For example, if 100 people visit your website and 10 buy something, your conversion rate would be 10%.

Conversion rates are significant because they help you track how effective your site or marketing campaign is at achieving its goal.

If your conversion rate is low, people are not responding to your call to action.

There are several ways to improve your conversion rate, including optimizing your site visitors for conversion, testing different calls to action, and segmenting your audience.

By increasing your conversion rate, you can boost leads and sales and ultimately grow your business.

Now that we’ve covered most of the basics, we can move on to focus specifically on getting higher conversion rates.

This section of the guide will explain how to increase the number of people who end up taking meaningful action—whether that’s buying a product, filling out a form, or micro-converting, as most of these different types can benefit from the same best practices.

I’ll be covering a number of different sections here, each with examples of their effective use.

Make Your Call to Action (CTA) Visible

Your first step is to make your call to action more visible. This should be obvious; after all, how are people going to convert if they’re never given the direct opportunity?

Yet many marketers and webmasters end up with CTAs that don’t stand out in any meaningful way.

This often represents a huge loss in potential customer conversions.

You can actually increase the visibility of your CTAs in a number of distinct ways:

• Frequency. Visibility is all about increasing the chances that one of your visitors will encounter a CTA, so one of the easiest solutions is to create more CTAs throughout your site. Make sure there’s at least one CTA on every web page—which you can ensure by keeping a signup form in the footer—and do some UX testing to make sure every user encounters an opportunity to convert at least once. The only caveat is to make sure you aren’t spamming your visitor’s interactions; if they feel like you’re shoving conversion rates in their faces, they’re not going to want to engage with you. This is where your multifaceted approach will come in handy; you can ask for direct purchases, information for lead generation, and email subscriptions all separately so you’re not asking the same thing over and over.
• Location. The placement of your CTAs is also important. I mentioned having a running CTA opportunity in the footer, but this isn’t very visible when compared to other locations (it’s just a good way to guarantee at least one conversion opportunity per web page). The old advice was to keep your CTA above the fold, no matter what, meaning your CTA should be visible immediately, without scrolling. However, this approach is a bit outdated. In fact, heat map studies suggest that some CTAs are better off when they’ve placed a short scroll map down from the top of the web page.

(Image Source: Unbounce)

The truth is, there’s no “right” or “wrong” place for your CTA, as long as it stands out and catches your users’ attention. This can be hard to discover, and you probably won’t get it quite right the first time, so play around with different locations and see how it affects your results.

• Coloration. Coloration is also significant, especially when you look at the actual button users click when completing the conversion rates action. There are a lot of psychological studies that seem to suggest that some colors have different effects than others, or that some colors are “better” for conversion rates. For example, Hubspot sometimes demonstrates this example, where changing the color of two buttons (and keeping everything else the same) from green to red spurred an enormous increase conversions.

(Image Source: Hubspot)

There’s no question that these results are real. However, the cause of this can be a bit misleading. It’s not the red coloration that made this CTA more effective, but rather the fact that the color stood out more in contrast with the rest of the home page. When experimenting with color, your goal shouldn’t be to find that one, specific, magical color that will increase your conversion rates; instead, you just need to stand out better.

• Directional Cues. You can also make your CTAs stand out by using directional cues; these are visuals that help guide users’ eyes, often unwittingly, toward the conversion rates opportunity. For example, you might include an arrow pointing to the main CTA, or use color to provide a directional guide to it. You can also go even subtler, by using photographs of people who happen to be looking in the CTA’s direction. Such a change may not seem that significant, but it can have a double-digit growth effect on your conversion rates.

Offer a Strong Value Along the Customer Journey

The core of any attempt to boost conversions is an exchange of value.

Your users are going to give you something, and in return, they expect to get something. For product purchases, this system is obvious and straightforward; your potential customers are giving you money in exchange for a product they believe to be worth at least that much. But the value exchange is present when users hand over their personal information, too, such as in an email signup or form submission. That’s because personal information has a value, and users know this.

Users aren’t going to convert unless your exchange is valuable. Therefore, you need to offer a stronger value if you’re going to see more conversion rates.

• Prove your worth or offer something. You have two main options here, depending on the type of conversion funnel you’re after. If you’re trying to get a lead or an email subscriber, you’re going to have to offer something in exchange for their information. For example, you might offer a complimentary download of an eBook or other valuable offer. You might also promise a free proposal or free consultation in exchange for reaching out. On the product side, you’re already offering something, only this time it’s in exchange for money, so you’ll have to prove the value of your item. There are a few ways to do this, but to start, think about what unique value proposition it is you’re really offering.
• Bullet-point lists. One of the best ways to communicate the value proposition of product pages is through the use of bullet-point lists. You could go for a paragraph-style approach, detailing the item, but remember—people make higher conversion rate decisions quickly. You need to convey as much information as you can in the smallest possible space. Bullet points help you organize this information so it’s easy to pick up and easy on the eyes. For a product, choose the top unique benefits to include here. For a special offer, like a consultation or a free piece of content, be sure to list the advantages. You can see Pebble using the technique here:

(Image Source: Pebble)

• Sweeten the pot. Sometimes, even a good product or a valuable exchange isn’t enough to help consumers finalize their decisions. They may be hesitant, or they may question whether the exchange is truly valuable enough to pursue. One of the best things you can do is sweeten the pot with some additional value—over and above what you originally offered. For example, you might “slash your price” to show that purchasing your product now is less expensive than it normally is.
• Offer more information for those who want it. Brevity is one of the most important elements of a successful google analytics, onine marketing campaigns , and conversion optimization is no exception to that rule. When introducing your products or services, you’ll want to be as brief and concise as possible. However, there will be users who want more information before they buy. How can you resolve this seeming contradiction? The best course of action is to be as brief as possible, but also offer information to those willing to seek it, such as introducing a live chat window or posting links to your main site, where users can learn more.

Make Conversions Easy

You’ve made your CTA visible, and you’ve proven your worth. The next thing you should think about is the actual process of conversion optimization. Though in principle, a website conversion rate optimization is often as simple as clicking a button, the reality is, you can make the process as simple or as complicated as you want it. Unfortunately, many marketers opt to make it more complicated than it has to be, often with logical intentions.

For example, they may produce form fields that demand a lot of input from the user; when trying to earn more leads, the more information you can get, the better. Getting information like previous purchase history, current interests, and background can help your sales people close more deals (and can give you more information to work with from a market research perspective). However, as a general rule, people are impatient and will greatly prefer forms with fewer fields to fill out. Whatever you can do to simplify your form, do it. Believe it or not, shaving off just a few extra seconds of effort can make the difference to a prospective lead.

In a similar vein, you’ll want to make sure your checkout process is simple as well. Most ecommerce site these days are able to offer one-click purchasing, or something analogous, to make the online store shopping process simpler. You don’t have to do this, but you should reduce the number of steps it takes to check out to the bare minimum.

You can also grease the kids on conversion rate optimization when you offer free shipping, particularly to loyal customers.

Ensure Proper Functionality

This is another piece of advice that should go without saying, but make sure your forms and shopping carts are working properly!

The low hanging fruit for eCommerce conversion rates include working and optimized shopping carts and a UX geared toward mobile users.

Do a test run of your form to make sure the fields can be filled out easily and submitted without error, and make sure you get an email notification as well—I’ve worked with clients in the past who simply weren’t getting notification of their website conversion rates, and they’ve missed a lot of opportunities as a result.

Beyond that, you’ll want to use a platform like Mobiletest.me to test how your CTAs, forms, and products look on various mobile devices and browsers.

Take note of any significant differences with your e-commerce conversion rate that could bear an impact on your potential customers, and correct them proactively.

The most important things to worry about here are content loading issues—make sure all your content and visuals are loading properly, and in a way that’s accessible to the user.

Write Compelling Headlines and Copy

If you want to boost conversions, be brief when it comes to selling the value of your offer, but now let’s focus on some of the bigger stars of your CTAs—your headlines, taglines, and filler copy.

Headlines are what will grab your users’ attention immediately, and it’s responsible for forming the first impression they’ll get of your brand, so take some extra time to craft the perfect, attention-grabbing, reputation building message.

Easier said than done, right? Here are a few tips to help you through the process.

• Don’t over-sell. This is the first trap most novice conversion optimizers fall into. When crafting your headlines and copy, you’ll be selling your goods and services, so you’ll want to make it sound as appealing as possible. However, this sometimes lends itself to a certain tone of voice that comes off as pushy or tacky. For example, a line like “you won’t believe what this product can do!” might sound like a good way to cultivate interest, but it’s both overused and overly salesy. Modern consumers are discerning and naturally distrustful of online advertising, so you’ll have to tone it down if you want to gain their trust.
• Be concise and straightforward. As an alternate route, it’s far better to be concise and straightforward about your offer. Don’t try to overhype it or build trust to be bigger than it is; if your product is good enough to be sold, try letting it sell itself. Be descriptive here, and as accurate as possible, but don’t use ambiguous language or inflated terms to push your product. For example, describing a chef’s knife as “strong, durable, and comfortable,” would probably be more appealing to something sensationalized like “the world’s most amazing knife—you won’t know what you did without it!”
• Highlight the problem and solution. You’re solving some type of problem, or else you wouldn’t be in business. It might be that your product addresses some critical consumer need, or it might be that your service can make your clients’ lives easier. Whatever it is, you need to identify that problem and bring it to the forefront. Make sure people know what the problem you’re solving is; this is psychologically valuable because it serves as a kind of one-two punch, making users realize they have a need, and then addressing that need with your chosen solution.
• Imply a degree of urgency. As I mentioned before, users have notoriously short attention spans. There’s a high probability that, once on your site or landing page, a user may spontaneously lose interest and click away to do something else. Also, if a user feels they can safely delay their decision, they may feel comfortable walking away—and even if they have the best intentions, it’s unlikely that they’ll return. Accordingly, your copy should convey some degree of urgency. Phrasing like “try it today” or “act now” help transition people to the “now or never” mentality. Using strong action-based words also helps; a change as simple as adding the words “get started” can yield a double-digit increase in website conversion rates:

(Image Source: VWO)

Include Images and Videos

Written content alone isn’t enough to improve online sales.

Not all of your website users will want to read to understand the benefits of your exchange. It’s also valuable to include images and video to influence more increase conversions , especially on a landing page. However, as you might imagine, not just any images and videos will work. Here are some tips to help you use images and video effectively:

• Use real people. First, try to use real people in your images. Seeing another human face can greatly increase conversion rates. The psychology behind this isn’t precise—it could be a trust factor to see another human being, or it could just be positive associations (since most people are either smiling or having a good time in these types of images). If you don’t believe me, check out this case study from KissMetrics; granted, there are a handful of changes that have been committed at once, but the biggest one is adding a picture of a human being—and increase conversions went up by 100 percent.

(Image Source: KissMetrics)

• Call to emotions. It’s a good idea to call to user emotions in your images and videos. For starters, if you have google analytics, people involved, make sure they’re smiling, laughing, or otherwise clearly enjoying themselves. This creates an emotional resonance, even if it’s only slight, that makes your product seem more positive. You can also influence emotions by sympathizing with negative situations; for example, you could show off your product in a video that highlights the key problem your product is meant to solve.
• Be unique. If you’re creating images and videos around a given product, you won’t have to worry about going out of your way to be unique; you’re already doing something original. However, most service-based companies and other businesses looking for a quick image fix may seek out stock photos or other low-hanging image fruit to fill in the gaps. Stock photography isn’t inherently bad, but it is often cheesy and unnatural—not to mention your users have probably seen the same images all over the web. If you want a higher website conversion rate, you need visuals that make you stand out.

Online Marketing Experiments has a great example of how changing a stock image to an original image can boost your conversion rates immediately.

(Image Source: Marketing Experiments)

• Show off your offer. Show off your offer as completely as possible to make sure users see the value in it. For products, this means showing images of your product from multiple angles, and video that demonstrates your product in action. For offers like a free proposal or an eBook, showing off an example, or a sample chapter could be a good way to show people what they’re actually getting. This insight can help people make up their minds—plus it gives them a sense of trust and familiarity with your products and services.

Offer Social Proof

Most people have an inherent distrust for corporations and brands, or at the very least, they tend to trust their peers more than organizations that are clearly out to make a profit. About 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews submitted by their peers as much as they’d trust a personal recommendation from a friend or family member—which is somewhat surprising, if you think about it. But the bottom line here is that most people need some kind of social proof, some evidence that you’ve been making exchanges with other users satisfactorily, before they’ll commit to your brand in any way (think positive product reviews or customer testimonials).

Social proof, therefore, should be one of your top priorities. There are a couple of easy ways to instill more multiple tests in your call to action or landing page: reviews and testimonials. Though related, these are two distinct forms of content strategy submitted by your past potential customers. Third party reviews are generally short, descriptive analyses of a past purchase or interaction, often based on a product or service. Testimonials, on the other hand, are generally longer, serving as a pitch for a company or organization as a whole.

As you can see in this example by VWO, simply adding a handful of reviews to your product landing pages (or testimonials to your lead generation landing pages) can have a substantial impact on your conversion rate optimization.

(Image Source: VWO)

Cultivate Trust with Website Visitors

Social proof can go a long way in cultivating more trust from your new user base, but you’ll usually have to go a step or two further if you really want to earn your users’ dedication. One of the simplest ways to do this is to add “trust badges” to the bottom of your site. These small icons, usually located in the footer of landing pages, show users your affiliations and accreditations, demonstrating your authority (and possibly your security). VWO found that adding trust badges can increase your conversion rates by more than 70 percent.

(Image Source: The New Media Co)

You can also build trust by showing off your expertise. For example, you can list all the major publications you and your brand have been featured in. You could also show off how long you’ve been in business, how much growth you’ve experienced over the years, or list some of your most noteworthy clients (assuming they’ve given you the permission to mention them).

Understand Variables for Improved Conversions

In addition to all the factors I listed above, there are a handful of other variables you should keep in mind when planning, executing, and evaluating the success of your conversion rate optimization strategy:

• Timing. The timing of your efforts can play a significant role in the type of results you see. For example, if you’re a landscaper, you’ll probably see far more increase conversions (and organic traffic ) in summer months than winter months. You may also see spikes in conversion rate optimization activity around certain times of the day or certain days of the week. Keep this information in mind, and make bigger pushes during peak times.
• Traffic sources. Your sources of traffic will play an enormous role in how effective your measure conversion rate optimization strategy is, because different sources will send different types of people to your site. My next big section focuses on audience optimization and target audience , so if you’re interested in learning more, skip down.
• Associations. Certain elements of your call to action may cause different effects in different people. For example, an image that seems warm and welcoming to some may seem frightening or alienating to another. There’s no easy way to compensate for this, other than by constant experimentation to find more images and elements that are acceptable to everyone.

There are countless variables to consider in landing pages average conversion rate optimization plan, but for the most part, it’s best to stay out of the weeds. Keep your attention high-level, on your actions and your measurable results.

Ignore Best Practices (When Appropriate)

Throughout this section, I’ve been listing a number of different considerations for increasing your average conversion rate—the best practices for conversion optimization. I have one more best practice to share with you, and it’s a little bit counterintuitive: ignore best practices (at least some of the time).

What do I mean by this?

Why did I waste my time writing out and showing examples of all these best practices if I’m now encouraging you to deliberately ignore them?

It’s because every business is going to be unique conversion rate optimization.

Your brand, your voice, your target audience , and your goals will all be different from everyone else’s.

The “best practices” for measure conversion rate optimization are rules that work well for most brands—but not all the time. If you stick too closely to norms and conventional practices, not only will you miss out on some great improvement opportunities, your conversion attempts will end up looking like everyone else’s—and that’s definitely something you don’t want.

Go against the grain by defying some of the standard conventions, as long as you have a good idea to substitute for the original best practice. As you’ll see, the more you experiment, the closer you can get to perfection.

The post How to Improve Online Conversion Rates appeared first on SEO Agency.

Search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, link building, and social media marketing are all advantageous in complementing each other’s effects and generating long-term results that snowball your return on investment (ROI) over time. But they have a critical weakness; they take a long time to start seeing results.

This makes pay-per-click (PPC) advertising a perfect complement, and the ideal addition to any suite of digital marketing strategies.

As the name suggests, you’ll place ads and pay for each click you get to your site or landing page. In other words, you’ll start seeing traffic (and results) almost immediately after you turn the strategy on.

To the outsider, PPC management may seem intimidating.

There are multiple platforms you can use, technical complexities to consider, and of course, a high-level strategy that demands innovative, competitive thinking.

Google even has an official education and certification program for people interested in mastering the art.

But while it does take months to years of practice to become a true master of PPC advertising, in the course of this guide, we hope to teach you the fundamentals, and equip you with all the knowledge you’ll need to start a campaign of your own.

PPC 101: The Basics of PPC Management

Before we dig into the mechanics of PPC advertising, let’s establish a foundation. PPC advertising networks connect advertisers to major online networks, like search engines or social media platforms, giving them a chance to guarantee advertising visibility to their target audiences. Advertisers then pay per click (hence the name), rather than paying per impression, like in typical advertising campaigns.

Oftentimes, PPC ads are purchased in an auction-like manner, ensuring that the price for different types of Google Ads reflects current demand and market conditions. The cost per click is often abbreviated CPC, with a cost per thousand impressions (or times your ad is seen) abbreviated CPM. In auction-style formats, you can typically set your maximum cost per click, or Max CPC, and allow an automated bidding strategy to bid for a position on your behalf.

You’ll have the ability to completely customize your ad copy, images and videos associated with your ad, and of course, where the ad leads (i.e., designing a landing page).

PPC advertisers spend time researching exactly the right people to target, the right copy and images to use, the right keywords to bid for, and how much to pay for placement. Over time, they gather metrics to determine the effectiveness of their PPC campaigns, and make tweaks to improve their return on investment (ROI). Ideally, you’ll earn more from the incoming visitors you receive than you pay to have your Google Ads placed. This also requires you to pay attention to factors like conversion optimization, so you can increase your revenue from the strategy.

Is PPC related to SEO?

Because PPC advertising relies on search engines, it’s often conflated with search engine optimization (SEO). However, search engines treat organic search results as separate from paid search engine listings; SEO requires an entirely different set of strategies, focused on onsite optimization, content development, and link building. Your SEO strategies will have no bearing on your PPC listings, and your PPC strategy will not affect your organic search rankings directly.

However, it’s worth noting that both PPC ads on search engines and SEO can be considered as belonging to the broader category of search engine marketing (SEM).

The Advantages of PPC Advertising

So why would you consider a PPC advertising campaign?

PPC ads offer a handful of unique advantages over other forms of search engine marketing, and other advertising strategies:

• • Immediate traffic. Most digital marketing strategies rely on accumulation of visibility, authority, or reputation over time. Accordingly, they take weeks, months, or even years to fully flourish. It takes some time to set up a PPC advertising campaign (e.g., designing and building out a landing page), but once you’re set up, you can start bidding immediately, and your Google Ads will be immediately visible to new people. It’s one of the fastest and most reliable ways to generate traffic, which makes it perfect for new sites, new products, and short-term deals and specials.
  • Guaranteed search engine visibility. SEO is an incredibly powerful strategy because it takes advantage of the universal popularity of search engines. However, it’s also extremely competitive; if you want to rank, you’ll either need to choose highly niche, low-competition keywords and phrases, or invest lots of time and money into ranking for higher-competition terms. With PPC ads, you can take advantage of the power of search engines—and guarantee placement, so long as you bid enough.
  • Near-total control. There’s practically no limit to what you can do with a PPC ad campaign. You can direct traffic to your core site, a product page, or a specialized landing page. You can choose exactly the right keywords and audiences. You can experiment with hundreds of variables in your wording, timing, and placement. This level of flexibility provides you with total control over your results, and makes it a useful strategy for practically any business or goal.

• Transparency and data analytics. Thanks to Google Analytics, platform-specific analytic capabilities, and other third-party tools, you can measure the effectiveness of your campaign in many different ways. You can study your click-through rates (CTRs), conversion rates, traffic patterns, and even your overall return on investment (ROI). Once you analyze these, you can quickly determine which variables are working in your favor and which ones still require tweaking. No campaign starts out perfect; instead, PPC success depends on your ability to iteratively evolve based on these abundant data.

PPC Platforms to Consider

Many different platforms offer their own PPC advertising services. Most of them work similarly, with some differences in terms of how you bid, the variables you can control, ad placement rules, and of course, the total number of people you can reach.

These are some of the most popular PPC platforms to consider:

• Google Ads. Google Ads is by far the most popular PPC platform, and the one much of this guide will be focused on. Previously known as Google Ads, this platform allows you to bid for ads by keyword within Google Search. Google remains the world’s most popular search engine, which means you’ll have access to the biggest possible range of subjects if you use this. Google Ads is also known for its incredibly robust platform, giving you direct and intuitive control over dozens of variables, and ample analytics so you can quickly and easily determine your campaign’s effectiveness.
• Bing Ads. Bing Ads / Microsoft Ads is a competing ad placement service, giving you access to Bing, Google’s biggest competitor. It functions similarly, featuring 36 percent of the global search share, with a handful of unique differences. Bing Ads can be advantageous because it features lower costs per click for even highly competitive keywords, and more transparency when it comes to search partner targeting (which we’ll touch on later). The Microsoft Advertising platform can actually yield higher ROI for many niches as costs per click (CPCs) can be lower.
• Social media ads. Social media ads occupy a nebulous niche in the digital marketing world, because some people consider them to be a variant of PPC advertising, while others consider social media advertising a category all its own. Either way, you can use Facebook ads, Twitter ads, and other social media platforms to accomplish most PPC goals.
• AdRoll. AdRoll is a platform dedicated to retargeting (aka remarketing), a topic we cover in a later section of this guide. It’s possible to use Google Ads for retargeting, but AdRoll offers some extra options—like also featuring your retargeting ads on social media.
• RevContent. RevContent is a niche platform that focuses on content marketing. With it, you can build a PPC campaign geared toward driving traffic to your best content, featuring clips of your content in advertising form on multiple external sites.

The rest of this guide will make the most sense in the context of Google Ads, but most PPC platforms will adhere to the same rules, follow the same high-level processes, and benefit from the same approaches.

Choosing Goals for Your PPC Advertising Campaign

Before you start a PPC advertising campaign, you need to decide what your goals are going to be. These are some of the targets you could choose:

• Brand visibility. Because you’re paying for clicks, and not impressions, brand visibility is typically a secondary concern for PPC advertisers—but it’s still worth considering. Your Google Ads will play a role in making your brand visible and memorable in search engines, so make sure you structure them in a way that will benefit your reputation.
• Direct sales. Some ads are created almost exclusively to land sales. If this is the case, you need to optimize your ads to target people ready to make a purchase, and highlight specific products or services, rather than simply pushing people further into the sales funnel. These ads tend to be highly actionable and concise.
• Site and content traffic. You could also try to steer more people to your site. This is an especially popular tactic among content creators; their primary goal isn’t necessarily to sell something, but rather to get more eyes on their onsite content. These ads tend to be focused on the early to middle stages of the sales funnel, and focus more on branding and content appeal than an immediate action like purchasing.
• Specials and promotions. Because PPC ads work almost immediately, they’re a perfect digital marketing strategy for temporary or time-restricted specials. For example, if you’re hosting a flash sale or if you’re celebrating the release of a new product, PPC ads can help you garner attention quickly. These ads function like those that drive direct sales, but they tend to include more variables, and need to adapt quickly to new needs.
• Lead generation. If your business has a longer sales cycle or is strictly B2B, your PPC ads will likely focus on lead generation. Generally, these ads lead to a specific landing page, where you’ll be able to provide plenty of details about your business and your core services. Accordingly, your Google Ads are just the first element of a multi-step process designed to get more sales; they target people early in the buying cycle, and are worded only to spark early interest.

You can choose more than one priority, but make sure you treat them hierarchically; you need to know what’s important for your campaign if you’re going to find success with it. Alternatively, you can create a separate campaign for each of these goals.

Types of PPC Ads

When creating a sequence of PPC ads, you’ll organize your Google Ads on several different levels. At the highest level, you’ll have PPC “campaigns,” which each focus on an overall message, theme, or goal for your brand. You can have one campaign active at any given time, or you may have several, depending on the size of your organization, your budget, and the number of distinct goals you’re trying to achieve.

Under each campaign, you’ll have several ad groups, collections of ads that fit together because they rely on similar keywords. For example, you might have an ad group focused on “patio furniture.” You’ll be able to place different CPC maximums for each of your ad groups.

You’ll have several types of ads to choose from:

• • Search Network ads. Search Network ads are the most common type of ads. In Google Ads, they apply to Google Search as well as Google’s extended network of search partners (like AOL and Amazon). These are primarily keyword based.
  • Display Network ads. Display Network ads appear on one or more of the millions of sites that partner with Google to display ads from paying customers. They can be text-based, image-based, or video-based, and don’t rely on conventional keyword targeting; instead, they’re displayed to specific audiences based on their demographic makeup or interests. For example, an ad for a patio table might appear on a blog dedicated to enjoying the great outdoors.
  • Hybrid: Search Network with Display Opt-In. Google Ads also offer a kind of hybrid option, giving you access to the core Search Network with additional options for the Display network. It’s typically better to optimize your ads for one or the other, but in some cases, this may be advantageous.

• Product Listing Ads (PLAs). Both Google and Microsoft offer Product Listing Ads (PLAs), which are optimized for ads intending to score direct sales. These are also sometimes called shopping PPC campaigns, since you’ll be listing ads for specific products sold by your brand. These ads feature multiple attributes you can tinker with, including categories like brand, category, condition, item ID, product type, and other elements you can customize to be unique to your business. These typically include an image of the product. To take advantage of this in Google Ads, you’ll need a Google Merchant Center

Targeting Options for PPC Ads

One of the most important variables for the success of your PPC campaign is how you choose to target your ads. PPC gives you control over how and where your ads appear; obviously, the content of your messaging will have a major impact on its success, but you’ll also need to make sure your ads reach the right people in the right ways.

In Google Ads and most other PPC platforms, you’ll have the ability to restrict how, where, and when your ads appear. You will also have the ability to modify your bids based on certain parameters, such as lowering your bid by 50 percent when advertising on mobile devices. This is one of the most important considerations for your campaign; its success is going to depend not only on how people respond to the ad, but also how much you pay for it. Accordingly, you’ll need to raise or lower your bid amount based on which targeting options are most important to you.

These are some of the most common targeting parameters to consider:

• Device targeting. You’ll be able to choose whether your ads appear on desktops and laptops, tablets, mobile devices, or all of these, and control how much you’re willing to pay for ads that appear on each of these platforms. For example, if you know your typical audience typically prefers laptops to mobile devices, but you don’t want to abandon mobile devices altogether, you might restrict your bid amount for mobile ads.
• Location targeting. Local-focused strategies tend to be very powerful, since they eliminate competition and allow you to focus on a specific set of demographics. With PPC ads, you’ll be able to precisely control where people see your ad—down to the ZIP code level. You can also set unique bid modifiers based on the state in which your ad is being displayed.
• Timing. You can carefully schedule your ads, or use bid modifiers to play with your purchasing prices based on when they appear. For example, if you know people tend to respond to your sales more on weekends, or during the noon hour, you can increase your bid prices during these hours. You may also choose to keep your ads rolling 24/7—especially if you have a global audience for an online store.
• Standard vs. accelerated delivery. You ads can be delivered in one of two ways: standard delivery or accelerated delivery. When you choose standard delivery, your ads will be delivered evenly and consistently throughout the day, altering their visibility so that your budget is evenly distributed across your time parameters. Accelerated delivery shows your ads more aggressively, pushing until the budget is completely depleted. Accelerated delivery is optimized for advertisers with flexible or inexhaustible budgets, who want to make sure their ads are seen for every relevant query.
• Optimization vs. ongoing rotation. Your PPC ads can be rotated in one of four ways. If you “optimize,” you’ll ensure the ads that get the most clicks will be most likely to show up for future queries. If you choose “optimize for conversion,” you’ll favor ads that tend to produce the highest conversion rates. If you choose “rotate evenly,” your ads will be rotated equally, regardless of how they perform, for 90 days—after that, your best ads will be favored. If you choose “rotate indefinitely,” your ads will be rotated equally until you manually choose another option. Rotation-based options are better for experimentation, or if you aren’t sure which ads will perform best; otherwise, it’s better to optimize.
• Audience-based targeting. In Display and Search ads, you can take advantage of some audience-based targeting options. If you do, you’ll disproportionately favor people who belong to certain demographics, have certain interests or habits, or who have interacted with your brand in specific ways in the past. For example, affinity audiences allow you to target people based on factors like lifestyle, interest, or buying habits. In-market audiences let you target people who are researching a topic similar to your area of expertise (or people planning to make a purchase in line with your product offerings). Remarketing allows you to target people who have visited your site in the past. And as with many of these variables, you can also define your own custom audiences, based on affinity or intent.

Of course, the majority of your ads will be dependent on user searches, which means the most important targeting variable is likely going to be your keyword selection. However, this is a more complex variable than any of the others on this list, so we’re going to cover it in its own section.

Keyword Research and PPC Advertising

Keywords play an important and complex role in your PPC advertising campaign. Like with SEO, keywords allow you to capitalize on specific search queries made by users, helping you get in front of people with specific desires or intentions. Generally, you’ll choose a high-level keyword “theme” for your PPC campaigns, and specific groups of keywords for each of your ad groups. For example, a campaign may be focused on “bicycles,” while ad groups may focus on “road bikes,” “mountain bikes,” and “hybrid bikes.” Ads within those groups can focus on variant keywords and phrases, like “inexpensive mountain bikes,” or “road bikes for competition.”

The keywords you choose will determine when and how your ads are displayed within search engines; they’ll also determine how much you pay, since more competitive keywords and phrases tend to be more expensive. Your goal will be to carefully balance ad relevance, popularity, and competition, selecting keywords that are both popular and relevant to your brand, but also minimally competitive, so you can get them for a reasonable CPC bid.

Types of Keywords

All PPC keyword research begins with a bit of brainstorming. You’ll jot down some ideas about what your customers might be searching for, or play around with some searches to see what your competitors are targeting.

Ultimately, keywords tend to fall into one or more broad categories:

• Brand terms. Brand terms are keywords and phrases that are somehow unique to your brand. It could be your company’s name, or the name of one of your signature products. These tend to have less competition than generic terms, but also limited potential; the people searching for these terms are probably already familiar with your brand, and may have found you because of your organic rankings anyway.
• Generic product terms. Generic product terms refer to a type of product, rather than the brand name of a product. They’re highly popular choices, since these queries are often made by people getting ready to make a purchase.
• Peripheral and related terms. These keyword terms tend to be only related to your core products or services. For example, if you’re trying to sell mattresses, a generic product term would be “memory foam mattress,” while a peripheral or related term might be “sore back after sleeping.”
• Competitor terms. If you’re trying to be aggressive with your main competitors, you could also try to place ads for terms related to your competition. For example, if you’re “Brand A” and your competitor is “Brand B,” you might place ads for phrases like “Brand B worth it?” or “Brand B alternative.” Just be prepared for a bidding war if you go this route.

The Research Phase

Any marketer can tell you that brainstorming and intuition isn’t enough to maximize the chances of your campaign’s success. If you want to rest assured that your keyword targets are going to be valuable, you need to use objective evidence to support your reasoning.

Google offers a free tool, Keyword Planner, to help you do this, but there are also a number of third-party options available for you to research your keyword terms. For now, we’ll focus on Google Keyword Planner, since it’s one of the best tools available and a direct product of Google itself.

Using Google Keyword Planner, you can choose to either discover new keywords or get search volume and forecast information on an existing list of keywords. If you want to discover new phrases, you can start with “seed” words and phrases you’ve brainstormed on your own and get suggestions for what to include in your campaign.

With responsive search ads you can also start with a website, and have Google crawl it to generate suggestions for you. These are good to start with if you’re new to PPC management, but more advanced users will only use this as a good start.

Once you have a list of potentially viable keywords, you can collect more information on them, including search volume information, historical search trends, and of course, the average CPC for the term. This will help you determine the popularity and competition of your chosen terms—determining the ad relevance is on you.

Match Types

Every keyword you include in your ad groups will need to be assigned a specific match type. This will dictate when the ad is displayed, when taking the search query into consideration.

These are the match types available:

• Exact match. With an exact match, the query must be typed in exactly as you’ve described it.
• Exact match (with close variants). This match type affords you more wiggle room, displaying the ad in cases of misspellings or very slight variations, such as “memry foam mattress” instead of “memory foam mattresses.”
• Phrase match. A phrase match means the query has to have its words typed in a specific order, but there may be extra terms before or after the core query. For example, “buy new memory foam mattresses” would apply because “memory,” “foam,” and “mattresses” are all in the correct order. The core query must still be exact.
• Phrase match (with close variants). Here, the conditions of a phrase match must still be met, but misspellings and small variants are allowed.
• Broad match. Broad matches give you lots of flexibility. Your ad may be displayed, regardless of whether the terms in your query are typed exactly, or in a specific order. You may also appear for topically similar searches.
• Broad match (modified). A modified broad match means your query can be typed in any order, but your specified terms must be included, exactly.
• Broad match (session based). This type of broad match takes into consideration the context of this user’s previous search queries, within the same session. It’s good for targeting people who are late in the buying cycle.

Negative Keywords

Most of your keyword research will be focused on positively associated keywords—in other words, targeting keywords that people are searching for. However, you can also select negative keywords, prohibiting your ads from being displayed when certain keyword terms are included.

For example, if you’re focused exclusively on selling new bicycles, you might include negative keywords and phrases related to “repair” or “restoration” when people search for bicycles. If you’re only selling high-quality, luxury goods, you may include negative keywords and phrases like “free,” “cheap,” or “inexpensive.”

Budgeting Parameters for PPC: Bid Management

You’ll be able to control your PPC budget precisely on most PPC platforms, so make sure you spend time strategizing how to effectively spend your money. If you’re like most businesses, you’ll have a finite budget to spend on PPC ads, like $1,000 a month. How you proportion this spending can make or break your campaign.

First, you’ll be able to set an “average daily budget” for your campaign. If you have a budget of $1,000, this would translate to an average of $33.33 per day. Google will automatically display ads based on your preferences and limitations, up to this amount. Sometimes you’ll spend a little more or a little less, due to the difficulty in hitting an exact dollar amount with ad placement, but once you hit this threshold approximately, your ads will stop for the day. The amount of time it takes to reach this amount will vary depending on whether you choose “standard” or “accelerated” delivery. Google will also adjust your ad placement to reach an average—so if you don’t get many displays on Sunday, you might get a disproportionate number of placements on Monday to make up for it (this is called overdelivery). You can change your daily budget at any time.

From there, you’ll have two main bidding options:

• Maximize clicks. If you’re new to PPC or if you’re looking for a hands-off way to manage your PPC campaign, you can choose to maximize clicks. In this scenario, you’ll let Google automate your ad placement to maximize the number of clicks you receive for your allotted daily budget.
• Manual CPC bidding. If you’re more interested in fine-tuning your campaign, you can set your own maximum CPC bids for various ad groups. Here, you’ll set a “maximum CPC” for each ad group, based on what you think is appropriate, given your keyword research. In most cases, the highest bidder will win.

There are other optimization strategies as well, such as “enhanced CPC,” which will automatically raise your max bid if Google believes the incoming click will convert, or “target search page location,” which allows you to prioritize a certain search engine results page (SERP), or position on the first SERP.

There are a few other things to keep in mind. First, remember you can set different bid adjustments, based on a number of different variables. For example, you can choose to set your bids 30 percent higher for ads on mobile devices, or 30 percent lower for ads in a specific location, like Colorado.

You should also know that while maximum CPC is one of the most important variables Google considers when placing an ad, it also takes into consideration something called a Quality Score. If you have a lower bid, but a higher Quality Score, you may end up getting favoritism in placement—and at a lower rate as well.

Understanding Your Quality Score

In Google, you’ll earn and develop a Quality Score, which is a measurement of the quality and relevance of your PPC ads and selected keywords on a scale of 1 to 10. If you add a “Quality Score” column to any report, you’ll be able to review the score in detail. The more relevant and the better your ads are, the higher your Quality Score will be, and with a higher Quality Score, you’ll be able to get your ads to rank higher—and you’ll find it easier to dominate your competitors when bidding.

There are several factors that will influence your Quality Score, including:

• Your overall click-through rate (CTR). The more people who see your ad and click it, the better.
• Keyword relevance to ad group. Your keywords should all have a logical link to your ad group topic.
• Landing page quality and relevance. In some cases, the quality and appropriateness of your landing page will also play a role in your Quality Score.
• Ad text relevance. The full text of your ad also matters; it needs to be relevant to your target audience. Ad relevance and ad rank scores help determine ad rankings, overall clicks, leads, and sales.
• Historical performance. Your entire Google Ads account performance will play a role in all your Quality Scores.

As you can see, many of these factors are subjective or difficult to define. For example, what exactly counts as “relevant” text? Unfortunately, this can be hard to discern. You’ll need to make your best subjective assessment, then use your actual Quality Score to determine your performance.

Ad Copy for PPC Management

Most, if not all of your PPC ads will depend at least partially on text to get results. You’ll have several goals here, including attracting the right type of people, earning clicks, increasing your Quality Score. If you don’t have an engaging ad, it won’t matter how much ad spend you blow through; this is the only way to place effective search engine advertising.

Traditional PPC ads have three main components:

• Headline. In Google Ads, you’ll have the option to create two headlines separated by a vertical pipe (|), each of which includes up to 30 characters. This is going to be the attention-grabbing part of your ad, so it needs to be immediately compelling. Strong action words and concise phrasing are your friends here.
• Description. In the description, you’ll have much more room to briefly describe the products, services, or offers you want users to see. If you’ve caught a user’s attention, this is where you’re going to persuade them to move forward.
• The URL. You’ll also need to include the URL for the site you’re using to attract customers. This is less noticeable, but it’s still important to have a URL with unique, relevant text.

There are other opportunities to include ad copy, but we’ll go over those in the “Ad Extensions” section.

For now, there are a handful of factors you should focus on to make sure your ad copy is both compelling to users and favorable for your Quality Score:

• • Relevance. Here’s that vague term again. Your ad copy needs to be relevant to what you’re selling, as well as relevant to your target audience. To achieve this, you’ll need to include words that directly and unambiguously define your product. Something like “You’ll never guess what we have in store for you” isn’t relevant, because it doesn’t describe what you offer. It also doesn’t appeal to a specific demographic. Focus on accuracy, transparency, and building trust with your users—many of whom will be seeing your brand for the first time.
  • Differentiation. There are millions of organizations and individuals competing for advertising space on Google and other broad networks. People are exposed to dozens of ads a day (if not hundreds). If your ad sounds like every other ad, it’s going to blend in as white noise. Accordingly, you need some way to differentiate your ads from every other ad on the market. Find a way to stand out.
  • CTA. At the end of the day, your ad needs to get clicks, and that means persuading web users to take action. Strong action words will compel readers to move forward; use phrases like “shop now” or “get a free quote,” rather than passive phrases like “we have an amazing selection” or “quotes available upon request.”

• Special offers. People respond better to ads that seem like they include a special offer—even if it’s not that special. For example, advertising a 15 percent discount, or limited-time free shipping can influence more clicks, and make your ad seem more interesting.
• Device consideration. Finally, make sure you take user devices into consideration. Ad copy may look very different on a mobile device than it does on a desktop.

Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are optional supplements to your core ad, giving you the chance to provide more information to users (or otherwise attract their attention more effectively). Most of them take up more space, giving you more visibility immediately, and they’re factored into your Quality Score, affecting your overall ad quality, position, and cost per click.

These are some of the most common extensions in Google Ads to consider:

• Sitelinks. Sitelinks are featured underneath your main ad; they contain links to different internal pages of your site, like a category page or contact page. You can include a separate headline for each, as well as 1-2 lines of additional text to describe what the pages offer.
• Locations and hours. If your business has multiple locations, you can feature one or more lines under your core ad to display the address and available hours of each location. This is most useful for brick-and-mortar businesses relying on mobile formatting.
• Call options. You can also include a phone number if you want to attract callers. You can also use a custom Google Forwarding number, so you can track the number of calls you attract distinctly.
• Brief callouts. Callouts function similarly to page links, but without the actual link. Instead, they serve a role as extra lines of text under your main ad, describing specific products or services.
• Structured snippets. Structured snippets are highly similar, and are limited to a fixed range of categories, like amenities, brands, courses, degree programs, destinations, featured hotels, insurance coverage, models, neighborhoods, service catalogs, show styles, and types.
• Products and prices. Assuming the products are relevant to your ad, you can list individual products under your ad with an introductory price. You can also feature a set of up to 8 cards, with different individual products and prices, when expanded.
• Mobile app links. If you have a mobile app, you can also add a link to install it on mobile ads.
• Ratings and reviews. Seller ratings work a bit differently, since you can’t manipulate them on your own. Instead, you’ll need to meet a series of criteria to have your ratings appear in your ads automatically. To qualify, you’ll need 30 reviews from the past year, an average rating of at least 3.5 out of 5, and a presence on Google Trusted Stores, Google Customer Surveys, or other qualified independent review sites.

Other platforms, particularly social media, provide even more customizability options, allowing you to use images, videos, and other forms of media to advertise your brand.

There are no right or wrong ad extensions to include, though all of them have the potential to improve your results. You’ll need to experiment to figure out what works best for your audience and your brand.

Optimizing Your Landing Page

The goal of most PPC ads is to encourage users to click a link—but what happens next? In most cases, your incoming traffic will be directed to a landing page, which you can further optimize to achieve a conversion. Depending on your goals, a “conversion” could mean completing a purchase, filling out a form, or interacting with your page in some way, like watching a video.

In any case, assuming you have a relevant stream of traffic, the effectiveness of your landing page is going to dictate the true value of your PPC campaign. If you can convert your incoming visitors, the money you spent getting them there will be worth it. Plus, remember that your Quality Score is also affected by your conversion rate; the more effective it is, the better your ads will perform in the future.

A good landing page has the following characteristics:

• • Relevant alignment with ad copy. The wording and design of your landing page needs to be in alignment with your ad copy; you promised something to your visitors, and now you have to give it to them. If you defy expectations or surprise users with something they didn’t expect, it’s going to hurt your conversion rate and your Quality Score.
  • A strong headline. Like with your PPC ad, your landing page is going to depend on a strong headline. Keep this concise and straightforward; people have limited attention spans, so if your headline can’t convince them to keep reading, your cause is lost.
  • A unique selling proposition (USP). Your unique selling proposition (USP) is what makes you valuable to your customers, and what makes you distinct from your competitors. As early as possible in the landing page, make it a point to emphasize why your brand is different, and why your product or service is worth buying. Keep it quick and simple.
  • A clean layout. Too many amateur marketers try to cram as much information as possible into their landing page. In most cases, it’s better to keep things clean and minimal, with plenty of white space. This way, the important design and copy elements will get more attention, and your landing page will feature better aesthetics.
  • A standout, compelling CTA. Your visitors got to your landing page because your first CTA was successful. Now, you need another CTA to finish the conversion process. In many cases, this is a button users will click, like “add to cart” or “submit form.” Make this prominent and aesthetically appealing, with a strong, bold color and visible font. It’s also a good idea to design your page around this CTA, drawing people in.
  • Easy, quick functionality. Again, web users have limited patience, so you need to make sure your page is extremely quick and functional. For starters, the page should load quickly and completely. People aren’t going to wait more than a few seconds for the page to load. If you want users to fill out a form, make it short and intuitive—even if it means collecting less information in total.

• Attractive visuals. Most landing pages benefit from having a handful of interesting, attractive visuals. Sometimes, that means a video of your product in action. Other times, it just means a photo of a smiling family. Make sure these visuals are in line with your brand values, aesthetically pleasing, and unique (i.e., try to avoid stock photos).

A/B Testing for PPC Optimization

As you’ve undoubtedly been able to tell, there are many variables that play a role in your PPC ad campaign’s success, and they all interact in complex (and occasionally obscure) ways.

You can make an on-paper prediction about how your ads are going to perform, but you might be surprised how rarely reality aligns with your best hypotheses.

If not properly optimized, you can create a lot of PPC ad bloat, which leads to wasted ad spend.

One of the best tools in your arsenal to check your assumptions and improve the overall effectiveness of your campaign is A/B testing. The premise here is simple: you’ll create an “A” version and a “B” version of a given asset, differing only slightly, and observe how they perform in an identical, preferably live environment. For example, you might display two very similar ads with different headlines to see which headline works better. You’ll keep the better-performing headline, and repeat the experiment, changing some other variable or adding a third headline.

There are many variables you can experiment with in this way, including:

• • Keyword targeting.
  • Audience variables.
  • Headlines and descriptions.

• Ad extensions.
• Every element of your landing page.

Remarketing

Remarketing is a specific type of PPC ad available on Google Ads and many other platforms. While it has many similarities with conventional text and image-based PPC ads, it requires some additional considerations.

Remarketing ads (also called retargeting ads) are exclusively displayed to people who have already interacted with your website or mobile app. Accordingly, they’re best used as a way to recapture the interest of someone who was already persuaded to visit your site, or as a way to convince someone to reconsider a product page they abandoned.

There are a few types of remarketing ads available in Google Ads:

• • Standard remarketing. These ads are displayed across the Google Display Network to any users who have visited your site or app.
  • Dynamic remarketing. These ads are displayed similarly, but feature customized products or services, based on what this past visitor has expressed an interest in previously.
  • Remarketing lists for search ads. These ads are designed to capture the attention of users who perform follow-up searches about your products or services.
  • Video remarketing. Video remarketing allows you to focus on users who have watched your videos on YouTube, rather than visiting your site or app.

• Customer list remarketing. If you have lists of customer information, you can upload it to Google Ads and remarket to those individuals. Whenever these contacts sign into Google, your ads will be displayed to them across a wide range of Google products and partners.

Measurement and Analysis

Few PPC campaigns are successful from the outset. Instead, PPC managers take the time to measure and analyze the results of their efforts, then make tweaks to gradually improve their results.

Google Ads and most other platforms feature ample built-in reporting features, allowing you to track metrics like:

• Impressions, or the number of people who see your ads.
• Costs, including average CPC and daily ad spend.
• CTR, your click-through rate, or the percentage of people who click on your ad after seeing it.
• Conversions, or the number of people who achieve your final intended action, like making a purchase or filling out a form.
• Quality Score, which reflects the relevance and quality of your ads.

You can dig deep with these metrics, measuring them for each ad, each ad group, and each campaign. You’ll also be able to measure them for multiple different time periods.

If you link your Google Ads account to your Google Analytics account, you’ll be able to gather even more insights, including how users behave once they get to your site.

There are many ways to interpret Google Analytics data and use it to improve your ad campaign. The most straightforward way is through experimentation; tinker with different ad variables, and see how your results change. In general, more impressions, lower costs, higher CTRs, more conversions, and higher Quality Scores are a sign you’re doing things right. You may wish to optimize for one of these metrics above the others, depending on your goals; for example, if brand visibility is just as important to you as actual conversions, you may disproportionately consider impressions.

Calculating Your ROI

One of the most important measurements for any brand to consider is your overall return on investment, or ROI. This is the amount of money your campaign is generating in excess of your overall expenses.

In PPC management, costs are easy to calculate; you can see exactly how much you’re spending per click, per day, and per month in your campaign. Take this dollar amount for a given time period and set it aside.

Then, calculate the value of your campaign. You’ll first need to calculate the value of a conversion. For some brands, this may mean calculating the average revenue per visitor by analyzing the average purchase. For others, it means calculating the average lifetime customer value and how many visitors eventually become customers.

In any case, you’ll arrive at an estimate of the revenue generated by your campaign in a given time period. Divide this by your revenue plus your expenses, and you’ll get an estimate for your overall ROI. For example, if you generate $10,000 in new sales, and you spent $5,000 on ads, you’d divide $10,000 by $15,000 for an ROI of 66 percent. There are a few variants in how to calculate and consider this figure, but all of them depend on comparing your new revenue to your total expenses.

The higher your ROI is, the more successful your campaign is considered to be. Ultimately, your goals in increasing ROI are twofold:

• • Reducing expenses. Improving your Quality Score can reduce your cost per click while increasing your ad positioning. You can also reduce your expenses by choosing smarter keyword targets and limiting your competition.

• Improving revenue. You can improve your PPC revenue by targeting more relevant, purchase-ready demographics, improving your CTRs and conversion rates, and increasing the amount of money you can get from every new landing page visitor.

Accomplishing improvements in both categories can skyrocket your ROI.

Conclusion

Obviously, there’s a lot to learn about PPC management, even if you’ve read this guide from start to finish. Much of your campaign success will depend on your ability to analyze your efforts, learn from your mistakes, and continuously adapt to new information and new circumstances.

If this all seems a bit too much to handle on your own, or if you’re currently running your own PPC campaign and are in need of assistance, you should know SEO.co offers start-to-finish PPC management services. If you’re interested in a quote or a free consultation, contact us today!

Are ultimate guides like this for SEO dead? Let us know!

The post PPC Management: The Ultimate Guide to PPC Marketing appeared first on SEO Agency.

But investing time and resources on new SEO clients can spread your team thin.

So how do successful agency owners find new SEO clients without compromising their existing workflows?

When the SEO Industry is Growing, But Your SEO Business Isn’t…

As an industry that continues to grow, organic search is also extremely competitive.

All sales and marketing strategies need to start with sound principles, and any competent agency knows this. By adhering to these foundational principles, you’ll not only increase your chances of getting seen, but you’ll also demonstrate your knowledge of marketing fundamentals:

• Demographic targeting. All your strategies should be targeted to one specific demographic (or multiple specific demographics, with a segmented strategy on your target audience). Aiming your words, ads, and sales pitches toward more specific audiences means you’ll instantly reduce your competition and simultaneously increase your relevance to that demographic. The better you understand the demographic, and the more finely tuned your SEO strategy is, the more effective it’s going to be.
• Competitive differentiation. There are dozens, if not hundreds of marketing agencies like yours, so what makes yours different? In Google Ads, marketing materials, and sales pitches, it’s vital to showcase how you’re different. That might mean lower prices, higher-quality services, a field of specialty, or even better customer service. In any case, it’s imperative to stand out. There are those who drill down into markets like SEO for lawyers or SEO for dentists. Sometimes niching down may be exactly what you need.
• Valuable offers. If you’re going to persuade new clients to enlist your services, you need to convince them of the value you bring. Don’t just pitch a new service; explain how that service is going to yield a positive ROI. Don’t just tell them a strategy is important, or that their competitors are already using it; show them the numbers, and explain how the strategy will affect their bottom line.
• Experimentation. No client acquisition strategy starts out flawless. The only way to improve is to try different approaches, measure the results, and adjust your tactics in the future.

How to Build a Predictable Lead Generation Process for Your SEO Business

Every agency wants predictability—consistent lead flow, reliable conversions, and a client pipeline that doesn’t vanish overnight. That’s where a repeatable lead generation process comes in.

Start by mapping your funnel: awareness, engagement, and conversion. Use tools like HubSpot or Pipedrive to track where each lead is in the journey. The goal isn’t more leads—it’s better-qualified ones who already understand your value before the first call.

A few essentials for building a scalable client acquisition system:

• Automate follow-ups using CRM workflows and email sequences.

• Score leads based on fit, urgency, and budget.

• Build a cadence for outreach and check-ins that feels natural, not robotic.

Refine your process monthly. Audit what sources bring in the most qualified leads and double down there. Over time, your agency becomes a machine—efficient, data-driven, and built for sustainable growth.

Positioning Your SEO Agency to Win High-Quality Clients

If your agency sounds like every other marketing firm, you’ll compete on price forever. Positioning changes that. The goal is to make your agency the obvious choice for a specific type of client—not just another name in the inbox.

Start by defining your niche. Maybe you specialize in SEO for home service businesses, SaaS startups, or e-commerce brands. Speaking their language and showing familiarity with their challenges builds instant credibility.

Then, strengthen your social proof:

• Publish success stories or performance graphs from past clients.

• Encourage video testimonials and case study highlights.

• Feature before-and-after analytics screenshots where possible.

Positioning is more than branding—it’s the strategic filter that determines who your ideal clients are and how they perceive your value. Once you own a niche, high-quality clients come to you instead of the other way around.

Outbound Strategies

Ultimately, every strategy can qualify as an “outbound” or “inbound” attempt to acquire SEO clients.

Outbound strategies rely on intentionally reaching out to new prospects, pitching them on your services and persuading them to pull the trigger on a new contract.

They come in many forms, but typically include traditional advertising and the use of an in-house team of salespeople.

Cold emailing

Identify potential SEO leads and reach out to them through email, highlighting the benefits of SEO and how it can improve their business.

LinkedIn outreach

Use LinkedIn to search for businesses that could benefit from your services and reach out to them through direct messages.

Networking events

Attend industry events, conferences, and meetups to network with potential local businesses and offer local SEO services.

Referral programs

Offer existing clients incentives for referring new clients who could benefit from your SEO expertise.

Guest posting

Write guest posts for industry blogs and include a call-to-action that offers a good hook to would-be clients.

Cold calling

Reach out to potential SEO customers through phone calls, highlighting the benefits of SEO and how it can improve their business. You can even offer incentives like free SEO audits or competitive keyword research.

Content marketing

Create valuable content on your website, such as blog posts and whitepapers, that can help pipeline prospects understand the value of you could provide and how they can benefit.

Direct mail

Send targeted mailers to potential SEO clients, highlighting the benefits of SEO and how it can improve their business.

Stay efficient

Outbound strategies can be effective, but they require strict attention to efficiency. Hiring a team of full-time sales members might seem like a strong way to secure new sales, but it’s only worthwhile if you’re properly incentivizing those team members, measuring your results, and constantly tweaking your approach for improvement.

The other problem with outbound strategies is that they tend to have finite value; a targeted ad is only useful so long as it remains paid for, and your list of prospects is only valuable until you’ve exhausted it. Inbound strategies, by contrast, don’t suffer from these drawbacks.

Inbound Strategies

Inbound strategies consist of tactics designed to naturally increase the visibility and attractiveness of your brand (and website). Again, there are many forms here, but search engine optimization (SEO) and content marketing are some of the most common.

Inbound marketing has several advantages over its outbound counterpart. Most of the strategies you’ll use here are permanent, or at least long-term, and will yield value indefinitely, increasing their ROI over time. They forgo the need for a robust full-time team of salespeople. And most inbound strategies are infinitely scalable; in other words, they can serve businesses of any size and at any stage of growth.

The best benefit of inbound strategies is that nearly all of them complement one another; investing in two strategies simultaneously can improve your results in both areas. Investing in multiple strategies can eventually result in a polished, lead-generating machine—and one that doesn’t require much maintenance.

For example, take the cohesion between these inbound marketing strategies:

Do Your Own Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO relies on both onsite and offsite changes that increase your site’s rankings in search engines. Search engines like Google measure your site’s authority based on its available content, its technical advantages, and the number and quality of links pointing to it, then use your authority to determine how to rank you for queries relevant to the content on your site. There are hundreds of technical factors, like how your site is coded, that could affect your rankings, but perfecting them can make your site far more visible to your prospects.

Content marketing

Onsite written and video content are some of your best tools for improving your onsite search optimization, but also serve as unique lead generation tools of their own. Providing valuable insights can improve your brand reputation and offer the opportunity to “convert” new visitors with a clever or persuasive call-to-action.

Link building

Link building with an offsite content strategy is one of your best tools for lead generation. Not only will you get more brand exposure and offsite visibility for your agency, but you’ll also generate an immediate stream of referral traffic to your site. Links will also, over time, increase your authority so you can rank higher in search engines.

Use Social Media Platforms to Attract SEO Clients

Social media remains one of the fastest ways to connect with decision-makers—if used strategically. It’s not about vanity metrics; it’s about positioning your agency in front of the right eyes.

Start with LinkedIn. Post brief insights from client wins or audit takeaways. Share performance data that demonstrates expertise without giving away trade secrets. On X (Twitter), join SEO and digital marketing conversations; consistency here builds familiarity fast.

For broader reach, create short-form video content on YouTube Shorts, Instagram, or TikTok that explains SEO concepts visually. These platforms help build credibility and often drive referral marketing when viewers tag others who might need help.

Above all, engage—comment, reply, and interact in communities. Algorithms reward authentic activity, and relationships built in public often become clients behind the scenes.

Partner Up with White Label SEO

It’s incredibly difficult to manage a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy all on your own, so the most effective route here is to outsource at least some of your needs to another agency that specializes in inbound marketing. There are some risks when outsourcing strategies like link building, but as long as you choose a trustworthy partner, you’ll see a return on your investment.

Ancillary Strategies to Attract More Clients to Your SEO Agency

No strategy for attracting new clients is done in a complete vacuum.

And some tools work better than others, but establishing means and methods across the board can ensure stability for your SEO company long-term.

Offering Free SEO Audits to Attract Potential Clients

Sometimes the simplest offer opens the most doors. A free SEO audit does exactly that—it builds trust while showcasing your technical expertise.

When offering a free SEO audit, lead with clarity: what’s included, how long it takes, and what the client will receive. You can highlight issues such as page speed, indexing, internal linking, or local citations. This preview of value demonstrates that you know how to spot and fix problems fast.

A solid audit should touch on both technical and content elements:

• Site structure and crawlability

• On-page keyword targeting and meta data

• Backlink quality and anchor text diversity

• Page experience and Core Web Vitals

Once you’ve delivered the audit, follow up with a short call or video walkthrough. This humanizes the data and increases the likelihood that a prospect becomes a paying client.

Leverage Local SEO to Win Local Businesses

Not every SEO win happens at the national level. Many agencies grow faster by dominating local markets first. Local SEO gives smaller firms and freelancers a chance to compete head-to-head with bigger players.

Start by optimizing your Google Business Profile. Add services, images, reviews, and consistent NAP data (name, address, phone). Then expand to directories and map citations that increase your credibility in search results.

For outreach, target nearby industries—restaurants, law firms, medical practices, home repair companies—where local visibility directly translates to revenue. Even one or two loyal local SEO clients can create recurring retainers that support your baseline income.

Finally, make sure each local client leaves a review and links back to your agency’s site. Those authentic endorsements compound your visibility in regional search results.

Using Google Analytics to Measure SEO Performance

Without data, you’re just guessing. Google Analytics is the backbone of every serious SEO strategy because it transforms assumptions into measurable outcomes.

Track engagement metrics like organic sessions, bounce rate, and conversions over time. When you compare these numbers to campaign milestones, you’ll see what’s actually driving ROI.

Pair Analytics data with keyword research tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, or Moz. The combination of behavioral data and ranking visibility helps you find relevant keywords that deliver real business value, not vanity metrics.

Set up automated dashboards through Looker Studio or Data Studio to keep clients in the loop. Transparency is what builds retention—and retention builds long-term profit.

Expanding Into E-Commerce SEO and Technical SEO Services

Once your agency has steady clients, expansion becomes essential. Offering e-commerce SEO or deeper technical SEO capabilities can instantly increase both revenue and retention.

E-commerce SEO focuses on optimizing product pages, structured data, and navigation. Clients in this sector value precision and measurable conversions, making it a high-margin niche.

Technical SEO, on the other hand, improves the infrastructure that supports visibility: site speed, crawl depth, schema markup, and canonicalization. These are areas where strong SEO skills make the difference between ranking on page two or page one.

Combining both creates a full-service SEO company capable of handling enterprise clients without losing smaller accounts. It also future-proofs your agency as the search landscape evolves.

Capitalize on Existing Clients

Remember, client retention is almost universally less expensive than client acquisition. In addition to utilizing strategies to attract or win new clients, it’s important for you to optimize your organization to reduce the chances of clients leaving—while also pushing for more sales from your existing client base. For example, you can improve your offerings with higher-efficiency and therefore a lower-cost SEO service, or you can try to upsell them on bigger, more effective SEO packages.

If your agency needs a compelling link building service to add to your suite of offerings, or if you’re looking to outsource some of your marketing strategies to save time and resources for use with other client acquisition strategies, contact SEO.co today! We’ll provide you with a free consultation, and/or a quote for our white label SEO link building services.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions for those looking to scale up agency sales either by servicing SEO clients directly or by providing white label SEO services.

How can I find potential clients for my SEO agency?

There are several ways SEO agencies find new SEO clients.

You can use social media marketing, attend networking events, offer referral programs, reach out to businesses through cold calling or email, and create valuable content that can attract potential clients to your website.

You can also leverage SEO tools to analyze and identify businesses that could benefit from SEO services.

What are the best ways to pitch SEO services to potential clients?

To pitch SEO services to potential clients, you need to clearly explain the benefits of SEO and how it can help their business.

You should also highlight your agency’s experience and expertise in the field.

Be sure to tailor your pitch to the specific needs and goals of the client and provide examples of successful SEO campaigns you have executed for other local SEO clients.

How can I differentiate my SEO company from competitors?

To differentiate your SEO agency from competitors, you should focus on your unique selling points.

This could be your SEO expertise in a specific industry or niche, your experience working with businesses of a certain size, or your use of cutting-edge SEO techniques.

You should also highlight your agency’s past successes and provide testimonials from satisfied clients.

What kind of services should I offer to attract new clients?

To get more SEO leads digital marketing agencies should offer a range of agency services that can help businesses improve their online presence.

This may include keyword research and optimization, content creation and optimization, on-page optimization, link building, local SEO, and analytics and reporting.

You should also be able to tailor your services to the specific needs and goals of each client.

How can I set the right price for my services?

To set the right price for your SEO consulting, you should consider factors such as the scope of the project, the level of competition in the client’s industry, and the amount of work required to achieve the desired results. You should also research industry standards and pricing models to ensure that your prices are competitive and fair.

How do I create a compelling SEO proposal for SEO leads?

To create a compelling SEO proposal for potential SEO clients, you should clearly outline the scope of the project, the specific digital marketing services you will provide, and the timeline and budget for the project. You should also explain how your marketing services will benefit the client’s business and provide examples of past successes. Be sure to tailor your proposal to the specific needs and goals of the client.

What metrics should I use to measure the success of my for clients?

To measure the success of your SEO services for clients, you should track metrics such as website traffic, keyword rankings, conversion rates, and revenue generated from organic search. You should also use analytics tools to analyze user behavior on the client’s website and make data-driven decisions to improve their SEO strategy.

How can I effectively manage client expectations for SEO results?

To effectively manage client expectations for SEO results, you should be transparent about the time and effort required to achieve the desired results.

You should also provide regular updates on the progress of the project and explain any challenges or setbacks along the way. Setting realistic goals and expectations from the outset can help ensure that the client is satisfied with the results.

How can I get more referrals from existing SEO clients?

To get more SEO leads from existing clients, you should provide excellent customer service and ensure that the client is satisfied with your campaign performance.

You can also offer incentives for referrals, such as a discount on future services or a referral bonus.

Be sure to ask for referrals directly and make it easy for clients to refer others to your agency.

Get SEO clients from the best sales and marketing channel ever: client referrals!

How can I build trust with during the sales process?

To build trust with during the sales process, you should be transparent about your agency’s experience and expertise in SEO.

You should also provide case studies and testimonials from past SEO clients, and get more SEO clients by allowing your SEO leads to talk directly with past successes.

Struggling to get more SEO leads and SEO clients as you start your SEO business?

We’d love to discuss partnership opportunities! Get in touch.

The post How to Find More Leads & Land More Clients for Your SEO Agency appeared first on SEO Agency.

To help make your job easier, we’ve compiled a list of tasks for you to complete before launching your site.

This website pre-launch checklist will ensure that no important steps are missed.

Perform an Initial Website Audit

What is a website audit? It’s a comprehensive diagnosis of a site’s performance, mainly for SEO purposes.

An SEO audit will tell you all you need to know about your website’s performance in regards to its SEO potential.

Here is everything you need to know about a website audit:

• It’s the first step to take before launching your website.
• You can do it in a few minutes, especially if you hire an SEO agency to do all the work.
• The results will tell you about how well your site is optimized for search engine ranking purposes.
• You’ll receive actionable insights regarding critical errors and areas of improvement to improve your website’s ranking.

If you want better rankings, then this is an important tool that should be part of your checklist.

Technical SEO & Website Compliance Factors to Consider

While basic SEO and UX elements are essential to any website launch, modern search engine optimization requires a deeper focus on technical structure, compliance, and performance. The following checklist covers often-overlooked—but critically important—factors that affect everything from crawlability and site speed to accessibility and legal compliance.

These elements not only influence how well your site ranks but also determine how trustworthy and usable it is to both users and search engines. Implementing these technical and compliance-related best practices can make or break your site’s long-term success.

The post New Website Launch Checklist appeared first on SEO Agency.

With the size of the market, there is plenty of competition, but you can still sell SEO, but doing so means you need to prove the value of your SEO services to clients.

Suppose you’re a digital agency, marketing consultant, or web design firm looking to expand your service portfolio without building an in-house team.

In that case, white label SEO offers a profitable path forward—but only if you position and prove it right.

Why Agencies Choose White Label SEO

White label SEO is more than outsourcing SEO services. It’s a way to scale operations, serve more clients, and increase client satisfaction—without hiring more SEO experts internally.

Whether you’re offering SEO services as part of a broader digital marketing play or selling SEO as a standalone product, white label SEO allows you to:

• Deliver technical SEO, content creation, and link building at scale

• Leverage a trusted SEO provider’s systems and results

• Focus on client relationships and business development

• Preserve your own brand (your clients never see the back end)

Agencies reselling SEO services this way often experience faster growth, better retention, and healthier profit margins—especially when paired with value-driven reporting and communication.

Packaging Your White Label SEO Services to Sell

Here’s the truth: clients don’t buy SEO tasks—they buy outcomes.

And yet, too many agencies offer a generic “monthly SEO package” with vague deliverables and no outcomes tied to business value.

To sell white label SEO effectively, you need productized offerings that focus on results. Examples include:

Core SEO Packages

• On-page optimization

• Keyword research and content strategy

• Link building services (backed by authority, relevance, and safety)

• Technical SEO audits and implementation

Outcome-Based Bundles

• “Local SEO Boost” for local businesses targeting the map pack

• “Traffic Recovery” for sites hit by algorithm updates

• “Topical Authority Buildout” for long-term search engine rankings

• “SEO for eCommerce” with full product page optimization

Clear naming, scoped deliverables, and expectations help clients understand what they’re buying—and help you avoid scope creep.

Crafting a Value Narrative Clients Believe

Clients don’t care how many meta tags you optimized. They care whether your SEO efforts improved their business.

Here’s how to frame your white label SEO reseller offering in ways that align with client goals:

• Lead with ROI: Show how SEO impacts traffic, conversions, and revenue

• Include competitive benchmarking: Show how clients stack up vs. competitors

• Highlight E-E-A-T: Explain how your SEO strategies build trust and authority

• Emphasize risk-managed link building: Not all backlinks are equal. Prove safety.

• Talk about permanence: SEO is an asset, not an expense. Links and content compound.

Make sure your white label SEO provider supports this value-driven approach with data, dashboards, and white label SEO packages that are easy to sell.

Proving ROI from SEO Services (with GA4)

Most digital marketing agencies use Google Analytics (GA4) to track performance. Your clients should see clear ROI from your SEO campaigns—and it’s your job to translate the data.

Step 1: Set Up Conversion Tracking

Use GA4’s Event and Conversion tracking to monitor:

• Form fills

• Phone clicks

• Purchases

• Bookings

• Page views of key offers

Step 2: Attribute Traffic Sources

In GA4, segment by Source / Medium and “Session default channel group” to isolate:

• Organic Search → signals effective content and on-site SEO

• Referral Traffic → often tied to link building campaigns

• Direct Traffic → may indicate increased brand recognition

• Social Traffic → tied to syndication and content marketing

Step 3: Calculate ROI

Use this formula:

(Total SEO-generated conversions × Value per conversion – Cost of SEO) ÷ Cost of SEO

Make it visual. Your white label SEO agency should provide conversion-driven dashboards and breakdowns.

Reporting That Increases Client Satisfaction

White label SEO reporting is one of your most valuable retention tools.

Instead of 15-page PDFs that no one reads, aim for:

• A one-page monthly executive summary (traffic, conversions, rankings, next steps)

• A live Looker Studio dashboard white-labeled under your own brand

• A KPI ladder showing leading and lagging indicators

  • Leading: Core Web Vitals, indexation, keyword rankings

  • Lagging: Organic traffic, goal completions, revenue estimates

Clients don’t cancel when they understand the compounding value of all your traffic sources, particularly from organic search.

• Direct traffic refers to any traffic typed into a URL bar or accessed via a bookmark. It’s hard to take credit for any of this traffic, though it’s possible your efforts have raised brand awareness enough to influence it.
• Referral traffic refers to any traffic coming from an outside source. If you’re building links for SEO in a diverse way (as you should), any link-based traffic you generate will be reported here, as will any traffic from any links your content has earned.
• Organic traffic is any traffic that came to your client’s site after finding it in a search engine. It’s the single best indicator you have for the overall success of your SEO campaign. Though some factors beyond your control may influence this figure, it’s almost exclusively a product of your optimization techniques.
• Social media traffic is any traffic that comes from a social media platform. If you’re engaging in social media marketing services, this is another segment you can take full credit for.

In each of these segments of traffic, you can access a “deeper,” more detailed report that will tell you about the type of visitors you receive, where they came from, what they did on the site, and whether or not they converted. For example, the Referral traffic chart will show you the biggest sources of referrals in your backlink profile, and your Social media traffic chart will show you the most popular platforms you use:

These reports aren’t perfect because you can’t prove the psychology of every user who enters your client’s site, but collectively, they can illustrate the power of your current strategies.

Communication: The Real Retention Engine

Offering SEO services without proactive communication is a recipe for churn. Keep these best practices:

Weekly Asynchronous Updates

• Slack or email summaries

• Snapshot of SEO tasks completed

• Traffic/ranking highlights

Monthly Strategy Call

• Review wins and losses

• Present roadmap for next 30–90 days

• Align on priorities

Quarterly Business Review (QBR)

• Refocus on goals

• Showcase SEO ROI

• Highlight expanded service offerings (upsell opportunity)

Also: celebrate the wins—not just in dashboards, but with actual recognition. A big client ranking win? Send a custom video. Hit a revenue goal? Mail a handwritten note. This builds long-term retention.

Why Choose You Over Another SEO Provider?

Most agencies offering white label services sound the same. Here’s how to stand out:

Feature	You / Your Partner	Typical White Label SEO Firm
Customizable SEO packages	Yes	Limited tiers
Transparent reporting	GA4, Looker, and Slack	Manual PDFs
Safe link building	Topical & authority vetted	Risky guest posts
Dedicated support team	Account manager + SEO lead	Ticket system only
Pricing flexibility	Resell with healthy margin	Fixed cost/low margin

If your white label SEO partner is flexible, trustworthy, and transparent, make sure your clients know that’s part of the value you provide.

Soft Metrics and Secondary Value

Even when SEO takes time, you can still prove value through:

• Brand visibility: Higher impressions, backlinks from authority sites

• Content permanence: Blog posts and links compound over time

• Momentum: Swapping SEO providers resets progress

• Social proof: Positive reviews and user-generated content from SEO efforts

Not every benefit shows up in analytics. Your job is to frame these as strategic assets, not fluff.

Pricing, Margins, and Selling the Numbers

White label SEO pricing varies, but here’s a general model:

• Wholesale cost (from provider): $500–$2,000/month

• Recommended retail (client rate): $1,000–$4,000/month

• Healthy margin: 50%+ (especially on long-term retainers)

Want to reduce risk for the client? Offer a pilot project—like a one-time audit, keyword research sprint, or link building burst—to prove value before committing to a full monthly SEO retainer.

Sell the SEO Sizzle, Not Just the SEO Service

Selling white label SEO isn’t just about providing SEO tools or reselling a private label SEO dashboard. It’s about translating complex SEO tasks into business value your clients care about.

When you:

• Package your services with outcomes

• Report results in a client-facing format

• Maintain proactive communication

• Work with reliable white label SEO providers

• And reinforce your unique value as an agency partner…

You’ll increase retention, earn positive reviews, and grow profitably.

Ready to Resell White Label SEO?

If you’re looking for a white label SEO company that delivers results you’d be proud to show your clients, let’s talk.

We provide scalable white label SEO packages, hands-off link building, and conversion-focused strategies—all under your own brand.

Try to think about this strategy as little as possible. If you overthink it, your efforts might be misconstrued as insincere or manipulative. Instead, just treat your clients like you’d treat a friend, and truly strive to help them succeed.

TL;DR

This is a massive guide to try and boil down to a few takeaways, so I’m only going to recap the high level here:

• Know that client retention is the only way to keep your business alive and thriving, and the way to client retention is proving you’re worth more than they’re paying.
• Make sure your agency follows best practices when it comes to engagement, relationship building, and overall disposition—communication is key here.
• Prove your worth using numbers, which can’t be argued with, calculating your costs and your value in terms of newly generated revenue.
• Use competitive research and comparative values to strengthen your worth to your clients.
• Include secondary benefits, even though they’re tough to measure, to complete the picture.

If you can do this, and assuming you’re seeing positive ROI, you should have no trouble demonstrating that you’re worth what your clients are paying you. If you’re struggling to do this, it means you need a change to your strategic approach; your client’s bottom line is your bottom line, so enlist the best white label SEO services to deliver the best results.

If you run an SEO agency and are looking for link building and private label SEO agency services, please get in touch.

We’re the SEO company that specializes in direct and white label link building.

The post How to Sell White Label SEO (and Actually Keep Clients) appeared first on SEO Agency.

For many small business owners, this type of SEO continues to be a mystery, and it shouldn’t be.

The concept is actually easy to incorporate in any web design or marketing strategy. This guide goes through everything that businesses should know when learning how to use local SEO more effectively for their markets.

Types of Businesses That Need Local SEO

In a phrase, any business can use local SEO, but it’s more effective if a business has a definitive physical location. However, if you get most of your business from local clients or customers, local SEO might also be a good idea for you as well. Local restaurants, retail stores, doctor’s offices, dentists, lawyers and so forth all benefit from using some type of locally optimized marketing strategy. If you expect foot traffic from your website, you probably want to be the first to use local SEO.

Local SEO vs. Traditional SEO

Traditional or national SEO will target broad scope keywords. These keywords aren’t attaching a regional identity. For example, if you’re the marketing team behind Wal-Mart’s new national campaign for cheap tires, then your keywords will likely direct towards all markets and focus on “cheap tires,” “tire discounts” or “tire deals.” However if you are a local auto tire company, you want to focus your keywords around location such as “cheap tires Orlando” or “tire discounts Orlando FL.” Creating a great local SEO strategy is about more than keywords but understanding this difference allows you to do accurate local keyword research, which is part of the whole marketing concept behind being local.

Foundations & Strategy – Setting the Stage for Local SEO Success

Before diving into technical tweaks, content creation, or Google Business Profile optimizations, you need a firm strategic foundation. In the world of local SEO, skipping the foundational steps is like building a house on sand. You might see some early results, but without structure, things will crack when competition intensifies or Google updates roll in.

Let’s talk about how to set your local SEO strategy up for long-term success.

Business & Market Audit: Know Thyself (and Your Local Competition)

Start by asking: What are we actually trying to rank for — and where?

Local SEO is as much about geography as it is about keywords. Defining your primary service area is step one. Are you trying to rank in a single city, a metro area, a region, or several distinct ZIP codes? Are you a brick-and-mortar store serving walk-ins, or a service-based business that goes to the customer? These distinctions matter.

Then comes the audit:

• Your existing online presence — Are your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistent everywhere? Do you have a Google Business Profile? What about Yelp, Bing Places, or Apple Maps?

• Your website — Do you even have location pages? Are you ranking for anything local? Use tools like Google Search Console and Ahrefs to see where you’re visible.

• Your competitors — Who dominates the map pack? What kind of content do they publish? How many reviews do they have? What backlinks are they earning from local sites?

This kind of audit reveals where the gaps are — and gives you a tactical edge.

Set Goals and Define Your KPIs (Because “More Traffic” Is Not a Strategy)

“Get more traffic” sounds nice in theory, but in practice, it’s too vague to guide your local SEO strategy.

Instead, define goals like:

• Increase phone calls from Google Business Profile by 25% in 6 months

• Rank in the top 3 for “personal injury lawyer in [city]” within 90 days

• Grow organic traffic to your [city name] location page by 40% YoY

Tie those goals to clear KPIs:

• Local pack rankings (map pack visibility)

• Impressions and clicks on local queries

• Click-to-call and direction requests

• Organic visits from users within your target geo radius

• Review volume and average rating growth

• Backlink count from local sources

Once those are in place, create a regular cadence for SEO reporting. Monthly reviews can help you adjust and refocus before campaigns go too far off track.

Local Keyword & Intent Research: Speak the Language of the Neighborhood

Local SEO lives and dies by intent. People searching “shoes” want one thing. People searching “best running shoes near me” want something entirely different — and they want it now.

Your goal is to find:

• High-intent local queries like “emergency plumber in [city],” “best Thai food in [neighborhood],” or “24 hour urgent care near me”

• Geo-modified terms combining your services with locations: “roofing contractor Springdale,” “estate lawyer Bentonville”

• Long-tail searches that show high buying intent but less competition: “affordable kids dentist west little rock”

Tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and even Google’s autocomplete suggestions are helpful here. But go beyond the tools — talk to your customers. Listen to how they describe their needs.

Finally, create a keyword mapping plan that connects these terms to specific pages:

• Homepage → Branded & broad geo terms

• Service pages → “service + city” combos

• Blog posts → Answer local questions

• Location pages → Anchor your presence in each area you serve

This way, every page has a job, and every keyword has a home.

Why All This Planning Matters

It’s tempting to jump straight into writing content or chasing backlinks — and those things are important. But without a strategy, they become noise. You need clarity on who you’re serving, where you’re serving them, and what terms matter most. Once you’ve built this foundation, the rest of your local SEO efforts will have something solid to stand on.

Think of this as your blueprint. The skyscraper comes later.

NAP, Citations & Business Listings – Building Trust Through Consistency

If content is king in SEO, then consistency is queen — and she rules the local kingdom.

One of the most overlooked but foundational elements of local SEO is your NAP: Name, Address, and Phone number. It sounds simple. It should be simple. But for many businesses, this is where chaos begins.

Let’s get into why consistency in your citations and listings matters — and how to fix it if things are already a mess.

What Is NAP — and Why Does It Matter?

Your NAP is the digital fingerprint of your business. It tells Google and other directories where you are, what you do, and how customers can contact you. When your NAP information is consistent across the web, search engines trust you. When it’s inconsistent, they get nervous — and nervous algorithms don’t rank you.

Here’s what can throw off your local SEO without you even realizing it:

• Your address is listed as “123 Elm St.” in one place and “123 Elm Street” in another.

• Your business name includes “LLC” on some profiles but not others.

• You moved locations — but some directories still show the old address.

• Your phone number is formatted differently (or outdated).

These mismatches may seem minor to a human. But to an algorithm trying to reconcile fragmented data? They’re red flags.

Google Business Profile: Your Local SEO Headquarters

If you haven’t claimed your Google Business Profile (GBP) — previously known as Google My Business — stop reading and go do that. It’s the single most important listing for local SEO.

Once claimed, make sure it’s 100% filled out:

• Correct business name (no keyword stuffing — Google will punish this)

• Accurate business hours — especially holidays

• Click-to-call phone number

• Website link

• Photos (inside, outside, staff, services/products)

• Business description that includes your primary local keyword naturally

• Categories — choose the most relevant one first, and add a few secondary ones if applicable

• Service areas if you serve multiple ZIP codes or regions

Bonus points for:

• Google Posts (short updates/offers/events)

• FAQs — you can pre-load these with local keywords

• Regular photo updates (fresh content signals to Google)

Your GBP is often the first impression someone has of your business. Treat it like your storefront.

Local Directories & Data Aggregators: Still Very Much Alive

You might think directories like Yelp, Foursquare, and YellowPages are outdated. But from a local SEO perspective, they’re still relevant — not for the traffic, but for the citations (aka local mentions of your business NAP).

Here’s how to get your citation strategy right:

1. Start with the Big Four Aggregators
   These companies distribute your NAP info to dozens (sometimes hundreds) of other directories:

   • Neustar Localeze

   • Data Axle (formerly Infogroup)

   • Factual (now part of Foursquare)

   • Yext (paid syndication)

2. Target Niche & Local Directories
   If you’re a law firm, make sure you’re on Avvo and Justia. A doctor? Healthgrades and ZocDoc. Local restaurant? Don’t ignore TripAdvisor or even OpenTable.

3. Clean Up the Mess
   Use tools like Moz Local, BrightLocal, or Whitespark to audit your current listings. They’ll surface duplicates, inconsistencies, and missing profiles. Once found:

   • Suppress duplicates

   • Fix incorrect info

   • Claim unclaimed profiles

   • Standardize formatting (including abbreviations)

4. Automate Where It Makes Sense
   If you’re managing dozens of locations or don’t have time for manual cleanup, consider platforms like Yext or Synup that auto-distribute and sync your NAP across dozens of platforms.

Schema Markup: Help Google Help You

Schema is like a digital cheat sheet for search engines. By adding LocalBusiness schema (preferably in JSON-LD format) to your website, you explicitly tell Google things like:

• Your business name

• Address & coordinates

• Phone number

• Business type

• Opening hours

• Review aggregate

• SameAs links (e.g. your social media or GBP)

It’s not just good practice — it’s a signal of legitimacy. And when Google understands your business better, it ranks you better.

Use tools like:

• Google’s Rich Results Test

• Schema.org templates

• Technical plugins (like Yoast, RankMath, or manual insertion if custom-coded)

Pro Tip: Your NAP Should Be Baked into Your Website

Don’t just rely on citations. Make sure your full NAP is:

• Visible in the website footer

• Present on your contact page

• Embedded via schema

• Clickable (especially phone numbers for mobile users)

For multi-location businesses, create a separate page for each location with unique URLs, content, and embedded maps.

On‑Site Local SEO – Turning Your Website Into a Local Ranking Machine

You’ve nailed down your business listings. Your Google Business Profile is humming. Great! Now it’s time to tackle something many local businesses overlook: your actual website.

Think of your site as the home base for your entire local SEO strategy. It’s where Google (and your customers) come to confirm who you are, what you offer, and where you operate. If your website doesn’t reinforce your local relevance, you’re basically whispering in a noisy room.

Let’s change that.

1. Technical Foundation: The Stuff Google Cares About

Before you even think about adding “near me” to a title tag, your site needs to be technically sound. Here’s your local SEO tech checklist:

• Mobile-Friendly Design
  Over 60% of local searches happen on mobile. If your site’s not responsive, you’re losing rankings — and customers.

• Fast Page Speed
  Speed impacts both rankings and conversions. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to test and improve.

• Secure (HTTPS)
  Google gives a ranking boost to secure websites. Plus, nobody trusts a site flagged as “Not Secure.”

• Crawlable Site Structure
  Ensure your pages are easily accessible by search engines. Avoid orphan pages, and create a logical internal linking structure.

• XML Sitemap & robots.txt
  These help search engines find and prioritize your content. Make sure they’re up to date and error-free.

2. Local On‑Page Optimization: Speak Google’s Language (and Your Customers’)

Each page on your site is a chance to show local relevance — especially your homepage, service pages, and location pages.

Here’s how to optimize them:

• Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
  Include your city and primary keyword:
  “Plumber in Fayetteville, AR | 24/7 Emergency Plumbing Services”
  Meta descriptions should compel the click and reinforce locality:
  “Looking for a reliable plumber in Fayetteville? We offer fast, affordable service—day or night.”

  Some of your content on your site can use local SEO keywords such as “SEO in Orlando” or “Orlando SEO”.The links, title tags, anchor text, in-text keywords and meta descriptions should offer city and state keywords that relate to any of the service areas that are within your physical location’s reach. Link building is important to gaining traffic, so you should be linking to authoritative pages with PageRank 3 or above that relate to your site’s articles and blogs while also linking to a page on your site that is related to the content with a keyword as well.

  For example, if you are selling SEO, you can link a high traffic site with authority on high quality SEO to the keyword “SEO specifications.” Later in the same piece, include a link for the keywords “Cheap SEO” but set the title of the link to “SEO in Orlando.” This can be done with the following HTML code for URLs:

  <a href=”url” title=”SEO in Orlando”>SEO in Orlando</a>

• Header Tags (H1, H2, etc.)
  Don’t forget to include your geo terms in headers — but keep it natural.

• Body Content
  Weave in location-based phrases naturally throughout your content. Mention neighborhoods, landmarks, ZIP codes, and service areas without sounding like a robot.

• NAP in the Footer
  Include your Name, Address, and Phone number (with schema) in the footer of every page.

• Clickable Phone Numbers
  Use tel: links so mobile users can call you instantly.

• Location-Specific Landing Pages
  If you serve multiple areas, create individual landing pages for each. Make sure these aren’t cookie-cutter copies. Include:

  • Unique descriptions of services offered in that location

  • Local customer testimonials or case studies

  • Embedded Google Maps for that address

  • Neighborhood or ZIP code references

• Internal Linking
  Link strategically between service pages and location pages to spread link equity and help search engines understand your hierarchy.

3. Local Content Strategy: Be the Local Expert

Content isn’t just for blog traffic — it’s a massive trust and relevance signal. If you want to dominate local search, create content that proves you’re active in and knowledgeable about your community.

Here are some ideas:

• Neighborhood Guides
  “Best Schools in Bentonville, AR for Families Moving to the Area”

• Local Events
  Blog about local happenings your audience cares about: fairs, expos, charity drives, seasonal specials

• Customer Stories / Case Studies
  Real work done for real people in specific areas (bonus points for photos!)

• FAQ Pages
  “Do you serve Centerton?” “What areas in NWA do you offer next-day service?”

• ‘Best Of’ Lists
  Great for building links, partnerships, and relevance:
  “Top 5 Coffee Shops Near Our Downtown Office”

The more hyper-local content you publish, the more chances you give Google to see you as the authority in your city or neighborhood.

4. Embedded Maps & Visual Local Cues

Including a Google Maps embed on your contact page or location pages isn’t just helpful for visitors — it sends clear geographic signals to Google.

Bonus tactics:

• Add local images with alt tags that mention your city or service area

• Include videos that reference your team, location, or community involvement

• Use virtual tours, especially for restaurants, salons, or retail stores

These visual elements do more than just look pretty. They anchor your business in a physical place, which is what local SEO is all about.

5. Schema Markup: Repeat What You Said, But for Robots

If your page says “We’re located in Rogers, AR,” great. But don’t assume Google knows what that means. Use schema to spell it out.

Add LocalBusiness or a more specific schema (e.g. Dentist, Attorney, HVACBusiness) with fields like:

• Name

• Address

• Geo-coordinates

• Phone number

• URL

• SameAs (linking to your GBP, social profiles, Yelp, etc.)

• Opening hours

Also consider:

• BreadcrumbList schema for better site navigation

• Product or Service schema for detailed offerings

• Review or AggregateRating if you feature testimonials

The result? Richer search results, better indexing, and stronger ranking signals.

The Takeaway

Your website should scream “local business” from every angle — not just to visitors, but to Google’s crawlers. Every page, every tag, and every block of content is an opportunity to reinforce that you’re the local authority.

If your competitors are only optimizing their Google Business Profile, this is where you outpace them. Because when your site, citations, and content all align around your local relevance — you don’t just compete.

You dominate.

Local Profiles on Google

Creating profiles in Google is the first thing that any business wanting local traffic must do. Why’s that? Most people are using Google to research products and services, and when they type in something like “new tires Orlando,” a list of businesses that have profiles on Google Places will pop up at the top of the results page for the Orlando, Florida location.

This means that businesses must add their complete location and details to Google Places and Google Plus. The profile must contain as much information as possible including a thoughtful description, pictures, contact details, store hours and hopefully reviews.

You also want to set up profiles on other social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. These sites will undoubtedly come up whenever anyone searches your store’s name or products to learn more information, and you should be the one to control that information.

Be Consistent with Every Listing

When you start to create profiles and even build a website, you should make sure that your address is consistent on any page that has your name, address and phone number. They should also feature the same main photo and additional images that are consistent with the rest of your profiles. It may seem trivial, but you should never abbreviate one address and not another.

Using On-Site Optimization Techniques

There are four things to know about local on-site optimization. For one, name, address and phone number must be on every page of your site, such as at the bottom or top. In addition, city and state names should be in the title tags, meta descriptions and content of your site. Schema local markup can also help search engines find your local content better and identify your location for users. Lastly, you can use a KML or keyhole markup language file to further your on-site optimization.

The Most Important Factors to Boost Local SEO Rank

Reviews, positive feedback and number of profiles is important. Reviews should be on every page that it is possible to have reviews, but Google Places reviews are seen the most, which means that they contribute the most to a local business ranking in search results. Businesses often ask customers to leave reviews or add hints to review when a customer is obviously having a great experience. It’s important that you don’t pay for reviews, but businesses have had some success by offering a free gift if a customer leaves a review.

Dominate Your ZIP Code—Before Someone Else Does

Local SEO isn’t a “nice to have” anymore—it’s a competitive weapon. And if you’re not actively using it, someone else in your area absolutely is.

And with national, broad-match terms getting obliterated by AI overviews and other LLMs, local search is even MORE valuable.

From your website and listings to your reviews and content, every local signal you send is a vote of confidence in your authority, credibility, and trustworthiness. The businesses that win the map pack aren’t always the biggest. They’re the most consistent, the most visible, and the most relevant to local searchers.

If you want to be the name people see when they search “[your service] near me,” this isn’t optional. It’s mission critical.

So stop treating local SEO like an afterthought. Build the foundation. Nail the technicals. Create content your city cares about. And own your market—block by block, click by click.

Because in local search, the business that shows up first is the business that wins.

While having all of the above will definitely boost your ranking, your business may still not be in the lead if you are from the city’s center. That’s because when someone searches for “tires Orlando FL,” Google uses “centroid bias,” which means that the search will look for locations closest to the city center of Orlando.

Now that you know a few ways to develop local SEO immediately, your site can build a reputation online and easily be found by those who are looking for your products and services near your location.

The post Ultimate Local SEO Checklist appeared first on SEO Agency.

Before there were YouTube, podcasts, and social media.

And back before there was radio and television.

Even before there was written word – there were authentic stories.

The medium through which stories are told has evolved over the centuries, but the power of the story has not.

As businesses and brands attempt to be more authentic and engaging, stories drive sales.

And if you want your marketing strategy to cut through the noise, it’s important that you embrace and perfect the art of brand storytelling.

The Power of Storytelling

The fact that humans continue to cling to stories after thousands of years shows that there’s something innately powerful about them.

It’s not just that we like them – it appears that we’re biologically compelled to respond to them on a physiological level.

“Depending on the story you’re reading, watching or listening to, your palms may start to sweat, scientists find.

You’ll blink faster, and your heart might flutter or skip,” Elena Renken writes for NPR.

“Your facial expressions shift, and the muscles above your eyebrows will react to the words — another sign that you’re engaged.”

According to functional MRI scans, stories cause multiple areas of the brain to light up. As the story unfolds, your brain waves actually start synchronizing with those of the storyteller.

In fact, the greater the listener’s comprehension, the more closely the brain waves mimic those of the individual telling the story.

In other words, the new way to get someone on the same page as you is to tell a compelling story that captivates their mind.

What is Brand Storytelling?

Storytelling has been around since the dawn of mankind. While we might sit in front of screens watching stories unfold on YouTube or Netflix, our ancestors sat around fires where skilled communicators relayed the oral history of where they came from.

Same concept…different vehicle.

Some time ago, savvy marketers and business owners picked up on the idea that humans relate to stories.

Thus it makes sense to engage with new customers through storytelling. And it’s out of this idea that brand storytelling emerges.

Brand storytelling is basically an audience-centric marketing strategy that focuses on capturing audience’s attention and captivating prospects through a combination of narrative and emotion, with a focus on the brand’s values.

The objective is to tell a great story that build loyalty and puts them on a specific “wavelength” so that they (a) recognize a specific need or want, and (b) believe you’re the best solution to satisfy that desire.

Whereas most businesses take a factual or best approach to marketing and branding, brand stories emphasizes the softer, more emotional side of things.

According to a Stanford University study, people remember stories more than facts.

In the study, just five percent of people were able to recall statistics after listening to a short speech. However, more than 60 percent of people were able to recall a single brand story from the speech.

And in a separate study out of USC, search results found that 31 percent of ad campaigns with emotional content performed “well,” while just 16 percent of ads with rational content did the same.

The study found that certain emotional themes were most effective, including achievement, love, pride, empathy, friendships, memories, and loneliness.

5 Tips for Effective Brand Storytelling

Understanding that you need to create stories in order to maximize your storytelling in marketing strategy and SEO ROI is one thing.

But, inevitably, the question becomes: How do you tell effective stories?

With this question in mind, let’s dig in and explore some of the top tips for successful brand storytelling (and how you can use them to propel your own content strategy).

1. Position Your Brand Appropriately

Most brands understand the value of brand storytelling, yet very few are as successful with it as they’d like to be. What gives?

In most cases, the problem can be traced to the type of brand storytelling.

To be more specific, they put the emphasis on themselves – they make their brand the hero. In reality, the customer should be the hero and your brand is merely the guide.

In classic storytelling, we call this the hero’s journey.

This formula was first developed back in the 1940s by film director Joseph Campbell. Since then, almost every major blockbuster film is based on this script. It goes like this:

• An ordinary person finds himself in an ordinary world.
• That person is called to an adventure.
• The individual initially refuses the call.
• However, he meets a mentor who encourages him to take rising action.
• A threshold is crossed as the person commits to the journey/challenge.
• Tests, allies, and enemies present themselves.
• The individual best approach an abyss and appears doomed.
• In the abyss, a struggle, death, and rebirth occurs.
• Transformation occurs and a reward is presented.
• The ordinary person finds themselves on the road back (atonement).
• There’s a resurrection and the individual becomes a hero.
• The hero returns with an “elixir” that they previously did not have.

Now that you see the 12 steps of the hero’s journey, you’ll never unsee it. In fact, you’ll probably think about it next time you watch a movie (and may even be able to predict exactly how the story will unfold before it happens).

Okay, great…but what does this have to do with marketing strategy and brand storytelling?

Well, this same script can actually be used to tell a powerful brand story.

Branding expert and best selling author, Donald Miller, believes in it so much that he created something called the “StoryBrand Brandscript,” which is a simplified, business-specific version of the classic 12-step script.

It includes seven basic elements:

• Main characters…
• Has a problem…
• And meets a guide…
• Who gives them a plan…
• And calls them to a rising action…
• That ends in a success…
• And helps them avoid failure

While it can take some work to get focused and drill down to these seven elements, doing so will allow you to tell a more compelling brand story.

Even more importantly, it puts the emphasis in the correct place.

Whereas most businesses frame themselves as the heroes, the reality is that the customer wants to be the hero of their own great story.

Our role is merely that of the guide.

And the sooner we embrace this, the more relatable and transformational our stories become.

2. Combine These 2 Elements

You can think of stories on an axis. As you move right on the X-axis, you go from “irrelevant” to “relevant.”

And as you move up on the Y-axis, you go from “expected” to “unexpected.”

The best stories exist in the upper right corner of the graph. In other words, they’re a combination of two ingredients: unexpected yet relevant.

No other combination works.

• Irrelevant and unexpected? Nope.

• Irrelevant and expected? Negative.

• Relevant and expected? That’s a no.

The only way for a story to be memorable and effective is for it to be both unexpected and relevant to the audience.

3. Share Your Customers’ Stories

Remember that the story isn’t about you. One way to shift the emphasis from you to your audience is by sharing your customers’ stories and then briefly connecting the dots at the end to show them that you were able to guide them from where they were to where they are now.

Testimonials are the classic tool for sharing customer stories.

These can be done in any number of formats, including written case studies, videos, audio interviews, or even graphics.

For successful customer stories and testimonials, you should ask the right questions. This includes prompts like:

• Can you tell me about your real life before working with our company/using our product?
• What made you decide to make a change?
• What was your goal/dream when you first became a customer/client?
• How did you achieve your goals with us?
• Tell me about what real life is like now for you?

You obviously don’t have to follow this script exactly, but hopefully you can see how it creates a nice story arc of transformation.

It positions the customer as the hero and your brand stories as the thoughtful and sage guide.

4. Expand With Permutations

The beauty of a successful brand storytelling is that it can be expanded and evolved.

(Not in terms of the brand story itself, but in terms of how it’s told.) And the more resourceful you are with your brand’s stories, the greater your return on investment will be.

Most stories exist in a core format. For example, you might have a video interview with a customer who used your product and experienced a significant transformation. But it’s up to you to figure out how to create additional permutations.

A video interview can be turned into a PDF case study.

It can also be used to create a podcast episode, an article on your blog, and a series of social media posts.

You can even use it in your email marketing and Facebook advertising strategy.

If you’re going to take the time to create a powerful story, you might as well make sure you’re able to tell it in multiple formats and places.

That’s the key to building a successful brand.

5. Choose the Right Emotions

From a very basic point of view, you can categorize the brain into three parts:

• The Primitive Brain. This part of the brain is responsible for the “fight or flight” emotional response and other basic mechanisms that keep you alive. This is the oldest part of the brain – the most mature system, if you will. Everything is filtered through the primitive brain at one point or another.
• The Limbic System. This part of the brain is responsible for producing emotions. It’s in this part of the brain that you learn to hate, love, or fear something.
• The Neocortex. Finally, there’s the third part of the brain – the most evolved portion – that is responsible for processing intellectual tasks. The neocortex has been described as the CEO of the mind. It’s this rational portion that truly sets us apart from any other animal on the planet.

Despite having a rational processing system in our brains, we can all point to daily instances where we don’t use rational or logical decision making.

Whether it’s saying something mean to someone you love (even when you don’t mean it), or buying a product that you don’t really have the money to buy, simply because it feels good – we all act irrationally from time to time.

Psychologists believe this is due to the formation of the brain light.

The simplest explanation is that the emotional level of the brain (the limbic system) processes information five-times faster than the rational part of the brain (the neocortex).

This makes people more likely to respond to emotional appeals than logical, rational arguments. And it’s for this reason that brand storytelling efforts works so well.

But here’s the thing: Not all emotions are created equal.

Learning how to tap into the right emotions is what takes a brand’s storytelling skills to the next level.

Depending on the product or vertical that you operate in, you’ll find the following emotions to be most powerful:

• Coolness/belonging
• Fear
• Empowerment
• Nostalgia
• Awe
• Guilt
• Sadness
• Love

You obviously can’t tap into each of these emotions in every brand story.

However, having a good mixture of these elements in other brand stories is a powerful way to grow your brand and resonate with customers.

Real-Life Brand Storytelling Examples That Drive SEO

Storytelling isn’t just a marketing buzzword—it’s a powerful lever for improving engagement, brand loyalty, and organic search rankings. The most successful brands use storytelling to position their customers as heroes, themselves as guides, and their content as fuel for SEO. Here’s a table of real-world examples that showcase how storytelling, emotion, and SEO intersect.

Partner With SEO.co to Tell Your Brand’s Story

At SEO.co, we believe as an SEO company in partnering with brands to help their brand storytelling efforts in more powerful ways.

We’re able to do this through a combination of different strategies, including link building, content marketing strategy, storytelling in marketing and public relations.

Interested in learning more about SEO and how we can bring your brand stories to people’s lives with better content? We’d love to chat. Click here to get started!

The post Brand Storytelling: How to Capture & Keep Your Ideal Customers appeared first on SEO Agency.

It’s a frustrating reality for many small and medium-sized businesses. And while poor results can stem from any number of internal or external factors, there’s often a common thread tying them all together:

There’s no clear, strategic plan for how to attract, engage, and convert prospects into paying customers.

Some small(er) businesses have something that resembles a plan, but it’s usually an improvised series of disconnected tactics. Rarely is it built with the psychology of customer decision-making in mind. Even when it is, execution tends to be rushed—focusing more on quick wins than long-term results.

It’s not always a lack of effort—it’s a lack of structure.

Most companies want fast sales, but they don’t realize that skipping the foundational steps of building trust and nurturing and marketing qualified leads is actually costing them more in the long run.

So what’s the fix?

It starts with understanding how people actually buy—and building a system that mirrors that customer journey.

That system is called a marketing funnel. And once you understand how it works, you’ll start to see that nearly every successful business follows the same proven framework for moving prospects from strangers to loyal customers.

In this post, we’ll break down:

• What a marketing funnel is (and isn’t)

• How the marketing funnel mirrors real-world customer behavior

• The types of content and tactics that work best at each stage

• How to build a scalable marketing funnel that drives consistent, qualified leads

Let’s get into it.

What is a Marketing Funnel?

Let’s begin with the basics.

A traditional marketing funnel is essentially a visualization for understanding the processes that take place when a prospect turns into a customer (through a sales lens).

The basic gist is this: A prospect has no clue that your business exists. She then becomes aware of your business and its products, interest is sparked, she evaluates whether she likes your products (in the context of other marketplace options), decides to make a purchase, and ultimately follows through by exchanging money in return for what you’re offering.

It’s called a marketing funnel because of how the number of leads ultimately gets smaller and smaller until only the most qualified are left.

You might have a pool of 15,000 people who are aware of your product, but only 10,000 of them are interested.

Out of this group, just 7,500 take the time and effort to evaluate your product. In other words, they make it down through the bottom of the marketing funnel.

And of these, 4,000 make a purchase.

The marketing and sales funnel is a customer journey that moves prospects through a sensical step-by-step process that weeds out the disqualified and disinterested, while nurturing those who are interested and likely to become paying customers. (In this sense, it’s an efficient process for both parties.)

While this sounds super formal and rigid, a good marketing funnel is invisible to your prospects.

To them, it’s all engagement.

It starts slow and surface-level and begins moving faster into a more detailed and refined direction. Before they know it, they’re sliding down your well-oiled marketing funnel – ready to open up their wallets and purchase what you’re offering.

The 5 Stages of the Sales Funnel

Every marketing and sales funnel has its own nuances and steps, but they all follow five basic stages. That’s because all human psychology is basically the same. People might seem different – and in many regards they are – but customers tend to act in predictable and repeatable ways. Thus dividing the sales funnel into five clean stages serves as an effective way to standardize the process.

We’ll discuss specific ways to target customers in each of these stages with high-converting content in the next section. For now, let’s get a clear understanding of what’s happening in each of them (from the perspective of the customer).

Stage 1: Problem/Need Recognition

It’s during this first stage that people become aware of the fact that they have a problem. This is the top of the marketing funnel. (Prior to this point, an individual isn’t actually in your marketing funnel to begin with. They have no issue, so there’s nothing you can do for them.)

Examples of customers entering into the problem or need recognition stage include:

• A homeowner’s AC stops working in the dead of summer and he suddenly realizes that he needs something fixed or replaced in his system.
• A busy mom hops in her van in the morning to carpool her kids to school and it won’t start. She clearly has a problem and a need.
• A freelancer gets fed up overpaying on his taxes. He figures there must be a better way, but he doesn’t know what that is.
• A college student is frustrated by the poor picture quality of his TV and begins wondering if there are better TVs on the market that are within his budget.

There’s no active searching going on in this phase. Customers in this phase are just realizing they have an issue or need. They’re on the front end of the process.

Stage 2: Information Search

While some people will live with a problem or need for days, weeks, months, or even years before taking action, most will seek to alleviate or solve it as quickly as possible. This leads them into the information search stage. This phase puts the user higher in the top of the marketing funnel.

During the information search stage, prospects gather information, explore the products and solutions that exist, gather information about different companies, get prices, ask questions, read reviews, browse Google, etc. This is also the phase where many would-be marketers tend to find and focus on vanity metrics and not conversions, which happen later. While top-of-the-marketing-funnel metrics can prove helpful to later success, they are not success in and of themselves alone.

Depending on a prospect’s personality and the severity of the problem or need, this information search can be fast (minutes) or extensive (months). Using our four examples above, here’s what the information stage might look like:

• The homeowner Googles possible problems that could be causing his AC unit to not work properly. He reads various online forums, watches a couple of YouTube videos, and even calls a handy friend to ask questions.
• The busy mom puts out a Facebook post asking her friends for advice on what to do when a Honda van won’t start.
• The freelancer visits a few freelancer message boards and Reddit pages to figure out how much most of his peers are paying in taxes, how they get their taxes filed, and what their recommendations are.
• The college student heads over to a couple of major ecommerce sites and searches for TVs that fit his parameters (screen size, technology, brand, and price range).

These information searches ultimately lead the customer to different companies and professionals

Stage 3: Evaluation of Alternatives

Now a customer is really in the thick of it. They’ve identified that they have a problem and they’ve researched the products and services that exist to solve their problem or smooth over their various points of friction. It’s at this point in the game that multiple options are compared and evaluated against one another.

The evaluation phase is often the most time-consuming – particularly if there are divergent choices and/or the customer is indecisive.

The lower the price point and/or less important the outcome, the faster a prospect moves from stage three to stage four. For example, choosing between Chick-fil-a and Subway for lunch takes just a couple of minutes.

The higher the price point and/or more important the outcome, the longer it takes for a prospect to move from stage three to stage four. For example, choosing the right type of setup for an aging parent (assisted living, nursing home, in-home health aide, etc.) could take months.

Using our illustrations:

• The homeowner considers whether he should have an HVAC technician come in and repair his AC unit at a cost of $750 or go ahead and spend $4,500 to replace the unit with warranties that will cover any future breakdowns.
• The busy mom decides whether to jump her car herself, call a mechanic to come start her battery, or replace her battery. And if she’s going to replace her battery, she figures out the best type of battery that fits within her budget.
• The freelancer decides between DIY tax filing with a software like TurboTax and switching accountants. (If going the latter route, he makes a list of three accountants in the area and compares each of them.)
• The college student makes a spreadsheet with four of his favorite TV options and compares features and prices from different retailers.

Every prospect is different, but this gives you an idea of how they think when solving problems. There’s rarely one choice. There’s almost always two or more options (and sometimes dozens).

Stage 4: Purchase Decision

Your prospect has successfully entered stage four of the marketing funnel. And this is where a purchase decision is made.

The purchase decision is the natural result of the three stages that precede it. At this phase of the game, a customer is ready to pull out the wallet and swipe the plastic.

Think of this stage like a football field. You’ve already marched 99 yards down the field. Now it’s first and goal from the one-inch line. While it’s technically possible that you don’t score, all you need to do is push the football over the line. A little more effort and no major mistakes (fumble) is all it takes.

Back to our illustrations:

• The homeowner calls up the preferred HVAC company and asks one final question to clarify something about payment or scheduling.
• The busy mom contacts a local mechanic and inquires about how to schedule someone to come out and replace her battery.
• The freelancer decides to go with TurboTax and visits the website to complete the purchase.
• The college student picks a TV model and goes to Amazon to click the “add to cart” button.

At this stage, the customer is looking to finalize the decision in a purchase. However, they have an expectation that everything will go smoothly. Any unforeseen friction can push the customer back into stage three.

Stage 5: Post Purchase Behavior

After making a purchase, the customer wants to know that they’ve made the right decision. And if they have made the right decision, they’ll want to tell people about it. (The same goes if they feel regret about their purchase decision.)

Here are some examples of what could happen:

• The homeowner is thrilled with the service provided by the HVAC company and posts a positive Google Review.
• The busy mom feels like she got ripped off by the mechanic and tells all of her friends to stay away from the company.
• The freelancer ends up saving a small amount of money with TurboTax. He researchers other options and finds that he can upgrade to a premium product and possibly save 10 percent more on his taxes next year.
• The college student loves his TV so much that, after graduation, he purchases another one (this time bigger!) for his first house.

Again, there are so many different options here. But this should give you a basic idea of what’s happening after purchase and why it matters so much.

Most importantly, add a customer retention strategy to your marketing funnel.

As the data clearly shows, acquiring a customer is far more costly than retaining one.

Learn the art of customer retention for your digital marketing funnel!

Creating High-Conversion Content for Each Step of the Marketing Funnel

Okay, now that we have a clear handle on what the marketing funnel looks like and how people move from awareness of a problem to a purchase decision, let’s explore the role of content in this process.

In other words, how can you create high-converting content that greases the marketing funnel, addresses prospects at each stage, and ultimately pushes them further and further down until they make a purchase?

Here’s a closer look.

Stage 1 Content (Problem/Need Recognition)

The most effective marketing campaigns use content to make people aware of their problem and help them see that they have a need.

Common content options in this stage are articles, digital advertising campaigns, webinars, podcasts, and paid search leading to landing pages.

As tempting as it may be to shove your product down a prospect’s throat or go in for a quick sale, this stage is all about laying the groundwork. You are helping them see that they have a problem or reassuring them that their need is a valid one.

Stage 2 Content (Information Search)

In stage two, the prospect is interested in finding a solution and actively working toward finding information to assist in solving the problem they face.

Good content options include website content, social media posts, blogs, newsletters, and targeted email campaigns.

Guest blog posts are especially helpful during this stage (as well as the next one). They’re seen as unbiased and helpful. Webinars are great because they’re able to go in-depth and build trust. Get creative!

Stage 3 Content (Evaluation of Alternatives)

At this stage of the game, a prospect has some information. They’ve become a mini “expert” on the topic and are ready to evaluate all of the options and alternatives.

Your content should center on establishing your product or solution as the best. You can do this in a positive way (amplifying your brand and using social proof to explain why you’re the best), or in a less positive way (explaining why the competition can’t match up and/or why alternative options are a mistake).

Content commonly used in this phase include white papers, ebooks, brochures, and PDF guides.

Stage 4 Content (Purchase Decision)

It’s purchase time. If you’ll remember from our previous discussion on stage four of the marketing funnel, you’re on the one yard line. All you need is one final push. Don’t mess it up!

Good content for this stage is safe and encouraging. The more specific you can be, the better. We’re talking about case studies, testimonials, data sheets, etc. You want to remind the prospect why they’ve decided to purchase from you.

Stage 5 Content (Post Purchase Behavior)

We’re not going to spend much time discussing stage five, but this is still an important one – particularly for subscription-based businesses and other brands that rely on repeat purchases.

During this phase, the goal is to wow customers, reassure them that they made the right choice, and attempt to upsell or cross-sell.

If you have an email list, this is a good time to slow drip them with the occasional social proof or case study that shows other customers are enjoying the products as well. You want to reassure them and encourage them to purchase again in the future.

If you have some sort of tiered business model with a low-price, mid-price, and premium-price, the objective is to move them up the tiers until they become the most profitable customer they can be.

Test Absolutely Everything

This is a basic overview of what a digital marketing funnel looks like and how the right content moves people to action. But it’s important to remember that every business and target audience has its nuances. This is why testing is so valuable.

Once you get your marketing funnel in place, the real work begins.

You need to isolate the key elements in each stage and test how they’re performing in order that you can optimize and iterate.

Here are a few thoughts and ideas to get you moving:

• Create Conversion Funnels on Google Analytics. If you really want to be successful with digital marketing funnels and content marketing strategy, take some time to learn the ins and outs of Google Analytics. It’ll take you a weekend to get the basics down and you’ll see tremendous fruit from the investment of time. Using your knowledge of Google Analytics, set up a “Goal Funnel” to track where users are abandoning your conversion funnel. You can refine your approach based on this data.
• Carefully Analyze and Optimize Landing Pages. Your landing page plays a key role in moving people from one stage of the marketing funnel to the next. Always analyze and optimize landing pages. (This includes elements like headlines, copy, color, font size, and purchase path.) You can use A/B testing to figure out the best combinations.
• Refine Your CTAs. How are you moving people through the marketing funnel? What calls-to-action are you using? How can you improve them to get better results?
• Analyze and Optimize Sign Up Forms. Sign-up forms are very important. They often mean the difference between losing someone at stage one of the marketing funnel and seeing them through to stage five. Study best practices, track what your data, and optimize until you reach your benchmarks.
• Test Out Different Trust Signals. Trust signals are valuable – particularly in the later stages of your marketing funnel. At a bare minimum, you need to incorporate and test guarantees, authoritative logos, and reviews/ratings.

You can’t set a digital marketing funnel and forget it. Testing is where the magic happens. Don’t be frustrated if your first crack at developing a marketing funnel produces minimal results.

Through regular testing optimization, and iteration, you’ll eventually get to where you need to be.

Scale Your Organic Traffic With the Highest Quality Content and Links

Marketing can look complex when you view it from the outside looking in. But once you get up close and personal – breaking it down into digestible bits, processes, and marketing funnel stages – it becomes much more approachable.

The hope is that this article has pushed air under your wings. That you feel empowered to tackle marketing in an effective capacity – once and for all.

But we also understand that you may not have the time or internal resources to handle all of it on your own. And that’s totally fine, as well.

At SEO.co, it’s our aim to help you with some of the heavy lifting.

As your SEO company we want to assist you in pushing prospects from the awareness stage all the way through the marketing funnel and into the sales stage of your customer journey.

We do this by scaling organic traffic with the highest quality content and links on the web.

We even perform these services for other agencies with our white label SEO program.

Want to learn more about our content writing and link building services?

If you need the most advanced, up-to-date and effective digital marketing tactics to take potential customers into repeat customers that love your product, our marketing and sales teams can help!

We’d love to hear from you on your goals and digital marketing strategy – contact us today!

The post Digital Marketing Funnels: How They Work and How to Optimize for Maximum Revenue appeared first on SEO Agency.

Their AI SEO agency promises they’ll outrank you in Google faster than you can say “OpenAI.”

They are also promising top rankings in LLM responses.

Should you panic?

Not yet—but maybe grab some popcorn.

In the marketing world, every few years we get a shiny new toy that promises to “change everything.”

Right now, that toy is AI.

And while artificial intelligence has real potential in search engine optimization, the industry’s current obsession with fully automated “AI SEO” tactics smells less like innovation and more like the 21st-century version of snake oil.

Let’s break down why.

SEO Has Always Had a Snake Oil Problem

First, some history.

SEO has never been short on schemes and scams that promise effortless rankings.

• Remember keyword stuffing?

• Or article spinning?

• How about private blog networks (PBNs) that linked everything and everyone together like a bad MLM?

Each tactic started as a loophole, got overused, and was eventually crushed by a Google update.

Yet each one was sold with confidence by self-proclaimed “experts” to unsuspecting businesses.

Now, we’ve entered the AI era—and wouldn’t you know it, the same old pitch has returned: “Just push this button, and boom—rankings.”

Or, promising an LLM chat output as if the AI SEO agency could control the model itself!

What AI SEO Is (And What It’s Definitely Not)

Let’s be fair. AI can be incredibly useful in SEO—when applied thoughtfully.

Ranking in LLM (large language models) results can be hugely beneficial. For instance, we have started to track our lead flow coming from ChatGPT and others and the uptick is promising!

Here’s what real AI SEO looks like:

• Natural language processing to analyze SERPs and user intent

• Machine learning models that cluster keywords into intelligent content silos

• Predictive analytics for link acquisition strategies

• Algorithmic site audits and technical fixes

• Ranking in results from LLMs as either a brand mention or a direct link to your company website

But most of what’s being sold as “AI SEO” today? It’s just:

• Mass-generating blog content with ChatGPT

• Plugging that content into your CMS without edits

• Adding AI-written meta descriptions that read like a toaster instruction manual

• Promises of LLM rankings with “new and improved AI SEO tactics”

• Repeating the above until Google deindexes your site (albeit slowly)

Spoiler alert: Google’s Helpful Content Update was specifically built to sniff out that kind of junk and traditional SEO tactics like entity and semantic optimizations are the same things that will get your ranking in AI mode and ChatGPT as it will in the traditional “10 blue links”.

The Problem With AI-First SEO Tactics

The real issue isn’t the tools—it’s the over-reliance on them. Here’s what happens when marketers treat AI as the strategy, not just a supplement:

1. Loss of Brand Voice

AI-generated content has the personality of soggy cardboard. You lose nuance, tone, and trust when your “thought leadership” reads like it came from a 2005 instruction manual.

2. Topical Authority Dilution

AI can write 100 blog posts on random topics. But if they’re not part of a strategic content cluster? You’re just spamming the web.

3. Google Will Catch On

Actually, they already have. With the rollout of SGE (Search Generative Experience), AI Overviews and now AI Mode, Google’s getting better at surfacing original, helpful content—while burying regurgitated AI fluff.

4. LLMs Can’t Be Manipulated As Much as an AI SEO Might Promise

We’ll use the following ChatGPT response to “What is the best SEO agency” as an example:

The problem here is that this is a personalized result tailored to me (results will vary depending on how you have previously interacted with the particular LLM).

Second, LLMs run off many of the same signals traditional search algorithms do including things like semantic and entity weights and even traditional link building.

There are some pretty stark differences, however. This is one of the reasons we launched LLM.co (among others), but I digress.

5. Strategy Becomes an Afterthought

If your SEO “strategy” is just uploading 10,000 AI blogs and praying for backlinks, you don’t have a strategy.

You have an automated mess ready for a Google penalty.

Spotting AI Snake Oil: Red Flags to Watch

If you’re considering hiring an “AI SEO” provider, here’s your checklist of flashing red lights:

• “We’ll rank you in AI Mode and LLMs in 30 days!” (No, they won’t.)

• “1,000 articles per month!” (Are they legible? Will they pass an “AI content” scan?)

• No mention of backlinks, technical SEO, or on-page audits (How do you think LLMs determine rank in their algorithm?)

• Proprietary AI that’s a total black box (aka ChatGPT with a new logo or running on an API key)

• No human editorial review process

• No mention of content lifecycle, branding, or user experience

If it sounds too good to be true—it’s probably snake oil in a SaaS wrapper.

So, What Does a Smart AI-Enabled SEO Strategy Look Like?

AI should enhance, not replace, your SEO strategy.

Here’s how pros are doing it right:

Use AI for:

• Keyword research and semantic clustering

• SERP and competitor analysis

• Drafting content briefs and content outlines, not final content

• Analyzing data trends and user behavior at scale

Keep humans in the loop for:

• Creating original thought leadership

• Editing for tone, voice, and flow

• Building backlinks through real relationships on real websites that have traffic

• Adding the right semantic context and entity keywords to disambiguate the content body

• Mapping user journeys and conversion flows

It’s not AI vs. humans.

It’s AI plus humans—at least if you want to rank and retain your brand credibility.

How to Vet an AI SEO Provider (Your Own Frequently Asked Questions)

Before you sign that contract, ask:

• “Where does the AI stop and the humans begin?”

• “Can you show me real case studies—rankings, traffic, conversions?”

• “How do you ensure the content is unique and brand-aligned?”

• “How does your strategy adapt to Google’s/ChatGPT’s/Perplexity’s algorithm changes?”

• “Tell me about ‘corpus injection,’ ‘synthetic anchor creation,’ and ‘LLM fine tuning’?”

• “What does your editorial process look like?”

• “If I scan your content with the likes of Originality.ai or ZeroGPT will it get flagged as ‘AI content’?”

If the answers feel vague, fluffy, or automated—you know what to do.

Don’t Drink the Kool-AI-d

Did you pick up on my pun there? 

The future of SEO absolutely includes AI, including AI rankings and mentions.

But don’t mistake AI SEO tools for AI SEO strategy, or you’ll end up with a bloated content graveyard and zero organic traction.

The AI SEO agencies promising overnight rankings through AI alone?

They’re selling digital snake oil in a fancy bottle.

Don’t fall for the hype.

Look for expertise, transparency, and a healthy mix of tech and human insight.

Because in SEO—as in life—there are no shortcuts worth taking.

As AI proliferates, we have found that following our local SEO checklist provides more wins for businesses that still want to dominate, but can’t seem to get above and/or compete with national brands.

That’s where we can help! Contact us today!

The post AI SEO is the Marketing Industry’s Latest Snake Oil Tactic appeared first on SEO Agency.

White labeling is a business strategy that allows you to take your own product and “rebrand” it as someone else’s.

For example, say you are an SEO company with a suite of white label tools for managing clients’ search engine rankings.

You can offer these same services under the name of another company (i.e., their brand) and charge more in the process!

This article will discuss how to create white label SEO report for your clients.

Let’s dive in!

What is White-Label SEO Reporting?

White-label SEO reporting is the process of offering SEO reporting services to your clients, done by a third-party platform of an external company.

The SEO reporting platform needs to generate a report for the client in their desired format.

This is usually done by taking all of your clients’ data and creating thematic visualizations (e.g., infographics) and analytical reports based on that information, like ROI [return on investment] analysis, social media marketing campaigns, or keyword research reports, etc.

Companies that offer packages with white label SEO services are able to increase profits by scaling up what they’re already doing without adding overhead costs.

This can be accomplished by outsourcing work from one company to another – externalizing part of the process so you don’t have to do it yourself. Outsourcing can also reduce labor expenses.

What’s Included in a White Label SEO Report?

Every report is customized to your client’s SEO goals and includes the following core elements:

The Reporting Process: From Data to Deliverable

The white label SEO reporting process is simple, scalable, and repeatable:

1. Data Collection: We pull from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SEO tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz.

2. Analysis: Our SEO strategists review the data to identify wins, gaps, and opportunities.

3. Report Creation: We build out your branded white label SEO report using your preferred template and delivery format.

4. Delivery & Review: You receive a ready-to-send PDF or online dashboard for client review and strategic discussion.

Whether you need weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly delivery, our white label SEO software automates much of this process while still offering room for custom notes and commentary.

What Do White-Label SEO Reporting Platforms Do?

White-label SEO tools perform a variety of tasks, including:

• Gathering data on the client’s website and keywords;
• Creating PDF reports for each individual client in their preferred format (like an infographic);
• Providing recommendations to improve rankings.

Platforms will often integrate (usually via API) with one another, allowing you to connect data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console (GSC), Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz and others in order to get the data that can be used for making decisions.

What Should You Look for in a Private Label Platform?

Some platforms offer to create reports for a variety of clients, some charge per client and can take care of the entire process.

You’ll want to research how much your prospective platform will cost you on an individual level as well as what kind of benefits it offers (e.g., discounts for creating infographics).

Also, be sure that its format is something that could work with what you’re looking for in terms of ROI analysis or keyword research.

Sometimes even more important is their ability to assist you in the SEO sales process.

When Should You Use a White-Label Platform?

White-label SEO reporting platforms are best used by companies that want to offer more services in a scalable way without taking on overhead costs or hiring additional staff.

Some companies may find that it’s more cost-effective to hire an agency than use a white label platform.

However, hiring a white-label marketing & SEO agency can be expensive when you just require SEO reporting services.

If you already have your SEO services under control, choosing a white-label SEO reporting platform is an ideal choice.

On the other hand, hiring a white-label SEO is beneficial if you would like to scale your entire SEO department.

How to Choose the Best White-Label SEO Reporting Tool

As you can see, it’s highly important to select the right white-label SEO reporting tool for your company. If you’re on the hunt for the best products, here are some steps you’ll need to take.

Always Check Online Reviews:

The most important thing to do when researching white-label SEO reporting platforms is checking for reviews.

It’s best to look at a company’s profile on sites like Google My Business, Yelp, and Facebook because they provide the most accurate information about an individual business.

You’ll want to take note of how the platform works overall (e.g., if it offers different tiers), whether or not their customer service team responds effectively in cases of emergency, and what kinds of clients are using them.

This will give you insight into which features each company has that might suit your needs better than others as well as who would be best suited for that particular product/service combination based on their experience with customers similar to yours.

Check to See if The Product is Offering a Free Trial:

A lot of white-label SEO reporting platforms offer a free trial, which is an excellent way to see if the product suits your needs as well as how it works with other programs you may have in place.

It’s important to do this because not all companies make return policies clear or allow for refunds.

If they don’t mention anything about returns, watch out! It could mean that once you sign up and purchase their service, there’s no going back – even if you find out later down the line that it doesn’t work for what you’re looking for.

Create a List of Expectations:

If you’re not sure what features are necessary for your company, create a list of different expectations that will be important to meet. This way, the right option can come up much more easily when searching through various reporting platforms.

For example: If you want to have monthly reports sent out automatically as opposed to weekly ones (and vice versa), make sure it’s on your list! That could mean all the difference in terms of ROI and keyword research if it’s something that affects how often clients need their data updated or changed based on keywords and campaigns.

Always Compare Different Pricing Models:

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that there are a lot of different pricing models out there.

Some SEO reporting platforms may offer an unlimited plan for their monthly fee (e.g., $100/month), while others might charge you more based on what features they have included in your package. Make sure to consider all options before deciding on one.

Partner with a Private Label Marketing Agency:

If you’re looking to partner with a white-label digital marketing agency, make sure they have experience not only in the plans and services that are offered but also in your industry.

Create a list of great marketing agencies that are knowledgeable about what it takes for clients like yours to succeed because if they don’t offer these options from the get-go, chances are good that once you sign on their dotted line, you’ll be locked into whatever plan they choose without any room for negotiation or changes down the line.

Why Agencies Choose SEO.co for White Label Reporting

Agencies trust SEO.co because we combine expert strategy with scalable infrastructure:

• 100% U.S.-based SEO team (no outsourcing)

• Transparent, white-labeled client communication

• SEO performance insights with actionable takeaways

• Flexible delivery options: PDF, spreadsheet, or online dashboards

• Dedicated account managers who understand your clients’ needs

We’ve helped hundreds of agencies scale with white label SEO services — and our reports are the proof that keeps clients retained.

FAQs: White Label SEO Reporting

1) What is a white label SEO report?

A white label SEO report is a client‑ready deliverable that shows SEO performance (traffic, conversions, visibility, and keyword rankings) with your agency’s branding. We compile data from Google Analytics, Search Console, and leading SEO tools into a clean, explanatory format.

2) How is white label reporting different from sharing raw tool exports?

Raw exports are noisy and unbranded. White label reporting consolidates multiple data sources, adds narrative insights, highlights wins/risks, and recommends next steps—so clients get clarity, not spreadsheets.

3) Which metrics are included by default?

Rank distribution and keyword tracking, organic sessions and conversions, CTR and impressions, top landing pages, backlinks/referring domains, technical health (crawl/index status, Core Web Vitals), local pack visibility, and content performance. You can fully customize the set.

4) Can I customize the template and branding?

Yes. Logo, colors, voice/tone, sections, ordering, and CTA blocks are all customizable. We can mirror your proposal deck or existing client report style.

5) Do you support dashboards as well as PDFs?

Yes—PDF, live dashboards, or both. Dashboards are ideal for day‑to‑day monitoring; PDFs are perfect for monthly executive summaries.

6) How often should I expect reports?

Most agencies choose monthly, but some are weekly, depending on the client contract. High‑velocity programs (e.g., large content or link acquisition sprints) often use bi‑weekly cadences. We’ll adapt the reporting process to your retainer.

7) Which data sources do you integrate?

Google Analytics (GA4), Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, Looker Studio, and ad platforms for blended paid/organic context when requested.

8) Can you map goals and conversions in GA4?

Yes. We’ll help configure events/conversions in GA4 so your SEO performance report ties to pipeline and revenue, not just traffic.

9) What if a client only cares about a few target keywords?

We’ll keep full keyword tracking, but your report can foreground the “money” terms, highlight movement for those, and tuck long‑tail growth into an appendix.

10) Do you include competitor benchmarks?

Optionally. We can compare share of voice, keyword rankings, link velocity, and content gap analysis against named competitors.

11) Will the report include local SEO specifics?

Yes—map pack visibility, GBP insights, citation status, local SEO landing page performance, and review volume/sentiment when provided.

12) Can you track technical issues and show fixes?

We include a rolling technical SEO log: issue detected → fix implemented → impact on SEO performance (e.g., crawl rate, indexation, Core Web Vitals).

13) What is white label SEO software in this context?

Our white label SEO software is the stack we use to automate collection, normalization, and visualization—so reports are consistent and on‑time while remaining fully branded to you.

14) How do you prevent keyword stuffing in reports?

We focus on keyword rankings as a measurement, not a strategy. Content and internal links are optimized for intent and UX–especially as the world is more focus on AI, LLMs and ranking on platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity.ai. Reports document results and recommend actions without forcing unnatural phrasing.

15) Can I add narrative insights for each section?

Absolutely. We encourage commentary for context: “Why did rankings move?” “Which page changes drove conversions?” These notes increase retention.

16) Do you support multi‑location or franchise reporting?

Yes—roll‑up plus location‑level breakouts: local pack visibility, keyword rankings by city, and store‑specific actions.

17) Can you show the ROI of content and links?

We attribute revenue‑adjacent metrics (assisted conversions, first‑touch/last‑touch) to content and campaigns, and we track how authority growth correlates with keyword rankings and leads.

18) How fast can I start?

If you have GA4 and Search Console access ready, we can start within days. First report delivery typically follows an initial baseline period to ensure accuracy.

19) What if the client wants custom KPIs?

We’ll incorporate any KPI you define (MQLs, pipeline, ACV, LTV/CAC proxy) and surface them prominently.

20) Is there a minimum contract?

We recommend quarterly at minimum to demonstrate trend‑level SEO performance; monthly works best for iteration and clear ROI storytelling.

The post White Label SEO Reporting: Guide + Template appeared first on SEO Agency.