Hello and Happy Tuesday!
This week in Internet marketing, we’ve gathered some of the most gripping and educational articles from across the web. We’re looking at avoiding five common e-commerce SEO mistakes, as well as creating smarter PPC campaigns, and taking your social strategy to the next level. We’re also looking at making your adequate content awesome, and keeping up with web design essentials in 2017.
Don’t Follow the Leader: Avoid These 5 Common E-Commerce SEO Mistakes
Often times, when you search for SEO inspiration, you'll notice that many e-commerce businesses are making serious SEO mistakes that you should avoid at all costs. So, how do you know which SEO mistakes not to make? Brian Weiss from Search Engine Land describes five of the most common mistakes to avoid including faceted navigation disasters, slow site speed, reliance on XML sitemaps for indexation, using tags incorrectly, and ugly URLs. Let's delve into ugly URLs. Brian explains that "short, clear, and concise URLs tend to rank well and get more traffic than long, parameter-laden addresses." Who knew? Unlike most industries in e-commerce, many of the sites that have the highest traffic have terrible SEO practices, so it's important to follow the leader cautiously and make your own SEO improvements along the way.
5 Ideas to Take Your PPC Audience Strategy to the Next Level
With PPC, many marketers rely on keywords to discover user intent and build ads based on these proxies. However, Illya Cherepakhim reveals a few tips to improve your current PPC strategy and blow your campaigns out of the water. His suggestions include segmenting out previous users and customers, using audience lists you already have, creating lists based on your site sections, watching out for in-market audiences, and adopting an audience-centric mindset and campaign structure. When looking specifically at using the audience lists you already have, it's said that you can use your email lists and your audience from social media combined with segmentation (by the date of their last interaction with you). This strategy will tailor your campaigns to a well-segmented audience and improve the personalization of your PPC campaign.
4 Easy Ways to Take Social Media Marketing to the Next Level
Everyone from your grandmother to your neighbourhood convenience store seems to be on social media these days. However, despite the oversaturated social worlds, these platforms are constantly changing, while a customer-centric mindset has become the status-quo. You have to ask yourself the question: are you broadcasting to your customers or engaging with them? Dayle Hall from Marketing Land encourages business to come out of the "dark ages" and to keep up with the changes in this ever-growing industry. Here's what you need to do to push your social strategy to the next level: go beyond listening, scale your engagement, accelerate brand awareness, and unite people, processes, and technology. Dayle explains that it takes a combination of "engaging paid, earned, owned and shared content" to get your brand out there, and, from there, you have to engage with your social audience across all platforms. Though you may want to turn your social strategy on autopilot, social media success comes from the people behind the strategy -- engaging with customers every step of the way.
5 Ways to Transform Your Content from Adequate to Awesome
In this article by Rachel Davidson, she mentions that "no matter how technology changes the type of content we're producing, and how our customers engage with it, the value of content shouldn't be compromised." This is so important when looking to create great content on your website, because if you begin the practice of feeding mediocre content with little to no direction -- nobody will benefit from your content. This article focuses on 5 ways to keep your content marketing strategy strong by aligning sales and marketing, valuing effectiveness over efficiency, personalizing each pitch, implementing a closed-loop improvement process, and making your content accessible. Aligning your marketing and sales departments can be quite the challenge, but your content strategy will work best if you focus on your end goals and work together as one unit.
5 Business Website Design Essentials To Have In 2017
In 2017, if your web design isn't keeping up with industry standards or creating a positive user-experience for your customer, your business will not survive online. There are 5 necessary web elements that you need to have in order to maintain your online presence and convert potential customers who have made it to your homepage. This article by Techniblogic explains that you should provide an introductory description of who you are, realize the importance of reviews, keep the design of your website easy to navigate and alluring, provide easy payment options, and host a platform that's reliable. In a competitive online landscape, it's crucial that you keep up with the times while providing a website that reels your customer in and makes it easy for them to make a buying decision in a matter of seconds.
Check out these additional articles for more Internet marketing news!
The Beginner’s Guide to Structured Data for SEO: How to Implement Structured Data
What You Need to Know About Visual Perception and Website Design
