Month: January 2021

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When to Focus on Your SEO Strategy

Karin Meglitsch

SEO

Many brands often try all sorts of approaches to attract new visitors but may often neglect their SEO strategy, which is crucial to gain new customers. It is an essential feature of digital marketing that you cannot afford to leave behind, so make sure that you plan your budget accordingly. Focusing on your SEO strategy is vital and is one of the top ways to convert results.

 

There is plenty of information available on the top SEO trends, but many fail to understand what it is when they should incorporate it into their strategies, and why they need to do so. We will help you understand the Why, When and How for an efficient SEO strategy.

When Should You Focus on Your SEO Strategy?

Although there are times when you need to consider refreshing your SEO strategy for better results, in the long run, there are certain times when it is critical:

Site Relaunch

Relaunching your website is a significant task to undertake and you should always perform an SEO audit before you give the green light, just to be on the safe side. An efficient audit can help identify potential SEO pitfalls so that you can fix the issues prior to your relaunch. This often consists of pre-launch and post-launch audits that include factors such as, smooth web analytics, review of technical issues such as coding, and images that affect a page’s overall speed. It also includes reviewing links, benchmarking SEO metrics, and reviewing content for your website. 

Site Pre-launch

People often think that they should launch their websites first and focus on SEO later.   Although you may think your website is more or less ready for launch, it may need significant tweaks to rank on Google. On-page SEO may work, but often it isn’t enough, and if your website lacks backlinks, external links, meta descriptions, keywords, and SEO titles, you can’t expect to attract many visitors.  A significant pitfall that most companies face is not checking the load time for their new pages. Page speed has a significant impact on your rankings because your website can lose a lot of organic traffic and its rankings may proceed further down in Google’s results.

 

Keep in mind that Google can take about two months to rank new domains and will more than likely not find value in a website where it cannot quickly extract relevant content. If Google and other search engines recognize you as authoritative for a product or service, it will feed visitors’ results with your content. Also, not planning your SEO pre-launch can result in higher costs to redesign your website and revisit every element.  By not planning ahead you will lose time and — more importantly — the opportunity for conversions.

Site Post-Launch

Sometimes you may think that your website is ready, but you may still not see an increase in visitors. This is the perfect time for you to revisit your SEO strategy and make technical changes to optimize your website. The best way to do this is to perform thorough internal checks for at least two months and observe the changes in traffic and rankings. After your website launch, you should make an SEO checklist to confirm whether internal links work well and that no pages contain a 302 redirect (temporary redirect) because Google will not filter authority sources unless the redirect is permanent, such as a 301 redirect. Apart from this, you should also check for 404 errors because your site’s crawl impact takes a negative blow if Google takes too long to find your unique URLs.

Another crucial point to add to your checklist would be to determine page speed. According to a 2020 study by Google, Deloitte, and 55 Data Company, a mere 0.1 millisecond change in site speed has dramatic impacts on customer behavior. Page ranking affects every aspect of digital marketing, such as traffic, site rankings, conversion, and customer engagement.

Rebranding

Whenever a company is rebranding for any reason, be it an outdated image or a change in management, they will risk losing their SEO ranking progress and may have to start from scratch. While rebranding is a good thing and may be necessary at times, you need to understand how it impacts SEO. You might be worried about the hit that your website will take, but it doesn’t have to be a devastating blow as long as you carry out research. It is crucial that you revisit your existing strategy and make changes to prevent low rankings. For example, make sure that your old website redirects to the existing correct pages and uses similar URL structures and similar content. Apart from this, try to keep to your original domain name and preserve your old content as much as possible.

Site Rebuild

Often companies wait until the website is almost complete before implementing SEO because many business professionals consider it to be an addition instead of the heart of their website. Good SEO can maximize customers and improve revenue if incorporated correctly. If you think that it isn’t necessary, you risk losing time and resources to fix essential features later, and organic traffic results from significant technical SEO issues. When you’re rebuilding or redesigning your website, you will need to focus on: technical problems that affect page speed, structural issues such as site navigation, access, organization, and efficient URL structures.  Apart from this, content is another significant element that can benefit from SEO direction for content development, publishing, and displaying. 

Content Refresh

Your website can run into two significant problems; how to create new content and how to update existing content. Website content has a lifespan and after a while, it will stop generating results and website traffic may come to a halt.  A dynamic SEO strategy and content creation go hand in hand.  For example, if you’ve produced a good blog post that has resulted in better traffic for your company, you should update the content so that it continues to have value and generate traffic back to your website after a long period of time. There are plenty of benefits to aligning your strategy with content and one of the most significant is ranking better on Google. 

 

Google’s aim is to serve the best results to the user’s search and it requires fresh content that is up-to-date. Hence, whatever you post needs to be authoritative, trustworthy, and relevant. Your SEO strategy can include certain keywords that your brand focuses on that you can include in your content. You can also utilize deep-linking and reposting on social media for better results.

Expectations and a Successful SEO Overhaul

 

If you’re reevaluating your SEO strategy, your website ranking is bound to drop. Since Google takes about two to three months until it recognizes new domains, be patient, and wait until then for traffic to pick up.

 

Here are a Few Tips for a Successful Overhaul:

 

  1. Don’t change your website name unless you need a fresh start. This could lower your rankings.
  2. Refrain from doing away with your old content completely. Try to produce similar content if your old website achieved good rankings.
  3. Keep important keywords that rank well, redirect to new pages, and create relevant inbound and external links.
  4. Promote your new brand or your site relaunch on social media as much as possible.

 

How HUSL can Help

We partner with brands to help them plan and execute SEO strategies and campaigns. SEO is just one part of a larger digital strategy. What happens if your SEO campaign is successful but you aren’t converting traffic on your pages into leads and leads into revenue? Drop us a line, and let’s see how HUSL can help you build and convert quality traffic.

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Launching a Customer Success Campaign

Karin Meglitsch

Marketing

As a business, your policies and processes are aimed at helping you succeed. However, when you are buried in metrics and reviewing KPIs, it is easy to lose focus on what makes your business successful – customers. Customers drive every metric in your business, and they’re the main reason your business will succeed (or fail). B2B companies are adopting a Customer Success methodology, weaving the concept into marketing or even dedicating whole teams to customer success. 

 

What is Customer Success?

Customer Success is a business strategy, a marketing tactic, and even an ideology popular with B2B businesses, especially B2B SaaS companies. Customer Success means approaching your business with a focus on empowering customers to use your solutions to the best possible effect. Why? This is the best, and most obvious, way to reduce churn. The ideal churn rate for a B2B company is 5% – the truth is, many companies come nowhere close to this target.

 

A common misconception is assuming Customer Success and Customer Satisfaction are the same things. Customer Satisfaction is a customer saying they were “satisfied” when they talked to one of your support representatives about an issue. It may provide a good feeling and look good on a report. Who doesn’t want to shout, “Our customer satisfaction rate is 97%!”

 

However, it is a metric that doesn’t provide any value because it doesn’t tell you anything about the customer’s relationship with your product.

 

Launching a Customer Success campaign is an effective way to measure how well your customers are learning, and using your solutions. In this article, we are going to share five ideas/tactics you can implement to start a Customer Success campaign.

 

How to Build a Customer Success Program

Let’s discuss how to build an effective Customer Success program, no matter who your customers are.

Chart your Customer’s Experience

It is important to try to make your business as efficient as possible, but that efficiency cannot come at the expense of the customer’s experience. Before you start measuring Customer Success, you have to understand what your customer goes through when they use your product.

 

  1. Do they know which button to push next?
  2. Do they know where to go if they have questions?
  3. Would they want to go through this process again and again?

 

These are the questions you must answer to see how your customer interacts with your product. This exercise may make you aware of defects in your products that help you but hurt the customer. Customer Journey is the starting point in understanding how to measure Customer Success.

Create a Scalable, Automated Customer Onboarding Program

First impressions are everything, and your customer’s first time using your product determines if they’ll use your product again. You need to develop a robust and easy-to-follow onboarding to ensure your customers know what to do and how to do it. We’re fans of automated email drip campaigns paired with microsites loaded with easy to use tutorials, examples, videos (if appropriate), and lots of links to further documentation. This is an effective way to gather data about customers in your onboarding program.

 

Examples of an effective onboarding program are:

 

  1. Automated email + microsite campaign that responds to customer behavior.
  2. Recurring calls with a Customer Success Onboarding Representative to review goals and resolve any issues.
  3. FAQ documents based on common questions/errors customers make with the new product.
  4. Microlearning videos showing ways to generate quick wins with your produce.

 

Measure Your Customers’ Perception of Your Value

Your business may have different types of customers, and those customers all have different goals and use cases for your product. You cannot rely only on how many customers you have to gauge success. The value you provide will be measured through their perception of your product. You may have 100 people “sign up” to use your product, but how many of them are using it daily? Are they reaching “milestones” through using your product?

 

If those answers are not good, then that tells you their perception of your product, and it isn’t good. If they felt your product was valuable, they would be using it every way they can. If this data shows your customers do not value your product, then the next step is to figure out why.

Create Multiple Feedback Systems

Whether your customers are using your products consistently or sparingly, you need to check in with them on their experience. Some examples:

 

  1. Monthly calls to review use cases with customers and their results.
  2. Focus Groups, done quarterly, with multiple customers targeting specific successes or opportunities they’ve experienced with your product.
  3.  “Feedback” buttons on your product or an e-mail address they can send to.

 

Creating multiple ways for customers to give feedback makes it easier for them to give you valuable information. Compiling the responses through these multiple channels will give you insights into how customers are succeeding (or failing) to use your products.

Track Product Feature Requests

Your customers can not only give you feedback on the current product, they can also give ideas on how to improve your product. Involving customers in the design of your product ensures you are invested in their success more than anything else. Conversations from your meetings with them (see Step #3) can reveal product requests you had not considered. Once a request reaches a certain number, you can start building it and releasing it in your product. Customer Feedback is vital to Customer Success.

 

These steps are meant to be a guide in building and developing a Customer Success campaign for your business. You may spend more time/resources in one step vs. another, but all are connected for tactics to create success for your customers and your business.

 

Interested in learning more about how HUSL Digital could be your key to success? Drop us a line and let’s get started today!