Author: Karin Meglitsch

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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!

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Page Experience: Google’s Major New Ranking Factor for 2021

Karin Meglitsch

SEO

Google will be updating its core ranking algorithm in a big way for 2021, and most companies have no idea this is coming.

 

The new ranking factor is called Page Experience. It’s a set of signals that measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page beyond its pure information value.

 

Following Google’s announcement of the update in May 2020, Page Experience seems to be still relatively unknown.

 

Companies that are in the know will be able to secure a decisive first-mover advantage when Page Experience rolls out next year, and potentially see significant boosts in organic site traffic, leads, and revenue.

 

The new Page Experience ranking factor will evaluate websites and pages on a set of both new and existing metrics:

 

Why is Page Experience important?

Google’s announcement that this could impact your rankings is reason enough to pay attention to Page Experience. Still, it also should matter to your business because of its outsized impact on the user experience.

Google has stated that:

“In cases where there are multiple pages with similar content, page experience becomes much more important for visibility in search.”

If you are looking to grow your digital presence, improving your Page Experience means you will be playing both offense and defense when it comes to your SEO strategy. You’ll be capturing visibility from your competitors whose content is strong, but Page Experience is weak, and you’ll be preventing competitors from doing the same to you for the keywords you’re already ranking for.

 

Depending on the keywords you’re targeting, you could dramatically increase your organic visibility by ensuring that you have not only the best content but the best page experience as well.

 

Investing in a better Page Experience will pay dividends across your entire digital marketing strategy.  A better page experience means higher conversion rates and better customer experience for your web users overall.

 

Need help getting your Page Experience up to par in advance of the Google algorithm update? Get in touch with our SEO and UX experts to make sure you’re fully prepared to take advantage of the change.

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Digital Optimizations to Sales and Marketing Strategy

Karin Meglitsch

Marketing

Effective growth marketing means, among other things, that you have to be able to adapt your sales and marketing strategies when called for. Sometimes these changes will be necessitated by internal changes within your organization or a shift in your consumer audience. And sometimes these changes will be based on the larger context in which you’re doing business — you know, like a global pandemic.

 

Times change, but the need to hit your sales goals doesn’t. To continue growing and succeeding, it’s important that you modify your strategies where needed so that you don’t just ride the wave of change but come out ahead of the game. Not only is this essential to growth marketing, it’s also essential to doing business in the constantly evolving digital age.

 

So, where do you start? Below, we’ve shared some ways to adapt your sales and marketing strategies for effective growth marketing in the current environment, with helpful takeaways for ensuring your team — and your sales quota — stays on track.

Why Growth Marketing Matters Now More Than Ever

 

Before we talk tips, let’s consider the role of growth marketing in your organization — especially, when the going gets tough.

 

Growth marketing means taking steps to optimize and improve your processes, protocols, and performance. Many established companies hire designated growth marketing teams, but even small businesses and startups should be channeling resources toward the initiative.

 

Key to note here is that growth marketing is data-driven. Rather than guessing what changes need to happen, the idea is that you strategically devise and test improvements before cementing them into place. Not every tactic will succeed, but the ones that do will be adopted and put to use to secure future success.

 

In the present, when face-to-face meetings are nixed and the “normal” way of doing things has undergone a major shakeup, you need to be going to the drawing board with your sales and marketing strategy, putting your data to use to shore up your processes and keep heading in the right direction. Failure to do so could inhibit your growth potential both now and in the future. It could also put you at a serious disadvantage when things start to level out again.

Optimize Your Sales and Marketing Strategy

 

Your goal: move full steam ahead, even if the rest of the world has seemed to slow down. While there might not be time for lots of back-and-forth testing, consider a growth marketing “lite” approach, with smart changes based on existing data and additional adjustments made as you go.

 

Here are some places to begin. 

 

1. Survey your customers

The best way to find out what your customers need right now is simply to ask them. A customer survey will be integral to helping you establish what digital changes will most benefit your sales and marketing tactics, as well as what your customers (current and potential) are looking for out of your product or service right now — and out of their experience with your company.

 

Use the survey to identify digital gaps that need to be filled, such as video-based demo opportunities or explanatory drip campaigns. Just be sure to keep the survey relatively short and simple to increase your chances of getting responses, and to frame your questions specifically around what you’re trying to learn instead of making them overly broad.

 

2. Open up the lines of communication

Conferences, networking events, and other in-person lead generating opportunities are on the backburner, so you need to offer plenty of alternative ways for interested prospects to get in touch.

 

Examine your existing data to see what channels people tend to use to reach out to your sales team. Is it social media? Email? Demo requests? All of the above? Whatever digital paths prospects are using to make the connection, make sure that they’re open and available, and that responses are going out fast. If you’re not already, this may be a good time to look into a chatbot widget (such as the ChatBot or Collect.Chat plug-ins for WordPress) or a similar tool that can provide instant or near-instant responses to incoming queries.

 

3. Give a boost to your content

Your content is one of the most valuable digital tools you have for generating and nurturing leads. It’s also key to growth marketing. If you haven’t already, it’s a fantastic time to audit your content KPIs and strategize for the future. Depending on your PPC performance, it may even be prudent to reroute some resources from paid to organic search, building a sustainable foundation of content that can bolster your efforts both now and in the future.  

 

In addition to thinking ahead, look at your existing content to see what could be updated or tweaked for better results. You’ll be able to stretch the utility of things you’ve already created, all while targeting your information better to the current climate.

 

4. Rethink the funnel

Behind all sales and marketing strategies is a concept of what the traditional funnel looks like and how it operates. But what happens when the funnel changes?

 

The changes in processes and best practices spurred on by the pandemic are reflected in the funnel. As such, they need to be reflected in your strategy too. This includes embracing fully contactless modes of engagement, as well as rethinking your messaging to acknowledge how your customers have changed. In all cases, the stages themselves remain the same but your approach needs to be put into context with the world around it.

 

Go to the drawing board with your team and your data and map out the journey your customers are taking right now as they go from prospect to lead to client. If it looks different than normal (and it probably will), then brainstorm — and implement — optimizations on your end in response. If you don’t, you may inadvertently stand in your own way when it comes to helping your buyers navigate their journey.

 

At the heart of growth marketing is the idea that things can, and will, change — so you have to, too. Any digital optimizations that you make to your sales and marketing strategies right now should go a long way toward helping you ride out the storm. And when things change again (which they inevitably will), just revisit and revise as needed.

 

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

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HUSL Digital Proud to be Named a Top UI/UX Partner in Virginia by Clutch!

Karin Meglitsch

HUSL News

 

Here at HUSL Digital, we know it can be next to impossible to juggle implementing game changing UX/UI trends while tending to your business’ various needs. That’s why we’re here to help! We’re a full-service digital agency that specializes in delivering high-value results for high growth companies across the map. For over a decade we’ve been delivering impressive solutions that set our clients apart from the crowd and help them maximize conversions as well as accelerate revenue growth.

 

In recognition of our success and prowess, we’ve been named one of Clutch’s leaders for UX/UI design! Clutch is a B2B market research firm that uses a one of a kind ranking formula to compare and contrast industry frontrunners. Our clients played a huge part in helping us earn this award. They took the time to give their honest feedback about our work in a 15-minute review call. Take a look at some of the kind words they had to share:

 

“I really appreciate their ability to explain technical terms in an accessible way. They always communicate their processes using digestible and business-focused language. Overall, UpTrending acts as a virtual partner for our company. They guide our digital brand identity through effective design and communication strategies.”

 

– Marketing Director, SaaS Startup

 

“They’re professional and consistently deliver a high-quality product. They know what they’re doing.”

 

– CEO, Shipping Platform

 

“They treated our priorities like their priorities. They delivered like they were members of our own team.”

 

– Marketing Manager, Large VC Firm

 

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