SEO
5 Great Value Proposition Examples & Why They Work
“Find a need and fill it.”
This quote is widely attributed to Henry J. Kaiser, the son of German immigrants who became the millionaire head of a vast industrial empire.
It’s also probably the simplest, clearest explanation of a value proposition, finding where the need is and then addressing it.
Arguably the most important part of any business’s marketing messaging, many business owners and marketers struggle to define their value proposition.
Instead of simply and clearly defining why they’re in business, they obfuscate through corporate jargon, buzzwords, and empty slogans. Or they don’t have one at all, at least not one they have defined.
If this sounds like you, there’s good news: You’re probably vastly overcomplicating things.
To help you shape yours, this piece will take a close look at five great value propositions and explain why they work. Ready to get started?
What Is A Value Proposition?
Just in case you still don’t understand or we haven’t been 100% clear, let’s define what a value proposition is.
Value props, as they’re sometimes colloquially known, are a business’s answer to a simple question: Why should a potential customer buy from you and not your competitor?
But before you go off on some wild brand story about features, cost and ROI, keep these three things in mind – a great value proposition is:
- Simple for a person to understand.
- Unique.
- Measurable.
It’s a promise by your company to your customers or target audience about what you do and why you exist.
It should also be the foundation for every piece of your marketing copy. Every banner ad, section of website copy, or television commercial should come back to this main idea about why you’re in business in the first place.
If you don’t have one in mind when you begin to draft content, you’re basically trying to steer a boat without a paddle.
An effective value proposition directly communicates with your customers and simplistically tells them why your company, service, or product stands out amongst competitors and why it is the best solution to their problem. It’s to the point and explains why you are the ideal choice for them.
The time you spend creating a strong value proposition is nothing compared to the advantages it will give you. By creating an effective, unique value proposition, you can potentially:
- Attract more engagement from more customers.
- Increase conversions.
- Stand out from your competition.
- Increase customer loyalty.
- Draw influencers to your brand.
As such a vital part of marketing messaging, it’s somewhat surprising that so many businesses don’t prioritize a strong value prop.
Instead of clearly defining their raison d’etre, they try to replace it with random discounts and pre-mature loyalty programs or by tossing money at disorganized marketing campaigns that ultimately fail to tell the customer the value the company brings.
They also commonly misinterpret what a value proposition is exactly. Many brands push one thing, and one thing only: their brand.
A value proposition should be focused on the people you’re trying to reach – not the company.
Another common mistake is creating a generic message that doesn’t engage the target audience or explain how the business can help.
This type of messaging may include empty statements like “local favorite,” “best quality,” and others that are not specifically tailored to an audience.
Instead of taking a shortcut and writing a meaningless statement, it’s worth taking the time to craft a strong yet simplistically clear value proposition. This will make it easier and more cost-effective to attract and keep the customers you want coming back.
So, now that we know what a value proposition is and what it isn’t, let’s take a look at some brands that have nailed it.
1. Trello
What they sell: A visual tool for managing projects, workflows, and tasks.
How it’s helpful: It streamlines project organization for multiple parties within a company, helping everyone track benchmarks and stay on the same page.
How it stands out from competitors: Trello quickly organizes tasks and deadlines into an easy-to-understand visual card format. Plus, the base version is free and shareable with anyone within an organization.
Is their proposition communicated simplistically? Yes, it is easy for people to understand right off the bat. The subhead addresses doing away with outdated project management practices that can oftentimes be a headache. This tells customers how directly Trello will make their lives easier while implying it will save time for their entire team.
2. Stitch Fix
What they sell: Personal wardrobe styling services.
How it’s helpful: Stylists help busy people find clothing that fits their personal style and ship it directly to them.
How it stands out from competitors: Stich Fix offers quick, customizable, unique clothing picked out and sent to a person by stylists.
Is the proposition communicated simplistically? Yes, their messaging proclaims that they not only offer personal styling, but they offer it to individuals of all different shapes and style preferences. This casts a wide net for their target audience and invites people of all types to use the service.
3. Evernote
What they sell: Software for task lists and note-taking.
How it’s helpful: Evernote helps users easily organize and share notes and tasks across notepads, devices, locations, etc.
How it stands out from competitors: It has major capabilities that allow a user to feel organized with a sophisticated notepad with cloud-based capabilities, so nothing gets lost.
Is the proposition communicated simplistically? Yes, the proposition addresses the user’s pain points directly – a lack of organization or the need for a better tool to help them get organized. It specifically states what the tool can be used for, i.e., to stay on top of tasks, avoid headaches, take notes and prevent things from falling through the cracks.
4. HotJar
What they sell: Heat mapping and behavior tracking software.
How it’s helpful: HotJar assists marketers and others in related fields, including project management and web development, in understanding how users interact with a website.
How it stands out from competitors: This product offers a unique mix of heat mapping, video recordings, and reports, allowing users to analyze user behavior on a website, as well as conduct user surveys and polls.
Is the proposition communicated simplistically? Yes, visitors are told exactly what the tool does right from the get-go: heat mapping, visitor session recording, user surveys, and polls. It also calls out GDPR compliance and shows that multiple team members can use the tool to make insights.
5. Freshly
What they sell: Prepared meal kits.
How it’s helpful: Freshly cooks and delivers meals; customers only have to heat them up.
How it stands out from competitors: People can choose from a range of more than 30 meals made from natural ingredients and delivered right to their door. There is also an opt-out option and the possibility to cancel specific weeks or at any time in general instead of being locked in for months.
Is the proposition communicated simplistically? Yes, it is communicated simply and clearly with helpful visuals and icons that outline the process of using the service.
Nail Your Brand’s Value Proposition
If you want to convert a customer and maintain their loyalty, it’s imperative to nail a unique value proposition.
There are a few steps to take when starting the brainstorming and research process for the perfect value proposition for your brand:
Research Your Audience
- What do they do for a living?
- Where do they live?
- What do they search for?
- What are their common pain points?
Create A Buyer Persona
After extensive research has been conducted on your target audience, analyze the data and look for:
- Repeated pain points.
- Specific language that a buyer may use.
- What industry do they work in?
Do Some Competitive Research
After researching your target audience, you may find that they already use a product or service similar to the one your company is trying to market to them.
Research those competitors and find the key differences in your offerings and identify the advantage(s) your product or service can provide that separate you from them.
Finding the primary benefit of your product or service is pivotal to differentiating your company from others.
You Take It From Here
For something that seems so simple (did you not how many times we used the word “simplistically?”), landing on the perfect value prop for your business is not nearly as easy as you might think.
It takes work to find the right value proposition. You have to perform research, brainstorm ideas, and discover what differentiates your business.
And then, once you’ve done all that, you have to distill it all down to as few words as possible and implement it throughout your marketing. But it’s worth every second and every drop of sweat.
On the other hand, it’s easy to create a bad value prop, one that lacks clarity and doesn’t convince customers of its value or that of your products and/or services.
But with this, you run the risk of it failing, which likely means a loss of profitability, cut-off access to some or all of your customers, and in the worst case, your company going out of business.
Put in the work now to clearly and strongly define why you’re in business and what your value is. Your bottom line will thank you.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Rawpixel.com/Shutterstock
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SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
SEO
All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024
Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.
What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?”
Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.
Let’s go!
OUR HUGE SCREEN
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました!@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
SELFIE BATTLE
Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
–
There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!
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