What is actually the individual quest in Search Engine Optimization?

You’ll probably have heard the term user journey a lot, but what is it exactly? And what does it have to do with SEO? The user journey consists of all the steps a user takes to reach their goal. In buying something, the user journey includes steps like reading reviews, checking prices, comparing shops etc. In SEO, you can map out the user journey and place content on all the points a user comes into contact with you. Let’s take a look.

Your user journey: how do you purchase a product?

The concept of the user journey becomes instantly clear when you are looking to buy something. Let’s say you want to buy a new tv — your 15-year old 42 inch LCD tv doesn’t cut it anymore. You do research and ask yourself some questions: how big should it be? Which screen technology? What about 4k or maybe 8k for future-proofing? Do my friends have any advice? Which shops can I go to to see some screens in action? You go through a whole lot of steps before you are ready to pull the trigger on a new tv.

That proces, from the moment you realise you need a new tv to the moment you turn on the new tv in your home — and even after that fact — is called the user journey. As an eCommerce store selling tv’s you need to know how a user might get from A to Z and prepare useful content for the moments when that user might need that content.

Now, you might think that you can simply think about which steps a user might take in any given situation and put that on some kind of timeline. Well, it’s more complicated than that. If you think about it, your process of buying something might differ completely from someone else’s. You can’t force everyone to follow the same path.

In addition, the user journey is hardly ever a straight line, more often, it’s a squiggly line moving in all directions. Users go from awareness, to research, to checking prices, to research, to talking to friends about it et cetera. Eventually, the user makes a decision — some users take hours, other months.

This also goes for how people behave on websites. They hardly ever arrive neatly via the homepage only to follow the path you want them to follow. In different stages of the journey, people need different kinds of information and they will, therefore, enter your site via different pages — probably the one buried deep in your site. After that, they can move in any kind of direction. That means that every page on a site needs to consider multiple user journeys, and act as a landing page. You can’t assume that there’s a linear/predictable flow through a site.

Mapping the user journey makes it easier for users to find what they need to come to a decision. For site owners, it offers a helpful guide to where what kind of content should be to help speed up this decision making process.

Classic marketing still applies

Thinking about user journeys automatically lets you think about all those classic marketing funnels. The AIDA model — over a hundred years old —, for instance, is a good fit for making user journeys insightful. AIDA stands for:

Attention: get your potential consumer to notice youInterest: find a way to hold that attention to build interestDesire: persuade the consumer to make them want your product/serviceAction: get the consumer to make that conversion 

AIDA is often appended with another letter, the S for Satisfaction — or the R for Retention. This is where you keep your customer once that sale is done, be it in excellent customer service or guiding him or her to their next purchase. You have to try and get some kind of loyalty. For many things, you don’t want to simply convert a sale, but also a customer for life and a champion of your brand. 

Mapping the user journey helps structure the process

Mapping the user journey helps you make sense of what you need to do to turn that potential customer into a loyal returning one. Once you start researching, you’ll probably find a number of holes in your strategy or thought-process. You’ll have missed a couple of entry points and discover thinking that hadn’t occurred to you. Once you find this, you’ll also notice that there is a lot of content missing that should have helped potential customers in their journey towards you.

Mapping done well, you’ll have a solid story for your customer’s process and a guide that helps you take away all pain points.

How to map out a user journey?

The most important thing for mapping a user journey is getting inside the potential customer’s mind. These are the people doing the travelling and they know what they do to get somewhere. Don’t think you can make up stuff by yourself or your marketing team. Talk to people! Also find out what they’re saying on forums and social media like reddit.

What journey does the user take to get to your solution? (c) Rosenfeld Media

Mapping a user journey can sometimes feel like releasing the kraken — it can become unwieldy, like something with a lot of tentacles. It is, therefore, a good idea to limit the scope somewhat. Set clear objectives, know when a task ends and don’t try to fit everything you do into one user journey. Research specific tasks for specific people and go from there. 

Define scope 

Before you start, you need to have the basics questions answered. Who are you? What is your mission? Which problems does your product or service solve? Who is your audience or who do you think your audience is? Know yourself before you jump into a research project with the wrong knowledge.

With that out of the way, it is often a good idea to make a high-level overview of what you want to achieve. Consider how you think the user will behave on this particular journey. Don’t go into detail, but simply make a quick visualisation of the process — this helps you to define the scope of the user journey. Keep in mind, you won’t know the exact user journey until you do the research. Don’t stick to these assumptions, please.

By mapping out a journey from A to Z, you get everything and the kitchen sink but that’s probably not what you need. It’s often better to focus on a sub-journey powered by a specific scenario. This makes it easier to develop, maintain and improve. 

For instance, if you offer SEO training courses, you might want to map a journey for people unaware of SEO that encompasses everything from becoming aware of the plusses of SEO to learning of SEO courses to finding your specific SEO course. That’s a whole lotta journey, so to say. In this case, you could make a high-level overview and fill these in with more detailed sub-journeys. That makes creating and mapping content to them easier as well.

In addition, it is good to think about who you are targeting. Are you targeting everyone? Probably not! By narrowing down the user profiles, you can get more specific in your journeys. This way, you can take the experiences of a user, for instance, into account. 

Start researching what you have

If you’ve been in business for a while, it might be that you’ve done a lot of user research already — both qualitative and quantitative data. Maybe you know your customers inside out. Have you interviewed customers, cool! Asked them how they use your newsletter? Nice. Got a whole bunch of keyword research sheets? Awesome. Did eye tracking tests on your new website? Epic. Go over every bit of research you have done and collect the most valuable insights that can help advance the development of the user journey. 

Take special note of your keyword research. If you haven’t done keyword research properly, you need to get to it. Search volumes and popularity of certain phrases can be helpful insight into what people want/need, and you can react accordingly. In addition, looking at the kinds of sites which rank for those keywords is useful. If the results for a particular keyword are mostly informational, for example, it’s probably worth considering that those searches are from people early on / in research phases, and your content/ui/etc should react accordingly.

Determine what you need

Once you’ve pored over the available research, you get an idea of what you need to form a full picture of your user/customer. You might notice a couple of patches that haven’t been discussed or questions that haven’t been asked by your customer. Make lists of all the questions you still need to answer before you know to fill in the user journey. Don’t assume anything. Don’t fill in the gaps yourself before doing the research.

Perform your research

It’s time to fill in the gaps. Once you’ve written your research plan, you can start your research. To get a good grasp on the way users are behaving, you can use all kinds of ways to get those answers:

Conduct customer interviews with specific questionsDirect observationsField studiesCompetitive analysis

You can combine these qualitative insights with quantitative insights, from survey data, Google Analytics, sentiment analysis et cetera. 

Structure the results

Once you’ve gathered all the data, you can start structuring the results. How you do this is up to you, but you could use the following buckets to structure your data and the user’s thoughts and expectations.

Actions: which steps does a user take to advance the journey?Motivations: how do they feel about the process?Questions: which questions do users ask themselves while trying to advance the journey?Obstacles: what stops them from advancing?

Combined, you’ll get a clear sense of the user journey. In addition, you’ll also get an idea of the obstacles you need to take down to help the user progress without too much friction. 

Visualize the results

The most recognisable part of the user journey is the visual that supports it. User journey visualizations come in all shapes and sizes. Pick one that you can understand and that fits what you want to achieve. Here are a couple of examples:

Here’s an example by NN Group »

A more complex one by Columbia Road »

Or this one by GatherContent »

Once you’ve built up the user journey, it’s a good idea to try it for yourself. Maybe even let real customers or users do the journey. Ask them if it seems logical? Do the steps jump around? Maybe it’s too narrow or too broad? This all helps to validate the journey and take out any assumptions you might have made.

Map content to journey touchpoint

Now, you’ll have the full scope of the user journey in focus, so you’ll notice all the points where a user or customers comes into contact with you or your product. These so-called touch points are great entrance points for high-quality, and extremely relevant content that answers all the questions the user has at that particular moment in the user journey.

It’s time to start mapping your content to these specific touch points. We’ll explain how to do that in another post. While thinking about your content, keep the old AIDA model in your mind: how do you get attending and arouse interest? And once you have that, how do you get people from visitors to customers — and keep them there? 

SEO is only part of the user journey

The user journey contains, more often than not, almost everything you do as a company. If you want to successfully help a potential customer from A to Z, you need to have everything in order. As users often start their journey by typing a query in a search bar, SEO plays an important role to get them relevant content when they need it. SEO, however, is merely a part of the machinery that forms a successful journey.

This probably goes without saying, but your product or service should be truly valuable and good. There’s no sense in getting people to try a subpar product. Marketing 101, right? The same goes for your branding. It has to be recognisable, genuine, unique and befitting of your company. Your site has to be technically awesome, filled with relevant content and looking incredible and trustworthy. The user experience should be stellar. Practice holistic SEO!

The consumer experience should be impeccable as well. Your potential customer is going to do a lot of research, both online as well as offline. So make sure that your companies profiles are well-tended. Get those five star online reviews and respond to the negative ones. Have active social media accounts that send out relevant content and respond to users’ questions. 

Also, think about what you are doing offline. Are you running ads anywhere? Sponsoring events? Holding your own event? Think about ways to get into the minds of people without having to resort to the internet. Many people will want to form a good picture of how you are, what you do and if you are deserving of their money, so to say.

primer on user journeys for SEO

This post gives you a solid overview of the use of user journeys for SEO. User journeys help you make sense of how users behave and they help you produce relevant content that answers questions and converts. Even if you don’t launch a full scale research project for this, thinking about how a user behaves and maybe even talking to a couple of them gives you great insights that might further your business. 

The post What is the user journey in SEO? appeared first on Yoast.

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9 Essential Stages for Every B2B Pipeline

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Welcome to the 2020 sales process where every single customer or sales initiated action is examined, scrutinized and obsessed over by sales people, sales managers, sales operation people and senior management. Like everything else in the world today, sales stages are much more granular, objective and should be more accurate than ever before.

Your CRM is the oxygen for a sales team’s life (HubSpot has a good, modern CRM and its free) but one of the most important aspects of your CRM that gets a lot of scrutiny is your deal pipeline. The purpose of the pipeline is to correctly project your monthly or quarterly results based on how deals move through a standard process.

As recently as 2015, a sales pipeline was a rudimentary look at your ability to meet or exceed your quota on an aggregate basis. It was typically a pain to manage, lacked essential detailed information and was essentially a time tax on a salesperson that added little value to their production.

Most legacy B2B pipelines had the following stages:

• Lead generated — (also known as lead assigned) defined a lead that met basic criteria of a contact who had interest into the product or service.
• Meeting scheduled — typically referred to a scheduled introductory meeting where a salesperson would qualify the prospect and determine if they were worth pursuing. The ideal outcome of an introductory meeting was a product demo.
• Demo completed — an opportunity for the salesperson to show the capabilities of the product.
• Request for quote — typically indicated that the prospect was requesting pricing information to potentially make a purchase.
• Proposal sent — a proposal or price quote was configured, produced, and sent to the prospect for consideration.
• Negotiation — the process of coming to an agreement on the price for the offer.
• Closed-lost or closed-won — indicated the outcome of the deal.

Fast forward to 2020, and a good B2B sales pipeline is more than a simple process diagram and deal outline that tracks a deal status. A modern B2B sales pipeline is a treasure trove of data to model and improve, providing insights that are critical to performance.

B2B Sales Pipeline

The sales pipeline can help senior management teams understand the health of the overall business, identify potential issues on a segment by segment basis and can serve as an early warning system for potential weakness in a region or product. For the modern sales manager or director, a good B2B sales pipeline can provide insightful data to improve team performance, support effective coaching, identify weak points in individual rep behavior and ensure best practices throughout the entire segment.

For the modern salesperson, a B2B sales pipeline is your scorecard to achievement and can identify critical conversion ratio information, identify specific skills improvement opportunities, and benchmark individual performance to industry standards and against best in class.

A modern B2B pipeline should be updated automatically with technology that sets the appropriate stage via defined criteria (Sales Hub is a great tool for this). Let’s review the standard stages of a modern B2B sales pipeline.

1. Identify lead and lead type.

So you have a steady stream of contacts on your radar — but how do you know if they’re ready for the sale? Here are the different types of contacts you are most likely to encounter during the sales process.

• Suspect — a company in your database that fits your ideal customer profile and has the potential to buy your product or service.
• Prospect — a contact at a suspect company who has a need and may be searching for a solution sometime in the next 12-24 months.
• Lead — a prospect that has taken an action or responded to a marketing or sales campaign and shows some level of interest in your product. There are multiple types of leads:
• INBOUND leads — leads that convert on your website.
• MQL or SQL leads — Marketing Qualified Leads or Sales Qualified Leads; typically have certain characteristics that would define additional sales follow up.
• Warm call or prospective leads — leads that are a good fit but have not taken action on your website or other inbound channels.
• Target account leads — leads in specific targeted accounts.
• Friends and family leads — leads you encounter from within your network.
• Event leads — leads you meet during a trade show or industry event.
• Referral leads — leads from current customers.
• Closed-lost or ghosted leads — previous customers or opportunities that have gone cold.

Different types of leads typically have different characteristics and close at different rates based on their defining characteristics. Successfully identifying what kind of lead you’re working with is a critical first step.

2. Connect call.

Once you identify a lead and a lead type, it’s time to set up a connect call. This typically entails a 10-15 minute introductory call where the salesperson asks some basic questions to get a better understanding of what problem the client is looking to solve. The goal of this call is to gather pertinent information that will help you navigate the remainder of the sales process. Your goal here is not to jump straight to solution-mode. Instead, you want to come from a place of curiosity to understand your lead’s situation and to begin building trust.

3. Discovery call.

Next time you talk to your prospect, hop on a discovery call. A discovery call is a 25 to 50-minute question and answer period where the salesperson where you can dive deeper with your prospect.

During this call, you should aim to discuss your prospect’s goals, challenges, timeline, authority level, market landscape, and sense of urgency. This information will help you understand exactly what they’re facing in their business and to determine if there is an opportunity to work together.

4. Opportunity stage.

This is usually the first time a dollar value can be ascribed to a deal stage based on the information discussed in the discovery call. Where the previous stages are important for tracking, the opportunity stage is where you begin forming the deal.

Through the opportunity stage, you should learn the following information: who the prospect is currently buying from (if they have a vendor), three solid reasons they would buy from you, three reasons they may choose not to buy from you, and who the economic decision maker is for this sale.

With this data, you can determine how likely you are to secure a closed-won deal.

5. Conduct a demo.

Most prospects like to see the product in action before purchasing, so scheduling a demo may improve the odds of closing a deal and is an appropriate deal stage. After conducting your demo, you can have a variety of outcomes including:

• Demo complete — refers to a situation where the demo was given and the prospect decides not to continue the sales process.
• Second demo — the prospect has expressed interest after seeing the product and would like to review more features. In many enterprise opportunities, multiple product demonstrations are required.

6. Influencer buy-in.

During this stage, the prospect recognizes the value and expects their company to purchase the product in the future, but may not be the economic decision maker who signs off on the purchase.

In this case, buy-in from the decision maker is needed to proceed. Ask your contact who they are, what their stake is, where they have pain points, and prepare to proactively address those matters.

7. Decision maker buy-in.

After gaining consensus to move forward by the influencer, economic decision maker, and executive sponsor, the deal can move to the negotiation stage to finalize the price and necessary agreements.

8. Negotiation.

While a deal is under negotiation, the prospective company’s legal team typically steps in to assist with contractual obligations. This is when the final price and terms are agreed upon and signed off from all parties involved.

Don’t let your contact go dark during negotiation. Check in at regular intervals to find out which direction things are headed in so any turn towards a “no” doesn’t head too far in that negative direction without a chance for you to turn it around.

9. Closed-lost or closed-won.

If the deal is set to go through, the prospect can then fulfill payment indicating a closed-won deal. They can then begin the onboarding process to begin using the product. With business won you need to deliver on your promises — excellent products, great customer service, and ongoing support. Whatever was in your proposal, do that and more, and your one new customer will multiply as they refer business your way.

In a closed-lost deal, the prospect can decline the final offer and either opt for a competitor or decide to not purchase the product. However, if a deal is closed-lost, don’t write a lost opportunity off for good.

Circumstances and needs change, so think of ways you can stay top-of-mind without getting in the way. Ask for feedback on why you didn’t close their business, then use that to guide your follow up. Perhaps in several months you’ll add a new product or feature that fulfills one of their buying criteria. You should also use your CRM to stay in contact with relevant, periodic, useful content via social media or email to maintain the relationship.

Both sales reps and prospects benefit from a well-defined process. And when we skip the jargon, keep it fun, and think of our B2B customers as people with emotional drivers and needs, that process becomes all the more successful.

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Pricing your Product: 5 Key Steps to Finding the Sweet Spot

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Pricing a product is like baking cookies for your kid’s second grade class. In this case, their classmates will only eat cookies within a certain range of crispiness — one you don’t have a definitive grasp on. Ideally, every kid in the class will want to eat your cookies, but you realize limitations in resources and variability in preferences make that improbable. So, you have a realistic goal of how many children you’d be happy with feeding.

Sometimes, you’ll only have enough time or oven space to make cookies crispy enough to appeal to a small portion of the class. And the optimal cookie crispy-ness you need to hit your goal might depend, in part, upon external factors that are prone to change — like shortages or surpluses of ingredients and shifts in kids’ preferences.

I’m not too proud to admit there are some holes in that analogy, but it still gives a solid sense of what it’s like to price a product. Honing in on those optimal baking circumstances would be difficult and fluctuate based on an array of circumstances — just like determining an appropriate price-point for your product.

Let’s take a look at some of the factors you need to consider when pricing, how to incorporate those factors into your pricing strategy, and what you’ll need to account for as time goes on when determining prices for your products.

1. Understand your fixed and variable costs.

Cost might be the most fundamental factor in pricing a product. No matter what the industry standards, trends, or competition around your product might be, your objective will always be to make money. In order to do that, you need to know what costs you incur when you produce your product.

Consider your variable costs — the ones that change with your level of output. These could include the prices of packaging, raw materials, or shipping. Also, assign a dollar value to the time you spend on producing your product and factor that in as well. Time is money — know how much yours is worth.

Then, consider your fixed costs — the ones that remain the same no matter what your volume of production is. This could include the rent you pay for your facilities, the costs of any permits your business might need to make your product, or your employees’ fixed salaries.

Take all these costs together to identify what producing your product costs on a monthly or annual basis. Use that figure to understand what it will take to consistently make a profit.

2. Get a feel for your industry and competition.

It’s important to remain mindful of the competition. Find out what people are willing to pay for comparable products and use those industry standards as a reference point. That sets the stage for a process that takes critical thought and self awareness — identifying what differentiates your product from the competition and factoring that into your price.

If you’re looking to sell at a higher price point, be prepared to convince consumers that your product is first-rate. If you’re trying to sell at lower price points, be ready to show prospects they won’t be compromising quality for value if they purchase your product.

If you believe you can pull off one of those kinds of messaging, then price your products higher or lower than your competition. No matter how you plan to price relative to your competitors, always understand where your product stands in its space. That means taking the time and effort to determine both your and your competition’s public perception.

3. Get to know who’s buying.

Every product has a target market. There are specific buyer personas who will be more receptive to what you have to offer than others. These personas will have different interests, sensitivities, values, backgrounds, and — most importantly — purchasing habits. Get to know who’s most inclined to buy your product, and that into consideration when pricing.

Surveys, buyer persona interviews, social media, and several other tools and tactics can be leveraged to get a picture of who you’re appealing to. Understand their priorities. Are they willing to pay more for premium quality? Are they looking for deals? Do you think they’ll be loyal to your brand?

It won’t be easy, and it might take a lot of trial, error, and effort to land on definitive buyer personas to consider when pricing. Still, if you stick with it, you’ll put yourself in the best position possible to hit the optimal price point for your product.

4. Identify a profit margin and a revenue target.

The most attractive, exciting figure when pricing a product is profit. In all likelihood, that’s why your business exists in the first place. After you’ve conducted extensive competitive research, determined your product’s place in your industry, and gotten a feel for who you’re selling to, you’ll come up with an ideal profit margin for your business.

That process can be tough. You have to choose a grounded, realistic figure that still allows you to operate, expand, and live comfortably — a margin you’re both content with and capable of reaching.

Once you have that figure, add it to your estimated fixed and variable costs, and you have a revenue target. After you have that target, it’s relatively easy to figure out how it plays into the overall pricing equation. Estimate how many units of your product you realistically believe you can ship over the next year. Take your annual revenue target and divide it by that number. Now, you have a rough picture of what you have to charge for your product.

5. Be ready for some trial, error, and volatility.

There’s no exact science to pricing a product, so there’s no guarantee you’ll nail it on the first try. You shouldn’t be reluctant to change your price if it’s not working for you. Just make sure you’re consistently running a profit and covering your expenses. Make some tweaks here and there as you go, and you’ll eventually land on that optimal price point.

That being said, there are some potentially volatile scenarios you should always be mindful of. Different, often-shifting external factors can force you to change prices. That could include the volume of product you can ship, your competitors’ prices, the efficacy of your marketing efforts, or the public perception of your product. In all likelihood, your price will be fluid. It will take some testing to get it right, and you might find yourself adjusting it on a consistent basis.

There are a lot of moving parts to consider when pricing your product, including some critical factors that will inevitably be beyond your control. Though there are strategies you can put in place and elements to be mindful of, you might not always have a definitive grasp on what your product should cost. But, if you remain patient and produce the best product you can, you’ll be in a solid position to move as units as possible.

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10 Google.com Ranking Elements You Shouldn’t Dismiss

Even worse, because nobody knows them all, most contain a lot of myths. So today, we’re going to take a different approach. Rather than listing 200+ ranking factors, we’ll talk about the ten that we think most deserve your attention.

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13 Google Analytics Monitoring Mistakes (and How to Deal with Them).

…then you’d probably want to prioritize improving SEO for that page. But what if this data is flawed? There’s a high risk of making bad decisions if you’re blindly relying on the data that you see in Google Analytics. You

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Article structure: How to establish an easy-to-read text

When blogging, it pays dividends to lay out the structure of your piece before you begin writing. The structure is the skeleton of your text and preparing it has multiple benefits. Firstly, it’s easier to write a text when your structure is already there. Secondly, a clear structure helps the reader to easily read your post and grasp the core message. Here, we’ll give you practical tips to help you set up a clear blog post structure.

Why is text structure important for SEO?

Structuring a text well improves readability and, thereby, helps your readers to understand your text. If readers better understand the information you provide, it’s more likely they’ll find the answer to the question they have. When Google notices, by so-called user signals, you’re giving valuable answers to certain queries, chances are you’ll climb the rankings.

Read more: why text structure is important for SEO »

Creating a clear text structure is just one aspect of SEO copywriting. If you want to master all facets, take a look at our SEO copywriting training, which is part of our online SEO training subscription.

How to set up your blog post structure?

Think before you start writing. Get a pen and paper and write down what you want to write about. That could include a bit of keyword research, but ideally, you’ve already done that. Check out our ultimate guide to keyword research for more on this. Next, set up a text structure and keep it close to hand while writing your blog post. One way of setting up a structure for your text is by following these three steps:

Create a list of topicsOnce you’ve gathered all the information you want to use in your post or article, you can begin structuring, so make a list of everything you want your article to cover. For instance, for this post this could be:

Bundle topics togetherWhen you have a clear overview of all the topics you want to discuss in your article, you can start bundling topics. Similar topics should, of course, be discussed together. For this post, this could look like this:

Order your topics When you’re done bundling, you should decide on the order of the topics in your article. In most cases, you can decide to order thematically. For instance, if you want to discuss various aspects or angles of the main topic of your blog post. But you can also order your text chronologically or didactically, as you can see in the order types table below. In the example we’re discussing, ordering topics thematically makes the most sense:

Write a few words about every sub topicAfter you’ve ordered the topics you want to address in your article, you should make a new list. This list essentially is a summary of the article you’re about to write. Write a short sentence or a few words for every paragraph you plan to write. This list serves as the skeleton of your article, and you should keep it close to refer to during the rest of the writing process.

Text order types

Apart from arranging the order of topics according to a theme; you could also order them chronologically or by explaining the basics first and going on to more difficult aspects – known as a didactic order. This is a good idea when you are trying to explain a complicated subject:

Order typeThematicordered on theme, aspect, topicChronologicalold to newDidacticeasy to hardProblem – solution(s)introduce the problem first and then possible solutions

Another way to order your articles is the inverted pyramid style, a method that’s been used by journalists for ages. It means you start out with the most crucial element in the beginning and later add details and more background information. Especially in news articles, this works well.

Guide users through your text

So, now you’ve got a skeleton/summary of the text you’re about to write. When you start writing keep the following best practices in mind to make sure the reader will easily flow through your well-crafted structure!

1. Create paragraphs

You have bundled topics together in the text structure you have set up, so now you can start to write your paragraphs. But what makes a good paragraph? A paragraph can be defined by three things. Remember these things while writing!

A paragraph should form a thematic unit.A paragraph contains one core sentence and an elaboration of this core sentence.Info should be made more visible by using whitespace.

Lots of people make mistakes while creating paragraphs. Some writers just put whitespace in their text in random places for aesthetic purposes but don’t think about the coherence and structure of the text. In many cases, the coherence within paragraphs and between paragraphs remains unclear. These kinds of mistakes can mess up the structure of your articles.

Paragraphs can be short or long. The length of a paragraph is decided by the theme you are discussing, so it could be anywhere between two and fifteen sentences. However, for writing on websites, we would advise creating short paragraphs (keep it to less than 6 or 7 sentences). Because reading from a screen is hard.

For text on websites, we’d advise you to start your paragraph with the most important sentence, then explain or elaborate on it. A reader will be able to grasp the most important concepts from your article, just by reading the first sentences of your paragraphs. You can conclude longer paragraphs with a summarizing sentence to clarify your point.

2. Use transition words

To guide your reader, you should use plenty of transition words. Transition words give direction to your readers. These words show the reader that you’re summarizing (e.g. and, too), comparing (e.g. less than, rather) or concluding something (e.g. thus, consequently, hence).Table 2: examples of transition words

Type of relationExamples of transition wordsenumerateand, first of all, also, another, furthermore, finally, in additioncausebecause, so, due to, while, since, thereforecompare/contrastsame, less, rather, while, yet, opposite, much as, eitherconcludeas a result, hence, consequently, therefore, in conclusionambiguityseems like, maybe, probably, almostemphasizemost of all, most noteworthy, especially relevantExamples of transition words

Using transition words is like putting cement between your sentences – they show your readers the connection between sentences and paragraphs.

If you’re not used to using transition words, it can be hard to correct content you have already written. Be sure to use transition words whenever you are summarizing or enumerating. Also, using signal words in your conclusion helps people to grasp your core message.

3. Use headings to help your reader

In the first place, headings are of great importance for your readers. Headings allow your readers to quickly scan through your text and decide whether or not (or which parts of) they want to read your article. Therefore headings should be attractive and should cover the content of the paragraphs below. Whether headings play a direct role in SEO is debatable, but if readers easily grasp the message of your content, that surely helps your SEO.

You should put a heading above each paragraph, or above a series of paragraphs which contain similar topics. The headings should reflect the structure of your text. We advise you to put a heading above very long paragraphs, or above several shorter paragraphs which are thematically similar. Here’s a detailed guide on how to implement headings in your post and on your site.

better structure leads to better copy

Setting up a coherent structure for your blog post is an essential step of SEO copywriting. It will result in a better understanding of the message of your blog posts. If people understand your message, they will be much more likely to share your post on social media or buy what you are selling.

Taking time to think about a clear text structure before you start writing is worth your while. As you’re writing, think about the structure of your paragraphs, your use of transition words and the headings in your post. If you follow these ‘rules’ your blog post will be far more understandable and readable to your audience.

Want to dive deeper into the subject of copywriting? Sign up for our SEO copywriting course for more writing tips!

Keep reading: The ultimate guide to Content SEO »

The post Blog post structure: How to set up an easy-to-read text appeared first on Yoast.

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How to Hire Your First Chief Sales Officer

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As your startup grows, you’ll want to build a stellar leadership team to usher in your company’s next level of success. And for nearly every business, bringing in more money is an important sign of success. As the founder, you can’t be responsible for this alone — you need a talented leader who can build a stellar team of sellers to bring in more revenue for your company.

Enter: the Chief Sales Officer.

Ultimately, the Chief Sales Officer is in charge of all sales-related activities for your company. Not only do they oversee the daily operations of the sales team, but they are responsible for implementing, assessing, and reporting on sales strategies that are designed to bring in more money, enabling the company to grow and scale.

Before you run out and promote the first strong seller you see to the role of CSO, it is important to note that this individual is responsible for more than bringing in sales. A talented Chief Sales Officer has to be a savvy businessperson who is able to navigate organizational and marketplace complexities to bring real results to your bottom line.

Here’s how to craft a Chief Sales Officer job description to attract the right candidate.

Chief Sales Officer Job Description

The role of Chief Sales Officer is often regarded as the highest sales position in a company. While the exact organizational structure varies by company, typically the CSO directly manages their company’s VP of Sales and is ultimately responsible for overseeing all sales activities for their company. As you draft the job description for the open CSO position with your company, here are some points you may want to include:

• Oversees the planning and execution of company sales strategy aimed at driving revenue growth.
• Leads revenue forecasting, and is accountable for reporting progress to revenue targets.
• Responsible for sales team personnel, and gives final approval for hiring and organizational decisions.
• Drives company strategy for customer acquisition.
• Work cross-functionally with fellow members of the leadership team to foster collaboration.
• Hire, develop, and retain top talent for the sales organization.
• Implements effective sales enablement tactics to help their sales teams work more efficiently.

The specific needs of your organization will guide the job description you create to find candidates for the role, however, the points above can serve as a helpful starting point.

Chief Sales Officer Qualifications

Now that you know what statement of work your Chief Sales Officer will fulfill, let’s discuss some of the key qualifications you may want to look for as you consider your candidates. When I say qualifications, I mean the key skills and attributes your ideal candidate has that enables them to meet or exceed expectations in the role. Use the points from your job description to determine what qualifications a candidate would need to have to perform well in the role.

Here are some qualifications you may want to consider:

• Relevant sales experience — to successfully lead a high-performing sales organization, your Chief Sales Officer should have a strong background in sales leadership pertaining to your company’s industry and product type.
• Change management — as your company continues to scale and grow, your leaders will need to be well-versed in successfully leading organizations through change.
• Coaching and mentoring — the Chief Sales Officer will be responsible for hiring and developing a high-performing sales team. This requires stellar coaching and mentoring skills to support and retain top sales talent.
• Effective problem-solver — in this role, the candidate will be tasked with resolving personnel and customer challenges. They should have demonstrated ability to professionally and effectively solve problems.
• Analytical skills — your Chief Sales Officer will be tasked with creating and implementing a successful sales strategy for your company. To do this, they need to be able to understand and analyze relevant information to drive data-informed strategies.
• Customer-centric — serving the customer should be the top priority in any sales organization, and this behavior should be modeled by the Chief Sales Officer first and foremost. Your ideal candidate should have a demonstrated track record of leading successful sales teams following a customer-focused approach.
• Communication skills — the Chief Sales Officer is responsible for communicating with a lot of different people, and strong communication skills are a must. The ideal candidate should have strong written and verbal communication skills, and the ability to share clear, relevant messages to their organization, customers, and fellow leaders.

In addition to the job-specific points above, you can also specify relevant education levels and years of experience as you see fit. Many companies seek candidates who have a Master’s Degree in a business-related field or extensive work history. Additionally, many CSO roles seek candidates who have at least 10 years of relevant experience.

Take your time as you look to make this important hire. The right Chief Sales Officer can help your company reach new heights. If you’re looking to bring on more leaders to your sales team, check out this guide showing you how to hire a VP of Sales.

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Keep Pushing Forward, with Dawn Birch

https://ift.tt/2wtnmDd presents: Keep Pushing Forward, with Dawn Birch

When the world is against you, don’t give in and fold. Push forward! If you’re passionate about something, don’;t let anything stop you from reaching your goals. On this episode of Inside Look, Dawn Birch, founder and CEO of Urbal Activ, stops by the studio to tell us how she went from working for the White House to starting a massive CBD company. Dawn tells us how she was able to persevere and overcome her challenges even though it seemed like everyone was trying to shut her down!

“I saw that there was a problem and I wanted to be the solution.”
“We went for it because we were passionate about doing some good and helping people.”
“Step up. You got to find solutions.”
– Dawn Birch

Here’s what you’ll discover:
09:49 – The importance of getting in front of a trend.
14:58 – What makes Urbal Activ different from the rest?
18:12 – The challenges of being an entrepreneur.
24:20 – Why didn’t Dawn quit when everything was against her?
26:28 – The secret to focus.

“Your purpose will change decade to decade, phase to phase.”
“You’re going to encounter many adversities and challenges.”
“That’s what entrepreneurs do, we figure it out.”
“How much shit are you willing to eat to get to the outcome you want?”
– Bedros Keuilian

—

► Subscribe to my channel for weekly videos every Monday & Friday: http://www.youtube.com/bedroskeuilian/?sub_confirmation=1

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Visit: https://urbalactiv.com/

Buy Man Up and get Bedros’ High Performance Leadership Course for FREE: https://manup.com/

Listen on iTunes and leave us a review: https://ift.tt/2tYJo4d

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13 KPIs Every Sales Manager Should Measure in 2020

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Sales managers — and particularly field sales managers — can often feel like they are trapped in a fog. Without a regular physical presence in the field, it’s difficult to keep tabs on their team and business operations. Instead, they rely heavily on their field representatives to be their eyes and ears.

The best way for field managers to gain visibility into their team’s activity is to collect and measure both team and product performance through KPIs. KPIs, or Key Performance Indicators, are metrics used to track the performance of a business, a department, or individuals against goals.

The key is to choose the KPIs that are most relevant to your industry and business goals — focusing on the wrong ones can be costly to your company. To save you some time, we’ve narrowed down a list of commonly used KPIs — identifying the ones we believe are most important to managing field sales teams.

1. New Leads/Opportunities

This is the metric that managers most consistently monitor. How are your salespeople contributing to the expansion of your business in their given territory? Who’s reaching their quota? What percentage of your team is hitting their number? Is quota too high? Too low?

Share this data with your team so they can see how they stack up against other reps. There’s nothing like a little competition to get your team motivated.

2. Client Acquisition Rates

Another commonly used measurement is rate of client acquisition. Of the new prospects your reps reach out to, how many convert to customers? It’s natural for some salespeople to perform better than others — but if there are large discrepancies between conversion rates, dig deeper.

Are lower-performing reps approaching bad-fit prospects? Is there something that over-performers do in sales meetings that others don’t?

Compare conversion rates to the number of prospects a rep reaches out to. If you find that conversions decrease after a certain number of touches, use that number as a benchmark to prevent your reps from getting burned out or stretched too thin.

Finally, use conversion rates to compare different outreach methods, such as emailing or cold calling versus pursuing face-to-face interactions.

3. Sales Volume by Location

By comparing sales volumes across locations, including physical stores and online transactions, you’ll see where demand for your product is highest and lowest. From there, you can figure out why. 

If sales volume is large in region A, perhaps there is a higher demand there, in which case you can focus on customizing certain products and services for that region. Or, if you are comparing numbers across physical stores, you can take advantage of A/B testing.

For example, if two locations see relatively similar sales volume in January, try implementing a promotional sale in one location and not the other in February to see if it drives sales.

In addition to promotional sales, you can try other tactics such as shelf displays, discounts, coupons, demos, or samples.

4. Competitor Pricing

While managers and business owners shouldn’t track competitors’ every move, being aware of their pricing can help create a competitive strategy. If your prices don’t differ much, you can consider a price-matching strategy to guarantee your customers the lowest prices — and you the most sales.

Additionally, by keeping track of the average retail price of your products, you can measure the impact of cutting your prices or implementing a promotion.

And make sure you’re training your reps to handle pricing objections appropriately. Try role-play exercises so they’re prepared to discuss price without defaulting to discounts.

5. Existing Client Engagement

Maintaining good rapport with customers after the sale is important to ensure long-term business. By regularly touching base with their customers to understand how things are going and how they can help, salespeople can build trust and keep customers happy.

When reps are consistently available to help, customers know they’ll always have somebody there to support their business needs.

Beyond benefiting your company’s business outlook, keeping in touch with clients supports your business’ strategic goals as well — it’s a sales metric that matters.

Ask your salespeople to keep a tally of interactions they have with each of their customers, then compare the number of touches to the average length of a client relationship.

If, for example, you notice that your top 10 long-term clients touch base with their sales rep approximately once per quarter, take a deeper look. What do those touch bases look like? How often do reps encounter an issue they’re able to help their client solve?

6. Employee Satisfaction

Ready for some sobering news? A 2018 survey by Marc Wayshak found only 17.6% of respondents rate their job satisfaction as “outstanding.” Think that’s bad? 47.1% rated their jobs as just “good.”

Working in sales requires persistence, and sometimes representatives can run out of steam. So one of your biggest challenges is making sure your sales reps are motivated and enjoy their work.

With a remote workforce, how do you keep your sales force in sync? Do they feel like they’re part of a team? Do they agree with the sales methods that you’ve implemented?

Employee feedback is crucial to a successful sales culture. KPIs are used not only to measure your team members, but also your performance as a manager. Employee satisfaction can be difficult to quantify.

Try asking each employee to rank their job satisfaction on a numeric scale, along with a few qualifying questions to understand what’s making them happy or unhappy, then compare the results against your goal. It’s also a good idea to learn how to spot burnout in your salespeople and determine a plan to combat it quickly.

7. Upsell/Cross-Sell Rates

Who are the most qualified leads in your CRM? Your existing customers. Have your reps track their upsell and cross-sell numbers, and use that data to identify whether certain verticals respond well to certain product or service pitches.

For example, if reps have good luck selling Feature X to clients with Product Package Y six months into their tenure with you — this might be a worthwhile milestone to add to your sales process.

Look at when, how, what, and to whom your reps are upselling and cross-selling, and adjust your efforts accordingly.

8. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Your NPS is a measurement of how likely customers are to recommend your product/service to someone else.

The survey asks participants to rank the likelihood of a recommendation on a scale of 0-10. Their numerical ranking is divided into three categories:

• Promoters (9-10): They like you — they really like you. Not only will these customers likely renew, but they also won’t hesitate to recommend you to friends or colleagues.
• Passives (7-8): They’re satisfied, but that’s about it. Passives are ripe for the competitive picking, because they feel your product/service is status quo.
• Detractors (0-6): They don’t like you — they really don’t like you. Detractors will likely churn, might tell others to avoid doing business with you, and will do the most damage to your brand.

Send your NPS regularly — and remember not to send it too early to new customers. There will always be kinks that need to be worked out of the system before an NPS is sent.

Cadence of survey sends depends on your business and goals. As a rule of thumb, start by sending an NPS every three-to-six months.

To calculate your score, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. You can also use this handy NPS calculator.

9. System Touches

Ideally, you’d like your sales process to be fairly “low touch,” meaning your salespeople are closing new business efficiently for your company and your consumer.

If you review a salesperson’s quarterly numbers and see that they missed their quota and had a very high number of touchpoints per closed-lost deals (say, five video meetings, 11 emails, and seven phone calls), it might be time to revisit how effective that rep’s strategy is.

Analyze your most successful reps’ average touchpoints. Do their closed-won deals average three video meetings, eight emails, and four phone calls? Ask these reps to share their strategies, techniques, and advice to streamline your team’s average, collective sales cycle.

10. Sales Cycle Length

Similarly, it’s important to look at the average length of your team’s sales cycle. Are some reps closing in three weeks while others are closing in six? What are the respective churn rates six months from onboarding?

Analyze what sales cycle length produces the highest number of closed-won business. And don’t forget to also look at how successful those deals are down the line.

If you have a rep who’s closing business in record time, but you find that their customers are dissatisfied with your solution and often churn after nine months, a longer sales cycle might yield a healthier business.

Once you have data on your KPIs, analyze the information to understand why you got those results. Then, determine how you can improve performance and follow through with action. And remember, as important as establishing KPIs are, they must be always tied to an overarching goal.

11. Positive vs. Negative Reply Rates

When tracking this KPI, consider all prospect replies through any channel as being binary — the prospect either is or isn’t interested. It’s based on sentiment, not customer acquisition. That’s what differentiates this metric from others.

It’s also notable in that it’s measured at a prospect level, meaning all that matters is the total number of prospects contacted. However many emails, calls, or other touches it took to contact them isn’t reflected in the figure. The metric is expressed as a percentage — if 50 prospects were contacted and three responded positively, the positive reply rate is 6%.

SDRs should track this figure, tagging positive replies to identify trends. This metric can expose flaws and highlight benefits in aspects of your sales process like outreach cadence, prospecting approach, and channel preferences.

12. Meeting Acceptance Rates

Consistently landing appointment acceptances is a mark of an exceptional sales rep. It means they can create a sense of urgency with prospects. Oftentimes, prospects try to push meetings off, don’t take them seriously, or just flat out stop responding. If an SDR lands meetings on a regular basis, it means they’re making their prospects prioritize your product or service in their schedules. 

This rate is calculated by dividing the number of meetings a rep schedules by the total number of replies they receive from prospects. It’s a valuable metric for understanding both your reps’ sales acumen and the efficacy of your sales training, specifically when it comes to objection handling.

13. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

As per HubSpot’s own definition, “Customer lifetime value is the metric that indicates the total revenue a business can reasonably expect from a single customer account. It considers a customer’s revenue value, and compares that number to the company’s predicted customer lifespan.”

It’s a crucial metric to determine which customer segments or buyer personas will drive the most revenue for a company.

Its applications aren’t limited to accounting for broad portions of your customer base. The figure can also be used to gauge the value of individual accounts and, in turn, your account managers’ ability to engage existing clients. Their ability to consistently provide value to their clients can be measured, in large part, by the value they offer back.

An account manager can demonstrate they’re actively involved with their clients with a high average customer lifetime value. It shows they know how to establish rapport and keep clients loyal to your business as time goes on. It’s a valuable KPI to bear in mind when getting a feel for account managers’ overall performance.

Once you have data on your KPIs, analyze the information to understand why you got those results. Then, determine how you can improve performance and follow through with action. And remember — as important as establishing KPIs are, they must be always tied to an overarching goal.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in June, 24 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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A brief past of Google.com’s algorithm updates

These days, the way we do SEO is somewhat different from how things were done ca. 10 years ago. There’s one important reason for that: search engines have been continuously improving their algorithms to give searchers the best possible results. Over the last decade, Google, as the leading search engine, introduced several major updates, and each of them has had a major impact on best practices for SEO. Here’s a — by no means exhaustive — list of Google’s important algorithm updates so far, as well as some of their implications for search and SEO.

2011 – Panda

Obviously, Google was around long before 2011. We’re starting with the Panda update because it was the first major update in the ‘modern SEO’ era. Google’s Panda update tried to deal with websites that were purely created to rank in the search engines, and mostly focused on on-page factors. In other words, it determined whether a website genuinely offered information about the search term visitors used. 

Two types of sites were hit especially hard by the Panda update:

Affiliate sites (sites which mainly exist to link to other pages).Sites with very thin content.

Google periodically re-ran the Panda algorithm after its first release, and included it in the core algorithm in 2016. The Panda update has permanently affected how we do SEO, as site owners could no longer get away with building a site full of low-quality pages.

2012 – Venice

Venice was a noteworthy update, as it showed that Google understood that searchers are sometimes looking for results that are local to them. After Venice, Google’s search results included pages based on the location you set, or your IP address.

2012 – Penguin

Google’s Penguin update looked at the links websites got from other sites. It analyzed whether backlinks to a site were genuine, or if they’d been bought to trick the search engines. In the past, lots of people paid for links as a shortcut to boosting their rankings. Google’s Penguin update tried to discourage buying, exchanging or otherwise artificially creating links. If it found artificial links, Google assigned a negative value to the site concerned, rather than the positive link value it would have previously received. The Penguin update ran several times since it first appeared and Google added it to the core algorithm in 2016.

As you can imagine, websites with a lot of artificial links were hit hard by this update. They disappeared from the search results, as the low-quality links suddenly had a negative, rather than positive impact on their rankings. Penguin has permanently changed link building: it no longer suffices to get low-effort, paid backlinks. Instead, you have to work on building a successful link building strategy to get relevant links from valued sources.

2012 – Pirate

The Pirate update was introduced to combat illegal spreading of copyrighted content. It considered (many) DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown requests for a website as a negative ranking factor for the first time.

2013 – Hummingbird

The Hummingbird update saw Google lay down the groundwork for voice-search, which was (and still is) becoming more and more important as more devices (Google Home, Alexa) use it. Hummingbird pays more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole search phrase is taken into account, rather than just particular words. Why? To understand a user’s query better and to be able to give them the answer, instead of just a list of results.

The impact of the Hummingbird update wasn’t immediately clear, as it wasn’t directly intended to punish bad practice. In the end, it mostly enforced the view that SEO copy should be readable, use natural language, and shouldn’t be over-optimized for the same few words, but use synonyms instead. 

2014 – Pigeon

Another bird-related Google update followed in 2014 with Google Pigeon, which focused on local SEO. The Pigeon update affected both the results pages and Google Maps. It led to more accurate localization, giving preference to results near the user’s location. It also aimed to make local results more relevant and higher quality, taking organic ranking factors into account. 

2014 – HTTPS/SSL

To underline the importance of security, Google decided to give a small ranking boost to sites that correctly implemented HTTPS to make the connection between website and user secure. At the time, HTTPS was introduced as a lightweight ranking signal. But Google had already hinted at the possibility of making encryption more important, once webmasters had had the time to implement it. 

2015 – Mobile Update

This update was dubbed ‘​Mobilegeddon​’ by the SEO industry as it was thought that it would totally shake up the search results. By 2015 more than 50% of Google’s search queries were already coming from mobile devices, which probably led to this update. The Mobile Update gave mobile-friendly sites a ranking advantage in Google’s mobile search results. In spite of its dramatic nickname, the mobile update didn’t instantly mess up most people’s rankings. Nevertheless, it was an important shift that heralded the ever-increasing importance of mobile.

2015 – RankBrain

RankBrain is a state-of-the-art Google algorithm, employing machine learning to handle queries. It can make guesses about words it doesn’t know, to find words with similar meanings and then offer relevant results. The RankBrain algorithm analyzed past searches, determining the best result, in order to improve. 

Its release marks another big step for Google to better decipher the meaning behind searches, and serve the best-matching results. In March 2016, Google revealed that RankBrain was one of the three most important of its ranking signals. Unlike other ranking factors, you can’t really optimize for RankBrain in the traditional sense, other than by writing quality content. Nevertheless, its impact on the results pages is undeniable.

2016 – Possum 

In September 2016 it was time for another local update. The ​Possum update​ applied several changes to Google’s local ranking filter to further improve local search. After Possum, local results became more varied, depending more on the physical location of the searcher and the phrasing of the query. Some businesses which had not been doing well in organic search found it easier to rank locally after this update. This indicated that this update made local search more independent of the organic results.

Read more: Near me searches: Is that a Possum near me? »

2018 – (Mobile) Speed Update

Acknowledging users’ need for fast delivery of information, Google implemented this update that made page speed a ranking factor for mobile searches, as was already the case for desktop searches. The update mostly affected sites with a particularly slow mobile version.

2018 – Medic

This broad core algorithm update caused quite a stir for those affected, leading to some shifts in ranking. While a relatively high number of medical sites were hit with lower rankings, the update wasn’t solely aimed at them and it’s unclear what its exact purpose was. It may have been an attempt to better match results to searchers’ intent, or perhaps it aimed to protect users’ wellbeing from (what Google decided was) disreputable information.

Keep reading: Google’s Medic update »

2019 – BERT

Google’s BERT update was announced as the “biggest change of the last five years”, one that would “impact one in ten searches.” It’s a machine learning algorithm, a neural network-based technique for natural language processing (NLP). The name BERT is short for: Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.

BERT can figure out the full context of a word by looking at the words that come before and after it. In other words, it uses the context and relations of all the words in a sentence, rather than one-by-one in order. This means: a big improvement in interpreting a search query and the intent behind it.

Read on: Google BERT: A better understanding of complex queries »

Expectations for future Google updates

As you can see, Google has become increasingly advanced since the early 2010s. Its early major updates in the decade focused on battling spammy results and sites trying to cheat the system. But as time progressed, updates contributed more and more to search results catered to giving desktop, mobile and local searchers exactly what they’re looking for. While the algorithm was advanced to begin with, the additions over the years, including machine learning and NLP, make it absolutely state of the art. 

With the recent focus on intent, it seems likely that Google Search will continue to focus its algorithm on perfecting its interpretation of search queries and styling the results pages accordingly. That seems to be their current focus working towards their mission “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” But whatever direction it takes, being the best result and working on having an excellent site will always be the way to go!

Keep on reading: Should I follow every change Google makes? »

Feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the different names and years? Don’t worry! We made a handy infographic that shows when each Google update happened and briefly describes what the purpose was.

The post A brief history of Google’s algorithm updates appeared first on Yoast.

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