Aaaand we’re back! Happy New Year, fam! We spent the last week stuffing our faces, hibernating, and brainstorming new things for the newsletter. 2018 is gonna be lit.
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How to Rank in 2018: The SEO Checklist
Since our bodies are here at work, but our brains are saying “no,” we’re gonna ease back into marketing with an easy SEO checklist.
SEO might not be your favorite topic, but it’s Rand Fishkin’s favorite topic. He’s simplifying SEO in 2018 for all of us today with a nice little checklist. Thanks, Rand!
Here’s what you need to do to rank in 2018…
- Crawlable, accessible URL whose content Google can easily crawl and parse. You need Google to clearly understand what’s happening on your website. That means short URL’s and no strange content formats.
- Keyword Research. If you’re still guessing at what types of content your audience wants to read, make it your New Year’s Resolution to do Keyword Research.
- Investigate the Search Engine Results Page to figure out what ranks for your keywords and why. Do a search for one of your keywords. If you don’t rank number 1, why not?
- Have the most credible, amplifiable person or team available create content that’s going to serve the searcher’s goal and solve their task better than anyone else on page one. Think of influencer marketing here. It’s actually great for SEO.
- Craft a compelling title and meta description. Yes, these still matter a ton in 2018.
- Intelligently employ those primary, secondary, and related keywords. It’s not all about one keyword anymore. It’s about that keyword and all of its related words.
- Optimize the page to load fast, as fast as possible and look great.
Today’s Listen is technically a video, but since Moz loves us as much as we love them, they also included a SoundCloud version for those who just wanna listen.
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The 10 Best Facebook Ad Campaigns that Killed It in 2017
New year, new us!
Psych—we’re still talking about Facebook ads. You’re gonna have to pry Facebook ad topics out of our cold, dead hands! Besides, this year we’ll be getting even more serious about our own FB ads thanks to our newest full-time marketing kween—a real beast when it comes to Facebook ads. Whaddup Gloria!
But enough about us. Let’s take a look at the brands with killer Facebook ad campaigns this year. Today’s Read also includes each campaign’s goals, implementations, results, and tips and takeaways for the ultimate learning experience.
Worldwide Breast Cancer, a global charity focused on early detection of breast cancer, decided to make lemonade out of lemons with its #KnowYourLemons campaign. The microsite also provided a quiz for women to check if they’re at risk.
- Result: By February, the campaign has reached 7.3 million people in just three Facebook posts alone.
- Takeaways: Including a memorable catchphrase or hashtag can make performance tracking a little easier. The lemons bearing 12 different symptoms as a reminder for what women should check added a bit of humor to help women overcome a fear of checking while keeping within censorship rules.
Sumo.com, knowing that organic competition was tough with all the high-quality content available, focused their efforts on distribution. They used layered targeting and a retargeting pixel for those who have read blog posts to then get them on board with a more profitable offer.
- Result: Chris Von Wilpert took Sumo from $5 million to $10 million just with paid advertising efforts.
- Takeaways: If you’re in an oversaturated market or you know most of your competitors are using a particular tactic, you might have more success if you channel your efforts in another direction. Also, make sure you present higher threat offers to those who had already shown interest rather than to a cold audience.
Birchbox tested videos meant for mobile vs. repurposing TV commercials to see what would perform better. They showed close-ups and demonstrated the product, used recognizable (and well-liked) beauty products, and opened the videos with attention-grabbing intros and music.
- Results: Mobile videos outperformed other content, increasing mobile conversion by 35% with 70% of website traffic coming from mobile. This led to Birchbox creating their own in-house production studio.
- Takeaways: Birchbox looked at insights from other campaigns where they repurposed content to get an idea of what to test moving forward, saving time and money. They also capitalized on the mobile video trend and created shorter videos for higher view rats.
So much more to discover below! You know what to do…
Watch
In Search Of…
You’ve likely seen today’s Watch by now, but we’d be remiss if we didn’t feature it, especially in our first Carnage of 2018. Plus, Google’s “Year in Search 2017” is one of the better retrospective videos we’ve seen (looking at you, YouTube…).
We appreciate it’s look back on the year through a more honest lens, all told through the narrative of people asking “how” via Google Search. They show the good, as well as the bad… the really bad. But, it flows into an empowering message as the proverbial “faith in humanity” is brought to life, reminding us that even in the trials of life there are triumphs.
