3. Agenda
• Overview of me and the Digital Marketing method
• The Main Digital Marketing channels
• User interface / user experience
• Analytics
• Tools & Best Practices
• Q&A
5. Steve? Who AREYou?
• Rutgers graduate, with B.A. in (computer-mediated) communication
• 8 years digital marketing experience
• Worked both agency & corporate-side
• Currently at Panasonic Industrial Devices in Newark, NJ
7. The Philosophy
• Entirety of this presentation is done with
regards to the generic digital marketing
sales funnel.
8. The Philosophy Cont’d
• Marketing vacuums suck.
• We use this funnel to help focus our marketing strategies & tactics
• Conversion actions are paramount
• Subscribing to a newsletter
• Downloading a PDF
• Purchases through your website’s shopping cart
9. Your Website
• Before we can utilize the digital
marketing funnel, we need
a website!
• Any old website won’t do though…
we need an existential website!
10. Your Website Cont’d
• Giving a (business) purpose to your website is the single most
important step to take when starting digital marketing.
• Are your users having a good experience?
• Does your site drive your users towards an end goal?
• A website is a lot like a good party…it’s great to have a lot of people
show up for your party, but the party needs to be fantastic for your
guests to stay.
• And it has to be fantastic for your guests only!
11. A Website’s Purpose
• Defining a website’s purpose is important for a variety of reasons:
• It helps align the digital marketing strategies & tactics with the complete
marketing vision of the organization
• Helps you strategize & create the appropriate metrics & reporting tools (more on
this later in the deck)
• Saves your organization some $$$$$$$$
• Make sure your purposes are measureable in some way/shape/form!
• S.M.A.R.T. goals – very helpful framework
12. Metrics / Analytics
• Giving your website purpose gives your website metrics purpose
• Enough metrics gives us analytics
• Enough analytics creates efficiencies
• Enough efficiencies gets
us raises!
15. Attribution
• Attribution helps keep your digital marketing metrics in line
• Attribution for EVERYTHING
• Website traffic
• Inbound links
• Conversions
• A lack of attribution creates muddy, unreliable data
16. Examples of Measureable Website Goals
• Performance related:
• Grow our website's organic traffic by 15% during the next year
• Improve bounce rate on all SEO/PPC pages
• Increase average time on site by 10 seconds on our worst performing pages
• Call to action related:
• Increase the number of email subscribers by 500 in the next two months
• Increase already identified leads’ website activity by 5%
• Increase percentage of visitors going to the contact-us page
18. Get Under the Umbrella Term
• Search engine marketing (SEM) contains two components:
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)
• SEO is also synonymous to webmastering
• PPC is synonymous with
search engine advertising, or SEA
• Some people say SEM for PPC...
I think they’re wrong.
A drink with an umbrella term.
19. Search Engines
• Search engines are programs that identify keyword queries in a
database.
• In our case, they’re programs that find particular websites on the
WorldWide Web.
• Search engine result pages, or SERPs, make the world go ‘round.
32. SEO Definition Cont’d
• Wikipedia states:
• “…is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search
engine's unpaid results—often referred to as ‘natural,’ ‘organic,’ or ‘earned’ results.”
• Search Engine Land states:
• “It is the process of getting traffic from the 'free,' 'organic,' 'editorial' or 'natural'
search results on search engines.”
• Moz.com states:
• “SEO is a marketing discipline focused on growing visibility in organic (non-paid)
search engine results.”
33. SEO Definition Cont’d
• And last but not least…Google’s SEO starter guide states:
• …they actually don’t have a definition for SEO.Awkward.
34. SEO Definition Cont’d
• My definition:
• The process of maximizing the clarity of a website’s content in order to achieve a
favorable organic search presence.
• This is a very complex process, and continues to evolve as search
engines evolve.
35. SEO Goals
• Identify your target audience(s)
• Identify content related to your target audience
• Solve problems
• Offer professional advice / subject matter expertise
• Create the best user experience possible
• Sound familiar?
36. The SEO Process
• On-site SEO
• Technical aspects (webmaster)
• Content aspects (marketing)
• Off-site SEO
• Content
• Branding/local SEO
• SEO never ends.
• NEVER.
38. On-Site SEO—Technical
• The cleaner the backend information, the more search-engine
friendly the website
• Organized information
• Good for users and search engine crawlers
• This is what webmasters should be doing
39. On-Site SEO—Technical Examples
• Minimizing 404 errors
• Creating 301 redirects
• Minimizing load times
• Security certificates – especially for ecommerce sites
• Responsive/adaptive design
• Proper HTML/CSS/etc.
• Structure data
42. On-Site SEO—Content Cont’d
• Optimized content is what drives the technical onsite SEO
• It’s also the reason for search engines to rank you better
• It’s also the reason why users visit your site
• And hopefully share your content
43. On-Site SEO— Keywords Topics
• The concept of keywords has given way to the concept of topics.This
was a natural progression.
• How does one identify the appropriate topics to discuss on a website?
44. On-Site SEO—Topic Research
• Question your users
• Surveys
• Website traffic patterns
• Top visited blog posts
• There are many tools to help with topic research (my favorites are
discussed a bit later), with examples
• User responses + topic research tools = content ideas
45. On-Site SEO—Content Map
• Organize your content ideas as user-friendly as possible
• Ignore the search engines here
• Good user-friendly content IS good SEO content
46. On-Site SEO—Basic Best Practices
• Headings
• Subheadings
• One topic per page
• Images/video
• Quickly loaded
• Good user interface
• Local information
• Internal links
47. On-Site SEO—Types of Content
• Articles
• Blog posts
• Lists
• Infographics
• Video
• Reviews
• User-generated
48. On-Site SEO—Long vs. Short Form
• Short form content is generally less than 500 words
• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Generic, “parent” pages
• Long form content can be as long as you want
• Reviews
• Articles or white papers
• Specific, “children” or “grandchildren” pages
• Websites need both for an ideal user experience
50. Off-Site SEO—Definition
• Any online activities on other websites that help reinforce your on-
site SEO content & messaging.
• Two segments:
• Inbound links / linkbuilding
• Digital branding / local SEO
51. Off-Site SEO—Inbound Links
• Inbound links from other websites help give our website more
‘authority’ in the eyes of the search engines.
• The more links pointing to our site from credible external sources, the
better.
• Inbound links are usually created by other websites pointing to yours.
• There are some websites that allow a brand to submit their unique
content and publish it after passing a screening process.
52. Off-Site SEO—Inbound Links Cont’d
• These types of links can come from a variety of sources:
• Articles
• White papers
• Social media
• PDFs
• Press releases*
• Guest blog posts*
• The ideal is to author content that your target audience likes so
much, they’re willing to share it on their personal blogs, social
networks, through email, etc.
54. Off-Site SEO—Digital Branding
• There are a variety of informational websites that allow businesses to
control their business information.
• Usually for brick & mortar stores
• I like to call this “digital branding,” because the goal is to have
consistent information & messaging across these sites.
• Also called Local SEO since it’s dealing with address & phone number
information.
55. Off-Site SEO—Digital Branding Cont’d
• Directories
• Yelp.com;YP.com; citysearch.com; etc.
• Social media pages
• Business accounts for Facebook;Twitter; Pinterest; etc.
• Search engine business pages
• Google business page; Bing local business directory; etc.
• Most directory & business pages are editable
• Data aggregators can help
56. Off-Site SEO—Best Practices
• Use natural anchor text, trying to target keyword phrases.
• This is an example of using natural anchor text as a link from a press release.
• Gives the user a very natural expectation of the type of content this link points to.
• Gives the search engines that same expectation
• Avoid phrases like click here or get more information here.
• Using that type of anchor text is a poor user experience.
• Search engines may see zero correlation between a phrase like ‘click here’ and a page
about college admissions.
• Ensure your business directory listings are consistent with
information!
57. Off-Site SEO—Take out the Trash
• There are trashy inbound links
• There’s a way to take out these trash links, at least in Google—
Disavow tool
• Use SEO tools to determine usefulness (or harmfulness) of both
unique inbound URLs or entire domains
• Any spam links should go
59. Measuring SEO Success Cont’d
• Applying our handy—dandy funnel, we can use this to help guide
what to measure.
60. Measuring SEO Success—Top of Funnel
• Primary “SEO” performance metric: keyword rankings
• Generally speaking, the higher you rank for keyword phrases, the healthier your
website is
• Number of organic impressions & clicks
• Secondary “SEO” performance metrics
• Page authority
• Domain authority
• Number of inbound links
• Note: I will discuss tools to measure all of the above a bit later.
61. Measuring SEO Success—Bottom of Funnel
• Total organic website traffic
• Organic website traffic behavior
• This is the ultimate metric. Once you start getting more organic traffic to your
website, figure out what they’re doing, then figure out how to make it better.
• Conversions.
63. SEO Tools
• Google’s Suite ofTools
• Most powerful set of SEO tools
• Best part: all of them are free.
• Not-so-best part: all of them take time
to sign up for, set up, and use.
• Google Analytics
• Simply the best
• GoogleWebmastersTools (search console)
• Google AdWords (yes, useful for SEO!)
64. SEO Tools Cont’d
• Search engines themselves
• Especially SERPs & autofill search queries
• For rankings & secondary SEO performance metrics:
• Conductor Searchlight
• moz Pro
• For website traffic & conversion tracking
• GoogleAnalytics
• Adobe Omniture
65. SEO Tools Cont’d
• Ideal dashboard would cover all of facets of the sales funnel
• Show each portion of the funnel, and its related metrics.
• Usually requires a developer and/or database admin to build, but is worth its
weight in gold.
• Most tools have API feeds that can be pulled into a database
• Could also use a tool likeTableau to gather & monitor various data
streams, including marketing objectives.
67. In-House SEOs
• Pros:
• Understand your business culture
• Understand the industry
• Easier cross-departmental projects (i.e.: working with IT for new hosting servers)
• Cons
• Limited by business’ parameters
• Less informed than agencies on digital marketing trends
• Less budget for tools
68. SEO Agency
• Pros:
• On top of all SEO best practices
• Large tool box to draw from
• Usually well connected with other related departments with equally
knowledgeable experts (graphics, social, content, etc.)
• Much more free reign to brainstorm
• Cons
• Limited by purchaser’s budget
• Could be using automated tools
• Bigger agencies have less focus on each client
69. My Suggestion
• If you have the capability, build an in-house team with lots of
specialization.
• Get a few internal digital marketing generalists that can manage the
agencies
• MANAGEWITH DATA AND NOTHING ELSE
• If you’re using an agency, and there’s no performance increase within
the first year, drop them and move on. Any SEO agency should move
the needle, even 2% for a single metric, within the first 12 months.
70. SEOverview
• Process of getting more organic search engine traffic to your website
• On-site SEO
• Off-site SEO
• Success is measured with both top & bottom of funnel metrics
• Rankings / domain authority
• Organic traffic / conversions
• In-house vs. agency
72. PPC Defined
• This one’s a little more straight
forward than SEO.
• According toWikipedia:
• “…an internet advertising model used
to direct traffic to websites, in which
advertisers pay the publisher (typically
a website owner or a host of website)
when the ad is clicked. It is defined
simply as ‘the amount spent to get an
advertisement clicked.’”
73. Goals of PPC
• Target very specific keyword phrases
• Try to get as many cost-effective clicks as possible
• Then make that traffic convert or go home.
74. Differences vs. SEO
• Immediate response
• Landing pages vs. website
• Generally, users clicking on PPC ads are towards the end of the funnel
• There’s a monetary cost associated with PPC ads
75. SEM Platforms for PPC
• Google AdWords
• Bing Ads (powersYahoo search PPC ads too)
76. Elements Unique to PPC
• Hierarchy ofAdWords & Bing Ads accounts:
Business Account
Campaign
AdGroup
KWs
77. Elements Unique to PPC—Cont’d
• Where are my ads?
• Ad extensions
• Sitelink
• Product& reviews
• Phone numbers / click to call
• Many more!
• Ad units
• Video
• Display
78. PPC—The Art of Bidding
• Budgets are set daily, weekly, monthly.
• Bids are at the keyword level only
• Bids, along with many other factors, dictate frequency & placement
of PPC ads
• Bidding is the single most interesting, frustrating, fun, confusing, and
exasperating part of PPC advertising.
79. PPC—Keywords
• Same keyword research process as SEO.
• PPC ads generally target “transactional keywords”
• When setting keyword bids, be sure to leverage the different bid
types
81. PPC—Basic Best Practices
• Use different match types to maximize your AdGroups
• Negative keywords
• Ad copy length
• 25, 35, 35, 255 (35 shown)
• Optimize destination URL
82. PPC—Remarketing
• The biggest benefit AdWords & Bing Ads has going for it!
• Benefits of remarketing are immense:
• Incredibly focused second (or third or fourth) touch ads
• “Follow” users around
• Costs a fraction of first-time PPC ads
83. PPC—Remarketing Cont’d
• Create a remarketing list, which in turn generates a remarketing
“pixel” to place on your website as you please.
• When the page loads for a user, they receive a 90-day cookie
• Then, when that same user does another Google search that triggers
your ad, they receive the remarketing ad rather than the primary ad.
• This same process also works for display advertising.
84. PPC—Remarketing Best Practices
• Segment pixels by persona, or content type
• Target the remarketing ads to these unique personas, and make sure
you’re furthering the conversation!
• I.E.: you have a pixel on all of Marist’s admission pages, make sure the
remarketing ad copy notes that specifically!
• Use a remarketing pixel for converted users!
• This way, users that complete your conversion funnel are taken in a new direction
rather than the path they already walked.
90. PPC Tools Cont’d
• AdWords & Bing Ads platforms & build in reporting tools helps you
identify campaign health metrics
• Google Analytics / Omniture integration for user-behavior (read:
conversion) metrics
• AdWords integrates seamlessly with Analytics with the click of a button.
• Bing Ads takes a little bit of work, but also integrates fully into Analytics.
• Both can integrate with Omniture, but it takes a lot of set up work.
• Avoid, at all costs, PPC automation tools.
91. SEO + PPC = Synergies
• Website A appears on page one of Google for both organic & paid
results.
• When only organic displays on position 2, average CTR is 8%
• When only paid displays in ad position 3, average CTR is 2.5%
• When both organic and paid display at the same time, average CTR is 37%
93. Website & Deeper Pages
• More geared for organic search / information gathering.
• Use white / open space wisely
• Break up walls of text with images / videos / visual breaks
• Clean upper & side navigational elements
• Clear calls-to-action through the page
• “Z” pattern
• Responsive or adaptive designs are now needed
95. Landing Pages
• More for PPC destination pages. Could also be used for those clearly
defined calls-to-action found on the rest of your website.
• Clear content…there’s no such thing asTOO obvious
• No navigation on them at all.
• Use that white space
• Contrasting colors
• Longer form, with explicit content about your products or services.
98. CRO
• CRO is where we tweak the website or landing page for usability.
• The idea is that particular elements of a web page can affect user-
behavior, and thus conversion actions.
• Benefits of performing CRO:
• Grow conversions incrementally
• Getting clarity of your website visitors’ behaviors and their likes & dislikes
• Some examples of tweaks:
• Button color; font size; verbiage; images; etc.
101. Measuring CRO Success Cont’d
• Oh man.Where has this funnel been these last few slides?
102. Measuring CRO Success—Top of Funnel
• Tests for SEO top of funnel:
• Keyword density for better rankings
• Different meta title & description tags for higherCTR
• Tests for PPC top of funnel:
• Ad headline
• Ad copy
• Bids
• Keywords & match types
103. Measuring CRO Success—Bottom of Funnel
• Tests for SEO bottom of funnel:
• Number of internal links per optimized page
• Number of, placement of, and verbiage of CTA on optimized pages
• Tests for PPC bottom of funnel:
• Landing page design & copy
• Length of form
• Images & colors found on landing page
105. CRO Tools Cont’d
• Google Content Experiments
• Found withinAnalytics
• Free!
• AdobeTest &Target
• A bolt-on for Omniture
• Optimizely
• Get this one.
107. Tools I Can’t Live Without
• Microsoft Excel & NotePad++
• Project Management software (Trello; Podio; freedcamp; Microsoft
OneNote)
• Conductor Searchlight or ZoomRank
• MajesticSEO and/or Open Site Explorer
• SimilarWeb, SpyFu, and SEMRush
• Google, Analytics, Drive, Gmail, Sheets
• Google Keyword Planner
108. Tools I Want to Try/Learn
• Tableau
• SQL Database stuff
• BrightEdge
• Bing’s keyword tool
• Convertro
109. Resources
• Technical SEOAudit image
• Onpage SEO best practices
• Onpage SEO best practices by Rand Fishkin
• Moz.com’s SEO beginner’s guide
• SearchCap
• Whiteboard Fridays
• Search Engine Land
• Search Engine Watch
• WebmasterWorld
• Fantastic graphic for PPC match types
110. Thank you very much!
I TRULY APPRECIATE YOUR TIME AND ATTENTION
EMAIL: STEPHEN.LELLA@GMAIL.COM
LINKEDIN: HTTPS://WWW.LINKEDIN.COM/IN/STEPHENALELLA
CELL: 732-492-2923
111. Additions from our Conversation
• MarketingAutomation
• Tools:
• Marketo: Integrates with Salesforce CRM. I’m recently introduced to this tool, and the interface is familiar
and the tool seems very powerful.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Seamless integration with Salesforce CRM. I have the most experience with
this tool. Requires heavy lifting at the on-set, but is very powerful once it’s set up.
• SharpSpring: I worked with an agency that used this tool, and have some experience with it. It’s got a
VERY easy interface, but lacks some of the capabilities of the other two.The price tag on SharpSpring is
much lower than the other two, making it a great cost-conscience option.
• The Capabilities:
• The opportunity to marry user-behavior across various digital channels with personally identifiable
information (mainly: email address). This allows you to build out individual profiles, and then extrapolate
profiles to create larger audience segments.
• Automated digital content flows (i.e.: a new email subscriber receives 3 emails over 10 days, all sent
automatically through the tools; or a website user identified as a student’s parent receives 2 automatic
emails and an automatic Facebook ad targeting a parents night event)
112. Additions from Conversations Cont’d
• Dashboarding:
• I recommendTableau for creating a portfolio level dashboard.
• Other tools:
• Manually built databases/dashboardS
• QlikView
• birst (business first!)
• Regardless of tool, ensure that it is capable of grabbing data from ALL your data
sources, and that the data relationships are in place
• You can use this tool to manage the entirety of the digital marketing funnel.