When you run an agency or business, you have a whole host of website data and analytics at your fingertips to improve your digital marketing.
If you know where to look and how to analyze the right information, you can learn which of your posts tend to perform the best on social media, how most people land on your website, and what you can improve upon to see better results.
In this article, we’re going to provide you with tips on how you can harness the power of data to improve your digital marketing and online visibility. Let’s dive in.
Monitor your bounce rate, and target new keywords if it’s high
Your website’s bounce rate is the percentage of people who click through to your website from a search engine results page (SERP), but then leave without clicking through to another page. You’ll be able to see your bounce rate by analyzing your website data through Google Analytics.
It’s important that you make an effort to keep your bounce rate low because, if it’s high, this can signal to search engines that you aren’t providing value for your website visitors. This may lead Google and other search engines to dock your keyword and page rankings.
One of the most common reasons why websites’ bounce rates can be high is that the wrong keywords are being targeted on their web pages. This can mean that people are presented with content that they weren’t expecting when they click through. So, when you’re writing your website copy, you need to ensure you’re always incorporating the most relevant keywords that reflect what is likely to be the searcher’s intent.
One of the most important things you also need to remember is that you should be targeting commercial keywords—those with a high purchase intent—on your product or service pages, and informational keywords in your website copy and blog content. This will help to ensure people land on the page they’re actually looking for when they encounter you through their preferred search engine.
If your content isn’t getting clicks, change your strategy
Many businesses come up with a content strategy and stick to it—even if it doesn’t get them the results they want. Don’t make this mistake! If you’ve tested out a particular strategy and you aren’t getting clicks through to your website, you might be creating the wrong type of content or may not be promoting it well enough.
A common mistake businesses make is that they focus on churning out new content all of the time, but don’t make the effort to ensure it’s actually going to provide value for their target audience. So, to ensure you get clicks from people who are willing to pay for your products or services, let’s take a look at several types of content you should think about incorporating into your strategy.
Free tools
If you can offer something useful to your customers for free, this will build a relationship with them and encourage them to make a purchase with you in the future. It also provides you with a chance to demonstrate that you’re an authority in your field and that you genuinely know what you’re doing.
To provide you with some inspiration, let’s take a look at some companies that are already implementing this strategy very well.
For instance, FreshBooks is an accounting software provider, and they offer a series of free invoice templates that their target customers—freelancers and small business owners—are sure to benefit from. By offering these templates for free, they can build trust with their target audience and encourage them to sign up for their software program in the future. Plus, this is the type of content that’s sure to get the company plenty of website clicks.
Similarly, Uplift Legal Funding, a legal loan provider, has a lawsuit loan calculator. This can help prospective clients to determine how much it will cost them to take out a loan to fight a legal case. Of course, this is relevant to the company’s services, but it also provides a lot of value for people who might be looking to take out this type of loan. So, it’s a piece of interactive content that can attract a lot of clicks, leads, and customers for the company.
How-to guides
How-to guides are another great form of high-performing content. If you can demonstrate your knowledge on a relevant topic in your industry, consider compiling it into a how-to guide. Not only will this be genuinely helpful for your target audience, but it can help you target relevant keywords and attract people that might want to use your services.
For example, Neil Patel, a content marketing expert, has a how-to guide on improving your Google rankings. The guide covers just about everything someone would want to know about SEO, whether they’re an expert or a beginner.
The guide covers keyword research, on-page SEO, how to avoid penalties, and more. By showing off his knowledge and expertise in this written tutorial, this can attract a lot of relevant web traffic, ultimately leading to more sales for the business.
Blog posts that answer customer questions
Answering customer questions with your blog content is a great way to attract them to your website and show that you understand their concerns or pain points. To start, check in with your customer service team and find out if there are any questions they get frequently. Creating content based on these queries will not only boost your SEO and attract more website visitors, but it can also save your customer service team time in the long run.
You can also conduct some question keyword research in order to find out what your customers are asking search engines. Head to Answer the Public and plug in some search terms related to your niche. The tool will provide you with a variety of questions people are searching for and you can use these to direct your content.
For example, the dog walking website Rover focuses on answering customer questions in their blog content like their article that answers whether daffodils are poisonous to dogs. Since their target audience consists of dog walkers and pet owners, this is a very relevant piece of content. This can help boost their SEO and build a sense of trust between the company and its readers. It’s also sure to generate a lot of clicks for the website.
Comparison pieces
Comparison pieces are ideal for helping your customers to make more informed purchases, and they can also help to attract the right people to your website.
In a comparison piece, you should outline several similar products, services, or tools that your audience might be considering investing in. You can then compare all of the pros, cons, and features so a reader will have all of the information they need to make the right decision.
This type of content is great for getting more people to your website, as it will catch people in the consideration or decision stages of the buying journey. Plus, this type of content shows that you truly have your customers’ best interests at heart and helps to earn their trust.
For example, Best Nursing Programs is a website that focuses on helping aspiring healthcare professionals to take the next step in their education. So, they publish a wide range of comparison pieces to assist with this — their round-up of the best accelerated BSN nursing programs in the US is a fantastic one.
They discuss the program lengths, costs, graduation rates, and more associated with each course. In doing so, they’ve created a high-quality piece of content that provides a huge amount of value for their target audience and will likely attract a lot of visitors.
Consider whether you could create similar content for your website. Are there similar products or services your audience might be looking at? Compare them to assist your prospective customers in making the best decision.
As well as creating the right types of content, you also need to ensure that you’re promoting it properly. To start, social media is one of the most effective tools for content sharing. Additionally, most of these platforms have built-in tools that give you even more data on what your most popular posts are. Collecting and analyzing this data can help you to ensure you’re developing the best content strategy possible.
Use audience analytics to target the right people
If you want to ensure you’re attracting the right people with your content and marketing campaigns, you need to pay attention to your audience analytics. This can help you to refine your target audience, as you’ll have a better idea of which demographics you’re currently reaching, how people tend to find you, and more.
One way you can collect helpful audience data is with a social media analytics tool. After all, if people are following your social media accounts and engaging with your posts, it’s probably because they’re interested in what you’re selling. Social media analytics tools can provide you with information about the ages of your followers, what times they tend to be online, and — most importantly — what kinds of content, products, and posts they’re most interested in. For example, with a custom social media dashboard, you can analyze audience demographics data such as age ranges, top countries, top cities, and languages for each social platform you’re using:
Once you’ve collected all of the relevant data about your audience, you can use it to create accurate buyer personas. These are representations of who shops at your company the most (or who you’re trying to attract). Look for trends in your data like your customers’ gender, age, location, and spending habits to start. It can also help to conduct customer surveys to learn more about the people who already shop with you. The better you understand your audience, the better you’ll be able to market and appeal to them.
Consider whether you should take a localized approach
Next, look at your location analytics to figure out where your customers or website visitors are based. If you spot that there’s a large proportion of your audience in one area, or even in a number of locations, taking a localized content and marketing approach could be very fruitful.
If you do decide to go down the localized route, there are a number of strategies you can use. Let’s take a look at some of the most effective.
Create location-specific web pages
If your business has a number of physical locations, it’s often worth creating an individual web page for each. These should include specific information about each store, such as the opening hours, the services they provide, which team members work there, and how people can reach you.
For instance, Bay Property Management Group is a real estate company with a variety of different offices, and they have a location page for each of them. On their page for their Baltimore County location, the company gives specific information about the office’s hours, fees, and more. They even have a carousel of reviews that are tailored to the staff and services at this specific location. This information shows the viewer that their local Bay Property Management Group office is trustworthy and helpful.
If you have physical locations or discover that a lot of your customers are based in a particular area, it could be worth using a similar technique on your website.
Publish local content
Publishing content that’s relevant to the area you serve can also be a great way to boost your local SEO and attract more of your ideal customers. Depending on the type of business you run, you could create round-ups of local stores, guides about the surrounding area, and more. If you’re actually active in the local community, you could even create content about events or charity initiatives you’ve been involved with.
For example, Tillamook, a dairy company in the Pacific Northwest, has published a blog post all about a local food drive they attended. In their article, they discuss their sponsorship of the KGW Newschannel 8 Great Food Drive and how they were able to help collect over 2 million pounds of food.
This type of content shows that Tillamook cares about its community and wants to help make it a better place to live in. This builds a relationship with prospective customers in the area, which can lead to more sales in the future. Consider whether this is an approach you could take, too.
Target local keywords
If you have a lot of customers or clients in one area, it might also be worth targeting local keywords in your content and website copy. If you run a hair salon in Washington, for instance, targeting the key phrase “hair salon in Seattle” could help you to reach more of your customers through search engines.
For inspiration, let’s take a look at an example from Redmann Law, which is a law firm based in New Orleans. They’ve successfully targeted a whole host of local keywords on their New Orleans car accident lawyer service page, and are reaping the rewards as a result.
According to Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, the webpage currently ranks on the first page of Google for 58 keywords that contain the phrase “New Orleans”. These keywords have a collective monthly search volume of 3,300, so that’s how many people this page could be reaching each month through local Google searches.
If you’re trying to reach more customers in a specific area, it’s worth taking a leaf out of Redmann Law’s book and targeting local keywords in this way. Study how they’ve woven these into their copy naturally, from their headline to the end of their service page’s body copy. Using a similar tactic could help you to reach your ideal audience.
Local links
Backlink building is the process of securing high-quality links from other authoritative websites. When this happens, Google takes it as a vote of confidence in your work and will give you a boost in the SERPs as a result. If you build local links and citations, you can give Google a better idea of which area you’re trying to do business in, and boost your rankings for local searches in the process.
Use customer journey data to optimize your touchpoints
It’s important that you collect data that will help you get a better understanding of your customers’ journey. Think of this as a roadmap consisting of every touchpoint an individual goes through when interacting with your brand, before, during, and after a purchase.
For instance, where do your customers find you? Through social media, search engines, or related websites? How many of your customers come back after making an initial purchase? These are the types of questions you need to ask yourself when analyzing your customer journey. It’s a good idea to collect data like this in order to determine what touchpoints you need to focus on optimizing.
To find these data points, it could be helpful to conduct a survey with people who have made a purchase with your business. Ask them how they found your business, what made them decide to make a purchase, and how likely they would be to make a purchase in the future.
Once you have your customer journey data, you’ll be able to identify the roadblocks your customers often come up against, and the concerns they might have before buying from you. You can find out if your customers are achieving their goals on your website, where the main areas of friction are, and where people are abandoning their purchases, then work to fix the issues.
Summary: Using Data to Improve Your Marketing
In this article, we outlined how you can use data to refine and optimize your digital marketing strategy.
Just by running a website and having the right analytics tools set up, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips at any given moment! Follow these tips to use your data and analytics to consistently improve your digital marketing efforts and reach your business goals.
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