Setting up a Twitter Account

To open a new Twitter account for your company simply follow this step by step signup process. When that is done go to your profile settings and upload your logo as your profile picture and set up your Twitter background to match your corporate identity. Alternatively you can find a designer on sites like Behance or Dribble to design a custom background for you for a small fee.

 
In your bio section make sure that you write a short description about your company. Be as descriptive as possible and include keywords related to your product/service as this will make it easier for someone to follow you when searching for similar companies.
You can also include a link to your Facebook or Linkedin pages so that visitors will follow you on these sites as well. As an example, below is the profile description of Thenextweb.com
“International news on technology, business and culture. Follow specific channels in our Twitter lists. Find us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/thenextweb”
Note how they are using the keywords “news on technology” “business” and “culture” in their profile description.

Increasing the number of Followers on Twitter

After setting up your Twitter account now is the time to start following some people.
The easiest way to do this is to search for your competitors and filter their followers by choosing only those that you think would be interested in your products. Let’s say you sell digital cameras, you will follow only those people that in their profile included something related to photography.
Avoid following a lot of people at once since Twitter might suspend your account if you follow too many people at once. Do it gradually.
When you start following people, some will follow you back. This is the main aim of following people i.e. to increase the number of followers.
I’ve found out that roughly 15% – 25% of the people you follow will follow you back. I usually spend a couple of hours every week following people and then again once a week I un-follow those people that did not follow me back.
The tool below will make it easier for you to spot those that are either inactive for a very long time or did not follow you back:

This process is quite time consuming, however it is much better than using any automated tools like TweetAdder that will automatically follow users that mention specific keywords and un-follow those that didn’t follow you back.
You should scan each and every profile before following and making sure that it fits in your target audience rather than following everyone that simply mentions a specific keyword related to yours. This way there’s a better chance that those that follow you back are actually interested in your tweets.
Do this religiously – never stop this process. It is key to keep on building followers.

Sharing Updates on Twitter

Now that you know how to increase your followers, let’s move on to explore the idea of generating traffic to your site using your Twitter profile.
The way you craft your post is essential. Write out potential tweets a few different times and try to think about which one would actually make you want to click on it. Not all tweets are created equal, so ask yourself the following questions before posting:

– Can you add a picture to make your post stand out more?
– Are you really highlighting the most exciting aspect of your blog post/page?
– Are there any fellow Twitter users out there who might benefit from being tagged in the post? Will they give you more exposure if they retweeted?

Also keep in mind that people are on Twitter at different times throughout the day. This means that the time that you post updates is an important factor to reach a bigger audience.
According to this infographic, the best time to tweet updates is between 1-3pm EST during week days. However you should test and post updates at different times throughout the day and find the best time where people are clicking on the links that you’re sharing.

You can use a tool like Bitly to share your updates, as it will show you the number of clicks that you get from every update that you post.
In order to increase the traffic to your site you need to post updates such as your news articles or blog posts for your followers. The best way to do this is to schedule your updates using tools such as Hootsuite or Buffer.
You can also tweet the same updates in different times throughout the day as your followers won’t be on Twitter all the time. However, make sure that you space your updates by a couple of hours.
This is a technique that Guy Kawasaki uses to share tweets with his followers. He repeats the same tweets at different times throughout the day. This way he tweets more frequently which in turn gets him a gazillion followers.

Finally – Keep posting, keep testing

Twitter can get you a lot of good quality traffic that you will really need as a start-up trying to growth-hack your way to the top. But remember: in order to reach this goal you will need to keep at it and increase your followers every week. You should also use Twitter to test the different content that you write on your site or blog.
When you share content on Twitter, make sure that you analyse and find out which articles your followers are sharing. Then, write more of those.
The recipe is simple and you can do it without any huge investments. All you need is time and tenacity.

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Aligning the customer buying cycle with SEO

In everything you do, whether it’s SEO, content marketing or any other type of web marketing, make sure that you understand how the customer’s buying cycle fits in. Just to refresh your memory a little bit, the buying cycle is split up into 4 different stages; attention, interest, desire and action. You can use the acronym AIDA to help you remember the sequence. There are other variations that incorporate other stages, such as the loyalty stage at the end of the cycle. Below is a diagram that shows the different stages:

 

The attention stage

This is the initial step that every consumer makes before buying a product or service. Usually at this stage the consumer searches for a product by using a generic keyword such as ‘black car’. The consumer is quite unsure about the different models and prices available. At this stage the consumer is made aware of the different options available.
Keywords that fall under this category are quite high in terms of search engine traffic and since the consumer is not yet ready to buy, it won’t be worth focusing your SEO strategy on these keywords. This is because it is quite difficult to rank for these keywords due to high competition, and if you had to rank for these keywords there’s a very slim chance that you’ll get a return.

The interest and desire stages

The consumer is now searching for keywords such as “black car reviews” or “compare black cars”. At these stages the consumer is still not ready to buy, however he might be susceptible to marketing messages related to the benefits of a particular model. By now, he has gathered enough information and has a clear picture on what he really wants to buy. It is important to include some of these keywords in your SEO campaign so that when the consumer is looking for different alternatives, your product will be one of the available options. However it is important to understand that it will take more time to rank for these keywords since a lot of your competitors might also target them.

The action stage

The last stage of the buying cycle is when the consumer is ready to take an action and is finally interested to make the actual purchase.  The consumer is now searching for keywords that are specific, such as “Ford Fiesta 2012 model” or “mini cooper 2013”. You definitely have to include these types of keywords since there is a better chance that you will get a return. This is because at this stage your website visitors already know what they want to purchase. So now it’s a question of whether your product is better than your competitor’s, and whether it is at the right price that the consumer is willing to pay for.

Keyword Research

If you want to get a return out of SEO, you need to make sure that you’re focusing on highly targeted keywords. What I mean by this is that you need to focus on keywords that will attract customers that are at the final stages of the buying cycle discussed above. In terms of potential traffic, it will be much lower than if you had to target generic keywords and you might think that it won’t be worth all the effort. However, since we’re interested in increasing our sales figures by using SEO, our best bet would be to attract customers that are ready to buy.
You will find these types of keywords by using tools such as the Google Keyword Planner. This is a tool that you can find in your Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one yet, you can go here to create one for yourself. As soon as you log into your account you will see something like the screenshot below:

 
Now go to Tools and click on Keyword Planner as shown below:

When you’re in the Keyword Planner section choose “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas,” it is found under “What would you like to do?” Now start entering some keywords related to your product. Let’s say that we sell Ford Fiesta cars, the form will look something like this:

For this purpose leave the other fields empty. Your next step would be to choose the countries and languages that you’d like to target; all found under ‘Targeting’. When you’re ready with the form click on ‘Get Ideas’. Now choose the ‘Keyword Ideas’ so that the tool will give you a list of keywords with the average monthly search traffic next to each one of them. In other words, this is the number of times that visitors have searched for that particular keyword in Google. As you can see from the list, the more specific the keyword is, the less traffic it generates. Now the question would be, which keywords should you choose? The next section will explain how you will find those keywords that will give you a bigger return.

Finding the Right Keywords for your SEO Campaign

The most common method of choosing keywords for your SEO campaign is by selecting those keywords from the list that you’ve managed to compile in the keyword research phase. Usually you’d choose those keywords that are highly specific to your product.
However there’s a much better way to do it. You can allocate a small budget, not more than $1000, and spend it on Google Adwords. The idea here would be to choose a couple of highly targeted keywords that you’ve found in the research phase and test them on a PPC (pay per click) campaign. Run the campaign for a couple of months let’s say 2 to 3 months. Then spot those keywords that converted, and use them in your SEO campaign. With this method, you’ll save a lot of money on SEO because you will only focus on keywords that are going to get you the money.

Conclusion

As a CMO, make sure that you share your ideas and intentions with your web marketing agency. You have to show them that you know all about the whole process of how SEO works, and that you’re not only interested in getting traffic, you also want to get a return out of it. I’m mentioning this because a lot of agencies out there will simply focus on getting you ranked highly in Google for particular keywords, and that’s it. They will tell you that they are going to get you massive traffic, and of course you’d think that traffic implies money. Although this might sound good to you, it will never get you the desired return. This is mainly because the visitors that you’re attracting are either not interested enough, or not ready to buy your products yet!

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Monthly Revenue

One of the most important metrics to measure is your monthly revenue. This can be calculated by multiplying the price of your products or services by the quantity you’ve sold over a particular month.

This is a very important metric to calculate as it allows you to assess the performance of your business month after month. By calculating your monthly revenue you can analyse trends such as dips in revenue during a particular period, prompting you to dig deeper to find out exactly what’s causing that drop. On the other hand, you could also spot a welcome increase in revenue, which should lead you to find out what caused it and, more importantly, how to make it happen again.
By working hard to replicate positive results you’ll be laying the groundwork for a sustainable business – one that draws in more revenue each month. You would also need to plan your revenue forecasts around this figure. This guide will help you out in preparing your forecasts with the help of a few additional bits of information, such as costs and profit margins.

Churn

If your business gets repeat customers, you should know who they are by calculating repeat custom. This metric goes both ways – you will also need to calculate the churn, meaning the number of customers that stop buying your product. This figure will give you valuable insight into whether or not your clients are satisfied with your product.
If clients are dropping out after making the first purchase, for instance, it could indicate that something’s not quite right with your product. At this stage you should focus your efforts on improving your product rather than try to attract new customers.

How? Ask!

You could get all the answers you need by speaking to both your existing and past clients and asking questions along the lines of:

“We really miss you! Is there something that we can do to get you back?”

“Would you suggest our product to your friends and relatives? If yes, why would you do so?”

You could even go a step further and ask for feedback before the client walks out on you, just like Starbucks did in coffee shops across the world:

If you don’t happen to have coffee shops in every corner of the globe, you can still get in touch with your clients to ask questions and get feedback by sending them a short email questionnaire, for instance. Online tools like Surveymonkey or Surveygizmo make this quick and simple.
You also have another option that’s closer to home – you can get customer feedback through your site itself! Check out Olark or Qualaroo – these tools make it easy for you to ask questions to your website visitors as soon as they go to specific web page or behave in a certain way.
Most importantly: If you really want to lower your churn you need to better understand your customers. Forget about what you think about your company and start thinking about it from your customers’ perspective. What do they want from you? Which problems are they trying to solve? Does your product address these problems? Find out, and modify your product accordingly.
Keep in mind that this is not a one-off exercise, but a process that should be implemented in an on-going manner. It’s crucial if you’re looking to build a sustainable business in the long run.

Lifetime Value

The client lifetime value (LTV) applies for businesses that either sell a subscription based service or get repeat customers. It is the projected revenue that you will get from each customer for his lifetime. There is a simple way in which you can work this out. Take the average revenue per sale and then multiply it by the number of repeat transactions and average retention time. The diagram below will make this easier to wrap your head around:

So let’s say that you get a total number of 2000 repeat customers per year for your online store that spend on average $200 for every transaction that they will make. The average number of transactions per year is 3 whilst the retention rate is 2 years. To work out their LTV you need to do the following:

In this case the LTV would be $1200. So in other words each customer is getting you $1200 before he stops buying from your site.
LTVs vary according to the type of traffic that you are attracting to your site. For example you can compare different LTVs for the different clients that you get from online marketing campaigns and then focus on those that have a higher LTV. You can also compare the different LTVs based on geography – which regions have the highest LTVs? Once you find that out you can start focusing your strategy on attracting more clients from those regions.

Conversion Rate

This metric will help you to measure the success rate of your website. In order to improve your website you need to know how many sales or leads you’re generating from your current web traffic. If for example you want to work out the sales conversion rate for your website you will use the equation below:

This will give you the percentage of unique visitors that are making a purchase from your website. In order to improve your conversion rate you will have to analyse every step that each visitor is making before purchasing your products.
A lot of CMOs are discouraged when they calculate their conversion rate because the real situation would be that from, say, 100,000 unique visitors they can only convert something below 2% into sales. However, keep in mind that not all of your visitors are ready to buy and most of them are still at the beginning of the buying cycle.
You should look at it this way: if you improve your conversion rate by just 1% you will increase your sales by 50%. So rather than discouraging yourself, focus on continuously improving your conversion rate by optimising your website. These tips will help you to convert more sales from your website.

Cost per Acquisition

This metric is one of the most important ones that is ignored by a lot of businesses, unfortunately. The cost per acquisition is the price that you have to pay to acquire a new customer. This means that it measures the cost of advertising to convert a visitor into a customer.
You need to know exactly how much a customer is costing you when using different advertising channels, such as PPC (pay per click) advertising. This will give you a clear indication on whether you should continue to invest in advertising or else use other means to generate business that will cost you less money.
So let’s say you have an option of choosing whether to continue running PPC ads or invest in SEO – what you would need to do is to calculate how much it is costing you to acquire a new customer through these channels. With PPC, this is quite easy to calculate since all you need to do is to divide the total cost of your PPC account by the number of sales that you’ve generated for that particular month.
On the other hand, to calculate the CPA from SEO you need to calculate the monthly service fees of your web-marketing agency and any additional costs that you might incur when running an SEO campaign and divide them by the number of transactions generated from SEO for a particular month. The latter can be easily obtained by logging into your Google analytics account and finding the total number of transactions generated by organic traffic. Find this under the Acquisitions > Keywords tab as shown below:
 

And there you have it!

The metrics above should keep you focused on increasing your sales. Do not see them as separate data sets – they all tie in to the same goal. It is important that you share this data with your team members so that they will be able to visualise the bigger picture.
After all, the more they know about the business, the better it is for them to come up with ideas on how to improve the process of acquiring new customers!

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Quality vs Quantity Search Engine Traffic

There was a time when getting your site to rank in Google was pretty easy. All you needed was a bunch of links from other sites pointing to your website, alone with the time it took to stuff your web content with keywords that you wanted to rank for. One of the quickest ways to get links to your site was to create multitudes of articles (which would usually be copied from other sites) that would include a number of keywords in them. You would then submit these articles to article directories.
A common procedure was to use an article, submit it to a site and then slightly modify a few sentences here and there and resubmit it to another site. This process was repeated over and over again, such that by the end of it, the article won’t make much sense anymore. Why was it done? Essentially, everyone tried to cheat Google and other search engines into thinking that the articles posted were unique. An alternative quick-fix for getting links to your site was to spam blogs and forums with a link back to your site. A high traffic keyword would be used to attach the link to your site, also known as anchor text. Check the example below:

This was the norm, done by thousands in order to rank highly in Google for that specific keyword. To outrank competitors a lot of companies enrolled in cheap link building services that were getting them the results they wanted in the short run.
Is this all sounding familiar? If you’ve ever done some or most of the above, that’s probably the reason behind your fall in Google rankings. The downside is that in order to repair all the damages it is going to cost you quite a lot of time and money. But don’t fret, this is probably the best investment you’ll ever make for your business. Why will it take time? Simple – you will need to remove each and every link that you have in these types of sites. Then, together with your web marketing team, you will have to start attracting good quality links to your site. The longer you take to do this, the more it will cost you in the long run. Keep in mind the online sales that you would be losing on a daily basis.
Remember this: unfortunately a lot of companies focus their web marketing strategies on quick wins. The longer it takes you to understand that there are no quick wins with search engine optimisation, the more money it’s going to cost your business.  But enough about that. The underlying lesson here is to shift your strategy and focus more on quality rather than quantity. This is the basic principle to understand all Google updates which primarily focus on web spam. You have to relate this to both content and link-building since they are the two main issues that directly affect your Google rankings.

Fighting Web Spam

Google is quite clear on this: Any and all spammy websites are banned from ranking in their search engine. Google’s main focus is on the user experience. This means that if a website doesn’t offer value to the reader it will simply fall in the rankings. As mentioned before, you have to see this from two different perspectives: from the content side and from the link-building side. In terms of content these are the main issues that will negatively affect your rankings:

Keyword Stuffing

When you make excessive use of the same keyword in the website’s content or meta tags (the top part of the html code of a web page that includes the page’s title and description) with the intention to attract more traffic to your website. This will lose the flow of the content and adds no value to the reader. Below is an obvious keyword stuffing example just to give you a better idea:
“Yes, we do have white cups and our cups are white and they are cups and the other white cups are not as good as our white cups because cups in general are white and our cups are white too”.
This sentence will get your site to rank for the keyword “white cups” and potential customers landed on your website. Once they read the above sentence, however, they will most definitely go and buy from another site. Which makes one very valid point: there is no point of attracting visitors to your site if you’re not managing to sell your products. From now on, before uploading content to your site, make sure that it adds value to the reader. Just for a moment, forget about ranking in Google and focus on producing amazing content that your readers will find useful.

Duplicate Content

This refers to the content on a website that is used more than once repeatedly, or else is copied directly from other sites. The main intention here was previously meant to increase the kind of content that helped in improving the rankings in Google. Not anymore though. If you really want to rank in Google the content on your website has to be unique. If you have any duplicate content, either that which is stolen from other sites or that which is repeated over and over again throughout your website, Google will penalise your site.  To solve this problem your web marketing team should remove any duplicate content from your website and publish fresh new content in it’s place.
The way forward in terms of SEO is to focus on one basic principle in everything that you do. Make sure that all the content that you produce as a company will be valuable to the reader.  Whether it is a feature list or a blog post, ask yourself: does this help my readers? If not, you’ll be better off not posting it at all. After all, you will only be damaging your brand. This also relates to link building – Make sure that you know what techniques your web marketing agency is using. If they’re trying to get links the easy way, you’re probably getting low quality links which will only harm your rankings.

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