Nick Baggott's CRM and Digital Marketing Blog

How to get backlinks to help with SEO

I have just read an informative and practical article on how to get backlinks for your web site to drive SEO rankings. It was written by T-ranks 

It is extremely thorough and practical and provides lots of simple tips.

Some of the tips that i particularly enjoyed were:

• Focus on guest blogging and make sure you think about your objective and the proposition to the blogger before you approach them
• How to find Private Blog Networks to simplify the process of generating backlinks for your content
• Focus on unique or skyscraper content, don't be a follower
• Focus on getting editorial links within the body copy of articles
• Create list style posts eg the 6 best SEO tips, or my 5 favourite research tools, or 7 top tips for 2020

I dont want to replicate the whole article here. If you are interested in learning more, why not check it out here

I am doing a free webinar on Building an Audience Driven Social Media campaign

I shall be delivering a free webinar on behalf of Crowd Control HQ on March 31st

It is entitled "6 Steps to building an audience-driven social media plan". If you'd like to sign up, please do so. It would be great to see you there. Here is the link https://content.crowdcontrolhq.com/6-step-audience-driven-social-media-marketing-plan

Who voted for who in the UK election? A great data profiling case study

As I am sure you are aware, the Conservative Party, led by Boris Johnson, won the recent UK government election comfortably. But who voted for them and where did Labour lose out? 

Traditionally, in the UK, you would expect the Conservatives to appeal to wealthier voters and Labour to the working classes, but Brexit and the appeal of the party leaders obviously had a huge impact on who voted for who. In the Times newspaper today, there was a fascinating article profiling the voters of the main parties and I thought it demonstrates perfectly the power of data analysis. Here are some of their charts: It seems class didn't have the impact that you would expect:

But age was the key differentiator as this demonstrates:

The most astounding analysis I have seen, is what the outcome would have been if only certain ages had been allowed to vote. You can see why Labour wants to lower the age range to 16:

Just to highlight the points at the bottom of this picture (it is a screen shot from my phone, so sorry it is a bit fuzzy):

• If only 18-24s voted: Lab 600, Con 0
• If only 25-49 voted: Lab 407, Con 171
• If only 50-64 voted: Con 354, Lab 215
• If only 65+ voted: Con 575, Lab 25

Finally, did the remainers all switch to Labour and Lib Dem who were campaigning for a new referendum or to leave? Actually, not as much as those parties needed:

If you ever wondered if data could tell a story and explain a complex situation more clearly, surely this is all of the evidence you need to see the power of data analytics. 

 

Hey Siri, how does voice search affect SEO?

How does voice search affect SEO? That is probably the most common question that I am asked in digital marketing training courses at the moment. Surprisingly, Google is using the same algorithm for both text and voice based searches, but voice queries are impacting significantly however you search. So, I decided to have a look for myself. Naturally, the first thing I did was ask Siri! This is what Siri came back with: 

So, I have had a read of some of these results and done some research of my own and firstly here are some stats:

1) According to Google, 20% of all searches are voice 

2) 65% of 25-49 year olds talk to their voice enabled device every day

3) 55% of households are expected to own a smart speaker by 2022 

4) People use voice search to ask questions. 20% of all voice search queries use one of these 25 words:

5) Teens use voice search for calling their friends: 

So, what does all of this mean to marketers?

Here are my thoughts on how marketers should respond to the growing movement towards voice search:

1) The voice and text algorithm is the same, so keep doing what you are doing. Focus on making pages load quickly, having mobile enabled web sites, generating external links and all of the other typical SEO tactics

2) People search using different language when it comes to voice - we are more conversational. For example, on text based search we may search for "best local coffee shop", but when we talk to our voice activated device, like Alexa or Siri, we may say "where is the best place to get a good coffee around here?" So, when you are writing copy, try to include some Q&A style content on the page. Frequently Asked Questions could be a really important part of your web design strategy. 

3) People tend to use voice search more for local searches, so make sure your web site is optimised for local search. The example I gave in point 2 is a typical example of this. According to this useful Forbes article, 22% of voice searches are for local content.

4) Can you create content that could become a Google "Featured Snippet" that is a short piece of content (less than 29 words) , that answers a query, such as "What is a Featured Snippet". See below as a perfect example....

How to Boost Your Recruitment Strategy Using Google Ads Campaigns

This is a guest post written by Chris Anderson of Recruitment Traffic 

Online recruiters, like many companies, regard Google Ads campaign as the best form of online advertising. They are useful for obtaining quick results and quality traffic. The challenge is how to show the paid ads to your target market at the right time. When clients or job candidates are searching for recruitment services or job boards, Google will show the ads.

The difference between SEO and Google Ads

Compared to search queries and the number of visitors, organic search engine optimisation (SEO) can deliver nine visitors compared to a paid ad’s one. So why bother running Google Ads campaigns when you can get more traffic from SEO? Well, it turns out that paid ads can convert more visitors to leads or clients than organic results.

While online ads increase your chances of increased quality traffic, they will require:

• Strategic thinking.
• Proper planning.
• Constant monitoring.

However, even with all the hard work, the campaign may not work out as you expect. It’s also frustrating if you don’t know why the Google Ads campaign isn’t working. Fortunately, you can still recover by searching and modifying the sections that are hindering your campaign’s success. To do so, consider performing the following.

Improve your quality score

When running Google Adwords, ensure that your ads have the highest quality scores possible. Google gives the high points to online recruiters whose ads, keywords and landing pages are all relevant to their service offers. So, if the ads provide positive user experience and are also relevant, the quality score goes up. As a result, Google will help lower your Google Ads costs. This is the main reason why high-quality scores are of utmost importance in any Google Ads campaign.  

To boost your quality score, Google recommends improving the following elements:

1. Click-through rate

The click through rate (CTR) measures the number of clicks online recruiters receive on their ads based on the people who’ve seen them. It’s also essential that you achieve a high CTR since every click can cost money. To help recruiters obtain such a goal, they need to ensure:

• Proper matching of keywords with search queries from their target audience.
• That the Google ads contain quality and engaging text.
• That the ad’s content and keywords are the ones used by prospective clients and job candidates in their search queries.

1. Ad relevance

Recruiters can improve the impact of their ads by ensuring that:

• The keywords used in the ads are directly related to the search queries.
• They regularly update the keywords and ad text to match any new search queries.
• They use negative keywords to prevent the ads from appearing in unrelated search queries.

1. Landing page

Recruiters must recognise the value of landing pages since they are the first step in the conversion process. To improve them, ensure that:

• The page’s loading speed is optimised.
• Visitors have an easy time navigating between pages.
• The headlines can grab the attention of potential clients.
• The images and videos are engaging.
• Every page is responsive and compatible with various devices, including mobile.

Learn and make use of negative keywords

Google Ads  campaigns aren’t cheap, so it’s vital to keep the budget within acceptable limits. One way to save money is to incorporate some negative keywords in your campaigns. Once users type a search term in the negative keyword list, your ads will not appear in their searches. It won’t get clicked on by people unlikely to use your products. As a result, your quality score improves, while keeping advertising costs low.

Make sure the ads are relevant to the search terms 

It’s vital that your ads are relevant to the search terms used by your target customers. If needed, improve the ads by adding text or keywords that your prospects and leads will be likely to use. Once you adopt this strategy, your campaign will improve its chances of turning leads into customers.

Compare your campaign with the competition

By periodically checking their competitors, recruiters can:

• Assess their strategy.
• Study their strengths and weaknesses.

Any information obtained will enable them to upgrade their Google Ads campaigns and boost the conversion rate. To conduct a successful analysis, recruiters will need reliable information about their:

• Most successful rivals.
• Service offers.
• Strengths and weaknesses.
• Threats that they pose to their business.

Only by collecting pertinent data about their competitors can an organisation establish a viable plan against their Google Ads campaigns. They can manually analyse their competitor’s campaigns or use a software tool, such as SEMrush or Adbeat.

Consider targeting previous visitors

This feature allows the ads to appear to previous visitors to their site. Its purpose is to increase customer conversion for the various services they offer. Since the users have already shown interest, they will be likely to do so again.

Convince your visitors with your landing page

The web page where visitors arrive is called the landing page. Its main objective is to convert them to leads or potential clients. To do so, a recruiter has to:

• Create a straightforward headline that will entice readers immediately, since many people have an average attention span of fewer than 10 seconds. With that in mind, the title should be short and precise.
• Remove any distractions, including unnecessary images, menus, sidebars and videos.
• Make the call-to-action (CTA) persuasive enough to convert visitors to customers. A CTA is a specific action you want the visitor to make. Without it, you’ll be unlikely to convert them as clients.
• Make sure that CTAs are placed where visitors can easily see them.

On the landing page, recruiters can engage their visitors using content, images or videos. However, remember that most potential clients use mobile devices to connect online. So it pays for recruiters to optimise their landing pages for mobile devices. Also, since Google is prioritising mobile sites over desktops, this is a big incentive to do so. Another essential feature of a landing page must-have is quick loading time. Studies show that many people will be likely to leave a website that takes more than four seconds to load. So, one of the most effective ways to increase conversion is to optimise the landing page’s loading speed.

Conclusion

You shouldn’t get discouraged if your Google Ads campaign isn’t performing to your expectations. Instead of abandoning it, consider improving your strategy. You can focus on various issues and loopholes that are making your campaign underperform. Replacing irrelevant keywords and content, and optimising the best-performing ones, can give your ad campaign a boost. Also, consider optimising the keywords and text. 

Written by Chris Anderson, head of Recruitment Traffic.

https://www.linkedin.com/company/recruitment-traffic/
https://twitter.com/RecruitTraffic
https://www.facebook.com/RecruitmentTraffic/

 

CHAID, is it the most under utilised marketing technique?

CHAID, less commonly known as Chi-Squared Automatic Interaction Detector can be a wonderfully powerful tool to use to help you to understand your customers. It can predict the future and help you to understand the past. So what is it and how can it be used? 

According to Wikipedia:

Chi-square automatic interaction detection (CHAID) is a decision tree technique, based on adjusted significance testing. The technique was developed in South Africa and was published in 1980 by Gordon V. Kass, who had completed a PhD thesis on this topic. CHAID can be used for prediction (in a similar fashion to regression analysis, as well as classification, and for detection of interaction between variables. 

In practice, CHAID is often used in the context of direct marketing to select groups of consumers and predict how their responses to some variables affect other variables, although other early applications were in the field of medical and psychiatric research.

Like other decision trees, CHAID's advantages are that its output is highly visual and easy to interpret.

So, what does that mean in practice? 

CHAID allows you to create groups of customers (segments) who have similar behaviour. It also allows you to understand which of the groups is most and least likely to do something. For example, I recently worked with a data analyst who built a model looking at the profile of openers v non-openers of a client's quarterly newsletter. The model divided the previous recipients into groups with the "best" group being 10x more likely to open newsletters than the "worst" group. That has allowed the client to decide whether to stop sending it to the worst groups or maybe create a different version for the under performing groups with a different message. The latter is what they have (correctly) chosen to do, as these non-responsive groups are still customers who have recently opted-in to receive the newsletter but for whatever reason are not typically opening them.

How did the project work?

• Firstly, we agreed which recent campaign we should analyse (we chose the newsletter because it was sent to the most people, giving us the largest sample size to analyse)
• Then, we asked the data team at the client to extract 2 files. One file was the people who had opened the newsletter and the other was non-openers (as this is a B2B client the total volume is low, so we chose to analyse all recipients in both groups.If we had more data, we could have taken a sample of responders and non-responders rather than the whole file)
• In the data file, we asked for every piece of information known about the clients who had been mailed (extracting every field on the database for every record). With CHAID you never know which data field will be the most predictive, so you ask for as much as you can get and let CHAID work out which variables are most useful
• These files were handed over to our data analyst, who ran the data through his SAS CHAID software. The output was a report with 3 key elements:

            - A profile report comparing responders to non-responders for every data variable that we had available to us (eg country, job role, gender etc)

            - A CHAID tree diagram showing each of the segments and for each group what % of them opened the email. Allowing us to see which was our worst                 and best groups

            - A Gains chart which ranked the best to worst segments, so that we could easily see how predictive the model was and how much more responsive                 the best group was compared to the worst group

• These 3 things demonstrated to us that the model was highly predictive and allowed the client to very quickly see (in a highly visual format) who their best groups were and to understand the types of people who were not opening the emails. 
• The next month, they tested a new angle for the least responsive groups. They did a simple A/B test where half got the same email as the best performing groups and half got a similar email with a different subject line. We are awaiting results of that trial now...

So, how could you use CHAID? In reality, as long as you have a previous activity to analyse, you can use it to predict anything such as:

• High v low value customers
• Loyal customers v those likely to switch to a competitor
• Good payers v bad payers
• Early v late adopters 
• Attendees v non-attendees at events.....

The potential list is endless.

If you'd like to know more, let me know (email me at [email protected]) and I can discuss how you could use this massively under utilised statistical model.

Due to client confidentiality, I cannot show you my client's CHAID diagram. But, just so that you can get an idea of what the output looks like, here are a couple of example pictures I found online:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212571X1600007X

 

And this is what a gains chart might look like (again, one I found online):

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Gain-plot-of-the-CHAID-and-CHAID-SPT-models_fig2_260062366

 

      

The Launch of Digital Experteers - fancy becoming a digital marketing consultant?

My blog has been quiet recently. That is because I have been putting a great deal of effort into the launch of a new business...

Digital Experteers is a new concept. If you have an ambition to set up your own digital marketing consultancy business, then this is your opportunity to do just that. Our aim, is to build a network of independent digital marketing consultants, who will all have access to the IP, tools and experience of the business' two founders (myself and Paul Haworth). Members will be self employed (it is not a franchise business), but will have the support of the founders, other members and a range of partners that we have linked up with, covering data analysis, web site build, e-learning and hosting services. You can find out more about the member benefits here. 

We have taken the content and tools that I have been developing for my consulting and training business over the last 12 years and added Paul's knowledge and experience and built some new planning and measurement tools. We call our process the ABC3 model. This model covers all aspects f digital marketing from developing your strategy to executing and measuring campaigns. Our data analytics partner, Coniak, have helped us to develop a new ABC3 evaluation tool, which will be going live very soon too. This is what the ABC3 model covers:

We will be having a free half day launch event soon, so if you are interested, please visit the site to sign up. 

 

Tik Tok - What is it and what is all the fuss about?

If you are under 24, you are probably already using Tik Tok. If you are older, then you may wonder what all the fuss is about. Last year, a chinese company purchased Musical.ly and rebranded it as Tik Tok. The usage has subsequently grown massively. 

In the first quarter of 2019, the Tik Tok app (iOS and Android) was downloaded twice as many times as YouTube or Instagram globally and there are already over 1 billion active monthly users. The majority are in China but the next biggest market is USA.

Tik Tok allows users to upload 15 second videos and share them (an updated version of what Vine was used for if you like). It is simple to edit and create videos and animations and you can live stream. This YouTube video shows an Australian news programme explaining simply what Tik Tok is and how you can use it. 

And if you want some great, practical advice on how to use Tik Tok for marketing, check out this great article by my good friend, Dan Rowles called "A marketer's guide to Tik Tok"

So why not download it, follow a few people (I started with big media starts like James Corden, Ed Sheeran and Jimmy Fallon) and let me know in the comments what you think.

 

Super Fans v Celebrity Endorsement

A national newspaper contacted me yesterday asking for my opinion on whether using super fans to create and share your content was more effective than traditional celebrity endorsement. So, I wrote a few pointers for them. I suspect they will only use a quote or two from this, so I thought I would share my thoughts in full here. Once they publish the story, I shall also tweet out a link @njbaggott.

Here are my thoughts:

Influencing the influencers has become core to most business’ social media strategy. As Social channels like Facebook and Instagram have reduced the free exposure a brand can achieve with their personalisation algorithms, brands have had to find alternative ways of engaging with their audiences. Typically, we think of influencing influencers as being synonymous with finding celebrities with large reach. However, consumers increasingly want to hear from authentic users of a brand’s product or service, rather than listening to celebrities who they do not believe to be experts or genuine users of that brand. They will trust someone that they believe is genuinely recommending a product because they use it, more than someone who is being paid to endorse a brand. For this reason, I believe brands should focus on giving their best customers a voice.

This is particularly true in the more considered purchases, like in B2B sectors or in consumer markets that consumers want to research before they spend, such as choosing a University course, or a vacation. The rise of review sites like Trip Advisor and the importance of positive reviews in search rankings are examples of this.

One brand who uses fans effectively is Disney Themes Parks in the USA. Their “Disney Moms” membership programme is used to encourage theme park visitors to post positive and authentic imagery on their personal social media channels in return for money can’t buy rewards at the park (such as their children appearing in the Disney Parade or feeding the giraffes in Animal Kingdom. This generates huge reach for believable content that promotes their experiences.

Other examples include brands like Red Bull and Abercrombie & Fitch who use student ambassadors in University Campuses to spread the word and drive traffic to events and in-store activities.

The challenge for brands is how to maintain the feeling of authenticity when reviewers and members are getting rewards in return and also generating the reach that a high profile celebrity could achieve in one post.

My football team, Reading FC have used super fans in a different way to build bridges with their core fan base and to improve their fan experience. Since the appointment of a new Chief Executive in 2018, Reading FC have regularly engaged with a select group of Super Fans to ask for their opinion on generating a more positive atmosphere in the stadium and to bring more of a connection between fans and the club. It is the fans’ responsibility to feedback how the club has co-operated and listened to them with the rest of the fan base, via podcasts and fan forums. This has resulted in the club opening up a new area of the stadium, Club 1871, to fans who want to support the team in a positive way that does not include being abusive to away team fans, which has contributed to a much more positive in-stadium experience.

Do you have any great examples of brands using Super Fans that you can share?

 

My 10 Top tips for Data Driven Marketing

Data driven marketing is still the key to marketing success. That is not just my view, a recent survey conducted by econsultancy revealed that better use of data, segmentation and targeting has become even more crucial, as they ranked it as the marketing related area that has jumped highest up their priority list for 2019. In second place, it is customer intelligence and having a full customer view, which is entirely reliant on having good quality data and superior analytics skills and tools. In 4th place, we have measuring ROI, which again is dependent upon good quality data.

In my opinion, from a data point of view, here is a checklist of the top 10 priorities for Data Driven Marketing:

• Make sure you have good quality, recently cleaned, GDPR compliant data
• Have effective data capture in all touch points
• Capture behavioural data, as a priority, as well as the overt data that is captured in forms (capture what they click on, download, open etc)
• Create automated direct marketing, that contacts the customer with relevant content, as their behaviour changes
• Build segmentation models that are simple to execute, using data that you can collect easily 
• Test and learn constantly, be agile and adapt as results come in
• Measure engagement as well as sales funnel and ROI
• Map out customer journeys from cold prospect to engaged customer, and plan out what data will be captured and how the experience will be personalised at each stage
• Don't forget to nurture cold leads who don't have an immediate interest in buying right now
• Dont just count how many people respond, profile responders versus non-responders and use analytics techniques like CHAID to build predictive models based on your results