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SEO and Why Your Business Needs It

SEO is a marketing fundamental that you need to have down. Why? For starters, there are 3.5 billion Google searches every single day. Plus, 77% of consumers perform research before they even engage with a brand.

This blog is adapted from a post by our partners at MarketGoo.

What Is SEO?

In a nutshell, you use search engine optimization to increase your website’s visibility.

When ranking your site, search engines use bots to crawl all over it. You need to make it easy for these bots to crawl your site and send out signals that your site is worth ranking.

Your goal is to get to the top of the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) and thus get more traffic.

SEO and Mobile Optimization
PHOTO BY NEONBRAND / UNSPLASH

Why Does My Business Need SEO?

  1. It’s your main sustainable traffic source
  2. If you rank well, your site will get more clicks and establish credibility
  3. If you’re a local business, it will help you get more foot traffic
  4. It helps you keep tabs on and surpass your competitors

Search is everything nowadays.

How many times do you ask somebody a question and they respond, “Oh, just Google it!”

It’s an integral part of our lives, so you need to make sure your business shows up in those searches.

Here are a few more indisputable reasons:

Your Main Traffic Source
51% of all traffic comes from organic search.

That’s more than double the amount of traffic from paid and social put together.

Naturally, then, SEO should be your priority.

SEO Source of Traffic Chart from BrightEdge

Increased Authority
70% of searchers click on organic results, ignoring paid results.

If you rank high on Google, searchers see your site as credible.

You’ve made it to the top for a reason. In other words, you haven’t simply paid to get an ad at the top of the page.

Local Presence
27% of people search for local business information online every single day.
SEO Chart From Bright Local

So, even if you have a physical store or restaurant, for example, you need SEO. Consumers research businesses on their phone before visiting them.

Keeping up with your Competitors
61% of marketers say that improving SEO is their number one Acomplia for sale priority because without SEO you won’t be able to compete.

Let’s have a chat about your SEO and I will run a report on your website’s marketing effectiveness live — and all at no cost to you!! Call me direct at 1-888-502 3523

 

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My #1 Question Asked: Do You Make Websites?

I decided to write this “My #1 Question Asked: Do You Make Websites?” post because at least once a week (50+ times per year), I get asked this question. This post is about the deeper answer, beyond “yes”.

We Make Websites

Today’s Marketing Professional

I am not boasting or making any claim that the average marketer of today has the same education as a physician, however, I have discovered that using the analogy of a family physician is an easy way to understand the term “marketing professional”.

Your family doctor would be able to administer a shot or take blood pressure, as well as specialize in some aspect of medicine. Today’s marketer can build a website with at least a WYSIWYG editor, and will often focus on a specialty.

That said, today’s typical marketer also specializes in something specific, such as what I do here at Cortex, conversion optimization and engagement engineering.

We make website to fit the Conversion Optimization Wheel

Yes, Cortex Marketing Does Make Websites

Although the skillset to make websites is needed in being a good marketer, today’s full-service marketing is bigger than that. An example is that Jason, and his business Ad-Sol.com, specializes in advertising, whereas Behrooz, and his business MasterPix.com, specializes in custom websites and graphic design. So, does Cortex marketing make Websites? Yes, but so does Ad-Sol and MasterPix. Clear as mud?

The bottom line is, marketing is a multi-spoked wheel and the many components of that wheel, support and works off of each other.

The General Top-10 Components Are:

      1. Big Picture Names (e.g. what you call your business, domain url’s, content titles, etc.)
      2. Big Picture Strategies and Plans
      3. Branding & Colour Schemes
      4. Target Defining
      5. Copy-Boarding
      6. Copywriting
      7. Online Development (websites, social media, etc)
      8. Publicity
      9. Testing
      10. Analyzing successes and failures

We Make Websites with Digital MarketingA Different Kind Of Marketing Company

If you are looking for an effective way to not just drive more traffic to your site, but to drive more qualified leads to your sales funnel, lets set up a time to chat… or you can call me now at 1-888-502-3523. I look forward to speaking with you about your ideas!!

 

 

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Landing Pages – What Are They Exactly?

Landing pages are often misunderstood outside the marketing world. They have made a splash on the business world and some clarification needs to be made. The bottom line is if you are not using them and expecting your engagements and conversions to rise, you may be in for a bumpy lead-generation ride.

Landing Pages From Unbounce

Where is the landing page confusion among businesses?

Landing pages have shown the ability to help the business reach certain goals. However,  that said, issues arise as many businesses believe that everyone is their target and anyone that lands on their website — on any page — must be interested in showing interest, and will do so “if they are really interested”.

Yes, while this is true, there are many factors that actually cause a conversion to happen. In this case, the conversion that I am referring to is when your site visitor actually provides you info they are interested in

What is the intent of a Landing Page?

 “A landing page can be any page that someone lands on after clicking on an online marketing call-to-action.” ~ Oli Gardner

“The full intent of lead generation landing pages is to use a web form and a strong Call to Action (or CTA), for the purpose of collecting lead data such as names and email addresses. This is the primary type of landing page used for B2B marketing.” ~  Unbounce Landing Page Course

So what makes landing pages successful?

So you want high-converting landing pages and you are still not sure what that means. Unbounce’s Garrett Hughes put together an article about the “12 High-Converting Landing Pages (That’ll Make You Wish You Built ‘Em)”  that talks about the 5-things that make a high-converting Landing Page:

1. Have a strong, contextual hero shot and supporting imagery
2. Present a single and focused call to action
3, Clearly state your value proposition with a compelling header and subhead
4, Outline the features and benefits (with emphasis on the latter)
5. Include testimonials and other forms of social proof

Read the whole article by Garrett Hughes

Landing Pages and their special features!!

While you can create campaigns to feed your user to a landing page within your site, there are some key takeaways that will separate you from the less professional.

A) In general, you cannot test the effectiveness of a page on your site. And while site builders are getting more sophisticated, most website frameworks are not designed for lead capture. Testing, including A/B testing, is crucial to understanding your engagement conversion and lead generation successes and non-successes.

B) Landing Pages have a single purpose. They are not mired down with distraction and are engineered to create a lift in your collection of visitors generated, generally, by an advertising campaign.

Are you building a landing page now?

If you answered “yes”, surely you have pondered about whether to DIY or hire someone, and with both, there are positives.

Landing Pages - The Definitive Landing Page ChecklistThere are some great companies out there providing a landing pages service, however, my absolute favourite is Unbounce. They have two plans, a DIY or they can do it for you. If you do not know what you are doing, the later is often your most economical choice.

Your best choice, however, is that you can hire Cortex to do it for you and manage your account.

Either way, if you are building it yourself you should download this free checklist to ensure you are up to speed and double-checking your page through a Landing Page Check List before publishing.

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Quizzes — The Latest In Effective Marketing Trends

Quizzes and Lead Generation.

Guest Post ByThe Quiz Collective, Inc.

If you’ve worked in marketing for more than ten minutes, you know that generating fresh leads is the backbone of everything that happens in the marketing world. Today I’m going to look at how quizzes – those viral, share-able, pieces of content that just won’t go away, can be turned into lead generation machines that feed the top of your sales funnels.

Quizzes - Communication StyleTo better understand how quizzes for lead generation work, we are going to follow the process of three companies whose quizzes combined to bring in 5,570 new email leads. We’ll look at the exact method each marketer used to formulate these quizzes and we’ll walk away with actionable ways you can create your own quizzes for lead generation.

Step 1. What to make a quiz about

Before you do anything, you need a subject to create your quiz on. To learn more about how this works, let’s meet our three example companies and see how they landed on the quiz ideas that worked so well for bringing in new subscribers.

UNiDAYS: This company is an E-commerce site dedicated to University gear. Their method for selecting a quiz idea was to scour the likes of Buzzfeed and Zimbio to find the top quiz content and use those ideas for themselves. This is also known as the skyscraper technique, which means finding out what’s worked for others and improving on it.

Unless you aren’t on Facebook, you recognize the title “Which Celebrity is Your Soulmate?” – it pops up in one form or another on almost everyone’s newsfeed. I especially like this example because it shows that any quiz can be turned into one that brings in new email subscribers, this is quite literally the same quiz title that’s been used hundreds of times before, but this time it will be used for growing UNiDAYS’ email list – stay tuned to learn how.

Quizzes - WWF Grizzly World Wildlife Fund: This organization is one of the worlds’ largest dedicated conservation-based groups. They work around the world to protect endangered animals and environments. For their quiz, they used something called quiz purposing, which means creating a quiz based on past popular content. In simple terms, the World Wildlife Fund discovered that the most popular articles on their website were about the various animals they were protecting (this was done by looking at Google Analytics). Then they created a quiz where the results led to one of those popular articles.

This method is great because it’s easily replicable on pretty much any site, you just have to look at the top articles and group them into a quiz format.

Viewsbank: This is a website that pays you to take surveys which companies want respondents to. They create quizzes to grow their email list which can then be leveraged into more customers (people who take surveys). The quiz strategy from Viewsbank is based on events. They’ve done Halloween “Which Monster Are You?”, Christmas “What kind of gift giver are you?”, and Valentine’s Day “What Kind of Valentine are you?”

Again, I like this quiz strategy because it’s not very specific to the particular industry – holidays are applicable to everyone and can be adapted to virtually any business application.

Create Your Own Quiz Now

2. How to build out your quiz

The first thing people see when they agree to start taking your quiz are the questions. For a quiz that’s designed to collect new email subscribers, the questions must build up some trust with the people taking your quiz so they’ll be more inclined to subscribe at the end of the quiz. Let’s look at how our three example companies built rapport using questions.

Quizzes - Drink ChoiceUNiDAYS: Following the topic theme of pure entertainment, the questions in this quiz are meant to just be fun. The example here is “What’s your drink of choice?” which doesn’t have much of a direct bearing on the results of the quiz but does work to break the ice and create some conversation. This tactic works to build trust by just having a good time, at the end of the quiz when the opt-in form comes up and asks for an email address, people are more likely to give over their email address because it feels personal.

World Wildlife Fund: The World Wildlife Fund has a different but equally effective technique for their quiz questions. Their goal is to make you start thinking about what you really believe in and what you stand up for. The question below “What’s Your Communication Style?” makes you stop and consider for a minute what your best communication style is. This starts to open your dialogue up and when you are asked for an email address at the end of the quiz it’s not such a big deal.

Quizzes - ValentineViewsbank: This quiz gets really personal, another great way to ask quiz questions. People are surprisingly willing to answer personal questions when taking quizzes online, and personal questions double as an excellent way to build trust with someone you don’t know who is taking your quiz.

3. How to use the quiz for lead generation

After the quiz questions (and before the results) is when the email opt-in form pops up. This is where you get to collect personal contact information from your quiz takers and continue the conversation beyond the quiz into the future. The way you ask for the email address can determine the conversion rate, let’s look at a few prime examples of this opt-in text.

UNiDAYS: The UNiDAYS quiz is all about fun. It’s lighthearted from the start and the quiz questions are enjoyable. The call to action reflects this theme by asking for an email address in a simple but direct way. This fits with the general idea of the quiz, which is perfect, and led to a very strong conversion rate.

Conversion rate: 68.5%

World Wildlife Fund: This quiz integrates a contest with the email capture form. The main call to action still references the fact that the lead capture form comes before the results, so the person should put in their email address to see the results, but since there is a skip step that’s not always enough to entice someone to input an email. This quiz has a contest attached to subscribing, it’s not a big contest (a Patagonia jacket is worth about $100), but it gives some level of extra incentive beyond the quiz results.

Conversion rate: 39%

Quizzes - Results ViewsbankViewsbank: This one is interesting. Viewsbank is a site that pays people to take surveys, and you have to be a member to take those surveys and make money. Their quiz asks for an email address in return for showing the results and getting your own personal invite to Viewsbank. This is a very direct tie-in to the product behind the company producing the quiz, but it turned out to be effective in this case.

Conversion rate: 81%

Create Your Own Quiz Now

4. How to write quiz results that get shared

When someone inputs their email address (or if they choose to skip that step), they are then taken to the quiz results. This is your very first interaction with a person who has given your company their email address, and it is important to building the type of connection that can lead to long-term customers. There is a lot of pressure here to make a good impression on new quiz takers, let’s see how our example companies handled that stress.

UNiDAYS: As you can see below, there’s not much to this quiz result besides a picture and some share buttons. This is on purpose. UNiDAYS primarily targets young people, who are active on social media. The quiz results, which tell you who your celebrity soulmate is are all very popular and attractive celebrities. Getting a well-known celebrity as your quiz result is like a badge of honour for these University students, and sharing those results is the primary objective. That’s why the results are limited to a large image and the ability to share.

Quizzes - Lead Generation EmailWorld Wildlife Fund: The quiz results from The World Wildlife Fund have the primary objective of getting quiz takers to continue interacting with the website. There are two large orange buttons that point to “learn more about Grizzly bears in Alaska” and “learn more about grizzly bears” These buttons provide an easy and natural opportunity to continue engaging with The World Wildlife Fund, which is exactly what they want.

Remember, because quizzes get shared so much on Facebook and Twitter, the people taking them are often complete strangers to the brand behind the quiz. There needs to be some sort of connection really soon after the quiz to connect people to the brand, and articles about bears are the perfect way to achieve that.

Viewsbank: This quiz wants to reach as many people as possible, and the main way it gets traffic is through social shares. They take a short and simple approach to getting shared, with a very brief description that’s uplifting. Sometimes shorter is better like this scenario where what really matters is the result title more than the full description.

5. Beginning the customer connection via email

After the quiz is all said and done, you have a stranger’s email address and the permission to email them. The key to beginning a successful relationship with this person and eventually converting them into a paying customer is to have a smooth transition into an email connection.

There is a ton of pressure put on marketers to bring in leads all the time, that’s just part of the job. When emerging technologies like quizzes can help with generating new subscribers, that’s an amazing thing.

Phone chats are always free – 1-888-502 3523 or contact me here!

Create Your Own Quiz Now

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Engagement — 4 Quick and Easy Steps

Encouraging engagement, of some type, is what every marketing campaign is ultimately about. Unfortunately, many campaigns miss the mark by forgetting that the message should be less about the information of your features, and more about the emotional relevance and benefit of your widget or service to your target audience.

As such, when you are writing to your audience — e.g. a prospect or someone who is higher up the food chain and who is extremely busy — it is important to engage with your best storyline.

This can easily be done with a simple exercise and if you are reading this, you are in luck; sign up here for an online complimentary mini-coaching session on copy-boarding. This is for new clients only and is about 1-hour in length.

That said, it is often a challenge to develop what you want to say without is sounding like a cold-form-letter.

Engagement Matrix

Encouraging Engagement Like A Professional

Tim Ferriss (the number one business podcaster) shared this simple template in an interview:
1st paragraph: “I know you are very busy and get a lot of emails so this will only take 60 seconds.”

2nd paragraph: 1 or 2 sentences about who you are and how that’s relevant to the person you’re contacting.

3rd paragraph: 1 or 2 sentences with a specific question the recipient can answer quickly.

4th paragraph: “I totally understand if you’re too busy to reply. Even a 1-to-2-line response will make my day.”

Engagement

Encouraging Engagement Old-School Style

Note this could also work if you picked up the phone and called. This seems to be a dying art as many would rather sens an email or text message.

I believe it is because people like to think things through before they speak.  Additionally, they like to hear from other thinkers. Certainly, they want other people to know what they think, but doing that via a call can be scary for some.

So off to the email engagement campaign, and HubSpot’s Barry Feldman suggests “prompting your audience with one of the following ‘What do you think?’ strategies:

  • Probe their personality. Post a question that invites people to share their opinion or weigh in on something.
  • Play the “test your knowledge” game. It’s irresistible.
  • Post a poll. It’s easy to create polls on Twitter and Facebook. In addition to engaging your followers, you stand to learn meaningful things about them too.
  • Respond to my email. Email from brands are bound to ask you to click-through to read, watch, and try or buy something, but how often do they simply ask you to write back? I find this be an enormously engaging strategy and have seen it work for my brand and many others. Notice I wrote, “Respond to my email,” not “our email” or “this email.” A human-to-human first-person approach will be the engaging way to call this play.
  • Just ask. Interactivity 101: simply post a question. Whether done so in a social stream, blog post, online group or community, or on a Q&A site such as Quora, I’ve witnessed asking followers relevant, provocative, and timely questions create some of the most engaging and thought-provoking social media activity of all.

Learn how to write more compelling content with a personal copywriting and copy-boarding session, or contact me directly for a chat.

 

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