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Link Building: Why Big Agencies Are Wrong to Neglect It

Add Your Heading Text Link Building: Why Big Agencies Are Wrong to Neglect It

Several high ranking SEO people in big agencies have recently opinionated that content marketing has replaced link building and that link building services are no longer necessary.

I don’t think these agencies could be any more wrong. When Google announced the release of its newest algorithm called RankBrain a few years ago, Greg Corrado, a senior research scientist at Google, offered insight into the new algorithm:

“RankBrain uses artificial intelligence to embed vast amounts of written language into mathematical entities — called vectors — that the computer can understand. If RankBrain sees a word or phrase it isn’t familiar with, the machine can make a guess as to what words or phrases might have a similar meaning and filter the result accordingly, making it more effective at handling never-before-seen search queries.”

Greg Corrado

Senior Research Scientist, Google

In an article, Corrado mentions that RankBrain has become the third-most important part of the Google algorithm.

What are the other two most important components of Google’s algorithm? Google won’t say, but it’s likely the other two are on-page (related to page content) and off-page signals (related to inbound links).

The original Google algorithm was heavily weighted toward the value (authority) of incoming links. Although this dial has been turned down slightly over the last couple of years, it is still a major factor in how Google ranks websites.

Which brings me back to the stance of some of the big agencies. These agencies believe that—because of Google’s high regard for brands, any content that a brand produces has a high likelihood of ranking well. And if that is the case why should anyone invest in link building?

Well, because first of all link building is not only about increasing relevance in Google. At its core, link building is about delivering your content directly to your target audience. With social media sites like Facebook and Pinterest, online fan groups and forums, and smart phone apps, audiences are increasingly scattered across the net.

The importance of social media amplification cannot be stressed as we enter 2016. Social media is where your audiences are, especially the ones you specifically want to develop content for. That’s why social media amplification is part of link building, and that’s a big part of why link building is important.

If you don’t engage in link building (specifically across social networks), you are neglecting a huge opportunity to reach a sizeable portion of your target audience, and in turn—losing traffic, leads, sales, and conversions.

Don’t neglect your links. Contact us today, so we can link you to more traffic, more revenue, and more success!

If you’re looking for help with SEO, contact Braveheart Digital Marketing today. We are a leading SEO Agency in Manchester NH that can help you to improve your website and reach new customers. Contact us today.

Five Tactics To Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Across your digital marketing channels, you may have noticed that we are living in a mobile world as mobile browsing has now surpassed desktop browsing in terms of percentage traffic:

1. Make sure your emails are mobile friendly

With this in mind, as email marketers, you cannot rest on your laurels when it comes to mobile optimization of your email marketing campaigns because the majority of emails are now opened on a mobile device.

2. Segment Your List

Your list is one of your most valuable assets, as it contains everything your contacts have told you about themselves since day one. Between behavioral and demographic information gained in your CRM, you’ve got your finger on the pulse of each contact’s engagement with your business. Use the data to segment your list and send tailored content to each group.

According to data from MailChimp, email marketing lists which are segmented see:

Here are a few types of segmented emails you might send to your list:

3. Have email come from a real person

This is such an overlooked, but easy to fix tactic. For your next email marketing campaign have your email come from a member of your marketing or customer service teams, or even your CEO – and let people know how to respond, so their reply won’t get bounced or ignored.

Sixty-four percent of subscribers open an email based on who the email is from. No one likes receiving an email from donotreply@example.com.

Steven Macdonald

digital marketing manager, SuperOffice

4. Make your subject line compelling and to the point.

Subject lines can make or break an email marketing campaign. They have to be compelling enough to persuade contacts to open the emails, but friendly enough to not turn them off. First and foremost, keep them short; lines with fewer than 50 characters have higher open rates, and anything over 50 runs the risk of being truncated.

“You win or lose with the subject line in your email, so make it as compelling as possible,”

Michael Weiss

cofounder & managing partner, C-4 Analytics

5. Optimize Your Thank You Page

This might be the most overlooked part of any email marketing campaign. The thank-you page that you see after you have signed up. Here are four ways that you can begin to cultivate a more personal relationship with your subscribers:

Tell them how excited you are that they’ve joined your list and that you’re grateful they took the time to sign up.
Give them a preview of the awesome content they’ll be receiving from you and the frequency with which they’ll receive it.
Include social sharing buttons.
Ask them to whitelist your sender address.

Email marketing can be on of the most powerful tools that a business has. How are you using email to drive customer loyalty and revenue?

Eight Ways To Effectively Grow an Email List

in order to build an audience of engaged sports fans for our sports network, we decided to increase our email list. While email marketing may seem old fashioned, email is still one of the best marketing channels in the B2C market according to a recent Conductor study. By accumulating 23,000+ people on our email list, we generated over $200,000 in sales.

Here’s how we did it:

1. We Made Capturing Email Addresses a Priority Within the Site Design

We strategically placed callouts and signup forms, along with targeted pop-up ads to collect email addresses. Although pop-up ads may seem another outdated tactic, there’s a reason why many top sites still use them; they work.

2. We Turned Deficiency into Opportunity

For example: if a Steelers’ fan searched for “Pittsburgh Steelers Tickets” and found our Steelers ticket page before the NFL released next season’s schedule, the fan would leave our site without discovering the schedule or adding to our revenue. To turn the fan’s experience around, we added email forms stating: “If you want to be notified when the NFL releases the Steelers schedule, leave your name and email address.” Not only could we let the fan know when the schedule came up, but we could also update said fan with Steelers NEWS and other relevant updates. This enabled us to build relationships with fans.

3. We Tested Subject Lines Again and Again

We constantly tested subject lines to find out the most efficient. Most mailing programs allow you to A/B test subject lines in the same email campaign. A/B testing allowed us to see open rates as high as 84.6%!

5. We Segmented Our List

If we were selling Red Sox World Series memorabilia, we only sent email notifications to Red Sox Fans. By sending relevant content to segmented, focused groups, we achieved click rates as high as 66.3%!

6. We Tested The Format Of Our Emails

The biggest jump in our click-through rate came after we redesigned the email to make the CTA clearer, more visible and mobile friendly.

7. We Implemented Gary Vaynerchuk’s philosophy of Jab, Jab, Jab, and Right Hook.

Not every email has to be sales-focused. We sent emails that highlighted content on our website and covered breaking NEWS stories. As a result, our opt-out rate was under 0.5%.

8. We Used MailChimp’s Scheduled Post Feature to Our Benefit

With MailChimp’s scheduled post feature, we were able to deliver the emails to sports fans across the USA and Europe at the most optimal times to reach our targeted audiences. For example, with London five hours ahead of New York City, it wouldn’t make sense to email Londoners and New Yorkers at the same time. The scheduled post feature allowed us to deliver emails at the beginning of our fan’s day—whenever that day began, which improved our open and click-through rates.

As a result of implementing these strategies, we grew our email list from zero to over 23,000 with over $200,000 in sales via email. The success of our email strategy in engaging fans and generating revenue demonstrates that email lists are still one of the best ways for brands like ours to stay in touch with fans and customers.

Looking to stay in touch with your fans and customers, get in touch with us!

Measuring Success in Content Development

Prospective clients often tell us that their previous or existing SEO agency is producing X pieces of content for them on a monthly basis.

My follow-up question is always “How is that working out for you?”

Many clients respond with “What do you mean?”

Content and Goals

In many cases, content developed for “SEO” reasons is not tied into the goals of the website or business. This content is produced to rank well. If anybody ever reads the content or responds to the page’s call for action—these are considered bonuses and not expectations.

When a client asks us to develop content for them I ask them two questions:

What is the goal of this content?

The three most common content objectives are to increase leads, to increase sales, and to build awareness. Occasionally the client desires content that is not product-related. For instance, some clients require a FAQ page, covering the most commonly asked questions. In this case, the goal might be to decrease the number of support phone calls over time.

How will content success be measured? By rankings?

Typically, increasing rankings is not a goal of content creation because SEO agencies often develop content targeting a very specific long-tail keyword that barely anyone searches. Is ranking #1 for an obscure keyword really the goal of content development? In most cases, the answer is no.

By leads or sales?

Sometimes a client will need content developed around a very specific product or service, where the search volume is low, but the buyer intent is really high. In this case, the goal for that piece of content is to generate leads or sales. It is not to rank highly because ranking highly without the subsequent sale doesn’t help the client reach their business objectives.

How Are You Measuring Success?

When your SEO agency creates content for your website, how are you measuring its success and impact on your business goals and objectives? Are your content goals directly linked to your larger objectives? If not, let us help! Contact us to learn more about our content marketing services.

If you’re looking for a content marketing agency that can help you achieve your business goals, contact Braveheart Digital Marketing today. We’ll be happy to discuss your content needs and provide a content strategy that aligns with your overall business goals.

Inbound Marketing ROI Unlocks Budget

A 2018 study from Hubspot illustrates that companies see higher ROI as a result of their inbound marketing practices.

A survey of over 6,200 marketing and sales professionals in 99 countries showed that over 53% of marketers see a higher ROI from inbound marketing tactics than from outbound.

The higher ROI is resulting in higher budgets, with 46% of teams have higher budgets in 2018.

Where are marketers spending this increased budget? One area is video channels

However, what is really interesting is the difference in enthusiasm around video the C-Suite to individual contributors but also the difference in opinion about what are the best distribution channels to use.

The Inbound Sales Process

The first step to understanding your inbound marketing ROI is to understand what your sales funnel looks like. A typical client inbound marketing funnel looks like this:

Identify

Identifying the right business opportunities from the start can be the difference between a thriving business and a failing one. Knowing what to look for also helps salespeople create a predictable, scalable sales funnel.

Connect

Inbound salespeople connect with leads to help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge they’re facing. If the buyer decides to do so, these leads become qualified leads.

Explore

Inbound salespeople explore their qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offering is a good fit.

Advise

Inbound salespeople advise prospects on why their solution is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s needs.

For the three areas (identify, connect and explore), use your analytics data to determine what your average conversion rate is for each category then compare it to the tangible fourth category—advise.

As you go through this process, working backward in some cases, you’ll discover a dollar expenditure that applies to each bucket into which you can split your inbound marketing efforts.

After that, demonstrating ROI is as simple as comparing those numbers to the amount of sales those efforts generated. If the number is positive, then the budget should be increased.

Contact us today and let us work with you to measure the ROI of your inbound marketing efforts.

Understanding Your KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

When it comes to increasing revenue, we don’t believe in guessing. That’s why we pay close attention to our key performance indicators (KPI’s). By understanding our KPI’s, we sold over $1.5 million dollars worth of sports tickets in twelve months.

Here’s how:

1. We Knew the Value of Each Website Visitor:

Consider these numbers:

Knowing the positive correlations between these rates helped us project what we needed to do in order to meet our revenue goals. The question was no longer “how do we sell an additional $100,000 online next year.” Instead, we asked “how do we drive an additional 1 million visitors to the website next year” which—when answered—answered our original question.

2. Know the Value of Each Visitor From Each Marketing Channel:

In addition to enabling us to calculate revenue per visitor, knowing our KPI’s allowed us to test our partner channels to see where we monetized the traffic. Through analytics we could tell how much traffic we sent to partner sites and the number of sales and revenue we made from those partners. We were able to track the revenue in order to compare different traffic sources (organic, social, referral) to determine which channel proved the most profitable. We quickly realized that having a partner with the highest commission rate was not as important as a partner with a high conversion rate. With KPI’s on our side, we tested, planned, and executed a strategy that enabled us to sell over $2 million worth of sports tickets worldwide in one year. Do you know your KPI’s? Do you know the value of a visitor to your website? Ready to find out?

Four 2019 Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong

As I was starting to work on my 2020 digital marketing predictions, I decided to take a look see how accurate the 2019 prediction were from industry leaders. The results were frankly disappointing.

Predictions from Google

● Multi-channel will grow into omni-channel
● The importance of the mobile experience
● Voice services will boom
● Breakthrough chatbots
● Personalization through data-driven marketing
● The value of custom content will increase

Lenovo offered up:

● AI Starts to Transform Marketing
● Privacy Laws Disrupt Ad Sales
● Voice-Based Marketing Enters Mainstream
● Digital Communication Becomes Personal

Jeff Bulas said:

● Omnichannel Marketing
● Artificial Intelligence
● Chatbots
● Personalization
● Video Marketing

Convince and Convert has similar views saying:

● Omnichannel Marketing
● Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
● Voice Search
● Personalized Marketing
● Video Marketing and Influencer Marketing
● Visual Search

It was clear in the minds of the experts that 2019 would be the year of: ● Omnichannel marketing ● AI/ML ● Voice Search ● Chatbots

As we look back at these predictions with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that not only did many of these channels and tactics fail to live up to the hype but, for the Small- and Medium-Sized businesses, they had little or no impact on their 2019 digital marketing efforts.

Omnichannel Marketing

Convince and Convert defines Omnichannel marketing as “a type of marketing that connects the dots between multiple channels, ensuring a consistent user experience and encouraging the consumer to engage with your brand at every touchpoint across multiple channels.”

The ideas behind this prediction made sense a year ago. In B2B, it takes 8 touches to make an appointment today, with many of those touches taking place across multiple platforms.

Business owners and CMO’s understand the importance of omnichannel marketing. The challenge is attribution. How do you track these multiple touchpoints–which is an issue at the Fortune 100 level, never mind the world of Small and Medium Sized businesses? The recent CMO survey showed that CMO’s expect to double their analytics budget in 2020 from 7.2% of marketing budgets in 2019 to 11.6% of budget by 2022.

This growth in analytics is fueled by marketers trying to understand the performance of Omnichannel Marketing. But marketers also struggle with measuring the impact of Omnichannel Marketing–only 40% of marketers report having the right quantitative tools to demonstrate the impact of marketing spend on company performance. The silver lining is that this is the highest reported level of use of quantitative tools in the history of The CMO Survey.

Omnichannel Marketing will continue to be important to marketers, regardless of the size of the company. But attribution tracking is a big hurdle to overcome, and that will impact how diversified a company’s digital marketing strategy will be in 2020 and beyond.

AI/ML

Using the definitions from Convince and Convert, once again: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computer science that is all about teaching the machine to think and act like a human being.

Machine learning is usually what runs behind AI algorithms. While AI is basically all about teaching the machine to replace human beings, machine learning is about teaching the machine what a human brain cannot grasp, e.g. complex data mining and future predictions based on current patterns.

Two of the best examples of AI-empowered marketing are: ● Amazon: Using AI to analyze each particular buyer’s decisions and suggest products to them they didn’t even know they want or need. ● Netflix: Using AI for content recommendations and beyond. Netflix successfully applies AI for product development too. They have analyzed years of viewer data to create successful products of their own, including the hit “House of Cards.” Put simply: thanks to AI, Netflix knows what people want before they do.

A post from Quora Creative said that 85% of consumers end up selecting the products that Amazon suggests, which creates a huge advantage that the retail giant has over it competitors. Most SMB’s don’t have the ability to provide that kind of AI-driven personalized marketing. But they can take advantage of AI/ML when running paid ads within the Google platform. ML/AI allows Google to optimize your ads and bidding strategies in real-time to make the campaign more effective–something you cannot manually do today.

But for the majority of SMB’s, ML and AI is still several years away from having an impact on their digital marketing efforts

Voice Search

We have all seen the stats about how strong the growth is in voice search: ● 55% of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022. That’s a 42% jump from today’s household ownership numbers (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants). ● Voice commerce sales reached $1.8 billion last year, per OC&C Strategy Consultants. They’re predicted to reach $40 billion by 2022.

Did voice search live up to the hype in 2019?

That depends on which industry you are in. According to seoClarity, nearly 20% of all voice search queries are triggered by a set of only 25 keywords. These consist mainly of question words like “how” or “what” and adjectives like “best” or “easy.” These are informational searches, not the type of search that drives revenue.

Some of the most speculative statistics around are about the ecommerce (or v-commerce) impact of voice search. The most quoted study on it was produced by OC&C Strategy Consultants, which predicted that voice channel will grow from a $2 billion channel in 2018 to a $40 billion channel by 2022. That is a huge jump, and before that can happen, the payment issue needs to be fixed.

The challenge here lies in voice payment authentication, where currently the prevalent modes consist of either a biometric authentication (e.g. fingerprint of Apple’s TouchID) or a four-digit PIN code to be read out loud.

The data does not show that revenue from voice search, or voice search itself, is growing as fast as predicted 12 months ago.

Chatbots

Definition from Wikipedia: A chatbot is a piece of software that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test

According to Gartner, by 2020 85% of such interactions between consumers and brands will take place via chatbots, without human participation. In order for Gartner’s prediction to come true, consumers have to be willing to engage with a bot, and the data suggests that they don’t want to.

According to Statista polls, only 34% of respondents prefer chatbots to traditional channels of communication with online retailers.

One reason for the reluctance of consumers to fully embrace chatbots is that bots are only as good as the playbooks that they are built on. Most chatbots that answers questions have been programmed to provide an answer to a specific question. Which means they are only as good as the database of questions and answers they have. When a consumer asks a question whose answer is not in the database, the bot stops working.

Which is the second reason why consumers prefer chatting with real people. We don’t think linearly like a machine. Instead we jump from one topic to another, which is difficult to program a chatbot to handle.

Also, we like personalized attention from our favorite brands, and the chatbot experience is the opposite of that. For a lot of companies that had chat on their site in 2019, the chat feature was simply a fill in a form where someone would get back to you, or it redirected you to the right department like an auto attendant on a phone system. It has not AI or ML, which is why is impact has been less that predicted, especially amongst SMB’s.

Conclusion

Predicting trends, even for the next 12 months, can be a daunting task. However, it is clear that the enthusiasm in 2019 for Omnichannel marketing, AI/ML, Voice Search, Chatbots was a little early. Will these channels and tactics be influential in 2020? Stay tuned for my 2020 digital marketing predictions.

What Does Mark Cuban Know about SEO That He Is Not Telling Us?

I have been a huge fan of ABC’s Shark Tank since it first aired in 2009. The show quickly became the most-watched TV show in our home as we discussed valuations of the companies and what we thought of the products and sales pitches.

Shark Tank made becoming an entrepreneur cool, and when ABC announced the spin-off series called Beyond the Tank, I was really excited to watch it.

As the name suggests, Beyond the Tank shows what happens after a deal is made and how the investors, or—the “Sharks,” work with the entrepreneurs to expand their businesses.

One of the companies showcased on a Beyond the Tank episode is the Red Dress Boutique which is an e-commerce site that Mark Cuban invested in.

Cuban has made his fortune in technology and the Internet, and I wanted to see what advice he had given the Red Dress Boutique to improve their online sales. What Internet marketing tactics was Red Dress using?

When I pulled up their home page, I was ready to be wowed, but when I hit “view source,” boy was I disappointed!

Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram have helped fuel Red Dress’s growth in part because these are platforms where they can shape the conversation with their audience (with the clothes they use) and interact with their community via comments. The main focus of the Beyond the Tank episode was the desire of the owners to redesign their site to make it faster—not to help with their Google rankings, but to improve the user’s experience. The Red Dress owners were concerned that the slow loading site was causing some of the images to pixelate, decreasing the user’s experience. My takeaway from the show and the Red Dress site is that Cuban is focused on Red Dress maintaining its hockey stick growth. He does not want anything to get in the way of that. Cuban is extremely intelligent, and if he thought there was an opportunity or market that the company was not targeting, then he would mention it. An analysis of the Red Dress Boutique website indicates that search is just not a key component of their growth plan. And that has to worry Google and the SEO industry. It is clear that Cuban is perfectly fine with the Red Dress Boutique’s current online marketing strategy of using social media to grow its brand, control the message, and interact with its community without the sudden curveballs that Google has been giving website owners the last two years. Will we see more e-commerce sites turn their attention and advertising dollars away from search and toward social networks? And if we do, what will that mean for search practitioners?

Add Your Heading Text Link Building: Why Big Agencies Are Wrong to Neglect It

Recent Posts

Five Tactics To Improve Your Email Marketing Campaigns

1. Make sure your emails are mobile friendly

2. Segment Your List

3. Have email come from a real person

4. Make your subject line compelling and to the point.

5. Optimize Your Thank You Page

Recent Posts

Eight Ways To Effectively Grow an Email List

1. We Made Capturing Email Addresses a Priority Within the Site Design

2. We Turned Deficiency into Opportunity

3. We Tested Subject Lines Again and Again

5. We Segmented Our List

6. We Tested The Format Of Our Emails

7. We Implemented Gary Vaynerchuk’s philosophy of Jab, Jab, Jab, and Right Hook.

8. We Used MailChimp’s Scheduled Post Feature to Our Benefit

Recent Posts

Measuring Success in Content Development

Content and Goals

What is the goal of this content?

How will content success be measured? By rankings?

By leads or sales?

How Are You Measuring Success?

Recent Posts

Inbound Marketing ROI Unlocks Budget

The Inbound Sales Process

Identify

Connect

Explore

Advise

Recent Posts

Understanding Your KPI (Key Performance Indicator)

1. We Knew the Value of Each Website Visitor:

2. Know the Value of Each Visitor From Each Marketing Channel:

Recent Posts

Four 2019 Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong

Predictions from Google

Lenovo offered up:

Jeff Bulas said:

Convince and Convert has similar views saying:

Omnichannel Marketing

AI/ML

Voice Search

Chatbots

Conclusion

Recent Posts

What Does Mark Cuban Know about SEO That He Is Not Telling Us?

Recent Posts

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