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SEO

SEO Spring Cleaning – Refresh Your Site in 2022

Cleaning a surface

Photo credit: The interesting Anton

It’s that time of year again when the seasons change and marketing budgets and expectations for the year have been set. Now that companies are turning their focus to performance, this is a great time to look at your site and more importantly how it’s producing organically. Here’s our guide to spring cleaning your site and making sure your organic presence hits the mark.

Crawl your site

Sites break over time for various reasons and if you haven’t run a crawl in the last few months, this is a perfect time to use Screaming Frog or similar tools to check your site. In addition to finding and fixing broken links, we recommend focusing on the following areas:

  • Sitewide redirects
  • Sitewide canonicals
  • Short H1 tags
  • Short Title tags
  • Missing meta descriptions
  • Buried pages (crawl depth of 6 or greater)
  • Short pages (100 words or less)
  • Low internal links

Once you have your crawl data, build a gameplay to prioritize and tackle everything over time. Sites can be nebulous so a schedule with accountability is a must have. 

Dust off your blog

Blogs work well for content development but for most sites on the web, the last entry is often months if not years ago. If you have a compelling value proposition, industry knowledge or want to address pain points in your market then you should consider creating a content calendar and holding your brand accountable for consistent, quality, content production. 

You’ll have new assets to share in social, Google will see new content and crawl your site more often and more importantly you’ll have new touchpoint for prospects looking for solutions. 

Cull your underperforming content

Similar to pruning a tree or rose bush, your site likely has content that isn’t getting any traffic and is taking link equity and crawl space away from more important pages. We recommend taking a list of current pages then doing an export of Google analytics for pages that received traffic over the last 6 months and comparing the two lists.

For most sites, you’ll see 5-10% of pages haven’t received traffic in the last 6 months and we recommend the following steps when reviewing whether to keep or remove content:

1. Is the content still relevant? A post about a new hire who has since left or a post wishing people a Happy 2017 are likely candidates for removal. Remember these posts take link equity and crawl budget away from your higher performing pages.

2. If it’s still relevant, can it be improved? This is something we consistently do with our corporate blog given the number of guides and how-to articles we create. Often steps need to be redone or a platform will make changes that require us to revisit and rewrite content which gives us the opportunity to make sure we’re up to date and let people know a post has been edited for 2022. 

For content you decide to update and improve on – make sure those changes get communicated to your prospects via social or email updates.

3. If you find content you need to delete, make sure to put redirects in place and crawl the site to make sure everything looks good.

Getting your site cleaned up and performing well is going to pay dividends throughout the year and if your brand is struggling to get your site to perform make this your top priority.

Categories
Paid Media

Preparing for Performance Max Campaigns

Cutting Board

Photo credit: The impeccable Debby Hudson

In October of 2020 Google announced the launch of Performance Max campaigns as the company continued to push for new automated ways to target audiences online. After a year of testing Google then decided earlier this year to not only make them available to all advertisers but to replace existing smart shopping and local campaigns with the new feature.

Advertisers who have been using either campaign types will be happy to know that Performance Max has additional features to help them potentially capture more revenue and higher ROI and if you’re trying to figure out how to get started transitioning your campaign types, here’s what we recommend.

Reassess Your Goals

Let’s talk through both campaign types, why they’re typically run and what will carry over:

Smart Shopping: These campaigns take your existing product feed and using machine learning try to automatically match the product, message and placement to consumers in the shopping/discovery phase. Performance Max campaigns won’t be too different other than offering additional ad inventory placements.

Local Campaigns: These are simple local business campaigns that take your address, a few selling points and assets and automatically generate ads. I really recommend that if you are running them, you meet with a paid search agency/freelancer because there are far better and more granular ways to setup campaigns that will target customers and generate ROI for your business.

Upgrade Window

The best thing about this transition is that Google will be providing a one-click upgrade experience starting in April for existing campaigns. Previously when campaigns were deprecated, they could often run without any edits for a limited time but had to be completely rebuilt in the new campaign type. This takes out a lot of the management headaches and gives advertisers a great starting point going forward.

What Performance Am I Seeing?

So far clients who have tested Performance Max campaigns have seen incremental improvement which we feel is largely related to improved machine learning and placement. I still recommend that before flipping the switch, brands need to make sure these campaign types still align with their business objectives.

Managing Complexity

If your brand is currently running smart shopping or local campaigns and is trying to figure out next steps, there are a number of great paid search agencies and practitioners that can build, transition and optimize your campaigns for the new format.

Categories
Social Media Web 3

Emerging Ad Platforms You Need to Test in 2022

Photo credit: The delightful Arthur Mazi

Just 5 years ago, if your brand was running campaigns on Google and Facebook/Instagram it was likely you were reaching 95+% of your audience between both platforms.

However we now live in a world where Tiktok got more traffic than Google in 2021 and a society that no longer sees Facebook as cool or hip and instead is turning to a slew of other apps for their time and attention. The transition from legacy platforms is happening so fast that it can be hard to understand and plan around where time/attention is going so here’s where brands need to begin investing in order to make sure they are reaching their audience:

Tiktok

To outsiders it seems like a quirky app featuring dance moves and memes but to users of the platform its turned into so much more. There are now influencers giving advice on anything and everything and diverse video content creators making true works of art. Advertisers have been slow to get on the platform as they try to figure out a messaging and engagement strategy but those that have already invested in the platform are realizing returns. In fact in 2021, more people visited Tiktok than Google and the trend should only continue to play out for 2022.

Snapchat

Teens abandoned Facebook long ago and smart advertisers know that teens have significant sway in the marketplace whether it’s spending their own money or influencing the purchasing decisions of their parents. The platform has gone from disappearing messaging to a host of self created shows that drive engagement and reaction. Brands have been swarming to the platform with their own serial content to try and attract consumers early and develop lifetime brand loyalists. Like Tiktok, the brand has matured from a single use app to a full fledged content creation platform and advertisers need to pay attention to it.

Reddit

If it’s on the internet, there’s likely an entire community talking about it on Reddit. If you rarely visit the site or just check the homepage, you’re missing out on a diverse community that is talking about your product right now. For instance search your brand or what your target market is looking for in a product or service and odds are you’ll come across hundreds of threads with people asking for recommendations for a product that does X to entire communities you never knew existed that serve as a forum for your brand. Finding the communities that matter and serving ads in those communities can drive incredible returns.

Pinterest

By now, most brands have a Pinterest page but many are missing out on Pinterest Ad platform and its powerful capabilities. The platform has always been a hub for product discovery and with detailed targeting options, it can be supercharged into an amplifier for brands and their products looking to get in front of the right people at the right moments. Pinterest knows they will be very high funnel consumers, which is why their ad platform comes with its own pixel to track performance and report on people who saw the product and later purchased through another channel.

NFTs

NFTs are so much more than pictures of cartoon apes. They represent the ability to personalize ownership and engagement with your brand which is why companies from ASICS to McDonald’s and the NBA are producing content to allow their raving fans to display their loyalty. If you have a product and you aren’t at the very least offering a NFT version of it, you should really look into investing in a deployment strategy. Finding your biggest fans, cultivating them and developing target audiences and lookalike campaigns from that data can give you a critical advantage when targeting on other platforms.

Categories
Paid Media SEO

4 ONLINE MARKETING MISTAKES ALMOST EVERY LAW FIRM MAKES

Law Library

Photo credit: The classical Gianmarco

Legal marketing is arguably the most competitive industry online and many firms make basic mistakes that hurt their ability to drive case volume and lower their overall return on ad spend. Having had the opportunity to scale successful lead generation campaigns for firms ranging from three person personal injury practices to 200+ employee firms I thought it would be a good idea to share the basic mistakes that almost every practice makes and how to remedy them. 

Only Running Expensive Paid Search Campaigns

What’s the easiest way to get a case in the next 24 hours? Run a paid search campaign.

What’s the most expensive way to get a case in the next 24 hours? Run a paid search campaign.

If you’re reading this and you’ve ever done paid search, especially for ultra-competitive practice areas like personal injury, truck accidents or mesothelioma you know that clicks can cost $150 or more. You also know the uncomfortable truth that most of those clicks are your competitors or people who aren’t serious and while Google can filter out some of that behavior, for the most part the majority of your clicks are wasted. 

For those clicks that are actually genuine, if visitors don’t have a user experience that immediately empathizes, educates and lets them take action they’ll leave and there’s nothing worse than seeing you’ve spent $1500 in a day and didn’t get a single call or form fill (for both the lawyer and the agency that will get a call from said lawyer the next day).

The way to improve visibility and reduce reliance on expensive terms is to think of the decision making process for your client. If someone is in a wreck for instance, a lawyer is actually what they search for well after the accident as their immediate needs center around insurance processes, liability, treatment, rentals etc …

Strategically having visibility on their journey is not only cost effective but gets your name into their minds well before they reach a point of seeking legal assistance.

Ignoring Organic SEO

What we generally hear from firms that rely heavily on paid search for lead volume is that they tried SEO and didn’t get traction or they were quoted a long timeline and heavy investment with no guarantee of page 1 ranking. The second part is true to a degree in that if you’re a brand new site, the odds you’ll rank on page 1 for your main practice term in a short span of time are low.

However SEO is often the best place to generate leads because as we began to discuss in the previous section, there is an entire ecosystem of online activity around even the simplest of cases. 

For instance with the car wreck example above there could be issues around fault, insured/uninsured motorists, diminution of value, medical billing, short term financial woes as a result of injury. Every firm I’ve seen strategically invest in content tailored to specific questions and issues always get results vs those spinning their wheels on expensive paid search campaigns. Would you rather invest in 10 well-written and optimized pieces of evergreen content that will generate pageviews and leads for years or x10 $200 clicks for car accident attorney Dallas? 

In fact when I previously worked on behalf of a firm that handled asbestos litigation, we spent thousands of hours mapping out every possible search area for mesothelioma including symptoms, diagnosis, actual factories/ships/places for exposure and reading through clinical trial data for potential therapies. The result is that we built an extensive content library that gave a full context around the cancer and every element of it and became a powerful lead generation engine that needed relatively little ongoing maintenance.

Falling Flat With Video 

Your firm has probably at one point or another been told you need to be on YouTube and most firms do the exact same thing: build a channel, upload their latest TV ad or radio spot and then watch as they rack up 2-3 views per month.

Most law firms look at YouTube from the lens of reality … people go there to watch cat videos and people playing video games. However the opportunity for law firms is that video for many people is easier to absorb and understand and taking the above example of evergreen content and applying that to video you can start to see where the opportunity exists. There are countless 200k+ view videos from lawyers explaining (without giving legal advice) obstacles, questions and challenges someone might face after a car accident.

When done right (not shot an iPhone as you walk down a loud street downtown) video can be an evergreen medium for connection, links and ultimately get people onto your site and into your queue. Video is the medium of the future and firms are even beginning to look at platforms like Snapchat and TikTok (especially for criminal law).

Downplaying Spanish Search 

The way that firms approach Spanish speakers is still relatively basic. I’ve consulted with many that hired Spanish speaking staff specifically to handle inbound calls and are shocked when they never seem to materialize.

The problem is most firms put it as a footnote for their advertising because they assume the Spanish speaking audience doesn’t need sophisticated messaging – just put Se Habla Espanol somewhere by the phone number and they’ll know what to do next. 

But often the web experience for many of these consumers is 99% in English and that doesn’t do enough to build confidence and not only win the click but win the client. If your firm has invested resources in accommodating Spanish speakers, you need to understand the investment should go beyond people and into the marketing assets themselves.

Basics like a Spanish language landing page and dedicated Spanish language ads are easy additions to existing web assets. Spanish speaking consumers will encounter the same questions and obstacles as their English speaking counterparts so investing in content marketing, often as a first mover in many markets, can pay significant dividends.

Categories
Paid Media Social Media

5 Ways Furniture Brands Can Boost Sales in 2022

Staged Furniture

Photo credit: The precise Nathan Oakley

January and February are traditional post-holiday planning months for many furniture and decor companies and during that downtime it’s important brands step back and take a critical look at their digital marketing strategies.

In the last year and even in the last three months, major advertising and social media platforms have introduced new formats or announced changes that will significantly impact campaign performance. To help brands navigate the ever changing and often confusing world of online marketing, we’ve compiled a list of the most important changes and opportunities you need to be aware of for 2022.

Take Advantage of Google Organic Shopping Listings

Most brands that sell online already have Google Shopping ads but what you may not know is that Google provides free organic listings that show after all of the sponsored listings.

Getting organic shopping enabled and integrated into your eCommerce platform is an easy and straightforward process and we’re seeing it produce incremental revenue and in some cases account for 5-10% of monthly revenue for some clients.

It should be a 101 level task for any online business in 2022 and especially those in the home furnishings space where platforms like Google shopping serve as a discovery point for many brands and their products.

Test New Platforms

The platforms where consumers spend their time and energy is quickly evolving and marketing strategies that only focus on Google and social media ads are missing opportunities to connect with consumers in the moments that matter.

Just how quickly are new platforms taking over your users time? Consider that in 2021 Tiktok received more traffic than Google. That’s right, more people watched videos on Tiktok than conducted Google searches and if your brand isn’t present there then you’re missing out on significant engagement opportunities.

Often the biggest hurdle for brands adopting new platforms is that you want your brand to be approachable and authentic and avoid an overly corporate appearance. That lingering debate can often delay or completely destroy innovation opportunities and we always advise to test and refine because no one will remember your first tweet or post but they will remember a meaningful piece of content, delivered at the right time.

We advise taking a look at the targeting and creative capabilities of the following platforms and coming up with a game plan to test in 2022:

  • Snapchat
  • Pinterest
  • Tiktok
  • Reddit
  • NFTs
  • Expanded Video use

Aggressively Segment Your Lists for Social and Programmatic

One of the biggest changes that rocked the ad world throughout 2021 was the ongoing impact of data and privacy changes on ad platforms, specifically Facebook and Instagram. Consumers now have more control over their data and these changes negatively impacted the performance of prospecting campaigns where you traditionally use lookalike audiences and demographic/behavioral targeting to serve ads.

With fewer users to track and less behavioral data being fed into user profiles, traditional prospecting campaigns that relied only on demographics and interests will continue to perform poorly. We recommend that brands replace these antiquated campaigns with highly segmented lists so that lookalike campaigns that typically drive prospecting can be much more effective.

Here are some initial ideas for lists based on where we’re seeing high ROAS:

  • Power users (Users who log in daily)
  • Repeat purchasers (Especially if you can segment by frequency)
  • Purchasers by AOV (Hint: low AOV consumers can be great for new to brand)
  • Multiple items/cart
  • Business referrers (scrape loyalty program)

An “All Customers” list should be the last resort and should have a lower budget allocation vs your highly segmented lists.

Test Expanded Text Ad Messaging (While You Still Can)

Google and Bing both announced that after June 30, 2022, expanded text ads (the traditional basic header and description format) will be replaced with responsive search ads (ads with a rotating combination of headlines and descriptions). This is important for many reasons and the biggest is that marketers will no longer be able to A/B test paid search ads.

The data that’s available for responsive ads will still show all the metrics you see with traditional expanded text ads (Impressions, CTR, CPC …) but you can’t segment it by specific combinations or review data between ad variations. Instead you’ll just see a distribution of what ad combinations showed and at what percentages but you can’t limit distribution to just a specific set of variants.

The important thing to note is that the format is going away completely. Previously when ad providers would sunset products, they wouldn’t allow users to create new ads or make changes to existing ads but they would still show for some time after deprecation. Instead July 1, 2022 you’ll either have all of your new responsive ads showing or you’ll have no presence at all.

It’s crucial that marketers heed this opportunity to both review and document previous successes in ad messaging while aggressively testing through early June to get as many data as possible. For this reason we recommend brands add more budget to search in the first half of the year so that they can gather the data and develop a bank of high performing ad copy that can be carried into responsive campaigns.

Clean Up Marketing Automation Funnels

Odds are your marketing automation flows were setup at least 1-2 years ago which means it’s a great time to review how visitors are tagged, nurtured and remarketed throughout their customer journey.

When we audit client marketing automation flows, especially with highly sophisticated products and paths, we generally find outdated messaging or sequences featuring deprecated products/promotions. You should also consider your flows in the context of how consumer behavior has changed since Covid and make appropriate updates based on buying and delivery options.

As you’re going through your funnels look for testing opportunities both at the audience and sequence level and if you haven’t made any sequence or messaging adjustments in awhile, you’ll have a stable benchmark with which to test against. (Bonus: That rich audience data can then be fed into your prospecting campaigns!)

Making the Most of Your 2022 Marketing

If you know you need to work on these core areas but aren’t sure where to start or how to review your existing marketing then contact a digital agency or strategist that can help define and implement an action plan to help you unlock value from new and emerging channels.