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Google’s Tips for Building Trust

JULY 19, 2023

Google expects a certain level of trustworthiness before displaying your business offers to potential customers. Consider these four key areas of focus for building trust with customers:

Business Identity

Use one official business name across the web.
Share your unique story in an About Us page on your site.
Link customers to your social media channels.

Transparency

Provide clear, detailed policies regarding shipping, returns, and privacy.
Be transparent about your business model and operations.

Online reputation

Display reviews and testimonials about your products to help potential customers understand how to use your products or how other customers have used them.
Display any relevant badges or seals of approval from third-party sources.
Make sure customers know how to contact you or request product support.
Promote blog content and share third-party content your business has been featured in.

Professional design

Install an SSL certificate so customers know that their sensitive data is stored securely.
Ensure that your site is accessible, easy to navigate, and free of broken links or unnecessary redirects.
Avoid placeholders for text and images.

Check out Google’s full post for next steps.

What is customer journey orchestration?

JULY 18, 2023

Customer journey orchestration (CJO) is a type of software that allows marketers to connect real-time data points across channels and systems to better analyze the customer journey over time.

With consumers browsing an average of nine channels to find advice and make purchases, marketers are tasked with delivering a consistent, personalized experience at every touchpoint.

So what defines CJO?

A customer-centric approach. CJO prioritizes data-driven insights over preconceived notions of the customer journey, recognizing that customers utilize multiple channels and have autonomy in shaping their purchasing decisions.
Lifetime value. CJO emphasizes the cultivation of customer-brand relationships, fostering repeat purchases, and promoting brand advocacy.
Cross-channel data. CJO integrates data from various customer touchpoints, such as call centers, chatbots, in-store interactions, and more.
Real-time data. CJO practitioners provide contextually relevant experiences at their preferred touchpoints, necessitating real-time data gathering and response.
AI. AI and machine learning enables real-time development of insights, identification of the next best action for individual customers, and seamless execution of personalized experiences.

Take a closer look at customer journey orchestration at MarTech.

10 Alternatives to Google Analytics

JULY 17, 2023

Love it or hate it, GA reigns supreme. But if you’re looking for an alternative to Google Analytics—whether it be due to privacy concerns, ease of use, or other reasons—consider one of these web analytics tools.

Matomo
Woopra
GoSquared
Wide Angle Analytics
Mixpanel
Heap
StatCounter
Publytics
Clicky
Leadfeeder

Dig into pricing and product features over at Search Engine Journal.

4 Strategies For Increasing Customer Lifetime Value

JULY 16, 2023

People have certain expectations about the things they buy. The bare minimum goal for any business should be to meet customer expectations. After meeting expectations, the sky is the limit, and there are so many ways to continue delivering for those customers. LinkedIn Ads blog is covering the importance of repeat business with 4 strategies for increasing Customer Lifetime Value.

Qualify audiences more intelligently: A customer-focused approach to marketing is a great strategy if you can consistently identify who your potential customers are. But recurring customers may be a unique subset of your customer base that you can tap into further. Instead of just understanding prospective customers, try to understand prospective repeat customers. These are the customers who will increase your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Build long-term relationships with prospects and customers: Focusing on the short term might earn you some quick sales, but a short-term strategy won’t do as well a job at building a relationship with a customer. Acquiring new customers is tough as it is: why not make your job a bit easier and invest more in the relationships you have with current customers?

Continually engage after the sale: Like any relationship, some sort of presence must be maintained. You can still add value for customers without just presenting more products and services they can buy. Try sending resources showcasing how to get the most out of the products or services they’ve purchased, or invite them to a webinar that may help them discover new use cases that apply to their personal lives or businesses.

Prioritize CLV as a key performance indicator (KPI): Setting CLV as one of your business’s KPIs will help your long-term strategy, especially if you’re already measuring CLV. Elevating this kind of performance indicator to a measurement of business health and growth will help ensure you don’t lose sight of the future of your business.

Get the most out of your existing customer base and allow them to get the most out of you. Read on for a deeper dive into these 4 CLV-focused strategies.

Build a Sustainable Content Practice With This 5-Point Blueprint

JULY 12, 2023

Y’all know that captivating and delectable air that lingers right outside a bakery? It’s enough to stop us in our tracks and make us explore whatever baked goods are to blame. There’s nothing like freshly baked bread, cookies, muffins, you name it.

There’s a bit of truth to this regarding content as well. Sure, you can hit it out of the park with a piece of content that’ll serve you for years to come, but people want to see what’s hot out of the oven. What’s new often equates to what’s relevant to people. You undoubtedly recognize the importance of a good, consistent content strategy, so Content Marketing Institute is showing us how to build a sustainable content practice with this 5-point blueprint.

Make the business case to build and scale your content practice: You need a content champion. Whether it’s you or another member of your team, make sure someone is communicating the importance of content to leadership.
Build strong relationships with cross-functional teams and departmental partners: Collaboration can make for better content. Furthermore, you need to know how your work affects others, so make sure you consider what the content you’re working on will require of designers and developers among others.
Create a foundation of content frameworks, processes, and tools: Determine what tools and programs you’ll use to make sure your team is always on the same page at the same time. Also, do an audit of your existing content to find out what’s working and what’s not. Anything that clearly isn’t working might be worth revamping or even eliminating.
Right-size your team: Everybody has to start somewhere, and this often means a one-person team. However, as the value of a good content strategy is recognized, leadership will often want to increase or expand content which means you’ll have more on your plate; this means it’s time to grow your team.
Define success measures: These are success measures specific to your team. The purpose is for you to discover whether or not your current strategy is working for all parties involved.

Now you have the blueprint, so go out and get the buy-in you need to make your content happen.

Comparing UA vs. GA4 metrics: Key differences you need to know

JULY 11, 2023

Goodbyes aren’t always easy. Exceptions might include parting with a chatty airline passenger after a weary travel day or clocking out of work on a Friday afternoon. But difficult goodbyes are a universal human experience. And, speaking of universal goodbyes, we marketers recently bid a permanent adieu to Universal Analytics. Unless you were ahead of the curve, you might be scrambling to get a grasp of its successor, Google Analytics 4. So today Search Engine Land is comparing UA vs GA4 metrics and pointing out the key differences you need to know.

Fundamentally different data models

Where UA relied mostly on sessions and pageviews, GA4 centers its approach around events and parameters. At the end of the day, you’ll be looking at a bunch of numbers, but you may notice they don’t completely match up.

Sessions

For instance, UA and GA4 have a default session timeout of 30 minutes, but UA would restart a session at midnight and then create a new session once a UTM promo code is clicked. This would result in an overinflated session count in UA, so keep that in mind as you look at session counts in GA4.

Conversions

Whether you agree with it or not, GA4 counts a conversion every time a conversion event occurs. This means that someone clicking “click to call” twice in a row will count as two conversions – even within the same session. In contrast, UA would have recorded one conversion event.

Rethinking our web performance metrics

Bounce Rate

Registering a low bounce rate as good and a high bounce rate as bad is a bit too black and white for GA4. Just because a user visits and leaves your page quickly doesn’t mean they didn’t find what they were looking for. Because of this, GA4 has done away with bounce rate as a stand-alone metric.

Views vs. Data Streams

We like to pick and choose what we see based on what is important to us. This is why creating Views was so beneficial. In GA4, Views are now Data Streams, and this now offers the ability to analyze web and app data.

There’s never a dull moment in the marketing world, so keep your skills sharp. Dive into the rest of the article for more key differences between UA and its successor.

11 Crawlability Problems & How to Fix Them

JULY 10, 2023

With the exception of Halloween, a spooky-looking house isn’t the most inviting place. You may be picturing a tall, rusted wrought iron gate with a “BEWARE” sign in front of a decrepit Victorian manor riddled with cobwebs. While looks may be deceiving, we’re going to stay far away.

You want content on your website to be as inviting as possible so people will find it and benefit from it. It’s crucial that before visitors can find you, search engines must be able to crawl through your site and do the same. SEMrush is showing us 11 crawlability problems and how to fix them so you can tear down those cobwebs and spruce up your site to help search engines lead visitors right to your front door.

Pages Blocked in Robots.txt: This is where search engines look to see which pages they can and can’t crawl. Check your robots.txt file to ensure that you’re not blocking them from accessing your website. Replace “disallow” directives with “allow” to grant access.
Nofollow links: The “nofollow” tag () tells search engines not to crawl specific links. Check your site for these links and remove the tag if it’s not necessary.
Bad Site Architecture: Put simply, organization is key. Improving your site architecture involves organizing pages in a logical hierarchy with internal links. This will help crawlers easily access all pages.
Lack of Internal Links: Check to ensure you don’t have pages with no internal links pointing to them. A page without any links pointing to it is like an uncharted island – it’s isolated from the rest of the site and there’s no clear path to get there.
“Noindex Tags”: Google treats “noindex” tags ()as it does “nofollow” tags, so leaving these tags on pages you want the crawler to access will render your page off-limits to the crawler.

If you’ve noticed pages of yours aren’t showing up in Google when you’re trying to earn a top-ranking SERP position, these issues may be to blame. SEMrush lists another 6 potential problems your pages may be facing, so read on and stay diligent.

Unraveling Threads: The Latest Social Media Platform

JULY 9, 2023

It’s so easy to feel that social media has peaked. We have a variety of apps and sites, and we can see last year’s promises disappearing in the rearview mirror. But there’s a new kid on the block, and this kid has quite the reputation. It can be challenging to see what the future will hold for us as digital marketers, but we’re experts in adaptability within the digital landscape, so we’re ready to welcome the new kid. ClickThrough Marketing is taking us through what Threads means for marketers so you can stay on top of your game.

Threads and Digital Marketing

Threads is no nimble startup trying to operate in Twitter’s shadow; it’s Meta’s opportunity to overtake Twitter as the biggest name in micro-blogging. If you’ve built up your brand on Instagram, then you’re off to a good start since those same followers will be waiting for you automatically on Threads. Don’t take this audience for granted; keep them engaged.

Threads and Content Marketing

For starters, Threads has a 500-character limit – larger than Twitter’s. Furthermore, Threads is part of the “Fediverse”, which uses the ActivityPub Protocol to share content between different platforms and services. (Fingers crossed for tight integration with WordPress.)

Threads and SEO

Interaction and discussion are at the heart of Twitter. When looking for a feed with the latest SEO best practices, you can jump into the conversation to learn from and debate fellow experts. But many have turned away from Twitter and are looking for a new place to take their thoughts and thumbs, and it looks like that place is Threads. Plus, the increased character count will allow users to express themselves in greater detail.

Threads is live now, but there’s still no shortage of speculation about what role it will play amongst other tech giants. We’re all eager to learn new ways we can leverage this platform for our marketing strategies, so keep reading for more ideas of what is to come.

How to Combat SERP Volatility

JULY 5, 2023

It’s a long way from the top when you’ve secured that sweet, sweet number-one position on the search engine results pages. You must be doing something right to get there; it doesn’t just happen on its own. So why do SERPs sometimes change so quickly when you’re following every rule and tried-and-true trick you can think of? Moz has an answer for us today as they cover how to combat SERP volatility.

With each method of combatting SERP volatility, there’s often an associated root cause. Let’s look at some of the reasons you may experience volatility.

Reason 1: Mixed search intent, SERP variety

We all do our best to meet users where they are on their journey, so knowing the intent of a user allows us to craft a more relevant message. Sometimes, a query may have multiple different intentions, and the search engine doesn’t know which is most accurate.

Solution: When the search engine can’t identify the intent, specify the intent with your own keywords within the content. Perhaps your content needed this clarification to begin with, but it could also be that the intent behind a user’s search today is vastly different that what it would have been 6 months ago.

Reason 2: High keyword difficulty

Some keywords are just more competitive than others, so fluctuations in rankings are easy to understand.

Solution: Assess how recently your keyword competitors have refreshed their content. This may just be a reminder that it’s time for you to revisit the content in question.

Reason 3: High market competition

Content is king and everyone is after the throne. A new competitor may enter the ring, or an existing competitor may refine their existing strategy and begin churning out tons of new content.

Solution: While you can only publish so much content, any waves of new content affecting the SERPs can be analyzed and help you determine what people want to see. When you see your competitor’s content performing well, they’ve made your job easier by identifying topics for your next piece of content.

The key is not to panic during the inevitable temporary SERP results fluctuations but to identify longer-term trends to combat. Read on to identify more causes and solutions to dropping SERP rankings.