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:

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Why You Should Check It Out

• Link-Building Strategies: Proven techniques for acquiring quality backlinks that enhance your site’s authority and increase organic search visibility.
• Keyword Research: How to identify the best keywords for your business and incorporate them effectively into your content to drive targeted traffic.
• On-Page Optimization: The essentials of SEO, including on-page SEO and optimizing titles, meta descriptions, headers, and images to improve search engine rankings.

About the Speaker: Michel Ann Sharritt

Cue Camp, Founder and Vice President

Michel Sharritt, a leader in playability and usability, has over a decade of experience helping Fortune 100/500 companies like Microsoft, Disney, and Sony create engaging, accessible, and successful products. An expert in game design and user experience, Michel has presented globally and published extensively on usability, accessibility, and design methodologies.

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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.

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1. Make Navigation Simple and Intuitive

Navigation is a critical component of UX. Visitors should be able to find what they are looking for quickly and easily. A well-designed navigation menu should be simple, clear, and intuitive. Consider using clear and concise language, organized categories, and a hierarchical structure that guides visitors to the information they need. Want a research-driven report on your website for free? Ask CueCamp for a free UX analysis of your website.

2. Use High-Quality Visual Content

Visual content, such as images and videos, can be extremely impactful in engaging visitors and improving UX. High-quality visual content can help visitors better understand the information being presented and can break up large blocks of text, making it easier to read. When selecting images and videos, be sure to choose high-quality, relevant content that supports your message.

3. Provide Relevant and Valuable Content

The content of your website is one of the most important aspects of UX. Make sure your content is relevant to your target audience and provides value to them. This can include information about your products or services, blog posts, and resources such as how-to guides or eBooks. Keep your content updated and consider using a content management system to make it easy to manage and update your website’s content.

4. Make Sure Your Website is Mobile-Friendly

With the increasing use of mobile devices, it is more important than ever to make sure your website is mobile-friendly. A mobile-friendly website should be optimized for smaller screens, with easy-to-use navigation and clear, concise content. Consider using responsive design to ensure that your website looks great on any device.

5. Optimize for Speed

Website speed is a critical component of UX. Visitors expect websites to load quickly and will quickly become frustrated if a website takes too long to load. Make sure your website is optimized for speed by using a fast hosting service, compressing images and other media, and using a content delivery network (CDN) if necessary.

6. Consider User Feedback

Finally, it’s important to consider user feedback when designing and improving your website. Ask for feedback from your customers, friends, and family and use this feedback to make changes to your website that will improve the user experience. You can also use analytics tools to track how visitors are using your website and make changes based on the data.

In conclusion, improving the user experience for your website can have a significant impact on the success of your business. Free tools are available to review your website’s UX, such as CueCamp’s free user experience analysis. By following these tips, small business owners can create a website that is user-friendly, visually appealing, and provides value to their visitors. In doing so, they can increase website traffic, customer loyalty, and overall business growth.

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1. Find Your Best-Selling Products

First, conduct a bit of research on your business to find out what sells the best. You may already know this intuitively, but research into actual sales figures and profit margins will be of use. In certain cases, great-selling products or services may not generate income for your business due to slim profit margins. Alternatively, you may wish to prioritize other products / services with less traffic, but higher margins.

Additionally, consult your website and social media analytics to see what actually interests your audience. Particular landing pages or social media posts may receive more traffic than you realize, which is worth noting. You might start by examining a subset of products or services, focusing efforts to generate powerful landing pages that convert. Certain businesses (such as an e-commerce clothing store) may have hundreds of products with a different type of sales cycle. Understanding how and why your customers buy from you will help in the design of good landing pages. For example, an online clothing store with $20 items will have a shorter sales cycle than stores selling $1000+ items.

Finally, to help refine your list, a business SWOT analysis can highlight both successful and problematic areas to change. A SWOT analysis looks at Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats: serving as a lens to examine your business. A brief analysis of these four categories reveals products or services that need attention and a marketing redesign. In addition, opportunities for growth are typically revealed that can help improve your digital marketing efforts.

2. Design Attention-Grabbing Landing Pages

Following the analysis done in step 1, you can focus on designing landing pages that grab the attention of your customers. The SWOT analysis (from step 1) will clarify the unique value proposition of your business. Leveraging what sets you apart from your competitors will dramatically improve your marketing. Drawing the attention of your clients to these unique properties will show why they should buy your product or service. Focusing on what it can do for clients (from their perspective) supplies a compelling reason to make a purchase. Be sure to present a powerful, unique value proposition.

For example, when Apple, Inc. releases a new product, they market it clearly with their users in mind. Rather than listing out technical specs first, Apple makes use of vibrant imagery from actual product usage, showing us what the product can do. For instance, iPhone marketing will headline how it is capable of low-light photography, and show crisp images taken in low-light. These may include someone blowing out birthday candles in the dark or sitting around a campfire at night. These contextual examples help people imagine what owning the new product might be like. Concrete examples show users what they can do themselves with the product.

Other phone manufacturers may try to tout superior hardware in their product (such as the camera’s F-stop or shutter speed; or more powerful hardware specifications). However, Apple creates a compelling reason to buy through examples of use, using storytelling and vibrant imagery. Finally, a clear call-to-action is presented: a button to ‘buy’ the product. This enables users to enjoy the described benefits of ownership, as conveyed by their marketing and storytelling.

3. Create a Powerful Call-to-Action for Lead Generation

A good strategy for designing landing pages is to place yourself in the shoes of a typical customer. Make sure that marketing content speaks to your customer’s goals and desires. Do not communicate from your own perspective. Tell a story or show an example of a client using the product or service to communicate from their perspective. Rather than starting with what you offer, addresses how you meet their wants and needs first. This helps prospective clients imagine themselves using your product or service while raising social capital.

Once you’ve created compelling landing pages for your top products or services, what can you do to raise conversion rates? Analyzing your marketing for clear calls to action will shed light on whether you are compelling your audience to take further action. Frequently, we want customers to make a purchase. However, most business models and sales cycles are not this straightforward. Often, businesses want their prospects to ‘take the next step’ and reach out. This may be requesting users to send a message or call the business. If this is the case, the call-to-action should be as straightforward and simple as possible.

What is the End Goal for Lead Generation?

For each landing page, decide on the best ‘next step’ for your sales cycle and for lead generation. Then, focus on making that process as simple as possible. In other words, analyze the landing page at a macro and micro level to be sure the process is easy. Want users to reach out? If so, a short form at the bottom of the page may be best for lead generation. Asking users to fill out a long form will probably cause many of them to fall off the bandwagon. Too many form fields can cause users to question why so much of their personal information is needed. Or it may simply annoy them by having to spend too much time filling out the form.

To conclude, this step should focus on compelling your prospects to act and making that action as easy as possible. Analyzing the user experience (UX) of the landing page is an excellent way to see what needs improvement. Streamlining your landing page UX and fixing issues will result in better lead generation. Business processes might be considered as well, including how transactions are managed. If users fill out a form, who gets it? Integrating forms with a CRM tool (software for customer-relationship management) could be a smart decision. A good place to start might be with a free UX audit from CueCamp.

4. Analyze & Create Resources of Interest

Take a multi-pronged approach to your digital marketing and create interest by offering resources to potential customers. Using the list generated in step 1, think about any resources that might help your customers engage with your business. For instance, a marketing company might realize that their audience often wants to learn about email marketing basics. In this example, creating a short guide as a downloadable PDF will capture prospects. Asking users to fill out a short form (name, company, email address) will capture leads for future prospecting.

Downloadable guides, e-books, blog posts, interactive workshops, and how-to videos are a handful of resources that you can use to generate interest. These efforts support a digital marketing strategy that makes an effective use of your website as a lead generation machine.

5. Newsletters and Social Media Posts

A monthly newsletter with valuable information or discounts may be a way to stay connected with customers, without overwhelming them with too many messages. A proper balance of touchpoints, with high quality information, is key. Email newsletters can offer resources of interest, upcoming sales, or industry news. In cases, segmenting your email marketing list will allow more personalized, customized email marketing to your audience. For instance, if you own an online clothing store, emails might be personalized based on gender, shopping habits, or other interests. As shown above, emails can be sent to customers that did not complete their purchase with an incentive to do so. An analysis of your marketing strategy and business objectives will clarify the type of resources you can offer for the highest impact.

Similarly, social media can be an effective way to draw people to engage with your brand. Like newsletters, a suitable amount of content for your business will help generate quality conversions. Posting low-quality content daily can overwhelm those following your brand, causing users to unfollow you on social media. Alternatively, posting too infrequently can cause a loss of interest. Analyzing your business objectives and designing a social media strategy to create a buzz for your business will draw prospective clients to your website. Additionally, hashtag research can separate your audience by interest, demographics, and location: enabling you to deliver personalized content to their social media feed.

6. Use Paid Ads & SEO for Lead Generation

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is concerned with optimizing landing pages (and websites) to rank highly on Google search. According to Google, the first five organic search results capture over 67% of all clicks. If your website ranks below the first page or search results, SEO can help improve your search rank to capture more traffic, which leads to more sales. Further, SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media, according to BrightEdge. Optimizing your website for keywords of high relevancy has a drastic impact on the traffic driven to your business website from search engines like Google.

The steps outlined above support an overall content marketing strategy, which aims to drive quality traffic to your website and drive business growth. Besides organic search rank, you can place ads on Google to get to the top of search results. Likewise, social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn will generate prospects and drive traffic to your website. Enabling retargeting / remarketing on your paid ads will push ads to users that previously interacted with your brand. Retargeting users is based on their analytics data. These users are more likely to convert based on their earlier interest in your brand.

Summary

Digital marketing efforts are driven by both quantity and quality. Focusing on both the quality (your website / landing page user-experience) and quantity of leads (your inbound marketing efforts) will generate success. To make your website a lead generation machine, the six steps described in this article will help you reach that goal.

Incorporating a multi-pronged marketing approach across social media, search engines, and paid ads will drive new prospects to your website. What happens once they reach your landing page is up to you, and the user experience provided on your website. For a user experience analysis of your website, you can request a free audit from CueCamp.

Depending on your business, a range of marketing touch points are needed before a prospect becomes a qualified sales lead. When possible, personalized content of high relevancy is more likely to convert a prospect. High-quality content, delivered on a regular cadence, results in a website that will engage your prospects. Crafting a content marketing strategy to achieve this goal will turn your website into a lead generation machine.

Written by: Matt Sharritt, Ph.D., Founder, CueCamp

The post 6 Easy Steps That Will Make Your Website a Lead Generation Machine appeared first on CueCamp.

Marketers must use discretion and choose to create the most relevant content for their brand and business. This requires research into the popularity of keywords to determine which are too competitive, and which present opportunities. Often, ranking higher for niche keywords that are more pertinent to your business can yield impressive results.

How does this affect your content marketing strategy? Content marketing is concerned with creating fresh, attractive, and useful content for your target audience. This content draws potential clients to your website or social media channels to engage with your brand. This in turn drives brand awareness, engages you with your target market, and drives revenue.

Content Marketing Stats to Know

As previously mentioned, content marketing drives business results, and supports the attraction of new customers. According to HubSpot, 47% of buyers will look at three to five pieces of content before reaching out to a sales representative. In addition, 82% of marketers report actively using content marketing this year, compared to 70% last year. Content can take the form of blog articles, social media marketing, videos, webinars, and emails. Higher quality content, along with pertinent information for your audience, will result in higher quality leads. With that in mind, how can you find content that matters to your audience?

Content Marketing Tools to Find Topics that Matter

Following are three of the best tools to find topics for content marketing, which all make use of Google search. Research on your competitors will help identify what your industry peers are doing. Google’s Keyword Planner can show the popularity of keywords and view their bid range, which helps determine competitiveness. Finally, industry influencers (those of prominence in your industry) can be great sources of trending topics. You can research trends on Google search, and social media platforms (like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter).

1. Competitor Research

Researching your competitors can show you what your industry peers are doing with their marketing efforts. This presents opportunities to see industry trends, and spot gaps in content that your business might use to its advantage.

As shown in the above example, searching Google for local businesses (e.g., “seo companies near me”) results in a list of local businesses to inform your business. Use of the “near me” in the search query will yield local results on Google. Typically, ads will appear first (not in the screenshot), followed by organic search results (in the above screenshot). Clicking through the list will help you discover both companies and indexes related to your search. In the above example, many of the results are landing pages that rank SEO companies, rather than actual SEO companies. These indexing websites (such as Yelp) create an opportunity for businesses to build citations that link back to their business. This can increase exposure by being added to the list, as well as raise ranks by creating additional backlinks to your website (a factor in Google search rank).

As shown above, Google attempts to interpret a search by offering related questions to the search query. In the above “people also ask” section, a user can click the questions for quick answers. These answers are in the form of a snippet of an article that Google ranks highly on the topic. They also present an additional strategy to rank on Google for content marketers.

2. Google Keyword Planner

As shown below, Google offers a powerful content marketing tool to help content strategists find interesting topics for their industry. In the example below, simply starting with a search for ‘pizza oven’ and ‘bbq’ yields many related keywords. Some of these results can then inform a content marketing strategy.

Google’s Keyword Planner, a tool from Google Ads, shows search data for keywords of interest. Content marketers can research a keyword’s search popularity (average monthly searches, and change over time), current competition, and bid range. This information can be especially useful to examine to inform a content marketing strategy. This data can help explain what your competitors are doing, and the difficulty to rank for those keywords. Keywords with high competition are often more difficult to rank high, while less-competitive keywords may present an opportunity. Less-competitive keywords, of high relevancy to your business, may present an opportunity to rank highly.

Long-tail keywords, or those that are usually longer phrases than commonly used keywords, can be powerful components of your content marketing strategy. These types of keywords are more specific, and typically have a lower volume, but can be of higher relevancy. This results in higher conversion rates, as they are more specific and relevant to your potential clients.

3. Industry Trends and Influencers

Popular marketers, individuals, and brands can start trends in your industry. It is important to keep informed of industry news and events to stay current and build your content marketing strategy. Social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are great places to follow industry leaders and topics (such as Instagram hashtags). Searching a trending topic, news, or upcoming event are great ways to generate ideas for your marketing strategy. If a topic is relevant to your industry, it’s important to partake so you present yourself as an industry leader. Industry trends can be formal or informal, such as a meme on social media. Participate early, as to not appear ‘late to the party’ or out of touch with your industry.

Google Search Rank

According to BrightEdge, 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Sparktoro reports that 92.96% of global traffic coming from Google Search, Google Images, and Google Maps.

Ranking Content

Ranking your content as high as possible is very important for your business. In fact, the first five organic search results account for over 67% of all clicks. Likewise, only 0.78% of Google searchers click on results from the 2nd page, according to Backlinko. The generation of content that ranks high is of critical importance for all businesses. However, some keywords and content are very difficult to rank highly, as the space is very competitive.

For instance, searching Google for ‘restaurants’ is very competitive, as there are many restaurants. This makes it difficult to rank very high for this term, although paid ads may help (discussed below). Attempting to rank for generic search queries may not be in the best interest of the business.

Google My Business / Local Businesses

Detailed search queries are typically more useful to a user than searching for something generic like ‘restaurants’ in Google. In fact, 69.7% of search queries contain four words or more, according to Ahrefs. In the following example, a user looking for ‘pizza delivery Naperville’ receives results highly relevant to their search location.

Searching for something like ‘pizza delivery Naperville’ instead of ‘restaurants’ produces a list of local pizza delivery restaurants. In this case, a user was probably looking for a pizza place that delivers near their location (Naperville, Illinois). This produces more relevant results for the users. Based upon the search query, Google will look for local businesses ranked by popularity and quality.

Many factors are factored into Google search results for local businesses. Google My Business is a way for businesses to manage their local profile on Google, with details like hours, location, and service area. Businesses with higher numbers of good reviews rank higher in local search, as shown in the above example. Google will rank based on location, reviews (quantity and quality), as well as other review websites (Yelp, etc.).

According to Think With Google, 30% of all mobile searches are related to location. Likewise, 76% of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day. Of searches done for something nearby, 28% result in a purchase. Both Search engine optimization (SEO), and local SEO (as described above), are of critical importance for businesses to attract customers.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization, or SEO, drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media according to BrightEdge. Many factors relate to the overall rank of your content. To optimize your content, many factors should be considered. For instance, a blog article should aim for quality content that mentions keywords throughout the article content, including headings and image alt-tags.

As Google algorithms change, so do suggestions for ranking high on Google. Over the years, ranking strategies have changed due to relevancy, and Google continually improves ranking algorithms to read content like a human. As an example, some marketers have used black-hat SEO techniques, which attempt to cheat the system to rank. Websites used to list every nearby city in their page footers, attempting to rank high in all those locations. As Google learned from these tactics, the algorithm changed to penalize black-hat techniques. Priority was given to rank content or businesses actually in a particular service area, with a good user experience (UX).

Other techniques, such as overloading content with keywords, sacrificed readability and usability in an attempt to out-rank competitors. Google algorithms have changed to prioritize content that is more useful to actual users: with current algorithms supporting content of higher relevancy and quality. Accordingly, websites with a better user-experience (speed, security / HTTPS) and more backlinks (others linking to the content) are prioritized in search rankings.

Pay-Per-Click / Google Ads

Using Google Ads, marketers can place ads for their products or services based on a set of keywords or phrases. These ads will appear above Google search results when appropriate, and rank based upon several quality factors and a CPC (cost-per-click) bid. For example, when searching for a ‘pizza oven’ (a product), ads will appear above the organic search results to help businesses sell the product.

Google Ads will rank (against other ads) based upon a variety of factors, including:

• cost-per-click bid (price paid to rank for a keyword or phrase)
• expected click-through rate (how often users are anticipated to click the ad)
• ad relevance (how closely the ad matches the search query), including previous search queries (as shown above)
• landing page experience (how well the destination page promotes quality content, security, loads quickly, and provides a good experience for users)

With ads showing above organic search results, they can serve as a shortcut to get content or products at the top of search results. Often, considerable time is needed to get content to rank higher. If organic search ranks are low, Google ads can help get content to page one of the search results.

Summary

This article introduces some of the basic principles of content marketing, and why it matters for your business. Your content marketing strategy determines how your business ranks on Google, and how well it can attract new customers.

A great content marketing strategy begins with some research. Investigating what your competitors are doing, especially successful competitors, can help your business generate ideas for growth. Finding areas that your competitors missed allows your business to carve out a niche to attract new customers as well.

Google provides many tools to help you in these efforts, including their keyword research tool (Google Keyword Planner). Performing a search on Google to look at page rank is useful as well. Google Ads can show the competitiveness of keywords and the cost of running ad campaigns for those keywords. According to Internet Live Stats, around 3.5 billion searches are performed daily on Google, and ranking high for relevant content will drive business growth.

Your content marketing strategy should be at the core of your overall business strategy. In short, your content strategy will determine how well your overall marketing efforts work. Do you have any content marketing stories or examples you can share? We would love to hear from you in the comments below. As always, please reach out to CueCamp if you’d like to chat about Google search or your content marketing strategy.

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

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