5 Product SEO Strategies to Get Your Products to Rank in the SERPs

Quite unlike before, people don’t depend on ads, the marketing landscape has changed tremendously and any successful digital strategy focuses on your products or services. The simple truth is that people who want to buy your products or engage in your services, do so online.

Covid-19, the lockdowns, and the drastic changes we have to live with now have made this the norm. Customers now search for the products they’re looking for and will churn your product at any slightest sign of a poor customer experience.

This ultimately means that you must build your product pages around buyer-optimized keywords that relate to what you offer if you want your product to feature prominently on the SERPs.  

The following are some product SEO strategies you have to implement to ensure your product ranks in the SERPs.

1. Listening to the voice of the customer (VoC)

Your customers’ views about your product are real and authentic. They are their genuine concerns, feelings, and sentiments.

The better or worse your product is, the more they talk or comment on it. The voice of the customer is a very powerful weapon and SERPs often take note.

Interestingly, the Internet enables your customers to share their frustrations in real-time, this means they have a 24/7 opportunity of getting the world to listen to their complaints. Those who will get to know about your product are not only your customers, even your detractors will get to know how you are doing or not doing well.

Appearing on the first page of any search engine depends on how well your product is doing and this is more or less dependent on what your customers have to say about your product.

According to research from Gartner, for a brand to build loyalty among customers, it needs to offer a good product and excellent customer service. The research also reveals that 89% of companies expect to compete mostly based on customer experience.

Just as people are listening, SERPs are monitoring how your product is performing, the better your performance, the better chance you have to rank high. It would be absurd to expect your product to rank on the first page if it does not sit well or has a poor rating from customers.

2. Making use of sentiment analysis using product review data

The SERPs are more or less your means of displaying your products. Most often, customers restrict themselves to the first two pages while searching for products to purchase.

Even if your product is of high quality but does not find its way to the first pages of search engines, nobody will notice it. These days, where the world revolves around data, your best bet to get your product to rank in the SERPs is sentiment analysis using product review data.

Recent research has discovered that if your product’s star rating increases from 3 to 5, there will be an increase of 12% in conversion rate. What this implies is that you will have more customers who buy your product, since your product SEO strategies are ensuring you rank high in the SERPs.

3. Boosting local SEO

Even though the new normal is shifting focus from brick and mortar, you still need to understand the importance of local SEO. You are operating from a particular geographical location and that is the launchpad of your products.

Apart from your customers, your supply chain is also important, and if you can get them from your locality, it will save a lot of costs. It affords you the opportunity of offering a special delivery option to your immediate community.

A strong local SEO ensures that your product shows up in search results especially to the potential customers in your local community.

4. Prompt your customers to give unbiased product reviews

Google makes use of product reviews to determine which product to display for specific queries. If your product appears on Google’s first page, customers believe it’s of high quality, and they are more likely to purchase from you.

You can prompt customers to send reviews through emails, coupons, gifts, discounts, flyers, or cards. The marketing team must always specify where customers can leave their reviews for effectiveness.

They can leave their reviews on Google My Business and the product pages on your website. Ensure that product reviews on your site include schema markup to enhance better search engine rankings and more conversion rates.

The effort from your marketing team will determine the number and quality of product reviews you get. It’s better if they can express their feelings and not just clicking on the like button.

The most important thing is that their reviews are not biased.

5. Optimize keywords

When search engines crawl with the intent of indexing and ranking your site, they go for keywords. To optimize keywords, you must ensure there is diversification, whereby each product page focuses on a different keyword.

While you should make effective use of the right keywords, it becomes absurd if you embark on keyword stuffing. Google will penalize you for that.

Ensure your keywords are strategically placed and do a good description of your product with the right words that customers will search for. Your ultimate goal should be for customers to easily locate your product while searching and this can be enhanced by ensuring that Google ranks your product high.

Guest author: Alon Ghelber is the Tel Aviv-based Chief Marketing Officer of Revuze.it, who supports B2B tech startups in capturing customers’ (and VCs’) attention through marketing based on data-driven storytelling.

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source https://www.jeffbullas.com/product-seo-strategies/

Where Should You Be Spending Your Digital Marketing Budget?

As a small business, there can be a reluctance to spend on digital marketing, especially if you are not getting an ROI. With so many digital marketing strategies to choose from it can be a daunting prospect to know where to spend your money. This article will give you insight into where to assign your digital marketing budget.

So how much should you be spending? Traditionally marketing budgets have been between 5-8% of your sales. In 2021 half of the total marketing budget is expected to be spent online.

Being successful with digital marketing brings massive rewards. This is why it is so important to spend your digital marketing budget in the right places.

Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is a vital digital marketing tool and not one that any business should overlook. Done right, it will make your website more visible, boost traffic and attract potential customers. Easy to say, but hard to do.

That is where a site like ahrefs comes in handy. It has so many tools that can help you with your SEO strategy:

• Keyword ranking and profile
• Top pages
• Backlink profile
• Site audit
• Competitor analysis

It is a must-have tool and should be your first port of call. You will be able to gather all the metrics you need to be able to make a plan going forward.

Content is so important for SEO. Currently, firms spend around one third of their budget on content creation. So what should your content be? This is where ahrefs helps. You can analyze your keywords to see if there are any content gaps you can exploit. Use it to see what is working for your competitors and mimic it. Great content in itself doesn’t bring people to your site, but it is a catalyst for better SEO.

Quality content will mean people are more likely to link back to you. Backlinks are the lifeblood of your SEO. Moz’s definition is a good place to start:

“…backlinks to your website are a signal to search engines that others vouch for your content.”

So the more backlinks pointing to your site, the more search engines think of your site as authoritative on that subject.

Backlinks are not easy to come by but are very worthwhile. Using a guest blogging strategy alongside your content strategy is a good way to create more of them.

Consider the expectation of your potential customer, what are they looking for? This is known as search intent and it is fundamental to helping you target your content correctly. This diagram shows the four different types of search intent. By finding an answer to a query you will improve the chance of your content reaching your potential customer.

Content is one of many factors that make up a successful SEO strategy. SEO is not a one-off fix, it takes time and effort. It is complex but the key is to stick at it and invest in it.

Social Media

Social media should play a key role in your digital marketing strategy. Social media is such an important medium to connect with customers, to advertise products and to build brand awareness.

It is key to know your demographic and then use the correct social media platform to target them. For example over 90% of 18-30 year olds use YouTube, whereas only 80% use Facebook.

Create standout images to help promote your product. A recent survey revealed that more than half of gen z and millennials were inspired by social media to make a purchase.

Using video is also highly effective and 81% of businesses now use it as a marketing tool. You will increase traffic and are more likely to get leads if you use video. By 2022, 82% of internet content will be made up of video.  

The question is not when will you use video but how? There are many tools that are quick and relatively cheap. A tool like biteable is a good way for you to start, especially if you are on a limited budget. 

Now get creating.

Banner Ads

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that banner ads are a thing of the past, this isn’t the case at all. Though banner ads do have a lower click through rate (CTR) than they once did, they are still a highly effective digital marketing tool.

Banner ads are a fantastic way to establish visual branding. They showcase your brand name, logo, brand colors and slogan.

They are a great way to engage with a target audience. Tools like AdRoll and ReTargeter help you be more efficient and can increase ROI. There are so many options with where to place ads and to which demographic. It is an important tool in your digital marketing arsenal.

PPC

With PPC, you only pay a fee once an ad has been clicked. If no one clicks on the advert, you don’t pay a penny. You can think of it as buying website hits and visitors, rather than earning the traffic organically through SEO.

PPC is a bit like a tap, you can choose when you turn it on and off. You have a lot of flexibility with how you implement your campaign and can set budgets easily. It is also worth knowing that a click through rate (CTR) of 4-5% is considered a success.

It is important that you know what keywords you are targeting. This will ensure the right people will see your ad.

When choosing a keyword, the higher the search volume the higher the cost. When on a limited budget, finding a balance between the volume and the keyword is key. With a lower volume keyword, you may be able to create a campaign where you are visible.

Email

This is the unsexy part of your digital marketing arsenal, but a very important one. Your email in someone’s inbox, creates recognition and sales. In fact email has a 4200% ROI, so the benefits are huge if you do it right.

What’s the use of email if you don’t have email addresses to send them to? You need to be actively collecting email addresses from the visitors to your site. Unfortunately, the best way to do this is with the really irritating popup.

There are a number of different ways of utilizing a popup, so it’s not quite as annoying. Consider having it appear as a sticky top bar on the page or have it delayed. Experiment with different types and see which produces the best results.

Images and video work well in email outreach and have a higher CTR. It is important to create meaningful and engaging content. Not only will it lead to more engagement but has the added benefit of improving your SEO.

Conclusion

This list is by no means exhaustive, but they are tried and tested methods for small businesses. By using these techniques you’ll utilize your digital marketing budget well. Otherwise, you run the risk of wasting money and not seeing a significant return on investment.

Guest author: Joe Dawson is the Director of Creative.onl. Joe has a passion for creating meaningful experiences. Through design, he creates authentic and innovative digital products. Read Joe’s blog here. Connect with Joe on LinkedIn. Follow Joe on Twitter.

The post Where Should You Be Spending Your Digital Marketing Budget? appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/digital-marketing-budget/

How to Use Twitter for SEO to Grow Your Business

Keyword optimization, building backlinks, and writing brilliant blog posts aren’t the only way you can increase your website’s visibility through SEO.

You can now use Twitter to improve your SEO ratings.

Google cracked a deal with Twitter a few years ago to get access to its live tweets data, which indexes tweets on the Google search engine. This makes Twitter a big player in the world of search engine optimization.

With 330 million users on Twitter, you are missing out if not promoting your brand on the platform. Apart from offering such a vast audience, Twitter also offers paid promotions for your brand.

How Twitter improves SEO and your online presence

According to Statista, there are more than 330 million monthly active Twitter users

Does social media really impact SEO ranking? Given that social media is more about pictures, one platform is more about words, Twitter. Google and Twitter struck a deal in 2015 where Twitter provides Google with its live tweet data and more.

This has in fact affected SEO in ways marketers didn’t think possible. Google now uses real-time tweets to showcase its search results. So, when you search a hashtag, Google showcases Twitter results with the most recent tweets that use the hashtag in its search results. This makes Twitter absolutely essential for businesses.

Twitter helps businesses get in touch with their customers, and interact with them. Twitter’s hashtags about a product can give insights about how the product is and businesses can learn how people are responding to their products/services. Twitter strengthens the PR relationship a company has with its customers, as well as employees.

Here are some ways you can leverage Twitter to its full potential for growth and visibility online.

#1. Paid promotions

An ad by Undeveloped on Twitter

Paid promotions are the easiest way to reach your target audience, not only can you promote your tweets, but you can also promote your account. 

Be mindful of what you write in your Twitter Bio. Deploying your brand’s Twitter Bio carefully is key. Make sure to add the correct keywords and hashtags in the Bio. The summary on Twitter should be effective and use keywords that are most relevant for your brand. This will increase your brand’s visibility on Google.

Creating a username with the brand’s name is crucial to bring you on top of Google’s search engine results. When someone searches for a brand name, Google also displays their Twitter accounts in the search list.

There are various tools that can be used to optimize reach on Twitter. By posting during the time most of your followers are online. Make sure to keep in mind the time for paid promotions too.

#2. Trending hashtags

Twitter has a feature that showcases various trending topics from around the world as “trends”.

What is a “trend”? Basically, it’s a topic a lot of people on Twitter are talking about. It can range from politics to fashion, from technology to food, literally anything.

Find the latest trending topics that suit your brand’s image and get into the conversation. This helps with visibility on Twitter and will also bring up tweets on Google.

#3. Re-sharing content

• 

Re-sharing old content shouldn’t be frowned upon. Re-sharing old content from your website or any content that may be relevant with the current time should be shared again with your Twitter audience.

Your new audience will probably miss out on good content that was posted in the past. So pick up the most educational/informative content and post it again.

Do it a couple of times, or you can just pin those tweets to the top of your profile, giving important content visibility on your page.

#4. Engaging in relevant conversations

You can search for hashtags and keywords on Twitter in connection to your brand. Hop onto conversations that you might think speak in the tone of your brand. Retweet, share tweets, or just reply to tweets that are discussing your product, by giving information or just having a simple conversation.

Being responsive to complaints, queries, etc, prompts the consumer to make a purchase. Make a Twitter plan that also includes engaging your audience, and engaging an audience that reposts and shares tweets is very important.

A few tools that help with Twitter growth and engagement

• MeetEdgar – This app helps with posting your content on a schedule and will also write your tweets on a lazy day.
• TweetDeck – A twitter owned app, helps you see multiple feeds in a side-by-side view. You can follow hashtags, conversations, and even your competitors’ feeds.
• Bitly – If you want to post your website links on Twitter, make Bitly your best friend. It gives you a shorter version of any link. Not only a link shortening app, but Bitly is also very informative about data analysis for Twitter.

While building social media for a brand, always have a reliable monitoring tool for insights, study the insights and make changes. Blending all the steps with your brand’s goals for Twitter will help it reach a better and larger audience. Be consistent, and patient to see growth, it doesn’t miraculously happen overnight.

Geust author: Semil Shah, Chief Marketer at Shrushti Digital Marketing

According to his team, Semil Shah can take any digital marketing profile to the next level. With over 15 years of experience in the SEO world, he is a certified SEO specialist, who mainly focuses on growing businesses. He is the Chief Marketer at Shrushti Digital Marketing. In his free time you will catch him either listening to podcasts or trekking in the jungle clicking some really cool pictures.

The post How to Use Twitter for SEO to Grow Your Business appeared first on Jeffbullas's Blog.

source https://www.jeffbullas.com/twitter-for-seo/

5 Expert Hacks for Crafting a Call-to-Action Readers Can’t Resist

“When I say jump, you say, ‘How high?’”

This may work for drill sergeants, but it probably won’t do you any favors in marketing. As nice as it would be to get customers to instantly buy from you the moment they see a button with the words “buy now,” that’s typically not going to happen.

Instead, you need to tap into all your powers of persuasion to write a call-to-action that gets the attention of your readers and convinces them to take the desired next step.

This can be easier said than done. After all, we’re bombarded with countless marketing messages each day, all with a call-to-action of their own. It’s easy to get lost in the clutter.

If you’ve ever felt like you can’t hack it at writing marketing content, you’re not alone. The good news is that even if you’re not a great writer, you can become a master at crafting a call-to-action that generates real results for your business.

1. Define wording around an outcome

One of the biggest problems I’ve noticed with calls-to-action is that many of them try to be too concise. Yes, there’s value in not being wordy. But super short calls-to-action like “free consultation” or “free trial” can actually seem too demanding or vague for someone who happens to click on a display ad.

Instead, you can make your call-to-action more clear and direct by defining the wording around the visitors’ desired outcomes.

For example, a food subscription box could use a phrase like “try your first free meal today” instead of “free trial.” An injury attorney could use a call-to-action like “learn your rights” instead of “free consultation.”

These phrases can actually be more effective with cold leads by more closely linking their actions with clear, concrete outcomes.

2. Use action words

Is your writing action-packed and engaging? Or flat and boring? The answer could reveal why you are (or aren’t) getting clicks on your calls-to-action.

Let’s face it, words like “submit” aren’t that enticing. They sound more reminiscent of turning in a term paper than gaining access to an exciting offer.

Because of this, your call-to-action should use engaging action words whenever possible. Words like “choose,” “get,” “try,” or “take” imply that the reader has more power over what happens next. These are active, rather than passive, invitations.

This can work even for shorter calls-to-action. Change the button that reads “free trial” to “get your free trial,” and suddenly, you’ve made an actual invitation, rather than simply telling visitors where the free trial is located.

3. Personalize whenever possible

When you think of personalization in marketing, your first thought might be of inserting a customer’s name in your call-to-action. While this could help, it often isn’t feasible. And there’s actually a better way to personalize your invitations.

A case study from HubSpot details how the company uses audience data to segment site visitors and present different calls-to-action based on where they are in the marketing funnel.

First-time visitors who haven’t interacted with the site previously are served a default call-to-action. But someone who is already a lead in the company’s internal system will be presented with a different call-to-action, even when visiting the same page.

You could create even more calls-to-action beyond those for visitors and leads, adapting the copy for what will be most appealing to individuals in different phases of the buyer’s journey. The results speak for themselves: HubSpot’s personalized invitations improved performance by 202 percent.

4. Use a call-to-action button

Okay, so this isn’t actually a writing tip. But by formatting your call-to-action as a button, you can dramatically increase your clickthrough and conversion rates. One case study from Campaign Monitor found that using a button instead of a link increased clickthrough rates by 28 percent.

This is because buttons have several important attributes that help them stand out from the rest of your landing page text. Effective buttons are larger than the rest of the text, and are typically separated from the rest of the copy by white space.

These simple attributes naturally draw the eye to the button, ensuring that your call-to-action actually gets read, rather than glossed over. When the button is the opposite color of the rest of the background, it will stand out even more, resulting in more views and clicks.

5. Create a sense of urgency

Creating a sense of urgency is a classic ingredient for marketing success, and that rings just as true for your digital call-to-action as it does with any other type of advertising.

There’s psychological backing for this, too.

A 2018 study published in the Journal of Consumer Research determined, “people are more likely to perform unimportant tasks (i.e., tasks with objectively lower payoffs) over important tasks (i.e., tasks with objectively better payoffs), when the unimportant tasks are characterized merely by spurious urgency (e.g., an illusion of expiration).”

In other words, even if your call-to-action is less important than other things going on in a consumer’s life, creating a sense of urgency will actually get them to prioritize it above those things.

Urgency words are typically time-oriented. They tell users to “order now” or that the call-to-action is for a “limited-time offer” or available “today only.” Sometimes, these calls-to-action will advise readers that prices will go up soon, or that a limited quantity of signups is left.

Either way, your invitation suddenly becomes a lot more important.

Time to craft a killer call-to-action

Even after you start implementing these hacks on your website, the work isn’t done. Each audience is unique, and those who visit your website could be hot or cold leads depending on their stage in the buying process.

So, even after you implement these hacks, you’ll have to use the tried-and-true marketing staple of A/B testing your calls-to-action. This will give you valuable data so you can determine which words or phrases work best with your audience.

With writing smarts and actionable data in hand, you can continue refining your calls-to-action so you can achieve more growth than ever before.

Have you used any of these hacks in crafting your website’s calls-to-action? Or are there other tricks you’ve used that I didn’t touch on?

I’d love to hear about what’s worked (or not worked) in your own efforts to craft compelling calls-to-action for your readers. I look forward to joining the conversation in the comments section below!

Guest author: Lucas Miller is a Freelance Copywriter and Founder of Echelon Copy. When not writing, tweeting or attempting to play pickup basketball, he’s working tirelessly to perfect what he claims is the “World’s Greatest Pompadour.” To get more tips on how to start your own six-figure freelance copywriting business, join his free newsletter.

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source https://www.jeffbullas.com/creating-call-to-action/