Timothy Carter

Out of all the online marketing techniques you can choose from, focusing on increasing your conversion rate optimization (CRO) is one of the most important. Conversion rate optimization helps answer the following critical questions: How does your traffic behave when it actually gets to your site and views your web pages? What steps do your visitors take moving through your conversion funnel? Do your visitors bounce from your product pages or pricing page? Are any of your web pages a great example of high converting content? Is there any single page that supports your conversion funnel more than others? How is your traffic translating into meaningful revenue for your business? If your conversion rate is low, why? What can be improved on my landing pages? When you fail to answer and improve upon these questions, you can generate all the traffic you like—and it won’t matter to your bottom line. High traffic sites need more than visitors to your web pages to generate conversions. What you need is another step of the process: a way to convert your inbound traffic into paying customers (or at least get them further down the marketing funnel). Getting traffic to your landing pages is just the first step in this process. Earning more “conversions” is vital for your brand to stay afloat, but conversions come in dozens of different varieties, and the process is somewhat complicated. When it comes to conversions, you can measure your success by improving your conversion rate. This is the percentage of visitors who visit your web pages and take a desired action like downloading a file, using a free tool, signing up for your email list, or making a purchase. However, conversion rate optimization strategies are nuanced based on what conversion you’re after. I’m here to walk you through everything you need to know about conversion optimization (CRO), from what qualifies as a conversion to ongoing best practices for success. Conversion Rate Optimization Overview First, in order to understand conversion rate optimization (CRO), we need to talk about what conversions are, why they’re important, and some general points to keep in mind when optimizing your site for conversions. This is going to serve as the basic framework on which we’ll build your direction and key strategies in the future. Why Conversions Are Critical You’ve probably “converted” or been a conversion before—and recently, too. Have you bought anything online recently? Your purchase technically qualifies as a conversion. Have you downloaded any free content in exchange for some personal information on any landing pages? This is a conversion too. Conversions aren’t just about getting people to pay you money; they’re about getting your users to make a meaningful interaction with your brand. SEO.co uses CRO tactics, just like you should, even on our home page: Optimizing your conversions is important because without any conversions, your traffic will pass through your site like water leaking out of a bucket. Once it’s gone, it can’t bring any value to your brand. CRO itself is important because most of the time, conversions don’t happen on their own. Website traffic doesn’t convert automatically. Let’s say you have the “perfect” product; it’s cheap, it’s something everyone needs, and it’s something that generates mass appeal. You get plenty of traffic, your click through rate for your landing pages is high, but you never worked on your conversion strategy. You’ll run into a number of potential problems: Your users might not understand how to buy your product. Your users might not realize your product is for sale. Your users may lose interest or procrastinate buying your product. The list goes on. On some level, conversion rate optimization is about making people want to buy your product (or engage with your brand), but even more importantly, it’s about giving them the power and opportunity to actually do it. When you achieve all of these goals, you’ll see your site’s conversion rate increase. Understanding Your Conversion Goals Before you get started in a CRO campaign, you need to understand what your core goals are. Yes, you’ll obviously want to “increase conversions,” but there are some other important elements to bear in mind here. You’ll want to start by looking at your existing traffic before generating more website traffic. If your existing traffic doesn’t convert, getting more traffic will only dilute your conversions. The first step required to optimize conversion rates is making sure you’re generating targeted web traffic. You could have the best product with amazing customer testimonials and the most convincing call to action and you still won’t get conversions unless your traffic is targeted. Try our free tools to see where your website stands Before you start optimizing your website for conversions, try one of our free tools to identify the easiest areas to address first. You’ll find a good selection of CRO tools to help you get started. Raw conversion power The first and most obvious goal is increasing your total number of conversions. The greater percentage of visitors who convert, the more valuable your traffic is going to become and the more revenue you’ll be able to generate for your brand. In a perfect world, your conversion rate would be 100%, meaning, you’d convert 100% of all website visitors who view a landing page. However, that’s unrealistic. Even when traffic is highly targeted, it’s rare to see a conversion rate above 25%. Ideally, you should aim for a conversion rate between 10-20%, with 20% being on the high end. If you can achieve 10% you’ll be doing great. This is about the average conversion rate in most industries. You can improve this rate in a number of ways; for example, you can create more conversion opportunities throughout your site, create a smoother checkout page, a simpler web form, a clear pricing page, detailed product pages, make your conversion process easier to complete, or add a greater degree of urgency—I’ll be digging into these strategies individually in later sections of this guide. Increase your conversions first,

When a potential patient seeks a plastic surgeon, they usually start with a Google search and go with one of the search results with the best reviews. If you want to be sure your practice is one of the first search results, you will need to focus on search engine optimization (SEO) for plastic surgeons. Why should your practice dedicate resources to SEO? Consider: Enhance online visibility: You need to rank at least on the first page of search results for ‘plastic surgeons’ in your community. Outrank the competition: Every major city has a boatload of plastic surgeons. Will you stand out from them? Attract qualified patients: With local SEO, you can attract prospects to your website that seek your specialties – facelifts, liposuction, tummy tucks, breast augmentation, and more. Increase conversions: Site visitors don’t matter if they don’t contact you. The best SEO services plastic surgery services will optimize your site so most visitors reach out to you. We have helped plastic surgeon’s dominate their niche with both national and local SEO plastic surgery SEO campaign. Plastic Surgeons Can Attract Their Target Audience Proper SEO plastic surgeons ensure you attract the right type of patients to your practice. Some of the ways your SEO strategy can target surgery prospects include the following. Gender City Education Pain points Buying behavior Hobbies Interests Income Desired and previous procedures It’s important to meet with your SEO team and decide who your target audience is. For example, say you are a board-certified plastic surgeon in Cleveland with extensive experience and fellowships in facelifts. You will want your plastic surgery SEO strategy to target mostly women in their 40s to 60s who earn a certain income and are interested in facelifts. They probably are fit and may have had previous facial procedures. The more you can target your audience, the more likely you can find them in Google or other search engines and get them to your site. Remember, it can help to go after a narrower target audience than a broad one. If your local SEO team focuses on ranking for ‘best facelift surgeon in Cleveland,’ it may be easier than to rank for ‘’best plastic surgeon.’ Once they get to your plastic surgery website, you should feature personalized content about procedures and pain points that concern potential more patients. They already are interested in plastic surgery SEO, so you are halfway there. You just need to provide them with reassurance that your plastic surgery practice’s SEO is the best place to have work done. Do that by offering helpful information and plenty of past patients and you should be able to get their contact information. Boost Traffic to Your Plastic Surgery Website As you know, SEO will get you ranking higher on Google and other search engines for major plastic cosmetic surgery keywords. The higher you rank, the more people will see it, which increases brand awareness. Research suggests that more than 50% of consumers like shopping from brands they already know. The more prospects who know the name of your plastic surgery practice, the more procedures they will purchase. It’s estimated that prospects need more than five impressions before they start to recognize and remember your brand. So, your SEO needs to ensure your plastic surgery practice gets to the top rankings and stays there. Working with a top SEO strategist also will help with getting your site optimized for the most conversions, too. Google puts a priority on websites with an excellent user experience, also called UX. It also favors sites that are optimized for mobile when doing SEO rankings. Improving the user experience on the site will boost your ranking and brand awareness. It also will keep people reading on your web pages longer, which helps ranking too. Your SEO team may also recommend doing guest blogs on other websites to get backlinks and more brand awareness. As you gain traffic to your website with proper SEO, you will have an increase in leads, too. Luckily, we have built a backlink checker so you can know how you’re doing compared to your competition. Use it now for free! Improve Lead Generation for Plastic Surgery Patients SEO also will gradually improve and simply lead generation. One of the most effective lead generation methods is by creating informative content. The content should answer some of the most common questions that potential patients have. Say your visitors want a facelift. They may want to know how long the facelift will take, potential side effects, how much pain there will be, how long the recovery is, and the cost. If you focus in your practice on eyelid lifts, people want to know how long their eyes will be swollen, will they be able to see afterward, will they have dry eyes, and how long until the swelling goes down. Creating detailed posts about each of these points, combined with a strong call-to-action at the bottom of each blog post, can quickly generate more qualified leads. Providing patients with detailed, helpful information forges a connection with them, and they will choose your practice. If the content is good enough, people will want to share it with their friends, which brings you more potential leads. Beat The Plastic Surgeon Competition There are many plastic surgeons in most cities, but you have an edge on them if you understand the importance of the best SEO for plastic surgeons. Your competition can’t rank ahead of you by paying for better organic results. They need to understand SEO, but many do not. With expert SEO professionals guiding you, it’s possible to improve your ranking organically in only a few months. As noted earlier, when your website is ranked ahead of others, people will naturally choose yours. There is no question that implementing effective SEO plastic surgery practices is one of the most cost-effective ways to generate new leads and plastic surgery business. While paid Google and Facebook ads can help to generate leads, nothing beats providing customers

Structured Data, like any other markup language, is important to the presentation of your content, in particular, your products and other information. It also has a variety of uses that improve your SEO. Structured data isn’t just about making your products look nice and orderly. It is now the only way to stay on top of your SEO. Structured data impacts user experience, click through rate and on-page dwell time and more. Unlike unstructured data, which often fails to delineate and demystify what a particular piece of content is about (text, image, motion graphics, etc.), structured data provides clear feedback, giving search engines the information they need to properly categorize web pages and their respective content. But, let’s dig in a bit deeper. Why You Need Structured Data Google doesn’t recognize structured data by itself as a Google ranking factor, it’s how you manipulate that structured data and what you do with it that affects your SEO and in turn your site traffic, ranking, and conversion rate. Without delving into the specifics of data structures and how coding languages facilitate site structure and layout, your structured data makes Google understand your content, therefore, it is one of the keys to how well you are defined by search engines and how users can find you and your products. In particular, e-commerce sites benefit greatly from using structured data along with your unstructured data to improve their ranking and presentation to better the user experience. If you want to compete in the marketplace effectively, building out product details to create robust and informative rich snippets that tell users everything they need to know before they even click on a web page. The overall benefits of structured data exceed far beyond ecommerce and rich snippets though. Structured data can impact your SEO negatively if you use it wrong, but if you take advantage of all that data in the right way, you can essentially teach Google how to interpret your content and improve your ranking with the data that you already have. The Critical Nature of Structured Data Structured data is in everything you do on your site. From customer information to search queries to click-through-rates. Maximizing the potential of this data is how you will stay competitive in your space. Managing your site traffic, click-through-rate, and bounce rate will help control your site ranking. Additionally, making more attractive content will cause users to stay on sites longer and prompt return visits. This is all done by manipulating your structured data. User experience is the second part of structured data and how it affects your SEO and ultimately your site rank. Using the information you gain and then making changes as you gain more and more information allows you to not only tailor a customized user experience but to continue learning. Not only that, user experience data relates to Google and improves your site authority. Plus, the structured data helps Google understand your site, so the more often you’re managing your data and making changes that they become relevant to user experiences, such as changing product details or prices, the more Google learns about your business. The more Google learns about your business, the better it can identify you in relevant searches which equals higher rankings. How Schema Markup Improves Your SEO The data you have available to you is the best tool in the box for improving your search results. This includes using structured data to improve how your site presents in search engines. One of the most common uses of this is showing positive reviews in your search results. This shows that your business is trustworthy and immediately tells potential traffic about your good reputation. Schema markup is the use of structured data as code to tell the search engine about your site. Sometimes this is little things, like where to place a box for product images, the price, and other criteria, but it can be used for practical purposes, both on your site and in your search results. Like we talked about above, structured data is the information that Google uses to figure out your business. From a practical standpoint, what it is, is code. Code that points out specific information that you can move, manipulate, and display however you choose. Marking up your site, search results, and your content is the best way to enhance your SEO using structured data. It is nothing short of essential to stay competitive and to rank higher. We’ll break down some of the ways to enhance your SEO and how to implement valid structured data. Types of Structured Data and What it Influences One of the main places that structured data is used on web pages that display product or service information. But there are key differences between the types of data generally stored on your website: Structured data: files and text that is clearly defined with the right tags and meta to ensure bots can understand what it’s all about. Various types of structured query language provide the details needed to make sense of content on the internet. While it may go without saying, structure data provides a well defined structure for otherwise dispersed and jumbled storage space on our server. Semi-structured data: data that has some meta included, but does not clearly delineate or clarify to crawlers and bots what is included in the data. Unstructured data: raw data created by internal and external users or bots/computers that remains without the right identifying meta that clarifies what the data is actually about. Unfortunately, most enterprise data remains unstructured. The reality is, your data itself can delineate as search engines get smarter with business intelligence and machine learning tools, but most site owners can and should contain and implement both structured and unstructured data. Schema.org (and its associated WordPress plugin) allows you to manipulate the code to markup certain information. In essence, this information is highlighted by the search engine and allows it to better match search queries with your business.

In the world of digital marketing, they say that content is king. With carefully crafted content marketing, you can easily influence your target audience and convert them into paying customers more effectively. And with quality content you can keep your audience in the know. On the other hand, link building is a crucial component of online marketing that no campaign should do without. By building links, you will help the search engine’s determine the importance and value of your brand or website. So . . . which should you place more value on? Content marketing and link building Efforts are two of the most important pieces of a successful Internet marketing campaign. However, evidence suggests that content marketing has the edge over services that just build links. That’s not to say you should abandon one in favor of the other, but the following are compelling reasons to regard content marketing as having more to offer than link building. Content Marketing is More Measurable Than Link Building Just what is the value that links give to a site? Experts agree it’s a bit difficult to quantify, although links certainly contribute toward improvements in a site’s ranking and traffic. On the other hand, with content you can measure your success by determining how many site visits and links are generated by each piece of content. Content also allows us to see how many social votes it gets and how many visits it garners from search engines and social media. We can also determine which keywords have been used by browsers to locate a piece of content. Can you determine how much revenue a new piece of content has generated for your business? Certainly. You can quantify how much revenue has been generated by each unit of quality content per day, per week, per month, or per year. Content Marketing is More Natural Than Link Building By generating high-value content, you will naturally gain and craete links. Great content is a natural link bait; it inspires people to share, blog about, and link to it, if they find it interesting. As for linking, in most cases you will find that when you analyze submission-based link-building activities, people link to your content not because they like you, but because you requested a link back to your own site or you paid for those links. Link Building is More Expensive & Time Consuming Than Content Marketing While there are some affordable SEO, a lot are offering their services at expensive rates. Finding great copywriters isn’t very hard, though. There are plenty of great writers out there who have strong copywriting skills and are not only creative, but also provide their services at reasonable prices. Link building efforts is a time consuming process that requires building massive Excel spreadsheets and keeping track of which links are actually generating traffic and which ones are hurting the website’s ranking position. Link building is a long and tedious process that requires patience. The cost of link building can also be restrictive. Writing content, on the other hand, requires a few hours and ingenuity, but that’s it. After it’s finished, it may need polishing, but it doesn’t require massive amounts of time looking at daunting spreadsheets that may require a detail-oriented person to navigate it. Content marketing costs less to produce than link building. Hiring a content marketer is more cost effective than a link builder because the work is less intense in most instances. Content marketing is effective for less money than most people think. Hiring a content marketing professional through a crowd sourcing firm will cost less than people think. The Value of Content Marketing is More Measurable Than Link Building The value of content versus the value of link building is surprising. In part, because the value of a link is difficult to quantify. It’s much easier to measure how many links content has created or how much traffic has visited the site based upon the last post than it is to measure the value of link building. It’s always easier to measure social votes and referral visits than to try and measure how much traffic was gained from adding a single link. It’s easier to determine how much revenue content generates if the purchase is made directly after reading the content. Most content generators can quantify that content will generate a certain amount of dollars over a period of time, but link building services focus on increasing rankings. From increased rankings, you can get more traffic, but this does not always equate. Content Marketing is More Scalable via GIPHY You can either outsource your link building and other SEO needs or you can build your own team. However, you should be warned: Setting up a competitive SEO team isn’t a stroll in the park. There are many things you need to consider to succeed. You need to find the people with significant experience in SEO, pay substantially for their talents and skills, and hope they turn out to be as good as they claim. If you hire the wrong people or people whose experience is limited, you run the risk of having to devote many hours to training them, testing them, and supervising them to make sure they do the proper job for your clients. If you are an SEO agency looking for resources to help you scale, please take a look at our white label link building solutions. On the other hand, setting up a team of copywriters is much easier. They are cheaper and not difficult to find. One look at their samples (you can test them if you must), and you should have a grasp of the quality of output you can expect from them. And if they decide to leave, you won’t be set back far because there are plenty of other great writers on the market to go around. Content marketing is scalable, but link building is less scalable. When you are scaling a content marketing team, it’s easier than

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), images matter. In this post, we will be discussing SEO for images. More specifically: What is image optimization or SEO? Why is image SEO so critical? What can you do to enhance your on-site SEO with images? If I add an image will it add value to the content or detract? Do my responsive images “show” vs. “tell” by enhancing the page or post dialogue? Or, are they just glorified stock images? Why Photos & Images Matter for SEO Just as video can add to the user experience, so can responsive images. Whether it is a photograph, artwork, graphic design or some sort of chart or graph, an image optimization can provide a great deal of information and greatly enhance the user experience. When a popular photograph or other image is shared on social media channels, Google, Bing and other search engines will rate the originating website or web page much more highly and boost its rankings on search engine and keyword image search results. Images are much easier to produce than video, although video has become easier to provide in recent years with webcams and handheld cameras. But images often times can be produced very easily and for very low cost when website owners and contributors can provide digital photos, proprietary artwork, graphs and other designs that illustrate information, entertain people and offer unique ways to demonstrate how something works or has an impact within a particular context. Your first goal is to optimize your image to maximize user experience. While the experience of your users is qualitative, and does not directly influence your search rankings, Google or many search engines does take user behavior into consideration. If you have better images, you’ll have lower bounce rates, and lower bounce rates means you’ll enjoy a higher authority. How to Optimize Your Images for SEO Optimizing your images with the appropriate meta data or structured data is important not only for Google Image search, but it will also ensure your blog posts themselves will be properly optimized. While Image SEO search gets less attention than search engines traditional search function, it can be a source of significant organic traffic, but your blog posts with embedded and properly optimized images can help your content to rocket to the top of the SERPs. Image Inclusion Your first step is to include images wherever you can. That doesn’t mean stuffing images into every nook and cranny of your website or web page, but it does mean having at least one significant image SEO for every major post on your blog. Without images, your site will appear bland, and people will be less willing to read your content or stick around. Image Appropriateness Next, you’ll have to make sure your Google images are appropriate for your content. It isn’t enough to pair a picture of a hamburger with an article about cat behavior simply because you “needed” an image SEO. Your images should be appropriate to the content they’re intended for, and if possible, they should be original. This will keep users on your page for longer, which can improve your authority. Image Captions As an added measure, it’s a good idea to include captions with your images. While image optimization captions won’t necessarily help your images rank higher in a search, they will help users understand why you’ve chosen specific images for your posts, which leads to an overall better user experience. Appropriate Alt Text Various Google updates have seriously cracked down on the overuse of keywords, including one or two keywords in your alt text can still help you rank for target queries. To add alt text, add alt=”example text here” to your image alt tags, where “example text here” stands in for your keyword-optimized description. Just be sure that your description is appropriate to the actual image SEO & content. Appropriate File Name In addition to an alt tag, you’ll want to make sure your image titles are appropriate. For example, if you’re using that hamburger picture from earlier, titling it “Delicious looking hamburger” is much more appropriate than “Broken ukulele.” This image title will clue Google in to the image’s content, and will help it appear in more relevant searches. Adding Images to Your XML Sitemap As a final tactic, be sure to include all your images in your XML sitemap. Google peruses your sitemap to learn how your site is laid out and to discover new content on your site, so make sure it is updated regularly. Otherwise, your images will be harder to find, which could negate the effectiveness of your other strategies. Your Images Should Load Quickly  We discuss optimizing image load speed in a separate post. Where to Find Public Images The first question most people ask about public images is “where can I find them?” The prospect of free-to-use images is certainly appealing, but that means nothing to someone who doesn’t know where to look. Finding high quality public images can be challenging, but the extra effort you put into finding perfect specimens is typically worthwhile. One of my personal favorite sources for free public images is Photo Pin, a search resource that scours Creative Commons photos from Flickr and similar image hosting sites. If you’re looking for something specific—like a penguin for your post about Google’s Penguin update—one search can give you dozens of options. However, when you find the image you need, make sure to check its licensing. Some images cannot be used commercially. Some other sources for free public images include: Wikimedia Commons Compfight(which also offers paid unique stock photos) Pixabay FreeImages.com Pexels.com No matter where you find your public images, you’ll also have to give proper attribution to the original owner. Different sources have different requirements for the type of language you need to include, but in general, you’ll need to say something along the lines of “Image courtesy of ____,” calling out the name of the photographer or creator and including

Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) is an important feature for any link-building campaign. UTM parameters can be added to your links in order to track which sources are driving traffic and conversions to your website. With this information, you’ll know what marketing tactics are working best and how they affect conversion rates. In today’s article, we’re going to discuss the basics of UTM tracking as well as some of the most common uses for it. What is UTM? UTM parameters are codes that you add to your links in order to track which sources are driving traffic and conversions. Adding UTM’s will allow you to see where a visitor is coming from, what they clicked on the link (landing page), and how much time they spent there before converting or leaving. These parameters can be added using either the URL of an individual landing page by adding them after the ‘&’ or “?” symbol at the end of the URL. Why is UTMs Important? UTM parameters are an important part of link-building campaigns because they allow you to track the sources, landing pages, and conversion rates for each. This way, you can see which marketing tactics work best for your website. When you use UTMs, you can gauge the success of your link-building campaign. This way you can save both time and money when performing these high-priority campaigns. How to Track Links Using UTMs If you want to track where your links are coming from, there is an easy way. Just add UTM parameters at the end of a URL in order to see what page was clicked on. UTM’s can be added using either a landing page or simply by adding them after the ‘&’ symbol following the link’s web address (URL). If you’re just tracking one specific link with multiple attributes, it will look like this-‘link text & utm_medium=social’. There are two ways that these fields can be formatted for more than one attribute; start each field with an ampersand and separate all values with semicolons. Should You Use UTMs by Yourself? UTMs are a great way to track sources and landing pages, but they aren’t effective if you don’t have the time or resources for managing campaigns. If this sounds like your situation, it’s best not to use UTMs on your own. Instead partner with an agency that can help. This way, you can focus on running your business, while a reputable link building agency does the rest. How We Can Help Link-building isn’t easy. Hiring an agency is the best route for getting the job done effectively. If you’re looking for an agency to help with your campaign, contact our team. Our link-building team will work with you to add UTM parameters to your targeted URLs to maximize the performance of your campaign. Contact Us Today! UTM parameters have long been used as a technical way of tracking the performance of links. Allow us to help your campaign reach its full potential. To learn more about link building, please take a look at our beginner’s guide to link building. Otherwise, let us help you with your digital marketing needs. Contact us today to speak to a member of our team.