The best way to justify investment in organic SEO is the fact your customers don't trust ads
The infographic from seotraininglondon shows just how important ranking well organically is for your business. Consumers are far more likely to trust links that aren't ads. People think organic search results give answers that are more relevant, and are thus more likely to click on them. Only 28% of people think organic results are more reputable than Ads, so in terms of reputation PPC may not be such a bad thing after all.
Check out the infographic based on 1,000 respondents to an SEO survey. It's perfect if you need to justify increased spend on organic SEO to a manager.
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Setting specific objectives that help dictate your online marketing budget
Deciding on a budgeting strategy for SEO and PPC can sometimes be tricky. There is not necessarily a one-size fits all blueprint that organizations can follow. It is oftentimes a balancing act between the organization’s long-term and short-term goals. Developing a SMART objective that can be measured is an effective technique to budget for both PPC and SEO. Once specific objectives are set, it becomes much easier to determine how much money should be allocated to each online tactic.
Managing a budget for SEO
SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes time to develop and implement an onsite/offsite SEO plan. Most good SEO firms can cost $1000-$5000 a month; even more in some cases depending on the complexity of the business. The important thing to remember with SEO is that contrary to popular belief,…
A quick briefing on the 6 new Google services announced at Google I/O 2016
It's important to keep up to date with the new spiel and jargon within #martech and media, to identify new marketing opportunities, or even if it's just to avoid any embarrassment in the office when you're asked for your view on the latest. Google and the other platform providers certainly keep us on our toes, especially their latest raft of announcements. You could say that with their new Alphabet parent, it reminded us of Alphabet soup.
Google's annual I/O event certainly had more new platform announcements than most. Here's our look at the 6 new services we counted.
1. Google assistant
This is Google's next step in machine learning and artificial intelligence and is a conversation-based tool designed to control smartphones, smartwatches and other devices. It's not a new product…
Facebook wants to leverage the power of its personal data to challenge Google for online Ad dominance
Importance: [rating=4] (For online advertisers)
Recommended source: Facebook for Business
Facebook is announcing a big extension to its audience network, which was launched in 2014 to let advertisers use Facebook's data for targeting customers with ads outside of Facebook.
Facebook will start selling video ads to cash in on this valuable section of the ad market. Ads purchased through Facebook's audience network can appear on the sites of any publishers signed up to use audience network, and can be targeted based on the data Facebook have from their users profile and activity within the platform. Facebook will let marketers know the number of views so brands can get an idea of the number of impressions which will have helped build brand awareness.
Taking…
What is the industry standard click-through rate (CTR) in AdWords for your company?
When you're running an Ad Campaign from scratch, or even if you've been running one for a couple of years, it can be tough to know how you're comparing to your competition. Wordstream recently used their huge dataset to show the average click through rate, across 16 industries (Advocacy, Auto, B2B, Consumer Services, Dating & Personals, E-Commerce, Education, Employment Services, Finance & Insurance, Health & Medical, Home Goods, Industrial Services, Legal, Real Estate, Technology, and Travel & Hospitality).
The search results confirm an age old saying - "Sex Sells", Dating and Personals leading the way with an average click-through rate of 3.4%; over 1.5% higher than the average CTR across all industries. Understandably, it's easier to write emotional copy, capturing the imagination of a lovesick audience.
Other noticeable CTR's include the Financial industry (2.65%) who…
Adwords/ PPC marketers need to make sure they're optimising for mobile- it makes up more than half of clicks!
We've seen the share of web traffic from mobile devices explode in recent years, with mobile overtaking desktop late last year. Now PPC has caught up, in America at least. In the 1st quarter of 2016 the combined tablet and phone PPC clicks outstripped desktop for the first time ever. Exciting times for mobile marketers, and an important moment for all PPC marketers, who need to make sure they are thinking about mobile as an integral part of their plans, rather than an ad on or appendage.
Source: Marketing Charts
Date released: May 2016
Data set: US Merkle clients
Related resource: Adwords guide
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Moz releases a new free tool to help you discover, prioritize, and build lists of high-quality keywords.
The Keyword Explorer (KWE from herein) comes as part of the Free tools offered by Moz, a leader in Digital Marketing and Search Tools. It's a result of year-long development by a team already dedicated to the maintenance and development of Moz's rankings collections and research tools. How has it the impacted the final product? Let's find out.
What does it do?
The official strapline is...
"Find The Best Keywords For Your SEO Strategy
Discover, prioritize, and build lists of high-quality keywords."
And I can safely say it passes the "Ronseal Test"; it does exactly what is say's on the tin.
The tool takes users through the entire keyword research process, whilst providing metrics and scoring systems (Volume, Difficulty,…
New research on how email readers interact with marketing emails
Those of you familiar with the latest email marketing stats will already know how important 'mobile opens' are. In fact, emails opened on smartphones and tablets make up over half of all emails opened over the last three years according to a new report from Yesmail. This research makes a compelling case for upgrading to responsive email designs, or if you already have them, for optimising them.
The importance of mobile email readership makes responsive email design more crucial than ever, because users expect attractive emails across devices, and are unlikely to click through on an email which looks poorly formatted because wasn't designed to appear on a mobile device.
Responsive design is key for boosting mobile clicks
Regardless of whether your emails have responsive designs, over half your email opens will be happening on mobile devices. However, if you don't have responsive designs, most…
How to make sure your backend is SEO friendly
Most SEO guidelines focus on off-page SEO. Little attention is given to optimizing your website backend for SEO. Without an optimized website, off-page SEO campaigns are all in vain.
As with any project, the success of an SEO campaign starts with mastering and flawlessly executing the fundamentals.
Digital marketing involves having well-optimized online real estate and then letting the world know about it. The success of your online business, therefore, rests on building a solid website backend that is optimized for performance and usability.
What does an SEO-friendly backend look like? Here are some issues to pay attention to:
Clean Code
Page loading speed has become a significant Google ranking factor. Google users are an impatient lot and will quickly exit a site that takes much time to load.
In fact, 25% of your visitors will have left your site if your site takes more than four seconds…
A new report by renowned digital marketing analyst Rebecca Lieb points to the decline of banner ads and the opportunity it represents for content marketers.
Advertising effectiveness is declining. Savvy web users are installing ad-blockers in droves with Adblock use in Europe over 30% in some countries, whilst everyone is developing 'banner blindness' with their own internal ad-blockers, which is also known by its more common name, the human brain. The move to mobile makes it harder to deliver effective ads without being obtrusive and increasing concerns about data privacy mean some consumers are in no mood to hand over their details.
This might sound like bad news for digital marketers, but it actually opens up a whole world of opportunities for doing things differently and reaching customers more effectively. For content marketers specifically, it means budgets will continue to tilt in their favor, and greater demands will be put on content marketing departments, as…
