Search Engine Optimization

93% percent of marketers use Social Media. If you’re a marketer, you probably are now wondering what on Earth are those other 7% doing. And you’re probably right because now, Social Media is one of the most important platforms for advertising.

Let’s take a look at some very interesting stats about Social Media:

Over 80% of accounts on Instagram follow businesses. We all do. If you want to find out about any kind of promotions or discounts you can get from your favorite brands, you just check on Instagram. Click To Tweet 93% of people who follow businesses on Twitter plan to purchase from those businesses. Click To Tweet Over 25% of Facebook users who clicked on an ad, purchased from that ad. That is converting at a very high rate Click To Tweet Over 80% of the B2B relationships or leads can be fostered back to relationships and connections on Linkedin. Click To Tweet

Google Ads Vs Facebook Ads

Now let’s take a look at costs, because I’d say here’s one of the explanations for the rise of Social Media Advertising: The average cost per click on Facebook right now is $1.86.

If you’re doing ads on Google, then you know there’s a very different story on Google. Just as an example, a business we manage has a CPC of $1.34 on Facebook, but pays $15.42 per click on Google Ads for essentially the same audience!

You can literally place a social media ad at every single stage of the customer journey. You go down this funnel faster, cheaper, and with a stronger brand loyalty because they are not text ads, but visuals. This happens when you empower somebody with an image, a video, or an animation.

The main advantage compared with the text ad is that you can tell a story, create an emotion. You get people to feel t think with their heart, and not just appeal to their logic.

We’re talking about people, not keywords. We’re talking about human beings that we are targeting, demographics, personas, avatars or whatever you want to call them. On Social Media, we’re talking about people and we’re targeting their profiles.

We’re not talking about keywords, and that’s a very significant change: Through Facebook Ads you’re creating a sphere of influence for these people and you’re not 100% concerned about the bottom line, the final click for the conversion, because most of the time it’s probably not going to happen, but we’re talking about influencing, about brand loyalty, brand awareness.

Behaviours compared to Keywords

If we take a look at Facebook’s users and their behavior, we can say that Facebook is not a website, it’s a mobile app. It’s not the first page of Google, it’s an app that I open on purpose, I’m not searching for something hoping to find the best results. I open Facebook to catch up with my friends and my family. We go on a mobile app to be social. We’re not necessarily there to be sold to or bought. So what do you have to do as a marketer? You have to make them excited to leave the app. To tap on your ad and to get to your landing page. And the landing page can’t be just a sales page, because they will be disappointed that they have left the social app to be sold something. They need to find something exciting there.

You, at your our own agency are always evolving and changing as this platform evolves and changes. So don’t get discouraged and don’t get complacent. Things change all the time.

The magic of Facebook Remarketing

The power of Facebook and Instagram (also owned by Facebook) is on the remarketing game!

First and foremost, let’s make one thing clear: Social Media Advertising is not only about brand awareness and cheap clicks. The power of social media is in the fact that you can remarket to list.

Not only do we upload custom audiences, our lists of emails, but Facebook helps us create lookalike audiences based on our lists.

Facebook has relationships with companies like Visa or Mastercard. So we’re not just giving to Facebook our profile: age, marital status, kids, books and whatever, but Facebook also knows your credit score. They know if you won your own home if you’re renting or if you have a car loan… and so on.

So Facebook has this amazing ability to create a lookalike audience and help you target more people – If you had the chance to discuss with any of the Facebook employees, they would confirm to you, based on their data, that the best performing campaigns are using lookalike audiences.

The Facebook Advertising philosophy is the remarketing,

Build your email lists

But remarketing is based on audiences, and for better audiences you need email lists. If you don’t have yet an email list, this should be your first assignment!  

How do you do that? Go through your analytics and look at your top five pages of your website. Every single one of those top five pages should have a lead magnet opportunity or a pop up of some kind to capture an email address.

If you can see that somebody has spent 4-5 minutes reading a blog, that is prime picking for the next like 30-page white paper to learn even more. You’ve already assessed their mindset and how much they’re in, like wanting to get from this blog. So why not give them more and then capture their email and provide that to Facebook. It’s a no brainer.

Demographics before Interests

Have done Facebook advertising before and it has frustrated you? Go into your Facebook Ads Manager account and look at your targeting. Is it full of interests targeting? Delete that. Stop targeting based on Interests. You were probably really excited when you did the targeting based on interests, but the truth is that Facebook isn’t always amazing when it comes to figuring out what people are really interested in. Go to your profile -> About and check. Just think of how many music bands are on your Facebook profile listed, and how many of their albums you actually own. And even more realistic, if you’re ever going to purchase something related to those bands. Or look at anything else – there’s a huge chance you liked a lot of pages because someone invited you, or because you went to an event and you just liked their page on a hype moment.

Instead of that, go to Demographics. And ask yourself which are the demographics you’re targeting. Here’s an example. You’re selling this cool game. WHo would you target? The 13-15 year old kid who wants to have this cool game for his next party? The kid that already knows about the game? Or the 35-44 year old woman who wants to be cool in her son’s eyes.

So do demographic targeting first. Once there’s a statistically significant winner, then you’re going to add now behavior one versus behavior too, right?

On Facebook, there’s demographic targeting, interest targeting, and behavioral targeting. Start with demographics. Then go to behavior and only after you have those two clearly defined go-to interests. Start testing with interests one at a time. Some of them will be garbage, some will be jackpots. The key for us to find them one at a time, don’t stick 20 interest in one thing.

Use Facebook creation tools and A/B testing

Upgrade your ad testing. Stop creating a lot of ads. Facebook now has its dynamic A/B testing of the ad creation functionality. Cut your design time in half by utilizing this new testing tool and only create ads after you have tested the basics. Upload three images, separate designs, concepts with different elements of the ads and then they mix and match until they find an answer that works the best. It really cuts down the time incredibly. Start with an image, a video, and a boomerang animation.  

Also, differentiation between offer and urgency. Offers like 20% OFF, $200 OFF – be really specific. “The urgency is ending tonight” Or “Three days left”. Want to do some of that language. It works really well for most marketers.

You need Social Proof in your message

And the last element you have to keep in mind is the element of social proof. As much as we all call ourselves “early adopters”, the truth is that most of us are not. We like it, but we always want to read testimonials first, to see what other people have to say about that product. So use in your message this social proof. “Trusted by over 10k people”, “The notebook that transformed America”. Prospective clients want to know that people like it. They want to see the elements of testimonials and social proof.

On average, social proof will increase the clicks 5 times and will decrease the cost of acquisition by 30%! Click To Tweet

Create personas based on behaviours

Chose behaviors over personas. How someone acts is so more relevant than how they behave. How you behave versus how you look on paper is very different. If you have a subscription-based business when someone cancels the subscription ask them why. Is it too time-consuming? Is it too messy? Is it too expensive? Let’s say the user select “too expensive”. When they submit the reason, redirect them to a specific page, based on their response. In our case, the user selected “too expensive”. On Facebook Ads, you have an audience based on the Facebook Pixel, created only for people who landed on your “Too expensive” page. Target them on Facebook with ads like “We miss you. Please get a $10 voucher to try our product again”

Behavior should dictate your marketing and when you do that, marketing is no longer just marketing, it becomes natural to the end user.

Tie your emails to your social media ads. If somebody sees a Facebook ad 24 hours after they opened your email in their inbox, they’re 22% more likely to purchase from you or sign up for the webinar or whatever it is that you’re promoting. So go back to your really pretty email sequences and your email marketing team (if you have one) and tie some of those best-performing ads that you found based on the above tips and tie it all together.

Other things that you digital marketing agency should do all the time:

Facebook groups are your new gated content community. There are very successful groups inside of Facebook and people are super engaged. You don’t have to create your own group. If you have one and it’s really engaged, then good for you. But, you can always be active in those big groups that have a lot of people that you’re targeting. Like if you’re promoting a hair salon, you should be in those moms groups. Obviously, don’t do silly promotion in those groups. Try to be as active as possible, with engaging, good content.

 

Facebook Ads should be just one part of your entire Digital Marketing Strategy

Facebook ads should never behave by themselves in a silo. That’s just not how social media advertising work. SEO plus social media is a marital bliss of online marketing. Go into your Google Analytics, under conversions, multI channel funnels and assisted conversions – you’re going to see the yellow brick road. In most cases, you’re going to see that the last conversion might not be social media. Maybe it is, but probably not the majority in comparison maybe to organic or to your paid advertising. But Facebook is the number one assistant in conversion marketing.

If you’re taking marketing decisions based on the last click attribution models, where you give all the credit to the very last click before they convert, you’re doing yourself a massive disservice. Go into your analytics and keep track of where you are today and where the assistant conversion techniques come in and how they help you.

The power of social media lies in behaviorally based remarketing strategies. Click To Tweet

You have to look at social media like a remarketing game, which means it’s all about those lists.

So have you learned something new today? Or have any additional tips? Leave them in the comments below!

I always said that one of the most important facts that you need to understand before even starting doing SEO is that Google doesn’t really care about your website. All Google cares is to make its users happy. To provide the best results to them – and best results are not always what the user is looking for, but what the user actually wants, sometimes without even realising. Based on that, Google will love your website if you have the content that the user needs, and will ignore your website if you don’t help Google keeps its users happy. Keywords research, backlinks, technical SEO, speed, all fall behind – obviously, they still remain an important part, but providing what the user wants was always key.

In a nutshell, Persona Driven Keywords Research is the process of doing your keywords research only after you have learned what the targeted user/reader is interested in and his/her location.  

Based on that, we did an experiment – we wanted to learn how should we write an article based on people’s behavior on the internet. Like, if you want to write an article about Superbowl you could only include sport and technical facts, or you could also include suggestions about how to prepare for the big game, where to watch it, what beer you recommend, or anything else you know is related to the event. Like ads, for example, I watch for ads as well, and some people are only watching Superbowl for the halftime show.

So, you have to think about your audience. Is your audience only interested in the technical facts about the game?

Persona Builder: What other things is the user searching on Google?

But let’s go back to our experiment. We said, let’s write an article about things to do in Dublin. And we asked ourselves, what else is that person (searching for this query) doing online? I mean, they should have other hobbies, interests as well, right?

So, using Filud’s keywords persona feature, we tried to find out first who is the person from Ireland who would type on Google “Things to do in Dublin”

And we got the following:

Based on that, we can guess that the person who’s searching this from Ireland is a woman. The word “fascinator” tells a lot. I didn’t even know what a fascinator is. It’s actually a fancy hat like, something that women wear at posh, special events, like races (horse races). Check here the full definition: Fascinator Wikipedia

I don’t think many men would know what a fascinator is. And probably no man would look for the query “fascinator” on Google. I did a test at one of my talks, and no men knew what a fascinator is. So that was an easy one.

But what else can we learn about this woman interested in things to do in Dublin?

So, we have a theme here, actually: “things to do with kids”; “Dublin with kids”, “family things to do”, “family…” tickets, activities and so on. It’s obviously a theme around family.

And we can see what would she like to do with the family on a trip: sea life, aquarium, days out, fun places, swimming pool – This person is looking for things to keep the kids busy, places where they could have fun with their kids.

And now you think you have a clear idea about how to write your article, right? Well, you’re right if you’re only going to target the Irish market.

Persona Based on Geo-location

But let’s take a look at our experiment, this time with an American search – we went for the United States and tried to find out who’s the person from US typing in Google “Things to do in Dublin”. Would it be the same woman with kids looking for fun activities?

You bet is not. It’s a totally different person. So, you’d think that is the same article, and you would optimize the keywords based on whatever tool you used for research. You’d follow all the rules you have learned about SEO content – a good, long article, with media and everything else. But you’d write an article who would make some of the searchers unhappy. Because that’s not what they are looking for.

So, let’s take a look at what else a searched from US is looking for in Google:

I would guess that the person who’s typing on Google “Things to do in Dublin” and is from the USA it’s actually a man, with totally different interests that the user from Ireland searching for the same “things to do…”

So this user is interested in hiking, boats and is interested in a Keystone – I have to be honest and say that I didn’t know what a Keystone is either. Is actually a camping van, a camping vans company.

Probably they’re not going to only visit Dublin, it’s not a city break. So obviously, some very different interests from our Irish user. They’re probably on a long holiday in Europe and are also visiting Paris, Milano, Rome. And they want to save money on accommodation, that’s why they’re probably even looking into renting a camping van – and they also search for “cheap hotels”. On the other side, they have a budget, just don’t want to spend too much on hotels. We can see they’re looking to get the best tours during their trip, they don’t search for cheap places to eat, but actually, want to experiment good healthy food – the keywords “seafood” and “one place nutrition”.

As you can see, there’s a totally different article that you should write for our main keyword, if instead of Ireland you target the United States. And the same goes for any other country.

Learn the interests and the ton of voice you need to use

We wanted to take our experiment a step further. We know now that the Irish person interested in “things to do in Dublin” is a woman, mostly looking for family experiences. Even if she was not searching that in Google all the time, we said that, if she comes to Dublin on her own, instead of having a family getaway, she would probably be more interested in shopping in Dublin. SO we decided to do a second test, this time for a person searching in Google for “Zara Dublin”. In case you don’t know, Zara it’s a fast fashion retail chain, targeting mostly women (or maybe not, but I know that my wife and my daughter spend a lot of time in this shop).

We just wanted to go a bit deeper into insights and learn what our “keywords persona” is even more interested in, apart from family activities, sea life, etc.

And let’s see what we got:

And we had our confirmation: the person from Ireland looking for “Zara Dublin” is a woman: she’s looking for “eyeshadows”; she doesn’t drive, or doesn’t like to drive, because she’s also searching for “dublin coach”, “bus timetable”, “taxi number”. We also located her: she’s from Sligo, Wilton, Mullingar, Tralee, Castlebar, Kilkenny or Newbridge – that was based on another search this persona is doing, looking for Penneys (a discount fashion chain) in the above-mentioned locations.

A part of this persona is not Irish. Our experiment showed that she’s also looking for “po angielsku” – and Google Translates tells me that this is the polish for “in English” – again, not a surprise since Wikipedia tells us that almost 3% of Ireland’s population is Polish.

She’s also looking for things like “Prosecco” and “Bodysuit”. Technology-wise, this person is mostly looking for Android phones and is preferring the “Pay as you go” plans to the Bill pay plans

Maybe this information is not 100% relevant for all the industries, but you’ve definitely learned a lot more now about the user behind the screen who’s typing “things to do in Dublin”.

And it is a bit easier now to write that article, knowing exactly who are you addressing to.

Auto-complete Keywords Research for e-commerce queries?

Now we can start the keywords research – if we need to target any other keywords than “things to do in Dublin”. One of the tools that we all use is Google Autocomplete – a very good tool, because (again) it’s a tool that Google uses to keep its users happy.

But Google autocomplete has two issues:

1. Everybody knows about it – so it’s difficult to find keywords that your competitors don’t know
2. Google uses geolocation – and sometimes the results are the only location based.

Let’s take a look at the geolocation and the problems it creates with our keywords research. Having in mind our first example, the one with the lady who was looking for things to do with her family in Dublin, we know she was looking on Google for “swimming pool”.

Now, this is what you get in Google as auto-complete suggestions for swimming pool:

Not too helpful, right?

But what if we look into the results from multiple search engines? We tried (yes, we got that in 2 seconds using Filud, but you could spend some more time and get the keywords suggestions yourself). Let’s see what we got:

If we look at Bing and Yahoo, maybe not the perfect keywords, but I think that’s a good start. Anyway, better than any keywords research we could make for this query in Google.

But then we look at Amazon and I think that’s amazing. Because actually, those results are what people are searching for when they’re ready to buy. So, if you’re into e-commerce, or in the Amazon referral program, I think this is where you should focus your keywords research.

On the other side, if I’m looking for something like “best pizza recipe” I’m not going to get geolocated results, because Google doesn’t want to give me the pizza recipe that my neighbor is using, but actually a collection of the best recipes from all over the web. Our “keywords persona” was interested in Samsung phones – and this search is not one geolocated by Google, because you might look into buying one online, or looking for reviews.

And this is what we got:

As you can notice, we kind of have the same theme on Google, Bing, and Yahoo – especially troubleshooting on Samsung phones. But then again, if you look into Amazon, you see exactly what people want to buy.

When you’re doing your keywords research, always keep in mind Amazon. It is the biggest search engine when it comes to spending money.

Use the Persona Driven Research to increase your Click Through Rate

The keywords research is not the only important part of writing the right content but is definitely one of the most important ones. Keep in mind to have good titles to your articles/pages. This helps not only to rank better, by using the right keywords but also to increase the click-through rate CTR – so use what you learned about the targeted audience to have them click on your titles from Google SERP.

How do you learn about the persona who’s going to read your articles? Do you do such research at all? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

What are back-links and why are they important

One of the most important ranking factors for Google is back-links. Back-links are links from other websites to yours. Based on the number of back-links and the importance/relevance of the websites they come from, your website could rank better or worse on Google. The more back-links from websites related to your business activity, the better your website will do in Google.

[Read more...] about Get the first back-links to your website

10 tips for your Search Engine Optimisation strategy

You decided that your business needs a website. But a website without visitors is not very helpful. Here’s a list of things you need to keep in mind when building your online presence:

1. Google is about providing the best results and not about showing your business

That’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind when you start building your online presence. Your spot is not reserved on Google. Not even for your branded name. Google wants to give its users the best results. So, chances are you’re not going to show on Google at all if you use on your website the same information that you already added into different web directories. If you want to rank better in Google, your website needs to contain what people are looking. If you plan to put the effort in your Search Engine Optimisation campaign, stop. You need to put the effort into making your potential clients happy, by having useful information on your website. That’s the only good way to start your SEO.

1.1 Your website should have content to help your potential clients, not to praise you

As mentioned earlier, in order for Google to like you, you need to have valuable quality content on your website. If you are an electrician in Dublin, don’t just fill a page with your contact details and one or two images of you or your equipment. Help them instead. What are people asking you when you call to fix their problems. What are their main problems and how could they avoid those issues? You definitely know better than me what’s the pain in your industry.

1.2 Don’t be lazy, but ask for help when you can’t handle it!

Chances are you were not born to become a writer. And even if it’s easy for you to talk about your work, when you start writing down your thoughts, everything becomes more difficult. You would prefer to go back to your work, instead of writing about it. Don’t give up. Try it a few more times. Try using bullet points, maybe it will make your writing easier. If it’s still not working, remember there are always people who can help. You could team up with a marketer, a social media consultant – they would be more than happy to help with your content writing. You would only have to spend a few minutes a day/week to explain to them what your work is about.

1.3 Time is money – that’s not just an expression, is pure math.
Probably you will try to write the articles yourself because you think this way you would save money. If you feel comfortable writing articles, then you’re good. Go for it, and help your potential clients find you. But if you struggle for hours, just think of how much time you wasted: Let’s say, you spent one hour a day to write, but the final result was not good enough to be published on your website. How much do you charge per hour? 25 Euro? 50 Euro? If it’s the last number, then you just lost 50 x 5 hours = 250 Euro trying to write an article. You know… an article for your website should not cost you that much. It’s time to find help.

2. Backlinks should be one way other people recommend you

Do you know your friend has a website? Your last client? Your stock providers? Ask them to write something about you, to mention you and your work, and to put a link from that story to your website.

Don’t just ask them to put links on the footer of your website or on the right/left sidebar. Those are not links that tell stories and are useless.

You don’t need to spend a lot of time getting those links back to your website. Get one a month, and that should be good enough. In one year, you should have 12 websites that recommend you through links to your website, and that should boost your website in Google.

3. Use a country code top-level domain (ccTLD).

If your target is local, then use a local level domain. If you plan to expand in the United States, buy and use a .com. But if you plan to grow local, then country code, like .co.uk, .de, .ie will help you. I won’t go into too much detail here, but just so you know, if we have two websites, with the same content, the same number of backlinks (recommendations), but one with .com and the other one with .ie, the .ie one would rank better than the .com in Ireland. Same with other countries. So, if you plan to sell in the UK, then buy a .co.uk or a .uk domain.

4. Use Google Business listing

Once your website is ready and online, register your business with Google My Business – https://www.google.com/business/

Remember step 1, when I told you that your spot in Google is not reserved? Google my business is your reservation ticket. Just make sure you fill all the details correctly. Again, not a bad idea to contact a marketing consultant to help you with that. Or ask your website developer, he might be comfortable in using Google My Business. Once your business is verified (you will receive a card by post with a code from Google), your branded name should be on top of Google, at least in your town.

Time for some more technical stuff. When you build or review your website with your developer, keep the following things in mind:

5. Title and Headings

Google title: That’s your website’s Meta – title – Should contain your branded name and your business. Something like “Jason & Sons – Emergency Plumbing Repairs Castlebar”

5.1 Pay attention to your headings – That’s your best PR

H1 – heading 1 should be the title. Talk to your developer about it. You don’t want your H1 to be your logo (an image), you want your H1 to be text, and should be something similar to the meta-title, but more user-friendly. Something like “We are Jason Electrical Ltd. – 24 Hour Mayo Electricians – Emergency Electrical Services in Castlebar”. Also, you should have at least 2-3 intertitles (heading 2) in your main web-pages.

6. The extra layer of security for your visitors

May not be one of your top priorities, but it well worth it: Add an SSL (Security) certificate to your website – That could cost you an extra few Euros, but will help you rank better in Google. Even if your website is not an e-commerce one, will still help.

7. Make sure your website is fast

Load your website from your computer at home. Is it fast enough? Try it again from your machine at work – still too slow? It means that not only the internet is slow, but maybe there’s a problem with your website as well. In most cases, there’s a simple fix: check the size of your images. Maybe you took photos with your phone, and they are full HD –too big for a website. Phones now take photos that are ready for print, but you don’t need the same resolution for web. Just make sure you optimize your photos before uploading them to your website. optimizilla.com, kraken.io/web-interface, and tinypng.com are just some examples of a website where you can optimize your images.

8. Make sure your website is mobile ready

That’s a no brainer. Most people are now using their phones and tablets to read articles, find services, or even to watch short movies with dogs and kittens. If you want them to find and contact you, then your website should be mobile ready.

9. Google tools

Create a Google Search Console (previously Webmaster tools) account. Link it to your Google Analytics account (have I mentioned you have to have a Google Analytics account?). Visit your Search Console at least once a week. Check for any errors. With this tool, you can even check to see how Google visualizes your website.

10. Codes and errors.

The technical stuff can be weird at times. For example, error codes: There’s a 200-server error code. This error means that… everything is good!!?? Really, 200 means there’s nothing to worry about. On the other side, there’s the 404 error. This means the page you were looking for doesn’t exist. And this can be frustrating to users. Do you remember when you added that new page, with a new service on your website, but after a couple of months you decided to take it off because that service is not worth providing it? Have you deleted the menu links to that page as well? Or when you deleted a page with some photos. Or maybe you have changed the title of a page, to make it more appealing to Google, and the Content Management System that you’re using (probably WordPress, Joomla or Drupal) automatically changed the url of that page? But the links from the menu are still pointing to the old url? Make sure you update all the menus and links. (Make sure you use a 301 redirect to make your 404 a 200. Too confusing? Use your developer’s phone number instead, and ask him to fix it).

Conclusions

Is not that difficult to make your website found by people in your area. My best advice is to forget about Search Engine Optimisation all together. Stop trying to optimize your website for Google. And start optimizing it for people.

If you have a website with plenty of unique quality information, then people will come to you. Put your effort in helping your potential clients, and make sure they have a great experience on your website. Their experience is the only reason I mentioned the technical stuff: You want to keep your users happy, and they don’t want to wait too much for the page to load or to get a “Page doesn’t exist” message. Keep them happy, and the results will come. Good luck!