typing into the Google search box as they look to prepare for, shop for, and celebrate the holiday season. This may include products, services, brand names, and roundups. So ensure that you’re targeting all keywords. Keep in minda also that consumers aren’t only thinking about the holidays during the holidays, but also about more logisitcal needs for the upcoming year, such as health insurance.

Make sure your ads have landing pages to help them to easily find details about your product or offer, and also that you have conversion tracking set up in your Google Ads account.

Also, give Google Shopping ads a try—a product-oriented means of boosting your holiday sales and 2020 revenue.

16. Improve your SEO for targeted traffic

SEO is one of the best ways to get free and targeted traffic to your website—and by targeted, we mean visitors most likely to buy your products. Just like with Google Ads, you’ll want to target queries revelant to your audience during this time of year. To boost your ecommerce SEO, you’ll want to target product-oriented keywords, like:

• best cyber monday tablet sales
• holiday sweaters for kids
• hannukkah decor

If you’re a local or service-oriented business, you can target keywords like

• home cleaning tips for the holidays
• DIY christmas decorations
• healthy holiday dish recipes

Create separate pages (or posts) on your website containing high-quality content that targets these keywords. Make sure to implement SEO best practices to help these pages rank higher on Google. It takes time to get results with SEO, so the earlier you can publish these posts, the better. But you can also make them evergreen so that they can continue to collect traffic during future holiday season.

17. Send out marketing emails

Email marketing is among the best channels to nurture leads into customers and maintain loyal customer relationships. If you’ve been building your email list throughout the year, this will be an asset during your holiday email marketing campaigns. You can announce your holiday promotions and events, and include links to your SEO posts. Just be sure to follow best practices such as segementing and personalizing to get the most success, and to write effective holiday email subject lines so that the emails get opened. 

 

Increase your sales and revenue during the 2020 holidays [recap]

Holiday season sales are your last chance to generate revenue this year. There is a plethora of holiday marketing strategy ideas for 2020, but regardless of which ones you implement, make sure you prepare, plan out, test, and track everything from spendings to sales and profit to return rate. It will help you to take the right steps at the right times—both during the campaign and in years to come.

1. Start preparing now
2. Be COVID-19-conscious
3. Choose the right channels
4. Start early, end later
5. Be ready for increased demand
6. Create unique and seasonal landing pages
7. Run time-limited sales
8. Create gift guides
9. Offer freebies
10. Get referrals
11. Try virtual reality
12. Create organic Facebook posts
13. Advertise your products on Facebok
14. Leverage Instagram posts and ads
15. Run Google Ads campaigns
16. Implement SEO strategies
17. Send email marketing campaigns

About the author

This post was written by Harpreet Munjal and edited by Kristen McCormick. Harpreet is a digital marketer and founder of a digital marketing company named LoudGrowth. Munjal has worked with leading brands including Godaddy and 3dcart, and has been featured in such publications as Forbes, Business.com, Shopify, Hubspot, SearchEngineWatch and more. 

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Behind the SEO: Launching Our New Guide — How to Rank

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Seven years ago, we published a post on the Moz Blog titled “How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint.”

From an SEO perspective, the post did extremely well.

Over time, the “How to Rank” post accumulated:

• 400k pageviews
• 200k organic visits
• 100s of linking root domains

Despite its success, seven years is a long time in SEO. The chart below shows what often happens when you don’t update your content.

Predictably, both rankings and traffic declined significantly. By the summer of 2020, the post was only seeing a few hundred visits per month.

Time to update

We decided to update the content. We did this not only for a ranking/traffic boost, but also because SEO has changed a lot since 2013.

The old post simply didn’t cut it anymore.

To regain our lost traffic, we also wanted to leverage Google’s freshness signals for ranking content.

Many SEOs mistakenly believe that freshness signals are simply about updating the content itself (or even lazier, putting a new timestamp on it.) In actuality, the freshness signals Google may look actually take many different forms:

1. Content freshness.
2. Rate of content change: More frequent changes to the content can indicate more relevant content.
3. User engagement signals: Declining engagement over time can indicate stale content.
4. Link freshness: The rate of link growth over time can indicate relevancy.

To be fair, the post had slipped significantly in all of these categories. It hasn’t been updated in years, engagement metrics had dropped, and hardly anyone new linked to it anymore.

To put it simply, Google had no good reason to rank the post highly.

This time when publishing, we also decided to launch the post as a stand-alone guide — instead of a blog post — which would be easier to maintain as evergreen content.

Finally, as I wrote in the guide itself, we simply wanted a cool guide to help people rank. One of the biggest questions we get from new folks after they read the Beginner’s Guide to SEO is: “What do I read next? How do I actually rank a page?”

This is exactly that SEO guide.

Below, we’ll discuss the SEO goals that we hope to achieve with the guide (the SEO behind the SEO), but if you haven’t check it out yet, here’s a link to the new guide:

How to Rank On Google

SEO goals

Rarely do SEO blogs talk about their own SEO goals when publishing content, but we wanted to share some of our strategies for publishing this guide.

1. Keywords

First of all, we wanted to improve on the keywords we already rank for (poorly). These are keywords like:

• How to rank
• SEO blueprint
• SEO step-by-step

Our keyword research process showed that the phrase “SEO checklist” has more search volume and variations that “SEO blueprint”, so we decided to go with “checklist” as a keyword.

Finally, when doing a competitor keyword gap analysis, we discovered some choice keywords that our competitors are ranking for with similar posts.

Based on this, we knew we should include the word “Google” in the title and try to rank for terms about “ranking on Google.”

2. Featured snippets

Before publishing the guide, our friend Brian Dean (aka Backlinko) owns the featured snippet for “how to rank on Google.”

It’s a big, beautiful search feature. And highly deserved!

We want it.

There are no guarantees that we’ll win this featured snippet (or others), but by applying a few featured snippets best practices—along with ranking on the first page—we may get there.

3. Links

We believe the guide is great content, so we hope it attracts links.

Links are important because while the guide itself may generate search traffic, the links it earns could help with the rankings across our entire site. As Rand Fishkin once famously wrote about the impact of links in SEO, “a rising tide lifts all ships.”

Previously, the old post had a few hundred linking root domains pointing at it, including links from high-authority sites like Salesforce.

Obviously, we are now 301 redirecting these links to the new guide.

We’ll also update internal links throughout the site, as well as adding links to posts and pages where appropriate.

To help build links in the short-term, we’ll continue promoting the guide through social and email channels.

Long-term, we could also do outreach to help build links.

To be honest, we think the best and easiest way to build links naturally is simply to present a great resource that ranks highly, and also that we promote prominently on our site.

Will we succeed?

Time will tell. In 3-6 months we’ll do an internal followup, to track our SEO progress and see how we measured up against our goals.

To make things more complicated, SEO is far more competitive than it was 7 years ago, which makes things harder. Additionally, we’re transparently publishing our SEO strategy out in the open for our competitors to read, so they may adjust their tactics.

Want to help out? You can help us win this challenge by reading and sharing the guide, and even linking to it if you’d like. We’d very much appreciate it 🙂

To your success in SEO.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

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CRM: What Your Small Business Needs to Know About Customer Relationship Management

You’ve probably heard of CRM software—used it in the past, gotten sales calls about adopting one, wistfully wished your customer data was nicely organized inside one. But if you haven’t, don’t worry. I myself was once a wet-behind-the-ears college intern throwing acronyms around like candy without any clear idea what the letters stood for.

CRM stands for customer relationship management. So do you need CRM? Yes. All businesses need to have an organized way of keeping track of clients and prospects as they move through their customer journey. But do you need CRM software? This depends on your business size, model, industry, customer type, and more. So in this post, I’m going to:

• Demystify exactly what CRM platforms are and how they help with sales and marketing.
• Cover the pros and cons of implementing CRM for small businesses in particular.
• Discuss costs and crucial features to look for when considering a CRM for your business.

By the end of this post, you’ll have a firm understanding of the role a CRM plays in business growth as well as the potential value it could have for your small business.

What is CRM software?

CRM stands for customer relationship management but it typically refers to a tool or solution that helps businesses track and manage interactions with customers and prospects. In broad terms, it’s a database that holds information like first name, last name, email address, company, a log of encounters with your business, and so on.

Your CRM will act as the main place to keep all the information you’ve gathered throughout your relationship with your clients. From the first time they read a blog post or sign up for your newsletter, to phone recordings of sales calls and lead qualifications, it’ll all be in one central location. CRM even manages the process through to sending proposals, contracts and billing information (with some plug-ins).

Think of a CRM platform as a multidimensional map. You have people, companies, and deals all connected through different interactions-—like viewing an ad, opening an email, taking a sales call, or signing a contract. Your team members are connected to action items and can add information to contacts, accounts, and deals as needed. All this information creates a web of insights to help you manage processes and relationships with the people who have decided to do business with you. 

The pros of CRM software for small businesses

There are a lot of good reasons to have a CRM software platform at your disposal. However, it’s hard work to get it integrated, particularly if you don’t have much infrastructure already built into your business relationships. We’ll go over those challenges in the next section, but first, let’s get to the good parts of CRM software.

Organization

While I can’t profess to be the most organized person (my roommate would argue that I need to stop keeping my books in the kitchen), all marketers thrive when our files, content, tasks, and communications are all in one place, or at least one organized system.

CRMs help you collect, sort, and filter your prospect and client information according to various criteria, like account type, location, contact person, channel, and company. That means you can group all contacts who work for the same company together, or the internal team that works on a certain account; just think of all the reports you could run!

From LOCALiQ’s Client Center CRM

And the more organized and centralized your information is, the easier it is for you to pull up when communicating with a current or potential client and have the context you need in order to have a productive conversation. Also, while it’s a best practice to have a dedicated account representative for each customer, having the information available to more people allows you to transfer information more easily, such as if that reprsentative leaves or your business starts to scale up.

Communication

At the risk of sounding like a broken record: marketers thrive with better communication. And I don’t just mean having regular meetings with the sales team. CRMs enable seamless communication between your prospects, marketing team, and sales team.

Picture it: a prospect enters their information on your website. Almost instantly, that lead is entered into the CRM so your marketing team can retarget them with ads, nurture them with emails, and move them down the marketing funnel. Simultaneously, the sales team can reach out through emails and calls, logging each interaction into the system. By the time the prospect is ready to sign a contract or make a purchase, you’ll have a full picture of each touchpoint they experienced.

Efficiency

For the aforementioned reasons that we love CRMs, they use streamlined communication and organization to create efficiencies. When it comes time to close the books on a fiscal year, or you get audited, or you need to reference exactly what your sales team promised a customer, it’s all right in your CRM.

Organization, communication, and efficiency are just three of the many positive aspects of a CRM platform that can lead to several benefits, including:

• Better collaboration among team members
• More movement through your marketing and/or sales funnel
• Time and cost savings from maximized productivity
• Happier customers, more loyal customers, and of course, more customers
• Increased revenue

The cons of CRM software for small businesses

As mentioned above, there are some challenges that come with CRM software. Luckily, there are fewer cons than pros.

Implementation

I’m not going to lie to you. CRMs can be quite complicated. In fact, some engineers are exclusively trained in managing, implementing, and integrating CRMs. While that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll need to hire a developer to help with your CRM implementation/integration, it may be challenging to do on your own if you’re not familiar with basic SQL, HTML and CSS, and Javascript. 

Cost

When you sign up for a CRM, it usually comes with a hefty price tag. There are plenty of open-source CRMs or services where you can pick and choose what kind of add-ons you’d like to include, but the more add-ons or licenses you get, the more expensive it’ll be; and the more upkeep it will require. But here’s the good news: if you implement a CRM platform early and commit to best practices, your data should be neat and tidy inside whichever platform you choose, eliminating the need to spend more money on annual fixes.

How much does small business CRM software cost?

As you probably expected, the prices and pricing models for CRM software vary. Many plaforms charge per user per month, with that rate depending on the number of contacts you have or the level of functionality you choose. Other CRMs are free but with limitations. For example, Zoho CRM is free but only for three users and doesn’t offer email communication. HubSpot has a “free forever” CRM, but the reporting and functionality stays pretty basic (we’ll cover features to look out for in the next section). And yet other CRMs created by marketing agencies aren’t available as a standalone product, but come free with the services offered by the agency, such as with LOCALiQ’s Client Center.

LOCALiQ’s proprietary CRM software comes at no extra charge when you sign on with their local marketing solutions.

While this information does not give you a clear-cut answer as to how much a CRM would cost your small business, it does clearly show that in order to identify the most cost-effective CRM for you, you need to know the features and functionality you require. Because if you go with a free platform that doesn’t generate the reports you need in order to ensure a return on your investment, well then, your CRM really isn’t free after all. So in this final section, we’re going to cover some key features of CRMS to consider.

What to look for in a small business CRM

As we just covered (but in case you skipped it), the various small business CRMs available on the market today all come with their own features and functionalities. When choosing one for your business, remember that price isn’t everything. The right CRM for your business is one that helps you to not only carry out your marketing strategy more seamlessly, but also to gain insights along the way to adjust and refine it—ultimately helping you to win more customers (and revenue) while also saving time and money in the long run. Here are the core features of a CRM designed to help you achieve that:

Ease of use

It’s hard to avoid complexity in any CRM, since it’s very nature is rather complex—it is housing every interaction and piece of information each of your team members and campaigns gathers on each of your contacts, in one place. But complexity doesn’t have to equate to difficulty with navigating the platform. A good CRM is intuitive and keeps things as simplified as possible. You’re looking for a CRM that is not a constant uphill battle, but that has a learning curve that settles out somewhat (not entirely, since there will hopefully be updates and new features to learn).

Advanced campaign tracking

Rather than just seeing how you’re doing overall, it’s important to be able to view your marketing performance at the campaign level. This way, you can see which methods are most effective in attracting customers and leads to your business, as well as which channels and devices within those campaigns are performing best.

Detailed campaign tracking allows you to identify the sources and devices to optimize for (Image source: LOCALiQ Client Center).

Analytics

So you can see which channels or devices are performing best in a campaign, but how well is the campaign doing overall? With analytics, you can identify benchmarks and also see if the numbers you are seeing are an increase or decrease from a previous time frame or condition. This is crucial in a CRM because it empowers you to make data-driven decisions and  know exactly how much you’re getting out of your marketing investments.

Make sure your CRM can reveal patterns and changes in your data (Image source: SugarCRM).

Real-time data

You shouldn’t have to wait until the end of the month or the end of a campaign to see results. A good CRM will have real-time data capabilities so you can get insights on-demand. This allows you to identify and make optimizations during campaigns, seize opportunities the moment they arise, and ensure you’re on track with your goals.

Customized reporting

Having advanced campaign tracking, solid analytics, and real-time data are all key considerations for a CRM. But also make sure that you can customize your reports by time frame and other criteria. This way you can keep your marketing strategies the way you intended them, rather than mold them around what your CRM is able to report on. Plus, being able to compare campaigns to previous years, channels, and more will allow you to learn, improve, and refine your marketing strategy into a finely tuned lead generating machine.

A good CRM enables you to filter your data for specified date ranges and make projections (Image Source: LOCALiQ Client Center).

Integration

Are you using other marketing automation tools or is there any chance you may implement some in the future? Make sure the CRM is compatible with these technologies as well as how complex the integration would be.

Nimble CRM is geared specifically for social media integration.

Support

Numbers don’t lie, but data can be deceiving (unintentionally, of course). For example, you may become concerned over a decline in your website traffic. But if this occurs concurrently with increase in conversions, then this actually means that while less overall people may be visiting your site, more qualified visitors who are actually interested in your business are arriving there. In this case, that decrease doesn’t mean anything bad, but more likely that your SEO strategies are working well and probably can be scaled up. All this is to say that having access to an individual or team of individuals who specialize in small and/or local business marketing can mean the difference between having a CRM to merely keep track of things and leveraging a CRM to grow your revenue.

A good CRM will come with support such as through a knowledge base, but nothing beats 1:1 expert advice (Image source: Keap).

Scalability

If your CRM does its job and your client database and sales team expands, can the CRM’s capabilities and pricing plans easily scale with your business? Conversely, if you need to dial things back for a period of time or are going through a slow period, are there flexible downgrade or resource-saving options?

Communication tools

Last but not least (and perhaps most important) in the list of CRM feaures to look for is communication tools. With email integration, you can get notified about new leads and important activity, as well as communicate with your contacts directly from the CRM. This could be an automated email that gets triggered when a contact completes a specified action, a prompt response to a form submission, or a personalized outreach or follow-up email to an individual.

Email is paramount to lead nurturing and customer communication (Image source: LOCALiQ Client Center).

Could a CRM be right for your small business?

As I mentioned at the start, the goal with this post is for you to gain a clear picture of what CRM platforms can do for small businesses as well as the background knowledge you need in order to find the right one for yours, should it be something worth pursuing. Here is a recap of what we covered:

• A CRM is a central location where all of the information you’ve collected on your leads and customers as you engage with them is stored.
• Pros of CRM software include organization, efficiency, and communication, while cons are cost and implementation.
• If implemented properly, a CRM can help a business to increase productivity, customer satisfaction, marketing efficacy, and revenue.
• CRMs vary in price from free to hundreds of dollars per month, but it’s important to know what you’re getting for the price.

And most importantly, here are the features to look for in a CRM for your small business:

• Advanced campaign tracking
• Analytics
• Real-time data
• Customizable reports
• Integration
• Support
• Scalability
• Communication capabilities

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How We Became Digital Marketers in Just One Summer

Posted by rootandbranch

Editor’s note: This blog is from the perspective of five University of Pittsburgh students — Kirsten, Steve, Darcie, Erin, and Sara — who completed a class this summer called “Digital Marketing Search Fundamentals”, taught by Zack Duncan of Root and Branch.

Introduction

Our digital marketing class this summer did not give us credits that count towards graduation (in fact, some of us graduated in Spring 2020), nor did it give us a grade. Instead, we learned about paid search and organic search along with some of the key concepts central to digital marketing. We also became certified in Google Ads Search along the way. 

We each had different reasons for taking the course, but we all believe that digital marketing will have value for us in our lives.

At the beginning of the term, in June 2020, we were asked, “What is one thing you’re hoping to get out of this class?” Here are some of our responses to that question:

• I hope to gain a strong understanding of SEO and Google Ads, and to get hands-on experience to understand how both would be used in a work setting.
• I want to learn something about marketing that I might not learn in the classroom.
• I’m hoping to become more competitive in this difficult job market.
• I hope to build on my resume and develop skills for personal use.
• I want to learn a foundational skill that can be applied in many different aspects of business. 

Now that we’ve completed the class, we wanted to share our thoughts on why we believe digital marketing matters — both for our lives today and as we look ahead to the future. We’re also going to cover five of the most important building blocks we learned this summer, that have helped us see how all the pieces of digital marketing fit together.

Part 1: Why digital marketing matters

Why digital marketing training matters now

To become more competitive candidates in applying for jobs

Some of us are recent grads in the midst of searching for our first jobs after college. Some of us are still in school and are actively looking for internships. We’ve all seen our fair share of job listings for positions like “Digital Marketing Intern” or “Digital Marketing Associate”. Given that the majority of us are marketing majors, you might think it’s safe to assume we would be qualified for at least an interview for those positions. 

Nope. 

Before gaining a solid foundation in digital marketing, we were often quite limited in the listings we were qualified for. But things have been changing now that we can say we’re certified in Google Ads Search and can speak to topics like digital analytics, SEO, and the importance of understanding the marketing funnel.

To help with growing freelance side businesses

Towards the beginning of the pandemic, a few of us were dangerously close to graduation with little to no hope of finding a job in marketing. Instead of binge-watching Netflix all day and hoping some fantastic opportunity would magically come our way, the entrepreneurial among us decided to see how we could use our current skills to generate revenue. 

One of us is especially interested in graphic design and learned everything there was to know in Adobe Creative Suite to become a freelance graphic designer, starting a side business in graphic design, and designs logos, labels, menus, and more.

After this class, finding clients has changed in a big way now. Instead of being limited to looking for clients in social media groups, digital marketing knowledge opens up a whole new world. With a functioning website and a knowledge of both paid and organic search, the process of finding new customers has dramatically changed (for the better!).

To be more informed consumers

While a digital marketing background doesn’t instantly translate to job opportunities for everyone, it can help all of us become more informed consumers.

As consumers, we want to pay for quality goods and services at a fair price. Some basic digital marketing knowledge gives us a better understanding of why the search engine results page (SERP) findings show up in the order that they do. Knowing about keywords, domain authority (for organic search) and quality scores (for paid results) can demystify things. And that’s just on the SERP.

Moving off the SERP, it’s helpful to know how nearly every advertisement we see is somehow targeted to us. If you are seeing an ad, there is a very good chance you fall into an audience segment that a brand has identified as a potential target. You may also be seeing the ad due to a prior visit to the brand’s website and are now in a retargeting audience (feel free to clear out those cookies if you’re sick of them!).

The more information you have as a consumer, the more likely you are to make a better purchase. These few examples just go to show how digital marketing training matters now, even if you are not the one actively doing the digital marketing.

How a digital marketing foundation be useful in the future

It’s helpful in creating and growing a personal brand

Your brand only matters if people know about it. You could sit in your room and put together the most awesome portfolio website for yourself and create a solid brand identity, but if no one else knows about it, what’s the point? Digital marketing concepts like understanding SEO basics can help make your presence known to potential customers, employers, and clients.

It would be terrible if your competition got all the business just because you didn’t use the simple digital marketing tools available to you, right? Digital marketing efforts can have many different goals ranging from making sales to just increasing general awareness of your brand, so get out there and start!

To become a more flexible contributor in future career opportunities

One thing we’ve heard consistently in the job search process is employers love flexible, cross functional employees. It seems the most successful and valued employees are often those that are not only experts in their field, but also have a pretty good understanding of other subjects that impact their work. Let’s say you’re an account manager for a digital agency, and you have some great insight that you think could be helpful in driving some new ad copy testing for your biggest client. It’s going to be a whole lot easier talking with your copywriter and media team (and being taken seriously by them), if you have an understanding of how the text ads are built. 

To see data as an opportunity for action, as opposed to just numbers

Are you someone who enjoys numbers and performance metrics? That’s great! So are we! But those numbers are meaningless without a digital marketing background to provide context for the data. 

Understanding data is a valuable tool for getting to know your audience and evaluating advertising campaigns. Seeing that your Google Search text ad has a poor click-through rate is only actionable if you have the foundation to take steps and improve it. Analyzing your website’s metrics and finding that you have a low average session duration is meaningless if you don’t connect the dots between the numbers and what they mean for your web design or your on-page content.

It’s pretty clear that the numbers don’t give much value to a marketer or a business without the ability to recognize what those metrics mean and the actions that can be taken to fix them. As we advance in our careers and have more and more responsibility for decision making, digital marketing fundamentals can continue to grow our experience with turning data into insight-driven action.

To optimize for conversions — always

Whatever the goal, it’s important to know if you’re operating efficiently in terms of your conversions. In other words, you need to know if you’re getting a return for the investment (time, money, or both) you’re putting in. When you’re operating to get the most conversions for the lowest cost, you are employing a mindset that will help your marketing efforts perform as well as they can.

Having a digital marketing foundation will allow you to think intelligently about “conversions”, or the kinds of results that you’d like to see your marketing efforts generate. A conversion might be a completed sale for an e-commerce company, a submitted lead form for a B2B software company, or a new subscriber for an online publication.

Whatever the desired conversion action, thinking about them as the goal helps to give context in understanding how different marketing efforts are performing. Is your ad performing well and should it receive more media spend, or is it just wasting money? 

Thinking about conversions isn’t always easy, and may take some trial and error, but it can lead to making smart, measurable, and cost-effective decisions. And those decisions can get smarter over time as we get more and more familiar with the five key building blocks of digital marketing (at least the five that we’ve found to be instructive).

Part 2: Understanding five building blocks of digital marketing

1. The marketing funnel (customer journey)

The marketing funnel (or the user/customer journey) refers to the process by which a prospective customer hears about a product or service, becomes educated about the product or service, and makes a decision whether or not to purchase the product or service in question.

It encompasses everything from the first time that brand awareness is established to the potential purchase made by the customer. The awareness stage can be known as the “top of the funnel”, and there are lots of potential prospects in that audience. 

From there, some prospects “move down the funnel” as they learn more and get educated about the product or service. Those that don’t move down the funnel and progress in their journey are said to “fall out” of the funnel.

As the journey continues, prospects move closer to becoming customers. Those who eventually “convert” are those that completed the journey through the bottom of the funnel.

Understanding that there is such a thing as a customer journey has helped to frame our thinking for different types of marketing challenges. It essentially boils down to understanding where, why, when, and how your prospects are engaging with your brand, and what information they will need along the way to conversion.

2. Paid search vs. organic search and the SERP

For many of us, one of the first steps in understanding paid vs. organic search was getting a handle on the SERP. 

The slide below is our “SERP Landscape” slide from class. It shows what’s coming from paid (Google Ads), and what’s coming from organic search. In this case, organic results are both local SEO results from Google My Business, and also the on-page SEO results. Here’s a link to a 92-second video with the same content from class.

We learned to look for the little “Ad” designation next to the paid text ads that are often at the top of the SERP. 

These are search results with the highest AdRank who are likely willing to bid the most on the specific keyword in question. Since paid search is based on CPC (cost per click) pricing, we learned that the advertiser doesn’t incur any costs for their ad to show up, but does pay every single time the ad is clicked. 

Although many CPCs might range in the $2 – $3 range, some are $10 and up. With that kind of investment for each click, advertisers really need to focus on having great landing pages with helpful content that will help drive conversions.

Organic search, on the other hand, is “free” for each click. But it also relies on great content, perhaps even more so than paid search. That’s because the only way to get to the top of the organic search rankings is to earn it. There’s no paying here! 

Search engines like Google are looking for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T) in content to rank highly on the SERP. In addition to making good local sense for Google, it all comes back to the core of Alphabet’s business model, as the slide below shows.

Understanding Google’s motivations help us understand what drives organic search and the SERP landscape overall. And understanding the basics of paid and organic search is an important foundation for all aspiring digital marketers who want to work in the field.

3. Inbound vs. outbound marketing

Are you working to push a message out to an audience that you hope is interested in your product or service? If so, you’re doing some outbound marketing, whether it be traditional media like billboards, television, or magazines, or even certain types of digital advertising like digital banner ads. Think about it as a giant megaphone broadcasting a message.

Inbound work, on the other hand, aims to attract potential customers who are actively engaged in seeking out a product or service. Search marketing (both paid search and organic search) are perfect examples of inbound, as they reach prospects at the moment they’re doing their research. Instead of a megaphone, think of a magnet. The content that does the best job in solving problems and answering questions will be the content with the strongest magnetic pull that gets to the top of SERPs and converts. 

If you’re going to be here for a while, click the image below for more information on how we think about content in the context of digital marketing efforts.

4. Basic digital marketing metrics

There are some universal metrics that we all need to understand if we’re going to develop a competency in digital marketing. Click through rate (CTR), for example, is a great way to measure how effective an ad unit or organic result is in terms of generating a click. 

But before we can fully understand CTR (clicks divided by impressions), we first need to make sure we understand the component parts of the metric. Here are four of those key components that we learned about during our digital marketing training:

• Impression: A search result (paid or organic) or an ad shows up on a page

• Click: A user clicking the search result or ad on a page triggers a recorded click

• Conversion: After clicking on the search result or ad, the user completes an action that is meaningful for the business. Different types of businesses have different conversion actions that are important to them.

• Cost: While organic search results are “free” (not counting costs associated with creating content), paid ads incur a cost. Understanding the cost of any paid advertising is a crucial component of understanding performance.

How does it all work in practice? Glad you asked! Check out the example below for a hypothetical advertising campaign that served 10,000 impressions, drove 575 clicks, cost $1,000, and generated 20 conversions:

5. Platforms and tools a beginner digital marketer should use

Our class was focused on search marketing, and we talked about one platform for paid and one platform for organic. 

On the paid side, there is only one name in the game: Google Ads. Google has free training modules and certifications available through a platform called Skillshop. You’ll need a Google-affiliated email address to log in. After doing so, just search for “Google Ads Search” and you can go through the training modules shown below. 



If you’re already a Google Ads pro, you can hop right to the exam and take the timed Google Ads Search Assessment. If you can get an 80% or higher on the 50-question exam, you’ll get a certification badge!

For organic search, we learned about keyword research, title tags, H1s and H2s, anchor text in links, and more through the training available on Moz Academy. The 73-minute Page Optimization course has eight different training sections and includes an On Page Optimization Quiz at the end. Fair warning, some of the content might be worth watching a few times if you’re new to SEO. For most of us this was our first exposure to SEO, and it took some time for most of our brains to sort through the difference between a title tag and an H1 tag!

Another platform that we liked was Google Trends, which can be useful for both paid and organic search, and is just generally a cool way to see trends happening! 

There are many more resources and tools out there in the world. Some of us are aiming to get more comfortable with these fundamentals, while some others have already branched out into other disciplines like social media.

Conclusion

Thanks for coming along with us on this digital marketing journey. We hope it was a useful read!

During the process of putting this together, things have changed for us:

• Kirsten landed a full-time job.
• Steve started doing consulting work for a growing Shopify site in Google Ads and Google Analytics, and is planning to make consulting his full-time work.
• Darcie landed a job as a Paid Search Analyst for a national retailer.

For all of us, we know we’re only taking the first steps of our digital marketing futures, and we’re excited to see what the future holds!

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What is Google AMP and Do I Need It for SEO?

According to a 2020 study, mobile traffic has grown 504% in daily media consumption since 2011. With more and more consumers using their mobile phones to access content, it’s more important than ever to optimize for the mobile experience—not just for your readers, but for your SEO; Google can detect pages that load slowly or that have a high bounce rate, and will rank those pages lower in search results.

We know that mobile optimization is important for your content strategy and SEO, and Google AMP is a technology designed to help with that, but whether Google AMP is the best tool to do that for your business website, in particular, depends on your industry, business size, business model, content strategy, and more. So in this post, I’m going to cover:

• What Google AMP is, who it’s best for, and how it works.
• The benefits and drawbacks of Google AMP.
• How to implement AMP on your site, if it’s right for you.

Regardless of whether Google AMP ends up being right for you, you’ll come away from this post with the SEO knowledge you need in order to feel confident about your site’s SEO and mobile performance.

What exactly is Google AMP?

In 2016, Google announced the launch of Accelerated Mobile Pages—an open-source, web-based solution designed to revolutionize mobile content consumption. It was a direct response to Facebook’s then in-app publishing platform (Instant Articles), and Apple’s iOS 9 news aggregation and discovery platform (Apple News). 

The AMP version of a product page, blog post, or landing page is meant to load instantly on mobile. It may also appear differently or in a card form in the mobile SERP. The AMP lightning bolt symbol associated with a result lets users know that that particular page will load faster than other non-AMP pages around it. 

According to an early study, Google AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages. The initial idea was to provide an open-source framework that would make the mobile experience not just better, but faster.

The initial idea was to provide an open-source framework that would make the mobile experience not just better, but faster.

Is AMP essential?

Before we get into the pros and cons of Google AMP, it’s important to note that while AMP can help your SEO, it is not necessarily essential for SEO in some cases, and the benefits are more applicable to some businesses than others. We will do a deeper dive into the pros and cons of AMP next, but let’s first just provide some key points that can help you orient yourself to AMP as it relates to your business:

• AMP is widely adopted by publisher sites that have a high volume of news articles or blog posts. If the majority of your website pages aren’t articles, then AMP may not be necessary for your business.
• If you do publish a high volume of articles but are already using a CDN (content delivery network), these platforms often come with performance optimization features such as image hosting, file caching, and lazy loading (which means the text loads first, before the images).
• AMP pages are cleaner and simpler for readers, but often because certain JavaScript functions and plugins are deprioritized or suppressed. If you rely on third-party tools for lead capturing and audience tracking, you’ll want to test to make sure your AMP pages function and capture information the same as your regular pages.
• AMP itself is not a Google ranking factor. It can help improve aspects of your web pages that are factored into Google’s algorithm (especially with Core Web Vitals becoming a ranking factor in 2021), but it is not the only way to optimize your site’s experience and performance.
• If you already have a mobile version of your site or mobile optimization measures in place (such as consolidated or minified CSS code), AMP may not be necessary and may even complicate performance and reporting.

While AMP can help your SEO, it is not necessarily essential for SEO, and its benefits are more applicable to some businesses than others.

So the bottom line is, optimizing for page speed and mobile experience is essential for SEO, and Google AMP is just one way of achieving that. Read on to learn about how it works and whether it’s the right solution for your business.

What are the benefits of Google AMP?

Apart from faster loading speeds and a better experience for content consumers, AMP offers several benefits to businesses with a content and SEO strategy:

Increased website engagement

Lightweight AMP content meshes well with mobile users that have a less-than-stable internet connection. Additionally, the decrease in page load time improves the user experience in a way that increases the chances of visitors staying on your site longer.

Improved ranking and traffic

Also, with page load time being a Google ranking factor, AMPs are prioritized in Google’s search algorithms, thus affecting rankings. Essentially, if two sites are neck-and-neck, the faster one wins out.

Lower bounce rates

With your pages loading faster, visitors usually stay onsite. A Google study once found that 53% of website visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than 23 seconds to load. Additionally, publishers who implement AMP could potentially get a 2x increase in time spent on a page. And more time on your website can mean more conversions from your content.

More time on your website can mean more conversions from your content.

Original image source

Increased ad views

With AMP, the HTML is coded in a way that enhances the overall usability of banners and images. This results in a higher ad viewability rate, helping publishers to increase opportunities for monetizing their content.

Higher click-through rates

A major benefit of AMP is that it is showcased in the Top Stories list (or carousel) of the Google mobile SERP—which appears on top of all search results. Readers are highly more likely to select those AMP pages first, leading to increased click-through rates.

 Current AMP statistics

While many popular websites are using AMP technology today, such as Yahoo, CNN, BBC, Reddit, Washington Post, WordPress, Gizmodo, Wired, Independent.co.uk, Pinterest, eBay, and many more—it is not a technology reserved only for big brands. AMP technology is being used by over 1.4 million websites. The chart below shows which industries are using AMP the most:

• Arts & Entertainment accounts for nearly 11% of total AMP technology usage.
• Computer Electronics & Technology accounts for about 6%.
• Science & Education is close behind at 5.88%.
• Gaming accounts for about 5.15% of AMP technology usage.
• The remaining 73% is the total of every other industry’s insignificant percentages

Image source

 

The anatomy of a Google AMP page

To understand how Google AMP gives your SEO and content marketing strategy a boost, it’s best to first get a grasp on the three core components of an AMP page.

AMP HTML

AMP HTML differs from regular HTML (or HTML5) in that it comes with mobile-focused properties and custom tags. AMP HTML guarantees certain baseline performance characteristics—which translates to content loading faster on users’ devices. This means faster consumption by the reader and a better overall user experience, which can impact conversion rates and SEO/content marketing metrics like bounce rate (mentioned above) and time on site. (Faster consumption means the reader can consumer more articles in less time).

Speaking of user experience, are you up to speed on Google’s upcoming page experience update?

AMP JavaScript

AMP JavaScript enables the AMP page to more efficiently provide the core benefit of the regular page to the reader. The AMP JavaScript library employs AMP’s top practices like inline CSS and font triggering—which ensure faster rendering of the AMP page for readers. It also allows for performance enhancement techniques, like pre-calculating the layout of every page element before resources are loaded, and disabling slow CSS selectors—all of which are crucial to the reader’s experience.

Image source

AMP Cache

The AMP cache is built to serve only valid pages and to let them pre-load safely and efficiently. What this means is, a confirmed page (which we’ll get to later) is guaranteed to work, eliminating dependency on external factors that could slow the page down.

Given the below breakdown, you can see that by cutting back on the HTML code tag management and loading only the page elements that are suitable for mobile users, the AMP version of a page renders more quickly. Will Critchlow’s Whiteboard Friday diagram provides a simple visual for this:

 

As Critchlow notes, if you have an AMP version, in the source code, you would designate that with the rel AMP HTML link. For example, if you put /amp at the end of any news story on The Guardian website (even on desktop), you’ll see the AMP HTML. It’s linked in display with the AMP HTML link in the source code. You can also see the AMP difference:

Here’s a regular Guardian news story page:

And here’s the AMP version of that same Guardian news story page:

That is, after adding “/amp” at the end of the link.

Without the ads, menu navigation, recommended reads, and other resource-heavy elements, the page loads faster and is a simpler experience for the reader.

Drawbacks and additional considerations for integrating Google AMP

While AMP can help to improve your ranking as well as the experience and performance of your content to mobile readers, it does have drawbacks and caveats which you should consider when deciding whether to implement AMP for your site:

• To begin with, adopting AMP pages entails sacrificing a significant number of UX elements on your webpage. At its core, AMP HTML prioritizes efficiency over creativity, so if engaging visuals is a big part of your web experience, this may not be for you. 
• In addition to limited images on your AMP pages, you’ll also only be allowed one advertisement per page. This limiting framework also doesn’t support disruptive ads like expendables, while direct-sold ads can be difficult to implement.
• From a marketing perspective, it costs double the crawl for one piece of content, part of Google’s thrust to ensure parity. For many publishers, it’s been found to drive impressions but not necessarily engagement metrics. This is due to the Top Stories carousel that encourages users to read from other sources. 
• In a similar vein, Google’s AMP viewer tends to dilute brand identity as a Google domain is shown in the address bar. While there is a fix to show the actual site on top of the AMP page, it takes up precious space above the fold. You may also not achieve the same brand feel with a Google AMP page vs a standard page, as seen with the example below:

• As well, AMP only works if users click on the AMP version of a webpage (instead of the canonical version). And while studies have found that the AMP library can reduce the number of server requests to fetch a document by as much 77%, the AMP version is not always served if it’s not implemented correctly.  
• While AMP has been around for four years, it’s still relatively in its nascent stages.

Here are some final details about Google AMP that must be considered when deciding whether to implement it on your site. 

• You need to use a streamlined version of CSS.
• You’re only allowed to use the JavaScript library that AMP provides, and because you’re not in control, you could experience lazy loading (perhaps the only downside of AMP).
• AMP sites must be properly validated if they are to work every time.
• AMP plugin pages don’t allow forms.
• Custom fonts need to be specially loaded for better experience.
• You need to declare image heights and widths.
• You need AMP-approved extensions if you want video content on your pages.

Finally, AMP prioritizes speed and readability, not shareability. So because your social sharing buttons are created using JavaScript, they may not display properly.

AMP prioritizes speed and readability, not shareability.

How to implement AMP to improve your content and SEO

Of course, if you have a WordPress site, the simplest way to start implementing AMP is to use the official AMP plugin from WordPress and Google.  If you’re looking to have more control over how your AMP pages look or gather analytics more easily, you might try other free plugins such as WeeblrAMP or AMP for WP.

However, not all businesses use WordPress, and plugins do have their limitations. So I’m going to walk you through the steps you can take to implement AMP technology into your content marketing strategy without a plugin.

Step #1: Create your AMP page template

The first step you’ll need to take to implement AMP for your blog posts and other high-quality content is to create an AMP page template from scratch. To create an AMP page template, you’ll need to start your AMP HTML page with at the top of your page, and identify the page as AMP content by adding a lightning bolt symbol (?) in the HTML tag like this .

Here’s an example of a simple AMP HTML page which you can use for your content:

These are the tags to include in your AMP HTML documents:

1. and tags
2. as the first child of your tag
3. inside your tag to include and load the AMP JavaScript library
4. inside your tag
5. inside your tag
6. AMP boilerplate code in your tag

These tags are those which you can change in the code of the pages themselves:

• link href=”hello-world.html”
• The content within the body section Hello World!

Now that you know how to create an AMP page template for your blog, you might want to learn about all of the HTML tags you can use for your AMP pages.

Unfortunately, there are some HTML tags that you can’t use for AMP pages. These include:

Step #2: Preview and validate your AMP page

To preview your AMP page, you’ll need to open your page directly in your web browser from your file system, or use a local web server, such as Apache 2.

To make sure your AMP page is valid, on the other hand, all you have to do is open your page in your web browser, add “#development=1” to the URL, and then open the Chrome DevTools console to check for validation errors.

Image source

Bruce Day recommends testing one to two types of pages from your website on AMP first. Ideally, you should also include some pages that rank so you can see if Google is serving the AMP version in mobile search results.

It’s important to note that it could take a couple of days for Google to find, check, and index the AMP version of a page. As well, you should let the rollout run for at least a month (longer if you can afford to do so). This allows you to build enough data to ensure that rolling out AMP sitewide is worth it.

It can take a couple of days for Google to find, check, and index the AMP version of a page, and you should run your AMP pages for at least a month in order to gain meaningful data.

Step #3: Track performance

As with anything in digital marketing, you need to track the performance of your AMP pages. Not just to see how you compare with your competitors, but also to see if your performance is aligned with your goals.

You can use in-house tools to do this, such as Google Analytics, or any of the various third-party B2B tools. There are a number of analytics vendors that provide built-in features for AMP analytics.

Image source

Other important things to note include using canonical URLs and other variables to define what should be recorded. This is crucial for identifying any traffic fluctuations caused by AMP.

Additionally, the extraUrlParams attribute in amp-analytics adds a query string parameter to the canonical URL (such as “type=amp”). This makes it easier to differentiate AMP pages from normal web pages in analytics. This enables you to compare total traffic on pages before and after AMP launch.

Canonical URLs enable you to isolate AMP traffic in Google analytics for better tracking and optimizaiton.

Is AMP right for you?

As you’ve learned, AMP is a great way to speed up web pages, ultimately, providing better UX in your content delivery, particularly for mobile users. If, based on your business model and the criteria above, it is deemed right for your business, be sure to take the above considerations into account and to follow the steps for implementation. It may take some time, but having better-performing content affords long-term benefits. 

About the author

Aaron Chichioco is the chief content officer (CCO) and one of the web designers of Design Doxa. Aside from his expertise on web/mobile design and development, he also has years of experience in digital marketing, branding, customer service, ecommerce and business management.

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5 SEO Tactics to Maximize Internal Links — Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Cyrus-Shepard

Are you using internal links to their full potential? Probably not. Luckily, Cyrus is here with five tips to help you boost your internal linking strategy — and your site performance — in this brand new Whiteboard Friday.

Resources for further reading:

• Should SEOs Care About Internal Links?
• Internal Linking Best Practices

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans! Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I’m Cyrus Shepard, and today we are talking about internal links. Specifically, five SEO tactics to maximize your internal links.

I love internal links. There are a lot of guides out there, internal link best practices — they explain everything. This is not that video. This is not that guide. Instead, I want to show you ways to maximize your internal links for maximum SEO gain, because I see a lot of people who don’t leverage their full power, and they think internal links simply aren’t as powerful. 

But first, a story…

So I have some specific tactics for you to try and employ, and we’ll get into those in a second. But first, to demonstrate internal links, I want to start with a story, a story which shows some of their potential power. It’s a story of a single link here at Moz that we employed several months ago. 

We have a page on Domain Authority. If you Google “Domain Authority,” it’s typically the very first result. Back in January, we added a single link to the page. We had just launched a new tool, SEO Domain Metrics, and we wanted to add a link from our existing page to our new page. So we did. The link said “Check your Domain Authority for free,” and we added it. Within weeks we saw some interesting metrics, not on the page that we linked to, but on the page that we linked from.

We also included an image on the page to draw attention to the link. Bounce rate instantly went down 33%. Why? People were clicking the link. They wanted to check their Domain Authority. Pages per session went up 33%. So when people were visiting this page, they were visiting more pages pretty much because of this link and the accompanying image.

Session duration was up 10%. So people were spending 10% more time on Moz after they visited this page. Within a few weeks, traffic to the page that we added the link to was up 42%, and it has sustained that traffic increase ever since January when we added that link. Of course, the page that we linked to we added links from all over the site.

Traffic on this page has risen exponentially, and it’s now one of the top pages on Moz, probably not all because of this link, but the cumulative efforts of many of those links. So why did that link work so well and why do we think that the link helped improve those page metrics? So here’s the thing that most people don’t get about internal links.

1. Engagement 

Number one, strive for engagement. When you add internal links to your page, it gives people the opportunity to visit other relevant pages on your site, thereby improving your engagement metrics. That’s when you know that your internal links are working when you improve engagement. If you’re just adding SEO links for SEO value and there’s no engagement change, are you really adding value?

No. So you want to go after engagement. There are some technical Google reasons for this. Google has several patents that we’ve discussed over the years — reasonable surfer. There’s a patent called User Sensitive PageRank. Through these patents, Google describes how they want to count links that people actually click.

If people aren’t clicking on your links, should they really count? So Google has several processes in place to sort of measure what people are clicking or what they might click and actually pass more weight through those links. So you get help with the engagement, but you also pass more link signals through those links that people are actually clicking.

Now think about where you might be putting your internal links now. Are you putting them at the bottom of the page, like in a related post? Is anybody clicking those widget links? Maybe not, probably not. Look at the top of this post, the top of this page. I’m going to add some links about internal linking at the very top of the post. Do you think people are going to click those links?

You bet they are. There’s a good chance you’re going to click one of those links after you watch this video. Or maybe you clicked on it before you watch those videos. So we would expect those links to pass more value than adding those links further down on the page or in a widget or something like that. You can tell your internal links are working and have value when you see your engagement metrics start to move.

So that should be the number one measure or standard of if your internal links are valuable and are working for you. Pursue engagement, number one rule. 

2. Extreme topical relevance

Number two tip, extreme topical relevance. Now people say, yes, you should link to topically relevant pages. I like link to extremely topically relevant pages.

So whenever I publish a new page, I look for the other pages on my site that are very topically related, and I make sure to interlink them appropriately so I can get the right rankings boost to the right pages that I want. There are other Google technical reasons for this too. We talked about reasonable surfer and user sensitive PageRank. Well, Google also has something they patented called Topical PageRank, and that means that links that are more topically relevant pass more value.

Links that are less topically relevant pass less value. You can also look at your engagement metrics to see if these links are topically relevant because people generally don’t want to click less topically relevant links. So a couple of tips for finding your most topically relevant pages on your site. For example, for Domain Authority, I might look at all the other keywords that that page ranks for in positions 2 and 10, which means they rank highly but they’re not quite number 1 and I want to boost the rankings.

I want to find other pages on my site that also rank for those keywords. So I would use a query like this, and I’ll put the code in the transcription below. I would search on my site, site to moz.com, search for my keyword “Domain Authority,” and I would exclude the page that I’m actually looking for, so:

site:moz.com domain authority -inurl:/domainauthority

Google will give me a list of other pages on my site that rank for Domain Authority, excluding this, and I know those might be good link targets to link to my page to help it rank for those terms. We have some other resources on that as well if you search around and I’ll link to:

Harnessing the Flow of Link Equity to Maximize SEO Ranking Opportunity

3. Add context

Third tip, don’t just add links, add context to your links.

One thing that a lot of people do, that I hate seeing, is when they add a link to a page, they’ll just find a piece of relevant text and they’ll add a link to it and that’s it, without adding any relevant context or anything else like that. In my experience, it’s much better if you add context around a link. Google’s freshness patents talk about the amount of change in a document.

When they just see a link, they might ignore just a simple link added. But if you add text, if you add image, if you add context around a link to help draw people’s attention to it, to help give some relevant signals to Google, that link, in my experience, is much more likely to pass value than simply adding a link and linking some existing text.

So always add context to your links. 

4. Make every link unique

Number four, can you believe we’re at four out of five? Number four, make every link unique. Now a lot of people in SEO they talk about link ratio. Should you use exact match anchor text or partial match anchor text? What should your ratios be? I think that’s far too complicated.

I think much easier is just simply make every new link you add unique. Make it natural. Use natural words. I tend to avoid exact match anchor text completely. That way I get to avoid something that’s very easy to do, which is over-optimization. If you’re a new site with not a lot of authority, Google has processes in place to detect over-optimization when they think that you’re trying to manipulate your rankings.

So make every link unique. Use natural words. Don’t worry about ratios and things like that. If you follow my advice, I would generally avoid exact match anchor text on internal links. Other people may give you different advice though. 

5. Trim low value links

Finally, tactic number five, you may consider trimming your low value links, and this is another technical reason.

This is a type of old PageRank sculpting. The idea is every page has a certain amount of PageRank. If you include lots and lots of links on your page, the value that Google is able to pass through each link is diminished. It’s diluted. So you sometimes may want to eliminate the low value links. So what do I mean by a low value link?

Links that are not engaging and not relevant. People are not clicking them. If they’re not engaging and they’re not relevant, there is simply no point to include them on the page if they’re not being actually helpful. 

Conclusion

All right. So those are my five tips for getting the most power of your internal linking. If you have any other tips that you’d like to share with the community, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

Hope you enjoyed this video. Best of luck with your SEO.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Implement Accessibility and Inclusivity in Advertising (+Why It Matters)

Even with all of the ad targeting and technology we have, advertising still often misses the mark for accessibility and inclusivity. Certain demographics are often misrepresented (or not represented at all), and some ads can’t even be enjoyed by the audiences that were intended to see them.

It’s for this reason that from the start of your campaign conceptualizing, you need to be thinking about accessibility and inclusivity. These aren’t attributes that are simply added in after the campaign has already been concepted and designed. These are two critical elements of the campaign that will determine the campaign’s overall success and how it reaches and resonates with those who experience it.

Image source

However, despite the importance of both accessibility and inclusivity, many ad strategists simply don’t address either in their campaigns. This may be due to a lack of knowledge of how they can create better campaigns that can be appreciated by all. In this post, I will:

• Define accessibility and inclusivity as it relates to advertising.
• Highlight why accessibility and inclusivity are key components of your ad campaigns.
• Outline a few strategies to help ensure that you address both in your campaign creation process.

Before we dive in, let’s take a look at what exactly is accessibility and inclusivity as they pertain to advertising.

What is accessibility and inclusivity in advertising?

Accessibility and inclusivity typically come together as one, but they are still two different entities. So we need to carefully define each term before we begin addressing how each impacts your campaigns. Failure to understand each one individually will result in a lack of awareness and an inaccurate implementation of each attribute in your campaigns.

Understanding accessibility in advertising

Accessibility in advertising addresses the campaigns’ ability to be experienced by those with physical or cognitive impairments. Campaigns should not discriminate against those who can’t see or hear or have another limitations that prevent them from experiencing the advertisement altogether.

Over 22% of people in the United States and 15% worldwide live with a disability. Without accommodations built into your campaigns, you won’t reach this population and your brand may also come off as insensitive. It’s up to ad strategists and their teams to ensure they are addressing the areas in which the ad could fall short with those who may need additional support and assistance.

However, this is often easier said than done. A lack of accessibility in a specific campaign is often a foundational design flaw from the early days of campaign concepting. Advertisers need to consider how the ad will be interpreted (both viewed and heard) by those with disabilities and make proper adjustments to accommodate everyone.

For example, brands are using both subtitles and narration in their ads across multiple mediums to ensure that their content can be experienced by those who are deaf or blind.

This is just a start for making your advertisements more accessible, but it is the right mindset to have when you’re thinking about how your campaign will be experienced.

Much like accessibility, advertisers still need to work to make their campaigns more inclusive too.

Understanding inclusivity in advertising

Inclusive ad campaigns take into account people of all different genders, races and backgrounds and ensure that multiple perspectives are represented.

For far too long, many genders and backgrounds have been underrepresented in advertisements. Unrealistic standards of beauty and limited representation of minorities in ads over the years has caused advertisers to take another look at who they are putting in their ads and how they are portrayed.

Body-positive, minority-led and non-stereotypical campaigns have now become the norm. For example, the clothing brand Aerie launched their #AerieREAL campaign, portraying real, authentic girls who are making a difference in the world. This campaign showcases girls of all backgrounds who may normally not feel represented in national, global campaigns.

By making your campaigns more inclusive, you can help more people to hear and see the things many of us take for granted, and empower them to obtain perspectives and knowledge they might not have otherwise been able to obtain. Keeping accessibility and inclusivity at the forefront of our campaigns also opens our own minds up to new perspectives and knowledge.

The need for accessibility and inclusivity in advertising

Accessible, inclusive advertisements aren’t something you do once and check off your list. Your company needs to adopt a mindset of accessibility and inclusivity. These attributes should be woven into all aspects of your marketing for a variety of reasons:

1. It extends your ads’ reach and relevance.

Accessible, inclusive ads can be experienced by more people. In addition, they’ll resonate with more people as well. Without them, you’ll risk stifling your campaign’s reach and relevance. What if a large portion of your Facebook ad targeting was deaf and your video advertisement only had a narration?

Or what if the cast featured in your campaign all had the same background, alienating a group of people that didn’t feel like your product was intended for them too?

Even with precise targeting, a lack of accessibility and inclusivity in your ads can be a critical error for your campaign. You’ll miss out on potential customers that may have sought after your product if those attributes were taken into account.

Overall, these two campaign attributes will make for more successful and impactful ads.

2. There may be legal ramifications

The law on ADA accessibility as it pertains to advertisements and marketing assets is complicated. Over the past few decades, guidelines and resolutions have been passed to ensure businesses take proper steps to make their websites and advertisements accessible to all.

However, the courts have had difficulty enforcing some of these laws due to different interpretations and the need for additional explanation. Nonetheless, it’s something that needs to be addressed in all aspects of your marketing efforts. Failure to do so could result in a lawsuit for your company.

Despite the murky laws, website accessibility lawsuits have been steadily rising over the past few years. Over 10,165 cases were reported in 2018.

To ensure your company is in the clear, make the necessary adaptations to your website and keep accessibility in mind when you are designing campaigns.

3. It’s simply the right thing to do

We’ve covered strategic reasons and legal reasons. Now it’s time to highlight the moral reason. 

Businesses don’t need to have an altruistic mission to simply know what the right thing is to do. Their message and marketing should be inviting to all people, regardless of their abilities and backgrounds. Everyone deserves to be able to decipher an ad that is being served to them.

How to improving accessibility and inclusivity in your advertising

It’s clear that businesses need to be proactive with making sure their campaigns bring in more people and do not leave anyone behind. Fortunately, the adjustments needed in order to make an ad more accessible and inclusive are minor, and their impact is profound—such campaigns will pay off for your company in the long run and enable more people to appreciate your work.

But what is the best way to accomplish that? To help you improve the accessibility and inclusivity of your advertisements, I’ve outlined four tips below:

1. Test ads in randomized focus groups to eliminate biases

Sometimes you’re too close to a project and don’t see what others see. Take a step back and review your work with your peers. Gather feedback and outside perspectives. This will make your campaign stronger and more effective.

One essential way to uncover personal biases and ensure you are making your advertisements as accessible and diverse as possible is to hold a focus group.

In the focus group, you can gather a multitude of different perspectives that will share whether or not your advertisement addresses both of those attributes. You’ll learn from new perspectives and see how your ad will be interpreted and viewed by consumers.

It’s not uncommon for advertisements to unintentionally use stereotypes in their ad creative. Only 76% of female marketing professionals believe they are creating ads that avoid gender stereotypes.

No matter how cautious you are, sometimes subconscious biases will slip into your work. Getting feedback from multiple data sources including focus groups will result in a campaign that addresses all the areas you need to consider.

2. Redesign your website with accessibility in mind

When you think of an advertisement, you likely envision the creative.

However, your advertising campaign doesn’t just stop with the ad creative and implementation. You need to ensure that the content in your entire funnel is accessible and inclusive.

This includes your website. Most websites likely need an overhaul to become more ADA-friendly and ensure they are both accessible and inclusive.Some common ways to make your website more accessible include:

• Ensuring your text color and background have contrast for those who are colorblind.
• Including alt text for your images for those who are blind.
• Adding auditory cues and site readers for those who are deaf.

It might take time to re-imagine your site with all of these new functions and design elements, but it is essential. These changes can make a significant difference in the way people perceive your content.

For example, this site for Dev Art could use a bit more contrast between the text color and its gray background. It is a little difficult to read in its current state and might be challenging for someone who is colorblind. 

 

By making your website more accessible, you will ensure that no one who encounters your ad isn’t able to complete the call to action on your site due to a disability.

3. Add narration and subtitles to digital ads

Narration and subtitles are two small adjustments to the digital ads you might be running on popular sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. By including both of these elements in your ads, you make it easy for those with audio or visual impairments to still experience the advertisement.

Thankfully, it is simple to add narration or subtitles to a digital ad. You can easily record a voiceover and have it run in the background of a video ad. For subtitles, Facebook added a new caption feature to add captions to your videos in just a few clicks. You can also preview and review the captions that are auto-generated for videos prior to publishing. After your review, you can click “Save to Video” and they will be added to the content.

Image source

With these slight campaign adjustments, you’ll reach more people than you would without them.

Do you have a proactive accessibility and inclusivity strategy?

Even if you understand the importance of accessibility and inclusivity, you need to ensure you’re always working to actively integrate them into all aspects of your marketing. These are two essential components of a successful advertising campaign. With them, you’ll reach more people, avoid legal ramifications, and stay on the right side of history. To ensure your campaigns are more accessible and inclusive, make it a point to:

• Hold focus groups to eliminate biases.
• Design your website to accommodate impairments.
• Add narration and subtitles to your advertisements.

These strategic changes will position your campaign for success while ensuring that everyone who is served the advertisement gets a fair shot to enjoy it on their own terms.

About the author

Joanne Camarce is a digital marketing expert specializing in SEO, ecommerce, and social media. She loves meeting new people and embraces challenges. When she’s not wearing her marketing hat, you’ll find Joanne fine-tuning her art and music skills.

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