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SEO vs Google Ads – ultimate guide to understanding the two

You might be wondering what the difference is between SEO vs Google Ads. You’ve heard that one is more important than the other, but you’re not sure which one it is SEO vs. Google Ads are both great digital marketing strategies for your business.

It is important to understand the difference between the two to make an informed decision about which one will work best for your company’s needs. This blog post will help you understand SEO vs Google Ads, so you can decide how to spend your marketing budget!

What is SEO, and how it works?

To solve your SEO vs Google ads confusion, we’ll start by explaining what SEO stands for – search engine optimization. Search engine optimization and search results pages help boost your website’s ranking in search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo!

To rank higher in search engines for keywords related to your business or industry of expertise, many things need to happen, including having quality content with tags on all site pages, link building from authoritative websites within the same industry, and others outside of the industry.

SEO focuses on target key phrases and keywords that target audiences for your site are looking for. Through keyword research, you’re helping your website to rank higher in the search engine results.

By using the right and relevant keywords, you’re directing traffic to your website. While using SEO involves website optimization, content creation, and establishing your company’s goals, you also need to track progress over time.

You need to monitor and check what contents are working and what is not.

Also, if you’re aiming to rank faster or have a specific target time, SEO won’t do that for you.

However, it’s a guarantee that SEO can give you a long-term solution between SEO vs Google Ads. Looking for a long-term solution might work best for you, depending on your business, quality score, google analytics, and marketing models.

In explaining SEO vs Google Ads, it’s important to understand how SEO can help optimize your website’s conversions. These conversions are the actions fulfilled by someone who visited your site.

Read more: SEO vs Google Ads – ultimate guide to understanding the two

7 WEB Design Tips to Improve you site

Most users will only read 20% of the content on your page. If your website is too busy and without a precise message or call to action, people will bounce.

Lack of traffic or high bounce rate on your website could be a result of poor website design. There are a few things that can help you improve your website and web presence but if done incorrectly could impair your Google ranking and conversation rate.

That’s why it’s common practice to delegate this responsibility to a web design agency. They use the best web design practices to bring the goal and vision for your website to life. Here are some web design tips on how to improve your website:

Make Your Site Load Faster

Most web users have a very short attention span. Hence, users get discouraged and move on easily, when you have a website with a slow load time. It’s something you’ve probably mindlessly on other people’s websites. To not have this happen to your website should ideally load within three secs. Here are some ways you could declutter your website and decrease your bounce rate:

Optimize Images

Reduce plugins

Clear Up Framework and Themes

Use a CDN (content delivery network)

Use SSI (server side Include)

Condense your website’s code (i.e HTML, CSS, and JavaScript)

Optimize the Homepage

Choose a great Hosting Platform

Ensure Your Website is Responsive

Responsiveness of a site is the degree of flexibility of that website on whatever device it’s been accessed on. This is especially important because an increasing amount of users now access the web through mobile phones and tabs rather than laptops and computers.

So, make sure your website is responsive. That means your site should contain the contents and information but a different display; that changes automatically depending on the user’s screen size.

Read more: 7 WEB Design Tips to Improve you site

How Spotify almost had its email marketing shut down because of spam traps

Spotify is one of the world’s largest online music streaming services and sends billions of marketing emails to its users every year. However, in December 2020 the team responsible for email campaigns was contacted by Twilio SendGrid – the platform it uses to manage email marketing – and was told that it was close to being shut down.

Why? Because Spotify didn’t realize that it was sending millions of emails to what are known as ‘spam traps’: bad actors that are looking to harm Spotify’s systems. Matt Gioe, Engineering Manager at Spotify, and the person heading up the email campaign office, was speaking at Twilio’s Signal event this week, where he warned other organizations that they need to get to grips with both the art and science of email, in order to avoid a similar situation.

The problem was brought to Spotify’s attention in December 2020, during the company’s largest campaign of the year, Holiday 2020. During this time Spotify sends approximately 1 billion emails to 170 email subscribers across 92 countries over roughly a 30 day period. It was in the middle of this huge campaign that Twilio SendGrid got in touch. Gioe said:

I received a series of pretty frantic emails, messages and phone calls from three Twilio employees, two of them who I’ve worked with before, and one that I’d actually never heard of.

It turns out this third person was Len Shneyder, who is the VP of Industry Relations at Twilio. Len wanted me to know…that if I don’t do something, I’m going to get shut down…and by me, he really meant Spotify, and by Spotify he meant all of Spotify’s emails. So this is pretty terrifying.

This kind of came out of the blue. This was actually my first marketing campaign that I’d ever worked on. But you can imagine that I was not having a great day.

Read more: How Spotify almost had its email marketing shut down because of spam traps

How To Check The Return On Investment Of Your Search Engine Optimization

Normally, you can measure the return on an investment (ROI) by taking the gain generated by the investment and subtracting its cost. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, in the search engine optimization (SEO) world, it’s a bit less straightforward.

That’s because it can be hard to pinpoint exactly how much of your sales or leads are generated by SEO alone. It’s also hard to track exactly which costs have gone into designing and implementing your SEO strategy.

Given this difficulty, I’ve gone ahead and outlined my formula for calculating and monitoring the ROI of an SEO campaign. As the owner of two full-service digital marketing agencies, I’ve tracked SEO performance across countless client campaigns for over a decade. After years of success in the field, I thought I’d share my basic strategy for SEO analytics and monitoring.

Where ROI Meets SEO For E-Commerce

For those who specialize in e-commerce, there are specific ways you can track and manage your SEO performance. Thanks to Google Analytics (yes, including the free version), you can do this fairly simply. Below, I’ve outlined the basic steps involved.

First, open your Google Analytics account and navigate to the “ADMIN” panel within the left-hand sidebar. From there, navigate to the “VIEW” tab and select “e-Commerce settings” and finally “Enable Enhanced e-Commerce Reporting.”

Whether you use Shopify or WooCommerce, your next step is to initialize tracking on these platforms so the data can be communicated to Google Analytics. Here’s a thorough guide on how to do that. Once complete, you’ll be able to view a variety of key metrics, such as:

Read more: How To Check The Return On Investment Of Your Search Engine Optimization

5 Simple Strategies to Update & Automate Your Email Marketing

Utilizing the latest email marketing strategies is a great way to expand the reach of your business and help you connect with a wide range of customers. You also want to stay in touch with those prospects who didn’t purchase your offer…yet. They might need a little more convincing that you know your stuff and email marketing is an easy way to get inside their inbox and appeal to them. Looking at ways to improve your email marketing strategy is essential to your success.

Implement these simple strategies to improve your email marketing efforts.

#1 Tweak Your Messages

Many entrepreneurs use various types of email sequences to help them maximize sales during a live launch. However, you can reuse these messages by simply performing a few tweaks to the original email. Performing these tweaks is a great way for you to save time while also improving your marketing reach. Ultimately, tweaking your messages only requires a little bit of work to your existing emails.

#2 Check Out Your Email Marketing Metrics

Another way to improve your marketing strategy is to check your metrics consistently. This is also one area that many entrepreneurs overlook or just don’t take the time to do. This information can play a key role in helping you determine the highest performing emails. Metrics can include a variety of information, such as click-through rates, open rates, and purchases. You can use these metrics to learn effective marketing strategies to help you maximize your consumer base. If you never, or rarely, look at your numbers any tweaking you do could be the proverbial ‘shot in the dark.’

#3 Craft New Emails

Taking the additional time to craft new emails is well worth the effort in helping you to expand the reach of your business. Writing new emails is especially effective if you are running a special promotion or giving away a free item. You can also reuse older messages to help your business grow and reach many more customers with only a minimal amount of effort.

#4 Create a Sense of Urgency

One of the best ways to reach new customers is to create a sense of urgency within each email. For example, you can offer a limited special offer that is only available for a few days. You can also use various elements, like a countdown timer, or programs, like Deadline Funnel, to help you include urgency in your emails. This simple marketing technique is highly effective in improving your sales rate since subscribers won’t want to miss your deal.

Read more: 5 Simple Strategies to Update & Automate Your Email Marketing

10 Essential Features Of Good Ergonomic Design Tech Developers Often Overlook

When tech designers are developing a new website, app or product, they usually focus closely on functionality, ease of use and, most importantly, the user experience. But there’s more to a good user experience than attractive graphics or fun interfaces. The best-designed tech will always be centered on ergonomics—the ways humans interact physically and mentally with the tools they use, particularly in the workplace.

Tech hardware and software, as well as websites and apps, should always be designed with the health and comfort of the user in mind if they’re to be fully effective and inclusive. Below, 10 tech experts from Forbes Technology Council share important aspects of good ergonomic design that tech developers sometimes overlook and why it’s so important to get these features right.

1. ADA Compliance

Making your website ADA-compliant is not only the right thing to do, but it also opens your doors to additional visitors. Many low-cost tools make this an easy and transparent thing to do. Ensuring your site is ADA-compliant is a no-brainer. – David Moise, Decide Consulting

2. Hand Size And Reach

Tech developers often forget that with the larger size of modern smartphones, one-handed operation gives a typical adult thumb comfortable access to only the bottom-right two-thirds of the screen. Interface elements in the upper left of the screen are only accessible through uncomfortable contortions, secret OS features or by using your second hand. – Sam Glassenberg, Level Ex

Read more: 10 Essential Features Of Good Ergonomic Design Tech Developers Often Overlook

Three Digital Marketing Industry Challenges That May Positively Impact Email Marketing

Email and digital marketers can be excused if they have been feeling a bit stressed over the past year. Beyond the immense challenges presented by the pandemic, there have been ongoing developments in the data privacy landscape and changing technologies to deal with. But it’s good to remember that challenges also often provide opportunities. Let’s take a look at a few big changes that could impact email marketing in 2021 and in the future — and how marketers can adapt and identify new opportunities.

Evolving Consumer Engagement

Consumer behavior evolves constantly. Some changes can occur suddenly and require quick decisions, while others allow marketers the time to adapt more gradually. Over the past year, email marketers have been dealing with largely unprecedented and sudden changes in consumer behavior.

Just one example was the shift to working from home that impacted workers around the U.S. and the entire world. People who had previously never had the option of working remotely were now scrambling to set up home offices with no certainty about when or if they would return to a traditional office setting. While marketers had already seen a shift toward more remote work in years past, according to Global Workplace Analytics data (via Business 2 Community), the massive acceleration of the change was a game changer for many companies. Consumer needs for some products and services skyrocketed while the need for others plummeted, and many marketers found that all of their existing campaign performance forecasts and benchmarks needed to be reevaluated and potentially tossed aside as organizations pivoted on long-standing strategies.

More people working from home means more people spending more hours in front of their desktop or laptop in a home office setting. Marketers may be seeing this shift in the form of increased desktop email activity and decreased mobile email activity.

Read more: Three Digital Marketing Industry Challenges That May Positively Impact Email Marketing

4 ways to use local SEO to attract more patients

The typical healthcare consumer’s journey often begins with extensive research. In fact, search engines drive 3 times more hospital visits than nonsearch visitors.1

Therefore, if you are not getting enough patients through your door, there is a good chance that your company has a poor local online presence. Not enough patients are coming—they are going to your competitors instead simply because they found them first while doing a local search.

But all is not lost.

With a well-designed health care search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, you can improve your medical practice’s digital presence and attract more patients.

Below are some of the best ways to leverage local SEO and get more patients through your door.

1. Claim and optimize your Google My Business listing

All local businesses, including health care providers, should claim their Google My Business (GMB) listing. Not only does GMB significantly influence search engine rankings, but it is also one of the first things that potential patients see (Google’s Local Pack) after conducting a local search query.

Fortunately, claiming your GMB account is easy and free.2 After signing up and claiming your listing, you will need to provide the following information:

• Name of practice

• Address

• Phone number

• Email address

• Hours of operation

• Photos of the practice

• Short description about the practice

The idea is to bring the GMB listing to life by providing complete information about the practice to potential patients. To optimize a GMB listing, make sure that you frequently update it and answer questions that people may have.

What about multiple locations?

Even if you have a main phone line for answering calls and booking patient appointments, all office locations should have their own Google My Business listing.

Otherwise, when a patient searches for your secondary locations (satellite offices), they are likely to end up finding the Google listing for the main location. This can result in patients

Read more: 4 ways to use local SEO to attract more patients

Your 9-Step Guide to Website Planning

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: Planning a website or redesign is an enormous undertaking. At the enterprise level, a site redesign can take several months to more than a year to complete, cost hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars and span thousands of pages.

If you’re the one planning for the design, you’ll need to consider the time and cost, as well as messaging, site layout, brand identity, user experience and performance.

You’ll need to meet with key stakeholders to define business goals and figure out who your customers are and why they’re coming to your site.

You’ll also need to create content that engages your audience at key touchpoints and nudges them through your funnel.

And that’s just the beginning.

After you’ve conducted research with stakeholders and devised a path forward, you’ll actually need to build the thing. That could mean hiring a third-party web development agency or creating an entirely new codebase in-house. Either way, you’ll have to think about the architecture and SEO structure, third-party integrations and responsiveness across screen sizes and browsers.

Even after the launch, you won’t be done. You’ll need to continue to iterate and test how well the site is performing against benchmarks. (And considering the average lifespan of a website is just two years and seven months, you probably don’t want to spend years building it).

Read more: Your 9-Step Guide to Website Planning

Optimizing Your Email Marketing In 2021

Digital marketing has more than shown its worth for businesses of all industries over the past year, and one strategy that’s been particularly valuable has been email marketing.

Email marketing is arguably more important now than it ever was before. However, while email marketing is extremely important right now, it can also be difficult to do well. If you want to get all of the benefits of email marketing, you’ll need to familiarize yourself with all of the best practices and stay current with the latest trends.

Don’t miss the impact that good email marketing can have on your business going forward. Use these tips to optimize your email marketing in 2021 and start appealing more to your audience.

Give emails a personal touch.

You’re probably already aware of the overwhelming amount of emails that people get each day, as you likely deal with this yourself. We all get tons of emails from businesses, and many of them don’t even look like they were meant for us specifically.

Generic emails sent out to all your contacts that don’t apply to a particular group of people or an individual won’t have much of an impact and could end up just getting deleted.

In 2021, personalization is one of the most important things you can do for your marketing efforts, especially email marketing. The more relevant you can make something, the more potential it has to be effective.

No one wants to spend their time reading emails that weren’t intended for them, and they definitely won’t feel compelled to do whatever the email is asking of them.

Ensure that you’re creating emails with relevant information for certain groups so that it appeals to their needs and interests. To personalize even further, include the recipient’s name, so they know they’re getting an email meant for them, not just anyone.

Boost engagement with interactive features.

Personalization isn’t the only way for getting users to be more engaged when reading your emails. While you may be able to write engaging content to keep your audience interested, adding interactive features to some of your emails is a great way of boosting agreement. This gives them more than just text to read when they open your emails.

Read more: Optimizing Your Email Marketing In 2021