• 60% of respondents didn’t know about Core Web Vitals or didn’t understand it
• Over 20% knew about Core Web Vitals but didn’t know how it would affect their business

If you’re part of the 80%+, this article is for you. I will discuss what Core Web Vitals is, why it’s important for your site, and your business, and how you can prepare for the Google update in May.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of factors, defined by Google, that impact its page experience score. That score is Google’s way of rating a page’s overall UX, similar to the Quality Score for Google Ads.

Google says Core Web Vitals metrics will evolve over time but currently hinge on the following:

• Loading
• Interactivity
• Visual stability

And the corresponding metrics for those are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – LCP measures loading performance and how quickly the main part of a page loads. Google defines a page as having a “good user experience” if the LCP is no longer than 2.5 seconds.
• First Input Delay (FID) – FID measures interactivity and the time between a user’s first page interaction and when the browser processes the response. Google defines a page as having a “good user experience” if the FID is less than 100 milliseconds. 
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – CLS measures visual stability and how often a user experiences “unexpected layout shifts” (i.e. when elements of the page suddenly move or shift across the screen as it loads). Google defines a page as having a “good user experience” if the CLS is less than 0.1.

Why are they so important?

There has been a lot of chatter in the digital marketing community about how important Core Web Vitals will be for sites. A key thing to understand is that poor Core Web Vitals metric scores aren’t going to see you drop off the first page but there is a possibility for slight position drops. How impactful those are depends on individual site metrics.

Primarily, Core Web Vitals are about user experience and that should be the priority for all site owners. A bad user experience feeds into fundamental marketing KPIs such as:

• Conversion rate
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Return on investment
• Social media engagement rates

You want to make sure your page experience scores are as good as they can be.

What you need to know

Here are some important messages from Google employees about Core Web Vitals:

• The Google Page Experience Update is coming in May
• All three Core Web Vitals benchmarks must be met in order to qualify for a ranking signal boost (source)
• Core Web Vitals calculations may include no indexed pages (source)

How to prepare your site for Core Web Vitals rollout in May

With all that information to take on board, you can turn that into tangible changes for your site.

1. Reinforce the relationships between your marketers and devs

Now more than ever, marketers (particularly tech SEOs) and developers need to work together on this one. User experience is often overlooked but it plays a vital role in a lot of KPIs as mentioned above and acts as a common ground for both parties.

And it’s not just SEO that can be affected. PPC relies on high-quality landing pages to help various metrics such as CPL (cost per lead), CPA (cost per acquisition), and Quality Score. If the page experience is poor, conversions can plummet and so can your Quality Score as landing page experience is factored into the calculation.

Find out what each other’s priorities are, explain what you need, the benefits, and how long you think implemented changes will take, and write tasks that make sense. And keep communication clear and open!

2. Focus on a great user experience, not on individual metrics

Core Web Vitals should not be seen as a clipboard of tick boxes. The scores and graphs you see in your Google CRUX dashboards are a visual representation of what you need to do but ultimately, you want users to have the best possible experience when they navigate your site.

If you feel any frustration when navigating yourself, imagine how a new user would feel who doesn’t know why it’s happening — they’ll just leave.

3. Optimize your images

Images affect so many details of a page when it loads. In many cases, they can directly affect all three Core Web Vitals metrics so it’s important to optimize your images. These actions include:

And with page experience and accessibility in mind, don’t forget alt text! Not only does this help screen reader users but it can help Google define what an image is about and improve visibility in image search.

4. Minify, consolidate, and defer your scripts (where necessary)

This part can be tricky. HTML, CSS and JavaScript are the bedrock of the Web and are therefore a priority for page load. But bloated, unoptimized scripts can affect your FID and LCP.

To avoid this:

• Minify your CSS and JS files to reduce their size. This means removing all the white space and potentially removing redundant code (as long as you know for sure it’s redundant)
• Consolidate files where you’re repeating code or loading files in different places to reduce your number of requests (and FID). Do you really need separate CSS files for print and screen?
• Defer files that don’t need to load immediately. This significantly contributes to FID and doing so can improve your FID scores by a considerable amount. 

This is where your devs can truly excel so get communicating!

5. Preload your fonts

If you’re using Google Fonts or other third-party fonts that you store on your server, these can delay page load so you’ll want to preload them. They can also affect your CLS as there are different options for what fonts you want to load if there’s a problem.

If a font doesn’t load properly, you want to avoid there being a flash of blank space before your fallback font loads. There are some helpful articles on how to mitigate this from CSS Tricks and Mozilla’s MDN Web Docs.

6. Optimize your server

A slow server can ruin the user experience before a page even loads… because it can stop it from loading altogether! Have you ever seen an error page like this?

That’s due to a server issue. Sometimes the issues are temporary but if they keep happening, you might need to make some adjustments — short term or long term such as:

• Upgrading to a faster server
• Using a CDN to load static files quicker
• Preloading your cache

7. Reduce your use of third-party resources

You’ve seen a cool JavaScript library or an awesome font and you want to use them. Suddenly, it takes forever to load your site and things are starting to break. It’s time to prioritize what you actually need to load.

Third-party resources like JavaScript libraries and WordPress plugins can be cool but they add time to your page load. What’s more, there could be better ways to do those actions with your existing scripts. Don’t add new things unless you really need them and if you do, minify and defer them at the very least. 

Further resources

Here are some articles to help you understand more about Core Web Vitals and different techniques to improve your scores:

• Technical SEO – The First Step To Lead Generation?
• Google’s Core Web Vitals report help page
• Core Web Vitals: Everything you, your SEO team, and your business need to know
• How to Use Python to Monitor & Measure Website Performance
• Tools to measure Core Web Vitals
• Using the CrUX Dashboard on Data Studio

Summary

Core Web Vitals have been the talk of the town for marketers and for good reason. They demonstrate page experience in a way that professionals can understand, through technical details for SEOs and devs, and revenue and conversion results for stakeholders.

Now that you know what it all means and the various ways you can improve your Core Web Vitals metrics, it’s time to make your page experience the best it’s ever been.

From what started as a Stanford PhD project, Google is now a multi-billion dollar company and at the forefront of multiple technologies.

But with that power comes great responsibility, as a great man once said. Now Google’s power and responsibility is again up for debate as they look to battle the Australian government over its news media.

What happened?

The Australian Parliament is considering a new code of law that would see companies like Google and Facebook have to pay local media outlets for providing their content in search and on social media.

In response, Google threatened to take away access to its search engine in Australia if it went ahead with the policy.

In a press conference, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said they did not respond to threats and “Australia makes our rules for things you can do in Australia”.

What would that mean for Google?

Mel Silva, managing director of Google Australia and New Zealand, said the idea of “unrestricted linking between websites” was key to search and called it an “unmanageable financial and operational risk.”

“If this version of the code were to become law it would give us no real choice but to stop making Google Search available in Australia.”

Having to pay media outlets to place their content on search would cost millions of dollars and not guarantee the most relevant content to users. But Google has seen both sides of the coin in this scenario.

In 2010, Google pulled its search engine out of China after a cyberattack controversy over censorship of search results.

Then, in 2014, the tech giant removed access to Google News from Spain after its government passed a similar law to Australia where news aggregators had to pay the publishers for their stories.

What would that mean for Australians?

Losing access to Google would be huge for Australians, particularly marketers who rely on the search engine for their work.

An Australian looking for a local plumber or gardener would be met with a screen telling them Google was no longer available to them. Online shops would lose custom through paid and organic search. The marketers who worked with these businesses could lose clients and revenue of their own. Even non-commerce sites could be affected where they used Google for their search functions.

It would be akin to taking a species out of an ecosystem or food chain. There would be growing changes to anyone or anything linked to the missing party and it would take time for everyone to adjust or otherwise fold.

In a Sydney Morning Herald article published yesterday, advertisers believe that while Google’s threat could hurt businesses, more competition could help them survive. This hope comes from an Australian Competition and Consumer Commission report that suggested a lack of competition was causing “significant problems” for advertisers and consumers.

The report also stated that Google held at least 50% of all four markets used to buy, sell and publish display advertising. These findings have likely fuelled the requirement of payment for Australian news content.

Is the Australian government justified in its idea?

With an ad tech industry worth over $3.4bn (AUD) and claims that Google’s dominance in those markets has driven up advertising costs, it makes sense that the government would want to find ways to level the playing field. They’re also not alone in their attempt at taking Google on, as Spain and China’s examples show.

But there needs to be more research carried out to make sure there aren’t any better alternatives, from a B2B and B2C perspective. Google is synonymous with search — paid and organic — and a shift to unfamiliar platforms might cause more harm than good.

The United States submitted a comment to the Australian Senate calling the proposed code unreasonable and “fundamentally imbalanced” while S4 Capital founder Sir Martin Sorrell believed the current system would not sustain the local news media sector even if the legislation was passed.

Is Google justified in its response?

There are different perspectives in this story.

From a business POV, Google wouldn’t want to spend vast sums of money on content. It might also show a sign of weakness to investors. From a user experience viewpoint, Google has remained firm in its user-first position. Search results are based on algorithms that provide users the most relevant information for their search queries.

That approach has led to what many call “zero-click queries” where Google provides the answer to a query on the search results page (SERP) without the user needing to click on a link to view the page it comes from. It’s a controversial topic and ABC believe it’s being used in response to Australia’s parliamentary discussions:

The Drum also spotted this and said Google explained it was “an experiment to test the value of Australian news services”.

Alternatives to Google

But wait… Google isn’t the only search engine on the Web. I wrote an article on Google’s search engine rivals back in January last year and there are plenty of alternatives available.

• Microsoft Bing is the second largest search engine in terms of market share (even if that makes up less than 3% compared to Google’s ~90%). The search engine has made a lot of positive changes in recent months as they look to close the gap
• Yahoo! Search is powered by Microsoft Bing but it still offers an alternative although Australian director Yahoo Serious might not be too happy (he sued them in 2000 for trademark infringement and lost)
• DuckDuckGo is the cool kid on the block thanks to its focus on net privacy and being everything that Google isn’t. Its daily search queries have grown from 0.033m in January 2010 to over 67.7m in January 2021.
• Ecosia is a good choice if you care about the environment. The Berlin search engine uses its ad revenue to plant trees where they are needed the most.
• Swisscows, like DuckDuckGo, cares about user privacy and doesn’t store data. It also omits all explicit content and has its search powered by Microsoft Bing like Yahoo!

It’s likely Bing would be the primary choice should Google pull the plug but it’s good to know there’s a variety of alternatives for Australians. This might also give marketers down under some new environments to explore for search traffic opportunities.

Some of the great features include:

• Microsoft Audience Network – a native advertising solution offering advanced audience targeting and brand-specific native ad placements. Microsoft Audience Ads can reach over 16 million unique monthly users in Australia.
• Bing Places for Business – a Microsoft Bing portal for local business owners to list their businesses on the search engine.
• Bing Webmaster Tools – a free tool offered by Microsoft Bing, similar to Google Search Console, allowing website owners to add their sites to the Microsoft Bing web crawler, view site performance and much more.

Find out more information on what Microsoft Ads can do for you and Adzooma’s special offer here.

Final thoughts

In my piece, Google Is Not A Meritocracy, I looked at some of the ways Google has used its dominance for good and not-so-good. One of the points was Google’s effect on local journalism:

“For the Wall Street Journal, Lukas I. Alpert wrote that Google – along with Facebook – was ‘making concessions long sought by news publishers whose business has been hurt by the platforms’ dominance’. The claim was that Google was diverting negative attention from the regulators, rather than helping news outlets out of goodwill.

US law officials launched antitrust investigations into both companies to see whether their online dominance was anti-competition. A meeting is set to take place in November in Colorado.”

That was November 2019. Google is still being investigated as part of an anti-trust lawsuit and its relationship with news publishers is still under scrutiny. Whether the Australian government’s tactics are too bullish or not, their reasoning is legitimate.

There is no meritocracy here, even if meritocracies were a real thing. Google’s power in national advertising markets borders on oligarchical, at least according to the Australian government’s findings. If pushing for parity causes such a problem, perhaps the wider industry needs to be investigated before its bubble bursts like the dot-com boom it survived.

Google announced the phasing out of third-party cookies in its Chrome browser platform by 2022 and members of the digital marketing community aren’t too happy since Chrome has an estimated 63.38% global browser market share on all devices. On 25th January, Google unveiled its new alternative to cookies called Federated Learning of Cohorts (or FLoC) but what does this all mean for PPC marketers and their strategies?

In this article, I’ll be examining cookies, why they’re getting culled, and what PPC marketers will need to do once they’re gone as well more information on Google’s Privacy Sandbox and the recently revealed FLoC.

What are cookies?

Cookies (also known as HTTP cookies, web cookies, Internet cookies, and browser cookies) are pieces of data stored on a user’s computer by their browser. They were created by Lou Montulli as a way for websites to remember things like the items you had in your shopping cart or login details. Cookies had helpful intentions but soon, e-commerce grew and cookies were used to aid online advertising and track users behaviour.

There are two main types of cookies:

First-party cookies

First-party cookies are created and stored by websites and allow site owners to collect data such as:

• User language settings
• Analytics data
• Shopping carts items
• Usernames and passwords

This is what cookies were initially designed to do and help to improve user experience.

Third-party cookies

Third-party cookies are created by third parties on behalf of websites who use them. Unlike first party cookies, they have more ad-focused uses such as:

• Cross-site tracking
• Serving ads
• Retargeting ads

The main differences between first-party and third-party cookies are the intentions behind the data collection, what they’re used for, and who manages the cookies.

Why are third-party cookies dying?

Privacy concerns

The user of tracking cookies grew in prevalence over time and they started to track long-term user behaviour. This activity posed a privacy threat and in 2011, European and U.S. lawmakers took action. For all websites involving EU traffic, site owners had to acquire “informed consent” from users before storing non-essential cookies on their devices.

Sketchy alternatives

With so many major browsers blocking third-party cookies, developers have created new ways to bypass the blocks such as ‘fingerprinting’, where setting changes are used to track users. On the plus side, Google is aware and continues to extinguish its use.

What will this mean for PPC strategies?

Google’s ban of third-party cookies is arguably a good idea but it will affect both digital advertisers and Google itself in terms of ad revenue for both sides. So what will PPC strategies look like once those cookies crumble? And is FLoC a good substitute?

I spoke with my colleague, Sophie Logan, a PPC manager at Adzooma.

“As marketers, we knew third-party cookies wouldn’t last forever and since the introduction of the new GDPR, it was only a matter of time until this came into force. I think off the back of this, a loss of data is the most powerful side effect for PPC strategies and technologies in 2021.

We will need to rely more heavily on first-party cookie platforms such as Facebook and Google. This will increase their control and power of user data, and provide them with data which is not available to other advertisers.”

In terms of next steps, Sophie suggested PPC marketers adapt to the new situation and “up their game”:

“Adapt and overcome. Advertisers have no choice but to up their game. But at least everyone (well almost everyone) is in the same boat.”

Privacy Sandbox and Federated Learning of Cohorts

Launched on 25th January 2021, Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) provides an “effective replacement signal for third-party cookies” with early tests reaching in-market and affinity Google Audiences expected to see “at least 95% of the conversions per dollar spent when compared to cookie-based advertising.”

However, the new technique hasn’t pleased everyone with some advertisers claiming it is anti-competitive. The CMA (Competition and Markets Authority) are currently investigating the Privacy Sandbox proposal after a group of companies in digital marketing, news media and tech complained that Google was abusing its position by phasing out third-party cookie support.

Speaking to Sophie, she understands marketers’ concerns:

“From what I’ve heard from marketers, it looks like the use of ‘sensitive’ data is a major concern. I think that opens up the whole issue of morals when it comes to advertising and how data is used. Currently, we don’t have access to universally determined ‘sensitive’ data, but this could open that up.”

As for the Privacy Sandbox project, Google says its project’s mission is to “create a thriving web ecosystem that is respectful of users and private by default”:

“The main challenge to overcome in that mission is the pervasive cross-site tracking that has become the norm on the web and on top of which much of the web’s ability to deliver and monetize content has been built.”

Google wants to combat those sketchy non-cookie techniques like fingerprinting, cache inspection, and link decoration to maintain users’ privacy and improve the Web experience for everyone. It’s early days regarding privacy issues with the project so we’ll see how it develops.

A remarketing redux is required

Sophie said it’d be impossible to run remarketing in its current state which means the technique will need to change in order to survive.

A loss in revenue

Without remarketing (at least in its current form) and with reduced user data, there will be a significant impact to revenue for advertisers and Google. Users will also get more irrelevant and repetitive ads and could tank important KPIs like click-through rate.

According to Google Ads, cookie-less traffic yielded an average of 52% percent less revenue for the ad publisher.

Conversion tracking will take a hit

If you can’t track user behaviour, you won’t be able to assess your ads’ effectiveness in the same way. That lack of conversion tracking will therefore impair value proposition which is an important part of PPC strategy.

People-based marketing

There’s also “people-based marketing”, introduced by Facebook, which uses first-party data and isn’t affected by cookies. It compares user IDs with customer data to help advertisers find targetable users for their ads. Google can also use first-party data for similar uses but with their ongoing anti-trust lawsuits, who knows how effective they’ll continue to be in their current state.

Outside of the tech giants, data management platforms are looking at alternative ways to help advertisers to track their data. Sophie recommends looking into alternatives now and to stay up to date with cookie news.

“Using customer data and offline data will allow advertisers to compare their quality and identify the best users to target. There will also be more reliance on contextual advertising, such a native ads, where the ad content is tailored to the content of the website rather than a specific user.”

Conclusion

It will be interesting to see how advertisers react to these changes and whether they’ll embrace FLoC or try more basic strategies but with more resources and consideration.

Online advertising worked before the use of third-party cookies, and they will be able to continue without them too. This will require advertisers to more manually ensure that they are targeting the right individuals with relevant messaging.

From Google’s perspective, it’s important that the company gets FLoC right and doesn’t alienate its customers further.

But that can involve different marketing channels such as paid search, organic search, or social. How do you decide who gets the credit?

With attribution modelling.

It’s a way of showing clients and stakeholders the monetary value of each marketing channel’s effectiveness and their contributions to every touchpoint in the customer journey.

But it doesn’t always work as intended.

In this guide, we’ll show you what attribution models are, the different types, how you can compare them in Google Analytics and how to use that data in conjunction with the Adzooma platform.

What are attribution models?

Attribution models are rules, or sets of rules, that determine how much conversion credit is assigned to different points in the conversion path.

They’re also great for data analysis where you can compare and contrast your performance under each model.

With Google Analytics, you can compare how different attribution models impact the valuation of your marketing channels using the Model Comparison Tool. Here’s how:

1. Make sure you’re using conversion tracking!
2. Log into Google Analytics
3. On the left sidebar, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool
4. You can compare up to 3 conversion models at a time

What are the different types of attribution models?

The 6 main type of attribution models are:

1. First Interaction – where 100% of the credit goes to the first touchpoint.
2. Linear – where each touchpoint receives an equal share of the credit.
3. Time Decay – where the touchpoint nearest in time to the conversion gets the most credit.
4. Position Based – where 40% of the credit goes to the first and last interactions, with 20% evenly distributed to touchpoints in the middle.
5. Last Non-Direct Click – where direct traffic is ignored and 100% of the credit goes to the last touchpoint before conversion.
6. Last Interaction – where 100% of the credit goes to the last touchpoint.

With models like Linear, Time Decay, and Position Based, this can be grouped under Multi-Touch Attribution as multiple channels get credit. There’s also View-Through Attribution which shows if an impression contributed to an app install.

Which attribution model is best?

There is no universal “best” attribution model. You may choose one as your primary attribution model for reporting and analysis but your best model depends on your conversion techniques, business goals or customer behaviour. That’s why the attribution model is seen as an analytical framework – it’s up to you to analyse which model is best based on the data.

What’s more, thanks to Adzooma’s integration with Google Analytics, you can use this data to vastly improve your conversions and overall campaigns.

Without a dedicated online advertising platform like Adzooma, you will have collected all this data and either:

1. Manually organise it into your PPC campaigns
2. Not have the power of machine learning to offer opportunities or automation

But with Adzooma, you can integrate all that attribution data into your workflow from one screen and minimal clicks as the platform takes care of the hard work.

But more on that later.

Benefits

Here are some key benefits of using attribution models:

1. Finding the true value of a conversion

Attribution modelling literally gives credit where it’s due.

Without understanding how a source impacts a conversion, you can not truly understand it’s value.

For example, if a PPC campaign generates a user’s introduction to your product, but the actual conversion comes via Organic a few days later, the Last Click model would only give credit to the Organic source.

This would mean that the PPC spend would not be associated with the conversion and suggest the PPC campaign was not generating conversions when it was. That’s why it’s so important to use the right model so all channels get their fair share.

2. They’re easy to implement

Models like First and Last Interaction are simple to analyse and apply.

They’re also very accurate because they evaluate the very first and very last interactions a user has and when they’ll convert.

For models like Time Decay Attribution, they get more specific by showing when a touchpoint occurred. Having time-related data can help improve when you make decisions for a campaign.

3. You can create your own custom attribution models

If you’re not happy with the default options, you can make your own in Google Analytics.

To do this, go into Google Analytics and on the left sidebar, select Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Model Comparison Tool.

When selecting a model, you have the choice of creating your own custom model or importing one from Gallery (see below)

4. Opportunities for marketing channels to work together

By displaying which channels are working well and which channels aren’t, attribution modelling can help bridge gaps between them. Perhaps paid search is doing really well while email is lagging behind—that’s an opportunity for one to help the other.

Pitfalls

Here are some pitfalls with attribution modelling to be aware of:

1. No way to track cross-device usage

With smartphones, laptops, smart TV’s, tablets and other such devices, cross-device tracking becomes an issue. You might start looking at a holiday on your phone, then switch over to your tablet to get a better look at your hotel options, before moving over to your computer to complete your purchase. Suddenly, you’ve used 3 different devices to complete a conversion and you might only capture the last one.

2. No way to track offline touchpoints

Offline touchpoints aren’t taken into consideration when it comes to attribution models.

For example, should an individual see a billboard for your product, which then leads them to search for your brand via a search engine and make a purchase, then the billboard will not be credited attribution, despite it being the very start of the conversion path.

3. Click fraud can cause problems

We briefly mentioned Multi-Touch Attribution earlier. While it has benefits in sharing credit amongst multiple channels, it can be skewed if there’s click fraud on the account.

ClickCease and PPC Protect are tools that you can use to prevent click fraud.

Read our guide on click fraud for more information.

4. No single model tells the full picture

As we said before, there isn’t a best model for conversions and that includes a best model for showing how well your conversion funnel is working.

That means you’ll need to combine multiple models and data to get a true understanding, which also means more work, reporting, and analysis.

Final touchpoints

Conversion paths aren’t as linear as they used to be. That means your campaign will have multiple touchpoints during a single conversion path and longer path to conversions. It’s the job of marketers to work with that impact on the traditional marketing funnel and find the most accurate ways to assign conversion credit to touchpoints.

Fortunately, Adzooma has a solution. In August 2020, the Adzooma platform added Google Analytics to its array of features meaning you can use your comparison data from GA to make better conversion decisions, view your Goals in the Management tab, and let Adzooma take care of the manual work.

To set up, go to the Management tab, click Link Google Analytics, authorise use of the platform with Google, and you’re done!

To learn more about Adzooma’s GA integration, read our official product update.

And remember:

• Changing your attribution models will affect the results of other source/mediums performance
• Attribution models do not consider offline touchpoints, external influences, or cross-device usage so find different ways to track these
• Make sure your conversion tracking is on and accurate!
• Add a note to your Google Ads account when changing your model to ensure that you have a note of when and why your conversion figures may change.

Of course, you could use Google’s native software for all your Google Ads needs, but it doesn’t always give you everything you need. The good news is that there are plenty of alternative tools and software to increase productivity, extend functionality, and give you the best possible Google Ads performance.

What Google Ads software does

Google’s advertising platform lets advertisers bid on keywords, create ads including these keywords, and obtain a position on Google’s search results pages (SERPs). You only pay when someone clicks on your ad, hence the name pay-per-click (PPC).

Like with other PPC management platforms, the purpose of software is to remove the time-consuming, tedious jobs you don’t really have time for. Nobody is expected to search for every relevant keyword by hand, individually set negative keywords, or analyse every bid. That would be ridiculous. So there are tools available to automate and optimise the process.

One of the advantages of using a tool or software suite for Google Ads is being able to manage your campaigns in a way that suits your needs. For example, you might want to focus on click fraud, in which case there are specific tools for that. Or you might want an all-in-one advertising platform that integrates with ad publishers like Facebook Ads or Microsoft Ads (like Adzooma for example).

Now you know what Google Ads software can do for your campaigns, it’s time to look at 10 of the best tools available.

1. Adzooma

Cost: Free

Good for: Campaign creation, bid management, one-click reporting, budget optimisation

In the words of Adrian Blockus, Head of Channel Partnerships at Google UK & Ireland,

“Adzooma has demonstrated the product knowledge, technical expertise and drive to help their customers build online success through Google Ads.”

Setting up campaigns is a breeze in the Adzooma platform, giving you time to work through the insightful recommendations in its Opportunity Engine, optimise your budget, and manage multiple advertising accounts in one screen.

What’s more, Adzooma being free gives businesses the chance to reach more customers and build an online presence that will continue to bring them more success. It’s the smarter choice for Google Ads software

2. SEMrush

Cost: Limited features for free; paid plans start from £99.95 a month

Good for: Keyword research, bulk analysis, CPC data analysis, competitor research

SEMrush is best known for its powerful SEO features but the software suite excels in PPC management, with features like:

• PLA Research (Product Listing Ads research)
• CPC Map (A world map of different costs per click)
• Ad Builder
• Keyword gap analysis
• Position Tracking

There’s a lot you can do in SEMrush to optimise your campaigns. You can analyse your сompetitors’ budgets and keywords to spot gaps, monitor ad copy and landing pages for possible improvements, and localise your ad campaigns to potentially boost your ROI.

3. SpyFu

Cost: Plans start from $39 a month

Good for: Keyword tracking, negative match recommendations, competitor research, spying tool

Yes, you read that last feature correctly. SpyFu gets its name from the ability to “spy” on your competitors (legitimately of course). Its Competitor Keyword Spy Tool lets you search for a competitor, download their keywords and see how many clicks they get and how much they pay for their keywords. By knowing what they’re doing, it could help you make better decisions or emulate their success.

Besides the Google Ads espionage, there are more generalised features like the AdWords Advisor that analyses the bidding history of your competitors and recommends profitable keywords you don’t have in your ad groups. There’s also a negative keyword match tool to save your budget for keywords that aren’t duplicates.

4. Answer The Public

Cost: Limited features for free; paid plans start from $99 a month

Good for: Finding questions to answer, untapped keywords, opportunities to convert

With Answer The Public, you get instant search insights straight from Google. People ask Google millions of questions a day and with a tool like this, you could answer them with your PPC ad. While this isn’t specifically a Google Ads tool, it’s a great resource for ad inspiration.

20% of the 3 billion Google searches conducted every day have never been seen before. That’s 600 million searches to tap into for great opportunities to convert.

5. PPC Protect

Cost: Plans start $50 per month

Good for: Click fraud protection, white label reporting, ads optimisation

One thing to look out for is click fraud: the fraudulent clicking of PPC ads to run up charges for advertisers and illegally waste their ad spend. Services like PPC Protect can protect your clicks from these fraudulent activities using “industry specific fraud prevention algorithms” and improve your campaign performance at the same time.

6. ClickCease

Cost: Plans start £12 per month

Good for: Click fraud protection, white label reporting, ads optimisation

ClickCease offers the same type of service as PPC Protect but there are subtle differences. Firstly, the pricing plans for ClickCease are cheaper on the lower end, while offering 24/7 monitoring, conversion analytics, and bot detection.

ClickCease also blocks click farms and finds out who is bidding on your keywords. You can see their ad copy and track their position daily, allowing you to improve your ads accordingly and blow them out of the water.

7. Dashword

Cost: Plans start from $29 a month and range to $99.

Good for: Producing copy that ranks

Dashword helps writers produce content that ranks with this keyword tool.

The software uses self-built ML models to determine relevance based on data from the top 30 Google results of any given keyword. It then assigns a score to each topic and you can evaluate competitors’ content as well. A worthy addition to any SEO tool kit.

Dashword helps you write better content too. You’ll receive a list of all the important topics that should be included in your content, get instant quality feedback and discover how your content compares to the top rankings.

8. Google Ads Editor

Cost: Free

Good for: Ad creation, bulk editing, performance tracking

The immediate bonus of this application is the fact it’s free to download. That makes it essential for beginners who might not have the budget for paid software. Google Ads Editor also lets you work offline and make bulk changes, which helps those with larger accounts.

In many ways, the Editor is the gateway to deeper analysis. Being a Google product, there are easy ways to integrate it with Google Sheets such as exporting account data to CSV. And you can also track KPIs and other important metrics, like click-through rate (CTR), costs, position, and conversions.

9. Keyword Planner

Cost: Free

Good for: Keyword research, trend analysis, bid estimates

Another free Google tool, Keyword Planner does exactly what it suggests – finds the perfect keywords to target in your ads and helps you plan out your bidding strategy. It does this by giving you bid estimates for every keyword, so you can test it against your budget. You can also search for terms related to your business by using the keyword research tool.

But one of the most underrated parts of the Google Keyword Planner is the ability to see how keyword searches have changed over time. Trends can make or break a Google Ads campaign so things like this are important.

10. Google Analytics

Cost: Free

Good for: Conversion tracking, custom reporting, demographic data

Google Analytics is an essential part of the Google Ads funnel in that it shows how effective your ads are. Once someone has clicked, you can track where they go on your site and how they engage with your landing pages. Whatever your goals are, you can track conversions and make custom reports to show what needs to improve and what’s going well.

You can also analyse data like the demographics of people interacting with your ads and consider tailoring certain ads for certain demographics.

Additional resources

With all this knowledge of the best software for Google Ads, you’ll need some resources to go with them. Below is a list of tips and advice on how to get the most out of your ads.

• 10 Proven Tips For Writing Kickass Google Ads
• What If Team Rocket Used Google Ads To Take Over The Pokémon World?
• A Beginner’s Guide To Negative Keywords On Google Ads
• How To Create A Customer List For Customer Match In Google Ads
• Agony Aunt: How Much Does It Cost To Run Google Ads?
• Why You Should Use Time-Limiting & Geotargeting Google Ads
• How To Use Google Ads Keyword Match Types & Succeed Like A Pro

The reach and popularity of Google Ads makes it the obvious first choice for anyone using PPC. With the tips provided and all the different types of software, you’ll soon discover the best way to optimise your Google Ads campaign.

Fortunately, there are no gargantuan marshmallow men or benevolent sorcerers in digital marketing but there are two opposing disciplines that really should work together more: PPC & SEO. Why? Because they have the same interests at heart and they share SERPs together, which means they offer each other insights to help improve performance.

But the divide still exists so in this article, I will look at why you should “cross the streams” and integrate both PPC and SEO into your strategy as a combined effort rather than two disparate sections.

Plus, as our brand new partnership with Hike SEO allows you to optimise your PPC and SEO performance simultaneously, there’s no better time to tell you all about it.

Here’s everything you need to know.

Note: if paid ads aren’t effective for your strategy, don’t use them. This is only for businesses who use both as part of a wider marketing strategy.

The Adzooma and Hike SEO partnership

Yup, you got it.

Adzooma is partnering with Hike SEO – a software that helps businesses increase their visibility on search engines such as Google – to provide our customers with more value than ever before.

Like Adzooma, Hike was designed to make online advertising quicker and easier than ever before. Their SEO platform is simple and easy to use, with each part providing step-by-step recommendations that anyone in your business can implement. They don’t even need to know SEO.

Both of our platforms were built with similar intentions. Where we created a solution we couldn’t find anywhere else on the market, Hike noticed a lot of small businesses were at a loss with SEO. So, it only makes sense for us to come together and offer double the expertise.

To celebrate this partnership, Hike SEO is offering Adzooma users 50% off their first month’s subscription. Not only can you boost your organic visibility in less time, but you can implement these strategies for half the original price.

Get 50% Off Today

Primer: what is SEO and what is PPC?

This wouldn’t be a digital marketing article without some brief definitions.

SEO stands for search engine optimisation and describes the maintenance of websites with the purpose of improving their visibility on search engines.

PPC stands for pay-per-click and describes an online advertising model where advertisers pay publishers for every click their ads receive.

The main difference between the two is SEO is a free or “organic” way of website promotion while PPC is a paid version.

Keyword research is key

Keywords are the lifeblood of SEO and PPC and therefore keyword research is essential for both. Without it, you’re wasting time and money with nothing to show for it.

The methods and applications of keyword research may differ between the two disciplines but they offer each other insights into what people search for and what people click on.

Using the Hike SEO platform, you can find the keywords your customers are searching for on Google without worrying about external tools. The platform even gives each phrase a priority score to help you identify the most achievable keywords, as well as showing the top searches in your industry. It’s a win-win.

Intent is a spectrum

People search for things for a reason; they intend to find something whether that’s opening hours for a shop or the latest football scores. But one thing PPC and SEO share is a more granular approach to matching intent. Broad keywords have the biggest scope but the worst return on investment (ROI) overall as they have the most competition.

In both PPC and SEO, it’s about finding the more niche intent and balance the outlay with the potential return, in the case of PPC. For SEO, you’re aiming for the right blend of search volume, keyword difficulty, and trend analysis.

PPC data that can help SEO

Digital marketing is useless without data analysis. But often, different channels rely solely on their own form of data: SEO sticks with organic data, PPC with paid data. That seems counterintuitive. Just because they’re different, doesn’t mean they can’t work together in finding opportunities for each other. After all, they share the same SERPs.

Here are some reasons why PPC campaign data can be an effective source for SEO analysis:

1. High-performing keywords offer an insight into what people engage with the most. If click-related metrics are high, they may be more likely to click organic links for the same or similar keywords. From there, you can decide the intent and type of page you want to create, if the volume and competition is right.
2. Given how paid ads are displayed, most users know to avoid them unless they want to click them. And if they do, the intent is to browse and potentially convert. That leads to longer sessions and higher dwell times which, in turn, work positively for sites in the long term. Finding the pages that perform best through paid referrals could lead to important SEO insights for future content.
3. Appearing in the SERPS with a paid ad and an organic listing is like hitting the jackpot, hence our partnership with Hike SEO. It might seem like a counterintuitive battle as you’re competing with yourself to a degree, but it needn’t be that way. A little competition never hurt anyone, right? So use it as a test – pretend the paid ad is a competitor and see how well it does against a piece of content. If it outperforms, dig deeper and find some potential reasons. If not, perhaps there’s some room for improvement for your ad. It’s all about testing.
4. Bidding on competitor keywords is commonplace now. But what if you wrote about your competitor and ended up ranking for one of their branded keywords? Assessing the performance of targeted ads that mention your competitor could give vital information if you choose to go down that route organically.

SEO data that can help PPC

Here are some reasons why PPC campaign data can be an effective source for SEO analysis:

1. As Sergey Grybniak mentioned in his article How to Combine SEO & PPC for More Powerful Results, long tail keywords can help with finding relevant negative keywords for your campaign. This could contradict #3 from the “PPC data that can help SEO” section but if ads aren’t relevant, you want to minimise wasted spend.
2. A good landing page will rank for high-performing keywords. Just as PPC keywords can influence SEO decisions, it can work the other way around if you’re looking for inspiration.
3. Use SEO as a testing ground for keyword ideas before taking the plunge with ad spend.

The tools to help SEO and PPC

There are a wide range of tools that can help both SEO and PPC efforts including:

SEMrush – As far as toolkits go, SEMrush is one of the industry leaders, offering both organic and paid tools. Its PPC Keyword Tool lets you plan and set up optimised Google Ads campaignS, with functionality to organise keywords, set negative keywords and export the campaign data for further analysis.

Ahrefs – The battle for supremacy is strong between SEMrush and Ahrefs and while the latter excels more with SEO, it also has a vastly improved PPC tool. You can research PPC keywords and find out what keywords your competitors are bidding on, alongside their CPC and potential traffic.

Serpstat – Described as a “growth hacking tool for SEO, PPC, and content marketing”, Serpstat offers a lot of the same features that SEMrush and Ahrefs have including position tracking, backlink analysis, keyword research, and competitor research. You can even try some of the features for free on the website.

Google Keyword Planner – Keyword Planner is primarily for PPC but the fact it’s free and offers hundreds of potential keywords makes it a fantastic tool for anyone who can’t afford paid tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs.

Google Trends – Forecasting trends can give you an edge in both SEO and PPC. With Google Trends, you can compare a campaign’s performance with potential seasonality issues if there’s been a drop in performance. You can also use it to find possible keywords with an upward trajectory and target those. The money/visibility isn’t always in the topics that everyone is talking about.

Excel/Google Sheets – With all the PPC and SEO data, how are you going to collect it and analyse it? With a spreadsheet. Whether you’re a Excel power user or prefer Google Sheets, there are hundreds of functions to use to analyse the data you have and make more efficient decisions.

Python – Python is the second most popular programming language behind JavaScript for a reason. It’s versatile, easy to learn, and perfect for small to large scale projects. And there are plenty of data analysis, AI, and machine learning capabilities. That’s perfect for any digital marketing strategy. I’ve previously written the ways you can use Python in your PPC campaigns and JC Chouinard wrote an impressive guide to Python for SEO on his website.

Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report – The SEO Performance Report will analyse your website and identify immediate actions you can take to improve your SEO. You’ll get an overall score out of 100 and then receive a detailed breakdown of your performance into 4 key areas: keyword performance, onsite SEO, page speed and backlinks. You can also compare your client’s performance with a competitor, showing how they compare with the competition.

If you don’t have the time or expertise to manage these tools or want to find out more about what’s out there, the Adzooma Marketplace has the answer. Designed to help businesses and agencies find their perfect match, it’s bursting with excellent digital marketing agencies to help improve your results.

Find out more by browsing our Marketplace today.

Brand awareness

One area that PPC and SEO share a commonality is brand awareness. The SERPs are billboards for your site and every appearance is an example of brand awareness.

Because of that it’s important to use both disciplines together. You don’t want to give a bad impression of your brand with poor practices. So from the PPC perspective, consider the ethics of how you advertise your brand and don’t mislead. The same can be said from an SEO perspective but also from a technical aspect – make sure all your on-page techniques are on point – optimised meta titles and descriptions, headings used correctly and in the right places, diversifying how content is presented (tabular data in tables, using bullet points, etc.).

It might sound like a lot, but it becomes second nature once you get the hang of it. And if you haven’t got time for that, Hike SEO is the number one platform for building a strong presence on Google and ensuring your content is getting in front of the right people.

Better yet, it has all the features you need to build a successful SEO strategy, make important changes and track your results. Paired with Adzooma helping to optimise your paid campaigns, what more could you need?

As long as both SEO and PPC are aligned, a customer’s brand experience will be a positive one.

Can SEO and PPC negatively affect each other?

Absolutely. Black hat tactics don’t thrive as much as they used to thanks to Google’s continuous efforts to combat spam and algorithmic trickery but they still exist. That includes attempts to game the system with keyword stuffing for example (yes, sites still do it, even if it isn’t as effective anymore).

With PPC, that can include tactics like click fraud to kill the competition. These kinds of negative acts are easily found and could cost your site.

So who ya gonna crawl?

I couldn’t resist the joke.

Even if you don’t use paid ads for your site, it’s imperative that you use SEO. The addition of PPC to your strategy should be complementary to the existing components, regardless of their differences. There’s a lot of similarities between the two and finding that balance is the difference between an okay strategy and a killer one.

Focus on your keyword research, how you can use each data channel to work with the other, and improve brand awareness without using underhanded tactics.

If you want to do all of that in less time, take a look at Hike SEO’s exclusive offer as part of our brand new partnership. All Adzooma users can benefit from 50% off their SEO services, making both SEO and PPC a walk in the park.

Boosting your ROI has never been easier.

Sign Up To Hike SEO Today

• How do you measure bounce rate?
• Is it an accurate metric?
• Should it be used in reports?

While we won’t be diving into those questions in this article, it is important to consider them as part of your strategy to ensure your reports give optimal data to your colleagues or clients. For this article, we’ll look at what makes a good bounce rate according to industry benchmarks and why, as well as that all-important definition.

What is bounce rate?

In her article “So Let’s Talk About Bounce Rate as a Ranking Factor”, Jess Peck asked colleagues on Twitter for their definitions of bounce rate and there were some critical nuances in the responses, relating to 3 general definitions:

• A bounce is when someone enters your site and immediately leaves
• A bounce is when a visitor only visits one page on your site
• A bounce is when someone enters a page and takes no action on that page

Jess goes in-depth into the pros and cons of each, which I won’t do, but Google’s official definition is the following:

“Bounce rate is single-page sessions divided by all sessions, or the percentage of all sessions on your site in which users viewed only a single page and triggered only a single request to the Analytics server. These single-page sessions have a session duration of 0 seconds since there are no subsequent hits after the first one that would let Analytics calculate the length of the session.”

There’s also a variation of that on the Tracking Code Overview page for Google Analytics:

“Bounce rate is referred to as a single-page session to your site, but is strictly defined as a single interaction request during a user session. For this reason, a bounce rate for a page is also affected by eCommerce transactions and event tracking requests. This is because these features co-exist with page tracking and, when they are triggered, they result in additional interaction requests to the Analytics servers.”

As for Jess, I will use the above definition, defining bounce rate as a single-page session where someone leaves immediately without any additional page interaction. Think of it like picking up a magazine in a newsagent after checking the cover and putting it straight back without opening.

How to measure bounce rate

Bounce rates are a percentage of the number of one-page sessions over the total number of visits. So if there were 100 visits to a page and 90 of those were one-page sessions, the bounce rate for that page would be:

90 one-page visits ÷ 100 total visits = 0.9 or 90% bounce rate

Is bounce rate an effective metric?

Now, there is a lot of debate on whether bounce rate is an effective traffic metric. The point of a bounce rate is to track site engagement—are people accessing multiple pages on a site as part of their site visit. That’s where pages per session would come in as an additional metric.

But bounce rate comes with an unintentional bias towards information sites. In an era of “zero-click Google searches”, the perception is that people search for queries and want immediate answers. Someone looking for a definition of bounce rate may come to this page, find a satisfactory answer and leave without reading the rest. Does that make my page “bad” or did I fulfil the requirement? Bounce rate can’t necessarily tell you.

That’s why bounce rate on as a sole metric isn’t as effective compared to it being part of related metrics, like pages per session and session duration, especially if a bounce counts as a single-session visit with no activity for 30 minutes. By that, you could read a page for 30 minutes and leave, which would be amazing but count as a bounce, which wouldn’t.

Average bounce rate by industry

I’ve gone into the philosophical aspects of bounce rate but in order to define a “good” bounce rate, we need to look at averages across different industries as every site is different. As the owner of a cooking supplies company, you can’t compare yourself to a news site as they serve different intents.

By comparing a site with another one within the industry, you can judge the bounce rate more efficiently.

A general range for all satisfactory bounce rates is between 30%-70%.

However, finding accurate benchmarks is difficult due to the age and quantity of studies trying to find them. There are also different segments used for benchmarks such as device type, channel, and website type. For the purposes of this article, I will be listing the two more commonly cited benchmark studies so you have a range to compare your bounce rates.

Note: as there aren’t any additional statistics such as variance to go with these averages, don’t treat them as hard-and-fast rules.

CustomMediaLabs

• 20% – 45% for e-commerce and retail websites
• 25% – 55% for B2B websites
• 30% – 55% for lead generation websites
• 35% – 60% for non-eCommerce content websites
• 60% – 90% for landing pages
• 65% – 90% for dictionaries, portals, blogs and generally websites that revolve around news and events

Kissmetrics [link to PDF]

• 10%–30% for service sites – self service or FAQ sites
• 10%–30% for portals such as MSN, Yahoo Groups, etc.
• 20%–40% for retail sites driving targeted traffic
• 30%–50% for lead generation – services for sale
• 40%–60% for content websites with high search visibility
• 70%–90% for simple landing pages with one call-to-action such as “add to cart”

What to do when your bounce rate is “too high”

Now that you have a range to work with, it’s time to measure yourself amongst your industry peers. There’s always room for improvement but if you’re in the middle, improving bounce rate isn’t a high priority. The issue comes when you’re way over the upper limit—it could be a sign of underlying problems.

Here are 3 diagnostic techniques to find the root cause:

1. Run a heatmap

A heatmap is a cool (pardon the pun) way of observing user behaviour on a site by showing the most commonly visited sections of a page with a warm/cool spectrum:

• The most visited sections are redder or warmer
• The least visited sections are bluer or cooler

By running a heatmap, you will be able to use the warm/cool spectrum to see which parts of the page got the most attention, and identify potential underlying issues that your page might have.

Read: 10 Free CRO Tools To Use In 2020

2. Try split testing

A/B testing, also known as split testing, is the process of conducting testing in a bid to lower and improve your conversions, which go hand-in-hand with bounce rate.

The basic idea here is that you publish two versions of a page, with slightly different variations, and analyse the differences in your chosen metrics (in this case, the bounce rate). This can indicate what might be lacking that is impacting your bounce rate.

3. Improve page speed

Page speed is a big indicator that you might have issues; a slow and unresponsive page is not going to see many page conversions, and will lead to a high bounce rate. There are a few things you can do to improve your page speed, and some of the best ways include reducing redirects, enabling compression, improving your server response time, and optimizing any images you might have.

You can use Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report to test the speed of your website and you’ll receive a list of actions you can take to prevent anything slowing your website down.

Just login to your Adzooma account and under Reports at the top, click SEO Performance Report to get started. If you’re not an Adzooma user, you can sign up for free here and access this feature.

Further resources

• 11 Reasons Your Website Can Have a High Bounce Rate
• Bounce Rate: Everything You Want to Know and More
• Predicting bounce rates in sponsored search advertisements
• Session Duration, Avg
• How to Optimise Your Site with Google Analytics Data
• 6 Tips To Create The Best Landing Page

Conclusion

There is a lot to think about when it comes to bounce rate. But once you’ve settled on a definition and used it with other meaningful metrics as part of your reporting and overall strategy, it can become more useful.

A helpful way to explain SEO is by splitting it into two parts: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

The two categories underpin the process of optimising content for users and search engines but they cover different techniques. In this article, I will discuss what they are and how to optimise for them for your SEO strategy.

What is on-page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to collective actions you take on a website to improve your ranking on the SERPs (search engine results pages). It includes both the quality of your content and the technical aspects.

Some examples of on-page SEO features include:

• Headings tags (H1, H2, H3, H4 etc.)
• Keyword research
• Meta titles and meta description
• Fixing broken links
• Redirects
• Page speed
• Determining a website’s “authority” (known as “domain authority” or “domain rating”)
• Schema markup

Many of these features are considered ranking factors by search engines and use them as part of their search algorithms.

You can use Adzooma’s SEO Performance Report to receive a detailed breakdown of your onsite SEO. For every recommendation, you’ll find out exactly why it’s been suggested, what it does and how you can implement the change straight away.

This basic SEO Performance report is free for all Adzooma users to access. If you’re not an Adzooma user, you can sign up for free here to be able to access this feature. You can also find out more of the fantastic features of the SEO Performance Report here.

What is off-page SEO?

Off-page SEO focuses on factors outside your website to influence your rankings on the SERPs. The aim is for the search engine and users to perceive your site as relevant, trustworthy, and popular.

Backlinks are a crucial part of making that happen and a fundamental feature of off-page SEO. That is because Google’s search algorithms use backlinks as units to measure a page’s authority.

This plays into a wider concept known as “domain authority” which was popularised by marketing firm Moz.

But apart from backlinks, other features that boost off-page SEO include:

• Having an optimised Google My Business profile
• Positive reviews on your Google My Business profile
• Brand mentions – both linked and unlinked
• NAP citations – in other words, online mentions that cite your Name, Address, and Phone
• To a lesser extent, forum and blog commenting (note: this should not be considered a strategy and commenting has varying levels of success for SEO or traffic acquisition)

Unlike on-page SEO, off-page SEO is mostly out of your control, which makes it harder to earn. However, putting in the effort to enhance your off-page SEO – particularly through link building – is worth every minute of your time if done efficiently.

How to optimise on-page and off-page SEO

Now you have an idea of what on-page and off-page SEO is, it’s time to see how you can optimise them for your site.

1. Write authoritative content that serves the user

People need relevant and informative content when they complete a search. How Google and other search engines determine that relevance is a journey through decades of machine learning and hundreds of ranking factors.

Keeping your content useful and up-to-date establishes your brand as a trustworthy authority on related topics and increases relevant traffic to your site.

Advice: One thing to keep in mind is E-A-T. We’ve covered it in our beginner’s guide to SEO but E-A-T stands for expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness and it describes criteria that Google’s Quality Raters follow in their guidelines. When they assess content they look at:

• The expertise of the writer
• The authoritativeness of the writer, the content, and the website
• The trustworthiness of the writer, the content, and the website
• Topic relevance

If you can demonstrate all of these criteria well, your content will rank higher than than pages that don’t.

2. Use purposeful meta titles and descriptions

Meta titles often mirror the main heading of a page (also known as the H1) but that isn’t always the case. Optimising your meta titles and descriptions for your users will help improve your click-through rate (CTR).

There are also space limits for meta titles and descriptions. For titles, keep them under 60 characters or up to 600 pixels in width and for descriptions, between 120–160 characters or up to 900 pixels.

Advice: Split up your copy using subheadings to make it more user-friendly. It can also help with click-through rates as Google can render headings as site links on the SERPs. It’s one of the easiest and most helpful ways to improve your on-page SEO.

3. Improve the site speed

If your web pages take a long time to load, that can affect your organic visibility as page speed is a ranking factor and very important for on-page SEO.

According to Kissmetrics, 47% of people expect a loading time of two seconds or less for the websites they visit. If a site takes more than three seconds to load, 40% of consumers will leave the site.

Advice: Get a detailed analysis of how fast your site loads using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. Then improve your site speed by:

• Hosting your site on a better server
• Keeping image/JavaScript/CSS file sizes small
• Load important files first and defer everything else so reduce load time
• Consider investing in a web developer to handle these amendments

We also have a handy guide on optimising your site speed which you should read.

4. Follow best practice where necessary

Whether it’s on-page or off-page SEO, best practices are established techniques that marketers use to improve organic visibility and user experience. But not all best practices need to be followed to the letter.

Noted SEO professional and managing director, Helen Pollitt, suggested potential issues with best practice in place of pragmatic decisions:

Best practice should be treated like training wheels […] But like any training wheels, at some point, they need to be removed so you can ride over more rocky terrain and accelerate. Use it as a guide in your early days but if you have called yourself an SEO for more than a year it would be worth re-evaluating what you “know” about SEO and seek to prove your knowledge with results.

Advice: Follow best practice where necessary and avoid any questionable tactics to gain an edge. For example, you don’t have to fill your pixel width limit for titles for the sake of it as that will lead to keyword stuffing.

5. Use internal linking

An underrated element of on-page SEO is internal linking.

Internal linking connects pages from the same domain together with common topics and relevant anchor text. They make your site easier to navigate and also allow search engines to understand your website and index your pages more efficiently.

It can also help to pass link equity to other pages. Link equity is the concept of an external link from another domain passing authority to your site. Think of it like someone pouring champagne onto the top of a champagne tower.

Advice: Content pillars are a great way to promote internal linking. They are pages that define a broad term (e.g. Google Ads) and have different related pages feeding off them. Doing this will help web crawlers like Googlebot to crawl through your site regularly and without hiccups and index your pages, ready for people to find them. The more relevant it is, the more likely your site is to pop up in a search.

6. Use external linking

External links show authority when you’re writing content. Remember when you had to write school essays and you had to reference other writers or books? External linking works in the same way.

You need to back up your claims with evidence and search engines use those references as part of E-A-T. (Also important to note: E-A-T is not a ranking factor.)

Advice: Link out to relevant pages that provide contextual proof but make sure they don’t cover exactly what you’re writing about. For example, linking out to an external page that discussed how to optimise on-page and off-page SEO in this article, would undermine my content.

If you reference any statistics or take quotes from people, link to the original sources otherwise people might think you made them up. George Washington once said that and 78% of people didn’t know that.

Linkology is a link building service who will help you increase your organic rankings – check them out, here.

7. Use adequate meta descriptions

These are concise descriptions that supplement your title tags, summarise your content and give users a reason to read the content on your site instead of other sites.

The meta description is displayed below the URL and meta title and gives users an idea of what to expect on a page before they click on it.

Google rewrite meta descriptions if they think their version serves the user better so be prepared for that. But think of that as a reason to write better descriptions if it happens frequently. It can also help to use your targeted keyword in your description but this isn’t a hard-and-fast rule so use your judgement.

8. Build an outreach strategy

Outreaching is the act of gaining backlinks for a site in order to build authority, ranking, and traffic to it. But it can be challenging.

In the words of my colleague, Amber Dawson:

Outreaching is an uphill battle from the start: you can see the summit and the path that will take you there, you just need to put the graft in. The number one obstacle with outreaching is that 90% of the time you’re a cold-caller – they’re not interested, and it’s up to you to change their mind. Whoever you’re contacting is likely super busy and has little time for helping someone out for no gain. It’s all about showing them what’s in it for them straight away.

But the benefits are significant. So rather than sending random cold emails, create a list of sites you’d want to be featured on, analyse their own authority and traffic estimates to see if it’s worthwhile (you can use a tool like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Majestic for this), and send them emails explaining the benefits for them by linking to you.

Building relationships with site owners and journalists is important to make this work so be personable but not forceful in your approach.

9. Use social media as an off-page SEO factor

As I said above, using forums or blog comments sections aren’t a feasible strategy for link building and they haven’t been for a very long time. But they can still build traffic and some see social media as a form of off-page SEO.

Reddit is a great place to try this as a lot of threads on subreddits are from people looking for answers. And if you can offer those answers (depending on the rules on self-promotion), you’re almost guaranteed to gain clicks.

While social media doesn’t have an effect on ranking, it is still a traffic source, and can help with brand awareness. We have guides on how to create a social media strategy, when to post, and social media marketing tips if you want to know more.

Conclusion

On-page and off-page SEO are the lifelines of your website. They ensure the success of your site in terms of attracting high-quality traffic. For instance, if you are in the business of selling limited-edition comic books, you want more people interested in buying limited-edition comic books.

You want people to find your page on search engines easily and to feel confident visiting and trusting your website. That trust and interaction transfer into them buying your product and even spread the word by sharing links to your page, which further improves your rankings and so on.

Growing your consumer base through efficient SEO is a cost-effective way to boost sales and increase your profits. Adopt these useful tips on how to boost your SEO and watch your business thrive.

In this list, I will look at 8 of the best SEO agencies in 2020 (both specialist SEO agencies and digital marketing agencies that offer SEO services), where they are, and what they offer.

What does an SEO agency do?

An SEO agency provides services with the goal to help clients improve their online visibility. These services include:

• On-page SEO (technical improvements such as internal linking, fixing broken links, site architecture, optimised meta titles and descriptions)
• Off-page SEO (mostly link building)
• Site audits
• Keyword research

The better optimised your site, the better chance you have to rank on the first page of the SERPs for targeted keywords.

Read our article on whether you need a SEO agency or consultant for further consideration.

1. Boom Online Marketing

Location: Nottingham, UK

Boom is a team of digital marketing experts, providing SEO, PPC management, social media marketing and web development. Founded in 2010, the teamwork with transparency and trust at the forefront of their practices.

Boom are also Google Premier Partners and have won awards for technical innovation and creativity. They pride themselves on having a deep technical knowledge and amazing creativity to support their clients with all aspects of digital marketing.

Previous clients: Yahoo!, Inc., and The Huffington Post.

2. Hike

Location: Lutterworth, UK

Trusted by more than 4,000 businesses, Hike SEO helps get businesses found on Google, without the need for SEO training or to hire an expert. It’s an easy to use platform that provides a personalised step-by-step instructions that tells you precisely what SEO actions to do to help you climb the search engine rankings.

Successful SEO requires building the right strategy – Hike walks you through creating the perfect strategy that will target and drive your ideal customers to your website.

Hike tracks your SEO performance so you can see what’s working and what needs more focus on. They also track your visibility in Google, your traffic levels and your recent backlink acquisitions giving you easy-to-understand, actionable insights.

Previous clients: Streamwork Marketing, Systemagic, The Bright Click, EyeMedia Studios

3. Verb

Location: Liverpool, UK

Verb is a marketing, web development and design agency based in Liverpool city centre and have become one of the fasted growing agencies in the UK. Verb specialises in B2B marketing and digital lead generation, mainly operating within professional services, including:

• Manufacturing
• Construction
• Legal
• Finance
• Digital
• Health & pharmaceutical

Their SEO and PPC team work to ensure your website is fully optimised to get you ranking highly on search engines. Verb uses Google Analytics to research your client’s behaviours, looking for niche terms and building more landing pages.

Verb offers a consultation and advice for your SEO, to help deliver a meaningful and relevant campaign for your customers, to ensure that the campaign will generate more revenue and raise the profile of your business.

Previous clients: Gillette, NHS, Hilton, BMW, Graham

4. Digital Orks Tech

Location: Dubai, UAE

Digital Orks is a digital marketing agency that sets itself apart from other marketing agencies by making sweet music with your online presence. They want to make your company grow digitally, by creating a digital marketing strategy in a way that it generates and ultimately turns into revenue.

As the best SEO company in Dubai, they provide exceptional SEO services to help you achieve your goals for your online marketing strategy and lead generation. They will provide:

• Search engine guidelines
• Guaranteed results
• Detailed worksheets
• Custom pricing

Digital Orks offer a wide range of digital marketing services including CRO, PPC and social media that work together to help you reach the objectives of your organisation.

Previous clients: Nikon Middle East, Emirates, Veolia Middle East, Basmaty

5. Local Marketing

Location: Leicestershire, UK

Local Marketing guides your business to become the local expert and business of choice through SEO and social media management. Their experts will help small businesses optimise their digital marketing and ensure your website is found by your customers through local search.

Their local SEO services will help your business to:

• Rise through the search engine rankings
• Improve your Google Map pack listing
• Unique blog posts are written for your website
• Rank locally for your keywords

Their team of SEO experts will support your business along the way, working closely with you to understand your business and knowing who your ideal clients are. Local Marketing will work closely with you to ensure your website is as strong as it can be.

Previous clients: Mortgage Experts Online, Science Intervention Centre, Bitex Home

6. Web Consulting Agency

Location: Dublin, Ireland

Web Consulting Agency are an award-winning digital marketing agency focused on internet marketing and developing the best websites and mobile applications through 1-1 consulting services.

They are experts on helping your business grow through organic SEO white hat methods and influencer marketing whilst focusing on deriving the best value through social media platforms.

Their talented team have worked in a range of industries including luxury retail, schools and dispensaries – their white hat techniques show results from just 6 weeks.

Previous clients: Upon request

7. Liberty

Location: Cardiff, Wales

The team at Liberty have been helping businesses big and small make a splash since 2008. They put this down to their transparency, expertise and proven track record for getting results.

Liberty’s team of SEO experts will help your brand climb search rankings, increase site traffic, engage visitors and boots its bottom line.

The end product for your business is:

• More people finding your brand in the search engines
• More people visiting your content
• More people contributing to your business goals.

Previous clients: Pizza Express, Happy Beds, Love Pork

8. Got Legs Digital

Location: London, UK

Got Legs Digital is a Growth Marketing Automation agency based in London. They are known for marketing automation into businesses to help free up their time, increase their profits and better understand their customers.

With the goal of helping businesses grow and increase their online visibility, search ranking and site traffic, Got Legs Digital provides specialist SEO services for start-ups, property and fintech companies looking to increase revenue.

Got Legs Digital focuses their attention on the entire customer journey and believe in an omnichannel marketing approach; everything they do is focused on data and performance.

Previous clients: American Express, Blackstone, Sky Line, Cosmico

Conclusion

So there you have it – 8 of the best SEO agencies of 2020. While SEO can take a lot of effort to get right, it’s essential to any business owner wanting an online presence. If you can afford to implement SEO in-house, go for it.

But know that there are some incredible SEO agencies out there ready to give your business the boost it needs and keep your sites technically sound in the process.

Unless you read the copy that comes before “click here”, you’d have no idea where you’ll be taken when you click there. As a call-to-action (or CTA), there are better alternatives.

In this article, I will look at what CTAs are and ways to improve under-performing ones.

What is a CTA?

Calls-to-action (CTAs) are special types of anchor text links that direct visitors to take a desired action on your page. They can be as simple as a text link like this:

Try Adzooma for free today.

Or take the form of a button like this:

As the name suggests, a CTA calls the visitor to perform an action. But not all CTAs are the same. Here are some brief examples of what you might want from a CTA:

• Submitting an email sign up form
• Registering for an event
• Downloading content
• Complete an order
• Sending a user to a lead capture page
• Push a user further down the conversion funnel

But not all CTAs work as well as they should and it takes time and tweaking to get them right. So let’s look at what to avoid in creating CTAs and how to improve their performance.

1. Don’t make your CTA’s difficult to read

If people can’t read your CTA, how can you expect them to click it? You need them to be accessible to all users or you run the risk of alienating a large number of potential customers.

Do consider accessibility and colour contrasts

According to AFB, 3.5% of the world’s population live with vision impairment (that’s about 253 million people). Accessibility is important to them as well as millions of people with hearing impairments and other disabilities that would affect their ability to engage with online content.

So make sure the colour of your anchor link text doesn’t clash with your button or background colour. Don’t prevent it from being readable for a screen reader. And if you use images, don’t forget to add keyword-rich alt text.

2. Don’t use complex language

Would you click on a CTA that says “Implement Posthaste!”? I know I wouldn’t. People won’t engage with a CTA they can’t understand. The same can be said for paid ads. Your headline is a CTA and you need to use your character limit effectively.

Do keep your CTA snappy and contextual

Consider plain language. It’s a way of writing that allows your audience to understand your words without further explanation. Plain language mixed with short and contextual words leaves no room for ambiguity (or, in plain language, confusion).

It’s also important to watch out for spelling mistakes. There are tools, like Adzooma’s Opportunity Engine, that can spot errors you may have overlooked from staring at the same words for too long.

3. Don’t over or undersell

Effective CTAs are all about balance. You don’t want to harass a user but you also want them to click. Aiming for either side of the spectrum ends up with the same result: no click.

Do give exactly what the visitor wants

Think about a CTA you clicked, what the anchor text was, and the reason why you click it. Examples that work for me include:

• Sign up
• Try for free
• Download
• Discover more
• Join today
• Our work
• Claim your free X

A lot of CTAs depends on the strength of actionable copy but brand awareness can go a long way. For example, Netflix CTAs would perform better than a video streaming startup on reputation alone.

4. Don’t fill your page with CTAs

Imagine a page full of CTAs that all read ‘click here’. You’d get confused about what you were clicking and why. Now picture a page full of different CTAs, possibly in different colours and different text. It’d be a sensory overload. And don’t forget mobile devices – it’s not a good idea to fill a small screen with loads of buttons.

Do place your CTAs strategically

Less is more when it comes to CTAs. The more you use, the more it appears you just want clicks rather than providing users with helpful information. Let your copy do the heavy work so the CTA can feel like a natural progression through the funnel.

5. Don’t link them to your home page

Avoid linking your CTAs to your home page. Whilst there are exceptions (e.g. a brand awareness for social media campaigns), your aim should be to send visitors to landing pages that can convert quickly. If users start on the home page, they may browse different pages and not the one you want them to visit.

Do link them to purposeful landing pages

If you want visitors to fill a form for a free downloadable white paper, sending them to your home page to find it themselves will kill your conversion rate. That’s why you should create a bespoke landing page with purposeful copy and an effective CTA button/link.

Also, don’t default to using “Submit” for forms. It might seem strange as, if they’re filling a form, they should know why they’re submitting their details. But by using a phrase like “download your free eBook”, it will remind them why they’re filling the form and entice them more knowing what the end goal is.

6. Don’t overcomplicate the design

Do you need jQuery animation, CSS animation, and SVG gradients for a Download CTA? The answer is no. Again, less is more, and in many cases, you can get away with a simple text link.

Do keep your CTA lightweight

There’s nothing wrong with using JQuery, CSS, or SVGs but consider things like page load speed for the former and ease-of-use for the latter two. Of course, a single CTA won’t cause significant lag but if there are loading issues already, making your CTAs more lightweight can shave off a few seconds overall, especially if you’re only loading one library for the sake of one CTA. It’s recommended that pages display content in no more than 2-3 seconds before users begin to abandon sites. And if you use a button, think about your use of negative space–don’t cramp your text into a small space.

7. Don’t stick to the same formula for every CTA

“Click here” stopped being effective because it wasn’t meaningful and it was formulaic. The CTA examples above might not work for you, so it’s important to A/B test your CTAs.

Do use tools and split testing

There are a variety of CRO tools that can help assess the performance of CTAs, including split testing tools. Changeable factors include:

• CTA text
• Colours
• Whether to use a button or a text link
• Animation or no animation?
• CTA placement
• CTA size
• CTA shape

We have a great selection of 10 free CRO tools to try and test your CTAs.

Don’t struggle—do use Adzooma

CTAs are small in size but large in importance. They come in many forms and they’re the last port of call for a user – either they click on them and they don’t.

One way to enhance the performance of your CTAs and your associated landing pages is to use a platform like Adzooma. With the Opportunity Engine, you can work through a wide range of opportunities to improve your ads and pages including:

• Check Low Performing Landing Pages
• Improve Landing Page Mobile UX
• Fix Broken Link
• Fix Landing Page
• Add Site Links Extension

The tool use machine learning, your campaign data, and best practices to offer optimal suggestions.

Now, don’t read anymore—do try Adzooma for free today.