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Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing

Email marketing is great for anyone looking to expand their reach to customers and prospects alike. 

It has become progressively more difficult over the years as spam filters get wise to marketing emails, but done right it can be a highly effective marketing tool. 

In this guide we will discuss some of the basics to help you start moving your email marketing in the right direction and turn it into a profitable channel for your business.

Email Marketing: How and When

When you send your emails, the timing is so important. Get this wrong and you could see no interaction at all or mass unsubscribe from your hard-earned lists. 

 

Bear in mind though, most email platforms like Active Campaign will bill you by the number of email addresses you have in your platform. 

 

Sometimes it might be better to let some go who are never going to interact. They’re costing you money, lowering your open rates and potentially hiking up your spam rates too.

Best day or time of the week for email marketing

If you run a bar or restaurant, you’ll likely see better returns from your email on a Thursday or Friday as people get in the mood for the weekend. 

 

A B2B company would normally find a Tuesday works great, but it’s well worth testing this as you never know. The different industry quirks can mean better open rates on other days. 

 

Within eCommerce, the best day will always be pay day, which is normally the last Friday of the month in the UK.

How often to send emails

This always depends on the industry you are in and what the subscribers on your list are happy with. 

 

It is so important to test these factors to make sure you aren’t losing subscribers due to not being active enough. On the flip side, being too active can annoy people with too much communication and lead to unsubscribers too.

 

That being said, we always recommend starting off with either monthly or fortnightly emails before starting to increase the velocity of your sends. This is purely down to making sure your subscribers don’t suddenly feel overwhelmed with the number of emails you send and head for the hills, in this instance hit the unsubscribe button or even worse, “mark as spam”.

 

Through trial and error you’ll be sure to find the sweet spot for the frequency of emails. You can even set up automations to create weekly/bi weekly emails. We do this within ClickUp – you can read about it here.

Best image size for email marketing

The answer to this is an SEO’s favourite saying – “It Depends”. 

 

According to Campaign Monitor, they use an email header image of 960px wide. This is due to the vast number of email clients there are in the world to open emails along with the fact most email clients are now fully responsive. Their email builder supports images of up to 20MB in size.

 

Active Campaign recommends you keep your image between 400 and 650 pixels wide. This completely depends on the layout you choose, however – some may be square images, some much wider. The maximum file size they recommend is 5mb.

 

Again, with Klaviyo, the image specifications depend on the design you choose. Like Active Campaign, the maximum file size they recommend is 5mb, however they recommend using less than 1mb where possible to avoid slow loading time.

 

Mailchimp recommends an even smaller guide of 1mb for all images.

What is a Good CTR for Email Marketing?

Again, this depends on your industry. Overall, a click through rate of around 2-5% is considered to be good. Mailchimp has a great table of average open rate and click through rate by industry, you can check it out here.

 

Click through rate can be improved in various ways, for example:

 

  • Making buttons or call to actions (CTAs) obvious
  • Improving your design, making it easy to show what you want readers to do or where you want to draw their attention to
  • Use powerful phrases in your CTAs, for example ‘save, start, now, join, win, exclusive’.

Best Practices for Email Marketing

In order to be successful, it’s essential to follow best practices. Here are some tips:

 

  • Ensure your list is opt-in: This is one of the most important rules of email marketing. If you don’t have permission from your subscribers, you could be facing spam complaints, unsubscribes, and even legal battles. Always make sure people have the option to subscribe to your list and that they are aware of what they’re signing up for.

 

  • Send relevant content: Don’t send your subscribers information that isn’t relevant to them. If they opt-in to your email list, they want to hear from you. Send them information that will interest them and help them in their everyday lives.

 

  • Personalise your copy: Personalise your copy with the subscriber’s name or other personal details. This makes them feel like you’re talking directly to them, increasing the chances that they’ll read your emails and take action.

 

  • Keep your messages short: Most people are busy and don’t have time to read long emails. Keep your email messages short, concise and to the point so they can be easily read and understood.

 

  • Use a clear subject line: Your subscribers should be able to quickly understand what the email is about by reading the subject line. Make sure it accurately reflects the email’s content so that subscribers don’t get confused or decide not to open it.

 

  • Test different types of copy: Not all copy works for everyone. Try different types of email copy to see what works best for your subscribers. This could include videos, images, articles, or even infographics.

 

  • Use A/B testing: A/B testing is a great way to see which email copy and subject lines are most effective with your audience. Test different versions of each to see which gets the best results.

 

  • Optimise your emails for mobile devices: More than half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices, so ensure your emails are optimised for these devices. Use a responsive design or ensure your text is easily read on a small screen.

 

  • Track your results: It’s important to track the results of your email marketing campaigns so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. Use analytics tools to track things like open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.

 

  • Use a reputable email service provider: Using a reputable email service provider will help ensure that your emails reach their destination and that they look great no matter what device they’re viewed on.

 

  • Use images sparingly: Too many images can slow down the loading time of your email and may cause spam filters to block the email.

 

  • Ensure your links work properly: Broken links can be frustrating for customers and may cause them to unsubscribe from your list.

 

  • Test your email before sending it: It’s always a good idea to test your email on different browsers and devices before sending it out to ensure that it looks correct and functions appropriately.

 

  • Use a responsive design template: A responsive design template will automatically adjust the size of your email to fit the device it’s being viewed on, ensuring a good user experience regardless of the device someone uses.

 

  • Segment your list: Segmenting your list allows you to send targeted content to specific groups of customers, increasing the likelihood that they will open and read your emails.

Email Marketing Tick list

Subject Line Tips

Subject lines are arguably one of the most important factors in email marketing. While it may only seem like a small part of your message, they are the very first impression you have on your recipients. This is why it is so important to craft a subject line which is compelling enough to get people to click through. 

 

Here are some tips for successful subject lines:

 

  • Learn by example. Seeing clever word plays or emojis is one of the best ways to get you thinking about how you could alter your subject line to be more compelling. Sign up to the newsletters of competitors in your industry and see what tactics they are using.

 

  • Keep it short and sweet. Email subject lines can be cut off if they’re too long, especially on mobile devices. Try to make your subject line 50 characters or less to ensure people scanning your email read the entire message. 

 

  • Avoid ‘no-reply’ send names. Thanks to the amount of spam people get these days, many people will ignore or delete email with an address like ‘noreply@company.com’. It makes the email less personable and prevents people from adding the email to their address book. 

 

  • Don’t make false promises. Your subject line is used to make promises to your reader about what your message will be. Make sure you are making a good commitment, and try not to get your email opened by false promises. This may bother your audience and they’ll lose trust in your subject lines. 

 

  • Don’t shy away from humour. Most people love a good pun, and it’s a great way to spice up your recipients emails. Don’t go overboard, but think of small ways you can incorporate humour into your subject lines.

UK Email Marketing Law

When you send emails for marketing purposes, you must be compliant with UK email marketing laws outlined in the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR). 

 

These rules outline specific things you must include in your marketing emails, such as disclosing your identity and providing a valid email address to all recipients. 

 

The PECR also covers:

 

  • Use of cookies or similar tracking technologies
  • Any form of electronic communication made for marketing, including text messages and emails
  • To make sure the communication service providers are secure, including customer privacy-directory listings, location-based data and other identifiers. 

 

Under the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), recipients can prevent companies from accessing their personal data, which is any information related to an identifiable person. 

 

The seven principles of the GDPR include: fairness; lawfulness and transparency; purpose limitation;data minimisation; accuracy; integrity and confidentiality; and storage limitation. 

 

Under the GDPR, an individual’s consent is considered as a critical aspect. The consent can either be expressed or implied freely by the individual. 

 

Here are some tips to make sure your emails align with the UK laws:

 

  • Identify your emails as an advert. This can be as simple as having a clear subject line indicating the purpose of your email, such as phrases like “discounts this week”.

 

  • Make sure you have permission from your recipients. 

 

  • Include your business details such as a postal address.

 

  • Give importance to the unsubscribe requests. The opt-out process should be made as uncomplicated as possible and done within 10 business days.

Pros and Cons of Email Marketing

As with all methods of marketing, there are positives and negatives to both.

 

Pros:

  • Lead generation: Emails are an incredibly powerful form of lead generation and can lead to sales.

 

  • Segmentation: You can segment, tag or create lists for the exact kind of audiences you want depending on their interests. This is especially useful for eCommerce businesses who may offer products for a variety of different audiences, e.g. a footwear business that sells mens, womens and kids shoes. By segmenting them, you can avoid sending irrelevant emails to your main list and avoid unsubscribers.

 

  • Advertising directly to your audience: Other forms of advertising, such as social media, may not get directly in front of those who like or follow you due to the different algorithms on each platform, however with emails you are directly in their inbox.

 

  • Opting in: These people have opted in and WANT to hear from you. This is much different to other forms of advertising, such as paid socials, where you may not always be relevant to the audience.

 

  • Access to valuable analytics: There are so many analytics you can access that can give in-depth insights into your audience, such as the best times to send emails, which subject lines are working best, where your subscribers come from, how many times links are clicked in the emails and by who, how many sales have been made, etc.

 

  • Can be easy to build a list with competitions: There are a few incredibly easy ways to build your email marketing list. One way that has worked really well for our clients is via holding competitions where entrants enter their emails to enter. Through just a few social media posts for our client, Hirst Footwear, we generated over 700 email subscribers – you can read the case study here.

 

Cons:

 

  • Can be costly for small businesses: Startups and SMEs may find that some email marketing platforms are out of their budget until they have the financial backing and resources to see a return on investment.

 

  • Can take time to understand platforms and segmentation: If you’re a newbie to email marketing, it can take some time to get your head around using different platforms. If you get stuck and your email provider’s guides aren’t much help, some email providers can take up to a week to respond to an issue.

 

  • Can get caught in spam: If you suddenly receive a lot of spam complaints, some email providers can automatically filter you into your subscriber’s spam folders, rendering your efforts ineffective.

 

  • Design issues: Some email marketing platforms have an easier design interface than others. There can be limitations on some platforms, e.g. not being able to change the colour of buttons or images not aligning without having to edit code. 

 

  • Can take a while to find a balance between sales and messaging: It’s important to find that ‘Goldilocks Spot’ of your messaging – not too many pushy sales emails and not too many blogs/advice. Striking the balance will depend on your industry and how your subscribers respond, which can be determined by your CTR.

Summary

The more hands on you get with your email marketing, the more efficient you’ll become. Although it may feel overwhelming at first, following the steps above will help your campaigns achieve success. 

 

The more you learn what resonates with your audience, the more you can scale your marketing goals and deliver meaningful messages that will drive results.

What is an SEO Audit?

If you’re looking to improve your website from a technical perspective, but are intimidated by the thought of uncovering all of your site’s issues, don’t be!

With the right professional help, you’ll soon be rising past your competitors and attracting more traffic.

In this guide, we’ll explain the in’s and out’s of an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) audit, allowing business owners, directors, marketing managers and more to understand the steps necessary to optimising a website.

 

An SEO Audit is the process of outlining and analysing potential problems or errors that will most impact organic performance, potentially preventing your site from ranking highly on search engines such as Google and Bing.

There are a few key parts which make up an SEO audit, including:

  • Checking your site for for on-page SEO problems
  • Analysing the strength of current on-site, off-site and core technical elements
  • Ensuring your site is being correctly crawled, indexed and rendered by Google
  • Verifying that your site has good user experience (UX)

SEO audit checklist

Why would you need an SEO Audit?

One of the most important reasons to utilise SEO audit services is the fact that search engines change their algorithms on a regular basis. 

It is vital that you keep your SEO strategy up to date, otherwise, you could be missing out on a significant amount of search engine traffic, as well as attention from potential customers.

Below are several reasons why an SEO audit would be necessary for your business online:

  • Webmaster guidelines: Popular webmaster tools from search engines are continually changing, so you need to make sure you’re compliant.
  • Algorithm changes: As we’ve mentioned, search engines are constantly changing their algorithms to provide better search results. You need to be aware of these changes so you can update your site content accordingly.
  • Outdated content: You may have content on your site that is outdated. It’s important to provide fresh content to search engines to give them a reason to come back.

Damaging elements: There may be some technical elements to your site that are actively harming your organic rankings. Core issues, such as broken links, duplicate content, unoptimised pages and poor site speed, can have significant negative impact.

What is an SEO audit tool?

SEO audit tools are used to make the work of Search Engine Optimisation much easier – auditors do not need to spend valuable time doing manual checks on every web page, as the tools help you to identify the problems on your website and categorise them for further, crucial analysis. 

Many SEO audit tools can examine your sites health, recognising technical issues and critical errors such as broken links and redirects, which can harm your sites rankings. 

Most Technical SEO agencies will utilise SEO auditing tools to allow them to spend more time analysing, proposing and fixing core site issues, which is what will bring businesses the most value.

What does an SEO Audit include?

While SEO audits may vary slightly, each one should analyse basic technical SEO elements such as sitemaps, server errors and metadata. 

Some audits may also include indexation, optimisation and accessibility. Every SEO audit should include technical and on-page audits. 

Technical audits will likely include:

  • Full Website Crawl
  • Site Analytics
  • Log File Analysis
  • Status Codes and Redirects 
  • Structured Data Testing
  • Site and Page Speed Testing
  • URL Structure
  • Crawlability and Indexability
  • Mobile SEO Analysis 
  • Backlink Profile 
  • Competitor Site Comparison

On-page technical audits can include:

  • Site Content Structure 
  • Keyword Use and research 
  • Meta Data Analysis 
  • User Experience 
  • Schema
  • Image and Video Optimisation
Book an SEO Audit SEO contact form

What to expect during an SEO Audit

An SEO audit varies depending on website size, quality and issues found; the core elements of data gathering and analysis typically takes around 6 weeks. 

During this time, a Technical SEO expert will be analysing and uncovering technical issues and opportunities on your website. 

During an audit, there may be a few low-hanging opportunities to be discovered and acted on. This gives you the opportunity to recover visibility whilst the remainder of the audit is being carried out. 

After the audit has been completed, you will receive a full comprehensive report of your site’s health, which is fully customised to you and your specific situation. Further actions can then be decided upon, depending on how severe the issues are found to be.

How are SEO Audit results analysed?

Analysing your SEO results can take some time, and there are many factors involved. 

A technical SEO expert will run through an audit once complete, categorising key issues in terms of priority, current harm to the site, difficulty of repair and time required. 

It would then be down to the business to decide how to proceed, but if you are considering analysing and working through an SEO audit yourself, following a checklist can help you to run through your SEO audit and ensure that you are working towards optimising your site efficiently. 

 

For technical optimisation, you should be:

  • Actively working to fix high-risk issues
  • Working through any redirects
  • Working on issues found through Robots.txt files and the site map
  • Removing or altering any harmful, pages, links and content
  • Optimising core SEO elements in the back-end of your site
  • Setting up any missed analytics
  • Adding in missed elements, such as page schema 

 

For on-page optimisation, you should be:

  • Researching top performing keywords
  • Creating a content plan including these keywords
  • Optimising titles, meta descriptions and headings
  • Writing original, long form, well optimised and well researched content 
  • Adding internal links 
  • Making your content easy to scan

 

For off-page optimisation, you should be:

  • Evaluating your backlinks 
  • Looking at your competitors backlinks 
  • Improving your internal linking 
  • Fixing broken links 
  • Finding link building opportunities 
  • Posting your content on social media, if relevant 
  • Generating backlinks with guest blogs

 

Depending on the results of an SEO audit, there may be a lot of work to be done. The work on core, on-site technical issues should come first, as without a technically sound website, your future marketing efforts, no matter the scale, will have far less of an impact.

Further work on content production, links and PR will all be backed up by a well-optimised, technically-sound, fast, high performing website. 

Google will be far more likely to rank content on a site that ticks all boxes when it comes to technical SEO, and link building and PR efforts will be easier when you have a great site to showcase.

Whether you choose to analyse and work on the issues found within an SEO audit yourself, then move forward with on-site and off-site work, or enlist the help of an SEO agency, the initial auditing services are vital to the progress and success of your business online.

The Six Best Free Design Tools for Entrepreneurs

Being an entrepreneur is no easy task, it takes serious effort, investment, and time. Keeping your overheads as minimal as possible is an important part of running the business, at least at the start of its life. There are, thankfully, a whole host of free design tools out there that you can use to kickstart your entrepreneurial journey.

Benefits of Using Free Design Tools

First of all, there’s the obvious reason that they’re free. There aren’t many people out there that don’t like free tools! The following tools are great for starting a business and the majority of them allow you to upgrade to unlock further features and tools. They’re essentially offering you a free trial with no time limit. 

Using these free tools offers the major benefit that everyone in your team is able to use them, be perfectly aligned on production, and you don’t have to worry about purchasing extra seats if a new team member joins.

The beauty of the majority of these tools is that they’re all online-based, meaning that you can access them from any internet-enabled device, from anywhere, at any point. That’s a whole lot more convenient that having to download software onto a specific device.

6 Best Free Design Tools For Entrepreneurs 2022

Canva

Canva has rapidly become one of the world’s leading design tools for the entrepreneur market. Its easy-to-use accessible software makes it incredibly simple to create stunning artwork in seconds. If you’re not a graphic designer, Canva has everything you need to create branding for your business from business cards to videos, and infographics to logos. There are literally thousands of templates, all of which you’re able to use for your business.

The free version is extensive and has the majority of tools that the typical user will want to use. Upgrade to premium if you want access to a huge library of images, videos, and premium graphics, plus additional features such as background removers and animations. There’s also a handy mock-up tool, however it doesn’t work fantastically and sometimes stretches images, so you might want to consider Pixelied’s iPhone mockups tool as an alternative.

Wireframe.cc

Within Wireframe.cc, you can create mock-ups of websites and apps easily within their online software and then share them with the team that will create them. It’s a great choice for when you want to retain some creative input without creating a website or app yourself.

WhatTheFont – MyFonts

Creating your brand takes time and effort, and a great deal of that time can be hunting around the internet for inspiration and similar effects or fonts that you’ve seen before. WhatTheFont takes some of the guesswork out of inspiration by helping you identify fonts and showing you where you can download them.

Simply take a screenshot of some text from a website, upload it to WhatTheFont, and within a few seconds, it will have either identified the font precisely or will offer you the closest alternatives that it can find.

Coolors

Another great branding tool, but rather than focusing on fonts this one focuses on brand colours. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be used for branding, simply anything that requires a palette of colours. 

Head to Coolors and load up their home screen, you’ll be presented with 5 random colours. If this is your first time using the site, start hammering the spacebar and you’ll see the colours change. Coolors aims to show you colours that complement each other and work well alongside each other.

If you already have some colours locked in, simply type in the # code and then hit the padlock to lock that colour in. You can also find shades of colours, check the contrast levels, favourite colours, and change the order.

It’s an incredible free tool, especially when combined with the export options so you can share your created palettes with your team. 

Unsplash

Finding stock photos for your website, content, or social media is a bit of an onerous task, especially if you can’t find them affordably or without complicated royalty issues. This is where Unsplash makes life easy. 

Unsplash is a huge library of free images taken by photographers (not necessarily professionals) from all around the world. The search engine lets you explore anything that you like, but relies on the photographer uploading using keywords in order to be found. Each image is free to download in a variety of images, they just ask that you name-drop the photographer or link to their portfolio (no obligation). 

Eye Dropper – Chrome Extension

Finding out the codes of colours can be complicated if you don’t have extensive knowledge of pantones. Realistically, that’s a small segment of society. To make life easier, download the chrome extension Eye Dropper. When launched it turns your cursor into an eyedropper tool that allows you to pick any colour on any website, it’ll then tell you the specific hex code and RGB of that colour.

Key Takeaways

These free tools give you a superb base to build on, they’re certainly worth investigating before you dive into paying for more expensive paid tools. At least when you’re launching your business journey these tools will help you keep overheads considerably lower.

  • There’s no harm in trying these tools, and you’ll find they do almost everything similar paid tools will do.
  • Ensure you’re happy with the tool before upgrading to a paid version.

How we’re revamping the Simply Electricals website after acquisition

We’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired the digital assets from a well-established local business to help relaunch it as an electronics reviews and informational platform!

Simply Electricals will specialise in honest, trustworthy and detailed online product reviews and updates to consumers through the new website, as well as providing a wealth of information to help consumers get the best out of their technology purchase.

The business, which until recently had a store not far from our offices in Bolton, has been operating for more than 70 years.

Simply Electricals will have the best, most experienced tech reviewers to help consumers make the choice that is best for them.

The website will feature a wide range of products, from coffee machines to the latest OLED TVs and popular brands, from Samsung to LG and Siemens.

Through the site we’ll offer expert advice and technical support via in-depth, quality reviews of a huge range of audio/visual equipment, along with domestic and commercial goods. 

We want to help consumers feel confident in making the perfect choice to suit their needs when purchasing potentially expensive electronic items – this will help to reduce the risk of products being returned.

All the information provided is always accurate, honest and helpful, and this is even more important at the moment as people look very carefully to ensure that the limited money they have to spend is used in the most effective way possible.

Ruler Analytics: ‘How SEO became our best acquisition channel’

Graphic detailing the title of the blog: Ruler Analytics for SEO

Laura Caveney, Head of Marketing at Ruler Analytics, has over six years of experience in digital marketing, working across digital content and SEO. She has worked in a variety of sectors, from the charity sector to the travel industry. Laura settled into Ruler in 2020 mid-pandemic to support the marketing team build on their current marketing strategy. 

Here, she explains how SEO has become their best acquisition channel over the past couple of years.

Thank you for taking the time to chat with us! We love seeing examples of SEO becoming the best acquisition channel for businesses. Tell us why you decided to make this your main focus?

When I first joined Ruler, we were getting the majority of our inbound leads via partner referrals. While it was fantastic to have this resource and strong relationships with our agency partners, content and SEO felt like a huge opportunity to improve results. 

The first job was assessing what we currently had and what was missing. Ruler had a small number of really high intent, middle-of-the-funnel blogs that were working well to drive demo enquiries. 

When we looked over the content we had and compared it to the marketing funnel, we found we were missing content from the top and from bottom of the funnel. We know that many marketers aren’t aware of attribution or that it could be a solution to their problem. As such, there was a huge untapped opportunity there with keywords we could use to kickstart customer journeys. 

Conversely, at the bottom of the funnel, we wanted to support current customers as well as those in the decision-making stage of the process to fully understand what Ruler was capable of and why it’s a better product than our competitors. 

While we knew building our SEO would take a lot of time and effort, it was clear even just from the handful of blogs we already had driving demos, that it would be worth it. 

How long have you been focusing on this?

Organic search has always been a priority for us and we have been making small waves of improvement incrementally. But, we really saw a shift after we realigned our strategy in January 2021. That’s where we found our feet in terms of content and SEO and started seeing amazing results. 

Now, we regularly assess our content and our strategy and shift to ensure that organic traffic grows month on month. 

Talk us through your strategy over the years. Has anything shifted through trial and testing?

When I first joined Ruler, the aim of the game was to just write more content. We got through a lot of blogs, and while traffic went up, there wasn’t a huge shift in traffic. 

We assessed what we had done and looked critically at what types of content we were creating and who they were aimed at. We found that a lot of our content was very top-of-the-funnel heavy. And, we were popping in demo CTAs left, right and centre and hoping they would stick. 

So, we decided to split out our content strategy into three funnel stages and we defined six content pillars. We went through all of our current blogs and applied each to the relevant stage and pillar. 

This exercise left us with clear gaps in our content that made it easy for us to see what was missing. From there, we researched keywords and titles that would fit the gaps that were left and got to work. 

While we created huge numbers of new blogs, we also capitalised on the SEO goodness of existing content. It took a year to get through our rewrites but we’re now in a position where we can do short, snappy updates and get our content into top rankings with much less effort. 

Our final focus for content in 2021 was creating data-driven pieces of content. We found highly relevant keyword opportunities and created our own data. Whether that was using the data from our product or tapping into our community, we were able to create strong, relevant statistics that other marketers would find interesting. 

This helped in two ways. First, we were creating highly-optimised content that was ranking well. And second, users were landing on our data and linking back to it. As such, our domain rating increased from 55 to 69 in a year with very minimal work on backlinking. 

Now, for 2022, we’re shifting again. We’ve nailed our SEO process, but now, we want to expand out into thought leadership. While our SEO content is working great at driving new inbound traffic, what we’re missing is the key to getting more people to stay. 

So this year, we’re going to share more data still. Our own tests and successes as marketers, plus insights to what we’ve learned during our time in marketing. I’m excited to see where this latest shift takes us. 

How have you found the process so far?

The process has been a long slog but our traffic has increased by nearly 300% from December 2020 to January 2022. And that year of hard work has put us in good stead to diversify our traffic while knowing that we can expect fairly consistent levels of organic traffic month on month. 

Some months we were writing 20 blogs between just two of us and at the time, it was hard to believe that that hard work would be worth it. And while getting through that big push of content was difficult, it’s got us to a really good base of organic traffic now that we can improve on and optimise. 

SEO is definitely a long-term game, but the rewards are so worth it. What advice would you give to others in a similar position in terms of timeline expectations?

Stick at it. The hard work is worth it in the end. There were times in 2020 when I felt like I couldn’t write another word. But, by getting through a big content shift like that, you just don’t know where you could end up. And just know, while it feels like all that effort is futile in the moment, in three to six months it’ll pay dividends. 

Do you have any future plans for increasing SEO focuses, or perhaps focusing on other areas?

Yes, we’re looking to continue creating data that is useful and valuable. And we’ll always keep our ear to the ground. We’re very lucky to be able to use an attribution tool as part of our regular reporting. 

With it, we can see the levels of traffic blogs are getting and how that’s translating into leads and sales. Even better is that we can see how organic search is informing customer journeys. Whether it’s from a first-click view of a blog or last-click conversion, we can definitively prove the impact of our content. This insight helps us understand a blog’s role in the customer journey, better plan for future content, plus tweak existing content. 

It’s been particularly useful from a CRO perspective too as it shows us if a blog is getting high traffic but low conversions, or vice versa. That gives us clear actions when it comes to rewriting and updating existing content. 

Ahead, we want to use this inbound traffic to develop our email offering. We love the idea of creating a community and want to use our success in dominating niche keywords to better support marketers with attribution, lead tracking and more. 

The Cheese Emporium website is now live!

Exciting news – the brand new website for The Cheese Emporium is now live!

Image showing a laptop and mobile version of the new Cheese Emporium Website

Earlier this year, our client The Mouse Trap decided they wanted to split their business into two areas, and therefore needed two websites. 

The Mouse Trap, based in Ramsbottom, is a wine and cheese bar, offering corporate and celebration charcuterie platters. The Cheese Emporium will focus on selling cheese boxes for delivery across the UK, as well as platters for local pickup. 

This means that we now focus on The Cheese Emporium as an eCommerce B2C client, rather than mixing eCommerce and local SEO with The Mouse Trap’s website. The client also created separate social accounts for the two branches of the business. 

The client tasked us with designing and developing a simple, easy-to-use Shopify eCommerce site, built with SEO in mind every step of the way. The site will be hosted on Kinsta to make the site as fast as possible.

We’ve added filters such as ‘availability’ (some products are seasonal or sell out quickly) and a price filter. We’ll be making further tweaks and adding more content over the coming months as the website grows from its infancy, so watch this space! 

You can read case studies of our client’s more established websites here. 

How Small Business Owners Can Acquire Assets To Grow Their Business

This article discusses the ins and outs of acquiring digital assets to grow your small business. It also discusses the advantages and disadvantages.

Growth is a requirement if you want to remain competitive as a small business owner operating online. You need a solid strategy for growing your business.

While most businesses will opt for tried and true growth methods, thinking outside the box can yield impressive results.

One of the best outside-the-box methods is acquiring digital assets (e.g., niche websites, social media profiles) to help further grow your small business.

Let’s discuss the ins and outs of digital assets.

The Status Quo of Growing Your Business

Most businesses opt to pursue traditional growth methods for lack of knowing better. Some of the more popular growth strategies typically include things like:

  • Obtaining organic traffic through content marketing
  • Developing an email list
  • Being active on social media
  • Investing in paid advertising
  • Word of Mouth

However, there is another less known way to pursue your growth goals that can potentially yield better results: growing your business by acquiring digital assets.

Digital assets are significant because they don’t come with much of the overhead that brick-and-mortar businesses have. It’s also possible to find a wide range of assets within your price range, giving you more options than traditional acquisitions.

Why Perform Growth Through Acquisitions?

The digital mergers & acquisitions (M&A) landscape is still largely in the early stages compared to more traditional brick-and-mortar businesses. That leaves plenty of opportunities for strategic acquisitions that can grow your business overnight.

Unlike traditional acquisitions of brick-and-mortar companies, which can be complex, owing to the transfer of hard assets such as land, vehicles, etc., digital assets can be easily transferred in short timespans – often in a day. 

This allows you to utilize cash on hand or leverage capital towards a growth outlet that provides more immediate returns than advertising and social media strategies.

Acquiring digital assets allows you to take on a company’s clients, content, website traffic, search rankings, email lists, etc. These can lead to more users for your service or buyers for your product in short order.

Assets you can require

What Kind of Assets Can You Acquire?

There are many digital businesses, which we will cover below, and not all of them will make for good acquisitions for all types of companies.

Before you begin looking at businesses to buy, you must understand the upsides and downsides of that particular website model. 

Understanding these risks and benefits will help you plan how the digital asset can fit into your current business model in the short term and over the long run to help you maximize returns.

Blogs and Niche Websites

Blog and niche websites can be an excellent investment, as they provide businesses with various ways to engage their audience and drive growth. This is especially true for online businesses or those that operate on a national or global level.

Typically, blogs and niche websites benefit from content that can rank in search engines like Google and Bing. This content drives traffic that can be monetized in a variety of ways, including:

By buying a website, you can use this traffic for marketing your products and services to visitors to the blog. It’s also possible to monetize through the aforementioned methods to increase revenue.

Social Media Profiles

Acquiring a well-established branded social media page or profile can expand your potential customer base overnight. This is a common way for businesses to skip past the growth phase of building up their social media profiles.

You don’t have to keep the branding of the social media page you buy, either. There are many prominent social media profiles and pages that have been purchased in the past and changed to new names without losing subscribers, so long as the new branding is relevant.

You first need to understand which social media platforms your target audience spends the most time on. Then, you need to figure out what type of content can help you better engage them. Different businesses will benefit from specific social media platforms, so don’t just rush out to a market like FameSwap and purchase an account.

Not all businesses will benefit from social media, either. So, start with understanding if you’d be better off acquiring another asset such as a blog or aged domain. 

Lead Generation Sites

For service businesses that rely on a steady stream of new leads, a lead generation website can provide you with plenty of growth opportunities. Some of the business types that commonly work with lead gen sites include:

  • Locksmiths
  • Plumbers
  • Roofers
  • Commercial Refrigeration

Because building lead generation websites can be complex, it’s best to purchase an established website to skip past the initial growth phase.

Ecommerce Businesses

For brick-and-mortar retail stores, acquiring an established eCommerce business can quickly allow you to expand your reach without the costs associated with building new stores.

Purchasing an established eCommerce business can be a better option than trying to build your own. For one, buying a site that is generating revenue ensures you already have customers visiting. It also allows you to skip past setting up the eCommerce backend, which can be costly and time-consuming.

You can altogether skip the initial phases of a new eCommerce website, allowing you to instead focus on bringing in new customers and expanding sales. Any business that sells products, from clothing shops to sporting goods stores, can benefit from purchasing an established store.

SaaS Businesses

Saas, for the uninitiated, stands for “software as a service”. It’s a method of licensing software on a subscription basis instead of the traditional way of selling software licenses. 

Likely, you’ve already used SaaS software many times in your life. Some of the largest software companies in the world have moved to SaaS models, as it makes their software more accessible to consumers. Some popular SaaS brands include:

  • Adobe Creative Cloud
  • Microsoft Office Online
  • Google Workspace
  • Quickbooks Online

Depending on the type of business you are operating, you can acquire an established SaaS product that can benefit your customers and work complementary to your business and expand your potential customer base.

An example of this would be a marketing agency purchasing customer relationship management (CRM) software. The agency can offer the CRM to their clients and now also has a host of businesses that use the CRM they can provide marketing services for.

Look at the acquisition of keyword research tool Ubersuggest by Neil Patel for a real-life example. Purchasing this tool allowed him to market services to people using the keyword research tool and expand his potential customer base overnight. He was also able to turn the keyword tool into a paid subscription generating further revenue. 

Aged and Branded Domains

Aged domains are domains that were previously used for websites but have since been dropped, either due to disuse or because a company forgot to renew its domain.

The first of those is what you want to look for. Avoid domain squatting, which is buying a domain from an active company that simply forgot to renew, as that is illegal.

Instead, look for domains previously associated with businesses but have since been discontinued. The benefit of these domains is that they have a backlink profile, traffic history, and likely residual brand recognition. You can do a few things with these domains, including:

  • 301 redirect to your primary website
  • Building a new website on them (LeadGen, secondary brand, etc.)
  • Change your current domain to the new one

Aged brandable domains can be beneficial. These will allow you to build a secondary website to capture more search real estate and improve traffic and leads. Or, you can redirect to your primary domain to increase your SEO backlink profile.

How to find assets

How to Find These Assets

There are a few different places to find digital assets listed for sale. I recommend that business owners who haven’t worked with digital assets stick to reputable public marketplaces, which is listed in the next section

Public Marketplaces

Public marketplaces are websites set up for people to list their websites, SaaS businesses, and other digital assets for sale. A few of the most popular public marketplaces include sites like:

There are many others, so keep looking if you don’t find something of interest on one of the above marketplaces.

These marketplaces typically have vetting processes for websites and other listed assets. Usually, this vetting will verify the website or assets analytics, traffic, finances, and additional important information. 

While this doesn’t mean you can forgo doing your own due diligence, it can provide a good starting point for first-time buyers that decreases risk.

Private Brokers

Similar to real estate sales, there are private brokers, such as Website Properties, that work with sellers to help find a buyer and facilitate a smooth sale of digital assets. 

You can find digital asset brokers for everything from social media profiles to websites, YouTube accounts, crypto portfolios, etc.

One benefit of working through a private broker is that you are likely to find higher-quality assets. Because broker fees are typically higher than public marketplaces, they tend to be more selective about who they are working with.

Private Sellers through Outreach

Many of the best opportunities won’t be publicly advertised on public markets or available through private sellers. Instead, you will have to reach out to private individuals and create those opportunities. 

The best way to go about this is to use a tool like Ahrefs to discover websites similar to what you want to purchase. Make a complete list of each website that meets your criteria and send out letters of inquiry.

You will likely be surprised at how many website owners would be interested in selling for the right price. As with anything, make sure to do your due diligence to put yourself in a better position for negotiation.

6 Things to Watch Out For

There are a few key things you need to know before attempting to purchase a digital asset. As with any investment, things can go belly up quickly if you don’t perform your due diligence and don’t fully understand what you’re getting into. The following are 6 things you should watch out for when investing in digital assets: 

1. Have a Long-Term Strategy

When you first start looking at websites, you will likely find numerous sites that look appealing. However, don’t be too quick to make a purchase.

The first thing to think about is how a website fits your long-term strategic goals. You want to purchase a digital asset that will grow with your business and continue delivering value over the long term.

Consider your business’s long-term goals and mission. Make sure that any digital asset you purchase fits in with that mission before making any purchases.

2. Perform Due Diligence

Due diligence is what separates successful investors from those that barely scrape by. With digital assets, due diligence can save you a lot of money and headaches in the long run.

While you can minimize your potential downsides by purchasing assets from reputable marketplaces, nothing will take the place of due diligence. This means going over the analytics, finances, link profiles, followers, etc.

The reality is there are people out to scam whoever they can. As with traditional investment schemes, digital assets have their share of scams that the unwise investor can fall for when rushing into a purchase.

The first rule is never to purchase a digital asset where you can’t see at least six months or more of records or all relevant records for assets less than six months old.

Use multiple tools to verify any data you are presented with.

3. Ensure the Asset Integrates with Your Workflow

Just because a digital asset passes your due diligence and fits within your long-term goals doesn’t mean it’s right for you.

It may not be worth the trouble if you have to expend considerable resources to integrate a newly purchased asset into your current workflow.

I’ve seen websites that, on paper, looked like great investments. The sites made plenty of money, had consistent traffic, and were primed for long-term growth. However, upon further looking at how the business was set up, things were unorganized and would have required a significant overhaul to work efficiently.

There are plenty of assets available for purchase, so don’t feel compelled to buy one that doesn’t integrate well with your workflow or complicate your business.

4. Sign a Sales Contract Laying Out the Terms

Once you’ve decided to purchase a digital asset, make sure you have a contract detailing timelines, deliverables, an NDA if necessary, and anything else you need to protect your investment.

Ensure that, when writing out the timelines, you leave yourself room to review all the deliverables. 

Some sellers may not want to work with contracts. This is particularly common with low-value sales. However, you should be wary of sellers who won’t use contracts for larger transactions.

5. Don’t Overpay

It seems like an obvious statement, but you don’t want to overpay for a digital asset. As with any other investment, there is a negotiation process, and the more information you have, the better your position will be.

Digital assets are typically sold in multiples of between 32x and 36x the average monthly profit of the previous six months. However, there can be a massive variance in this. I’ve seen websites sell as low as 12x and as high as 40x or more. 

As part of your due diligence process, you should have a solid understanding of traits unique to each asset that increase its value. Things like high-quality content or aged and brandable domains can make a website more valuable. Look for digital assets with these specific traits that are undervalued.

6. Use an Escrow Account

With higher valued assets especially, the transfer and payments must be run through an escrow account. This will decrease the risk for both you and the asset seller. 

An escrow account serves as a holding account for funds and acts as an intermediary for transferring files, passwords, domains, and other deliverables. The seller doesn’t transfer anything until the money is deposited, and you don’t release funds until all deliverables are confirmed.

You will need to discuss with the seller whether you are responsible for the escrow fees or if you both do a split. Avoid sellers who don’t want to work through escrow.

Actionable Takeaways

If you’re in the growth phase of your business, and the prospect of pumping money into SEO or advertising for a year doesn’t appeal to you, acquiring digital assets may be the way to go.

You can seriously cut down the time it takes to see results by acquiring established digital assets already bringing in traffic and income. However, be prepared to spend money. This is not a good strategy if you don’t have working capital or cash reserves. 

Assets that are established and bringing in revenue will sell at a premium. The good news is that you can find digital assets at all price levels, making it more likely to find solid assets within your price range. So, if you want quick growth without the downsides and risks of SEO and advertising, consider purchasing digital assets.

Kinsta Hosting Review – We think it’s the best WordPress host around

When it comes to hosting a website, it’s important that you use a hosting company that allows your website to perform at its best and can be closely monitored for any errors. Having adequate hosting will ensure that your website runs optimally, giving you the best chance of online success. 

We use Kinsta for all of our client’s websites, and it has helped to power our business in several ways. Below, we’ve rounded up a full summary of what Kinsta does, and the key factors that we, and other agency owners, enjoy.

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Table of contents

What is Kinsta Hosting?

Kinsta is a secure, fast and reliable hosting platform – the best we have ever used. We host over 100 sites and consult with our clients on where to host their WordPress websites. To this day, we still haven’t found a company that is better at hosting WordPress sites than Kinsta. 

We normally see an instant performance improvement of over 50% reduction in loading speed, along with being able to update the core files, plugins etc. on a staging site without the fear of losing anything on the live website. 

You can get all of this from $35 per month for one website. Check out their pricing plans here.

Our favourite Kinsta features

There are many features we love about Kinsta, detailed below…

Staging with the click of a button

With one click of a button you can create a staging site that is an exact replica of your existing website. It also handles blocking search engine crawlers to stop duplications of your site in Google’s index along with the ability to click to update plugins in the MyKinsta dashboard.

Security is top notch

One of Kinsta’s greatest service offerings is the free removal of malware from your website. We all hear of the issues with WordPress security, and don’t get us wrong, it can be an issue if you don’t have a maintenance plan in place and site software is not updated. It’s great to have the back-up of the support team to help out if the worst does happen. 

Sai Blackbyrn, CEO at CoachFoundation, has enjoyed this feature too: “Fixes for hacking are available for free. If a customer’s WordPress webpage is hijacked, we’ll take care of it right away.” 

Support is second to none

This is one of the biggest reasons we use them for all our hosting. There are many companies online who claim to provide great customer service, but Kinsta is by far the best we have ever experienced. 

Within minutes of raising an issue with the support team, they will do their very best to help. We have had some issues over the years and we have always been able to rely on the team. 

Mushfiq Sarker, CEO of Stream SEO, is also a fan of the support provided: “The customer service at Kinsta is outstanding. Whenever I have an issue or a question, the team is always quick to respond and help me out. They’re also very friendly and seem to genuinely care about their customers.”

Pedro Braz, Co-Founder of Investing in the Web, adds: “The Kinsta customer support has always been friendly and very fast to work with. This is something that we find very valuable since it is something that we’ve had troubles with in the past with other hosting companies – delayed responses, closing chats, etc. With Kinsta, everything has been running smoothly.”

Kinsta Server Locations

Kinsta has 32 data centers throughout the world, you can select the server location nearest your target audience. 

List taken from this page on the Kinsta website.

When creating your site, you can choose from 32 data centers:

  • Changhua County, Taiwan (asia-east1)
  • Hong Kong (asia-east2)
  • Tokyo, Japan (asia-northeast1)
  • Osaka, Japan (asia-northeast2)
  • Seoul, South Korea (asia-northeast3)
  • Mumbai, India (asia-south1)
  • Delhi, India (asia-south2)
  • Jurong West, Singapore (asia-southeast1)
  • Jakarta, Indonesia (asia-southeast2)
  • Sydney, Australia (australia-southeast1)
  • Melbourne, Australia (australia-southeast2)
  • Warsaw, Poland (europe-central2)
  • Hamina, Finland (europe-north1)
  • St. Ghislain, Belgium (europe-west1)
  • London, United Kingdom (europe-west2)
  • Frankfurt, Germany (europe-west3)
  • Eemshaven, Netherlands (europe-west4)
  • Zurich, Switzerland (europe-west6)
  • Montréal, Canada (northamerica-northeast1)
  • Toronto, Canada (northamerica-northeast2)
  • São Paulo, Brazil (southamerica-east1)
  • Santiago, Chile (southamerica-west1)
  • Council Bluffs, Iowa, USA (us-central1)
  • Moncks Corner, South Carolina, USA (us-east1)
  • Ashburn, Virginia, USA (us-east4)
  • The Dalles, Oregon, USA (us-west1)
  • Los Angeles, California, USA (us-west2)
  • Salt Lake City, Utah, USA (us-west3)
  • Las Vegas, Nevada, USA (us-west4)
  • Milan, Italy (europe-west8)
  • Paris, France (europe-west9)
  • Madrid, Spain (europe-southwest1)

Selecting a server location in MyKinsta

Free SSL on all sites

Kinsta supports both free Cloudflare SSL certificates and custom SSLs. For most users, the Cloudflare SSL integration provides HTTPS support at no additional cost.

Push just theme files or databases from staging to live

The ability to choose whether to push theme files, databases or both to the live environment is a great tool for any Woocommerce site owner. 

Developing new features on a Woocommerce site can be a bit of a handful to make sure you keep all live orders in tact. When a website is in the development environment (‘staging’ on Kinsta), there can be sales happening on the live website. When you then push the website to live, the orders that have been made in this development time can be lost if you’re not using an external order system. 

With the ability to just push changes to the theme files, the database will remain the same and you will therefore not lose any orders. 

Kinsta Woocommerce Hosting

Kinsta is a great platform for hosting a Woocommerce website. The speed improvements help with increase in revenue, SEO and a number of additional benefits. 

Kinsta uses the Google Cloud Platform to make sure they are using the very latest and greatest cloud hosting technology available. 

This is a feature that Patrick Garde, Co-Founder of ExaWeb, also enjoys: “We moved from Hostgator to Kinsta and we never looked back. It improved our website’s performance as well as our clients’ websites. We liked the infrastructure of Kinsta as they use Google Cloud Platform. In addition, expect a speed up on content delivery with their CDN as it is powered by Cloudflare.”

DevKinsta for local development

If you prefer developing on your local machine, then DevKinsta is a great addition to the platform. It has seamless integration with your MyKinsta dashboard allowing you to upload changes you have made straight to your container, similar to using GitHub. 

You can also download your website with the click of a button to your local machine and work away in your own time.  

Fastest loading theme we have seen on Kinsta

We have a few different themes on our Kinsta account, but by far, the one that performs the best is Generatepress. So, our recommended WordPress theme for using on Kinsta is Generatepress. 

One of our better performing sites is The Goldfishtank, built with Generatepress and moving the site to Kinsta improved Core Web Vitals in a very impressive way, especially when the site attracts traffic from across the globe. 

How much does Kinsta cost?

There are numerous plans available depending on your business needs, starting at $35 per month – view details below or read more here (correct as of June 2022).


Mushfiq Sarker, CEO of Stream SEO, also adds: “You get what you pay for with Kinsta, and I think the extra cost is worth it for the speed, features, and customer service you get in return.”

Overall, we’re massive fans of Kinsta for hosting. If you have any further questions, or want to chat to us about web hosting, email us on hello@taodigital.org or call us on 01204 282 213.

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11/01/2022

Matt Tomkin

4 Steps for Successful Collaboration Outreach

How do you create a successful marketing collaboration outreach campaign? After all, networking is an important business aspect in any industry. Let’s discuss what steps are essential to initiate and establish a successful collaboration outreach strategy.

Before we get into that, let us ask you a different question. How many emails do you get a day?

The answer will obviously depend on what you do (or how popular you are). But overall, the number of emails we send every day is growing. According to statistics, by the year 2025, the number of daily emails we send and receive is expected to increase to over 376.4 billion.

That’s a LOT of emails. Now, in addition to email communications, marketers use social media as a collaboration outreach tool. So, add on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram messages, posts, and stories. You’ve got yourself a whole ocean of information going around the world in hopes of reaching just the right shore.

Within this, we, as marketers, have a very difficult task to do - stand out. Somehow we need to figure out a way to reach out to people in our niche and deliver our message in a way that is so unique, it will capture people’s attention. Not easy! But not impossible either.

So here are steps to creating a successful collaboration outreach.

1. Have something cool to share in collaboration outreach

Have you ever been to a party where you get stuck talking to someone who has a lot to say? Yet, you find yourself staring absent-mindedly at the dessert table, wondering how to introduce the excuse of going to get some cookies just to get out of the conversation?

Well, you’re on your own there with the “talker.” But we would like to point out that not being “the talker” yourself when planning a collaboration outreach is a really good idea.

As we established, we all get bombarded with information pretty much every waking minute. So when we do open an email or read a social media post, we just want to get value from it. It could offer informational, supportive, inspirational, or entertainment value. Or, it could bring up something that would address the current pain points we’re experiencing in our lives.

Whatever it is, the information you send has to matter to the recipient, not to the sender. Therefore, it’s essential to focus on the needs of your audience, not on your own goal to promote yourself. Of course, you still do need to promote yourself a little bit. So the key here is to find your audience, then learn enough about it so you can support the audience’s needs.

To do that you have to get creative.

Shoot For Radical Differentiation For A Successful Collaboration Outreach

Being creative with your content will ensure that you get your audience's attention. Of course, we are all tired of hearing the endless calls for “being creative” and no specific advice on how to do it.

Louis Grenier, the creator of Everyone Hates Marketers, comes to the rescue here, with a specific plan to create radical differentiation in content marketing. According to Grenier, radical differentiation is what it takes to stand out and be noticed in the sea of information. He recommends a five-step process to create a strategy that makes a company stand out. (Click on the link above for more information on each step.)

  • Get rid of your self-limiting beliefs - take risks, you CAN do it!

  • Pick a direction - simplicity and focus go a long way

  • Obsess over your customers - make them your top priority in every way possible

  • Engineer your uniqueness - what is different about you? Highlight that!

  • Identify your status quo - where are you at on the market?

  • Show it to the world - it’s not fair to hide your unique self from people. Show off!

2. Find the Right People (Once Again by Being Creative)

A natural step in a successful collaboration, this one is probably the trickiest one. Making friends is hard enough. Making friends in the right places is even harder. Where can you find your collaboration partners?

Your email box

Yes, you read that right. Some of the people you need are already right in front of you. All those emails you get? Some of the senders can be recipients of your content and potential collaboration partners.

For example, let’s say you get a message from a company that is offering you products or services, but you have no need for those products and services. However, the company and its audience are in your niche (selling similar products or sharing content on similar topics). Instead of trashing the message or letting it drown under piles of more daily emails, email the sender.

In your reply, let the sender know that while you might not be interested in his or her offer, you are open to collaboration. Personalise the message by discussing a specific piece of content on the sender’s site that you found interesting and offer some of your content. Suggest a collaboration that can be beneficial for both parties.

One advantage of these email replies is that the original senders are more likely to open and read your email. After all, your message shows up in their mailboxes as a reply to a message they have sent themselves.

Of course, there is always a chance that the person emailing you does not handle content and would not be the right contact person for a content collaboration. That is why it might be helpful to include a quick note at the end of the email, asking to be forwarded to the right person in this case.

Backlinking and Journalist Tools

Content marketers are always on the lookout for expert insights. That is why tools such as HARO, JustReachOut, and others similar to these offer a great opportunity for successful collaboration outreach.

These tools can connect you to the right audiences when it comes to sharing your expertise and insights. But there are additional opportunities there. Once you connect with a writer or marketer through the platform you can build and maintain strong collaborative relationships. That, in turn, can help build up your audience.

Here is an example of this strategy at work:

Social media

Whether we like it or not, social media rules the world today. We use it for everything, from shopping to connecting to our distant relatives. It is also a gold mine for building relationships and creating successful collaborations.

The important thing here is to remember that just like when you walk into a room full of people, connecting with them takes time and effort. Good news for introverts, however. On social media you can be as outgoing, engaging, and frequent with your interactions as your time and energy allows. All of that can be done from the comforts of your home or office, no need to even dress up.

Participate in Twitter Chats, read and comment on LinkedIn posts and articles, and join some Facebook groups that discuss topics relevant to you. You never know whom you're going to meet on social media, but you can bet you will learn a lot from these interactions. You might even have some fun along the way.

Google Search

Another great source for collaboration outreach is, of course, Google search. After all, this is where you want your content to appear. It only makes sense to find what content already appears on the first pages of the search, and try to join the party. Here are steps to connect with people who write and share topics similar to yours and to enhance your content promotion strategy.

  • Come up with a list of keywords relevant to your content topic or products

  • Search each of these keywords in Google Search

  • Review the results and see if you have any information to add

  • Find contact information for content authors and publishers

  • Contact these important people and offer them your content to add

  • Offer them something in return. After all, they have already completed their work and it has been popular and relevant enough to reach the top of Google Search. What is in it for them if they add your content to theirs? What can you offer?

Here is an example of such an email from a fellow marketer at Motionbox:

3. Stand Out with Your Messaging

Going through tons of email messages every day can be a monotonous task. Wouldn’t it be great if the emails we got were fun to read? Well, in the words of Michael Jackson, “If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make the change.”

The first thing your recipients see is the subject line of your email. You only have a second or two to appeal to them through one that does not cause them to yawn and move on with their busy lives. Check out this one:

Yes, that is the same Louise Grenier that called for radical differentiation when it comes to marketing content. He stays true to his belief and adds a flare of creativity into everything he puts out. I say he is on point with getting my attention.

Once you get your contact to open the email you still have some work to do. You can make your email body text stand out by creating unique, non-boring messages. Here is one that I think did a stellar job at that.

I mean, how can you say no to that face? If Ayah sent me an old boring email about link collaboration, there is a chance I would miss it. But Archie makes this email memorable, increasing chances for a successful collaboration outreach. Ayah and Archie for the win!

There are many ways to make your emails stand out by adding some fun and creativity to them. The more “you” you make the messaging, the better. Remember the words of another great poet: “There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

4. Don’t Give Up and Follow Up

Years ago, back when I was in Journalism school, I got an internship at my local city paper. My biggest assignment on the weekly basis was to select five top events in the city to highlight in the weekend section. Five. Mind you, every week a pile of about 300 print-outs with event details sat tall on my desk. There was no way in the world I could read all 300 and select five. Most of the time I’d read from the ones on top, discarding those that did not fit or sound fun, until I had five. Sometimes I would cut the pile in half and read from the middle, but those events on the bottom of the pile never had a chance.

The lesson here is that in the vast world of information (of which there is so much more in digital format) sometimes to stand out you might need some pure luck. You never know who will come across your emails, when, and in what state of mind. Research shows that the percentage of cold emails that receive a reply varies between 1 and 3 percent. That is one to three people out of 100!

How can we make our own luck? By staying positive, staying persistent, and following up. If someone misses our message the first time, there is a chance our recipient might see it the second time.

And if not, perhaps we need to reach someone else’s desk.

So, how does one create a successful marketing collaboration outreach campaign? By sharing the right content with the right people in a creative way. By being authentic and fun. By being uniquely you in every message you send. And by never ever giving up.

Natalya Bucuy
Content Marketer at HelpSquad

Natalya Bucuy is a content marketer at a B2B live chat agent company, HelpSquad. With expertise in customer service and marketing, she has written numerous articles on the topic of customer experience, employee experience, and small business operations.

19/11/2021

Matt Tomkin

Law Firm SEO – The fundamentals to better search rankings

The legal sector is one of the longest standing and seen as one of the most professional sectors in the UK. A number of law firms are really lucky in that their client base is relatively secure and has been for some time.

They get recommendations from other professional service providers for the services they offer and have spent numerous years building those networks to create a solid foundation for the firm to keep going.

Recently, with Covid-19 being a large driver in this, we have seen a number of law firms now looking at what other channels are available to drive revenue and visibility for their brands.

We work with a number of law firms on their SEO presence and continue to see great results from organic search visitors.

Table Of Contents

But, how does a Law Firm do SEO? 
3 core parts to SEO
Technical SEO for legal sites
Page load speed - why is it important and how do you fix it?
Mobile usability: we all know why this is important, don’t we?
Check nothing is blocking Google or the search engine spiders
Core Web Vitals: what are they and why should you care?
What are the Core Web Vital measurements?
Search content for legal sites
Writing for search engines and users is an art
Creating search content for each stage of the buyer journey
Links for legal sites

But, how does a Law Firm do SEO? 

What do they need to implement internally within their business to gain from SEO as well as the component parts that have to be implemented correctly to gain the up-tick in visitors from Google, Bing, Duckduckgo or any of the other search engines?

3 core parts to SEO

There are 3 core parts to SEO, these are:

Technical SEO, Content and off-site signals.

Technical SEO for legal sites

Technical SEO is all about making sure your website is built in a way in which the search engine spiders can access the information and understand all the information in the most efficient way possible.

Top level technical considerations are things such as:

  • Page load speed

  • Mobile usability

  • Checks that nothing is blocking googlebot from accessing the websites pages, etc.

Then there is Core Web Vitals to consider, but this does incorporate a number of scores that we’ll discuss in further detail.

Page load speed - why is it important and how do you fix it?

In a nutshell, page speed is how fast a web page is loaded when a user visits it.

No-one likes a slow website! It’s as simple as that. Google, and the other search engines, therefore see this as a ranking factor (how they decide where your website/page sits in the search engine results) and a slower website is seen as bad for the user.

The ideal time for a website to load on mobile is between 1-2 seconds. Yes, this is fast, but studies show that 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load. Here is the study for further information: Think with Google.

However, with the addition of Core Web Vitals, there is now more complexity in the recommendation to “just make it load faster”. Core Web Vitals have been introduced to help website owners understand how to improve overall website experience, rather than outright speed.

For example, the content layout shift measurement is now targeting those annoying moments when you go to click something, but the page shifts as you do it and you end up on a random page; i.e. one that you didn’t want to go to.

Mobile usability: we all know why this is important, don’t we?

Everyone now uses their mobile to browse the internet! If your website doesn’t show properly on a mobile device and users are unable to read, click or even use the site at all, then this is going to affect how you rank on Google and on other search engines.

In Q1 2021, internet users on mobile devices accounted for 54% of all traffic, and this is not slowing down. People are moving away from their laptops and just using mobile devices for all things internet. Make sure they can access your site properly.

Test your website now to see if it works on all the latest devices, use Blisk to check.

Google now, and has been doing so for a few years, ranks websites using a “mobile first” ranking method. This means that if your site doesn’t work very well on mobile, it is very unlikely that the site will perform well on desktop Google searches either.

Check nothing is blocking Google or the search engine spiders

Website owners and developers can use a very tiny piece of code on the back end of a website to ask Google, amongst others, to not index an entire website, or just certain pages. This is great when you want to make sure some pages don’t show up in search for whatever reason, but we have seen examples of developers forgetting to change this to allow indexing of an entire website.

Sometimes, this happens when a new site has been built and the site is set to ‘no-index’, making sure there isn’t a duplicate. The only problem is, it gets forgotten about when the site goes live.

Believe me, this happens. We’ve seen websites disappear from Google within days due to a tiny error like this. Normally, it’s easy to sort and relatively quick to get the rankings back, but it can have permanent damage if not found quickly.

This is just one of many things that can affect how search engines get blocked or have issues with finding and indexing your website pages.

Core Web Vitals: what are they and why should you care?

Core Web Vitals is the name given by Google to a number of measurements that affect user experience and they believe every website owner should be measuring.

They will be used to help determine where a website ranks across all of Google’s tools. As of yet, we’re not sure how much of an impact this has on search results, but you can be sure they will be having some; especially in competitive sectors such as law.

They are measurements from real world data, so it is extremely important to keep a close eye on these scores within your Google Search Console portal.

Page experience is so important and should form part of your overall plan for how to attract new visitors and keep them on the site. However, if you need a push to do this, then Core Web Vitals is for you.

What are the Core Web Vital measurements?

They are split into 3 aspects that affect user experience: loading, interactivity and visual stability.

Google terms these aspects as Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS).

  • Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading performance. To provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading.

  • First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity. To provide a good user experience, pages should have a FID of 100 milliseconds or less.

  • Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability. To provide a good user experience, pages should maintain a CLS of 0.1. or less.

It has never been more important to measure how your website loads for your end users and to make sure that there is a budget in place to improve the way your site is built. This is why we moved into website development, to help our SEO clients’ sites load better and hit the scores where needed.

If you need any help understanding your website's speed metrics or technical issues, get in touch.

Search content for legal sites

So, you have likely heard the saying “Content is King” - this phrase does have some truth to it. The real saying however, should go “The Right Content is King” when it comes to SEO and gaining website visitors from search engines.

What we mean by this is that you can write as much content as you want but, if your goal is to get more visitors to your website via organic search, then you need to make sure it matches what Google knows the user is looking for. We call this the ‘intent of the searcher’.

Blog content that doesn’t target search is very important, but only once you have customers on your website. We’re talking about SEO in this article, so we will be concentrating on what we term ‘search content’ or ‘SEO content’.

Writing for search engines and users is an art

When you are looking for more traffic from Google or other search engines, you have to think about what they understand the intent of a search to be. We call this the search intent.

Search intent is basically what a user wants to find when they type something into the search box.

There are 3 different types of search intent as we define them.

  • Informational: A searcher is looking for content to help understand something or find the answer to a question.

  • Navigational: The user knows where they want to go and uses a brand name or place to find the relevant website.

  • Transactional: A user is wanting to buy a product or service. This can include researching a type of product or service, and it could be that they know what they want to buy and go ahead and purchase.

A great example of an informational search would be “How long does probate take?” which is searched for an average of 6,800 times per month in the UK (and this is actually an underestimation of the actual volume!).

The person searching this is higher up in the sales funnel and we want to answer this question for them along with other relevant information surrounding the topic in the best way possible. Once we have answered all the questions this searcher has, they will likely move through the buyer funnel to the point where they will then use a more transactional search, such as “probate solicitors” which is a 1100 per month search volume; again, an underestimation.

Creating search content for each stage of the buyer journey

It is so important to create content for each stage of the buying process.

Links for legal sites

Google was the first search engine to use links to help decide where to rank a website in its search results. They worked on the basis that some links are more trustworthy than others. As an example, the BBC would be very trustworthy as they have very high editorial standards and are one of the most trusted websites and organisations in the world.

However, a website that is not trustworthy and has lower editorial standards will be discounted as a link in the eyes of Google. They need to be good, relevant and trusted links.

It is therefore important that you build inbound links to your website that are from trustworthy sources. Let’s be honest, you’re not likely to get a link from the BBC every day of the week, so we use a tool that estimates the potential domain rating of a website.

This score is out of 100 and can help build a picture of how valuable a link might be if you were to gain one to your website.

The Law Society website https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/en, as an example, has a domain rating of 84/100, meaning that having a link from this site would be great for any law firm.

The content of the page linking to you is important too. Let’s say a major newspaper uses you as a source for an article about probate law; this would be seen in the eyes of Google and the other search engines as a trusted and reliable source and would be a great link.

On the flip side of this, an article about changing the tyre on a car that contains a link back to a law firm's website would not be a relevant or trusted source.