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The web audience is changing. With mobile and voice search, the shopping journeys are becoming more fragmented and harder to predict, the attention spans are getting even shorter and the content supply is often greater than demand.
Consequently, it is increasingly important to understand how your site users are interacting with the page elements, and what you can do to better engage them.
Put simply an engagement is just about any sort of action a user performs on your page. This could be anything from clicking a link to scrolling to the end of your page…
In our era of information overload and on-the-go web surfing, we tend to be happy with any type of user engagement we are able to get.
In fact, we want to know how users engage with our pages to better understand what attracts their attention, what prompts them to convert and what pushes them to leave. Understandably, we want to build more engaging page elements and we want to get rid of anything that distracts or annoys them.
Any type of user engagement is important for us to understand how users interact with our web pages.
Google Analytics has a lot of metrics (some of them are being very much misunderstood) that help you better understand user engagement with the page.
Bounce rate always comes to mind first, but let me note right there: A high bounce rate does not indicate poor engagement or low content quality. As a matter of fact, a high bounce rate may indicate that users were able to find what they were looking for right away (so they didn’t have to browse around). So I wouldn’t consider bounce rate an engagement tactic (unless it suddenly increased which may be a sign of something going on).
Time on Page can be a slight indication of a good page engagement (at least you can see people spend some time reading).
Based on HubSpot data, almost 60% of visitors spend 15 seconds or less on your page.
Tracking your site “Time on Page” metric using Google Analytics is very easy. To see page-by-page numbers, go to Behavior -> Site Content -> All pages:
Using Google Analytics Goals you can set up “Duration” goal to monitor sessions that lasts a specific amount of time or longer.
Other goals you can monitor using Google Analytics include:
Once you set up your goals inside Google Analytics, you get access to two more reports, called Funnel Visualization and Goal Flow. Both provide a visual representation of how your users interact with your on-page CTAs:
Funnel Visualization:
Goal Flow:
While Google Analytics does a pretty good job monitoring your on-page clicks, heatmaps monitor other types of on-page engagement:
(There’s also a click map too but we are focusing on non-click tracking here).
Hotjar lets you set up both types of tracking. It also offers a free account that lets you track 2,000 visits a day (you are unlikely to need more).
Move maps work great for identifying page elements that distract your site users from performing important actions on the page, e.g. you don’t want your readers to stare at an image instead of clicking your “Subscribe” button.
Hotjar also allows you to visualize and compare user engagement on a desktop and a mobile device.
While Google Analytics is very efficient at tracking your primary page goal, it’s not as easy to use for evaluating and comparing multiple CTAs.
The thing is, you probably have dozens of calls-to-action including sharing buttons, optin forms, links to your money-pages, etc. How to track and compare all of them?
Finteza is a free analytics suite that helps you monitor hundreds of events easily. Events can be added using Finteza dashboard or their WordPress plugin. Then you can easily build up your funnels to compare your multiple events and see what actually results in the final conversion:
Finteza provides a much easier and clearer event tracking functionality than Google Analytics, so it’s something to look into.
And which tools are you using to monitor different types of user engagement? Please share in the comments!
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Social media marketing planning is key to successful content marketing. It makes your team more productive and allows you to catch all the seasonal trends and trending hashtags. Furthermore, it streamlines content planning and helps you focus more on community building aspects and other long-term goals of social media marketing.
One of the best ways to plan your social media marketing campaigns, is to create a year-long content roundup including all big holidays, related awareness weeks and trends and other seasonal trends.
Holidays and seasonal trends are an opportunity for savvy marketers to take advantage of a mass feeling of goodwill, positivity and cheerfulness, and make it work for them. Why else would the biggest brands in the world spend the biggest bulk of their annual budgets making holiday-specific advertisements, or running massive campaigns on social media pages? It doesn’t just work for giant corporations that are doing direct sales. It works for everyone.
Best of all, holiday posts have the three most important elements of popular social posts: they capitalize on an emotional response, they are time-specific and so generate a lot of shares and engagement, and they are ridiculously easy to produce.
The sooner you get the prepared, the better off you are going to be. So here are some tips on how to start planning your social posts today.
So how to create your social media calendar?
ContentCal is a great way to create an actionable social media content calendar your whole team can collaborate on. Start with its “Campaigns” feature: Put your holidays and ideas there, specify start and end dates and create a detailed campaign brief including all the keywords and hashtags you have identified.
Once a campaign is created, it will show up as a ribbon on your social media content calendar view:
Clicking the ribbon will take you (and your team) to your campaign brief where you can see (and add) related hashtags and angles around the trend.
From there your whole team can add social media updates to your shared “Pinboard” for you (or your moderators) to review and put on the specified days.
This is a great way to involve your whole team into social media content planning for more and better results
Not all seasonal trends are obvious. I suggest running your core topics and keyword through Google Trends to get a better idea on how to time your social media content better:
No one is saying that you have to produce a John Lewis Christmas ad for your social media pages. That would be an insane amount of effort, and holiday posts should be simple and fairly easy to produce and share. But that doesn’t mean you can’t look at what others have done, and follow suit.
REI Coop had a brilliant holiday campaign that tried to get their followers away from stores and into nature. Their Twitter used the hashtag #OptOutside, encouraging people to comment with pictures or stories about what they were doing with loved ones in the great outdoors, instead of spending hours of their life in malls buying expensive gifts. It was a roaring success, and it produced opportunities for user made content, email newsletters, and a lot of shareable moments. Without adequate planning they never would have been able to make such an impact.
Contests are always huge draws for your audience, and the holidays are the perfect time to host them. With a couple weeks of promotion and planning you can automate the majority of the contest, and just manage it in the weeks leading up to each holiday of your choice. People are already in a festive mood, and more likely to take part.
Don’t just do a drawing or giveaway. Make it something create, fun challenging, and otherwise interesting. This is also a great idea because it works and is easily adaptable for any platform that you happen to be active on. So you can customize it to most appeal to your audience.
Proceed here for some useful resources: How to Host a Successful Social Media Contest: Your Ultimate List of Tools & Resources
Holidays are ripe for visual content. Creating a simple, but beautiful graphic is easy, since so much imagery is already in popular culture for you to draw on. You don’t have to struggle to find things to connect with your audience; a snowman, sparkling lights, snowy mountains… they are all non-culturally specific visuals that you can use, which still immediately cause your viewers to relate. That is one of the best things about holiday posts.
Canva always offers lots of timely holiday themes for holidays
If you have the expertise or access, also consider holiday specific videos. These are passed around like hotcakes, and are a great addition to your campaign. It doesn’t have to be anything too fancy.
Wave is any easy way to put together festive videos and they have a few awesome holiday themes too. And they also have a handy calendar listing big and small holidays for you to prepare for:
Why does your social media profile exist? Branding and promotion, engagement and interaction, but mostly to improve profits in the end. Everything you do is with that end goal in mind. If you sell direct products you can vastly boost your sales over the coming months by offering coupons good only during specific time blocks until the end of the holidays.
Now, when I say specific time blocks, I don’t mean coupon codes that are good for the entire month. I am talking time sensitive super deals that last hours, maybe a day, and where you can only find them through links on social media. Amazon has a version of this, where they have deals which are good for a day that they advertise on a single page, and then post about.
Do you have any tips for creating a social media content calendar well before the holiday comes about? Let us know in the comments below!
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Search traffic remains one of the major sources of traffic and conversions to any website. Keep your organic search visibility in mind when working on your most important “money pages” (i.e. those that drive direct sales).
In this article I’ll go you through both basic and advanced keyword research tactics for your product pages that will also positively impact conversions.
Keyword research lies at the heart of any marketing campaign, whether it’s a local or an international business. And despite what many business owners may think, keywords are not for search engine optimization only.
Keyword research helps a marketer:
Think about keyword research this way:
Behind each search query there’s a human being with an actual problem. Whether your (product) page is able to solve that problem well defines how successful your business is.
In order for keyword research to be able to provide the required amount of insight, you need to:
Let’s see these two in action!
The first step of keyword research is running your core term through tools like Spyfu, Majestic, Ahrefs or Wordstream and downloading hundreds of phrases your target customer is typing when searching for solutions, answers and/or products in your niche.
How to make sense of those enormous lists? There’s no way you can create as many landing pages to match all those search queries.
The solution is: Keyword clustering
Identify groups of keywords by relevancy and optimize your product page for the group of keywords instead of each individual one.
Serpstat’s clustering feature is a great way to make sense of huge keyword lists. It breaks your lists into meaningful groups based on how they are related:
Grouping your keywords helps you maintain focus: Instead of trying to target each individual query, it allows you to create landing pages that can get ranked for a variety of keywords within one group and capture all those potential leads.
On the other hand, keyword clustering gives you a better understanding of your niche, types of queries and questions your target audience tends to ask online. This provides you with more structured and organized ideas on how to serve them better.
Search intent analysis is the most important aspect of keyword research. It defines all your further actions when it comes to content creation and search engine optimization.
Search intent reflects the most probable kind of action a user is likely to take when searching. In other words, it helps you identify what your target customer intends to do when searching.
There are three main types of search intent: Do – Know – Go
Now, with our step above in mind, instead of assigning intent to each individual query, we try to identify search intent behind our keyword groups, which is much more doable:
So what’s next?
Now that we know what people are searching, create and implement your keyword optimization plan:
|
Search Intent Type |
Landing page type | Sales funnel |
|
DO |
Use these keywords on your product pages (especially in the title and in the subheadings (H1, H2) | Use your primary call-to-action / sales funnel |
|
KNOW |
Create articles, guides and tutorials (Linking to product pages from within context as one of the solutions) | Use your lead generation funnel to tie these searchers to your brand |
|
GO [Your brand] |
Use these keywords on your product pages | Use your primary call-to-action / sales funnel |
|
GO [Your competitor’s brand] |
Create additional landing page demonstrating the selling point / advantage of your offer/product (Example: Here’s a subtle explanation how Vimeo on Demand is better than Youtube) | Use your primary call-to-action / sales funnel: Get creative here!*** |
Search intent helps you understand your customer better and consequently serve them better. There’s no point in trying to sell right away to someone who has no intention to buy: This will result in page bounces (sending poor signals to Google and losing your leads).
Matching your page content to the search intent results in higher conversions and better page engagement (which is also an important search ranking signal)
The first two steps may have taken you a couple of days of work. On the bright side, this research will last you for a year or so (before you’ll have to re-address your search positions or introduce a new product)
Now that you know which keyword group refers to each product page, and which action is intended (“buy”, “research” or “research, then buy”), it time that you start creating content.
Google generates these search snippets based on what it is they have found to be serving the user best. We can reverse-engineer Google’s editorial decision and build the product page that matches both Google’s and users’ expectations best.
That is exactly what TextOptimzer is doing: It grabs your query, searches Google and using semantic analysis extracts related terms and categories for you to build the best product page around:
[Text Optimizer urges to create a better copy by suggesting what Google and its users expect to see on that page]
You can use it before you create your page as well as for your existing content (in which case it will compare your content to Google’s SERPs and suggest areas of improvement).
Like with search intent, this is another level of matching users’ expectations better, this time using Google search result page analysis.
The idea is, Google has already found that these terms tend to do a better job satisfying their users, so our task is to add them with in the copy to engage those people better, once they land on our page clicking through the search result.
Niche question research gives you even more insight into your target audience struggles and your own content opportunities. With Google’s “People Also Ask” boxes this research is easier than ever.
Notice those “People Also Ask” boxes all over search results offering users a list of related questions on the topic they have just typed:
Whenever you are working on your product page copy, take note of those “People Also Ask” results and think how they can be utilized.
It makes perfect sense to address popular questions on the landing page. This will accomplish several goals:
Featured Snippet Tool helps you research People Also Ask opportunities for any page: It checks your domain’s and/or URL’s important search queries and generates “People Also Ask” results for all of them:
Questions are highly engaging: Asking a question triggers an “instinctive elaboration” reflex in human beings prompting them to stop and look for an answer. And higher engagement results in more time spent on a web page, more time to consider your offer and a higher likelihood of the conversion.
So to make it easier for you, here are your basic steps:
Further reading:
And how do you research keywords for your product and landing pages? Let’s discuss!
The post The Ultimate Guide for Your Product Page Keyword Research appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.
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