You know you’re a marketer when you’re sitting in traffic on the highway, it’s completely bumper to bumper, and all you can think about is “Why can’t I drive traffic to my website like this?“ If you’ve struggled with driving traffic to your website, you’re not alone. According to 2019 research done by Content Marketing Institute, 61% of content professionals are challenged with knowing what is most important to their audiences, 50% are challenged with knowing the goal of the audience at a particular stage of the customer’s journey, and 49% are challenged with knowing the steps in the customer’s journey. Between writing a new blog post, posting on social media, and strategizing for a new email campaign, it’s hard to look back and see what’s driving traffic to your site and what isn’t. The list below will help you increase the traffic to your website, generate more leads, and improve ROI. 1. Content Creation Inbound marketing focuses on attracting the right people to your company. One of the best ways to do this is by creating content through blogging. To come up with content that will attract the right visitors to your website, you should know your buyer persona. Once you know your audience, you can create content that will attract them to your website. But how do you write a good blog post that will attract the right audience? Follow these five steps: Identify your buyer persona: Find out more about your audience, from job title to pain points. Conduct SEO research: Learn what your audience is searching for on search engines so you provide the right content. Write a draft: Begin by drafting a post that answers your audience’s questions. Publish: Publish your post on your blog. Promote: Promote your blog post on social media and email newsletters to generate traffic. The more traffic your post generates, the higher it will rank in search engines. You can learn more about how to implement a blogging strategy here. 2. Topic Expertise Ranking higher in Google will increase the organic traffic to your site. At HubSpot, we do this by using the pillar/ topic cluster model. Google favors sites that are known to be topic experts on the subject matter they’re writing about. To be seen as an expert, you can create a pillar page, which is essentially a longer blog post that broadly covers all aspects of a topic. Then, you write “cluster content,” or supporting blog posts, targeting long tail keywords that show you’ve covered a topic exhaustively. Focusing on long-term traffic will help you rank higher on search engines Christina Perricone, team manager of HubSpot’s pillar page content, says, “The pillar cluster model organizes content on your site around a single topic and search term through internal linking. This organization helps search engines easily crawl and categorize all of the content that you have on a particular topic, thereby making it easier for you to rank for that search term. When the model is done right, it also helps visitors navigate your site and move through related pages, boosting traffic for all of the pages in your topic cluster.” Want to get started on pillar pages for your company? Learn more here and here. 3. Paid Advertising You can drive traffic to your website quickly with paid advertising. With search engines, you can run pay-per-click or retargeting ads. With social media you can run display ads or sponsored posts. Your strategy will most likely include a combination of different types of advertising. In fact, according to the 2020 CMO Survey, firms expect social spending to rise by 62% over five years. (Getting started with paid advertising can be a simple process — learn more about it here.) 4. Organic Social Media Organic social media is not a new strategy, but it’s still something marketers should pay attention to. Besides posting on social media platforms, you can also use Instagram Stories (Hello, swipe up feature!), live video, IGTV, or Facebook Messenger. The key with organic social media is to be an early adopter of new features For instance, Facebook is releasing an automated lead generation feature on Messenger, allowing businesses to create an automated chatbot experience within Messenger to link to content offers on your site. This is a great feature for sending traffic to your website. It’s also important to have a diverse social media strategy and use the right social media platforms — not just Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Platforms like YouTube or Pinterest generate a lot of traffic. Pinterest has great engagement rates — 66% of Pinterest users make a purchase after seeing a brand’s Pins. Henry Franco, a brand marketing associate at HubSpot, recommends two things regarding organic social media. “First, don’t spam your audience — it costs a user nothing to scroll past your post, and if you don’t offer them any value, that’s exactly what they’ll do. Know your audience, and craft content that speaks directly to them,” Franco says. “Second, stay active with community management. People love when brands like and reply to them — it’ll humanize your business, and keep people coming back for more content.” Check out our social media marketing guide to learn more. 5. Website Analysis Let’s do a little reverse engineering of our thought process. Before you drive traffic to your website, it’s important to learn about your audience. To do this, there are platforms that will analyze your website, such as Crazy Egg, to see where you’re losing visitors. With this information at your disposal, you can create the right content to drive the right traffic to your website. 6. Contests and Giveaways A simple way to drive traffic to your website is through contests and giveaways. This can give you a quick boost, while also rewarding your followers. You can host giveaways on social media, through your email list, or both. Implementing a strategy like this can be simple. Just follow these six steps: Decide what platform on which to host your

Posted by BritneyMuller Businesses all over the globe are struggling with new challenges as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic. With consumers turning to the internet for the majority of their needs, it’s never been more vital to ensure your online presence is easily found and your business updates clearly communicated. In this special edition of Whiteboard Friday, Britney Muller outlines a checklist that businesses can use to meet the changing needs of consumers and improve visibility for local searches. Bonus — We’ve adapted these tips into a free checklist you can download and share: Get the checklist Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab! Video Transcription Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Today we’re going over crisis adaptation, and I first have to give a huge shout-out to Miriam Ellis, who really helped me package all of this up to deliver to you today. If you’re not already following Miriam on Twitter, I highly suggest you do. She is a local SEO genius. So let’s dive right in.  Meet your customers where they are You often hear this phrase in marketing and in SEO about meeting your customers where they are. This might be important now more than ever because the current landscape, it’s changed so much. Listen to your customers & understand how their needs have shifted In order to better meet your customers where they are, you really first have to listen and understand how their needs have shifted, how have their concerns shifted. What are they searching for now? Just really paying attention and listening online to your current target market. One of the things I also like to suggest is listen to competitive reviews. Keep an eye on competitive reviews being posted on Google and other spaces to get a gauge of how desires and concerns have shifted.  Know where your audience is This could have also shifted a bit. Whiteboard Friday’s OG, Rand Fishkin, launched SparkToro that does exactly that. So you can really deep dive into real-time data around what your audience is listening to, who they follow, all sorts of great stuff for you to leverage in today’s climate. Connect with potential customers in meaningful ways Now is a great time to reach out and engage with not only potential customers but current customer base and remind people that you are still here and serving them in various ways. This is key. Partner with relevant businesses I’ve seen this do really well in some great examples of pivoting, where a fruit delivery company partnered with a bakery to include these free cakes within orders. What a great way to get some visibility for that bakery, and vice versa. I think it’s a great time to leverage industry relationships and help one another out. I absolutely love that tip.  Communicate all changes and updates Now the other big, big priority right now is all around communicating changes and updates to your website visitors. So what do you need to cover? Changes to hours is so important right now. It’s essential that you have that information readily visible to anyone visiting your website, if this applies to you. All forms of availability, video, curbside, no touch delivery, have that information available. Any expected delays and product availability challenges.  Sanitation and any adopted safety precautions.  Payment methods accepted.  Any philanthropic efforts that you’re doing to help support people in need. I’m seeing a lot of these show up in banners and readily available information for people visiting websites. I think it’s great to consider making sure that this information is easy for people to access.  Immediately communicate this information: Set up online orders and catalog inventory/services In addition to these things, set up online orders. At the very least, catalog your online inventory or services for people to let people know what you’re currently offering. If you’re a struggling business and you don’t want to go into a huge website build, you can absolutely check out and explore things like Squarespace or Shopify.  I would have never thought I would be suggesting these platforms a year ago (just because they’re not usually great for SEO reasons). But they can do a beautiful job of solving this problem so quickly, and then you can roll out V2 and V3 down the road when you’re ready to make those improvements. But I think just getting businesses off the ground is so important right now.  Add products for free on Google Shopping This was such a neat thing that Google offered several weeks ago, and it’s doing great. It allows you to list products for free on Google Shopping, giving you that extra visibility right now. So if you’re an e-commerce brand, definitely check that out.  Create maps showing delivery radiuses Miriam had this great idea to create maps showing delivery radiuses, if that applies to you, so really giving someone visiting your site quick information about the areas that you serve. Sometimes when you see the ZIP codes, it’s a little overwhelming. Routific Then this was mentioned in a recent GatherUp webinar by Darren Shaw — Routific. So if you are doing local deliveries and they’re getting a little out of hand, Routific is a company that creates delivery routes to make them most efficient for you, which I thought was so cool. I didn’t even know that existed.  Double down on SEO and content marketing I absolutely loved Mike King’s correction: Nathan Turner’s post on this — I think it was a couple weeks ago — where he explains why economic downturns favor the bold. It’s brilliant. There are incredible use cases around this, and we’ll link to that down below.  Someone who has impressed the heck out of me the last couple of weeks is Kristin Tynski — I hope I’m saying that right — over at Fractl. She is going above and beyond to create content pieces that are not only genius but are

Email marketing is an undeniably powerful strategy for lead acquisition and customer retention — in fact, 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI, and 93% use email as a major channel for content distribution. Of course, creating an email marketing campaign isn’t easy, and it might require you to build a template using HTML so you’re not designing and altering every new email from scratch. Thankfully, there are dozens of email template builders available, all of which can help you intuitively and quickly create new email templates for your upcoming campaigns. Then again, the fact that there are dozens of tools available can pose a challenge — how are you supposed to know which template builder will best suit your needs? Fortunately, you’re in luck. We’ve done the homework for you, compiling a list of our 13 favorite email template builders, complete with pricing, screenshots, and a general overview of each app’s unique features. Keep reading to choose the best email template builder for your company. But first — why do you need an email template builder, anyway? Why You Need an Email Template Builder Email marketing remains one of the highest-ROI marketing strategies, in part because of how easy and inexpensive it is to create a campaign, but if you’re designing and sending emails on a frequent basis, you’ll need additional support to work efficiently—and maximize your results. An email template builder grants you several advantages: Better design features. Without a template builder, you may struggle to arrange your content in blocks as you want, or add videos to your email. Initial time savings. Most email template builders rely on intuitive mechanics, like drag-and-drop editors, so you can design your emails faster. Long-term time savings. Creating a library of email templates can save you a ton of time long-term, allowing you to quickly choose and lightly edit past templates for new emails. Replicability. Did you see impressive results with your most recent campaign? With an email template builder, you can easily replicate it with some minor tweaks in the future. Analytics. Most email template builders also feature built-in analytics, which you can use to study your past email marketing efforts and make improvements to your approach. Additionally, depending on the email template builder you’re using, you may have access to even more features. Let’s dive into some of the best builders, next. The Best Email Template Builders 1. HubSpot HubSpot offers a comprehensive, start-to-finish solution for all your marketing needs. You can create a sleek, on-brand email campaign using HubSpot’s drag-and-drop editor, and customize the template to match your brand and align with your goals. Additionally, you can customize each email depending on your recipient’s lifecycle stage, list membership, or any information in their contact records to ensure each email is designed for optimal conversions. Best of all, the email tool provides top-notch analytics and A/B testing tools so you can continue to refine your marketing strategy over time. Unique Features Analytics to provide deep insights into your email success rates, including open-rate, most popular links clicked in an email, who engages with each email, when and on which device, and what emails perform best. Tailor each email to individual subscribers based on lifecycle stage, list membership, or any other contact information to serve the best calls-to-action to segmented groups. Ability to run A/B tests to improve open-rates and clickthroughs. More than 100 email templates available by default. Custom landing page creation tools. Advanced social sharing options. Integrations with other marketing tools (more than 300 third-party apps). 24/7 support from customer service reps. Pricing You can get started with HubSpot’s email tool for free. Alternatively, if you’re already a HubSpot customer (professional or enterprise), the email tool is already included. 2. MailChimp MailChimp is one of the top names in email marketing, in part because of its accessibility. It’s super easy to learn and build your first few email templates, and you can get started right now with a free plan. As you scale your business, you’ll find additional options, features, and tools for your needs. Image Source Unique Features More than 100 email templates available by default. Custom landing page creation tools. Advanced social sharing options. Integrations with other marketing tools (more than 300 third-party apps). 24/7 support from customer service reps. Pricing MailChimp offers a free plan that provides basic templates, marketing CRM, surveys, and even website creation. At $9.99 per month, you’ll get additional support, custom branding, A/B testing, and all email templates. To get access to custom templates, retargeting ads, and better audience insights, you’ll need the Standard plan at $14.99 per month. Advanced plans, including a Premium tier at $299.00 per month, are also available, and offer features like advanced segmentation, multivariate testing, and more. 3. BEE Free BEE Free is a free online email editor that has been used by more than a million people. In just a few clicks, you can get started designing your first email template — or use one of the 150 templates currently available by default. It also offers free design ideas on its own blog. Image Source Unique Features 150 predesigned templates (and additional paid templates). Full responsiveness for mobile friendly designs. Integration with many SaaS apps. Options to pick up where you left off. Pricing BEE Free, as you might have guessed, is free. You can drag-and-drop to create emails without even needing to sign up. However, you may eventually want to upgrade to one of three BEE Pro packages, which are targeted to freelancers, marketing teams, and agencies. Pro plans start at $15 per month. 4. Mosaico Mosaico.io is an open source email template builder, which is something of a rarity. You won’t find any predesigned templates, as you would with other email template builders, but you will be able to alter the tool however you see fit. Image Source Unique Features A unique click-based design tool, abandoning the traditional “drag-and-drop” model. Community support, due to its open source nature.

In 2019, Google began rolling out what is arguably one of the most significant changes to its search engine since the introduction of dedicated video carousels in June 2018, or the introduction of featured snippets in October 2017: Google has begun to ad podcasts to search results. Every minor tweak to the search algorithm can have marketers scrambling to understand how they can take advantage of this shift — or, for the more pessimistic, how to avoid getting pushed to the dreaded page two of search results. Adding the podcast to search results is going to affect content creators, SEO specialists, marketers, and perhaps most importantly, it will also likely have a major impact on podcasts. In this post, we’ll explore how to take advantage of the advent of audio SEO. Then we’ll dive into how you can create high-quality audio from home, if you’re creating a podcast remotely.  But before we dive into how marketers can create SEO-friendly audio content, let’s look at the primary problem Google is solving by indexing all podcast content. The History of Podcasts Discoverability Problem If you do any reading on the podcast industry, you will find endless articles lamenting “the discoverability problem” of podcasts. When people talk about the discoverability problem they’re not referring to being able to find a podcast they’ve already heard of — instead, they’re talking about how difficult it is to discover new, unheard-of shows. For the majority of podcasting, there has been one primary mechanism for discovering new shows: the iTunes Charts. The vast majority of podcast downloads occurs on iTunes. Despite Android commanding ~75% of smartphone ownership, iTunes commands the vast majority of podcast downloads. As Google’s PM for Podcast Zach Reneau-Wedeen notes: “It’s actually so egregious that on a device-by-device basis, the average iPhone listens to over ten times more podcasting than the average Android.” Due to Apple’s outsized command of podcast downloads, their charts have played a critical role in helping new shows gain traction. As a quick overview, the iTunes podcast section has Top 100 charts based on regions. There are charts for the top shows, charts for the top episodes, and then a whole collection of categories and sub-category charts such as Top 100 Business Shows. These charts are algorithmically generated. iTunes also has a hand-curated list such as “New & Noteworthy” where they can promote interesting new shows that have yet to gain a massive following. Beyond these charts, many podcasts are discovered through word-of-mouth or social media. The problem with Apple’s system for discovering new podcasts is the shows that tend to get traction on the charts are the ones that already have built-in audiences. This is why you tend to see New & Noteworthy being filled with shows from reputable publishers. The one area that has never been particularly effective for finding a new podcast has been search. In 2018, Google set out to change that. Google’s Quest to Fix Podcast Discoverability With over 700,000 podcasts out there, millions of episodes and even more hours of content, podcast are a set of data that Google can help people sift through. However, Google is not only trying to make it easier to find podcasts — they’re also trying to rapidly grow the number of people listening to podcasts. As Google PodcastsProduct Manager Zack Reneau-Wedeen notes, “Our team’s mission is to help double the amount of podcast listening in the world over the next couple years.” Google’s approach to solving discoverability is two-fold: 1) make podcast discoverable via search, and 2) enable new content creators who have traditionally been excluded from the podcast world to develop new shows and attract new audiences. Here’s what Google has done to help fix podcast discoverability: June 2018: Google rolls out new Google Podcast App October 2018: Google partners with PRX creator program to attract new creators and audiences to podcasts. March 2019: Google begins indexing podcasts. Google collects information including the name of the podcasts, episode titles and descriptions, and transcriptions of new episodes. May 2019: Podcast begins to surface in podcast results Looking at Google’s new smartphone, the Pixel 4’s recorder app, you can see how incredibly good big G has gotten at transcribing voices. It makes sense, considering they have tons of data from YouTube videos, Google Home products, and all Android phones. There is no company better positioned to digest massive amounts of audio data than Google. So now that they have all of this data on podcasts, let’s explore how they’ve begun to integrate it into search results. Google Adds Podcast to Search Results As of writing this, the majority of search results that involve podcasts require the word ‘podcast’ to be in the search query. We are seeing podcast appear in two ways. Broad Category Search aka Popular on the Web: When you search a broad topic like “business podcast”, shows will show up in a carousel at the top. Clicking on these results will simply open a new search for the name of the show. Searching for an Answer: When you’re looking for a more specific answer and include the word “podcast” you will find a Podcast Carousel. The carousel appears to give weight to the title of the show, then the episode title, show description, and finally the actual content of the episode. In the example below, you can see a mix of shows that either including something about home building in the show, or in the episode title. The “Popular from the Web” and podcast carousels are the two mechanisms for how Google is surfacing podcasts into search results. In terms of real estate, both these carousels occupy top positions in the SERPs. HubSpot’s SEO strategist Aja Frost explains what the addition of podcasts will mean: “This will definitely have an impact on SEO.” Frost says, “Search is a zero-sum game — there’s a set amount of space on the SERP, so every new search feature, like a podcast carousel, means there’s less space for the

90% of all web searches happen on Google, which means, if you’re a marketer, you should probably know the ins and outs of Google Ads I’ve opened Google to search for something at least five times today. And every one of those times, I’ve seen at least two ads on every results page. No matter the wide range of my searches — from vegan snickerdoodles to makeup brands and HTML codes — I was met with Google advertisements. From a business perspective, Google Ads is amazing for lead generation. It’s a pay-per-click platform that helps you boost visits to your website. With Google Ads, you can create targeted ads that will be shown to a segmented audience. Google Ads allows you to track the traffic, metrics, and conversions of your ads without switching to Google Analytics. Let’s begin by talking about GCLID more in depth. What is GCLID, and how do you use it? If you are unsure of the number of conversions you’re earning from your ad campaigns or want more insight into how to improve the performance of your ads, you may want to look into Google Click Identifier. A GCLID is generated every time an ad is clicked and the user is redirected to a landing page. GCLID communicates data to Google that will be sent to Ads and Analytics, like the pages per visit and the amount of time spent on the website as a whole. When you track ads, you can monitor their real-time performance. You can optimize ads for better performance. Ads can be tracked by adding tags, like GCLID. GCLID which helps you streamline tracking ad performance and gives you end-to-end conversion performance. This post will teach you all about GCLID and how it can fit into your Google Ads strategy. When you have GCLID turned on, you’ll be able to track extensive details of the end-to-end conversions you’re earning with specific campaigns. If you use auto-tagging, (also known as GCLID), you’ll be able to track more dimensions than with manual tagging, including how your keyword is being matched to search queries, the ad group associated with the keyword, the URL ID, the ad format, and the distribution network. Below is an example of the amount of features available to you with auto-tagging: Ultimately, these metrics, available to view as a full report in Analytics, will help you improve the quality of your ads. Let’s talk a little more about how tagging works. Manual tagging vs. auto-tagging in Google Ads You can tag ads manually or have Google track for you using auto-tagging. Manual tagging is completed by adding a unique UTM code into your tracking data in Google Ads. While both GCLID and manual tagging allow you to obtain unique analytics about ad performance, there are differences. Keep in mind this important note from one of HubSpot’s paid ads managers, Nicole Ondracek, about manual tagging: “Manual tagging overrides GCLID auto-tagging when used, but it’s good to have auto-tagging turned on so you can see all the data and dimensions possible when looking in Google Analytics.” If you use manual tagging in Google Ads, you’ll be able to access data for these dimensions, including Source, Content, Medium, Campaign, and Keyword. Ondracek notes, “We look at all of the interactions, like clicks and impressions, in the Google Ads interface, and if we want to see further conversions, we look in Analytics using the manual UTM tracking.” GCLID helps to keep all of those reporting features in one channel which means less back and forth for you. Now that you have a deeper understanding of the differences between tagging, let’s talk about how to enable GCLID. How do you enable GCLID tracking? Setting up GCLID is pretty easy. First, access Google Ads, click “Settings,” > “Account settings,” > “Auto-tagging.” From there, select “Tag the URL that people click through from my ad,” and save your changes. Then, make sure your Google Ads and Analytics accounts are linked. Learn how to do that in this ultimate guide. Want the abbreviated version? In Google Ads, click “Linked Accounts” under Setup, which is located in the Tools icon. You’ll also have to activate Google signals, which will import those conversions across the two channels. From there, check your reports in Ads by creating reporting columns based on the metrics you want to follow. To access your GCLID data in Analytics, go to the left sidebar and click “Acquisition,” > “Google Ads,” > and the type of campaign you’re checking. In this case, I chose “Video.” From this screen, keep track of the ROI you’re earning from each GCLID you have. Additionally, sort your GCLIDs by campaign goal, or click on a specific GCLID to learn more details about how it’s performing by the hour as well as specific web behavior concerning that URL. GCLID is meant to help you organize and keep track of your ad performance. It’s a tool to help you optimize your campaigns so you can improve them as they’re running. When you use GCLID, you are personalizing your Google Suite dashboard to benefit your company. How do you plan to fit GCLID into your Ads strategy?