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Bounce rate is the percentage of site visitors that land on your website and leave before viewing a second page. You can easily determine your website’s bounce rate by setting up Google Analytics.

Now, if you’re thinking this isn’t such a big deal and that as long as they visit your website, irrespective of how long they spend on it or how many pages they view, they at least know your business exists, that’s not good enough. The longer visitors stay on your site, the more time you have to turn them into subscribers and customers. But how can you convince users to stick around longer and visit more pages?

Luckily, there are a number of easy and free ways to improve your website’s bounce rate and grow your business.

Here are five ways to improve your website’s bounce rate

1. Create content consistently

Creating content consistently is one of the best ways to keep users around longer and get them to view multiple pages. Useful, engaging content will drive traffic to your website. Once that traffic is there, they’ll stick around, keep reading, and eventually become a subscriber or customer if you have a wide array of informative blog posts for them to read. In fact, according to HubSpot, companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got about 4.5 times more leads than companies that published zero to four monthly posts.

So, create a content plan that’s consistent and offers something for everyone. Not everyone prefers written content, so include a mixture of formats such as written, video, infographics, audio recordings, and more.

Another important tip for your content: Practice effective internal linking. Relevant and useful internal links sprinkled throughout your content can guide users to more of your awesome content and keep them reading.

2. Add images and videos

Speaking of a mixture of formats, to improve your website’s bounce rate, be sure you add eye-catching images and videos to your website. Many users won’t spend a lot of time reading your website content, so you need to grab their attention with images and videos.

Add a large high-quality image or video to your homepage to grab the attention of viewers as soon as they see your site. Most websites do this while keeping everything else on the page simple, like the Panera website for example.

Image Source

If you don’t have the means to hire a photographer, you can find a ton of stunning, free stock images on a site like Unsplash.

3. Speed up your site

You may not have realized it before but your website speed is important for improving your website’s bounce rate. In fact, according to Google, 53 percent of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. And for every extra second that your page takes to load, the probability of users bouncing dramatically increases. So, don’t make your website visitors wait.

You can use a site like GTmetrix to test the speed of your site. Not only will it tell you what your site speed is, but it’ll also give you advice for improving it. If you’re running your website on WordPress, it would also be wise to download and install some free plugins like WP Smush and W3 Total Cache to help boost the speediness of your site.

4. A/B test

As you’re attempting to improve your website’s bounce rate, don’t leave it up to chance. You should be A/B testing everything in order to determine what’s working and what’s not. You might be surprised by the small things that can cause users to abandon your website. It might even be something as simple as the color of your call-to-action button.

So, perform A/B tests, or split tests, of every aspect of your website. Does your bounce rate improve with a popup on your homepage or does it get a bigger boost on another page? Does one font convert more visitors over another? Does showing or hiding a progress bar help or hurt your bounce rate? When we say A/B test everything, we mean everything.

5. Target abandoning visitors

Did you know that over 70% of people who leave your website will never return? If you don’t start to improve your bounce rate now, that’s a lot of potential leads and customers your business is missing out on. One effective way to stop those users in their tracks and get them to stay on your website longer, and eventually convert them into subscribers or customers is by utilizing exit-intent popups.

Image Source

Exit-intent popups are able to track when a user is about to leave your website and send them a targeted message at exactly the right time. Your popup can encourage website visitors to subscribe to your email list, download your lead magnet, or even offer a discount if they purchase. So, not only can exit-intent popups improve your bounce rate, but they can also boost your sales in an instant.

Got more points to share on improving bounce rates? Share them in the comments.

Syed Balkhi is an entrepreneur, marketer, and CEO of Awesome Motive. He’s also the founder of WPBeginner, OptinMonster, WPForms, and MonsterInsights. Syed can be found on Twitter 

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Software giant Adobe let fly a bevy of partnership announcements at its annual Summit in Las Vegas this week, confirming tie-ups with everyone from Microsoft to Drift to Roku to ServiceNow — with each deal involving data connections to fuel more efficient and powerful marketing.

B2B data integrations include LinkedIn. In addition to the Open Data Initiative details from Wednesday, Adobe has also expanded its relationship with Microsoft to bring together key data sources, including LinkedIn, Marketo, Adobe Audience Manager and Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales.

The linkages aim to provide B2B marketers with better information for their Account-based Marketing initiatives, so they can more easily identify buying groups within targeted accounts and deliver personalized content.

“Orchestrating the engagement of multiple individuals in a complex marketing and sales journey is at the heart of account-based experiences,” said Steve Lucas, senior vice president of Digital Experience business at Adobe. “With these new account-based capabilities, marketing and sales teams will have increased alignment around the people and accounts they are engaging.”

Specifically, Adobe said marketers would be able to use the predictive modeling and automation capabilities of Marketo Engage Account Profiling to find the correct targets to engage with LinkedIn Matched Audiences. Additionally, the audience data within Adobe Audience Manager DMP can be used with contact-based campaigns on LinkedIn and other channels.

Conversational ABM with Marketo and Drift. Adobe’s partnership with conversational marketing platform Drift is bringing even more ABM goodies to marketers’ toolboxes. Together, the companies are offering what they’re calling Conversational ABM for Marketo Engage, which will let marketers have real-time personalized conversations with members of a target account’s buying committee whenever they visit the brand’s website.

That “conversation” can take the form of a chatbot interaction, a relevant piece of content, or an opportunity to immediately book a meeting with the sales rep handling their account.

Because customers have more power than ever before in today’s environment, David Cancel, CEO of Drift said, “whoever makes it easier to buy, wins — yet most B2B websites add friction and force buyers to jump through hoops just to talk to someone. ”

WPP integration and consulting firm Verticurl has signed on to help customers quickly add this capability to their marketing stacks.

OTT with Roku. The Adobe partnership with Roku aims to arm advertisers with more tools to precisely target consumers watching OTT TV programming. Adobe says its customers using Adobe Advertising Cloud, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Analytics can employ the first-party data in those platforms to find their known targets on the Roku platform, reach them with ads and measure the results.

“Roku has a direct, first-party relationship with its consumers and the most advanced ad capabilities in OTT,” said Scott Rosenberg, general manager, Platform business, Roku. “This partnership gives Adobe clients a seamless way to activate their data and reach customers who’ve moved their TV viewing to Roku devices.”

Bringing customer service into the equation with ServiceNow. Meanwhile, Adobe has teamed with ServiceNow — a digital workflow and productivity player — to link customer service data with the other data marketers are gathering and employing. The idea is that the intelligence that goes into winning a customer could be leveraged by the customer service team after the purchase, and then marketers could employ that service data to up-sell or drive loyalty programs.

The companies say this kind of integration will bring together the Adobe Experience Cloud and the ServiceNow Now Platform,“…to provide enterprises with real-time actionable data across the customer journey so they can better manage and grow their digital businesses,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO, Adobe.

Why you should care. Though each of Adobe’s partnership announcements are light on details, for now, they signal some of the areas where marketers can expect new capabilities to become available. The focus on data integrations that span areas of marketing from advertising to customer service points to a broader trend of helping marketers get data out of silos.

This article was originally published on MarTech Today. Check it out for more martech news and features.

About The Author

Pamela Parker is Content Manager at Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ, and worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing.

Almost anyone running a B2B or B2C business knows that Google and other search engines like quality links, and could consider them as one of the top ranking factors.

So, if you want your website to rank higher than your competition on search engines, a proper link building strategy is not debatable.

However, if you’re going to implement link building in your 2019 digital marketing strategy, you have to do it the right way.

Search engines shroud their algorithms in secrecy, so the SEO and link building industry is flooded with many myths that will never get you results but can get you into a lot of trouble.

To avoid investing resources into wasted link building efforts, pay attention to these nine link building myths that won’t get you anywhere in 2019.

1. Guest posting is dead

This myth started to get really popular in 2014 when Google’s Matt Cutt said,

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company. So stick a fork in it: guest blogging is done; it’s just gotten too spammy.”

Because of how direct and stern this warning by Cutt was, it’s understandable that many people believe that guest blogging is genuinely dead.

However, Cutt later clarified this statement by saying that what he meant was spammy blog posts for the sake of SEO purposes was dead.

This means that publishing relevant and resourceful blog posts on authoritative sites for building links, exposure, branding, increased reach, and building a community is still very relevant in 2019.

2. Links not relevant to your niche are low-quality links

This is a prevalent myth that contradicts the fundamental idea of link building in 2019. To rank high, you need to get top authority sites to link back to your site. To get these sites to feature your link, you need to provide relevant content for them. Moreover, whether or not that content is related to your niche or not, it still improves your ranking.

So, when your site receives a non-relevant backlink from a non-relevant niche, Google will not frown upon these links.

3. Building tons of links to a single piece of content is spammy

Many people still think that building tons of links to a single piece of content could negatively impact their keyword rank. Again, this link building myth contradicts itself because it goes against the idea of organic link building.

If search engines do not penalize highly original and valuable webpage that other websites link to because of how helpful and informative their content is, why would they consider a piece of content with tonnes of backlinks spammy?

However, if your links are low quality (from spammy content networks and directories), you could be slapped with a manual penalty or significant link profile devaluation.

4. Link building is irrelevant if you already rank high in search queries

It’s sad, but many marketers still believe this. Link building, like other digital marketing strategies for social media marketing, blogging, and others should be consistent. Not only because it helps you maintain your position above your competition in search queries, but also because it helps you with the following:

• Increase your brand’s visibility across the web
• Increase traffic to your domain
• Showcase your brand’s authority and value

Link building is not just about increasing the volume of links to your site; it also exposes your business to new customers.

5. Google will always prioritize sites with higher backlinks over others in search queries

The truth is there isn’t a “one size fits all” for search engine ranking. There are about 200 ranking factors related to UX, mobile usability, technical performance, query intent, and many more.

Google’s ranking factors are very dynamic. According to Google Webmaster John Mueller, the search engine focuses on a particular query intent to select its ranking factors.

So, while link building is a valuable ranking factor, Google algorithms find a balance between its 200 ranking factors before displaying results to a search query.

6. All pages/posts/links on your site have an equal ranking value

When people talk about this myth, they usually mean either of these two things:

• Every post on your site has the same authority or
• All links on a page are of equal ranking value

Both statements are wrong. In the first instance, a post that has been linked back to by high authority sites will rank higher than others which have not. There are tools like website auditor which can be used to check the individual ranking value of your site’s posts.

As for the second statement, Google’s John Muller confirmed that their search algorithms take into account the position of a link on a webpage it appears.

So take advantage of link positioning. SEO experts like Bill Slawski and Rand Fishkin recommend positioning your links higher on the page because the higher a link is placed on the page, the more it weighs, and the more value it passes to the pages it links to.

7. Internal links don’t help you rank higher

While high-quality external links are one of the most important ranking factors, internal links also play a huge roll in helping you rank higher. This is because linking from higher to lower ranking pages can give a massive boost to weak pages. Interlinking related content on your website also creates what search engine experts call a “topic cluster”.

In 2019, topic clusters are significant because when a search query is made for a particular topic and search engines find relevant topic clusters on your website, your site will be considered an authority in this field and will automatically rank higher than other sites with relevant single pages.

8. Stuffing your image alt texts with relevant keywords helps you rank higher

Image links are not bad for SEO. However, too much of anything is never a good idea. And this applies to image link building. While there are no penalties for using image links, stuffing your image alt tags with keywords to manipulate rankings is against Google’s guidelines.

Before Google started using AI and machine learning to understand images, people had to stuff their alt tags with text to ensure the pictures appeared in relevant search queries. However, in 2019, both text and image are translated into the same language in coding.

9. Wikipedia and Wiki-like pages are the Gods of domain authority building

Many people are convinced that getting a link back from pages like Wikipedia will automatically give them a higher ranking authority because of the exceptionally high domain authority Wikipedia has. But sadly, digital marketing has as many facts as it does fallacies.

Information directly from Google’s Garry Illyes tells us that Google ranks Wikipedia just like any other website.

Wikipedia is ranked just like any other website.

— Gary “鯨理” Illyes (@methode) December 16, 2016

In conclusion

Don’t allow the fear of spamming keep you from harnessing the many fantastic benefits of implementing a link building strategy.

Also, although Google’s dynamic algorithms are usually hidden, SEO and link building agencies like seopow study them every day to let you know what’s a fact and what’s a fable.

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Email newsletters and marketing campaigns are considered to be a low-cost, effective way to reach your audience, making it a no-brainer for many brands. However, as inboxes fill up, email fatigue can set in and members of your audience may wish to unsubscribe.

No marketer wants to see the email list they worked so hard to build shrink, but mishandling the unsubscribe process can have dire consequences on your brand’s reputation and bottom line.

What’s at stake?

For starters, your company could be fined (up to $41,484 per violation), as outlined in the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) CAN-SPAM Act compliance guide.

The CAN-SPAM Act in a nutshell. Keep in mind that the CAN-SPAM law doesn’t just apply to bulk emails, it also includes “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service.” It stipulates that you must:

• Use accurate header information and subject lines. This means the “From,” “To,” “Reply-to,” routing information, and subject lines should accurately reflect what’s in your email. Essentially, don’t try to trick recipients into opening the message.
• Identify your message as an advertisement.
• Provide a physical postal address.
• Provide a clear way to opt out of receiving future emails.
• Process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after the email was sent and honor those requests within 10 business days.
• Monitor third parties that may be handling your email campaigns on your behalf. Both the brand whose products or services are being promoted as well as the third party can be held legally responsible.

How hard is the FTC cracking down on offenders? Let’s just say, more likely than a fine are email deliverability problems.

“While the FTC has not had an enforcement action in recent memory, the deeper penalty is with the receivers (Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc.),”  said Ryan Phelan, co-founder of marketing consultancy Origin Email. “They see a higher standard when it comes to not only customer permission and engagement, but they are the true determination of your message being spam.”

“A simple fine from the FTC is not what’s going to get you. It’s when you cannot get any of your mail to people that may actually want it,” warned Phelan.

What it means to get flagged as spam. In addition to the legal consequences of ignoring proper opt-out procedures, you may also find your open rates (and by extension, revenue) plummeting as recipients turn to their email client’s “report spam” button.

When a recipient flags your communication as spam, Google says that it receives a copy of it, which it may analyze to protect others. That means that, over time, more reports might land your brand in the spam folder instead of in front of your audience — and, since “out of sight” often equates to “out of mind,” your email campaigns may become less effective and your brand less relevant.

Opt-out best practices

An email subscriber can opt out on good terms and provide you with actionable insights as to why they want out, or they can flag your brand as spam. Address the points below in your opt-out procedure to guide them to the former.    

Don’t make people jump over hurdles to edit their email preferences. On this topic, Phelan highlights two major points: “First, make it easy for the user to unsubscribe. By CAN-SPAM, it’s got to be one-click, but on a more important level, you want to make sure you don’t hide it and, in essence, force the user to hit the ‘spam’ button that is present with many ISP’s. Realistically, if people want to unsubscribe, why would you make it difficult and take a choice and change it to a negative brand experience? Second, regularly check your data processes and integrity. I have seen an increase in companies emailing opted-out customers and in some cases, the company made a mistake including an unsubscribed group.”

Schedule regular audits. Phelan recommends that marketers audit their opt-out and data selection processes annually. During your audit, ensure that you’re not frustrating recipients with unsubscribe links that blend into the background of the email or requiring them to log in before they can opt out — “These may seem simple, but from working with marketers and being on myself, these are the causes of many of the mistakes outside of the pure bad actors.”

Provide an “opt-down” option. Unsubscribing doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. Consider giving users other options.

“By giving recipients the opportunity to dial up or dial down the frequency and cadence of emails they receive, they can literally tailor the mail flow to their needs thus decreasing the likelihood that they will unsubscribe and report spam,” advises Len Shneyder, VP of industry relations at SendGrid.

Clothing brand Bonobos is one example of a brand that does a great job of giving users other options. It can then tailor (and measure) campaigns for audience segments based on their interests.

And, remember, you still have to include a one-click option to unsubscribe to all your emails.

The example below from a different company takes giving users options to an extreme. Users may be more inclined to hit “spam” than go through all of these options.

Ensure that your unsubscribe link is safe. All your links should be safe and you should have an SSL certificate. If you don’t, and your opt-out link directs people to a page like the one below, that may cast doubt on the legitimacy of your brand as well as drive recipients to mark your messages as spam instead of risking a security breach to unsubscribe.

Make sure your opt-out isn’t getting snipped. Gmail clips messages that exceed 102KB. If you’re sending messages bigger than that, Gmail will simply show a “Messaged clipped” notice and link to view the entire message. When this message shows, your email doesn’t, and that includes your unsubscribe links and even tracking to register email opens.

“Senders have to be careful that messages are under 102KB to avoid clipping and cutting off the unsubscribe link,” said Shneyder. “Some senders have experimented with placing the unsubscribe in the header of the message to ensure it doesn’t get cut off and to encourage people who may be tempted to click the spam button. For marketers, a quality list of recipients who actively want to receive email vs. those that don’t is both healthier and will yield better engagement, if not ROI.”

Keep in mind that the “report spam” button is located at the top of most email interfaces, while unsubscribe links are generally in the footer of an email. Which one is more easily accessed? This is an example of what Gmail does when emails get too long.

Find out why they opted out. “Whatever the way in which you enable unsubscribes, be sure to set a baseline, measure and track unsubscribes over time as those trends can be signals of poor content, poor targeting etc.,” said Shneyder. An opt-out is an opportunity to gather data you can use to improve your content marketing efforts.

First and foremost, the example above lets the user know that they’re no longer subscribed. Then it provides enough options to inform the marketer without overwhelming the user. It also provides an accidental un-unsubscribe options for users to re-subscribe.

Proactively remove disengaged subscribers. If recipients aren’t opening your emails, then they’re definitely not clicking through to your site. That can skew your click through rates and impair your email deliverability. You can get more accurate metrics by removing subscribers who haven’t opened your emails or engaged with your brand in a long time, exactly how long will depend on your industry.

Ironically, you should email recipients to let them know they’ve been removed from the list due to inactivity. Lead with a clear subject line and provide a link to opt back in.

Remind them why you’re a match. We know users are inundated with email, so much so that sometimes they don’t remember signing up. Remind your recipients in your email header or footer how and when they opted in to receiving your emails in the first place.

Then there are the cases when users don’t want to opt out, but want to get your emails sent to a different account. Perhaps they’re switching jobs or have a separate email for newsletters. Provide a link in your emails for users to easily change their email addresses.

Following these practices can keep you off spam lists, ensure you don’t run into deliverability issues, generate audience segments for more effective messaging, and above all, keep your email efforts profitable.

About The Author

George Nguyen is an Associate Editor at Third Door Media. His background is in content marketing, journalism, and storytelling.

Among all social channels, Facebook is the one that has the most monthly active users, 2.23 billion.

This means more than 20% of the world’s population is active on Facebook every month.

Can you guess how many Facebook pages exist? 50 million? 60? 70?

Not correct.

As of May 2018, there were more than 80 million Facebook business pages.

And we as marketers have to try to be more unique than the other 79,999,999 marketers. Yeah, probably that sounds something impossible. Well, instead of being different, let’s try to give the best value we can to our audience.

Eight effective tips to help you as a marketer to get the most from your Facebook business page for 2019

1. Get rid of promotional content and make more educational, fun content

When people start complaining that their page posts are not getting enough engagement, I just take my phone, search their business name on Facebook and start analyzing their latest posts.

Post number 1: Promotional

Post number 2: Promotional

Post number 3: Promotional

And I’m like, well, you really think, that the people who’ve liked your page are interested in seeing only promotional and sales oriented posts from your page? And they’re like, “Hmm, what else should we post, if we just want to get new sales for our business by using Facebook?”

In such cases, I start explaining to people that users really don’t like seeing such kinds of posts because their feed is already filled with so many ads, that advertisers put on Facebook for promoting their products or services.

Promotional content isn’t something, that will engage your customers and make them hit the “Like” or “Share” buttons. It’s something, that will make them scroll down through their news feed or even browse your page and unlike it. 

Source: WritersWrite

And the reason why so many pages on Facebook fail, is the fact, that we want to get value from someone without giving it. Not fair, is it?

Promotional/sales oriented content isn’t valuable in most cases. The good thing is you can promote your product or service and at the same time provide valuable content for your audience.

They love to hear your company story more than what you are trying to sell to them. So, get rid of the promotional material from your page. Instead, start educating them with valuable and entertaining content.

Renderforest reports, that 86% of marketers are satisfied with their video marketing results and consider them successful. This means that you can use lots of videos in your content marketing strategy and have success in it. What about starting to produce videos right away?

2. Only use Facebook ads for selling your product or service

You read it correctly.

We’ve already talked on the first point, that you shouldn’t put any promotional content in your organic posts. People hate that.

Instead of it, you can run engaging ads on Facebook and get new users/sales for your product or service.

Of course, I agree that lots of small businesses might not have budgets for Facebook. But well, if you’ve started a company, then you should have at least $100 for testing Facebook ads.

And you may want to read carefully as I’m going to tell you an easy trick on the next line for not wasting that $100 on Facebook ads.

Let’s split the $100 into two $50. What’s your business about? Do a little research or analyze what ads your competitors currently run, if you can’t come up with an idea.

Think of that content and create content for two ad campaigns. Once you’re finished, start running the promotion at least for a week for each campaign.

Seems easy, right? Wait, you’re not done. Instead of sitting and smoking a cigar, while your ads run, start analyzing how they perform.

After your ad has been in the process of running for several hours, you may start optimizing it. By optimizing and measuring your ads every 24 hours, you can at least get your invested money back after the campaign ends. You can do this several times while you find out which ad type works the best for your product or service.

And this whole idea means that you don’t have to invest thousands of dollars to start Facebook ads. All you need to kick off is $100.

3. Conduct webinars and provide valuable information to your audience

Webinars can help you to:

– Stay connected with your current customers

– Make announcements about your products or services

– Talk about niche related topics

– Connect with a wider/new audience and tell them about your services

Webinars are a little bit underrated among Facebook marketing, but they can become a huge weapon for increasing your engagement and driving more sales.

And here comes a question. How to start conducting webinars? Well, the first step is to choose a topic, that can bring value to your audience.

Let me tell you some interesting webinars topics that might be interesting for any audience:

• Invite experts in your industry and conduct QA sessions with them
• Do a QA session by yourself during which the viewers can ask questions
• Announce new product updates and introduce why you made it and how it can help your customers
• Pick interesting news in your industry and go deep with it

These are really basic ideas that you can start with, and then you can make your webinars a big part of your digital marketing strategies.

After deciding what topic to choose, you have to think about the environment and the time you are going to shoot it. Be sure to make everything in high quality: Setup lights, camera, and voice.

There are lots of tools, which will help you stream your webinar in a professional way on your Facebook page.

After setting all these things up, it’s time to go and create an event for your webinar. Write an engaging description, pick an eye-catching title, create a beautiful cover pic or cover video for your event. Don’t forget to choose the right time. You have to understand your audiences’ timezone and pick a time that will be convenient for them to participate in your webinar.

Source: RightMixMarketing

4. Use Facebook insights wisely and make decisions based on your data

Make the most of the data that Facebook Insights provides about your right audience for targeting and marketing. Here is a short list:

• Page views, reviews, likes, reach, recommendations, post engagements, and followers.
• Audience behavior, buying patterns, demographic, and geographic locations.
• Posts reach for both organic and paid strategy. Here you can also add custom timing, to better understand post reactions.
• Traffic source like Google or your website.
• Activity details such as “get direction clicks”, “website clicks”, and “action button clicks”.
• Post engagements and shares.
• If you often hold events, it will show “people reached”, “event page views” and more.
• Videos’ performance and engagements.
• There are also other statistics that you can find when going through Facebook Insights in order to make better marketing decisions.

5. Use Facebook polls and get feedback from your audience

Conducting polls is a very interesting way of engaging your audience. Why?

Let me give you a quick example. People love playing games everywhere. And why not think about a game idea and give your customers something each week?

Why will it work?

• It’s fun. People like to have fun on social media, and you can give them that opportunity by conducting one for them.
• They’ll get something in return if they win the game. You have to think of interesting rules of your game.
• Engagement rate for polls is really high. And if you make the content of your polls interesting, you really have chances for getting good results from it.

Facebook gives you the opportunity to create polls with texts, photos or GIFs. You can publish them in your story or news feed. They’re a really cool way to increase your page engagement rate.

Source: HubSpot

6. Build a Facebook group in your niche and discuss interesting topics there

Facebook groups are a little bit underrated nowadays. But I can’t really find the reason why.

WordStream reports that more than 100 million Facebook users belong to meaningful Facebook communities. Why not build another great community on Facebook who can ask questions, discuss some topics, and gather an active community around your brand name?

People love communities. They love to meet new people on social media and discuss their problems, ideas with others. And also they love to hear what other people talk about their minds.

And you can build that emotional relationship between them. And when your community will become a little bit bigger, you can do other cool things, including the following:

• Conducting meetups with your community and sharing information with them
• Gathering them and discussing how your product could be better
• Doing an event and giving awards to the most active members of your community

This list can last long. I just want to give you the idea of how you can use the community for making a stronger emotional connection with your brand. It will also help you to get your brand name more popular on Facebook.

7. Reply to any activity on your page positively

Whatever happens on your page you must react promptly before any other person․ Any activity should be under your control.

In the past, where bots or automatic answers weren’t available in Facebook, it was a little bit harder to react to all the activity happening on your Facebook page in a short time.

But now you can set chat-bots and automate the whole messaging process of your page.

We have to realize that people who live in the 21st century, don’t like to wait even a minute more. They want their issues to be solved ASAP. If you can’t give the best experience to your users, then the chances are high that you’ll lose your customers. Just be with your customer whenever they need you.

You can set an auto-reply for any recommendation you’ll get for your product. If it’s a positive recommendation and your customer is happy, thank him/her and tell them something awesome.

If the recommendation was negative, don’t mess up. You have to find out the reason why the customer is angry with you and left a negative review on your page. When getting negative feedback for your company, you must dig very deep for finding out the real reason why your customer isn’t satisfied. Maybe someone from your employees did something bad to him/her? You should know about it.

Even if it is the worst feedback about your company (in a professional way), don’t remove or ignore it. If someone else comes and sees bad and unanswered feedback from someone, that can hurt your business a lot. Also, you can’t remove negative feedback, so you have to answer as clear as possible, for not negatively impressing others.

8. Always analyze your competitors and keep an eye on them

Do you know what’s the ranking of your page among your Facebook competitors? There are several tools and ways that you can use to analyze your competitors for generating new ideas for your page.

If we start from the beginning, the first thing to analyze is the kind of posts your competitors making on their page.

You can use the Facebook “pages to watch” report and add your competitors there.

Source: Buffer

What about the ads they are running? You can see that information publicly by checking their ads and info section. By doing this, you’ll know where and how your competitors target their ads. And it can give you lots of ideas for your next marketing campaigns.

If you do this analysis twice per month, it will be complete enough for knowing everything about your competitors.

Conclusion

Facebook marketing tips haven’t changed a lot since the last year. Usually, marketers underrate some tools Facebook provides, such as groups and polls. If you understand how you can bring value to your audience by using these tools, they’ll be effective for you.

Roman Daneghyan is the Chief Marketing Officer at Renderforest. He can be found on Twitter .

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Spotify announced Tuesday that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Parcast, a storytelling-driven podcast studio. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

“The addition of Parcast to our growing roster of podcast content will advance our goal of becoming the world’s leading audio platform,” said Dawn Ostroff, Spotify Chief Content Officer.

Parcast runs 18 high-quality scripted, story-driven podcast series including Serial Killers, Unsolved Murders, Cults and Conspiracy Theories and the studio’s first fiction series, Mind’s Eye. These genres are particularly appealing to women, according to Spotify. Over seventy-five percent of the Parcast audience is female.

“In three years, we have created a production house that has grown exponentially and hit a chord with mystery and true-crime fans, especially women, across all 50 states and around the world,” said Ostroff.

Parcast will continue to develop its own stories. In addition to the podcast series Parcast currently runs, the studio is developing more than twenty new scripted shows focused on topics like crimes of passion, the justice system, and the world’s most resilient survivors which Spotify plans to launch by the end of 2019.

Why you should care

The podcast industry as a whole is growing, and Spotify considers itself the second biggest podcasting platform in the world, behind Apple. The acquisition further bolsters both Spotify’s competitive edge and podcast advertising revenues.

The IAB and PwC forecast that podcasting ad revenue will more than double to $659 million by 2020.

While Spotify doesn’t play ads to Premium subscribers, some podcasts might have third-party ads within their episodes. For some marketers trying to reach certain demographics, podcast advertising could prove to be a effective channel. Whitepapers like the IAB’s Podcast Playbook: A Guide for Marketers are a good starting point for marketers interested in exploring more about the opportunity. Spotify’s Ad Studio program also offers extensive resources and tools for advertisers.

More about the deal

• Spotify has said it plans to spend up to $500 million on podcast start-ups this year.
• In February, Spotify spent $337 million to acquire the Gimlet Media podcast network and production house Anchor.
• Spotify claims more than 200 million global users, far behind Apple’s nearly 1 billion users.

About The Author

Sometimes a web page can be reached by using more than one URL. In such cases, Google tries to determine the best URL to display in search and to use in other ways. We call this the “canonical URL.” There are ways site owners can help us better determine what should be the canonical URLs for their content.

If you suspect we’ve not selected the best canonical URL for your content, you can check by entering your page’s address into the URL Inspection tool within Search Console. It will show you the Google-selected canonical. If you believe there’s a better canonical that should be used, follow the steps on our duplicate URLs help page on how to suggest a preferred choice for consideration.

Please be aware that if you search using the site: or inurl: commands, you will be shown the domain you specified in those, even if these aren’t the Google-selected canonical. This happens because we’re fulfilling the exact request entered. Behind-the-scenes, we still use the Google-selected canonical, including for when people see pages without using the site: or inurl: commands.

We’ve also changed URL Inspection tool so that it will display any Google-selected canonical for a URL, not just those for properties you manage in Search Console. With this change, we’re also retiring the info: command. This was an alternative way of discovering canonicals. It was relatively underused, and URL Inspection tool provides a more comprehensive solution to help publishers with URLs.

Posted by John Mueller, Google Switzerland

You are now living in the midst of a tantalizing revolution as the great minds of user experience (UX) and search engine optimization (SEO) finally converge to produce beautiful on-page content designed to rank in search results AND engage or educate the user.

Gone are the days of plugging in keyword phrases into your blog posts to get the density just right and building landing page after landing page targeted at keyword variations like, “automobiles for sale”, “cars for sale” and “trucks for sale”.

Since the introduction of RankBrain, the machine-learning component of Google’s Core Algorithm, in late 2015, Google has moved farther away from a simple question and answer engine and has become a truly intelligent source of information matching the user’s intent — not just the user’s query.

Crafting compelling content is tough, especially in such a competitive landscape. How can you avoid vomiting up a 1,500-word blog post that will meet the deadline but fall very short of the user’s expectations? If you follow these 10 on-page essential elements, your brand will be on the right track to provide a rich content experience designed to resonate with your audience for months to come.

The basics:

Title Tag

Always seen in the <head> block or the beginning of a web page’s source code, the title tag is text wrapped in the <title> HTML tag. Visible as the headline of the search listing on results pages, on the user’s browser tab, and sometimes in social media applications when an Open Graph Tag is not present, this text is intended to describe the overarching intent of the page and the type of content a user can expect to see when browsing.

What I mean by “intent” can be illustrated with the following example. Say my title tag for a product page was Beef for Dogs | Brand Name. As a user, I would not expect to find a product page, but rather, information about whether I can feed beef to my dogs.

A better title tag to accurately match my users’ intent would be Beef Jerky Dog Treats | Brand Name.

Query = “beef for dogs”

Query = “beef jerky dog treats”

How do I know what the title tag of my page is?

Identifying what has been set as the title tag or meta description of your pages can be done URL-by-URL or at scale for many URLs. There are distinct uses for each discovery method, and it is always important to remember that Google may choose to display another headline for your page in search results if it feels that its title is a better representation for the user. Here are a few great online tools to get you started:

URL-by-URL inspection:

At scale:

NOTE: If you are one that prefers to “live in the moment”, you can also view the page source of the page you are currently on and search for “<title>” in the code to determine what should be output in search results. Lifewire produced this handy guide on viewing the source code of a webpage, regardless of the internet browser you are using.

Are there guidelines for crafting the perfect title tag?

Yes. The optimal title tag is designed to fit the width of the devices it’s displayed upon. In my experience, the sweet spot for most screens is between 50-60 characters. In addition, a page title should:

• Be descriptive and concise
• Be on-brand
• Avoid keyword stuffing
• Avoid templated/boilerplate content

Meta Description

Though the text below the headline of your search result, also known as the meta description, does not influence the ranking of your business’ URL in search results, this text is still important for providing a summary of the webpage. The meta description is your chance to correctly set a potential user’s expectations and engage them to click-through to the website.

How do I build the perfect meta description?

Pay close attention to three things when crafting a great meta description for each of your website’s pages: branding, user-intent, and what’s working well in the vertical (competitive landscape). These 150-160 characters are a special opportunity for your page to stand out from the crowd.

Do your page descriptions look and sound like they are templated? Investing time in describing the page in a unique way that answers user’s questions before they get to the website can go a long way in delighting customers and improving search performance.

Take for example the following product page for the Outdoor Products Multi-Purpose Poncho. The top listing for this product page is via Amazon.com, with a very obviously templated meta description. The only information provided is the product name, aggregate rating, and an indication of free delivery.

While not the top listing, the following result from REI Co-op clearly includes the product name, breadcrumbs, aggregate rating, price, availability, and a unique non-templated meta description. The standout feature of this meta description is that it does not copy the manufacturer’s text, provides some product differentiators like “easy to pull out of your bag” and “great travel item” that speak to user questions about portability.

The meta description plays an important role in complementing other elements of a well defined rich result, and it is often overlooked when retail businesses are using rich results to improve the ecommerce search experience specifically. That said, the same considerations apply to information focused pages as well.

Section Headings

Section heading elements (H1-H6) were originally intended to resize text on a webpage, with the H1 being used to style the primary title of a document as the largest text on the page. With the advent of Cascading Styling Sheets (CSS) in the late 90’s, this element had has less effect. CSS started being used for much of this functionality, and HTML tags acted as more of a  “table of contents” for a variety of user-agents (i.e. Googlebot) and users alike.

For this reason, the primary header (h1) and subheaders (h2-h6) can be important in helping search engines understand the organization of and context around a particular page of written content. Users do not want to read through a huge brick of text and neither do search engines. Organizing written words into smaller entities (sections) will help digestion and lead to better organic results, as seen in the example below:

In the example above, the primary topic (How to Teach a Child to Ride a Bike) is marked-up with an H1 tag, indicating that it is the primary topic of the information to follow. The next section “Getting Ready to Ride” is marked-up with an H2 tag, indicating that it’s a secondary topic. Subsequent sections are marked up with <h3> tags. As a result of carefully crafted headings, which organize the content in a digestible way and supporting written content (among other factors), this particular page boasts 1,400 search listings in the top 100 positions on Google  —  with only 1,400 words.

Over 92% of long-tail (greater than 3 words) keyword phrases get less than 10 searches per month, but they are more likely to convert users than their head term counterparts.

Focus on providing your potential users with answers to the search questions about a particular topic, rather than granular keyword phrases, will lead to a more authentic reading experience, more engaged readers, and more chances of capturing the plethora of long-tail phrases popping up by the minute.

Internal Linking

Internal links are hyperlinks in your piece of content that point back to a page on your own website. What is important to note here is that one should not create a link in a piece simply to provide a link pathway for SEO success. This is an old practice, and it will lead to a poor user experience. Instead, focus on providing a link to a supplemental resource if it will genuinely help a user answer a question or learn more about a specific topic.

A great example of helpful internal linking can be found above. In this article about “How to Ride a Bike”, the author has linked the text “Braking” to an article about types of bicycle brakes and more specifically how to adjust each type for optimal performance.

If there is supplemental information on your own website to substantiate your claims or provide further education to the reader in the article at hand, link to this content. If this doesn’t exist or there’s a better source of information on a particular topic, link out to this external content. There’s no harm in linking out to 3rd parties and in many if not all cases, this will serve as a citation of sorts, making your content more legitimate and credible in the user’s eyes.

External Linking

Linking to sources outside your own domain, also known as external linking, is often seen as one of the major ranking factors in organic search. External entities linking to your content are similar to calling someone you live next to a good neighbor, with a credibility effect similar to the citations you put in a term paper or an article on Wikipedia.

When writing a post or crafting a page for your own website, consider the following:

1. How can I substantiate my statistics or claims?
2. Why should my users believe what I have to say?
3. Can anyone (customers or companies) back up my thoughts?

If you are crafting the best user experience, you will want to take special care in building an authentic, data-driven relationship with your past and present customers.

There are no magic rules or hacks in how you link to external sources. As the SEO industry evolves, you will realize professionals are simply “internet custodial engineers,” cleaning up the manipulations of the past (part of the reasons for Penguin, Panda, Hummingbird, and less notable algorithm changes by Google) and promoting the creation of expert-driven, authoritative, and accurate (E.A.T.) content on the web.

For more information on E.A.T., check out Google’s Official Quality Raters Guidelines.

Getting Fancy:

SEO-friendly images

Now more than ever, visual search as an alternative to text search is becoming a reality. In fact, even Pinterest’s CEO Silbermann said, “the future of search will be about pictures rather than keywords.” Seen below is data from Jumpshot compiled by Rand Fishkin at SparkToro that confirms Google Image Search now makes up more than 20% of web searches as of February 2018. As a result, including images in your content has some unique benefits as it relates to search engine optimization (SEO):

1. Images break up large blocks of text with useful visuals,
2. Alternate text embedded within an image can provide more context to search engines about the object, place, or person it is representing. This can help to improve your rankings in this medium.
3. According to a study by Clutch in 2017, written articles, videos, and images are the three most engaging types of content on social media. Adding images to your text can improve a piece’s shareability.

A great example of using varying types of content to break up a topic can be seen below. In the article titled, “How to Tie the Windsor Knot”, the author has provided an informative primary header (h1) based on the functional query and also included video content (in case the user prefers this method of consumption), origin information, a comparison of this knot to others, and an explanatory graphic to walk anyone through the entire process.

By providing an abundance of detail and multimedia, not only can your business realize the additional search opportunities in the form of video object structured data and alternate text on the images, but meet the E.A.T. standards that will delight your potential users and drive performance.

Open Graph Tags

Developed by Facebook in 2007, with inspiration from Microformats and RDFa, the Open Graph protocol is one element of your page that can be easily forgotten because it’s often built into popular content management systems. Forgetting to review how your shared content will display on popular social networks can kill productivity as you race to add an image, name, description post-publishing. A lack of “OG Tags” can also hurt the shareability of the piece, decreasing the chances for its promotion to be successful.

“OG Tags” as they are commonly referred to are similar to other forms of structured data but are specifically relevant to social media sharing. They can act as a failsafe when a page title is not available, as Google commonly looks to this field when it cannot find text between the <title> elements.

How can I construct and validate open graph tags on my website?

Unless your content management system automatically generates Open Graph tags for you, you will have to build a few snippets of code to populate this information for those sharing your posts. You can find a few tools to help you out below:

Documentation:

Code snippet generators:

Code snippet validation:

Meta Robots Tags

The content your team produces will never get the success it deserves in organic search if no one can find it. While a powerful tool for ensuring search results stay nice and tidy, the meta robots tag can also be a content marketers worst enemy. Similar to the robots.txt file, it is designed to provide crawlers information about how to treat a certain singular URL in the search engine results and following it’s contained links, a single line of code can make your page or post disappear.

Where can I find the meta robots instructions?

This specific tag (if your website contains one) is generally contained within the <head> section of the HTML document and may appear to look similar to the following:

<META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

What instructions can I provide to crawlers via the meta robots tag?

At bare minimum, your URL will need to be eligible for indexing by Google or other search engines. This can be accomplished with an INDEX directive in the content field above.

Note: It is still up to the search engine’s discretion if your URL is worthy and high-quality enough to include in search results.

In addition to the INDEX directive, you can also pass the following instructions via the meta robots tag:

NOINDEX – Tells a search engine crawler to exclude this page from their index

NOFOLLOW – Instructs the crawler to ignore following any links on the given page

NOARCHIVE – Excludes the particular page from being cached in search results

NOSNIPPET – Prevents a description from displaying below the headline in search results

NOODP – Blocks the usage of the Open Directory Project description from search results.

NONE – Acts as a NOFOLLOW, NO INDEX tag.

If you are taking the time to produce a high-quality article, make sure the world can see it with ease! Competing against yourself with duplicate articles and/or pages can lead to index bloat, and your search performance will not live up to its true potential.

Canonical Tags

The canonicalization and the canonical tag can be a tricky subject, but it is one that should not be taken lightly. Duplicate content can be the root of many unforeseen problems with your business’ organic search efforts.

What does a canonical tag (rel=”canonical”) do?

In simple terms, utilizing a canonical tag is a way of indicating to search engines that the destination URL noted in this tag is the “master copy” or the “single point of truth” that is worthy of being included in the search index. When implemented correctly, this should prevent multiple URLs with the same information or identical wording from being indexed and competing against each other on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Can my canonical tag be self-referential?

Absolutely. If it’s the best version of a page, do not leave it up to a search engine to decide this. Wear the “single source of truth” badge with pride and potentially prevent the incorrect implementation of canonical tags on other pages that are identical or similar.

Page Speed Test

Last but not least, we can’t forget about page speed on individual pages of a business’ website. While the elements listed above are great for helping search engines and users better understand the context around a piece of content, page speed is important for ensuring the user gets a quality technical experience.

The entire premise of using a search engine is centered around getting a quick answer for a particular question or topic search. Delivering a slow page to a user will likely lead to them leaving your website all together. According to a study from Google across multiple verticals, increasing page load time from 1 to 5 seconds increases the probability of a bounce by 90%. That could be a huge loss in revenue for a business.

Source: Google/SOASTA Research, 2017.

Tools for testing page speed:

Page by page:

At scale:

Crafting the perfect piece of content is more than simply understanding your audience and what they want to read about online. There are many technical elements outlined above that can make or break your success in organic search or many other marketing mediums. As you think about producing a blog, an informational guide, or even a product page, consider all of the information a user needs to take the desired next step.

(All screenshots were taken by the author for the purpose of this article.)

Cooper Hollmaier is Associate Program Manager, SEO at REI.

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While Apple’s big event Monday didn’t disappoint when it came to glitz, glamour or even new offerings, services like Apple News+, Apple Card, Apple Arcade and Apple TV+ will be largely, if not wholly, ad-free. Marketers looking for new distribution and subscription revenue for their magazines, games or video content may have come away pleased, however.

Privacy reigns. Mostly, though, the announcements were marketer-unfriendly, with the biggest spates of applause coming for privacy-focused (and data-stingy) lines like when CEO Tim Cook explained the mechanism behind the personalization of Apple News and Apple News+ — the company’s new $9.99/month subscription offering that bundles content from around 300 magazines, three newspapers and a few web publishers.

“Sometimes people ask us how we recommend the best articles for you without compromising your privacy. The answer is we download groups of articles from our servers, and then we use on-device intelligence to make recommendations,” Cook said. “And that means we don’t know what you read. And in addition to that, we don’t allow advertisers to track. So what you read about on Apple News will not follow you across the web.”

That said, Apple News+ may be a boon for publishers seeking new distribution and to supplement their current revenue streams with additional subscription dollars. Yet, there’s also the possibility of it cannibalizing current subscription revenue, as it bundles a great volume of existing paywalled content — like the Wall Street Journal — and only costs the end user $9.99/month. The WSJ’s current annual commitment plan comes in at $15.60/month. No word on how the takings will be divvied up among the publishers, but the terms must not be terrible as Apple has managed to collect a substantial number of participants — though not the New York Times or Washington Post, it should be noted.

A new kind of credit card. Even one of marketers’ most treasured sources of data — a credit card — will be very different in Apple’s new incarnation, the Apple Card.

About The Author

Pamela Parker is Content Manager at Marketing Land, MarTech Today and Search Engine Land. She’s a well-respected authority on digital marketing, having reported and written on the subject since 1998. She’s a former managing editor of ClickZ, and worked on the business side helping independent publishers monetize their sites at Federated Media Publishing.