Where: Duluth’s Storied Office (9 W Superior St #200, Duluth, MN 55802)
Who This Benefits: Companies with 1-75 employees aiming to maximize digital marketing dollars and gain insight into website design, content marketing, paid search and social media
In true Aimclear tradition, the Duluth Zenith digital marketing workshop is back this year on April 25 — with a twist.
This year’s workshop is scheduled for the day BEFORE Zenith — consider it a 10 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. tailgate party before the main event. PLUS, the 2018 workshop is specifically tailored for small businesses and nonprofits aiming to maximize limited marketing budgets to their TRUE potential. Heck yeah!
So, who should come? Anyone with an interest in hands-on digital marketing education, advice, assistance… and, of course, fun! Specifically, the event, to be held at Aimclear’s storied Duluth office, will focus on aiding companies with 1-75 employees to get the most out of their marketing dollars in the areas of website design, content marketing, paid search and paid social media.
Walk Away With a Plan
With limited seating, the focus is on equipping attendees with actionable marketing plans that can be implemented ASAP. Instead of theories and dazzling case studies, the focus is on helping YOU.
Each session is designed to be interactive — this isn’t a lecture, it’s an opportunity to work together with industry leaders to solve marketing problems and boost your marketing efforts. Sessions will incorporate attendees’ companies for on-the-spot feedback, dialogue and recommendations for meeting marketing ROI goals.
For attendees who’d rather discuss marketing dreams and objectives in a more intimate setting, the end of the day will feature roundtable sessions with workshop hosts. This is your chance to ask the straight up questions you’ve been longing to answer. Really, it’s all about your business — and we just want to help!
The Tailgate Lineup
The fun kicks off at 10 a.m. with a quick intro from Aimclear CMO Manny Rivas. From there, we’ll dive into all-things-website-management (including website structure, user experience, mobile performance, analytics and tracking) before moving into the content marketing live session.
Like any good tailgate party, we’ll break for food at 12:30 p.m. — you’ll need plenty of that brain fuel before we dive into Google Paid Search and Facebook Paid Ads. The day will round out with the roundtable sessions, featuring design, content, paid social targeting, Facebook advertising, Digital PR, community management, paid search and tracking & reporting. The choice is yours!
Because seats are limited to the first 40 attendees, we encourage you to snag your spot early! For those early birds who register before April 11, the cost is JUST $ 150. After that, registration will increase to $ 200.
Sign up TODAY and reserve your spot at the tailgate marketing party of the year! See you there!
If you want to get a top Google ranking, then we say you follow the old saying: When in Rome, do as the Romans do. When having a website for which you want to get the best display on Google, do what Google would like you to do.
We gathered a list of 22 must-dos, things that Google said you should be doing in order to rank high in SERPs.
How to rank high on Google fast. That’s everyone’s concern. After all, Google (and search engines in general) is the sole playground where our websites and their whole activity take place. We display, play, fight, and sell online. The offline environment is another story. But most people forget something. It’s that success doesn’t come for granted, but it’s rather built. To better there’s bitter, said someone once.
Speaking of which, here’s a list of pieces of advice coming directly from Google, one that will help you boost your traffic and rankings. All get big thumbs-up from Google. Check for yourself:
Google is smart – they know how they like their food. Google is a fully automated search engine set to explore the web on a daily basis and find those websites that deserve to be on the first pages. Many ask themselves what’s the best way to make Google like them in order to rank high in SERPs. You’ve got great content, rich and good link profile, yet Google doesn’t place you in top positions. So what should you do? We gathered all the things Google encourages their users to apply in order to rank on top positions and compiled them.
We wanted to see if Google really has the answer to all questions and if yes, we would’ve easily declared our quest ended. So we typed a query into the search bar: How to make Google like you? And this is what we got:
Apparently, we didn’t find an answer to our question. So we decided to take the research a little step further and search related phrases and ranking pages of this long tail keyword. We looked it up on Keyword Tool & Content Assistant and, again, we had a lot of fun on the returning results.
Things are simple. The truth is there’s no thorough and comprehensive list of everything Google says you should do to get a top position.
There are tops and lists, but there’s little clear-cut answer to what’s there to be done in order for Google to like you and lift you high in SERPs.
Before setting out to discuss what Google says you should check if you’re hunting for first positions in search results, remember this. You should make sure to get your website Google-friendly in all aspects, avoid implementing shady practices on your website, hence taking care to not be that person who gives a black eye to the industry of SEO and marketing when trying to rank high.
Among many others, Neil Patel summarizes what we know so far and tells us the most important things of getting up in SERPs. Neil himself points out the fact that getting a top Google ranking is hard and takes a lot of work, resources, and time. He shares 3 ways you can rank #1 on Google, and you should definitely know them.
The following 24 steps Google listed as paramount to rank high in SERPs are the baby steps to a greater tomorrow.
It’s good to know the overall picture of what you should do to get your website on the very top of Google search. However, you should definitely check all the things Google promised will make you attractive to the search engine algorithms.
Find all missed marketing tactics and use them for your very benefit. Just like in this meme, find the ingredients used in your (apparently) unattractive-to-Google website, and “googlize” them. Your website ranking story will be different.
1. Craft Smart Titles and Snippets in Search Results
As always, content is king. And the king must be served right in order to be happy and thrive. It’s important to pay attention not only to the page content, but also to the one in the title tags, URLs, snippets, and alt tags. We’ve underlined the most important things for which you should optimize your content.
There are thousands of instances across the web where pages and websites use and display unrelated and dull titles. This prevents them from being targeted by the Google algorithms and be ranked higher in SERPs. Here’s one example:
2. Use the “Description” Meta Tag
The description meta tag provides the search engine a concise yet comprehensive explanation of the page content. In addition, Google might use them as snippets for your page when popping out in search results. Often times, people are drawn to click through a page when, after skimming the SERPs and reading the titles, to check the text in the meta description. This both helps Google’s algorithms to better understand your page contents, and the user, who’d be more likely to land on your page if the words do the work.
However, it’s possible for Google to skip your meta description text and instead select something more relevant for the query from the page contents. In case Google cannot find something worth mentioning from your page content, it’ll turn to your description meta tag – hence, it’s always useful to have one, just in case they’ll need it.
These are the do’s when talking about successful description meta tags:
write a clear, accurate, and relevant summary of your page content;
make sure it’s long enough to fit the display in search engines;
write information that both informs and raises interest;
similarly to title tags, use different descriptions for each page.
If you want to rank high both in Google and in the users’ eyes, avoiddoing the following:
write irrelevant descriptions, unrelated to the page content;
opt for broad descriptions such as “This is a web page” or “Page about football equipment”;
do keyword stuffing;
take a snippet from your text with copy-paste, instead of writing something truly catchy and relevant;
use one description for all or the majority of your pages.
3. Avoid Displaying Important Names, Content, or Links in Images
Whenever you want to convey a message containing names, content, or links, use text instead of images. This way you make sure the search engine can crawl your content, given that the crawlers can’t recognize text comprised of graphics. However, if you still want to display words in an image and not do it again in the page content, you can use ALT attributes. Make sure that the ALT attribute is short yet descriptive, faithfully describing the meaning of the photo as it can be easier both for Google bots to index it and for users to find the image bearing it in their SERPs.
4. Add Structured Data Markup
Structured markup data is a code used by your website to make Google better understand the content on a page. This data can improve your position and page display on search. The main role of the structured markup data is to offer a thorough search experience to the user and turn them into a possible customer. Google Search also uses structured data to show rich and complex result display, providing more information within narrower borders and in more eye-catchy ways.
Simply put, structured data is a systemized format for giving information about a page and hence better and more efficiently classifying the page content. By helping Google understand your page content, you convince them to place you higher in SERPs.
Structured markup data is of great use to businesses. For example, you can provide significant key business details such as physical location, contact info, prices or price range, and marketing details like official name, logo, social profiles and many more. Your business information will get more exposure in search results, Knowledge Graph cards, and Google Maps.
Google My Business is a great way to start getting your website in front of potential customers. Claim or create a new business, verify yourself as the owner of that listing, and provide/edit details such as address, contact info, business type, photos, reviews, feedback, social links, comments. This way you’ll definitely pop with the right info back to user queries.
Google developed a Structured Data Testing Tool which is free and extremely easy to use. It’s meant to test your markup and verify the accuracy of your data.
Another smart move would be to enable breadcrumbs. They trail the page’s position in the site hierarchy, ultimately forming a chain. Users can easily track pages, one level at a time, by starting from the last breadcrumb up to the first one. Google Search is interested in displaying breadcrumbs in markup format, hence better guiding users through.
Users can fill in different queries, and even if their search might return the same webpage, the breadcrumbs will know how to categorize the content in accordance with the Google Search query – example: Books › Authors › Ann Leckie › Ancillary Justice or Books › Science Fiction › Award Winners.
It’s often happening that users bump into a page that doesn’t exist on your site anymore, for various reasons: they follow a broken link or a mistyped URL. Setting a 404 page that nicely informs users that the page isn’t working and redirects them to relevant ones can greatly influence users’ experience, hence click-through rate and ratings. Here’s Google’s reasoning behind why custom 404 pages are so important.
404 pages usually contain a message guiding users to their root page. One twist would be to provide some extra links besides the homepage one, links to popular or related content on your site. This way you’re more likely to retain and eventually convert them. Google says you can also use Search Console to find the sources of URLs responsible for “not found” error status.
As for what you should avoid, here’s what Google tells us to do:
6. Use the Right Mix of Keyword Phrases
Content comes in a variety of forms, all meant to entertain and satisfy as many of the human senses as possible. We are witnesses to the competition blogs, websites, outlets, and every possible business is in. The best thing is to know what your readers want and feed them that.
Google recommends us to create a powerful and useful mix of keywords, one that would leave your competitors far behind and will make your content more likely to be found by user searches. Remeber that you serve a wide variety of user types, both new and experienced ones. Hence those with a heavier load of knowledge will know how to refine their search and introduce more specific keywords in order to get the results they’re looking for. Anticipating the different and various search behavior can really benefit your piece of content when writing it. Google provides two tools that can help you fit your content for the competition ahead: Google AdWords with their Keyword Planner and Google Search Console (find the top searched queries your page ranks for and what are the ones who drew the most readers).
Consider providing interesting, useful, and unique content. You can write news stories, user case studies, original pieces of research. Furthermore, write easy-to-read, grammatically correct and attractive text and organize your topics clearly (you can use headings and break up the content in divisions) as these score a lot when speaking of text readability.
Your content should be the means to make your reader come back. Make it new, exciting, fresh. When using keywords and answering to users’ questions (you can find many with auto-complete in the Google search bar) make sure you’re not doing keyword stuffing and the text stays relevant and natural. Don’t (only) optimize for search engines, but for your readers. In the end, they’re your customers.
7. Give Visitors What They’re Looking For
Chocolate is intoxicatingly attractive to those with a sweet tooth. The same mechanism works for quality content. The more high-quality page content on your website, the more visitors, conversions, fans, mentions, positive sentiment, and credits to you, says Google. Quality content will also appeal more to webmasters, driving them to link to you more and more often.
Whenever crafting content for your web pages, think of what words will most likely attract readers to your content. In addition, scan the web, the competition, and your own page to see what concerns people most. Take extra care of your homepage – that one might be the most important landing site for users.
8. Consider Implementing AMP
A study from DoubleClick by Googleconducted an analysis on more than 10,000 mobile web domains and stated: “We found that the average load time for mobile sites is 19 seconds over 3G connections. That’s about as long as it takes to sing the entire alphabet song!”.
source: www.doubleclickbygoogle.com
Although not yet an official ranking factor, AMP is paramount for site quality and user experience, a fact backed up by well-known webmasters.
More than 50% of mobile users decide to abandon a webpage if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Therefore it’s high time you considered implementing it on your mobile if willing to rank better in Google Search. He’s a how-to guide on how to use Google AMP to make your website rank higher on Google.
9. Use Search-Friendly URLs
Similar to creating fit and appropriate title tags and snippets, so it goes for URLs too. Creatingdescriptive yet concise URLs can truly helpyour fans and fellow marketers link to you. Extremely cryptic links that contain various characters, letters and numbers are chaotic an irrelevant. Easy, SEO-friendly and user-friendly texts in the URL will encourage people to link to you more, make your site better organized, and provide potential users an appropriate text for their anchor texts when linking to you.
Moreover, simple text URLs provides both Google crawlers and users with more information than a highly coded and messy parameter would. Here’s an in-depth study on howthe title and URL influence rankings.
10. Google Ads Don’t Guarantee Top Position in SERPs
Advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in our search results. Instead of paying for your position in Google, try to deploy transparent, relevant, organic, in a word natural means to get your page up in SERPs.
There’s nothing more powerful than listening to and obeying the common sense rules of doing your job first, and maybe only after paying for some boost. True, lasting fame doesn’t come with money, but with working hard. And this will eventually pay off and make you stand among the first search result in Google.
More so, it’s usually nagging the user, as your paid ad featuring your web page doesn’t always really deliver an answer to the query, but rather sticks among the first results without being of any use (it contains 1-2-3 keywords). It’s not relevant to the query.
11. Optimise Your Twitter Page for Google Ranks
Tweets are now indexed on SERPs. For a second time in a row, Google partnered with Twitter in 2015to get full access to the so-called Twitter firehose of thousands of tweets spread every second on the web.
Most users are not satisfied with the information a couple of hours old, hence they want the freshest piece of news they can get. No need to emphasize that you should start optimizing your tweets with fit keywords and length so to serve both your interest – of attracting readers – and users’ interest – of finding the piece of content they’re after.
12. Pay Attention to Page Speed
Having previously talked about AMP, it’s time for you to know that the common belief indicating that speed is sometimes everything has now become a regulated fact. Folks wish their questions to be answered fast; in fact, as fast as possible.
53% of visits are abandoned if a mobile site takes longer than three seconds to load. That’s a big problem.
Daniel an
Global Product Lead, Mobile Web at Google
Page speed has been used as a ranking signalfor some time now, says Google, but this year it comes with a twist – starting July 2018, page speed will not only address desktop searches but mobile searches as well. In terms of being a ranking signal, of course.
Besides, page speed primarily influences how people experience your site services, and they easily bounce off when having to wait for too much time for the page to load.
source: www.thinkwithgoogle.com
This update will mainly affect the sites offering the slowest user experience. However, the page speed ranking signal will not weigh heavier than that of great, relevant, popular content. Hence, the page can still rank high if the content is a big asset in the game.
13. Give Googlebot Access to the Code Data
Unlike in the old times, the web is now filled with a gazillion rich, complex, great websites that roll heavily on JavaScript. Google needs access to your JavaScript, CSS, and image files on your website in order to be able to see and display the page the natural way a user would see. This will help crawlers index your content better. Moreover, they say this permission benefits your context in the sense that it’s better indexed, while the pages are better rendered. Especially on mobile.
Google recommends you to use their tool Fetch as Google to allow the Googlebot to crawl your JavaScript, CSS, and image files. The cool thing is that you can see exactly the way Google renders your page and will help you know beforehand what indexing errors to avoid. Moreover, you can analyze and test your robots.txt files using Google Search Console. More on this type of files and the mistakes you should avoid lest your rankings would drop, you can find in our article.
14. Get a Listing on Google My Business
As previously said, if willing to benefit from structured data markup in Google Search or Maps, hence gain extra visibility, you should definitely use Google My Business service too.
According to Google, there are multiple benefits when opting to create a listing in Google My Business: it’s free, your business gets in the spotlight in searches, easily attract customers by simply sharing helpful information which otherwise is already on your website but not visible enough, take charge of what people (should) see when searching for your business, update your info when needed, use enticing snapshots of your business, engage online and display ratings, and build popularity and loyalty.
Google My Business mostly benefits local businesses, hence listing your brand this way should be part of your local SEO strategy.
15. Optimize for Answer Boxes
Everybody dreams of being up there, ranking no. 0 (which is higher than 1) in SERPs. The answer box is a snippet powered by Knowledge Graph, and usually offers the answer to your query often sparing you from flickering, looking for, and opening another search result. It’s like popping two times in search results – that surely must be a blessing. Results range from product information, nutritional facts, answer boxes, all-time music hits, to recipes, various uses, how-to guides, and blockbuster movies. You can even check how tooptimize your content for answer boxes.
Researchers in Canada found out the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds. Hence, if you want to really catch users’ attention and get higher rankings, target the search boxes using well-crafted content.
16. Manage Internal Linking
Even if your website isn’t quite new and Google already crawled your pages, it would be wise to check your internal links from time to time. Google comes to rescue you and lets you do a check and report on your internal links pointing to the other pages on your site using Search Console.
Linking to a certain page is vouching for their relevance, utility, and importance. It’s like a certificate of quality given to it. Hence, if a less important page on your website has more links than a more important and truly helpful one, than you should really reassess your internal linking.
17. Be Mobile-Optimized
Smartphone usage is overwhelmingly popular nowadays; the mobile searches have long overrun the desktop ones. There’s this trend now of “mobile-first” designs and updates, yet the truth lies elsewhere. You shouldn’t fit into one category or another, give to one more importance than to the other, but actually go multi-platform. That’s where the great audiences come from.
source: www.smartinsights.com
Hence, given that the web is accessed more and more on the mobile devices, it’s needless to say that you should have your website designed mobile-friendly. And here’s how Google can help you – with a mobile-friendly test tool.
Furthermore, make sure you design your site for all device types and sizes, including tablets, not only desktops and smartphones.
18. Use Synonyms in Content
This one is way simple. Google encourages us to use synonyms when writing and making a piece of content live on our pages because this serves to the greater good of having your website found in response to queries.
Synonyms are variants of the same word or phrase. Google Search is smart enough to return results that not only include the very word typed in the search bar, but also content that means the same thing as the typed-in term. It’s because Google tries hard to guess user’s intent behind the actual query. For example, if you write “professor” and one synonym for that could be “teacher”, the search engine might return results for both “professor” and its synonym “teacher”.
Google tries to understand language, not only terms in general. That’s why synonyms stand very high in Google’s eyes. They help the search engine to better sense the world surrounding users’ words and, hence, what they’d wish to receive in response to their queries. Synonyms are the bridge between users and Google bots.
It very much has to do with the fact that content has been overrun in importance by context and search experienced a facelift, now being more of a topical search than the regular one. Context makes it easier for crawlers to return relevant results to queries (or not; it depends). Here‘s where you can set to add synonyms to queries.
Knowing how Google uses context and semantically related phrases can improve the content you create and how well you optimize pages for particular queries”
Images often occupy the most visual space on the page and justify the most of the downloaded material and bytes on the web. That is whyGoogle recommendsstarting optimizing images, which most of the times is seen as both art and science. Plus, users can lose their patience waiting to download something from the web that simply wouldn’t load and have to wait for many seconds to minutes. It’s all about page speed.
The many formats available out there – GIF, PNG, JPG – ask for separate optimizations. There are multiple techniques to do that and here’s where Google comes to rescue us.
20. Switch to HTTPS
Users nowadays want and expect a secure online environment. Preventing unauthorized access to the interactions between the user and your website and encrypting it is a good practice for communication on the web. And that’s why you should secure your website with HTTPS.
If that’s not an argument enough, then maybe you listened to Google, that, starting August 6, 2014, made HTTPS as a ranking signal official. And you know why? Because another top priority to Google besides quality is security. They want to keep their users satisfied and happy, yet secure at the same time. Anyways, this ranking signal doesn’t, of course, weigh that much s high-quality content does, but it’s very important.
HTTPS is a way stronger encryption than the former one, HTTP. The former one can now prevent breaches on websites, hence Google called for HTTPS everywhere.
21. Make Sure to Use Correct Redirects
Make sure you’re using correct redirects, and those would be 301 redirects, not 302s. This is the fittest way sure to provide a clear path to correct pages for users. While a 302 redirect conveys the message of a page content “moved temporarily”, the 301 one means that a page has been permanently moved to a new place. Here’s why 301 redirects are considered (more) useful:
If you want to know how to implement a 301 redirect for your website, here‘s what Google says you should do.
22. Debug Your Pages
In order for your pages to appear in SERPs, you need to have your website crawled by Google. Many times, when doing content optimization, redirects, or content pruning, Google doesn’t immediately crawl it after you make the fix live. Yes, there are times when you can request an accelerated crawl but most times it takes a couple of days for your new content to be live.
Therefore, if you wish to rank as high as possible in search results and be sure you provide the high-quality content you know you have on your website, debug your pages. You can find herehow to do that and what tools you can use – some of them having been previously mentioned in our article: Search Console, Fetch as Google, Robots.txt Tester, AMP report, and so on.
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap, boys and gals! Try implementing the above-listed tips coming right from Google’s mouth and there’s no way you won’t benefit from them. This is definitely not a success recipe, but it’s the path to experimenting, experiencing, and eventually getting to know what’s bringing success or not.
We believe we should first do our job, and then expect miracles to happen. By following these steps, you make sure you abide by Google’s wisdom and rules and make them to like you and rank you higher in search results.
But that’s not all. You now know what Google likes, yet we haven’t told you what they don’t like at all. Avoid doing the following and you’ll surely stay out of trouble:
Take part in link schemes
Creating pages with little or no authentic content
Cloaking
Covert links and text
Auto-generated content
Underhanded redirects
Doorway pages
Scraping
Abusing rich snippets markup
Partner with affiliate websites and have no added value
Loading pages with irrelevant, stuffed keywords
Intentionally (or mistakingly) hosting pages with malicious behavior, such as phishing or installing viruses, trojans, or other (duh!)
Badware
Deliver automated queries to Google
Mic drop. But please lift it yourselves and tell us your opinion and maybe other tips you know they’re extremely important in order to make Google like you.
Imagine you run a successful digital agency, and suddenly get an urgent email from the IT department.
Turns out, an account manager who left the company months ago has continued to log into your software, moved tons of high-value clients to a sub-account, and has shut you out completely—effectively stealing your hard-earned rolodex of clients as his own.
Or, you work in a marketing team and IT has discovered an unauthorized person has logged into your SaaS tools and now has access to all of your data, payment details, and even your customers’ data, too.
Considering many businesses now run almost entirely on the internet (and the average marketer uses anywhere from 12-31 different tools), the above scenarios aren’t just unsettling—they’re not as far fetched as we’d hope. Sure they may not happen everyday, but as a marketer you need to ensure they don’t happen to you.
Whether it’s protecting your data or that of your customers, today we’re taking a closer look at security, data privacy (including the upcoming GDPR), and sharing what we’ve rolled out at Unbounce to make sure our platform doesn’t leave you scrambling.
Making your life easier, and more secure
Us marketers tend to love inviting as many users into our SaaS tools as needed (faster workflows for the win!), but user management, and other potential threats involving passwords and more can be a nightmare waiting to happen in the eyes of IT. Overall, we all need to be especially careful choosing software tools that IT can stand behind.
At Unbounce, we know you may not have the time or resources to ensure you have the latest security measures in place. And you want to be able to focus on building incredible marketing, anyway (not fretting about security).
So we’ve spent the last few months making sure we’re the most secure conversion platform out there.
We’ve rolled out a few new features to ensure you can breathe easy and focus on conversions. And we think your IT team will love them.
Introducing single sign-on
IT administrators often need centralized platforms. Being centralized helps keep track of all of the users of a given account, especially as you scale. And now you can do this with Unbounce via Google Single Sign-on (SSO).
Available on all plans, this means you can use your Google account and credentials to log into Unbounce.
In short, you can now easily manage verified users of your Unbounce account from one, central directory. Your IT manager will be over the moon :)
More built-in safeguards
Connected to single sign-on, as marketers we rarely need to consider the importance of authentication or how it works, but it roughly boils down to password requirements, access, and how IT can confirm it’s actually you logging into an app and not someone else.
Back in a less secure time, a typical password requirement workflow depended on two factors:
Something you are– i.e. your identity , confirmed via email address, and
Something you know – i.e. your password, or a security question if you’ve forgotten.
But many of the things you know, someone else might know too. Moreover, 80% of people reuse passwords across several sites. A password shared with just one site that’s been breached can be used to gain access to another site (something you need to ensure can’t happen).
Fortunately there’s a way to effectively ban this by adding a third factor to the equation with two-factor authentication (2FA). The idea behind 2FA is that accessing especially secure software now requires one extra thing:
Something you have – i.e. an authentication code you have access to via an app on your phone, for example.
Intended to make it difficult for attackers to exploit vulnerabilities (like password reuse and phishing), 2FA is the option to authenticate users’ identity with their mobile device in addition to their username and password.
Available on our Enterprise plans and above, you can now add an extra layer of protection to the login flow with an authenticator app.
Google Authenticator is very popular (accessed via your phone), but you can use any of the following in line with your company’s IT policies:
We’re now one of the only conversion marketing platforms with two-factor authentication built right in (so you don’t have to go through integrations or workarounds to comply with your IT manager’s wishes!)
Wait, who did that? (Audit logs, your new lifesaver)
Beyond accessibility to software, it’s important your organization gets complete visibility and control of user actions in the tools you use.
As one of our agency clients once joked about with us, they’d invited a client into Unbounce to preview their pages, but this particular client was always trying to get edit-access to their landing pages to make sneaky changes to suit their preferences on the fly. This was, of course, not malicious but the account owners were later scratching their heads as to why pages were magically changing, and why so many integrations were suddenly broken.
The lesson here is that, beyond being able to assign user capabilities, you need to have a high-level breakdown of what’s going on in your SaaS tools, including who does what, and when.
This is why we’ve recently introduced audit logs on enterprise plans or higher to provide admins with a detailed trail of account activity. Used in tandem with our version control feature, you can now both identify changes made to your Unbounce creations and roll back any undesired changes to previously saved pages.
Overall, an audit trail can be used to detect suspicious activity or to playback account activity during an incident review and it can be very helpful for you to have for harmless rollbacks, or larger security-related infringements.
Up ‘til now, we’ve largely covered security in this post, but we’d be remiss to not mention data privacy too. The two tend to get grouped together, but there is a difference.
While security largely tends to involve your brand’s protection, data privacy relates more holistically to the protection of the collection and dissemination of data (often related to your customers or lead’s data in a marketing context).
This is especially relevant for you because, when running virtually any marketing campaign, you collect information from individuals and then process that information.
In the case of running landing pages, popups, or sticky bars in Unbounce, we each play a role. You as the controller, and Unbouncer as a processor:
Unbounce’s Customers as Controllers You make decisions on what data you’d like to solicit and how that data is used. As the creator of a form, you’re not only deciding on what data to collect but how you plan to use that data with your marketing stack.
Our Role as a Processor Unbounce will process data on behalf of our Customers. When you use an Unbounce Form, Unbounce is doing the “behind the scenes work” to store and transfer that data.
Why is this important? Privacy concerns exist wherever personally identifiable information or other sensitive information is collected, stored, used, and finally destroyed or deleted – in digital form or otherwise. Improper or non-existent disclosure control can be the root cause for privacy issues, and it’s up to you to ensure both your data collection and the software you use to collect data is compliant.
Data privacy is especially timely now concerning GDPR.
What is GDPR?
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new data privacy law which will come into effect on May 25, 2018, impacting how businesses collect and process data from individuals who live in the European Union (EU). It’s the most significant piece of data protection legislation to be introduced in the EU in 20 years, and will replace the 1995 Data Protection Directive.
GDPR is currently a hot topic, and understandably as it will have a major impact on Unbounce and our customers. So we’re doing everything we can to keep you all up to speed on our efforts on becoming fully compliant.
Hey, I’m not in the EU, does GDPR affect me? Yes — if you have customers in the EU, plan to have customers in the EU, or process any form of EU data, this applies to you.
Unbounce takes data privacy very seriously, and we view the GDPR as an opportunity to further enhance our commitment to data protection for the benefit our customers.
Right now we’re completing a comprehensive audit of the GDPR’s requirements and identifying where we need to make modifications to our platform, contracts, and documentation.
Our top priority is ensuring that our customers have confidence in our product, and that data you collect and process in our platform for your marketing campaigns meets the GDPR, complying by the date of enforcement.
Rest easy
On a whole, security or data privacy threats involving SaaS tools are like insurance. You hope you never have to worry about them, but you need to be prepared all the same.
We’re excited to be able to provide industry-leading security for you, and we’ll always work to alleviate issues of security and data privacy, so you can focus on campaigns.
Yesterday, Google released a pair of new tools designed to help businesses compare their mobile site speed to that of other websites and estimate the potential revenue lost due to poor mobile performance, respectively.
The aptly named Speed Scorecard (depicted above) sources data from Chrome User Experience Reports to surface insights about, you guessed it, speed. It allows you to enter your domain and that of just about any other business and instantly receive a speed score (we’ll get to exactly what ‘speed’ is in a bit).
The Impact Calculator takes that speed figure and a handful of additional inputs—average monthly visitors, average order value, and conversion rate—and uses that data in concert with an interactive sliding scale to estimate the potential revenue impact of improving mobile site speed.
Today, we’re going to take an in-depth look at both free tools and discuss how they can be used to lower cost and improve performance in your AdWords account. But first…
More Mobile?!
Yup.
Last December, Google began moving towards a mobile-first indexing in an effort to make the mobile version of websites into the “source of truth,” at least as far as the search engine is concerned.
And since January 1, we’ve seen Google unleash an onslaught of mobile-centric features and tools designed to declutter and improve the on handheld devices. From Chrome’s baked-in ad blocker to AMP-based creative outlets and more, one thing’s clear: Google understands users’ unyielding desire for faster, better browsing, and is making it easier for businesses to identify ways to improve their site performance and content on mobile devices.
Using Google’s Mobile Speed Scorecard
Google, internet-aggregator extraordinaire, knows that you, me, the guy who lives at the end of the hall, the three kids bouncing a tennis ball off your car for fun, we’ve all got something in common: we aren’t going to wait around for a website to load, especially if we’re on our phones.
While it might sound like a reskinned version of the mobile PageSpeed tool Google released in tandem with its Speed Update at the beginning of February, the Speed Scorecard is another beast entirely. Its primary differentiator is that it gives you the ability to see how your site compares to your competition.
Above the Speed Scoreboard, you’re asked to select your country and whether you would like your speed based on 3G or 4G metrics, like so:
Google recommends that, on middle-of-the-road mobile devices, your website loads within five seconds on 3G and 3 seconds on 4G, respectively. In the event you’re, say, Sports Illustrated (8 seconds on 4G, yikes), you’ve got some work to do.
Currently, 12 countries can be selected. These include:
Australia
Canada
France
Germany
India
Italy
Japan
Netherlands
Spain
Sweden
United Kingdom
United States
Once you’ve selected your country and network speed, you’ll need to input your domain and those of up to 9 competitors (according to my calculations, that means you can get a speed score for 10 domains simultaneously):
Now, it’s worth mentioning here that the “speed” column is not determined by a guy with a stopwatch. Instead, it’s an aggregate score made up of three metrics that, frankly, go above my pay grade. So here’s what Google has to say about them…
“No single metric perfectly captures mobile site speed and user experience. As such, the ranking methodology is based on a combination of three metrics as reported across mobile devices by the CrUX Report: First Contentful Paint, DomContentLoaded and Onload. The site speed metric shows the 90th percentile of First Contentful Paint from the CrUX report. However, since rank is based on multiple metrics rather than on First Contentful Paint alone, sites with slower First Contentful Paint times may rank higher than sites with faster First Contentful Paint times.”
Might as well be Latin, right?
Basically, this says that your site speed is based on three metrics: First Contentful Paint, DomContentLoaded, and Onload. You should also know that, in the event one of the domains you’d like to research doesn’t show up, it’s due to the fact that the Speed Scorecard’s dataset is reliant on “a subset of sites from the CrUX Report; if Google doesn’t know you—or your nemeses—you’re not going to get much utility out of the tool.
Translating the Impact Calculator
“Even a one-second improvement could increase conversions.”
That sounds ridiculous, right? The sort of whimsical grift foisted on fledgling #marketers two internships and a few hundred High Life’s from a degree in [field]. But watch…
While poor mobile experience agitates the hell out of site visitors, it also has the capacity to bleed your business. Google’s Impact Calculator uses benchmark data to tell you if site speed is a splinter in your business’s thumb or a lost limb.
Once your mobile site speed has been determined, Google will automatically pull that figure, along with your domain, into the Impact Calculator:
The other three fields required to make the tool go—average monthly visitors, average order value, and conversion rate—are a bit trickier to get ahold of. While you can certainly estimate these figures or input random numbers just for the fun of watching that dollar figure 10x itself, you’re better off operating with, you know, actual data.
Average monthly visitors can be pulled easily in Google Analytics—or AdWords, for that matter. If you’d like to focus exclusively on paid traffic, simply use clicks to your site from mobile devices—just be sure to segment your data so that you’re only looking at mobile traffic.
Average Order Value is a bit trickier.
If you run an ecommerce site, head into Google Analytics. Under “Conversion,” click “Overview.”
From here, click “All Users” at the top of the page and check the box for “Mobile Traffic” instead.
This’ll change the Average Order Value metric below to reflect only mobile traffic.
For lead generation, you’ll need to get a bit more creative. Consider the average value of a sale, then your average conversion rate on mobile devices. If you multiply these two figures, you’ll have the approximate value of a lead generated from mobile site traffic.
Finally, if you don’t already know your site’s conversion rate on mobile devices, head back to GA, go to Conversions > Goals > Overview, then segment out mobile traffic as you did to determine Average monthly visitors.
Once you’ve got all this data on deck, enter it into the Impact Calculator to determine how much more bread you could make by improving mobile site speed.
Gosh, whoever owns allenfinn.com is really missing out…
Is Your AdWords Account Mobile-Friendly?
While the Speed Scorecard and Impact Calculator are designed to give you information that can be leveraged to improve performance for all mobile users, not making life easier for traffic you’re paying for is straight up tomfoolery.
Luckily, Google makes it simple to figure out whether or not your landing pages are mobile-friendly.
Per Google, "Mobile-friendly click rate is the percentage of mobile clicks on the Search Network that go to a mobile-friendly page.” Note that, if your use of the Speed Scorecard and Impact Calculator have inspired you to make changes to your mobile landing pages, it’ll take up to two weeks for Google to refresh this data in AdWords.
Why does this matter?
A better landing page experience means a better Quality Score, which means lower CPCs, which means more clicks, which means more conversions, which means more opportunities to make money, which makes the likelihood of you riding off into the sunset on a yacht before you turn 45 pretty much a mortal lock.
The Bottom Line
Stop dissuading potential customers with a slow website. Stop leaving money on the table. Be faster on phones.
Marketing predictions for 2018 might be a dime a dozen, but we have something a little better than a crystal ball backing up our look into the future. Let’s face it, if you’re going to take anyone’s advice, it might as well be the marketing experts and thought leaders who are helping to write the 2018 story right now.
Conductor co-founder & CEO Seth Besmertnik and Seer Interactive founder Wil Reynolds have quite a few decades of combined marketing experience, and a shared passion for predicting the future of the industry. They sat down with Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose to discuss what’s on the horizon (listen to the full conversation here). All that’s left for you to do is to take their marketing predictions and run with them for a successful 2018.
Feather headdress optional.
Prediction #1: SEOs & Content Marketers Will Report Straight to the C-Suite
The long-term value that comes from well-optimized content – in terms of engagement, brand awareness, and, of course, revenue – should be an easy sell. Unfortunately, words like “ranking” and “crawlability” have been tougher to translate into eye-catching, CEO-friendly reports. No longer.
Robert Rose’s first prediction for 2018 is that executives will start taking an increased, direct interest in SEO and content marketing.
As reporting gets easier, long-term efforts bear fruit, and proving ROI simplifies, there are fewer and fewer barriers to executive buy-in for SEO & content. Besmertnik has seen this firsthand – he’s had more meetings with Fortune 500 CEOs curious about SEO in the last nine months than in the first ten years of Conductor’s existence. And that’s not just anecdotal – according to Conductor’s recent survey, a majority of execs say they’ll increase their focus on SEO and content in 2018:
This presents a serious opportunity for SEOs and content marketers, as increased interest means increased investment. The money brought in by content and SEO practices will start being reinvested in those departments, which means content marketing efforts will scale up. What will your team do with that extra budget?
What every marketer longs to hear from their CEO.
That’s an exciting question, but it also presents a newfound responsibility.Use executive interest in content marketing and SEO as an opportunity to educate execs about SEO, keywords, and what resources you need, but keep in mind that reporting to a CEO is different from reporting to an SEO director. Will Reynolds points out that SEOs and content marketers will have to translate the metrics of SEO into the metrics of the c-suite; that is, dollars and cents – literally.
“How do we better translate down to dollars and cents?” Reynolds asks. “Because if you don’t… someone’s going to look over at the PPC team and say, ‘they told me if I spent 10 grand they’d bring in a hundred. I think I’m just gonna go there, because that’s an easier thing for me to get my hands around."” Reynolds will even compare the number of dollar signs in his PPC team’s reports to those from his SEO team. Currently, it’s an 8:1 ratio – something that SEOs will have to change if they want to convince CEOs.
Prediction #2: “SEO” Will Just Become “Marketing”
The second marketing prediction for 2018 comes from Seth Besmertnik: SEO will become more integrated into the mainstream marketing team, Besmertnik will sometimes tell customers, “There’s no more SEO you need to do. Go make your site better instead.” Google’s determination of whether or not a page actually provides value to customers has gotten so advanced that it’s not just about keywords anymore – if your site has a bad experience, or your content is poorly written, Google can tell.
No cheating on this test.
As more and more content jobs require SEO skills, search marketing will cease to be relegated to the technical corner of the team. While doing SEO, Will Reynolds will often recruit volunteer customers to search for a product on Google, and ask what would make their experience better. That’s SEO now, too. That’s because SEO is a strong indicator of what customers actually want, and whether or not your brand is providing them with content, products, and services that align with that.
This isn’t necessarily an easy thing to accomplish inside an organization. SEOs need to evangelize their process within the company. But SEO success is like a snowball rolling down a hill, gaining weight over time. Those results are hard to ignore – especially as SEO becomes more diffused into the rest of the org’s actions.
And what’s precipitated this shift? The fact that…
Prediction #3: Your Customer is the Only Algorithm That Matters
Will Reynolds’ final marketing prediction for 2018 brings all of this together: Customers must come first, both in business and in SEO. That means a customer-driven, quality-over-quantity approach is crucial for any search marketer looking to make a dent in the market. You should be writing and creating content for people, not machines.
Robert Rose points out the primary question we should be asking as marketers, at all times: How do we provide value to our customers? You’re not writing it for Google, because Google is really just trying to provide the best solution to questions people ask online. Answer questions people are asking. Add value and be helpful.
Conductor customer Madison Reed sells at-home hair color products. As a smaller company with a small marketing team, you might think they’d be hopelessly outmatched against the Revlons of the world. And yet when you search for “hair color,” one of the top keywords for that industry, they outrank Garnier and L’Oréal.
It’s nice to win.
Why? Because their content, a quiz to find your perfect hair color, is more useful to customers than the product pages of their competitors, which are the only other pages that rank. This is customer-first marketing at its finest: help the most people, and you will rank the highest.
Reynolds drives this point home: “every query someone types in isn’t search volume,” he says. “It’s a person trying to solve a problem.” While observing a user searching for “rent-to-own laptops,” his team met an elderly woman who, rather than having bad credit (the presumed user profile for rent-to-own searches) said she was on a fixed income and needed to budget carefully. That made his team more empathetic for everyone they could serve on that project – and empathy is what great marketing requires.
There are plenty of marketing predictions for 2018 out there, but the most important thing to keep in mind is this: as long as you’re putting customers first, you’re on the right track. Let that be your north star in all your marketing endeavors.
Want to hear from these thought leaders up close? Join us for C3 2018, this March 7-8 in New York City.
Imagine you run a successful digital agency, and suddenly get an urgent email from the IT department.
