If you’re selling products and want to reach the widest audience possible, having a well-optimized e-commerce website is an absolute must.

Why? Well, there are several benefits to having an online store.

The most obvious reason to have an online store is to take advantage of the rapid growth of e-commerce worldwide. The value of total e-commerce sales has soared from $1.3 trillion in 2014 to 5.7 trillion in 2022. By 2026, Statista predicts total sales will be worth $8 trillion.

An e-commerce store can significantly grow your customer base, making it possible for people from all over to buy your products. Given that so many more people shop online today, an e-commerce website can also make up for falling foot traffic.

But that’s not all. An e-commerce website can also help you learn more about your customers. By installing an analytics tool like GA4, you can discover your customers’ demographics: locations, age, and even how they found you.

Whether you already have an e-commerce store or you want to create one, you need to take steps to ensure it’s as visible as possible.

How do you do that? It’s simple enough: with SEO for e-commerce.

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What Is SEO for E-Commerce?

SEO for e-commerce is a strategy that helps web retailers rank higher in search engine results. A well-designed and optimized website with high-quality content will rank better in search engines such as Google, increasing your store’s visibility and driving traffic.

In other words, SEO for e-commerce concentrates on optimizing your site, which makes it easier to get leads and conversions.

However, unlike SEO for content-focused websites, SEO for e-commerce is more than just adding keywords, writing blog posts, and gaining links. You need to understand how search engines work and what they reward.

That means having a working knowledge of SEO for e-commerce, considering Google’s guidelines, analyzing buyer intent, and implementing it strategically.

E-Commerce SEO Best Practices

SEO for e-commerce is a complex field. With tens of millions of online retail sites in existence, it’s not always easy to make your site stand out.

While increasing your SEO rankings might seem like a huge challenge, you can make a positive start by applying the best practices I outline below.

If you haven’t optimized your e-commerce website at all, I highly recommend working through this guide in order. If you have optimized your site in the past, then feel free to implement my advice as you wish.

Ready? Then let’s learn how to do SEO for e-commerce.

1. Perform Keyword Research the Right Way

If there’s one thing absolutely every e-commerce business owner should do, it’s perform in-depth keyword research for their store.

Your goal should be twofold.

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First, you want to find the most relevant and popular keywords in your niche. Second, you must understand buyer intent behind each keyword.

Keyword intent is the aim behind a search query. You can identify it by looking at the specific phrases people use when looking for an item online and the results shown by Google.

There are two main types of keyword intent you’ll see most often.

Informational Keyword Intent

Informational keyword intent is when users search for an answer to a question or to understand a topic in more detail.

They aren’t quite looking to make a purchase yet. Instead, they might want to understand your niche in better detail or get an answer to a question that isn’t related to a product. For instance, if you owned an outdoor clothing store, an informational keyword might be something like: “best hikes near San Francisco.”

Commercial Keyword Intent

Commercial keyword intent is when people are looking for information to help them make a purchase.

Consumers typically use commercial keyword intents when they know what they want but don’t know where to find it yet. You see this when you’re typing specific terms into Google, like “buy digital camera” or “find new laptop deals.”

But they may also use commercial intent keywords when they don’t know which product they want to purchase. Review-based queries are a great example of commercial keywords, for example: “What is the best digital camera?”

Determining Keyword Intent

Deciding consumers’ keyword intent seems challenging, but you can make it easier on yourself. For example, follow the advice of AgencyAnalytics, who break it down into stages.

1. Analyzing SERPs: Pay special attention to paid ads, knowledge graph results, and organic listings.
2. Look at Google ads for commercial intent: Seeing bid prices for keywords gives an idea of how competitive keywords are.
3. Review your analytics: Look for content with high bounce rates as it may mean it doesn’t match with search intent.

In order to determine the right keyword mix for your site, though, you’re going to need support. Let’s talk about a couple of tools that can power your search for SEO e-commerce keywords.

Using Ubersuggest and AnswerThePublic for SEO E-Commerce Research

While Google’s keyword planner is an effective start, you may want more depth or specialized support to build out your keyword targets. Here’s a closer look into some of the other options that can help you build your target keywords for your SEO e-commerce strategy:

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is an online tool that makes keyword research easy. Simply search for a seed keyword (like outdoor jackets) and Ubersuggest will serve up hundreds of related keywords and give you all of the data you need to choose which keywords to focus on.

This tool is great for content writers, bloggers, copywriters, and marketers who want to generate new content ideas.

Other Ubersuggest features include:

• backlink data
• rank tracking
• site audit reports

Backlink Data

Ubersuggest isn’t just a great tool for getting keyword data. It also lets you see who links to your and your competitors’ sites.

Head to the Backlink Discovery Tool found under the Backlinks header.

Enter a domain—it doesn’t have to be yours—and Ubersuggest will show you who links to it. It’s a great way to identify targets for link building.

Rank Tracking

See how you rank in organic SERPs for your target keywords with Ubersuggest rank tracking. It’s a great way to see how you improve over time. You can find it under Dashboard on the left side.

Site Audit

Run a site audit to track which issues could be affecting user experience and organic traffic. Think of the audit as a starting point, then review it regularly to make sure you’re fixing every issue. You’ll find Site Audit in its own tab in the left-hand sidebar.

Once the audit has run, it will tell you your top SEO issues and how to fix them.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public, now acquired by NP Digital, is a search listening tool that uses autocomplete data from Google to deliver hundreds of questions for every keyword you enter. If you’re looking for long-tail keywords, this is one of the best tools to find them.

Answer the Public is very intuitive. Just enter your keyword on the homepage, and the platform will list related questions under a range of headings (where, when, how, what, etc.) You can see the questions in an alphabetical list and download the questions in a .csv file. It’s free to use, but you can upgrade to a premium plan for more features. The following example uses “multivitamins.”

The results give a detailed picture of the kind of questions people are asking and give a better idea of intent.

2. Optimize Product Pages to Improve Ranking

Every business owner that wants to grow its search traffic and acquire new customers needs to optimize the on-page elements of their website. On-page SEO covers things like your site structure, meta descriptions, and heading tags.

Not every on-page element of your e-commerce site needs optimizing, so in this section, let’s focus on the ones that matter most to online retailers: product descriptions, images, and reviews.

Optimize Your Product Descriptions

Product page descriptions are important for a number of reasons. Firstly, they provide vital, keyword-rich content that Google uses to rank your site. Second, they entice users to buy your products once they’ve landed on the page.

To begin optimizing your e-commerce product pages, you need to keep three key aspects in mind:

1. What are the most crucial things on the page?
2. How can you maximize visibility and impact with these elements?
3. How can you use this information to improve your product description’s effectiveness?

Now, start looking at what you can do to maximize the impact of your product descriptions. This could be things like.

• adding multiple, high-quality, unique images
• including keywords
• including detailed, keyword-rich descriptions
• adding calls to action (CTAs)
• including testimonials

You’ll notice that a lot of these suggestions aren’t what you’d normally consider being a product description. But rest assured, user reviews and call-to-action buttons are just important as product-focused copy.

Optimize Your Images

A sometimes neglected area of on-page SEO for e-commerce is images. Photos are an excellent way to communicate a message and draw in an audience. However, they can also distract people from the message you are trying to convey, so be careful not to use too many images and crowd your product pages.

Although quality images are vital to show your products at their best, there’s more to it than that. Optimizing your images for SEO will give you higher search engine rankings and more traffic from potential customers and may gain you traffic from social media channels.

Here are some pointers for optimizing your images:

• Provide captions with alt tags.
• Keep your images as small as possible without impacting image quality.
• Use keywords in file names.

Feature Reviews

Reviews provide much-needed information that helps shoppers weigh the pros and cons of a product and decide whether to make a purchase. In addition, they help you build trust with your potential customers and improve conversion rates.

You can encourage customers to leave reviews by sending automated messages whenever they make a purchase. You can also set up email campaigns to send out reminders or offers once they have left a review on your site.

Before moving on to another area of this e-commerce SEO guide, here are more on-page optimization tips:

• Use canonical tags to link duplicate product pages and similar group products together.

• Create a well-written page that includes the necessary information about the product, an image of the product, and a video of it in action.
• Include at least one CTA on your product page. For example, “Add To Cart” or “Check Availability.”
• Make sure you include shipping details and policies upfront, so customers know what they’re paying from the start.

3. Make Sure Your Site Is User Friendly

UX stands for user experience and it is vital for e-commerce stores to have a good one. You can enhance UX with good design, a better site structure, and making the aesthetics more visually appealing.

However, it’s not just about making a website look good; it’s about making it work well. UX includes everything from navigation, ease of use, and the overall “feel” of the website.

UX is also about making sure people can find what they are looking for, keeping them engaged while browsing, and giving visitors the best experience possible.

You may not think that UX affects SEO, but the kind of experience you provide for users can have a direct correlation with how well you rank.

This includes Core Web Vitals,a set of factors Google uses to grade a page’s user experience. Google measures your site’s user experience in three primary areas:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)
• First Input Delay (FID)

LCP is a measure of how useful Google thinks a page is to users based on the load time of the largest blocks visible to users.

CLS is a measure of how much buttons and other interactive elements on your website move after a page has fully loaded.

FID is a measure of the time it takes a page to respond to a user’s input.

From a site owner’s perspective, there are several things you can do to improve your Core Web Vitals:

• Improve your site load time
• Make sure any ads don’t interfere with the user experience
• Make sure your site is interactive with clear CTAs.

4. Don’t Forget Long-Tail Keywords

A long-tail keyword is a longer and more specific search phrase. It typically contains at least three words (often more) and has low volume. But they can be incredibly valuable to e-commerce stores. These phrases are so specific that they tend to convert at a much higher rate. So even though they generate less traffic, they generate an unusually high number of sales.

Long-tail keywords are valuable for any business, but they are especially good if you operate in a highly competitive niche.

You can find long-tail keywords by using Google’s “People Also Ask” feature or using a keyword tool like Ubersuggest.

Head over to the Keyword Ideas tab on Ubersuggest—it’s found under the Keyword Research heading. Enter your seed keyword. I’ve used “hiking boots” as an example. The tool will then generate thousands of related keywords.

The best way to find long-tail keywords is to change the SEO Difficulty filter to easy since long-tail keywords are less competitive.

As you can see in the image below, I now have over 100 long-tail terms that I can rank for.

5. Use a Simple URL Structure

A simple URL structure enhances the user experience and improves your SEO e-commerce efforts.

Additionally, when your e-commerce site has a simple URL structure, it’s easier to share products on social media and other websites.

For the best results, URLs should be as readable as possible.

For instance, here’s an example of what NOT to do: https://www.example.com/articlesabouthiking/

It would be much better to use this URL structure: https://www.example.com/hiking-articles

If you get stuck, Google also has some advice on improving URL structure. I’ve also written a detailed guide on improving URL structure.

There are other tactics that can help out as well when it comes to improving your URL structure. See below:

Use Keywords

Search engines can scan your URLs and will use the content as a ranking factor. That’s why you must spend some time thinking about your keywords before deciding on a URL structure.

For example, if people are searching for “mens sneakers”, it can help your category page to rank if that keyword phrase is also in your page’s URL.

Avoid Stop Words

Common stop words are “the,” “and,” “of,” and “a.”

Stop words can decrease your URL’s readability and may lower your SEO rankings.

There’s simply no need to have them in there. So instead of having a blog post with the URL:

http://example.com/what-are-the-best-hiking-shoes

Instead have:

http://example.com/best-hiking-shoes

Use Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are a navigational tool. They allow website visitors to retrace previous steps and return to where they started. Breadcrumbs are not just a usability technique but also provide additional SEO benefits.

For example, if you visit a blog post from your main homepage, the breadcrumb for that post would be “Home > Blog > This Post.”

You find breadcrumbs in many web design tools, and you can add them by using markup tags or via JavaScript.

6. Use Schema Markups to Help Google and Users Understand Content

Schema markups are HTML tags that provide additional information to search bots about the content on web pages. By using these markups, it can improve your SEO for e-commerce efforts.

When you use schema markup, it can produce rich snippets. These are a way for search engines to show more information about specific queries at the very top of search results.

They also help people find what they are looking for faster and easier by showing different types of information.

There are many different types of rich snippets, such as:

• product markup snippets
• music snippets
• review snippets

The kinds of e-commerce schema are:

• Product schema: This is an extension for products, services, and organizations. It enables discovering new products and services in web search queries by providing rich product information such as images, price, and availability. Product schema also allows the display of product ads on the SERPs.
• Review schema: This enables online reviews. The author and title filters allow you to find specific people who have written reviews on your website or blog post and for searchers to find product reviews.
• Product availability schema: The product availability schema is a list of products that are available to purchase. It can be a single page, or it can be within an online store. Such lists typically detail the product name, description, price, images, and variants.
• Video schema: Video schema is a type of metadata used to describe the content and format. For example, video schema may include the audio language, video resolution, or age rating of the video.
• Price schema: Price schema is a technique for the pricing of products or a price range.
• FAQ schema: FAQ schema is a type of markup that you can add to your page that contains a list of questions and answers. You can find an example in the FAQs section at the bottom of this article.

7. Avoid Duplicate Pages and Content

Have you ever visited a website and got the feeling you’ve read it all somewhere before? That’s all too common with production descriptions and category descriptions when online retailers use duplicate product catalogs and images.

It’s understandable why e-commerce sellers just republish the same descriptions. Usually, it’s simply because they don’t have the resources to produce fresh content themselves.

However, even if you don’t have time to rewrite everything, you can still significantly reduce the amount of duplication on your site in product descriptions and other areas.

For instance, by

• using a CMS with site-wide 301 redirects or adding canonical tags on every page that you know might have duplicates (pages with similar titles, pages that share an identical URL, etc.)
• adding a suffix to the URL
• using different product images
• adding unique keywords on other pages

8. Don’t Let Page Speed Kill Your Ranking

Page loading time is the measurement of how long it takes for an internet user to open a web page.

Page speed is a ranking factor, and survey after survey shows consumers aren’t willing to wait around while a site loads. A recent study found that 19% of shoppers will abandon a page that takes longer than two to three seconds to load.

Web users say their ideal site speed is just two seconds, but the faster, the better. If you’re not sure about your current speeds, you can test it at Cloudflare or try Google’s tool.

What should you do if your site is too slow? First, you need to find the reason. It could be:

• Your site simply has too much content for your server to handle.
• Too many scripts are slowing down load times.
• Images take an excessive amount of time to load.
• There’s a problem with your web host.

While not all e-commerce site owners can guarantee a perfect 100 percent on Google’s PageSpeed Insights, you can try and reduce load times by:

• having fewer images on the pages
• compressing files
• using fewer social media widgets
• optimizing your images
• avoiding clutter and using plenty of white space
• limiting redirects and HTTP requests
• fastening your server response time

Additionally, you might want to think about changing web hosts or upgrading your hosting package to accommodate your needs better.

9. Content Matters for E-Commerce

E-commerce isn’t just about images and keywords. Written content should also be part of your SEO for e-commerce strategy.

Posting regular content not only attracts organic traffic. It can gain your customers’ trust, boost your website rankings, and solidify your reputation as an expert in your niche too.

There are many types of content you can focus on:

• sharing how-to pieces and answering FAQs
• new product launches and anything newsworthy
• a glossary page
• including user-generated content (UGC)
• testimonials and launches
• video demonstrations and Q and As
• webinars

For more ideas, take it a step further, and get to know your audience so you understand their main concerns and problems. This allows you to write content that addresses their everyday worries and offer products that solve these.

Now you know which kinds of you can create, let’s look at how you can build a content strategy to give your audience exactly what they want:

1. Get to know your customers better with buyer personas.
2. Understand their preferred content. If you’re tracking your content data, you should see which content types get the most views. Additionally, you can ask customers and prospects through surveys or groups.
3. Establish a content calendar and create the content.
4. Publish the appropriate content for the various stages of the buying cycle.
5. Use A/B testing in key areas like titles.
6. Measure the results and tweak.

10. Link Building for E-Commerce

Link building is an important SEO ranking factor. Quality links tell Google that your site has credibility. Backlinks also influence how your website ranks for keywords.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? But just how do you go about creating these all-important backlinks?

A few ways to do this are:

• creating internal backlinks
• writing guest posts
• using social media ads
• sharing content on social media
• issuing press releases
• writing blog comments and sharing on forums (if allowed)
• creating infographics and sharing them online
• issuing whitepapers and case studies

These are all legitimate ways to build quality links. Although they can take time, you shouldn’t take shortcuts by buying links.

Paid links violate Google’s guidelines, and if you’re buying cheap links, the quality is usually questionable. Poor quality links lead to lower SERP rankings and reduced traffic, as well as a potential negative impact on your site’s reputation.

11. Add a Sitemap

A sitemap is a file on your website that contains information about all of the pages, videos, images, and other content. Search engines use your sitemap to crawl your e-commerce store more efficiently.

Your sitemap should include all of the pages on your site, from category pages to product pages. It should also include all the subcategories, products, and other content within those sections.

You can develop a sitemap manually or use an automated tool such as Google’s Webmaster Tools to generate one. Sitemaps use both XML and HTML, although HTML sitemaps are more helpful to visitors.

Other tools for creating a sitemap are:

Lucidchart Sitemap Generator

The Lucidchart sitemap generator is a user-friendly tool that makes creating a sitemap easy. It has many features, like adding categories and subcategories.

Powermapper

Powermapper is an easy-to-use tool for creating and updating sitemaps and allows you to generate one-click checkouts.

It’s a web-based tool with no coding expertise required. However, there is a fee.

12. Make Social Sharing Easy

Google’s Matt Cutts once said that social sharing doesn’t impact SEO, but many would disagree.

While social media sharing may not directly affect your SEO, sharing your content on social media increases brand exposure and gets people more familiar with your business.

Further, the more mentions you get on social media, the more influence this can have on your SEO by:

• driving organic traffic and increasing visibility
• improving local SEO
• expanding your content reach and enhancing brand recognition
• increasing backlinks

If you want an easy way to increase your shares on social media, consider getting a tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to automatically post content from your site across all of your social media accounts at scheduled intervals.

25 More Quick Tips for E-Commerce SEO

Think you’ve finished optimizing your e-commerce store for SEO? Not so fast! There are dozens of other strategies you can implement to skyrocket your organic traffic and sales. Look into these 25 tips I list below.

1. Get an SSL Certificate

Your e-commerce store needs to have an SSL certificate. That means users will see https:// before your URL. An SSL certificate protects customer information, is trusted by Google, and even improves your SEO.

2. Improve Your Meta Descriptions

Write more compelling meta descriptions to increase CTRs on organic search. This won’t directly impact your rankings, but increasing your CTR can.

Use terms like “buy online” to give the user an idea of how they can get your product before they even click. Tons of e-commerce stores do this to increase their organic CTR.

3. 301 Out-of-Date Products

If you have an expired or discontinued product, 301 redirect the URL to a newer product page. All SEO value will transfer to the new page, and you may get a nice little rankings boost.

4. Improve Category Pages

Treat category-based pages (like men or women) as individual homepages with their own keywords and content. That way, they should rank higher.

One way to do this is to structure category pages around specific keywords. For example, “men’s basketball shoes” is a popular keyword that you can also use as a category for your site.

5. Add Category-Level Navigation

Always offer category-level navigation on your e-commerce store. This helps Google crawl your website and makes it easier for users to find what they’re looking for. And that means more sales.

6. Optimize E-Commerce Marketplaces

Don’t neglect your marketplace SEO. Did you know 38% of e-commerce product searches start on Amazon? Make sure your product is listed and linked back to your site.

One store was able to generate 320% more sales in 10 minutes of optimization on Amazon.

7. Improve Your Title Tag

Optimize your title tag to be 60-70 characters and always include the keyword to grab user attention. The more enticing it is, the more users will click on it.

Always use the product name in your meta titles to give the searcher exactly what they are looking for.

8. Think About Your 404 Page

Turn your 404 error pages into a sales-driving machine. Rather than just letting 404 errors occur, head into Google Search Console, find the 404 error pages and 301 redirect these pages to the most relevant pages on your site. That way, you don’t lose an opportunity to sell to customers.

You can even customize your 404 message so that it links out to the most popular pages on your e-commerce store.

Watch the video below to learn more

9. Add Live Chat

You can boost your conversion rates by nearly 50% simply by adding live chat to your site. Why? Because live chat means customers don’t have to go to the effort of picking up the phone or sending an email and waiting for a response.

Live chat gives the customer instant access to your customer service team who can provide them with the information they need to make a purchase decision.

10. Add More Internal Links

You can reduce your site’s bounce rate by increasing internal linking. This helps you rank higher and ensures users spend more time browsing your store.

Use internal links to suggest related products or products that other users bought to drive more relevant sales and better your site structure:

11. Change Up Your Anchor Text

Use keywords in anchor text instead of “click here” to rank pages for specific terms. It may also make shoppers more likely to click through.

12. Optimize Your Site’s CTAs

You should change the calls to action on your site frequently. Optimize them for specific holidays, promotions, and sales. You should see a boost in conversion rates.

13. Add Trust With an About Us Page

Creating an “About Us” page will increase content on your site and give Google more context about which industries you’re in and what products you sell. It will also help customers to have more faith in your store.

14. Add Product Recommendations

Your homepage should already initiate the selling process. Start by suggesting products that are popular to get people interested fast. This will help reduce the likelihood of a bounce.

15. Optimize Out-of-Stock Pages

Collect leads on product pages when your product is out of stock. Instead of leaving the page blank, most likely causing the user to bounce, ask them to give their email in exchange for stocking notifications.

16. Implement Proper Heading Structure

Be sure to use header tags on your product pages correctly. They are easy to add and improve your HTML structure. For example, you can use the product name as the H1 header tag. Product description, delivery information, and returns-related headings can be H2s. Using header tags this way organizes your content for readers and SEO.

17. Create A Sense Of Urgency

Create urgency on product pages and even within your meta descriptions in organic search. This is one of the reasons why Kickstarter campaigns are so effective:

Convince users to buy using urgency-inducing countdowns.

18. Compare Products to Boost Traffic

Create product-focused SEO content by creating “versus” style posts in which you compare different products that are trending.

19. Create Gift Guides

Create holiday gift guides to drive tons of organic traffic to your site. Gift guides are simply round-up posts of popular products in your niche that make great gifts. They are a valuable tool for consumers looking for the perfect product to buy and they also do wonders for your traffic levels and conversion rates. Not only do they convince visitors to buy your products, but you can use gift guides to target high-intent commercial keywords that have seriously high search volumes.

20. Add Video Content

Always use video content for product demos. A study by online video platform Brightcove found that almost half (48%) of respondents said video increased confidence in their purchasing decisions. The survey found they are particularly important if you have a store that sells consumer electronics, toys, and DIY tools.

21. Pay to Play

Don’t neglect paid search. It can be a great driver of brand awareness that leads to an organic purchase (last-touch bias).

Bid on branded PPC terms to dominate the organic results for your company. This ensures that all organic searches for your store result in a click to your site.

22. Invest in Blogger Outreach

Contact popular bloggers in your product niche and ask them to review your products. This will get you links fast on roundup-style posts:

23. Create an Affiliate Program

Start an affiliate program to get bloggers writing about and promoting your products on your site. This will not only generate more sales, but it will also increase your site backlinks, giving you more authority and better rankings.

24. Use Search Console to Find Ranking Opportunities

You can use Search Console to find popular keywords that you’re already ranking for without meaning to. Create pages dedicated to these queries to send traffic levels soaring.

You can also use another Google tool, the Ads Keyword Planner, to find high-intent, purchase-based keywords that will drive organic sales

25. Install an SEO Plugin

Install the Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress to clean up any missed on-page SEO tasks.

You can also use ScreamingFrog to crawl your site for any 404 errors, duplicate content, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is SEO for E-commerce?

SEO for e-commerce is the process of optimizing an online store so that it can rank higher in search engines. Several factors affect how well a website ranks on the SERPs, such as the quality and relevance of the content, the use of appropriate keywords to optimize the site, and the number of backlinks pointing to the site.

Is SEO Important for E-commerce?

Increasing your store’s organic traffic as an SEO is a great way to boost revenue and profits. Customers acquired through SEO often have a much lower Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC). SEO also lets you attract customers earlier in the funnel who aren’t yet ready to make a purchase.

How Do I Start E-commerce SEO?

Start e-commerce SEO by optimizing the on-page elements of your website like your product descriptions, UX, and page speed. Once you have optimized your website, you can start building backlinks.

How Is SEO for E-commerce Different?

When it comes to SEO for e-commerce, there are different areas you need to focus on, such as optimizing:

• product pages and descriptions
• diversifying product content and information
• images on your website
• your homepage

How do I Find the Right Keywords For my E-commerce Store?

There are several free resources that you can use to find keyword ideas, such as Google AdWords, Ubersuggest, and Google’s Keyword Tool. You should also look at what your competitors are using to find the best keywords for their audience.

Finally, avoid using broad keywords that generate many clicks but don’t provide much conversion value. Use long-tail keywords where you can.

What Should Be Avoided In SEO?

You should avoid using any discouraged SEO tactics when optimizing your e-commerce store. That includes creating spammy backlinks, paying for link farms, and keyword stuffing.

What Is The Most Overlooked Aspect of SEO For E-commerce Brands?

Link building is the most overlooked aspect of SEO for e-commerce brands. Many store owners assume they can get away with great on-page optimization, but building backlinks is still essential if you want to compete for the most competitive keywords.

How Much Does SEO for E-commerce Cost?

The cost of SEO depends on many factors, including the number of keywords targeted, competitive landscape, and how much effort you need to optimize each page for ranking.

It’s not easy to put a price tag on SEO because it depends on how many resources you allocate and what you want to achieve. To help you budget, Search Engine Journal provides an SEO budget calculator.

Conclusion

SEO for e-commerce helps boost your website visibility, brings new customers to your store, and helps build a loyal audience.

It may seem like there’s a lot to think about. However, by concentrating on the main SEO best practices and optimizing the critical areas of your website, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as it sounds.

The most important thing to remember is SEO for e-commerce doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, it’s an ongoing strategy that requires updating as you go to get the optimum results.

What part of your e-commerce store are you going to optimize first?

There’s a strategy that will help you skyrocket those rankings without a lot of extra work.

Yes, you could keep writing and producing more content. But this is complicated and it takes lots of time.

Instead, you can update old content. It takes less work and delivers faster results which can only be beneficial for your overall content marketing strategy.

To increase the effectiveness of your SEO efforts and boost your search engine traffic, you can just update your old content and give yourself an improved freshness score.

When you tell Google your content is new, you’ll get a spike in traffic that will make the tiny amount of work required well worth it.

In fact, this has been known since Google’s announcement in 2011, and their reiteration of this as a ranking factor in 2020.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you know you need to refresh content. We’ll also share relevant data we’ve collected on refreshing content from our very own blog, as well as 14 benefits you may receive as a result of updating your old content.

Let’s get started.

How Do You Know A Piece of Content Needs To Be Refreshed?

We tend to think that the work we publish is always our best work. That may be true at the time of publishing, but things change over time.

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Just consider SEO.

How much has SEO changed in the last 10 years? Five years? One year?

The answer is, a lot.

The same can be said for so many other topics and niches.

So how do you know a piece of content needs to be refreshed?

There are a few telltale signs that your content is in need of an update, including:

• New information becomes available. Be sure to regularly (i.e., every six months or so) update articles with new studies, new research, and the most up-to-date backlinks. Topics can rapidly evolve over time.
• When it becomes irrelevant. If your post was highly specific (e.g., X Socially Distanced Vacation Spots for the COVID-Conscious Traveler), it might need to be completely revamped or even retired.
• When it begins to underperform. If your post has been published for a while, you may start to notice that impressions and clicks drop off. You may also notice you’re ranking for fewer keywords than before.
• When it becomes “old.” The older your post gets, the more out-of-date your content and backlinks become. Be sure to evaluate your content at least once per year to avoid your content becoming too stale for your readership.

Of course, you can also update your content whenever you want. You don’t need a reason to update your content, but if it’s currently performing well, then keep an eye on the changes you make and their impact on your metrics.

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What Our Data Shows Us About Refreshing Content

Updating your old content is important, but exactly what benefits might you see from refreshing your content regularly?

Take a look at three of our own updates of old content and how they performed.

Refresh: What is A Shadow Ban? (and How to Fix It)

What We Refreshed

The team refreshed the meta data to be more aligned with user intent, updated the content to be up to date with the terminology (it was previously written about ghostbanning which is now coined shadowbanning), and updated the keyword targets.

The content refresh was published on August 7th, 2022.

How the Refresh Impacted Our Metrics

The above chart shows 16 months of performance data for this particular blog post. When we refreshed this, there was an instant lift in performance.

Let’s break this down.

On August 6th, 2022, one day before the content was updated, the blog had 134 clicks. On August 8th, 2022, one day after the content was updated, the blog had 245 clicks.

So what about longer-term performance metrics?

When we look at the data period-over-period (PoP), we see a 96% boost in clicks.

Pre-update, from March 6th to August 6th, there were 27,783 clicks to this page.

Post-update, from August 7th to Jan 7th, there have been 53,755 clicks to this page.

The declines we see in the image towards the end do include holiday time, which will impact the performance of these pieces, as many marketers and agencies are closed for the holiday time period.

Beyond clicks, though, we also measured our performance by analyzing keyword universe. We did this with Semrush.

In July, before the refresh, our blog post ranked for 1,924 total keywords with 53 keywords in positions 1-3. We saw an almost immediate growth in keyword universe in August, with an increase to 84 keywords in positions 1-3.

We continued to see growth in October (135 keywords in positions 1-3, 2,229 overall keywords), November (144 keywords in positions 1-3, 2,416 overall keywords), and December (152 keywords in positions 1-3, 2,555 overall keywords).

Refresh: How to Get on TikTok’s For You Page (FYP)

What We Refreshed

The team refreshed the metadata and content to update the piece and align it better with searcher intent.

The refresh was published on August 9th, 2022.

H4: How the Refresh Impacted Our Metrics

The above chart shows 12 months of performance data for this particular blog post. This page was updated August 9^th, 2022, and there was an instant lift in performance.

On August 7th there were 252 clicks, on August 8th there were 281 clicks, on August 9th there were 266 clicks, on August 10th (the day after publishing) there were 329 clicks– the instant lift when updated content was published.

When we look at the data period-over-period (PoP), we actually see a 20% decline in click performance.

Pre-update, from March 10th to August 7th, there were 48,936 clicks to this page.

Post-update, from August 8th to Jan 7th, there have been 39,167 clicks to this page.

While there was a decline in PoP performance, we did see a surge in performance immediately after the refresh went live. This also helped drive traffic to the site that would have otherwise been lost if we had not done the refresh.

Now we see something interesting here, in that our impressions continued to increase, but our clicks leveled out and, eventually, decreased again following the refresh. We see this most markedly in September.

This told us two things. One, our updates worked to increase our blog post’s visibility on SERPs. Two, there is likely a downtrend in interest for the term “tiktok FYP.”

So we did some digging into Google trends and, sure enough, we noticed a significant drop in interest for the term “tiktok FYP”:

With all of these considerations in mind, it indicates to our team that there may need to be some updating, whether it be the metadata or refining keyword targets, to help click performance improve.

We also measured our performance by analyzing keyword universe with the help of Semrush.

In July, before the refresh, our blog post ranked for 2,999 total keywords with 104 keywords in positions 1-3. In August, we jumped to 3,870 keywords owned but only 98 keywords in positions 1-3. However, in September we recouped 106 keywords in positions 1-3 and 4,137 owned.

We saw another slight dip in October (96 keywords in positions 1-3, 3,858 overall keywords), another jump in November (108 keywords in positions 1-3, 4,396 overall keywords), and another dip in December (92 keywords in positions 1-3, 4,520 overall keywords). These fluctuations align with the click fluctuations we are seeing and the slight declines.

Refresh: How to Get Over 1 Million YouTube Subscribers (Like I Did)

What We Refreshed

The team refreshed the meta data and the content to help boost performance. This includes redefining keyword targets to align with searcher’s intent.

The refresh was published on August 13th, 2022.

How the Refresh Impacted Our Metrics

The above chart shows 12 months of performance data for this particular blog post. This piece was refreshed on August 13th, and there was a noticeable lift in performance.

On August 12th, 2022, one day before the content was updated, the blog had 262 clicks. On August 13th, 2022, the day the content was updated, the blog had 315 clicks.

When we look at the data period-over-period (PoP), we see a 38% increase in click performance.

Clicks had been steadily declining since January 8th, 2022, with some upticks here and there. Post-update, click performance drastically improved, hitting a high at 729 clicks on November 7th, 2022. From there, holiday seasonality impacted click performance, yet we see January 2023 trending up.

Pre-update, from March 18th to August 12th, there were 43,188 clicks to this page.

Post-update, from August 13th to Jan 7th, there have been 59,562 clicks to this page.

We also measured our performance by analyzing keyword universe with the help of Semrush.

In July, before the refresh, our blog post ranked for 3,284 total keywords with 42 keywords in positions 1-3. In August we saw a slight drop in total keywords at 3,284 but an increase to 72 keywords in positions 1-3. We saw a further drop in September to 2,910 total keywords and 44 keywords in positions 1-3.

However, October saw an increase (90 keywords in positions 1-3, 3,016 overall keywords). We saw more decreases in November (77 keywords in positions 1-3, 2,931 overall keywords), and December (60 keywords in positions 1-3, 2,888 overall keywords).

What We Learned From Our Data

If there is one takeaway from our data, it’s that updating your old content can be a hugely beneficial endeavor to undertake.

As we saw with our three examples, there was one blog that saw a 98% increase in click performance, and another that saw a 38% increase.

One blog did see a 20% decrease in clicks, but we know that interest in different topics varies, and not all refreshes will have the same performance. The SERP landscape was also quite volatile throughout 2022, with the algorithm updates that were shaking up rankings and click performance. Even with that decrease in clicks, though, we saw an increase in impressions which means we now know we need to make updates that target click performance.

Beyond clicks and impressions, though, we looked at the benefits of old content updates to keyword universe. Overall, updates have a positive impact on keyword universe. Most importantly, on the number of keywords ranking in positions 1-3. If you are not ranking in positions 1-3, you won’t see the results you are hoping for.

Another caveat to keep in mind was that we also analyzed performance that had holiday peaks, which can slightly skew the data. However, we wanted to keep this in to show the long-term positive impacts refreshing your content can have on your site performance.

Benefits of Refreshing Old Content

To further build upon our case studies from above, let’s look more closely at the benefits of refreshing old content.

1. Improve Your Click-Through Rate

If you do a Google search for just about any term, you’ll quickly notice the top results are usually published in the past year or so.

For example, a search for “SEO strategies” on Google brings up these results:

You’ll notice that the oldest of them has a date of April 2016, but the rest of the results have dates ranging from March 5, 2021 through September 19, 2022.

NOTE: The Marketo blog article published in 2016 does not have the publish/update date as part of the structured data HTML markup. However, the majority of the results on the search listing page do contain the markup with more current dates.

The truth is that for a lot of topics, including SEO, times change quickly. Information that was accurate just a few months ago might be completely different now.

This isn’t just with a topic like SEO, however. Imagine searching for “best gardening techniques” or “running shoe reviews.”

Wouldn’t you prefer to read something published in the last year, rather than an article from 2010? Of course you would.

The truth is, we’re more likely to click on articles that have been published recently, and this means the click-through rate of an article you publish will increase when you update it.

This is important because, in Google’s algorithm, you’re more likely to rank higher if more people click on your content from the search engine results page.

So, updating your content will make it more appealing, and that appeal will tell Google it’s a better resource that should rank higher.

But it isn’t just the date that increases your click-through rate.

You can also write a compelling headline and description that grabs your reader’s attention and pulls them in. This helps you maintain a strong position in Google’s results.

It’s also important to keep the headline to about eight words or 70 characters, to make sure your visitors can read the whole title in the search results.

Once the reader clicks through to your content, however, you don’t want them to click away immediately. Great search results are based, in part, on how valuable people find your page.

To make this work in your favor, look to grab the attention of your readers by telling a story using descriptions, or help the reader see things from your point of view.

(Source)

By updating your content, you’ll draw more people into your words and get higher search engine rankings as a result.

2. Fix Grammar and Spelling Mistakes

Everyone knows the feeling.

We’re reading an old post we wrote months or even years ago, and we notice a cringeworthy spelling mistake.

Instead of just ignoring it and hoping for the best, spend a bit of time correcting the errors.

Google’s former anti-spam team leader, Matt Cutts, stated that spelling and grammar aren’t one of Google’s 200 ranking factors, but it’s still something to consider.

Poor grammar and spelling negatively impact the user experience, which will play out in your rankings either directly or indirectly.

When Tim Soulo at Ahrefs decided to make minor changes (including mostly spelling and grammar errors) on an old post, he increased traffic to that page by 486%.

Now, to be fair, he didn’t just edit the spelling and grammar mistakes. He also optimized the post for a more relevant keyword, which I’ll discuss in a minute.

Then he changed the date to display the recent fresh content, and he pushed it onto the blog’s homepage and promoted it like a new article.

(I’ll also cover these strategies later in this article.)

As a result of a change that involved fixing a number of small errors, he was able to drive a massive amount of new traffic to the page.

He also bumped up the search engine placement of the page from #8 to #3.

If you have small errors, it’s time to make some changes and correct your spelling and grammar.

3. Show Google That Your Content is Fresh

It’s no secret that Google loves fresh content.

Content published recently gets a higher ranking, especially for topics that change frequently.

So if you’re only publishing new content, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Your old pieces will die a slow death in the search engine rankings.

Instead, you can revive that content. The truth is, updated content is an easy way to double your traffic.

Create a new publication date or just save an update in WordPress. When Google crawls your site again, you’ll see a boost in your search engine traffic.

When Ahrefs launched evergreen content instead of content that was quickly outdated, they saw a massive spike in views and visits. This may be a historical example, but the principle holds through today.

You can do the same thing with your content. Work hard to make sure it’s fresh, and you’ll get the lion’s share of the Google results your articles deserve.

It’s an easy way to improve your rankings by demonstrating you have fresh content.

4. Improve Your Content’s Accuracy

At the end of the day, every Google update is centered around one thing: improving the user experience.

If your site is designed to make for a great user experience, you’ll succeed with Google’s multiple algorithm changes and constant refining of their ranking factors.

You can make your content more usable and helpful for your visitors by updating it to provide new information or updated content.

In this Wordstream article on Google Ads benchmarks, the original article was updated to include up-to-date and accurate data and recommendations:

This provides additional context for the user, makes the piece more accurate, and improves the worth of the article as a whole.

In fact, the article was originally published in 2016, but it contains relevant information as of the date of this publication.

If you aren’t publishing a news site — or you don’t have an audience large enough to deserve a personal response from Google — you can still implement the same strategies.

To do this, you should look to find new and updated information about the article you’re writing and include it.

Mentioning that you’ve included this new content in an update is a great way to indicate that you’ve gone through the article to improve the content.

And as you create a more valuable resource, look to see your rankings skyrocket.

5. Improve the Freshness of Your Entire Site

It’s a fact: fresh sites rank better.

All things being equal, Google will place a higher priority on sites that update their content frequently.

This is one of the reasons why abandoned sites don’t rank well after a few years, even for articles that would otherwise be very helpful.

If Google recognizes that your site isn’t being updated recently, it will hurt the rankings of all the pages on your site.

To change this, you should skyrocket your traffic by bringing this old content back to life. A few updates on key articles can demonstrate to Google that your entire site is valid.

This means that every piece on your site will get a ranking boost as Google recognizes that you have fresh content on your site.

Whether correct or not, Google will interpret this as giving all the articles on your site a higher value, and it will improve the rankings for everything you’ve ever published.

6. Show Value by Removing Broken Links

One of the most frustrating parts of old content is finding broken links.

Oftentimes, the helpful resources you linked to in the original article aren’t around anymore. Perhaps the website has been shut down, or the URL has changed.

Either way, it hurts your rankings on Google and it pushes you further down the search engine results page.

Thankfully, fixing your broken links isn’t very difficult.

To do this, I recommend two different free tools. The first is the online site Broken Link Checker.

Go there and type in your domain URL. Then click “Find broken links.”

Enter the security code when prompted and click the “Find broken links now!” button.

After a few minutes, you’ll get a notification of any links the search found. You should go in and repair these.

The second tool I recommend is Broken Link Checker for Google Chrome. It’s a free plugin that lives in your Chrome browser.

To start, you’ll need to download it into Chrome by clicking the “+ Add to Chrome” button on the plugin page.

When prompted by Chrome, choose “Add extension.”

It will create a small icon featured in your browser’s header bar.

To use the tool, just navigate to the post you’d like to check and click on the icon. It will display a small box on top of the page.

This will browse all the links on the page and find any that are broken. It will give you a total number of links, both functioning and broken.

All the links that work properly will be highlighted in green. Any that are missing or lead to 404 pages will show up as pink, along with the problem in finding the link.

To repair a broken link, you’ll need to find the original page you linked to and look for other ways it might be published. This is the easiest way to improve things.

If the article is truly off the web, you’ll need to take more drastic measures. Look to find another resource that matches the other in quality, and link to that instead.

If you can’t find it at all, and there’s nothing similar, you can just delete the link altogether. It’s better to have no link than a dead one.

Either way, fixing or removing your broken links makes the page more valuable in Google’s eyes and helps to increase your rankings.

7. Link to Newer, Better Resources

If you’re improving your old content, you can also add new links to better resources.

According to HubSpot, research for your content includes using experts, statistics, infographics, events, and breaking news.

As you go back over old content, you can easily add links to this new content. Since these resources weren’t available when you first wrote the piece, it adds a lot of new value.

It also makes your content look much more valuable to Google. Since outbound links are an important ranking factor, you can create a more valuable resource this way.

Link to the best content on the web and Google will take notice. Instead of only linking to those resources, your page will become the go-to hub of information for others.

There’s one last thing you should do with your content: link to your own resources.

If you’ve published a recent article on a related topic, you should link to this.

It’s also a good idea to update the call to action that you currently use and make sure it’s relevant to the new content you’ve updated.

By including up-to-date resources and more in-depth content, you can bring blog posts back to life and drive massive rankings in Google.

It’s the perfect way to increase your search engine traffic without spending hours creating new content or writing lengthy updates to your old posts.

8. Include Multimedia for Better Rankings

One of the best ways to improve your search engine rankings is by adding different types of media.

As the content online becomes more diverse, there is special privilege placed on new content that includes different types of images, plus audio and video.

The use of strong imagery has many benefits, as outlined in the image below:

(Source)

The exact types you want to use depends on your preference.

It’s a good idea to include an image for every 150 to 350 words or so.

No matter what images you want to use, you need to include a link back to the original content. This makes it easier for others to know where the image came from.

It also lets you review the images and easily find updated pieces if you need to later.

If you struggle to create interesting images yourself, you can easily find them online by searching sites like StumbleUpon for graphics that are proven to grab attention.

This is a simple way to make your content more appealing without lots of extra work.

This focus on new types of media will make your content more engaging and give you improvements on Google’s search engine results pages.

9. Improve How Often Google Indexes Your Site

As you work to improve the old content you’ve published on your website, you’ll actually start to see benefits across the entire set of content, not just on the articles you’ve updated.

The reason for this is that Google looks at your entire site to see your most recent updates.

This is then used as a measure of how often Google will set aside time to crawl your site.

A simple example is the frequency with which Google crawls a news site like the Huffington Post versus a static site, like a simple three-page “about us” website for a local law firm.

With HuffPo publishing articles every hour, Google will learn this frequency and update more often.

Meanwhile, the law firm will get updated every few weeks (or less), since Google recognizes there isn’t new content each time it crawls the site.

By updating old content, you can get Google to crawl your site more frequently without needing to publish more often.

The more Google crawls your site, the more likely your most recent information will show up in search results after publishing, which gives you an advantage in your search engine results rankings.

10. Optimize for the Right Keywords

There’s a chance you didn’t do enough keyword research when you published your original post, or perhaps you didn’t do it the correct way. The keywords you initially targeted could have changed its intent – meaning a once commercial keyword could now be transactional.

Either way, you may find that the old content you published is actually ranking better in keywords you didn’t expect.

Instead of just leaving the keyword focus the same and hoping for the best, you can take proactive steps to improve the keyword focus of the pieces you’ve created.

Here’s how to do that.

First, you’ll want to go to Ubersuggest. Then, follow these steps:

Step #1: Enter your URL and click “search.”

Step #2: Click keyword research > keywords by traffic in the left sidebar.

Step #3: Enter your domain or URL in this new window.

Step #4: Review the results.

Once you have the results, you have access to five key pieces of data:

• The keywords your site ranks for
• The estimated monthly search volume of each keyword
• Your website’s current Google ranking (position) for the keyword
• The estimated monthly traffic your website gets for the keyword
• The estimated competition in organic search

With this information, you can decide how to best update your old content to rank higher.

For example, this page of my website currently ranks #3 for the keyword phrase “blogging.”

There are two sites above mine, all of which receive more monthly traffic for this keyword phrase.

By updating this piece of content to better target the primary keyword, I improve the likelihood of reaching the #1 spot. And if that happens, I’ll receive, on average, another 80,000 visitors per month.

11. Share Your Content and Promote It Again

Now that you’ve updated your old post, it’s time to promote it like it’s brand new.

Social media networks drive 0.8% to 12.2% of a website’s traffic, so don’t miss out on this key opportunity.

To begin, make sure you have plenty of share buttons on the page. This ensures that if the article is popular with your audience, you’ll be able to expand its reach.

Without sharing buttons, you can kill all the potential your post has for going viral. Don’t allow that to happen.

Once you’ve fixed this, distribute your content through the normal ways you’d promote a new piece of content.

This might be through sharing it with your email list and posting it on social media. I also recommend contacting influencers about the post you’ve written.

This is a great way to get backlinks from new posts that have just been recently published.

These recent linking pages show Google that the page itself is also fresh since fresh links indicate fresh content.

An easy way to guarantee more backlinks is by using ego-bait.

This is a strategy where you reference someone else who looms large in your industry and let them know you quoted them.

Since they’re proud to be featured (hence the term “ego-bait”), they’re more likely to share.

Because this is a strategy you can easily implement with old articles, simply by referencing and linking to new influencers, you can build up a solid backlink profile.

Share your content again, and watch your rankings skyrocket.

12. Fix Any Issues with Recent Google Updates

There are as many as 600 Google updates each year, with each one focusing on improving the algorithm and changing the ranking factors for a number of different sites.

With each new algorithm update, there is a change in how different factors play out for the success in your Google rankings.

To improve your content’s guaranteed success in the Google results, you should work to ensure that all your old content follows the best practices for Google’s latest changes.

Look to see what those changes have been, and add features that give your content the best chance for success.

Take, for example, Google’s new experience algorithm update.

Google has added an extra “E” to its well-known E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness). It’s now E-E-A-T for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.

What does this mean?

Experience in this case stands for a website owner’s or blogger’s experience in the field they claim expertise in. This means you should update your content to include references to your own personal experiences within your field.

Do you need an example of how to do so? Look no further than this article!

Neil Patel Digital is a full-service digital marketing agency. The “data” sections of this piece, and others on our blog, outline our real-world experience as a digital marketing agency. This gives readers that extra confidence they need and enhance our expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Content refreshes that take such updates into account will give you the best shot at maintaining content and staying up to date through the variety of changes Google makes to its algorithm each day.

13. Repurpose Your Content for More Backlinks

To get the most impact from the old article you update, you should create different content types from the original work you did.

Instead of going back and finding new information, just repurpose the research you’ve already done.

There are plenty of ways to repurpose old content, and I recommend doing whatever you feel most comfortable with.

(Source)

By simply reading your old content out loud and recording it, you can create a podcast episode, SoundCloud content, bonus audio for subscribers, or even a content upgrade.

Best of all, this doesn’t require any fancy or expensive equipment. Just record using the built-in microphone on your computer.

Another easy way to create new content from an old post is to craft a SlideShare presentation. Just divide up the post into a few different pieces of information.

The easiest way to do this is to create a separate slide from each piece of content in your article, like breaking the article into subpoints.

Publish your slideshow on SlideShare and promote it again.

These are easy ways to increase the visibility of your post. And when others link to your other content, you can gain new backlinks to what you’re publishing.

As one of the biggest ranking factors for Google and other search engines, backlinks are guaranteed to improve your rankings.

14. Leverage the Value of Your Old Content

Think for a minute about how much of your content is old versus how much is new.

Chances are, 90% or more of your total content is more than a few months old. And every minute, it’s losing value as it becomes less fresh.

The solution is to inject new value into your old content. Those old posts already have value as solid resources. You’ve done the research and created something that’s worthwhile.

Chances are, you’ve even started to develop a lot of backlinks to the content.

So why let it go to waste?

Instead, you should look to update the content.

Google looks for quality content first and foremost. This means that even if you have a recent article on your site, if the quality isn’t there, Google will still prefer the high-quality content that was published years ago.

By updating your old content, you can give it a second life and transform it into content that will continue to drive massive search engine traffic.

Don’t let your old work go to waste. With a little freshening up, you can boost your search engine rankings with old content that’s been given a new look and updated relevance.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do you have more questions about refreshing your content? Here are the answers to some frequently asked questions on the topic.

How do I choose which pieces of content to refresh?

You should make time to update all of your content at least once per year. If you must prioritize, though, then focus on articles that 1) help you with further developing your content strategy; 2) compete with other articles on your website; and 3) content that saw a significant drop off in performance.

How often should I do content refreshes?

How often you refresh your content will depend on how much content you have. I’d recommend you try to update each blog post at least once per year. If you have too much content to go over in one year, though, then focus on small updates like fixing broken links and removing any dated language.

Conclusion

If you want to boost your SEO, look no further than updating your old content. This is one of many often overlooked content marketing strategies.

This is the perfect way to increase the traffic your website gets from search engines, and it’s guaranteed to make a huge improvement in how well your content ranks.

To start, create compelling new content to add on top of your old articles. Include new resources, clean up any broken links on your site, and include multimedia.

You should also work to improve the accuracy of your content and make sure it’s up to date with the most recent and critical information.

Once you’ve freshened up the content, look to make sure it meets all the newest requirements of Google’s algorithm updates.

Expand the reach of your article by repurposing it to different types of media, and even consider changing the keywords for which it’s optimized.

After you’ve updated the content, it’s time to share it again. Look to promote it in the same way you did earlier, showing the new value to readers and fans alike.

With this complete set of updates for your old content, you’re set to create a powerhouse of search engine improvement for all the older pieces you had forgotten about.

How will you update your old content to help with your rankings?

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6. HubSpot – Best for centralizing your tech stack
7. Acoustic – Best for enterprise multi-channel marketing automation
8. Act-On – Best for marketing agencies
9. Pardot by Salesforce – Best for B2B companies

Or perhaps you want to find out more before you make a decision. My full-length reviews below go through the strengths and weaknesses of all my top picks. Marketing automation is a huge part of my business. I have strong opinions about what works and when to use it. But what if you want to see what’s out there beyond these top names in the niche?

In this post, I’ll briefly explain what marketing automation is and then recommend more than 20 of the best marketing automation tools for you to try out. Learn how this stuff works by trying it out; simple as that. First, let’s cover what marketing automation in general can do for your business.

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What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing automation is the act of using software and technology to create and implement applications to automate repetitive tasks, such as email marketing, ad campaigns, tracking, and much more.

For example, brands could create an automatic lead generation funnel that gathers an email address, sends a recorded demo, then invites the prospect to schedule a live demo.

Marketing automation is not a nice-to-have strategy you can ignore — it’s the standard.

If you want to compete, you need to be using marketing automation.

The good news? Marketing automation can save you time and money, and improve your marketing efficiency.

Now, on to the best marketing automation tools.

1. Let Constant Contact Deliver Powerful Emails Simply and Easily

Modern marketing doesn’t happen on one channel. It’s happening all over the internet on various devices, all at once.

There are many multi-channel solutions for marketing automation, but Constant Contact takes the cake for most businesses that need an easy way to join email and social media efforts.

With its unified dashboard, Constant Contact lets anyone—from beginners to advanced marketers—easily stay on top of both marketing fronts.

The platform’s intensely customizable emailer lets you build welcome sequences, drip campaigns, and any other sort of automated email campaign and segment messaging with individual sequences that are based on what you know about your contacts.

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Whether you’ve gathered crucial info about your list of members manually or use Constant Contact’s custom form builder to capture it on your landing pages, you can set up individual email sequence tracks based on virtually any data point.

Thus, you can send one welcome sequence to VP-level subscribers, another one for folks in sales, and another for marketers. And that’s just based on job title. You could thin slice on anything from where they live to their favorite beer.

Make it as granular and intricate as you’d like. Set long-tail, automated campaigns for each track and let Constant Contact do the hard work for you over weeks or months. All you have to do is look at the reports and keep a finger on the pulse.

But that’s not all. You can also push new social posts and reply to messages on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn from the same place you set up automated email sequences and drip campaigns.

Schedule out social posts for the next month or quarter and then sync that messaging up with your email campaigns.

Here’s how both features can work together:

Set up a series of social media posts about the big game, then have unique email sequences for folks on the East Coast rooting for one team and then a separate one for the West Coast dwellers rooting for the other.

That’s just a super simple example—with Constant Contact, you can make these nested, unified marketing campaigns as intricate and complex as you’d like.

Social monitoring, messaging, and posting are available on Constant Contact’s plans. But its most useful email features come in the Standard plan. In it, you can set up automated behavioral and welcome sequences, plus include dynamic content in your emails.

The Standard package from Constant Contact starts at $35/month for up to 500 subscribers, with the price scaling upward alongside the number of additional contacts you need.

If you just want unified email and marketing without all the advanced automation, you can still get that with the Lite plan. That’ll run you $12/month for up to 500 contacts.

Unify your social and email campaigns by getting started with Constant Contact.

2. Gain Opportunities on Abandoned Carts and After Purchase with Brevo (formerly Sendinblue)

Brevo’s (formerly Sendinblue) powerful automation features will help you seal up the holes that allow opportunities to fall through the cracks.

Stay connected with customers using email, text messaging, or live chat directly on your website. Once you set it up, you won’t need many agents or reps with all the work Brevo does behind the scenes.

For a lot of folks, their eight prebuilt automated workflows will be enough.

There are two in particular that are great for e-commerce store owners. One is triggered by a completed purchase and the other by an abandoned cart.

In either case, Brevo does the hard work and sets up the first and last actions in the three-step automation: the trigger event (either a successful checkout or a visitor leaving with items in their cart) and the action (sending them a message).

Then you take over. You’ll determine the delay between the trigger event and the action, and create the follow-up emails. That could be anything from a promo code to complete their purchase, personalized reminders about the product they’re interested in, or a satisfaction survey, to name a few examples.

In minutes, you can set up automated workflows to generate sales from situations you may not have been able to capitalize on before.

With the depth available in Brevo’s email features, you can craft the perfect message to take advantage of any moment.

Personalize content based on who your audience are, what they considered purchasing, or where they clicked. Then embed unique offers, tweak the email’s design, and schedule sending based on when it will be most effective. You can even A/B test options to gather data on the smartest way to wield these automations.

Not afraid of getting your hands dirty? That’s great—the custom automation builder opens up a world of different ways to construct trigger and action sequences. You can even have multiple entry points feeding into one action or get really granular with qualifying conditions to make sure each action is tailored to proper audience segments.

Brevo offers automation capabilities on all of their pricing plans. With the free forever and Starter (starting at $25/month) packages, you will be limited to targeting up to 2,000 of your contacts in your automated workflows.

Upgrade to either Business (starting at $65/month) or the custom-priced Brevo+ plans to get unlimited use of Brevo’s marketing automations. From there, it’s pay-as-you-go style pricing to increase the number of emails or SMS messages you send.

You don’t have to resign to chalking up every abandoned cart as a loss or thinking of each purchase as the end of the sales journey. Brevo’s automations can help you seize on missed opportunities that boost your revenue today.

3. Integrate Sales, Marketing, And Support With Engagebay

EngageBay knows sales, marketing, and support can’t exist in silos. For a business trying to grow, post-sale engagement is every bit as crucial as getting to a sale in the first place.

With EngageBay, all of your key customer-facing teams can use the same software. This is more efficient for your company and provides a seamless experience to customers. In other words, everything you learn about existing customers can be leveraged in the quest to grow your audience.

EngageBay’s automation tools can start having an impact the moment a prospect expresses interest and joins your list. From there, through your sales funnel and beyond the purchase, you can automate many of the routine touchpoints, nurturing, warming up, and more.

With all that information and interaction gathered, your support reps are well-prepared to handle anything your customers can throw at them with ease and grace.

That’s big, especially if your service team handles more than troubleshooting issues.

Maybe your service team also provides continuing customer training (something common in B2B SaaS) or often puts on their sales hats to handle adding services or upgrades.

With all of EngageBay’s automation tools capturing each customer’s entire journey, your support team is never without context or key information, so they can keep impressing the people who buy from you.

EngageBay does have a free option. They have a free-forever package that lacks the automation tools, but allows you to get used to the platform and dashboard.

You’ll need at least the Growth plan for the full array of EngageBay’s marketing automation features. That can cost as little as $42.99 per user per month if you pay for two years upfront. That can handle up to 10,000 contacts and 25,000 branded emails per month.

Paying for a single year at checkout raises the monthly per-user rate to $45.99. If you want to pay month-to-month, you’re looking at $49.99 per user per month.

Need more contacts? Upgrade to Pro for $84.99 per user/month (for a two-year commitment) to have no limits on the number of contacts, plus get double the monthly emails that Growth offers and more advanced features.

Bring together sales, marketing, and support, and provide them with the same useful automation tools by signing up with EngageBay today.

4. Hyperfocus on B2C Automation With ActiveCampaign

If you are looking for marketing automation specifically in the B2C space, ActiveCampaign is a very compelling option.

It’s a super affordable tool that includes numerous automation features for leads anywhere in your funnel. You’ll be able to cut down on busywork instantly, reaching more people at the same time.

Best of all, you’ll be able to connect with customers anywhere. ActiveCampaign offers omnichannel automation, including instant messaging and SMS, live chat, and Facebook.

So, you’re not limited to just email marketing automation with ActiveCampaign.

Their most popular features cover leads at every point in the funnel, including:

Engage – Automation maps, site tracking, and subscription forms.

Nurture – List segmenting, dynamic/predictive content, and event tracking.

Convert – Contact and lead scoring, split actions, and win probabilities.

Support – Predictive sending, SMS, A/B split testing, and e-commerce.

You can also set up numerous types of emails like autoresponders, targeted or triggered emails, broadcasts, scheduled emails, and automated funnels.

On top of that, you can design those emails using their intuitive drag-and-drop designer, or start from one of their 25+ pre-made mobile-responsive design templates.

Whether you’re just getting started or interested in scaling and optimizing your email marketing strategy, ActiveCampaign is an excellent choice. They offer everything you need to capture, nurture, and close leads at scale.

ActiveCampaign offers four plans, with the price of each starting at:

Lite — $29 per month with up to three users

Plus — $49 per month with up to 25 users

Professional — $149 per month with up to 50 users

Enterprise — customized pricing

Each tier includes more advanced features, and pricing is based on the size of your list, starting with up to 500 contacts.

So, keep in mind that you will have to pay more than the prices above as your list grows.

5. Automate All Things E-commerce With Freshworks CRM

Freshmarketer is part of the Freshworks family of products. I highly recommend it to people that want to automate their e-commerce marketing. Freshmarketer comes packed with all the tools you need to attract customers, understand their needs, and drive conversions.

Keep in touch with customers via email, live chat, SMS, and WhatsApp. Build out personalized customer journeys and stay organized wherever the conversation happens.

From awareness to retention, you get all the automation features you need to gain more leads, turn those leads into customers, and keep those customers around for life. Best of all, you accomplish this while doing less work with better results.

You don’t need any technical skills or a dedicated support team to get started, and it takes about a minute to get up and running.

You also get access to features like:

• Email campaigns and contact management
• Visual drag-and-drop customer journey builder
• Website, form, and offline event tracking
• Conversion rate optimization tools
• A/B and split testing
• Advanced personalization
• Dynamic heat maps
• Audience segmentation
• Real-time funnel analytics

In addition, the software seamlessly integrates with Freshworks’ other tools, so it’s an excellent choice if you currently use or plan to use any of their business software. It also integrates with WooCommerce, Shopify, BigCommerce, and other popular e-commerce platforms.

You can try Freshmarketer on their limited free forever plan or a 21-day free trial of their paid plans, which are incredibly affordable and accessible for businesses of all sizes. However, they limit the number of contacts you have, so keep that in mind.

Freshworks also offers Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans for their sales and marketing platform, Freshsales Suite. Plans for Freshsales Suite start at $15/month for 1,000 active contacts.

6. Generate Leads, Close Seals, and Manage Your Pipeline on Auto-Pilot With HubSpot

If you’re looking to cut down the number of tools you use for marketing automation, take a look at HubSpot, which lets you supercharge your sales, customer service, and marketing processes in a single platform.

It goes beyond automating your business processes. Integrate and optimize different departments in one centralized location, streamlining your entire business’s workflow.

Teams don’t have to jump from software to software to get the information they need, and you can automate the data transfer process from one team to the next.

HubSpot has a shining reputation in this field. Their marketing automation capabilities are powerful, with fine granular control.

Set up a drip campaign (or multiple) as complex as you like with delays, triggers, dependencies, and more. You can let email follow-ups and campaigns run automatically with no fear.

Beyond email, automations within HubSpot can apply to contact and client organization, team notifications, lead qualification, data management, and much more.

All your workflows benefit from the HubSpot platform’s clean visual interface. See how all the disparate parts of your marketing department and campaigns can link and work together, while you find new ways to take advantage of automation through visualizing unique team and action connections.

No matter how complex your sales journey or pipeline, HubSpot has the tools and features to not only add useful automation, but improve every part of the customer lifecycle.

And, by using one of HubSpot’s suites, you also get access to essential features like:

• Blog post and SEO planning
• Ad tracking and management
• Social media management
• AI-powered live chat
• Forms and landing pages
• Revenue attribution reporting
• A/B split testing

HubSpot offers basic features, like emails, landing pages, forms, and live chat capabilities for unlimited users absolutely free. So, you can try the platform without spending a penny.

Alternatively, you can sign up for a free demo to see their advanced features in action.

The Starter Suite (sales, marketing, CRM, and customer service) starts at $50 per month for two users and up to 1,000 contacts, making it extremely affordable for most businesses. You can add another 1,000 contacts for $50 per month, and additional users cost $25 per month.

However, remember you can only access HubSpot’s Starter version of their Marketing Hub. So you’re going to be somewhat limited in automation capability. Some features you’ll only be able to use so many times per month; others are missing entirely.

The heavy-duty plans above Starter cost a good bit more, but remove those restrictions if you need everything HubSpot offers by way of automation:

• Professional — $1,780.01 per month ($1,600 per month if you pay annually)
• Enterprise — $4,999 per month for everything HubSpot has to offer

Professional starts with 2,000 contacts, and you can add contacts in increments of 5,000 for $250 per month. Enterprise starts with 10,000 contacts, and it’s only $100 per additional 10,000 contacts.

There’s also the ability to build your own bespoke HubSpot product bundle. You can set how many features you want for each Hub.

If you want to go heavy on marketing automation, but don’t need as much for sales, customer service, or operations, make your own bundle that includes the Enterprise tier of Marketing Hub but Starter tiers for the rest.

Plus, if you’re a current member or alumni of HubSpot’s approved incubator, accelerator, or Venture Capital partners with a round of Series A funding under your belt, you can get up to 90% off your first year.

7. Master Multi-channel Automation With Acoustic

Acoustic offers a wide range of marketing automation solutions for multi-channel marketers.

It’s an excellent option if you’re managing large-volume campaigns that have a lot of moving parts.

You can use it for email campaigns, social media, SMS, push notifications, print ads, mobile apps, and every possible touchpoint where your audience lives.

Some of the top features of Acoustic include:

• AI-recommended triggers
• Split testing
• Customer journey mapping
• Budgeting tools
• Lookalike audiences
• One-to-one ads
• Advanced personalization

You’ll also have access to a powerful drag-and-drop campaign builder, which helps simplify even the most complex campaigns. Your marketing data can also be monitored with advanced reporting and analytics.

I really like the fact that Acoustic has an active community where you find quick answers to your questions. They even have self-help videos and other learning tools to help you get the most out of the software.

If you’re just looking for a super basic marketing automation solution, Acoustic probably isn’t for you. Smaller businesses running single-channel campaigns will likely find the features overwhelming.

Pricing isn’t publicly available, so you’ll need to schedule a consultation to learn more.

8. Let Act-On Seamlessly Nurture Inbound and Outbound Leads

As a marketing agency, you handle marketing campaigns for several clients (if not hundreds of them) at any given time. As such, you need marketing automation software with the ability to manage everything, including your own marketing campaigns, in one place.

Act-On offers the perfect solution.

Their scalable software features unique child and parent campaign capabilities, meaning you can easily manage and handle all of your client accounts from a single Act-On login.

Plus, you can completely brand and customize everything to deliver custom reports to clients in just a few clicks.

With Act-On, you can learn more about your clients’ audiences to personalize and tailor their message to match. Not only does this make their life easier, but it also means your team can work less to produce better results.

When you sign up, you get access to powerful marketing features, including:

• Automated engagement programs
• Website and landing page tracking
• Customer/prospect scoring
• Behavior and demographic segmentation
• Pre-built email, form, and landing page templates
• Interactive reporting dashboards

Plus, you can build custom real-time analytic dashboards for internal and external use, so you and your clients always know what’s happening.

On top of this, you can use this information to improve customer ROI, build better technology stacks, and optimize entire marketing campaigns on behalf of your clients. From lead gathering and nurturing to transferring contact information to sales, you’re in good hands.

The great thing about Act-On is that you pay for what you use. The professional package starts at $900 per month for 2,500 active contacts, three marketing users, and 50 users in sales. You’ll get 30,000 API calls per day.

Enterprise pricing is offered on a personalized basis, and you’ll need to get in touch to find out more.

9. Supercharge Your Marketing Analytics Automatically With Pardot by Salesforce

As a B2B business, you market to other companies, which presents a unique set of marketing challenges. As such, you need a marketing automation tool built for the job.

Pardot exists to help B2B companies build relationships and turn those relationships into revenue. You get a suite of tools perfectly designed for this mission, so you can accommodate an extended buying process and manage complex pipelines.

Plus, it’s a fantastic marketing automation software built around Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM. So you know you’re in good hands.

From lead generation to sales alignment, the software offers a wide range of features, including:

• Dynamic content and data-based personalization
• Lead-nurturing email automations
• Prospect and lead scoring
• Visual multi-part automation creator
• Advanced segmentation
• Landing page builder
• Smart forms + drag and drop builder
• Social media scheduling, profiling, and analytics
• Lead activity tracking
• Campaign performance reporting
• Lifecycle and funnel reporting
• Pardot Einstein for lead and behavior scoring

Furthermore, over 2.8+ million worldwide users rely on Pardot for their marketing automation needs, making it one of the most popular platforms on this list.

Pardot is on the expensive side, so it’s best suited for larger businesses. Paid plans include:

• Growth — $1,250/month for up to 10,000 contacts and basic features
• Plus — $2,500/month for up to 10,000 contacts with deeper automation + analytics
• Advanced — $4,000/month for up to 10,000 contacts with AI and all features
• Premium — $15,000/month for up to 75,000 contacts with supercharge features

It also offers a few add-ons that come free in the Premium plan. Those add-ons include Salesforce Engage ($50/user per month), Analytics Plus ($3,000/month), and Engagement History ($300/year).

All plans and add-ons are billed on an annual basis.

Oh, and one last thing: Pardot is pronounced par-dot. The “t” is not silent.

10. Use Customer.io to Automate Timely Emails

If you’re like most B2B and B2C companies, email marketing isn’t the only outreach tool in your arsenal. SMS, push notifications, and in-app messages play a role as well—and that’s why a tool like Customer.io is so important.

Customer.io lets you send targeted messages to your customers across all of these channels, personalized and segmented based on user behavior and customer data.

Basically, it makes personalized messages simple.

The marketing possibilities are almost endless. Use Customer.io to:

• Collect feedback
• Upsell
• Cross-sell
• Onboard new customers
• Renew existing customers
• Nurture leads

Other features include A/B testing, conversion tracking, customer profiles, and in-context conversations.

Pricing starts at $100 per month for unlimited emails, SMS, tracking, and technical support. Their Premium plan costs significantly more but includes all the basic features plus a dedicated customer service rep, onboarding, HIPAA compliance, and premium tech support. You’ll need to request a demo for a quote.

11. Use AdRoll to Automate Ad Campaigns

Customer acquisition is vital for e-commerce brands and usually takes the form of several paid advertising channels like social media and display ads. Managing all of these channels individually can be tricky, but that’s where AdRoll saves the day.

AdRoll offers e-commerce store owners a single platform through which they can launch and manage display ads, social media ads, and email campaigns.

Your ads no longer have to be one-dimensional and try to appeal to everyone. With cross-device and cross-platform retargeting capabilities and flexible segmentation, you can provide customized experiences that dramatically improve marketing efficiency.

Key features include retargeting across devices and platforms, dynamic LiquidAds, flexible segmentation, transparent analytics, and expert optimization and conversion reporting.

AdRoll pricing is based on the number of visitors to your site. It’s just $36 per month for 1,000 visitors, $135 for 10,000, $225 for 15,000, and $315 for 30,000+.

12. Automatically Engage and Grow Your Following on Instagram with InstaChamp by MobileMonkey

Are you drowning in DMs? Need to automate part of your social media workflow? Then you need to know about InstaChamp, the world’s first Meta-approved social automation tool by MobileMonkey.

InstaChamp is a powerful Instagram automation tool that lets you automate everything, from replying to comments, stories, and even direct messaging. It’s perfect for busy marketers looking to get back more time in their day through automation.

And don’t forget the power of automation to grow your audience, your brand affinity, and your conversions from hot engagement channels like Instagram.

MobileMonkey Instagram marketing tools let you automate:

• Replies to DMs
• DM replies to Story Mentions
• DM replies to post comments

And if you really want to make your Instagram marketing funnel run on autopilot, set up drip campaigns to automate follow-up messages to anyone who engages with your brand. Send anyone who comments on your posts or mentions you in their stories a thank you, a reward, a link to enter a competition, or any message you like.

Best of all, these Instagram DM automations are 100% Instagram-approved because MobileMonkey is one of the only official partners for Facebook and Instagram marketing automation.

Instachamp Platinum usually costs $19 per month, but it’s currently being offered at a discount rate of $9.95 per month.

13. Automatically Nurture Leads With Marketo Engage

If your enterprise is serious about marketing automation, you’ll want to consider Marketo Engage, one of the largest and most comprehensive marketing automation platforms on the planet.

It’s the complete tool, whether you work in marketing or sales and has a whole range of use cases on top of marketing automation, including:

• Account-based marketing
• Lead management
• Email marketing
• Multi-touch attribution

No wonder Gartner has named Adobe a market leader in automation for the past 11 years straight.

Size and comprehensiveness are defining features when it comes to Marketo Engage. That makes it perfect if you want to personalize the user experience across multiple touchpoints. It also is an ideal fit if you want to share marketing platforms between sales and marketing.

Size also means it’s not the cheapest platform on this list. In fact, Adobe doesn’t display pricing on its site, so you’ll need to get in touch to find out more.

14. Automate Inbound Call Analytics with Invoca

Do your sales and marketing efforts revolve around phone calls? Maybe you work with a sales team at an enterprise B2B company or have an e-commerce store with an active telephone support team. If so, Invoca is the marketing automation platform for you.

Invoca is powered by a smart conversation intelligence platform that lets you enhance every customer interaction, whether before or after the purchase.

Features include keyword call-tracking, phone surveys, caller-profile data, reverse lookup, conversation analytics, in-call scoring, geolocation routing, voice broadcasts, SMS, and more.

Keyword call tracking is a game-changer for voice interactions. Otherwise, you have no way of tracking that kind of data over the phone unless you’re manually recording calls and playing them back later. Even then, you’d have to manually track how those customers reacted after hearing certain keywords.

Better still, you can use Invoca to automatically score how your reps handle each call on a range of pre-defined criteria.

Unfortunately, they don’t publish their pricing. So you’ll have to get in touch with them to get a quote.

15. Deliver Personalized Campaigns Across Multiple Channels With Oracle Eloqua

Oracle’s B2B cross-channel marketing solution Oracle Eloqua lets marketers plan automated campaigns while simultaneously personalizing them.

The platform is built for B2B enterprise-level businesses, and comes with all of the features you’d expect from such a platform. These include:

• Campaign creation
• Segmentation and targeting
• Lead management
• Sales and marketing alignment
• Measurement and reporting
• AI capabilities

Like many of the enterprise-level tools in this list, Oracle does not publish pricing on its website. You’ll need to request a demo to find out more.

16. Automate the Customer Journey With LeadSquared

Do you want to save some cash and combine your CRM and marketing automation platform into the same tool? Then LeadSquared is the answer.

However, that doesn’t mean LeadSquared is light when it comes to marketing automation features. This tool will capture leads from inbound email, online campaigns, phone calls, your website, chat, and more. Then use LeadSquared’s Workflow Builder to create the perfect campaign.

As you’d expect from a CRM tool, integrations are a key part of LeadSquared’s offering. The platform integrates with almost every tool you use, including WhatsApp, Twitter, Shopify, Livechat, Zoom, Gmail, and more.

LeadSquared offers a free trial, and pricing for automation plans starts out at $400 for the basic package (10,000 contacts). The standard package (20,000 contacts) costs $1200, and the enterprise package (200,000 contacts) costs $2500.

17. Get CRM, Sales, and Marketing Tools Automated Together with Keap

Keap is another all-in-one CRM and marketing automation tool. Its CRM is a market leader, but its marketing automation system is not to be ignored — especially if you want the ease of keeping as many marketing and sales functions as possible in the same platform.

Keap makes it simple to create a new sales or marketing strategy and execute it so that you can capture and close sales more quickly.

Save time by automating repetitive tasks like follow-ups, billing, contact management, and payments with a this-then-that workflow.

If you want to get advanced, use Keap’s Advanced Automations builder to build automated marketing processes from scratch. You can integrate third-party apps into these workflows to save even more time.

Pricing starts at $149 for their Pro plan and $199 for their Max plan. You get 1500 contacts with Pro and 2000 contacts with Max as standard.

18. Attract, Capture, and Streamline Leads With Sugar Market

Do you want to cut the guesswork out of your marketing efforts? How about seeing how much you are really contributing to your company’s revenue goals? If you answered yes to either of these questions, then Sugar Market could be the marketing automation platform for you.

The truth is that 70 percent of the buying cycle is complete before the customer contacts sales. Sugar Market helps businesses build revenue funnels by creating custom digital conversations that marketing and sales representatives can use to convert customers.

But acquiring any old customers isn’t good enough. That’s why Sugar Market has predictive lead scoring that accurately predicts the likelihood of each lead converting.

That’s on top of all the other features you’d expect from a marketing automation system, like:

• Cross-channel engagement
• Integrations
• Analytics and reporting

Pricing depends on the number of contacts you want but begins at $1,000 per month for 10,000 contacts.

19. Segment and Automate Customer Experiences Using iContact

Is email your jam? Then you might want to try one of the world’s easiest email marketing automation tools, iContact. The platform provides marketing automation software, email marketing services, and more so that your team can drive successful results every time.

Focus on email marketing with all the tools you need to grow your list, create beautiful campaigns, personalize emails, and automate the entire process.

Then take things further with smart sending, audience segmentation, and A/B split testing.

If you ever get confused, you’ll have access to strategic advisors who can help you “optimize your sending strategy and inbox delivery for maximum conversions.”

Pricing starts as low as $14 per month for 750 contacts. It costs $65 per month for 5,000 contacts, and $350 for 50,000 contacts.

20. Get BuzzBuilder Pro to Automate Cold Email Campaigns

BuzzBuilder Pro bills itself as a complete outbound lead generation system and backs it up by giving you all of the tools you need to automate the process of getting new customers.

First, there is its email marketing automation feature, which lets you create cold and personalized email campaigns that run on autopilot.

Once you have a bucket of leads, BuzzBuilder’s Predictive Lead Scoring tool shows you where to focus your energy by rating the likelihood of each lead converting into a customer.

Automation is key at every stage of the process, allowing you to save five or more hours each week.

You will need to call for detailed pricing information.

21. Create Automated Marketing Workflows With Net-Results

Some marketing automation solutions are incredibly powerful but way too complex to use on a daily basis. Others are easy to use, but don’t have the capabilities that enterprise businesses need. If only there was a marketing automation tool that was just right.

Enter Net-Results.

Net-Results helps to automate almost every kind of marketing task imaginable, giving you the power you need while being easy to use.

Their goal is to help you save time while allowing you to better uncover and nurture leads so that your revenue will grow quickly.

Features include an email builder, form builder, landing page builder, campaign builder, and A/B-test builder. Nurture leads, automate workflows, and more.

Unlike other enterprise tools, Net-Results’ pricing is clear and obvious. Prices start at $800 per month, billed annually for less than 2,500 contacts, and go up from there.

22. Streamline and Simplify Marketing Automation With GreenRope

GreenRope is “the ultimate dashboard for your business.” Manage operations, sales, and marketing all from one dashboard that will help you visualize your performance and make key business decisions. It’s a CRM at its core, but it also has a raft of other features, including marketing automation.

When it comes to marketing automation, GreenRope has everything you could ask for. Create powerful automated workflows from scratch using the drag-and-drop customer journey builder or use one of GreenRope’s pre-set templates.

Make use of all of GreenRope’s features by creating an integrated customer experience. Connect your marketing campaigns with your CRM to customize every touchpoint and ensure that every time a new contact gets added to your CRM, they are automatically added to an existing marketing campaign.

GreenRope isn’t as expensive as you might think. Pricing starts at $99 per month for 500 contacts and goes up to $799 per month for up to 50,00 contacts.

23. Deliver Automated Email Campaigns Using MailChimp

If you haven’t heard of Mailchimp, where have you been living for the past 10 years? Mailchimp is one of the best-known and easy-to-use email automation platforms on the planet. This tool is perfect for contacting prospects or customers who are vital to your success. If you need an effective email tool, this is one you should definitely check out.

Features include email marketing automation, personalized emails, automated welcome emails, behavioral targeting, engagement monitoring, and more. With this tool, you can trigger emails based on actions like sign-up date and website activity.

Mailchimp goes beyond helping you with your email now, though. The platform also lets you create and manage retargeting ads, so you can re-engage lost visitors.

You can send up to 1000 emails with Mailchimp for free. The Essentials plan allows for 5,000 emails and costs $10.97 per month. Premium, the most expensive plan, costs $295.27 per month and gives you unlimited users and up to 150,000 monthly emails.

24. Automate Marketing Processes with Gliffy

Do you think better when you can see your marketing plans in diagrams and charts? Then Gliffy is the perfect marketing automation platform for you. It lets you create organizational charts, high-quality flowcharts, UML diagrams, network diagrams, technical drawings, wireframes, and more.

Unlike other tools of this nature, there’s no need to download additional software. It works in your web browser to help you visualize workflows and boost marketing productivity.

Key features include workflow organization, an intuitive interface, collaboration with anyone with access to a web browser, and more.

The best part? Gliffy has a free trial!

It’s not expensive if you’re willing to commit, either. Gliffy costs just $8 per user per month.

Bonus: Add fresh data to your marketing campaign with DataForSEO

DataForSEO provides “comprehensive SEO data via API at a predictable price.”.

While they mostly work with SEO providers, you can use their data to juice up your marketing efforts.

Here’s a list of APIs DataForSEO provides:

• Rank tracking API
• SERP API
• Keywords data API
• Competitor API
• OnPage API
• Keyword finder API

What I Looked At To Find the Best Marketing Automation Software

I stand behind all of my top recommendations, but as you can tell, these are very different products.

Finding the right tool for the job is extremely important. Marketing automation software that serves one company perfectly might be a poor fit for another.

Below, I’ve laid out the major criteria you should use to evaluate each option. Use this guide to narrow your search down to a solution that meets your company’s marketing challenges.

Your Industry and Business Type

B2B businesses have different marketing needs than B2C companies. Agencies may also require automation tools that make it easy to handle multiple campaigns at once.

The size of your business matters, too. Large companies run complex, massive-scale campaigns and have bigger pockets. So, small business tools aren’t a good match.

However, smaller companies will probably find enterprise-grade features confusing and wildly out of budget, which is why those small business tools exist in the first place.

So, pay attention to who the software is built for when making your final decision.

Number of Contacts

Most pricing plans vary depending on the number of contacts or leads you have. The larger your list, the higher the price.

If you have tens or hundreds of thousands of contacts, enterprise-grade solutions are going to be more cost-effective. However, that’s not the case if you have a few hundred or even a few thousand leads on your list.

You’ll also want to think about how your list may grow in the future and what impact that will have on price and performance. A platform that offers a cost-effective solution right now may become unaffordable when you add 10,000 more contacts to your list. Similarly, some tools may not have the features required to run the kind of complex, multi-faceted campaigns you aspire to execute in the future.

Your Marketing Channels

Different marketing automation software supports various marketing channels.

From SMS and email marketing to social media and push notifications, it’s crucial to choose software that handles everything you need.

Smaller businesses with simple campaigns may not utilize a wide range of channels and can get away with using a more affordable tool.

However, large businesses with complex campaigns spanning numerous channels need something more robust to manage all the moving parts.

Furthermore, some software includes varying channels in different pricing tiers. So, you may start on one level and need to move up to gain access to more marketing channels. Or you may need to move to (or integrate) a new tool altogether.

It may help to map out your upcoming campaigns and decide which channels you plan to use.

Automation Features

Automation is at the heart of every tool on this list. But some offer more advanced automation features than others.

Do you need to score leads and prospects? Maybe you want to combine SMS, email marketing, and Facebook ads in the same customer journey. Or perhaps you need the ability to send hyper-targeted emails on autopilot.

Regardless of the complexity of your campaigns, don’t forget to consider:

• Split A/B testing
• Automated email campaigns
• Event and website tracking
• Contact management
• Visual customer journey mapping
• Automated segmentation and personalization
• Prospect and lead scoring
• Dynamic content
• Transactional emails
• AI-powered recommendations
• Action and logic-based triggers
• Reporting and analytics

You may not need all of them, and some tools don’t include them. So it’s critical to understand what you need (and don’t need) before making your decision.

Additional Features

It’s not uncommon for marketing automation software to include a handful of features typically found in a CRM tool, like live chat or customer support capabilities.

Before making a final decision, it’s essential to understand which additional features you need to fill the gap between marketing and sales or customer service.

You may already have these systems in place. So you won’t want to pay for additional features. But if you don’t, you might be able to save money, hassle, and time by choosing software that includes everything you’re missing under one roof.

FAQs

What is marketing automation?

Marketing automation is software that automates marketing workflows and handles routine tasks without marketers needing to interfere. 

What are the benefits of marketing automation?

Marketing automation allows you to get more done in less time, improves effectiveness, and provides access to far more data. For small or streamlined teams, it is ideal to do more with fewer resources. 

Are there any free marketing automation tools?

Some tools offer a free trial or free plan, including MailChimp, HubSpot, and Constant Contact.

What can I do with marketing automation?

A ton! You can automate email campaigns, reporting, lead nurturing, lead scoring, and much more. In some cases, you may be able to automate half of your job by using a comprehensive marketing automation tool. 

Conclusion

Good marketing has the ability to set you apart from your competition. However, it can be hard to keep up with what marketing strategies work and which ones don’t.

Even when you do, it’s hard to focus on all of them at once. You don’t always have the time or energy to do it. Neither do I.

Thankfully, marketing automation tools exist to make marketing easier for you and your team. By automating, you can spend your time and attention focusing on other efforts that will increase your company’s success.

Try out some of these marketing automation tools based on your needs and budget. Kick back as they streamline your processes for you. Then, pick your favorites and stick with them.

What marketing automation tools are you using?

When it comes to digital marketing, optimizing the customer journey is key, and that starts with online advertisements and SEO.

But what happens when potential customers actually click on your ad and land on your product landing page?

This page needs to be clear, well-structured, and straight to the point to keep their attention. Without a compelling landing page, all your online advertising efforts could fall flat.

In this article, I’ll discuss how to create a product landing page that delivers results.

What is a Product Landing Page?

A product landing page is a page on your website designed to promote and showcase a specific product. Its primary goal is to convert visitors into customers by providing them with all the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

There’s a distinct difference between landing pages and homepages—while homepages serve as the main entry point to a website, landing pages are designed specifically to convert visitors into leads or customers, with a clear focus on a specific product or offer.

Product landing pages are useful for boosting traffic from email, display, social media, and referral sources. They can be used to introduce new products, give potential buyers more information, and convince them to make a purchase.

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Your product landing page is like a virtual elevator pitch for your product. It’s the first impression your potential customer will have of your brand, so it needs to have all the information necessary to convince and convert.

Building Blocks of A Strong Product Landing Page Design

The goal of your landing page is to turn visitors into clients or leads. To achieve this, there are some essential building blocks that every great product landing page should include. Remember you can be unique, but it’s important to include these core elements.

• Headline and hero section
• Features and benefits
• Product images and videos
• Reviews and testimonials
• A clear call to action (CTA)
• Frequently asked questions (FAQs)

Regardless of what landing page builders you choose to use in your design process, these building blocks should be the framework of all of your product landing pages.

Headline and Hero Copy

Your landing page headline, or hero copy, is arguably the most important element of your product landing page.

When people visit your landing page, about 7 out of 10 will leave without taking any action.

To make sure visitors stick around, you need to grab their attention immediately. Your copy in this section should clearly and concisely explain what they’ll gain from your landing page and offer.

Source: Copyhackers

In the example above, Copyhackers hits the nail on the head for their target audience (freelance copywriters). The hero copy speaks to freelancers’ pain points and sounds just like the voice in their heads. It’s the perfect way to grab their attention and encourage them to keep reading.

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Once you have your audience’s attention with the headline, it’s time to dive into the benefits of your product.

Features and Benefits of a Great Product Landing Page

The features and benefits section is where you need to really start selling. You want to explain what makes your product different from the rest—why should people buy from you instead of someone else? Provide a clear overview of all the features of your product and what they’ll get out of it.

Remember it’s not simply the features that sell—it’s the benefits those features offer your customers. Don’t make the mistake of solely talking about all the amazing things your product can do.

Your customers care less about what your product can do and more about what it can do for them. For every feature, be sure to answer the question: “So what?” What does that feature mean for your customer?

You want to talk about the problems your product will solve, how it will make your reader’s life easier, better, faster, etc. Speak to their pain points and show them why buying from you will be worth it.

Asana does a great job of this on their Workflow Builder feature page. They clearly explain the effect and impact of using this product in your daily workflow.

The page goes on to describe benefits in more detail, giving the potential customer all the information they need to make a decision.

On another page, they make the features obvious but concise, so you know what you can do on each device.

This clearly shows and tells the reader why it’s great to have the Asana app without going into too much detail about what each of those bullets means.

Product Images and Videos

Images and videos are a great way to show off your product, give potential buyers a preview of what they’re getting, and explain features in greater detail.

If you’re selling physical products, use images or videos that showcase the quality and craftsmanship of your items. This can help customers feel more comfortable about the purchase by giving them a better idea of what to expect.

If you’re selling digital products, screenshots or video walk-throughs can be helpful in explaining how the product works and the features it offers. Animations or GIFs can also help break down complex concepts into more understandable visuals.

For example, Hotjar, a product experience tool, uses easy-to-follow product videos with guided instruction to help customers digest all the capabilities of their complex product.

Source: Hotjar

Absurd Design uses unique illustrations on their product landing page for absurd illustrations. It’s a great show don’t tell tactic that ties the product directly into the experience.

Source: Absurd Design

Reviews and Testimonials

Online reviews and testimonials are a great way to show potential customers why they should trust you. Seeing what other people have to say about your product can be very reassuring.

You don’t necessarily need hundreds of reviews—even just a few positive reviews will help build trust with potential customers.

Sales enablement tool, Lavender, proudly shares their reviews and companies they worked with like badges of honor.

Source: Lavender

These types of social proof help build trust and confidence, smoothing your sales process.

Effective CTAs

Next, you’ll want to give readers a clear call to action. Tell them exactly what to do next. Your CTA should be obvious and direct, so there’s no confusion about what you want them to do.

Here are a few types of prompts you can use to create a compelling CTA:

• Sign up: Invite your reader to sign up for a free trial, future event, online course, or any other offer you might have.
• Join us: This call-to-action is perfect for those managing an online community or a product created in collaboration with more than one user.
• Subscribe: This is the most commonly used call-to-action, and it invites readers to receive regular updates from you. It’s ideal for building an audience.
• Learn more: Use this call-to-action if your landing page doesn’t have all the information you want to provide. Invite visitors to access further details.
• Try for free: Offering a free trial is an excellent way to build trust and boost sales. Encourage potential clients to demo or try your product before buying with this effective CTA.
• Get started: This call-to-action can cover or drive several behaviors, from a virtual experience to a free trial.

On Mailchimp’s Landing Page Builder product landing page, the CTA inspires action and immediate gratification for the user.

Source: Mailchimp

It’s ok to add some personality to your CTAs. Just be sure you’re always offering value and clear direction.

FAQ Section

Finally, many product landing pages include a FAQ section or bottom-of-page copy. This is a great way to address any lingering concerns and provide additional details on your offer or product.

Here are some tips for writing effective FAQs:

• Make it clear: Your answers should be easy to understand and get to the point quickly.
• Be concise: Don’t get too wordy. Keep your answers short and to the point.
• Use visuals: Incorporate images, diagrams, or other visuals whenever possible to help explain complex concepts.
• Add personality: While you want your answers to be clear and informative, don’t forget to add a little bit of character within your copy.

Mailchimp does a great job of making its FAQs clear, concise, and easy to find.

Source: Mailchimp

By making them collapsable, the reader can choose to find the answers to their questions without being overloaded by too much information at once.

You’ll often find FAQs at the bottom of landing pages instead of boilerplate copy because they’re a great way to address any lingering concerns visitors might have before making a purchase.

If your potential customer has scrolled all the way to the bottom of the page, they’ve likely already passed up several opportunities to buy. You can use FAQs to tackle any objections that may be holding them back from making a purchase.

Importance of Mobile Landing Pages

More than 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices, which means your product landing page better be optimized for the best mobile experience, or visitors will bounce off quickly and without action.

Not only that, but Google also gives preference to mobile-friendly pages when ranking search results. This means that if your landing page isn’t mobile-friendly, it may not show up in search results, hurting your visibility and potential traffic.

Designing your landing pages with mobile users in mind doesn’t have to be complicated.

Simple adjustments like using larger fonts, reducing the amount of text, and making sure buttons are easily clickable on a smaller screen can make a big difference.

Hootsuite makes its signup page simple and easy for mobile users, as you can see below.

Source: Hootsuite

Unlike the desktop version, mobile product landing pages can’t fit the entire process on one page. Mobile screens are smaller, so they’ve limited the first page to just the essential information. That’s why designing for mobile requires a simplified approach that focuses on providing the most critical details upfront to ensure visitors don’t miss out on what you’re offering.

Product Landing Page Best Practices By Industry

When it comes to creating effective product landing pages, one size doesn’t fit all. Depending on the industry you’re in, there may be different best practices and strategies to consider.

Here are some of my industry-specific tips and tricks for creating high-converting landing pages that resonate with your target audience.

SaaS

If you’re in the SaaS industry, creating a high-converting landing page requires a different approach than other industries.

Here are some tips to keep in mind:

• Focus on benefits: SaaS products can be complex, but customers want to know how your product can help them. Focus on the benefits your product provides, such as saving time and money, improving workflows, and solving their problems.
• Keep it simple: Don’t overwhelm visitors with cluttered landing pages. Keep your design simple, clean, and easy to navigate, so potential customers can quickly find the information they need.
• Use social proof: SaaS customers often rely on peer recommendations, so use social proof to build trust. Include customer testimonials, reviews, and case studies that show how your product has helped other businesses.
• Highlight pricing: Price is often a major consideration for SaaS customers. Be transparent about your pricing and make it easy for potential customers to compare plans.
• Offer a free trial: Give potential customers a risk-free way to try your product with a free trial. Make sure the sign-up process is simple and prominently display your offer.

E-Commerce

If you’re in the e-commerce industry, your product landing page is your storefront.

Here are some best practices to keep in mind when designing your e-commerce landing pages:

• Use high-quality images: People want to see what they’re buying, so use high-quality images that showcase your products from different angles. Make sure to include zoom features so customers can see the details.
• Write compelling product descriptions: Your product descriptions should be detailed, accurate, and compelling. Use clear language to describe the product’s features and benefits and include any relevant specifications, such as size, weight, or materials.
• Incorporate social proof: Use customer reviews and ratings to build trust and provide social proof. Encourage customers to leave reviews and make sure to display them prominently on your landing pages.
• Simplify the checkout process: Make the checkout process as simple and easy as possible. Reduce the number of steps required to complete a purchase, and avoid asking for too much information upfront.
• Optimize for mobile: More and more people are shopping on their mobile devices, so make sure your e-commerce landing pages are optimized for mobile. Use a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes and make sure your checkout process is mobile-friendly.

Education

If you’re in the education industry, your landing page needs to speak to your target audience of students, parents, or educators.

Here are some tips to follow:

• Focus on your unique value proposition: What sets your educational program apart from others? Highlight your unique value proposition in your landing page copy, whether it’s the quality of your teaching staff, the curriculum you offer, or the success of your alumni.
• Use multimedia: Educational programs can be challenging to explain with words alone. Use multimedia, such as videos and images, to showcase your campus, student life, and facilities.
• Address concerns: Education is a significant investment, so address common concerns such as tuition costs, financial aid, and student outcomes. Include information about scholarships, grants, and student success rates to ease concerns and build trust.
• Include a clear CTA: What action do you want visitors to take on your landing page? Whether it’s filling out an inquiry form, scheduling a campus visit, or applying for admission, make sure your call-to-action is prominent and easy to find.
• Optimize for mobile: Many prospective students and parents are likely to be browsing on their mobile devices, so make sure your landing pages are mobile-optimized. Use a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes and ensures your content is easy to read and navigate.

B2B

If you’re in the B2B industry, your landing pages need to speak to your target audience of business decision-makers.

Here’s what to focus on:

• Focus on solutions: Business decision-makers are looking for solutions to their problems. Focus on the benefits of your product or service, and how it can solve their specific pain points.
• Use industry-specific language: Use terminology that resonates with your target audience and demonstrates your expertise in their industry. Avoid buzzwords and jargon that can make your content difficult to understand.
• Incorporate social proof: Use case studies, testimonials, and customer success stories to build trust and demonstrate the value of your product or service. Make sure to feature logos of well-known companies you’ve worked with to establish credibility.
• Use data and statistics: Business decision-makers are data-driven, so use relevant statistics and data to back up your claims. Highlight key performance indicators (KPIs) and other metrics that demonstrate the effectiveness of your product or service.
• Include a clear CTA: What action do you want business decision-makers to take after visiting your landing page? Whether it’s scheduling a demo, requesting a consultation, or signing up for a free trial, make sure your call-to-action is clear and prominent.

Successful Product Landing Page Examples

Looking for inspiration for your product landing page? I’ve compiled some examples of great product landing pages that effectively communicate value, engage visitors, and drive conversions.

Source: Apple

Apple always delivers great examples of product landing pages across. Check out Apple’s AirPods Max landing page. As soon as the page loads, you’re greeted with a full-width image of the product, giving you an up-close look at the Airpods Max.

Right below that, there’s a powerful headline that highlights how these headphones can provide the ultimate listening experience.

These are some of the best practices in the wild, and they work!

Source: Bellroy

Bellroy‘s product landing page for their wallets is a great example of how to engage potential customers. The interactive image slider is a standout feature, allowing users to easily compare the size of their wallet to Bellroy’s offering.

A product demo video is also included to get customers excited. And if that’s not enough, the product grid provides even more details for those who want to dig deeper.

Source: Square

Square’s mobile credit card reader product landing page is a great example of effective marketing. The page hooks visitors with a bold headline and a CTA button to get a free reader. But if they’re not ready to commit, they can easily continue scrolling down to see how the reader works and its benefits.

Square uses short, actionable sentences, easy-to-skim bullet lists, and lifestyle product photos, along with trust badges for mobile apps, to create a compelling and trustworthy landing page.

There are plenty of great landing page examples out there. Are there any that stick out in your mind?

FAQs

What should a landing page include?

A landing page should include a clear and concise headline, a brief description of your product or service, compelling product benefits, supporting visuals such as images or videos, social proof such as customer testimonials or reviews, and a strong call-to-action (CTA) such as a button to sign up, download, or buy.

What should you not include on a landing page?

It’s important to avoid clutter and distractions on a landing page. Don’t include non-essential links to other pages or external sites that could lead visitors away from your conversion goal. Avoid too much text, confusing navigation, or irrelevant information that could distract visitors from your main message.

What are 3 of the key elements to include on a landing page?

Three key elements to include on a landing page are:
A clear and concise headline that communicates your value proposition
Supporting visuals that showcase your product or service
A strong call-to-action (CTA) that directs visitors to take action 
Additional elements could include social proof such as customer reviews, trust badges or security symbols, and a form or other means for visitors to take action, such as a button to sign up, download, or buy.

Conclusion

Designing an effective product landing page requires thoughtful planning and attention to detail. By following the best practices outlined above, you can create landing pages that engage visitors, communicate value, and drive conversions.

Remember to keep your messaging clear and concise, use supporting visuals and social proof to build trust, and make it easy for visitors to take action with a strong call-to-action (CTA).

What are some of the best practices you’ve found most effective in creating successful product landing pages?

Are you looking for a proven way to gain consumer trust and increase conversions? Don’t ignore the power of customer reviews and testimonials.

After all, if you’ve got many other satisfied buyers, then whatever you’re offering must be pretty good, right? That’s why social proof is vital.

In the digital era, customer reviews and testimonials are among the first things most people look for when considering a purchase.

According to Statista, almost 70 percent of consumers read up to six reviews before purchasing.

Incorporating authentic, positive reviews into your ads can set you apart from your competition and show your audience your worth.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss six strategies for successfully using customer reviews and testimonials to promote your business. Plus, we’ll cover legal tips to keep in mind when using customer testimonials.

Why You Should Use Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Reviews and testimonials work a lot like word of mouth. Slick visuals and sales materials may not entirely convince you. However, a positive comment or recommendation from someone you trust may be all you need to make a decision to buy.

Customer reviews work in the same way. They’re valuable to your business because consumers trust online reviews from strangers more than those from their friends and family.

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When you use customer reviews in advertising material, you eliminate the middle step of consumers combing the internet for information.

Instead, you build immediate consumer trust with these user-generated descriptors of your service or product.

Where Customer Reviews Are Generally Used

Customer reviews are usually displayed on a company’s website. They may appear on the home or about page or a dedicated page.

Many brands, like Amazon, use reviews on their product pages—a popular approach on many websites.

E-commerce stores often invite consumers to submit images and videos (user-generated content), which is an effective way to market products.

Then there are multiple review sites like Yelp!, Trustpilot, and Feefo.

Now that you understand the power of customer reviews, let’s move on to some best practices.

1. Make Sure Your Google Business Profile Is Filled Out

If you want a free way to build credibility and increase visibility, you could do much worse than setting up a Google Business Profile (GBP), formerly Google My Business.

When consumers search online, your GBP appears when people are looking for a similar product or service. By viewing your profile, potential leads can see customer reviews and star ratings and make an informed decision about buying from your business.

You can optimize your GBP by including relevant information, like:

• Hours of operation
• Contact information
• Photos of your business
• Pictures of your products

This information helps potential customers find you easily and better understand what your company has to offer.

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With your GBP set up, what’s the best way to request customer reviews? We’ll discuss that next.

2. Ask Your Customers for Reviews — The Right Way

Asking customers for reviews is essential to your digital marketing strategy. However, don’t bug buyers for reviews or annoy your customer base. There’s an art to asking for customer testimonials. Below are some methods:

• Email follow-ups: Sending an email may well be your best bet. Research shows that most consumer feedback comes from sending out post-purchase emails. You can request feedback in two ways: by adding a request with your dispatch email or by sending a separate email a little while after the purchase. To make it easier, provide a link for your customer to follow and take them straight to your review page.
• Incentivize: Offer incentives such as discounts or freebies as a thank-you gesture for leaving a review.
• Personalize your request: Don’t send out generic requests for reviews. Instead, take time to customize each message and show that you value your buyer’s opinion.
• Checkout review requests: Ask at checkout or on your thank-you pages. Blend your review requests seamlessly into your business by inviting customers for feedback at checkout. This type of survey gives your customers a chance to comment on the entire shopping experience and can be extremely valuable to your business.

3. Respond To Negative and Positive Reviews

The customer reviews are flowing in. Great!

However, what happens when those testimonials aren’t all glowing? Then you take them in the same spirit you would a positive review. As tempting as it may be to ignore them or get defensive, it’s essential to respond professionally and empathetically.

Before you answer a negative review, consider the comments carefully:

• Is there something you could have done better?
• Can you change any of your processes and ensure the same problem doesn’t occur again?

In that case, the buyer has done you a favor, even if it doesn’t feel like it at the time.

Here are some more tips for handling negative feedback:

• When you reply to your customer, start by thanking them for their feedback and apologizing for their negative experience.
• Next, offer solutions or ask for more information so that you can address their concerns. Alternatively, explain what measures you’ve implemented to stop the issue from recurring.
• Respond quickly. The faster you reply, the better impression you give. Whether the feedback is negative or positive, responding swiftly to consumers enhances trustworthiness, reliability, and customer satisfaction.
• Finally, don’t dread negative feedback. It can be a learning opportunity and give you added credibility. Yes, really! Research shows that too many positives may seem fake.

On the flip side, remember to respond to positive reviews! These customers took to share their positive experiences with others, so show them some appreciation!

If you’re unsure how to reply, Google has a list of suitable responses, which you can use as a starting point.

4. Focus on Quality Reviews as Well as Quantity

Having dozens or even hundreds of five-star ratings might look impressive at first glance. However, if those glowing reviews don’t offer any real substance, they don’t give any value to potential buyers.

That’s why it’s crucial to prioritize quality over quantity with your customer testimonials and reviews. Instead of simply asking satisfied customers for a rating out of five stars, take the time to reach out with specific questions about their experience buying from you.

What does a quality review look like? Let’s start with the fundamentals first.

According to Gartner research, great customer reviews are:

• Specific: Reviews should cover product information and highlight features the reviewer liked or didn’t like.
• Verified: Give the review legitimacy by including the customer’s name, job title, and purchase status.
• Unbiased: Ensure reviews don’t have an agenda, which can influence the review’s integrity.
• Recent: Reviews shouldn’t be more than six months old, according to Gartner.

Use a free survey site and ask questions like:

• What did they appreciate most about your product or service?
• How did you go above and beyond their expectations?
• What was communication like throughout the transactions?
• How easy was the buying process? Could you do anything better?

Questions like these don’t just provide consumers with helpful information. They also help you identify areas of your business where you could improve.

5. Make It Easy for Customers to Leave Reviews

How do you make it simple for customers to leave reviews? Just follow these steps:

• Ensure you have a presence on relevant review sites such as Yelp, Google Reviews, or Tripadvisor.
• Keep your profile up to date with accurate information about your business, including hours of operation and contact details. Consider linking to these profiles from your website or social media pages.
• Ask for customer feedback through email surveys after their experience with your business. One way to do this is by sending follow-up emails after a purchase asking for feedback. Include links to review sites to simplify things.
• Give them a nudge. Sometimes your customer just needs a reminder. For example, if a customer hasn’t left a review, send them an email with a direct link and explain the importance of reviews to your business.

Customer reviews are one thing, but how do you gain customer testimonials?

Requesting Customer Testimonials

When you have a satisfied customer, it’s an excellent time to request a customer testimonial. These can be in writing, or you could ask your customer to record a video about their positive experience.

Gartner suggests you can make your happiest customers “feel special” by sending custom-made invitations requesting feedback. Additionally, you could give them incentives like discounts, prize draw entry, or a small gift.

Displaying Customer Reviews and Testimonials

With your collection of reviews hopefully growing, it’s time to include your most useful ones on your website or GBP. If you have a brick-and-mortar store, then Google has a marketing kit so you can print off your best reviews and display them.

Remember social media, too!

6. Leverage Social Media as a Review Platform

Do you know one of the first places consumers visit to make their views known? Social media.

It doesn’t matter if their experiences are positive or negative. These days, many shoppers are keen to share their experiences online.

That’s an excellent opportunity for you.

Here’s how to leverage your customers’ reviews on social.

• Choose your platform(s): First, decide on your platform. For example, YouTube is ideal for video content, and Instagram is perfect for image-based content. Don’t overlook the other platforms, though. It all depends on where your audience is.
• Display them prominently: Once you’ve collected customer reviews, prominently display them on your website and social media channels. This provides social proof and also encourages others to leave their thoughts.
• Use video testimonials: Video testimonials offer a unique advantage over written reviews because they allow potential customers to see and hear from actual people. This adds a level of authenticity that’s difficult to achieve through text alone. Additionally, when done well, video testimonials create an emotional connection between the viewer and the customer sharing their stories.
• Use live stories: Why stop at video stories? Patrick Ward of Rootstrap suggests doing a livestream with a satisfied customer. Ward says this approach builds trust and allows the reviewer to give authentic reactions.
• Create templates: Want to save time and brand your customer reviews simultaneously? Then use a template. As Melissa Kandel of the little word studio told Forbes, using customer reviews as branded content lets you promote your products/services while remaining authentic to your regular customers.

7. Follow Legal Tips for Customer Testimonials

Editor’s Note: For any questions regarding the law, please consult an attorney.

When sharing customer reviews, businesses must ensure that they follow legal guidelines. Failure to do so can lead to serious consequences and tarnish your brand’s reputation.

You can be held liable for false or unsubstantiated statements made through endorsements and for failing to disclose material connections with your endorsers. Therefore, you must disclose any special relationships between you and your endorsers.

Here are some legal tips and customer testimonial guidelines to remember when posting customer testimonials on your website or social media pages.

1. Disclose Your Relationship with the Endorser

Employees who promote your product must disclose that they are your employees, and business owners must create a policy that states this. Share this policy with employees, shareholders, and investors within your business.

One way that endorsers can disclose their connections is to include tags or hashtags on social media promotions. For example, here’s a Tweet with the #ad hashtag so you know it’s promoted.

As another example, Amazon requires that all Amazon Associates (business owners and bloggers who earn referral fees by placing links to products for sale on Amazon.com on their own websites) disclose that they are an Amazon affiliate and receive payment when users pay to purchase a product from their promotion.

Additionally, disclaimers and disclosures should be in clear, simple language so viewers can’t overlook or misunderstand your message. For example, use the #ad tag or a short statement like “This product was sent to us for review purposes” or “This review was funded by [Company].

2. Ensure That Testimonials Are Accurate

One of the primary rules of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is that endorsements must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences of the endorser.

The FTC uses the following example to show how honesty about products should be conveyed:

“An advertisement for a weight-loss product features a formerly obese woman. She says in the ad, ‘Every day, I drank 2 WeightAway shakes, ate only raw vegetables, and exercised vigorously for six hours at the gym. By the end of six months, I had gone from 250 pounds to 140 pounds.’ … Because the endorser clearly describes the limited and truly exceptional circumstances under which she achieved her results, the ad is not likely to convey that consumers who weigh substantially less or use WeightAway under less extreme circumstances will lose 110 pounds in six months.

“If the advertisement simply said that the endorser lost 110 pounds in six months using WeightAway together with diet and exercise, however, this description would not adequately alert consumers to the truly remarkable circumstances leading to her weight loss.”

The other aspect of this (illustrated by the above example from the FTC) is that endorsements must reflect typical experiences. If the experience is not typical, it should be disclosed in an easy-to-spot disclaimer. Here’s an example of what this type of disclaimer would look like:

3. Get Written Permission From Your Customers

Be sure to keep a paper trail of any endorsement agreements or arrangements that you set up. For example, if a customer agrees to endorse your product, get their agreement in writing (an email is sufficient).

This protects you in case a customer later wants to retract their testimonial. If they’ve agreed in writing that you can use their testimonial for a set time, you won’t have to remove it until the contract ends.

You can include clauses in your terms of service or privacy policy that any user reviews submitted to your website can be used for marketing purposes.

4. Don’t Lift Testimonials From Review Websites

If you see a good testimonial for your product on another site, don’t just copy and paste it onto your own website. Most review sites have a clause in their terms of service stating that users own their content (such as reviews or testimonials) and it’s licensed to the website.

This means that if you copy and paste the testimonial, you are infringing on the intellectual property rights of the person who wrote the review, which is not the best way to treat people who love your product!

Instead, you can use links on your website that go to these review sites or plug-ins that connect to crowdsourcing review websites like Yelp. If you want to have reviews readily available on your own site, use resources such as BazaarVoice.

Curious about General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws? Check out this video:

FAQs

What makes a good customer testimonial?

A good customer testimonial should be authentic. 
The best testimonials tell specific stories about how your product or service solved a particular problem or delivered an exceptional experience. They also include details about the person’s background or situation so that other potential customers can relate to their story.

What are the legal requirements for a testimonial?

It’s essential to make sure that your testimonials are truthful and accurate. You don’t want to make false claims about your product or service or misrepresent what a customer says. This could lead to accusations of false advertising or even lawsuits. Additionally, if you offer incentives (such as discounts or free products) in exchange for a testimonial, this must be disclosed clearly.
Another key consideration is getting written consent from customers before featuring their testimonials publicly. This is typically done via email or a release form that outlines how their testimonial will be used and shared.
You must also be able to support your testimonial with proof and ensure it’s original. 
In addition, remember that guidelines can change, so keep up to date with individual affiliate terms and conditions and FTC changes.

How do I get permission to use a testimonial?

Reach out to the person who gave you the testimonial and ask if they are willing to let you use their words in your marketing materials. Ensure you specify precisely how and where you intend to use their words so they can make an informed decision.
It’s also important to clarify that the person providing the testimonial retains ownership of their words. This means they have the right to revoke permission at any time if they feel uncomfortable with how you use their testimonial words. Clarify that they understand this before proceeding with using their testimonial.
Whatever you do, don’t offer an incentive in return for a positive testimonial, and ensure you’re following legal guidelines.

Conclusion

Regardless of industry or product, you should use customer reviews to enhance your digital marketing strategy.

As more and more searchers look online to determine if a product fits their needs, you’re doing your business a disservice by not having an aesthetically engaging video or image ready to greet them.

By implementing a multichannel customer review campaign, you can demonstrate to potential customers that owners love your product and that you truly understand your audience’s pain.

Highlighting this central pain point through the language and context used by your current customers assures would-be customers that you both understand and solve their needs.

While the strategies for customer reviews we discussed above allow you to provide potential customers with proof points, consider launching an entirely review-based campaign. With a handful of effective reviews, you can craft a narrative that tells your entire brand story, all while increasing visibility and awareness.

Where will you start incorporating customer reviews?

Freelancing is about more than just monetizing your hobbies or passion projects.

It also requires discipline, hard work, and the ability to manage clients and projects independently.

Balancing passion and productivity is hard. But rest assured. You’re not alone.

More than 1 billion freelancers make up the global workforce, including you. That’s a whopping 47% of the work world.

If you’re a marketer looking to streamline your workload and boost productivity, I’ve got some tools for freelancers you can drop in your toolbox. These resources will turn you into an organized and efficient digital marketing guru.

Investing in these must-have platforms will keep you on track with everything from project management related to SEO optimization.

By automating or streamlining certain tasks, you’ll have more time to focus on other aspects of your business.

With these marketing tools for freelancers in your arsenal, you’ll be a digital marketing force.

How Tools Help Freelancers

You’ve got the freedom to choose your clients, the freedom to work on your own time, and the freedom to do what you love.

Now, it’s time to find the best marketing tools for freelancers and embrace the freedom of a streamlined workflow.

Freelancers often juggle multiple projects. Managing all the tasks and deadlines can be challenging without the right tools. Platforms such as Trello or Asana help organize tasks, track progress, and communicate with clients.

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Without these productivity boosters, freelancers might struggle to manage their workload, meet deadlines, and maintain professional client relationships.

The Best Tools for Freelance Marketers

As a freelance marketer, the right resources make all the difference.

Whether you’re just starting out or you’ve been in the game for years, choosing the right marketing tools for freelancers is a game-changer.

These tools will cut the time you spend on tasks in half in some cases. That way, you can focus on what’s next for your business.

Here are some of the best tools for freelancers:

1. Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest should definitely be on your ultimate list of free SEO tools. Not only because Ubersuggest is my tool, but because it’s excellent for finding new keywords.

To begin, type a keyword or phrase into the tool.

In this case, let’s go with “digital marketing.”

Enter the phrase and press the Search button.

Ubersuggest provides data on the following metrics:

• Search volume: Number of times a keyword is searched in a given month
• SEO difficulty: Estimated organic search competition
• Paid difficulty: Projected paid search competition
• Cost per click (CPC): Google ad average cost per click

You’ll also get an idea of the backlink count and domain score it might take to rank on page 1 of Google. This displays above the keyword search volume graph.

Ubersuggest gives you so many possibilities to generate keyword ideas, which is why it gets my stamp of approval.

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You can use Ubersuggest as a free keyword research tool at first. As you get comfortable with the software, you can upgrade and unlock all the offered features. Check out the different plans and pricing.

2. AnswerThePublic

This is another keyword research tool, but with a twist.

AnswerThePublic provides insight into actual queries users are typing into search engines. You can then use this data to shape your keyword research.

Say a keyword you want to rank for is “earrings.”

Hit Search and see the questions your audience (and potential audience) is asking.

The Preposition formats show all the ways questions are being asked.

From here, you can mold your content strategy accordingly.

You can see how your competitors are responding to fill gaps in the industry (or if they’ve responded at all).

Not only is it a tool that’s easy for freelancers to grasp, but it also suggests search topics you might not have considered.

3. Copyscape

Protect your work from plagiarism.

As a freelancer, your work is your intellectual property. It’s important to ensure that it’s not being copied or used without your permission. It’s also important to verify that you’re not plagiarizing anyone else’s work.

Copyscape allows you to quickly and easily check for plagiarism by scanning the internet for duplicate content.

It can even pick up on copied sources featured in client work you are auditing or refreshing.

Copyscape gives you peace of mind that you are delivering high-quality, original work.

4. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a powerhouse social media management tool that makes a marketer’s life a breeze.

Managing multiple social media accounts for different clients can be daunting for solo or small teams.

Hootsuite simplifies this process by allowing you to manage social media accounts all in one place.

Use this all-in-one solution to schedule posts in advance, monitor engagement, and track the performance of your social media campaigns.

Hootsuite also provides insights into your audience’s behavior, helping you tailor your content to their needs.

Manage your clients’ social media presence—and save some time—while delivering high-quality results.

5. Canva

I can’t think of a single marketer who doesn’t use Canva these days.

This software has given marketers the confidence to create anything with no graphics experience at all.

Canva makes it easy to design cost-effective graphics that look professional.

As a freelancer, you need to create visually appealing content that stands out from the competition.

Canva is super straightforward. This graphic design software offers a dashboard full of pre-made templates, graphics, and design elements that you can customize to fit your clients’ brand and messaging.

You can create social media posts, infographics, and presentations in a matter of minutes.

Since this tool is beginner-friendly, you don’t need any design skills to use it effectively.

6. Zapier

Need to automate repetitive tasks and streamline your workflow?

Use Zapier to connect different apps and other marketing tools you use for work.

This allows data to flow seamlessly between them all.

You can save time by avoiding manual data entry and focus on more important tasks like developing marketing strategies and creating content.

Use Zapier’s vast library of pre-built integrations with popular apps to easily set up automated workflows without any coding skills.

7. Mailchimp

As an all-in-one email marketing solution, this is one of the best tools for freelancers.

It gets bonus points from me for being easy to use and affordable.

With Mailchimp, freelancers can:

• Create and send professional-looking email campaigns.
• Manage email lists.
• Track campaign performance.

Yes, you can do all that on this one platform.

Mailchimp also offers a variety of pre-designed, customizable email templates, allowing freelancers to match branding and style guides.

There’s an advanced segmentation and automation feature to send targeted and personalized messages based on the behavior and preferences of the subscriber.

8. Asana

Asana is a tool for freelance marketers that streamlines project management, task delegation, and collaboration with clients and team members.

With this tool, you’ll be able to:

• Organize your workflow.
• Assign tasks to specific team members.
• Set deadlines.
• Track progress.

This way, you can get all projects completed efficiently and on time.

Use the central hub for communication and file sharing to collaborate seamlessly and eliminate the need for multiple tools and platforms.

9. Trello

Trello provides a flexible, visual way to manage projects, tasks, and deadlines.

Trello’s boards, lists, and cards help freelancers organize their workflow in a way that works best for them.

No matter if it’s by project or task, Trello’s interface is simple and intuitive.

Quickly add and assign tasks, set due dates, and track progress all within the platform.

Collaboration features such as comments and file sharing enable freelancers to communicate and collaborate with clients or team members in a foolproof way.

10. Google Workspace

You should be familiar with Google Workspace. This is the new and improved G Suite.

It provides a comprehensive hub of productivity apps to help you manage work more efficiently.

Google Workspace includes tools like Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, and Google Meet.

These apps allow freelancers to communicate, collaborate, and share files from any device, anywhere and anytime.

I especially appreciate that Google Workspace offers advanced security and privacy features, protecting confidential client data at all times.

11. Slack

Slack takes team communication and collaboration to the next level.

This communication platform helps you stay in touch with clients and team members in real time.

Slack’s instant messaging capabilities allow freelancers to communicate quickly and easily, facilitating collaboration and feedback on projects.

Freelancers can also use Slack to organize conversations into channels based on topics, projects, or clients, making it easy to keep track of different discussions.

Slack is like everyone’s best friend because it integrates with other tools such as Google Drive, Trello, and Asana, enabling freelancers to streamline their workflow and keep all their work in one place.

12. FreshBooks

If you need a user-friendly platform for managing finances, invoicing, and time tracking, this is the tool for you.

FreshBooks allows freelancers to easily create invoices, automate payment reminders, and track expenses.

Get acquainted with the time-tracking features that help freelancers accurately bill clients.

FreshBooks’ reporting and analytics features provide insights into your financial health, allowing you to make informed decisions about your business.

You can also integrate popular tools like Stripe, PayPal, and Zapier to automate accounting processes.

13. Unbounce

You may not be a web developer, but with Unbounce, you don’t have to be. This easy-to-use platform is great for creating landing pages, popups, and sticky bars without any coding skills.

Unbounce helps you quickly design and publish high-converting landing pages optimized for conversion.

Use the A/B testing features that allow freelancers to test different versions of their landing pages to improve conversion rates.

You can also integrate tools like Google Analytics and Salesforce to gain valuable insights into your marketing campaigns’ performance.

14. Buffer

Creating, scheduling, and publishing content across multiple social media platforms just got easier.

All you need is in this centralized platform.

Buffer allows you to manage social media accounts and schedule posts in advance.

Buffer’s analytics features also provide valuable insights into social media performance, allowing freelancers to track engagement, follower growth, and other metrics.

The tool’s team collaboration features enable you to work seamlessly with clients and team members on social media strategy and content creation.

15. Loom

Sometimes a call or email just can’t cover it all, but that’s what Loom is for.

Want to save time and make sure everyone has clear instructions on what’s happening? Make a Loom video.

You can use this tool with your team or your clients.

This video messaging software lets you record and share videos with ease.

It’s a concise and convenient alternative to in-person meetings or lengthy emails.

Freelance marketers can use Loom to share project updates, brainstorm ideas, and provide feedback on campaigns.

I know many small businesses and entrepreneurs who use this tool to walk clients through tutorials or show work that they’ve done.

The receiver of the video can also take things at their own pace with your step-by-step walkthroughs.

If you need to collaborate more effectively and productively, Loom is a tool all freelancers will appreciate.

AI Tools For Freelancers: Are They Worth It?

My answer is 100%. If you’re not using AI to work smarter, you’re working harder.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the way we work, and freelancers can greatly benefit.

There are so many AI tools available. Even Google and Bing jumped in on the AI action.

These tools help freelancers identify new opportunities and optimize their rates. Here are three reasons AI tools are worth it for marketers, especially freelance marketers:

1. It improves targeting and personalization: AI-powered tools can analyze large amounts of data to identify patterns and insights about target audiences. This helps marketers create more personalized campaigns and improve their targeting, resulting in higher engagement and conversion rates.
2. It streamlines workflows and increases efficiency: AI tools automate many repetitive and time-consuming tasks, such as data entry and analysis, freeing up marketers to focus on more strategic activities. This can lead to faster turnaround times and increased productivity.
3. It helps with better decision-making and optimization: AI tools can help marketers make more informed decisions by providing real-time insights and recommendations based on data. This helps optimize campaigns and improve return on investment (ROI).

While some AI tools are expensive, many are free or offer affordable pricing plans. The ROI can be significant in terms of time saved and improved efficiency.

AI tools for freelancers are definitely worth exploring and can give freelancers a competitive edge in the marketplace. They won’t be a full replacement for your skills, but they can help to make your work more effective and efficient.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best tools for beginner marketing freelancers?

As a beginner marketing freelancer, it can be overwhelming to navigate all the resources available to you versus what you need more immediately. As you gain more experience, you can explore more advanced tools and features to expand your skills and expertise. If I had the following tools when I got started, I would have been a guru much sooner:

1. Ubersuggest: An SEO tool that provides insights into search volume, keyword difficulty, and content ideas during keyword research.
2. Canva: A beginner-friendly graphic design tool that allows you to create professional-looking designs for social media, marketing materials, and more.
3. Hootsuite: A social media management tool that allows you to schedule posts, monitor mentions, and engage with your audience across multiple social media platforms.
4. Mailchimp: A beginner-friendly email marketing tool that offers pre-designed templates and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface. It allows you to create and send professional-looking emails, newsletters, and automated campaigns.
5. Trello: A project management tool that helps you organize tasks, collaborate with your team, and stay on top of deadlines.

What tools would I need to start my own digital marketing agency?

Starting your own digital marketing agency can be exciting, but it can also be daunting if you’re not sure where to start. Here are some of the tools you’ll need to get started:

1. Social media management tools: To manage social media accounts for your clients, you’ll need a social media management tool like Hootsuite or Buffer.
2. Email marketing tools: Email marketing is an effective way to reach out to potential clients and keep in touch with existing ones. Tools like Mailchimp can help you create and send professional emails to subscribers.
3. SEO and keyword research tools: To help your clients rank higher on search engines, you’ll need SEO and keyword research tools like Ubersuggest, AnswerThePublic, and Google Keyword Planner.
4. Project management and communication tools: To manage your projects and stay on top of deadlines in house and with clients, you’ll need tools like Trello, Asana, or Slack.
5. Design and creative tools: You’ll need design tools like Adobe Creative Suite or Canva to create compelling visual content for your clients.

Conclusion

These tools for freelancers can make a huge difference in how you work.

From project management and social media tools to pay-per-click (PPC) automation tools, there are so many marketing tools for freelancers to get the job done.

With these tools at your fingertips, you’ll save time, improve workflows, and drive better results for clients.

Each is user-friendly and easy to integrate into your existing workflows.

Think of them as cheat codes to make your brand a well-oiled machine of efficiency.

Don’t be afraid to try out a few different options and see what works best for you.

With the right tools at your disposal, you can take your marketing game to the next level.

No matter which stage you’re at in your freelancing career, you can use these tools and explore opportunities through the LinkedIn Marketplace for freelancers, which connects businesses with freelancers across a wide range of industries.

There’s something out there for you, and these are the best tools for freelancers to help you do it.

Are there any other tools I didn’t cover that you use as a freelance marketer?

It’s been a few weeks since Google announced that they are releasing a new version of their search that is powered by AI.

If you missed their announcement, Google is now releasing AI-generated answers within their search results when you ask Google specific questions. For example, if you asked Google “What’s better for a family with kids under 3 and a dog, Bryce canyon or Arches” you would now see something like the response below.

And it’s not stopping there. It’s also affecting transactional searches as well. For example, if you ask Google for a “good bike for a 5-mile commute with hills” you’ll now see results similar to this.

What’s cool about the result above is you can then go and ask a follow-up question and have Google filter the results. For example, if I prefer a bike that can meet the criteria above plus is also red in color, and an e-bike, Google will then filter the results and show me what I want.

The best part is you don’t have to start your search all over again. Filtering is just like how you can filter results on a typical e-commerce site when you are shopping.

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So, what does this mean for SEO?

Most SEOs I have talked to are freaking out… the first thing that comes to people’s mind is Google is going to take away my traffic.

And yes, you can and probably will lose some traffic from this. But at the same time, it will create a better experience for people using Google, which will cause Google’s overall traffic and usage to go up, which should help you continue to get a lot of traffic from Google and potentially even more.

According to Danny Sullivan, the Public Liaison for Search at Google, Google Search sends more traffic to the open web every year.

In reality, Google Search sends billions of clicks to websites every day, and we’ve sent more traffic to the open web every year since Google was first created.

This is even after all the changes they’ve made over the years.

Do you remember the days when you used to ask Google the weather in any city and they would just list out tons of websites?

Now that’s not the case, they just show you the weather.

Whether you are looking up a stock quote, a definition, or asking Google about a math problem it just shows you the answer. They haven’t stopped there. They’ve continually made changes like this and many more will come over the years.

Why?

Well, it’s not that they want to keep people on Google. It’s that they want to provide the best experience for users.

And when they made all those changes, people freaked out and said SEO was dead. But it isn’t.

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Heck, I built one of the fastest growing companies in the United States according to Inc Magazine mainly off of SEO. When we first hit the list, we were the 21st fastest growing company.

And if that doesn’t convince you, maybe this will… Do you want to take a guess on why Google won’t cut off traffic to websites and why you shouldn’t worry?

I’ll give you a hint, check out this chart from Oberlo.

Google makes a whopping $32.78 billion a year in revenue from ads shown on network sites. These are largely sites running AdSense.

Now imagine if Google stopped sending traffic through SEO to a lot of these publishers. What do you think would happen?

Their revenue would tank, and so would their stock price.

Sure, maybe they could make it up somehow, but I doubt they are going to make a $32.78 billion gamble.

Those network sites in most cases are not buying traffic to their site through ads. The economics don’t work out in most cases… the cost of the traffic through ads would be more expensive than the revenue they generate through ads.

So, what do they do? They focus on organic traffic… SEO and social media.

Killing off their organic results and driving traffic to sites will hurt their income by billions of dollars.

Now it doesn’t mean these changes won’t hurt some publishers. For example, if you run an affiliate marketing site that breaks down the 6 best toaster ovens like this site, you’ll see your affiliate revenue get crushed in the long run.

It’s better for Google to use AI to give you the right answer. That creates a better user experience for you the searcher.

The same goes for finding cheap flights. Why would you want to do a search on a search engine like Google for “cheap flights” and then be taken to another search results page like one on Kayak to see the flight options?

It’s a terrible user experience. It would be more convenient for Google to just show you the best flight option.

Yes, this will hurt some publishers (and sites), but this already creates a better user experience. The better the user experience the more popular Google gets and you’ll continually see websites generating organic traffic (it could be more or less depending on the industry) but you should be able to generate substantial traffic still.

Why? Because again, Google isn’t going to kill off its $32.78 billion revenue stream.

And when you look at transactional keywords like “good bike for a 5-mile commute with hills” just like the Gif I showed earlier (and below in case you missed it)…

They are showcasing organic results. It should help you generate more sales as well. This would be a win because someone has a specific use case and they are showcasing your product, which means the conversion rates should be higher versus someone just typing in “red bike”.

Well, how about paid ads?

The changes they are making with AI should help paid ads.

A lot of the queries that are affected aren’t transactional keywords.

And if you go back to the example of “good bike for a 5-mile commute with hills” which is transactional, you can bet they will integrate paid ads into those areas to generate more income.

This will hurt the organic results, but when they first introduced paid results, it also hurt the organic results.

But we’ve learned to live with both paid and SEO results on search result pages.

Keep in mind Google generates over $162 billion a year from ads on Google.

That’s a lot of revenue for them to lose. They won’t want to do anything to jeopardize that income.

So you don’t have much to worry about as an advertiser.

Similar to the organic results, when people start getting very specific results from Google, it should actually increase the conversion rate for paid ads as well.

It’s why marketers target long-tail phrases.

Conclusion

We of course don’t have Google’s dataset. But when we look at our Ubersuggest data, of users typing in extremely longtail phrases (8 plus words), it’s less than 11.6% of the queries.

Again, this isn’t Google’s data… it’s ours (which is still a large sample). Because the search volume from these terms isn’t high it shouldn’t impact traffic to most websites as much as people are thinking.

But… and it’s a big BUT… Google’s improved search engine with AI will start creating better results for long tail phrases that are 8 or even 10 plus words long.

This should cause more people to search for longer tail phrases, which tend to produce better conversions. This means the sites that rank organically or rank through paid ads, should generate more conversions.

In other words, don’t be worried about these changes. They are better for users, which means it’s better for you as a marketer.

You just have to adapt over time.

One of the challenges you have as a content marketer is continually creating new content. You likely don’t have the luxury of running a content site like Huffington Post or Buzzfeed, where you’re free to write anything from cat memes to particle physics. You’re a content marketer, and you need to produce content that your audience (and customers) would search for and enjoy. You have to stay disciplined in your content, as you can only stay within a certain range of topics.

Fortunately, you don’t have to be stuck staring at a blinking text cursor, hoping a great topic will magically strike us. There are lots of tips you can use to help give you ideas on what content to create.

One of the most common ways is to create content that is centered around news in your industry. For instance, when Twitter announced scheduled tweets we wrote an article about what it means for marketers.

If you’re in an active industry like technology, there is always something to write about. Just today Twitter announced a new advertising product called Promoted Video. As a marketing blog, we could write about how marketers can use this to your advantage.

See How My Agency Can Drive More Traffic to Your Website

• SEO – unlock more SEO traffic. See real results.
• Content Marketing – our team creates epic content that will get shared, get links, and attract traffic.
• Paid Media – effective paid strategies with clear ROI.

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Today’s infographic comes to us from Copyblogger. It gives us 22 ideas for creating content when we don’t have any idea what to write. If you’re ever stuck, come back to the infographic, find an idea that appeals to you and go forward creating.

Do you know who Timothy Armoo is? He’s the CEO and co-founder behind the social media agency Fanbytes.

If you’re an online marketing nerd like me, you probably do.

However, if you’re part of the other 99.9% of the world who isn’t super excited about this “Internet marketing stuff” you’ve probably never heard of this man.

OK, so he’s not a mega-famous, super-celeb type, but this online marketing star got people talking when he sold his startup for eight figures.

You know what Armoo excels at? (apart from online marketing, of course). It’s his ability to:

• Adapt to change
• Focus on smaller niches to stand out
• Outperform other ads on social media

Yet despite his massive success, most people don’t know who Armoo is.

If you’re an introvert, that’s a cause to celebrate!

Fewer than 20 years ago, extroverts had a way better chance of becoming rich and successful.

Why? It involved a ton of networking.

You had to hire employees and build a huge company. Or, for a career in arts, music, movies, etc., you had to get every person in your industry to know you.

While connections are still a huge deal, today you can get them right from your couch (or from your living room floor in my case).

As a single individual, you can build a huge business from the comfort of your home after work, during your afternoons, and on your weekends.

I don’t think that I’m being overly dramatic when I say that online marketing is your shot at the life of your dreams.

Trust me, I would know.

I want you to have as much fun at work as these guys and I do. That’s why, today, I’m introducing you to this world with my online marketing guide.

Note: Even if you’re deep down the rabbit hole already, you can still learn a ton of new things from the following examples.

If you’re interested in a particular topic, feel free to jump ahead:

• Definition of Online Marketing
• Overview/Types of Online Marketing
• SEO – Search Engine Optimization
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• SEM – Search Engine Marketing
• Content Marketing
• Why Content Marketing?
• Social Media Marketing
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising
• Everything That You Need To Know About Google Ads
• Affiliate Marketing
• Email Marketing

Definition of Online Marketing

Not every digital marketing campaign is automatically an online marketing effort. There are some differences.

As MooSend explains, online marketing is “a strategy that entails using digital channels to reach your audience. In comparison to traditional marketing, this method is more cost-effective and has better chances of increasing brand awareness through personalized messages.”

Want the drop-dead simple version of it?

Basically, it’s anything that you do online to get more eyeballs on you, grab people’s attention, and hopefully, at some point, get them to buy from you.

There are seven major sub-categories of online marketing that I want to cover in this guide.

Overview and Types of Online Marketing

If you’ve read my SEO guide, it’s a great resource on what it is and all of the important aspects of it that you have to get right. Basically, it’s all the changes and tactics you can use to increase the rankings and visibility of your content in organic searches.

Next to SEO, there’s search engine marketing (SEM), which is simply the paid version of SEO.

Marketers pay Google to display ads in its search results in the hopes that they drive traffic (especially interested people, or leads) to their product landing pages.

Then there’s content marketing. This is where marketers try to create valuable media and content to distribute to potential future customers. This is the good-guy version of online marketing where you mostly try to guilt people into buying.

Of course, you already know social media marketing, which is where you use one or several social media channels to engage with customers, build relationships, and then send them to your products and services.

Pay-per-click advertising (or PPC) is similar to search engine marketing, but it isn’t limited to Google and its competitors. Most social media networks let you create ads that integrate naturally into their feeds, allowing you to pay for clicks to your website.

Affiliate marketing is a kind of referral marketing where you share profits with fellow marketers in exchange for promoting each other’s products.

And finally, there’s email marketing, which some already consider old-school. However, it’s still one of the most effective channels with an average ROI of 42 percent for every dollar spent and an average open rate across all industries of 21.33 percent. Once your customers have given you permission to contact them, you can email them at any time, but, you may find 8-9 AM is the best time to send them. However, it doesn’t matter what time you send your emails if they aren’t relevant to your audience and if they don’t add value.

You can already guess how big online marketing really is. You know how huge of a space each of these individual categories fill.

I mean, just think about how many social media platforms you can name off the top of your head:

Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Tumblr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, TikTok…

OK, you get the point.

I want to give you a good grip on all of these categories just like in our beginner’s guide, yet not drown you in the vast information that’s out there.

Ready. Set. Go!

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

It goes without saying that I think the Neil Patel blog is one of the best resources around when it comes to SEO (we’re kind of a big deal, I think).

However, instead of spending an entire category bragging, I’ve linked to some of my articles below:

The following three blog posts are some of the best ones to help you get started:

• A New Way to Do Keyword Research
• A Simple Step-by-Step Guide to SEO
• 11 Critical Google Ranking Factors That Will Drive Traffic

Within search engine optimization, there are two big sectors to be aware of:

On-page and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO involves optimizing individual web pages to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines. This includes optimizing content, HTML, and other coding elements that are part of a webpage.

It also involves engaging in practices such as keyword research, broken link checking, meta tag creation, image optimization, and many more. All these steps help optimize your site for search engine algorithms so that it ranks higher in SERPs.

Off-page SEO is all about creating relationships to other websites and building trust with your customers. By engaging in off page SEO activities, you are creating backlinks, which can help boost your website’s visibility and rankings on the major search engines.

At its core, off-page SEO involves optimizing content outside of your website that links back to it. This includes activities such as link building, social media engagement, content syndication, guest posting on other blogs or websites, and influencer marketing. Each of these activities helps create more backlinks that point to your website and help increase its authority in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

Let’s dive into each.

On-Page SEO

Over the past few years, Google has made countless updates to its algorithms.

Data tells us that Google makes thousands of changes to its algorithm every single year.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with Google’s rapid pace and changing user behavior.

However, one thing that’s remained relatively constant is conducting on-page SEO.

Some on-page activities for SEO aren’t linked to direct ranking factors but rather to indirect factors like click-through rate and time on site.

For example, an on-page SEO task that’s common is to optimize your meta description and title tag:

Your title tag and meta description are what shows up on a given Google search result. For example, if someone searches for “SEO Tips,” my post, ‘The 10 Most Important SEO Tips You Need to Know’ appears:

While placing keywords in the title and description can help users navigate the content faster (as seen by the bolded text), it doesn’t directly increase rankings; simply stuffing keywords in your meta and title tags isn’t an option. In fact, as Google’s algorithm gets smarter, you can get penalized for actions like that.

However, they do contribute to the click-through rate. When your title tags and meta descriptions are more compelling or related to the topic that someone is searching for, you can expect higher click-through rates.

The higher the CTR, the higher the chance of ranking better. Google is all about providing the best user experience possible. So if Google notices that your post that ranks at #10 is getting a higher CTR than the post above you, they will move your content up.

On-page SEO consists of a few major elements to be aware of:

• Crawl errors
• Keyword research
• Page speed optimization
• Speed

In this section, I’ll walk you through how you can improve each of these elements to get your on-page SEO on the right track.

Crawl Errors

Crawl errors can be anything from a 404 error (broken link) to duplicate content. And all of these issues can plague your website with:

• Slow speeds
• Impacted rankings
• Penalties from Google
• Increased risk of users leaving your site (bouncing)

If you’ve ever seen this on your site, it’s a broken link error that can cause major problems:

For example, 404 errors can impact your traffic heavily if another external source is linking to them.

If you’ve gotten your content featured on another site, but the link is broken, you’re losing out on tons of traffic.

One of the fastest tools to fix crawl errors that could be harming your site is Screaming Frog.

It’s a technical SEO tool that can scan your website for free, telling you detailed information on what you need to fix and how to do it:

When scanning your site, be sure to look for common problem areas like:

• Duplicate or missing content
• 404 errors

These issues are all too common on the majority of sites.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is a fundamental process in any online marketing game plan for SEO.

Keywords are what you search in a search engine to find the content you are looking for.

For example, type “SEO Guide” into Google — that would be a keyword. And pages can target these keywords to compete in the rankings.

There are a few types of keywords to be aware of before conducting a basic keyword research strategy. There are two major kinds:

• Long-tail keywords: Long-tail keywords are longer keywords made up of 3-5+ words. They are often easier to target due to specificity, less traffic, and less competition.
• Short tail keywords: Head or short-tail keywords are one-word or two-word keywords that are more general. For example, “basketball shoes” would be a competitive head keyword.

A good SEO strategy will target a mixture of both of these kinds of terms.

Short-tail keywords will be much more competitive because they are more general (and therefore have a higher volume).

On the other hand, long-tail keywords will get you less traffic but will convert better.

To conduct keyword research, all you need to do is head to a keyword tool like Moz or the Google Ads Keyword Planner.

Simply start by entering the basic topic that you want to cover for your next post or page:

Searching for your basic keyword will give you a list of metrics telling you the volume (how many searches per month), difficulty (competition ranking for it), and the number of clicks that come from organic search.

Lastly, it will also give you keyword suggestions.

Generally speaking, when looking to target keywords for your next blog post, you want to find long-tail terms with higher volumes and lower difficulty scores.

Then, you can take that keyword and follow the next steps under page optimization!

Content Optimization

Content optimization is a crucial part of any website; it can make or break the success of an online marketing venture.

It’s all about making sure your website is easy to navigate, and contains content that’s properly optimized for search engine algorithms.

Some areas you can focus on are:

• adding internal links
• keyword selection
• optimizing URLs and titles
• marking up headings

However, you’re writing content and optimizing pages for both the user and the search engine. Write for humans, not machines.

Here’s an example of why page optimization is so vital for your online marketing strategy. when you search for an article on Google, you expect to get something similar to your search:

Everything from the permalink (URL) to the title and structure of your post (h1 and h2 headings) makes a difference in how Google scans your content and how user-friendly it is.

The better on-page optimization you have, the longer users will stay around to consume your content.

Plus, optimizing things like internal links (where you link to another article on your site from a new post) will help you drive users throughout your entire site.

Improve Your Page Speed Optimization

One of the biggest factors for success is improving the speed at which your page loads.

When it comes to SEO, you want your content to load fast. Google prefers websites that load fast as well.

Studies have shown time that page speed affects consumers’ attitudes toward your website, too:

• Almost 70 percent say page load speed impacts their likelihood of buying
• 26.9 percent of internet users only wait 1-3 seconds for a page to load.
• 22 percent say they would try and refresh a slow-loading site, while 14 percent would go to a competitor.

Thankfully, Google offers free tools like Pagespeed Insights to help you to optimize page speed across all devices each of these can help you improve your site speed dramatically.

You could also try Pantheon for testing speed.

When you improve your site speeds, you can expect users to stay around on your site, reducing bounce rates that can negatively impact your organic rankings.

Always continue to test your site speed and improve where you can. These tools will help you fix any lingering problems by offering detailed, step-by-step solutions under each problem area.

Off-Page SEO

What’s off-page SEO? It’s simply the opposite of on-page SEO and means everything you do offsite to increase your site’s rankings.

There are a few major ways that off-page SEO comes into play. Everything from link building to social media promotion and content syndication can improve your off-page SEO.

Even things like guest blogging or writing a promotional piece on another site can result in a link (i.e., off-page SEO). Link building is a tried and tested technique, and still crucial now. According to Ahrefs, link building is one of the top three Google ranking factors. Additionally, when Ahrefs disavowed links to study the impact on traffic, pages lost up to 18 percent of visitors.

It’s no secret that quality backlink count tends to correlate with strong rankings: The more links you have back to your site from other sites, the stronger authority you have in the eyes of Google.

Link building is tough, but it’s necessary to compete with your competitors and help with coveted positions in the SERP.

Ranking higher with links involves everything from your total number of links to the quality of those links and the diversity of the sources.

When it comes to getting links, you need great content. The majority of content ranking #1 on Google is stellar, and that’s why they have thousands of links. The content is nearly unmatched!

In Moz’s article “How to Rank on Google,” they explain the 50/50 rule of link building:

‘When building link-worthy content, spend 50 percent of your time actually creating the content itself, and 50% of your time promoting it.’

Without great content, you won’t get the links you need to bring in more traffic and drive sales.

One of my favorite ways to build backlinks fast is by mentioning other influencers in my content. This adds great value to your content while also mentioning and giving praise to others.

This works well because we all know humans love it when people lift their egos. It’s a great feeling to get compliments and praise for your knowledge in a space.

By tapping into that and getting value and input from influencers, you can easily drive backlinks. For example, Themexpert mentions me in its list of best digital marketing blogs.

Mentioning influencers is a great way to get them to share your post!

For more methods on building backlinks, here are a few key resources:

• How to Get Backlinks For A New Site With No Money
• 9 Link Building Resources That’ll Increase Your Search Rankings
• 13 Efficient Link Building Strategies for Busy Marketers

Social Sharing

Social publishing is a great way to indirectly contribute to your off-page SEO strategy. While it’s not a direct ranking factor, it’s an off-page tactic that can lead to more backlinks.

Sharing your latest post on social media helps to spread it to new audiences. The more users you attract, the more brand awareness you get, and hopefully, the more links you can get as well.

Try using a tool like Buffer to schedule your content in advance:

Using platforms like LinkedIn is one of my favorite ways to conduct off-page SEO with social media as well.

Beyond simply sharing your latest posts, a great strategy is to write articles on LinkedIn, directing traffic back to your site.

Let me show you an example of an article I posted on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn content is much different than simply pasting your material into the status update bar. When you publish content on LinkedIn, it alerts all of your connections each time a new article goes live. That means that everyone who follows you gets a notification rather than having to stumble across it while scrolling through a timeline.

My favorite strategy for LinkedIn articles is to copy the introduction paragraph of my latest blog post and end it with [click to continue reading…].

I then hyperlink that phrase back to my full blog post on my site, driving tons of traffic and engagement!

To get started with this off-page SEO tactic, head to LinkedIn and select “Write an article:”

Next, add your featured image from your blog post and copy and paste the headline and intro paragraph:

Add your “click to continue reading” tag at the end and watch your traffic and links skyrocket.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing is the paid cousin of SEO.

Instead of optimizing your content and promoting it a lot to eventually show up as a top result for organic search engine results (which can often take a few months to happen even if you do it right), you can pay your way to the top.

Since it’s the first thing searchers see on the page, you’ll likely get a lot of hits to your site. However, you also pay for each and every one.

Google results look different now, although Ads still show first:

Depending on what keyword you want to show up for, you pay different prices.

The keywords that people search a lot for are more competitive and are, therefore, more expensive.

Some keywords can cost several hundred dollars per click. Others cost $600 for a single click! While ads are a great strategy, it only works if you can immediately recoup your advertising costs.

Companies easily blow tens of thousands of dollars on Google Ads campaigns, failing to make sure that they get their money’s worth.

To win with SEM, you have to offer a paid product or service.

When you’re still in the phase of producing free content to build an audience, don’t waste your time with SEM. You’ll run out of money faster than you can spell S-E-M.

Thankfully, avoiding the mistake of paying for worthless clicks is not as hard as you might think.

By setting up conversion goals inside of your campaign, you can track exactly who made a purchase from your ads, and you’ll know exactly how much money you spent and how much you made at any time.

If you need inspiration, there are plenty of success stories about brands that have yielded significant returns from running Google Ads. For example, a medical software company, Samedi, increased returns by up to 85 percent, while Kinetica Sports recorded a 267 percent return on ad spend.

With an informed and focused approach to Google Ads, you could do the same.

Content Marketing

Jon Morrow is a master content crafter. After getting annoyed by how great content often suffers from little traffic and exposure, he set out to help people change that.

His blog, SmartBlogger.com, boasts over 300k subscribers and four million readers.

As I taught you in the previous guide, content marketing is all about providing timely and relevant value to your audience.

The first step to doing that is knowing your stuff, and Jon did his homework! He’s built his blog into a six-figure monthly income.

That’s right: He makes more in a month than most people earn in a year. From that, it’s fair to assume that he excels at online marketing.

The most remarkable thing about Jon’s blog? He did all of it with just the power of his voice. Jon is paralyzed from the neck down:

When he decided to make marketing strategy a key focus of his blog, he knew that sharing the lessons that he learned when building his blog and former businesses would attract a lot of readers.

However, he also knew that he could get even more fans and potential customers by teaching people how to implement the online marketing strategy that he used to growth hack his companies to these huge revenues in such a short time.

One tactic he uses often is breaking down a marketing tactic step-by-step with screenshots, results, and detailed how-tos.

Super-specific instructions like this are rare in any industry. If you can take people by the hand from A to B, that’s when you’ll build a loyal following.

What’s more, Jon often brings on guests to share their best tactics in the same manner so that you can learn about other ways of online marketing as well, such as building client relationships, social media metrics, and email marketing.

One way to learn what it takes to create awesome content is to just look at Jon’s writing.

For example, look at this intro:

“There are lots of guides about how to make money blogging, but here’s what makes this one different:

I’ve taken three different blogs to over $1 million per year. In fact, the blog you’re reading right now has made a total of $6.7 million.”

Doesn’t the intro entice you to read more? Morrow creates a huge curiosity gap, and he immediately draws the reader in. He then engages the reader further with imagery, captivating headlines, and bullet points:

Another way to learn from him is by straight up reading his posts about, well, creating content. Three good articles to start with are:

• Demystifying Epic Content: How to Actually Create It (Not Just Jabber About How Important It Is)
• The Ultimate Guide to Writing Irresistible Subheads
• 20 Rules for Writing So Crystal Clear Even Your Dumbest Relative Will Understand

Why Content Marketing?

Why do you need content marketing? Because content marketing is SEO.

According to Google, content is one of the top two ranking factors. The more amazing content you create, the higher the chance you have of bringing in new traffic and leads from organic search.

If you’re looking to start an SEO marketing strategy, you need to produce content. The only way that people can discover your company from organic search (from a non-branded search) is through content.

For example, if you are a law firm without a strong brand presence, you need content that users are searching for to drive traffic.

You could publish an article on “Top 10 Things to Know When Getting in a Car Crash.” Blog content like this can drive inbound traffic, but how often should you post?

According to HubSpot, the amount of content you should publish every week depends on the size of your company and your aims. For example, a small company should post up to four new blogs a week for organic traffic, while a larger company would post four-five new and updated posts a week.

On the contrary, if you wanted to build brand awareness, you’d post fewer weekly blogs:

The more blog-based content you have, the more indexed pages on Google you have. Combine the two, and you have a lot of chances to get someone to visit your site.

Content marketing is the key to powerful SEO.

Sure, you can optimize your product pages and your homepage, but that won’t bring in traffic that doesn’t already know you.

Content marketing is the key to bringing in new visitors who haven’t heard of you!

Plus, the ROI of content marketing is massive:

In the first few months, costs per lead can drop by 80%.

While content marketing isn’t an overnight success like PPC might be, no other tactic can match its long-term viability; content marketing is still one of the top tasks for the majority of businesses trying to generate more customers and sales.

Results might take a few months, but costs are overall much cheaper than paying for customer acquisition.

If you haven’t already, it’s about time you hopped aboard the content marketing train. What if you don’t want to blog, though? Well, you don’t have to.

Hubspot’s latest State of Inbound Marketing report shows social media is dominating online marketing, with website content/blogging not far behind, swiftly followed by email marketing.

As you can see, content comes in many more forms than writing, including SEO and influencer marketing, blogs, virtual events, and videos.

For example, Daisy Jing grew Banish, her Shopify store, to earn $3 million in annual revenue by creating informative YouTube videos about acne.

If your strength isn’t blogging or writing, or if they simply aren’t a great fit for your business model, don’t stress about it.

As long as you are creating some form of unbranded content that users need, it’s likely you can find success.

For example, can you develop videos to upload to YouTube? I currently create videos on the top marketing struggles or trends in my niche:

These videos serve as a form of content that can help me rank on Google searches while also providing valuable content on YouTube searches.

As always, this content serves a few major purposes for my company:

1. Building brand awareness: By spreading my content and my name with tons of videos, people start to recognize my brand.
2. Developing credibility and social proof: Posting informative, data-rich videos shows that I am a thought leader in my space, giving me instant credibility.
3. Driving traffic and sales: I produce all of my videos with ROI in mind.

However, what if you don’t have the resources or time to create video-based content?

Try building a blog that focuses on photos like Pura Vida Bracelets does:

Their company sells bracelets with a charitable purpose, so blogging doesn’t really fit their niche.

Nobody wants to read about bracelets. They want photos of the bracelets and downloadable, lifestyle-based content.

Pura Vida meets these needs perfectly.

Blogging isn’t for everyone or every business. You simply need to find your content niche and start producing that content ASAP.

If you want to know more about other ways of creating content, take a look at my content marketing guide.

Content Mapping By Customer Journey

One lingering question you may have is this:

How does content help to drive sales and bring in new customers?

Well, that answer is complicated, but the best way to summarize it is through a customer journey.

Let me explain:

When someone visits your site or interacts with your brand on social media for the first time, there is little chance that they choose to buy from you.

Why? Because they don’t know who you are!

Would you Google search for “shoes” and buy the first pair you saw? You probably wouldn’t.

Customers buy in a logical manner, following a specific journey from awareness to decisions. HubSpot calls this the buyer’s journey:

Customers move in progressive stages where they become aware of their problems, assess possible solutions, and then come to a decision.

This means that your content marketing efforts have to align with this journey. If you offer a user a lead magnet that requires them to give you their information in the awareness stage, you’ll simply scare them off.

They don’t know your brand, so how can you expect them to give you their details? You haven’t built trust and credibility yet. The relationship isn’t there.

However, if you ask for their email or contact details in the consideration stage, you’re right on track! They are brand aware and want high-value content.

Mapping your content to the customer journey means aligning your content efforts with each stage.

In stage one, the consumer is aware of their problem and need to fix it. As a content creator, you want to offer materials that attract these buyers, like:

• How-tos
• Infographics
• Press releases
• Social media

In the second stage, engagement, the prospect wants to evaluate products and see how they compare to others. You can do this through:

• Buying guides
• Case studies
• Explainer videos
• Benchmark reports

The third stage is conversion. Some ideas for this phrase include:

• Pricing pages
• Pitch decks
• Spec sheets
• Comparison pages

The final stage is retention. Once you’ve got your customer to commit to buy, you want to retain them through:

• Help articles
• Updates
• Announcements
• Surveys/polls

If you need more ideas, here is a checklist of content types for each stage of the funnel.

All that leads to one question, though: How do you understand your buyer’s journey better and know what content to serve your prospects?One way is by building audience personas and giving your personas individual names like John, Mary, Timothy, or Jane.

Naming your personas, however, is only the first step in identifying who these individuals and business owners are. Next, you’ve got to give them demographics and a background: how old they are, where they came from, where they’d like to travel, what their occupation is, etc. Use the raw data from whatever source you have access to – such as surveys, keyword and search term analytics, and forum threads.

When designing personas, include whether this persona represents your primary or secondary audiences. Also, include the persona’s goals and how he or she might meet those goals. That information shows you how to reach and persuade your audience effectively.

Developing a persona can be as simple as filling in the blanks of a template. Just remember that the reason that you’re doing this is to help you convey your message better and to answer your audience’s questions more clearly.

You can send a survey, questionnaire or, directly ask for input via your email autoresponder (Aweber, Getresponse, etc.),

When you receive feedback from your target audience, evaluate it against the details of the persona you developed. Then, incorporate the persona into your marketing strategy. Your marketing campaign will yield a higher return, as a result of this process.

Content Publishing and Syndication

Once you’ve created content, the next step is to publish that content and syndicate it on as many platforms and sites as you can.

Content is great on its own, but it never hurts to boost it on social media or share it with other content creators.

This helps you drive more traffic and links to your content, increasing your chances of ranking and getting leads.

The most common step is to share content across social media platforms.

For example, using a tool like Buffer, you can schedule a new content piece to publish on every single social platform that your business is connected to:

I use this strategy to share every new blog post on social and to promote all of my latest pieces:

Syndication is another tactic to help expose your content to as many people as possible.

Content syndication is simply the process of publishing your content (blogs, videos, etc.) to third-party sites that will re-publish it on their own.

Do you want to syndicate your content and get more traffic? Check out my guide here:

• The Step-by-Step Guide to Syndicating Content (Without Screwing up Your SEO)

Social Media Marketing

Social media is a beast. This industry is gigantic, and according to recent research from the Digital 2022 July Global Statshot Report, there are 4.7 billion active social media users.

By now, there are a ton of social media networks out there.

This topic deserves a whole guide on its own, but if you want to be successful with social media (and you’ll HAVE to in the long run), your best bet for a one-stop shop is Gary Vaynerchuk.

Gary is firing on all cylinders and platforms. He has written five New York Times bestsellers (two of which solely focus on how to use social media for your business), and he runs one of the biggest media agencies around.

He’s successful on Twitter because he’s witty and engages with lots of people individually. He has managed to amass 3.1 million followers on the platform.

On YouTube, he dominates with his #askgaryvee show, which he publishes frequently now. It’s attracted 4.04 million subscribers and covers online marketing, entrepreneurship, content creation, and NFTs.

Then, there’s his Facebook page with over 5.5 million followers and his Pinterest board with 110.5k followers. Finally, of course, he couldn’t miss out on Instagram. He’s grabbed another 10 million followers there.

Several million people follow his every move. If you watch him closely, you can learn the art of social media from him.

One of the biggest takeaways from Gary is that content follows context.

He says, “Content is king, but context is god.” What he means is that if you don’t respect the context of each individual social media platform, you’re bound to lose.

For example, I could have posted this blog post as a Facebook status update, but would that make any sense? No!

No one consumes long-form content on Facebook. That’s what blogs and YouTube are for.

Instead of seeing social media as a distribution channel where you push out the content that you created on one platform to all of the others, try to tell stories that match the context of each platform.

Since Gary is also a speaker, you can learn a ton about social media by watching his talks on YouTube.

However, Gary’s not the only social media wizard out there, so here are a few other resources to help you learn how to thrive on various social media platforms:

• Facebook Marketing: A Comprehensive Guide for Beginners
• 22 Ways to Make Your Facebook Ads Better
• Instagram Marketing Guide: 10 Tips that Actually Work
• 12 Powerful Twitter Marketing Tips (That Actually Work)

How Brands Are Using Instagram

Instagram is among one of the most popular social networks in the world, with 1.39 billion active users.

Despite TikTok’s growing user numbers, Instagram surpasses it, and companies are getting aboard.

Brands are tapping into this growth to showcase their products and drive sales.

One of my favorite examples of brand success on Instagram is HubSpot.

HubSpot excels at producing online marketing and entrepreneur-related content for its followers.

Instagram is, of course, focused on visuals; HubSpot taps into this by producing beautiful images and video-related content with marketing tips.

It perfectly combines inspiration with tactical tips for a great, well-rounded Instagram account.

Do you want to get started with Instagram marketing? Create an Instagram for your business and start posting content related to your niche.

If you need more tips, here are a few articles to get you going:

• Beginner’s Guide: How to Build a Killer Instagram Following and Increase Your Sales
• 15 Ways to Get More Instagram Followers

How Brands Are Using Snapchat

Snapchat is another popular social network channel that can be huge for building brand awareness.

While it’s not as popular as Facebook or Instagram, it still works to create a following that engages with your content.

Currently, brands are finding huge success by appealing to new audiences through online marketing. MTV is an excellent example of this. When it joined Snapchat, it decided to target Gen Z (people born between 1997-2012) viewers.

What did MTV do to achieve this? It put a new twist on an existing show. Long-term show Cribs was given a new look with an energetic pace and featuring celebs that are likely to appeal to a younger audience.

The show also provides behind-the-scenes footage to further engage the younger audience, along with the development of an online community.

Snapchat is great because the options are so diverse. You can post anything you want, just like you can on Instagram.

Do you want to learn more about Snapchat marketing? Follow these tutorials:

• New Kid Alert: How to Drive Sales to Your Business Using Snapchat
• The 4 Principles of Successful Snapchat Marketing

Recent Social Media Trends to Be Aware Of

As consumer behavior changes and technology expands, trends are always shifting.

Current trends show us that social media marketing is changing fast. While social platforms have always been amazing for organically reaching customers (and for free), that is slowly becoming less of a reality.

While Facebook once was the king of organic reach, research shows it’s on the decline.

The organic reach levels are nearly at rock bottom compared to five or six years ago.

Why? The social media landscape is becoming a ‘pay to play’ sector.

As social media platforms continue to grow, they realize that ad revenue is their number one money maker, and simply giving away free organic visits doesn’t help their cause.

With that in mind, you need to have a combination of both organic and paid posts on social media to find the most success in your marketing plan.

Other social media trends are:

• Short-form videos
• More social media communities (think Facebook Groups and similar)
• A growth in social commerce
• An increase in social listening
• Local targeting
• Personalization
• User-generated content and influencers remaining popular

Looking further ahead, Hootsuite predicts that ‘TikTok will take over the world’. It also anticipates the following trends:

• Photo-sharing app BeReal will dominate the sector
• Gifs will no longer be cool
• Closed captions will become the default on social media

According to Hootsuite, you’ll want to be on the lookout for more billionaires buying social media platforms, too.

Paid Social Advertising

All social platforms have their own forms of paid advertising. From Instagram to Facebook to Twitter, you can sponsor posts and even create powerful custom audiences.

On Facebook, advertising works in the display format. Here’s an example of an ad that I’ve run on Facebook:

These ads show up directly in the news feed of the customers you’re targeting.

Facebook has some of the best audience-targeting options in the market. You can effectively target audiences by income, interests, job positions, and just about anything you can think of.

Here are a few articles to get you going with Facebook advertising:

• Facebook Advertising Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Beginner’s Guide to Running Facebook Ads That Convert

On Twitter, running ads is a great way to boost your posts. I love running Twitter-based ads that boost my latest blog posts to get more traffic.

One of my favorite examples of a powerful Twitter ad comes from Hootsuite:

Using their content, they boost their posts to create ads for relevant, targeted audiences.

This allows them to reach a larger audience than their own following, bringing in more traffic, leads, and followers.

To get started on Twitter with advertising, I recommend reading this resource:

• Start to Finish Guide – Using Twitter Ads to Generate Sales for Your Business

Lastly, LinkedIn is one of my favorite places to advertise and promote content. LinkedIn not only offers successful organic posting, but it also has a user base of high-level users.

It helps you reach people who are otherwise hard to reach, such as c-suite executives.

Content promotion and audience targeting are the keys to LinkedIn. Currently, one of the best ads I’ve seen on LinkedIn comes from Godaddy Australia, and it’s a fine piece of online marketing.

Rather than taking the obvious approach and promoting its web hosting service, GoDaddy chose to use an inspirational story from one of its customers.

This is an excellent example of doing things differently: you don’t always have to directly sell to your customers: A story that inspires can be enough to get your prospect to want to find out more.

LinkedIn, just like Facebook, has diverse audience targeting options and ad options.

Get started today by following this tutorial:

• Linkedin Ad Best Practices: Comprehensive Guide

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising is exactly what the name suggests. You pay for each click that you receive on an ad that you create.

Sounds similar to search engine marketing, doesn’t it? That’s because it is. However, while SEM is only one type of PPC advertising (and a very special one), many platforms offer to show your ads to their audiences with PPC, too.

Twitter does it, LinkedIn does it, YouTube does it, and Instagram offers them, too. However, the most popular platforms for PPC advertising are Google Ads and Facebook.

On Facebook, you create Meta Ads that look just like a Facebook status update.

Then, you can pick a specific audience. For example, you could target women in Austin, Texas, between the ages of 32 and 45, who like Jon Bon Jovi. Yes, it’s that specific.

Last, you set a budget based on how much you’re willing to pay per click.

Facebook then serves your ad to your audience in their Facebook news feeds on their desktop computers or their mobile phones.

You can also place ads in the sidebar.

When people click on your ad, Facebook redirects them to your page, which can be part of your Facebook fan page or any URL you define.

This way, you can get people to buy your product, read your content, or sign up for a webinar.

Stock photo company Shutterfly knows how to run a great online marketing ad, as you can see from the example below.

Shutterfly takes the ‘why advertise one product when you can promote multiple items?’ approach to its Facebook advertising and does it well.

In its advert, Shutterfly shows the 50 percent discount buyers can get, which automatically captures the eye. Additionally, Shutterfly targets the ad at a specific demographic: the kind of person who enjoys taking photographs.

That’s not all, though.

Shuttefly gives a time-limited offer, encouraging consumers to click through sooner rather than later. Finally, the ad finishes up with a CTA with ‘shop now’ in bold.

What’s good about PPC is that it integrates seamlessly into the flow of its respective social media platform.

Ever since marketers first started advertising heavily, consumers tried to avoid it.

Why?

Because in 99 percent of all cases, it’s not relevant to them.

What college kid needs to see a billboard about adult diapers? None!

With PPC, marketers can be sneakier; we need to be.

The ads show up as part of the natural ‘just scrolling through my Facebook feed’ process and are much less obvious.

Plus, thanks to the specific targeting, you can ensure that relevant potential customers actually see your ads.

A prime online resource is AdEspresso.

It helps you optimize your online marketing efforts by allowing you to:

• Create A/B split testing
• Write ads across three platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Google Ads with the grid composer for bulk ad creation
• Automatic page post promotion
• Create dynamic ads

Subscriptions to AdEspresso start at $49 a month with a spend limit of $1,000 a month. To get started, you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.

Not sure where to start with Facebook ads? Don’t worry. AdExpresso provides a detailed guide and an eBook to talk you through it.

Here are some other good articles and resources to help you start your first Facebook Ad campaign:

• What Is Facebook Advertising and How Does it Work?
• How to Create, Optimize, and Test Meta Ads

Everything That You Need to Know About Google Ads

In pay per click (PPC) advertising, Google Ads is the most popular platform to conduct business on.

Recent search ad sales for Google Ads reached $40.69 billion, and has a 28.6 percent share of the total digital revenue in the United States.

Second to Google Ads is Facebook, but they are still behind by a large margin.

Perhaps you’re wondering why Google Ads dominates the PPC space?

It’s simple: it’s the best search engine in the world and the most popular, with a market share of 83 percent of the global search market.

According to the Statista figures I’ve mentioned above, Bing trails far behind with a market share of nine percent. Nothing else even comes close to the power and user base of Google.

That means that everyone wants to advertise on Google to capture these billions of users daily.

Advertising on other search networks can be great, but the user bases are much smaller, making it harder to reach your target market.

With that in mind, Google Ads is one of the best places (if not the best place) to focus your PPC strategy on.

How does it work?

Google Ads operates on a bidding-based system. For example, on the search network, you bid on different keywords against multiple other advertisers who are looking to rank first.

Keywords can cost anywhere from ~$1 to $500+ depending on your industry. Keywords will cost whatever advertisers are willing to pay for them.

For example, a keyword for a law firm might cost $100 per click because their end profit from a single case could be thousands of dollars. That means that they are willing to bid that high because their profits can justify it.

On the other hand, cheaper products will result in cheaper costs per click.

So, where can you advertise?

Google Ads consists of multiple different advertising options. Here, I detail them for you and explain what works best for most businesses:

Google Ads Search Network

The Google Ads search network allows all advertisers to produce text-based ads targeting a specific keyword to show up in search results. For example, when you see results at the top of a search result marked “Ad,” that’s the search network:

The search network is one of the most powerful PPC advertising platforms the world has ever seen.

Why? It’s due to one single factor:

User intent.

Think about it this way:

On Facebook, people aren’t browsing their news feeds to see ads, right? They are on Facebook to engage with their friends and family and maybe to see some news on the side.

However, the goal of it isn’t to find products or services. It’s social media. It’s about interaction.

The search network on Google Ads is a whole different animal. People are literally searching for things based on specific keywords to find solutions.

For example, think about a search for “plumber near me.” What does that keyword signify?

That user is trying to find plumbing services ASAP.

That’s intent to buy directly from a single search. Where platforms like Facebook can take multiple ads and remarketing campaigns to convert a prospect, the search network can convert someone from a single keyword search.

It’s one of the main reasons why people love advertising on Google’s search network.

Google’s Display Network

Google’s display network is a key tool for marketing online. By placing ads on websites, apps, and videos across the internet, businesses can reach a vast audience of potential customers.

It’s another powerhouse of advertising that Google offers to every advertiser on their platform.

The display network taps into Google-approved sites, allowing advertisers to show image-based advertisements on related sites by topic and keyword context.

For example, ads like these are from the display network:

These ads show up on related sites or sites that you frequently browse that use AdSense.

AdSense is sort of the reverse of the Amazon display network.

It’s an online marketing program that allows website owners to place targeted ads on their sites. The program is free to join, and it’s easy to set up. Once you’ve signed up, you simply add a few lines of code to your site. Google then serves the ads. When someone clicks on one of the ads, you earn a commission.

They’re often sitting above the website or on the sides of the web page, and they’re a great way to capture new users.

On top of that, the display network offers another powerful feature: it’s called remarketing and I’ll discuss it next.

Remarketing

Remarketing is the process of bringing back users who have previously engaged with your company.

If you have remarketing enabled, you could use ads to target users who landed on your website but didn’t convert.

This allows you to bring those users back for a second or third or fourth shot at buying from you.

Remarketing is vital because most of your prospects aren’t yet ready to buy from you.

One of my favorite examples of a powerful remarketing ad on the display network is from Gap.

It’s a basic advert, but it targets a former customer by promoting the sale. As you can see, there’s a 60 percent discount on offer, free shipping, and it’s an exclusive online deal. Those are three reasons right there to click-through.

You can use the Google Ads display network for remarketing, and anyone can set it up.

If you want to find out more, here are a few key resources for you.

• Google Ads Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Google Ads
• I Increased Sales When I Made this One Google Ads Change
• Unbelievably Devastating Mistakes People Make with Google Ads

Read those posts, and you will be on your way to dominating Google Ads and driving sales, like you’ve never imagined.

Affiliate Marketing

You can’t spell affiliate marketing without Pat Flynn. Well, you actually can, but you shouldn’t learn it without him.

When Pat first launched Smart Passive Income, he was just starting to get familiar with selling informational products online. His first product was Green Exam Academy. It’s a course that he created to help people pass the LEEDs exam for architects, and it sold well.

He wanted to learn more about the concept of passive income, which is where you earn money without actively working for it (after an insane amount of work up-front, of course).

If you’re familiar with Flynn’s site, you know that affiliate marketing is his single biggest source of income.

What exactly is affiliate marketing, though? Let me explain.

Imagine that you know a great pizza place. You know the owner, Luigi, and you go there all the time.

Naturally, you tell your friends about it.

When your friend Tim goes to the pizza place, he mentions that you told him about the pizza parlor and proceeds to buy four pizzas for his friends.

The next time you come back, Luigi says, “Dude, your friend bought four pizzas because of you, and that’s the biggest order I had all week! Thanks, man! Here’s $5 for referring him.”

Ka-ching!

You’ve just made your first affiliate marketing sale.

Except, it doesn’t usually happen in real life like this, especially because a pizza place whose biggest order in a week is four pizzas won’t be around for very long.

However, luckily for you, there’s a place where it happens all the time: online.

Amazon is a prime example (pun intended).

When you sign up for their affiliate program, you can generate a special link for every single product page that they have.

You can then put that link on your blog, for example, or send it to friends you want to recommend that product to. If they click your link and buy the product, you get a small commission from Amazon for referring that customer.

Interested in affiliate marketing? I’ve created some of best resources online about affiliate marketing.Here are some great starting points:

• How to Start A Blog That Makes You Money
• 6 Advanced Affiliate Marketing Strategies to Try
• How to Boost Your Growth With Affiliate Marketing

Getting Paid For Affiliate Marketing

Now that you have a basic understanding of how affiliate marketing works, how do you get paid?

As I explained in the pizza example, you usually get paid every time your referral leads to a sale.

One of the most popular ways to drive affiliate sales and get paid is by blogging or creating content around those products.

NerdWallet is a great example of a business that thrives off of affiliate marketing:

They focus on personal finance, so they review different credit cards and help users find the best cards for their businesses or lifestyles.

Here’s the kicker: they make money every time someone signs up for a credit card using their site.

For example, if someone clicks on the Revolut card and signs up, NerdWallet gets a portion of the revenue for their efforts.

Do you want to take your affiliate marketing to the next level? Follow this guide to add affiliate marketing to your online marketing game plan today:

• Affiliate Marketing Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide

Email Marketing

Lots of articles online show you “how to write better emails” or “how to pitch anything.” But, before you can send those emails, you first need the list of people to send them to.

That’s what email marketing is all about: Directly communicating with your audience and customers.

According to Mailmunch, 60 percent of the online marketers it questioned said email outperformed social media in terms of getting traffic and conversions. Plus, email is a good, long-term method of building relationships, nurturing prospects, and guiding them through the customer journey.

There’s an easy explanation why this is: Think back to the last time you changed your phone number. It probably wasn’t that long ago, right?

Now, do you remember the last time that you changed your email? You probably don’t.

Changing your email is an absolute pain, so people rarely change them. That makes an email address a valuable piece of contact information.

Want to learn more about email marketing? Follow the links below:

• How to Grow Email Subscribers to Five Figures and Beyond
• How to Craft Lead Magnets Your Customers Can’t Ignore
• How to Use a Giveaway to Accelerate the Growth of Your Email List

How Email is Evolving

Email marketing has evolved over time, but it continues to be one of the most rewarding online marketing strategies.

Don’t believe me? Then look at these stats.

According to Hubspot,

• 77 percent of marketers are seeing an increase in email engagement.
• 64 percent of B2B marketers say email marketing helped them reach their business goals
• B2B marketers say new product and feature announcements have the highest click-through rates.

Email marketing is critical for any business to develop loyal customers and drive sales without spending a dime on advertising. However, you can only create effective online marketing campaigns if you keep up with the trends.

What’s looking hot for the future? Well, it depends on who you listen to, but these feature in most trend lists:

• Hyper personalization
• User-generated content
• Interactive emails
• AI

There’s also perennial trends to consider, like:

• Mobile marketing
• Storytelling
• Segmentation
• Personalization

Just a quick word on personalization and segmentation:

Personalization

You need to personalize emails to break through the flood of emails an average person gets. That means everything from using the customer’s name to referencing their history or interests. Personalized emails deliver much higher open and conversion rates when you compare them to boring, templated emails:

For a few more in-depth examples, read my article ‘15 Email Personalization Techniques That Work.’

Segmentation

Segmentation focuses on splitting up your customer email list into specific groups, allowing you to target them with much more specific content.

For example, let’s say that you have customers who have purchased basketball shoes and customers who have purchased soccer shoes.

Sending a generic email about a coupon likely won’t generate sales. However, splitting those groups into two email lists and sending specific basketball and soccer shoe coupons will skyrocket engagement.

For example, look at this email from the owner of Video Fruit, Bryan Harris who was looking to validate his online course. To do this, he segmented his email list for users who downloaded content that was similar to his online course:

This customized, segmented email blast generated a 72% reply rate.

Making email marketing as specific as possible is going to help you drive better open rates, response rates, and conversions.

Do you want to learn more? Here’s my guide on how to use email segmentation to increase your conversion rate.

The Best Email and Online Marketing Tools

This article wouldn’t be complete without a quick roundup of some resources to get you started in your online marketing journey.

Below, I’ve listed some of the most popular mailing list management services. If you’ve got limited funds and are looking for some low budget strategies, I’ve got you covered there too with a list of free copywriting resources and tools.

A good email marketing tool can help you automate your efforts and consolidate your tools into one, saving time and money while improving productivity.

The most popular email marketing tool on the planet right now is MailChimp.

Their drag-and-drop builder allows you to create stunning email templates for any type of business.

You can do everything from scheduling email campaigns to automating, segmenting, and personalizing them, and more.

It’s safe to say that MailChimp is a one-stop-shop email marketing tool that can help your business save time.

Other amazing email marketing tools include Constant Contact, Drip, ConvertKit, AWeber, GetResponse, and ActiveCampaign.

As for the content creation side, there are plenty of free tools and resources available. Here’s a round-up of some of the best:

• Copyblogger’s Copywriting 101: This is the first free resource I recommend you start your copywriting journey with. You need to focus on building a solid foundation that can pave the way for more refined copywriting skills like headline hacking and creating conversion-inducing copy.
• ConversionXL Quick Course: This is the next great step in mastering copywriting skills. The truth is that 79% of people skim blog posts and long-form website content. People don’t like to read today. That’s why your website content needs to be punchy and direct. You need to deliver the message with as few words as possible, without skimping on the value. Peep Laja’s guide will help you do just that. You’ll learn how to simplify your writing while still providing the same message to convert more readers.
• HubSpot’s landing-page copy checklist: Landing pages are your chance to dazzle visitors with the value you can offer them, and to do that, you need copy that creates urgency, action, and desire. HubSpot’s checklist teaches you exactly how to do just that.
• CopyBlogger’s Magnetic Headlines Guide: Only 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, and on top of that, only 2 out of 10 will read your post. That’s where these magnetic headline tricks come into play. They help you beat those odds!
• De-jargonizer: Concerned you’re using too much jargon? Fear not! Just upload your document or copy text into this tool. Give it a moment and it highlights ‘jargon’ and gives your copy a score.

Marketing Online: Some Tips for Writing Amazing Copy and Creating Successful Campaigns

Sure, all this may seem daunting, but creating an online marketing plan and writing engaging content doesn’t have to be as challenging as it seems. Here are some tips and techniques to use:

Drip Campaigns

Drip email campaigns are the bread and butter of a successful email marketing game plan. They make use of automation to send follow-up emails to users who don’t respond.

For example, if a user doesn’t respond to email #1 about your offer, you can re-engage them with a second automated email in two days to remind them.

Similar to remarketing, they offer another chance for a user to convert.

One of my favorite examples of a drip campaign comes from Kapost. Here is the first email in their sequence:

Later down the line, when the prospect isn’t responding, Kapost taps into personalization to re-engage the user:

By referencing their interest in Kapost’s content, they are showing a deep level of understanding for the customer.

Drip campaigns should be a big part of your online email marketing efforts. If you’d like more details, here’s a guide:

Get started creating a powerful drip campaign today with this guide:

• Seven Lessons From Top-performing Drip Campaigns

Now, here are some tips on crafting copy:

Use Persuasive Hacks

What factors influence your customers to say yes?

That’s what persuasion is all about and it’s always a challenge. Instead of struggling to convert your readers into customers, try leveraging successful persuasion hacks. Use these hacks to persuade and drive more visitors to your landing page.

Growth hacking is all about taking advantage of proven marketing campaign strategies to grow your business. There’s nothing fancy or trendy about it – it’s just marketing that works.

Online persuasion has everything to do with understanding your target customers and what they’re looking for. Once you’re sure about their needs, you can speak their language and convert them much more easily.

When influencing people, remember that reciprocity is crucial. In other words, give to your readers, without expectation of anything in return. This isn’t just New Age feel-good stuff – it’s science: when you give to others without expectation, it creates a feeling of indebtedness in them, making them more receptive to your eventual pitch.

See also: 6 Psychological Triggers That Will Win and Influence Customers

Write Instant-Clarity Headlines

You might get 8 out of 10 people to read your headline, but only two will read further – less if your headline is sub-par. The headline is the key action driver for your content. It should be designed to persuade each of your readers to read the rest of your article.

WordPress has made it fairly easy for anyone to start a blog and write all day. Sounds great, right?

The downside of that lower barrier to entry is that users are overwhelmed and suffering from a bombardment of web pages, derivative ad copy, and information overload. Another byproduct is that our average attention span has dropped to roughly 8 seconds.

Tons of articles and blog posts have been written about how to craft headlines. From what I can see, I don’t think most bloggers have trouble writing catchy headlines featuring good copy with the right keywords.

Instead, the biggest mistake that lots of content marketers are making is the lack of clarity in their headlines.

Headlines have a lot of tasks to accomplish. In addition to persuading readers to keep reading, headlines ought to drive search traffic and encourage word-of-mouth referrals, as well.

Here are some resources:

• How to Write Irresistible Headlines
• How to Write Headlines: A Step-by-Step Guide
• Nine Steps to Write Your Ultimate Home Page Headline

Leverage the AIDA Strategy

Creative minds look for opportunities to improve their results. It doesn’t matter whether they’re writing a blog post or connecting on Facebook – they always look for ways to give more value.

A lot of factors contribute to the success of your website content.

One way to accomplish your goals is to implement the AIDA model.

AIDA is an acronym for:

A – Attract Attention

I – Trigger Interest

D – Create a strong Desire

A – Call to Action

Attract Attention: In copywriting, there’s lots of advice on writing a powerful headline.

If the headline is catchy and piques interest, the chances of eventually getting the user to trust you are high. Since the headline is for attracting attention, follow these simple tips to make it great:

• Include specific numbers (preferably an odd number) at the beginning of the headline (e.g., 13 Simple Ways To Design High-Converting Landing Pages).
• Be clear on the headline. Don’t hide the ball. It’s better to write a clear headline that answers your user’s question than to write a clever and confusing one. So, instead of “How to Get Found,” use “5 Simple and Effective SEO Techniques to Optimize For Search Traffic.”
• Include your targeted keywords (search terms) in the headline, to catch the attention of customers.
• Limit your headline to 60 characters (this is especially advisable for SEO).
• Use power words (e.g., Tricks, Secrets, Free, Smart, Powerful, Unknown, etc.)

Build a strong desire: A good marketing campaign is all about discovering the gap between what the customer really wants and the products or website content that you’ve created for them. According to James Gilbert, “good marketers don’t sell products, they create desire.”

There has to be a strong desire, either already present or one that you create yourself. Otherwise, customers aren’t going to take action on what you say.

If you can identify the gap between your customer’s perceived state and their desired state, you can speak to them more personally with compelling copy, which will help persuade them to take whatever action you want them to take.

How do copywriters create strong interest through benefits? Well, they usually display the benefits using subtitles and bullet points within good copy to make them understandable, easily accessed and perceived as important.

I use bullet points in a lot of my website content because they’re scannable, interest-building and easy to digest. I’ll sometimes combine numbering and bullet points in website copy, to show hierarchy or order of importance:

Call-to-action: The last piece of the AIDA puzzle is the call-to-action. One of the most common mistakes bloggers and marketers make is failing to effectively persuade customers to take action, even after attracting attention, building interest and creating a strong desire.

Depending on your website content, the kind of call-to-action that you’ll use will vary. For example, if you publish an in-depth, high-quality article, then you might ask your readers to leave a comment and share the post.

From experience, I’ve found that if your blog content is truly helpful and you’re consistent, people will naturally link to you and share on any social media platform (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube) where they actively engage with others.

But, to get a higher conversion rate, simply ask readers/customers to do exactly what you want them to do. If you want them to write a comment, just ask them to leave a comment – a specific prompt question can help:

Improve Click-Through Rates

Your customer is pressured to click tons of ads that are thrown at them on a daily basis. The average person is served thousands of ad banners per month. However, when it comes to search click-through rate, there are many variables, including whether search results have images, videos, featured snippets, etc.)

If you want to succeed at content marketing and stay ahead of your competitors, you’ve got to continually improve your knowledge and skills, especially in the area of testing.

Before writing a post on how website content length affects rankings, I had to test it for myself. How else could I draw any conclusions? You have to test, too.

One of the important lessons that I learned, early in my blogging career, is that there is no single rule for improving your conversion rate.

No matter where you get advice from, you know that no one can guarantee specific results. I might set up a split testing campaign today and get a 34% click-through rate on my headlines, whereas you’ll get 44% or less than 10%, even if you and I follow similar strategies. Much of the result depends on skills and on your niche or industry.

Since they’re so effective at improving your conversion rate, you should especially test your headlines.

If you want to increase clicks on your campaigns and you’re wondering where to start, my advice is: start with the headline, not the call-to-action.

The headline is critical. It’s easy to identify a lack of clicks when the CTA is not compelling. It’s much harder to figure out when the headline is actually the culprit, though.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is online marketing?

Online marketing is the practice of digital channels to spread your message about your products or services. Some of the ways you can do this are through paid ads, social media, emails, blogging, or even SEO.

How do I learn online marketing?

The Neil Patel blog is always a great place to start. You can find articles on every area of online marketing, including on-page and off-page SEO, Google Ads, and affiliate marketing. My intention is to give you comprehensive, actionable content you can put into action today.

Is online marketing affiliate marketing?

Sometimes it is, but online marketing covers multiple other areas, from social media to content marketing. Affiliate marketing is just one area of online marketing.

What’s better between online marketing vs traditional marketing?

While there are benefits to both online and traditional marketing, online marketing is often more effective. With online marketing, businesses can reach a larger audience more easily and at a lower cost. Additionally, online marketing allows you to track results and adjust your strategy as needed.

That said, there are still some cases where traditional marketing may be a better option. For example, if you’re targeting a local audience or need to build brand awareness from scratch, traditional methods may be more effective.

Conclusion

When done correctly, online marketing can make you seriously wealthy. Just don’t make the mistake of thinking it’s easy and that big things happen overnight. Of course, there’s always the exception, but for most online marketers, it’s a process that you get better at in time.

It doesn’t matter what background you’re from or work experience you have, thanks to the power of the Internet, everyone has the opportunity to become financially independent through digital marketing.

However, starting your online marketing journey doesn’t mean you can ditch the boss and the nine-to-five or shake the fear of losing your job right away. Nevertheless, if you work at it and stick to the proven methods, who knows where that may take you? You might even become the next Neil Patel!

I hope this guide helps you do just that.

The 4 Ps of marketing — you’ve probably heard about them from a friend, a textbook, or even at school.

I know it sounds like a boring topic that’s common sense, but there is more to it than meets the eye.

And no, it’s not just for large companies. The smaller you are, the more important for you it is to leverage the 4 Ps of marketing.

So before we dive into it, let’s first break down what they are…

What Are The 4 Ps of Marketing?

The 4 Ps of marketing is a marketing is a concept that summarizes the four basic pillars of any marketing strategy.

The four Ps of marketing are:

• Product: What you sell. Could be a physical good, services, consulting, etc.
• Price: How much do you charge and how does that impact how your customers view your brand?
• Place: Where do you promote your product or service? Where do your ideal customers go to find information about your industry?
• Promotion: How do your customers find out about you? What strategies do you use, and are they effective?

It sounds simple and it really is. The harder part is implementing the 4ps of marketing, which we will get into in the next sections.

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The theory behind the 4 Ps of marketing is that covering all 4 Ps will result in higher sales. But, sadly nothing is quite that easy.

The origin of the concept, also known as marketing mix, goes back to 1960 when McCarthy introduced it in his book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach.

I know that’s ages ago, but the 4 Ps/marketing mix concept is just as valid today.

Let’s dive into the concepts and look at 4 Ps of marketing examples to understand how you can apply this to your own company.

The First P of Marketing: Product

The product is what the company sells.

It might be a product like a soft drink in the beverage industry or dresses in a clothing store. Or these days it may even be software like Ubersuggest.

It could also be services, such as consulting or a paid speaking gig or even a therapy session.

In short, the product is everything that is made available to the consumer.

In the 4 Ps strategy, this means understanding what your offer needs in order to stand apart from competitors and win over customers.

In other words, what makes your product so great or unique? Because if you don’t stand out it’s going to be hard to thrive.

For example, you may know about my product Ubersuggest, but you probably know about a handful of my competitors.

So what’s the big thing that makes my product stand out from everyone else?

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I don’t focus on features, I don’t have 100s of reports. Instead, I focus on usability. My goal is to make Ubersuggest really easy to use, especially if you are new to marketing.

On the flip side, my competitors focus on ad agencies and really advanced marketers. I built something for a different target market, even though I am in a crowded market place.

How to Create an Amazing Product Your Customers Love

I want you to do something simple. Go to Hotjar, signup for a free account, and run a poll. Just like the one below.

I’ve been running polls for a while now, but if you are starting off I would ask open-ended questions like:

• What’s the biggest problem I can help you solve? This will give you an idea of what your product needs to do.
• What’s your favorite marketing product and why? You’ll want to replace the word “marketing” with whatever industry you are in… this question gives you an idea about who your competition is and what they are doing right.
• Why did you come here today? This will tell you why people come to your site and what they are looking for.
• How can we make our product better? This is great if you already have a product up as you will get real feedback.
• What don’t you like about COMPETITOR ABC? Replace competitor ABC with your competition’s name… this question tells you where there is an opportunity.

I want you to pay special attention to the last question. It really helps you identify how you can differentiate yourself from the competition.

Now, before you go and build a product (or make yours better if you already have one), don’t invest too much time and money without getting feedback.

For example, if I were to add a new feature to Ubersuggest, I wouldn’t just build it. I would get it designed, show you first, get feedback, and then adjust from there.

That way I won’t waste months’ worth of time building a product you don’t want to use.

The Second P of Marketing: Price

Price is simple, it refers to how much you charge for your product (or service).

Although it’s simple to understand, it’s really hard to come up with the “right” price. The one that doesn’t just drive the most amount of sales but also drives the most profit.

The real question is, how do you want to be perceived?

Amazon wants to be the place where you can get the best-valued products from A to Z. And of course, delivered fast.

My buddies’ company, Imperia Caviar offers high-end caviar at low prices. He’s able to get the same caviar that big brands charge thousands of dollars.

You would think having a cheap price is cheapening his brand, but instead, he is bringing transparency to the market and educating people on how caviar isn’t really expensive… it’s actually just a marketing ploy.

I take a similar approach to Ubersuggest. I don’t think marketing software and education should be expensive. So I give a lot away for free or super cheap.

Do you think that has cheapened my brand or hurt it? Well, let’s look at the data:

I guess not. 🙂

On the flip side, would Ferrari be Ferrari if their cars were selling for $10,000? Probably not.

How to Pick the Right Price for Your Product

By no means am I a pricing expert, so I don’t want to tell you what to price your product.

I will tell you to read the Price Intelligently blog. Those guys know to price like the back of their hand and have dozens of articles that will teach you exactly how to price your product.

It’s important to think about pricing, especially if you are in a crowded space. My rule of thumb is: If you are in a new space or already a leader, you can charge a premium amount.

On the flip side, if your space is saturated and you are late to the market, you’ll want a cheaper price (if not the cheapest price).

Some questions you should ask yourself are:

• What would be the lowest price you are willing to sell your product?
• What would be the highest price that consumers would be willing to pay?
• How sensitive to price are your customers?
• What prices do current leaders in your niche charge?
• How does your price compare to the competition?

The Third P of Marketing: Place

“Place” is another word for location.

As they say in marketing, it’s all about location, location, location.

I once ran a tech conference in Los Angeles called Twiistup.

It was a cool event with LA vibes and celebrities. I didn’t create the event, I bought it out years ago.

But you know what? It failed.

It wasn’t because the event wasn’t good, it was more so that I moved it to a terrible location.

I moved it from Santa Monica, which is the heart of the Los Angeles tech scene, to the valley, which is an hour’s drive from where all the tech companies are located.

In other words location, location, location.

You have to pick a location where your customers are. Don’t expect them to come to you, you have to go to them.

How to Pick the Right Place

The web is this virtual world. And although the location (place) may seem irrelevant, it really isn’t.

Just think of it this way… if I put my company all over Tiktok, what do you think would happen?

Well, I wouldn’t generate any new clients for my ad agency because none of my ideal customers are on Tiktok.

Do you think a bunch of 16 to 24-year-olds are looking for marketing services? If we offered services where we helped you get more social followers, sure, but we don’t offer that.

Think of the platforms and places your ideal customers are and be there.

That could be a specific site like Google or even an offline venue like conferences. Don’t try to bring your customers to you, go to where your customers are; it’s much easier.

Here are some simple questions to ask yourself so you can find the right place.

• Where is your customer?
• Which outlets (online and offline) sell your product?
• Which distribution channels are currently working for you?
• Do you sell directly to businesses or consumers?
• Do you sell directly to your end customer or do you have to go through middlemen?
• Where are your competitors?

The customer should always be at the center of your decision, but it’s important to also include aspects of the other Ps that we discussed.

The Fourth P of Marketing: Promotion

My favorite P (and the one I tend to blog about the most) is promotion.

Once you’ve optimized the previous three Ps of marketing, it’s time to promote your offer.

To be clear, when I talk about promotion, I am not just talking about getting your brand out there. I am talking about generating revenue.

What’s the point of promotion if you can’t drive sales?

With all of the channels out there, which ones do you start with first?

Well, I want you to go here and put in your competitor’s URL.

If they are big, you’ll see data on how much traffic they are generating, which keywords they rank for on Google, the sites that link to them and talk about them, and even how many social shares they are generating.

If they are small, you won’t see any data. You’ll have to put in a bigger competitor.

Another site that you should use is Similar Web. Put in your competitor’s URL and you’ll see tons of data on how they promote themselves.

What’s cool about the web today, versus when I first got into online marketing, is that there are tons of tools that make your life easy. So use them to your advantage. 😉

How Do You Promote Well?

I want you to start off by asking yourself the following questions:

• Which channels does your audience use the most to consume information?
• What kind of message tends to be more effective when promoting your solutions?
• What is the ideal period for promoting your product?
• Is there any concern about seasonality?
• How do your competitors plan and carry out their promotion?

Again, you can use the tools I mentioned above to get a jump start. Another thing I would highly recommend is that you look at Facebook’s ad library.

It will show you the ads that your competition runs and, more importantly, the messaging they use.

Now, I won’t bore you to death about promotion tips as I already have tons of blog posts on that. But I would start off with these:

• Online marketing
• SEO
• Social media
• Google ads
• Facebook ads
• Affiliate marketing
• Content marketing
• Email

Time needed: 8 minutes.

The 4 Ps of marketing is a marketing is a concept that summarizes the four basic pillars of any marketing strategy.

1. What Are The 4 Ps of Marketing?–Product: What you sell. Could be a physical good, services, consulting, etc.
   –Price: How much do you charge and how does that impact how your customers view your brand?
   –Place: Where do you promote your product or service? Where do your ideal customers go to find information about your industry?
   –Promotion: How do your customers find out about you? What strategies do you use, and are they effective?
2. The First P of Marketing: ProductThe product is what the company sells.
   It might be a product like a soft drink in the beverage industry or dresses in a clothing store. Or these days it may even be software like Ubersuggest.
3. The Second P of Marketing: PricePrice is simple, it refers to how much you charge for your product (or service).
   Although it’s simple to understand, it’s really hard to come up with the “right” price. The one that doesn’t just drive the most amount of sales but also drives the most profit.
4. The Third P of Marketing: Place“Place” is another word for location. As they say in marketing, it’s all about location, location, location.
   -Here are some simple questions to ask yourself so you can find the right place:
   -Where is your customer?
   -Which outlets (online and offline) sell your product?
   -Which distribution channels are currently working for you?
   -Do you sell directly to businesses or consumers?
   -Do you sell directly to your end customer or do you have to go through middlemen?
   -Where are your competitors?
5. The Fourth P of Marketing: PromotionOnce you’ve optimized the previous three Ps of marketing, it’s time to promote your offer.
   Start off by asking yourself the following questions:
   Which channels does your audience use the most to consume information?
   What kind of message tends to be more effective when promoting your solutions?
   What is the ideal period for promoting your product?
   Is there any concern about seasonality?
   How do your competitors plan and carry out their promotion?

Conclusion

The 4 Ps of marketing may seem boring, but they are essential to creating a successful marketing plan.

Without them, you can’t differentiate yourself from the competition.

No one cares for another me-too company. We all want something unique, special; something we resonate with.

How do stand out from your competitors? You leverage the 4 Ps of marketing.

How are you leveraging the 4 Ps of marketing? Is it helping you drive profits?