What Makes YouTube Advertisements Different? 

With PPC or Paid Social, you don’t have as many creative restraints as you do on YouTube. When used, graphics and display ads can be simple and effective. Whereas with YouTube, your creativity really has to stand out. You can’t create a successful YouTube Ads Campaign without a video budget and time to spend on developing unique content for your ads. 

However, if you’re willing to spend that time and budget, the platform can give a great return on investment with a reasonable conversion rate. In this latest blog, we’re running through the creation of a YouTube Ads Campaign, so you can get started on the platform.    

How to Set Up a YouTube Ads Campaign; Your Channel

First of all, the most essential step to take is to have a professional YouTube Channel set up and ready to host your videos. Simply sign into YouTube, or create an account, then head to the “All My Channels” tab, which will prompt you to create a new channel.

There are options to create multiple channels for product types or different areas of your business if you want to make everything separate. However, for most SMEs, you will find everything more manageable if you just create one channel for the entire company. Choose a name relevant to your brand and which appeals to users, then select your category. 

Once you have completed all the steps, you can agree to the platform’s terms and conditions, and your channel will be ready. Before you do this, consider the channel name and ensure it includes your business or something strongly associated with your business… and maybe your region if local SEO is important to you. 

When the channel is created, you can edit all the details on the account. This will include adding content to the “About” tab and adding your logo to the thumbnail on the channel. Your description should consist of some keywords relating to your channel and brand, and you can also include links, but bear in mind these will be no follow links, which means anchor text won’t matter for your SEO. Finally, you will need to upload the creative that you want to show to the channel and then link your Google Ads Account to your channel. 

How to Set Up a YouTube Ads Campaign; Your Campaign Parameters

Go to your Google Ads account and select “New Campaign”. From here, you can choose your campaign goal – sales, leads, website traffic, consideration, awareness – or continue without the goals’ guidance. 

You’ll then be offered the choice of display ad or video; make sure you choose video. There will then be an option for campaign sub-type – for which beginners will want to choose “Video reach campaign”. Next, select your video subtype – a complete list of these is included below, with more information about what they offer you. 

Next up, you can build your parameters; the bid strategy, your budget, where your adverts will show, which countries and languages you want to show your ads in and how “sensitive” your content is. If there is any profanity or adult content within the ad, you will have to declare this. It is good to avoid using profanity and sexually suggestive content as this will be shown to fewer users and can increase the costs of your campaign.  

You will then need to set up your bidding strategy. Cost per view is the only option when setting up video campaigns on YouTube. However, this means you will only be charged when a user watches more than 30 seconds of your video or the entire video ad if it’s shorter than 30 seconds. Once you have determined your audience, more on that below, you can choose your bid or the maximum price you’ll pay per view. Remember, the more you bid, the more your video may be seen; however, you may get less from your money because your budget will deplete quicker. 

How to Set Up a YouTube Ads Campaign; Your Audience 

One of the benefits of YouTube ads is that you can really target the right people and cater to their needs through individual videos for that audience. Your buyer personas will help you set your audience up in your Google Ads account so if you haven’t created these yet, do so now! 

The targeting for YouTube is like the other Google Ads campaigns. You can set up audiences to target demographics like age, gender, parental status, and income. You can also set up remarketing targeting to show your ads to people who have interacted with your brand elsewhere. You can also target specific keywords. YouTube is a search engine, much like Google, so users can search keywords, and related videos will appear. By targeting these keywords, you can have your adverts show when a user searches for those specific phrases and words. 

Types of YouTube Ads

There are five different types of YouTube ad formats you can opt for when running a YouTube ads campaign; 

1. Skippable in-stream video ads 
2. Non-skippable in-stream video ads 
3. Bumper ads 
4. Discovery Ads
5. Non-video ads 

Each type of ad gives different benefits and has different ways of working, so you must determine which type you will use before creating your ad. Let’s look at them in more depth; 

1. Skippable In-Stream Video Ads 

This is one of the most common and effective ad types on YouTube. You will have seen these videos yourself when using the platform. They appear before a video and allow the user to “skip” after around 5 seconds.

Skippable ads are the standard when you create a campaign and will be between 12 seconds and 6 minutes long, though it’s not recommended to make them as long as that! You will only pay for these adverts when a user views at least 30 seconds of the ad, the entire ad if it’s less than 30 seconds long or if the user interacts with the ad during viewing. By allowing a user to skip, you may save money on your campaign as you won’t get charged for the user viewing the ad. 

You can also choose to let these ads play anywhere on the Google Display Network. You can customise these ads with CTAs and overlays for users to find their way to more information about you and your brand. 

2. Non-Skippable In-Stream Video Ads 

These ads are seen either before, during or after a video on the platform and cannot be skipped. They need to be between 15 and 20 seconds long but offer the same clickable areas and overlaps as the skippable ads. They will only appear during a video that’s longer than 10 minutes. 

3. Bumper Ads 

This is the shortest type of advert on the platform and will be a maximum of 6 seconds long. They cannot be skipped and are seen before the user’s chosen video. 

As you are limited to 6 seconds, you can’t show much of the brand or product, so you have to make an impact quickly. They can be used well when combined with the two ad types above, as they can make a short snippet to remarket when users have interacted with other ads. 

4. Discovery Ads

These adverts don’t appear within videos like the previous three ad types. Instead, you find them on the YouTube homepage, suggested/related videos reel and the search result pages. 

If a user clicks on the video, it will be accompanied by a column with a companion banner display ad appears. These ads act more like those on the Google search result pages that you will have set up as part of your PPC campaigns, and users will be aware of them being ads due to the “ad” box on the listing. They are usually made up of a thumbnail image and three lines of text to grab the user’s attention. 

5. Non-Video Ads 

If you don’t have the budget or time to create captivating video content, you could try a display ad instead. These are like remarketing banners and have an image, some text and a button to click to take users to your website. 

There’s little to no animation involved, and the banner will show over a YouTube video from a channel that has opted into the monetisation option from Google. These are the only CPC basis adverts available on YouTube. 

Getting More from Your Marketing Through Video 

Video content is an excellent way of getting your brand out there and getting a good return on your marketing. The future really is video, and with the heavy targeting options, YouTube ads are an excellent tool for any business. You can run it alongside a PPC and Paid Social campaign easily, especially if you have a proven Google ads management tool in place like Adzooma to make that process easier and create an even stronger only presence. 

Our top tips will include:

1. Optimising for featured snippets
2. Focus on answering questions or long-tail queries
3. Keeping the language on your site conversational
4. Using schema markup
5. Improving local search
6. Don’t forget the basics – meta descriptions and title tags
7. Optimising for mobile
8. Reducing load times

Read on to find out more.

What Is Voice Search, and Why Should You Care?

Voice search is exactly what it says it is. It’s an individual using their voice to carry out a search on the internet from a smart device. They could be requesting information, buying a product, or navigating an app on their device. This could take place on a mobile phone, a home assistant like the Homepod or Amazon Echo, or even on a laptop or desktop with a microphone enabled.

Voice search was already rising ahead of the pandemic; we even remarked on it in our advertising trends in 2019. But since then, 32% of consumers have been interested in devices that allow hands-free solutions to find the answers to their questions as it will enable fewer germs to spread. It is believed that around 1 billion searches are made using voice each month, and voice commands account for 20% of all mobile phone-based queries.

While many queries on a device are linked to asking it to play music or tell the user about what the weather is going to be like that day or over the next few days, there are requests for the news and direct questions requiring an informative answer from the internet make up 34% of queries. Around 30% of users will make a purchase through voice search.

So, it’s essential to make your site accessible to voice search users now, before this number gets bigger. But how do you go about this task? The first thing you need to do is take control of your SEO, clearly understand your site’s keywords and the information shared, then carry out some of the tips below to help optimise it for voice and traditional search.

1. Optimising for Featured Snippets

Have you ever seen a results page on Google with a larger box at the top of the organic results, giving more information about your query? This is what’s known as a featured snippet, and they are great for voice search.

Snippets offer quick information about the question being asked, giving the search database on your voice assistant the information it needs quickly. If you know a page on your site can provide a good, detailed answer to a query in a few lines, and that query has a featured snippet on Google, try and improve the content to match it. Things like implementing FAQ formatting and FAQ Schema Markup [EW(D1] can help with this.

Occasionally you will find featured snippets referred to as “position 0”, as this is not always the result that would have been at position 1 in the SERPs, and it appears differently from the other results.

2.     Focus on Answering Long-Tail Queries

A long-tail query is a keyword with five or more words, often formatted like a question. The long format of a question is how people speak to voice assistants, so by creating content around these questions, you are giving the search engine the answer it needs for the query directly.

To find these long-tail queries, you can use the keyword research tools you have used for your standard website keywords, check Answerthepublic and look at the “people also ask” section when you type in your website’s main keywords. These places will give you an idea of the longer queries people are searching, and you can optimise your relevant pages or create blogs on your site to answer the queries.

Make sure your content directly answers the query you are optimising for too.

3.     Use Conversational Language on Your Site

You will likely write your answers more conversationally by answering questions people ask, which is really important for voice search.

People generally don’t type the same way they speak when searching Google. They will use conversational language as if they are talking to a person. By writing your content in an easy-to-read, casual way, you are providing the voice assistant with the answer to a user’s query precisely the way they are expected to reply.

Try and answer the queries within around 30 words. You can provide more information about the topic on your page. But by providing a direct reply of fewer than 30 words to your conversational-based query, you are more likely to give the voice assistants what they require.

4. Use Schema Markup

If you haven’t got schema in place on your site, put it in place now. It helps with traditional onsite SEO, and it will help with optimising your website for voice search too.

Schema markup is a language that helps Google and other search engine bots determine what they see on the page they are crawling. The language provides more context to your page, the industry your business operates in, and how people perceive the products you offer.

5.     Improving Local Search

If you have business premises or offer service within a local area, work on your Google My Business profile to improve your chances of being found using voice search. Also, consider getting listed on platforms such as Bing Business and make sure you have local content on your website.

If you can make sure your website has relevant content showcasing your location, and you are listed on the Google Maps platform, with an optimised profile which makes it clear what services you offer. Many voice searches target questions regarding the local areas “where is the nearest petrol station?” or “where can I eat near here?” and return maps results.

Improving your local SEO will improve your digital presence as map listings and local directory listings offer more opportunities to be seen.

6.     Don’t Forget the Basics

Meta descriptions and title tags are the basics of SEO, but they can significantly affect how your site is found and perceived. Ensure these tags are included whenever you add new pages or blogs.

While a voice assistant may not necessarily read these out, the listings will be based on their information. They help provide more context about what a page is about for the crawler and will entice readers to progress to your site. Voice assistants on phones and home accessories such as the Amazon Echo Show will sometimes show results on the screen if they can’t quickly answer a question, so your metadata will be essential to entice users to click on your links.

7.     Optimise for Mobile

Mobile-first design has been an important SEO ranking factor for several years, and, for voice search, it’s even more critical.

Google predominantly uses the mobile version of a site for indexing and ranking, so if your site isn’t responsive, it will struggle to rank in any SERPs. You can use the mobile-friendly test site from Google to check how your site performs on mobile.

8.     Reduce Your Websites Load Times

Page speed is essential for ranking well, and even more so regarding voice search. Voice assistants need to answer the user’s query quickly, so the SERP will not rank slower sites in higher positions, and you will be unlikely to rank in that featured snippet position without a quick loading site.

If your site has a slow load speed, you want to make sure you work on your core web vitals to improve this. The Google PageSpeed Insights tool will help you see where your site needs to improve.

In Summary: How to Optimise Your Site for Voice Search

If you want your website or business to be found on voice, there are a few key takeaways. You need a mobile-friendly site with good quality, conversational content that answers people’s questions. You need this to load quickly and make your business available on other platforms too, especially on local map results.

There are no official design requirements or even searchable listings that you can track your progress on for voice search, but if your business buyer personas are using search, you need to try and get in front of them.

Building a space for blogs, expert opinion pieces and news articles on your website offers a powerful solution to these metrics and will help reinforce your brand as one to trust. 

With over 409 million people viewing blogs and 77% of internet users reading blogs, they make up a substantial part of a business content marketing strategy for a good reason. So now is the time if you haven’t added a blog to your site yet. 

In this post, we’ll dive into the benefits of creating a blog on your site and how you should aim to maintain it as part of your marketing going forward. 

The Benefits: 

• Increase site traffic 
• Improve your site’s crawlability 
• Showcase your brand as a thought Leader 
• Increase leads 
• Build relationships 
• Develop fresh content 

Increase Your Site Traffic 

We’d all love more traffic to our business websites, wouldn’t we? That’s why we put so much effort into creating brilliant sites with excellent user experience and paying for Google Ads to ensure we’re at the top of search results. 

But by building a blog into your website, you can increase your site’s traffic drastically and cheaply. Hubspot found that increasing the number of pages on a site can lead to double-digit lead growth for a business. By creating relevant, high-quality content that is data-driven, your site will start ranking for more terms and have more visibility in organic search. As such a low-cost technique for driving traffic, it’s a no-brainer. 

Improve Your Site’s Crawlability 

In addition to creating new avenues to be found on search, blogging can provide additional internal links to other pages on your website and improve the crawlability of your site when it comes to Google’s bots. 

The more regularly the bots find their way onto a blog that links to your most valuable products or service pages, the more often the page will be crawled. The bots will also recognize the intent of the page through the anchor text that is linked on the blog. 

By writing relevant and informative blogs about areas within your sector, you may also find external sources link to your blog. Remember, longer blogs are often linked to more as they are trusted to be a reliable source of knowledge, so try to make your blogs long but don’t waffle. 

External links are one of Google’s 200 ranking factors and will boost your site’s page authority and domain authority. In turn, this can improve the ranking positions of your site’s main keywords. 

Showcase Your Brand as a Thought Leader 

By developing a blog on your site, you’re showcasing your talents and positioning your business as a place others can go for information and knowledge. 

Not only can you build your customer’s trust, but you can also build your business’ reputation within your industry through blogs. Building a credible blog that is useful to others in your industry makes you the go-to for knowledge. This thought leader persona can then develop into new opportunities for your business at events and through webinars. 

You can use your blog space to humanize your brand, whilst also reinforcing the brand message you want to get across. By sharing company news, you can put faces behind the names and job roles that your customers encounter.

Increase Sales & Leads 

Most blogs you write should have a clear purpose and link to your business. They should answer questions you can provide information about, offer people the opportunity to learn technical knowledge and skills or talk about solutions to issues using the types of products you supply. 

With every blog you write that gives people reason to use your products and services, you should include a call to action. Therefore, this becomes an opportunity for that reader to quickly turn into a customer. 

A call to action can be anything from a newsletter sign-up to links to products that provide the best solution for the users’ needs or offers them the chance to get in touch. Forms are best kept short and sweet but can be used as a first touch point. 

You can target very specific personas by blogging about niche topics and answering very targeted questions through your blogging strategy. Have these in mind when coming up with concepts, and you will deliver a very targeted solution for your content marketing. 

Build Relationships With Collaborators 

By showcasing your talents in providing great blogs and information, you may find yourself working in collaboration with other companies to promote your content on their platforms. 

Blogging can result in a networking channel you may not have considered, and it could also open your site up to a new audience. There has been an increase in recent years of brands utilizing influencers to promote their products and services. These influencers and professional bloggers can talk about your brand on their social media and blogging platforms and link back to your site. However, you can also ask them to collaborate on your website and share links to the blog post they have collaborated on with you with their followers. 

Fresh Content Opportunities for Social Media

In addition to being an excellent resource for your customers and website visitors, you can improve your overall digital marketing strategy when creating a blog. By providing valuable resources for your website visitors, you will automatically create great content that can be repurposed for your social media followers. 

Whether your main platform is LinkedIn or TikTok, you can repurpose the blog’s main points for a post, or a series of posts and point followers in the direction of your site, increasing traffic from those avenues. 

The content you share on your website can help your social media strategy, and the two can work hand in hand. 

Not Started a Business Blog Yet? Now Is the Time

There are so many ways blogging can build your audience and why it is an excellent tool for helping boost your brand’s digital presence and marketing efforts. 

If you have been putting off developing a blog because you think it’ll be difficult, you don’t have to worry. Platforms such as WordPress make it easy to add a blog to your website, and even with a custom-built site, your developers should be able to set a blog up quickly for you that matches the look and feel of your existing site. 

Alternatively, if the time it takes to write and publish blogs sounds unachievable for your business, you can always look for a blog content marketing company to help provide you with blog content on an ongoing basis. This can mean you are providing your site with fresh valuable content regularly but you aren’t distracting from your business’s everyday needs. 

The latest statistics say that 97% of consumers head to the internet to research more about a local company. 

With all of this in mind, your business must be seen in front of its target audience. We’ve spoken before about building your online presence, and it’s likely if your company has been operating for several years, you have these things in place. But if you want to improve your digital presence quickly, read on.  

What is Digital Presence? 

Digital presence is the ability of your brand to be seen online. It can be as simple as having a website and social media channels. When starting out, these are the bare minimum you require to have an online presence. But with the internet being so fast-paced and so much out there for consumers to take in, you need to make sure your platforms can be found. 

Not only is a digital presence your company’s face on the internet, but it also takes into account your company’s reputation. It is how your business is perceived when people find information about it. You need a professional-looking, easy-to-use website, good social media interaction, well-written blogs, and email marketing content that answers the questions your consumers may be asking.   

So, once you have done the basics and have a website and platforms to which you are posting regularly, what else is there to do? 

1. Check Your Target Keywords & Optimize for the Latest SEO

SEO is vital, and you need to continuously keep on top of your website’s optimisation. So if you haven’t looked at this for a while, now is the time to optimize your on-page and off-page SEO.

When you build your website, you should have a clear keyword plan in place, and your site should have been optimized for these keywords. However, if this was a while ago, you should check these keywords, make sure you are still ranking, improve pages that need improving, build your internal links to key pages, and check for new terms that may not have previously had search volume. 

It’s a great idea to think about your Local SEO value too. Have you got Google My Business set up if you have a physical location? If so, is all the information correct? If you don’t have a physical location but provide service in specific areas, are you ranking better for those areas than your generic keywords? 

Don’t forget about new trends in search too. Voice search may not have been a thing when your website was built, so a quick win would be to optimize for this new way of searching. With more and more individuals installing voice assistants in their homes and Google reporting that over 20% of searches on its app and android devices are performed using voice search, you need to be at the top of the results for this type of search. 

2. Carry Out A Fresh Content Audit

By carrying out a content audit, you will find the pages generating click-through to your site, with keywords that you can try and optimize better to rank higher. 

If you have topical content that has been on your site for years this is a fantastic idea for improving your digital presence, as your website will have gained some authority over the years as a font of knowledge for your market. A quick win would be to target old blog posts that rank on the second page of Google for some key terms relating to the piece and optimize the content for those terms.

Optimizing old content is also great for building a better internal linking structure and allowing your webpages to be crawled more frequently by Google. 

3. Identify New Approaches to Old Content

When you carry out your content audit, you may find that some of your content is ranking well and getting a lot of traffic because its seen as an excellent resource for your audience. One of the things you can do is expand that content to a new audience. 

You can use well-optimized and well-ranking blog posts to create an infographic to share on social media, in fact in some cases you can repurpose them into a series of posts for social media. Another option could be to turn the blog post into a YouTube video, or a video for Instagram Reels or IGTV. You can address the images on the post to provide a resource for people who use Pinterest or create a downloadable checklist for users to retain the information they are reading about for longer. This could be branded to keep your website and company in mind each time they use the checklist. 

4. Keep on Top of the Latest Content Trends

The internet is so fast-paced and you have to keep up with the latest trends. Those spending time creating Reels on Instagram, or posting to newer platforms like TikTok are opening their brand to a new audience and having their content seen more because of the user-focused social media algorithms. Platforms such as TikTok capture the data from videos that users have viewed to the end to promote similar content. For example, those who may have watched a cleaning video will begin to see more videos from other content creators who feature cleaning in their clips, which will help other businesses in that category to be seen more. 

Video marketing has grown in strength over the last few years and appears to be here to stay, so focusing on video creation would undoubtedly be a bonus if your business allows it. You will get your name out in front of a new audience and could have fun in the process. This could be a quick win if you repurpose the content mentioned above in video format.

5. Audit Your Existing Social Media Platforms

While you are looking at newer content trends and new platforms to publish to, take a look at your existing platforms. If your audience and reach has gone on Twitter, is it worth posting to anymore? Can you readdress your content strategy to see if something new boosts engagement? Are there hashtags that you could start looking at? 

It is often noted that the most popular hashtags are not always the most effective. If you publish a post with the hashtags #Love, which has 2.1 billion posts, or #PhotoOfTheDay, which has over 1 billion posts on it, your content will get lost pretty quickly. So take a look at the hashtags you use frequently and check they are still relevant and not oversaturated. 

6. Allow your Customers to Shout About Your Service

Consumers look to the internet for recommendations and check your service’s reputation. So give past customers the chance to shout about you. Review software such as Trustpilot and Trustmary allow your customers the opportunity to talk about their experience with you. 

By using software like this, your reviews are trusted more by consumers. A number of review software platforms will allow you to integrate reviews onto your site using a widget or plugin so that consumers can see that independently audited reviews are available for your products or services. 

7. Invest in New Ad Spend Areas 

If you have never invested in Google ads or Facebook Ads, now is the time. These paid adverts will allow you to quickly get in front of the right audience. What’s more, paid advertising is very measurable, so you will know soon if it’s working and tweak it accordingly. The perfect quick win for your digital presence. 

You can use Adzooma’s Clever Campaign to quickly and easily create Google campaigns, without the need to research keywords, write ads, or configure campaign settings. Simply answer a few quick and easy questions and Adzooma will generate your advertising campaigns for you automatically. 

8. Invest in Social Listening

Social Listening is a fantastic tool for finding out how your customers perceive your brand. And it’s a great way of building up an understanding of your audience too. By conducting social listening, you can help improve your buyer personas, find out where your target audience is spending their time on the internet, and then work harder to get in front of them. 

What’s more, you can understand what your customers may not like about your service or business and work on improving this to get better reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. 

9. Dip Your Feet into Digital PR  

Digital PR can be a great way of getting your name out there online. It isn’t necessarily the quickest win for digital presence, but as long as your content is picked up by some outlets, you will increase the awareness of your brand to some degree. 

You can repurpose that amazing content from your site to create an infographic that educates and informs. Or you could offer guest blog posts or opinion pieces to other sites with a similar audience to yours, get an article about your company into the local online newspaper or publish a video on a partner’s platform. These are all great ways to improve your brand awareness and online presence.

10. Work with Influencers 

Another option for building your digital presence could be to work with influencers. Many marketers trust influencer marketing, and 60% believe that influencer-generated content can perform better than brand posts on social media. 

The majority of successful influencer marketing strategies are usually linked to eCommerce sites as they can directly view the impact of the influencer, but some service-driven companies have had success with influencers and getting the right influencer for your brand could be the key to improving your digital presence. 

11. Create an FAQs Page 

Your website should answer every customer’s question quickly and effectively. Take some time to look through the kinds of questions you get via email or your social media inboxes and turn them into an FAQ page to make your website even more of a valuable resource. 

Also, remember to speak to your sales team or front-of-house staff to ask them what questions they are asked frequently. And make the page easy to navigate with anchor tags or accordion content. This is a really quick win to make your website more accessible and improve your reputation online. 

12. Organise a Webinar or Conference 

Work with other leading experts in your industry to create a conference or festival for your target audience. This can be online or in-person and could offer the best experience that people will discuss for months whilst providing an in-depth knowledge of your services or products. 

Alternatively, offer a series of webinars to your consumers. You can build up your email marketing lists through sign-ups and make it really easy for them to share the webinar on their social media platforms. You will naturally get people shouting about what you are offering by providing valuable, unmissable content through webinars. 

13. Start a Podcast 

One of the most recent trends in the digital sphere is the rise in audio content such as podcasts. Audio content allows people to take in information or news on the move while commuting or carrying out daily chores. It’s estimated that there are around 21 million podcast listeners in the UK alone, up from 8.9 million just five years ago, and the number is rising every month. 

Whilst most users listen to podcasts for entertainment, a large number also listen for education and if you can create a service that offers both entertainment and education for your audience, you will provide a valuable outlet to improve the awareness of your brand. You could invite expert guests, promote products or provide anecdotes from your experience within your field. 

14. Collect User-Generated Content 

User-generated content, or UGC, helps when consumers research your brand for the first time. There is more authenticity attached to this content, and it’s seen as the modern-day word of mouth. When they can see real people using your products or showing off your services, they will be confident that they are going to get their money’s worth from your services or products. A survey from Nosto found that consumers find UGC nine times more impactful than influencer content.  

UGC is often posted on social media platforms or through youtube videos and podcasts. If you provide a fantastic product or service, then user-generated content will come naturally, as your consumers will be happy with what they get from you. You can use this UGC in your own marketing, provided you get permission from the creator, and often people will be happy to see themselves on your posts and adverts that they will then share with their friends. 

15. Measure Return on Investment with Clear Goals 

Always have a clear goal in mind and a way to measure that goal. If you are looking to improve your digital presence, then think about how the things you are investing in or implementing can help with that and attach goals to each aspect. For example, if you do start a podcast, have a target for how many listeners you will gain in the first three months. Or, if you readdress your hashtag lists, think about how much more reach you are aiming to achieve. 

An online presence can often be a cost-effective way of getting your brand known because there are often free tools to help improve the presence – like organic social media and SEO time. Use the analytics features of the platforms you chose to build on to ensure that your work is not wasted and determine what to invest in the most. 

The Key to Customer Acquisition

A focused, well-designed landing page is the key to gaining customers and converting users from your PPC campaigns. We’ve spoken before about how to create the best landing page for your adverts. However, its’ not just about the creation of that single page. Landing pages are designed to convert your customers, and you should have everything you need on that page so they can do this in a single click. Though, if a user wants to find out more about your business and services by navigating throughout your site, make sure they can do that with ease, and your site flows well. 

User Experience and Conversion Rate Optimisation 

A user is more likely to convert on a page with a good user experience. This includes how they feel when they land on a page, if they find the page easy to understand, if they can find everything they expected to find on the page and if it’s easy to make contact or buy the product they wanted from the page. 

Many things can hinder user experience, such as slow loading speeds, a disjointed layout on mobile or tablet devices, uninspiring content, lousy navigation, unclear CTAs and more. Issues like these can crop up at any time due to theme updates, new form implementation or plugin changes, so it’s a good idea to check your landing pages frequently. If your landing page looks good when it was created, it might not look the same 6 months down the line. Here are a few tips for checking your landing pages’ user experience. 

How to Check The User Experience Of Your Page

One of the simplest methods of checking user experience is by going on the page. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospective customers. Think about what has made them click onto your site, what they are looking for and how they can get it. 

Navigate the landing page as if you are them, and test that the forms work and that there are no blocks to get to where you expect them to get to. Check that the rest of the site is accessible too. Then do it again on different devices. There are tools like Screenfly, which will allow you to see what a webpage or a site looks like on other devices if you don’t have access to many yourself. 

Of course, when you work on a website every day, it’s easy to know where to go to find certain things. So testing the site yourself doesn’t always work. How you navigate the page may differ from how your target personas might navigate. It’s a good idea to have these personas in mind and try to think and act as they would. 

Check The Activity of Real-Time Users To Your Site 

Alternatively, if you have the time and budget, you can set up a recording for your site to actively see how people find the experience when they land on the page. This is an excellent idea for landing pages connected to adverts with a high click-through rate but few conversions. 

Using software like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar allows you to witness exactly how people interact with your website. It can show pain points that users have found that you may have missed and show when buttons don’t work the way they are expected on specific devices. These tools require time to capture the experience as it happens by unique users. Microsoft Clarity is entirely free, whereas Hotjar has a freemium version to capture the activity of 35 daily sessions.

With user experience software like this, you can also find out if there is essential content too far down the screen that is being missed by most visitors and find the most common actions on your landing page or website. 

How to Improve the User Experience of your Landing Page 

One of the worst PPC mistakes you can make is failing to use a targeted landing page. If you are just sending users to your homepage, or a page that is irrelevant to their search term, you are starting the process off with a bad user experience, and the first thing you need to do is create a targeted page for your adverts. Once you have a targeted page, there are many things you can do to improve the user experience and increase your PPC performance. 

1. Fix Any Issues 

Testing your page may have brought about a list of issues that you need to fix in order to improve the user experience of a page. These bugs need to be fixed as soon as possible so that users are not hitting a wall when trying to convert. 

This may fall with your design, development or content teams, but it needs to be done quickly. Get your list, split it into the departments responsible to fix the issues and ask them to work together to improve the page and any problems that may have cropped up with the site in general.  

Remember to double-check the fixes work on mobile too. Over 54% of all website traffic was generated through mobile devices in the last quarter of 2021, and it’s easy to forget about mobile when you’re working in the office on a desktop all day. 

2. Make Design Improvements 

Once the technical, broken aspects of the page or site have been fixed, you want to look at making improvements to the page to help the user feel comfortable, and understand that they have found the correct information and are in the right place for what they need. Speak to your design team about any improvements that back be made above the “fold” of your page. 

This is the area that loads first and that most users will see. Incorporate video into the area above the fold, or use animation to capture the users’ attention. You can also use different scrolling methods to make the page more interesting for users. 

3. Improve the speed of your site 

It’s essential to ensure your site has a fast load speed so that users find what they need quickly. Studies have shown that online shoppers will abandon a cart on a site that takes too long to load, so this is especially important if you have an eCommerce site.  

Slow loading speeds can be combatted with lazy load options for images, less reliance on video content, and improving your website’s host. Check out our handy guide to site speed optimisation for more information about how to carry out site speed checks and what steps to take to improve the speed of your site. 

4. Create Great, Readable Copy

Compelling copy will capture your users’ attention and let them know the information they need ahead of conversion. Encouraging the user to find out more about your products and services and giving them that information in a concise way will improve your site’s user experience and the conversion rate on your PPC landing page. 

In addition to having compelling copy, you need to make sure it’s readable. Website readability measures how easy a user can read and understand the content on the page. The higher your readability score, the better. There are some great tools out there, such as Readable, that measure your score based on sentence complexity, sentiment, style, tone and personalism. 

Image source: Readable.com, May 2022

5. Re-Assess Your Contact Forms

The most important aspect is the contact form or checkout process on a PPC landing page. Without these features, you will not get any conversions, and your page is rendered useless. After testing that the form or checkout works, you should re-assess them regularly. 

Can you make the forms simpler? Are you asking for too much information? Does the form look intimidating? Can you gather less information, so it doesn’t take as long to complete, then fill in the blanks later? Are all the fields correctly labelled with information regarding any special instructions for the field? Keep your form and checkout as simple as possible to increase your conversion rates. 

6. Test regularly 

This isn’t a “make and forget” process. To get your PPC campaigns to deliver, you want to ensure the landing page they go to is working and engages users. Regularly test and refresh the page to improve its effectiveness and keep note of any changes and the response to these by using Google Analytics effectively.

Conclusion 

It really is simple, the better your user experience is, the more likely a user is to convert. That conversion means your return on investment is improved, and your PPC campaigns benefit your business. 

Take the time to improve the experience of your entire site, and not only will you improve conversion rates from new users finding the site through PPC ads, but you are also likely to generate more traffic from returning customers too. 

It’s easy to lose track of what you’re meant to keep on top of on your website. Things like maintaining alt tags and carrying out internal link audits don’t seem as crucial as getting products updated or putting fresh content on the site. However, these things can really help with your overall SEO strategy. 

Spring has always been associated with cleaning. Out with the old and in with the new means, people start looking at their belongings differently. It also marks the start of the financial year, so many businesses are looking at budgets and readdressing their strategies. This means it’s the perfect time to look at your website to ensure it works for you and your business. 

What to Focus on When It’s Time to Review Your Website

Spring cleaning your site can look different depending on your business goals and how you monitor your website throughout the year. If your site is starting to feel slow and clunky, it could be tidying up the CMS to clear files, removing unused plugins and checking plugins and apps are still working correctly and are fully supported. If it’s been a while since you spent any time looking at the customer-facing aspects of your site, it could be time to freshen up the look, update content, assess the call to action visibility and put together a strategy for the next 12 months. In this guide, we will go through some of the most important aspects to look at when spring cleaning a website, including: 

1. Plugin, App and Software Updates 
2. Link Auditing
3. Image Optimisation 
4. Responsive Design
5. Content Audit & Proofreading 
6. UX Audit

1. Update Plugins, Apps or Software 

You should be keeping your website updated throughout the year to ensure that it stays as secure as possible. However, it’s an easy thing to forget about. With WordPress sites, you will notice an updates tab on the menu of your dashboard with a notification telling you how many updates are required when you log in. However, as you are logging in to do something else, it might not be the right time to deal with it. Other CMS’ feature similar notification systems, but some will rely on you checking manually for updates from the creator. Software updates are essential as they often address security vulnerabilities, so start with this when looking at your website. Then check each plugin or app that is in place on the site. 

Plugins, apps, and themes all use up file space for your website, affecting load speed. You can check your website’s speed with Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool. If it’s low, it might be worth checking these to see if there are any that you definitely don’t need anymore. If you didn’t build your site yourself, check any you want to remove with your web development team, as the plugins may be there for their use. 

You should also check that the plugins or apps that you are using are still supported by their developers. If you are using an app that is no longer supported, speak to your development team about finding an alternative option or updating it to a newer version, as this will help keep your site secure. 

2. Carry Out a Link Audit 

Links help your users find their way around a website, and they help search engine bots find pages and map the website. Your site must have an excellent internal link audit for both of these reasons. Your link audit should involve several aspects; checking the sitemap and submitting a new one if it hasn’t been updated in a while, checking for broken links on your website and looking for new linking opportunities. 

Your sitemap is a list of URLs from your site. Many SEO plugins like Yoast, Rankmath and All In One SEO offer an auto-generated sitemap that will add new pages and blog posts as they are added to your site. However, if you don’t use a plugin or app like that, you will have to check your site map and see if it adds your new URLs when you add content to the site. If it doesn’t, update the sitemap and submit the new one through your Google Search Console account. 

Next, you should check for broken links throughout your site. These are links to pages that have been removed or where the URL has been changed, but a redirect hasn’t been added. Broken links are bad for the user as they expect to find themselves on a new page and instead are faced with a 404 error. They are also bad for search engine bots as they essentially hit a wall and can’t carry on mapping your site. You can check for broken links using the Screaming Frog SEO Spider or other SEO auditing tools.

Finally, you want to go through your site and make sure there are internal links in the content on your site where they would be expected. If you mention a product on a crucial landing page, link the product. Link to the service page if you add blogs about your services and mention specific services throughout the post. Users will spend more time on your site if they can easily access relevant pages from the one they have landed on. 

3. Optimize Your Images 

We’ve mentioned file size above when it comes to deleting old plugins and apps that aren’t being used, but one of the most common usages of file size for a website is the images on the site. If your pictures aren’t optimised, they will take a long time to load and take up a lot of disc space on your website’s server. Check through your image library, or use a service like the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to compile a list of images over 1MB in size and resize them if you can. Be careful as header images will need a high resolution to fit different size screens; speak to your web design agency if you need to resize anything used on a header. You can also look into implementing a lazy load onto your site so that images only load as they are required; this can help improve page speed. 

Your images should also have alt tags to help improve the accessibility of your site and improve your SEO. The alt tags on your images should be descriptive and help anyone who may not be able to see the picture to understand what it was meant to be showing. 

4. Check Your Site On Mobile 

Mobile responsive designs have been a thing for a while now, so it’s likely your site passes mobile usability checks. However, it’s a good idea to confirm this by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Site Test tool. This tool checks your homepage or a specific URL for mobile-friendliness and offers advice should there be anything that doesn’t work on mobile. You can also check for mobile usability errors in your Google Search Console Account. 

However, some things that just don’t look right on mobile may not be flagged. Google looks for text that’s too small to read and clickable elements too close together. It will also tell you if an image is too wide for the screen. But it won’t tell you if a pop-up is getting in the way of a call to action and can’t be cleared. Or if the alignment of a heading isn’t correct on your hero slider. For these things, it’s best to check the site yourself on a mobile or using Chrome’s developer tools and change the responsive design options to see how your homepage and key landing pages look when accessed on different devices. 

5. Carry Out a Content Audit

We’ve spoken about content audits before, as it’s good to take the time to look through your site regularly to plan future content and check for any issues that may have arisen since you carried out the last audit. 

During this, you want to look for any outdated content; for example, if you have an article that used to get a lot of traffic about trends from 2019, you might want to update it to the current year. Or better still, make the content evergreen, so you don’t have to update it again.

Whilst checking your onsite content, make sure that the metadata for each page is also correct. Update missing title tags and meta descriptions, add H1s, and align them with SEO keywords. Keywords in meta titles and headings are essential for your SEO. Be careful not to update your content in a way that will “overstuff” it with keywords. 

6. Carry Out a UX Audit 

One of our final suggestions is to conduct a UX audit on your site. This is particularly helpful if you have noticed your bounce rate has increased or your conversions haven’t increased as much as you had hoped through your marketing activity. 

A UX audit will help you find issues that customers are coming up against on your site. You can put screen recording in place to see where these things occur or ask a team to test the site’s usability as if they were a customer and then fix the issues that arise based on their feedback. This is an excellent opportunity to review your call to action buttons across the site, check forms are working correctly and check triggers that have been set up in Analytics. You may want to work with a designer to give your call to action buttons or site layout a bit of a freshen up, too, just so that any returning customers have new colours to catch their eye. 

Completing a Spring Clean of Your Website

As marketing executives or small business owners, we often spend so much time looking at other marketing aspects that we tend to forget about the face of our business; our website. It’s a great idea to schedule a check-up of your website every six to twelve months to find those things that sometimes fly under the radar. These ideas will help you freshen up your site for its users, help reduce file sizes and fix technical errors on your website. 

Choosing the right keywords for your audience is one of the most important aspects of SEO. Optimizing for keywords that will rank your site is always great, but you have to ensure the keywords are correct to attract the correct audience and get a conversion. In this blog, we’re talking about how to find keywords to attract the right audience.  

Step 1. Think Like Your customer 

One of the key things that Google ranks a page for is relevance. If the information on a page is not relevant to the term, you will struggle to rank. To find the relevant keywords for your website, you need to understand your user’s search intent, what your website visitor is looking for, and match that up to the information on the page you are hoping to target with that term.

You want to start by creating a list of topics that your website provides information on and the products or services you offer. Create one topic per service, which can be broken into sub-topics should you need to break them up.

Think about what a customer is likely to search when looking for the topics you have noted down and start producing queries relating to them. Next, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. What do they need when looking for these topics?

Step 2. Understand The Search Intent

Of course, as you start coming up with these queries, you will notice different types of terms come up. This is to do with the user’s search intent and their stage in their user journey. Most terms fall into three types of searches; navigational, informational, and transactional. 

A navigational search term is used when a user wants to find a website, and they know what site they want – for example, “Facebook” or “Adzooma”. The user knows which website they want – but they don’t want to type the address in or can’t remember it. Your branded terms will be navigational, and it’s likely your homepage will be the SERP listing for these terms. 

Informational terms are terms searched when a user is looking for information. They may have a question they need to answer or wish to do some research about a product. They are not ready to buy the product yet, though. They won’t be looking for a specific site, just one that offers the information they are looking for. These terms are hard to monetize, but you can guide a user towards a product or service by writing informative blogs about what they are looking for information on. For example, if someone is looking for information on how to paint over tiles and you sell home improvement tools and paint, you could give them the information they need in a blog post and link out to products on your site where they can buy the things they need. 

A transactional term is one where the user knows what they are looking for and is ready to buy it. This is also sometimes known as a commercial search term. This would be something along the lines of “Nespresso coffee maker”, “black Converse size 6”, or “solicitors in Nottingham”. These terms have a lot of competition on the SERP, with paid shopping ads, local business map listings, and other aspects of the landscape which you may have to consider. 

You should have a mix of these keywords for various pages across your site. While your product or service landing pages are likely to have transactional keywords associated with them, you want to think about creating informational content on blogs that will back up your site’s relevancy for the topic.

Step 3. Understand Different Keyword Types 

Alongside different search intents and considering what your customer is thinking about, you also have to understand the different types of keywords that your site requires so you know which pages should be optimized for what terms.

There are three different types of keywords; head, body, and long tail. These indicate the depth of the search term. 

A head keyword will generally be two words at a maximum and offer a very top-level insight into the thing being looked for. Typically, these keywords have a lot of results and aren’t tailored to specific search intent. If a user searches “patio doors” because they are looking to replace theirs, this is a head keyword. It returns around 473 million results, so you will be fighting a battle to try and rank for this term. However, it’s worth bearing in mind that keywords like this usually show a local search option, as google knows where the user is based and knows they are likely to want a company serving their area. So don’t discard the keyword altogether. 

A body keyword is usually around three to five words, reducing the number of results and improving the search’s intent. For example, sticking with our patio doors, a body keyword may be “French patio doors”. This has 39.5 million search results but gives the user more relevant search results as they are more specific to the type of patio door they are looking for. The same term can be made even more specific by adding the material they are looking for; “UPVC French patio doors” returns just 4.5 million results. 

Finally, a long tail keyword is given to a keyword that is more like a question or a longer phrase. To follow the example above, the user may believe they want to replace the patio doors themselves. So they search “replace sliding glass door with French doors”, and this returns 5.6 million results. This would be a long tail, informational keyword, and the user is looking for a guide on how to do what they want to do. You wouldn’t optimize your UPVC French door page for this term, but it’s a keyword that has search volume, which you could offer a blog about and link from your blog to your UPVC french doors page so they can see what doors are available to buy. 

Step 4. Create a List of Keywords Relating to your Service

Now you have started to think about your user and the different types of keywords, you can create a list of keywords for each of your website pages or topics. 

First of all, make a list of your top-level pages, and then list a few relevant keywords for each page. Make sure these are either head or body keywords. The long tail queries you may have thought about can go in one file to help develop blog concepts for your site later. 

Step 5. Use SEO tools to refine your keywords

Once you have a list of relevant keywords, you can check them in an SEO tool like SEMRush’s Keyword Magic tool or Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool. These tools will help you understand the difficulty of ranking for the term, its search volume, and even what your competitors are ranking for that you aren’t.

For more information about each of the SEO keyword tools available, take a look at our SEO Keyword Tool Checklist; they all have a great list of features and can offer a lot when finding your keywords.

With this, you can flesh out your keywords, and work out which ones to optimize for, which to monitor and which may not be achievable right now but could be potential targets for a later date. 

Once you have refined your keywords, you need to adapt the content on each page, including the title tag and meta description, to reflect the keywords you have chosen for that page. Don’t stuff the content with your keyword, though, as you want your content to match up to Google’s EAT concept. We have a guide to ranking your keywords if you need further information about this. 

Step 6. Track and analyze the data 

Finally, once you have your list of keywords and the content on your site reflects these, you want to monitor and analyze the data of your website to track them. You can use our SEO reporting tool to track keyword performance and Google’s own Search Console platform. This will allow you to see which keywords are ranking your site, how much traffic they are generating and when used in conjunction with Google Analytics, what conversions are coming in from those terms. 

We recommend you monitor the data regularly to see where improvements can be made and if new semantically similar keywords start to rank your site. You can further improve your content for these, should they have a better search intent or conversion opportunity. 

Since the introduction of its “freshness algorithm” in 2011, Google prioritizes fresh content at the top of its search engine results pages (SERPs). This algorithm allows the platform to offer the most recent and up-to-date content to its users, so they know they are getting the right content delivered to them at the right time. Most search engines have replicated this model to offer relevant and informative content suggestions to their users from regularly updated sites. 

Table of contents: 

• Why optimize old content
• How to optimize old content 
• Step 1. Carry out a content audit 
• Step 2. Improve the relevancy of your content 
• Step 3. Add fresh content 
• Step 4. Check for new keyword optimization opportunities
• Step 5. Add fresh images or other media and check the alt text
• Step 6. Republish and reshare your content 
• Monitoring your changes

Why optimize Old Content

Regular content on your site can strengthen the view that your site is a reliable resource for information. This, alongside good user experience and authority, are the key factors Google and other search engines look for when choosing which sites to rank. A good way of building authority for your site is to optimize older content to ensure any updates are included and remain relevant to the user. 

optimizing old content is a great way to give your content a chance to rank higher in the SERPs, improving organic traffic levels. Also, according to Hubspot’s State of Content Marketing Report 2022, producing new content ideas is one of the top three challenges marketers face. By revisiting older content, you don’t have to think too much about producing brand new content from scratch when it feels like you have written everything there is to know about your product and services.

How to optimize your Old Content: A 5 Step Guide

So how do you go about finding and optimizing that content? We’ve touched upon optimizing existing content in our previous blog, 7 Steps to Increasing Your Search Visibility & Outrank Competitors. However, in this guide, we’re going to dig deeper into how to find content that requires optimization and what to do to make it better. Let’s take a look… 

Step 1. Carry Out a Content Audit 

Take an inventory of your entire site using a system like Screaming Frog, and create a list of all your pages. 

Prioritize the list by your most important landing page and the highest lead-generating blog content; you can use Google Analytics to understand which blogs generate traffic and leads. 

When you understand which pages are your priority, use Google Search Console to identify what keywords those pages are being found for and in what position your site ranks for those keywords. Search Console often shows a graph of search volume next to the keywords so you can see how many average monthly searches the terms get to know which ones are the most important. 

If you find these pages are already ranking in high positions in SERPs, then you can move on to concentrate on lower-priority landing pages and blog posts. However, it’s important to review the content on these pages if you believe the keywords aren’t the right fit because the page’s focus has changed or your business has gone in a different direction. 

Once you have a list of pages that you feel could benefit from optimization, take a look at the content on those pages. You want to ensure they are a decent length (we recommend at least 400 words for on-site landing page content and 800 words for blog posts) and have relevant, informative content on them. At the end of your content audit, you should have a list of landing pages and blog posts that you want to expand and improve.  

Step 2. Improve The Relevancy of Your Content 

One of the most important things to consider when readdressing old content is the relevancy of the subject matter and what message the blog is sending. If you are talking about a service, has that service changed since you published the content? If so, that needs to be changed too. This is especially true for software or any platforms that continually update to have new and better features for their users. 

If you used Screaming Frog to pull the list of pages from your site, you could also check to see where there are broken links on your site. Google uses links as signals to understand the benefit a page has for the anchor text the link uses. If a link is broken, Google can’t crawl the linked page to check its relevancy for the term it is linked from and therefore can’t place any authority on that link. As a result, broken links can harm your site’s SEO. We recommend updating any broken links to internal web pages and external sites when you update your content.   

Step 3. Add Fresh Content 

If your content is short, it’s likely it doesn’t go into enough detail about its topic, and search engines won’t see it as a relevant piece. Pick pages with low word counts and see what can be added.

It’s important to not focus on the word count alone, though. You need to ensure the content you are adding increases the page’s value, so don’t mindlessly add words to hit a magic number. Instead, think about your user and what they expect to find on the page. Is there anything missing or anything that could help them go further on their user journey when they land on the page? 

Step 4. Check for new Keyword Optimization Opportunities

The search landscape changes regularly, and information you wrote years ago may now be relevant for terms that previously didn’t have search volume or didn’t show that type of content at the time. Hopefully, your page will start getting impressions from these terms as they develop more search volume. However, if you feel the content is relevant or could be improved to make it relevant for a particular term that it’s not ranking for, you can add fresh content to optimize it for that term. 

There are so many SEO keyword tools for you to use, which will help you angle your content towards new terms or improve it for terms it relates to. We love Answer the Public, which tells you all the questions being asked across the internet on a topic you submit. 

Step 5. Add Fresh Images or Other Media and Check the Alt Text

A few years ago, images weren’t regarded as important in content, but they are now. The recommendation is to have an image every 350 words on average in blog posts as it helps with user experience. Other media types are also available, such as video and audio, but be sure not to increase the page load time when adding these. 

It’s a good idea to use this opportunity to check your images’ alt tags. Every image on your site should have a relevant, informative alt tag, not one that doesn’t make sense because it was put in to help a page rank for a specific keyword.

Step 6. Republish and Reshare Your Content 

Finally, if you have improved the length, value, and relevancy of your content, you can hit the publish button. It’s a good idea to update the date to the date you updated the content as Google can see that it is new and fetch the page on Google Search Console. 

This also gives you a fresh perspective for resharing the content on your social media platforms or in emails. Share it with a catchy headline and image that will capture the attention of those scrolling and generate more traffic to the page. 

Monitoring Your Changes 

Once you have optimized the old content on your site, you should track its progression with an SEO Reporting tool. This will allow you to see how the keywords are improving if the keyword positions have influenced traffic levels and more. Using this alongside Google Analytics, you can understand the full impact on your overall content strategy.