Digital marketing for law firms is one of the fastest and easiest ways for lawyers to grow their business. The more people who discover your law firm, the potential clients you will gain and the more growth your business will experience.
So, what are the best digital marketing strategies for law firms to adopt?
Do Law Firms need to invest in digital marketing?
We always suggest that legal firms invest in digital marketing due to the fact it is one of the best ways to promote their legal services and attract new clients. It is also a great way to build brand awareness and establish your firm as a trusted and reliable source.
Digital marketing for law firms includes the use of digital channels and techniques in order to get the results you want to see, whether that’s an increase in leads or higher engagement on your social platforms.
What types of digital marketing strategies are there?
There are few different types of digital marketing strategies that you can use in order to get the results you want.
Strategies such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content Marketing heavily focus on improving and optimising your website and how this can organically bring in new clients, as well as retaining old ones.
Other strategies focus more on how you can drive people from other avenues to your website. For example, PPC, Social Media and Email Marketing are all great ways to get new leads from external sources to your website, not just organically from search result pages.
Can digital marketing work for the legal industry?
With the right strategy implemented, digital marketing for your law firm can help to increase website traffic, generate new leads and ultimately drive your business to be one of the top ranking sites on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
However, it is important to remember that these results won’t be instantaneous and will depend on several factors, such as:
There are several different digital strategies that can be implemented to promote your legal services:
Website Auditing and Optimisation
As a law firm, it is vital you have a formidable website to stand out against your competitors, especially since so much of your business will come from local clients. Your website serves as the foundation for most of your digital marketing efforts and it’s where you will provide key information about your services, as well as high quality blogs for your current and prospective clients.
Part of having an optimised website is ensuring that it is centred around user experience (UX). This will not only take into account the needs, values and limitations of your users, but the goals and objectives of your business. Your website should be easy to navigate, accessible to all users, useful and credible.
These values also need to be carried across to your mobile site. Some of the basics to make your site more mobile friendly include:
Making your site adaptive to any device such as mobile, laptop, tablet and so on
Always use responsive design for assets like images
Use shorter meta titles since they are easier to read on mobile
Avoid pop-ups that cover content and cause visitors to leave the site
Consider where and when long-form content is appropriate.
SEO
SEO is the process of optimising your content and your site in order to achieve higher rankings in SERPs. Ultimately, implementing an SEO strategy for your law firm will bring in the right visitors organically to drive more leads and sales.
It involves a variety of different tactics, such as:
Fixing and monitoring technical issues
Implementing core SEO features like title tags, meta descriptions and schema
Working on Core Web Vitals
Creating high-quality content
Optimising content around specific keywords
Targeting local keywords will help you to show up for relevant searches made by prospects in your area. Using these keywords will increase your visibility and the potential of attracting new clients.
Optimising individual pages can help make them easier for search engines to read, which allows you to compete with other local law firms. Optimisation includes a variety of different factors including images, text, video, schema, HTML tags and so on.
Using the above techniques will help your site to rank higher on SERPs, which in turn allows you to build brand awareness and trust from your visitors. They will be more inclined to purchase your services than they would if you didn’t have a great web presence.
Email marketing involves sending promotional and information emails to build relationships with your audience, win over prospects and turn one-time buyers into repeat customers. Emails can include a variety of different content from new services, promoted website content or general messages on behalf of your business.
Law firms can tap into this market by asking users to subscribe on their website, dedicating a specific webpage that asks for their email and even giving away something free, such as an ebook or a PDF, in exchange for their email address.
Emails are a great way to promote traffic to your website, as the emails you send to your subscribers should contain links to pages. A good way to determine the success of your emails is through key performance indicators, such as open-rate and click-through rate.
Compared to other marketing strategies, email marketing is usually quite cost-effective, which is great for new law firms starting up.
Social Media
Social media marketing utilises social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Twitter. You may use social media marketing techniques if you want to:
Promote your content and services
Build brand awareness and visibility
Gain more followers
Engage with current and prospective customers
Drive traffic to your website
Tap into a different audience
Using social media for marketing is a relatively low budget, but it does require ongoing advertising spending and most of the time, you will need a landing page designed specifically for users from that spend.
Social media is, however, a great place to achieve audience engagement. Choosing the right channels, doing research on how the platforms work and creating useful and interesting content is a tried and tested way for many in achieving a social presence.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is based on answering people’s questions and really helping them through the content, rather than interrupting them with promotions about your business. It can include content such as blog posts, landing pages, white papers, ebooks, case studies and much more.
In most cases, content marketing is used to:
Put content in front of prospective clients when searching
Improve brand awareness and online authority
Improve brand loyalty
Educate your target audience
Convert and keep leads
In order to do the above, a great strategy to include is by creating what is known as a “content hub”, which is a curated collection of content on a specific topic or subject. You can then fill your resource hub with a combination of informative and useful pieces of content which utilise your key terms and common industry queries.
Not only is this a great way to contend with your competitors, but it also increases your brand visibility online and therefore, generates organic traffic through your content showing up on SERPs.
Content marketing also goes hand-in-hand with SEO. This means that if you have high-quality content, it will significantly improve your website’s SEO, so you can enjoy more organic website traffic that will turn visitors into buyers.
Google Business Profile and Reviews
Google Business Profile is a section about your business that appears on the side of Google’s SERP. It will appear when someone searches for you or your business in their area.
It is essentially a brief overview of your business, including:
Your business name and address
Primary and secondary categories (the services you offer)
Photos of the team, business, service offering
Location on Google Maps
Opening hours and contact details
Website
Reviews
Having a Google Business Profile (GBP) can particularly help with local SEO. Ensuring your information is up to date and well optimised is highly likely to be a ranking factor that can help Google to understand your business offerings.
Every business should have a GBP as it helps potential clients find your business. For example, if someone locally searches “law firms near me” into Google, you will appear based on the location you have listed. These clients may have never found your business otherwise.
PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising, or PPC, is a strategy in which you pay every time a user clicks on one of your online ads. It is most commonly done through Google Ads and it is an effective way to reach people who are searching for terms related to your business. Implementing a PPC campaign will likely be used to help increase your sales or leads.
Costs can vary quite drastically, from relatively inexpensive to thousands of pounds per month, depending on the size of your campaign. When campaigns are discontinued, the traffic generated by that campaign is also discontinued.
When users click on PPC ads, they are directed to a landing page that encourages them to take a certain action. Either:
Make a purchase
Complete a form
Download a report, or something similar.
PPC campaigns are really easy to track, especially with platforms like Google Ads. You’ll be able to track how many people view your ads as well as how many click on them and what percentage of them convert.
Which digital marketing strategy is best for your law firm?
There is no single strategy that will work best for all law firms. Even within the same industry, online and search marketing strategies will need to be tailored to your individual business.
The first step in any digital marketing journey should be a website audit. These audits allow you to gain a better understanding of the position that your site is, in order to plan the most effective next steps.
By working with an SEO agency, you’ll be able to discover and discuss:
Your goals, needs and current strategy
Your competitors and the industry
How your site is currently performing
Whether your site has any issues
What digital marketing channels would work best for your firm, and why
To get started, we just need a few details about your business and chat about where you want to go. Contact the team today.
In the age of searching for services online, it is important that you find a way for your law firm business to stand out amongst the rest.
Using SEO techniques can significantly help you to outrank your competitors, increase traffic to your site and generate new leads.
How does SEO work for the legal industry?
A big issue within the legal industry is figuring out how to get your business in front of potential clients. Fortunately, SEO for your law firm can be the driving force to an increase in leads.
Although there is no foolproof method behind SEO in the legal industry, there are a variety of different ways to improve your chances of ranking on page one of a search engine.
Through the use of specific keywords, dedicated blogs and geographically based content, you are much more likely to appear in the search results when people start to look for law firms in their area. The higher your site ranks on a search results page, the more likely a user is to click on your site and use your services.
Is SEO important for solicitors?
Yes, SEO is absolutely one of the most important factors for solicitors to get their business out to new prospects. If you’re a solicitor looking to grow your business, organic search traffic may be a significant marketing channel that you’re overlooking.
Optimising your website for better visibility and rankings in search engines can increase traffic to your site, leading to higher conversion rates.
Your website is the foundation of a successful SEO strategy.
Implement keywords
Keyword research and implementation is one of the most effective ways to organically increase your leads. Keyword research involves using professional tools and strategies to discover what people are searching and how you can use this to your advantage to attract them to your site.
Your ideal keywords will range from highly searched, significant industry terms to long-tail, low searched terms that capitalise on a small audience to aid in conversion.
Keywords shouldn’t be too general, as it will become increasingly difficult to rank for them – for example, the simple term of ‘family law solicitor’ is searched 4.6k times per month in the UK (Correct on Ahrefs as of August 2023). Perhaps, instead of initially trying to rank for the term “family law solicitor”, you could aim to rank for “family law solicitors Bolton”.
Search Intent
You will also want to rank for keywords/queries whereby you understand a clear search intent behind them. These are often queries which include words and phrases such as “why”, “how” and “can I”, as people are seeking to have questions answered.
The most common search types are:
Informational
Commercial
Navigational
Transactional
This means that your on-site content must match the intent of a search. For example, if you want to talk about how your Family Law firm supports people when choosing Grounds for Divorce, you may think about creating a page to showcase this service.
However, if you analyse what’s currently ranking for key terms and searches around ‘grounds for divorce’, the results are mostly blog posts. This would suggest that the search intent is informational, and you should create articles around the main topic: ‘What are the Grounds for Divorce?’.
This will then likely break down into more questions and more niche blog posts, such as ‘What Does Irretrievable Breakdown Mean in Grounds for Divorce?’. These types of content help to increase your online authority, showcasing your firm as knowledgeable in all areas and having answers to all questions surrounding one topic.
On-Page Optimization
To fully optimise your content for keywords it’s important, that they are used in the following areas on a page:
Title tag
Meta Description tag
Heading 1 and subheadings
Throughout the blog content (where relevant – never keyword stuff)
More often than not, the URL
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can make or break your law firm’s SEO performance, making it a major factor to your success.
In basic terms, technical SEO is how “google-friendly” your website is, which in turn means ‘user-friendly’ as Google prioritises users first. Since this can get very complicated, it’s best to consult an SEO agency who specialises in law firm SEO. However, there are some things you can keep in mind with technical SEO.
Make sure your website is user friendly
There are two basics to ensure your site is user friendly:
Pages load fast, ideally under 2.5 seconds
Pages render well across screens, for both desktops and mobile
One of the quickest ways to reduce page load times is using a better hosting provider, we recommend Kinsta as they’re just the best there is. We’ve written a full review that you can read here, Kinsta Hosting Review
Make sure your site is easy to navigate
It’s important that your website has simple and easy to navigate menus and links, so users can easily find all of your pages and understand what each page is about.
Google is quite transparent about things you can do to improve your law firm’s technical SEO, and you can familiarise yourself by viewing the Webmaster Guidelines (now called Google Search Essentials).
Backlink and off-page citations
Having great content and a Google friendly site is one thing, but having backlinks and off-page citations can help to boost your presence even more.
For SEO, backlinks work somewhat like a popularity contest. If a law firm website gets a lot of backlinks from other high profile sites, they essentially receive backing that the content on their site is correct and reliable.
Increase local SEO through off-page citations
The contact information of your law firm shows up in all kinds of places online, making it both visible to search engines and potential clients. That’s why the best way to gain more visibility from local SEO is to obtain backlinks from places where your business is displayed.
Some examples of where you can get off-page citations to improve your local SEO include:
Legal directories
Local directories, including your Google Business profile
Social profiles
Reviews and endorsement websites
Collect positive client reviews
Part of a successful law firm SEO strategy is generating more positive reviews. These reviews show users that your law firm can be trusted and will provide high-quality services.
If you have more positive reviews than your competitors, this may lead you to outrank them. As well as this, users will be more likely to choose your firm over others which have little to no reviews.
There are many easy ways in which you can increase your positive reviews. This could be by using a new review platform that offers more support than just Google reviews, or you could utilise email marketing to encourage new and existing clients in your database to leave reviews.
What benefits will SEO have for law firms?
The benefits of SEO for law firms are huge. Beyond increasing a law firm’s ranking on a search result page, SEO works to bring in more traffic which is likely to convert to leads.
Other benefits of SEO for law firms include:
Outranking local competition
Generating new traffic
Collecting more client reviews
Solidifying their law firm as a reputable authority
SEO is a long term strategy, and it needs time to work. Many Law Firms struggle with in-house capacity for well-researched and search-focused content production, local SEO implementation, technical SEO maintenance and an ongoing link strategy.
Consulting with an SEO agency for one or all of the above allows you to focus on your internal goals and keeping clients satisfied. Consistent investment and trust in SEO allows leads to flow in at the pace you want.
The Best Email Marketing Software for Insurance Agents
Email marketing is a bit of a hot topic at the moment, not least because it has one of the highest returns on investment out of any form of marketing.
Although this type of advertising has been a key staple for eCommerce businesses for many years, it is quickly emerging as one of the key revenue areas for B2C/B2B insurance brokers. In this article we’ll be exploring why, plus our top software picks.
Benefits of Email Marketing for Insurance Brokers
There are so many benefits to email marketing in general, but for especially those in the insurance industry – it is a bit of a goldmine!
Here are just some of the many benefits for insurance agents:
Automate renewal emails: Sending renewal reminders can be a tedious process if done manually. Save time, effort and money by connecting your insurance software with email platforms that can automatically follow up with a client a couple of months before their contract expires.
Lead generation: If a lead submits their email in order to get a quote from your website you can ask them to opt into receiving emails from you. Based on your follow up/sales process you can set up a series of automated emails for contacts tagged as warm leads.
Advertising directly to your target audience: Other forms of marketing, such as traditional PR, may not get directly in front of those who may actually be in the market for your services. However, those on your email database have directly opted in and so are open to hearing from you.
Access to valuable analytics: Most email marketing platforms will provide you with a decent insight into your audience. This can directly feed into your overall content marketing strategy. For example, if you see that you are getting more clicks about a certain email topic (e.g. adjusting your insurance during inflation or new industry laws), this can spark ideas for longer form content on your site that your audience may be interested in.
Top Email Marketing Software for Insurance Brokers
There are a wide variety of email marketing platforms out there that can suit many different budgets and number of contacts. Here are our top recommendations:
Active Campaign
ActiveCampaign integrates email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM categories. We prefer to use this platform for our own marketing and for our B2B clients due to its combination of site tracking, app integrations and AI.
One of our insurance clients uses MailChimp for their email marketing and finds it very useful. The platform is aimed at SMEs and has a number of unique features, such as its built-in survey creator (great for getting client feedback) and landing page builder.
Along with decent tagging abilities, the platform comes with thorough reporting, an easy template editor and over 500 integrations with other pieces of software. There is also the ability to send personalised email postcards.
Sendinblue
Sendinblue describe themselves as a ‘SaaS solution for relationship marketing’ and is the only email marketing platform that we currently know of that does not have a contacts-based pricing system – the price is based on how many emails you send.
They are also incredibly helpful when it comes to GDPR compliance and respond to customer service requests promptly and effectively. The drag and drop editor is a great feature, especially for those who may be new to email marketing.
Which email platforms integrate with insurance software?
All of the email platforms we have mentioned above have hundreds of integrations with apps. We’ve taken a look at three of the most popular pieces of insurance software (Acturis, TAM from Applied and Go-Insur) to see if they integrate with the above email marketing platforms.
Acturis
One of our insurance clients uses Acturis to store all of their client data. This can be integrated with Outlook to store and send email traffic directly from the platform. It also allows them to quote commercial insurance products automatically as it integrates with a number of insurers’ back office systems too.
That being said, Acturis does have an API that allows for the development of connections between software applications. So, with a little effort and a developer on side you could have all your data flowing between Acturis and your chosen email provider.
In theory, you could even build a connection into Zapier and then you can connect your Acturis account with all the apps Zapier connects with. You can read Zapier’s full list of apps here.
TAM from Applied
Another one of our clients uses The Agency Manager (TAM) from Applied. Our client tells us they rarely connect the software to external systems as it is not particularly configurable. Alerts for renewals etc. are added manually. As with Acturis, it doesn’t appear to be listed as any of the email platform’s integrated apps.
Although TAM has been traditionally closed off, Applied (owner of TAM) do shout about the open technology and promote it heavily on their site. That, alongside a list of existing partners, would suggest it is similar to Acturis in that if you make contact and the solution works for both Applied and customers, it would be likely a connection could be developed.
Go-Insur from Pancentric Digital
Go-Insur describe themselves as ‘the modern way to do insurance’ and allows you to unlock new efficiencies and revenue streams, rapidly expand distribution, and improve servicing for your clients.
The website doesn’t talk directly about what software integrations it has out of the box but it does reference integrations. The platform also comes with an inbuilt email automation system to help tackle some of the benefits mentioned above.
Conclusion
Email marketing can be a great way to create warm leads, stay in touch with your clients and generate revenue. If you don’t know where to get started, read our Beginner’s Guide to Email Marketing or get in touch with us today.
Email Marketing Software: A Comparison Guide
In this guide, we’ve taken a look at two of the biggest platforms in the email marketing space (Klaviyo and ActiveCampaign) and explained how they work, their top features, price and more.
How Email Marketing Helps B2B and eCommerce Businesses
Email marketing software helps both B2B and eCommerce businesses in a variety of ways, such as:
Lead generation: Email marketing is a brilliant method of marketing and can be a great form of lead generation and direct sales.
Advertising directly to your audience: You’ll be contacting people who have opted in to hear from you, so the chance that they’ll convert is marginally higher than other forms of marketing, e.g. paid social ads or traditional PR.
Access to valuable analytics: The analytics available within email marketing platforms can provide you with really helpful insights into your audience – you can see what products/content/offers are working well, and what kinds of people are drawn to different content. Not only can this help your email strategy, it can also work hand-in-hand with your content marketing strategy too.
Automation: Email marketing platforms can help you understand the user journey in more detail, but more importantly, you can set automated emails and SMS campaigns based on certain trigger events.
Klaviyo is a US-based marketing platform used primarily for email and SMS marketing. Their mission statement is to ‘help businesses grow with real-time data learnings for marketing campaigns through email and SMS marketing campaign automation.’
The platform largely focuses on eCommerce due to the customer-focused analytics it provides, which we’ll dive into further in the top features section. We personally use the platform for our eCommerce clients plus a couple of our own projects.
How Klaviyo Works
Klaviyo works by connecting to your online store as well as other tools, providing in-depth data about your customers and their buying journeys.
Once you log into the platform you have an overview of how your campaigns are performing – example pictured below. You can see how well your ‘flows’ and campaigns are doing, and from there you are able to navigate to your campaigns, analytics, audience etc.
Within the campaigns section you can view your most recent campaigns as well as see a top level overview of their success, including open rate, click rate and how many of your subscribers are currently active on the site (if you have web tracking enabled). From there you can create either an email or SMS campaign, which can be sent now or scheduled for later.
There is also an analytics section where you can review how your campaigns are doing, which allows you to continually optimise your emails.
Top Klaviyo Features
There are various features that we enjoy about Klaviyo:
Segmentations: we really like how customisable the segmentations are within Klaviyo, in particular being able to segment customers when they were last active on the site or when they last opened a campaign from us. This has made it very easy to clean up our lists via ‘reengagement’ and ‘sunset’ campaigns.
This is something that we believe makes Klaviyo stand out compared to other platforms – within ActiveCampaign, for example, at the time of writing (February 2023) there is no way to filter contacts who haven’t opened campaigns within a specific timeframe.
You can also segment by ‘interests’, e.g. for our footwear client we have been able to segment which email subscribers have visited pages under the category of ‘workwear’, ‘mens’ and ‘womens’ so that we can send campaigns specific to them.
Design templates: We really like the wide variety of design templates within Klaviyo’s ‘Drag and Drop’ editor, some of which look quite complex design-wise but are very easy to customise. You don’t have to be a world-class graphic designer to put together a decent looking email.
Although through the many emails we have sent we have naturally come across some technical issues with design (e.g. the whole design shifting if we move a block slightly), we have been able to resolve these issues quickly with the support team’s help.
Subject Line Assistant: Klaviyo has a built-in subject line assistant that can help you to nail your subject lines based on your previous campaigns. It can also generate subject lines for you based on the goals of your campaign, e.g. promotions/product announcements/newsletters etc.
Audience breakdowns: Another great feature is the audience breakdown within campaigns. You can see which lists open your emails the most, and tweak your strategy accordingly.
We love how in-depth you can get with the audience analytics. This is Klaviyo’s real strength and the reason we prefer to use this platform for our eCommerce clients. Within each customer’s profile you can get a historical overview of when they first ordered, the average order value and how likely they are to order again. This can help you clean up your lists by identifying customers who ordered a long time ago or are unlikely to become repeat customers.
Customer Service
The customer service that we have received from Klaviyo is top notch. When we first started using the platform there were a few teething issues that their written guides were unable to assist further with, so we used the live chat function.
Although there is a bit of a queue (the longest we’ve waited is around 90 minutes with 40 people in front of us), it’s still a very quick turnaround time from request to solution. This is a much shorter response time than other platforms.
Even though the live chat support is listed as open between 9am and 5pm EST (so 2pm to 10pm GMT), we’ve often sent requests earlier than this and still received an answer. Please note that the live chat feature is only available to paying customers – those on free accounts only have access to email support, so will need to wait longer.
Difficulty Level
If you’re a complete newbie to email marketing, we’d give this platform 3 out of 5 stars for difficulty, the reason being the teething problems that we ourselves experienced when we first started using the platform (e.g. technical difficulties and design issues).
Segmenting and flows can also take a while to get your head around, but their guides are very useful and once you’re more familiar with it, it’s a great beginner platform. If you’re more experienced with other platforms, we’d give the difficulty 2 out of 5.
Klaviyo Price
The cost of Klaviyo depends largely on how many contacts you have and/or how many emails you are looking to send each month. Please note these are subject to change and the GBP equivalent may be incorrect depending on the value of the pound at the time of reading. For the most updated version, take a look at Klaviyo’s guide with live costs.
ActiveCampaign is a US-based cloud software platform encompassing email marketing, marketing automation, sales automation and CRM categories. For the purpose of this blog, we’re going to focus specifically on the email capabilities of the platform. We prefer to use this platform for our own marketing and for our B2B clients.
ActiveCampaign’s aim is to help you ‘reach your audience through the power of automation without sacrificing personal touch.’
How Active Campaign Works
ActiveCampaign works through a combination of site tracking, app integrations and AI. Through all of this integration you can get a huge amount of data about those who have signed up to receive your email marketing.
Similarly to Klaviyo, when you log into ActiveCampaign you have a dashboard that gives you a general overview of your contacts, campaigns and recent activity. We really like the ‘Top Contacts’ feature, which shows those who have opened/engaged the most with your campaigns.
The campaigns section gives you an overview of your most recent campaigns, as well as some handy links to best practices (it’s always good to have a reminder!).You can also manage and create custom design templates from here.
The reports section is where you will find all of your analytics, including campaign data, automation reports, goal reports, contact reports and much more.
Top Features of Active Campaign
There are some great features that we enjoy using within ActiveCampaign, such as:
Tagging: Similar to Klaviyo’s segmentation feature, you can set up ‘tags’ that will automatically be added to contacts based on certain behaviours, e.g. if they have entered their email to download a PDF guide or have even subscribed to our YouTube channel.
We’re a fan of their ‘tagging quiz’ which lets you know whether a tag is necessary when setting a new one up – this can help to avoid tonnes of unnecessary tags that are never followed up.
Email deliverability checks: When you send your first few campaigns within ActiveCampaign, one of their team members will check them before they get sent out to see if they are compliant.
The platform is top of the list when it comes to compliance – they’re members of top industry groups, for example M3AAWG, and platforms such as TrustRadius and G2 have given them praise for compliance. Their guides on this are incredibly helpful.
Free onboarding and migration: we believe this is a top feature of ActiveCampaign in comparison to other platforms and is a great help for beginners. It’s like being part of a community who are committed to your success.
The platform offers free small group digital onboarding sessions from their Education Team, which can help you to get up to speed quickly and have any questions answered. Other platforms, such as Klaviyo, rely more on guides and checklists to get you up to speed.
Free training: ActiveCampaign’s Education team provides ‘Blueprints Sessions’ hosted by highly trained members of their team, in several different languages and across different time zones. They also offer 30 minute one-to-one meetings.
Customer Service
The response from the support team takes longer compared to Klaviyo and Hubspot. On their Contact Us page, it appears they once had a live chat but have since removed it as the link isn’t working (January 2023). It also isn’t easy to navigate to the contact page compared to Klaviyo, who always have the option in the top right of the platform.
Whilst the chat function has been down we have submitted support requests via email, which can take up to five working days to receive a reply if one of the support team is on annual leave – this was our experience recently.
They are, however, able to resolve the issue quickly and usually ask for a Loom video of your screen to get a real understanding of the issue at hand so that it can be solved ASAP.
Difficulty Level
If you’re new to email marketing, we’d give ActiveCampaign 3.5 to maybe even 4 stars to get your head around on your own. Booking in for a one to one and taking advantage of their free training can bring this down to a 2.5, the same level of difficulty goes for those more experienced.
The main downfall we have with ActiveCampaign is that the design templates are quite basic compared to Klaviyo, so you do need some level of understanding of design and what elements you need to move in order to get the look you want. However, the free training and customer service is above and beyond the other platforms in our opinion!
Active Campaign Price
Again, the cost largely depends on how many contacts you have, and/or how many emails you are looking to send each month. It also depends on the features you want in your account, so there are Lite, Plus, Professional and Enterprise options.
As the costs are so bespoke depending on what you want from the platform, it’s best to visit Active Campaign’s page, which will give you the most up to date information. We’ve added a screenshot below of an example of the costs for 1,000 contacts.
Which email marketing software is the best?
To use a marketer’s favourite phrase, ‘it depends’! The platforms are equally good for different reasons. If you’re in the B2B space, Active Campaign would be your best choice as Klaviyo is certainly more catered towards eCommerce, especially with its Shopify integration.
If your goals are more towards easy customisation, Klaviyo may be a better option for you. From our own experience, their templates are much easier for a beginner to familiarise themselves with.
If you’re looking for a great onboarding experience, Active Campaign may be better for you due to their onboarding process, one to one sessions etc. It all depends on what your needs are.
We recognise that there are pros and cons to each and we use each platform for different clients!
If you’d like to speak to us about email marketing, you can contact us below – we’d love to chat about your strategy and how we may be able to help you.
What is a WordPress SEO Audit & Do you Need One?
In this guide, we’ll explain what a WordPress SEO audit is and why you need one, allowing business owners, directors, marketing managers and more to understand the necessary steps to optimising their website.
What is a WordPress SEO Audit?
If you have a WordPress website for your business, you will likely be aware of the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Naturally, you may be wondering how you conduct a WordPress SEO audit.
A WordPress SEO Audit is the process of evaluating a website, hosted by WordPress, to determine its ability to appear on search engine results pages (SERPs).
It will also identify any flaws in your SEO strategy that could be negatively affecting your site’s performance. WordPress SEO audits also give you an insight into how well your site is able to generate organic traffic.
They present an opportunity to uncover issues, such as:
Technical aspects that prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your site, such as poor architecture.
Duplicate or irrelevant content or broken links .
Slow loading times.
Problematic off-page elements ,such as low-quality backlinks.
The pros and cons of WordPress for SEO
Using WordPress does have its pros and cons when it comes to SEO that you should be aware of when deciding whether or not to use it for your site.
Pros of WordPress for SEO
User friendly CMS
WordPress is made for blogging, thanks to its strong content management system (CMS). It is extremely easy to manage and edit your content and makes it simple to organise without the need for knowledge on website management.
Plugins
There are over 50,000 plugins for WordPress users, with a range of both free and paid for. These plugins allow you to customise and enhance any WordPress site, and there are many plugins available to help optimise content, meta tags, keywords and much more. Having access to plugins like this ensures your website is SEO ready.
Responsive
WordPress has thousands of themes available which can help your sites become more responsive. How mobile friendly your site is plays a huge part in an SEO audit, since an increasing number of searches are conducted on a mobile device.
Cons of WordPress for SEO
Speed
Certain WordPress themes contain a lot of unnecessary code which can decrease the speed of the site and cause slow loading times. This can cause visitors to quickly bounce off your page, which can negatively affect how your page ranks on search engines.
Updates
Installing updates is important for the health of your website, but it can be a nuisance if it isn’t done thoughtfully. Updates can bring small problems to your site that could affect the way your site ranks on search engines.
SEO audit tools for a WordPress site
Most significant website issues that might negatively affect search rankings can be found and rectified with the assistance of reliable SEO audit tools.
Some of the best tools to use on your WordPress site include:
Google Search Console
SEMrush
Screaming Frog
Ahrefs
GTmetrix
What are WordPress SEO plugins?
Plugins can be both helpful and potentially harmful for your site. They make web page customisation easy, but they can also slow down your site if used improperly.
Listed below are a few popular plugins amongst WordPress users:
Yoast is a simple plugin that helps you to set-up meta tags and descriptions.
WP Rocket is a plugin used to optimise site speed.
Imagify is a popular plugin for image optimization.
WooCommerce is a plugin for e-commerce, turning any site into an online store.
Ninja Forms is a great plugin to create well maintained forms on your site.
Common SEO issues on a WordPress site
Too many plugins
WordPress by default is lacking in many features of SEO that professionals need at their disposal. Instead, you have to rely on plugins for basic SEO features, like Yoast.
The problem with having too many plugins on your site is that oftentimes, you will need more resources to be able to keep your site well maintained. When a plugin is updated, it can damage your entire website if it conflicts with another plugin.
Internal broken links
There is no easy way to detect broken links on a WordPress website without the use of another SEO plugin. To work around this issue, you will have to download a plugin to check for links or use tools like Screaming Frog.
Poor header tag setups
By default, your WordPress site’s theme may have poorly structured header tags. Your header tags (H1, H2, H3 and so on) are extremely important for readability.
You can change these tags by editing your theme, but you may need to have web dev experience or hire a developer to do this.
How often should I do an SEO audit on my WordPress site?
Just like any other website, regardless of if it is hosted on WordPress or not, you should be doing an SEO audit between two and four times a year.
If you are a smaller business with a small website, once every six months would be perfect. If you are a larger company, with new content being regularly uploaded every month, reviewing your site every quarter is more sensible.
If you have a relatively new website, or have never had an audit done before, then the first SEO audit you have is the most crucial.
How to perform an SEO audit on a WordPress site
There are various ways to perform an SEO audit for any website. You can go down the route of a manual audit or via an audit tool to accomplish the task.
If you choose to go down the manual route, here is a checklist for WordPress website audits:
Verify the programme and plugin versions
Check the sites speed
Review the content on your blogs
Verify WordPress’ security
Look for any broken links
Verify the functionality
Analyse your metrics
Review your SEO results.
SEO audits can be difficult to understand; that’s why the team at Tao Digital are here to help. We can perform a WordPress SEO audit for you and run through the key findings with you in order to plan the best next steps for your website.
How do I know if I need to audit my WordPress website?
There are a few different signs that your WordPress website will need an audit:
Your search rankings have fallen
You’ve launched a new site and want to check it is built correctly
Whether your site is new or old, is for a large business or an SME, we can conduct an SEO audit to help identify key issues and areas of improvement for your website to help its performance.
Get in touch with us today to plan your WordPress SEO audit and let us ensure that your website performs as best as it can.
ClickUp Review: Ratings & Features 2023
ClickUp is one of the most popular project management tools out there, and for a good reason!
We use the software day in, day out at Tao Digital and have done so for many years – it’s a great way of keeping the team on track and organised.
As we’ve been using its many features for some time now, we thought it was only right to put together a review with our honest thoughts!
What is project management software?
Project management software is exactly what it sounds like – software that allows you to manage your projects, meet deadlines and manage costs. The main aim of them is to help you to save time by automating your workflows and streamlining processes. It isn’t just limited to project managers, though – anyone within a team can use it.
What is ClickUp?
ClickUp is a cloud-based project management tool founded in 2016 with the focus of streamlining your workload, claiming to save you one day per week by helping you to work more efficiently.
You can organise your whole team within the platform, setting up client folders, tasks, deadlines, workflows, processes etc. Its main features are team collaboration and shared task-setting functions, allowing you to see time spent on tasks, the status of the task, comments, links within tasks and more.
What industries would benefit from using ClickUp?
Any industry that carries the majority of their work out online would benefit from using ClickUp – the platform is great for businesses both big and small. It is used by the likes of Nike, Netflix, Google and Airbnb to manage a huge variety of projects.
ClickUp Best Features
There are many features we enjoy within ClickUp, as follows…
Time Tracking
Time is tracked via a ‘stopwatch’ on each task, which your team begins or ends when they start/stop a task, or can be added in manually afterwards. This really helps with client reporting and allows you to see easily if you are over or under servicing a client each month.
It can also help you spot if you are running over budget in terms of time – e.g. if you expected a site build to take X amount of hours and it is seriously running over, you may have to review with the team and re-assess the budget for the allocated project.
Workload view
We love the visual aspect of workload, which provides an at-a-glance view of the team’s workload. This is calculated by adding estimated times to tasks in order to provide an accurate calculation. The workload capacity is represented in a green, orange and red system, showing who is close to capacity or over capacity. This can allow us to see who may be struggling or where workload needs to be distributed more evenly.
You can also click individually within these days to get a full overview of what that team member is working on, including estimated times and the names of the tasks. You can then individually click on these to view status, time tracked, who else may be assigned to the task, any links within the task, etc.
Within tasks you can also see any briefs that were set, the status of it, who is a ‘watcher’ of the task, any comments, links added etc.
Ability to create automated tasks
Are you working on a long and complex project that has a similar process whenever you work on it? Save time and effort by creating an automated process. Simply create a master task, set up your subtasks and save it as a template within ClickUp’s template centre. You’ll need to adjust due dates and possibly assignees each time, but it ensures you don’t miss a step of the process.
Cost Effective
ClickUp is very cost effective compared to other project management tools, such as Asana and Trello. ClickUp even has a brilliant free version, which allows you to create an unlimited number of tasks and allows you to use their sprint management tool, which is a great option for those using scrum management within the Agile methodology.
Depending on the number of users you have on the platform, ClickUp price plans range from 0 to $19 per member per month, Asana is 0 to $24.99 and Trello is 0 to $17.50. There are bespoke increased price options for large businesses, but most SMEs won’t need this option.
What are ClickUp automations?
Another feature we really like within ClickUp is their automations feature. This means that you can set certain subtasks to only open once its predecessor is closed, e.g. a task won’t open to approve a piece of content until the content writer has closed the writing task and therefore won’t appear in someone’s workload until this happens.
This saves time as you won’t need to keep rearranging tasks if any become overdue or keep checking in on the main task to see where everyone is up to.
There are so many different ways to automate your tasks – ClickUp operates on a ‘When X, X happens’ feature. Here are some of their official examples below:
You can also automate across integrated apps, such as Calendly, Google Sheets, Dropbox, Slack and much more. We have an automation set up within Slack which alerts the team when a task has been closed for a certain client and reminds us that the client needs to be made aware.
What are Spaces in ClickUp?
Spaces are essentially a way to manage all tasks for the different areas of your business. They are the second level of ‘hierarchy’ within ClickUp, as follows: Workspace, Space, List (within a folder), Task, Subtask and Nested Subtask.
At the top of the hierarchy is the workspace, which contains your entire organisation and all of its work. Most businesses have one workspace per company. You may, however, have several ‘spaces’ – we have one for our retained clients, which contains sub folders of all our clients and individual tasks, one for Tao projects and one for one-off projects/clients.
If you view the above screenshot, you can see our Tao projects space. Within this we have folders of our own projects, within which are lists and tasks we work on.
Pros and Cons of ClickUp
The pros and cons from our personal experience are as follows:
Pros
Improves efficiencies: The main pro of ClickUp is that it improves efficiencies for us across the board, as much as 20% as the platform claims. It’s easy for us to make sure our workload is evenly distributed across the team and that no one is over capacity. This then allows us to see when it’s time for a new hire.
Real time reporting of workload: We love the live view of what the team is working on at any one time, as well as the ability to look into tasks and see its current status, when it was last worked on etc. This is much easier to digest than a traditional written task list that doesn’t have real time updates.
Collaborate from anywhere: Our team works from home two days a week and have the freedom to work from anywhere thanks to ClickUp – we can assign them tasks that they could be working on in a different country! We also have some of our freelancers signed up to the platform.
Setting up workflows: As we have discussed, the ability to set up automated workflows has been incredibly helpful to us and has saved us a lot of time. If we’re working on a big yearly campaign that involves a lot of different departments and steps, it saves a lot of time that would have been spent searching through emails/folders to see what steps were taken last time and potentially missing vital tasks, compared to having the process set up waiting for you next year. A little bit of weight off your shoulders!
Time tracking: This really helps with client reporting and allows you to see easily if you are over or under servicing a client. It can also help you to see where extra capacity is needed, or may lie within the team and so can ease the workload off those who may be under additional pressure.
Cons
Onboarding can be difficult: As you can see, there are hundreds of different ways to use ClickUp to suit your needs. However, the huge amount of customisation can be a slight downfall when it comes to onboarding as it can be overwhelming and difficult to find where certain options are.
Slow to load: We have been experiencing a number of lagging issues over the past few months while new features have been added, especially when it comes to workload view – this can sometimes take up to a minute to load. In a December 2022 tweet ClickUp replied to a Twitter user who was concerned about the loading speed and said: ‘Our Technical team is currently investigating the slow speeds that you are experiencing. If you have any questions about their investigation, please feel free to reach out to us via chat or email at help@clickup.com.’
Inability to assign more than one person to comment: One feature that could be improved is the ability to assign people to comments within tasks. Assigning comments means the individual gets both an email notification and an alert within the notifications bar. Although people will be notified if they’re tagged in a comment, it isn’t as prominent as if they are both notified to have been assigned one and that they have to resolve it to clear it from their notifications bar.
Difficulties within the ClickUp app: The ClickUp app can be a little slower than the desktop version and it isn’t as easy to access certain features, such as the workload view. It’s also more difficult to see what folders tasks are in, which can be a limitation when it comes to subtasks that may all have the same name – e.g. research – so you may struggle to know which project/client this is for. Example below:
How Much Does ClickUp Cost?
The price of ClickUp depends on what you want to get out of it. As mentioned earlier, they have a ‘Free Forever’ option. Please note that prices are correct at the time of writing (January 2023).
For the first paid tier, the $9 a month Unlimited option, you will also receive features such as:
Unlimited automations
Unlimited dashboards
Email in ClickUp
For the $19 Business plan, which is their most popular option, you also receive:
Custom exporting
Advanced public sharing (great for keeping clients in the loop)
Workload management (one of our favourite features)
On the Business Plus plan, which is $29 per month and a good option for multiple teams, the extra features include:
Custom capacity in workload
Priority support
Increased automations
There is also an option for ‘Enterprise’, best for many large teams, but the price of this is only found out via contacting the sales team as it is bespoke. This includes everything in the previous packages plus white labelling, a dedicated success manager, live onboarding training and more.
Our Rating
Overall, we believe that ClickUp is an excellent project management tool, and we have been using it for quite a few years now.
We’d give the software 4.5/5 stars. Our only areas of improvement would be the cons we mentioned earlier, mainly loading time. It would be difficult to run an agency which works on so many projects and different clients without a system like the one ClickUp offers!
If you like the sound of the platform and would like to sign up, you can do so by clicking here.
Video for SEO in 2023: Predictions | Tao Digital Marketing
Video is becoming more prominent in search and will be a channel that needs to be part of a successful SEO campaign next year and beyond.
With Google Search Console recently adding it in as a separate section within the platform, we see this as a sign from Google to show the power and importance of video for the future of the search engine.
We’ve already seen some of our own pages on the Tao Digital website start to rank higher once we embed a video, and we expect this will only continue. We’ve already included this in our marketing strategy for 2023 by planning accompanying videos to be included as part of our overall content strategy.
So, what do other agency owners and SEOs think? We decided to ask them and have rounded up their thoughts below!
Matt Tomkin, Our Founder and Director
Video is definitely going to help with a website’s overall organic search visibility. It’s important to optimise the description on Youtube along with adding the relevant schema markup to the web page it is published on.
By adding video to your content you are giving another option for visitors to digest your content and I think Google sees this as a user benefit.
Don’t let Google tell you they don’t use user metrics as a ranking factor! Why wouldn’t they? Give your visitor more ways to digest your content and you’ll be ahead of 99% of the other websites online.
The format is less important than the content. Your rankings won’t improve just because you’ve got a video on a landing page.
If, however, you can use that video to add value to the page (think video case studies, testimonials, research launch etc. – video needs to work for the part of the sales funnel the landing page is intended for) and that video is exclusive to that page (duplicate content is duplicate content) then it’s going to separate your landing page and content from the majority of your competitors’ webpages.
When it comes to Google Search Console adding video as a separate section, I’ve been following this closely. My prediction for the future of SEO/video content is that we’ll start to see fewer featured snippets in position 0, and instead, more videos. This makes sense because people are wanting videos instead of reading long-form content now.
In order for your business to benefit from this, I’d suggest creating videos for your most popular blogs. If you’re getting search volume for the blog, have a video for it too. If you’re in position 0, definitely have a video for it. Upload this to Youtube and make sure it’s also SEO-optimised. This way, whichever way Google decides to go, you’re covered.
I think Google will continue to develop ways of highlighting video content within search, especially for current and trending topics, with many people digesting information through the medium of video. We see this with the rise in popularity of TikTok which has spurred other social platforms to follow suit, such as Facebook and Instagram with Reels, and YouTube with Shorts.
Brands that do not utilise video marketing, whether it be in short form clips or longer-length videos, will be missing out on traffic potential, whether that’s from Google search directly or from social media.
Jamie Coles, Freelance Journalist, Press Officer and Video Producer
It’s really interesting that Google Search Console is adding video search to its platform. The importance for video search seems to be growing as we see video results bumped to the top of Google results.
From the point of view of SEO, I think we’ll all end up subtitling or transcribing our videos to improve the searchability of our videos thanks to the additional keywords. This will mean a rise of SRT (subtitle format) tools, which, as a video producer, I’d be grateful for.
We’ll also see a rise in AI transcribing tools and – hopefully – a bit of a step up in their accuracy because, right now, they’re more hassle than they’re worth. The positive side of these transcripts or subtitles is that they make videos more accessible.
We’ll also see a further trend in attention-grabbing thumbnails, probably with better optimised text as AI OCR tools begin recognising thumbnail text for search, too.
Beyond that we’ll likely see more video content better embedded higher up on a lot of web pages, and web pages better optimised for video embedding, as the Google search bots and results seem to be favouring video.
Conclusion
Although it’s impossible to predict the future, it is apparent that many SEOs are predicting similar themes – the power of video improving rankings, video being used to enhance existing content and transcription software developing further. These are likely to be key elements throughout 2023.
If you’re looking to use video as part of your SEO strategy, get in touch with us today.
