We combed through our Analytics data to bring you the most valuable posts from this year. Each one is meant to get you better results from the web.
Enjoy!
1. Lead Generation: Website Best Practices
A visitor takes action, a contact form is submitted, a lead is born.
It happens millions of times each day. It’s common, but not simple. There are dozens of little factors involved in lead generation. When it works, a stranger who needs help finds a webpage offering a product, service or advice. They learn, they trust and they take action.
Some websites do it well and generate leads all day long …but most don’t.
2. How to Research Keywords: A Step-by-Step Guide
Search engine traffic doesn’t just happen. It’s the outcome of a set of deliberate steps. It’s not as complicated or mysterious as you’d think. There are three key ingredients behind every listing in every search results page:
- The keyword (keyphrase research)
- The content on the page (on-page SEO)
- The trustworthiness of the website (domain authority)
In order to rank, a page must indicate its relevance to search engines, and the website itself must be credible in the eyes of search engines. It also must focus on a phrase. If you do everything else right but get this wrong, you’ll be hearing crickets.
3. 27 Research-Backed Web Design Tips: How to Design a Website That Works
Total visitors. It’s easy to see. Every marketer knows how much traffic they’re getting because it’s right there in your Analytics. But what happens next isn’t as obvious.
That’s why giving advice for driving traffic is easy, but web design tips are hard. There are so many factors. Even after 1000+ successful web projects, it’s difficult for us to know what will work best.
This article has 27 web design tips for getting more value from every single visitor. Most of these tips are supported by research.
4. Is your website’s menu broken? Find out fast using the Navigation Summary report in Google Analytics.
If your site were a physical store, you’d be watching. Where do people go first? When do they then turn around? Which aisles are crowded and which are empty? Are your signs confusing?
Few website owners look this closely at the navigation summary reports in Google Analytics. And they miss the opportunity to fix problems with their navigation. Read this quick guide to using Analytics to improve your navigation menu and labels.
5. SEO Basics: A Complete Guide to the 3 Search Ranking Factors
Let’s review the basics of SEO (search engine optimization). This is a high-level look at the three main factors involved in search, the art and science of attracting qualified visitors from search engines. It’s a big topic, so we’ll start with a video summary.
6. How to Future-Proof Your Search Rankings: 5 Tips for Semantic SEO
When I was a kid, search engine optimization was simpler. Pick a target phrase and use it on the page. Put it in your title, header and body text. Pretty straightforward. These are still (and will always be) the SEO basics.
7. How to Make Solid Social Media Videos: 9 Steps for More Traffic
Social media streams are crowded, fast-flowing and very very competitive. As social networks pull back on organic reach, showing up is hard and getting attention is even harder.
So how can you stand out on social?
Marketers that go big are doing better. And the one way to go bigger than anyone else is to upgrade your content to maximum power. That’s social media video.
8. How to Increase Email Open Rates: 5 Key Success Factors
All content marketers have one common goal: capture their visitors’ email addresses. Visit any major blog or media website and you’ll see email signup forms pop up, slide in and drop down. You’ll see them right when you land and right as you’re leaving.
Why are brands so eager to collect your email address? It’s because email is the only direct connection they have to their audience.
9. A Guide to Content Marketing Metrics: The 37 Most (and least) Useful Metrics
What metrics should I be looking at? What should I be tracking? How often should I look at Analytics?
These are some of the all-time greatest questions in digital marketing. There are so many numbers in so many places. This guide lists 37 content marketing metrics, from the tippy-top of brand awareness to the bottom line and bank account.
10. The 5th Annual Blogger Trends Report
For the fifth straight year, we asked 1000+ bloggers to take a short survey. Each year, the trends and statistics tell the story of the evolution of content.
We’ve grouped this into three sections. Scan through and discover what a small minority of bloggers does differently, what correlates with “strong results”, and how blogging is changing over time.
