Third party data is increasingly under threat. As one case-in-point, a bill introduced this week would amend the New York City administrative code to prohibit the transfer or sharing of consumer location data with third parties within city limits.

In other words, the party that collects or captures the data could not share it with another entity. It appears to be a very bright line.

Won’t affect first parties. The proposed law would not eliminate use of location for ad targeting and offline attribution; first party platforms and publishers could still do these things. But it would impact data brokers, MarTech platforms, agencies and the programmatic ecosystem, which relies on the free flow of third party data.

The bill is explicitly directed at telecom companies and mobile apps that capture or have access to user location. It’s designed to protect consumers who may not be aware their location data is being shared. But the law would appear to not make an exception for opt-in consent to sharing.

Each violation worth $1,000. Violations would bring $1,000 in penalties per incident, up to a maximum of $10,000 per day. New York City’s Department of Information Technology would enforce the law but individuals would also have a right to sue and collect damages.

The bill provides for a number of exceptions, including for selected law enforcement use cases and for other first responders. It would take effect 120 days after being signed into law.

Passage not guaranteed. The bill still faces a number of hurdles and its passage is not a forgone conclusion. Technology and advertising interests will probably seek to block or dilute the bill before passage. And even if passed, it would almost certainly face legal challenges. But the genie is out of the bottle. We may see similar rules proposed in cities across the country in the coming months.

Google and Facebook won’t be impacted. Google and Facebook would not be affected because they can collect and use location data for targeting and attribution within the closed environments of their platforms. They are first parties. But programmatic ad networks would probably be prevented from targeting ads any more precisely than “New York City.” And it’s unclear if even that level of user location targeting would be allowed.

Why we should care. Assuming the law passes, there are some unanswered questions. Among them, will advertisers or agencies (or tools used by agencies) be blocked from accessing location data regardless of the ad platform? In other words, Google and Facebook could use location but would reporting to customers violate the law?

The more local and state rules there are that seek to govern privacy and data security the more these jurisdictions make the case for a uniform federal law and preemption. Paradoxically, these local laws are appearing precisely because there are no new privacy rules at the national level. And it’s unlikely we’ll see any before the 2020 elections.

While there are many extensions that can supplement your online presence and improve your on-page SEO performance, some happen to be very underrated but offer a lot more than others.

On-page SEO is an integral part of online marketing. Over time, on-page SEO has been hammered and defined into several key instruments of the digital marketing toolbox that helps brands achieve their business goals on search engines. Without practicing on-page SEO, your brand may not rank on search engines effectively and fail to achieve the competitive edge it needs to get online exposure, generate leads, and earn revenue.

In this article, we will share five extensions to boost on-page SEO. These would directly complement your on-page SEO strategy, help you rack-up rankings, track your website’s performance and measure the core metrics of your online progress.

By using these five extensions you can build a stronger digital footprint on Google and significantly increase the efficiency in your marketing operations.

1. Canonical URLs

Canonical URLs is a great on-site SEO tool for your website that helps remove duplicate content and improves the crawl-ability of your web pages through canonical meta tags. It comes with a bunch of useful features that allow you to add tags to products, categories, and other pages of your website, improving relevancy with other pages and eventually helps boost on-page SEO. After installing them to your store you can set the authoritative version of your website by adding canonical tags to your store view, storefront, or a custom URL. Moreover, this extension organizes and defines your website content for search engines and users by adding canonical to layered navigation pages.

2. Hreflang tag implementer

Hreflang was Introduced by Google in 2011 to improve the relevance of searches by geographic location and distinguish the relationship between alternate languages and web-pages. Hreflang helps organize your website’s traffic inflows by specifying its geographic and language restrictions. These tags are understood by search engines which rank the website based on its geographical targets. But since the hreflang attribute has to be placed separately in the HTTP header, on-page markup, or the sitemap, many website owners face difficulty in determining the ideal location to use. With hreflang tag implementer, you can automatically generate alternate hreflang tags for any specific location. This allows website owners to prevent plagiarism issues when they add duplicate content on their website and is particularly advantageous for on-page SEO of bi-lingual websites that have language-specific audiences.

3. Image Alt tags extension

Alt tags are an important part of on-page SEO. These attributes help in creating a more accurate image context/descriptions for crawlers and search bots to index your image properly on search engines. Moreover, they serve a crucial purpose for visually impaired users in finding your website images through screen readers. But since they require dedicated effort, they often end up last in the list of tasks. Image Alt tags extension makes this simple and efficient for website owners by automatically generating alt tags that are SEO optimized for product images. It allows you to create unique and image friendly alt tags by using either custom text option or default product attributes.

4. SEO meta tags and templates

Being one of the fundamental elements of SEO, meta tags also serve a key factor in Google’s ranking process. But since meta tags have to be added individually, many website owners often neglect their implementation because of the time they consume. To make this process simpler, extensions such as SEO meta tags offer automation features that cut the process into a fraction of the time it takes to update meta tags. The extension helps optimize your on-page performance by automatically updating meta-tags on your products, generating meta titles, descriptions, keywords based on products, categories, and different CMS pages.

5. HTML and XML sitemap generator

A sitemap is an HTML or XML document that declares the list of pages your website contains by communicating it to search engines such as Google for indexing. These files are used by search engines to make your web pages more discover-able especially when you have a big website that contains loads of content. However, creating sitemaps involve certain technicalities and may not be everyone’s cup of tea. To overcome this, you can use an HTML and XML sitemap extension that helps auto-generate SEO optimized XML and HTML sitemaps so your web pages get indexed faster. Furthermore, it helps strengthen your internal linking, improve user navigation and boosts your on-page SEO.

Zeeshan Khalid is a web entrepreneur and an eCommerce specialist, and the CEO of FME extensions.

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A panoramic Casper ad draws curious eyes in the subway car. Free product samples and a sponsored insert find their way into a glossy bag at checkout. And there’s a 3D Heineken wallscape stretched across a block of bars around the corner.

It’s a delicate balancing act for brands teetering between the worlds of traditional and digital advertising – one which leaves much to be desired when it comes to quantifying impact. Why invest in expensive out-of-home inventory when you could launch a display campaign for much less? Why mail a product catalog when you can send a targeted email? Why are so many digitally-native brands moving offline with their marketing?

For those digital brands with direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales models, online marketing is the lifeblood of growth. From targeted social to paid search, digital campaigns have proven an efficient and measurable way to build direct relationships with customers. But at what cost? 

Digital saturation is driving up customer acquisition costs

While traditional marketing is often curbed by finite ad inventory and budget constraints, digital advertising exists as an open marketplace in which any digitally-fluent player can launch a far-reaching campaign – and do so relatively cheaply. Digitally-native vertical brands (DNVBs), in particular, revel in the instant gratification of marketing direct-to-consumer through online channels – and for good reason. These brands can own the entire funnel (and a goldmine of data!) to track every consumer detail – down to the exact cost it took to capture the customer. But as more D2C companies flood the scene, digital acquisition costs are skyrocketing.

Basic economics would dictate that a low barrier to entry paired with a high return on investment makes a slow-burning recipe for market saturation. The rising cost of acquiring customers (CAC) is a signal that we’re nearing saturation, and many brands will be faced with the reality that digital strategies alone no longer pay off.

“When demand rises but the supply is steady, cost goes up. Brands should be concerned because the cost of acquisition is becoming higher than the average order value (AOV),” said Pini Yakuel, CEO and founder of customer data platform Optimove on the long-term implications of rising customer acquisition costs. “This means that if a customer comes to your site or storefront once, makes a purchase, and never returns, your brand is losing money.”

CAC is outpacing customer lifetime value

With the influx of D2C brands (and their inevitable competitors) playing fast and loose in the digital ad space, more dollars are needed to compete for the same impressions. As a result, CAC has reached a point where it’s outpacing customer lifetime value (LTV). This means the total amount a customer spends with a brand is less than the cost it took to acquire them, when calculating the marketing resource costs (effort and ad spend).

Mary Meeker, the famed internet trends analyst, touched on this issue in her 2019 Internet Trends report, deeming the rise in customer acquisition costs “unsustainable.” Depending on the industry, acquiring a new customer can cost anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining current ones – and the cost will continue to rise as marketers attempt to stay afloat in a noisy digital marketplace.   

“We all know that it’s much more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain and grow the one you have,” said Jake Sorofman, CMO of Pendo. “This continued obsession on acquisition — at the expense of retention is what’s inflated today’s customer acquisition costs.”

A fiercely competitive digital ad environment and a more saturated market will force D2C brands to seek more diverse, and potentially less-targeted forms of marketing. Likewise, they’ll need to stay hyper-focused on customer experience to retain a customer base for the long-term. For the digitally-native brands that grew up in the golden days of social advertising, sustaining growth in today’s environment means a return to brand-building basics.

Related: Welcome to the next era of social media marketing

Loyal consumers are the most effective brand advocates. They translate brand value to the masses in the form of reviews and engagement – which helps bring in new customers at little to no acquisition cost. But for that to happen, brands need to nail experience and deliver value. 

How to reduce customer acquisition costs and grow lifetime value

If loyal customers are the benchmark of value for a brand, then brands must be willing to give value back to those customers — particularly when it comes to data.  

Deliver personalized value. “Digital and mobile experiences are a rapidly growing part of this equation,” said Mike Stone, SVP of marketing at Airship. “But these experiences can’t just be a novelty, there must be a true value exchange. The most impactful experiences are often highly personalized, and personalization requires some exchange of customer data… that means we need to give consumers something that clearly and proactively makes their lives easier.”

Examples of successful value exchanges include Wayfair’s augmented reality app that shows how furniture might look in a customer’s home, or Sephora including free cosmetic samples with loyalty program purchases. Apps such as Accuweather sends a push notification before a thunderstorm strikes, and airline apps send texts to notify users about flight updates such as upgrades and gate changes.

When customers are able to benefit from meaningful connections with brands at a time of need, brands can build a lasting foundation that enables LTV by default.

Optimize your sales and marketing tech stack. Allowing automation and machine learning to power your marketing technology can free up sales and marketing teams to focus more on building memorable brand experiences for customers.

“Brands can use marketing tech to mitigate the rising customer acquisition costs. They’re using technology to unify customer data, create contextual single customer views, strategically segment customers, and treat campaigns as experiments to optimize as they go,” Yakuel explained. “In order to treat your customers the way they want to be treated, you need to look at all your marketing as relationship building, and find the right tools to get you there.”

Yukel pointed to its customer, activewear brand Sweaty Betty, as an example. By optimizing for customer lifetime value with automated personalized messaging campaigns, Sweaty Betty reduced CAC and increased LTV, while still acquiring 42% more customers compared to the prior year. Customer churn dropped by 32%.

Lean into the customer experience. Customer experience impacts how an audience will value a brand, and can also indicate how long a customer will stick around. The D2C brands that are making the most of customer experience have invested in building niche communities, strengthening one-to-one personalization, and diversifying their marketing channels to connect with consumers both online and off.

Julia Stead, VP of marketing at Invoca, explained that contextual, personalized customer experiences are essential to building lasting customer relationships.

“While there are many avenues like retargeting and freemium to get there, success depends largely on delivering on this personalized promise. Personalized, relevant and timely engagement is how you convert non-paying to paying customers, no matter the model. Brands need to ensure every touchpoint not only feels personalized but is also done cost-effectively,” said Stead.

But building a strong customer experience often requires a foundational shift in strategy, where digital advertising isn’t always the silver bullet. Achieving a reliable customer experience at every touchpoint involves marketers reaching beyond digital to be present in the offline journey as well.

Take for instance Narvar, a company that seeks to help brands elevate the post-purchase e-commerce experience for customers. “Direct-to-consumer players and bigger brands are doing a better job of bridging offline to online and vice versa,” said Elain Szu, VP of marketing at Narvar.

Szu explained how Rent the Runway, one of Navar’s clients, is making moves to ease the process of e-commerce transactions for customers. Rent The Runway teamed up with WeWork and Nordstrom to allow drop-off service at the brands’ physical locations – much like Amazon’s Locker or Counter service.

“While these offline locations help Rent The Runway retain customers because it’s making their lives easier, it also elevates the post-purchase experience by alerting them about the status of their orders and returns in a timely and relevant fashion,” said Szu.

An omnichannel brand experience – like that Heineken wallscape or Casper ad in the subway – requires marketers to set expectations with stakeholders. Top-of-funnel, branding initiatives aren’t designed to produce the instant satisfaction of programmatic metrics, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t contributing to long-term profitability. It takes the right mix of online and offline strategies to narrow the experience gap for customers.

If brands make the effort to deliver value and understand a customer’s journey at every touchpoint, the effectiveness of those offline activations will be reflected in digital lift. Like any marketing strategy, finding that mix will vary depending on the type of market and target consumer.

Planning for sustainable customer acquisitions in our hyper-connected world means returning to the basics and restructuring the digitally-native foundation on which many modern brands are built.

When you have a smaller digital marketing budget, you might think that testing should take a backseat to efficiency and driving conversions – but that would be short-sighted.

In order to stay competitive, continue to take up more market share, and keep up with the changing digital space it’s important to always be testing.

That said, you can test almost anything, but don’t get bogged down with your options. With a small budget, it’s important to focus on one or two tests at a time to make sure that you can reach statistical significance relatively quickly.

In this post, we’ll focus on some of the most important tests you can run:

1. Ad copy testing

2. Landing page testing

3. Testing new engines and ad formats

Ad copy testing 

Ad copy testing can do more than lead to more efficient ads. It can be a very effective tool for testing messaging that you can apply to other marketing efforts like your website, emails, and other digital marketing collaterals. Testing different messages can also help to understand your customer base and the ways they engage with your ads. Is there something that is getting a strong CTR but not converting down-funnel? Maybe you aren’t qualifying the user. My recommendation is to run at least two versions of your ads at all times, with particular attention paid to calls-to-action, pre-qualifiers, and value propositions.

In the image below, a bunch of hotel aggregators shows different value propositions – discounts, price comparisons, and selection:

If you’re a hotel aggregator trying to draw eyes and clicks, consider those main value props and how to stand out from the crowd. If you have a unique selling proposition, for example, exclusive access to boutique hotels, use it and see how users react.

Landing page testing

For lead gen and B2B businesses, tuning up your landing page can be hugely impactful in improving lead quality. You can test a ton of areas, but one of my favorites – simple and high-impact – is your download form. For example, it could be a “request a demo”, “download a whitepaper” type of landing page. Test the layout, the number of fields, the fields specified, error messages, and consider adding testimonials and value propositions to the lead form’s landing page to encourage users to convert. The surest rule of thumb with a landing page is to do everything you can to not confuse the user. The landing page from Blurb is a great example of a clean page with a simple value prop and CTA:

Source: Blurb

The number of fields is one of the simplest factors to address, too many fields can dissuade the user from filling out the form, but your internal team needs a certain amount of information to qualify the leads. Our recommendation is to winnow down the number of fields to only what your internal team can’t dig up on their own. If the lead volume gets to be too overwhelming for your team to do the research, consider adding fields to capture the hardest-to-find information.

Testing new engines and ad formats

If you stand still in this industry, you’ll fall behind, so make sure you’re testing emerging channels and ad formats. Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and other platforms are constantly introducing new ad formats, for example – lead gen forms, responsive search ads, and dynamic creative, all introduced in the last 12 months. Channels like Quora, Reddit, and SnapChat are clamoring for marketing attention and offer new ways to engage users.

For established platforms, test just about any beta you can get your hands on. They often provide performance gains because the competition is greatly reduced. Early adoption has its risks, but we’ve found those to be generally outweighed by the rewards of low initial costs and the chance to get a jump on creating best practices.

To expand your reach, it’s important to test into new engines. Putting a percentage of your budget (we’d recommend 15-20% as a rule of thumb for SMBs) into a new channel can help you find more efficient and qualified leads and potentially open up a budget.

Let’s start testing

You might be asking yourself, “How long do I run these tests?”, “What tests do I start out with?”, and “How do I measure the impact of these tests?”. And those are critical questions.

There is no set length for how long to run a test. It varies for every business. I recommend using a statistical significance calculator (a quick Google search for the term brings up dozens of options, we recommend Neil Patel’s or Optimizely’s) to see if you have reached statistical significance. Those tools are great free resources to let you know how much faith to put in your test results – or whether you need more volume to feel confident in your findings.

You might be tempted to make a decision before you have enough data, but I would recommend against that, especially if one or two conversions might sway the different outcome. In terms of what tests to prioritize, I would recommend you think about your business goals and objectives for the year. Maybe refining your messaging isn’t as important as driving more leads or testing new channels.

If you are into lead gen or B2B business running a landing page test or testing new engines or ad formats, it’s important to understand lead performance at all points of the funnel – are they marketing qualified leads? Are they turning into paying customers? Are they junk leads? Whatever your metrics, make sure to establish concrete before-and-after testing windows to compare apples to apples, and make sure no other hugely significant updates, for instance,  a rebrand or price increase are muddying the data.

Good luck, and happy testing.

Lauren Crain is a Client Services Lead in 3Q Digital’s SMB division, 3Q Incubate.

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Snap, the company behind Snapchat, reported a 48% year-over-year increase in revenue for the second quarter of 2019, reaching $388 million. That’s just shy of the $390 million it generated in the fourth quarter of last year, which enjoyed the benefis of the holiday season.

The upswing continued on the user front as well, with 13 million new daily active users (DAUs) added during the second quarter. Snap now stands at 203 million total DAUs.

DAUs passed the 200 million mark. Of the 203 million total DAUs on Snapchat, 83 million are in North America. Snap reported that 7 to 9 million of the 13 million new DAUs can be accounted to the higher user engagement with its new AR Lenses. The new AR Lenses “brought in new users and re-engaged lapsed users,” the company’s CFO Derek Andersen said. Snap reported it saw more engagement with Lenses created by users during the second quarter than all of 2018.

Snap’s ad business driving revenue. Snap showed more evidence it has found its footing after a difficult 2018. Not counting the holiday push during the fourth quarter of last year.

“Over the past few years, we have built a large and unique audience, created effective and engaging mobile ad units, and migrated to a self-serve monetization platform,” said CEO Evan Spiegel in prepared statements, “We’re now working on scaling demand on our platform by helping advertisers of all types and sizes generate returns on their ad spend.”

Spiegel said the enhancements Snap has made to its self-serve ad platform has helped increase ad engagement and revenue growth. Last quarter, the company launched Snap Select, giving advertisers access to premium video inventory with the ability to reserve inventory at a fixed CPM via its Ads Manager. It also introduced a proposal feature for media buyers to review and approve Snap Select plans.

Snap’s Android problem on the mend. A year and a half ago, Snapchat began rolling out a major redesign that resulted in a loss in revenue during the fourth quarter of 2017, according to Speigel, and impacted its Android users.

The company said Tuesday it is seeing early results from improvements made to its Android app, with the majority of Android users now sending 7% more Snaps compared to users on the previous version of its Android app. It also reported a 10% increase in the retention rate for first-time users on Android.

Why we should care. As part of the company’s prepared statements, Spiegel reported 75% of the 13- to 34-year-old population is currently active on Snapchat. “Making us larger than services like Facebook and Instagram among this audience, and demonstrating the broad-based appeal of our service,” said Spiegel, highlighting how Snap is positioning itself against the likes of Facebook and Instagram.

The data is a reiteration of statistics Snap shared at the beginning of second quarter, when it also reported it reached 90% of 13- to 24-year-olds. This is an impressive reach for advertisers that aim to connect with younger audiences. Now that Snapchat appears to have overcome the challenges caused by its redesign during 2017 and 2018, the company is moving swiftly on its ad initiatives.

It is also delivering more video content — specifically within its Discover platform. On Tuesday, Snap reported viewership on Discover grew 35% year-over-year, with the daily time spent watching Discover up over 60% year-over-year.

Google’s PageRank is one of the metrics that started it all. It was present in that very first research paper, that laid a foundation for Google’s entire ranking system.

PageRank figures out the importance, credibility and “weight” of a webpage, based on the type of backlinks that the webpage gets. It’s a system analogous to academic quotations. So the more robust your backlink profile is, the more appropriate and authoritative backlinks you receive, the higher your chances to rank.

We all know perfectly well what importance good backlinks have. The weight assigned to the page due to its backlink profile can make or break the ranking. And ever since PageRank was first adopted, the SEO community started trying to optimize for it. So it goes, they adopt, and we adapt.

During its long history as a vital ranking factor, PageRank was surrounded by a multitude of misconceptions. In this article, I will address some of the most prevalent ones.

1. PageRank as a metric is too old to matter

PageRank went out of public access in 2016. Before that, its last available update was in 2013. And the original algorithm was presented way back in 1999.

On the Internet, not just metrics, but entire tools can become outdated in a matter of weeks. So talking about an instrument from 1999 might seem like a bad idea to some.

And usually, I’d agree. But not in this case.

First of all, PageRank is, in many ways, one of the cornerstones of Google’s entire ranking system. PageRank (PR) was originally created with a specific goal in mind – to help users avoid junk results in their searches. And it’s been fulfilling that function beautifully for years.

Second, it’s not exactly the same metric. PageRank’s formula has been updated dramatically (you can read a more in-depth review of the algorithm changes here). And that’s done in order to reflect the changes in the Internet landscape.

And on top of all that, there is also the news that PageRank’s patent is being prolonged by Google. So it’s pretty obvious that PageRank is still alive and well as a metric of a page’s weight.

Closely connected to the first is the second misconception.

2. Google isn’t using the PageRank tool since they stopped publicly updating it

First off, PageRank was never officially discontinued. It stopped being publicly available, sure. And Google hasn’t updated the publicly available version in years, yes.

But always keep in mind that Google states outright that they are still using PageRank after all these years.

This misconception stems from the fact that Google is no longer showing the public PR scores.

In the beginning, PageRank was an easily and conveniently accessible metric. By using Google Toolbar, you could simply click and see the one to ten value of any page you’re visiting.

That led to the overwhelming use of link spam by the malevolent SEO agencies to get juice from authoritative blogs and websites.

That needed to be stopped, so Google (along with a couple of other search engines) introduced a “nofollow” tag. That’s an attribute that you can use to stop PR from taking certain links into account so that you don’t lose your authority due to link spam.

But even after that, an entire economy grew out of SEO agencies and companies optimizing solely and purely for PR. It got to a point where it started hurting the actual users, at which point Google put their foot down.

3. There’s no way to gauge the weight of a page

Since PR stopped being public, there’s no way to gauge the weight of a page.

This is a tough one because it’s based on a very real, indisputable fact. Since PageRank became closed to the public eye, we can no longer see that metric. That’s pretty much the end of the story.

No company, no developer team, can actually claim to know precisely what PageRank says about any page.

But there are actually alternatives to PageRank, which are definitely useful to look at. Those are the tools like SEO PowerSuite’s InLink Rank, Moz’s Page Authority, and Ahrefs’ URL Rank.

Those are all built with the goal of substituting PageRank in mind. They try to give their users an easy way to understand the relative weight of a page due to the number and quality of its backlinks.

Every one of those alternative metrics uses specific algorithms to get closer to whatever the actual PageRank of a page would’ve been like.

(Note, full disclosure: Me being a creator of SEO PowerSuite, I can only fully vouch for that particular software. I suggest any reader interested to go and check out the work done by other teams.)

4. PageRank lost its weight 

PageRank lost its weight compared to hundreds of other metrics that come in play for Google to determine rankings.

Now, the big question is, does it even matter that there are these alternative metrics available? Since there are hundreds, literally hundreds of metrics that Google uses, can we actually say that backlinks are as important as they once were?

To find this out, we did some research in-house. And we found a strong correlation between InLink Rank scores and Google SERP positions.

We found that the correlation between Domain InLink Rank and SERP ranking stands at a high enough number: 0.128482487. Which means that the backlink profile of a page plays a significant role in the placement of a page in the rankings.

So backlinks absolutely still play a huge role in the ranking of pages. For our part, we routinely perform this type of research, continually finding how important this metric is to the ranking. It’s now up to the webmasters and site admins to keep close tabs on their backlinks, using the available alternatives to PR.

5. You can’t influence your PageRank score

Obviously, even getting that PR score, the question is – To what extent can webmasters really influence it? How much can be done to improve your scoring?

Of course, we cannot really know how to increase PR. But we can definitely talk about some things that you need to avoid in order to not lose any of them.

Run a backlink analysis

We’ve already established that backlinks are still important for rankings. By using software to run backlink analysis you’ll see the type of backlinks you get. Then you can manage your profile that much easier.

Keep your content close to your homepage

It’s a truism that a user should never travel more than three clicks from your homepage. Make sure the important pages stay close to those of high PageRank and ensure that there are breadcrumbs for easier user navigation.

Use anchor text with relevant keywords

Create anchor text with the appropriate (but avoid stuffing at all costs) keywords. This achieves two things:

a) It lets your users orient themselves in your content a lot more.

b) It will help you with optimization.

Organically placed relevant keywords are a perfect way to tell the search engines about the actual content of your page.

Place your links carefully

Always know what kind of weight is carried by what kind of link. Links that you place in your content will be more valuable to PageRank than navigational ones. Keep the number of links out of your pages reasonable, don’t overdo it and damage your PR score inadvertently.

Shape your internal PageRank flow

Use “nofollow” tags and appropriately placed internal links to shape what pages get the highest ranking. For that, first, open an auditor tool to see what pages get the most rankings. In WebSite Auditor, you can see a convenient visualization with every one of your website’s subdomains laid out according to their InLink Rank score.

Based on that, you can easily create a little boost for the pages that don’t get enough ranking, by linking to them from your most important ones.

Perform a technical audit

By performing a technical audit, you can see the internal linking structure, and eliminate the dead links, 4xx pages, and much more, all of which influences your PR score.

Extra – Maximize your linkless mentions

Google is starting to look at your brand mentions, and using the info it found in order to evaluate domain authority. As we know, the algorithms used by Google rely more and more on users’ intentions nowadays than anything else. So the straightforward links will give way to linkless mentions, implied links. Growing linkless mentions is clearly much easier than running backlinks.

Use a social monitoring tool for this. Ideally, the one that has a web crawler of its own instead of relying on third-party databases (Awario comes heavily recommended). Looking through your brand mentions across the social media as well as millions of webpages, you’ll be able to manage your branding that much more successfully.

Conclusion

PageRank is still going strong as a metric used by Google for ranking. It’s been around since 1999, and it’s still one of the cornerstones of Google’s ranking of pages.

Since it’s been closed to the public eye, hundreds of new metrics sprung up, from the quality of images on your page to the existence of a privacy policy, and terms & conditions page that is easily available. But having a solid backlink profile is still as important as ever.

Luckily, due to a vast number of tools available on the market, you can see the state of your backlink profile, and influence it to help your pages and your domain grow. In 2019, it would be foolish to ignore any metric influencing growth. And it’s doubly true for a metric as important and fundamental as PageRank.

Aleh is the Founder and CMO at SEO PowerSuite and Awario. He can be found on Twitter at .

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From URL mapping to testing, five ways in which the expertise of an SEO professional can propel your website towards successful migration.

Look around at a macro-level to see the trends vs. always focusing on detailed keyword level optimizations. Trends to help put your strategy in context.

According to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), The Justice Department (DOJ) is launching a new investigation into whether big tech companies are “unlawfully stifling competition.” It will take aim at Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Notably absent is Microsoft, once the primary focus of the government’s antitrust ire. 

Taking investigations to another level. The WSJ says, “The review is designed to go above and beyond recent plans for scrutinizing the tech sector that were crafted by the department and the Federal Trade Commission.” Several months ago the FTC and DOJ each agreed to divide up investigation of the big tech firms, with the FTC taking a look at Facebook and Amazon and the DOJ taking Google/Alphabet and Apple. 

The FTC recently fined Facebook $5 billion for alleged violations of a 2011 consent decree that required the company to do a better job of protecting user privacy. This new DOJ investigation is apparently more sweeping and will review “how the most dominant tech firms have grown in size and might—and expanded their reach into additional businesses.” It will also explore how they benefit from “network effects” and their impact on competition.

There’s also yet another, though unconfirmed, antitrust investigation brewing against Alphabet according to the WSJ. And while today’s report suggests that the FTC and DOJ will coordinate their parallel investigations, the DOJ appears to now be taking the lead with a new more aggressive posture.

One door closes, another opens. In 2013, the FTC closed a multi-year investigation into alleged “search bias” at Google, as well as related issues. The settlement reached by Google and the agency required a number of minor changes to Google’s business practices, but nothing structural. Since that time Google critics have lamented that the agency merely delivered a slap on the wrist. But that was a very different time and political climate.

Today both the right and the left are angry at Google and Facebook for different reasons and so the stars have aligned to support these investigations, which are partly motivated by concern about competition and partly political vendetta. Separately, the House Judiciary Committee has also been examining issues of competition and market power in the technology sector, around questions of:

• Whether and where competition is lacking in digital markets
• Whether large companies are suppressing competition
• Whether Congress and regulators need to do more “to address Big Tech’s dominance”

Why we should care. The European Commission has been very aggressive in the past several years investigating and fining Google, and Facebook to a lesser degree. These broad, new investigations in the U.S. could result in fines, which have thus far not been very impactful, but also could bring recommendations for more fundamental change or even the breakup of these companies (though unlikely). Some analysts have cheered the prospect of breaking up Google and Facebook as a means to “unlock additional shareholder value.”

Any such demands from the government would also have to win in court, which is far from certain. In the interim it would likely be business as usual for marketers.

Sales funnels form the backbone of just about every company you’ll make a purchase from today, tomorrow, or all year round.

For many business owners, the term “sales funnel”, otherwise known as “conversion funnel”, can sound much like self-important corporate jargon – an affectation that makes the process of selling products seem like brain surgery.

The good news is that if you’re already selling goods or services online, then you already have a sales funnel in place. Easy! Right? Well, there’s a significant difference between having a funnel for customer conversions and utilizing your website in a way that actively drives sales.

Fundamentally, a sales funnel is a term that helps you to visualize and understand how a visitor flows from your landing page into the other side of your checkout page – converting themselves into a fully-fledged customer in the process. The reason the word “funnel” is used to describe the process is that you’re aiming to guide prospective customers from your landing page towards a conversion.

There are five key elements behind a strong sales funnel. Firstly, you need to focus on raising awareness of your business and brand. You then need to transform your target audience’s awareness into discernible interest. The third element involves building desire in your product or service from interested visitors. If your sales funnel is firing on all cylinders, the desire you’ve built will then turn into a conversion. Finally, re-engagement is the pivotal ending point – which helps to lure returning customers straight back up to the top of the funnel.

Source: BigCommerce

(An effective sales funnel will not only guide visitors into making a purchase but also re-position strategically so that they feel encouraged to return to buy from you in the near future.)

Learning from your funnels

While many businesses are guilty of leading customers up the garden path, be sure to create a funnel that leads them directly to a conversion. This can be done by carefully crafting your pages in order to encourage a sale, from call-to-actions to alluring offers – if your pages can spark audience interest then your sales funnel will be looking good.

One problem that a surprising number of marketers suffer from is their failure to understand that people are complex creatures and that it is fairly difficult to shepherd them into spending their money. This means there will never be a one-size-fits-all solution when creating effective sales funnels, and the best course of practice is for businesses to get into the minds of their target audience.

How old will our most dedicated customers be? What sort of language will they respond to? How persuasive can we be without running the risk of alienating them?

Audiences are difficult to predict. A punchy and slang-laden call-to-action may work with customers under 25, but this could represent just five percent of your prospective following. Be sure to connect with your target audience in a way that will inspire them to make a purchase.

Time is money, and it certainly pays to be proactive. But setting up a sales funnel that’s reactive enough to adapt to customer demands can certainly work wonders in maximizing your sales moving for the foreseeable future.

Sales funnels are great tools to conduct a little trial and error. Be sure to monitor the key pages that customers would visit during their path towards completing a purchase, and keep a watchful eye for weak links.

There are plenty of analytical approaches towards monitoring the success of your sales funnels, but one of the most effective methods is also the most simple. Keep an eye out for the level of traffic your pages receive. It’s logical that as you peer deeper into your sales funnel, the traffic will drop. From your catalog page to your item description page, to your checkout page, all the way through to your completed purchase page; expect to see fewer visitors and lower click-through levels. However, if a link between one step and another represents something of a cliff-edge in terms of visitor figures, it’s worth rethinking your approach. If masses of visitors decide to leave at a specific stage in the conversion process, it’s logical that you’ve failed to appeal to them effectively enough.

Source: Google Analytics

The value of returning customers

Sales funnels can also tell you a lot about the type of customer you attract. Sometimes marketers are also guilty of failing to differentiate between new customers and returning customers. Your sales funnel could be brimful of exciting offers for fresh-faced new visitors, and mailing list incentives too – but these measures aren’t going to do too much for long-serving customers looking for a fresh reason to jump back down the rabbit hole of your funnel.

Again, the effectiveness of your appeals to new and existing customers alike can be analyzed at varying depths, depending on the tools you have at your disposal (said tools will be explored later).

The value of the returning customer certainly can’t be underestimated. They’ve already gone to the trouble of coughing up for your goods or services so it can be assumed that they’re better placed to shoot through your funnel and make a purchase again.

The industry-wide emphasis on attracting new blood into a sales funnel can risk leaving existing customers feeling alienated – and is a particularly common oversight when it comes to businesses offering services.

Returning customers have little reason to be exposed to your glowing company testimonial page (even if the five-star review you received two weeks ago feels worthy of hanging up on the office wall), they’ve already experienced your sales process and enjoyed it enough to revisit your site.

If you see that there are considerable numbers of returning customers on to your homepage but very few completing purchases in relation to new visitors, it could mean that your sales funnel isn’t structured to be appealing enough to them.

Should your sales funnel analytics point to a need for engaging better with existing customers, consider investing fresh content that gives them a reason to get excited about your products. Regular blog posts are a great way to help keep your audience interested and engaged – whether it’s their first time visiting your site or the 301st time.

If you’re keen to level the playing field between new and returning customers, a great way of covering all bases is to utilize smart call-to-actions for your website and mailing lists. Smart CTAs are capable of displaying different information in the same space on your website’s pages, depending on a range of variables – like a visitor’s location, preferred language, membership to a mailing list or whether they’re a new or existing customer.

Tools

Naturally, there’s a wide range of tools available to help you to tap into your sales funnel performance and analyze exactly who you’re appealing to and who appears to be disinterested in your product.

SEO guru, Neil Patel, believes that Google Analytics can enable marketers to take a more organic approach in monitoring their sales funnel. By listing a range of significant pages throughout your funnel to monitor, Google Analytics can tell users exactly where potential customers lose interest as well as quantifying the most effective pages of your site in a marketing perspective.

For a deeper, more exponential scrub of exactly how well your sales funnel is performing, using tools like Finteza can help. The tool allows you to register events like account registration, email subscription, and purchases, carry out behavioral analysis and see the final drop-off point.

Source: Finteza

(Image above shows Finteza’s “Exits” section that illustrates where sessions are completed and which external link has caused the exit.)

Such tools enable you to essentially visualize your funnel, whilst regular reports can keep you fully aware of its performance long into the future.

When it comes to analyzing exactly what makes returning customers tick, the insight provided by Kissmetrics takes some beating. With intuitive visualizations and customer retention analysis, Kissmetrics makes for a formidable tool in shaping a winning sales funnel.

Source: Kissmetrics

Remember, audience behavior can be tricky to predict. You might think that your sales funnel is entirely leak-free, but with the support of competent analytics, you’ll be capable of tending to any structural weaknesses in a flash before your custom starts to fall away. There’s nothing wrong with a little trial and error in marketing and with the right data behind you, it’s safe to assume that there’ll be a lot more instances of trial and success when it comes to your conversion rates.

Related reading

Free or freemium keyword research tools (not including obvious ones like Google Ads Keyword Planner) to provide useful insight into organic ranking opportunities, persona building, competitive research, product development, and more.

A brief idea of how you can rank a page on Google’s featured snippet, without building any links to that page. Types, techniques, and screenshots included.

From URL mapping to testing, five ways in which the expertise of an SEO professional can propel your website towards successful migration.

Look around at a macro-level to see the trends vs. always focusing on detailed keyword level optimizations. Trends to help put your strategy in context.

A new executive has joined the ranks of Twitter’s global business marketing team, the company announced Monday. Gap Kim will oversee global business marketing at Twitter, aiming to help businesses improve results from platform’s advertising capabilities.

Tech veteran with Facbook, Google history. Reporting to Twitter’s VP of Marketing Brad Ramsey, Kim boasts more than 20 years of experience in the tech and digital sectors, leading digital adoption and growth across mobile, video, search, messaging, and social at companies including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google.

“There’s no platform more embedded in every day culture and what’s happening than Twitter,” Kim said in a statement on Monday. “In this day and age, that is a critical opportunity for marketers to make meaningful connections with influential audiences to grow their business and brand.”

Why we should care. In his new role, Kim is tasked with communicating Twitter’s advertising value to businesses. In his last role at WhatsApp, Kim was responsible for leading product marketing strategy for business, brand and growth.

In the first quarter of 2019, Twitter reported an 18% increase in ad revenue year-over-year to $679 million. Additionally, total ad engagements increased 23% in the first quarter, while cost-per-engagement fell 4%.