A Step-by-Step Guide to Generating Clients by Writing Case Studies

You can use many methods to improve your conversion rate. But very few can improve your conversion rate as much as case studies can. Case studies have a few big benefits: they resonate with prospects they show that your product or service can work the transparency increases the trust a reader has in you All of these benefits are important, but the last one—in particular.  Trust is one of the most important factors in conversion rate optimization: Why is trust important? The reasons might seem obvious, but data explains these reasons to eliminate all doubt. A study by Edelman showed that gaining a customer’s trust has many rewards: Obviously, most will buy your products if they trust you and need what you’re selling. On top of that, they will recommend you to friends. And because they trust you, they would rather pay you more for a product than go to a competitor, all because they know what they’re getting when they buy from you. But trust is getting harder to earn. The sa
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Announcing the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Results

As we head into the thick of fall conference season, I m happy to announce that the results of the 2015 Local Search Ranking Factors Survey are in. Eager to dive right in? Click here for the full results. At the very least, I hope they help kickstart your Birds of a Feather roundtable conversations. (Or if you have a local search addiction as debilitating as mine, perhaps even an after-party conversation over over a pint!) My high-level takeaways Google s local search algorithm seems to be maturing Overall, we ve seen a continuation of the gradual trend towards Google rewarding quality on all fronts—from citations to links to reviews. And as more companies have implemented the table stakes of site architecture, keyword- and location-relevant title tags, and claiming their Google My Business pages, quality and authority become the differentiators in competitive markets. The influence of Google+ on local results is on its way out (if it even existed in the first place) With the remova
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Link Building Outreach Platforms Compared

Find the original post on Point Blank SEO at: %%PostLink%% In this post we’re going to compare the most popular solutions for conducting & managing link building and/or PR outreach. Which one should I use? After my research & testing, it pains me to give such one-dimensional answers (cue waves of criticism), but since that’s what a lot of you are looking for, here’s the TL;DR version of what you should use: Small business owners – Google Drive / Excel ($ 0/anything/month) Solo person or small team – Pitchbox ($ 47-67/project/month) Mid to large-size team – BuzzStream ($ 15-25/user/month) See the more in-depth comparison here. The group up for the most debate is the mid-size teams (i.e. ~5 people). With that said, making a decision purely off the above is a very poor idea. They were made off a few critical assumptions that don’t hold true for ALL of you. Each platform has its own sets of advantages, so you need to answer these main questions before you can decide which i
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Let Me Work, Please: A Case for Fewer & More Productive Meetings

If you feel like your workweek is structured around meetings—like all you re doing is preparing for and attending meetings, talking about and reporting on your work rather than sitting and doing it—then you ve reached a point of frustration where you need to regain control of your time. There are two sides to meetings: not attending them if they re unnecessary, and when running a meeting, ensuring that it s purposeful, on-point, and driving a specific outcome. If the meeting lacks purpose and has no desired outcome, what s the point? Today s workplace The current workplace is operated on a model that doesn t promote productivity. Many offices are built around the open office concept, which serves as an ideal delivery system for distraction. This open-plan environment may promote camaraderie, but constant noise damages attention spans and workplace productivity. Even the most sophisticated noise-canceling headphones cannot defend workers from inevitable but unpredictable waves of i
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Social Influencer Prospecting with Co-Citation

A few Saturday nights ago, I had a bit of a eureka moment. I’d been thinking about how we could prospect for social influencers in a way that was more data driven than the current approach of doing keyword searches on tools like Followerwonk. An interesting feature of BuzzSumo was introduced to me a few weeks prior by AJ Ghergich (@SEO), a marketer that’s very talented when it comes to content promotion. He pointed out to me that you can see exactly which Twitter accounts shared a given piece of content, via the ‘View Sharers’ button next to each result. This was very interesting, and thought it would be useful to simply grab a list of who shared a specific piece of content that was relevant, and add them to our prospecting lists. However, on that Saturday night, I realized that this feature was much more powerful than that. But before we explain how, let’s start with how we currently generate quick-win link prospecting reports for new clients to give you the background know
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14 Examples of Truly “Epic” Content: How Does Yours Stack Up?

 The word epic is overused. It’s become watered down over the years, and most people don’t seem to appreciate what it means. Which is a problem. Why? Because the first rule of content marketing is: Create epic content. I’ve written about creating great content many times before, but epic is a level above that. According to the dictionary, epic describes something that is: heroic; majestic; impressively great OR of unusually great size or extent In plain English, it refers to something that’s so much better than any other thing out there that you can’t help but to be impressed with it. And although you can’t always hit the epic level with your content, it’s something you should strive to reach at least a few times a year. That’s when you’ll start getting hundreds of links to your content and tens of thousands of views. But here’s the problem: You can’t create a guide to making epic content because it comes in many different forms. Great content is fairly predic
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Drive More Traffic To Your Site With These Proven Methods

When it comes to the success and profitability of your blog, the number of visitors you receive is more important than anything else. We can talk about leads, conversions and authoritative backlinks until we’re blue in the face, but without any actual traffic your blog is just a barren wasteland on the internet. In order for your blog to be successful, it needs to be seen. Today I’m going to reveal proven methods that are guaranteed to bring people to your blog. What You Will Learn Proven methods to generate traffic How to apply them to your own site How to get your first 1,000 visitors ATTENTION: Unlock My Award Winning Blogging Resources Instantly 3 Ways To Bring Traffic to Your Blog Today Before we dive into these methods, it’s important to understand that while traffic is good it’s important to drive relevant traffic to your blog. More specifically, it needs to be people who are within your target audience. If you you blog about SEO tactics and someone stumbles in looking
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How to Use Keywords Throughout Your Marketing Strategy

Posted by kristihines How do you use keywords? If you re only using them to optimize your website for search, then you re missing out on many ways to get visibility amongst your target audience. In this post, I m going to share with you the best ways to use keywords across your entire online (and even offline) marketing strategy. Webpage optimization I don t want to spend a lot of time on this one, especially since you can read all about it in the Beginner s Guide to SEO. But just for a quick review, here are the places that you should use your target keyword phrase on each page of your website that you d like to optimize for search. In the SEO title tag of your page (or just the main title of the page if your CMS does not allow you to edit SEO fields). This is a requirement for the on-page optimization of a keyword. In the meta description for your page. Even though it may not count for optimization purposes, it will get bolded when someone sees your webpage in search results for tha
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6 Clever Ways to Get Influencers to Link to You

One of the most important things I say you should do is create great content. But then what? If you don’t do anything with that content, no one will see it, which is a waste of your time, effort, and money. Once you start using promotional techniques, you’ll start getting readers to your blog posts. A few dozen at first, then a few hundred, maybe even a few thousand after a while. But there’s one thing missing at this point. I’ll tell you what it is in a second. From my experience, I can tell that organic search traffic is going to play a major role for almost all websites. You can try to diversify, but the fact remains that any site with a ton of traffic gets a large chunk of it from search engines. After all, organic search traffic makes up over 60% of the traffic on the web. 
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Traffic and Engagement Metrics and Their Correlation to Google Rankings

Posted by Royh When Moz undertook this year’s Ranking Correlation Study (Ranking Factors), there was a desire to include data points never before studied. Fortunately, SimilarWeb had exactly what was needed. For the first time, Moz was able to measure ranking correlations with both traffic and engagement metrics. Using Moz’s ranking data on over 200,000 domains, combined with multiple SimilarWeb data points—including traffic, page views, bounce rate, time on site, and rank—the Search Ranking Factors study was able to measure how these metrics corresponded to higher rankings. These metrics differ from the traditional SEO parameters Moz has measured in the past in that they are primarily user-based metrics. This means that they vary based on how users interact with the individual websites, as opposed to static features such as title tag length. We ll find these user-based metrics important as we learn how search engines may use them to rank webpages, as illustrated in this excel
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Demystifying SEO: How to Skyrocket Your Traffic Through Schema Markup

Good writers always write for their visitors, not for search engines. Actually, that’s not quite true… At the dawn of SEO, you did have to write for the search engines. The primitive search engines could only evaluate the relevance of your content to the query by the number of times the searched keyword was mentioned in the content. By simply including the keyword as many times as possible, you’d rank well. Obviously, search engines have evolved since then. With Google’s updates in the past few years, it’s become clear that keyword stuffing no longer helps you rank (in fact, it hurts you). Now, Google looks at several on-page factors to determine a page’s relevancy. The new advice for content writers is: write for your visitors, and let Google worry about the rest. It’s not bad advice. In fact, that’s what the writer should do. However, SEOs can, and often should, optimize that content further. Even if you write all your content yourself, you need to play the parts of
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New Study: Data Reveals 67% of Consumers are Influenced by Online Reviews

Posted by Dhinckley This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc. Google processed over 1 trillion search queries in 2014. As Google Search continues to further integrate into our normal daily activities, those search results become increasingly important, especially when individuals are searching for information about a company or product. To better understand just how much of an impact Google has on an individual’s purchasing decisions, we set up a research study with a group of 1,000 consumers through Google Consumer Surveys. The study investigates how individuals interact with Google and other major sites during the buying process. Do searchers go beyond page 1 of Google? We first sought to understand how deeply people went into the Google search results. We wanted to know if people tended to stop at page
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25 List Building Strategies: From Zero to 4,476 Email Subscribers in 10 Months

Building an email list should be your number one priority. Period. Why? It allows you to generate traffic and REPEAT customers on demand. Think about it An email list is something people opt into. They actually want to hear from you. You can build a relationship with your readers. People buy from those they trust. Your message gets delivered to the place 91% of consumers check everyday the inbox. YOU OWN THE LIST. An email list is the only channel if nurtured that will allow you to directly and personally communicate with your audience on an ongoing basis. It’s essential to building a profitable business. So, how do you build an email list without breaking the bank? That’s exactly what I’m going to show you in this post: 25 actionable list building strategies you can use to grow your email list TODAY. ​ These are the exact strategies I use to grow my email list from zero to 4,476 subscribers in 10 months: Download a Free PDF of this Guide + BONUS 3-Step List Building Formula
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What’s in Your SEO Arsenal? 6 Skills All SEOs Need to Have

There’s no university degree for SEO. Yet, you’re expected to know a lot about many different things. This is why it’s so tough to define what a great SEO is. In most professional situations, knowing SEO alone is no longer enough. You also need to have your fair share of marketing, business, and PR skills. While some of these skills are luxuries, I’ve identified six things that all good SEOs need to possess. Great ones will possess all of them and more. SEO is an interesting field because it can use skills from all sorts of other fields. So, if you’re passionate about something that doesn’t seem immediately relevant to SEO (discussed in this article), don’t just throw it away. You never know when it will come in handy.  1. Great SEOs know how to get consistent results As an SEO you know you can’t guarantee that a specific keyword will rank #1—certainly not 100% of the time. For some reason, statements like that have led people to think that SEO is blind luck.  This
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How I Generated 2,178 Leads In 14 days With Just $60

This is a case study of how one of the blogs readers was able to generate a lot of leads in a short period of time using a single giveaway. By leveraging a mix of partnerships and the viral component, results were quite mind blowing. Whether you’re a blogger or an entrepreneur, doing giveaways can be a great way to grow your list of potential customers. Read the case study to see how she did it for her wellness brand. What You Will Learn How I gained 2,178 subscribers by running a single giveaway in only 14 days and only $ 60 spent on advertising Planning your giveaway in a way that attracts quality leads What to expect when running a giveaway Mistakes most people make when running a giveaway for list building ATTENTION: Unlock My Award Winning Blogging Resources Instantly Why Should You Care? Before I dive into this case study, I wanted to make sure I introduce myself. Why should you care what I have to say anyway, right? Well, my name is Kamila Gornia and I am a digital marketing
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5 Ways to Build Links Without Getting Penalized

How do you get more search traffic if you’re not supposed to build links? It’s a catch-22… You know you should create content that attracts links, but you need to have links to have an audience that can link to you. Therefore, you must be proactive in order to get backlinks to your site. And according to Matt Cutts, the importance of backlinks isn’t going away anytime soon: …backlinks still have many, many years left in them … over time backlinks will become a little less important … we will continue to use links in order to assess the basic reputation of pages and websites. According to just about every study out there, backlinks are still one of the most important factors in ranking highly in search engines—as the image above illustrates. Bottom line: You need to build backlinks. But…you need to do it in a safe way, so you don’t have to worry about having your site sent into oblivion by the next Penguin update. Avoiding penalties while building links isn’t ab
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A Clear Path for Marketers to Surviving Content Shock

Posted by EricEnge Yes, we all know that content marketing is all the rage. More and more brands are embracing content marketing as a basic way to engage with the community at large, and to build credibility, trust, and relationships with potential customers. You ve probably also heard about content fatigue, or the oncoming content glut. Mark Schaefer attracted a ton of attention on this topic with his post, Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy. A key part of his thesis is that each human has a physiological, inviolable limit to the amount of content they can consume. He then goes on to say that deep pockets win, that the entry barriers will become higher and higher, and that the level of investment that one will have to make in content to win will become impossibly high for most businesses. Many responded with counter-arguments, including this article by Joe Pulizzi called Content Shock: Worrisome Trend or Content Marketing Myth?, in which he includes a
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Content, Shares, and Links: Insights from Analyzing 1 Million Articles

Posted by Steve_Rayson This summer BuzzSumo teamed up with Moz to analyze the shares and links of over 1m articles. We wanted to look at the correlation of shares and links, to understand the content that gets both shares and links, and to identify the formats that get relatively more shares or links. What we found is that the majority of content published on the internet is simply ignored when it comes to shares and links. The data suggests most content is simply not worthy of sharing or linking, and also that people are very poor at amplifying content. It may sound harsh but it seems most people are wasting their time either producing poor content or failing to amplify it. On a more positive note we also found some great examples of content that people love to both share and link to. It was not a surprise to find content gets far more shares than links. Shares are much easier to acquire. Everyone can share content easily and it is almost frictionless in some cases. Content has to wo
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10 Tips to Master Google Panda 4.2

Google’s search algorithm updates tend to scare business owners and webmasters because they are as unexpected as they are unpredictable, penalizing websites in search engine results for reasons that are pretty much unknown to anyone who doesn’t have a deeper understanding of how SEO, and Google in particular, works. Those who have hired a great SEO service needn’t worry about losing their ranking with the new Panda update, but if you should find yourself in trouble with Panda 4.2 and need to take care of business yourself, here are some useful tips that will help retain your website’s position: 1. Know if you’ve been affected: only a small number of queries were affected, and not all of them were penalized, so in truth, your website might not have been affected at all, or might even have benefited from the update.
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