SEO
A Guide To Getting Started
Most forms of marketing are expensive.
Direct mailers can cost up to $1 per target, while billboards could run you $14,000 apiece in major cities. And television commercials can run into the millions, once you include the cost of production and placement.
Let’s face it: most small businesses can’t afford that.
But what if there was a way to reach your desired audience for much less – perhaps as little as $9 a month?
You don’t need a fairy godmother. You just need to harness the power of email marketing.
Why Use Email Marketing For Your Small Business?
When it comes to reaching new audiences, heating up cold leads, or staying top of mind with existing customers, there’s nothing quite like email marketing – and not just because it’s cost-effective.
The main reason you need to be using email campaigns is that they’re extremely effective.
The average open rate for marketing emails in 2021 was a whopping 21.5% – a growth of 3.5% in just one year. That makes it by far one of the most effective ways to advertise.
Professional marketers know it works – that’s why 41.5% consider it a very critical factor in their company’s success.
In 2019, email marketing provided a return on investment (ROI) of an unbelievable $52 for every dollar spent. That means you can’t afford not to use it.
While price and effectiveness are two key selling points for running email marketing campaigns, one that tends to appeal to busy small business owners is that it’s something you can do yourself.
You don’t have to outsource your email campaigns to an agency or hire someone in-house.
With a little elbow grease and the information you gain here, you’ll be able to create and launch your own effective campaign in no time.
Ready to get started? Let’s go.
How To Start Email Marketing For Your Small Business
1. Choose The Right Email Marketing Platform For You
Having the right tools is an essential part of any job, whether it’s carpentry or marketing. And for business marketing, that means selecting the right email marketing software.
You could forgo this step and build all of your lists and campaigns manually in Gmail, Outlook, or whatever other email service provider you’re using, but you have a business to run.
Manual list building is a tedious, time-consuming process that takes your attention and energy away from other areas.
Plus, an email platform gives you the opportunity to personalize your messages while collecting performance metrics. These things alone make it worth the investment.
When deciding between the dozens of programs available, you need to find one that has the right functionality for you.
Some features you should consider are:
- Personalization features – Targets are 26% more likely to open personalized emails. Look for a platform that can parse your list for names and automatically insert them into emails.
- Custom branding – Your customers associate your small business with certain colors and a logo. The software you choose should make it easy for you to customize your emails with your brand.
- A/B testing – Version testing is one of the pillars of modern marketing. You should select a platform that allows you to try different subject lines and other content to find what works best for your field.
- Drag-and-drop – If you don’t know how to code, you’ll want software that lets you create great-looking emails without a thorough knowledge of HTML or CSS.
- Responsive design – 81% of emails are opened on mobile devices; Make sure your email builder automatically scales them to different screen sizes.
- Segmentation tools – To get the best results, you’ll want to target different groups with different messages. Look for a platform with a segmentation tool that allows you to divide your list into smaller groups.
Some of the most popular email marketing platforms include:
2. Build Your List
Successful email marketing depends on getting your messages in front of the right people. To do this, you need a good marketing list.
There are a few ways you can get one.
The first is to build it yourself.
Go through your contacts, pull out the business cards you gathered at industry conferences, and comb the internet for the contact information of the people you want to reach. This can be time-consuming.
To expedite the process, add a signup form to your website. This makes it quick and easy for interested visitors (who are hopefully hot leads) to get on your mailing list.
Consider offering a discount to encourage those who are hesitant. You’ll be shocked by how many new emails you can generate just by adding an interstitial to your site offering a 10% discount in exchange for an email address.
You should also leverage the power of your social media accounts to generate subscribers.
Create interesting, relevant content that will attract the right type of people. Put a link in your profile bio that directs to a signup landing form.
People who are following you on social media are probably already at least a little interested in your offering. It’s up to you to get them on your mailing list.
Another option is to buy a list.
Ranging from $100 to $600 CPM (cost per mille, i.e., cost for 1000 addresses), there are a number of places to buy these lists available with a simple Google search. Just be aware that there can be variable quality to these lists.
Furthermore, it’s very easy to run afoul of spam guidelines when you’re buying lists. In some places, it’s illegal to send people emails without their consent.
You may also end up hurting your sender reputation, which, in some cases, can even result in your IP being blacklisted.
If you’re buying email marketing lists, you do so at your own risk.
3. Plan Your Campaign
Now that you have your targets assembled, it’s time to start figuring out what you want your email campaign to achieve.
What are your goals? Do you want to send promotional emails promoting sales and special offers? Do you want to send transactional emails like abandoned cart messages or upsells? Are you soliciting referrals or reviews from existing customers?
Once you have decided what you hope to accomplish, it’s time to create your campaign. There are five common types of emails that will suit most of your needs:
- Blast emails – used for general announcements to a large audience.
- Monthly newsletters – to keep your business top of mind and update your audience about new developments.
- Welcome emails – For new subscribers or customers.
- Promotional emails – offering sales, benefits, or incentives to encourage transactions.
- Reminder emails – encourage targets to complete purchases or make another.
One of the more common sequences consists of a welcome email after initial signup, one or several promotional emails enticing sales, followed by promotional emails or reminder emails.
Email marketing is also an effective way to re-engage past customers or warm up leads who have gone cold.
A typical sequence for this consists of a reintroduction email, reminding them of your brand, followed by a “we miss you” message that offers a discount or other incentive to use your business again.
There are many other uses for emails, too.
Perhaps you’re hosting an open house and want to invite the recipients. Maybe you have a monthly newsletter that helps establish your credibility and authority.
The beauty of this medium is its versatility. All you need to do is customize your messaging to your goals.
4. Create Your Emails
This is where your emails become reality.
A common mistake many inexperienced marketers make is wanting to add too many bells and whistles. Not only does an overly elaborate design distract from your key message, but it also confuses customers.
Keep your design clean and simple. Some businesses opt for plain text emails, which contain no graphics aside from maybe a logo in the signature.
This may be too extreme for you, however. It’s okay to brand your emails, just make sure you keep them simple.
Once you have settled on a design, it’s time to focus on messaging.
The first battle is getting your message opened, and that means a compelling subject line.
Try to inspire curiosity or offer some other motivation, e.g., “You won’t believe this deal,” “25% off sitewide,” or “Mistakes that can cost you.”
Now that you have your reader’s attention, it’s time to make your case.
Avoid overwriting and keep it simple. Explain what you’re offering or hoping to achieve, then include a call to action (CTA).
Any salesperson worth their salt will tell you, you have to ask for the sale. CTAs in emails and other collateral are the marketing equivalent.
Some people find it helpful to imagine writing to a specific customer they know well.
It’s okay to use industry jargon, but only if it’s something everyone in your field will understand.
5. Send The Campaign And Analyze The Results
The email platform you selected back in step one should provide you with all the information you want about how your messages are performing – and this should give you an idea of where you can improve them in the future.
Are you not getting enough opens? You could have a bad list or maybe you need to try a different subject line.
Are you getting opens, but no conversions? Try changing your content.
Are you seeing a lot of unsubscribes? You could be sending too many emails and becoming annoying.
If your results are poor, don’t worry. Email marketing is an art and no one gets it right the first (or second, or third) time. That’s why you want to take advantage of A/B testing.
But if you put in the work, you’ll get a feel for what does and doesn’t work in no time and start generating the results you want.
Bonus Tips
Here are some additional ideas to help you maximize your email campaigns:
- Focus on quality, not quantity.
- Encourage signups wherever it makes sense (social media, on your website, etc.).
- Segment your list so your messages are more targeted.
- Automate messages where you can. This includes welcome messages, purchase confirmations, and re-engagement emails.
Email Marketing Is A Powerful Tool For Small Business
Email marketing provides the opportunity for a massive ROI, without a lot of upfront costs.
But you can’t just send out messages willy-nilly and hope for results.
Plan your strategy, do the work, track your results and tweak your messages (in other words, follow the tips provided here), and you’ll find your campaigns getting great responses in no time.
More resources:
Featured Image: Billion Photos/Shutterstock
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SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
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
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