SEO BENEFITS

Getting traffic to your website is great, but if that traffic doesn’t convert, it’s almost useless. This article will outline 39 proven strategies for getting your visitors to take action, whether that’s filling out a form, handing over their email address or making a purchase.

1. Include as few fields as possible.

When asking for information in an email opt-in form, ask for as little information as necessary. Here’s an example of how using one additional form field decreased conversions by 11 percent.

2. Add a guarantee.

Include a no-questions-asked refund policy on all purchases. This reduces risk, and increased sales will usually more than make up for any returns.

Related: Increase Your Conversion Rates With These 7 Landing Page Must-Haves

3. Use tangible action verbs.

When testing out different calls to action, try using action language that spurs visitors to take action (for example, “grab yours,” “reserve your seat”)

4. Use testimonials.

Testimonials reduce risk and provide social proof. Use them on product landing pages as well as on your email opt-in landing page.

5. Clearly state the benefits of your product or service.

Listing the features of your product is important, but it’s even more important to tell potential customers exactly how your product will help them or solve their problem.

6. Pay careful attention to your headline.

Your headline is perhaps the single most important element of your landing page. Brainstorm at least 10 possibilities before choosing the strongest one.

7. Keep conversion elements above the fold.

Opt-in boxes and other conversion elements should be above the fold for optimal results.

8. Use video to humanize your brand.

Include a simple video on landing pages to show there’s a real person behind your brand.

9. Create dedicated landing pages for pay-per-click ads.

If you’re using AdWords or another form of PPC ads, be sure to send these visitors to a dedicated landing page (not your home page!).

10. Include subscriber or social-media follower counts.

Just like testimonials, including social proof helps reduce risk and increase conversions.

11. Incorporate strong calls to action (CTAs) into every piece of content on your site.

Let your readers know exactly what you want them to do next, whether that’s click a button, read a blog post or fill out a form.

12. Recommend related products.

Include links to related content or products to keep visitors engaged and on your site.

13. Include stock numbers.

If you have a tangible product, include the number of remaining stock with your product descriptions (for example: “Order now … only 3 left in stock”).

14. Lose the hype.

Most consumers are too savvy to fall for hype-based copywriting. Lose the hype, and focus instead on writing clear, compelling copy that helps your visitors make a purchase decision.

15. Test variations of your CTA button.

Your “buy now” or “order now” button may perform quite differently depending on where it’s placed, what color it is and how big it is. Test out several variations to see which ones perform best.

16. Tell visitors exactly what they’re going to get.

Provide visitors with absolutely everything they need to know about your product: What are the features and benefits? What does it look like? What are the possible uses? Who will benefit most from it? How will it be delivered?

17. Include a clear value proposition.

Tell potential buyers what’s special about your product. How is it different and better than every other, similar product on the market?

18. Give your visitors tunnel vision.

When creating a landing page, remove anything that could potentially distract your visitors, such as a navigation bar and other CTAs. Your landing page should be 100 percent about getting your visitors to take one, specific action.

Related: 3 Critical Principles of Effective Calls to Action

19. Include a privacy statement on opt-in forms.

Your privacy policy can have a huge impact on your email conversions. In one experiment, changing the wording just slightly resulted in a 19 percent increase in conversions.

20. Get your visitors excited.

Use emotionally-charged language and amazing storytelling to get your visitors eager and excited to try your product.

21. Keep input fields optional.

f you must ask for numerous fields of information, keep as many as possible optional to increase the likelihood that visitors will complete the form. You can always ask for additional information later.

22. Meet the expectations of your PPC visitors.

If visitors are coming to your landing page via a PPC ad, make sure your ad copy is consistent with your landing page copy. Your ad should tell them exactly what they’ll findonce they click through to your site.

23. Offer various payment options.

Believe it or not, not everyone wants to use Paypal. Consider offering a variety of payment methods to satisfy the preferences of all your potential customers.

24. Include consumer reviews.

There’s no doubt that consumer reviews are extremely influential in helping people make purchase decisions. In fact, according to a study by Zendesk, 88 percent of respondents said their buying decisions were influenced by positive and negative reviews.

25. Test out various color combinations on your landing pages.

Different colors can signify different things to different people (for example, light blue can be calming, while red can evoke feelings of stress or even anger). Test a variety of palettes to see which ones result in optimal conversion rates.

26. Use high-quality images.

Using generic, tacky stock photos can send the wrong message about your brand. Use professional-quality photos where possible.

27. Use CTA buttons rather than links.

Buttons are more obvious and more clickable, particularly when viewed on mobile devices.

28. Use a chat tool.

Offer live chat to help answer questions and alleviate any concerns potential customers may have.

29. Use directional cues.

Move your visitors’ attention to your most important on-page element through the use of arrows or other visual cues. Just be careful to stay tasteful – flashy red arrows generally don’t work like they used to!

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Using Videos on Your Website

30. Try a single column layout.

One experiment showed a 681 percent increase in conversions when changing from a double column layout.

31. Include a headshot.

Don’t be afraid to include a personal photo in your sidebar or near your CTAs. It can reduce the sense of risk by showing that there’s a real person behind the brand.

32. Offer a price-match guarantee.

While most people won’t take you up on the offer, it helps convey that you’re concerned about keeping your prices competitive.

33. Test out various content lengths.

Depending on your niche, product and audience, short copy may outperform long copy (or vice versa). Be sure to test various lengths to see what works best with your audience.

34. Use pictures of happy, smiling people.

It’s commonly believed that these types of images result in the highest conversion rates.

35. Make sure you include contact info.

Give your customers confidence in buying from you by including complete contact info in an easily accessible location.

36. Offer bonus discounts at checkout.

Offer free shipping or a percent-off discount to customers on their next purchase.

37. Don’t require registration in order to buy.

Some sites require users to complete a registration form in order to make a purchase. Be sure to offer a one-time, “express” checkout to minimize potential roadblocks.

38. Match your copy’s reading level to your audience.

Using difficult or obscure language – or language that’s too simplistic, for that matter – can alienate some of your visitors. Use a tool such as Readability Score to make sure you’re matching your copy to your audience’s preferences.

39. Don’t offer too many options.

When faced with too many choices, people may actually become paralyzed and completely avoid a particular task or decision. When possible, be very clear about who your product is for, or suggest which product is best for the majority of people (“Most popular choice”).

It’s a commonly accepted truth that writers write to be read.

If you’ve been writing for a while, you’ll probably agree that each new piece of writing attracts a different level of publicity.

Some posts will blow up with views just days after publication, while others can languish unnoticed months later.

Even though they’re of relatively the same standard.

So what gives? And what actually attracts traffic online?

Interest in new content is a subject close to the heart of most digital publishers.

Refinery29‘s senior vice president of content strategy and innovation says, “We are not after building our business from lone fragments of celebrity news. Banking exclusively on the news cycle is far too risky a move if one is after sustained loyalty and growth.”

Ben Robinson, chief creative officer at Thrillist, agrees and notes that content is an area which needs to be approached strategically and methodically.

In his words, “Assuming we roll out a list of best burgers you could find in San Francisco, not updating them at least annually or even so often, would be a great downfall on our side.”

Evidently, the need for fresh and compelling content is a top priority for most of today’s brands. But increasingly, digital publishers are digging deeper into their archives to resurface buried gems, and it’s becoming clear that evergreen content does not necessarily have to be brand new.

Old is gold

Little tweaks here and there to previously published content can go a long way to effectively maximizing traffic to your site.

Old is gold, well, at least to those who know how to mine it. For brands growing into independent publishers, creating new content can be a great challenge.

But what makes the challenge even greater is that not many brands have creatives among their workforce. The other challenge is keeping up to speed with industry insights, and creating content on the go.

Creating new content only every so often has proven to be an uphill battle for many.

But what if we could get this out of the way by using what you have on your hands – your old and dusty (but still valuable) content?

Here are some helpful tips to see you through growth by creating a larger following to your content. Firstly, by attracting new readers, and secondly, by encouraging loyalty from existing traffic.

1. Learn from your audience

Content marketing is all about developing content that satisfies the needs of a particular audience. In order for your content to find relevance in its intended niche, proper homework needs to be done.

For digital publishers, creating surveys or engaging user interactive content can help get your audience talking. After collating their opinions, it is time to put them to use by revamping your old post ideas.

This can be approached from two perspectives:

Create spin-off posts

For posts that did statistically well, you focus on creating spin-off posts. Identify any ideas that might have been overlooked while compiling the post and give it an in-depth touch. Using readers’ comments and feedback emails, you might be able to know what they felt was left out and maximize on that.

The above post from Inked Hub Writers, for example, targets digital publishers and tells them what to look out for when putting up content that stands out for a specific audience.

This same post recently got a revamp, and this time, the SEO bit was left out of the post. As it turns out, there was conflicting interest mentioning SEO and audience, seeing both could have differing ways of analyzing what fares well.

With that information coming in, it was possible to put out a post on the same topic, which now went straight ahead to address the audience as the big focus in the post, as shown below.

These spin-off articles make ‘cluster’ content, which continues to link back to the original content, helping it to rank higher. In other words, it’s the same content, but with a fresh feel to it.

Try rebranding

The second consideration in doing this is concerning posts that didn’t perform to the writer’s expectation. Ask yourself what a salesperson would do to increase the sales or shelf life of an under-performing commodity, and re-spin it.

Identify the places that could use a makeover, incorporate new ideas and better editing, or lend themselves well to additional graphics and anything else likely to jazz up the article. A new take on the general outlook of an article could be all it takes for audiences to realize how great your content is and engage with it afresh.

2. Experiment with creative promotion

Not being creative or bold enough with marketing strategies is a common sin that creeps into many brands’ publishing departments. There’s a genuine phobia about promoting already-published content. The truth is that most of the archived content is simply there growing dust because it lacks a focused, creative promotion strategy to begin with.

Try sharing across multiple social media platforms. In today’s world, promotion has become much harder and easier at the same time. Thinking creatively as a publisher can help you leverage your old content and close in more viewership. A start to that would be asking some very simple but worthwhile questions.

The major one is, how has your social promotion performed so far? Today’s many available social media platforms provide a virtually unlimited target audience. How you sell yourself on these social platforms is what will count. Focus on the things that your audience will easily relate to.

For example, you could share one post across multiple platforms by simply playing around with the headlines. An online pesticide store could be launching a new product, for example, and publish a press release on it. Seeing as it would appear too redundant to keep sharing the same title, the editor can get creative in this scenario. Possible ways for sharing this across different social media platforms could be:

Writing an interesting post on the overarching need for households to keep their houses pest-free by providing simple executable do-it-yourself tips on Facebook

Highlighting the prevalent problem the pesticide seeks to solve. Making audiences feel like you relate to their problems and frustrations to help them get interested in your proposed solution for it in a simple tweet

Creating a discussion reel around the subject, and letting your target audience share their input around it on Instagram. This could look like: passive opinions, shared disappointments and a mention of what has worked for them.

Simply put, settling for only one way of running a promotion could only limit the chances of the content’s performance.

3. Republish on a different platform

This can also do the trick. Guest blogging has become a networking boon for the digital publishing industry. Not many brands, though, have mastered the art of republishing.

While guest blogging in most cases, takes in new content from scratch, some sites are willing to republish a piece on their site with your permission.

While this can be viewed differently by different parties, it sure can be an opportunity for an expansive reach. There is no limitation to how many times you can self-publish your own content.

To mean that, you don’t have to publish the content entirely, but you can share the link to a piece through other published pieces that are relevant to your content.

Whether you are self-hosted on a private website or use WordPress or BlogSpot, you can choose to increase the breadcrumbs leading to your content by posting it on various other sites. The more links you put out there, the more likely you are to increase your page views.

4. Optimize for SEO again

A great way to get URL topping results in search engine searches is to effectively optimize your content. The SEO landscape is crucial to successful content production so it makes sense to update your publish times and keywords as it changes and evolves.

You might have noticed that among even the most informative posts in search engines, some of them date way back, beyond three or four years. That does not mean that the information has changed since – but people may not be as likely to click on the link if they think the content is dusty or outdated.

Posts actually often reappear years later because they were well-researched and optimized for the particular needs they were addressing. The publishers can therefore keep updating them in any case where information has changed over the years.

Using Google’s keyword planner, you can identify relevant keywords that will link well with your work. It also gives quick ideas for terms the page was not targeting.

A little tweak on a title tag and inclusion of relevant modifiers in the body part of the article can also go a long way to putting your content out there.

It may be a wise idea to consider engaging the services of a professional SEO writer or agency who understand the steps involved to achieve this.

5. Digitally repackage your content

Branded content has an appeal that helps your audience identify with your brand. Most times, what this calls for is effective packaging.

So how do you go about updating your content packaging?

Firstly, consider visual appeal. A larger percentage of humans tend to be visual learners; this is a proven fact. You can rejig content in the form of an infographic, which in simpler terms is a visual summary of your content.

Infographics can be as detailed and as engaging as you’d like them to be. On the other hand, they can be as simple and minimal as the one below.

To some, infographics appear to be more ‘snackable’ than consuming large pieces of written content.

You can also consider revamping your old content into videos, podcasts or maybe even live chats that showcase its value.

For instance, video blogging, or what is commonly known as ‘vlogging’, has taken content development by storm. Most online users are engaging channels like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook and Instagram to get their content out there.

Many marketers and content strategists are now pushing their brands to produce more graphics and video content as a result.

What’s good about video and infographic content is that it is, by nature, very interactive and easy to understand. This increases its likelihood of being shared widely, hence reaching a greater audience.

6. Create ebooks and white papers

Traditional publishing, or more notably, print media once held a fair share of the content market. But that’s not the story today. In the wake of the digital media boom, today’s consumers of content are more accustomed to reading things online than in print format. For brands and publishers, this presents a great opportunity.

If you have published content or flyers relating to a certain topic, you can consider compiling these previous articles to form an eBook. Make it easily downloadable on various sites for free, but if you want to make that extra buck by ‘gating’ it, that’s all well and good.

White papers, like eBooks, can help identify you as an industry authority. All you need is to compile your different informative and relatable pieces to create a very informative white paper.

Wrapping up

Content has been, and will always be, an interaction point between brands, publishers and consumers.

Publishing content may continue to be a necessary burden for brands. But with the different possibilities that dusty old content in the digital archives can offer, this burden can be somewhat reduced.

Paying attention to the six tips above can help you revamp your old content and develop a good readership from it.

What is a valid Hreflang?

Sometimes users of our Hreflang testing tool see an error like this and get baffled:

Invalid hreflang (en_US) found in HTML.

Why is en_US incorrect? Because the correct way to write a language code is with dashes, not underscores. The correct value is en-US.

What are valid values for Hreflang?

A valid hreflang can be specified as:

A 2-character language code (e.g. “en“), or

a combination of language and region code (e.g. “en-US“), or

a combination of language and script code (e.g. “sr-Cyrl” or “sr-Latn“), or

a combination of language, script and region codes (e.g. “sr-hu-Latn“)

A special value of “x-default”, used for country/language selectors and redirector pages. These pages are not specific to any language/locale. Users either choose their language/country (e.g. from a map or dropdown box), or the website uses the IP address of the visitor to this page and automatically redirects them to the page that is appropriate for them.

Examples of invalid Hreflang

Here are some examples of invalid language codes found recently by the online testing tool. See if you can figure out why these codes are incorrect:

en_US: Underscore used instead of hyphen

en-en: The second “en” is incorrect because “en” is not a valid region code.

en-UK: “uk” is not a valid region code. Use “en-GB”.

us-en: The order is inverted. It should be “en-US”.

ua: ua is not a language code. It is a region code. So it is incorrect to use it by itself, i.e. without a language code.

cmn-CN: The country code for China is correct (this page was in Chinese and the URL was a .cn URL. The language code is incorrect.

Valid Codes for Reference

Valid Language Codes (2-character ISO-639-1 Codes)

A list of valid 2-character language codes is as follows (the format is ISO 639-1): aa, ab, ae, af, ak, am, an, ar, as, av, ay, az, ba, be, bg, bh, bi, bm, bn, bo, br, bs, ca, ce, ch, co, cr, cs, cu, cv, cy, da, de, dv, dz, ee, el, en, eo, es, et, eu, fa, ff, fi, fj, fo, fr, fy, ga, gd, gl, gn, gu, gv, ha, he, hi, ho, hr, ht, hu, hy, hz, ia, id, ie, ig, ii, ik, io, is, it, iu, ja, jv, ka, kg, ki, kj, kk, kl, km, kn, ko, kr, ks, ku, kv, kw, ky, la, lb, lg, li, ln, lo, lt, lu, lv, mg, mh, mi, mk, ml, mn, mr, ms, mt, my, na, nb, nd, ne, ng, nl, nn, no, nr, nv, ny, oc, oj, om, or, os, pa, pi, pl, ps, pt, qu, rm, rn, ro, ru, rw, sa, sc, sd, se, sg, si, sk, sl, sm, sn, so, sq, sr, ss, st, su, sv, sw, ta, te, tg, th, ti, tk, tl, tn, to, tr, ts, tt, tw, ty, ug, uk, ur, uz, ve, vi, vo, wa, wo, xh, yi, yo, za, zh, zu

Valid Region Codes (2-character ISO-3166-1 Codes)

And here are all the valid region codes (ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format; note that the code for the United Kingdom is “GB”, not “UK”): AD, AE, AF, AG, AI, AL, AM, AO, AQ, AR, AS, AT, AU, AW, AX, AZ, BA, BB, BD, BE, BF, BG, BH, BI, BJ, BL, BM, BN, BO, BQ, BR, BS, BT, BV, BW, BY, BZ, CA, CC, CD, CF, CG, CH, CI, CK, CL, CM, CN, CO, CR, CU, CV, CW, CX, CY, CZ, DE, DJ, DK, DM, DO, DZ, EC, EE, EG, EH, ER, ES, ET, FI, FJ, FK, FM, FO, FR, GA, GB, GD, GE, GF, GG, GH, GI, GL, GM, GN, GP, GQ, GR, GS, GT, GU, GW, GY, HK, HM, HN, HR, HT, HU, ID, IE, IL, IM, IN, IO, IQ, IR, IS, IT, JE, JM, JO, JP, KE, KG, KH, KI, KM, KN, KP, KR, KW, KY, KZ, LA, LB, LC, LI, LK, LR, LS, LT, LU, LV, LY, MA, MC, MD, ME, MF, MG, MH, MK, ML, MM, MN, MO, MP, MQ, MR, MS, MT, MU, MV, MW, MX, MY, MZ, NA, NC, NE, NF, NG, NI, NL, NO, NP, NR, NU, NZ, OM, PA, PE, PF, PG, PH, PK, PL, PM, PN, PR, PS, PT, PW, PY, QA, RE, RO, RS, RU, RW, SA, SB, SC, SD, SE, SG, SH, SI, SJ, SK, SL, SM, SN, SO, SR, SS, ST, SV, SX, SY, SZ, TC, TD, TF, TG, TH, TJ, TK, TL, TM, TN, TO, TR, TT, TV, TW, TZ, UA, UG, UM, US, UY, UZ, VA, VC, VE, VG, VI, VN, VU, WF, WS, YE, YT, ZA, ZM, ZW

Valid Script Codes (4-character ISO 15924 Codes)

There are many mistakes you could make when implementing Hreflang tags on your website. Via the online Hreflang testing tool, we try to catch as many of them as we can. Here’s a list, complete with how to fix each type of problem.

Page-level errors

Some errors can be noticed simply by looking at an individual page. These are:

Broken pages: It is not uncommon that we crawl the pages in a sitemap and find some that are broken e.g. 404 page not found errors, or 301/302 redirects, or even pages that are completely blank or do not have HTML markup.

An Hreflang tag with broken markup. e.g. a <link> tag with missing href attribute

Incorrect Hreflang: Acceptable values for the language code used in Hreflang attributes must be in ISO-639-1 or the ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. e.g. while “en-US” is correct, “en-UK” is incorrect. The correct value for the UK is actually “en-GB”.

Page not linking to itself: When you implement Hreflang tags on a page (say Page A), you obviously want to include <link>s to the version of page A in other languages. So you link to pages B, C and D. But search engine guidelines specify that page A must also link to itself (specifying the language used on that page, of course).

Missing x-default: Another guideline from Google is that an “x-default” must be included as the default page to be shown to users whose language is not among the languages that you have pages for. Usually this is English, and usually it’s the page that is in the XML sitemap.

Same page, multiple languages: Sometimes when Hreflang tags are incorrectly implemented, all (or multiple) language versions point to the same page. (see example here). You will see this error if two different languages — say en and fr — point to the same page. However, if the two hreflang attributes both use the same high-level language — say en-US and en-GB — then they can point to the same page and it will not throw an error.

Duplicate (or multiple different) Hreflang tags for the same language

HTML lang attribute does not match hreflang: The “lang” attribute of the <html> tag on the page is different from the “hreflang” attribute for that page in the <link> tag. This error is usually because of a CMS (content management system) template problem. The <html> tag has an optional lang attribute to specify what language this page is in. This tag is generated by the back-end CMS and most marketers don’t pay any attention to it because it’s not an important SEO meta tag like robots, description or hreflang. Since all pages served by the CMS tend to use the same hard-coding for the lang attribute, we find that pages in German, French etc. — even if they have the correct hreflang attribute — continue to use <html lang="en">

Hreflang in HTML and HTTP headers: This is rare but some sites specify Hreflang tags in both their HTML and the HTTP headers returned by the URL. Use only one and keep it simple for yourself and for search engines.

Errors related to a set of pages

Other types of errors require you to take a look at a set of pages that all have the same content. All pages in the same set have the same content, just in different languages. That is why they are grouped into a set and the set is examined collectively. All such pages should point to each other (and to themselves). What’s more, they should point to the canonical version of each other. The errors we look for are:

Pages not linking to each other (aka no return tags or missing return tags): All pages in a set must link to each other (and to themselves). Sometimes we see the default page (say Page A) linking to pages B, C and D but each of those only link back to page A. That is a mistake. The correct way to implement it is to have the exact same Hreflang tags on all pages in a set. Remembering this will greatly simplify your implementation. This error is explained in detail in this blog post.

Not linking to the canonical version: You have a set of pages all linking to each other. Wonderful! But sometimes when we crawl these pages, we discover that a page specifies that its canonical version is different from the URL that was in the Hreflang tags (or in the sitemap you are testing). This is a mistake because when you are dealing with search engines, you only want to specify the canonical version of a URL, both in your sitemap and in any hreflang tags. All other versions of that page (that point to the canonical version) are discovered by the search engine crawler when it is spidering the web (on your website or from outside). But you do not want to include non-canonical versions of a page in your sitemap, or any structured data that you provide to search engines (like hreflang tags).

Other Errors

Other errors we check for are a byproduct of crawling the pages supplied. These are not related specifically to Hreflang:

Invalid (mal-formed) canonical URL

More than 1 canonical URL specified for a given page

Further Reading

What is Hreflang?

Explain to me like I’m five.

You will use Hreflang if—and only if—you have multiple pages (URLs) that all have the same content translated into different languages.

These pages do not all have to be on the same domain. For example, your English content could be at https://www.example.co.uk and your Spanish content could be at https://www.example.es. Or these pages can be on different subdomains, like en.example.com and fr.example.com. You could even create separate folders for each language, e.g. www.example.com/en/foo.html and www.example.com/de/foo.html.

What does Hreflang signal?

The Hreflang signals to search engines that content on this page is exactly the same as content on another page (or pages) that are in a different language. This means that both pages can share link authority.

Let’s say your primary site is in English and has been live at http://www.example.com for many years. Let’s say you sell system administration services and you’ve been operating in the U.S. for a while. Over time, your site has accumulated some good backlinks. Now you want to launch in the German market so you translate your site in German. Most pages on http://www.example.com now have a corresponding German language page at http://de.example.com.

Let’s say one such page—your top organic traffic landing page—is http://www.example.com/how-to-choose-a-sysadmin.  Your corresponding German page is http://de.example.com/Wie-man-ein-sysadmin-wahlen. Naturally, you’d like the new page to benefit from the link equity generated by the longstanding English page. That is what Hreflang can do for you.

Update: Google has confirmed that using Hreflang for a new language version does not transfer equity from sister sites. The only thing it does is if your EN version was already ranking in the DE market, then the new site and associated Hreflang markup will allow Google to swap out the EN URL and replace it with the DE URL in German-speaking markets.

Show me the tag

Here’s what the Hreflang tag will look like:

<!doctype html> <html> <head> <meta charset=utf-8> ... <link rel=alternate hreflang=de href="http://de.example.com/Wie-man-ein-sysadmin-wahlen" /> <link rel=alternate hreflang=en href="http://www.example.com/how-to-choose-a-sysadmin" /> <link rel=alternate hreflang=x-default href="http://www.example.com/how-to-choose-a-sysadmin" /> ... </head> <body> ...

In future blog posts I’ll dive deeper into the nuances of hreflang implementation and the mistakes people typically make when implementing Hreflang. For now, note the following:

Tags appear in the <head> of the HTML like other meta tags. But these are <link> tags while other tags like the description or robots/noindex are <meta> tags.

There are 3 <link> tags: one for English, one for German, and one for signaling the default language. This signals to search engines which page to show when the user’s language is—respectively—English, German or unknown/other.

The same set of 3 <link> tags appear on both the English and German pages. This means the pages link to each other and to themselves. This is very important.

When to use Hreflang

Hreflang is to be used only when the content is exactly the same on both pages. Here are some examples:

Homepage for sites in different languages

A blog post about a new product or feature

Product pages for e-commerce sites. Prices and currencies may be different on both pages, but that’s OK. The main content—product description, pictures, videos, ratings—should be substantially the same on both pages. I say “substantially” because you may have some regional variations, e.g. the German page may specify product dimensions in metric units like cm instead of inches. Customer reviews should ideally be translated but are considered supplemental content so it’s OK if pages in different languages have different customer reviews. It is also OK to show English reviews (without translation) on the German page.

Landing pages for tools or widgets like store locator or mortgage calculator.

Company information pages like the About page, management, investor relations info, pages describing services offered

Check-in procedure for airlines

Amenities offered at a resort or theme park

A community forum where users have posted mostly in English but the site offers language-based variations where the header, footer, navigation are translated. This makes it easier for people all over the world to use the site even if the posts are all in English.

Here are some examples where Hreflang should not be used:

English page that lists store locations in the U.S. and German page that lists store locations in Germany.

Target your audience based on location and language settings

International Targeting SEO: Hreflang Manager WordPress Plugin + WooCommerce

DON’T LET YOUR WEBSITE GET LOST IN TRANSLATION: RESOLVING ISSUES WITH INTERNATIONAL TARGETING

As more and more businesses take advantage of the incredible opportunities offered by the World Wide Web to expand into global markets, it’s more critical than ever that sites are correctly optimised for international search. The detrimental effects of having the wrong content presented to users in organic listings cannot be underestimated. If your French content ranks in the Spanish SERPs, you will see decreased click-through rates, increased bounce rates and ultimately, your conversion rates will suffer along with the user experience of your visitors!

Google uses several pieces of information to ascertain the best target audience for your content, such as

hreflang tags

geo-targeting settings in Google Search Console

ccTLDs (country-code top-level domain names), for example .es, .fr, .co.uk

IP address of the site’s web server

location and currency information on the page

Hreflang tags are little snippets of HTML code that allow webmasters to signal to search engines which language(s) and region(s) their site is targeting. They also indicate alternative versions of the content that may be more appropriate for the search engine to serve. Hreflang tags are also useful to eradicate issues of duplicate content which can potentially arise when you have very similar content in the same language which is targeted to different locations. For example, you could have separate, but very similar, content targeting English speakers in the UK and English speakers in the US.

These tags have a strong influence on Google’s decision as to what content should be served up to international users. How do we know this? Well, there is abundant evidence that the incorrect, or complete absence of, implementation of these little snippets of code can result in the wrong content being displayed in the international SERPs. Given that incorrect implementation of hreflang tags can cause havoc for your international targeting, it’s crucial that you get it right.

HOW TO IDENTIFY IF YOU HAVE AN INTERNATIONAL TARGETING PROBLEM

The first step, of course, is to ascertain whether or not there actually is a problem with your site.

If your Google Analytics dashboard is showing poor traffic or user engagement metrics, then this could be a first indication that something’s up. For a more in-depth analysis, you could look at what countries your visitors are from when analysing the traffic to your geographically targeted content.

In order to confirm whether or not your site’s hreflang implementation (or lack of) is the culprit, it’s definitely worth checking in Google Search Console to see if any issues have been flagged. If Google have detected a problem, you are likely to receive the following error message:

While this is useful to make you aware of any issues, it is certainly not advisable to rely on this exclusively – the list of errors that Google provide here will by no means be exhaustive. It really is up to you to do the digging to identify the full extent of the problem (more on how to do this below).

Finally, in order to gain a really clear perspective on exactly how your site is behaving in the international SERPs, you can use an international proxy in combination with changing the language settings in your browser. In this way, you can carry out a search for your brand terms and identify exactly what content from your site is being displayed for a range of locations and languages. For example, you could identify the content that’s served up to French speakers in France, as well as English speakers in France – be aware that this may not be the same content!

GATHERING THE DATA

Once you’ve identified that you’ve got a problem with your international targeting, getting to the root of the issue will require some nifty tools, mind-bending data manipulation and a bit of good old detective work. Essentially, however, the problem shouldn’t be too difficult to resolve – there are only a handful of ways that things could have gone wrong, and once you’ve spotted the issues they shouldn’t be too difficult to fix.

Very fortunately for us SEOs, the Screaming Frog tool has a neat custom extraction feature that allows us to collect the hreflang data for all URLs on a site. All you need to do is go to Configuration > Custom > Extraction and then fill out the form using the following Xpaths:

(//*[@hreflang])[1]

(//*[@hreflang])[2]

… etc

You can extract up to 10 hreflang elements at a time using this format (see image below). Make sure that you select ‘Extract HTML Element’ – this will ensure that the entire HTML element is extracted, along with the link and the hreflang value. In addition, don’t forget to opt to crawl subdomains if some of your language- or location-specific content resides on subdomains instead of in subfolders.

After you’ve run the crawl, simply download the custom report and you’re ready to start digging through the data.

ARE YOUR HREFLANG TAGS RECIPROCAL?

A key problem to look out for with hreflang implementation is a lack of reciprocity between tags. Pages must link to each other. For example, if page A says that page B is its equivalent, page B must also refer back to page A in the same way. These mistakes are easy to overlook but crucial to fix.

Once you’ve downloaded the report from Screaming Frog, this is where the real fun begins. You will find that the extracted hreflang elements are listed in columns in the spreadsheet according to whether they were the first, second, third (etc) hreflang element extracted from the page. In this way, you could have a mixture of different language and location tags located in each of the columns.

What you actually want is for the tags to be arranged in columns according to the tag contents. For example, all fr-fr tags are to be located in one column, all en-gb tags to be located in another column etc. This will require some filtering, sorting, cutting and pasting. In addition, you only want the linked URL to be specified here, not the entire hreflang tag – you can use ‘find & replace’ to remove the rest of the html element. For example:

In a new tab in the spreadsheet, you now want to utilise this data that you have so neatly arranged in order to clearly visualise which pages are missing the appropriate hreflang tags and – more crucially – instances where pages are not reciprocal. Using some VLOOKUP, IFERROR and EXACT functions you want to draw this data into a new sheet to create something that resembles the following:

In this set-up, you have each URL on the site located in the far left column. Then, for each language or country variation, a column that specifies which URL is linked to from the necessary hreflang tag on that page. In addition, another column indicates the connection in reverse. A third column clearly states whether these URLs are reciprocal.

Now you can clearly see which tags are reciprocating and which URLs are lacking hreflang tags altogether.

ARE YOU INCORRECTLY USING THE “X-DEFAULT” TAG?

Another mistake that can cause issues is the overuse of the ‘x-default’ tag. This tag is used to specify that a page is not targeted to any specific language or location.

For example, you would implement the following piece of code

on an international landing page that requests for users to choose their country or location from a drop-down menu.

The ‘x-default’ tag is not to be used to refer to URLs which are also associated with specific language or country selectors. For example, the following code would be incorrect:

These tags are contradictory and provide conflicting information to Google; the former tag is indicating that the content is targeted to English speakers in the UK, while the second tag is saying that the content is not targeted at all.

HAVE YOU UPDATED GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE?

In addition to hreflang tags, another way to indicate your target audience to Google is to update the international targeting settings in Search Console. In order to be able to do this correctly, you will need to ensure that you have a profile associated with each country-language subfolder (or subdomain). For example, you would want a profile for https://example.com/uk/ and a profile for https://example.com/france/ – in this way you can target each subfolder to a specific country. In order to do so, simply go to the ‘Search Traffic’ dropdown and select ‘International Targeting’ in the Google Search Console profile. From here you can then select the country that you wish to target for that section of the site.

OTHER COMMON ERRORS

Listed below are another couple of common errors that can trip up webmasters and SEOs in their quest to correctly target their content:

Are your language codes correct?

An easy mistake to make, but a mistake nonetheless – these finicky little codes could have you targeting your content to users in Georgia (GE) as opposed to Germany (DE). A useful way to make sure that your codes are correct is to use this hreflang tags generator tool.

Have you tried to target just a region, but not a language too?

While it’s possible to use hreflang tags simply to target speakers of a particular language (for example,signals that the content at this URL is targeted to all English speakers, independent of location), it is not possible to specify a country code by itself.

SEO Structured Data: Schema Markup WooCommerce Plugin

SEO Structured Data: Schema Markup WooCommerce Plugin to improve your results in Google

Structured data and schema are becoming more and more important for search engine optimization. The bad news is that this is pretty complicated stuff and even the most seasoned SEO specialists struggle with the proper implementation of structured data and schema. The good news is that we have created the WordPress SEO Structured Data Schema plugin which enables web designers and business owners a super-easy way to add schema for:

Organizations Local Businesses Articles Blog Postings Events Products Videos Services Ratings We created this plugin after trying dozens of free and premium schema and rich snippet plugins for WordPress. There are some great ones out there for specific kinds of content, but we could not find an easy-to-use, comprehensive JSON-LD plugin that provided features that most business websites need. So we made our own.

WHAT IS STRUCTURED DATA & SCHEMA?

Structured data adds context to your website content by way of using standardized search engine “vocabulary” at Schema.org. When implemented correctly, structured data increases the chances that search engines like Google will show additional information about your content directly in the search engine results pages (aka SERPs) via “rich snippets”. In other words, if you are searching for a WordPress rich snippet plugin, this may be the one you are looking for….

WHAT IS A RICH SNIPPET?

Rich snippets are the extra information that you often see right in the search results, such as:

Star ratings Events and event times Embedded site search box Videos Breadcrumbs In other words, rich snippets are the visible result of structured data that appears in the SERPs.

DOES STRUCTURED DATA HELP WITH SEO?

Absolutely! There is no question that structured data that produces rich snippet “bling” that improves SERP click through rates (CTR). Virtually every search engine expert on the planet will tell you that organic click through rates are a major search engine optimization ranking factor. This, structured data has a very high correlation (ie indirect relationship) with search engine rankings.

Is there a direct effect on SEO? Maybe. Recent communication from Google indicates that structured data may become a direct ranking factor in the near future.

HOWEVER…as with all things on the Internet, it garbage in, garbage out. Just installing this plugin will not do anything for your website unless you use it correctly, and properly and accurately configure the data.

WHY JSON-LD?

In summary, there are three structured data formats:

Want to understand all of the advantages of SEO?

This list of SEO advantages can blow your mind. you may be appreciative you browse this.

Every business must invest in programme optimisation. programme optimisation is that the method of optimizing your web site to maximise organic traffic from search engines. The leading search engines square measure Google, YouTube, Bing, and Yahoo.

This diary may be a warning to everybody that doesn’t have an efficient SEO strategy. you’re creating an enormous mistake by not leverage all of the below SEO advantages.

You are losing cash a day your web site isn’t optimized within the search engines.

Here’s why.

1. There square measure folks checking out your merchandise or services on search engines

There square measure over a pair of billion folks on-line. ninety three of on-line activities begin on an exploration engine. There square measure forty,000 searches each second, and 3.5 billion searches per day. There square measure various opportunities for your business to become found on search engines. one in all the foremost necessary advantages of SEO is that your customers square measure mistreatment search engines daily.

2. SEO pulls-in quality traffic Traffic on search engines is that the best traffic. Why? as a result of folks are literally checking out the matter you solve. you’ll be able to “pull” traffic to your business. you are doing not ought to “push” out advertisements to influence folks to shop for. Search traffic is already fascinated by your merchandise and services. this can be why the SEO trade is price $65 billion.

3. SEO traffic is additional possible to convert SEO traffic is additional possible to convert than alternative sources of traffic. In fact, search traffic has the simplest conversion rates for many websites. By positioning yourself on search engines, you’re positioning your business to win additional conversions.

4. SEO will increase sales and leads SEO isn’t a story. you may increase your leads and sales if you supply a viable product or service. One little business generated over $103,510.98 price of SEO ends up in simply five months.

However, you want to invest within the best SEO strategy. With a winning SEO campaign, your business are going to be on it’s thanks to higher conversions.

5. SEO will decrease your value per acquisition

Another good thing about SEO is that it’s “free”. it’s so much more cost-effective than advertising to amass customers. the sole prices in SEO square measure the prices to rent the simplest SEO company. Unless you have got expertise in web site secret writing and Google algorithms, you may want associate degree SEO firm or agency to grow your rankings.

6. SEO doesn’t involve any paid advertising

You do not ought to advertise if you have got sturdy SEO standings. you’ll be able to increase your web site traffic while not having to pay per click. an efficient SEO strategy will assist you cut back your advertising bucks, and invest it in additional economical areas.

7. prime SEO rankings provides 24/7 promotion

SEO is 24/7. It doesn’t sleep. Your rankings don’t disappear long. you’ll be able to increase your web site traffic all day, every day. Once you rank high in search engines, they’re going to promote your business whereas you’re sleeping.

8. SEO builds trust and believability

People trust Google. They use it a day to seek out what they’re longing for. By ranking high on search engines, your business can build trust and believability together with your audience. In fact, thirty seventh of programme clicks square measure on the primary organic listing.

9. SEO may be a long-run strategy

SEO may be a long-run strategy. It will take 6-12 months to check best rankings. However, even as it takes time to maneuver up the rankings, it takes time to maneuver down the rankings. Once you’re placed in prime positions, you seldom move down. the sole reason this might modification is because of rising SEO competition or changes in Google rule.

10. SEO makes your customers additional wise

Your customers square measure mistreatment search engines to analysis. They use their findings to assist them create wise choices on accessible choices. High SEO rankings permits you to coach potential customers. This indirectly builds trust, however most significantly helps them create associate degree wise call.

11. SEO influences buying choices

SEO considerably influences buying choices. this can be as a result of the developed trust and believability mentioned in our previous points. Use SEO to boost your conversions by considerably influencing the buying choices of these on the net.

12. SEO will increase your whole awareness and equity

Conversions aside, SEO will build your whole equity. In alternative words, SEO can facilitate folks become tuned in to your whole. Awareness is vital as a result of your web site guests might not invariably be able to purchase. However, by being tuned in to your offerings, they will purchase within the close to future.

13. SEO will increase client attribution or “touches”

While your awareness is increasing, SEO can at the same time increase your client attribution points. Attribution is that the quantity of times your audience sees your whole. The additional times they see your business, the additional possible they’re to get from your business. sturdy SEO rankings can assist you dramatically increase your bit points with potential consumers.

14. SEO receives ninetieth additional clicks than PPC

SEO trumps paid advertising. this can be as a result of organic SEO listings receive ninetieth of clicks. several users of search engines tend to skip paid advertisements. this can be possibly because of their trust in Google’s rule. By investment in SEO, you may possible gain additional traffic than the advertisers on a similar keywords.

15. SEO will increase your web site referrals

SEO can increase your web site referrals. you may gain additional web site referrals from search engines. additionally, your web site guests square measure possible to refer your web site to their friends. a robust SEO presence can you grow referrals, virtually and figuratively!

16. SEO is measurable

SEO is measurable. you’ll be able to live your conversions and therefore the supply of conversions. you’ll be able to conjointly live the progression of your web site rankings and organic traffic. With the correct tools (or SEO company), you may be able to live that search keywords square measure the foremost valuable to your business.

17. SEO drives offline sales

Do your customers do analysis on-line before visiting your store? in fact they do! as a result of the majority do their analysis on-line, SEO conjointly drives offline sales. this can be as a result of they’re mistreatment search engines to try and do their analysis, however could visit your store or create a telephone call to really purchase your merchandise. Therefore, SEO may be a major contributor to driving offline sales.

18. SEO is less expensive than paid advertising

This is a no brainer. SEO is less expensive than paid advertising. Once you rank high on search engines, you are doing not ought to get clicks from search engines. Pause your PPC advertising campaigns and let #1 SEO rankings drive additional results.

19.Your competitors square measure mistreatment SEO to grow

Kill or be killed. Your customers begin their net journey with an exploration. Your competitors square measure mistreatment search to grow their business. Sooner or later, if you’re not mistreatment search to grow your business, you may not have a business!

20. SEO will provide smaller businesses a grip on larger corporations

If you use atiny low business, you’ll realize that it’s powerful to outspend larger competitors in AdWords. However, an efficient SEO strategy is also your thanks to gain higher rankings. whereas larger corporations trust advertising, you’ll be able to trust a savvy SEO strategy to travel within the back door to amass customers.

21.SEO can assist you gain market share

Gain market share by being initial. If you’re the primary possibility, your customers can ne'er fathom the many alternatives. Unless, they scroll to page ten of Google. However, we all know that may not happen. Why? as a result of seventy fifth of users ne'er scroll past the primary page of search results.

22. SEO can assist you forced an entry new markets

SEO can assist you forced an entry new markets. Once your web site is optimized, you’ll be able to begin to expand your web site to focus on alternative keywords. The keywords you decide on will be new merchandise or services you’ll supply. you’ll be able to figure the search engines to drive qualified traffic to your new offerings, serving to you enter new markets.

23. SEO will increase the worth of your business

Your business becomes additional valuable as your SEO rankings rise. If you’re within the market to sell your business, several consumers can realize sturdy SEO rankings as a valuable assets. this can be possible as a result of SEO rankings tend to carry its price and sustain over the years.

24. SEO integrates all of your on-line promoting activities

SEO is on-line promoting. All on-line promoting activities in a way will attribute to your SEO rankings. Web design, content promoting, social media promoting services, and on-line advertising influences SEO. once all activities square measure integrated, your SEO rankings.

25. SEO improves your overall promoting ROI

As antecedently explicit , associate degree integrated promoting campaign can influence SEO rankings. Not solely will this influence your SEO rankings, however your overall ROI from all of your promoting activities are going to be higher. this may be explained in additional detail within the next points below.

26. SEO is that the best PR strategy

SEO is that the new “PR” strategy. It makes PR add up. so as to rank high in search engines, you want to have quality backlinks. Backlinks square measure links from external web sites that link to your website. The additional you have got, the additional relevant your web site is. The additional relevant your web site is, the upper you rank. effort quality backlinks could need substance. The additional substance you have got, the additional backlink opportunities you’ll have. the 2 works hand-in-hand.

27. SEO can increase your social media followers

SEO can add-on additional social media followers. As your guests square measure researching your web site, they’re possible to click your social media icons to follow you. an efficient SEO campaign can generate thousands of web site guests, that you’ll be able to expect to translate into a smaller share of followers.

28. SEO can increase your email story subscribers

SEO can increase your email story subscribers. If you have got associate degree email story signup type on your web site, you’ll be able to expect additional subscribers as your rankings rise. this can be as a result of you’re gaining additional traffic to your web site, and additional exposure. For best results, offer associate degree incentive on your web site for those who subscribes to your email story.

29. SEO can increase your diary traffic

SEO can increase your diary traffic. As your website’s authority rises with search engines, some things can happen. Your blog’s individual ranking in Google can rise. Your diary content is additional possible to be found on Google. And lastly, you may possible gain additional referral traffic from your web site by promoting your diary throughout your web site.

30. SEO improves your website’s click-through-rate

High SEO rankings can improve your website’s click-through-rate. Or, vice versa. you want to have a high click-through-rate to boost your SEO. Click-through-rate is that the quantity of individuals United Nations agency click your web site divided by the number of individuals you reached.

31. SEO improves your website’s time-on-site

As your click-through-rate rises, your website’s time-on-site can possible increase additionally. this can be however long your web site guests square measure staying on your web site. The longer your guests remain your web site, the additional possible they’re to shop for. to boot, it’ll boost your SEO rankings additionally.

32. SEO improves the protection and security of your web site

SEO can force you create your web site safe and secure. this may shield your web site guests from viruses and fraud. at the same time, {it can|it’ll} boost your rankings as secure websites will considerably influence your SEO rankings.

33. SEO improves the speed of your web site

As you’re engaged on growing your website’s SEO, you may improve the speed of your web site. High-speed websites can assist you supply the simplest user expertise to your guests. additionally, high SEO rankings will correspond with higher-speed websites.

34. SEO can improve the user expertise of your web site

As you’ll be able to tell from the previous few points, SEO can improve the user expertise of your web site. it’s necessary that you simply detain mind that Google’s goal is to supply connectedness to their users. To rank high in Google, your web site should be relevant. so as to be relevant, you may ought to supply a good user expertise

35. SEO is growing

SEO payment is forecasted to extend to $80 billion by 2020. SEO payment is probably going to be over on-line advertising payment. SEO is growing for one reason. It works. Your business has a chance to leap on the SEO bandwagon before it becomes too saturated.

36. SEO is mobile

Mobile is that the way forward for on-line. And, five hundredth of all net users square measure mobile. this can be possible to still increase. By optimizing your web site for SEO, you’re conjointly getting ready yourself for ensuing generation of promoting. Your web site should be mobile-friendly. And, search engines can favor your {website|web web site} for optimizing your site for mobile.

37. SEO can assist you stand out

There square measure 250 million websites on the web. the typical person can ne'er recognize what most of the web has got to supply. Higher SEO rankings can assist you stand out from the various alternative websites.

38. SEO is laser-targeted

SEO is keyword-based. this implies that listings seem supported the keywords folks rummage around for. The advantage here is for you to succeed in those who square measure longing for precisely what your business offers. The keyword targeting ability of SEO is one in all the primarily reasons why it delivers the foremost qualified traffic to your web site.

39. SEO traffic is that the real deal

SEO traffic is that the real deal. The folks visiting your web site don’t seem to be coming back for fun. they’re in unjust pain. they need real issues. they’re longing for answers, and that they clicked your web site as a result of they suppose you’ll be able to realize it together with your business. As long as you add price, and perceive your customers, you may have a lot of success with SEO.

40. SEO rankings last forever

Okay, not really. however honestly, it’s extraordinarily onerous to screw up SEO rankings. you may possible stay in prime positions, unless you utilize black-hat SEO practices. Black-hat SEO practices carries with it frowned-upon ways to trick search engines to rank your web site. However, you’re not progressing to ought to worry regarding this. Why? as a result of you’re progressing to use a trusty SEO company. Once you attain prime placement, it’s time to celebrate! Or, begin increasing to alternative keywords.

41. SEO will eliminate cold-calling and alternative ancient ways

Tired of passing out flyers? uninterested in advertising in magazines and not seeing results? uninterested in cold occupation folks and bothering those who can ne'er need to shop for from you? If your answer is affirmative, invest in SEO.

42. SEO will double, triple, or quadruple your business

SEO will virtually double, triple, or quadruple your business. SEO exposes you to the whole market of people checking out you. you’ll be able to expand in additional cities, states, nations, or alternative elements of the planet with an efficient SEO strategy. the planet becomes your marketplace with an efficient SEO strategy.

43. SEO will assist you attract talent

SEO will assist you attract talent. folks longing for work conjointly begin their journey on Google. you’ll be able to optimize your web site to rank on Google for the positions you’re hiring for. Avoid recruiting fees and acquisition prices by investment into a SEO strategy.

44. SEO is reasonable

SEO is more cost-effective than advertising to extend your conversions. SEO rating generally ranges from $800-$2000 per month. However, the come is priceless. Once you rank #1 on Google, your web site can receive thousands of free hits to your web site.

45. SEO is that the smartest promoting investment you’ll be able to create

1. Low cost in comparison to AdWords and PPC

Organic listings are essentially free. When you are listed at the top, you don’t need to pay per click or allocate a budget for advertising, one of the main benefits of SEO is that it is the gift that keeps on giving.

2. Higher brand credibility – people trust Google

People trust that the first listing in google is a reputable company, by doing SEO, your website becomes THE brand name. The further back you are in rankings on Google the more people are skeptical about your website.

3. 60% of clicks go to the first result

This means that only 40% of clicks are left for the second through the millionth result on google for the keyword. Securing that top spot on Google is a sure fire way to gain thousands upon thousands of visitors.

4. You’ll always have access to data

You can discover new products by looking at keyword data and seeing what people are searching the most for. Customer data is extremely valuable in business and is not that hard to come by with the right tools. Manipulating it to your advantage can be exponentially beneficial for your business.

5. The results require minimal upkeep

Unlike advertisements the affects of SEO are permanent. They don’t suddenly stop if you stop paying for them. Of course you will need a little upkeep to maintain that top 1st spot ranking, but if you can get that top spot chances are it will be quite difficult for it to get taken away.

6. Your competitors are doing it

When it comes to social media advertising, Facebook reigns supreme. That’s whyrunning successful Facebook ads is vital to the success of any business.

Facebook ads are generally the cheapest and most easily trackable form of online advertising. Plus, they’re totally optimizable! This gives you a lot of control over your ads, but you have to know what you’re doing if you want successful Facebook ads. Otherwise, you may be wasting your money.

In fact, small businesses are using Facebook to increase sales. Below is a screenshot of a Facebook advertising campaign for an eCommerce store that generated 152 purchases through Facebook ads. And, the best part is, they only spent $3.42 to acquire each new customer.

Here’s a screenshot from another client who made $24,804.73 in revenue:

If this gets you excited, you must first learn the fundamentals of Facebook advertising. Here are 10 must-know essentials for running successful Facebook ads:

1. Have a goal in mind

In order to run successful Facebook ads, you must first answer this question: what do you want your ads to do?

Do you want more followers? More sales? More engagement? No matter what your goal is, Facebook has a marketing objective for you!

The first page you see when to start to set up a Facebook ad is this:

These are the different marketing objectives you can choose from. They each correspond to different end goals. If you want more people to click on your website, you’ll run a traffic campaign. Likewise, if you want to generate sales, you’ll run a conversion campaign.

Some objectives contain sub-objectives. For example, when you click on the engagement objective, here’s what you’ll see next:

There are three different types of engagement campaigns. The one you choose will depend on your overarching goal. If you want more followers, run a page like ad. If you want more likes, comments, and shares on your posts, run a post engagement as. If you want more people to go to an event you’re promoting, run an event response ad.

Even if you have a specific goal in mind, Facebook likely has an objective perfect for you. You can run Facebook ads that optimize for everything from conference registrations to app downloads!

Having a particular goal in mind will help you determine the success of your ads.

2. Target your audience

Facebook has 1.28 billion daily users who you could be converting into customers! Everyone is on Facebook, whether they’re a CEO or a high-schooler. So no matter who your ideal audience is, they’re on Facebook!

That being said, merely posting on Facebook won’t be enough to convert users into customers. You have to run Facebook ads, and they have to be successful Facebook ads at that, to generate sales.

What if you’re not sure who your target audience is? There are a few different places you can start!

Your three most basic audience options are a cold audience of everyone on Facebook (which you can narrow down from there) or warmer audiences of either people connected to your page or a custom audience.

If you already have a decent number of page likes and you want to turn your followers into customers, you can select people already connected to your page as a target audience. This ensures the people you advertise to are familiar with your company and interested in what you’re selling.

If you don’t have that many followers, but you do have a customer list, a custom audience may be a good option. You can upload your customer list directly to Facebook and Facebook can generate a lookalike audience consisting of users similar to the ones you’ve provided.

But what if you don’t have a lot of followers or a customer list? This is a common problem for many startups and small businesses. To start building your audience from scratch, you’ll want to click the “Everyone on Facebook” option.

Narrowing a useful audience out of everyone on Facebook can be daunting, but Facebook’s Audience Insights is a phenomenal tool to help you out. First, you’ll want to set any specific parameters you know you want. For example, you may want to advertise only to people in the U.S. or people eighteen or older. You can set these parameters first before you start delving into data from Audience Insights.

Once your parameters are set, you can begin searching for data about the followers of your competitors. This will give you a great starting point to form your own target audience. For example, let’s say you own a convenience store. Under the “Interests” parameter, you can select people who like the pages of your competitors. For a convenience store, a potential competitor might be 7-Eleven. Once you’ve selected these interests, the Audience Insights tool will provide you with demographic information for the followers of those companies.

Here is what some of the demographic information for people who like 7-Eleven:

From this information, you can deduce that most of 7-Eleven’s Facebook fans are married, college-educated women.

The data is gathered from self-reported information provided to Facebook as well as third party data partners. You can use the information gathered from Audience Insights to set up a few potential audiences and use A/B split testing to determine the best one for you. There will be more information about A/B split testing later in this article.

If need be, you can make different ads for different segments of your audience. Just make sure your target audience is decently large but as specific as possible.

3. Use Eye-catching images

A picture is worth a thousand words. When you’re confined to a limited number of characters, a thousand words is a lot!

A potential customer might scroll right past your ad without reading it if the image doesn’t catch their eye. To prevent losing valuable customers, you need to select bright, clean, high-quality images for successful Facebook ads. Just make sure the image contains less than 20% text, or else Facebook will show your ad to fewer people.

The best type of image is one that’s relevant to your business as well as to your target audience. For example, let’s say you sell kitchen supplies to married couples living in the suburbs. A photo of a cute baby may grab the attention of the right people, but it won’t do anything to make them want to buy your kitchen supplies. A photo of a precious baby playing with pots and pans might do the trick though!

Better yet, use a video! Videos can convey a lot more information than a single image. Plus, with Facebook’s autoplay feature, you may be able to snag the attention of someone who otherwise would have scrolled right past your ad. Just make sure your video doesn’t rely on sound. 85% of Facebook videos are watched on mute!

Whether you opt for an image or a video, the most successful Facebook ads include bright, clear colors and people’s faces. People’s brains are hardwired to recognize faces, so including a face will make your ad more eye catching. Plus, depicting people using your products can make them seem more relatable!

4. Know what to say (and what not to say)

Now you know what kinds of images are necessary for successful Facebook ads, but what about the copy?

The most successful Facebook ads have copy that includes three elements: an attention grabber, a phrase or sentence to add value, and a call to action. The attention grabbed is the hook that generates interest in your ad. If the first phrase or sentence of your copy doesn’t spark the reader’s interest, they’ll stop reading. Some examples of attention grabbers are questions and surprising statistics.

The attention grabber in the above example is effective because it lists a stat that’s relevant to the target audience.

Once you’ve gotten their attention, you need to add value to your copy. Explain to the user why they benefit from clicking on your ad. This sentence also serves to link your attention grabber and call to action.

The call to action is what you want the reader to do. Do you want them to purchase your product? Click onto your website? Sign up for your newsletter? Be sure to make your call to action clear, or your add will not be effective. The most popular calls to action are “learn more,” and “shop now”.

The above ad is designed to send people to a company blog. The call to action is effective because it lets the reader know they need to click onto the blog to learn all the reasons they should invest in SEO. It’s clear, succinct, and generates interest.

Whether or not you use the three sentence model, be sure to keep your text short and clear. People won’t read a large block of text that looks overwhelming or time-consuming to read.

Successful Facebook ads often contain buzzwords like “promo code,” “free,” or “sale”. When running deals, always create a sense of urgency by using phrases like “act fast,” or “this deal won’t last long!” People are more likely to react in the moment when they’re afraid they might miss out on something. If you’re not running a deal, action verbs like “test,” “see,” and “try” work well to create some urgency as well.

Now that you know what to say, you need to know what NOT to say. Facebook isn’t too keen on running ads with the word “you” in them and often will not allow those ads to run. However, you can circumvent this rule by using “your,” “you’re,” or “yourself” instead. There are also certain types of products that cannot be advertised on Facebook like firearms and supplements. Any copy that seems like it could be advertising those products will be flagged.

5. Don’t sound like an ad

People don’t like being advertised to. Study after study has proven that people reject what they perceive as an attempt to persuade them. This may sound counter-intuitive, but the most successful Facebook ads don’t sound like ads.

The goal is to make users understand that it benefits them to click on your ad rather than just telling them to. This is why adding value is such a vital step to copywriting. Successful Facebook ads make consumers aware of why they should follow the call to action. That being said, people don’t like being told what to do. You have to make them understand why it’s beneficial for them to follow your call to action.

Here’s a good example of an ad that is persuasive without sounding too much like an ad:

This copy sets a great example for successful Facebook ads. It advertises the company’s services in a way that makes it seem beneficial to the user through the use of buzzwords like “free” and “no strings attached”. It doesn’t feel like the ad is trying to sell you something, it just looks like a free offer.

6. Leverage A/B split testing

It’s rare to get something right on the first try. That’s why A/B split testing is vital to running successful Facebook ads!

A/B split testing is when you run several slightly different variations of the same ads to find out what works and what doesn’t. It’s used to single out the most effective elements which can then be combined into one optimal ad.

To start, figure out which elements you want to test for. The two most common things to test are images and copy. Once enough people have seen the ads (100 people is a good rule of thumb), you can begin turning off the ads that have high costs per click. Continue this process until the single most effective ad is the only one remaining.

In the above example, you can see how different variations of the same ad have been created in a single ad set. These ads have already been optimized, so only the most successful one remains running.

A good recommendation is to start with three images and three copies, every variation of which should create 9 ads total to test against one another. Once you’ve determined the best image/copy combo, you can begin testing other features like headlines, audiences, placements, and buttons.

Ads won’t be optimized overnight. You should let your ads run for at least a few days before you begin the optimization process. A/B split testing can be a time-consuming process, but it’s worth it in the end!

7. Install Conversion Pixels

One of the most useful tools for running successful Facebook ads is a tracking pixel.

A pixel is a piece of code that you can embed on your website. It allows you to track conversions and re-market your leads. The data it collects can also be used to fine-tune your target audience and optimize your ads.

Facebook pixels allow you to track how people interact with your ads and your website. You can see which ads people clicked on to get to your website, which pages of the website they clicked on, and even what type of device they were using. This can help you learn which of your ads are the most effective and whether mobile or desktop users click on your ads more. They also allow you to get a clear picture of the types of people who click onto your website so you know who else to include in your target audience.

So how do you create a Facebook pixel? It’s simple! Start by clicking the ≡ icon in Ads Manager and choosing “Pixels” on the drop-down list.

Next, click the green button that says “create a pixel.”

Then name your pixel, accept the terms, and click the “Next” button.

Once your pixel code has been generated, you can copy and paste it into the header of the page you want to track. If you are unfamiliar with coding language, you may want to enlist the help of a web developer.

The best pages to track are shopping cart, check out, and purchase confirmation pages. This way you can track which people are turning into conversions and which people should be re-targeted.

8. Start Re-targeting

Re-targeting is when you use the data from your tracking pixel to run special ads for the people who clicked onto your website but didn’t make a purchase.

Have you ever clicked on a website and then seen ads for that same website the following day? If so, you’ve been re-targeted! It’s a fantastic strategy for successful Facebook ads.

Only 2% of shoppers make a purchase on their first visit to an online store. Re-targeting allows you to generate specific ads for the 98% who showed an interest in your website but haven’t converted yet.

Re-targeting creates a warm audience of people who are already aware of your brand and have interacted with it. You can entice them to purchase a product they almost passed up by running a special sale or promotion. This is extra effective since you don’t have to run the promotion for your full audience, just a specific warm audience.

It may seem creepy, but retargeting ads should make the user aware you know they’re interested in the product already. Be straightforward and you may be able to turn valuable leads into conversions.

9. Develop Landing Pages

Landing pages are one of the most underutilized marketing strategies for lead campaigns. This is a shame because they’re a necessity for successful Facebook ads!

A landing page is a web page with a lead capture form that collects visitors’ information. This allows you to convert more of your visitors into leads while simultaneously capturing information about who your target audience is. When someone clicks on your Facebook ad, it’s better to have it send them to a landing page than directly to your website.

So how do you get people to click onto your landing page? If your ad copy is tempting on its own, a simple “learn more” call to action may be enough. Otherwise, a special offer may be necessary to make people decide it’s worth it to provide their information in your lead capture form. Some examples of effective offers are discounts, free e-book downloads, or free consultations. By offering your audience something of value, you have a better chance of converting visitors into leads. Plus, even if those leads don’t turn into conversions, you’ve gathered valuable information about your target audience from them.

So what types of information should you request on a lead capture form? You shouldn’t ask too many questions, because it turns potential leads off when they feel like they’re being interrogated. The more questions that are asked on a landing page, the higher the cost per lead tends to be.

Common pieces of information to request include name, phone number, email, and job title. At least one piece of contact information is necessary to ensure you can follow up with your leads.

When people personally supply you with their contact information, they’re more likely to be qualified leads. They’ve already expressed a clear interest in your product or service and want to learn more.

Landing pages should always lead to a thank you page. This page serves as a confirmation that the information has been received and can provide an offer if one was promised. The offer can also be sent in the form of an automated email.

Make sure your landing page is mobile friendly. Over half the people who click onto your landing page will do so from a mobile device. Also, remember that consistency is key! Similar design elements should be used in your ad and landing page.

10. Have a Healthy Budget

Facebook is a very money-motivated platform. In other words, the more ad dollars you’re willing to spend, the more people will see your ads. If you want successful Facebook ads, you have to put a healthy budget behind them.

Up to 29.99% of Google Search Results on Page 1 and 2 Don’t Get Clicked On

A new study from Internet #Marketing Ninjas concludes that up to 29.99% 👉 of search results ranking on page 1 and 2 don’t get clicked on at all.

You may also be surprised to know just how low the click-through rate 👉 (CTR) is for search results in some of the top positions.

According to Internet #Marketing Ninjas’ study:

·         CTR for a #1 ranking position is just over 20.99%

·         CTR for a #2 ranking position is just over 10%

·         CTR for a #3 ranking position is around 7.5%

·         CTR for positions 5-8 are in the 4.99% to 2.99% range

What that all boils down to is that around 1 out of 3 and 1 out of 4 searches end with no clicks.

What is that? Why are people searching and not clicking on the results ?

nternet #Marketing Ninjas believes it has something to do with the prevalence of the Knowledge Box and Rich Card formats.

”With the introduction of the Knowledge Box, the other Rich Card formats, all of the various carousels and blended universal result types, and of course the expanded 👉 4 pack of Paid Ads, this isn’t too surprising to us…”

The study also presents interesting findings when it comes to branded queries. 👉 A MUCH higher 👉 CTR 👉 was discovered 👉 for branded queries appearing on the top half of page 1.

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