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.

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:

Affiliate Marketing
Digital Products
Ad Revenue

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 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.

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.

A8: Depends on the platform. Once a day on LinkedIn and Facebook. 3-4 times a day on Twitter. #BizapaloozaChat

— LiveHelpNow (@LiveHelpNow) December 20, 2021

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.

16 Aug 2025

Matt Tomkin

As a search marketing agency, we get asked about SEO vs. PPC a lot. Of course, what we recommend completely depends on the client and their industry, and there are many things to consider before we look to recommend either channel.

In this guide, we’ve gone back to basics about what each of the processes involve (feel free to skip ahead if you’ve already got some understanding), how they can work together and the pros and cons of each.

Table Of Contents

What do SEO and PPC stand for?

SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and PPC stands for ‘Pay Per Click’.

Search Engine Optimisation isn’t just a case of optimising your pages once and never looking at them again. Due to constantly changing search algorithms, site infrastructure updates, your competitor’s activity and much more, you constantly need to be on the ball to make your site as search engine friendly as possible. This is done through a mixture of technical SEO, content marketing and digital PR.

PPC refers to the ads that you see at the top of Google search results. As a business you will pay per every click received on your ad. It’s not a case of paying the highest, although this is a factor - rather, it’s all about the quality of your landing page experience, ad copy quality along with a whole host of other factors.

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

There are a few differences between SEO and PPC to bear in mind:

The positioning on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

First and foremost, the most obvious difference between the two is their positioning on the SERP. The paid ads are the first results you see and are labelled as ads, as shown in the graphic above.

The organic results are shown from that point onwards and are what search engines believe to be the best match to a user’s query, starting from the best match and descending from there.

The goal for both search channels

With SEO, it’s likely that you want to boost the site's visibility in the search results, which is a great investment in the overall value of a business. There are a number of advantages to SEO, improving your keyword rankings, increasing your domain rating through gaining links, improving site traffic, bringing more site visitors that will lead to more sales and leads.

SEO is best viewed as a long term investment in your business, it can take some time and considerable investment to make major gains in organic search but the value keeps building over an extended period.

With PPC, you’re normally directing your site visitors to one page (often a particular service page you’d like to push, or a contact form we term a landing page) with the aim being to get users to take an action - ideally, buy a certain product or contact you for more information.

We wouldn't recommend starting a PPC campaign without having a very focused landing page, or set of landing pages, depending on the campaign and number of ad sets you are running.

The time frame

SEO is a long-term strategy and investment in your businesses long term lifespan.

Creating a new piece of content, whether a blog or new service page, goes live, you will need to wait till the search engines ‘index’ the page.

This can be sped up to an extent, but it completely depends on your website's authority and how important the search engines see your website. It can take 3-6 months before you start seeing traffic to the page - in fact, the average time a URL takes to hit page one is over 12 months, according to Ahrefs. On the other hand, paid ads are live immediately and can start generating results quickly when done correctly.

The sort of visitors you will bring to the site

Having managed PPC for a wide variety of clients, alongside undertaking SEO work, we have certainly noticed a difference in the sort of leads that each one will bring in.

With SEO, you’re likely to attract the sorts of visitors who may be at the top of the sales funnel. For example, if you’re a craft insurance business, many small craft businesses won’t know exactly what they need to cover them from claims - these sorts of visitors are at the top of the sales funnel.

Say for example they search a question such as: ‘What sort of insurance do I need for craft fairs?’. They may come across your piece of content, a guide to showcasing at a craft fair. After reading the guide and finding out the sort of insurance their business needs, they may request a quote from you as you have positioned yourself as an expert. (p.s. - you can also read our guide for more information on how to use Google searches to create content that answers user’s questions).

If you did want to target people who are more towards the bottom of the funnel, perhaps you want to create a highly targeted piece of content around getting a quote for insurance. SEO can target both top of funnel and bottom of funnel users, it all depends on the content produced and the competition for the terms.

With PPC you can attract visitors much further down the sales funnel who are either looking to make a purchase now or are looking for very quick results - e.g. someone who has left organising their car insurance until the last minute and is looking for a quote as soon as possible.

They may fill in forms from several of your competitors in order to see who responds first. This means that you may have to filter through more leads to see who is seriously considering buying your product or using your services.

In some instances, you may want to target further up the sales funnel, like promoting a piece of content or a guide, but typically we do see PPC being used for bottom of the funnel purposes.

How SEO and PPC work together

Although SEO and PPC do have their differences, you can seriously reap the benefits of using both together.

Getting greater target audience insights

PPC can give you invaluable data about your target audience. Once your ads have gone live, Google collects information about who is clicking on your ads, such as their age, gender, industry, job role, the area they live in, etc.

This data can help you to refine your next projects as part of ongoing SEO. For example, if you are a business coach and you see that owners of insurance businesses are clicking on your ads, you might want to create a piece of content or a service page around ‘Business Coaching for the Insurance Industry’. This can help you to continue bringing in leads through your PPC work and also attracting those leads organically too - it’s a win-win situation as you start to dominate the SERP!

Increased brand awareness

Using both together also boosts brand awareness. For example, someone might be carrying out some quick research about your industry, and once they visit your landing page from an ad they get a general idea of your offerings and who you are. They may get distracted and leave the site.

However, when that person searches again, or really does need your product this time, they will remember your name and click on your organic listing this time. Or, you could even use remarketing list search ads on Google and make sure you are there for both organic and paid ads.

Testing what works and using it in your SEO efforts

You can also test new keywords that can help with your SEO. Choose a word or phrase that you think you could potentially rank highly for and use it in your PPC ads. If you see great results, this is a sign that you should start to include this keyword in your content.

You can also review statistics such as time spent on the site and bounce rates to see what is working on your landing page and what isn’t - for example, are people getting tired of reading a huge piece of content, or is a call to action too far down? This can help you avoid the same mistake in other pieces of content across the whole site.

Does PPC affect SEO?

Not directly, but as we’ve touched on, you can use the insights to better your SEO. It can be part of your overall SEO strategy, but it’s not essential to your efforts, especially if you have a smaller budget starting out.

What are the pros and cons of SEO and PPC?

SEO: Pros

Increase traffic, leads and brand awareness
It often isn’t as costly as PPC can be
Visitors who view your site are likely to have a higher level of trust as search engines have suggested you as the best match to their query, rather than paying to get there
You can easily attract local traffic to your site by taking advantage of Google My Business and other local listings
You can become an authority figure in your industry as people search your site for information and guides
One great piece of content can consistently bring in leads - we’ve seen this with some of our client’s top performing pages

SEO: Cons

SEO takes longer to see results, so return on investment isn’t instant and needs a consistent budget
In some extremely competitive industries, SEO needs a vast amount of resources to compete. You may need to use PPC as well to generate results in the shorter term
There are no guarantees with SEO - algorithms change constantly
You can suddenly go down in rankings due to a variety of factors, such as competitor activity, the toxicity of the sites that have been linking to you, algorithms etc.
The organic results aren’t as high up on the SERP

PPC: Pros

Generates almost instant results
Return on investment is very clear
Can feed into your SEO strategy and give insights that are more difficult to find through SEO
Gets you to the top of the SERP immediately, compared to months or even years of effort with SEO
Targets people who are at the bottom of the sales funnel, and so are looking to buy NOW
You can set a maximum daily budget to make sure you aren’t spending too much

PPC: Cons

Once your competitors catch onto you efforts, you could face a bidding war where essentially the price per click consistently increases
Many people don’t trust ads as much as they know businesses have paid to get there - 97% of all clicks go to organic search results.
Money can be burned up quickly if it isn’t done correctly - we’ve spoken to many business owners and marketing managers that have tried their hand and spent so much with little ROI!
You can get caught up in ‘click fraud’, a process where people or certain pieces of software constantly click on your ads to use up your money
The data can be complex to understand for those who are new to PPC

So, which is better overall?

Sorry to go for the typical SEO answer here, but really… it depends (yes, we can hear you booing over there).

If you want quick results and know how to optimise a campaign as best you can, PPC might be the best option for you.

However, if you want to put the effort into an SEO strategy over time and bring in consistent organic results, that could be a better choice.

In our honest opinion, a combination of both works really well due to the insights you can get. For the clients we do this for, we are constantly reviewing PPC campaigns to see what’s working and what isn’t, then implementing this into their content.

If you want great results that will take your business to the next level, get in touch with us today. All of our clients receive monthly video reports that prove real return on investment and growth over time.

What’s a Good Click-Through Rate (CTR) for Facebook Ads?

As you figure out how to measure your Facebook Ads’ performance, you might hear a lot of advice about click-through rates (CTR). This number measures the percentage of an ad’s viewers who clicked on the ad’s primary link.

Nifty, right? While you want plenty of eyes on your ad, you also want the people who see it to act on it — that’s where the money comes from.

But, if you look at Facebook’s help page for CTR, something’s missing. It tells you what a CTR is, but not what a good CTR is.

That’s where we come in. We’ll explain what to expect as a good CTR so you can start setting benchmarks that matter.

What is the Average CTR for a Facebook Ad?

Before we talk about what makes a good CTR for Facebook Ads, let’s find out what an average CTR looks like. After all, if you’re doing better than most advertisers, that’s a great start.

Wordstream estimated an average CTR of 0.90% across industries in their 2017 survey of 256 businesses. Of course, the numbers they got varied by industry. Legal (1.61%) and retail (1.59%) had some of the highest CTRs, while employment/job training (0.47%) and finance/insurance (0.56%) had the lowest results.

What Does a Good Facebook Ad CTR Look Like?

It’s promising to have a higher-than-average CTR for your industry, but just because a CTR is average doesn’t mean that it’s good. So, what makes a good CTR? Let’s see what the experts get from their ads to learn what a professional expects.

Databox asked more than 30 marketing professionals about their average CTR to understand what a good Facebook Ads CTR is. They found that industry experts tend to get at least 2-5% — over half of the respondents said they had a CTR between those percentages.

You can think of that CTR as a floor, not a ceiling. Almost 15% of the marketers had a CTR of 10% or greater. CTRs can go far beyond the average if you know what you’re doing.

If you have a CTR lower than 2%, look at these results as an opportunity. These professionals can earn high CTRs, so you can, too.

How Do I Get a Good Facebook Ads CTR?

What can you do to improve your CTR? Regardless of your CTR, you can aim for a higher number by looking at your ad’s:

Targeting: Do you target people who will actually want to click on your ad?
Visuals: Does your ad have an image or video that catches viewers’ attention?
Copy: Does your ad copy make a compelling point?

Knowing the right direction to take these ad elements takes two actions — research and testing. Research your customers and market to guide your targeting and creative, then test different components against each other to learn what works best.

16 Aug 2025

Matt Tomkin

When John Mueller tweeted about the importance of digital PR in January 2021, #DigitalPR Twitter went wild. Finally, we had gotten a very clear nod from the brains at Google about how important telling your brand’s story is.

John Mueller, from Google, praises Digital PR
This caused a bit of confusion in the community about what digital PR actually is. So, we’re here to explain!

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR means to build your online presence and brand awareness. Essentially, create something worth linking to – whether that’s a study you’ve done about your industry, an interactive map, data sorted by region, fun content, a case study, etc.

These links, in turn, increase your domain authority (moz.com) or domain rating (ahrefs.com) – AKA how authoritative your site is. This is typically rated on a scale from 0-100 by different tools that us marketers use. The theory is, the more authoritative your site is, the better you rank on search engines as they want to show the most trusted voices first in the results. (Yes, it’s a theory – Google would never reveal all its secrets!)

Digital PR and SEO: how are they linked?

Digital PR and SEO are intrinsically linked. As mentioned above, links built to your site will boost your domain authority, meaning your rankings will improve. You could have the most informative pieces of content in the world, but if your domain rating is low, you won’t see the traffic you deserve.

The domain rating of the sites that link to you is also important. Those with high domains tend to only link to other reputable sources, again showing search engines that you’re a thought leader. Think about this in real life situations – if you get a product recommendation from someone you know and trust, you’re more likely to believe it is good quality as it has their seal of approval.

Digital PR can also improve your keyword visibility. For example, if you’re a recruitment agency and you create a campaign about the most popular month for job searches, the sites that use your content will help you to boost your rankings for terms relating to this. Obviously, this is relevant to your industry and will therefore help boost your overall rankings too.

Campaigns have to be relevant to what you do already – journalists will be confused if a pet shop creates a campaign about the rise and fall of mortgage prices! Plus, search engines can potentially penalise you for creating far-fetched and irrelevant content.

What are the benefits of Digital PR?

The biggest benefit you will see from digital PR is an increase in domain rating/authority, but don’t underestimate the additional benefits of brand awareness, traffic to your site and even more business coming your way. For example, an SEO case study we did for Moz about our work with Fleetcover lead to the following:

Referring domains for Fleetcover almost doubled from 74 to 163 within a week, boosting the DR from 13 to 20…

According to Buzzsumo, the piece became the 6th highest trending content WORLDWIDE in the SEO community the day it went live…

And we got various shoutouts from Moz on their social media – our Twitter went a bit crazy after being showcased in front of their half a million followers!

We also had an international enquiry about working with us, so not only did this work wonders for our site and brand recognition, we could potentially be getting work out of it too. Watch this space!

Moz has a domain authority of 91, making them one of the highest-rated sites online. Many marketers would burn money trying to get featured on there, and all we had to do was tell our story – the magic of digital PR.

Digital PR and outreach

Outreach is essentially how you get your digital PR campaigns out there. Once the story/study/graphics are live on your site and ready to go, you then create an outreach list full of journalists you want to email the story to. This can be done using a simple Excel spreadsheet to track details and progress or by using helpful tools such as Buzzstream.

Different experts will tell you different ways of outreaching pieces to achieve optimal open rates and replies, but the truth is, we don’t believe there is a perfect time (unless it’s a Friday afternoon – don’t bother!). Different journalists work to different times, and if your subject line is interesting enough, they’re likely to click through. Plus, if you have already established a relationship with a journalist, you definitely get more leeway in terms of when you can send it as they already know who you are.

What is ‘newsjacking’?

Newsjacking, or ‘reactive PR’, is the most fast-paced form of digital PR and involves providing an expert comment to news or trending topics. For example, we have outreached various comments from business brokers Hilton Smythe in reaction to various Government changes to business rates, the extension of the furlough scheme, news about Boohoo acquiring Debenhams, etc. Essentially, it’s all about providing that expert voice. The exchange works both ways – you provide journalists with an expert voice, and in turn, they *hopefully* link to your site.

The question of how quickly you should do this is something that varies depending on who you ask. Some would say anything over 30 minutes of the news breaking is too late, but we have had success with sending a comment a couple of hours later.

How does data tie into digital PR?

Data heavily ties into digital PR. If you are not releasing a special, limited-edition PR-stunt product or creating an interactive quiz, you’ll likely be using some form of data. In order for the data to be newsworthy, it has to relate to a mass audience, or else news outlets just won’t cover it as it’s too specific.

How can you make your industry-relevant to a mass audience? If you’re an insurance broker, can you look to popular TV shows and films and quote how much it would cost to insure certain items? Or, can you incorporate one of the following emotions into your data?:

Funny – will the data make people laugh – is it a bit out there?
Shocking – can you reveal something people don’t know about where they live across the country, e.g. crime rates?
Gross – this is perfect for cleaning brands (did you know your work desk, where you are sitting right now, contains 400x more bacteria than a toilet seat!?)
Scary – can you reveal something rather worrying?
Love – can you make people go ‘aww’, or feel a sense of pride or joy?

When sending out a PR campaign, it’s really important to contain notes about your methodology, AKA how you went about getting the data, how you organised it, how you split it up to calculate certain aspects, etc. If you miss this out, journalists will be a little suspicious of your data and can ask questions, or even ignore your outreach if you aren’t transparent from the get-go.

How to improve the success of your digital PR campaigns

There are several factors that can make or break your PR campaigns. After outreach, it’s important to reflect on each of these aspects and see what you can improve:

Timing: Yes, we know, we mentioned that timing isn’t as important as some say, but if you’re sending them out all at once on a Friday afternoon, maybe reconsider your methods. Some programmes, such as Buzzstream, allow you to schedule outreach for a certain time, or break it up across a period of time so that you can see when your emails are getting the most opens.
The angle: The angle can change everything. If you notice your campaign isn’t really getting picked up, change the angle a bit and see what happens.
Make sure your landing page is worth linking to: if a journalist can describe your data without you needing to see it to understand, they will! Make sure it’s something interactive – e.g. type in your postcode to find data for your area, play with the graphics on the site, etc.
Don’t waste time: if you’re doing a reactive PR campaign about how much certain things in a trending TV show would cost, make sure you get it out there while the show is still trending. We know, it can sometimes be hard to cut through approvals tape, but the sooner you can get it out there, the better. A few days late and you’re better off waiting until the next season.
Think, would I actually share this?: if you wouldn’t click on it and read it, why would anyone else? It has to be interesting. If you’re finding ideation hard, sit on it for a while. Our team finds that PR ideas come up at the most random times.

How is the success of digital PR measured?

There are various ways of measuring the success of your efforts depending on what your goals are. Common ways of measuring success include:

The number of links you get: you could have a goal of a certain amount, but it’s important to remember that coverage is NOT guaranteed each time.
Online readership: what is the total combined online readership of the sites you got coverage from?
Social media shares: how many people have shared your content on social media sites?
Average domain authority: what is the average DA/DR of the sites you got coverage on? The higher, the better.
Increase in domain authority: this goes hand in hand with the above point – hopefully, you want to see your rating improve over time as a result of coverage.
Web traffic: how much traffic came to your site from the coverage? (Referral traffic)
Conversions/goal completions: if you’ve made a new PR-stunt product that people can buy, how many people bought it and how much revenue did this bring? Or did people simply sign up for your newsletter?

This will vary from client to client and depends on other factors such as budget, timescale, existing relationships with journalists, etc. The more experience you have with digital PR campaigns, the more realistic your goals will be as you understand what can be achieved on a certain budget or time scale.

Digital PR for startups

Digital PR can be both a costly and time-consuming process. If the industry data doesn’t exist publicly and you need to submit a Freedom of Information request to those who have the data, you can be held up by weeks. Or, if you’re doing a survey, prepare to let go of a couple of thousand pounds in the process.

Analysing data also takes a lot of time, as well as creating infographics or an interactive page on your site. This can put a lot of businesses off investing in digital PR until they have more money. But it’s a bit of a double-edged sword – to get more money through your site, you need to rank better and invest in those authoritative links, AKA digital PR!

The key to having a news-worthy campaign, then, is using your own data. When you’re so involved in a business day to day, you can forget certain aspects or interesting statistics you can get hold of. Again, if you’re an insurer, do you have any funny claims stories you can tell? Or are you starting to see new trends in your industry? This unique content can be a great starting point for a campaign.

If you need help with creating ideas or want to chat more about digital PR, get in touch with us via hello@taodigital.org or call us on 01204 920 096.

How to use Answer the Public to boost your SEO

There are absolutely loads of helpful SEO tools out there, but when it comes to helping with content marketing, we do have our favourites.

One such favourite is Answer the Public, which is the holy grail for our content writers. Not only does it make coming up with content ideas so much easier, it shows you what people are searching for in real time. Responding to these searches and providing useful content is a sure way to move yourself up the pages on search engines such as Google.

In this blog, we’re going to explain what Answer the Public is, why it’s useful and how it can help you to boost your online presence.

What is Answer the Public?

Answer the Public is a long-tail keyword tool that shows you questions and autocomplete searches around a certain topic. This can help you to understand what people are searching for so that you can provide content featuring relevant, in-depth answers that people are actually searching for and looking to find answers to.

Is Answer the Public free?

Answer the Public is free, but only for a few searches per day! Otherwise, you’re going to run into this guy…

The downside of this is that it works off your IP address, so if a colleague is also using the tool they can hit the day’s limit for your whole team. Not good news for those needing to churn out content consistently.

If you’re stuck for content ideas and want to improve your SEO, it’s definitely worth investing in the tool, which costs $99 per month, or $79 per month if you pay annually. This lets you have unlimited searches and users, as well as allowing you to compare data over time.

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

Speak to one of our team today about our SEO services

How does Answer the Public work?

As mentioned above, the site shows you what people are searching for. We’re going to use the example of one of our clients, Complete Koi & Aquatics, here. Through another SEO tool, Ahrefs, we saw that ‘Ghost Koi’ was being searched for around 1,900 times per month with a keyword difficulty of 0 – what a goldmine!

If you don’t have another SEO tool to help with this, simply note down some topics that you think potential customers would be interested in reading about.

We then headed over to Answer the Public, typed this phrase in and had a look at the results. There are two ways which Answer the Public will display results, the first is through a visualisation wheel. Although the tool will never tell you the exact amount of searches for each question, the darker the dots on the wheel, the more they are searched.

Be warned, though – it can also mean that the particular question or phrase is trending at the moment and actually has relatively low search terms in comparison to others. You’ll never get 100% accurate numbers as search engines like to keep this information top secret.

The screenshot above is just the ‘questions’ section. As you scroll down, there are more wheels for prepositions (i.e. ‘ghost koi for sale near me’) comparisons (ghost koi vs goldfish), and finally alphabeticals, which list every searched term from A to Z.

The other way the information is presented is as ‘data’, as below:

This is a bit easier to read than the visualisation wheel, but the downside is that you don’t get hints as to what is searched the most.

This information is really useful, because when you know so much about your niche, you forget the kinds of information newcomers might be looking for. You might be surprised with what people are asking about!

Using Answer the Public for SEO

Using these questions in a piece of content can really help to boost your rankings. It shows search engines that you’re an expert in your field. Generally, the more questions you answer and the more in-depth you go, the better. This is of course dependent on the number of searches and content, as sometimes people are just looking for a small amount of information.

Based on our research, we then created a piece titled ‘Everything you need to know about Ghost Koi’, which answered many of the questions from Answer the Public. This piece was published in July 2020 and naturally it will take a while for search engines to pick up on this content, but at the time of writing (December 2020), Complete Koi are now position #1 on Google for ‘Ghost Koi Carp’ and ‘Butterfly Ghost Koi’, even though their domain rating is 3.7. We expect this to continue increasing!

Similar results can be expected if you follow this process. Ensuring that the questions are formatted as H2s, H3s and H4s will mean the keyword is in the questions too, and that search engines will understand that they are your headings and subheadings.

For an extra boost, add FAQ schema to your content. This means that your questions and answers will appear when people type in related search terms, as below.

This is much more eye catching to users, and they can get their answers without even having to click on a site. Even if you’re not ranking for the term they typed in, you can appear in excerpts on the page as above, which is especially useful if you’re just getting started.

Another way that Answer the Public can help with SEO is the feature that helps you to compare data over time. For example, if we head towards Winter and suddenly spot that people are searching for questions such as ‘Do Ghost Koi hibernate?’, we can add this into the content and keep it up to date.

Also, if a new cool gadget for ponds has been released but there aren’t many searches around this yet, we can get the product page ranking as searches increase and keep an eye out for more questions trickling in as the product gains popularity. This can help us to answer those questions before anyone else does.

Finally, if one of your old pieces of content previously had a lot of traffic but is slipping down in the ranks, it could be that your competitors are answering questions you aren’t. Keep an eye on old content and update it as and when new questions arise.

In conclusion…

Answer the Public is a fantastic tool for any content writers looking for more ideas and to boost their SEO.

If you’re stretched for resources and would like to outsource content research and writing, we’re your people! Get in touch today via hello@taodigital.org or call 01204 282 213 and we’ll see how we can help.

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

Speak to one of our team today about our SEO services

4 Ways That Email Marketing Can Increase Your Sales Funnel

Email marketing has proved to be one of the most cost-effective ways of communicating with your audience.

For any company that wants to engage and inform their subscribers, setting a proper email marketing strategy is the best way.

More specifically, it can increase your website’s traffic, form stronger relationships, increase the recognition of your brand, and give opportunities for engagement.

One of the most important aspects of email marketing strategy is the way it affects the sales funnel of your company.

Regardless of the stage of the funnel, email marketing can help you maintain and improve your funnel.

So, the first thing you have to do is find an email marketing service that provides all the features and data you need for your company.

This is the fundamental principle, as not every platform offers exactly the same.

1. Generate Subscribers

The first thing you need to have to make your sales funnel successful is a great list of subscribers.

You should make clear why someone should subscribe, what someone has to gain. If there is nothing specific there for your subscribers, then no one will give his email address.

So, your brand awareness should focus on getting your brand identity across and your USP so consumers can differentiate you from the rest of similar brands.

Also, you should make it as simple as possible to enter their email address to decrease the number of click-throughs a person needs to be subscribed.

Share content posts on your social media accounts that lead them to a subscribing page.

Also, you can create QR codes so even if they see a product of yours, they are directed to a mobile-ready, mobile-responsive email subscribing form.

After they get subscribed, you should send a “thank you email” to welcome them.

This will make some feel valued and appreciated, while others will value it as a confirmation for their subscription.

The last thing is that you should pay attention to your email sequence, content, subject lines (which will be more analysed later), in case you see your unsubscribing rates increase.

2. Increase Recognition

Once you have created your subscribers’ list, then you should create a comprehensive, consistent channel of communication with them.

If you want to have an effective email marketing strategy, you should create some recurring email campaigns, based on the type of your company and your products.

One option is to send a weekly email with the company updates, or at least a monthly newsletter with new data, information, and offers.

These email campaigns should highlight your brand identity, colours, and personality. Your logo characteristics should be there in every email; but always consider to make it friendly, while formal.

Then, your emails will be enjoyable and fun for your subscribers, but still, you will pass all the needed information.

You should use any automation features of your email marketing service and through different tests find the best time to send an email to your subscribers.

Then, your opening rates will improve, which will bring extra traffic to your website.

3. Improve Consideration

Once you have your subscribers’ list, you build your recognition, then your subscribers should start considering your company, instead of other companies they already trust.

Consideration marketing campaigns are difficult but can be your key players.

The first crucial thing is to create exclusive limited offers and discounts for your subscribers.

This will create a feeling of urgency, value, and appreciation for your company.

Human beings love to feel that they receive unique personalised gifts and offers.

In these campaigns, you can also promote any private label products you have by including the companies that produce these items.

With that, you gain credibility by the name of the manufacturing company, which will make your subscribers consider you more.

Also, based on the actions they take on your website, you can send personalised emails to educate them about the products they are interested in.

These educational emails can be tips and tricks for how to cleverly use your products or their extra features.

Another automated email campaign you can design is based on the products your website visitors abandon in their carts.

The cart abandonment strategy is highly personalised, time-saving, cost-effective, and forces people to return to your site to complete a purchase.

To ensure that your subscribers receive these emails, you should run an email deliverability test.

This will guarantee that your emails end up in their inbox folder, not their spam folder.

4. Motivate Action

The last stage of the sales funnel process is to motivate your subscribers to take action.

You should pay attention to your email copy and content. Use active words that motivate people to take a specific action.

Make clear that you have on a specific target and centralise it in your emails. This purpose should be your central Call-To-Action in the email, which pops-up from the rest of the email.

Another important aspect is your email subject line and the preview shown.

Your email subject line should be precise, clear, and intrigue people to open their email for one reason.

Write your subject lines as you are a salesman that likes to be more friendly.

As it was stated before, you should provide them with limited offers and discounts. T

his feeling of urgency will make people take immediate action and buy your products.

Final Thoughts

Creating, designing, running an effective email marketing strategy is complicated, but it can be simplified by setting specific goals and objectives.

If you set creative, target-oriented, agile goals, based on the different stages of the sales funnel, you can see your metrics increase and improve.

A great way to make your company grow is by paying attention to every single stage and always use your data analytics to redesign your strategies.

Always use quantitative research to increase your quality, and focus on bringing extra value to your company.

These are the basic things you should know to shape an effective email marketing strategy.

Let me know what you think. Do you have a specific email marketing strategy? What would you change and what have you implemented?

Digital Marketing In The Telecom Sector: How To Do It Effectively

The telecom industry, like many other industries, is constantly evolving and changing. This ranges from technological advances and innovations in the market to consumer behaviour and marketing investments.

Change is the only constant in business and willingness to adapt has never been more important than it has today. The telecom companies that will be the most successful are the ones who listen to the market and aren’t rigid in their old ways – resistant to change.

Digital marketing is a prime example of this. Some companies have adapted to digital and have utilised the digital landscape to improve their bottom line. Others have, however, been left behind due to an unwillingness to adapt and change their strategies.

After working with various telecom companies, we have taken the time to break down some of the fundamentals when it comes to digital marketing in the telecom industry. Read on below and find out exactly how to keep up with everything digital.

Why digital marketing?

If you didn’t already know, digital marketing is an incredible asset to any business – if done correctly. In fact, the term ‘digital marketing’ soon won’t be seen as something separate to ‘marketing’. Currently, businesses need to prioritise digital marketing as a fundamental pillar to their overall marketing strategy. In this day and age, if you are a ‘marketing expert’ but have no understanding of digital, then you are seriously missing out on a major skillset.

From search engine marketing to social media advertising, digital marketing capitalises on the 7.7 billion people that use the internet and allows you to deliver your message to your ideal target audience.

Not only this but with digital marketing you can accurately measure the effectiveness of every campaign. From your ROI to the amount you pay for a click, the measurability of digital marketing is a key reason why it has been more effective than traditional marketing methods in recent time.

Once you can track your online performance, you can then identify what is working, what’s not working and optimise for the best possible return for your business.

It doesn’t matter if you are a telecom company that operates within the B2C market or the B2B market, digital marketing can help you raise brand awareness, generate leads and most importantly increase your sales.

Telecom digital marketing strategies

Every telecoms company is looking to improve their customer experience and increase the numbers of sales they generate.

Having a clear digital marketing strategy that is realistic and measurable is one way to do this.

Based on the report carried out by ‘E-consultancy’, digital marketing is a strategic priority for the telecom sector.

In terms of budget allocation, this report shows that 46% of total marketing budgets in the telecom sector are assigned to digital.

So, hopefully, you now recognise the importance of digital marketing when it comes to generating revenue for your telecoms company.

But now, let’s take a deeper look into the specific strategies that can help your business grow online.

How can telecom companies increase sales?

SEO

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is much more than ‘getting your business to rank on the first page of google’. SEO is a consistent and cost-effective way for you to drive your target customers to your website at each stage of the sales funnel. You could choose to target keywords such as ‘Business missing too many calls’. Targeting this type of phrase would capture people when they are at the awareness stage of the sales funnel.

They are aware of the problem they have but aren’t exactly sure what the solution is. Your telecom company could choose to write an in-depth article on the best strategies for businesses to avoid missing calls. As well as giving the searcher some valuable information, and building trust with them, you can tie your services into the blog or have a call to action on there to contact you.

On the other end of the sales funnel, you could target keywords such as ‘telecoms company in Bolton’ or keywords that are more location-based. These keywords would fall into the bottom of the funnel as the searcher is aware of their problem, knows what solution they need and now wants to find the best company to carry it out.

To put it simply, they are ready to buy.

Bottom of the funnel keywords are the most valuable keywords that a business can target and the possible revenue that can be generated from them is huge.

But, how can I find these keywords, I hear you ask?

This is a common problem a lot of businesses have. They have a very basic understanding of SEO and try to do it themselves. However, success is rarely found here if they do not have a sufficient strategy in place.

As a business, you need to know:

The search volumes for the keywords in your industry.
The domain ratings of your competitors.
What a solid content strategy looks like.
What your customers are searching for.
How easy it will be to rank for your keywords.

Whilst businesses can find the answers out themselves, using a search marketing agency who does this day in and day out, for a range of sectors, is always a good way to go.

PPC

Like SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC) captures the attention of users as they are searching on Google for a product or service that they are in the market for. In PPC, you target keywords in the same way that you would for SEO, however, there is one major difference.

With SEO, you could choose to target certain keywords and produce content for them but seeing results may take more than 3-6 months. With PPC, you pay to show up at the top of Google meaning that you can have a campaign up and running and have your site at the top of Google in a few hours.

This is very powerful for telecom companies that have customers consistently searching Google for their services. Telecoms companies are able to quickly capture the attention of these searches, take them to a landing page on their website and then collect information from them – e.g. an email, name and phone number.

PPC is also a great way to outperform your competitors. You will be able to see who is doing PPC in your industry by just typing in some of your services. Now, you should be able to see who is currently paying to be at the top of Google.

The great thing about Google ads is that you can instantly outbid your competitor and, providing your ads are good, you can outrank and take their share of traffic and customers!

Let’s take the keyword “telecom company uk’ for example. We can see from keyword research tools that over 1000 people search for this keyword every month. That means there are 1000 possible customers that are looking for your services, that you can advertise directly to!

This is why it’s so important to conduct keyword research for SEO and PPC so you can understand your customers and advertise to them at the moment they are in need.

How can Telecom companies attract customers?

Content Marketing

Another effective strategy that can work well alongside SEO and PPC is content marketing. For the telecoms industry, content marketing can be extremely effective as you can provide useful information for your customers, whilst also advertising products and services within the information.

For example, you could produce an E-book titled ‘Best business phone systems in 2020’. You could then use this piece of content as a lead magnet on your website and use it to collect email addresses.

Alternatively, you could post this on your social media profiles to get people engaging with your brand and visiting your website. An effective content marketing strategy can provide your customers with educational content that improves brand positioning and increases your authority and trust in the telecom market.

Summary

As a B2B search marketing agency, we have seen the effects SEO and PPC can have for businesses, first hand. In fact, one of our clients in the B2B sector won the number one spot in the UK for most businesses sold in the first quarter of 2020. You can read more about this client here and find out how we used SEO and PPC to increase their sales.

With our clients, we usually find that a long-term SEO campaign, accompanied by a results-based PPC campaign is the most effective way to approach the two channels. If you have the resources, a content marketing strategy can also work well, if you can produce engaging content that your customers actually care about.

If you are a telecoms company and would like to bolster your digital marketing efforts, get in touch with us and we’ll guide you on your path to online success!

Writing better content: Beyond the data

Rory Stobo, Chief Copywriter at digital marketing agency Sookio, joins us to share tips on writing content that works for humans as well as the algorithm.

Fun fact: 90% of data that exists online has been created since 2016. The internet’s 4.5 billion users churn out exabytes of information daily… which is a lot.

For you, that means flabbergasting opportunity to build your marketing strategy around observable, provable facts. But even the most developed algorithms have limits. Data gets your product in front of the customer… then what?

Yes, the hardest thing in marketing is to grab attention, good start. You then need to make them desire your product and, critically, act on that impulse to buy.

Do I need copywriting services?

Good content, particularly good copy, is your salesperson to get this done. The best copywriters I know have backgrounds in sales and customer service, the very best are psychologists.

Just like data and analytics, professional-standard copy is now essential. 59% of people wouldn’t trust a company with sloppy grammar and spelling in their marketing. That rises to 82% if they detect non-fluent English.

On the other hand, optimised content nets huge results:

A well-written blog with strategy behind it could boost lead growth by 126%
Content creation is by far the most effective SEO technique
91% of customers actually want to receive email marketing from brands they buy from

Building on analytics with strong content is the recipe for success. If you’re currently writing your own copy, try applying these industry secrets and see what happens for yourself…

Write for humans

Analytics give you demographic data about who’s interested in your product. Age, location, gender, all useful to know but handier in context.

Use these factoids to create a profile of your ideal customer. One person to whom all your marketing is addressed directly. Name them, give them a job title, decide what newspaper they read.

This gives you several advantages:

You can envision the desires and drives of one person more clearly than you can for a blob of analytics
Influencing a person is much easier than influencing a business. Go in with this mindset and conversions will increase
Feedback is a doddle; find a real person who matches your imagined ideal audience and ask them what they think of your copy

A client once asked me to review a Merc C63, a car I had never so much as sat in. I can’t even drive. But I googled some stats and imagined I was writing for, to, and as Jeremy Clarkson. The client and his customers loved the review, the cars got sold.

Be upfront with your message

Your audience is busy. They’re being bombarded by thousands of marketing messages every day. If you have something to say that’s of value to them, say it right away.

This is true for all copy but especially titles. Analytics will furnish you with juicy stats about who’s using your product which you can use as social proof to attract more like them:

3,000 office managers are serving better coffee
76% of new mums are enjoying a better night’s sleep

Likewise, you’ll know the quantifiable impact your product has from testing:

Cut your gas bill by 20% with a smarter smart meter
Build 15% more muscle in 90 minutes

This is what people want to know immediately: what’s in it for me? You have the data to give them that answer.

Put your most gripping information right at the top of the page, before the reader even has to scroll. Newspapers call this ‘above the fold,’ high-value real estate where readers engage without lifting a finger.

The NHS website is particularly good at this. Their page on stomach aches gives no preamble, no intro on what a stomach ache is, just what you need to know in the immediate moment: it’s probably just wind.

Choose clearer website copywriting

In a marketplace saturated with data, it can be tempting to throw everything you’ve got at the customer and hope something will stick. Surely if one big stat doesn’t wow them, the next three might?

Maybe. Or maybe a wall of numbers will chase them away, into the waiting arms of the competition who played things a little cooler.

Instead, take one or two key insights per message and ease them naturally into the copy.

When laying it all out, keep paragraphs short, no longer than three or four lines max. Use bullet points to break up long lists. Clarity, both in content and structure, makes sure your message sinks more easily into the reader’s mind.

It’s also vital to stress the importance of plain English over technical jargon. Even in cutting-edge industries, the desire for plain language increases in line with the reader’s level of education and expertise.

Don’t be tempted into using every convoluted industry buzzword you know in an attempt to impress the reader. You’re more likely to bore them.

Recap: write to sell

So there you have three things you can immediately do to improve your content marketing:

Defining a clear audience profile
Front-loading key information
Breaking down your message

Above all else, don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and test different approaches.

Only trial and error, backed by analytics and intimate knowledge of your industry, can produce marketing that hits the spot every time.

How Small Business Owners Can Acquire Assets To Grow Their Business

The Status Quo of Growing Your Business

Why Perform Growth Through Acquisitions?

What Kind of Assets Can You Acquire?

Blogs and Niche Websites

Social Media Profiles

Lead Generation Sites

Ecommerce Businesses

SaaS Businesses

Aged and Branded Domains

How to Find These Assets

Public Marketplaces

Private Brokers

Private Sellers through Outreach

6 Things to Watch Out For

1. Have a Long-Term Strategy

2. Perform Due Diligence

3. Ensure the Asset Integrates with Your Workflow

4. Sign a Sales Contract Laying Out the Terms

5. Don’t Overpay

6. Use an Escrow Account

Actionable Takeaways

1. Have something cool to share in collaboration outreach

Shoot For Radical Differentiation For A Successful Collaboration Outreach

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

Your email box

Backlinking and Journalist Tools

Social media

Google Search

3. Stand Out with Your Messaging

4. Don’t Give Up and Follow Up

Natalya BucuyContent Marketer at HelpSquad

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

What do SEO and PPC stand for?

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

The positioning on the SERP (Search Engine Results Page)

The goal for both search channels

The time frame

The sort of visitors you will bring to the site

How SEO and PPC work together

Getting greater target audience insights

Increased brand awareness

Testing what works and using it in your SEO efforts

Does PPC affect SEO?

What are the pros and cons of SEO and PPC?

SEO: Pros

SEO: Cons

PPC: Pros

PPC: Cons

So, which is better overall?

What’s a Good Click-Through Rate (CTR) for Facebook Ads?

What is the Average CTR for a Facebook Ad?

What Does a Good Facebook Ad CTR Look Like?

How Do I Get a Good Facebook Ads CTR?

What is Digital PR?

Digital PR and SEO: how are they linked?

What are the benefits of Digital PR?

Digital PR and outreach

What is ‘newsjacking’?

How does data tie into digital PR?

How to improve the success of your digital PR campaigns

How is the success of digital PR measured?

Digital PR for startups

How to use Answer the Public to boost your SEO

What is Answer the Public?

Is Answer the Public free?

Looking for help with generating more sales leads?

How does Answer the Public work?

Using Answer the Public for SEO

Natalya Bucuy
Content Marketer at HelpSquad