Internet Rocket

Thursday, May 2, 2019

Digital Marketing

Unlike many of the old marketing channels that have enormous barriers to entry, every single business can use digital marketing to grow their business.

Even better, the more you put into it, the more you get.

If you’re just starting to explore digital marketing, start with our Beginners Guide to Online Marketing. It covers all the core topics that you’ll need to get going. If you only read one guide, I’d make it this one.

When you’re ready to go deeper, we’ve put together hundreds of guides across the site, including the guides below that cover every aspect of digital marketing.

Marketing Foundations

Digital marketing changes fast but the fundamentals always stay the same.

That’s why I always recommend getting a good understanding of marketing fundamentals first. Once you have completely internalized these core concepts, you’ll be able to quickly stay on top of the tactics as they evolve. It’ll also help you sort through the snake oil and find the advice that truly works.

You’ll be reaping the rewards from these guides for years to come:

Marketing Tips and Tricks

In digital marketing, the number of tips and tricks is quite vast.

And with how fast online marketing channels evolve, it’s critical to stay on top of these. If all your competitors figure out a new tactic and you don’t, you’ll quickly get left behind. This is one area that you constantly want to review:

Marketing Channels

One of the most important marketing decisions you’ll make is which channel to focus on. I’ve personally worked with businesses that have made it to $1 million in revenue and above using every channel out there.

No single channel is best, it’s all about finding the one that’s the best fit for you.

What about going after multiple channels? Why not get the benefit of all of them?

If you get big enough, yes, you’ll be in every channel eventually. But in my experience, businesses diversify across channels way too early. Especially with online channels, the level of competitive has gotten very high. It’s almost impossible to compete at the highest levels on SEO, social, and paid at the same time. Most marketing teams are only good at one channel which subsidizes the rest.

Personally, I avoid diversifying across channels until I have a good enough brand that can give me an advantage as I scale into other channels. I’ll also start new channels when I’m starting to hit the limits of my first channel.

We have entire sections devoted to SEO, social media, and paid marketing. You’ll find everything you ever wanted to know about those channels.

These guides below will also help you with the channel that you decide to go after:

Marketing Psychology

Marketing psychology is one of the “first principles” in the field of digital marketing. Once you know all the principles and tricks of marketing psychology, every aspect of your marketing will improve. You’ll always know how to improve a campaign, strategy, and ad.

This is one my favorite areas to go deep on:

Growth Hacking

Many of the biggest companies from the past few decades have utilized growth hacking to drive their explosive growth. Facebook, Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb, and countless others have built entire Growth Teams to accelerate growth at every step of their funnels.

I consider growth hacking to be a subspecialty of digital marketing. Growth projects prioritize virality, finding ways to get users to drive growth, heavily focuses on the product itself, looks for exploits in other channels that can be scaled, and relies heavily on engineering along with design skills to ship projects.

These guides will get you up to speed on how it all works:

Marketing Demographics

Digital marketing needs to be completely different depending on what generation that you’re targeting.

This is one of those insights that seems obvious the first time that you hear it but has profound implications across your entire career. Your channel selection, brand values, products, and campaigns will all be completely different if you go after millennials compared to baby boomers for example. For B2C marketers, this is possibly the most important variable to keep in mind when building your overall marketing strategy.

These guides will help you craft the right strategy for your target demographic:

Marketing Careers

One of the smartest decisions that I ever made was to skip the MBA and go straight into my marketing career. From the hands-on experience by leading marketing teams and all the marketing books, podcasts, and blog posts I’ve consumed over the years, I’ve basically given myself an MBA in marketing at a fraction of the cost. And I got paid along the way.

To jump-start your own career, here’s a few of my favorite resources on marketing:

Small Business Marketing

Digital marketing for small businesses takes on a different flavor. Mainly, budgets are pretty limited and the marketing needs to be a lot scrappier.

There’s still plenty of ways to market your business. We go through all your options here:

Marketing Examples

All these tips are great but how does this really work in practice? What’s it really like?

To see how all this works, we put together several case studies along with some lessons that we’ve learned from others:

Is Podcast Advertising Effective?

Podcasts are growing in popularity. According to Edison Research, the podcast audience has grown to 90 million listeners a month, up 113% since 2014. An increase in listenership in this medium means you have a chance to spend advertising dollars, reaching new and current audiences in different ways. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you necessarily should.

Spending part of your budget on a new method of advertising or convincing your boss that this is a good idea will more than likely cause you to pause. How do you know if spending money on podcast advertising is actually worth it? Will you see results? Even if other brands are seeing results, how do you know you will?

In this post, we explain the reasons why podcast advertising is effective and help you determine whether it makes sense for you to spend your money on it.

Why is Podcast Advertising Effective?

Although it is currently difficult to track hard metrics for podcast advertising, there are still some compelling reasons why we believe podcast advertising is effective. Let’s dive into them below:

There’s a Strong Host-to-Listener Connection

If you’ve ever gotten hooked on a podcast, it’s almost certainly in part because you felt a connection with the host. That’s because of what Glenn Rubenstein, the author of Podcast Advertising Works, calls “the voice inside your head.”

According to Rubenstein, “If you spend even a short amount of time listening to the radio, an audiobook, or a podcast, you begin to make a connection to the voice you’re hearing. After you spend hours listening to that same voice on a daily or weekly basis, it feels just like you’re listening to a friend.”

It makes sense. If you’re an avid podcast listener with a long commute, you could be spending up to 5-10 hours a week listening to the same podcast host. And who do you trust more than anyone? The people with whom you spend the most time and/or admire.

When you trust someone, it’s likely you’ll value their recommendations more than anyone else’s. The idea behind this is the same as word-of-mouth marketing and influencer marketing, and it works with podcast advertising, too.

When a host recommends a product, you’re more likely to remember it and purchase it.

You can see the direct correlation between an affinity for the host and the purchase of products in a study done by Midroll, which found that 72% of people who have listened to a podcast for four or more years have made a purchase because of that podcast. Additionally, 63% of Midroll podcast listeners have bought a product they heard advertised on a podcast.

Listeners are Engaged

Unlike more passive forms of media like TV and radio, if done well, people will search for and subscribe to podcasts—coming back repeatedly for more. This is a unique opportunity to connect with your audience when they’re actively engaged and ready to hear your message.

One of the reasons people are so engaged with podcasts is because they require your brain to create images of the story in your mind (unlike visual media, which provides those images for you).

Emma Rodero, a communications professor at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, explains that “…like reading, listening to audio allows people to create their own versions of characters and scenes in the story.” She believes that listening, is more active, “since the brain has to process the information at the pace it is played.”

Many of today’s podcasts also have staff, budget, and industry experience, and subsequently the ability to use sound effects and music in addition to just talking heads. The use of sound effects increases the level of mental imagery, causing listeners to pay more attention.

People are also engaged with podcasts because they’re often listening to them when they’re by themselves—cooking, driving, walking the dog, or working out. When people are alone, they’re less distracted and more able to fully tune in. Additionally, wearing headphones while you listen creates an even more intimate experience.

Add to this the fact that streaming audio is now easier than ever before, with newer models of cars becoming more connected with capabilities such as Bluetooth and USB cables.

“Connected cars are a boon for the entire streaming audio industry, but they’re especially exciting for podcast makers, whose shows are perfectly suited to in-car listening,” Kevin Roose says, “Just as TV watchers can now choose Netflix or Amazon streams over surfing channels, radio listeners will soon have a bevy of on-demand options at their disposal.”

You Can Accurately Target Your Audience

Your ability to target specific audiences through podcast advertising is one of the most compelling reasons to give this medium a shot.

“I think that the great thing about podcasts is that there is literally one for everyone,” says Christine Merrill, Account Executive at Gimlet Media. “There are so many podcasts in the world, and there are so many different niches.”

At Portent, we’ve seen this ourselves with podcast advertisements that we developed alongside our client MagellanTV, a documentary streaming service.

MagellanTV has many different genres of documentaries available, which allowed us to drill down our targeting. We could have gone after any podcasts with available advertising slots—after all, most people are interested in documentaries. Instead, knowing that they have a specific niche in history and science, we started with podcasts that focused on the same subjects.

In targeting those subject areas, we found that the podcast hosts were genuinely excited to work with MagellanTV because it was such a natural fit. In one instance, the host of a podcast we targeted accidentally doubled their time when talking about MagellanTV because they were so stoked about the streaming service (which they were able to try out before they recorded the ad).

You Don’t Necessarily Need a Huge Budget

Podcasts are priced on CPMs (Cost Per Mille, or thousand listeners). A CPM pricing model makes sense—the more popular a show, the higher the price of the advertising slots.

Initial prices may seem like a lot, but if you sponsor multiple episodes the pricing goes down, which is also better for brand awareness.

Let’s look at a couple of examples. MagellanTV sponsored the History on Fire podcast, which gets ~150,000 downloads per episode, at a cost of $2,000 per episode.

For one of our client’s who is in the development space, we placed ads with Developer Tea, which gets ~60,000 downloads per episode. We spent $1,500 per episode on ad spots.

You may be thinking, but the audience size is so tiny, what’s the point?

We’ve seen first-hand through our work that larger audiences don’t necessarily equal higher engagement.

Hack the Entrepreneur, another podcast we worked with, gets ~14,000 downloads per episode, but we saw the highest time on site (10:39) and page views (106) from this ad. Within the same campaign, we placed ads with The $100 MBA. They average ~70,000 downloads per episode, but our time on site was only 4:17 and our page views were 52—about half of the engagement we saw with Hack the Entrepreneur.

Don’t shy away from an opportunity just because it’s small. Think of it as you would keyword research. Even though some search terms have a smaller keyword volume, that doesn’t mean they’re not worth targeting; you can still go after long-tail keywords with smaller search volume if the user intent is there.

How Do I Know If Podcast Advertising is Right for Me? Things to Consider

Although podcast advertising is effective, that still doesn’t mean it’s right for every brand.

Below, we’ll explain a few things to think about before you start setting aside a budget for podcast advertising.

Challenges with Audience Metrics

If you’re pitching this to your boss, it’s likely they’re asking how you plan on measuring the ROI.

With podcast advertising, the answer isn’t simple. Podcast advertising analytics is still very much in its early stages, so we don’t have quick and easy-to-read metrics like we’re used to. We also don’t have a direct way to track conversions. Some podcasts offer their own independent tracking, but there aren’t any consistent practices in place yet.

There are, however, a few metrics we can start looking at now such as:

Downloads per Episode
Direct and Referral Traffic
Exclusive Offer Code
User Engagement

For a deeper dive into how you can track these metrics, check out Kat Shereko’s post, 4 Effective Metrics For Measuring Podcast Advertising.

Although it is still challenging at this point, there is good news on the horizon. Apple Podcasts is investing in podcast performance insights and Spotify acquired Gimlet Media and Anchor, two data-driven podcast platforms.

There isn’t an easy way to measure the efficacy of radio or TV advertising either, but advertisers continue to spend their dollars there. Don’t let the lack of current analytics stop you from experimenting with a possible new way to connect with your audience. We believe that podcast advertising analytics are going to get more sophisticated in the future as the medium continues to grow.

Challenges with Scheduling

You need to be comfortable with planning ahead if you want to run a podcast advertising campaign.

With the model we’ve been using at Portent, we start two months before we actually launch any promotions. Ultimately, this is dependent upon the popularity of the podcasts we’re working with. For podcasts with larger audiences, seeking out an ad placement spot on their calendar six months in advance may still not be enough time.

We recently tried to place ads on the Syntax podcast for the same client we mentioned above that’s in the development space. Syntax has ~28,000 downloads per episode, but they were booking their ad placements out six months in advance, which didn’t give us enough time.

Fizzle is another podcast that we worked with for the same campaign and client. Fizzle gets ~11,000 downloads per episode, and we were able to book with them two months in advance.

How far in advance you need to book depends on the popularity of the podcast spots you’re going after. Overall, schedules and budgets vary greatly. You may even be able to haggle and get a spot at a lower price.

Ultimately, we recommend researching what podcasts you’d potentially like to sponsor, reaching out to them, and seeing what they say. Once you start scheduling spots, you should stay organized by creating a calendar such as the one below:

You can also get more information about pricing and effectiveness from this fantastic article on Ahrefs Podcast Advertising: $51,975 Spent. Here’s What We Learned.

Types of Ad Placements

It’s important to determine what type of ad placements you want for your campaign.

In podcast advertising, there are three different types of ads: pre-roll, interstitial or mid-roll, and post-roll.

Pre-roll ads: occur at the beginning of an episode.
Mid-roll ads: occur in the middle or as a break during the show.
Post-roll ads: occur after the episode.

We believe that mid-roll ads are the most effective because people are highly unlikely to stop what they’re doing and skip past the commercials. If the ad is at the beginning or the end, they may skip it entirely. Because of this, mid-roll ad placements are typically the most expensive.

However, some podcasts will require you to use a combination of pre-roll and mid-roll ads. Having a mix of the two can work well.

Pre-roll ads can give listeners that first exposure to your brand, followed by mid-rolls to explain what you’re offering and who you are.

Running one mid-roll ad followed by multiple pre-roll ads can also work.

Bonobos frequently runs a full-60-second mid-roll ad the first week and then follows up with a few weeks of pre-roll.

This approach helps them keep their costs down while also repeatedly exposing the podcast audience to their brand since they know listeners usually listen to every episode.

Advertising Styles

In addition to the different types of ad placements, there are different styles for interstitial or mid-roll ads. You’ll need to check with your podcast host to determine what type of ads they provide.

Sponsor-produced ad: typically ends with a clear call to action and uses music, sound effects, or a voice-over artist.

Host-read produced ad: delivered by the show host but is often produced and may include an interview with a sponsor’s customer(s).

Host-read integrated ad: read by the show’s host organically during the recording of the show.

If done well, the host-read integrated ad can be one of the most effective styles of podcast advertising because it feels so genuine.

As we mentioned in the MagellanTV example, if you allow the host to use your product or service before they record the podcast ad, and it’s a good fit, they’ll be genuinely excited about sharing it with their audience.

Is Podcasting Going to Be Effective For Your Brand? A Checklist

Although podcast advertising is successful for many brands, there’s still a lot to consider before you decide to bring the idea to your boss and spend your budget on it. We recommend asking yourself the following questions to determine whether or not you’re ready to give it a go:

- What are you advertising?

What is your product/service? Are you clear about who you are as a brand?

- Does podcast advertising make sense for your audience?

Who are you planning on targeting through podcast advertisements? Does your target demographic listen to podcasts? What podcasts do they likely listen to?

- What are you offering?

Are you running an awareness campaign, or do you have an actual service or product for which you can give a discount or free trial?

- Is it that good of an offer?

Is the product or service ready for market? Is the price of the product competitive? Are you running any better offers, discounts, or lower prices elsewhere? Note: We do not advise this. If people do a quick Google search and find a better offer elsewhere, guess which one they will choose?

- What is your budget?

How much money do you have to spend? If you have a low budget, are there podcasts out there with lower prices, but highly targeted audiences that would fit your demographic? If you have a high budget, how much of it are you willing to allocate to podcast advertising?

- What is your timeline?

When are you planning on launching your campaign? Give your budget and which podcasts you want to advertise on, do you realistically have enough time to launch?

At the end of the day, authenticity is key when it comes to successful podcast advertising. If your product/service is market-ready and you can find podcasts that fit your niche, we recommend launching a few ads to test and see what works and what doesn’t.

The post Is Podcast Advertising Effective? appeared first on Portent.

Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Conversion Optimization

Conversion optimization gives you more customers with the traffic and marketing budget you already have.

Even better, once you find these conversion wins, you get to benefit from those wins day in and day out.

These are permanent increases to your business.

Start with our Beginners Guide to Conversion Optimization which breaks all this down in detail.

To simplify everything, we put together an extremely detailed guide on How To Double Your Conversions in 30 Days. It’s a step-by-step process for making an immediate improvement to your conversion rates.

Before jumping into all the conversion tactics, we recommend getting a strong foundation with how conversion optimization works. By knowing how customer personas and conversion funnels work, you’ll know which conversion tricks to use for your business:

Website Optimizations

The first step of any conversion optimization program is to optimize your website. There’s tons of improvements that you can ship today. There’s no need for intense A/B testing programs or complex tactics, we always start with the basics.

A thorough polish of your website can easily boost conversion rates 30-50%. That’s a permanent lift from a one-time project.

One of the pitfalls that I’ve fallen into the past: holding back on obvious improvements until I had an A/B testing program that could verify everything. I wish that I had launched improvements a lot earlier instead of waiting. These days, I pursue good-enough instead of perfect.

To help guide you through all the best practices that are worth shipping right away, we put together these guides:

Tips and Tactics

Regardless of what you’re optimizing, there’s an endless number of tips and tactics for getting an extra boost in your conversion rates. When you’re ready to start going after the smaller wins to squeeze every last bit out of your traffic, these guides will give you plenty of ideas to use:

Landing Pages

The right landing page can make or break a funnel.

I’ve seen landing pages improve conversion by over 400% with the right offer and design. That’s right, I’ve quadrupled lead and signup flow by finding a stronger offer for my landing page. Think of it this way: if you were previously paying $10 for a lead, that kind of win would reduce your lead cost to $2.50. Getting 4X the lead volume with the same marketing budget would catapult your business to the next level.

I’m not going to lie, there’s a bit of luck in finding these kinds of wins. But there’s always a lot of things you can do in order to stack the odds in your favor.

We’ve put together all our best practices for landing pages:

A/B Testing

I personally love A/B testing. There’s something about getting hard data on what truly works that I’ve always found to be addictive.

A quick warning: only start A/B testing once you have a ton of data to work with. Even though I’ve built A/B testing teams for multiple businesses, I rarely A/B test these days. There’s just too many other major wins to pursue first. I’m more focused on getting the core funnel to a healthy place before running any A/B tests.

Once traffic is flooding your site and you’re scaling nicely, consider an A/B testing program for that little extra boost. These guides show you how:

Traffic Optimization

While most of our conversion optimization work happens on our site, there are also optimization wins to help with our traffic. Whether it’s SEO or paid traffic, you’ll want to optimize your entire funnel. Use these guides to get started:

Is Direct Traffic an Indicator of Brand Strength?

If you’ve gone into Google Analytics lately to look at your website performance, you’ll notice a large chunk of traffic and conversions attributed to “Direct.”

It’s tempting to think all those visitors came to your website because they either already know your brand, or saw some kind of offline advertising you did. But in this post, we’ll lay out a few reasons why that isn’t always the case, and what you can do to get a true understanding of your brand strength in Google Analytics.

Some Background on “Direct” Traffic

A very common misconception in digital marketing is that Direct traffic is registered when a user visits your website by typing your URL into their browser, or from bookmarking the site.

This might have to do with Google’s definition of Direct source traffic, which is as “users that typed your URL directly into their browser, or who had bookmarked your site.”

This is true, but not comprehensive.

Direct traffic is actually:

Users who type your URL directly into their browser
Users who bookmark your site and navigate to it from their bookmark
Users from any source where Google Analytics can’t detect referral information

That third grouping of traffic can create a black box for marketers.

We hope to shed some light into that black box and provide you with a handful of metrics and reports to better show the strength of your brand through Direct traffic.

Direct Traffic That isn’t Actually Direct

When traffic arrives on your site that doesn’t fit any other Google Analytics channel and can’t be considered actual Direct traffic, we refer to it as “dark” traffic.

Recently, Portent Analytics Architect Michael Wiegand did a study and found that an average of 17.6% of our clients’ traffic was dark.

For example, if you’re getting Direct traffic to pages deep in your website, or to URLs that would be unnatural for someone to type into a browser, then that traffic is likely “dark” traffic. Depending on the page content and volume of landing page sessions, a bookmark may also not be likely.

However, “dark” does not necessarily mean “bad” traffic. It simply means that Google Analytics cannot track where the user came from when they arrived on your site. The reality is that there is a growing number of reasons for this. Some examples of sources that GA sometimes cannot track are:

App referrals
Text messages
Incognito/secure browsing
Social platforms
Bots

However, there are tools at your disposal to make corrections for some of these instances. If you know you are sending traffic to your site that is not within Google defined segments, you can build your own custom segment and capture some of that misattributed traffic.

Another common source of Direct traffic comes from third-party booking sites, which can be fixed with cross-domain tracking.

Mobile traffic also tends to generate more traffic than Desktop. Redirects from HTTP to HTTPS may also break the user path in a way that Google can’t track. Even the browser you use may contribute to what Source/Medium data is available to GA. These instances are where “Direct” becomes a catch-all for anything GA can’t attribute with a defined Source or Medium.

Direct Traffic That is Actually Direct

While those caveats might seem overwhelming, it’s not time to throw out your Direct traffic metric just yet. There is obviously a good portion of your Direct traffic that is truly Direct.

Reviewing the landing pages of your Direct traffic is a good indication of what is legitimate.

Traffic that lands directly on the homepage is likely real Direct traffic because that is what users are most likely to type into a browser. Direct traffic to other URLs with short page paths may also be legitimate traffic.

In terms of visibility, this difference in Direct traffic to the homepage could be a good indication of how well-known your brand is to users on the internet. Big brands like Nordstrom will tend to see higher volumes of Direct traffic, where small start-ups don’t see the same level of brand recognition reflected in their Direct traffic.

For example, we work with a large e-commerce retailer whose brand name is commonplace. Over the past quarter, 68% of their Direct traffic was to the homepage. For a smaller client brand, around 20% of Direct traffic went to their homepage.

Direct Traffic as a Piece of the Brand Strength Puzzle

Now that we have an understanding of the right components of Direct traffic to be looking for, how do we use it as an indicator of brand strength?

To get a full picture of brand strength in GA, we recommend combining the following sources:

“Real” Direct traffic. Likely by homepage landing page traffic, and other pages you determine are appropriate.
Organic traffic to the homepage. This captures people who type brand names into a search engine and click the homepage link in the search engine results.
Traffic from Paid Search campaigns that are triggered by branded keywords. This captures the second group of brand-name-Googlers who click on paid branded ads, instead of the organic homepage listing.

We’ve built this out in Google Analytics as a custom segment, free for your use. Download it and update the “Landing Page” and “Keyword” fields to capture information specific to your company.

The next time you’re asked about brand strength, refer back to what we’ve laid out here to get an answer backed by your data. There are so many ways to gauge the strength of your brand but by using Google Analytics and understanding the appropriate indicators, you can be readily equipped to clearly answer that question.

The post Is Direct Traffic an Indicator of Brand Strength? appeared first on Portent.

Monday, April 29, 2019

Social Media

Before jumping into specific channels, it’s best to look at social media as a whole. While all the social media channels have their quirks and differences, there’s also a lot of overlap in how you approach them.

Should you even be using social media at all?

When does it make sense to make social media part of your marketing strategy?

How do these channels fit into the rest of your market funnel?

What are the trends sweeping across all social media channels?

I recommend getting a solid grounding in how social media works, then going through the different channel options to pick the one’s that are right for you.

Facebook

Facebook has definitely gone through a period of ups and downs over the years. For a long time, lots of businesses invested heavily into building their pages and audiences. Then Facebook completely changed how those posts end up in the newsfeed. The organic reach got so limited that Facebook became a “pay-to-play” social network by default.

You can still lead with a content and value-based social media strategy but it’s really difficult to get traction with paying to post your Facebook posts. Every Facebook strategy needs a dedicated budget to promote posts.

Even with the extra hurdle, Facebook is still the heavy-hitting social media channel. You can reach anyone on earth and Facebook’s targeting is extraordinarily detailed. You can get anyone and everyone that you want. Facebook is still the starting point for any social media push.

Instagram

Instagram has become THE social media network. It’s easy to generate content for, has solid engagement, and still has a true flywheel that you can build over time. As you build your audience, you can still depend on being able to reach them with every post unlike Facebook which became “pay-to-play.”

For any B2C brand, a thriving Instagram account is absolutely essential. I wouldn’t waste any more time before getting started:

YouTube

YouTube has gained a ton of momentum in the last few years. The search volume is almost as big as Google and the user engagement is off the charts.

The one major downside is how much effort and money that great video content requires. There’s certainly shortcuts and corners to cut in the beginning, but it’s always going to require more effort than some of the other social networks.

That said, YouTube is worth the effort. Use these guides to ramp up quickly:

Surprisingly, LinkedIn has become one of the hot social media networks lately. The engagement on LinkedIn posts are off the charts, easily outpacing Twitter profiles and Facebook pages.

If you’re B2B, I strongly recommend that you make LinkedIn a core part of your social media strategy. It’s too hot to pass up right now.

Pinterest doesn’t get nearly as much attention in digital marketing circles as it should. Yes, the Pinterest audience is overwhelmingly female. You should strongly consider making Pinterest a priority if your target market skews towards females and you have a highly visual product.

Check out our Pinterest guides to get started:

Twitter

Twitter used to be one of the heavy-hitting social networks. If you wanted a serious social media strategy, you had to have an engaging and active Twitter account.

These days, Twitter isn’t considered a required channel for a social media strategy. The half-life of tweets are exceptionally short, it’s really difficult to get them to go viral, and a lot of people have decided to avoid Twitter because it’s too difficult to use. While it can still be worth pursuing, it’s definitely no longer a requirement.

If you think it could be a good fit, these guides break it all down:

Other Channels

There’s always a new up and coming social media channel to start looking into. If you’re looking to push into channels that most teams haven’t spent much time on, start with Reddit and Snapchat.

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Use This SEO Strategy for Your Next Website Redesign

Redesigning your website presents a significant risk from an SEO standpoint if not managed appropriately.

What can be years of optimizations to your infrastructure, design, and content are going to be overwritten, and it’s hard to predict if the organic rankings you’ve earned are going to be swept away. `

If your redesign strategy includes taking SEO into account post-launch, you’ll probably end up in for a world of hurt.

Here’s a look at organic traffic from a brand that came to us after launching a new beautifully designed site, wondering what happened to their SEO traffic.

Don’t be that website.

If your brand heavily relies on organic search to drive traffic, engagement, and conversion metrics, the risks from a redesign are real, and the impact can be devastating.

But through careful consideration throughout the redesign process, you can account for potential pitfalls and mitigate your chances of a drop in organic search ranking and traffic post-launch.

Follow along as I outline how we approach this at Portent.

How to Approach SEO Strategy in your Next Redesign

For many websites, organic search is the channel that brings in the most traffic, and inherently, conversions- whether that be leads or transactions and revenue.

Adding to that, organic traffic is the acquisition channel most at-risk through a significant website redesign.

SEO isn’t a tactic to employ after the website launches to clean up loose ends. Approaching your redesign with SEO in mind from the very beginning of the project is vital to ensure your channel’s requirements are baked into the result.

The key to preserving organic rankings through a redesign is two-fold:

1. Marketers must focus on minimizing risk pre-launch

2. Marketers must have a response plan to threats post-launch

With that in mind, our approach to minimizing risk and building a response plan requires us to include an SEO-minded team member in the project from the very start, identify and address gaps in the marketing stack throughout the redesign process, and quantify the impact on organic KPIs post-launch.

This approach lines up with three stages of the project:

The planning and design stage (before any code is written)
The development stage (when the website is being built)
The post-launch stage (after the dust settles)

Let’s explore each of these stages further.

Get SEO Involved Early

The best way to handle potential SEO issues in a redesign project is to prevent them from existing in the first place. SEO for a website redesign starts long before the first line of code is written.

Get your SEO team a seat at the table from the very first meeting.

Their role on the project is to find solutions to infrastructure and content issues that may crop up. Providing a list of SEO requirements and expecting a designer or developer to take them into consideration isn’t enough.

SEO must be hands-on throughout the process.

Don’t wait for infrastructure decisions to be made for you. You may end up with a funky hosting plan, three subdomains, and two of them running on Wix.

(We’ve seen it happen.)

As an SEO, here are some of the questions to consider when kicking off a redesign process:

Is the new CMS or framework SEO-friendly?
Will you need to prerender JavaScript?
Does the new information architecture include your essential landing pages?
How many URLs are going to change?

Find the Gaps

As your new website starts coming together, you should ask yourself the question, “is this website more or less optimized than before?”

To answer this, you need to conduct two SEO audits of the website’s infrastructure and content: pre-launch and post-launch.

The goal of the pre-launch audit is to find all of the big problems that you can’t afford to launch with. Auditing a website that isn’t finished yet may seem premature, but it’s a great exercise; it allows you to correct any show-stopping bugs you may find.

This audit is where your SEO team will do most of the work involved with a typical redesign:

Redirecting old URLs to new URLs
Migrating title and meta description tags
Correcting broken links and unnecessary redirects
Testing mobile rendering
Ensuring canonicalization

The pre-launch audit should also communicate gaps between the two websites in a few key areas:

Site speed

Does the new platform have fewer site speed optimizations?

Content

Does the new content satisfy queries better than before? Are the same Featured Snippets targeted?

Site structure

Is site navigation more or less descriptive than before? Do your important pages still have smart internal links?

Conversion

Do you expect the conversion rate to be higher or lower?

Your post-launch audit should uncover any new bugs and make sure the website is being crawled and indexed correctly.

Some important factors to review post-launch are:

Robots.txt (It’s incredibly common for websites to go live disallowing all crawling)
Sitemap submission in Google and Bing search consoles
The index coverage report in Google Search Console
Checking redirect implementation

Doing two thorough audits goes a long way toward minimizing risk.

Any major threat to your rankings will be identified and hopefully addressed before launch, and everything else will be a known quantity. At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of which way your site’s performance will go.

Measure the Impact

Before you launch your new site, make sure your web analytics and rank tracking are recording reliable baseline data for your KPIs.

Also, confirm the new website has your web analytics implemented correctly. You don’t want to launch with all of your conversion goals broken.

I find these metrics and trends the most useful when gauging post-launch performance:

Organic users by landing page

If you didn’t change your URL structure, this report will be incredibly helpful in narrowing down performance gaps.

Organic users by website section

This report will help you find problems with the design or internal linking structure for sections that aren’t doing well.

Non-brand keyword rankings

For each important landing page, add the non-brand keywords contributing the most traffic to a rank tracker. If any of these rankings take a dive after launch, you’ll know which topics you need to prioritize.

Conversion rate by landing page

If your sales copy or CTA links had a drastic change in the new design, this report would let you know which pages will need their offers reconsidered.

Bounce rate and exit rate by website section

Increases in either after the launch might indicate usability problems with the new design for that section.

Common SEO Pitfalls

There are SEO problems so common to redesigns that I’ve seen one in nearly every launch I’ve cleaned up.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by making these mistakes:

Unnecessarily changing the URL structure

The best way to map old URLs to new URLs is to not change them at all. Plus, you won’t break year-over-year reports in Google Analytics. Unless you have a good reason, don’t change your URLs in a redesign.

Not redirecting URLs with backlinks

If you have to change your URLs for a new website, make sure you aren’t throwing your backlinks away. Redirect your old URLs to keep the link authority flowing into your site.

Not checking robots.txt on launch day

If your traffic flatlines after launching the new site, this is probably why. Make sure your robots.txt file is configured correctly.

Using uncompressed images

Please don’t make your users download 4 MB of images on every page. Use the right image format and level of compression to keep your images crisp and as small as necessary.

Introducing unnecessary subdomains

Keep your content in one place. Adding a subdomain to your site will split link authority and guarantee a migration project in the future. Always base a new website on a single platform that can do everything you need.

Time to Go Live

Eventually, it’s time to go live with your redesign.

It can be a nervewracking time for every party involved, but at the end of the day, it’s going to happen.

And while redesigning your website can have profound effects (both positive and negative) on site performance, there are ways to mitigate your risk through the process you take.

Be sure to:

Get SEO involved from the start
Find the gaps
Measure the impact

Sticking to this strategy can set yourself up to limit website problems that could devastate your organic traffic.

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