A Beginner’s Guide to Landing Pages

May 16, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

Most people aren’t aware of the implications of a good landing page. Heck! Most people aren’t even aware of what landing pages are. However, a true master of digital marketing will tell you that unoptimized landing pages are a bane to your website’s existence. If you can think about all the problems that could plague your site, you would be able to link them in one way or other to your landing page design.

Think about it!

Not able to convert traffic to leads? Your landing page may just be the one to blame.

High bounce rates? Guess what, landing page again.

You could learn all about optimizing your landing page with a Website Conversion Rate Optimization certification course, which will simplify the intricacies of a suitable landing page methodology.

Having said that, let’s take a look below. In this article, we will talk about what landing pages are and how they can help you optimize your website’s user experience.

What is a Landing Page?

Leadpages (one of the top lead generation resources online) defines a landing page as a web page that is created distinct from a website’s navigation. The landing page also called a ‘lead page’ or a ‘lead capture page’ is designed with the fundamental purpose of persuading a visitor to take specific action including:

To purchase something,
To click and go to another page on someone else’s website or on your own website
To sign up or give permission for you to follow-up through email, phone, etc.
To share or tell a friend,
To learn something new by downloading information,

The above definition is important because contrary to what a lot of marketers still believe, the landing page isn’t just any page that a visitor lands on after clicking on a promotional link or an AD. The fact is that your Homepage, Contact Us page or About page are not actually your landing pages. Understanding this fact is critically important if you want to have any success in persuading visitors or audiences to act in the manner that you would like when they visit your website.

To be more specific, landing pages differ from other web pages in two principal ways:

On a landing page, a visitor’s expectations of the message need to be met as a matter of urgency because they arrived at a landing page through a promotional link or advert that already set their expectations. That is, expectations need to be met with a matching message.
Each landing page should correspond to a conversion goal or the singular action that you want your visitor to take. If you use several distinct Customer Psychographics or customer personas, then the prospects will be less easily distracted because of an imbalanced conversion ratio. The most appropriate ratio should be one outbound link to one conversion goal.

The two principal distinctions of landing pages from other web pages logically lead one to imagine that building several landing pages for several different visitors is the best way to go. In actual fact, research actually supports this assumption. There is no doubt that you need to create more landing pages in order to be more effective in persuading more people to take specific action. Increasing to between 10-15 landing pages increases leads by 55%. Increasing to 40 landing pages almost triples the number of leads.

The reasons for the incredible increase in leads due to the use of more landing pages include the following:

More landing pages mean more conversion opportunities due to finely tuned and appealing messages to each marketing segmentation or persona.
The patch from discovery to conversion will also have less friction because visitors can swiftly move from what appeals to them to directly what you have to offer on your website that meets those needs.
When more landing pages are indexed in search, this only goes to improve a websites SEO.
More landing pages mean more opportunities or offers to fuel your inbound marketing efforts.

Why is a Landing Page Important for SEO?

One of the core reasons for the exponential increase in the number of leads attracted by a landing page is an improvement in SEO.

Ultimately, landing pages are important for SEO in the following ways:

Targeted landing pages are likely to rank higher in SEO

At the end of the day, when it comes to fulfilling a search engine users intent, if a search engine user (who is likely to be a potential client/customer), visits a landing page that answers their query, then the more likely that the marketing efforts of the website and landing page will rank higher in SEO.

Targeted landing pages lead to better SEO quality scores

Your rank in search results is determined quite strongly by the quality of the keywords that you use. This Quality Score not only determines where you fall on the SERP (search engine results page) but also how much you must pay (PPC) for a better position. The Quality Score is determined by factors like CTR (click-through-rate) and relevance and specifically AD relevance and Landing Page Relevance.

Targeted landing pages convert better, a core goal of SEO

Directing marketing campaign traffic from email, PPC, social media, SEO, or through any other means, to the homepage of a website is not as effective as directing traffic to a landing page. One reason for this is that it is simply too distracting for a potential customer or client to land on a page that has a lot of messages (whether the person is interested in the messages or not) and remain true to their initial purpose.

Instead, visiting a landing page that has a specific message that already appeals to the visitor, on account of their clicking on an AD or promotional link, will lead to better conversion rates. Landing pages that convert are therefore great not just for lead acquisition and lead conversion but also for overall direct marketing. Lead acquisition and direct marketing are core goals of SEO that grow customers and build revenue.

How is a landing page used?

The main use of a landing page is to persuade a visitor to take specific action as described above (to buy, to click, sign-up, share or learn). However, landing pages can also be used for a more targeted marketing purpose including the following:

To present the benefit of using a specific product or service.
Create an email list that can be used for targeted marketing to potential customers with more than a passive interest
To create tailored surveys and mine for directed data on customers opinions of offered products and services
To acquire feedback from social media about offers, products, and services
To gather data about where your potential customers or clients visited before getting to the landing page.

Types of Landing Pages

There are many ways to create and optimize a landing page in order to squeeze more conversions out of it. Landing page design depends on how you decide to use it, where you choose to use it and when you use it. Remember that despite the different names, the types of landing pages listed below are still just landing pages for their primary purposes. The most common types of landing pages include the following:

Splash Page

A splash page is also called a ‘splash screen’ or a’ welcome gate.’ These landing pages get their name from the fact that they are a single page that a visitor see’s right before they can access a website. The splash page provides valuable introductory information or may also be designed for lead collection purposes. Business owners often display a splash page requesting a visitor to join an email list before getting to the main website.

Squeeze Page

These are landing pages that are designed to squeeze information (especially email addresses) from visitors. At their core, squeeze pages are designed for lead generation. They may, however, look distinct because they vary widely based on content type, shape, length, and size. For example, a squeeze page may contain testimonials, contextual information, progression information and such, all of which are designed to eventually convert or squeeze a lead into taking specific action.

Sales Page

Normally, a landing page uses the principle of reciprocation to eventually convert visitors into customers or client. To achieve this, the landing page will usually provide value to the visitor before asking something in exchange for the value. With that said, sometimes a more direct approach is more appropriate and expedient.

In other words, the landing page can sometimes seek to sell immediately. Such a landing page, called a sales page, contains testimonies, videos and other elements that focus on selling instead of lead generation.

Capture Page

The capture page is again synonymous with the landing page. It is a page that captures the attention of a visitor and guides them towards conversion.

If you are curious and want to compare several assorted styles and types of landing pages, you can go through 100+ conversion-focused landing page templates at ubounce.com

Components of a good landing page design

A landing page can be like a puzzle in that even if you have all the right pieces, they still need to be fitted together in the right way to make the most sense.

To understand how, when, where and probably even why it is useful to use a landing page, it is important to closely examine the core components or elements of the landing page. Several authorities in the field have suggested different elements to pay attention to. For example. Neil Patel emphasizes the following key elements of a good landing page as being the main ones:

Use testimonials
Use high-quality images
Try to limit choices
Limit scrolling length
Use shorter forms if possible
Add directional cues
Make them an offer they can’t refuse

For our purposes, landing page optimization and Landing page best practices are synonymous with understanding the core components of landing page design. The core elements including the landing page best practices are as follows:

Lack of navigation

As discussed above, the landing page is meant to have a specific purpose in mind. It should be a one-page summary of all that the visitor needs to know and then ‘buy-in’ or convert to the website owners offer. Including navigation negates this purpose.

Figure 1: SEO Moz

A catchy headline

Without a catchy headline, your visitors will not engage with your landing page in order to appreciate the other elements that you have made an effort to incorporate. This makes a catch headline probably the most important component in landing page design.

A catchy headline needs to:

Play to the visitor’s self-interest
Solve an immediate problem or challenge
Provide useful and relevant information

landing-page-example-2

Clear, compelling, and effective CTA (call-to-action)

A clear, compelling, and effective call to action is more than just words added to a fancy button. You need to carefully choose the right :

Location
Size
Shape
Color. And,
Words (Copy)

It’s important to note that the CTA should generally be above the fold so that visitors can see it and click on it without having to scroll. Of course, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have another CTA for the visitors that scroll down a page.

Figure 3: Spotmarketing.ca

Value-centric copy that is easy to skim through

Eye tracking studies show that most people only get to read 20% of the content on the page. When they do so they follow a so-called F-pattern:

Essentially, the typical online reader moves horizontally through the first paragraph. Then they go further down and read another heading or catchy text, albeit the text is normally much shorter than the first heading. Finally, they scan through the rest of the content vertically.

Simple and non-distracting language and design

Readability, legibility, and comprehension are important components that must be upheld on every landing page.

Readability: lines and blocks of text should be easy to read. Use the right line and paragraph spacing.
Legibility: Text should large enough and not too small (about 16px is a good place to start). There should be an effective use of contrast between text and the background and it should be easy for readers to distinguish characters.
Comprehension: avoid jargon, use short concise words, and get rid of ambiguous content

Figure 3: unbounce.com

Impeccable and engaging content

Content does not just means words. In fact, it is often better to prioritize imagery over words. In a survey conducted in 2015, ‘4 times as many consumers would rather watch a video about a product than read about it ‘

Of course, the video is not the only media that you should take advantage of because people absorb more information and absorb the information faster if the information is visual. Some of the engaging content that you can experiment with includes the following:

Landing page images and video’s
Product images
Infographics
Hero shots
Icons
Trust badges

Figure 4: Five9 call center software landing page infographic

Strong trust indicators

If you are going to persuade a stranger to buy-in to your offer, you are first going to have to gain their trust. There are several ways to gain this coveted trust. Some of the trust indicators that you can use on landing pages in order to gain trust include the following:

Using testimonials: the testimonials need to be relevant, positive, specific and recognizable
Security indicators e.g. links to a privacy policy, security badges from companies like Norton
Authority indicators e.g. Titles (Ph.D., Dr.), Uniform/expensive suit, expensive items like cars, buildings, landscapes etc.
Credibility signals: including high-profile clients and their testimonials, offering statistical proof, awards, publicity, and social counters

landing page example

Conclusion

Understanding why you need to use a landing page along with the different essential components of a landing page will make it a lot easier for you to get it right the first time around. Additionally, using as many as 40 landing pages should be your ultimate goal in order to take maximum advantage of this important tool. Thereafter, do not forget to test and measure how effective your landing pages are and then adjust accordingly.

Digital Marketing Interview Questions for Beginners

It doesn’t matter who you are, taking the first plunge into a new career can be intimidating. No matter how nervous you might be when you show up to your interview, it’s important that you convey nothing but confidence to the person sitting on the other side of the desk.

For beginning careers in digital marketing, the interviewer is going to be looking for a basic understanding of DM concepts, along with a willingness to learn, adapt and grow. Here are a few of the questions on digital marketing you should be prepared to answer.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 1: Tell Me What You Know About Digital Marketing.

Answer: This basic question is actually very strategic. Digital marketing is broad enough that if you could talk at length answering this question. However, what the interviewer is looking for is evidence that you understand digital marketing well enough to form an answer that’s thorough, but concise.

For example, try something like “Digital marketing is a strategy of building and marketing brands on the internet. A comprehensive strategy should include SEO, search engine marketing, social media, responsive websites, link building and other purposeful measures that bring online exposure to businesses.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 2: Great answer, but you didn’t touch on segmentation. What can you tell me about it?

Answer: Digital marketing can be segmented into two distinct categories – inbound marketing and outbound marketing. The purpose of inbound marketing is to bring awareness to a brand by increasing visibility and providing the target market with valuable content through websites and social media.

Outbound digital marketing is a way for a brand to reach out directly to customers through email and paid advertisements.

Digital Marketing Interview 3: What is the importance of SEO in digital marketing?

Answer: SEO is a set of digital tools that increase online visibility by optimizing search engine results. Different aspects of SEO should be leveraged in digital marketing. For example, targeted keywords, local SEO tactics, link building and responsive websites are all part of SEO. It’s impossible to maximize a digital presence without a solid knowledge and understanding of SEO.

Digital Marketing Interview 4: What About PPC?

Answer: PPC, or pay per click, is a strategy for creating targeted paid advertisements. Using elements of SEO, like keywords, businesses promote ads that appear in digital mediums, such as search engines and social media. With PPC, business only pays when a user clicks on their ad. It’s a cost-effective strategy for generating quality traffic fast.

Digital Marketing Interview 5: Why is digital marketing preferred to offline marketing?

Answer: With advances in technology and increasing accessibility, more people are online than ever before. When anything that they want to read or learn about is at their fingertips, offline marketing starts to become less relevant.

Plus, digital marketing offers numerous unique benefits. For example, SEO helps brands reach a more targeted audience than possible with offline marketing.

Digital Marketing Interview Questions for DM Specialists

DM specialists are in high demand, and now is the time to make a move if you’re looking to advance your career. If you’ve spent most of your time working for one for a company, those first few steps into advancing your career are critical. You want to make sure that you’re prepared for the interview that’s going to propel your career forward.

You can start by being prepared for digital marketing analyst interview questions, as well as those focused on other specialties in the industry. Here are 5 to get you started.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 1: What is your process for determining the best channels for a brand’s digital marketing budget?

Answer: It starts with demographics. The first step is to actively put the brand on the digital channels where their audience can be found. This might mean a diving into social media or be developing a comprehensive email strategy. You use what you know to set a starting point.

From there, we’ll test and measure to learn more about the customer persona and adapt as necessary to optimize the brand’s digital presence.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 2: What is the difference between on page and off page optimization?

Answer: On-page optimization is the mechanisms through which structure and content is managed on a site to elevate a brand’s digital presence. Off-page optimization is a way of boosting search engine ranking by connecting the site with external links that point back to it.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 3: What are the two types of SEO practices?

Answer: SEO can be broadly classified into two categories of practices – white hat SEO and black hat SEO.

White hat SEO are legitimate practices that generate higher rankings in SERPs. To be considered a white hat practice, it must strictly follow Google’s guidelines for SEO. Examples of white hat SEO include HTML optimization, quality content and link acquisition.

Blackhat SEO are practices that go against Google’s guidelines and are often aimed at finding weaknesses in search engine algorithms to achieve a more favorable ranking. Spam links, keyword stuffing, and hidden links are examples of black hat SEO.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 4: Can you name a few ways to get natural backlinks to a site?

Answer: For a new site, it takes time to get quality links. One common strategy is to offer to write a guest blog post on a highly reputable site in the same niche. For example, a new graphic design business could petition to supply a guest post to several influencers in the industry. Smaller, micro-influencers are a great place to start, if the focus is on choosing partners that are reputable.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 5: What is the value of competitive analysis in digital marketing?

Answer: Competitive analysis is a critical part of developing a digital marketing strategy for businesses. The goal is to identify industry competitors and evaluate their strategy to determine where their strengths and weaknesses are in relation to product or services that the company is providing. Competitive analysis helps to identify a brand’s unique place in the market and focus on which attributes will attract their target customer.

Digital Marketing Interview Questions for Managers

As a digital marketing specialist seeking a management opportunity, employers are going to be looking for evidence of everything you’ve learned in your years of experience, and how you’re able to apply that experience to bring something valuable to their company.

For this interview, be prepared to have discussions rather than just give answers. Here are a few of the marketing interview questions and answers to help you prepare.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 1: Let’s take a look at your portfolio.

Answer: A potential employer isn’t going to consider someone for a digital marketing management level position without proof of the successes that back up their resume. It’s important to have a well-constructed portfolio prepared before the interview. Include examples with concrete evidence of how you’ve helped businesses grow with your digital marketing expertise.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 2: I’m assuming you’ve looked at our website. What would you do to improve it?

Answer: When interviewing for this position, you’re being tested not only on your experience in digital marketing but also your interest in the long-term success of the company. What most interviewers are looking for here is proof that you’re not afraid to use what you know.

The best answer isn’t one that completely tears their website apart or claims that there’s nothing that could be changed. Both extremes can make you look desperate and unprepared. Instead, take a thorough look at their website before the interview and be prepared with 1-3 suggestions for improvement.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 3: Let’s say that as your first task, our CEO wants you to evaluate some of our content. What would you say?

Answer: Before evaluating a specific piece of content, I would need to be briefed on specific details. For example, if it’s a blog we’re looking at, I would need to know about the blog’s metrics, current traffic generation and what the goals of the piece are. It’s crucial to use data when forming opinions and making decisions.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 4: Data shows us that none of our customers are using social media. Would you still encourage investing in a social media strategy?

Answer: With this question, the interviewer is looking for evidence of a broad perspective of digital marketing and the ability to see past today. Your answer should include several reasons why a social media presence can benefit a company, even if their primary audience isn’t there.

For example, just because their target market isn’t there yet doesn’t mean that they won’t be in the future, so building a presence now is crucial. Plus, being on social media helps to build respect and trust and plays a significant role in organic search results.

Digital Marketing Interview Question 5: Digital marketing is a dynamic industry. What do you do to stay current?

Answer: The interviewer is looking for evidence that what you know now isn’t the cap of your knowledge in digital marketing. This is time to mention which blogs or podcasts you regularly follow, as well as any books you have recently read or authors that you feel, have a finger on the future of digital marketing. This is also the time to mention continuing education opportunities you have taken advantage of or are planning to in the future.

This is an exciting time of growth and opportunity in digital marketing. Regardless if you’re just starting out, or you’ve been doing this for years, there’s a perfect job opportunity out there just waiting for you to come along and grab it. Armed with these digital interview questions and your ability to excel, we know you’ll land the digital marketing career of your dreams.

Best of luck in your job seeking adventure!

15 Google AdWords Interview Questions That Employers Are Guaranteed to Ask

May 11, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

Paid marketing, including Google AdWords, is a crucial part of a successful digital marketing strategy. When businesses are looking to fill PPC positions, they’re looking for someone that knows exactly how Google AdWords can be optimized for the growth and success of their company. This means that they’re going to be coming at prospective employees with some tough, detailed SEM or Google Adwords interview questions.

In cases like this, it is always a plus to invest in a PPC certification to help you get an in-depth understanding of the topic at hand. Nevertheless, the first step to being the candidate they can’t resist is to be prepared and confident as you enter the interview. To help you with this process, we’ve collected 15 of the top paid ad interview questions and answers for all levels of PPC positions.

Here is your quick interview guide that will have you hearing the words “Welcome to the team”.

PPC Interview Questions for Beginners

Starting a career in PPC is exciting. Make sure you brush up on the basics of PPC with a Google Adwords certification course and be prepared to answer entry level AdWords questions and paid search interview questions if you want to land the job. Here are 5 questions that every interviewer will expect those new to the field of PPC to be able to answer easily.

PPC Interview Question 1: Tell us what you know about Google AdWords.

Answer: Google AdWords is a paid advertising platform used to market product and services on Google and its affiliated sites. It works using a bidding system to determine ad placement where the business pays per each click on their ad.

PPC Interview Question 2: Why is Google AdWords important to our business?

Answer: Traffic that comes to your site via paid ads is generally more valuable than traffic that reaches you through organic search. The reason for this is that users are often looking for something specific when clicking on an ad and are more likely to convert. This means that less traffic from a PPC ad is more valuable than higher traffic from organic searches.

PPC Interview Question 3: What is meant by ad rank?

Answer: Ad rank determines the ad’s position on Google. It’s determined using a metric that combines keyword bid and quality score.

PPC Interview Question 4: You mentioned a quality score. Can you tell us more about that?

Answer: The quality score is a measurement of how relevant your ad is to the user. This number is based on several factors including CTR, keyword relevance and the quality of the landing page that the user is directed to through the ad.

PPC Interview Question 5: What is CTR and how is it calculated?

Answer: The CTR is the click thru rate or the percentage of visitors who visited the ad on your webpage. It’s calculated through a simple formula that’s the number of clicks divided by the number of impressions times 100. In other words, clicks/ (impressions) (100) =CTR.

PPC Interview Questions for Specialists

When interviewing for a specialist position, the person across the desk from you is going to be looking for evidence of your advanced skill set with detailed Google analytics interview questions. This the place to show that you, and your knowledge of AdWords, will be a valuable asset to their team. Here are 5 interview questions and answers specifically for PPC specialists.

Google Adwords Interview Question 1: Tell us what you know about the Google AdWords Quality Score.

Answer: The quality score is an AdWords metric used to calculate the value of each keyword on a scale of 1 thru 10. The quality score, or QS, is used in calculating the AdRank which is directly involved in determining the ad position.

While the QS is directly proportional to the position, it’s inversely proportional to CPC, meaning that keywords with a higher QS will cost less and generate a higher position in ad ranking.

Google Adwords Interview Question 2: Regarding your own personal experience, what is your average and highest QS?

Answer: Be prepared to discuss with the interviewer the examples of your most successful AdWords campaigns. It’s best to detail examples where the quality score was at least 7 or higher, and what steps you took to achieve those results. Include details such as the type of analysis, tools, and testing used in the process.

Google Adwords Interview Question 3: How many ads should we have in each group to optimize our ROI?

Answer: The answer to this question will change depending on the specific campaign and how we’re implementing it. For example, if we chose to use the rotate evenly setting, it’s best to stick to 2-3 ads to keep the campaign manageable.

However, if for a campaign we choose the optimize setting, where AdWords chooses the ads that are most likely to get clicked on, then it’s smart to increase the number of ads in the rotation.

Google Adwords Interview Question 4: Testing ads are important, but how do you know when it’s time to conclude a test and leverage the results?

Answer: There is no set answer to this question, but each test should start with defined testing metrics including time and measurable data. For example, it doesn’t do us any good to set goals for acquiring data and then reach those goals after only 2 days. We need a testing period that extends through different days of the week to show us how an ad performs based on differences in user behaviors.

Generally speaking, a test period of at least a week that gives us 1000-2000 impression and a couple hundred clicks is sufficient for an ad group, even if there isn’t a clear winner.

Google Adwords Interview Question 5: No matter how successful our AdWords campaign, it’s all in vain without an optimized landing page. Can you tell what, in your opinion, are the hallmarks of a winning PPC landing page?

Answer: A strong PPC landing page seamlessly connects your ad with your brand and proposition. There are specific elements that make this happen. They include features such as a strong headline and supportive tagline, a clear CTA, simplified lead capture form, visual imagery, content that explains the value and trust symbols.

PPC Interview Questions for Managers

When seeking a management level position, be prepared for Google AdWords interview questions that will illustrate your combined knowledge of PPC tactics and the ability to protect and grow the company by being able to look at an AdWords campaign strategically. Here are 5 questions, along with the answers that will highlight your capabilities.

Google Adwords Interview Question 1: It’s crucial that we’re able to track conversions with our AdWords campaign. Can you explain the methods you use for tracking?

Answer: There are several ways of tracking conversions and measuring success. For example, accessing the search funnels inside tools and analysis which shows us when a customer first clicked on an ad and how frequently they viewed the ad before clicking.

We can also track purchases using the basic Adwords tracking code and adapt it with additional code that’s specific to your e-commerce platform. It’s also important to know when a customer isn’t clicking on an ad, so it’s smart to leverage conversion window options to track when ads are being viewed but not clicked.

Google Adwords Interview Question 2: If our current campaign isn’t producing the results we’re looking for, how can you increase conversions?

Answer: The first step is making sure that the ad is targeted to the audience that’s most likely to convert. This means creating ads that are matched seamlessly with a set of high performing keywords and creating tightly themed ad groups.

Google Adwords Interview Question 3: Are you familiar with the conversion optimizer in AdWords? Can you explain what it is?

Answer: A conversion optimizer is a tool that can help you get maximum ROI out of your AdWords investment. It’s used for bid manipulation and gives insights into which clicks on an ad will be the most valuable for maximizing your return.

Google Adwords Interview Question 4: The CPC on our highest performing keywords is continuing to go up. Can you explain some factors that might be affecting this change?

Answer: Often, an increase in CPC is directly related to an increase in competition for those words. It can also commonly be caused by a reduced search volume or downward trending quality scores. There are ways of determining which of these is the cause.

For example, we can compare the Auction Insights to determine when the CPC was lower and if new competitors have made added to the list. This helps to determine if other businesses competing for the keywords is the cause of the fluctuation.

We can also leverage Google Trends to analyze search volume and assess the quality score via a detailed analysis. Plus, it never hurts to look at recent changes such as those in current CPC policy which may also be affecting the rising investment of your current campaign.

Google Adwords Interview Question 5: How familiar are you with our competitors and their current PPC strategies?

Answer: The only way to successfully answer this question is by doing your homework. For PPC management positions you need to understand the current market and the other major players in it. Every business, no matter how big or small has competitors that can threaten the ROI of an AdWords campaign.

Start by researching who these competitors are, and then learning as much about their ad strategies as possible. Arrive at your interview prepared to detail the strategies of 1-2 competitors and how you would adapt your own PPC tactics to gain a competitive advantage over them.

These questions are meant to serve as a stepping stone to acing the interview and landing the job of your dreams. One of the best ways to acquire the skills that employers are looking for is to always be looking for ways to build upon your knowledge of PPC. Simplilearn offers many professional courses that will help you gain a competitive advantage in the world of PPC. Check out our course offerings to learn more.

8 Tips to Help You Create the Perfect Facebook Ads Campaign

April 20, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

Facebook ads are a big deal. According to Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, the platform has 65 million businesses using Pages with about 4 million of those businesses directly advertising on Facebook. These businesses are targeting 2.2 billion Monthly Active Users (As of Q4 2017).

By any measure, these are vast numbers to contend with, and this is why it is undoubtedly a good idea to take advantage of this vast resource of active users on the platform.

With that said, one glaring dilemma comes up as soon as you decide to take the leap and use Facebook marketing and more Facebook business advertising for your promotional needs. How do I make my business stand out given that there are so many others already advertising on Facebook? An easy way to learn how to make use of this is to take a social media course that will help you learn techniques to distinguish yourself from what is common.

You could even start by reading this article and hopefully, you will be able to make a difference for your business through creating the perfect Facebook Ad campaign. The first logical step in our journey is to understand how Facebook Advertising works.

How does Facebook Advertising Work?

The tool that you will need to familiarize yourself with to create an AD on Facebook is the Facebook Ads Manager. The Facebook Ads manager is your ‘AD campaign Command Center’ that you use to create and manage your Ads on mobile or desktop.

For a first-time user, Facebook Ads Manager can be quite daunting. In as much as Facebook calls it a compelling AD management tool built for advertisers of any experience level, the truth is that just the sheer number of options that the tool offers can make it quite confusing for beginners.

Thankfully, there are a lot of guides out there that can hold your hand through the process for How to Use Facebook Ads Manager.

At the end of the day, there are a few key points that you need to pay attention to if you want to create successful Facebook Ads. Below are some of the key points:

Are you a good fit to advertise on Facebook?

Facebook Ads best work to generate demand and not to fulfill demand. In other words, most people using Facebook are there to connect with their friends and not to look for products to purchase. Essentially, the best way to advertise on Facebook is to make the distinction between display Ads and search Ads and learn when to use each to get the best ROI. As a rule of thumb, start with search advertising (with the likes of Google Ads and Bing Ads) and then slowly move to display advertising (Facebook Ads) for remarketing purposes.

Most successful Facebook Ads use low friction conversion techniques including asking for sign-ups. They also depend on customers who have a customer lifetime value of at least six months or more because you want to build trust before asking them to buy from you.

Who to target and how to target them

Facebooks targeting choices are quite robust, and you can reach a very large demographic. That said, by and large, the purpose of targeting is to focus on niche areas where you can derive the most benefit from your efforts. If you choose to go for broad category searching as opposed to precise interest targeting, be ready to pay more for it.

Depending on your audience, different target criteria like Education, workplace, connections, and language may be the best option for you. However, for most marketers targeting based on Age, Gender, Interests, and Location are sufficient. You should do Facebook Ads interest targeting research to find out what works best for you.

Facebook Ads example that appealing to a specific demographic

Figure 1: Facebook Ads appealing to a specific demographic

Choose your images carefully

The image you choose for your Facebook Ad is quite possibly the most significant part of your Ad. If your image doesn’t catch attention, then it is unlikely that anyone will actually take a closer look at the Ad and read your copy.

Since you want to make your Facebook Ads stand out, you must also make your images stand out and catch attention. Your options for creating such images is to either buy them, license them or to make them yourself.

Whichever approach you choose, remember that to make your images stand out, some of the well-known ways to achieve this include:

Use images of people and especially close-up faces that your audience find attractive
Use colors to grab attention
Use your logo
Use minimal text
Use unusual pictures including quirky pictures and illustrations, fun and funny pictures of people or animals

Figure 2: An adorable dog in a Facebook AD is almost always a great idea

Figure 3: Colorful, attention-grabbing image, including a logo and minimal text

Write a good copy

Once you choose a great image for your AD and thereby earn your audience’s attention, you then have the opportunity to tell them what you have to offer. Remember, when in doubt, keep it short, keep it crispy, and keep it simple.

Figure 4: Keep the title short, simple, and catchy

Keep iterating on your Ads

Since your goal is to make your Facebook Advertising stand out, you constantly want to improve the Ads that you use. A good strategy is to choose a maximum of three Ads for each campaign and then based on the click-through-rate (CTR) of each AD, replace the lowest performing one and replace it with another. This strategy will eventually make your Ads stand out from the crowd. The average Facebook AD CTR should be based on your specific industry.

Place the right AD bids

If you don’t place the right AD bids, then two things often happen:

You pay too much for AD results
Your Ads will not get delivered due to low AD bids

As such, optimizing your Facebook AD bids is crucial. Your basic strategy should be to bid on conversions because Facebook sponsored ads will be delivered to people most interested in your offer which means a higher likelihood of conversion. Optimizing your targets and the Ads you place is one way to continuously increase your CTR.

Send prospects to a high-converting landing page

Beginning your Facebook AD campaigns with the end in mind is critical to your ultimate success with Facebook ads. In other words, optimizing your Facebook ads for lots of relevant clicks is just half the journey.

Although FB ads are best designed for generating demand, you still want to have a good ROI for the Ads that you place by converting the generated traffic into revenue. Therefore, instead of sending your audience directly to your website, direct them to a high converting landing page.

High-converting landing pages have the following basic characteristics (LINK to ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Landing Pages’):

They lack navigation
Have a catchy headline
They have clear, compelling, and effective CTA
They have a value-centric copy that is easy to skim through
They have a simple and non-distracting language and design
They incorporate impeccable and engaging content
They include strong trust indicators

Make use of Facebook Analytics and insights

Once you have managed to get your voice heard in the Facebook crowd, tracking the performance of your Ads is valuable to stay on top. In fact, right from the start, understanding the metrics on your Facebook page allows you to ensure that Facebook algorithms work for you, instead of against you. Learning to effectively use Facebook Insights and Analytics is therefore crucial.

Tips to Keep in Mind for Great Ad Campaigns

If you have managed to through most of the content above including looking through the useful links provided to elaborate on the points made, then you are in a great position to make the next move towards creating great Facebook Ads. For those looking for just the highlights of what they need for Facebook AD success, here are some quick Facebook advertising tips for you:

Creating your campaign and relevant targeting

Learn to use the Facebook Ads manager
Make your Facebook Ads relevant by targeting your high probability customers first. For example, target your existing customers as well as people that have already ‘liked’ you on Facebook or people that have expressed interest in you or your brand
Make use of Facebook Insights and Analytics tool to optimize your demographic and refine your Ads
Test your Ads and rotate them as you find out what works and what doesn’t
Choose the right time of day to display your Ad. When your audience is most likely to view ads and click on them.

Choosing the assets and optimizing them effectively

Make use of AIDA (Attention-grabbing headlines, garner Interest in your product by describing its benefit, create immediate Desire with a great offer/discount, call to Action) to generate leads and revenue.
Use high-quality images that have the following features:
- Eye-catching images especially pets and beautiful faces
- Images of women perform better than images of men
- Images of fun and happiness
- Avoid Facebook colors because people will most likely skip over the AD
- Choose images that are the right size based on the type of AD that you choose to use
Use interactive experiences for example by experimenting with GIF’s
Be direct with your message and avoid being too clever. The main reason for this is that your audience probably has just a few seconds to stop and check out something attention-grabbing as they scroll through their Facebook page. As such, decoding messages is not something that they want to do.
Use powerful words or phrases to pass your message across but avoid making your text more than 20% of the image’s size.

Analytics and optimization

Install Facebook pixel to allow you to measure, optimize and grow your audience
Place the right bids by setting the right conversion value. If you don’t set a conversion value, it will default to $0
Setting the right conversion value allows you to measure earned amount versus the spent amount
Optimize your analytics by tagging your URL’s. or example, if you have two Ads that lead to the same URL, having tags will allow your analytics provide you with more information to differentiate the source and determine which Ads are more effective.
Use A/B split testing to optimize your Ads. Change CTA’s, headlines, descriptions, images, demographics, bidding types, device placement, time of day, purchase behavior, interests, and other elements to see what works and what doesn’t.
Give your Ads equal opportunity to succeed by choosing the right amount of time that is equal for each AD
Run analytics reports from the Facebook Ads Manager regularly to find out how your Ads are performing on an ongoing basis
Keep an eye on your relevance score. A low score means that your Ads are not resonating with your audience and this means that you should switch up your Ad.

Conclusion

This is not an exhaustive list of all that you could do to succeed with your Facebook Ads campaigns. However, if you at least keep in mind an apply the suggestions mentioned here you will create an ad that will stand out from the crowd and deliver the impressive results that you are after. By a lot of standards, this is just the perfect Facebook Ad campaign that every business owner or marker is looking for.

SEO Interview Questions That Will Help You Land Your Dream Job

April 16, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

We’ve all had that one tough interview – the one where you thought you were prepared, but then came those hard SEO interview questions that had you utterly stumped. At the risk of looking unprepared, you rambled on and on, never really answering the questions at all.

It’s the worst fear of every person heading into a new job interview. You just never know what the interviewer might ask, and no matter how qualified you might be, it’s impossible to know everything about a job that isn’t even yours yet.

The good news here is that prospective employers understand this, and they know that even the most competent candidate can get sidetracked by the occasional question. But, this is their chance to gauge an SEO’s ability by testing their knowledge and ability to come up with creative solutions quickly.

SEOs who are job seekers should be prepared for a comprehensive interview that will give them the chance to demonstrate their knowledge and expertise. While an SEO course helps prepare for just such a situation, one of the best ways of being prepared is knowing what questions the interviewer is most likely to ask.

We’ve compiled a list of SEO interview questions for SEOs of all levels. These questions range from typical to unexpected, and the answers will help you land that next big job.

SEO Interview Questions for Beginners

Interviewing for your first SEO job can be intimidating. In an industry filled with experts, you’re starting from the ground zero.

But do you want to know a secret?

Each one of those experts started at the exact, same point where you are today. The SEO industry is ripe with opportunity for beginners.

Before your first interview, it’s smart to brush up on all the SEO terminology. Publications like SEO for Dummies (not really for dummies at all) presents the basics in an easy to understand format. Even if you’re super confident in your SEO knowledge, it doesn’t hurt to fine tune your vocabulary for the interview.

Now, for the most common beginner SEO interview questions that will help prepare you for your big day…

SEO Interview Question 1: Tell me what you know about SEO and why it’s essential.

Answer: SEO, or search engine optimization, is used to define one or more activities performed to improve a brand’s search engine ranking. SEO is building visibility through free, organic search results. SEO is important because the digital landscape is enormous, and brand’s need a way to get noticed. Internet users view businesses that land on the first page of Google, more specifically the first 5 entries, with higher regard. SEO helps business land these tops spots.

SEO Interview Question 2: What are the two types of SEO? What are the differences between them?

Answer: The 2 types of SEO are on-page optimization and off-page optimization. On-page optimization regulates the site through page coding, where off-page optimization does not. On-page SEO consists of the activities performed on a business’s website to drive a higher ranking from search engines. This includes optimizing website content as well as HTML source codes, meta tags, meta descriptions, title tags and heading tags. Off-page SEO refers to other aspects that influence rankings, such as social media, content marketing, and link building.

SEO Interview Question 3: What is the difference between a backlink and an outbound link?

Answer: A backlink is any incoming link to a web page or website. An outbound link is a link to a website that links to another web page or website.

SEO Interview Question 4: Define keyword and tell me about their importance in SEO.

Answer: Keywords are literally as they sound – words that serve as a key to unlock visibility. They are the words and phrases used in web content that helps Internet users find specific websites through relevant search queries. Keywords and keyword research are both crucial parts of SEO. They’re not the only focus, however.

SEO Interview Question 5: What other factors are important for SEO?

Answer: Search engines like Google and Yahoo use a complex system of analytics to determine a page ranking. It consists of over 200 metrics, some of which include UX, website speed, content, backlinks, social media and image optimization.

SEO Interview Question 6: What do you feel are some of the most common SEO mistakes?

Answer: Not leveraging the right keywords, not using longtail keywords to attract a specific audience, paying more attention to the number of links then than the quality, an inadequate content strategy, not having unique meta descriptions and title tags, and not paying enough attention to the factors that contribute to UX.

SEO Interview Question 7: It’s impossible to tackle SEO without the use of some tools. Which have you used and are familiar with?

Answer: For this, you should answer honestly with any SEO tools that you have experience with. Some of the common SEO tools include SEM Rush, SpyFu and Google’s Keyword Tool.

SEO Interview Questions for SEO Specialists

You’re a candidate for a great new SEO position. This isn’t your first rodeo in the SEO interview question and answer arena. It’s expected that you already know a great deal about SEO. Here’s your chance to shine with the knowledge that elevates you above the other candidates.

SEO Interview Question 1: Tell me about your process. What are the steps you take to optimize a website for a new client?

Answer: What the interviewer is looking for here is evidence that you’re methodical in your process, and also detail oriented. Walk the interviewer through your entire process and take the time to mention details that other candidates might overlook. Start at the beginning of your process for assessing the quality of a site’s rank to testing and evaluating the success of your strategy.

SEO Interview Question 2: Is data important to your strategy?

Answer: This seems like a no-brainer, but those that have been in the SEO industry for a while can become immune to data and begin to use instinct to drive their SEO decisions. The bottom line is that SEO should never be based on guesswork or intuition alone. You need to present yourself as someone who is analytically minded and knows how to integrate strong data into your strategies.

SEO Interview Question 3: Tell me about your biggest SEO disaster.

Answer: Every SEO expert has had one, so don’t present yourself as being above making a mistake. It’s your job to try new things and measure the results. This is how you build new strategies. What the interviewer is looking for here is proof that you’ve tested your strategy, found what was wrong and were able to adapt accordingly.

SEO Interview Question 4: Tell me about the current changes to Google’s SEO algorithm.

Answer: Google makes changes to its ranking algorithm on a regular basis. In fact, it’s pretty fluid and constantly evolving. It’s an SEO specialist’s job to be up to date with these changes, so make sure you’ve researched what’s new on Google’s end before you head into your interview.

SEO Interview Question 5: What are the black hat techniques that a good SEO specialist will avoid?

Answer: Mention anything that has the potential to hurt rankings like keyword stuffing, link farming, and hidden text.

SEO Interview Question 6: What do you do if you take on a client with a website that’s been banned by Google for black hat practices?

Answer: The specific path of action will depend upon the offense, which could be anything from backlink manipulation to link selling or scraped content.

Once the offending issue has been resolved, it’s time to appeal to Google and ask for re-inclusion. This requires accountability, fully admitting the wrongdoing and detailing how the issue has been fixed. This is also the right time to assess the quality of the site and make sure that it’s offering value to visitors with features like quality content and UX. Sites that provide value are viewed favorably by Google, which increases the likelihood that they’ll agree to re-inclusion.

SEO Interview Question 7: How do you keep current in the industry? Which blogs do you read on a regular basis?

Answer: It’s part of your job to be on top of industry news and trends. Show the interviewer that you’re interested in the growing field of SEO by reading several of the popular SEO blogs – like Moz, SEMRush, SearchMetrics, and Ahrefs – and be prepared with a recent article or two that you’ve found especially interesting.

SEO Interview Questions for Managers

The SEO interview questions you’ll be asked at this level of interaction will expand well past basic SEO knowledge and reach into the territory of personal experience. Expect to be presented with more open-ended questions and prepare to go into greater detail with each of your answers.

You should be able to speak about any SEO topic and provide insight based on your own personal experiences.

SEO Interview Question 1: How does data help you build both short and long-term strategies?

Answer: The interviewer is looking to discover the level of your technical skillset, your ability to think analytically and glean meaningful insights from large data sets. This question is a great opportunity to expand your experience with API integrations and custom formulas.

SEO Interview Question 2: Tell me about the reports you use to monitor a site’s health and performance.

Answer: You should be able to list 3-4 reports that use regularly, including – but not limited to –HubSpot’s Website Grader, Google’s Webmaster Tools, Moz’s Pro Tools, UpCity’s SEO Report Card and Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider. This demonstrates that you have a commitment to monitoring the success of your work and pay attention to detail. This question is all about exhibiting excellence in your field.

SEO Interview Question 3: Tell me what you know about Google’s best practices and how they influence your SEO philosophy.

Answer: Google is pretty serious about what they will and won’t accept in the SEO arena. An SEO manager needs to have intimate knowledge of Google’s best practices and be able to apply them to their work daily. Some of the main things you’ll want to discuss include Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to check your markup, how to create a naturally flowing hierarchy of web pages, mobile optimization, sitemaps, and page speed optimization

SEO Interview Question 4: Should compensation be tied to results?

Answer: Tricky question, but the best answer is yes. The best candidate for an SEO manager position is one that believes in themselves and the ability to exceed the goals and expectations of their employer. Answering yes to this question also gives you more bargaining power for compensation.

Regardless of your skill set and the number of years of experience you have, the perfect SEO position is out there, just waiting for you. SEO is a growing field with huge potential for the future. Preparing for your interview today will help guarantee that you’re the candidate they can’t pass up tomorrow.

Good luck!

Taking Stock of your Website: A Step-by-Step Guide to SEO Audit

April 10, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

While most professionals in the field of SEO have heard of an SEO audit, few truly understand what it is.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve just started a website or if you are the owner of a seasoned, well-oiled website. The truth is; everyone needs to know what an SEO audit is and how to perform one. If have SEO experience or if you have taken on an SEO certification course, then this task is piece of cake. If not, perhaps this article could act as a lighthouse.

Introduction to SEO Audit

A search engine optimization audit is among the most important processes that you can embark on for your websites marketing and overall growth.

This statement is a big claim; however, after reading this article hopefully, you shall see why it is a critical process to go through as suggested. Additionally, after reading this article, a website audit shall not seem daunting as you may think.

To ensure that we are all on the same page about the issues at hand, here are some essential premises that we shall build upon.

First, what is SEO or Search Engine Optimization?

SEO is the practice of acquiring and increasing the quality and quantity of free or organic traffic to your website. Quality is essential because you only want to attract relevant traffic to your site. Relevant traffic means people that are interested in the content or in what you have to offer. Once you draw quality traffic, you also want to focus on increasing the number of people visiting your website (quality). Ideally, all this should be achieved without having to pay for the traffic, and hence you want to attract the traffic organically.

Good SEO boosts the performance of a website based on several factors including keywords used, the right type of pages, the quality of content and so on. Sites with good SEO rank higher than sites with bad SEO because the good SEO sites make a search engine user’s experience a lot better. To acquire this information, you could take an SEO test.

Ideally, you want your website to appear on the first page of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) because a lot of search engine users never go past the first page to look at search results. To ensure that you appear on page one of the SERP, you need an SEO Audit.

What is an SEO audit?

An SEO audit is an analysis or an examination of both the good performing parts as well as the poorly performing SEO components of your website. The SEO audit also includes recommendations to help you improve your websites SEO by enhancing the poorly performing areas and keep up the good performing areas. The SEO check also helps to understand why a site is not attracting relevant traffic and also why traffic is not being converted into sales.

Is an SEO audit really that important?

Analyzing websites overall health to ensure streamlined usability is quite crucial. One of the reasons why it is essential is because you want to avoid getting penalized by search engines for not following their prescribed rules. Another essential reason is that you want to ensure that the search engine users experience is a pleasant one because it will mean that the website will attract relevant traffic.

To ensure the overall health of the website, you need to investigate several factors including anchor text, sitemap, social media, load time and so on. If you are managing your website, you might already be doing a lot of the things required by an SEO audit. If you are uncomfortable doing an SEO audit or if you don’t have the time or patience to one by yourself, you could, of course, get an external SEO checker to do an SEO audit for you.

On average, an internal SEO audit should be done once a month while an eternal SEO audit done by an expert website SEO checker should be done at least once a year. Through the audit, you can gain valuable insights about a wide variety of metrics and how you can tweak the website to achieve the results that you are after.

The ultimate goal of doing an SEO assessment is to ensure that:

You gain targeted and organic visibility for your website
The targeted traffic increasingly converts to your offer
There is an overall growth of revenue

The above results can take several months to achieve. Therefore, a thorough SEO assessment through a properly executed SEO audit is not only essential but crucial for any website owner.

How to perform your SEO audit

To conduct an SEO audit, it is critically important to decide what your Strategic Objectives are. These strategic objectives should be based on the S.M.A.R.T principle. That is, your goals should be Specific, Measurable (w/Measurement), Achievable, Relevant and Time-Oriented.

Additionally, to perform your SEO audit, it is important to answer three critical questions

Do I have the necessary technical expertise to do an SEO Audit?
Should I do a manual or an automated website SEO analysis?
What tools do I need to perform an SEO Audit?

Do I have the necessary technical expertise to do an SEO Audit?

A comprehensive SEO website audit usually requires technical expertise because many moving parts need to be attended to. That said, with proper organization skills or by following an SEO audit checklist, you can conduct a thorough SEO audit without any errors.

The specific items to monitor can be divided into diverse groups. A basic classification of the necessary areas to monitor include the following:

On-site: On-page SEO includes all the specifics of the user experience including links, meta tags and such that can be monitored through the websites content manager.
Technical: This includes the specifics of the coding building blocks of the website. Web developer skills may be necessary for a thorough technical SEO audit.
Off-site: This includes specifics of what other people are doing that could be affecting your website. For example, what are competitors and the search engines doing that could affect your site?

Should I do a manual or an automated SEO analysis?

Some areas of the audit may be automated while other areas regions are better done manually. Areas that can be automated include metrics like bounce rate, page views, and conversions. These automated audits can be done once a month. If you find significant issues, then you can call a professional, or you can dive deeper with a more manual website analysis.

Even with everything performing well, doing a comprehensive SEO audit should be done at least once a year. It should cover areas like the landing pages, menu’s, user-friendliness, the effectiveness of ads and banners and so on.

What tools do I need to perform an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit can be effectively performed if you choose to use the right SEO audit report tool. Luckily, there are several free options that you can choose from. Examples of some tools that you could use include Ubersuggest, Check My Links, Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, Moz Crawl Test Tool, SEO Report Card.

Below is a list of the specific components of the SEO audit that you will need to pay attention to based on the three primary categories:

On-site SEO checklist

Are description tags between 150-160 characters long?
Are titles between 50-65 characters long?
Are page Titles unique on every page?
Are your website URL’s SEO friendly?
Is your description tag keyword stuffed?
Does your content make use of short paragraphs, bold, and italics?
Does your content make use of H1 Headings for titles?
Does your content have H2 and H3 tags for subheadings?
Does your website have a unique logo?
Do you have fresh content on your website?
Do you have a favicon?
Have you optimized content for featured snippets?
Have you linked internal pages?
Do you have the right content length on post pages?
Do you have varied anchor text for internal linking?
Do you have ALT tags for all images?
Are you ranking for highly competitive keywords?
Do images have descriptive file names?
Do blog comments have the ‘nofollow’ tags?
Are image file sizes optimized?
Do web pages with duplicate or no content have noindex and nofollow tags?
Do banner ads have a ‘nofollow’ tag?
Do you have too many ads above the fold?
Does your website implement rel=canonical to identify original content?
How long do your home page and other web pages take to load?
Do you have an HTML sitemap in the main menu?
Are important pages easy to navigate to (e.g., through sidebar navigation or from the homepage)?
Do you have a ‘related posts’ section on each detail page?
Do you have a Contact, About, and Privacy policy page?
Do you have an author for all web pages?
Does your website have broken links?
Do you have a custom 404 page?
Do you have a breadcrumb on all pages?
Does your website have invalid 301 and 302 redirects?

Technical audit

Is your website registered on Google and Bing ( for Webmaster tools and Analytics)?
Is the website optimized for mobile crawlers?
Does your website have the robots.txt file and robots meta tags?
Do you have a valid XML Sitemap?
Have you used JavaScript best practices to allow optimized JavaScript crawling behavior and Content Rendering?
Have you done Panda and Penguin checks?

Off-site SEO checklist

Do untrusted external links have ‘nofollow’ tags?
Have you searched for opportunities to acquire new links?
Is your website mobile friendly?
Have you done competitor analysis
Do you have a Google+ Add to circles button?
Do you have a Pinterest business page?
Have you considered the number and type of outbound links?
Do you have dedicated social media buttons on all pages?
Do you have a Google+ business page?
Is your website listed in Chrome Web Store?
Do you have a native Android app on Google Play (have you considered building a Progressive Web App- PWA)?
Does your website have a dedicated YouTube channel?
Do you have a Facebook business page?
Do you have a twitter account?
Are your social media profiles SEO optimized?
Have you considered asking your audience to register for Newsletters and RSS feeds?

An SEO audit template you can follow (and why you need one)

Having an SEO audit template will allow you to have a structured approach as well as make it easier and more manageable to address all the critical aspects of the audit comprehensively. Additionally, an SEO audit template will also afford you the following benefits:

Immediately identify what needs a change and how to make the change
Instantly appreciate how efficient your website is from an SEO perspective
Quickly determine your site’s weaknesses and know how to address the shortcomings
Ensure constant and measurable improvement of your website over time
Assist you in balancing your strategy for paid advertising and organic optimization
Assess Keyword (KW) use. Specifically, if KW’s are appropriately used and well placed; attracting targeted traffic; attracting the optimal amount of traffic.
Set realistic expectations for your website based on S.M.A.R.T goals
Measure yourself against competition and gain a competitive edge on your competitors

One of the best SEO audit templates that you can follow to comprehensively cover all the essential aspects of a Website Audit in a step-by-step or structured way is as follows:

STEP 1: What Are Your Strategic Objectives: The goal is to determine the goals of your SEO campaign and overall business.

STEP 2: Keyword Analysis: to determine whether your keyword strategy is working and find easy untapped keywords that you could use

STEP 3: Competitor Analysis: are keywords you are using too competitive? What content is working well for your competitors? Can you scrape for possible link opportunities by scrapping your competitor’s link profile?

STEP 4: Technical Analysis: Are there technical issues hurting your websites user experience and search engine performance?

STEP 5: Page Level Analysis: are landing pages appropriately optimized with keywords for maximum effectiveness?

STEP 6: Content Analysis: Is your current content strategy working?

STEP 7: User Experience Analysis: How well are users interacting with the website and its content as a whole?

STEP 8: Link Analysis: What are the strengths and weaknesses of your link profile?

STEP 9: Citation Analysis: Do you have consistent NAP-W (business Name, Address, Phone number, Website) information on all listings?

Conclusion

If you want to get maximum benefit from owning a website, then it is necessary to do an SEO audit. There are several options for doing a site audit including using free SEO audit tools, doing it manually by yourself or by asking a professional to do a more comprehensive audit for you. Each option has its place, and it is, therefore, essential to utilize all these resources for your maximum benefit. If you do this well, then you will end up with a website that not only attracts relevant organic traffic but one that can continuously improve conversions and increase the overall revenue of the website.

Social Media Interview Questions That Potential New Employers Love to Ask

April 9, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

Thinking about how to crack your social media interview?

Not sure what social media interview questions are asked?

Read this article to learn more about how to crack your next social media interview. It could make all the difference between bagging the social media role of your choice or losing it to someone else.

Digital marketing is constantly changing. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that marketers were questioning if social media was even worth their time. Now, social media is an integral part of any successful digital marketing strategy.

Considering that this change in thinking is still in its infancy stage, there are tons of employment opportunities in this space with great growth potential. The only trick is getting past the interview to land your dream social media job. Of course, this task does become easy if you are the proud owner of a social media certification, which can tell employers about your commitment to learning new skills. However, no matter how qualified you are for a position, you’re going to do well by preparing for the social media interview questions that will be presented to you. Social media interview questions will vary depending on the position you’re applying for, but every interviewer is looking for high standards and the potential for growth in their candidates.

Here are some of the top social media interview questions to help you prepare, starting with some for SEO beginners and leading up to more advanced social media specialist interview questions.

Social Media Interview Questions for Beginners

Congratulations, you’ve landed your first social media interview. You’re excited but have no idea what to expect from the interview. Before the big day, it’s a good idea to brush up on social media marketing as much as possible. TThere are so many intricacies, that it’s easy to overlook something important. A publication like social media for dummies can help lay it all out in an easy to understand format.

Once you’ve brushed up on social media basics and terminology, it’s time to prepare by getting an edge up with the most common interview questions for social media marketing positions. Here are a few to get you started.

Social Media Interview Question 1: What is social media marketing and how can it benefit our business?

Answer: Social media interview questions like this are looking to test your basics. Begin by explaining what social media marketing is and how it can be used.

An example of an answer to this social media interview question is given below.

Social media marketing is the practice of using social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. to promote brand awareness and generate traffic to the business’s website. The goal is to attract high-quality leads that will eventually turn into customers.

It can benefit a business in many ways, including providing valuable customer insight and increasing brand loyalty. While social media is also one of the best tools for increasing brand visibility, it also establishes better lines of communication and engagement between a brand and its customers.

Social Media Interview Question 2: In one word, tell me what it takes to succeed in social media marketing.

Answer: Authenticity. Audiences are attracted to the transparency of social media and the ability to get to know brands intimately. Authenticity in everything you do is going to establish respect and trustworthiness for any brand.

Keep answers to social media interview questions like this one short, crisp and to-the-point.

Social Media Interview Question 3: Which social media platforms my business have a presence on?

Answer: This is a common social media intern interview question. Arrive at the interview prepared for this question by doing your research on the company. Understand their demographic, their message and their marketing goals. Then, determine which social platforms are best suited for helping them reach those goals, and explain why. For example, a professional demographic for a B2B company means they need to be active on LinkedIn. Similarly, a brand that caters to young adults is missing opportunities if they’re not on Instagram and Snapchat.

Social Media Interview Question 4: Name a piece of content that you’ve seen recently that you’ve loved.

Answer: The interviewer isn’t trying to find out more about your personal interest with social media questions like this, but is instead assessing your eye for high-quality content. Your answer shouldn’t focus on the subject of the content. It should focus on what it was about the content that made it enjoyable.

Was it written by a master wordsmith, or maybe it was engaging live content that caught your attention? Share your insights about why you loved it and how you would apply the same concepts to your own social media strategy.

Social Media Interview Question 5: When is it best to not engage on social media?

Answer: This question is all about judgment. It’s especially important for damage control to respond promptly and appropriately to negative comments. However, we all know that some commenters are only on there to get attention and cause trouble, and it’s best to not engage with these people. Often times, innocent responses “fan the flames,” per se, and make a bad situation even worse.

Show the interviewer that you know the difference when you must and must not engage. Highlight how this skill can protect their reputation by being prepared with an example that you have seen. If you don’t yet have personal experience with this, that’s fine too. Mention a brand that you’ve noticed has done an exceptional job of engaging with their audience while not caving into trolls.

Social Media Interview Questions for SEO Specialists

SEO and social media are intricately entwined. The social media marketing interview questions for these positions are going to be aimed at uncovering how well you understand this relationship.

You know that social media and SEO both help build an audience. This interview is where you get to dig in and define how they each expand brand visibility and why they’re natural partners. This is your time to shine.

Here are a few of the top SEO and social media coordinator interview questions.

Social Media Interview Question 1: Tell me about your SEO experience and how it relates to social media.

Answer: There are multiple things that the interviewer is looking for with social media interview questions like these. They want to make sure that you understand key points like Google’s algorithms and how they apply to social media. So, mention key points like keyword usage, content creation, local listings and link building from social channels. It’s important to mention current changes. These changes could include examples such as Facebook’s recent change in the algorithm used to display preferred content on each user’s feed.

Social Media Interview Question 2: Which social media tools do you use?

Answer: The interviewer is going to expect you to be experienced in using social media tools like HootSuite, BuzzSumo, CrowdBooster, and/or Sprout Social. Be prepared to highlight those that you have experience with, as well as how you leveraged them and what your results have been. For added “oomph,” mention a tool that you’ve been interested in trying but haven’t had the opportunity to experiment with yet.

Social Media Interview Question 3: How would you respond if Google devalued one of your most trusted SEO strategies?

Answer: Google makes hundreds of changes to its algorithm throughout the year. Most of them are small and barely detectable in SEO, but occasionally an update will come along that really shakes things up. At some point, a trusted SEO strategy will lose steam. Here’s your opportunity to discuss how Google adapts its algorithm and how you would approach restructuring your strategy. This question is all about how you handle challenges and adversity.

Social Media Interview Question 4: What social media strategies do you plan to implement to generate more leads?

Answer: The company you’re interviewing with is going to expect you to produce a good ROI for their social media investment, and this means generating leads. You should familiarize yourself with the social media platforms the company is currently using and understand their unique strengths and weaknesses with SEO. If you see potential in a network they’re not currently using, be sure to mention why and how it could be an asset.

Social Media Interview Question 5: How did you generate traffic in your last position?

Answer: Arrive at your interview prepared with not only answers to this question, but with data to back them up. If you haven’t already, now’s the time to update your portfolio to include examples of how you’ve boosted traffic for previous clients.

Social Media Interview Questions for Managers

One of the best ways to prepare for this type of interview is by imagining that you were in the interviewer’s position. Start by making your own list of social media manager interview questions. What’s on your list and how would you answer each question?

Once you’ve made a list of potential question. You can go through your own list and prepare further. Review this list and see how you would want these social media interview questions to be answered.

Here is a list of the most common social media interview questions asked to managers during an interview.

Social Media Interview Question 1: How do you measure social media success?

Answer: Mention the key factors you look for in determining success, such as an increase in followers and leads, number of new inbound links to your site through social platforms, engagement and shares, amount of new traffic generated, and an increased conversion rate.

Social Media Interview Question 2: How do you respond to a social media crisis?

Answer: Do not answer this social media interview question by saying you can prevent a crisis from ever happening. This tells the interviewer nothing about you, other than you have an over-inflated ego. Instead, outline a methodical approach to a crisis.

When you face a social media crisis, the ideal steps of action are:

Start by responding quickly. Negative remarks can fester into something larger when left unattended
Let the audience know that you care about their concerns.
Acknowledge the crisis and get all the details you can

Additionally, you should mention how you would use sentiment analysis to track what people are saying about your brand so you can stay ahead of a looming crisis.

It’s your job to prove to the interviewer that you have a keen sense of judgment. With this question, interviewers decide if you are capable of deciding if a resolution is possible on social media, or if the conversation needs to be taken off social media and resolved independently.

Social Media Interview Question 3: What is our competitor’s social media strategy and what do you think of it?

Answer: Be wary of social media interview questions like this one. Research the company’s biggest competitors and dig into their social media strategies. Being prepared for this question shows the interviewer that you took the time to learn about the company. This prep work includes the deficiencies of their competitors. These deficiencies present significant social media marketing and SEO opportunity.

Social Media Interview Question 4: What goals should we set for our social media strategy, and what does the road to reaching those goals look like?

Answer: Outline one or two specific goals and how you would reach them. For example, perhaps you’ve noticed that this company would benefit from increased brand engagement. You could start by researching their social media demographic to help you define a content strategy. From there you would determine the most important metrics for measuring success in achieving this goal. These metrics include clicks, engagement rate, and hashtag performance. The interviewer isn’t looking for a one or two-step process. They want to see evidence of methodical thinking.

Social Media Interview Question 5: We’re thinking of running a free contest on Facebook where all our followers need to do is like and share our regular posts to win. What do you think of this idea?

Answer: Social media interview questions like this one are a test of your knowledge of the rules and guidelines for each platform. Facebook doesn’t look fondly on “clickbait” posts, so running a contest like this could get the account temporarily locked. Plus, while engagement numbers will climb while the contest is taking place, they will flat-line again once the contest is over. This short spurt isn’t going to do anything to help with sustainable, long-term organic reach.

Are you ready to make the next move in your social media career? Let these social media interview questions serve as a springboard for propelling you along the way. You’re worthy of that job you’re applying for. All you need to do is show them that the choice is easy!

5 Keyword Research Tools That Will Skyrocket Traffic for Your Brand

March 28, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

5-best-keyword-research-tools-generating-more-traffic-your-website

Keywords are the foundation of your SEO strategy.

Keywords are words, or phrases, that are powerful enough to unlock sections of your market. In essence, they are the “key” to SEO success. Unless this is your first rodeo in marketing, you’re already aware of this.

The challenge for many businesses isn’t understanding the value of keywords (KW) but discovering which ones will help them reach their growth goals through SEO.

On average, Google receives over 65,000 search requests every second.

That’s huge keyword competition happening every second of every day. If you want to drive traffic to your site, you need a way of discovering not just the highest performing keywords for your industry, but the ones that are going to do the work for your business on an individual level. Of course, this skill is one that needs careful nurturing. Professionals with an SEO certification tend to have mastered the trick of the trade. That isn’t the only way to get there though.

What you need is a keyword research strategy that includes the best keyword research tools.

What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding the best, most impactful keywords for your content. This is incredibly important if you want to increase brand visibility, traffic, and engagement.

Businesses shouldn’t waste time with underperforming SEO Keyword research strategies. What you need are keyword search tools that perform.

Maybe, you’re already using Google Analytics to learn the keywords people are using to find you, but that isn’t enough. That only tells you what keywords your audience is already using to find you. You might learn what keywords aren’t working, but you’re not going to gain much regarding new insights.

That’s why keyword research tools are so important.

Except, not all keyword search tools are created equal. Some are geared more towards discovering high performing keywords for PPC, rather than SEO, and there is a difference.

SEO Keywords Vs. PPC

Let’s stop the misconception that keywords work the same with SEO as they do with PPC. Yes, the overall purpose is to generate traffic, but SEO and PPC are different strategies, so of course, keywords are going to play different roles.

With PPC, you’re bidding on keywords that have a very targeted purpose. Since users are clicking on an ad, these keywords should lead the user to an action, such as a purchase. These words need to be targeted to provide an ROI, not just traffic.

But, SEO keywords are different. Here, you’re looking to expand reach and visibility, and you’re willing to put in the effort to nurture the relationship. SEO keywords take your brand, carry it to a broad audience and find a way to make your name stand out.

SEO keywords are the real powerhouse of a marketing campaign.

5 Keyword Research Tools to Help You

The right SEO keyword research tool will enable you to generate traffic and high-quality leads, without investing in costly PPC. These keyword research tools are great for small businesses who are facing the challenge of marketing on a budget because they don’t cost an arm and a leg to produce results.

Here are 5 of the best keyword search tools for businesses today.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is a complete keyword research tool, and it’s one that’s trusted by SEO experts.

This keyword research tool updates their database of keywords every month, which is key to staying competitive and relevant with your keyword strategy.

Ahrefs stays at the top of the keyword research game by crawling the web 24 hours a day, storing information about live websites, and which keywords are driving traffic across the entire internet.

In addition to being a keyword search tool, Ahrefs offers competitive analysis and content research to help you fill in the gaps in SEO that are keeping you from being competitive.

Long Tail Pro

Long Tail Pro (LTP) is an excellent keyword research tool for small businesses who want to see significant results from their SEO keyword strategy.

LTP leverages keyword data to deliver robust results including keyword competitiveness, keyword profitability, what your keyword difficulty target should be, and metrics that enable you to scope out what your competitors are doing. LTP is comprehensive, easy to use, efficient and helps you find long tails keywords that will bring converting customers to your site while avoiding high-end competition.

SEMRush

SEMRush is a keyword suggestion tool that performs well for businesses that want maximum SEO keyword performance, but also have an interest in pursuing a PPC campaign to complement their SEO efforts.

With every keyword in SEMrush’s 8-million-word database, users get detailed information about its value in both organic and paid search. Additional analytics include CPC, number of results, volume, trends and ad copies for the keyword or keyword term.

Keyword Finder

“Find longtail keywords with low SEO difficulty” is the sentence that greets you when you land on Keyword Finder’s homepage, and it sums up their mission flawlessly.

This keyword research tool is incredibly easy to use and gives you SEO optimizing analytics such as search volume, SEO difficulty, how a keyword trended in the last 12 months and additional metrics for PPC.

Seed Keywords

Seed Keywords is a keyword research tool with a different approach.

Instead of depending on unknown metrics to derive a keyword strategy, Seed Keywords lets you reach out to your contacts for keyword help and inspiration.

You provide a scenario and ask your contacts what search terms they would use under the search guidelines. Is Seed Keyword a tool filled with a database of information? Not exactly. But, it’s a fantastic tool for finding seed keywords that real people, the ones who are local or familiar with your industry are using every day.

3 Examples of How to Use Keyword Research Tools

Now, that you’re armed with a list of 5 practical Keyword research tools, let’s look at how to put them to work.

Targeting the Local Market with Longtail Keyword: Let’s say you own a local footwear boutique. Sure, words like “shoe store” are high performing, but don’t do much for targeting the local market where your real customers are.

With the right Keyword research tools, you can start with a seed word like “shoe” and build it out into a longtail Keyword phrase that speaks to your market. For example, keyword analytics might point to “where to find size 9 ballet flats in San Antonio”. This is much more specific than “shoe store” and will prove to be useful based on your targeted audience.

As proof of the effectiveness of longtail keywords, we can look at some results from KISSmetrics. In a 30-day period, KISSmetrics received 156,482 visitors from search engines. Of those, 142.493 came from longtail keywords and resulted in 87% of their conversions for the month.

Uncover the Keyword You’re Missing: Want to know what your competitors are doing that you’re not, or why your content just isn’t generating interest the way you think it should?

Use a keyword research tool to get insights into your competitor’s keyword strategy. These insights will help find high performing keywords you’re missing out on and will assist you to fill in the gaps in your content to generate higher engagement.

For example, let’s say you want higher engagement when you share content on social media. A keyword research tool can help you identify industry-specific topic and keywords that are currently trending.

While uncovering trending keywords is the first step, an excellent keyword tool also helps identify user intent. In other words, which keywords are only getting attention because they’re hot at the moment, and which ones stimulate real action, like sharing and engagement, from your audience.

This can mean the difference between content that gets a passing glance, and content that leads to conversions.

Plan Ahead: Your keyword strategy shouldn’t stagnate. Use a keyword planner tool to assist you in planning ahead for keyword usage in upcoming campaigns, events and content creation.

For example, the same shoe boutique mentioned above decides to do a local event where everyone that brings in a pair of gently used shoes to donate receives a discount for a new pair. Someone hears about this event but doesn’t get all the details, so they do a quick search. The keywords they use to find the promotion are going to be different.

A keyword research tool would help you identify which keywords are going to perform under specific conditions. This allows you to plan ahead and have a winning Keyword strategy in place before the big event.

Know What You’re Up Against: You can use keyword tools to spy on your competition. To some, it seems underhanded, but the truth is your competitors are already using keyword research tools to spy on each other, so you aren’t gaining anything by not doing it yourself.

Additionally, there’s nothing sneaky about it.

Keyword research tools can give you insights about which keywords are performing for your competitors, which ads bring in their traffic, and even how much they’re spending on ads. Don’t think of this as spying, but instead learning about your market’s behavior so that you can adapt your own strategies for success.

Conclusion

The importance of SEO and keywords isn’t even a question in today’s digital climate. Are you as confident as you could be in your SEO and digital marketing abilities?

Snapchat vs Facebook vs Instagram Stories: Who is Telling it Better?

March 27, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

If you follow events in the social media world, then you will be well aware that Instagram stories clearly did not come first. In fact, first came Snapchat, then Instagram Stories and then later followed Facebook Stories. More on this later. But for now, let’s start off by describing Instagram stories so that we are all on the same page as we go forward.

What is Instagram Stories?

Instagram themselves describe their Stories feature as allowing you to,

‘share all the moments of your day, not just the ones you want to keep on your profile.’

Essentially, Instagram stories allow you to share pictures, videos in a slideshow format. The photos and videos then automatically disappear after 24 hours. Once you take pictures and videos, you can then add Instagram story filters, text, stickers, drawings and even include mentions of other users and add links to add your distinctive flavor and interpretation to the images. You can learn how to do all this by enrolling in our advanced social media course.

Adding the links and mentions to the images and videos are two key features that differentiate Instagram from Snapchat. More on the differences later.

The other features that Instagram boasts include:

Adding effects; such as adding doodles, geostickers, and live face filters
View those watching your content
Posting your insta-story to your public profile feed or grid (you must opt to do so since this will not happen by default)
Allowing your story to be visible to a select few such as your friends/followers, and further blocking those that you do not want to see your stories on Instagram even if they follow you.

What is the difference between Instagram Stories, Snapchat, and Facebook?

In the war of Snapchat vs. Facebook vs. Instagram Stories, it gets confusing for brands. Most people aren’t even aware of the differences between the platforms. Before we can get to the differences between these different tools and platforms, it is important to touch on the similarities and the background of these tools. As mentioned above, first came Snapchat, and then Instagram and then later followed Facebook.

For those that are not aware, Facebook now owns Instagram. Also, it is clear to most that Instagram and Facebook both copied the one feature that Snapchat used to boast as being their exclusive domain. That is, the ability to automatically vanish your videos and images.

Instagram reinvented this feature and called it Instagram Stories while Facebook copied it as well and called it Messenger Day and Newsfeed Stories.

The similarities across the platforms are as follows:

Videos and images disappear
Filters, on-screen drawings, emojis, and text are used to enhance videos/images
Images/videos can be sent publicly, privately or just to followers
The number of views on videos/images can be monitored when the content is live.
Individually delivered messages can be viewed twice

All these features work in much the same way and create the same sense of urgency across all the different platforms.

The differences between the platforms, or rather, the unique features specific to each platform are as follows:

How is Instagram stories different from Facebook and Snapchat

Instagram Stories or Insta snap distinguishing characteristics include:

You can create and send out Live Stories, automatically notify your friends/followers and then interact with them in real-time
Stories can be shown to ‘new’ users who have not yet connected with you in an ‘explore’ section. This feature is somewhat in Snapchat, but you have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to enjoy this feature on your account.
For more efficient marketing, you can create and share Ads through ‘Instagram Story Ads.’ You, must, however, pay for this feature.
Instagram Stories has a larger fanbase than Snapchat

How Snapchat is different from Instagram and Facebook

Snapchats differentiating features are as follows:

Snapchat still maintains a unique and fun feel even though Facebook and Instagram have poached Snapchat features
Snapchat boasts unique and feature-rich geofilters in their Ad platform (Facebook tried to copy the feature with their ‘Location Frames,’ but Snapchat quickly shut this down through their patent)
Snapchat has a unique and loyal fanbase

Facebook Messenger Day/Stories differentiating features

Facebook’s Messenger Day and Stories work comparably apart from the fact that Messenger Day is published on the users’ Messenger app while the Facebook’s Stories are published on the mobile Newsfeed.

Why You Should use Instagram for Business

There are several reasons to use Instagram Stories for business. Some of the features tailored to work well with business users are as follows:

Instagram Story feeds are uniquely organized

IG story feeds are ordered using an algorithm (instead of chronology) which benefits Business Marketing Strategies since factors such as engagement, likes, frequency, and consistency are prioritized. As such, Instagram stories are good for marketers and hence for businesses in the following ways:

They allow for more average posts and not just viral posts to filter to the top of users feeds since frequency and consistency are just as crucial as viral or popular feeds.
You can diversify content that you already have and use it in unique and diverse ways to stay top of mind by making it to the top of user’s feeds
Instagram stories allow you to tap into instant marketing by allowing those that are not present at business/marketing events to still feel connected to your business
Marketing through an insta story has a more fun, and authentic feel since posts are not perfected but instead created by merely taking snaps and pushing a few buttons to share your story.

Instagram Stories encourage personal engagement

Instagram Stories create a sense of urgency that encourages personal attention to the content that is in a user’s feed. As such, an ig story can have great benefit to a business in the following ways:

It ensures that companies create content that allows for high-quality engagement since it promotes real-time participation.
It allows businesses to connect with target customers right away
It prevents cluttering of your business ig account since posts are automatically deleted.
Your business Instagram account can be used to showcase your most recent and relevant content without any effort. Of course, if you want to keep a story and add it to your profile, you could easily do so

Instagram Stories allow you to manage and store your marketing content

Since you can choose to save the images or videos that you feel are valuable to you, you can instantly have access to lots of content that you can use down the road for your marketing needs. This has the following benefits for your business:

Through the story saver for Instagram, you instantly have a store of all your images and videos that you can use for your other marketing and business endeavors.
You can use the enhanced content created in stories (images/videos with drawings, text and other markups) to add more pizzazz to your overall marketing content.
You can repurpose the images and videos to create more elaborate marketing campaigns

How to use Instagram Stories? (Instagram Stories Formats)

If you want to know how to use Instagram for business, you need to understand the different Instagram Stories formats.

Essentially, when you choose to use stories on Instagram, you can choose from different formats at the bottom of the screen and beneath the shutter button by just swiping. The different formats that you will find are as follows:

Normal: this is a regular photo/video that you can take by tapping (to take a photo) or holding (to take a video up to 15 seconds long).
Boomerang: this format allows you to create a GIF that loops over and over. If you time it right, you can capture a fun moment in a few seconds with few seconds of motion.
Rewind: this works just like a normal format video but plays back only in reverse.
Hands-free: works like a normal video only that you do not need to hold the button to record the video. All you need to do is just tap once to keep the camera rolling until the allotted time runs out or until you stop the video recording

An Instagram new feature that has also become popular is Instagram live stories. Through this feature, you can stream live videos to your friends and followers at the moment.

The difference between Instagram Stories and Instagram Live Stories is that with Instagram Live Stories the live video is even more ephemeral since it disappears as soon as the video ends and not 24 hours after it is created as is the case with Instagram stories.

What are Facebook stories?

As mentioned earlier, Facebook’s Stories are published on a user’s mobile Newsfeed. They sit at the top of the Newsfeed and comprise of two separate parts; Stories and Direct.

Direct can be accessed through the top left-hand side of the Newsfeed by tapping on the paper airplane icon. Direct offers a private messaging feature (distinct from the Messenger) that allows you to view stories sent directly to you. Direct also allows you to see replies to your own stories. Conversations in Direct can only be started through video/image and not through text.

Facebook stories sit at the top of the Newsfeed in the area that is occupied by circles with pictures and videos representing stories sent by you and your friends. Tap on any of the circles, and you can view the Story.

How are Brands using Facebook Stories?

In as much as Instagram Stories seems to be the preferred way for businesses to engage their customers through the use of visual content, Facebook marketing, through Facebook Stories does not lag too far behind. Brands use Facebook stories in the following ways:

Product showcases: One of the best ways for brands to use Facebook Stories is by highlighting product versatility through images, videos, text, and special effects. Not only is the visual element of a product displayed but also how the product should be used or how it can be used differently.

Adding an authentic perspective: Through Facebook stories, brands can share their stories and journeys in the most authentic way possible. At the end of the day, most people love a story that is not only entertaining but one that has emotion and passion for expressing an authentic perspective of events or moments.

Revitalize communication: In this visual age that we are living in, having yet another way to share visual content and especially visual content with special effects never seems to grow old. In fact, Facebook content is used by brands and businesses to combine text and visuals that are easier to attract attention to and absorb.

Provide an insider perspective: Everyone loves to be an insider or to have an inside perspective of what is happening with their favorite brands. Facebook Stories is a window that can provide this view of the inside of a brands work and play by humanizing a brands activity.

Straight-up marketing: By merely recording a marketing event through photos or videos, brands can make audiences feel that they are present at the event and this is an additional way to reach out to large numbers of people for higher levels of engagement.

How to Use Facebook Stories for Marketing

Facebook is continually improving ways for individuals and businesses to connect with their audiences. Recently, (October 2016) Facebook rolled out Stories for all Pages. Since businesses mostly use Pages for their business needs, this has provided a massive incentive for businesses to use Facebook stories.

More specifically, sharing of Facebook stories has had a significant impact on brands since it is widely known that, great companies are not just about products and services but about their stories. In short, an authentic brand story can improve trust which can have a significant impact on a brands bottom line.

With this in mind, below are three main ways that Facebook Stories can be used for marketing and branding:

Give your audience an insider view

People love being insiders with exclusive access to their favorite brands. By offering behind the scenes access, through Facebook stories, to; office parties, product lines, conferences, or just sharing scenes from the office you will make your audience feel like connected to you by humanizing your brand. This, in turn, increases engagement and creates a loyal following that is a lot easier to market to.

Show up and offer value unscripted

With Facebook stories, all you need to do is show-up and provide value. There is no need to perfect scripts and offer huge production value to market your ideas. As such, Facebook Stories allows marketing to simply rely on sharing expertise or information as the vehicle for success in reaching out to audiences.

Share valuable and exclusive content

If you make people excited about viewing your stories, then you will always have direct access to promote your ideas and market to them. This excitement can be easily created by offering valuable and exclusive content that allows people to feel special. Valuable content is informative, educative and engaging while exclusive content can include new content, discounts or special offers.

What is Snapchat Stories?

Snapchat plays the role of both a social network as well as a messaging platform. Snapchat allows users to use their smartphones to chat with their friends by sending pictures or 10-second videos. A simple way to think about it is texting through videos and pictures.

One of the defining features of Snapchat is the ephemeral quality of all the content that is shared on the platform. Essentially, content gets deleted just a few seconds after the receiver has viewed it.

The images and videos shared have the characteristic feature of being manipulated in fun and exciting ways to add value to what would probably be a very mundane or ordinary visual experience. Snaps can be edited through the use of Snapchat filters, effects, geofilters, drawings and text captions.

Snapchat also features a Snapchat Stories feature through which users have a feed feature where they can share videos and photos with their friends as a story clip as opposed to just a specific individual or as a group message. Stories disappear after 24 hours.

Snapchat Stories That Have Worked

Snapchat stories were initially not as easy to pull off as Instagram or Facebook stories. That being said, they are well worth the effort since they allow brands to reach a target millennial crowd that seems to easily gravitate to Snapchat stories as their chosen social media platform.

Some of the brands that have successfully used Snapchat stories for business and marketing include the following:

Audi and the Onion

Both Audi (car manufacturer) and The Onion (a satirical news site) released fun stories throughout the 2016 Superbowl for viewers that wanted to watch something apart from football. In a campaign tagged ‘all news that isn’t football,’ Audi and the Onion generated more than 37 million impressions and 100,000 total views through their Snapchat stories.

Cisco

Instead of keeping a focus on just their products marketing campaigns, Cisco chose to focus on their employees by using Snapchat stories as a window to an inside perspective of the company.

According to Cisco, the highly successful Snapchat stories campaign dubbed wearcisco ‘a day in the life of…’ garnered a 600% follower increase every week from its inception and a 70%-80% rate of story completion.

Netflix: Gilmore Girls promotion

Through the Snapchat stories campaign to promote Gilmore Girls on Netflix in 2016, over 200 coffee shops were used to recreate Luke’s café from the show. ‘Snapcodes’, (Snapchat’s version of QR codes) were used on free ‘Luke branded cups of coffee’ to direct customers to a custom filter that they could apply their photos to. The Netflix filter reached 500,000 people and was viewed 880,000 times for the one-day stunt.

How to Use Snapchat Stories for Marketing

Now that you know Snapchat stories can be effectively used for marketing and promotions through the above examples, isn’t it time that you create a Snapchat business account for your marketing needs? Below are some ways to use Snapchat stories for your business marketing purposes:

Sharing big events and milestones

You will probably not create a massive marketing campaign surrounding the achievement of a milestone or for the preparation of a big event. That said, letting it all pass by without some marketing should not be an option. You can use Snapchat stories to capture the moment in a fun and engaging way for your audiences.

Offer deals

As with the Netflix-Gilmore girls example, you can offer deals like free coffee as well as exclusive filters and such to your customers or audiences to drive traffic and engagement.

Brand Loyalty

You could, for example, offer deals or discounts to those that watch your Snapchat Stories right up to the end. You could also provide instructions on your Snapchat Stories that can get audiences free gifts or coupons. You could do this by for example asking them to send snaps of themselves using your product or service. All this can increase or encourage brand loyalty.

Other ways to efficiently use Snapchat stories for marketing include:

Promoting a more elaborate marketing campaign on other platforms and your website
Promoting traffic towards your other social media platforms
Partner with micro-influencers on Snapchat to grow your following on the platform

Stories on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and Influencer Marketing

According to Collective Bias, a shopper focused influencer marketing leader, 70% of millennials prefer peer endorsements when seeking to purchase products. Since Stories on Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook offer influencer-friendly tools, they are the perfect match for influencer marketing.

Below is a brief examination of how each tool can be used efficiently:

Instagram

The polls feature, in Instagram Stories allows an Instagram influencer to post a question to followers and get real-time feedback. Brands and influencers can use this tool to encourage audiences to share and provide unbiased feedback about the brands and to learn more about brand products and services.

Preferences, suggestions, and concerns can then be immediately addressed or used to inform future campaigns and product development strategies.

Snapchat

Snapchat has recently rolled out the conversion tracking Snap Pixel feature for brands that can be used to not only measure conversions but also to retarget site visitors and create niche audiences. Although this feature is only available to brands, brands can partner with influencers to create content or to sponsor products and services to loyal influencer audiences.

Facebook

One of Facebook’s more recently added features is the ability for brands to promote influencer posts directly. Through this feature, brands can easily retarget relevant influencer content in a streamlined and transparent manner and therefore also manage multiple influencers at the same time.

Over to you

Deciding who tells a better story between Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook are entirely up to you and how you choose to use the tools available to you. At the end of the day, you can succeed with any one of the tools. Of course, there is also nothing stopping you from using all the tools before deciding the best approach for your brand going forward.

Conversion Rate Optimization – The What, Why and How

March 19, 2018 by Akshata Chandrasekhar Leave a Comment

Conversion is an important metric in digital marketing. In fact, most of what marketers do eventually boil down to conversion. For this reason, marketing experts with proven expertise or a certification in conversion rate optimization are highly sought-after by most firms.

For those who are still trying to grasp what conversion is and how it affects your firm, let’s start with the what and how of CRO.

In defining Website Conversion Rate Optimization, it is best first to understand its two primary components. That is Conversion (Rate) and Optimization.

Conversion

Conversion is the number of people that visit a webpage and then click on a call to action to take up an offer. Conversion Rate is the number of people visiting the web page and taking up the proposition expressed as a percentage.

Depending on a website goal, a conversion can mean different things. Website goals can, for example, include an eBook download, signing up for membership, signing up for a free trial, purchasing a product, etc. If a website visitor, for example, ends up buying an item then this is a conversion. Also, if a visitor clicks on a call-to-action (CTA) on a landing page and registers for an eBook, then your conversion rate has just increased.

Optimization

In the context of CRO, optimization means improving your overall marketing funnel or a specific component of your marketing campaign such as your landing page. The purpose of optimization is to make it easier for visitors to understand the use of the webpage or campaign and therefore convert on your offer without hesitation.

As a marketer, the importance of a marketing funnel as a tool cannot be overstated. The marketing funnel helps to inform, educate and engage prospects about what you have on offer. If the stages of the marketing funnel are personalized for opportunities, then converting them to become customers becomes a lot easier and predictable. CRO helps you achieve exactly this.

Essentially, therefore, Conversion Optimization is the continuous process of ensuring that the marketing funnel works as planned and that it is successful in converting visitors (and sometimes even strangers) to become customers through the assistance of different optimization processes eventually. The optimization processes can include usability tests, multivariate testing, A/B testing (Split testing), on-page experience improvements, etc.

When is Conversion Rate optimization right for you?

Just because you have high volume traffic coming through your website, advert or landing page doesn’t necessarily mean that you will automatically get more customers. Furthermore, it is also probable that you may have already reached the optimum number of visitors or leads being driven by your strategies and therefore you may be experiencing diminishing returns from your efforts.

As discussed earlier, to convert prospects, you not only need to have a marketing funnel in place, but you also need to optimize it.

Principally, the best time to use CRO is when you already have a marketing funnel in place. Then and only then will using CRO, and its different elements such as testing, psychology, UX, visual design, customer behavior, copywriting, be productive and most efficient at moving strangers, visitors or prospects further down the marketing funnel.

You can enroll in our CRO certification to learn how to develop and utilize the right marketing funnel for your company.

If you want to maximize the results of your marketing campaigns, then CRO should be perfect for you. For example, in the e-commerce category, you can use CRO e-commerce, to optimize online experiences for your target customers. In doing so, you will quite easily convert visitors to leads and leads to customers and you therefore also lower costs of customer acquisition and retention.

At the end of the day, CRO is meant to help you get more from what you have and make it work better for you.

The relationship between CRO and marketing funnel

Understanding the marketing funnel and going beyond the funnel, allows marketers to contextualize their CRO efforts and therefore prevents them from making glaring mistakes in strategy. For example, as a marketer, instead of being satisfied by CTA clicks on a landing page, you would realize that this is not the end of the journey and you need to continue down the funnel to the retention stage.

To better understand the relationship between CRO and marketing, it is important to discuss each step or stage of the marketing funnel because each stage needs optimization to make the most of CRO. Accordingly, the phases of the marketing funnel and their corresponding CRO strategies are as follows:

Top of the Funnel Strategies – Awareness/discovery stage

The goal of this stage of the marketing funnel is education and brand awareness, mostly through indirect customer acquisition strategies. The idea is to let prospects know that your product is the best solution for the problem, challenge or pain that they are experiencing. At this stage, the content that you use should be educational and should be a soft sell. In effect, no personal details should be gathered; you should just give information.

Additionally, the information should be an ‘easy read’ that engages prospects and offers a dedicated landing page to promote all your offers.

Some of the content formats at this stage include blog posts, eBooks, email newsletters, videos, guides, and webinars. This content should be ‘free’ but should contain short-form lead capture forms on respective landing pages for each offer.

Middle of the Funnel Strategies – Consideration stage

At this stage, you have already succeeded at engaging your leads with information about their problem and pain and about your brand. The goal at this stage is, therefore, direct customer acquisition because you want your leads to buy.

At this stage content that you produce and promote should align the problem of leads with the relevant products or services in your portfolio.

Mid-funnel content should focus on:

Nurturing leads and drawing them closer to purchase
Educating prospects and current customers on what differentiates your brand
Inspiring active engagement through emotional connections with unique audience segments to build brand loyalty and brand ambassadors.
Retargeting prospects who may have shown interest in your offers in the past

Some of the content and content techniques at this stage should include; case studies, targeted emails, live events, product demos, webinars, and marketing automation.

Fundamentally, mid-funnel content focuses on nurturing the relationship with customers. In B2B companies where the sales cycle is more complicated, efforts at this stage are mostly spent cultivating relationships and prospects. In contrast, in B2C companies, efforts are mostly spent on Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Bottom of the Funnel Strategies – Decision/conversion stage

Every marketer’s ultimate goal is to get to this stage and yield a positive result in their favor. If you tick all the optimization checkboxes in the preceding steps, then you should have valuable and highly targeted offers directed at customers who are willing to transact with you.

The type of content or offers at this stage include; customized emails/newsletters, Q & A sessions, free trials, live demonstrations, customized pricing, comparison sheets.

The offers at this stage are to the point and valuable designed to convince prospects to ‘buy-in’ fully.

CRO best practices

As discussed so far, to create and implement a CRO strategy, having a well thought out marketing funnel needs to be an integral part of the process. Thereafter, following CRO best practices for your approach will guide you towards success with your marketing goals and business objectives:

Use analytics software for data analysis

The fundamental underpinning of the optimization process in CRO is data analysis using a web analytics tool.

“A problem clearly stated is a problem half solved.” – Dorothea Brande (1893 – 1948), American Writer and Editor

Essentially, you cannot come up with a proper plan if you don’t know the problem with your web pages, landing pages or adverts. Additionally, analyzing marketing campaigns and keeping sight of what’s working and what’s not working can redirect your efforts towards continually improving results.

Surveys

A lot of times, the simplest solution to any problem is to merely ask what works best. In the context of CRO, this is best done through surveys to get feedback from customers. If you want to get the most useful answers, then it is also essential to conduct a segmented study where you can get more accurate answers to specific problems. The branching logic system can be beneficial in asking specific questions based on the previous response provided.

Such surveys are very useful in generating good leads because you can discover details about your customers that you simply cannot get through analysis of on-site behavior.

A/B Testing

A/B Testing is probably the most popular technique used in the CRO process. It primarily involves experimenting with two or more variants of a web page, where users are shown the different pages and statistical analysis is conducted to determine which variant of the web page performs better based on a specific conversion goal such as an item sale or subscription for a service.

The A/B testing, however, needs to be structured to be most effective. When planning A/B testing, you need to keep in mind the following steps:

Collect Data: to help you pinpoint where to start optimizing.
Identify Goals: for example; item purchased, CTA button clicks, signing up for email, etc.
Generate Hypothesis/generate A/B testing ideas: Define why you think one option will be better than the other and prioritize accordingly
Create Variations or make the desired changes
Run Experiment and wait for visitors to participate
Analyze the Results

Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing involves testing multiple variables that have been modified based on a hypothesis with the goal of determining the combination of variations that best performs out of all possible combinations.

For example, 2 variations of text and 4 variations of color on a CTA button are combined to create a total of eight versions of content that are all tested to find out the best variation.

If you are wondering about the difference between A/B testing and Multivariate testing, well, its that with multivariate testing you can eliminate the need to run numerous sequential A/B tests on the same page and with the same goal. Basically, with multivariate testing, you run more tests in a shorter period.

Web Personalization

By creating personalized content for your visitors and customers, you effortlessly draw their attention and become not only a relevant but a chosen source for the information that they crave. The targeted messages that you create for your audience can take the form of banners, popups, landing pages, etc. and should also be based on your goals.

When designing such personalized experiences for your audience, it is critical to bear in mind your goals and your strategy for reaching those goals. Doing so will direct your efforts and lead to the practical results.

CRO tools and their benefits

One of the fundamental benefits of CRO is that it helps to optimize marketing budgets since it illuminates the source of traffic. Basically, if you know where traffic is coming from, whether through Pay Per Click (PPC), search, Social media or affiliate marketing, you can optimize your marketing budget to get the most out of each channel.

The insights that CRO provides should help you to follow better the 70-20-10 rule, where your marketing focus should be:

70% on tried and tested marketing. Or on marketing that is working well so far.
20% should be on programmatic, automated, rules-driven or machine-driven and executed to respond to different market stimuli. It is not planned.
10% of your marketing should be purely responsive so that it is sensitive to new marketing channels as they rise and fall

There are dozens of tools that can be used for CRO depending on your needs. That said, below are some of the most popular and useful ones:

Moz Pro.

Provides SEO tools to improve organic search rankings and especially Page Authority and Domain Authority. You can use it to track the most profitable long tail keywords for your site. Additionally, its useful for measuring and monitoring competitors search ranking concerning your ranking. You can also use it to fix on-site SEO gaps, and ensure that search engine crawlers find and favor your web pages.

Optimizely.

It is an experience optimization platform that features quantitative tools for A/B testing, multivariate testing, behavioral audience targeting and so on. This tool makes use of predictive analysis to personalize audience experiences. The tool is also useful for interface customization, campaign management, and mobile web compatibility.

Crazy Egg.

Basically, a heat map tool that finds the most engaging areas of a web page. It uses a color coding overlay to give you visual clarity for where to focus page optimization.

Unbounce.

Most useful for building engaging landing pages including those for mobile devices as well. You can use tried and tested landing page templates, or you can design your own. Additional features include; account transferring, campaign grouping and IP filtering.

Yoast.

Mostly helps to optimize on-site elements and search engine rankings for WordPress websites.

Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) tools

CRO tools fundamentally help to improve sales by improving website visitor’s engagement. More specifically, the benefits of the CRO tools are as follows:

Clarify and contextualize customer needs

CRO tools help you to identify who you are engaging and how you are doing so by analyzing traffic and customer behavior. You can therefore easily segment your audience to effectively launch and manage campaigns explicitly directed at different groups according to; age, gender, location, profession, etc. The result will be finding a perfect match for customer needs and your interests and therefore increasing conversion.

Realize new markets

CRO can easily help you to discover new untapped markets as your product line expands. This is possible since CRO tools allow for a clearer understanding of exactly who your audience, prospects, and customers are.

Facilitates growth

Since CRO allows for a targeted approach to satisfying customer needs, you not only turn more visits into sales, but you also add to the number of repeat sales to old customers as well. CRO tools, therefore, facilitate growth through better addressing or targeting audience needs.

Help to leverage leads and sales

With CRO tools, you optimize pages and processes by measuring the impact of changes to different elements including CTAs, social proof elements, headlines color, images, etc. As a result, you can, therefore, maximize on leads and sales without investing more in traffic.

Improves ROI

By using CRO tools, you can increase your ROI because you lower costs of customer acquisition and retention. By understanding the relationship between your customers’ needs and your valued assets including; landing pages, content, deals, white papers, etc., CRO tools help you to increase sales.

Conversion Rate Optimimization (CRO) case studies

Given below are some CRO case studies that highlight its usefulness.

Intuit:

Hypothesis: Adding chat increases conversions by 211%

Research
The QuickBooks maker found out through their customer service that customers were only upgrading after getting frustrated about using a product that did not match their exact needs. Intuit realized that speaking to already frustrated customers was not the best use of their resources. Instead, they decided to provide a solution to this problem earlier in the buying funnel.

They determined that since the ‘Review Your Order’ and the ‘Product Comparison Pages’ were among the pages that represented the highest purchase intent, these are the pages where they would seek to connect with customers.

Execution
Intuit partnered with LivePerson, to implement a live chat solution on especially these pages (among others) where customers had questions about what would be the best choice precisely for them.

Figure 1: Conversion rate on this Lead generation page increased by 190% when a chat window was used.

Results

Every page with this added live chat feature increased conversions and revenue for the company significantly. Additionally, customer satisfaction was increased since customers were less frustrated by the purchase process and this has led to better long-term relationships.

DesignBoost:

Hypothesis – Shortening landing page improves signups by 13%

The Research
Through the experiences of their conversion agency, DesignBoost wanted to test the hypothesis that shorter landing pages were typically better for free offers. They used CrazyEgg to find out where the attention of visitors to their long version webpage begun to fade using the scroll map feature.

The Execution
With data from CrazyEggs’s scroll map feature, a shorter version of the web page was created. They then A/B tested the long page and the short page using Visual Website Optimizer and decided to go with the shorter page based on data from their tests.

conversion-rate-organization-2-screenshot

Figure 2: Short version of homepage increased sign-ups by 13%

Results

As expected, a shorter homepage got more email signups, 13% more to be exact, while the courses page where a shorter page was also implemented experienced 25% more click-throughs

Conclusion

To better understand and use CRO, the what why and how, it is important to remember that having a holistic approach is critical. Essentially, having a complete inbound marketing strategy is important if you want to get the most out of any component of your inbound marketing strategy, including Conversion Rate Optimization.