Month: April 2019

Categories
SEO

User Intent: Crafting Content Based on What Users Want and Need

To be successful with your SEO campaigns today, the most important thing to consider is user intent. Behind every search, there is an intention. People are looking for something in particular when they search, whether it’s the answers to their problems, information about available services, or sources for a product they want. If you want people to be able to discover your business online, your content must be optimized for user intent.

Google’s algorithm has come a long way in its ability to recognize user intent, and that’s how it serves the most relevant content to the user. As a result, understanding user intent as you create content will improve the relevance of your website, and thus go a great way toward improving your SEO.

Understanding the Types of User Intent

To create an SEO strategy based on user intent, you must first be able to tell the difference between the types of user intent. Search Google with the terms your audience will be looking for, and based on what you see, you’ll be able to determine the type of content users want to see at the various stages of intent.

Informational

In the informational stage, users are trying to gather more information about a topic or product, but are not ready to buy. This is where you’ll find how-to posts and tutorials particularly useful. There are generally no ads on these types of searches because there isn’t a particular product to buy.

Navigational

In the navigational stage, the user is looking for content to help consider their options, but still isn’t ready to buy. This is where you’ll find best of lists and the like, to help people make their decision. Options may contain links to buy, but the sites are not pushing making the sale too hard.

Transactional

At this stage, the user is ready to buy. They have their credit card in hand and are ready to purchase. They may search “where can I buy?” Most of the search results that will show up are from online stores that sell the product the user wants to buy. These sites are delivering product pages, because they know based on the nature of the query, the user already has the information they need.

Audit Your Existing Content

Now, you’ll take a look at whether or not your existing content matches the needs of your audience. You can do this with Google Analytics. Take a look at your top performing keywords. If you determine that your top performing keyword, “buy laptop”, a transactional keyword, leads to a blog post with tips on how to choose the best laptop for your needs, you’re not giving users what they want.

In this case, you should adjust your strategy so that people who search for “buy laptop” are taken to a product page instead of an informative blog post. This way, your users get what they are looking for, and you’ll get more conversions.

Look at your other blog posts. If users aren’t seeing them, start incorporating more informational keywords. And if your product pages aren’t showing up in the search results, add some transactional keywords to improve your ranking for that user intent.

Create Content with User Intent in Mind

Keywords are an important part of your SEO strategy, but they aren’t the only thing you need to consider. You must craft the content around the keywords, based on user intent. Because Google understands user intent, if your content doesn’t match the intent for your keyword, you won’t rank for it no matter how well other factors indicate that you should.

For instance, if you are targeting the long-tail keyword phases, “how to bake a cherry pie” but you stray from that subject in your blog post and it ends up being more about how to grow a cherry tree, you won’t show up in any results related to baking. Instead, your content will show up in searches related to gardening, which doesn’t match your target audience. You’ll get traffic both ways, of course, but without matching intent, that traffic won’t be targeted, which means conversions will suffer, and ultimately, so will your revenue.

Plan content for each type of user intent as this will help guide users through each stage of the buyer’s journey. That way, users will discover you in the informational stage, and they’ll find helpful content from you again once they move to the navigational phase. At this point, you’ll have built up some trust and credibility with the audience so you can nurture them all the way through buying your product or service.

Take a look at all the keywords you’re trying to rank for. Separate them into buckets based on intent. Create content that supports that intent, even if it means reworking, or completely scrapping your existing content. Each time you conduct keyword research to find more potential ranking opportunities, make sure you first understand the intent of the keyword.

Knowing (and making use of) user intent will make your SEO strategy that much more successful. By following this advice, you’ll be serving your audience with highly useful content at the right stage of the journey, and will keep them coming to your site. It’ll go a long way toward ensuring those people become your customers, and start referring more customers to you.

If you want help with crafting a user-intent based SEO strategy, you can reach out to the team here at Sachs Marketing Group.

Categories
Social Media

How to Create a Facebook Page Without a Personal Account

Facebook has a user base of over 2 billion people, and because of that, it’s one of the most powerful social media platforms for marketing your business. If you’re still not there, you’d better get a move on, because I am willing to bet your competition is there, since there are more than 60 million active business pages, many of which use Facebook ads to reach their audience. The platform adds half a million new users every day – that’s about six new profiles every second.

Even though the network is one of the most popular websites online today, there are some people out there who still don’t have a profile on the network. Statistics show half of people who don’t have a Facebook live with someone who does, and use their account to browse the site.

If you’re the person in your social circle that just refuses to use it, I’m not here to pass judgement, but if you’ve got a company that you want to build a Facebook Page for, you’re out of luck.

You Must Have a Personal Account to Create a Facebook Business Page

While you used to be able to create a Facebook Page without a personal account, as of 2018, the rules have changed. Before, all you had to do was sign up for a Facebook Business account and you could create a page with relative ease and speed. Unlike a personal account, you could not have friends and view personal profiles. Because of issues with advertising campaigns and bots, Facebook has had to make some changes to the way they operate, so the Business account option no longer exists.

 In an effort to increase transparency in advertising, Facebook now requires a personal account be attached to all business pages. You cannot create a new Facebook business page unless there is a personal account attached to it. This is because Facebook requires all pages to have an administrator who can manage the profile and assign roles to other individuals in a company for other admins and contributors. This is only available by connecting the page to an admin’s personal account.

In the past, there was no way to show your personal profile was connected to your business page, as everything you post on your business page is posted with the name of the page, rather than the name of the person who is doing the posting. This, too, has changed.

On the right hand side of the page, there is now a Page Transparency Box that shows when the page was created, and who the Team Members are. Anyone who is a page admin is listed in this box. This is why it’s important to make sure you create an authentic profile, even if you don’t ever intend on posting personal status updates or adding your coworkers or personal friends.

When you click the profile name on the Team Members section, you’ll be taken to that person’s profile, where there is a box at the end of their bio, that indicates which pages they manage. There is no way to edit this information to hide it from your profile, and it will show as part of your public profile, regardless of what kind of privacy settings you have in place to protect your content.

Creating Your Facebook Business Page

If you do not have anyone else in the company who is willing to attach their personal account to the page for management purposes, you can create a basic account that you flesh out with enough information to prove it is legitimate, and lock down with privacy settings. That said, don’t count on anything you post on Facebook ever being 100% private.

Visit facebook.com/pages/create. Choose the category your new page best fits into, and then follow the on-screen instructions to finish creating your page. Spend time adding all the details to your page so you can start benefiting from it right away. In the page settings, you can add additional admins, contributors, and editors so if you have someone else handling your social media, you can give them the necessary permissions to post content directly.

Once you’ve created your Facebook Page, it’s time to start posting content and engaging in conversation to attract new fans. You can get started by reaching out to people who are on your email list, updating your website to indicate you now have a Facebook profile, and running an ad campaign to build an audience. For best results, spend some time building your social media strategy before you create your page so it doesn’t sit inactive too long before it gets put to use.

You can even create a Facebook Group and link it to your page to build a sense of community in your brand and to connect with your customers on a deeper level.

To Instagram or Not to Instagram?

If you’re getting started on Facebook, it’s worth noting Instagram is part of the Facebook family. You can create an Instagram account quickly and convert it to a business account simply by linking it to your Facebook Page. Doing so will allow you to share your Instagram content to Facebook automatically, if you so choose, to help expand its reach.

Once you have a Page set up, you can also start a Facebook Ads account, where you can advertise to people on Facebook, Instagram, and other sites that are part of the Audience network. You can also install a Facebook Pixel on your website as part of your remarketing efforts. This tracks who your website visitors are so you can advertise to them when they are on Facebook. It’s highly flexible in the sense that you can advertise only to people who visit certain pages, or abandon their shopping carts. This allows you to integrate Facebook further into your overall digital marketing strategy.

Categories
Content Marketing

What is Hyper-Personalization in Marketing?

Today’s consumers demand more from the companies they do business with. They don’t want blanket offers or experiences – they want things personalized to them. In fact, 79% of consumers say they’re only likely to use a brand promotion if the promotion is tailored to them based on previous interactions with the brand. And by 2020, 51% of consumers expect companies will anticipate their needs and make relevant suggestions before making contact. The good news is, 57% of consumers are okay with giving a website personal information as long as it’s used responsibly and for their benefit.

Many brands do a decent job at delivering a personalized experience, but as marketing continues to evolve, hyper-personalization is where we’re heading. To ensure you’re able to keep up with the changes and get one step ahead of the competition, it’s time to work on your hyper-personalization strategy.

Personalization vs. Hyper-Personalization

Personalization adjusts brand communications based on the available information about the consumer, such as name, location, and purchase history. Hyper-personalization, considers that information along with real-time data and browsing behavior to adjust messages in the moment. It leverages artificial intelligence (AI) with the real-time data to deliver more relevant product and service information and content to each user.

Brands Getting Hyper-Personalization Right

Amazon

Amazon has long been personalizing the experience for its shoppers, but thanks to its various membership options and massive inventory, it has created a hyper-personal experience for its millions of users.

When a customer searches for a pair of headphones, a “Frequently bought together” section appears on the page to suggest other items to purchase.

Beyond this, the homepage is personalized for each customer based on their previous shopping habits, their shopping cart, and wish lists. Through anticipating their customers’ needs, Amazon makes it easier to find what they’re looking for, while also making it easy to find new products.

Amazon accomplishes this through the use of predictive analytics to gather data. Using both historical and real-time data allows them to get a deeper understanding of their customers, which allows them to improve customer satisfaction with these hyper-personalized marketing techniques.

Netflix

Netflix has been serving up suggestions based on the content you’ve watched in the past, but today, they take it even further. They personalize film covers to give prominence to the actors and actresses you’re familiar with.

Netflix uses massive amounts of data, getting granular and specific with their genre suggestion, to accomplish this for all its users. In a way, your watchlist is customized by them as much as it is customized by you. The streaming services knows when you stop watching a title halfway through, when you hit pause or play, and when you click the button to add something to your watchlist. By harvesting the information from user profiles and feeding it into its personalization engines, no two Netflix users has the same combination of rows on their homepage.

Age and gender are not factored into the recommendation system, because user behavior is a far more important metric. And Netflix doesn’t use the data just to change your suggested titles. The personalization can even adjust how the player looks in terms of design – and you’ll get different recommendations depending on when you login.

Starbucks

Starbucks has allowed customers to personalize their products – using non-dairy options, sugar-free syrups, and so on. But to take that even further, Starbucks now uses a real-time personalization engine to create individualized offers for their customers based on preferences and previous behavior. The data comes from their loyalty app, so they can understand the habits and needs of each customer. Using the information, Starbucks sends personalized emails with deals and updates that are relevant to them. People share their data with the app because it enriches their customer experience. Creating a loyalty program for your brand not only rewards your customers, but helps you to understand how they interact with your products or services so you can make use of the data for hyper-personalization.

Planning a Hyper-Personalization Strategy

When you’re ready to take your personalized marketing to a new level, you’ll need to ensure you have a plan.

Mine Data

Take a look at the data you have available and the kind of data you’re collecting. Consider what you’re doing with the data, because the more you’re doing to ensure its accuracy, the better your results will be. This means continually removing outdated, duplicate, and incomplete information. According to Eloqua, companies with consistent data hygiene processes generate 7x more inquiries and 4x the leads than those who don’t.

Craft a Personal Message

With hyper-personalization, you’re turning your company data into relevant messaging and offers that best address your customers’ needs. This approach is highly effective in email marketing, and can be transferred to other areas of your marketing, too.

Develop a Personalized Offer

Much like Starbucks has done with their hyper-personalization, you should aim to personalize your offer based on your customers’ past behavior. How effective the offer is will depend on the quality of the data you have. Beyond personalizing the offer itself, you should aim to make things as convenient and user-friendly as possible.

Use All Your Channels

When you combine all the consumer data you have available with multichannel marketing efforts, you’ll be able to create one-to-one relationships with each one of your prospects and customers. Websites, email, and smartphones all offer advanced customization and personalization options, and those options are also available for print marketing and direct mail initiatives.

Timing Matters

Contextual data, or the who, what, when, and where of customer behavior, helps you better understand how and why your audience interacts with messaging. Applying predictive analytics also helps determine the best times to deliver specific messages to drive the desired results.

Test, Test, Test

To build the most effective hyper-personalization strategy, you must continually test. It’s critical to identify the most compelling elements of your messaging, and you can only do this with multivariate and usability testing. These go beyond basic split testing to help you gauge the combined effect of multiple elements at once, so you can figure out which combinations perform the best.

Research from Ascend2 reveals only 9% of surveyed marketing professionals have completely developed their hyper-personalization strategy. Getting started now puts you ahead of the competition as an early adopter. Make your top priorities improving customer experience and applying your data insights to decision-making, and you’ll get the most benefit from your efforts. By improving your customer’s personalized experience, you’ll build goodwill and loyalty for your brand.

Categories
SEO

How to Create a Global SEO Strategy

If you’re nailing your business here in the United States and feel like it’s time to expand your brand to an international market, then it’s time to create your global SEO strategy. To be successful with SEO in other countries, it takes more than translating your website and letting people select the language they prefer to read your website with.

I don’t recommend this approach for just any brand. It’s generally only worth your time and effort if your analytics data reveals you have a steady amount of traffic coming from a foreign market or a spike in customers from a particular region or country.

Global SEO vs. Local SEO vs. General SEO

International SEO focuses on optimizing your content for a number of regions across the globe. Local SEO focuses on offline businesses that have a brick-and-mortar presence in a local area that relies on general SEO and reviews, business information networks, and local directories. General SEO focuses on the basic factors that make it easy for search engines to crawl, index, and list your content. General factors include:

  • Keyword optimization
  • Site speed
  • Sitemap
  • User experience
  • Backlinks
  • Schema markup

You’ll use general SEO whether you’re focused on local or global SEO.

Let’s say you sell shoes and you have business operations in Spain, Germany, and France, but your local market is in the United States. Your international SEO optimizes for those counties, as well as the word “shoes” in their languages.

In Spain, you’d optimize for Zapatos

In Germany, you’d optimize for “Schuhe”

And in France, you’d optimize for “Des chaussures”

And of course, at home, in the United States you’d still optimize for “shoes.”

Relevance Remains Key

No matter the market, Google wants to ensure the content they serve is relevant to the user. On-page and off-page SEO, along with visitor behavior is used to determine relevance. You won’t be successful if you copy and paste content across pages and translate it according to the language. Each market has unique needs, and your site’s content needs to reflect that. What performs best in the United States may be completely irrelevant to your German market. Craft content for each region and market.

Now let’s get to the nuts and bolts of crafting your strategy.

Step One: Determine Potential in Target Countries

Estimate your international SEO potential by using tools such as Google Analytics and SEMRush Domain Analytics to determine how your website is ranked in other countries. In Google Analytics, go to Audience > Geo > Language or Location and look at the number of sessions from the countries you’re interested in targeting.

Step Two: Conduct a Competitive Analysis

Regardless of your international SEO potential, you need to know who you’re going up against in the new market. You may already know who your biggest competitors are in the country, but they may not be as successful as you think when it comes to their online presence. As such, you should focus on your organic competitors.

Step Three: International Keyword Research

After you determine who your main competitors are, determine the keywords they are indexed for, so you can choose the best ones you should use for your SEO efforts. This helps you get a bunch of keywords you can use to improve your content and gives you a decent chance at being able to compete against them. Repeat the process for a few competitors to make sure you have plenty to work with.

Step Four: Localizing Your Brand

With the international keywords in hand, it’s time to create content in each of the local languages. You shouldn’t just translate it and stuff it with keywords because of differences in market. If you’re selling fruit in a country with a cooler climate, then the content you’ve written for a warmer climate in another market wouldn’t make sense to the audience even if it was translated.

It would be worth the investment to hire a native speaker to translate content you’ve written specifically for the audience – or to write the content itself. Native speakers are more familiar with the nuances of language and idioms so you avoid issues with certain forms of “you” because you need to use the polite form when you’re speaking with someone you don’t know. Germans, in particular, and more strict with their use of the formal “you” than Italians are, for example.

Step Five: Address the Technical Aspects

Once everything else is planned, it’s time to handle the technical side of SEO, including:

Website structure: Are you targeting a language or a country? If a language, use the language targeting approach. If you’re targeting a certain country or audience, you’ll want to use country targeting. Determine whether you’ll use country code TLDs, subfolders, or subdomains.

Server location: The further your server is from the destination, the slower the site loads. You can either go with a content delivery network that has multiple markets, a single provider with multiple server locations, or by hosting on servers in key markets.

Correct hreflang implementation: When correctly done, this ensures users in each of your target countries are coming to the right country or language version of your site. If they are not done properly, it can damage your ranking and user experience, since they are meant to cross-reference pages with similar content but target different audiences.

An important thing to remember is data privacy regulations vary from one country to the next. Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) got a lot of media attention, but Africa and Asia also have their own guidelines in place, known as Personal Data Protection Guidelines for Africa (PDPGA) and Asia Pacific Data Regulation and Cyber Security Guide, respectively. When you build out your global SEO strategy, make sure you’re in compliance with all data privacy regulations in the markets where you’re conducting business.

If you’re ready to go international with your business, let’s talk. I can help you develop the right strategy to expand your brand into new markets and keep your customers happy.

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