Hello and Happy Tuesday!
This week in Internet marketing, we’ve gathered some of the best and most interesting articles from across the web. We’re looking at signs your website needs a redesign, as well as tips to increase sales on Instagram, and small but powerful SEO tactics. We’re also looking at data-driven content creation, and tips for deciding when to bid.
Need A Website Redesign? Answer These Questions To Find Out
This author describes a website as a "digital sales person," creating a positive user experiences and generating conversions. If you think your website needs a redesign, consider these warning signs. If your website doesn't load within two to three seconds, isn't mobile friendly or has a dated design with too many ads and colours, this could mean you're in need of an upgrade. Even more, if your site isn't designed for optimal functionality and user experience, you could be impacting your ability to generate leads and drive conversions. Your website should be updated as your business grows, and it should easily move users through the sales funnel.
Increase Your Instagram Sales With These 10 Tips
Instagram posts are highly engaging. With so much content populating this social media giant daily, it can be difficult to cut through the noise. This article outlines some tips you can use to increase sales and drive engagement on Instagram. Make sure your photos stand out with a theme, simple edits, different angles -- and be consistent in your posting. Run contests with user generated content (UGC), for example, and leverage both videos and stories to increase comments, posting behind-the-scenes footage or shooting your products in action. Respond to comments, offer exclusive information or offers, and use all 30 available hashtags. Include a link to your store in your bio and be sure to use emojis to drive engagement.
Minimum Viable SEO: If You Only Have a Few Minutes Each Week... Do This!
If you have limited time to dedicate to your SEO strategy, you can prioritize a few simple tricks to stay ahead of the curve. Create a spreadsheet with 50-100 of your most valuable keywords, including the current rank and SERP features for each keyword -- updated weekly. However, if you know you have issues on your site, be sure to first perform a simple crawl analysis and address the most important issues, such as duplicate content, 404s and 500s. Lastly, complete a checklist each time you publish a new piece of content, including: Is it keyword targeted? Does it have a compelling meta description? And does it answer a searchers query? Once you've completed all the above tasks, spend some time doing outreach to gain backlinks, or upgrade well-performing content, for example.
7 Risks of Data Driven Content Creation & 8 Tips to Avoid Them
It's essential to take a data-driven approach to all of your digital marketing ventures -- including content marketing. However, it's important to not only look to numbers for insights when creating content. Instead of falling victim to tunnel vision and focusing only on vanity metrics, broaden your scope by learning about new methods and tools to assist you in creating more original content. Avoid only writing content that has worked well for yourself or others, and stick to specific and relevant data to make writing a piece of content more efficient. Getting lost in data can also impact your ability to get creative, or cause you to draw incorrect conclusions. All of the tips outlined in this article will help you distinguish content creation from data collection -- and ensure you get the full value of both of these tactics.
How to Decide 'Should I Bid?'
In order to optimize your paid search budget, i's important to know when to bid. This article recommends first asking yourself six questions, including: What percentage of your traffic is mobile? Are you using a landing page? Are competitors paying a lot of money to bid on your brand? Does your business name, product or service lend itself to broach match terms or phrases that could trigger competitive ads? Next, consider the cost or loss of not bidding, and the relative profit of all your paid media efforts. However, it's also important to avoid cannibalization -- in which your paid and organic listings compete with each other. In order to prevent this, calculate your CTR, conversion rate on paid and organic, and recalculate your ROI.
Check out these additional articles for more Internet marketing news!
How to Make Sure Your Digital Marketing Strategy is Results Driven
Google Maps Ad Traffic Steadily Growing
How Do Consumers Really Feel About 2017's Digital Trends [Infographic]
