Still, have you ever measured the success of your customer acquisition campaigns? For starters, you need to calculate your Cost per Acquisition (CPA). This metric tells you how much money you spend to aggregate one paying customer. 

If your CPA is high, don’t worry. You can reduce it using the following tactics.

Track your Customer Acquisition Costs

There is a simple formula to use when calculating your CPA: dividing the total cost of marketing by the total number of customers. For example, if you spend $1500 on your marketing tools and strategy and you acquire 50 new customers, your acquisition cost will be $30. In other words, this means you are spending $30 on each customer you acquire.

To understand your customer acquisition cost, you also need to measure:  

• The average purchase value tells you how much your customers spend on average when buying from you. It is calculated by dividing your total revenue by the number of orders.
• The average customer’s lifespan indicates customer loyalty. It is measured by dividing the sum of each customer’s lifespan by the number of customers.
• Customer lifetime value tells you how much money each customer spends on your business during their lifetime. You can calculate it by multiplying customer value by their average lifespan.

Keep your Content Targeted and Relevant

Always keep in mind that the one-size-fits-all approach to sales and marketing doesn’t cut it anymore. Your customers expect your content and offer to be highly targeted and relevant. And, this is an immensely important thing to know for young companies wanting to minimize their cost per acquisition.

Namely, the longer it takes to turn a lead into a customer, the greater your customer acquisition cost will be. Above all, you risk attracting low-quality leads that won’t convert into paying customers or even brand advocates.

The key to attracting the right leads and converting them lies in building detailed buyer personas. Start by collecting customer data through website analytics, online surveys, polls, quizzes, chatbots, and social listening. Then, use their demographic data (geolocation, age, marital status, profession, salary, education) and psychographic data (their hobbies, interests, problems, frustrations) to segment your audiences into smaller groups and develop personas.

Segment your newsletter audiences.

Sending a single, uniform email doesn’t work for online users. To grab their attention in their overcrowded inboxes and get them to click on your subject line, you need to offer something valuable to them. Focus on addressing their needs and preferences. There are many ways to segment your email newsletter lists, such as by their geolocation, previous purchases, browsing habits, interests, activity/inactivity, etc. By investing in a reliable email service provider like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or AWeber, you will do so easily.

Target relevant keywords.

Your target audiences dictate many aspects of your SEO strategy, from choosing link-building prospects to your UX elements. However, they play a particularly important role in your keyword research process. You should always optimize your pages for relevant keywords that will support your prospective customers at each step of their journey.

For starters, you need to focus on search intent. For example, if someone is visiting your website for the first time, they will want to learn more about you by reading your blog posts and news. On the other hand, people at the bottom of the sales funnel already know what they want to buy from you. To convince them to do so, you should provide them with targeted incentives, case studies, customer testimonials, discounts, etc.

The idea is to optimize your website for the right keywords, based on the user’s intent. Apart from optimizing for exact-match keywords, you should also use conversational and long-tail keywords to stay competitive. To learn what your audiences are really searching for, you could also use People Also Ask or Google Suggestions.

Educate customers through diverse content.

Content marketing is the backbone of brand-customer relationships. Diversify your content to make it relevant to different audience segments. For example, you could create powerful company newsletters to deepen customer relationships. Comprehensive guides and how-to articles to offer actionable tips. Customer testimonials, case studies, and demo videos will gain their trust. Provide self-service options, like a detailed knowledge base or a FAQ page that will solve their problems quickly.

Build a Sold CRO Strategy

When attracting customers, you cannot expect them to convert overnight. You need to have a solid, well-defined CRO strategy to convert your prospective leads into paying customers.

Prove your website is safe

This is particularly important to companies that require users to provide their sensitive information. With the rise of cybersecurity threats, customers are concerned about the security of their data. According to some recent stats, 17% of shopping car abandonment rates are caused by security concerns. Therefore, before purchasing from you, they will want to know that they are buying from a trustworthy store. For starters, invest in SSL certificates and add trust badges to your website.

Show social proof

Many customers rely on online reviews when making purchasing decisions. Precisely because of that, social proof is a fundamental part of your CRO strategy. Here is how to use it:

• Enable customer reviews and ratings on your website. 
• Leverage social proof software. Use a CRO tool to provide your website’s visits, leads generated, and conversions in real time. Third, encourage customer testimonials and display them on your website. Finally, create detailed case studies that show your previous customers’ problems and explain how you solved them.

Make your site easily navigable

Complicated website architecture frustrates customers and prevents them from converting. To prevent that, you need to optimize your website navigation. Start with your navigation menu. Reduce the number of categories and subcategories – include the most relevant ones. The categories should be logical and informative, helping customers find the right content faster. For those customers who already know what they are searching for, you should also offer search and filtering functionalities.

Turn Customers into Brand Advocates

In today’s highly competitive digital marketing landscape, acquiring a customer is only half the battle. The other half is increasing their brand loyalty and turning them into a raving fan base. Even though retaining customers and building a growing community of brand advocates takes lots of time and effort, the results are amazing. You will get tons of positive word-of-mouth marketing, boost sales, and help you regain your acquisition costs faster.

Now, there are many ways to nurture your leads and sales into loyal customers.

Show you care about their opinions

Listen to your customers on social networks and monitor your brand and product mentions to understand what they feel about you. You could also create customer satisfaction surveys on your website, social accounts, or email. Use their feedback to improve your customer support, marketing, and products and, in this way, increase their satisfaction.

Build a customer loyalty program

A customer loyalty program rewards customers who are continuously buying from you. The more they buy from you, the more they are incentivized. This practice keeps your shoppers satisfied, as it shows them that you value their loyalty. There are different types of loyalty programs, such as point programs, tiered programs, and value-based programs, and you should always choose ones that resonate with your target audience.

Have a social responsibility strategy

Your startup is more than just a product. Customers would always choose to buy from companies that share their values and missions. Precisely because of that, you should inject your core values into a corporate social responsibility program. Give back to the community. Make your products more eco-friendly. Those are just some of the numerous ways to build trust with your audiences and inspire them to stay loyal to your brand.

Conclusions

Attracting new customers and yet, reducing acquisition costs is any startup’s priority. To do so, you first need to measure your CPA and know how much you spend to acquire a new customer. Based on this data, you will formulate your customer acquisition and conversion rate optimization strategy. Those are just some of the numerous tactics that may serve as your solid starting point.

The post Best Ways to Optimize Cost per Acquisition in the Startup Environment appeared first on Tricky Enough.

As an SEO professional, you know how to adapt your services to your clients’ needs. You keep track of the latest SEO trends and understand what tactics you should use to help a client achieve the desired goal. Above all, you have the right tools to monitor and streamline most of your SEO activities and SEO reports.

However, just because you are killing it in SEO doesn’t mean you will make your clients satisfied. You also need to communicate with them regularly and honestly. And, this is where client reporting shines, helping you build trust with your clients.

Now, exporting a bunch of data from your SEO tools to PDF files or copying them to Excel spreadsheets is not enough to keep a client happy. Their inboxes are packed with a bunch of relevant emails. Creating a complex SEO report will only frustrate them and discourage them from opening your emails. Inconsistencies in agency-client communications may harm your collaboration on multiple levels.

Precisely because of that, you need to create easy-to-understand and aesthetically appealing SEO reports your clients will open and read. Here are a few simple steps to follow.

Aligning Reports with Clients’ Goals

To demonstrate the effectiveness of your SEO services, you first need to talk to a client and ask them what their goals and expectations are. Now, those clients who are familiar with the basics of SEO will be able to state their objectives clearly. However, if a client has very little SEO knowledge and experience, you will first need to educate them so they can decide on what their SEO goals are. Also, if you notice that a client is setting unrealistic expectations, be honest with them and help them set achievable goals. 

Once you establish goals, you need to agree upon the metrics you will use. They tell your clients whether your SEO services are helping them achieve their goals.

That is why you need to talk to your clients and set the right targets. For example, do they want to generate more leads, boost online sales, increase organic traffic, or maximize brand awareness? Each of these tactics requires a specific set of KPIs to measure a client’s progress.

Tailor SEO Reports to your Clients’ Needs

Creating reporting templates can save you lots of time, but sending a uniform report to all clients may not be as effective as you think. Remember that your clients have different SEO knowledge levels, as well as different experiences with SEO companies. The one-size-fits-all approach won’t resonate with them. Just like each website requires different SEO strategies and goals, client reports you create should also be tailored to their specific needs.

Know who you are writing reports for 

If you are sending a report to an SMB owner, chances are they will have little or no SEO knowledge. In this case, you will need to adapt your reports to their needs and provide clear explanations. Above all, you should keep your reports straightforward. Use simple language, shorten sentences, and avoid complex industry jargon. Bombarding a client with a bunch of complex metrics and datasheets will only confuse them.

On the other hand, if you are sending a report to a company’s digital marketing team, they will expect you to skip simple explanations and provide more granular insights into the KPIs critical to their campaign success.

Visualize SEO data

Apart from your writing style, you also need to pay attention to the design of your reports. One of the most effective ways to present your data and make it easy to follow and understand is to use visual elements, such as graphics or charts. You should also leave lots of white space to make it easier for a client to read a report on both smaller and larger screens. Above all, balance your textual and visual data. Make sure that colours, fonts, or data visualizations support the information you are presenting. 

Automate Reporting Processes

Creating consistent and valuable reports for each client is a complex process that will take up lots of your time. To track clients’ performance, you will need to use various SEO tools. The choice of tools also varies, depending on the client’s specific goals and needs. Then, you will need to go through piles of data to find the most important ones and export them to an Excel spreadsheet. Finally, you will need to design a document or use a slide-share presentation to create a report worth reading.

Luckily, you can use automated reporting tools and create a custom marketing dashboard for each client. SEO reporting software integrates with the most popular SEO tools. You can combine the widgets from those tools and, in this way, track only those metrics that are relevant to each client. You can also create SEO dashboards and share access with a client. Unlike Excel spreadsheets, your dashboards will be updated automatically when changes occur. Finally, you can export SEO data to PDF and schedule reports to auto-send. This way, you will increase client reporting consistency and boost clients’ satisfaction.

What to Include in your Reports?

Even though the choice of metrics will depend on your client’s goals, here is a brief list of common elements of an informative SEO report:

Organic traffic

Traffic helps your clients understand what their common visitors are and where they come from. SEO professionals should focus on organic traffic, as it is directly linked with clients’ organic search rankings.
Traffic is the lifeblood of every digital business. Understanding who a client’s visitors are, and where they are coming from is an essential component of every marketing and growth strategy.

Conversion rates and goal completion

Observing traffic as an isolated metric doesn’t make sense. Your goal is to understand whether a client’s traffic converts. As your conversion rates are tightly related to other metrics, such as website speed, bounce rate, and so forth, they will help you explain the rest of the report more easily.

Conversions come in numerous shapes, including contact form completions, lead magnet downloads, live chat triggers, email newsletter subscriptions, and so forth. Logically, there are different conversion-related metrics you can choose to track, including URL destination, visit duration, and pages per visit.

Keyword Ranking

Keyword rankings are the most popular metric among your clients. Irrespective of their niche, they probably have a list of keywords they want to rank for Google. And, your job is to help them perform keyword research, rank for the right phrases and, above all, measure how they work on their rankings. For example, if you notice that a client’s rankings are stagnating or dropping, that usually means that your SEO tactics are not working for them and that you should change something. You can monitor keyword rankings via SEMrush and Ahrefs which are easily integrated with your automated SEO reporting tools.

Search Visibility

Your clients will want to know how well they perform in Google’s SERPs. Search visibility will help you understand how to optimize clients’ rankings and link-building strategies. This is where Google’s Search Console shines. It lets you observe a client’s website performance, from their CTR to crawl data, in Google’s search index. As this is one of the most important tools in any SEO toolbox, it integrates with most digital marketing reporting tools.

Future Practices and Recommendations

One of the most significant parts of the client reporting process is analyzing the metrics mentioned above. Based on the SEO data you present, you should explain what works for your clients’ SEO efforts, as well as inform them about your future course of action.

Conclusions

Client reporting is the nerve centre of your client relationship management. It validates the effectiveness of your SEO services, improves your communications with clients, and builds trust with them. This is why your reports need to be simple, visually appealing and, above all, client-centred. I hope these tips help!

The post Best Practices for Creating an SEO Report appeared first on Tricky Enough.

From introducing chatbots into the customer service department, generating advertisements with laser precision, and improving personalization, all the way to improving your entire content strategy and getting people to read your content, there is a lot to be gained by integrating technology into your business. Here’s how technology innovation is impacting the promotional landscape.

Redefining the art and science of PR

Back in the day before the web became the primary place of advertisement and the foundation of digital marketing, public relations depended on print media and press releases, television and radio, and of course, word of mouth. Even though these are still valuable communication faucets for experienced PR managers and business leaders, it’s important to note that the art and science of PR have greatly migrated into the online realm.

Technology has made it possible for public relations to become more efficient and effective by broadening a brand’s reach and amplifying its voice to reach global audiences quickly. Social media platforms, automation tools for content management and posting, big data, influencer tools, and more are now making it possible for PR managers to optimize their entire strategy to reach the hearts and minds of their audience. They achieve this by collating relevant industry data into actionable reports that they can later transform into moving speeches, videos, and other content.

Leveraging AI to outperform human-made advertising

With the rise of online entrepreneurship and digital marketing all over the world, online advertising is becoming increasingly competitive and nuanced. The need to create story-driven landing pages, craft actionable CTAs, and optimize advertisements for maximum visibility on search engines is making ad creation increasingly difficult with each passing year. Why? Partly because there are more companies out there fighting over the same customers nowadays, and partly because modern customers can easily identify a poorly-written ad.

If you are to succeed in all forms of online advertising, including native advertising, you need to integrate artificial intelligence and smart software into the creation process. More importantly, you need to monitor relevant KPIs and act on the reports you create. You can achieve all of this by extracting valuable information from AI-driven reports on CTA effectiveness, content performance, attention spans, tone of voice reports, and more. For example, use AI to identify the wording that makes a CTAs convert in order to make them that much more effective for every subsequent ad campaign.

Combining personalization with valuable incentives

Modern brand promotion, be it through advertising or marketing, is all about personalization. Nowadays, there is little that drives brand loyalty and trust in the competitive market like personalizing and tailoring content, visuals, and promotional products to the customer. From personalized emails to social media giveaways that drive engagement through valuable gifts, there is a lot you can achieve by either branding or personalizing every process.

This is one of the reasons why branded promotional products such as the prepaid Visa card have been so widely adopted by businesses in recent years, as entrepreneurs and marketers have identified the need to provide their customers with gifts and incentives that are not only valuable but inspirational as well. In essence, when you put your brand on a promotional product or personalize an item to fit your customer’s preferences, you are effectively making your brand an integral part of their everyday life. This is a powerful way to promote your business as a whole.

Using voice search to boost SEO and engagement

Without a doubt, voice search is on the rise across the globe. With people increasingly searching for products, services, and information by asking their AI assistants a question rather than typing in a string of keywords, companies need to optimize their SEO strategies to remain relevant in the SERPs.

Optimizing for voice search will bring more quality traffic to your website and improve your engagement rate through Google snippets and other relevant content. For this to be successful, though, you will need to adapt your content to answer questions concisely and accurately, while incentivizing the customer to follow the link to the full article, video, or infographic.

Capitalizing on social media influencers and their reach

Finally, there is a big emphasis nowadays on working with prominent influencers to improve brand reach, awareness, and reputation online. While influencer marketing is not a new concept, it’s interesting to note just how technology is making it easier for companies to get matched with the best influencers in their niche.

Through automation and AI-driven software, marketers can filter, organize, and reach out to the influencers that fit the company’s tone of voice, personality, and values. This will ensure that your messages reach the right audience, which will lead to more conversions down the road.

Marketing and advertising are the foundation of successful businesses nowadays, hence the need to take the art and science of promotion into the 21^st century and leverage technology to achieve better results. With these five innovations in mind, go ahead and optimize your entire promotional strategy for more engagement, traffic, and conversions.

Suggested:

Point of Sale Pricing and Cost: Factors to Consider.

Integration capabilities Associated with S/4HANA to SAP Cloud Solutions.

The post 5 Ways Innovation in Technology is Impacting the Promotional Landscape appeared first on Tricky Enough.

In today’s overcrowded digital marketing landscape, competition is fierce. So, if you’re planning to build a recognizable digital agency from the ground up, you’ll need more than creativity, motivation, and knowledge. You need to have a solid plan that will support your startup’s growth over time.

Improve your Digital Marketing Skills

Many articles you’ll find online will tell you that having a good business idea and securing funds is enough to launch a startup.

I wouldn’t agree with that statement.

Just because you’ve taken a marketing diploma or you’ve landed an internship at a digital marketing agency doesn’t mean you’re competent enough to run your digital agency.

You don’t have enough experience.

Before you even start thinking about starting your digital agency, you should get a real job in the industry.

This way, you will gain a better understanding of the digital marketing industry overall and understand how its different aspects intertwine.

This is also an opportunity to gain invaluable project management skills and learn how to run a campaign from beginning to end. What people to include? How to determine their roles and responsibilities? How to measure employee performance? What tools to choose to simplify your creative processes or measure your campaign performance?

Answering these questions is the only way to keep your clients happy and deliver the desired results.

Choose your Niche

One of the most common mistakes digital agencies make is casting their net as wide as possible instead of choosing a narrower niche. Some of the major disadvantages of such an approach are:

• Not getting the most out of the onboarding process. When a potential client reaches out to you, you need to consider a wide range of factors before deciding whether to work with them or not. When your niche is clearly defined, this process gets easier. First, you will turn down all businesses outside of your target market. Second, you will be able to separate quality clients from those you don’t want to do business with.
• Failing to improve your skills, you won’t know what skills to focus on. By working with clients within the same niche, you will know what tactics work for them and be able to boost a specific skill set.
• Failing to gain a competitive edge. When building a digital agency, your goal is to grow your brand reputation within a particular niche. This way, you will be perceived as a credible resource, gain positive client reviews, and acquire new clients.

Develop the Right Business Model

By choosing the right business model, you will know what services you will provide, how you will manage your clients over time and, above all, how you will bill for your services.

Now, here are the most frequent ways to bill for your services:

• Hourly rates – You’re charging for your services hourly.
• The flat fee – Based on a client’s goals, you determine how much time, effort, and resources you will invest in their campaigns and determine a flat monthly fee.
• The percentage of spend – Your billing efforts change, based on a client’s needs and scalability. In other words, as you gain new connections and larger clients, you will start turning down those prospects with little marketing resources.
• Commission-based businesses– You get paid once you complete the job.

Determine how your Agency will Grow

when starting a business, we all dream big. You’re now probably thinking about renting out large offices and equipping them with fancy equipment.

Remember that, no matter how great it all plays out in your head, in reality, surviving the first months of operation is extremely difficult. There will be lots of bills you will need to pay and your profits will still be low. That’s why you need to scale down your ideas.

Instead of hiring 50+ workers right away, recruit a few skilled people at the positions critical to your agency. Sure, as your company grows and your client base expands, your team will grow, too.

First, estimate the costs of launching and running a digital agency. How many people will you hire? How will you attract top talent and acquire clients? What tools and equipment will you need?

Based on these estimations, secure funds on time. What financing methods will you use? Will you rely solely on bootstrapping and your friends and family’s help? If you believe your agency is different from the rest, why not consider crowdfunding? Maybe you want to take out a bank loan or apply for a government grant for startups and small businesses – the options are multiple and you just need to choose the right one.

You need to prepare for unexpected situations, too. What if you’ve just entered a slow season or you’re struggling with lots of unpaid invoices? What if an essential piece of equipment breaks or your staff needs an additional tool to get their jobs done? For example, in such situations, taking out personal loans is probably the fastest way to get your money injection.

Promote your Digital Agency

Would you ever hire a tattoo artist without tattoos? I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t. The same goes for hiring digital agencies without a strong online presence. For your digital agency, your website, content, ads, and social media strategy are the strongest letters of recommendation. Without them, your prospects would have no reason to hire you.

Here is how to stand out in the crowd:

• Create high-quality content and promote it strategically to increase your industry authority.
• Establish a solid social media strategy to humanize your brand and build a vibrant online community.
• Listen to your target audience and provide relevant and actionable answers to their questions.
• Share case studies and client testimonials to build trust with your audiences.
• Register on all relevant business review sites to generate customer reviews.
• Speak at all industry-specific events that will position you as a credible resource.

Over to You

Before even starting, you should know that launching a thriving digital agency won’t be easy. You’ll need to pour your heart into it. Still, with a detailed plan and the right skills, you will be able to weather the storm and finally reap the benefits of running your own business.

So, choose the right business model, pick your narrow niche, and have a business growth strategy. Don’t forget to market your agency and start building a solid brand around its name from the very beginning.

The post How to Launch your own Digital Agency? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Needless to say, no matter how elaborate or ingenious a marketing campaign might be at the point of inception, you will never be able to improve upon it in the future or know how to effectively change it if you don’t track your marketing ROI. With that in mind, here are the essential ways to track the ROI of your marketing campaigns that every growth-oriented business should implement into their processes.

Track your general performance

Luckily for every digital marketing expert out there, modern technology has made it possible for every seemingly minuscule metric to be tracked and acted upon effectively. Regarding your general performance, there are three essential metrics or KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) that you need to track to ascertain a marketing campaign’s effectiveness: traffic, leads, and overall reach.

As you might have gathered, if your website and social media pages have experienced a surge of traffic since the launch of your campaign, that could prove that the campaign has had a positive impact. However, ROI can also be measured in the number of new leads your marketing efforts have created, and it will be up to you to nurture them until they become paying customers. What’s more, your overall reach will also be an important indicator, especially across social media platforms, detailing how many people saw your campaign.

Monitor channel-based performance

Speaking of social media platforms, they represent a single part of your overall channel-based performance and are an excellent indicator of the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. If your social media feeds experienced an increase in likes, shares, mentions, and retweets, and are being talked about across the digital realm, then you can safely conclude that your marketing campaign is doing good.

However, several other key indicators fall into this category: your website, blog, and relevant search engines. Not only is it important to ascertain the number of visitors to your website, but it’s also important to know how well your blog is doing in terms of engagement, shares, and whether or not it successfully leads people to the product or checkout page. This claim is backed up by an SEO company from the Gold Coast, identifying their secret weapon to be data. More specifically “in-depth insights from the latest SEO trends, keyword research, customers and competitors“.

Use inbound call reports to your advantage

There is an excellent method for measuring the ROI for your marketing campaign and your brand awareness and reputation in general that every business should use: capitalizing on inbound call reports through the use of a business number.

This gives you a comprehensive and truthful overview of your marketing campaign’s performance in the market, providing you with actionable feedback from your customers as well as your demographics in general. By using inbound call reports to your advantage, you can gain meaningful insight into the state of the market and improve upon your success.

Assess campaign performance

Next, you can focus on assessing your campaign-based performance, or how well the campaign itself performs based on a set of special parameters. These will be lead generation, click-through rate, conversion, and conversion rate. Needless to say, generating new leads should be one of the most important long-term goals for any growth-oriented company.

Along with lead generation, it’s important to track the click-through rate that your marketing campaign has generated from the point of inception to its finalization. And of course, if your conversions have skyrocketed in the process, you can safely conclude that the campaign did its job well. However, the only true way to assess long-term ROI is to work on preserving that click-through rate for as long as possible.

Don’t forget about source-based performance

Finally, ROI can be measured through source-based performance. This means tracking your direct traffic, organic search, referrals, PPC, and email communication effectiveness. These performance indicators will tell you just how many people are searching for your website specifically, how many people have typed in your URL, and how well your ads and email reach-outs are performing. Without a doubt, these metrics will help you evaluate how well your brand is performing in the online world in terms of recognition, awareness, and trustworthiness.

Measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts is by no means an easy task, especially considering the numerous fluctuating factors that will influence the final outcome and the performance reports. Nevertheless, by using these essential performance-tracking methods, you will have no problem evaluating the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and its ROI.

The post How to Measure ROI for Your Marketing Activities? appeared first on Tricky Enough.

Some of your lost profit may be a consequence of a change in the algorithm such as Panda or Penguin which are introduced over the years and can tamper with your search engine rankings, as well as lower your organic traffic. When your business unwittingly crosses Google’s new quality requirements are in place, it may seem like an actual penalty, but the latter means that you’ll need to go straight to the source and file a reconsideration request.

Hard-working squads at Google hand in over 400,000 penalties every month, to make the Web a level playing field for all participants. They manually search for quality gaps in your web presence and penalize companies that do not comply with their latest quality regulations. Then you’ll notice a sudden plunge in your sales, website visitors, and other metrics going haywire, and it’s time to make amends.

Determine your penalty type

In case you have received a manual action report via the Google Search Console to notify you of your missteps, congratulations, it’s an official penalty. That means that a member of Google’s trusty search quality team has found something even their algorithm has missed, whether it’s a series of bad backlinks, low-quality content, or spammy comments on your website, and they have reduced your rankings accordingly.

On the other hand, with no official reprimand from Google, regular updates of their algorithm can play havoc on your website rankings overnight. Even something as basic and simple as ranking for your brand name no longer yields the same results as before, and your website no longer exists in Google’s caches search – these are telltale signs that your website has been affected by the latest algorithm update.

When Mobilegeddon was released in 2015, websites that were not designed to be mobile-friendly were severely affected by the algorithm changes, so that those who offer a mobile version would receive better ratings. As for the famous Fred update, Google has used it as yet another opportunity to show just how much they value quality content, as they filtered out the sites that showed signs of affiliate link abuse and other poor SEO practices.  

Find your key culprits

Once you have discovered you’ve been penalized or affected by an algorithm change, rest assured that there is a basis for Google’s actions, no matter how difficult it may be to face the music. To make any meaningful changes to your website before you reach out to Google with your request to lift their penalty, you need to check with Google Webmaster Tools to find the exact source of the problem. Find “Manual Actions” under “Search Traffic” to check if there is an actual penalty in place, and they will always let you know the general cause of their actions.

Some of the most common issues include keyword stuffing and content of no value, a poor content practice of bygone times when marketing experts were unaware that Google is an evolving beast. Google likes websites that are useful and that offer merit to their searchers, but since competition is strong, many websites resort to rewriting and recycling their own content, as well as posts found on other better-ranking sites.

Of course, we must not forget by far the most notorious violation in Google’s book, also known as unnatural backlinks. For companies that have been in the game for decades, manually checking and disavowing the links that have caused the mess in the first place is not just time-consuming but downright impossible, so it becomes essential to create a penalty removal strategy that will both prevent and help minimize the consequences of such issues arise.

Speaking of penalty removal strategies, Hong Kong SEO experts from Elevate Digital suggest that one of the first things you will notice is a great deal of lost traffic. What you should do next is determine what kind of penalty you endure as well as identify all the other symptoms. Only then, when you have analyzed the situation and accepted all the changes, can you make the list of possible options and conclude the severity of the problem. Since the process can take months, it is crucial to act as promptly as possible.

Time for a strong support system

What was meant as a means to lead to better click-through rates and better SERP rankings has turned out to be labelled as unacceptable by Google’s standards, and it now calls for changes. Dealing with penalties, fixing backlinks, and removing spammy content is only one piece of this complex puzzle. What becomes even more pivotal is to focus on creating an all-encompassing online approach that will not cause such glitches, or at least reduce the possibility of their occurrence.

Massive companies with a multitude of websites that publish new content daily rely on their own “spiders” to mimic the crawling that Google performs, to notice any issues before the big G. They are designed to point to any basic website errors and “double trouble” content so that you can avoid days or weeks of manual research.

Monitoring your link profile is another good way of staying on Google’s good side. It’s not just unnatural backlinks you should worry about, although they do make up for the largest portion of manual penalties out there. Keep in mind things such as broken backlinks from outdated pages, and links to your site sitting on a website in a different language, as well as balancing the number of outbound links you’re including in your content.

Stay ahead of the curve

Many of these penalties (both manual and automatic) could be downsized if not completely averted by applying what Google considers as best practices in website creation and maintenance. Their focus is on your website visitors, so it makes sense that they ought to refine the over one-billion-strong database that keeps growing by the second. Their purpose is to find a handful of top-quality, honest, trustworthy businesses that a searcher is looking for based on just a few simple words.

To serve that purpose, Google will keep improving their filtering systems, thus keeping track of their algorithm changes is not just beneficial for your customers, but it’s simply good business. Striving for excellence in every aspect of your business without resorting to shortcuts may not be an overnight way to launch you to the top of the search page, but it sure will prevent penalties and months of recovery work on your hands.

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