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Introduction to Digital Marketing: Understanding & Mastering the Digital Marketing Basics

Increasing Global Digital Population

It’s hard to imagine a world without the Internet.

Billions of people are going digital to search for information, shopping for groceries or do their banking. That’s why businesses should follow the suit and master the digital marketing basics.

However, you can’t expect to become a digital marketing expert overnight. The field is vast and involves several concepts necessary for establishing a solid online presence and meeting consumers in the digital realm.

In this introduction to digital marketing, we’ll help you understand all the modern marketing techniques it constitutes, why they’re essential for your business, and how to use them to your advantage.

Billions of people are connected worldwide via the internet. From searching for information to shopping for groceries or banking, the internet has become an essential part of our day-to-day lives.

In fact, as of April 2022, there are over 5 billion active Internet users. That is 63% of the global population!

What is Digital Marketing?

Very simply put, ‘digital marketing’ refers to all marketing efforts that take place on the Internet.

It involves promoting your products or services on digital channels such as via a website, social media, or email.

Digital marketing is also about leveraging consumer insights. It uses data to formulate marketing approaches targeted at specific market segments.

For example, checking the number of impressions of your blog posts lets you determine how many times visitors view the content. It also gives an idea of what type of topic appeals the most to viewers and tailors your content according to user behaviours.

The advantage of using data to sell online is that it allows companies to make calculated marketing decisions. Knowing who to target and where to sell online gives digital marketers the ability to estimate budget spending for a certain set of Return Of Investment (ROI) goals.

Whether it’s inbound marketing or digital marketing for clients, common KPIs for digital marketers include increasing brand awareness, lead generation and conversions across different digital marketing channels.

Digital Marketing Introduction: The Fundamentals

The role of digital marketing is to help brands gain online visibility, acquire leads, and turn leads into paying customers.

There are several digital marketing concepts that enable business to connect with prospects and attract a steady stream of customers.

Let’s dive in and explore each concept so you can start building an effective strategy!

What does a digital marketer do?

Digital marketers have different specializations, but they often work together as a team to make a campaign succeed with their ROIs. Some of the different departments include:

A design team to make the creative assets
A copywriting team to write the ads
A performance marketing team to create and manage paid ads

To give you a better understanding, you may refer to the diagram down. The chart shows you the various aspects influencing a website and or mobile app, plus the array of digital solutions a digital marketing agency could offer to improve those aspects.

Introduction To Digital Marketing | 2Stallions — A digital marketing agency offers specialised services for online marketing

For example, a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Manager is responsible for overseeing the performance of websites and web pages. The manager optimizes websites by conducting regular website audits to identify technical issues to be fixed. He or she will also do regular keyword research to rank the site for certain keywords, so as to boost the position of a website (ranking) on Google’s search results page.

On the other hand, a content marketer is in charge of content marketing. He or she focuses on content development and content distribution. Examples of content creation include writing articles and electronic direct mails (EDMs) that represent a brand’s story to connect and engage with the target audience.

The content marketer often tracks web traffic using Google Analytics and also conducts keyword research in order to know the kind of content readers are looking for.

Performance marketers or advertisement specialists are also critical to many marketing campaigns. These are the people responsible for social media marketing (social media ads) and also search engine marketing (Google’s display ads).

Here are some examples of digital marketing elements that people specialise in:

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a low-cost marketing channel that can be used by any business, from small startups to large corporations. It has been proven effective in driving conversions, generating revenue and building a loyal customer base.

In a nutshell, email marketing is a type of direct mail marketing that provides information about products and services to potential customers. Its goal is to get people interested in your business’s product/service offerings so they will purchase them.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that focuses on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined audience.

The key objective of content marketing is to create both evergreen and timely assets that will serve as a foundation for your business’s growth.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing helps companies to reach customers by connecting with them on the platform through content and other promotional methods. It can also be used to develop brand awareness, increase customer engagement, and improve sales and lead generation.

The value of social media marketing can be seen in the fact that as of July 2022 there are now 4.7 billion global social media users.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is the process of promoting your business or website by paying for advertising on search engines like Google and Bing. It’s a digital marketing technique that helps businesses rank higher in organic search results.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a website or web page to improve its ranking in search engine results and thus increase traffic.

The first step in SEO is to create content that will attract users. The second step is to ensure that the content on your website or blog is accessible, easy to read, and relevant for users.

SEO can be used for a variety of purposes including increasing online visibility, driving traffic, making money from advertising on your site, boosting brand awareness, building authority and credibility with key influencers, and attracting new customers.

Digital Marketing Is A Crucial Part Of Any Business Strategy Now

Digital marketing is more in demand than ever.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses and individuals were forced online, triggering a digital transformation. As a result, the Internet is now being used at a rate never experienced before.

Companies with digital solutions can easily answer customers’ queries online and are better able to grow in this post-pandemic normal. Due to their digital transformation experiences, companies are now better equipped to move forward in a digital world.

Digital marketing is likely to be a critical part of any company’s business strategy in the future. It is also evident that digital marketing is crucial for any company to remain adaptable to any market situation. The firms that cannot adapt digitally are likely to be left behind.

Wrapping Up

Now that you have a better understanding of digital marketing, it is time for you to consider how your business can transform digitally too. If you’re interested in making a digital marketing campaign for yourself or need advice on digital marketing, contact us.

To stay updated about all things digital marketing, subscribe to our newsletter!

Orignal publication date: 11 May, 2020
Updated: 25 November, 2022

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Digital Marketing

7 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Increase Website Traffic

Quality website traffic is the lifeblood of every business with an online presence. Driving more traffic to your website is one of the key functions of most digital marketing initiatives, the argument being that once you’ve got them on your site they are exposed to what you’re selling and will, hopefully, make a purchase.

One of the most vital tools to help drive traffic in the right direction is Google Analytics, which comes packed with data! For the uninitiated, leveraging Google Analytics’ insights to boost traffic and search engine ranking can be tricky, but with the right understand and the right approach it can be done. Just remember that like most things in life, results aren’t going to be instantaneous – but they will be sustainable!

A Quick Note about Traffic

Website traffic can be divided into two basic types: organic and paid.

Organic traffic is what happens ‘naturally’; this is where your search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing strategies can really make a difference. Both these strategies can help lift your visibility online, making you easier to search for and findable.

Paid traffic, on the other hand, is the traffic generated from when you pop some funding into advertising to make sure that your links and posts appear in front of the people most likely to click through to your website site or landing page.

7 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Increase Website Traffic

1. Understand your Audience

Knowing your audience is the first and perhaps the easiest step to take to increase your website traffic. Luckily, Google Analytics has always been a big provider of information to help you form a solid picture of what your existing audience is interested in.

One of the best and most sustainable ways to build organic traffic is to make sure you know what they are searching for and generating relevant keywords from that information. The trick with keywords is to imagine what your target audience might be searching for when they go looking for your product or service. For example, if you sell hairdryers, your target audience would probably be searching for terms like ‘hairdryer’ or ‘best hairdryer’, they may also be searching for product-adjacent items like ‘curling irons’ or ‘heat protection hairspray’. The key is to understand what your audience is typing and working with the data. Google Analytics provides insights into how your audience finds you – their sources, if you will – and this includes information like keywords and search terms.

2. Identify Your Best Content & Optimize

One of the best things about Google Analytics is its ability to tell you what’s working on your website and what’s not. Using page and content reports, you can see exactly where your traffic is spending the most time on your website and where you’re losing their interest. Using this information you can identify your strongest content and pages and improve on areas where you’re weaker.

Another great aspect of Google Analytics is being able to see just how your website visitors are traversing through your site – you can see entry points and exits – and this should add another layer to your optimization strategy. If you’re seeing a lot of traffic come in on a handful of blog posts, then you know they’re catching people’s attention, but maybe you’re losing them on your ‘sign up’ or ‘contact us’ page and you’re not sure why. It might be something as simple as a broken ‘submit’ button, but it could also be that navigation is too difficult or your contact forms too complicated. Remember that most of us like to keep things simple.

3. Identify Potential New Markets

Google Analytics can show you where people are accessing your website from – what countries and cities. If you’re a small company with a local presence and you want to keep it that way, you can use this information to make sure you’re reaching your local audience by changing up your targeting strategy. On the other hand, you might be able to use this opportunity to expand to new markets in different cities or countries outside of your normal target zone. If you find a high demand from outside your zone, why not explore it?

4. Stay on top of Incoming Data

One of the great things about Google Analytics is that you can set it up to email reports to you to provide you with key highlights or detailed insights, depending on what you’re after. Getting this information delivered straight into your inbox can help you act more quickly on incoming data. If you’re getting highlights you’ll see drops and spikes and these will help give you an idea about how your site has done and whether you need to make any adjustments or tweaks.

5. Discover your Best Traffic Sources & Referrers

Website traffic sources can show you where your getting your website traffic from. As we mentioned, it helps you identify the keywords that people are using to find your site, but Google Analytics can also help you figure out where your traffic is originating – are your organic tactics working? Are your paid campaigns doing their work? What are your best referrer sites? Referrers are sites through which your audience is finding their way to your website – this could include social media, affiliate links, or SEO backlinks. It’s important to know where your audience is coming from you so you can nurture those sources to make sure you maintain that traffic stream.

6. Be Mobile-First

Google Analytics can show you what devices are being used to access your site. Mobile-centric is on the rise, and all websites and online platforms need to put their best foot forward to allow people to visit them on their mobile devices. In fact, mobile-friendliness is one of the main factors in increasing SEO ranking. Using Google Analytics will let you keep an eye on just how mobile-friendly people are finding your site and whether visitor behaviour changes depending on their activity on mobile.

7. Don’t Focus on a Single Metric

This is a key point. Google Analytics offers a whole host of different kinds of data and it can be easy to get lost or to focus on just one data point, but it’s important to use context to get the most out of your data. Don’t fall into the trap of the single metric, make sure you take a look at the bigger picture as well to work up a proper data profile to give you the strongest ability to drive traffic to your website.

Final Thoughts

Getting quality website traffic can be tricky if you don’t know where to start. Using Google Analytics can definitely help you identify your site’s strengths and weaknesses and help you find out where your current traffic is coming from. Making the most of the data you’re getting is important to any good digital marketing strategy.

If you’re not sure where to start, or you’d like to step up your data-driven digital marketing, we’re 2stallions(a full-service digital marketing agency) here to help you! Get in touch and we’ll talk!

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Search Engine Marketing

What Is Google Analytics 4?

For many businesses, Google Analytics has been the go-to source for data insights into customer behaviour and preferences. It has allowed companies to build better customer experiences and improve their digital customer journeys. Google launched the latest update of the favoured analytics platform, dubbed Google Analytics 4, on the 14th October 2020.

The new update includes a host of new powerful features and is built around machine learning. THis means what it provides improved monitoring and tracking methods for key data trends, and has the ability to actively alert marketers and other interested parties about opportunities. Google explains that Analytics 4 provides customer-cetnric metrics as opposed to data split across device or platform.

8 Google Analytics 4 Feature Highlights:

Analytics 4 is accessible from the current Google Analytics account.
Removes reliance on cookies to track performance.
Provides more detailed data control and access to predictive and customer lifecycle metrics.
No more need to use Google Tag Manager or code snippets to track events.
Integrates AI.
Improves cross-device tracking and measurement
Deepens integration between Google Ads and search efforts.
Divides reports into life cycle, user, events, explore and configure – moving away from the old setup of acquisiion, audience, behaviour, and conversion.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Google will be focussing on this new update, and will no longer be providing updates for older versions.

What do these changes really mean?

Google Analytics 4 uses advanced machine learning models to automatically alert marketers to significants trends in data. This will help anticipate customer behaviour, and predict possible actions customers may take. The combination of these predictive metrics and improved trend tracking will allow companies to track, measure, analyze and take action on consumer behaviour trends.

Essentially, Google Analytics 4 lets users create more targetted audiences, reach higher value customers and analyze the incoming data. All of which improves our insight into why some customers are likely to spend more than others and providing opportunities for action to keep optimizing.

How will this impact SEM efforts?

There is no doubt that Google Analytics 4 will impact search engine marketing (SEM) tactics and results. Marketers are going to have to wrap their heads around these new features and tools, and they are going to have to be quick about it. Understanding how the new features will impact the ability to generate web traffic, leads, and build good customer experiences, is going to be the first step to maximize the results gained by the new insights offered by the new Analytics platform.

SEM is going to have to adapt to changes in incoming data. Since its inception, Google Analytics has been the foundation of a strong SEM strategy, allowing marketers to make data-driven decisions and pivot to adapt to changes in the market, shifting trends, and results from segmentation testing.

With the improved data and audience integration, the new Analytics now empowers marketers to optimize their targeting across all devices and platforms. Customer-centric analytics will further improve the ability to augment previous targeting efforts and be even more impactful. Additionally, Analytics 4.0’s enhanced measurements and trend alerts will further reinforce a strategy’s effectiveness.

How to Setup Google Analytics 4

The first thing to do is to check what sort of account is currently in place. Depending on whether the Google Analytics 4 beta was activitated, the account would be labelled as ‘App + Web properties’, if the beta was not in active then it would be called ‘Universal Analytics’ instead. With a Universal Analytics account it is straightforward to create a new Google Analytics 4 account. By default, all new accounts will be Analytics 4.0.

The key to setting up the new plaftorm successfully is to ensure the tagging is done correctly. As with the old Analytics, this tag creates the bridge between the Analytics and the property in question.

Final Thoughts

Whether the world is ready or not, there is no escaping Google Analytics 4. Google is invested in the new roll-out, setting it forward as the future of analytics. In the right hands, Google Analytics 4 will propel digital performance marketing into the new era.

At 2Stallions Digital Marketing Agency we are already using the latest features and tools to help our clients optimize their digital strategies. Are you ready to take the next step to maximize your company’s reach? Get in touch with us today and take the first step.

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Digital Marketing

3 Ways To Learn Digital Marketing For Any Beginner

Digital Marketing Is Growing In Demand

Globally, people are choosing the internet as a way to access information, communicate and carry out daily tasks such as shopping and banking. With over half of the world’s population using the internet, it’s no surprise that companies are going digital to sell their products and services online where their consumers are found.

According to Forbes, 70% of companies in 2019 already have a digital transformation strategy in place or are working on one. 52% of marketers around the world also made digital transformation as their key focus for driving growth.

The rate of digital transformation is accelerated when the world is hit with COVID-19.

With the pandemic keeping people in their homes and driving internet usage online, we’re seeing the most rapid digital transformation in the history of the modern firm. Companies are scrambling to leverage digital to connect with customers and continue marketing their products online. As more firms turn online to sell, the demand for digital marketers to carry out online marketing also rise in tandem.

Digital marketing is likely an area of growth right now and a potential career path for many. Many companies may not be hiring right now, and you may be anxious about a job opportunity. Instead of worrying, focus on developing your skills and building your portfolio.

Don’t let the speed of digital marketing change outpace your ability to adapt and expand your skills. This is the time for you to brush up your digital marketing skills and make yourself a potential hire after the pandemic situation improves.

If you are a fresh graduate or someone looking to enter the digital marketing field, here are 3 ways we recommend for you to upskill yourself and learn more about digital marketing.

3 Ways To Learn Digital Marketing

1. Make Use Of Online Resources To Self-Learn

Google and Facebook offer free certified courses

A great way to get started is to use online resources for learning.

Google’s Skillshop and Facebook’s Blueprint are popular platforms among aspiring digital marketers. Not only are they reputable and credible sources for learning, but they also offer a huge range of current and updated courses. Additionally, you can earn recognized certificates upon completion of the lessons!

Let us take a look at Google Skillshop. It offers important – and FREE – courses for their products such as Google Analytics and Google ads– all of which are essential tools used by digital marketing agencies and ad specialists today. Thus, it will be beneficial for you to learn how to use these Google products to their full potential and earn a Google product certification to showcase your expertise to future employers.

Google’s Skillshop offers many essential courses
for you to be familiar with their product

The lessons and content are also categorized according to their difficulty level, which will make learning easier for a beginner. One thing to note for Google Skillshop certification is that they typically last for 1 year, so you’ll have to recertify annually. Not to worry, Google Skillshop will send reminders for you to recertify before your certification expires.

Other than Google Skillshop and Facebook Blueprint, another favourite learning platform for marketers is HubSpot. You will find on their website, that HubSpot hosts a vast library of free training and online courses. The courses are taught by industry experts that are typically less than 4 hours long, which also makes learning easy and less time consuming for everyone.

HubSpot has over 50 free certification courses online

General assembly is another well-known educational site, which is currently offering “Free Fridays”- a list of free courses meant for digital marketing beginners. Although these are not certifiable courses, they are nevertheless informative introductory courses for anyone looking to enter the field of digital marketing.

Take advantage of discounted digital marketing courses

Equinet Academy, ClickAcademy Asia and Udemy are also great alternatives. Click Academy Asia provides public and corporate training in the areas of digital marketing, media and advertising, as well as leadership skills and professional soft skills. A great course series we recommend is the Certified Digital Marketing Strategist (CDMS) programme that will be up to 90% subsidized for self-funded Singaporeans. It’s a course that will help you create a good overview of all digital marketing areas.

For a more detailed course into UI/UX design, you may take a look at Udemy that is currently offering a promotion for their web design courses.

2. Develop Hands-On Experience

It’s important to put your skills to practice

Whether it’s running an Instagram page, writing articles or shooting videos, it’s important that you have practical skills beyond theoretical knowledge.

You might be an avid reader and have a passion for writing. Consider starting a blog and build a list of articles you’d love to share with readers online. You may refer to our guide on the ways you can improve your content marketing skills and get some of our copywriting tips. The more you write, the better you’ll be at content creation.

If writing is not your strong suit, but you enjoy shooting and editing videos, you can work on improving your video marketing skill which is also an important skill needed for many businesses these days. It’s not necessary to have a professional camera. Start with your smartphone and experiment with different frames and angles. The more you practice, the more familiar you will be with the art of videography.

As you start working on your projects, you’re also building your portfolio which will help showcase your best works to your future employer. This way, you’ll gain a competitive edge over other candidates who lacks a portfolio because you have actual projects to demonstrate your level of knowledge and skills.

3. Find A Fitting Company And Learn On The Job

Learning on the job is the best way to get hands-on experience

The best way to learn is still to get hands-on experience through an actual job. That is because it’s the chance for you to ask questions, work on real projects and measure the actual results of your work.

However, in times where we work from home, this might not be an option yet. But you should still use the opportunity now to improve your digital marketing skills. Build your portfolio and equip yourself with knowledge of the industry to make yourself more attractive as a potential hire.

After the pandemic situation improves and companies start hiring again, you will find yourself better prepared to land a job with a digital marketing agency. If you’d like to explore a digital marketing career with us, take a look at our job openings!

Wrapping Up

When we talk about Digital Marketing, we refer to everything from copywriting to enhancing customer experience through better UI/UX design. There are many fields for you to become an expert in and many ways for you to do so. Make sure to check out the online learning platforms we recommended and get started on your digital marketing journey! Remember to follow our blog to stay up to date about all things Digital Marketing.

If you’re interested in making a digital marketing campaign for yourself or need advice on digital marketing, contact us!

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Search Engine Optimization

Five Traits of a Truly Reliable SEO Company

If you’re still using an Android or iOS device’s voice-search feature, search engines are still relevant. If you use Google for research, then search engines can still be used for content marketing.

Some marketers believe search engine optimization (SEO) is dead. The reason behind the belief: social media advertisements and mobile applications make content marketing more effective. They believe spending on SEO nowadays is a waste.

However, the industry is still growing. According to SearchEngineLand, research by Borrell Associates shows that businesses have spent about $65 billion on SEM campaigns. The researchers note that the industry can grow to $72 billion by 2018. Their reasons include the decline of traditional advertising, increasing fact-checking attitudes of audiences, and sophisticated techniques.

Sophisticated SEO is spot on. SearchEngineLand’s Stephan Spencer writes that SEO is a “shape-shifter.” He writes about how it has changed in practice over the years. Modern SEO is a far cry from just optimizing headers and meta-tags. It is now about monitoring “entities” or subject-specific keywords and informative content. Spencer also highlights the importance of UX (which Google measures).

SEO has changed with the advent of Web 2.0’s appearance and technicalities.

Source: Slideshare

SEO plays a vital role in any business. In 2009, Marin Search Marketer helped improve Century Novelty’s overall revenues by 20%. The 1951-established party decors and supplies business saw new light online after the project. Marin Search Marketer focused on creating keyword-bidding goals to minimize their paid ad budgets and maximize ROI.

Another example of SEO success is this one project of Prime Visibility (now known as WPromote). The company helped Compass-Guard Security Systems improve its sales by using SEO targeted content and a PPC campaign to minimize paid ad spending costs. The result of their 2005 search engine marketing efforts increased content visibility by 79.4%. The business site had 278 CTA button clicks per month, effectively increasing their leads.

Never underestimate the power of a reliable SEO agency willing to provide excellent results. If you need to look for one, you must make sure to note these five characteristics.

Five Characteristics of a Reliable SEO Agency

1. Assess their Assessment

Most SEO firm sites want you to send your email and your interest in scheduling a free appointment. Take the plunge; sign up and wait for their correspondence. Their online correspondent will ask you through an email to detail your business, its performance, and SEO goals. The free consultation, just like the real thing, will take time. The correspondent may likely ask for more information; remember not to provide delicate ones crucial to your business.

Once they provide you a final recommendation and quote, assess their assessment. Ask the firm how they came up with the milestones and methods. Inquire why they feel strongly about using the indicated procedures. Finally, question them how they measured the projected results.

If you want to make an informed decision, then you need to use the free quotations of other prospects, too. It may take some time to wait for each assessment. However, it will be worth it because a data-backed, informed decision will significantly save your business time and money. You can have a free quote here.

If they’re willing to, ask their tool’s tool accuracy, too.

Source: Backlinko

2. Performance Metrics Guaranteed (and Fulfilled)

Reliable SEO agencies want to help you genuinely. It might seem silly to believe a copy that talks about their passion for data, analytics, and seeing growth. However, some firms sincerely feel it is their goal in existing.

These companies know the realistic metrics they can achieve for your business. Reputable agencies will need to know your goals for the SEO campaign, the timeframe you expect it done, and the budget you have to implement it. You will have several meetings with them. The goal of these interactions is to adjust certain metrics to achieve your goals within a realistic timeframe and budget.

Reliable companies will advise you on the type of digital marketing style advantageous for the company. They can create drafts for ideal and realistic plans to show you the difference between timeframes and budgets. SEO agencies you can depend on will never begin any project without your approval. They will also include in the contract all agreed metrics they intend to deliver for your business.

3. Years of Experience

An SEO company that is has been around in the industry for years indeed sounds impressive. Digital marketing as a whole is a continuously-changing environment. For a company to survive a year, they must have provided excellent service to their previous clients. However, make sure to observe their methods and assess their assessment (as mentioned earlier). If you do this, you can maximize your investment in these long-established companies.

4. Portfolio

If an SEO company strongly caters to you, it wants to achieve one of these two things. It might want to expand their services and learn with you. It could also be that the firm is confident because it had handled cases similar to yours. You can answer this question by asking them for their portfolio of case studies.

Some companies publish these case studies on their site. Some firms can digitally send them for your reference. Make sure to prioritize studies and service renditions similar or relevant to your industry.

If their portfolio is informative and data-packed, then the more helpful it will be for your evaluation. Take note of the set milestones and the results. See if they met these goals. Next, check the space of time between each procedure implemented and achieved the goal. These small details will help you make an informed decision in using the firm’s services. Meanwhile, feel free to check our previous works here.

5. Feedback from Trusted or Similar Businesses as Yours

A reputable SEO company can forward you to customers they serviced. On their pages, you can also find a list of client feedbacks. Most of these will be positive. You can email the agency and ask them to provide customers with your reference. Prioritize references for industries similar to yours.

Make sure to ask about the referred client’s goal during their project. Have them describe the firm’s attitude. Discuss scheduling and milestone achievement frequencies. Ask about the overall working system and logistics of the company. The more informative their answers, the easier it is to know whether the SEO firm is reliable or not.

Wrapping-Up

SEO is an industry that is bound to get bigger than its current stature in the next few years. Social networks, target-centric search engines, and applications might invade specific markets. However, users will still keep on researching regarding particular, and search engines are vital to doing this.

You will need an SEO agency to help your content and advertisements reach the top of the results pages. Outsourcing SEM campaigns will be better for your business. Having a team dedicated to the task is time and resource-conserving than having an in-house equivalent.

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Search Engine Optimization

Ranking On The 1st Page Of Google – An SEO Case Study

Background

Nearing the end of March 2017 at 2Stallions, we realised that we had failed to “walk-the-talk” for search engine optimization (SEO). Despite offering SEO services in Singapore to many happy clients, our own website’s presence on Google for keywords was lacking. Most keywords were on the 2^nd page and beyond, with none ranking on the 1st page of Google. Frankly, this did not help our standing with potential clients, who often searched for, and failed to find us. We decided to change this state of affairs and decided to target a vanity keyword – “SEO” – to rank our website for (amongst others).

Vanity Keywords vs Valuable Keywords

A ‘vanity keyword’ usually describes what the website is trying to sell. However, it is not likely to drive qualified traffic nor produce high conversion rates. These have high search volume and are highly competitive, meaning they’re difficult to rank on the 1st page of Google for. However, they also tend to have higher bounce rates due to being broad.

At 2Stallions, we highly recommend targeting ‘valuable keywords’ to all our clients. Generally, we target such keywords for our own efforts as well. While these may have a lower search volume, the traffic is bound to be much more targeted and likelier to convert. For a business, this is what matters.

Why Rank On 1st Page Of Google For “SEO”

You may be wondering why then, did we select a vanity keyword for 2Stallions to rank for? Quite simply, we needed to make a bold statement, and show off our SEO skills to potential and existing clients. Hence, ranking on the 1st page of Google for a competitive keyword like “SEO” appealed to us for this case study. We analyzed the keyword on Google in Singapore.

The term “SEO” has 4,400 average monthly searches and is considered a ‘medium’ competition keyword. The suggested bid of over $17, which is what advertisers are expected to pay per click for it, was what made the effort to rank for “seo” worth it. Even 1% of the average monthly searches and clicks back to our website, i.e. 44 clicks, would save $748 per month in potential ad spend. Cool!

Ranking Results For “SEO”

Here is the fluctuation in rankings for the keyword “SEO” from mid-April, when we started, to August 2017. As you can see, we hit the 1^st page of Google Singapore for the term within 3 months, by mid-July 2017. You can observe on the graph that since we hit the 1^st page, we’ve actually fluctuated between 9^th and 12^th position. This confirms that there is no resting on your laurels when it comes to SEO, and that staying on the 1^st page can be tougher than getting there.

If you are interested in learning about the techniques our SEO team used to rank our website for the term “SEO”, now!

Impact Of Ranking On 1^st Page Of Google For SEO

Search Impressions, Clicks & Leads

As a business, your main objective from any SEO effort should be to drive targeted traffic to your website that can convert to a lead for you to follow up on, and generate revenue from.

Unfortunately, Google isn’t open about how much traffic a particular search term generates, so you may or may not be able to view this depth in data for specific keywords. Therefore, for a client SEO campaign, we focus on overall Organic & Referral traffic as our metrics, together with conversions (read our Guide on Web Analytics to learn more about how to set this up yourself).

As we do not have exact data for the specific search term for our website, we decided to pivot and analyse results from the perspective of the landing page. For SEO-related search terms, we’re focusing on having visitors land on to our SEO Services page. The table below shows the improvements we saw since we started our SEO efforts in % improvements from the previous month period.

Month-over-month Improvements	May Compared to Apr	Jun Compared to May	Jul Compared to Jun
Impressions (%)	4,497.6	69.9	69.1
Clicks (%)	∞ (divided by zero)	600	57.1
Conversions (%)	0	0	∞ (divided by zero)

We saw an immediate, and dramatic, increase in impressions and clicks to the website when we began SEO work. However, we’ve only recently started seeing this traffic start to convert. Another reason for this low conversion could be that the vanity keyword resulted in traffic to the site that was not targeted or intent-driven.

Following the publishing of this case study, we shall be focusing our efforts mainly on valuable keywords rather than vanity keywords.

Analyzing Our 1^st Page Ranking On Google

In an ideal world, being on the 1^st page, and especially being ranked in the top 3 positions of Google should result in a dramatic website traffic increase. However, reality can be different. Despite organically ranking 8^th, our visual ranking on the search result page is closer to 15^th.

We took a screenshot of the search result page for the term “seo” on Google Singapore to illustrate our point. We have marked the area above the fold (light blue dotted line), which is what you see immediately when you land on the search result. We’ve also highlighted the area occupied by paid ads and areas taken up by rich snippets like business listings and video results.

For this particular search term, even the top organic result from Moz.com is only partially above the fold. The 8^th position, where our 2Stallions SEO service page organically ranks, is towards the bottom of the page. Google now shows up to 4 ads at the top, with expanded ads like the 1^st 2 ad results. You can’t really blame Google – after all, they stand to make $17 for every click. Statistics are clear that the top 3 results get almost 60% of the clicks, so the ads there are a major source of revenue for Google.

For a new business with poor organic traffic, that is trying to generate leads, SEM is vital. On the other end of the spectrum, existing businesses have their own reasons to continue SEM spends. For them, the goal is merely to keep their brand awareness high and prevent competition from occupying the top positions. Therefore, you should never discount SEM services for your own business. You can reach out to us for such services as well.

Furthermore, search results these days devote a great deal of real estate to localized business listings and YouTube video results. To show up amongst business listings, you can use Google My Business to set it up for your own business and optimize it.

Next Steps

Does this mean we should not be doing SEO, and focus our marketing spend on Adwords & PPC instead? Absolutely NOT! As you can see from the stats shared above – our organic search impressions have increased dramatically. There is now a greater chance of people seeing and recognizing our brand. To top it off, we have seen an increase in organic traffic to the website. We’re now also starting to see conversions to leads on our landing page from organic visitors.

We could focus on ranking at number 1 on the 1^st page for “seo” going forward. However, it makes little sense fighting such fierce competition. It would mean overcoming established content from behemoths like Moz, Search Engine Land, and Wikipedia.com. These have been around for YEARS and have collected a ton of trustworthy backlinks that our content is unlikely to achieve.

Now that we rank on the 1^st page of Google locally, it provides credibility with potential clients. We finally “walk-the-talk” when it comes to SEO. As this keyword does not generate targeted traffic, we’ll spend little effort to maintain its ranking. At the same time, we are shifting our focus to more valuable keywords.

To learn the techniques used to achieve 1^st page results, !

Leveraging On Rich Snippets

Google’s apparent favouring of rich snippets makes it seem prudent to leverage on other forms of content, especially video. Therefore, 2Stallions has created and optimized a YouTube video. Specifically for our SEO services (see below), we are looking to generate additional traffic directly via YouTube. It also serves to increase our landing page relevancy to Google. If you’re interested in taking this path, our team has developed methods to dominate Google search results via YouTube videos.

Conclusion

SEO will not catapult your website to the top and keep you there without consistent effort. Also, while the techniques we discuss in our worked great for this particular keyword, it may not be the case everywhere. As an SEO agency in Singapore, our 2Stallions SEO team continuously refreshes our SEO skills. We learn and try out new techniques that help us to rank websites for our clients and ourselves. So if your business is looking to achieve similar results and boost its organic lead generation, reach out to us!

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Online Marketing

How Much Should You Spend On Your Adwords Campaign?

A large chunk of the world’s population may not be familiar with Google Adwords but they have all likely interacted with its output in some form if they have ever searched on Google before or visited websites that served advertising banners. In 2015 alone, online advertising generated $67.39 billion in revenue for Google.

That is a whole lot of impressions and clicks that Google redirected to different landing sites with the potential to turn into leads and customers. And this is why Google Adwords continues to attract an increasing amount of advertising every year. If you’re not sure what Adwords or PPC is, and why your business should be engaging in Search Engine Marketing, we recommend you to read our article on the topic.

When it comes to your Adwords campaign, one question that always pops up is how much to spend every month? A major positive about Google Adwords is that it is very customisable and you can easily vary your budget for different needs and results. We know this sounds vague and non-committal. That’s why we’re sharing the blueprint for you to determine a sensible budget for your own Adwords campaign. We recommend DIY readers to always start out with a Test Phase in order to determine their budget. Since we’re focusing on budget, we’ve skipped the steps for setting up your Adwords campaign.

Test Phase

1. Determine the right keywords

Create a list of keywords that are relevant to your business. Keep in mind that Google estimates cost per click (CPC) based on the keywords. This is known as ‘Adwords Suggested Bid’. To determine how much your keywords are going to cost, use the Keyword Planner from Google. When deciding on the keywords, be mindful of your goals and WHERE in the customer buying cycle you’re targeting for your visitors.

If you’re planning to increase your online sales, you want to focus on keywords that have more ‘buying intent’. For example, if you sell shoes, keywords like “buy shoes online” or “best deal for shoes” are more likely to convert to sale than a generic keyword like ‘shoes for dinner’. Some solid buying intent keywords include coupon, buy, discount, shipping and deal. You can also focus on product keywords like cheap, affordable, brand name & product, review, and best. Someone looking for these keywords in your phrase is much further along the buying cycle towards a purchase. If you’re looking to get as many visitors to your website, words like ‘free’ and ‘how to’ are good for attracting them, but these are not likely to convert to a sale.

2. Decide on a test time frame

You must decide on the duration for your test phase. A month can be a good length of time to determine the effectiveness of your keywords. Consider the nature of the product that you are selling when deciding on your timeframe. Does your product “fly off the shelves” or does it usually require a longer buying timeframe? Keeping these into careful considerations will help you make better sense of your data.

3. Start With A Small Budget

Based on the Adwords Suggested Bid for the keywords you select, as well as the price of your product, you’ll be able to gauge how much money your Adwords campaign may need to expense each month. However, it’s always a good idea to start slow, until you’re comfortable with the Adwords interface and with your potential returns. Based on the Keyword Planner tool, you’ll also be able to get an estimated optimum daily spend. Use this to keep your initial bid for each keyword low and maximize your impressions. Increase bids based on performance of the keywords. At this point, you should set up your campaign, your Ad Groups, your ads and keywords and then finally, put money into your Adwords account to get started. If you’re a little more savvy, also link up your Google Analytics to your Adwords account and set up goals for better performance tracking. When starting out a campaign, stick to broad match keywords.

4. Cull Your Non-Performing Keywords

It is estimated that one 1 in every 100 clicks of your online ads will result in a sale. While it is tempting to check your results everyday, we suggest looking at it once a week. Look at the search terms that people are finding your ads with. Add keywords irrelevant to your goals and business into your ‘negative keywords’ list so that you don’t waste money on them. By the end of the month, you would have a growing negative keyword list that your budget will not be wasted on moving forward. Go through your original keywords list and start determining the performance of the keywords. This can be based off a comparision of your Analytics data (if it’s connected to your Adwords, this is much easier) to your Adwords results. Figure out the keywords that brought in the right targeted traffic and generated sales. Start culling those that generated very little impressions or clicks (unless the buying intent is really strong). Start updating your keyword list by shifting from broad match to broad match modifier keywords, phrase match or even exact match keywords. This reduces the overall number of impressions or clicks you receive but drives much more targeted traffic to your site.

If you are struggling in determining your sales generating keywords, consider hiring a professional SEM service.

Maximize Your Adwords Campaign ROI

When advertising online, you should aim to derive the profit generated from every click of your ads to ascertain the level of success your campaign is having. This is known as your Earnings Per Click (EPC), which is the best way to determine your return on investment (ROI) and identify the keywords yielding the best returns.

How to Find Your EPC

To find your EPC, multiply your customer value and your conversion rate. The customer value is how much profit you generate from a paying customer and the conversion rate is the click percentage that turns into a sale. For example, if you are promoting a product that gives you $20 in profit and it converts at 1% then your EPC is $0.20.

Ideally, you want this value to be positive and getting larger month over month. Based on your EPC, and your profits, you can determine your monthly Adwords campaign budget for following months and increase or reduce it accordingly. Of course, to keep growing your EPC, you would want to optimize your campaign further. You can try out copywriting experiments for your ads, modify your keywords lists and experiment with pricing models other than CPC.

If your ads didn’t perform as expected in the first month, it’s not cause to give up. You probably need to take a closer look at your keywords list and optimize your Adwords campaign further, and test for another month. This is why starting with a smaller budget helps – it allows you to get acquainted with Adwords without being too expensive a lesson.

Do you run Adwords campaigns for yourself? We’d love to hear about your experiences and any tips & tricks you have discovered when setting the budget for yourself.

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Digital Marketing

5 Ways Web Analytics Help Strengthen Your Marketing Strategy

Having a professional website is a crucial business differentiator in the digital age. It helps companies establish brand identity and create an online presence. Having a website is not enough, setting up web analytics will maximise results.

This is why digital marketing and web analytics go hand-in-hand. Without analytics, opportunities to shape and strengthen marketing strategy can be overlooked.

Still not using website analytics? Read on to learn more about the business role it plays.

What Is Web Analytics

Web analytics is the process of collection, reporting, and analysing website data. It provides site-specific metrics that aid in making informed decisions about web presence and site performance.

Metrics such as page load times, time spent on a certain page, page views per visit are good examples of web analytics that should be tracked and analysed. Data sets like these interpret how users interact with your website, track every event, and map out conversion paths.

Google Analytics (GA) is the most popular analytics tool. It has been the go-to platform of many marketers because it offers “freemium” service. There is also a paid version of GA, which is called Google Analytics 360. (We will discuss how to use this tool effectively later on).

Other commonly used tools for website analysis include platforms like:

Matomo (formerly Piwik) –,also a free and open-source analytics solution with similar functionality as that of Google Analytics;
Adobe Analytics – highly-customizable real-time analytics platform. Adobe bought analytics leader Omniture in 2009;
Kissmetrics – a powerful website analytics tool that focuses on individual users and behaviour;
Mixpanel – an advanced analytics platform that tracks user interactions with web and mobile applications;
Clicktale – a cloud-based analytic system that taps into customer’s behaviours and experience

How Analytics Tools Fuel Marketing Success

1. Know Where Your Traffic Comes From

Knowing where your site traffic comes from makes it easier to engage audiences and identify the best platform to use.

Google Analytics does this perfectly. The acquisition tool helps you find which channels are driving the most traffic to your business website.

Simply head to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Here, you can see whether your audience found you through search (organic), paid advertising (PPC), social media or direct (they knew your URL). The report will also show the number of users, sessions, bounce rate, and conversions.

For a further in-depth look at each source, Acquisition > All Traffic > Source/Medium will narrow down the traffic sources of a specific channel.

2. Learn Your Website Visitor’s Behaviour

A physical store sees plenty of daily walk-in customers, but only a few leave with a purchase.

Online stores, on the other hand, can track the reasons why customers leave your website with or without a purchase.

Google Analytics, specifically, provides insights into your visitors’ actions. It tells you what pages people visit and what actions they take on those pages.

Using the same sidebar menu of the Google Analytics dashboard, click Behaviour > Overview.

[Insert Overview report]

The Behaviour Overview report provides the following data:

Pageviews – the total number of pages viewed; this number includes repeated views of a single page;
Unique Pageviews – the number of visitors who have viewed a specific page at least once during a visit;
Average time on Page – the average amount of time users spend viewing a specific page or screen or set of pages or screens;
Bounce Rate – the percentage of single-page visits or the number of visits in which people left your website from the same page they visited;
% Exit – the percentage of users who exit from a page or set of pages.

Google Analytics also lets you see the path your site visitors take. With GA’s Behaviour Flow report, you can see the pages visitors first viewed, tracking their movements through your website to the last page they visited before they leaving.

3. Gauge Individual Page Performance

GA is every marketer’s favourite web analytics tool because of its ability to provide a detailed look at how visitors engage with specific pages on a website.

By clicking Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages, users can gauge the performance of each webpage.

The All Pages report shows the top-performing pages based on traffic, as well as each page’s pageviews, unique pageviews, average time on page, entrances, bounce rate, % exit and page value.

This data provides insights to improve your pages and improve conversion rates.

If your website has subfolders, the Content Drilldown report allows you to see the top content sections on your website. To find this report, click Behaviour > Site Content > Content Drilldown.

Similarly, the Landing Page report can help determine the top web pages where your visitors enter. It shows metrics such as acquisition, behaviour and conversions based on your website goals.

4. Analyse & Track Social Media Impact

Google Analytics is also used for tracking and analysing social media impact. Users can get the most out of their social media campaigns and strategize for the future.

Here are some of the benefits of coupling GA with social media:

Learn which social media platforms give you the most traffic
Calculate the ROI of your social media campaigns
See what content works best with a specific social media platform
Ensure traffic from the right demographics with social media
See how many sales conversions your business gets from social media

To generate social media reports, Google Analytics must be set up for it. Follow the step-by-step procedure below.

Create an account on the Google Tag Manager dashboard, set up an account and a container. Then click create, review the Terms of Service, and agree to those terms.
You will be given the container’s installation code snippet. Copy and paste the two snippets of code onto your website.
Once you do that, set up Google Analytics. First, create a Google Analytics account by signing up on the GA page.
Enter your account and website name, as well as the website’s URL. Then, accept the Terms and Services to get your tracking ID.
Once you have the tracking ID, set up an analytics tag with Google Tag Manager.
Go to your Google Tag Manager dashboard and click on the “Add a new tag” button. There are two areas of the tag you’ll be able to customize. First, configuration—where the data collected by the tag will go. Second, triggering—what type of data you want to collect.
Choose what you want to customize and click Save.

5. Improve Your Content Marketing

Given the detailed and in-depth insights about your website and your visitor’s behaviour on your site, web analytics tools can offer you a hand in improving your content marketing efforts.

Since Google Analytics tells you where your customers are coming from and their behaviours and habits, engaging with them can be a piece of cake. You can tailor your content according to their interests and even promote on the channels they prefer.

GA’s ability to gauge individual pages, on the other hand, allows you to discover the room for improvements.

For instance, the All Pages report showed that some of your blogs have a few numbers of pageviews. What you can do is to update those blogs, optimize them for search engines, and promote on social media. Doing this will help increase your pageviews per visitor.

Similarly, you can update the top landing pages with the latest information and targeted keywords or revamp the layout and content. These things will not only increase search traffic to your site but also boost site engagement and reduce bounce rate.

Ready to jump into the pool of data analytics?

Bonus: How to Use Google Analytics Effectively

1. Define Your Business Objectives

Set the right goals for your website. Whether it is boosting sales, moving from offline to online, or increasing user engagement or awareness, set them up in GA so you can measure how your website meets these objectives.

2. Translate Objectives into Goals & KPIs

Align KPIs with your business objectives. If your business objectives are sales-driven, then you can create a goal on Google Analytics.

For example, if you run an e-commerce store, you can track each sale or lead using a contact form for corporate sites. You can even create goals based on the URLs people land on, the time they spend on your site, and the number of pages people visit per session.

Track what business objectives by understanding metrics can gauge business objectives. Learn how to set up goals via Google Analytics Help.

3. Set up Google Analytics Dashboard

Once you have defined your goals and identified the key metrics, it is time for you to set up Google Analytics dashboard.

The dashboard will show you the metrics every time you log in. Not only that, but you can also set scheduled reports to keep a finger on the pulse on the performance of your website.

4. Improve Your Website Based on Analytics

The true power of Google Analytics comes from being able to see WHERE improvements are needed. For example, with your conversions and events set up, you can explore the Multi-Channel Funnels (MCFs) to see the path that visitors take to conversion.

This feature helps you easily understand the customer acquisition process. It shows you the visitor paths that convert and how interaction occurs on your site. With MCFs you can improve pages, remove them or add new ones that will drive your goals.

Watch the video below to understand multi-channel funnels better.

The Takeaway

Web analytics is not just another buzzword. Businesses should find a greater meaning in their website data to create a strategic plan that will drive marketing success.

The process eliminates guesswork from planning marketing campaigns, content creation, and measuring the campaign’s performance.

Speaking of effective marketing, 2Stallions can help you discover the right mix of digital marketing services to achieve your objectives. We also use a range of tools to ensure our clients receive nothing but the best service.

To learn more about the services that we offer, visit www.2stallions.com/service.

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