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Day: February 20, 2020

How to Increase Your Organic Growth by Over 400%, According to the SEO Lead at Nextiva

Here’s a reality check for 2020 — only one-third of businesses make it to the 10 year mark.

No market demand, running out of cash, and getting out-competed are among the leading reasons businesses fail.

The good news? You don’t have to figure it all out on your own, because I’ve done a lot of the legwork for you.

When I served as the VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker (a publication and community for B2B salespeople), I uncovered strategies and processes that exploded our growth.

In fact, the results were outstanding: in just over a year, we were able to grow Sales Hacker’s traffic from 19,000 monthly organic sessions to over 100,000 monthly organic sessions.

That’s a 426% increase. As a result, Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach, a sales engagement platform.

Now, I’m using that same exact process to lead SEO at Nextiva, and here is a snapshot of our organic keyword growth to prove that this really works:

If you’re looking to skyrocket your organic growth with an efficient SEO strategy in 2020, check out the five proven steps I’ve taken with both Sales Hacker and Nextiva to achieve tremendous results.

First things first: why is it so hard to stand out in search?

The goal of owning search rankings is simple: organic presence means qualified traffic, which leads to conversions, which turn into sales. In fact, marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.

That’s not to say blogging is the only way, or the best way to do it — but it’s what works best for us.

Creating content can have a powerful long-term impact, too: over its lifetime, one compounding blog post creates as much traffic as six decaying posts.

Of course, in 2020, most companies get the importance of blogging. Nowadays, 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Unfortunately, that leads to a new problem: the SERPs are getting a little overcrowded.

Keyword difficulty is rising. Almost every topic you can imagine already has dozens of guides and tutorials ranking against each other.

Most industries have become noisy, which makes it hard to stand out. Ultimately, it’s more important than ever to be intentional about your website and the content you publish.

Additionally, this viral tweet — which received commentary from several Google employees — suggests search results have gotten so competitive, personal websites have no chance of ranking anymore due to businesses going all-in on long-tail SEO, which takes away even the lowest search volume opportunities.

At Sales Hacker, we had an aggressive publishing schedule, with 4-5 new blog posts going live each week. They were all written by our community — we didn’t contract an agency or freelancers. Since we had more content than we could handle, we wanted to keep our contributors happy while ensuring all content was evergreen and actionable.

Let’s explore exactly what steps we took to achieve organic growth, and what you can do to stand out in 2020 and beyond.

1. Start with audience research.

When you need to take your results (such as traffic or leads) to the next level, it’s always a challenge. This challenge is easier to tackle when you already have a loyal audience — even if it’s a small one.

Why? Because you get to ask them what they like, what they dislike, and what they want more of. The thing is, we found that when people see you genuinely care about their interests, they’re more than happy to talk to you and share their insights.

The key to succeeding with audience research is setting strong goals for your research. This applies to surveys, interviews, and any other method you pick.

For instance, at Sales Hacker, I had the following five research goals on which I wanted to collect information:

  • Brand messaging insight
  • Audience development insight
  • Content strategy insight
  • UX and website navigation insight
  • Email marketing insight

I set up 30-minute interviews with a sample of Sales Hacker’s audience: typically mid-to-senior-level sales roles, ages 25 to 44.

These are some of the questions I asked in these interviews, which you can implement into your own audience research process:

  • What are your most common daily tasks?
  • What are your top challenges in sales/business?
  • How would you describe Sales Hacker to your grandma?
  • Give us your best Sales Hacker Slogan.
  • What is the main benefit of Sales Hacker?
  • What is the main problem with Sales Hacker’s website?
  • What would discourage you from subscribing to our email list?
  • What type of content would you find helpful?
  • What type of content is a waste of time?

These questions match my audience research goals outlined earlier. If you’ve set different goals, make sure to add interview questions that correlate with them.

Based on the answers I received from my recipients, I ended up with a list of topic clusters and understood the content types that were in highest demand.

I also learned that thought leadership content was the biggest loyalty driver, and that our audience would listen to our podcast if we launched one (which we did!).

Takeaway: Build a list of audience research goals and corresponding questions you can ask in surveys and interviews. Analyze results so you can find the content to focus on.

2. Run an SEO site audit.

Why an SEO audit? Think about it like this — if search engines can’t read your content, you’ll struggle to reach your target audience. On top of that, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

In other words, when you get your ideal readers to your website, you’ll want to make sure you don’t lose them right away.

An SEO audit involves crawling your website using a tool like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the data. Here are some things you should look for:

  • Duplicate content
  • Noindex pages or nofollow links
  • Robots.txt file
  • Improper redirects and redirect chains
  • Broken media assets (video and audio files)
  • Broken links
  • URL structure
  • Pages with long load times

Some of the issues I found with Sales Hacker was the lack of referring domains, non-optimized URLs, poor internal linking structure, poor site structure and navigation, and some branded search problems.

Once we had a list of issues, we tackled them one by one so we could set a strong foundation for our content creation and optimization going forward.

Takeaway: Download the SEO Audit kit which includes a guide and a checklist to work from. Alternatively, make a list of all the improvements you can make and start working on them as soon as you can.

3. Develop new content opportunities.

As I mentioned earlier, our audience research helped us identify the topics that help them progress in their sales careers the most. With these topics in mind, we looked for gaps in existing search engine results.

We did this for the topics we wanted to grow an authority in, including cold calling, best sales tools, channel sales, sales Excel templates, and more.

Here are some of the existing patterns we were seeing:

  • Low-value round-ups
  • Definition-based content
  • Theoretical content
  • Lack of focus on user intent
  • Unengaged approach to sales templates
  • Long introductions

I decided to go the opposite way and provide what our audience was asking for: getting to the point quickly with zero fluff, providing a great content experience, and offering mega-lists of tools and tips, with a highly actionable writing style.

This worked so well for us that we ended up earning a featured snippet for the’ channel sales’ topic, as well as some others, like BANT, customer success manager, and sales forecast modeling:

Takeaway: Based on the topics your audience is interested in, analyze the highest-ranking content on search. Brainstorm ways you can provide more values based on gaps that existing content has and on what your audience is looking for from you.

4. Update and optimize your existing content.

If you have an audience of any size, that probably means you also have a library of published content. Is it up to par? And is it serving your audience the best way it could?

Optimizing your past content is one of the most powerful ways to increase the mileage of the work you’ve already put into your blog.

We discovered that our audience doesn’t want to feel like we’re pitching them all the time, so the first thing we did was rework our content in a way that wasn’t sales-y, but to the point, actionable, and purely educational.

Some of our most successful updates have included:

  • Making our lists longer and more comprehensive (example: best sales books)
  • Building long-form guides on topics we’ve only touched on in the past (example: sales operations)

Here’s the before of the sales operations guide:

And here’s the after:

As a result, our existing content skyrocketed in search rankings.

Takeaway: Using Google Analytics, make a list of blog posts that are covering an evergreen, relevant topic, but get low search traffic. Update them one by one, starting with those that have historically had the highest conversion rate (for example, email signups) and work down from there.

Bonus: Use schema mark-up to own more search page real estate.

With zero click searches on the rise, it’s now up to savvy SEOs to find more ways to stand out in search results and fight for clicks.

One way to do that is by using rich schema mark-up to enhance your content in search results. Google recently deployed FAQ schema which allows websites to have their webpage FAQs displayed directly in the search results.

For instance, check out how we’re optimizing VoIP Call Center in the search results for Nextiva. The FAQs themselves display right on the search page. This is a powerful tactic for stealing more clicks back from Google.

You can use the rich schema generator to help you with this.

5. Tailor your homepage and navigation to your audience.

I believe that Sales Hacker’s homepage re-design (which happened in July 2017) was a huge growth accelerator.

Right after I took over Marketing operations for Sales Hacker, this is what the homepage looked like:

This version of the homepage likely made it difficult for people to take the actions we wanted them to, like finding the content they need or signing up for our email list.

The key approach to our homepage re-design, like with many other things we’ve done, was setting clear goals behind that process. In this case, these goals were:

  • Showing people exactly what Sales Hacker is and what we do
  • Making the process of signing up for the email list super simple
  • Helping visitors find the content they want quickly and easily
  • Showcasing social proof
  • Improving internal linking

This obviously wasn’t just down to what the homepage looked like, but also our site structure and how we approached internal linking in general.

I’ve sketched a mindmap of the ideal new site structure with categories and subcategories. The taxonomy I had in mind would achieve the following:

  • Increased engagement from natural site exploration from visitors
  • The shortest possible path to the most important content on the site
  • Landing page visibility from an increase of internal links pointing to them

Takeaway: Identify the single most important actions you want your visitors to take (lead generation, sales, etc.) and organize your homepage in a way that makes those actions obvious and the path to them uncluttered. Use a tool or simply pen and paper to draw a map of journeys on your website you want your visitors to go through based on their interests. Apply this not only to your homepage, but to any menus and content categorization you have on your blog.

Over to You

This process won’t give you results overnight. In fact, while the homepage updates may show some instant results from a user behavior point of view, most efforts to improve your organic presence will take months to bring significant improvements.

Remember — these steps outline exactly what we did to go from low organic presence to a highly authoritative sales community hub, which we ended up selling. It took us over one year, but we made a persistent, intentional effort in places we knew mattered most.

Want to grow at a rapid pace? Start with your audience and listen to their feedback. This way, you can take the right actions to reach even more of your target readers and customers and take your business to the next level.

23 Ways to Tag and Segment Your Subscribers in AWeber

The days of one-size-fits-all email marketing are long gone. To get better results, you need to send targeted, personalized emails.

By delivering hyper-relevant content to those who are most interested in it, your subscribers will open, click, and purchase more.

In this post, you’ll learn how to use tags to create more targeted segments (or groups) of subscribers and increase your engagement.

What are tags and why should you use them?

Tags are simple words or short phrases you use to categorize and group your subscribers based on their interests, behaviors, or other shared attributes.

They allow you to segment your audience, send targeted one-time broadcast emails, and trigger targeted, automated campaigns. This leads to better subscriber engagement, improved chances of hitting the inbox instead of the spam folder, and higher conversions.

Start getting more personal with your subscribers and try these 23 easy ways to tag your subscribers in AWeber.

1. Tag someone who fills out your AWeber sign up form.

The easiest way to tag a subscriber is when they opt in to your email list using a sign up form.

With AWeber, you can create unlimited sign up forms, and you can apply different tags to subscribers when they fill out different forms. This way, you’ll know exactly which form a subscriber used to sign up.

For example, if you offer a 7-day email course, weekly newsletter, and downloadable checklist as lead magnets, you can have three separate sign up forms that apply unique tags to your subscribers. This lets you see quickly which lead magnets they signed up for. Iff they opt in to all of them, all three tags get applied!

Related: How to tag an AWeber sign up form

2. Tag someone who completes a custom field on your sign up form.

Let’s say you want to know a bit more about your subscribers at the time they sign up, such as what topics they’re interested in, or their experience level in a particular skill you teach.

You can collect this additional information, beyond just their name and email address, using custom fields on your AWeber sign up form, and you can associate a tag with each custom choice.

This allows you to segment your subscribers from the time they join your list, and create personalized experiences for each of them.

Related: How to tag a custom field in an AWeber sign up form

3. Tag someone who fills out a sign up form on the AWeber Atom App.

Do you attend in-person events? Using the AWeber Atom App, you can create a sign up form on your mobile device to collect subscribers’ information in person, and use tags to remind you which event you met them at.

And if you attend multiple events, you can change which tags your Atom App sign up form applies. That way, you know where you met each particular subscriber.

You can even set up an automated welcome Campaign ahead of time that would go out to each new subscriber you met at that event.

Related: How to tag someone with the AWeber Atom App

4. Tag subscribers when you import them into AWeber.

Perhaps you have a list of new subscribers you’re migrating to AWeber. (Side note: We offer free migration support. Contact our experts to learn more!) You can easily import your list along with any existing tags or apply new tags.

You can also update existing subscribers’ tags when importing a list into AWeber. This will add any new tags in your import file to your existing subscribers.

Related: How to tag subscribers when importing into AWeber

5. Tag someone who fills out a sign up form on a landing page that integrates with AWeber.

You can use a landing page provider like Unbouce or Growtheme to invite your audience to subscribe to your email list, and tag them so you can send them the perfect email campaign based on the page or form they completed.

6. Tag someone who fills out a sign up form that integrates with AWeber.

Although AWeber enables you to create sign up forms in your account, you can also integrate your AWeber account with other sign up form providers, such as OptinMonster, Hello Bar, MailMunch or ConvertFlow. These providers support AWeber tags, allowing you to tag your new subscribers in your AWeber account.

7. Tag someone who makes a purchase.

Have a digital or physical product? Providers like Shopify, WooCommerce, ThriveCart, 3dcart, and DirectPay allow you to easily add your customers into your AWeber account and tag them so you know who purchased from you.

AWeber’s Shopify integration even allows you to apply unique tags for each product your subscribers purchase.

Related: Watch this demo to learn more about AWeber’s Shopify integration

8. Tag someone who abandons their shopping cart.

 With AWeber’s Shopify integration, you can tag a subscriber who left items in their cart and didn’t purchase them. You can send them an automated email to encourage them to finish their purchase.

You can apply a generic tag when someone abandons any purchase  , or you can apply unique tags based on the product that someone abandons.

Related: How to set up cart abandonment with Shopify

9. Tag someone who completes a quiz.

Quizzes are a great way to provide a fun, interactive, and educational experience for your audience. Tools like Interact and Quiz Cat allow you to create engaging quizzes and tag your subscribers in AWeber who complete your quiz.

10. Tag someone who registers for your webinar.

Webinars are a great way to engage your audience directly and provide educational content to your subscribers. Tools like EasyWebinar allow you to add your webinar registrants directly to AWeber, and tag them based on the webinar they signed up for.

Then, you can automate reminder emails and follow up with your registrants after the webinar to share the recording and special offers.

11. Tag someone who subscribes from a text message.

Using a tool like Call Loop allows you to invite your audience to text a number to join your email list. Using the Call Loop integration with AWeber, you can add these individuals automatically to your email list, and tag them.

12. Tag someone who enters your contest.

Contests are a great way to engage your community and grow your email list. Using tools like Gleam or ViralSweep, you can automatically add contest participants to your AWeber email list, and tag them based on the contest they joined.

13. Tag someone who uses an online calculator or requests a custom quote.

Do you offer quotes, online calculators, polls or chatbots as part of your business? Tools like Outgrow allow you to add your interested prospects automatically to your AWeber account, and tag them accordingly, so you know exactly who they are and what they expressed interest in.

14. Tag new contacts from your CRM.

Do you use a CRM to manage client relationships? With tools like Agile CRM, you can automatically add your client and prospect contacts to your AWeber account, tag them with specific categories, and automate emails to keep your contacts engaged.

15. Tag someone who begins your automated campaign.

One way to tag subscribers is when they begin a campaign. This is helpful if you want to easily identify subscribers who are currently going through a Campaign so you don’t send them your regular broadcast emails as well.

Once they complete the Campaign, you can automatically remove that tag.

Related: How to use tags at the beginning of a Campaign 

16. Tag someone who completes your automated campaign.

Another way to tag subscribers in a campaign is at the end of the series. This allows you to link campaigns together.

For example, you may have multiple welcome campaigns for different sign up forms, and you may want them all to flow into a general nurture campaign after each welcome campaign is complete. Simply apply the same tag at the end of each campaign, and then set the general nurture Campaign to start on that tag.

Related: How to use tags at the end of a Campaign

17. Tag someone at any point in your automated campaign.

Let’s say you have a welcome campaign where your first two emails welcome your new subscribers and introduce them to you and your business.

Then, for the rest of the campaign, you’re trying to sell them on your products or services. You can apply a tag before the sales emails begin so you know which subscribers are being actively sold to. With this data, you can assess the effectiveness of your offers and improve the sales copy.

Related: How to use tags in the middle of a Campaign

18. Tag someone who opens an email in your automated campaign.

Tags can also be used to record specific actions your subscribers take within your campaign. For example, you can tag subscribers when they open specific messages in your campaign.

This helps you identify subscribers who expressed an interest in the topic of the email by opening it.

Related: How to add a tag when someone opens a message in a Campaign

19. Tag someone who clicks a link in your automated campaign.

Similarly, you can tag subscribers when they click specific links within the messages of your campaigns. This is helpful when you’re trying to learn more about your subscriber’s preferences.

For example, in our blog welcome campaign, we ask what our subscribers are interested in learning, and we provide links within that email. Each link has a different tag, and it allows our subscribers to self-select their interests so we can better target them with relevant content.

Related: How to add a tag when someone clicks a link in a Campaign

20. Tag someone who opens a broadcast email.

You can also tag subscribers when they open one-time, broadcast emails. Similar to tagging subscribers who open your Campaign messages, this helps you identify who is interested in the topic of the email enough to want to open it.

Related: How to tag someone who opens a broadcast

21. Tag someone who clicks a link in your broadcast email.

If you’re promoting an upcoming webinar in a broadcast email, you can tag anyone who clicks the registration link and send them an automated email with the link to join the webinar. This improves the subscriber experience by eliminating the need to fill out another form to sign up for the webinar.

Related: How to tag someone who clicks a link in a broadcast

22. Manually tag an individual subscriber.

In addition to automatically tagging subscribers, there are times when you may want to manually apply tags to individual subscribers. 

Let’s say you meet someone at an event and they agree to join your email list, but you don’t have a sign up form handy. You can add them to your list manually, and apply a tag that indicates where you met them. You can also apply another tag that adds them to an automated email campaign.

Related: How to manually tag an individual subscriber

23. Manually tag a large group of subscribers.

Let’s say you want to launch a new automated email campaign to subscribers who are already on your list. You can create the campaign and set it to launch for subscribers with a certain tag. Then, identify which subscribers you’d like to add to the campaign, and apply a tag to them all at once.

Or, let’s say you’re launching a new course and want to promote it to subscribers who have expressed interest in the course topic in the past. You can search for those subscribers and bulk apply a tag to them. henThen, create a segment of subscribers with this tag and send a one-time email to them that promotes your new course.

Related: How to manually tag a group of subscribers

Start using tags today.

Using tags to organize your subscribers enables you to provide a more personalized experience for your subscribers and increase your engagement.

Not an AWeber customer yet? Start your free 30-day trial today and try AWeber’s tags today.

The post 23 Ways to Tag and Segment Your Subscribers in AWeber appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

How to Increase Your LinkedIn Engagement: 4 Tips

Want a highly engaged LinkedIn following? Looking for tips to spur engagement? In this article, you’ll discover how to cultivate a following on LinkedIn. #1: Prepare Key LinkedIn Profile Components to Make a Good First Impression People see your LinkedIn headline when you share a post, comment on someone else’s post, or send an invitation […]

The post How to Increase Your LinkedIn Engagement: 4 Tips appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

How to Increase Your LinkedIn Engagement: 4 Tips

Want a highly engaged LinkedIn following? Looking for tips to spur engagement? In this article, you’ll discover how to cultivate a following on LinkedIn. #1: Prepare Key LinkedIn Profile Components to Make a Good First Impression People see your LinkedIn headline when you share a post, comment on someone else’s post, or send an invitation […]

The post How to Increase Your LinkedIn Engagement: 4 Tips appeared first on Social Media Marketing | Social Media Examiner.

How to Increase Your Organic Growth by Over 400%, According to the SEO Lead at Nextiva

Here’s a reality check for 2020 — only one-third of businesses make it to the 10 year mark.

No market demand, running out of cash, and getting out-competed are among the leading reasons businesses fail.

The good news? You don’t have to figure it all out on your own, because I’ve done a lot of the legwork for you.

When I served as the VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker (a publication and community for B2B salespeople), I uncovered strategies and processes that exploded our growth.

In fact, the results were outstanding: in just over a year, we were able to grow Sales Hacker’s traffic from 19,000 monthly organic sessions to over 100,000 monthly organic sessions.

That’s a 426% increase. As a result, Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach, a sales engagement platform.

Now, I’m using that same exact process to lead SEO at Nextiva, and here is a snapshot of our organic keyword growth to prove that this really works:

If you’re looking to skyrocket your organic growth with an efficient SEO strategy in 2020, check out the five proven steps I’ve taken with both Sales Hacker and Nextiva to achieve tremendous results.

First things first: why is it so hard to stand out in search?

The goal of owning search rankings is simple: organic presence means qualified traffic, which leads to conversions, which turn into sales. In fact, marketers who prioritize blogging efforts are 13 times more likely to see positive ROI.

That’s not to say blogging is the only way, or the best way to do it — but it’s what works best for us.

Creating content can have a powerful long-term impact, too: over its lifetime, one compounding blog post creates as much traffic as six decaying posts.

Of course, in 2020, most companies get the importance of blogging. Nowadays, 55% of marketers say blog content creation is their top inbound marketing priority.

Unfortunately, that leads to a new problem: the SERPs are getting a little overcrowded.

Keyword difficulty is rising. Almost every topic you can imagine already has dozens of guides and tutorials ranking against each other.

Most industries have become noisy, which makes it hard to stand out. Ultimately, it’s more important than ever to be intentional about your website and the content you publish.

Additionally, this viral tweet — which received commentary from several Google employees — suggests search results have gotten so competitive, personal websites have no chance of ranking anymore due to businesses going all-in on long-tail SEO, which takes away even the lowest search volume opportunities.

At Sales Hacker, we had an aggressive publishing schedule, with 4-5 new blog posts going live each week. They were all written by our community — we didn’t contract an agency or freelancers. Since we had more content than we could handle, we wanted to keep our contributors happy while ensuring all content was evergreen and actionable.

Let’s explore exactly what steps we took to achieve organic growth, and what you can do to stand out in 2020 and beyond.

1. Start with audience research.

When you need to take your results (such as traffic or leads) to the next level, it’s always a challenge. This challenge is easier to tackle when you already have a loyal audience — even if it’s a small one.

Why? Because you get to ask them what they like, what they dislike, and what they want more of. The thing is, we found that when people see you genuinely care about their interests, they’re more than happy to talk to you and share their insights.

The key to succeeding with audience research is setting strong goals for your research. This applies to surveys, interviews, and any other method you pick.

For instance, at Sales Hacker, I had the following five research goals on which I wanted to collect information:

  • Brand messaging insight
  • Audience development insight
  • Content strategy insight
  • UX and website navigation insight
  • Email marketing insight

I set up 30-minute interviews with a sample of Sales Hacker’s audience: typically mid-to-senior-level sales roles, ages 25 to 44.

These are some of the questions I asked in these interviews, which you can implement into your own audience research process:

  • What are your most common daily tasks?
  • What are your top challenges in sales/business?
  • How would you describe Sales Hacker to your grandma?
  • Give us your best Sales Hacker Slogan.
  • What is the main benefit of Sales Hacker?
  • What is the main problem with Sales Hacker’s website?
  • What would discourage you from subscribing to our email list?
  • What type of content would you find helpful?
  • What type of content is a waste of time?

These questions match my audience research goals outlined earlier. If you’ve set different goals, make sure to add interview questions that correlate with them.

Based on the answers I received from my recipients, I ended up with a list of topic clusters and understood the content types that were in highest demand.

I also learned that thought leadership content was the biggest loyalty driver, and that our audience would listen to our podcast if we launched one (which we did!).

Takeaway: Build a list of audience research goals and corresponding questions you can ask in surveys and interviews. Analyze results so you can find the content to focus on.

2. Run an SEO site audit.

Why an SEO audit? Think about it like this — if search engines can’t read your content, you’ll struggle to reach your target audience. On top of that, 40% of people abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.

In other words, when you get your ideal readers to your website, you’ll want to make sure you don’t lose them right away.

An SEO audit involves crawling your website using a tool like Screaming Frog and then analyzing the data. Here are some things you should look for:

  • Duplicate content
  • Noindex pages or nofollow links
  • Robots.txt file
  • Improper redirects and redirect chains
  • Broken media assets (video and audio files)
  • Broken links
  • URL structure
  • Pages with long load times

Some of the issues I found with Sales Hacker was the lack of referring domains, non-optimized URLs, poor internal linking structure, poor site structure and navigation, and some branded search problems.

Once we had a list of issues, we tackled them one by one so we could set a strong foundation for our content creation and optimization going forward.

Takeaway: Download the SEO Audit kit which includes a guide and a checklist to work from. Alternatively, make a list of all the improvements you can make and start working on them as soon as you can.

3. Develop new content opportunities.

As I mentioned earlier, our audience research helped us identify the topics that help them progress in their sales careers the most. With these topics in mind, we looked for gaps in existing search engine results.

We did this for the topics we wanted to grow an authority in, including cold calling, best sales tools, channel sales, sales Excel templates, and more.

Here are some of the existing patterns we were seeing:

  • Low-value round-ups
  • Definition-based content
  • Theoretical content
  • Lack of focus on user intent
  • Unengaged approach to sales templates
  • Long introductions

I decided to go the opposite way and provide what our audience was asking for: getting to the point quickly with zero fluff, providing a great content experience, and offering mega-lists of tools and tips, with a highly actionable writing style.

This worked so well for us that we ended up earning a featured snippet for the’ channel sales’ topic, as well as some others, like BANT, customer success manager, and sales forecast modeling:

Takeaway: Based on the topics your audience is interested in, analyze the highest-ranking content on search. Brainstorm ways you can provide more values based on gaps that existing content has and on what your audience is looking for from you.

4. Update and optimize your existing content.

If you have an audience of any size, that probably means you also have a library of published content. Is it up to par? And is it serving your audience the best way it could?

Optimizing your past content is one of the most powerful ways to increase the mileage of the work you’ve already put into your blog.

We discovered that our audience doesn’t want to feel like we’re pitching them all the time, so the first thing we did was rework our content in a way that wasn’t sales-y, but to the point, actionable, and purely educational.

Some of our most successful updates have included:

  • Making our lists longer and more comprehensive (example: best sales books)
  • Building long-form guides on topics we’ve only touched on in the past (example: sales operations)

Here’s the before of the sales operations guide:

And here’s the after:

As a result, our existing content skyrocketed in search rankings.

Takeaway: Using Google Analytics, make a list of blog posts that are covering an evergreen, relevant topic, but get low search traffic. Update them one by one, starting with those that have historically had the highest conversion rate (for example, email signups) and work down from there.

Bonus: Use schema mark-up to own more search page real estate.

With zero click searches on the rise, it’s now up to savvy SEOs to find more ways to stand out in search results and fight for clicks.

One way to do that is by using rich schema mark-up to enhance your content in search results. Google recently deployed FAQ schema which allows websites to have their webpage FAQs displayed directly in the search results.

For instance, check out how we’re optimizing VoIP Call Center in the search results for Nextiva. The FAQs themselves display right on the search page. This is a powerful tactic for stealing more clicks back from Google.

You can use the rich schema generator to help you with this.

5. Tailor your homepage and navigation to your audience.

I believe that Sales Hacker’s homepage re-design (which happened in July 2017) was a huge growth accelerator.

Right after I took over Marketing operations for Sales Hacker, this is what the homepage looked like:

This version of the homepage likely made it difficult for people to take the actions we wanted them to, like finding the content they need or signing up for our email list.

The key approach to our homepage re-design, like with many other things we’ve done, was setting clear goals behind that process. In this case, these goals were:

  • Showing people exactly what Sales Hacker is and what we do
  • Making the process of signing up for the email list super simple
  • Helping visitors find the content they want quickly and easily
  • Showcasing social proof
  • Improving internal linking

This obviously wasn’t just down to what the homepage looked like, but also our site structure and how we approached internal linking in general.

I’ve sketched a mindmap of the ideal new site structure with categories and subcategories. The taxonomy I had in mind would achieve the following:

  • Increased engagement from natural site exploration from visitors
  • The shortest possible path to the most important content on the site
  • Landing page visibility from an increase of internal links pointing to them

Takeaway: Identify the single most important actions you want your visitors to take (lead generation, sales, etc.) and organize your homepage in a way that makes those actions obvious and the path to them uncluttered. Use a tool or simply pen and paper to draw a map of journeys on your website you want your visitors to go through based on their interests. Apply this not only to your homepage, but to any menus and content categorization you have on your blog.

Over to You

This process won’t give you results overnight. In fact, while the homepage updates may show some instant results from a user behavior point of view, most efforts to improve your organic presence will take months to bring significant improvements.

Remember — these steps outline exactly what we did to go from low organic presence to a highly authoritative sales community hub, which we ended up selling. It took us over one year, but we made a persistent, intentional effort in places we knew mattered most.

Want to grow at a rapid pace? Start with your audience and listen to their feedback. This way, you can take the right actions to reach even more of your target readers and customers and take your business to the next level.

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