In this session, Michel will discuss:

• The main traffic channels that truly move the needle
• What actually converts visitors (hint: it’s not just “more leads”)
• How to align usability, messaging, and strategy into one clear system

If you care about conversion, clarity, and real growth — this is worth the watch. To schedule a 30 min FREE consultation with Michel to create your own marketing strategy, email her at michel@cuecamp.com.

Watch the Webinar Recording:

View Slides:

The post Traffic to Customers, A Marketing Strategy That Converts (Webinar Recording) appeared first on CueCamp.

It’s important to know the fundamentals of Google’s search ranking system before we get into the strategies. At its most basic, Google searches the web for all the different pages available, then picks the ones it thinks best fit the particular search being asked. When it does this, it tries to evaluate not just the content of the page but also the reasons why that content might be a good fit. Five different “conversational” factors guide this evaluation. The first is relevance: Does the content match the searching user’s intent? Next is quality: Is the content informative, engaging, and well-structured? Then comes authority: How credible is the site? Often, this is determined by how many other trustworthy sites link to it. After that comes user experience: Is the site easy to use, mobile-friendly, and fast? And finally, what about engagement metrics: Are users interacting with this site in a way that suggests it’s a good fit for what they’re searching for? Focusing on these factors can give your site a better shot at showing up higher in Google search results.

How to Outrank Competitors: An SEO Primer

At the core of a prosperous digital marketing strategy, there must be Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. This is primer SEO for you:

1. Research Your Keywords: Unearth the search terms your ideal customers are using and blend them seamlessly into your content.
2. On-Page SEO: Dial in title tags, meta descriptions, headers, and images. More important, ensure that your content has a clear hierarchy and is effortlessly scannable for our friends at Google as well as for your humans.
3. Quality Content: Write something for heaven’s sake. Make it worthwhile, make it useful, make it easy to digest, and, for the love of all that is good, make it engaging.

Link Building Strategies

Links pointing to your content from respectable websites show Google that your content is high quality and trustworthy. Here are some ways to get those links pointing back to your website to help you outrank competitors:

1. Write for Other Blogs: Find reputable blogs in your industry. Write articles for them. Include a link back to your site in the article.
2. Work with Other Businesses: Find businesses in your industry or a related one to partner with. Work with them to cross-promote your businesses.
3. Research: Conduct studies that are important to your industry. Write articles about those studies. Do so in a way that makes them sound interesting and in a way that also makes them shareable.

User Experience and Perception

Your search rankings can be substantially affected—positively or negatively—by how users perceive your site. There are several ways to make a perceivable impact on how users interact with your website, and thus how they perceive it. First, see to it that your website is equally responsive on both desktop and mobile devices, as more and more people are using smartphones to access the internet. Second, check to ensure that your site is loading quickly. A variety of tools exist to help you identify issues and fix them, if any are found. Finally, have a look at your site from the perspective of a first-time user and ask yourself whether or not navigating through your content is a straightforward experience.

Local Search & Google My Business

It is vital for local businesses to optimize their websites for local search so that they can be found by prospective customers in their area. Here are several steps you can take:

1. Google My Business: Your listing can be a local search engine. Ensuring its optimization can push your appearance in local search results.
2. Local Keyword Usage: Google is smart but not necessarily as smart as your content. You need to signal to it that your content is about something locally relevant.
3. Customer Reviews: Good reviews don’t just help your business look good; they also can help place your business in local search results.

Social Media Tips

Although social media signals might not have a direct effect on SEO, these can drive significant traffic to a website and boost brand visibility. Making the most of social media is a worthwhile endeavor, and it’s possible by doing these three things:

1. Be Engaging: Share not just your content but also engage with your audience, and even have conversations with them. For some brands, it might make sense to only be present on one or two platforms. For others, six might be too many and one might be just right.
2. Be Promotional: Use ads to target specific, fairly narrowed-down demographic segments.
3. Be Collaborative: With whom and with what can you be a part of? Use your platforms to engage with the potential audience on the other end of your collaborators.

At CueCamp, our focus is on expanding the online visibility of businesses such as yours. We accomplish this, in part, through custom website design, but primarily, we engage in a much more detailed and exhaustive practice known as SEO. SEO—that is, Search Engine Optimization—can be thought of as a (more or less) scientific process. It involves (again, more or less) some fairly straightforward math and, more often than not, some “hidden” multipliers that many of your competitors either don’t know about or, if they do, aren’t using to their fullest advantage.

Prevent your competitors from getting all the attention. Reach out to Michel Sharritt at michel@cuecamp.com to set up your no-cost consultation. We’ll get you started on the path to much better placement in Google search results and much greater visibility online.

The post How Can You Outrank Competitors in Google Search Results? appeared first on CueCamp.

Instagram Hashtag Research

Businesses strive to engage potential customers on social media, with Instagram being a key component of social media marketing campaigns. Besides engaging your audience, Instagram is useful for conducting hashtag research that informs your marketing strategy on a broader level. For instance, researching trending topics can inform your overall marketing strategy, and influence of your marketing campaigns. These trending topics can help you generate content for websites, blog posts, and emails. In addition, you can find engaging content for social media platforms besides Instagram, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. Conducting hashtag research can help you reach, engage, and target potential customers at a higher level.

In this article, we’ll show some of the best ways to conduct hashtag research to encourage interaction. Additionally, we will present guidelines for generating engaging Instagram posts that yield results. The following section will look at ways to identify potential influencers that matter for your business and industry. Finally, we will discuss ways to research hashtag competitiveness to generate content of higher relevancy for your audience.

Influencers and Trending Hashtags

Influencer marketing is experiencing a boom, and is a driving force in social media. In fact, estimates suggest influencer marketing is a $13.8 billion industry this year. Over 63% of marketers intending to increase their marketing budget this year. Most importantly, the return-on-investment (ROI) of influencer marketing is approximately $5.20 for every $1 spent, according to Influencer Marketing Hub.

How can you use influencer marketing as part of your hashtag research strategy? Influencers and industry leaders, especially those most relevant to your business, can help you discover up and coming topics that are trending in your industry. Discovering these topics can help your business participate in discussions and generate content on social media channels: providing authority, credibility and relevance to your brand. Whether it being a funny meme, or a temporary interest, it is important to stay up to date on what is changing in your industry, and create engaging content before it is passé. In other words, don’t be late to the party, and get in on the topic while interest is growing.

Competitor Analysis in Hashtag Research

A great way to discover hashtags that are important in your industry is by doing a competitor analysis. While the direct competitors of your business may have a great social media strategy, it is important to realize that many of your local competitors may not have a good strategy at all, which should be evident by their posts and related engagement. Regularly checking in on social media to see what your competitors are doing can help you see trends over time, and which competitors are more successfully growing and engaging their audience. Besides local competitors to your business, a larger search may reveal other brands with successful social media marketing strategies.

As you discover successful brands and marketing campaigns, you can modify your own strategies. Spending some time browsing competitor’s posts can show you what works well, and what does not. While doing competitor research and searching for hashtags, you can follow hashtags that are relevant for your business and industry. This allows you to keep tabs on competitors and see new content that uses that hashtag.

How to Research Related Hashtags

Looking up related hashtags on Instagram is easy. When using the Instagram search bar, a search will show ‘Tags’ as a tab underneath. Clicking this tab (‘Tags’) will show related hashtags to the search, as shown below.

In the above example, a search for ‘#coffee’ reveals related hashtags, such as ‘#coffeebar’ or ‘#coffeeshop’, as well as others like ‘#coffeeart’ or ‘#coffeelovers’. This is a great way to find related hashtags, along with their frequency of use. Depending on the nature of the business and industry, some of the suggestions may be more relevant than others. For instance, a business in the furniture industry might be more interested in the ‘#coffeetable’ hashtag above.

Besides looking up related hashtags to a search, you can find related hashtags by browsing posts on Instagram. When looking through posts of interest, you can follow or save some of the hashtags found in the post description (and post comments) as related keywords of interest for future use.

Using Branded Hashtags, Product Hashtags, and Brand Mentions

Custom-branded hashtags (or product hashtags) can create good branding for a business or product. While an audience for these hashtags does not exist until their creation, they can serve as a way for a business to claim and brand a particular hashtag for others to follow. Businesses and their followers can then use these custom hashtags in every relevant post, and encourage their use as shown in the post below.

In the above example, an Instagram influencer mentioned a fellow brand (@gopuff) and also used their custom-branded hashtag (#GopuffChicago). This provides a means for others to both follow the brand (@gopuff), as well as follow posts tagged with #GopuffChicago. This branded hashtag helps those in the Chicago area follow posts that are more relevant to their local area.

Competitiveness, Popularity, and Relevancy

Similar to keyword research, hashtag research involves searching and sorting phrases that achieve a balance of popularity and relevancy for the post, and brand. Using a small handful of relevant hashtags is effective, as is posting additional hashtags in the post’s first comment. The following example shows how to limit hashtags in the post (to not look like spam). Additionally, the comments section is used to target more hashtags not used in the original post.

Using Popular Hashtags

Using hashtags with millions of posts is more likely to reach a large audience. However, a post can become buried in the large amount of other posts using that same hashtag. Those following the hashtag (with millions of posts) are therefore less likely to see your post. Alternatively, the use of hashtags with smaller numbers of posts (or followers) is more likely to reach that smaller audience. So, how does one go about choosing hashtags for their posts? In one word, relevancy.

Content (Relevancy) Is King

When posting content meant to engage an audience, marketers should always focus on the relevancy of their content. As stated, this involves choosing hashtags that balance popularity and relevancy, so that posts reach an audience that matters. Often, using highly-used hashtags will result in lots of spam in the comments, as the audience is too broad. Using smaller-audience, more relevant keywords that corelate to the content are more likely to engage and attract customers to a business.

Summary

When conducting hashtag research, marketers must use discretion. When choosing the most relevant keywords (and hashtags) for their brand, marketers determine the content (and reach) of their posts. Popular hashtags lend more exposure, but are often seen by a less-relevant audience than smaller-volume hashtags of a niche audience. While the latter is more relevant to the content and industry, a balance must be struck between reach and relevancy.

By following your competitors, discovering interesting hashtags that are relevant to your business, and testing ideas in the Instagram search bar, you can find trends in your industry that generate interest and engagement for your business. If you can share any of your successes or failures on Instagram, or any experiences from your own hashtag research, we would love to hear from you in the comments below. If you have questions on hashtag research or social media marketing, please reach out to the experts at CueCamp today.

Written by: Matthew Sharritt, Ph.D. (Founder, CueCamp)

The post How to Create Engaging Social Media Marketing Content Using Instagram Hashtag Research appeared first on CueCamp.