“This page just won’t load. I’m done.” You think to yourself. 

If you’re like most people, then you might move to another website if the website you’re trying to access keeps slowing down when it loads content onto your screen. That’s because in a fast-paced world like in the 21st Century, people are looking for quick and easy things to do and use. In psychology, this is often referred to as the desire for  instant gratification. If you’re a brand or business looking to expand your brand, then you will need to tap into your consumer’ bases mindset. This mindset includes wanting things that are quick and easy to use. 

To help you understand how to measure how quick and easy your website is to use, in this article, we’ll talk about Core Web Vitals. We’ll also talk about why they’re so important or should be important in your digital marketing strategy. Keep reading for more information on this key marketing metric system. 

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are aspects of your website that Google looks for when it comes to overall user experience. These Core Web Vitals are markers of how your pages are doing based on user data. 

Core Web Vitals are important because they can improve exposure to your brand or business, as well as raising awareness of your brand or business.  These Vitals are also important because they can help you figure out what’s working and what’s not. We’ll share more about why Core Web Vitals matter later on in this article. 

What are the 3 Core Web Vitals

There are three types of Core Web Vitals:

• Content load speed: this is how quickly your content shows up on the user’s screen. This is also called “Largest Contentful Paint” (LCP). LCP can be rated. LCP includes both text and media content. An example of this is how if a user clicks on a page and is waiting for the page to load. 
• Interactivity: Interactivity is also called First Input Delay (FID). This FID is how long it takes for a user to undertake an action and for the page to complete that action. For example, if a user is trying to download a whitepaper, FID would measure this. 
• Visual Stability: Visual Stability is also called Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). This measures how stable the page is once it loads. An example of poor CLS is if images and texts move to different areas of the page once they’ve loaded. 

2  Reasons why Core Web Vitals are important

Core Web Vitals matter for a variety of reasons. Here are just some of those reasons.

1. Core Web Vitals measure how easy or difficult it is for a user to use your website

A user should be able to easily use your website. If your website is hard to use, then it’s unlikely that the user will stay on the page for a long time. They may then go to another website that provides the same service but with better website functionality. For example, if it takes a long time for the page to load, then the user might just move on to another website. Likewise, a user may move to another website if the content looks disorganized due to lack of visual stability or what’s called CLS. 

2. Core Web Vitals are important if you want your user to become a consumer

As a brand, your ultimate goal is to help your user understand the benefits of your service. If a user feels like your content lacks coherence and that your website is difficult to navigate or use, then they may not want to be a consumer. Think of traditional forms of marketing: if a flyer looks sloppy and is difficult to read, then potential customers might see this flyer’s sloppiness as evidence of your brand’s lack of organization. 

Performance Driven Marketing has the tools and knowledge to to help you

If you’re looking to expand your brand or business, consider reaching out to us at Performance Driven Marketing (PDM). We can help you set up your website so that you’re aware of how different pages are performing. We’ll also help you with:

• Providing high quality content
• Understand how your pages are performing
• Create a marketing strategy that will work for you and your brand

Our ultimate goal at PDM is to help you expand your brand. We would also like to help you gain more visibility and clients. Reach out to us at 801-326-0582. You can also contact us here.  We would love to hear from you!

 

As Gary Vaynerchuk says, “Content is king.” What this means is that in your overall digital marketing strategy, content is what helps attract potential clients to you. Content is also the norm in the 21st Century’s movement to a more targeted marketing strategy. Content is also what helps you increase and improve on many aspects of your marketing strategy. In this article, we share 4 reasons why content is important in digital marketing. 

Content Marketing–A Growing Trend in the 21st Century

Content marketing is growing in popularity because of all that it can do to help you increase your clientele. Content ranges from website pages, white pages, to blog content. Content is short form and long form. So, to help you understand just what content marketing can do for you, we share 4 reasons why content is king in digital marketing.

1. Share your brand or business’s story

As Gary Vaynerchuk writes in Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy World, “The incredible brand awareness and bottom-line profits achievable through social media marketing require hustle, heart, sincerity, constant engagement, long-term commitment, and most all, artful and strategic storytelling.” What this means is that most potential clients or consumers are interested in your story. By story, we mean:

• What your business or organization does
• What makes your business or organization different from others
• Why the potential client or consumer should care/what you can do for the client or consumer

Sharing your brand or business story can happen through your website’s pages. It can also happen in your blog posts and email marketing. Remember, human’s like a human and personalized touch to things that may seem impersonal. They also want to know what sets you apart from others and why they should care about your business or organization. 

2. Connect with your audience

Another reason why content is so important to your business is because it can help you connect with your audience. For example, by tracking which type of content is getting the most views and generating the most interest, you’ll be able to find out what type of audience you’re getting with. You’ll be able to find out:

• The demographics of your audience
• The type of content they’re interested in
• How to produce more of that content so that you can improve your digital marketing strategy.

Connecting with your audience can help you refine your content marketing strategy. That’s because one of your goals as a business or organization is to generate potential clients or consumers. Knowing what they’re interested in and what they’re like can greatly help you connect with them. 

3. Drive traffic which can help with more conversions

Connecting with your audience also helps you drive traffic to your website. Traffic to your website helps with exposure to what your business does and what makes your business unique. Think of traditional marketing strategies of passing out flyers. The point in passing out flyers isn’t just to gain potential customers who love everything about your business, it’s also about increasing the exposure your business has. You want as many people as possible to know about your business or organization. 

Having an organization or business that is well-known can also help you convert potential clients or customers into actual clients and customers. The more people that know about you, the more likely you have more customers and clients. 

4. Build your credibility with useful content

Finally, sharing useful information can help you build your credibility. If you want to be recognized as a leader or expert in your field, then you need to be sharing content that addresses your potential clients’ answers or problems. For example, instead of only creating content that tries to sell your business, you should also create content that can help a client with questions or problems related to your field. This helps establish your credibility since you’re not just trying to sell; you’re also trying to engage with your audience. Think of how useful content can help with Google rankings (we’ll say more about this in another article), reviews, and your overall marketing strategy.

Performance Driven Marketing–Quality Content That Engages Your Audience

If you’re looking for quality content that engages your audience, then you should consider Performance Driven Marketing (PDM). At PDM, we can help you with:

• Long and short form content
• Website content
• Blogs
• And so much more.

Our goal is to help you produce content that is both useful and interesting to your audience.  We can also help you create content that drives more traffic to your website, thereby increasing the level of exposure to your business or organization. We can also help you find and convert potential customers into actual customers. 

Reach out to us at 801-326-0582 for more information. We would be happy to address any questions or concerns you have! 

Since the start of the early 2000s, social media has continued to rise and become one of the most profitable marketing methods for businesses. Social media gives companies direct access to their target market and can create stronger relationships with those customers. With nearly three-quarters of Americans actively using social media monthly, it is vital to have it become part of your marketing strategy.

Create a Solid Social Media Strategy

Before you start posting on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, you must take the time to plan out the social media strategy. Take the time to ask yourself the following questions:

1. What is our target audience seeking on social media platforms?
2. Do we have an existing social media strategy? Have we seen any results?
3. What are our goals for social media marketing?
4. Can we effectively manage multiple social media channels?
5. What are our competitors doing on social media?

Create a social media calendar to push content to the correct social media platforms for proper engagement.

SEO Pro Tip: Use the 80-20 rule for social media marketing. 80% of content to entertain, inform, and educate—20% for brand and product promotion.

Define Social Media Platforms

It is important to take time to define your target audience by understanding where they spend their time. Are your customers primarily on TikTok, or do they spend all day on Twitter or Instagram? The more you know about their social media patterns, the easier it will be to spend most of your time on those social platforms instead.

SEO Pro Tip: Use this helpful social media Audit tool from Hootsuite to evaluate your social media strength.

Find Your Audience

Social media marketing strategies can be successful when you are capable of finding your audience. Start by reviewing the analytics on your website. Find out which platforms they are on the most and go to the social media site’s analytics. Create a marketing strategy that helps to link the two interests to bring in a new audience.

Test Your Advertising

To learn what works for your customers, start by testing different ads on social media platforms. The majority of businesses turn to Facebook for a direct advertising method while Instagram is centered more on “relationship marketing” to strengthen the brand’s image and generate interest.

If you want to see results for a local business, target the local conversations. Facebook groups provide information focused on connecting local customers to local businesses. Look for discussions that pertain to your customers so you can build a more substantial community presence.

Maintaining a strong local presence will expand the trust and loyalty for the company. The higher the interaction rate on social media, the higher your account will appear in the social media search algorithms. Relationship marketing leads to sales over time, based on reputation and trust.

Find the Influencers

Another way to build your following, reputation, and overall visibility is learning who influences your customers on social media. Who do people trust? Why do they follow this influencer? How can you connect with this individual and ask them to promote your product or service?

Instagram influencers often make upwards of $1,000 a post. The micro-influencers assist in establishing brand trust and do not cost as much as the more significant influencers.

Make It Visual

The world today is centered around color. Compelling visuals make for a great way to catch the eye of your target audience. People have come to expect things to be visual and often ignore the posts that are not. Social media networks are all visually-driven. Take a moment to review the top five posts on your feed, how many of those are compelling enough to look at?

Memes are a great way to gain some visual attraction. Start by testing visual posts with older posts by updating them with a new image and seeing how many unique views they receive. The more you watch these trends, the easier it is to see how vital visual posting is for social media.

Use photos to tell a story to your customers. Share the stories of your employees hard at work. Giving your customers a face to connect to names they interact with builds stronger customer relationships.

Social Media Focus Must Be Engaging

Do not just post to post; always look for ways to post something that engages your audience. Do the posts offer value to your customers? If you only post to sell something, you aren’t going to keep your audience motivated. Social media platforms are built upon the foundation of relationships. Look to social media to foster new relationships and strengthen the relationships you already have with your target audience. Posting great content is key to winning on social media.

Respond to Comments and Messages

People have come to expect companies to use social media as their direct source to speak to the company. You must acknowledge when people are commenting and when they send you messages. Respond to comments in the right way and when it is appropriate. Social listening is one of the most critical elements of social media users.

Use Content Scheduling Tools

A great way to free up your time is to use tools like Hootsuite to manage social media. On Hootsuite, you can manage several channels at the same time by planning using the content calendar. A content calendar automates social media marketing and will post the information on the day you choose and with the image and content, you create.

Review and Change Often

Just like the search engine algorithms, social media is always changing. It is important to keep up with the latest information on how to manage social media correctly. Understand how to use new and emerging social media platforms. TikTok is one of the hottest social media platforms in 2020, but not too many small businesses can understand how to use it within their social media marketing tools. Hiring someone with the knowledge and experience with TikTok and emerging apps and tools can help keep your business in the know when it comes to social media.

Social media can drastically alter the way your company connects with your audience. Join Performance Driven Marketing on Tuesday, September 2 to find out how you can empower yourself to drive social media forward for your business!

Google recently rolled out their newest update, which they say is the biggest update in the last 5 years. Google Search is designed to provide the most relevant, helpful results for users and this update is a significant step toward improving these results. BERT is an update that will change the way Google handles queries to provide more useful information. Google’s blog post about BERT lists several before and after examples describing how BERT has ultimately made the search engine results more effective and applicable. If you haven’t yet heard about BERT, now is the time to learn what BERT is and how it might impact your business, as well as your search results.

What is BERT?

BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. It is a form of AI that helps Google to provide better search results by analyzing the relationship between words and their overall context. This is likely one of the most impactful forms of NLP (natural language processing) and is designed to provide more accurate results for more complex search terms. This comes from the idea that users aren’t turning to search engines to find keywords and are more likely to perform searches using a more natural form of language. In most cases, people use search engines to answer a specific question. Before BERT, the search would focus primarily on the keywords, which may bring up results that don’t necessarily pertain to the question. Google says that BERT will improve 1 in every 10 English-language searches, providing better results for 10% of all English queries.

BERT Explained

If a Google user wants to answer a specific question, they are likely to enter that question into the search engine, particularly when using a voice-to-text approach. Users will ask their smart devices the question, rather than simply stating keywords. Prior to BERT, the complexities of some questions would often be ignored, as the search engine didn’t have the tools to analyze the context. Google cites an example where asking for visa information from Brazil to USA would bring up information for US citizens traveling to Brazil. In this example, the “to” is important, but the search engine disregarded the context. BERT is designed to reduce this problem, as it examines the words before and after the main word to more accurately find results. Therefore, in this example, the search results after BERT was implemented brought up information about the Brazilian Embassy in the United States.

In addition to disregarding words that change the meaning of the phrase, Google searches also had difficulty differentiating between words with multiple meanings. There are many words in the English language that have multiple meanings that were previously not differentiated between in Google searches. For example, “rose” can mean a flower or can be a physical movement. “Right” may refer to a direction, a correct answer, or a moral opinion. By analyzing all of the words of the search phrase, BERT brings up results that more effectively answer the original question and pertain to the intended meaning of the word. It can also use synonyms of words to provide effective, accurate results. BERT has currently been released primarily for English searches, as well as a few other languages and locales that use snippets, but will be released for other languages over time.

What Does BERT Mean for SEO?

Ultimately, BERT probably won’t impact SEO a huge amount. It is designed to provide effective search results for more complex phrases, so it likely won’t disrupt keyword rankings in any significant manner. Websites that contain vast amounts of useful information will be found more often than they were previously, while their counterparts with poorly explained or written information will come up in searches less frequently. Text that is mainly keyword stuffing and doesn’t contain any particularly beneficial information will be hurt by this update, but keyword stuffing is already rather heavily penalized by Google’s algorithms. Due to the short time that BERT has been out, it is difficult to gauge just how much of an impact it will have on Google searches, so it may be particularly beneficial to keep an eye on your website’s analytics for the next short while.

Can you Optimize your Website for BERT?

There’s not really any way to optimize a website for BERT. BERT is designed to provide better results for unique phrases that are based on the way an individual would speak naturally. These phrases can’t really be predicted, which means that you can’t use these phrases to optimize your website. Adding regular, useful content for readers is really the only way to take advantage of BERT’s algorithms. This is also a basic component of good SEO practices, so it shouldn’t impact your website too severely. It is important to note that this content needs to be written in natural language to maximize its benefits.

Consult with a Professional

Google is constantly improving and evolving to best meet the demands of their users. For this reason, it can be difficult to keep your website up to date with all of the newest SEO strategies. Not only will you have to invest the time in learning about the new strategies, but you will then have to implement the changes to your website. Hiring a professional SEO specialist can go a long way toward optimizing your website without sacrificing significant amounts of your time. There are many components of a website that help it to be found by relevant consumers. It is important to maintain a blog with frequently added content to provide useful information to your customers. Other things may also impact your website’s SEO ranking, like your website’s responsiveness or mobile functionality.

If you’re struggling with your company’s website, it might be time to consult with an expert. Here at Performance Driven Marketing, we strive to provide you with the tools you need to thrive and obtain success for your business. To learn more about how our internet marketing solutions can benefit your business, contact our experts at 801-326-0582.

Now that we are half-way through 2019, it’s time to look over the changes in the SEO world. What is important to Google, and how can you make sure your website is meeting the Google requirements. Google has spent a great deal of time focusing on mobile and speeding up websites. At Performance Driven Marketing, we provide our customers with monthly insights into website performance, and always focus on improving the user experience. Having a fast, effective website is one of the most important elements to boosting your search engine rankings. Let’s take a look at some of the other elements that contribute to your Google ranking.

Mobile-first indexing

One element you must understand is how Google uses the mobile version of websites to provide ranking and indexing results. A mobile-first index result means Google is considering how well your website provides functionality to the user. Contact us for a free website evaluation to ensure your website is mobile-friendly, and working effectively to attract your core audience.

*PDM Tip – Use our website auditing tool to find out how the search engine spiders see your mobile pages, and to focus on improving certain elements to meet Google requirements.

Our reports will show a complete analysis of your website, and will show the mobile analysis you need to understand in order to ensure your website is meeting the right requirements.

We will also provide a task list of items you can follow in order to update your website, and meet the Google requirements.

Optimization and Speed

Google has also focused extensively on optimization and speed. Speed score reflects how your website loads for each website visitor. Fixing the issues that are preventing your website from being able to load quickly will improve your website ranking. Effective optimization is what matters the most when it comes to improving the rankings. Fortunately there is a list of recommendations from Google that will help you effectively optimize your website. Here are some of the areas where you need to get started:

Build Your Brand

Branding your business in an effective manner is vital to your online results. Using your brand as a ranking signal means you want to have brand mentions. What Google is looking for is the good and the bad, and trying to provide search engine results that show the good. Trust, reputation, complaint-solving, and advertising are all key components to brand building. How can you build your brand? Here are a few suggestions from Google:

• Backlinks – Focus on white-hat backlinking to help your website. What this means is you want to search for brand name mentions in a natural way.
• Reputation management – track your online reputation to know what people are saying about your business. Engage with your satisfied clients, and make sure you are recognizing your customers on social networks.

The search engines are always changing, and being updated. Anyone dealing with strict time-constraints knows how difficult it can be to try and work on your website and online marketing. If you need help with your online marketing efforts, give us a call. Our expert team creates custom solutions based on your business needs, and we do not handcuff you into a contract!