What is a content upgrade and how can it impact your conversion rates?

What is a content upgrade and why does it help you increase your conversion rates more than a lead magnet? Kevin McGrath from Beacon will explain you this and how you can create it with Beacon tips and tricks.

But before delving into the topic, let me start introducing you, Kevin McGrath.

About Kevin McGrath

Kevin is from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Beacon, a plugin that can be used with WordPress to help you generate more leads.

He has a background in Design and initially ran a web design agency called Starfish for about 6 years. But he is now more focused on Marketing and Growth.

Through his webinar, he talks about:

• Lead Generation
• Landing Page
• Lead Magnet
• Content Upgrade
• Time-Saving Tips and Tricks with Beacon
• Exclusive Bonuses from Beacon

Lead Generation

• Every marketer looks for more leads to gain more clients. However, most people don’t buy on their first interaction.

Indeed, people like to do research before they make a purchase (web price comparisons, shipping rates..). If people spend a big budget, they will want to make sure they get it right. When you do your research, you want to find out things like: How does this company work like another business like mine? Can this company offer a solution to the problem that I’m facing?

• As marketers, we want to help you with your research and also available and stay in touch with you through the course of that research.

We want leads and email addresses from people who are likely to buy from us in the future.

• Better Leads.

Avoid having an email list of poor leads not interested in your products. This will be a waste of your time to target these people.

So, in order to get email addresses, marketers have been doing this for decades. If you give somebody something of value in exchange for their email address, they are more likely to give it to you. We can give something like an eBook in exchange for an email address.

Generally, when people offer eBooks, they do so on a dedicated landing page to offer the prospect a lead magnet. A lead magnet is essentially a downloadable piece of content like an eBook, or a whitepaper or something that is basically information-based that you are giving your prospects to help nurture to become your customer.

Now, there are two points in this strategy:

1. Landing Page

2. Lead Magnet.

The Problem with lead magnet strategy

The strategy is flawed. Basically, if you are putting a lead magnet up on a landing page, you are going to have to spend a lot of time preparing the content for that lead magnet.

• Large lead magnet.

The lead magnet will have to be impressive and well package (100 pages long).

• Another page to drive traffic to.

That’s a new page in your website. You are not having the benefit of, say, a blog post, that is already gaining lots of organic traffic. You are going to have to come up with a new traffic acquisition strategy, in order to drive customers to the page.

• Visitors need to be ‘warmed up’.

Once your visitors get to the page, you are going to have to warm them up to get them to download an eBook and see its benefits. You are essentially starting from scratch.

• Trying to appeal to everyone is another issue with this lead magnet strategy.

I’m sure, guys, to have familiar with various customers’ personas, various stages in the buying cycle. Say, you have 2 or 3 personas with their individual needs and problems that they want to resolve, each may be at a different stage of the buying cycle. Some may not know you at all and others may know you well and just need a gentle reminder note.

• eBooks aren’t anymore the new kids on the block.

They have been around for a while and as marketers tend to overdo these strategies with this as soon as we see some success with that. People have become jaded with the overall eBook strategy and do not take the time reading a lengthy book.

But don’t worry, there is a solution to that.

the SOLUTION WITH content upgrade system strategy

A content upgrade is a targeted resource for individual blog posts.

So, instead of having a dedicated landing page for a big eBook type of resource, it’s just a bonus offered as part of a blog post. You will place this free bonus just after the introduction of the blog post in a centred embedded box for better results. If you click on the box, you will get a pop-up asking for your details. It will bring you to a checklist or short 1-3 pages long content.

• So, a content upgrade is a short actionable download like a checklist or resource guide.
• It will build on the subject of the blog post.

So, the blog post is the theory and the free bonus is the practical application of that theory. So, you are educating people with the blog post. They are already interested in and read it and you are helping them to implement the advice in the blog post with your download.

• It’s just a simple strategy and that’s why it’s so effective. You basically capitalise on that existing blog traffic.
• It is also very targeted as related to a blog post for a specific persona at a specific stage in the buying cycle.

After anyone downloaded that targeted content, you can segment them as, for example, ‘a copyrighter who is interested in SEO’ if that’s the blog topic.

• When you have that extra information, you are more likely to sell and market to them more appropriately in the future.

So, they are more likely to purchase his premium products from him.

• But most importantly, this content upgrade system strategy results in high conversion rates.

Your conversion rate is essentially the percentage of people that come to your blog post and give you their email address. For eg, if you have 100 people visiting your page and 10 people downloading your content, you have a conversion rate of 10 %, The higher conversion rate is, the more efficiently you are using your traffic. It means the fewer resources, i.e time and money, you will have to spend driving traffic to your blog posts. So optimising for conversion rates is important. You can generate between 5 and 16 times more leads for your business. It’s a life-long evergreen strategy.

So, why is it working? You are offering something is short.

• It’s a short article. Most people are more likely to download something short as they have a short attention span.
• It’s useful. It is directly related to the blog post to help implement tactical and practical advice. It helps reader getting closer to the goals they want to achieve.
• Because this is part of a blog post, readers are already engaged. The next part is to convince them that you can help them further by doing the content upgrade. People are more likely to opt-in when they are already engaged.

People tend to ignore pop-ups when they scroll down the page. So, if you can include your call-to-action within the main flow of the blog post, you will see better results. I would say to use the in-line forms.

Actually, LeadPages did some research into the number of clicks required to opt-in. They said that the two-staged call-to-action is more effective/ than the single stage one and perform better in terms of conversions. So, if you show an email box with an input form straightaway, people will try to avoid it.

So, before we move on, I’d like to recap.

What is the difference between a content upgrade and a lead magnet?

Content Upgrade	Lead Magnet
Embedded within a blog post Builds on the content of a blog post Is short Is actionable Uses existing traffic Prospect is nurtured by the blog post (more qualified traffic) Has high conversion rates	Has a dedicated landing page Lies on a standalone content Is long Is educational Has new traffic required Prospect needs to be convinced by the landing page Has lower conversion rates

Content upgrades should be part of your blogging routine and go along with it.

So, your blogging strategy probably looks like this:

What I’m proposing is that you add an extra step to that process:

I want to show you how you can create these content upgrades.

Beacon can help to speed up the content upgrade strategy for you. I want to show you time-saving tips to implement these content upgrades into your blog posts quickly.

Beacon Time-Saving Tips and Tricks

• Set up brand colours. This is quickest overly most overlooked feature within Beacon.
• Create a re-usable content library, so that you can drop in any pieces of content into any content upgrades you create in the future.
• Create a re-usable template so that you can create your branding and keep re-using it, instead of having to work from scratch every time.

So, in Beacon’s normal interface, I create a workbook with one of our standard templates. The template contains a cover page, a short introduction, a worksheet with some questions to answer. This kind of school-like exercise helps people think about strategic things by working through the process on their own. The content upgrade finishes with a call-to-action.

• If you choose that template, go through each page to see what you can customise for your business. First thing, you are going to have to change that logo. You will need to pick your brand colour on all pages to get the colour scheme in line with my brand. I would advise a more sullen kind of colour but there is no colour to avoid.

Obviously, that’s not ideal. So I want to show you this trick. It is buried a little bit under the document settings (4^th icon down the left-hand side). Once you click on it, it will open this ‘default styles’ panel. You will notice that the colour template is set up for you. This means that if you set up your template colours, this will be updated throughout the document.

• What you are going to find in content upgrades is that you may be re-using certain types of content in every single content upgrade that you make.

One example of that would be an ‘about the author’ page to give readers context about who prepared the content upgrade. Why should they trust you? The purpose is to nurture prospects into qualified leads.

Let’s create an ‘about the author page’. Underneath the first ‘pages’ tab, I’m going to click on the ‘Add New Page’ button. I’ll look for a text focused page template. I’ll filter that. I’m going to choose the two columns layout. I’ll include an image. It’s always good to add an image of the author. I’ll also add some information from social media in a headline box/card at the bottom.

Every time I make a content upgrade, I don’t want to go through all those steps each time. Instead, I’m going to go to ‘Pages’ tab, then click on the 3^rd button down ‘Page settings’. Then I’ll click on the ‘Convert’ button under ‘Convert this page into a template’. I’ll save that template and refresh the page. So, next time you click on ‘Add New Page’, you will have your template saved if you scroll down the templates.

• How to convert an entire publication into a reusable template. I want to show you how to convert a document into a template.

Let’s create a re-usable template as a starting point. We are not going to have a worksheet in each template, so let’s delete that. You can your logo/image. You will be able in a week time to save image library as well.

To convert this into a reusable template, I’m going to click on ‘Document Settings’ tab on the left-hand side and click on the ‘Convert’ button. I’ll give this template a name and save it. Then I’ll leave the editor, go back to the ‘Dashboard’. When you go and click on the ‘Create New’ button, then ‘New Editor’. This will lead you to the ‘Pick your Magnet’ screen to choose a template. Let’s say we create a ‘Checklist’, select ‘No’ to import content. Then, on the next screen for ‘Choose a theme’, scroll down to the bottom and you’ll find your re-usable template. Then, you’ll click on ‘Add New Page’, filter for the checklist and add what you saved.

Note: Some of the features that I did show you are Premium Features. The part where I showed you the convert templates (page and document), you need a paid account to use that feature. However, the brands and colours are available for free. To justify going for a paid account, you will get exclusive bonuses.

EXCLUSIVE BONUSES

These will be available to you if you upgrade to a paid account after this webinar (Kevin will be notified once you do so). For that, just shoot an email to Kevin so that he can send them to you.

1. Lead Magnet Learning Pack is a swipe file of 13 content upgrades used on our blog to help Beacon grow to 25000 users. This is a good source of inspiration for a content upgrade to make. They are all different in design.
2. Expert Audio Interview with Laura Roader, founder of MeetEdgar. Laura has grown to 7 figures business. She developed a software product that uses content marketing, content upgrades and lead magnets to grow her business. I’ll be sharing with you some of the strategies she uses.
3. Free Beacon Template Design that I will personally design for to your business worth $1000. I’ll have a consultation with you to understand your needs (2-3 days work).

If you have any questions, drop an email to Kevin@beacon.by and he will be more than happy to follow-up with you individually.

To finish off with this talk, you want to watch its demo and presentation:

Finally, if you are interested in, you may explore these 30 Content Upgrade Ideas to Grow Your Email List (Updated).

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How to understand your website traffic data with Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager

I signed up for a Learn Inbound Marketing event a few months ago on Google Tag Manager data insights!

The presentation delivered by Tom Bennett is divided into 5 topics:

1. Understand and invest in your data
2. The challenges of engagement traffic
3. Google Tag Manager can help us improve our data collection
4. Smarter segmentation
5. Work with your developers.

Since it is quite technical, I recommend you to sign up for Google Tag Manager and follow the process he is talking us through.

If you have a more audio or visual memory, you will find the podcast transcript and powerpoint presentation further in this article.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

1. Understand and invest in your data

Google Tag Manager helps you measure success in Google Analytics.

If you take away only one thing from this evening, it’s understanding and investing in your data.

Google Analytics is designed to work well. Out of the box implementation with zero customisation, it’s very easy to set up.

But let’s be honest, ‘the one size fits all’ approach to marketing is rarely the best. Indeed, the needs of your business and the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)  of your website are unique.

Consequently, data collection is crucial for the entirety of the analysis process. It doesn’t matter:

• how many segments you build
• or how  many goals you define,

if you mess up your data collection, it will screw up every other stage, too. So, what the value of the insights your analytics software will give you is directly tied back to the investment you have made in data collection at first stage of the whole process.

So, today I’m going to run through few examples of how a smart implementation of Google Tag Manager (GTM) can dramatically improve the relevance and quality of the available data in Google Analytics.

There are no magic bullets, but I hope everyone here will be able to take away at least one technique they weren’t previously aware of and get some of the value from it.

2. The challenges of engagement traffic 

So, we are going to start with engagement tactics, specifically content engagement, because so many organisations are stuck trying to answer meaningless questions like ‘why is that Bounce Rate so high?’

The problem with that is that you see reports saying things like ‘Our content is really good because our sitewide’s average bounce rate is down to 10%’. But this statement is worse than misleading and is often inaccurate.

in fact, many people who use Bounce Rate as the primary KPI don’t actually understand what Bounce Rate is measuring. The effect of this is that the individuals are encouraged to fix the metric rather than the underlying problems, which are of course unique to your site.

So, let’s refresh ourselves with the definition of a Bounce Rate.

Google finds a single page session calculated as only being a single request through the analytics server. What that typically means is that a user arrives and leaves your site via a single page without doing anything on any other pages in-between.

It’s important to remember that sessions are really these fictional constructs Analytics come up with when it processes your data.

Analytics doesn’t know how long a user spends looking at a particular page. It doesn’t set any kind of timer to measure when a session started and when it ended. All it has is this raw hit data:

• pageviews
• events
• transactions.

From this data, it extrapolates and builds this arbitrary notion of a session, which starts and ends after 30 minutes of inactivity (a time gap between hits, midnight or a campaign change).

Now, incidentally, this is why if you commit the sin of tagging your internal links with UTM parameters, you generally see a very high Bounce Rate on most pages. Navigation via those links will result in a new session starting.

So, in order to calculate, divide as the ‘average time on page’, it actually measures how long it takes until the next page is received. To get the session duration, it just measures the time between the first and the last ‘hit‘ in that session.

So, when it uses ‘Bounces’, GA doesn’t have enough data to generate all those metrics it reports such as average time on page, for example.

Indeed, there is no second hit it can measure against to calculate ‘time on page’, which is why it’s not a really good metric to use as your sole KPI, especially when used in aggregate. It becomes meaningless because the questions we can’t answer are substantial.

We don’t know what the user did on the page, how valuable they are to us as potential customers. We don’t even know either if:

• the website functions properly on that device
• they read every single word of that content and
• they bookmarked it to come back later.

Ultimately we lack data.

3. Google Tag Manager can help us improve our data collection

A smart implementation of Google Tag Manager (GTA) is necessary.

• CONTROLLING AND TWEAKING THE BOUNCE RATE

So, we will stick to the ‘Bounce Rate’ for a while because it demonstrates some good points. You do have control over the bounce rate calculation.

Indeed, you can control which hits will affect Bounce Rate(BR) and which don’t. To illustrate this point, this is an example of a client I recently on-boarded. They received a 0% BR on most of their pages and couldn’t figure out why.

Ultimately, what happened is the development team, which configured not just the standard page but also an ‘Event‘ that fired when all the dependent resources on the page were ready (images, skyscrapers…).

Consequently, it was impossible to have a single hit session because every page viewed was firing two hits. That’s the same principle why really bad WordPress implementations will often see low Bounce Rate because you get duplicate tracking code, i.e two hits per page.

But don’t worry, you can control which ‘events’ effect the Bounce Rate by using the ‘Non-Interaction Hit‘ Flag. You can set this very easily in GTM when you are configuring your ‘event’ tag to  ‘Non-Interaction Hit’ to ‘True’. The BR for the page, on which this ‘event’ fires will be calculated as if the event wasn’t there.

So, for example, if you absolutely have to fire an event when an auto-playing video starts, just set ‘Non-Interaction Hit’ to ‘True’ and the BR will be calculated as if our second hit wasn’t there and would be more accurate.

This idea of using ‘events’ to control our BR plays nicely into the whole idea of ‘On-page Engagement Tracking‘, in a single page new session for eg.

A lot of people started using some of GTM built-in triggers to try and manipulate the BR. For example, GTM has a ‘Timer‘ trigger and by using that, you can avoid relying on GTM arbitrary ‘time-on-page’ calculations.

But one trigger I’m really fond of is the new ‘Element Visibility‘ trigger. To illustrate my point, I picked random examples from the Learn Inbound website. Let’s say you have strategically distributed throughout your longer pieces of content ‘Calls-to-Action‘ like this email sign-up widget.

You may be interested in who is getting to that position in your content or preventing people who got that far through your guides from being counted as Bounces.

If you strategically position these kinds of elements at different positions throughout your various page types, then the ‘element visibility’ trigger can be a powerful way to take advantage of this.

So, we’ll set up a trigger now. As you can see, it lets us define an ‘event’ based on either an ID or a CSS selector. We have control over when this trigger will fire. We can set it to fire when the element is on-screen for a certain duration as your user scrolls through your content. Or it has to be visible for a certain percentage of the element in the ‘View post’. You can even control how many times it will fire if the element appears multiple times per page.

So, in this example, we use this trigger and other triggers to fire an ‘event’ when someone starts scrolling through our content. Obviously, that would be a ‘Non-Interaction Hit’ trigger, when they view the ‘call-to-action’ and then when they reach the footer.

So, by drilling down to a particular page and then viewing this kind of ‘event’ data, it can be very powerful in allowing us to get a sense of who is actually reading our content versus just bouncing immediately.

It can also be segmented by audience types and page to give us insight. This way, we can actually stir our internal linking or content strategy, based on what we learnt about which pages people are engaging with. It can be specific to your other page types. So, needless to say, it goes much further than tweaking the Bounce Rate.

• TAILORING YOUR DATA COLLECTION METHOD AROUND THE PAGE TYPES

Your data collection method needs to be tailored not just to your business but to that different page types, the different page types of content on your site.

As an example, we are going to look at ‘Interactive Content‘. It’s an interactive piece of content marketing which lets you calculate the heating costs for their home. You can select your ‘Room Types’, ‘Sizes’ and ‘Glazing’. Then it will give you an approximate cost for heating.

Now, in a classic example of ineffective communication between marketing and developing teams, this was pushed out of the door with very little consideration given to its tracking requirements.

It is a shame because GTM is really good at letting us track high relevant interactions that would be taking place on a piece of content like this. Interactions which are very relevant to the kind of audience we are trying to appeal to with this content.

One of the best ways that allow us to do that is with the ‘Custom Event‘ trigger type. In practice, you will ask your developers to implement a piece of Javascript code into your Application. This will push an ‘Event’ to the ‘Data Layer’. All it does is provide us with something that we can listen for at the other end in GTM.

In this instance, we have touched the ‘Data Layer’.push’ in the ‘Event’  and we have pulled ‘CalculatorGo’.  To listen for this as a trigger in GTM, all we do is set up a ‘Custom Event’ trigger. Then, name the ‘Event’ that will appear in ‘Data Layer’ ‘CalculatorGo’.  We can use this to fire a Google Analytics Event Tag, so we know how many people are using interactive.

• USING CUSTOM VARIABLES TO GET MORE GRANULAR

We want to know how people are using this content. The purpose of it is to appeal a wide audience and drive more revenue. Ultimately we want to know how people are engaging with this content we built.

So, let’s say, for example, we want to know which option uses our selecting when they use our calculator. We can supplement our ‘Data Layer’ Event with two data variables. We’ve gone from ‘Room Type’ to ‘Glazing Type’. These simply populate the ‘Data Layer’ with variables reflecting the user choices at the moment. At the moment, they hit ‘Go’.

Then, we set these as data layer variables in GTM. This means they are now available for us to use in our tags, in our Google Analytics ‘Event’ Tag, for eg.

So, here we have referenced down variables as the ‘Event’ action label respectively. This will give us relevant data about:

• our audience
• what they are using our interactive content for
• and what they are looking for.

We can use this to iterate not just the layout, the functionality of the page, but also use it as the basis for guiding our content strategy or improving our lead nurturing process.

You can extend this approach a long way by using our ‘Goals’. By segmenting to a particular campaign for eg., we can then see how people are engaging with this content and analyse that in isolation.

Thanks to native ‘variable types’, we can get quite creative.

So, to keep the same example, we could set up an ‘Event’ value which fires when someone engages with our piece of content and we can set the value based on what we know about them as users.

We could come up with systems using ‘Lookup Tables’  or even ‘Custom Job Description’ running in GTM, which will assign an arbitrary value to them based on how valuable they are to us as ‘leads’. Then set this as the ‘Goal’ value in GA.

This will give us a sense of how valuable that traffic is as potential customers. So, we can see the absolute number of conversion, but also an approximation of the fair value to us as customers.

And of course, when segmented based on a particular campaign, we can start to gauge the content value of our marketing content efforts.

4. SMARTer SEGMENTATION

The last area I want to explore is using GTM to better group our content.

• CONTENT GROUPING

For example, if we wish to segment our content strategy into different groups based on the offer, we can do that with the ‘Content Grouping’. It’s very easy to implement.

We can create the ‘Content Grouping’ at a ‘View’ Level. Then, we enable a content tracking code based implementation, and give it an ‘Index Number’ of ‘1’. Afterwards, we can set up the actual author using a ‘Data Layer’Variable’.

By using the ‘Data Layer’, you can work much more smartly. We get our development team to implement the ‘Blog Author‘ as a ‘Data Layer Variable’.

Same principle as we did earlier for our interactive content and then we can reference that in our ‘Pageview’ Tag.  Under ‘More Settings’, we can reference the ‘Data Layer Variable’ in there, so that every page you hit will fetch the account of the author from the ‘Data Layer’. Then it will fire that as the value for that ‘Content Grouping’.

As a result of this, you can view an aggregate performance of pages by particular authors and get a sense of how they perform as a whole. That’s very useful data when it comes to assessing how well your content strategy is performing.

• CUSTOM DIMENSIONS

To segment further users, let’s look at particular groups of our audience like ‘Behaviours‘.

For example, we might decide to track users who comment on our blog. Then, view that ‘Audience’ group as a separate segment of traffic with ‘Custom Dimensions‘.

Whereas ‘Content Grouping’ allows us to organise our pages into logical groups, ‘Custom Dimensions’ let us record extra like non-standing data on top of GA standard dimensions. They are very flexible in how they let us do this as well.

Remember that every hit which goes to GA has a different scope. For eg, the ‘Pageview Hit’ has a scope limited to that page view. But ‘Landing Page‘ has a scope which applies to the whole session.

 Now, it’s the ‘User Level Scope‘ we are interested in because it lets us apply the data from that hit from the user and all of their subsequent interactions on that website.

So we set it up at the ‘Property Level’, giving 20 ‘Dimensions’ per ‘Property’. We’ll give an ‘Index number’ of ‘1’ and set the ‘Scope’ as ‘User’. So, back in GTM, we are going to fire these ‘Custom Dimensions’ as part of an ‘Event’ hit that will be launched when someone is coming on our blog.

Then under ‘More Settings’, we can set the ‘Custom Dimensions’. We will put an ‘Index number’ of ‘1’ and a ‘Dimension Value’ of ‘Commenter.

In terms of trigger, we can once again use a ‘Data Layer Event’. To run through what happened in the back of this, I user a ‘User Submitted Content’. That action will push an ‘Event’ to the ‘Data Layer’, which we are listening for in GTM.  GTM fires out a normal GA Tag ‘Event’. That hit goes on and includes a ‘Custom Dimension’, which defines the user as a commenter and that will apply to all his subsequent actions on the site as well.

As a result, we can now view the behaviour of our engaged users as a segment in GA. We can also see how they differ from our wider readership. We can use that as the primary dimension in a report to analyse the results in our funnel.

5. Work with your developers

It is important to collaborate with your development team when it comes to data collection.

It is really vital that you understand how these technologies work so that you can communicate effectively with your development team.

Google Tag Manager is kind of unique in it’s an inextricable tool for both marketers and developers. They are about tracking what users do, how valuable they are for us as customers. But Google Tag Manager is also a complex Javascript Application. You need to have a familiarity with Javascript in order to work properly with it.

The ‘Data Layer’, which kind of underpins a lot of the techniques that run today, is in international waters. If you look at the kind of data encoded into the ‘Data Layer’, its semantic information about:

• our audience and our customers,
• what they are doing

enforces a shared language.

A well defined and maintained ‘Data Layer’ means the data about your content and interaction that take place are accessible in a format independent of any platforms or technology. You are not reliant on scraping your HTML. You can instead make the data points you are interested in available to use.

However, you need to get your development team to implement it. Indeed, it is a very powerful tool that can easily break your website. The ‘Data Layer‘ should be regarded as a pre-requisite for good measurement.

I will give you a gift for your developers. It is the ‘Javascript Error‘ trigger tag. All it does is fire an ‘Event’ tag when the browser encounters an unquoted Javascript error.  This is normally the information only available in Javascript Console on your developers’ machine. It lets you fire an ‘Event’ whenever a user’s browser encounters an error in GA.

Thanks to the built-in variables of error messages, error URL, error line, information which the user wouldn’t be seeing, we can the fire the information to GA on real-world usability issues. Don’t forget to set that ‘Non-Interaction Hit’ to ‘True’. This will take no more than 5 minutes to implement. It will get real-world testing of your data about:

• what’s breaking on your website
• where
• and for who.

You can cross-reference it with the other built-in dimensions as well, like upgrading system and browser. You can give that information to your developers, segment it by page. And you will make your website more accessible, functional. The value of the insight you can get from your analytics software is tied to the investment you make in data collection.

By demonstrating success and by unlocking the kind of actionable insights that you need, you can justify whatever it is that you are looking for:

• bigger budgets
• more innovative projects
• more development time for your team
• and ultimately whatever you need to do your job better.

For those who would like to download the Powerpoint slides containing more visuals and his contact details, click on the link below:

Google Tag Manager Insights Powerpoint presentation

SEO Masterclass by Filip Silobod from Honest Marketing

SEO Masterclass

First, thanks so much to all those who came to attend this SEO Masterclass by Filip Silobod from Aro Digital Strategy on Tuesday 21st November 2017. Much appreciated! For those who want to keep in touch with him on LinkedIn, he has since then created his own company under the name of Honest Marketing.

I’m sharing with you a few pictures of the speaker and the audience taken at the venue.

If you would like to know more about Filip Silobod and the company he is working for, check this Eventbrite page.

SEO STRATEGY TOPICS

Secondly, Filip gave us a comprehensive masterclass on Search Engine Optimisation Strategy (SEO) to ensure that:

• Your website is getting a high amount of traffic
• It is ranking well on Google
• Your website is user-friendly and user experience-optimised
• The business is getting a good visibility online
• Your website is getting good Click-Through-Rate (CTR) conversions, whether through organic or paid search and advertising.

Let me share with you his presentation before delving into a bit more details on some topics. You will find Filip’s contact details in it. Please note that the slideshow of his presentation can be downloaded, saved or shared through Social Media.

When you build your website, you need to ensure that it is SEO-friendly and follows a long-term strategy.

DIGITAL SEO STRATEGY STEPS

Indeed, you may get more visits to your website and build a loyal customer base by considering these digital marketing and SEO methods:

1. Understand and optimise the use of machine learning
2. Optimise the User Experience on your site: easy access, page loading time, navigation ease, mobile-friendly website… Make sure you regularly check your Google Page Speed Insight as well as see how your website looks on mobile phones
3. Use paid advertising and search: Pay-Per-Click (PPC) with good visuals perform best. Paid Advertising will allow you to rank high in the Google Searches with Google Adwords. You can use Paid Social Media when you launch your website, new products or services
4. Analyse and Compare your site with your competitors
5. Take into account search trends for branded and non-branded keywords by using Google Keyword Planner and having a varied content with plenty of synonyms
6. Have clear Call-To-Actions (CTA) in your website’s main and secondary pages to allow higher conversions
7. Have a good landing page
8. Use long-tail keywords (min 4 words): This advice is especially valid if you are a small business with a recent website. It will improve the discovery of your keywords in searches
9. Create unique content that Google likes
10. Have few good backlinks (off-page optimisation) throughout your blog posts, linking to high authority websites. You may consider as well getting Public Relations (PR) releases
11. Review your website’s authority score with Moz. Your authority score indicates trust in your business
12. Increase your business local visibility by registering with Google My Business. Ensure you add quality images and request your customers to leave you reviews.
13. Optimise, track and analyse your traffic with Google Webmaster Tool.  You will need to review the queries (keywords) made by consumers to find your website or blog. These include meta title, URL and meta description. This analysis will give you insights as to understand when and why people left your website.

Remember that, although Social Media doesn’t have much value in terms of SEO (‘no-follow links’), it still allows people to interact with your brand. Social Media helps consumers discover your brand online. It also adds extra traffic to your website thanks to re-tweets, sharing of your posts’ links.

Although Google is the biggest and most used search engine used worldwide, there are other valid search engines that you may use, such as:

• Baidoo for the Indian market
• Bing for North American market (USA)
• Ecosia.org that is based on Bing
• Yandex for the Russian market.

Finally, keep in mind what matters the most isn’t so much how much your website/blog is searched for, but how many conversions you get. Conversions can be downloads, newsletter sign-ups, purchases, shares… This can be measured with the CTR by using Google Analytics.