Monday, December 28, 2015

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Sunday, November 15, 2015

How To Run A Successful Affiliate Marketing Program

How To Run A Successful
Affiliate Marketing Program

Any feedback would be great. “Most important Article of your Life
so make sure you read this and Leave comments.

Have you ever thought of promoting an affiliate
product that you didn’t really believe in? This isn’t the worst
thing you could do, but it sure makes it harder for you to convince
others about why they should buy it from you. Increase your
chances of earning big by choosing to promote products that are the best
fit for you using these tips.

Focus on the sell through, not just the number of clicks.
Remember affiliate marketing is not about the number of page views,
it’s about the number of people who follow through and buy.
Just bringing someone to a page won’t make you any money so
make sure the customer has a reason to want to buy what you are offering.

The link between marketing companies and consumers is
called affiliate marketing. Special attention must be made
by the marketing company to try to attract the right customer.
They must be diligent to place their ads on websites that are relevant
to what they are selling. Without the right customers, there are no sales which lead to no income.

You should take advantage of the connections you already have
to help build your affiliate market. If you work through your contacts
from real life and from other projects, you are dealing with people
who already trust you. Trust is a huge leg up in getting people to
sign up for your service.

Do a video for affiliate questions and concerns. By having video training,
not only do you position yourself as an authority, you can also address all
your affiliates at once and give them the same information on how to achieve
success. Even better, your affiliates can share your video with others,
giving you a new set of leads.

Keep a notebook full of affiliate strategies that have worked for
you in the past and use them in your current affiliate promotions. Wording,
link placement, graphics, link density and style of advertising can all be
replicated in a variety of combinations to help your sales continue to be strong.

The key to making big-time money as an affiliate marketer is to find a
profitable niche with very little competition. If you do not choose a niche product,
and try to market something more mainstream, you will be facing so much
competition that it will be extremely difficult to make large profits.

Instead of jumping in with hundreds of affiliates, start your
website with a small number. Try to stay with one to three affiliates to
start. Starting smaller will make it easier for you to manage your
time and keep better records of your sales and your clicks.

Use the keywords from your website’s Search Engine Optimization
on Twitter, too. Include them in the first thirty words of your description,
as well as in the Tweets you post. Also include your URL in
your biography to get another backlink to your website, driving
people who enjoy your Twitter feed to read more on your website.

Every affiliate marketer should keep track of any advertisements
made by their affiliate programs. If there is a particularly special
deal running, it might be a good idea to post it on your page, as
this will surely generate more clicks for you. This will insure that
you get a piece of the higher traffic that the program will be receiving.

When in doubt, just think about what is important or useful to you.
Chances are, if you really have a need for a specific product, someone
else out there does too. Let your sincerity shine through in your
affiliate marketing campaigns and your customers will buy from |
you because they trust you and believe in you.

If this article was useful in anyway helping you run a successful
Affiliate Marketing Program, please leave your comments, like, and share.
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Saturday, November 7, 2015

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

The Anatomy of An “Elevator Speech”

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The Anatomy of An “Elevator Speech”

The Anatomy of a Compelling Elevator Pitch

This article should provide every entrepreneur with insights about 1) what is an elevator pitch, 2) 7 major components of a successful elevator pitch, 3) how to create a successful elevator pitch.

WHAT IS AN ELEVATOR PITCH?

Elevator Pitch: A definition

An Elevator Pitch (or Elevator statement) is a compelling statement or summary that is used to explain to describe a service, a business, an objective or its value proposition. Such a statement is used in situations where one person is trying to convince or persuade the other about something of importance. It is a statement that is meant to grab interest in a short period of span, mostly within 60 seconds. It can also be understood as a concise and well planned/practiced description which a person gives to a business owner/leader/senior executive either to get a job, get a plan okayed or to make investors or customers get curious.

The idea of an ‘elevator pitch’ focuses on a kind of a description or persuasion tactic that can be delivered within the time span of an elevator ride. The term reflects upon an accidental scenario in which a person could be required to pitch in an idea and get registered in the listener’s mind. It is common for many people like sales persons, policy makers, project managers and evangelists to rehearse and use such statements whenever they can get an opportunity.

What an elevator pitch is not

 

A lot of people confuse elevator pitches with sales pitches. An elevator pitch is definitely not a ‘sales pitch’. A sales pitch is a statement through which a sales person or business owner tries to sell a product or win more customers. However, an elevator pitch is a statement that only aims to put forth an idea and hope that the listener would be impressed by it and would want to know further.

While using an elevator pitch, one must not get caught up in trying to tell how good a product or service is. The pitch must rather be used to explain how you would do your job and run the business.

When to use an elevator pitch

 

An elevator pitch doesn’t necessarily have to be used by salespersons when they are trying to introduce their products or services but can also be used in other situations and cases. It can be used when:

  • One is trying to introduce his/her organization, its goals and how it can help the listener.
  • One is trying to sell new ideas to a business owner/CEO or other high-level executives of the company.
  • One is trying to get a thought across or trying to get a job by explaining how he/she could be an asset to a company.

7 MAJOR COMPONENTS OF THE PERFECT ELEVATOR PITCH

In order to come up with the perfect and most intriguing elevator pitch, one has to adhere to certain principles and rules. An elevator pitch must move only higher on altitude and should hit its highest mark right at the end. One just cannot afford to sound desperate; however a decent degree of passion must be present in order to make it sound brilliant. If you are someone looking to create a perfect elevator pitch, then don’t forget to include the following given 7 components:

  1. The Problem – The first step is to try to address the problem of the customer or listener in the simplest way. You must be able to distil it to its shortest form and then try to solve it in not more than a sentence or two. This will make the listener feel that you are concerned and connected and have an insight into what is real. It will showcase your intention and will give you an edge.
  2. Your solution – Now that you have pointed out to the problem, the next step is to come up with a solution, in the briefest way possible. Describe one of the solutions in a very clear and concise way that is easy to understand and gets registered in the mind of the listener. The solution must be practical, unique and should be stated in not more than 1-2 sentences. The solution that you present could be the highlight of the elevator pitch if stated correctly.
  3. Target market – Another very important component that must form a part of an elevator pitch in order to make it perfect is that information about your target audience or market. You must be able to talk about which segment of the market you are targeting and how many people are there in the target market. Speak a sentence or two about the same and make sure that each word counts. This will help investors to get an idea of your plan.
  4. Competition – The listener wants to compare and evaluate you with respect to the other players in the same market. Thus, it is better to address this issue on your own. You will need to describe the key differentiators from your competition out there so that the listener can be convinced that you are trying to come up with a solution that is unique to you. If they like your idea better than that presented by others, they will be inclined to choose you.
  5. Your team – The listener wants to know who you are working with and who your team is. This is why, it is important that you talk about your team. Tell him/them how you and your team are a business partner and how you share the same vision. Give a reason your combination works brilliantly and how it can help his/their cause. No matter how fantastic your idea is and how unique your solution is, if you don’t have the right people working with you, it’s all probably in vain.
  6. Financial summary – Give a sales forecast right away to let your audience know that you are serious and want to get right down to business. This will help them know that you know your facts and have done your homework. Knowing the expense budget, and profit expectations will incline them towards your idea a little more and will give you a boost. A detailed forecast is not necessary; just give an assumption or a number that you aim to reach and can through your ideas.
  7. Milestones – The next step is to talk about your goals and how you plan to reach each. By doing so, the audience will begin to understand that you already have everything planned out for you and are already on the path of reaching your objectives. If you have already accomplished a few of the milestones, then do make sure that you talk about them in brief.

HOW TO CREATE A SUCCESSFUL ELEVATOR PITCH

An elevator pitch can surely be spontaneous, but it is always better to have it created and prepared in advance so that you can pitch it to your audience whenever you bump into them or get the opportunity. Creating an elevator pitch is not a matter to be taken lightly. You must pay enough attention to each of its sentence, parts, and details. Besides creating it, you must have it well practiced and rehearsed so that you don’t fumble in that 60 seconds you get to deliver it neatly. So here’s how you can create a compelling elevator pitch considering to include 7 components described above:

  • Define your objective – One of the first things that you will need to keep in mind to create a compelling elevator pitch is to identify and know your goals and objectives. Start by thinking about why you are creating the pitch and what do you aim to achieve it. The goal depends upon your position and who your audience is. For example, if you are a business company who wants to communicate with clients, then you must aim to achieve that but if you are an employee who wants to sell a business idea to the CEO, then you must work accordingly and so on.
  • Describe what you do – The audience probably doesn’t know you or about you and hence you must always start your pitch by explaining who you are, what organization you work for and what is it that you and your organization do. Lay stress on the problem that you solve and the kind of audience you cater to. Add stats and facts to make your pitch more real and strong. The pitch must be able to excite you because if it doesn’t excite you, how will it excite the audience? The pitch must create a clear image about you and your goals in the minds of the listeners within that one minute.
  • Pitch your USP – It is very important for you to state yourUnique Selling Point or USP in the elevator pitch. For communicating this very fact, you must first know what your USP is. Sit down and think about how you or your organization is different from the others and why a customer must buy from you and not your competitors. Be honest and try to identify why you are so unique. When you come up with something, add that in the pitch in the most compelling way. Your USP must immediately draw the attention of your audience and make them know more about you.
  • Engage your audience – If your pitch is not engaging and interactive, the audience will probably lose interest right through it. The best way to make anything interactive and engaging is to include a question or give something to your audience to think about. Prepare one or a few open-ended questions that can be answered in a simple yes or no. This will involve the customers in a conversation and keep their interest hooked.
  • Summarize – Now that you have created a few sections and parts in your pitch, the next step for you is to put it all together and summarize it. Bring each part together and link it all, before you state your final statement. Read it aloud when you are done and try to analyze what is missing and whether it is well connected or not. The entire speech or pitch must not be longer than 60 seconds. If it is too long, then the audience will lose interest and may not even listen till the end of it.
  • Practice – In order to deliver the pitch in the finest way and without any errors, it is important to practice it several times before you deliver it. Remember, that practice makes perfect. Practice in front of the mirror many times and say it with confidence. Mean every word you say and pay attention that you are neither too fast nor too slow. Bring in passion and make it compelling and convincing. If you aren’t able to practice on your own, take help of a friend and ask him to point out the weaknesses so that you can perfect it before delivering it.

Some Effective Tips and Suggestions

While you prepare and train your elevator pitch consider some tips to make it perfect:

  • Be natural – One of the most effective tips you can follow in order to create that perfect pitch is to remain natural and real. You don’t want to sound like a pre-recorded machine or program. You must show passion however also show restraint to not sound desperate. Relax as by getting nervous, you will fumble and stumble.
  • Be honest – One of the most important tips that can help you make a good elevator pitch is to remain as honest as possible. Never communicate any detail that is not true. Sometimes, in order to make the pitch more compelling, people tend to cheat and be dishonest but you must always avoid that.
  • Have a call to action – Every elevator pitch is stated for a reason and to make your objective successful, you must have some call to action. Give the audience information about how they can contact you, buy the product, invest in your idea or become a part of what you are offering.
  • Leave them wanting more – Elevator pitches are not meant to be over detailed. You must frame yours in such a way that there is still scope left for your audience to know more. In the end, they must be left intrigued and wanting more. Keep some and hold some.

Six questions an elevator pitch must answer

1.   What is your product or service?

The first question that your elevator pitch must definitely answer is what exactly your product or service is and how can it serve the audience. You must briefly explain about the product or services offered along with their uses and USP.

2.   Who is your market?

The elevator pitch must also focus on what the market or target audience of your business is. For example, if you cater to young people, then you must briefly mention that in your pitch to make it clearer.

3.   Who is your competition?

Another question that an elevator pitch must answer is who your competition is. If you think that you don’t have any competition, then think again and be honest. The audience will appreciate if you are willing to name your competitors.

4.   What is the competitive advantage of your company?

By giving what your specialty / competitive advantage is and how this specialty is unique and better than that offered by others, you will be able to establish a better elevator pitch. This will help your audience know why they must opt for you rather than the others.

5.   Who is behind the company?

You have to present a background for the audiences so that they are better able to relate to you. Name your organization or your business partner and list a few of your achieved milestones or accomplishments.

6.   What is your revenue model?

Tell your audiences how you plan to make money and achieve your desired profit goals or sales figures.

Four laws of an excellent elevator pitch

  1. Law 1 – Short: In order to create an excellent elevator pitch, you must make sure that it does not go on and on until the audience totally loses interest and dismisses you in their minds. The elevator pitch must be strong, short and concise. You must be able to say a lot in just a few words. Of course, being able to achieve this takes time, practice and sometimes even a few rejections. You must be able to communicate whatever you have in mind for not more than 1 minute.
  1. Law 2 – Easy To Understand: Another thing that you want to do while delivering the pitch is to confuse the audience. The second they get confused, they won’t be able to understand whatever follows. So make your pitch as easy to understand as possible and go from one point to another by breaking down ideas and statements.
  1. Law 3 – Greed Inducing: Your investors want to make money, and if you give them a way to make a lot of it, they will definitely be attracted to your idea. So make your pitch as greed inducing as possible.
  1. Law 4 – Irrefutable: At the end of your elevator pitch or that one minute, the audience must just not be able to say no to you. Your elevator pitch must be irrefutable for anyone who listens to it.

Image credit: Flickr | heiwa4126 under Attribution 2.0 Generic.

Related Articles:

  1. 4 Methods to Get More Blog Traffic From Twitter
  2. 8 Things You Should Know Before Building Your Website
  3. Are you wanting to learn More about how to Market Your Business


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Friday, October 23, 2015

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Thursday, October 22, 2015

Top 10 Hurdles Facing Bloggers

 

Super Track and Field Meet

Top 10 Hurdles Facing Bloggers

1. Technical Know How

 

Start simple and grow your knowledge and skills as you need them – and as you’re able you might also like to look at partnering with others or outsourcing to people who complement your skill set.

2. Fear of Looking Stupid

 

I think the key for me in overcoming this fear was to focus my energies on creating content with my blog that attempted to solve tangible problems that I knew people had. I think by taking this constructive approach you create a useful blog that is pretty difficult to critique.

3. Finding a Focus

The more topics I wrote about the more I enjoyed blogging but the more push back I got from readers who didn’t always share my eclectic mix of interests. It wasn’t until I started new blogs for different topics that I began to find my groove and my readership really began to grow.

4. Bloggers Block

Recently I had my first bout of bloggers block. The creative juices were not flowing and I would sit at my computer staring at an empty draft of a post and wonder if I’d ever come up with something to write about. The first time it lasted a week or so but I had numerous other bursts of it periodically over the years that followed.

Following are some tips on how I overcame bloggers block.

Further Reading: 11 Tips to Breaking Bloggers Block Through Solving Reader Problems

Also Check out: 31 Days to Build a Better Blog to help you kick start your blogging if it has lost motivation.

5. Bloggers Burnout

Similarly I also went through times when I almost burnt myself out with the amount of work I was putting into my blogging. At one point I had over 20 blogs running at once and was trying to post to them all each day. It was a recipe for disaster and the quality of my blogging suffered – as did my health.

The solution? I had to scale back. I decided that in order to be able to sustain my blogging I should have just a couple of blogs that I enjoyed writing and could throw myself into. This raised the bar in terms of the quality of what I was doing but also gave me more energy for those projects.

6. Personal Attack

Blogging has always been a medium where you put yourself ‘out there’ with your ideas and will from time to time get people critiquing what you do and write. This is all a part of blogging – however there have been a couple of instances over the last 10 years where the ‘critique’ of others began to feel more like a personal attack than a constructive and genuine dialogue or critique.

This takes its toll and you do wonder whether it is worth it all. This particularly was the case on one occasion where the attack became quite personal and physical in my ‘real life’. Not a nice situation but thankfully one in which things worked out in the end after a frightening encounter.

There’s no real ‘solution’ to this one – I guess you get thicker skin over time when you blog for years but you also develop positive connections with others that help to support you when times get tough!

7. Building Readership

When it comes to building a profitable blog there’s no escaping the need to build a decent sized readership. Every blog monetization strategy I can think of relies upon having people read your blog in order for you to make money and so this is something we all face the challenge of as bloggers.

This is a particularly frustrating challenge and I remember many times where I almost lost hope after many many hours of writing the best quality content that I could only to find that nobody was reading it.

Further Listening: Listen to the ‘Finding Readers for Your Blog’ Webinar for everything I know about finding readers for your blog.

8. Finding the Right Monetization Model

Having readers is not enough. I know of many bloggers who have built amazing readerships only to find that what they thought would be the right monetization model simply doesn’t work in their niche and with the type of reader that they have attracted.

For me I’ve found I’ve needed to be constantly experimenting with new ways of making money from what I do. I started with using ad networks and some basic affiliate marketing and as my blogs grew found that new opportunities would open up (such as selling ads directly to advertisers and creating my own products to sell).

Further Reading: Here’s my 12 blogging income streams and how I added each gradually over 10 years.

Further Listening: Listen to the ‘Monetizing Blogs’ Webinar

There is no one way to monetize a blog and over time what works might change. It can be a real juggling act!

9. Time Management

There are just not enough hours in the day some days!

Coming up with topics to write about, writing content, editing it, promoting it, answering comments, engaging on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Youtube, LinkedIn…. and more), commenting on other blogs… the list goes on of things you feel the need to do as a blogger.

Add into this mix having a ‘real life’ and the challenge of doing all this between your ‘day job’, family, social life and the logistics of running a household and it is not easy.

Time management is the #1 struggle I find most bloggers have – and it only gets harder as your blog grows!

Further Reading: Check out BlogWise – our eBook on becoming a more productive blogger that features advice from 9 successful bloggers.

10. Scaling Yourself

Related to time management is the challenge of trying to scale yourself.

With the right server set up a blog can pretty much have unlimited readership and reach and still keep running. The challenge of growing a blog isn’t so much a technical one – it often is more about how keep your blog personal and to stay accessible to your readers.

In the early days its relatively easy to answer every comment and reply to every email and tweet while also creating blog posts… but as your readership grows it can become more challenging and something usually needs to give.

The choice is either to just let some reader engagement go, or to bring someone on to help you manage it (and loose some personal touch) or to work longer hours (not sustainable in the long term).

I still don’t feel like I’ve got this challenge right – but keep working at it!

Further Reading: Making Yourself Accessible to Readers

What Hurdles Have You Faced as a Blogger?

As I wrote this post I realised just how many more huddles and obstacles I could have come up with (in fact I may just publish a post with 10 more).

Which of the above resonate most with you? What would you add?

please share

leave your comments



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Tuesday, October 20, 2015

You are only $7 from Online Success

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RE: 4 Methods to Get More Blog Traffic From Twitter

4 Methods To Get More Blog Traffic From Twitter

If this TEENAGER can make money blogging, why can’t you?

—————————–

This is a guest contribution from Marc Guberti.

No matter how much blog traffic we get, we will always want more, right? More blog traffic opens the door to more opportunities, relationships, and sales.

Not only do we want more blog traffic, but we also want to get blog traffic from a variety of platforms. This is why many bloggers are active on multiple social networks.

I have experimented with dozens of different methods for gaining more blog traffic. I pin, post on Facebook, and write guest posts, but my most successful platform for driving traffic to my blog is Twitter.

Twitter alone is responsible for close to 50% of the traffic that my blog gets, and the amount of traffic I gained from Twitter has dramatically increased in a short period of time. In 2013, Twitter brought 3,408 people to my blog. The following year, Twitter brought 97,321 people to my blog. The big increase in traffic also led to a big increase in opportunities, relationships, and sales.

Many people ask me how I made such a quick transition. How did I suddenly go from getting 3,408 visitors from Twitter to almost 100,000 visitors from Twitter in just one year? I am going to share with you the methods I used to get more blog traffic from Twitter and make my big shift in just one year.

Pin A Tweet Of Your Most Popular Blog Post

When you pin a tweet of your most popular blog post to the top of your Twitter timeline, that tweet gets more exposure because its lifespan is infinite. The reason most tweets get some engagement when they are first posted but then get virtually no engagement a few days later is because most tweets have short lifespans.

Although the lifespan of each tweet differs, most tweets’ lifespans end in a day because other tweets take its place on your feed, and your followers’ home feeds are filled with other people’s tweets at that point. Pinning a tweet to the top of your profile page guarantees that the tweet will be seen by anyone who views your account. Thus, the lifespan of the tweet is infinite (until you unpin it from the top of your feed).

Pinning your most popular blog post to the top of that feed will lead to more traffic for that blog post, and all of that extra traffic for your popular blog post will equate to a better search engine rank.

The first tweet I pinned to the top of my feed was a tweet that promoted one of my free eBooks. While most of my tweets get around five retweets and favorites, the pinned tweets has been retweeted and favorited over 100 times.

Pinned tweets will get more engagement than your average tweet, so if there is a popular blog post that you want to give special attention, tweet it out and pin the tweet to the top of your feed.

Include Visual Content In Your Tweets

The value of visual content can no longer be overlooked. On every social network, including an image in the post leads to more engagement than not including the image in the post.

On Twitter, including the image in the tweet leads to a 150% increase in engagement for that tweet. It makes sense that tweets images get more engagement because the human mind processes images 60,000 times faster than text.

Buffer tested out what type of impact images have in tweets. Here’s what they found:

twitter

Including an image in your tweets is important, but not any image will do. The best images are often the ones that we create ourselves because we can create an image based on what we want in the image instead of trying to find the best (but not perfect) match on Google.

IT turns out that creating your own picture is surprisingly easy. Here are the two tools I use to create my own pictures:

#1: Canva

This free tool lets you create pictures in any pixel dimensions you want, and the tool also offers pictures perfectly sized for social media posts. Canva comes with numerous free features and images to choose from, and if you can’t find the image you are looking for on Canva, you can upload pictures from your computer to Canva.

Canva easily allows you to add text to your images and play around with the background.

#2: KeyNote/PowerPoint

Normally, when you think of KeyNote or PowerPoint, you think of creating a presentation. However, these tools also allow you to create your own pictures.

You can resize the slides in your presentation to any dimensions. You can make a slide 1000 pixels wide and 4000 pixels high if you wanted to. You can add shapes, text, and other pictures from your computer to the slide.

I primarily use KeyNote for creating Infographics because of the flexibility that KeyNote provides. I can easily move one part of the slide anywhere I desire, and I can see a full preview before I put the infographic on my blog.

Tweet The Same Blog Posts More Than Once

One of the biggest secrets about Twitter is that it is okay to tweet the same thing more than once. If you do it right, it is okay to tweet the same thing more than 100 times.

I schedule my tweets using the HootSuite bulk scheduler which means I send tweets in a cycle. Every 4-8 days, you will see the same tweets delivered in the same exact order, and these tweets always get engagement.

Since I send over 100 tweets every day, the identical tweets are barely noticeable. I get interaction for my tweets to this day as if I had never tweeted them before. Here are some reasons why it is okay to tweet the same blog posts (and for that matter, identical tweets) more than once:

#1: You are going to get new followers who have not read any of your tweets before. For these followers, your tweets are actually new.

#2: Many of your followers will miss your tweet the first time. If you send your tweet at 4 pm on a Monday, then your followers must be logged in at that time to possibly see the tweet on their crowded home feeds.

#3: The world has different timezones. If it’s 4 am in New York, then it’s 9 am in London. If you send a tweet at 4 am eastern time, many of your followers from New York won’t see the tweet. You can schedule the same tweet the following day at a better time for your followers on the east coast so they can engage with it all the same.

Optimize Your Tweets For More Engagement

Having an image in your tweet is just one step towards optimizing that tweet for more engagement. The more you optimize your tweet, the more engagement it will get. Here are some of the additional methods you can use to optimize your tweets for more engagement.

Twitter is the main reason my blog gets so much traffic. In one year, my blog traffic jumped leaps and bounds primarily because I focused my time on growing my Twitter audience and promoting my blog posts to that audience.

Getting hundreds of daily blog visitors from Twitter takes patience, but that patience will eventually allow you to get hundreds of daily visitors to your blog from Twitter alone. Constantly experiment with your tweeting frequency and what you tweet to determine what impact it has on your audience and blog traffic.

Do you use Twitter to get more blog traffic? And if you aren’t using Twitter to get more blog traffic, when will you start?

Marc Guberti is a teenage entrepreneur, author, and digital marketing expert who shares his advice on his blog MarcGuberti.com. His mission is to teach teenagers how to become entrepreneurs.

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Friday, October 16, 2015

Fundamentals of Marketing Your Business Online or Off

Are you wanting to learn more about how to Market Your Business?

 

In this video, you will learn more about how to market your business online or off.

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Thursday, October 15, 2015

Revealed: The Truth about MLM Commission Payout Structures

Thanks for taking the time to watch this training video on the Truth about MLM Compensation Structure.

If you found value, please comment and share

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Thursday, October 8, 2015

14 Most Important SEO Metrics

Another amazing post by one of our own.. Neil Patel

Quantify Your Results: The 14 Most Important SEO Metrics

seo

Many SEOs, especially those new to the game, have a constant feeling of uncertainty.

They spend weeks or months working, but it’s really hard to see if the results are worth their time.

Eventually, they (possible you) realize that without some way of tracking results, there’s no way of evaluating whether all the work you’ve done was worth it or not.

So then, you start tracking a single metric such as keyword rankings diligently. You do that for a few months and see some improvement.

However, a new problem arises: a single metric can’t describe the results of your work.

Unless you’re tracking every single keyword ever searched in your niche, keyword rankings are just one indication of whether your domain’s search authority is increasing. Sometimes, search traffic can go up while rankings decrease or vice versa.

So, what’s the solution? 

The solution is to track multiple metrics. If you’re presenting these results to a team, you might hear them refer to these metrics as key performance indicators (KPIs).

Metrics, or KPIs, are hard numbers obtained from your website data. Most of this data will come from your analytics tool of choice, whether it’s your basic Google Analytics or a more advanced tool such as KISSmetrics.

In this post, I’m going to show you 14 of the most important SEO metrics. You can pick and choose which (if not all) metrics you incorporate in your regular reporting.

One last thing you need to keep in mind is that most of these metrics are just indications of your success—not exact measurements of it.

Download a printable version of the 14 most important SEO metrics.

For example, organic traffic usually grows exponentially. An extra 100 visitors in the first month after you do some specific work could really be worth thousands in the future. We’re typically using metrics as indicators of your site’s health and growth.

1. Keyword rankings: know where your traffic is coming from

There’s no perfect way to track your exact search engine authority as a whole, but some metrics are good estimates.

Keyword rankings can be used to measure specific terms you’re trying to rank for. They can also help you determine if you’re targeting appropriate keywords when trying to outrank your competition.

However, there are some pretty big limitations as well. For example, I once shared that 91% of Quick Sprout search traffic came from long-tail searches. Similarly, KISSmetrics gets 91% of its search traffic from long-tail keywords.

Then why do we want to track keywords?

Even though traffic from keywords only represents about 9% of your potential traffic, measuring rankings for keywords with significant search volumes (anything over a few hundred per month) tells us a few things:

  • whether you’re targeting the right keywords – if none of your blog posts rank for their target keywords, you need to target less competitive keywords for now.
  • whether you’re growing over time – all keywords should slowly improve in rank as you gain backlinks and your site becomes more trusted. If not, something is wrong with your SEO plan.
  • whether you’re transferring “link juice” well – when you get a new link to a page, most of its power goes to that page. However, some will also flow to other pages you link to. If most of your older pages never improve in their rankings, you can likely improve your internal linking.

Here’s how you track keywords

Identify anywhere from 1 to 5 keywords for each blog post or important page on your site that you’d like to rank for. If you don’t know how to, refer to my guide on keyword research first.

There’s no need to manually check rankings anymore because you have many tools you can use.

If you need a free option, try the free plan for Serpfox or Pro Rank Tracker.

Most keyword tracking tools work similarly.

In Serpfox, for example, start by adding a URL:

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Then, expand the URL you just added in your dashboard, and click on the “add keywords” option:

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Then, you just add the keywords you’ve identified before, one per line. You can also track a specific search engine or country if needed:

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Once you’ve done that, the tool will automatically check to see if you’re ranking in the top few hundred results and will do so every day. You can see the ranking on your dashboard:

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You can also click the graph icon to see changes over time.

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Obviously free tools are more limited than paid tools, but if you’re just getting started, they will do for now.

Each time you publish a post, you should add keywords to track.

At least once a month, you should export your rankings and see how they do in relation to the three items I mentioned above.

2. Backlinks and linking root domains: track your authority

There’s no doubt that search rankings are becoming more dependent on on-page SEO factors and user interaction patterns.

That being said, backlinks are still one of the factors, if not the most important factor, behind rankings right now. They will continue to play a major role in the future.

What that means is that a big part of any SEO plan should revolve around acquiring backlinks. If you’re not getting any (or many), there’s a problem that’s going to hold back your growth.

You can measure the results of your link-building campaigns by monitoring new backlinks you acquire, both in terms of quantity and quality.

Here’s how to track new backlinks.

The most popular backlink trackers are Ahrefs and MajesticSEO. You can start with a very limited free plan to try, but you’ll eventually need a paid plan.

Although Open Site Explorer is an option, it doesn’t have as large of a database as the other two options and updates slower as well.

For the purposes of this walk-through, I’ll be using Ahrefs.

Start by inputting your domain name into the search bar:

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On the main results page, scroll a bit to see a graph that shows the quantity of backlinks and linking root domains over a significant period of time. This should be trending upwards (more important for the linking root domains than the backlinks).

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Next, use the navigation menu at the top to select “Inbound links > New”:

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This brings up the new links to your domain in the selected time period:

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You can see who linked to you and even visit that specific URL. Note that on free plans, you will only be able to see a few results.

How do you track quality of links?

All link-tracking services are built on a few “scores” assigned to links. The higher the score, the better the quality of the link. Majestic uses trust flow and citation flow, while Ahrefs uses URL rating.

When you first search your domain name, you’ll see a URL rating and a domain rating.

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You should record these periodically along with the rest of your results. If you’re acquiring quality links, they will both go up. The URL score will take into account only links to the homepage itself, while the domain rating is more of an overall score.

Even if you get 10,000 links, if they’re low quality and from spammy sites, your scores won’t go up much.

If you’re using Majestic, focus on improving your “trust rank” over time.

Why you should track backlinks

Tracking the overall growth of your backlinks is important, but there are three other main reasons to check them regularly:

  1. To assign a cost per link – even if you acquire a few really high quality links, if it costs you $1,000 per link, it’s probably not profitable. Evaluate the cost of links from different link-building strategies and tactics.
  2. To see the success ofyour tactics – similarly to the cost per link, you can also monitor how many links you get from a single tactic. For example, you might see that you get seven links from 100 emails in an email outreach campaign (a 7% link rate).
  3. To find potential relationships – if someone links to you, they probably like your content. You can send them a quick email to begin a relationship that could lead to more links or other opportunities.

3. Organic search traffic: do search engines love you?

Why do you do SEO?

I’m going to guess that you do it to get organic—free—search traffic (that’s a good reason).

You should track how much search engine traffic you get per month and make sure it’s increasing. Note that you should look at it over a period of at least a few months because seasonal changes can affect traffic.

To start, go to your main dashboard (Audience Overview) in Google Analytics for your site. This initial graph shows you your overall traffic for the last 30 days. Feel free to adjust it for a longer period.

Click on the “Add segment” button to bring up a list of options:

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Then, scroll down until you find “Organic Traffic.” Check the box and click “Apply.”

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Once you do that, another line will be added to your graph that shows your organic trafficalongside your overall traffic.

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You can also break down your search traffic by specific search engine. Use the left sidebar menu to navigate to “Acquisition > Overview,” and then click on the “Organic Search” link:

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To see the traffic by day, and not just the overall traffic, click the checkboxes beside each search engine, and then click the “Plot Rows” button:

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4. Average time on-page: are you nailing user intent?  

What do visitors typically do when they land on a page they are not interested in? They leave.

Conversely, if the page is extremely relevant and interesting, they spend time on it.

In real life, your page exists somewhere in-between the two extremes. Obviously, your goal should be to satisfy your readers as much as possible so that your page ranks highly.

Although you can find out an overall average time on-page metric for your site in the Audience Overview section, that’s not very useful. Instead, you need to dig down and look at how much time visitors are spending on each page.

Start by going to the “Behavior > Overview” option on the left-hand menu:

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That will show you a few of your top pages. Look at the bottom right corner for the “view full report” link, and click it:

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This will bring up all your pages ordered by the traffic volume. Look at the “Avg. Time on Page” column for each page:

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If you only have a few pages, you can record the results in a spreadsheet manually. Otherwise, scroll back up and click the export option to download a spreadsheet of data you can work with:

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Typically, time on-page won’t change much once you have a few hundred visits. So you only need to record this value for most pages once.

Sometimes, you might see a really low average time on-page. Record your initial time and the dates over which that data was gathered. Then, work to improve your content, and then re-check the value after you’ve had enough visitors.

There’s no specific “good” or “bad” time on-page for all pages. If your content is really short because it addresses a very specific issue, the visitor shouldn’t spend much time on it (then you can look at other metrics such as bounce rate). If your content is very long, the average time on-page should be relatively high.

5. Pages per visitor: track your usability

For most content (not all), you want your visitors to continue to read other content on your site after they visit the initial landing page.

To test your internal linking practices (both in content and navigation), you should track pages per visitor.

You can find the average pages per visitor in your Audience Overview:

image22

If your site and/or blog is relatively new, it’s okay if the number is low. However, you should record it as well as the date when it was recorded. Ideally, you want to increase this number as much as possible over time.

In general, there are two ways you can improve this:

  • link more within your content
  • add more enticing links in your sidebar or after the post

You can also dig into the pages per visitor for each landing page, using the same report as was described in point #4 (average time on-page). Look for any values that are relatively low, and see whether you can add some appropriate links.

6. Returning users: are you making an impression?

The number of returning visitors your website gets is a measure of how engaging your content is.

If you’re just slapping together some mediocre content, visitors aren’t going to return. You won’t be able to add them to your email list either, which is another way to get them to keep coming back.

No matter how you’re monetizing the site, having visitors who don’t come back is a bad thing.

Within the main screen of Audience Overview, look in the bottom right corner for a graph that looks like this:

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Not only can you see the percentage of new and returning visitors individually but you can also hover your mouse over each section of the pie graph to see the actual numbers of visitors.

Record both the ratio and the absolute number of returning and new visitors at least once a month. The absolute numbers of both types of visitors should be going up. The specific ratio isn’t a big deal, but the returning traffic should make up a good chunk of your traffic (at least 20%).

Returning visitors already know who you are and like you, which makes them more likely to buy from you. They are the most valuable traffic you have.

7. Bounce rate: don’t scare off visitors

It’s debateable whether or not bounce rate is a direct factor in search rankings.

After all, for some pages, a high bounce rate could be good. It can mean that a user came to your page, found what they wanted, and then left.

However, it’s still our best indication of pogo sticking.

Pogo sticking refers to users’ behavior of continually hopping back and forth between search results because they can’t find what they’re looking for:

image06

Google wants to satisfy users, which is why it doesn’t want searchers to get frustrated by not being able to find an answer. If too many visitors to your page click the back button and then choose another result, your rank will get worse.

A “bounce” is when a user lands on your page but doesn’t interact with it. They either close it or click the back button. Closing the page might not be a bad thing, but clicking back is. Since we can’t measure this specific action—closing the page, we look at the closest thing—the bounce rate.

Since the bounce rate is important on a page-by-page basis, that’s how you need to look at it.

Start by revisiting the “Behavior > Overview” option on the left menu:

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Then, click the link in the bottom right corner to view a full report:

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This report will list all the pages on your site with traffic as well as their bounce rates:

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Keep in mind that unless you have a few hundred visits to a page, the bounce rate isn’t all that accurate. Have a big enough sample size before drawing any conclusions.

A “good” bounce rate will depend on the topic. If it’s a very straightforward answer you’re trying to provide, like “how many grams are in a pound,” then you will have a high bounce rate because visitors will see the answer and leave.

If it’s a more open-ended question or topic, like “how to reduce your bounce rate,” good content should have a bounce rate of under 50% in general.

If you are interested in learning how to reduce your bounce rate, read this post that offers you 13 ways.

8. Optimize page load speed: bounce rate and speed go hand in hand

Bounce rate mainly depends on two things: good content and its accessibility.

If your page takes too long to load, visitors will leave even before they have a chance to read it. A slow loading web page is a leading cause of a high bounce rate, which in turn will result in lower Google rankings.

Ideally, you want your web page to load under two seconds, but lower is even better.

To test the load speed of a page, you can use the Quick Sprout tool. If you don’t want to use that, you can use alternatives such as GTmetrix or Pingdom.

Enter a URL into the Quick Sprout tool, and submit it. You’ll get a report with an overall speed score at the top:

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To get more details, click on the “full speed report” button below. It’ll take you to the report, where you can pick from three tabs:

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Each tab will give you different insights about which parts of your page take the longest to load and in what order.

Next, scroll down to get speed recommendations in simpler terms:

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Addressing the “high” priority concerns should have the most effect on your page’s loading speed.

Technically, you should do this for every page on your website. In reality, though, that would be a waste of your time. Check all standalone pages such as your homepage and landing pages as well as 5-10 blog posts.

If all those blog posts load in under 2 seconds, the rest typically will as well. You can always check a specific post if you have reasons to believe it loads slowly (like a high bounce rate).

Warning: Optimizing a page’s load speed is not easy if you’ve never done it before. There’s a lot of technical terminology involved that will take a significant amount of time to understand. If it gets the best of you, consider hiring an expert to help you out.

For the DIY approach, here are some of the best guides when it comes to fixing page speed problems:

9. Monitor and address crawl errors: eliminate indexing problems

In order for Google (or any search engine) to understand what your pages are about and what you should rank for, it needs to be able to crawl it.

Putting it simply, it doesn’t matter how good your content is and how many backlinks you have if Google is having trouble reading your page.

To check crawl errors, log into your Webmaster Tools (now Search Console) dashboard.

Use the left-side menu to go to “Crawl > Crawl Errors”, which will bring up a report:

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Most sites have some crawl errors, and some even have thousands. Fixing these can have a significant impact on your overall search visibility.

You’ll also likely see multiple tabs across the top. Google categorizes the errors to make them easier to identify and fix.

Here’s a complete guide to fixing the most common crawl errors.

It’s important to keep an eye on crawl errors on a continual basis because issues can unexpectedly come up and pages that used to be accessible can become blocked. If you don’t catch it in time, those pages can become de-indexed.

10. Check traffic by device: SEO in 2015 doesn’t discriminate

Mobile traffic makes up a significant portion of most Internet audiences. It makes up about 50% of all online retail traffic.

Google recognizes the importance of mobile optimization. If your site isn’t responsive or optimized for mobile, it’s difficult for your readers to easily read your content, which leaves them less satisfied.

On April 21, 2015, Google’s “Mobilegeddon” update was released. It wasn’t quite as big as anticipated, but sites that were clearly mobile-unfriendly took a bit of a hit:

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Think of this as a warning shot. Google will likely continue to place more emphasis on having mobile-friendly content, which means that the consequences will only become more severe.

To check if your pages are mobile-friendly, you can use Google’s own checker:

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If you fail, refer to Google’s guide to mobile-friendly websites.

Having mobile-friendly content is important not only for SEO but for other reasons too. If your readers can’t easily read your content, you have less of a chance of moving them down yourconversion funnel.

To get a general look at your performance on mobile, go to “Audience > Mobile > Overview” inGoogle Analytics:

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Look at the other metrics we’ve looked at (bounce rate, time on-page) for each type of device. While mobile stats are usually a bit worse than desktop, there shouldn’t be a huge amount of difference. If there is, you need to look into making your site more mobile friendly.

11. Pages crawled per day and time spent downloading: invite search engines

If Google likes a site, its bots will crawl it often.

What makes Google like a site? It’s a combination of many things, including good user metrics (bounce rate, time on-page, etc.), as well as having a good page speed (optimized page size) and a lack of crawl errors.

Ideally, you want your site crawled as much as often. That way, when you make a change or publish a new post, Google will notice quickly. A new Quick Sprout post is indexed in minutes usually.

Go to Webmaster Tools, and navigate to “Crawl > Crawl Stats”. You’ll see graphs for pages crawled per day as well as the amount of time spent downloading them:

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You want your numbers for pages crawled per day to be as high as possible while your numbers for time spent downloading to be as low as possible.

You need to check this report once every few weeks or once a month and look for any strange differences. If all of a sudden the time spent downloading pages goes through the roof, you likely have a loading speed problem that needs fixing.

Similarly, if the number of your pages crawled per day takes a dive, you could have some new crawl errors that are having a big negative impact.

12. Index status: monitor your site health

Don’t close Webmaster Tools just yet.

It’s time to check your site’s index status, which is a count of your indexed pages.

As you might expect, it’s a good thing if all your pages are indexed as only indexed pages show up in search results.

Under the “Google Index” category, click on “Index status”, and then on the “Advanced” tab:

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You’ll be able to see how many pages are indexed. On top of that, you’ll be able to see all the main errors that caused your pages to be de-indexed. So if your indexed pages started to drop at any point, you’ll be able to see why.

13. 404 pageviews: don’t lose your audience

Some website owners go through all the trouble of getting links and traffic and then send them to non-existent pages.

I don’t think I need to spell out how much of a waste this is. You aren’t getting maximum value from your traffic or your backlinks.

If you grow to a certain size, you’ll inevitably have 404 errors. Most of the time, it’s simply other websites linking to the wrong address.

If you have that problem, invest in a custom 404 page. When you get a 404 page on Quick Sprout, you see this:

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At the bottom, there are two links to popular parts of the site so that I don’t automatically lose the visitor.

When it comes to finding broken links, you have a few options.

Option 1: Quick and dirty method

This isn’t the best method, but it gives you a quick overview of the size of the problem.

Go into Google Analytics, and go to the Behavior Overview tab:

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Then, go to the full report (bottom right):

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Now, sort the pages by either bounce rate or time on page. But click twice so that it’s sorted from worst to best.

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If someone goes to a page that doesn’t exist, it’s going to have a near 100% bounce rate, or zero seconds spent on the page.

Alternatively, if you have a 404 error URL, you can just look at the number of visitors that came to that page.

Either way, this tells you how big the problem is—but not what’s causing it. Which is why either of the two other methods are best.

Option 2: Use Webmaster’s Tools (Search Console)

Go back into your Webmasters Tools, and navigate to “Crawl > Crawl Errors.”

This time, we’re specifically looking for “Not found” pages:

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When you click on one of these URLs, a pop-up will appear with error details. You can then click on the “linked from” tab to see which pages link to it.

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Fix the link on those pages and then mark the problem as fixed.

Option 3: Ahrefs broken links tool

To find out when someone else has linked to your pages incorrectly, search for your site in Ahrefs.

Then, under the “Inbound Links” dropdown menu, click on “Broken Backlinks.”

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This will bring up a list of sites that incorrectly linked to a page on your site. You can then contact someone from the site and nicely ask that they fix the link.

If you don’t hear back from them, you can 301 redirect the incorrect URL to the right one.

14. Conversions (goal completions): find out if you’re making the most of your traffic

Search traffic is great, but what you’re really after is traffic that converts.

Once you understand how well your search traffic converts, you can figure out how much you can afford to invest in content and link building.

A goal is a specific action or event that you can track in Google Analytics. For example, a goal can be a visitor visiting a specific page that is only available after making a purchase (like a thank-you or receipt page).

To create one, go to the “Goals > Overview” link at the very bottom of the left menu:

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Then, pick a template for your goal. Typically, it’s going to be something like making a payment or signing up for an email newsletter:

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After that, pick a type of goal, which is usually a destination (a specific URL they visit).

The final step is to input that destination’s URL as well as to assign a value to that event. For example, you might know that every email subscriber is worth $20 to you, so you can quantify the value of your search traffic.

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After some time, you can go to the “Goals > Overview” tab again, but this time you’ll see a graph of your goal completions:

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You can then click on the “Source/Medium” option in the bottom left to see how well your search traffic is converting.

If you need to sell your work to your boss in order to keep your job or get a bigger budget, this metric is great. Show them exactly how much money you are making them.

Additionally, you can also see if any particular pages are converting well by going back to the Behavior tab and clicking on the site content option and then landing pages:

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Conclusion

If you don’t track metrics, it’s impossible to know what is and isn’t working.

If you don’t know how effective your SEO work is, you could end up spending time and money on work that has a poor return. This could cost you your job or your business.

Metrics aren’t sexy, but they’re important.

You can’t leave them up to chance. Decide which metrics are most relevant and important for your website’s SEO (it probably won’t be all 14), and then decide how and when you will track them.

Follow a tracking schedule, and take conscious action to improve each of the metrics over time.

Let me know which metric(s) is most important or useful to you and your SEO work in a comment below.

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