This is reflected in conversion rate data. 

With average organic conversion rates hovering around 2.35% across industries, it’s clear a significant portion of organic traffic is just passing through, often too top-of-the-funnel, or landing on pages without a clear path to conversion. 

Unfortunately, without the right technology or tools in place, the majority of those visitors are lost to the ether, never to return again. 

But fear not, this is where innovation comes in. 

By weaving together creativity, technology, and data-driven strategies, there’s a huge opportunity to transform these visitors into loyal customers. 

Let’s look at three ways you can convert organic traffic into real revenue.

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1. Website Visitor Identification

One of the biggest hurdles in converting organic traffic is the anonymity of website visitors. 

Without knowing who’s visiting your site, tailoring the user experience to meet their needs and interests becomes a shot in the dark. 

Herein lies the power of website visitor identification technology—a game-changer when it comes to personalized engagement and boosting conversion rates.

With website visitor identification, you can get data on each individual visitor – names, emails, domains, etc. 

By connecting these visitors to your CRM, you can start to create (or expand upon) a customer profile. 

We can see if they are a return visitor, if they’ve downloaded an asset, if they’ve made a purchase, etc.

With this information in hand, we can market to them in a more effective way. 

Example:

Let’s say someone comes to your site through Google and lands on a blog post featuring tips for running in the heat. 

We have no record of them in our CMS but we can see the page they landed on and exited.

We can then add them to our retargeting audience list and show them ads featuring equipment for running in warm weather.

This is amazing stuff!

It also lends perfectly into the next section – customer journey tracking.

[Did you know we integrate with Semrush?]

2. Customer Journey Tracking

If you remember the old days of using Google Analytics to track the customer journey, you know how impactful it was.

The ability to understand how users interacted with your content and how they navigated through your site was immensely helpful.

Unfortunately, with the rollout of GA4, this is much more difficult to see and almost impossible to understand.

Instead, you need a tool that does this for you. 

And…here’s our shameless plug (hey, it’s our blog, we can plug if you want).

With Customers.ai, you can not only see who is visiting your site, but you can also track their journey.

We can see what pages they visited, what emails they opened, what products they were interested in, if they abandoned a cart or form.

THIS IS GOLD!!!

Look, customer journey tracking is not just a tool for understanding your audience, it’s critical for increasing revenue from organic traffic. 

By meticulously mapping the journey from the first touchpoint to conversion, we can unlock real insights and build strategies that directly influence the bottom line.

The Power of Tracking in Conversion Optimization

Let’s look at how customer journey tracking can help optimize conversions:

• Optimize Each Touchpoint: By identifying what content and which channels are most effective, you can direct more resources towards what truly works, increasing efficiency and ROI.

• Reduce Friction, Boost Conversions: Identifying where potential customers hesitate or abandon their journey allows for targeted interventions. Whether it’s streamlining the checkout process or clarifying product information, small tweaks can lead to significant increases in conversion rates.

• Tailor the Conversion Path: Use insights from journey tracking to customize the path to purchase for different segments of your organic traffic. Personalized content and offers that resonate with the specific needs and interests of these segments can dramatically improve conversion rates.

• Segment Your Audience: Adjust your marketing and content strategies to address the unique needs of different audience segments.

• Improve Attribution: Organic doesn’t always get the credit it deserves. With customer journey tracking, we can see what is successful and allocate marketing spend more effectively.

Customer journey tracking is key to turning organic traffic into revenue by understanding and optimizing the conversion path. By focusing on the journey, marketers can not only attract but convert and retain customers more effectively, directly impacting revenue growth.

3. Advanced Segmentation and Targeted Messaging

When it comes to converting organic traffic to revenue, advanced segmentation and targeted messaging stand out as key tactics. 

With website identification and journey tracking already in place, advanced segmentation becomes a breeze. 

You can create segments based on pages visited, demographic data, intent, and so much more.

With these audiences in place, you can create custom messaging throughout the rest of their journey.

Example:

Let’s look at another example using the fitness company we mentioned above.

You created a page on dealing with runner’s knee. 

The page ranks exceptionally well and drives a ton of organic traffic. 

However, since visitors are likely looking for information vs. looking to make a purchase, the conversion rate on that page is very low. 

With website visitor identification in place, we can see just who those people are visiting the page and if they’ve had any previous interactions with your brand. 

For those who have, we can send them into an email automation, offering them key products for dealing with runner’s knee and personalizing the email based on their information (ex: men’s sneakers vs. women’s sneakers).

For those who haven’t, we can create targeted ads that touch on the same subject and take them back to a page featuring products to help with runner’s knee.

The messaging is targeted, it’s relevant, and when done right, it’s helpful!

If you are looking to create advanced segments and implement targeted messaging, here are a few things to consider:

• Leverage Behavioral Data: Use your first-party data to track how different segments interact with your website and content. This data forms the basis of your targeted messaging, enabling you to address the specific needs and interests of each segment wherever they are.

• Personalize the Experience: From email marketing to website content to retargeting ads, ensure that every touchpoint is personalized. Use the insights gained from deep segmentation to tailor your messaging, whether it’s offering a solution to a common problem or highlighting a product that a particular segment shows interest in.

• Test and Optimize: Continuously test different messages with your segments to see what resonates best. A/B testing can reveal invaluable insights into preferences and behaviors, allowing you to refine your approach and boost conversion rates.

Advanced segmentation and targeted messaging are not just tactics, they are components of a sophisticated strategy to convert organic traffic into revenue. 

By understanding the needs and behaviors of your audience segments, you can craft messages that resonate deeply, engage effectively, and ultimately drive conversions. 

Converting Organic Traffic to Revenue

At the end of the day, capturing organic traffic is only the first step. The real challenge, and opportunity, lies in converting these visitors into customers. 

Using innovative technologies that support website visitor identification, customer journey tracking, and advanced segmentation, marketers can better reach our audience and improve overall conversion rates. 

Ready to get started? Get demo from the team and learn how Customers.ai can help you convert that coveted organic traffic into real revenue.

Important Next Steps

• See what targeted outbound marketing is all about. Capture and engage your first 500 website visitor leads with Customers.ai X-Ray website visitor identification for free.
• Talk and learn about sales outreach automation with other growth enthusiasts. Join Customers.ai Island, our Facebook group of 40K marketers and entrepreneurs who are ready to support you.
• Advance your marketing performance with Sales Outreach School, a free tutorial and training area for sales pros and marketers.

The post 3 Innovative Tactics for Converting Organic Traffic to Revenue appeared first on Customers.ai.

All of today’s best practices came as a result of past experiments – both failures and successes. Everything we do in SEO is an opportunity to learn and improve, be it SEO auditing, keyword research, technical SEO or link building.

That’s why I love doing SEO tests and experiments. While Google may reveal a few bits and pieces of information, they’ll never tell us everything we need to know to evolve our SEO strategies from the ordinary into the realm of unicorns.

Today I’d like to share six mind-blowing SEO experiments we did this year, what we learned from them, and what it all means.

1. Does Organic Search Click-Through Rate Matter?

We know that machine learning – including Google RankBrain – is changing SEO as we’ve known it. Already, Google uses RankBrain for every search, and it impacts “a lot” of queries.

Is RankBrain (or other machine learning-based elements) impacting rankings? If so, how? Well, that’s exactly what wanted we wanted to find out: what’s a good click-through rate for organic search.

For this experiment, we looked at a set of 1,000 keywords from Google’s Search Console for the WordStream site. What we found is very interesting. In April, the average CTR for the top position was 22 percent. That increased to 24 percent by July and 27 percent by September.

So our data clearly showed that are top ranked results had its highest CTRs by September. Meanwhile, on the other end, the data showed that lower positions (4-10) were being clicked on less than ever.

Clearly, the click curve is bending. I believe this is exactly what you would expect to see from a machine learning algorithm – it’s about providing the best answers (based on the highest user engagement), which means fewer people will need to scroll down and click lower results.

So does organic search CTR matter? YES! More than ever before.

2. Is Organic CTR an Organic Search Ranking Factor?

So we’ve established CTR is important. But what’s the relationship between organic CTR and organic search rankings?

Numerous people who work at Google have said they don’t use click-through rate for the purposes of ranking. But when they say this, they mean they don’t use it as a “direct” signal. Could it be that clicks have an indirect impact on Google’s search results?

We decided to find out the answer to this question with an experiment designed to figure out whether CTR impacts SEO rankings.

The goal of this experiment was to see whether there was any clear relationship between organic search CTR and organic search position. The biggest challenge was that separating CTR and ranking is like separating Kanye West from his ego.

So we attempted to isolate the natural relationship between CTR and ranking by taking the difference between an observed organic search CTR minus the expected CTR:

After looking at our data, we found that, on average, pages that beat the expected average organic CTR for a given position were far more likely to rank in the top four positions. These are unicorns! For example, a page that beats the expected CTR for a given position by 20 percent will likely appear in position 1.

Also, pages that failed to beat the expected organic search CTR were more likely to appear in positions 6–10. These are donkeys. For example, a page that falls below the expected CTR for a given position by 6 percent will likely appear in position 10.

So, based on the data, does CTR impact organic search rankings? It certainly seems that way!

3. Can Rewriting Your Titles Boost Your CTR?

So if you’ll be rewarded for having a higher click-through rate, what’s the best way to raise your CTR?

If people see nothing else, they will see your headline in the SERPs. Your content may be totally awesome – but they won’t click on it if the headline is boring.

SEO has evolved. It’s silly to write title tags like it’s still 2008!

WordStream has been trying to move away from overly “optimized” “SEO titles” like this one: “Guerilla Marketing: 20+ Examples and Strategies to Stand Out.”

That old headline followed “SEO best practices.” The most important keyword was at the front and everything fell within 60 characters. But it’s kind of a snore, right?

So we ran a little CTR optimization experiment. Our content and SEO manager Elisa Gabbert changed only the title of the post – to “20+ Jaw-Dropping Guerrilla Marketing Examples.” The new headline is closer to this super-successful headline template that foregrounds the list format, the emotional impact and the content type (examples):

The article text, images, links, or anything else you can think of were left untouched.

After updating the headline, the article CTR increased to 4.19 percent (up from 1 percent) and it ranked in position 5 (up from position 8).

So can you increase your CTR just by changing your title? Yes!

Don’t be boring! Write brilliant headlines that people will click on like crazy. (Just make sure the content behind them backs them up.)

4. Do Website Engagement Rates Impact Organic Search Rankings?

It’s super important to create clickable headlines, but the goal isn’t just to create clickbait. You also must have great engagement metrics. If people feel cheated and go right back to the SERP, Google can detect that.

Dwell time is really the thing that matters. And time on site is a much better proxy for dwell time than bounce rate.

My theory is that Google uses dwell time (which we can’t measure, but is proportional to time on site) to validate click-through rates. These metrics help Google figure out whether users ultimately got what they were looking for (i.e., a successful search).

So do engagement metrics (bounce rates, time on site, conversion rates) impact organic search rankings?

To put this theory to the test, we gathered some engagement rate data. First, we looked at whether the bounce rate of the pages/keywords we rank for had any relationship to their ranking:

See that “kink” in the graph? Kind of hard to miss, right?

Landing pages that had a bounce rate below 76 percent were more likely to show up in one of the top four positions. But landing pages that had a bounce rate of 78 percent or higher were more likely to show up in position five or lower.

What about time on site?

This graph shows that if your keyword/content pairs have decent time on site, then you’re more likely to be in top organic positions 1–6. If engagement is weak on average, however, then you’re more likely to be in positions 7 or lower.

And how about conversion rates? This data shows that higher CTRs tend to lead to higher conversion rates:

Why is this? Because if you can get someone excited enough to click on your offer, that excitement typically carries through to a purchase or sign-up.

Higher CTRs, engagement rates, and conversion rates lead to more leads and sales. But I believe this data clearly shows proof that improving engagement metrics and conversion rates will also lead to better organic search rankings.

5. Do Engagement Metrics Impact the Selection of Featured Snippets?

Google’s Featured Snippets, which appear in so-called Position 0 above the organic search results, come in the form of text, lists, images, and charts, among others. But how does Google’s algorithm pick Featured Snippets?

First, I wanted to find out whether Google’s traditional organic search ranking factors impacted whether your site gets snipped. So I looked at data for 981 snippets that the WordStream site has earned.

Clearly not. Otherwise, the top ranked position would get the snippet every time. Google is featuring snippets from content that ranks on page 2 to as far back as the 71st position!

Having on-page copy that is clear and concise is also clearly important. But, again, word count isn’t the full picture.

So we dove deeper and investigated this page after seeing it as a snippet for searches relating to getting Bing Rewards points. We discovered two interesting things from our Google Analytics and Search Console data:

• An unusually high CTR (21.43 percent), even though it had an average position of 10
• Unusually high time on site (14:30), which was 3x above the site average.

So do engagement rates play a role in the selection of Featured Snippets? I absolutely believe so!

6. What’s the REAL Relationship Between Organic Rankings & Social Shares?

We’ve heard about the ridiculously high correlations between social shares and organic search rankings for about five years now (see the ranking factor studies done by SearchMetrics and Moz). Many people have assumed that social shares are a ranking signal, even though Google shot this down every single time.

My belief was that it’s not the visible social share counts that matter. What’s more important is having high social engagement.

So we tested it out to find the real relationship between organic rankings and social shares. Here’s what we found:

This data showed that Facebook posts with super high engagement rates (above 6 percent) also had an organic search CTR that beat expectations. In other words, if you have Facebook engagement that is 4x higher than average, you’ll have an organic search CTR that is 4x higher than average.

Why is this? Well, I believe that the same emotions that make people share contenton social media also make people click on those same pieces of content when they see them in the SERPs. This is especially true for headlines with unusually high CTRs.

The correlations were much stronger with unicorn content (those “blockbuster” pieces of content that drive 10-100x more traffic to your site than most of your other donkey content put together). Unicorns with high social engagement rates almost always had high organic CTR, and vice versa.

The correlations were substantially weaker with donkey content. Donkeys sometimes had high engagement rates, sometimes low engagement rates. The same was true with CTR, some high, some low.

So yes, high social engagement rates correlate with high CTR, and vice versa. That’s the real relationship between search and social. It’s all about how engaging your content is!

What Does It All Mean?

As these experiments show, running SEO campaigns is continuing to evolve in a way that rewards your pages and site based on how people engage with your content.

That means it’s mission critical to optimize for engagement.

In other words: Optimize for PEOPLE! Write headlines that will make them click and then reward them for that click by publishing amazing and memorable content that will make them want to stay on your site and share your stuff.

Check out all six experiments summarized below:

Did any of these experiments surprise you? What SEO experiments would you like to see next?

Originally published in Wordstream.com

The post 6 SEO Experiments That Will Blow Your Mind appeared first on Customers.ai.

Marcus covers a ton of ground in our 45 minutes together. But immediately after this tutorial webinar I sent these 7 site errors to my developers and content teams.

Top 7 Critical Errors on the Site Found with Ryte

1. Internal nofollow is bleeding PageRank. There are unintended nofollow links to internal pages.
2. Canonicals to other domains make no sense. Some fairly hidden pages are giving bad canonical signals to Google.
3. XML sitemap is missing pages. We’ve got a growing blog, but we’re not feeding new pages to Google.
4. Images are missing alt attributes. This is a missed opportunity to tell Google what images are about for image search ranking.
5. We link to broken external pages. Marcus calls cleaning up broken links “basic hygiene”. Is that like the hemorrhoid cream for sites?
6. We link to potentially shady pages. He found a link to a domain with a casino ad. Google can see this as a punishable offense.
7. We have broken links to internal pages. AKA user experience fail.

These 7 errors are actually the tip of the iceberg Marcus covers in this tutorial. Ryte also has a search performance report, SEO advice and content success tools which you can take a look at in our recording.

This tool is really easy to use. You go through the overview, see where you can fix things, and shoot for a score of 100%.

Just so you can see, here’s my score now:

We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Luckily, Ryte reports can be shared and exported in every imaginable way, like PDF, URL and API.

There’s a lot more hands-on advice Marcus shares on SEO performance and content success in our 50-minute tutorial.

Email Marcus for your own free trial of Ryte with the tip he shares at the beginning of the webinar. Apparently he’s also your guy if you have priorities that are a little lower … ahem.

Give Ryte a spin on your own site.

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The post Marcus Tandler Reviewed My Website and Found These 7 Awful Errors to ‘Get Ryte’ appeared first on Customers.ai.

After all, branded keywords tend to be “unicorns” — in PPC, these are keywords which generate ridiculously high CTRs (click-through rates) (40, 50 or 60 percent) and Quality Scores (9 or 10); in SEO, these are keywords that rank at the top of the SERP. Meanwhile, non-branded keywords perform like donkeys — in other words, average at best.

While branded vs. non-branded is an interesting distinction, it’s also an incomplete one. Even non-branded keywords can act like brand terms when brand affinity exists.

Here’s why it’s time that we re-examine some of our assumptions about branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords in both paid and organic search marketing.

Search doesn’t grow demand

Generally in search marketing, the goal is to connect with people who are searching for your products and services. If you reach them at the right micro-moment, you can turn these searchers into leads and sales for your business.

By definition, however, the greatest strength of paid and organic search marketing is also its greatest weakness.

Search doesn’t grow new demand. Search harvests existing market demand.

Specifically in terms of commercial queries, searchers need to know what they are looking for — and to have already decided to buy — in order for search marketing to be successful. So when people search, they already need to know what they want to search for and purchase.

But how do they decide which ads they click on and from whom to buy? Where does that come from? Certainly, it isn’t based on whether the keyword is branded or non-branded.

Brand affinity makes or breaks your search

The propensity to click on your paid or organic search listings is often based on pre-existing brand affinity. Put simply: searchers are more likely to click on you if they’ve heard of you before:

What you’re witnessing here is the massive impact of branding on paid search. When more people know about your brand, they will search for your brand and the products you sell.

All the queries people are searching for are branded terms. When people search for these terms, they express their preference for brands they know and love!

So if your “non-branded terms” aren’t performing as well as “branded terms,” then that means that these terms are performing great for other companies. Search is a zero sum game. You’re just not getting the clicks.

This points to a branding issue. You’re being passed over, and there could be various reasons why. But most likely, you don’t have strong enough brand affinity among people searching for your solution.

Are we creating as much value as we think?

Are we the search marketing rock stars we think we are? Or are we really just positioning ourselves at the very bottom of the funnel and taking credit for harvesting the existing demand and brand preferences that were established elsewhere?

If you have really good performance on non-branded keywords, then a lot of times you want to take all the credit. However, it could just mean you’re working for a company with strong brand affinity.

If you find your branded keywords acting like non-branded keywords (with low CTRs and conversion rates), then that means you have a lot of work to do.

Remember, people don’t just randomly click on paid search listings. Listings don’t really have a simple one in seven chance of getting clicked on (or a one in 10 chance on the organic side).

The impact of brand can be difficult to quantify. But now, with Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA), we can target ads to repeat users.

RLSA has revealed what I suspected might be true but had been hard to measure. The easiest way to measure the impact of brand affinity on CTR is to run the same ads, keywords, bids and budgets, but using RLSA in one campaign and excluding the same audience in another non-RLSA campaign.

The success or failure of search marketing campaigns is based largely on the existing brand awareness of your product, service or company in the marketplace. People are overwhelmingly biased toward clicking on brands they know and love.

RLSA is incredibly powerful. It can triple click-through and conversion rates and cut CPC (cost per click) in half, as shown here:

We position ourselves to look heroic to our clients. These notions about our awesomeness are kind of falsely affirmed by Google Analytics, which tends to focus on the last-click attribution.

It’s OK to be the hero in your client presentations. Just don’t delude yourself.

Search marketing, particularly when it comes to commercial queries, is often just reaching people already at the bottom of the funnel and ready to purchase.

What should we do?

Search used to be a way to build a brand. But Google’s machine learning algorithms (RankBrain on the organic side and Quality Score on the paid side) are becoming pickier about which results they show. This has changed search from a channel where you can just do demand generation into more of a direct reflection of pre-existing preferences of the market.

What we need is a more predictable and repeatable way to win business, so we’re not waiting on people to search for our stuff and just show up at the last minute in the hopes of making a sale.

So how do we create value? What we should do is balance search marketing efforts with brand affinity and demand creation activities.

Organic search

If you’re doing SEO, that means embracing doing off-topic content. So, in addition to going after the people who are looking for the exact commercial keywords you’re going after, you also want to go after higher-funnel queries (i.e., informational queries) that don’t have as much commercial intent, but could bias a future commercial search toward your brand.

Organic search is becoming increasingly a reflection of people’s brand preferences because of feedback loops. You may have never heard of Brand X, but if enough other people have heard of Brand X, then it will have a higher average CTR — and a more prominent position on the SERP.

That feedback loop always existed in AdWords because of Quality Score. Big brands have had huge advantages thanks to brand affinity. People tended to click on ads from brands they knew.

Now the same thing is happening in organic search. There’s a kind of feedback loop where brands you see in search now more closely correlate to the overall popularity of that brand.

Paid search

Now, on the paid search side, it’s remarkably difficult to use the same strategy because of the Quality Score algorithm. The Quality Score algorithm rewards high CTRs but is very punitive for low CTRs (it will restrict your impression share and increase your cost per click).

The problem you run into is that people tend to click on ads if the query is commercial in nature because they were looking to buy something. They also tend to not click on PPC ads for educational/informational queries because they aren’t looking to buy something.

Google grades your CTR for keywords on the same curve, regardless of whether it’s an educational or transactional query, as long as they’re in the same query space. You don’t get bonus points because it wasn’t a high commercial-intent keyword.

Informational queries tend to get very low paid search CTR (around 1 to 4 percent, in my observation) and Quality Scores of 1 to 4. This CTR is substantially lower than you’d expect to get compared to a commercial query.

So what can you do? If you’re doing paid search, use display and social ads, as well as other forms of brand advertising (radio, TV or whatever) to create the demand before people search.

What does it all mean?

If you see such a huge difference between your branded keywords vs. non-branded keywords, it means you need to focus on building brand affinity even more. Go after users before they ever search for your stuff!

The success of campaigns that include queries without brand trademarks is largely based on the brand awareness and brand affinity of the products and services you’re promoting.

Stop thinking in terms of branded vs. unbranded. There are just queries and the native amount of awareness you’ve been able to create.

It’s not the presence of a certain brand term in the query. That was always just a proxy for whether or not the searcher has brand affinity.

Once that brand affinity exists, you’ll see the CTR and conversion rates for non-brand queries start behaving like brand queries.

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Originally posted on Search Engine Land

The post Attention search marketers: ALL keywords are branded keywords! appeared first on Customers.ai.

People are searching for answers to their every question and need, often while they’re out on mobile devices and completely motivated to buy.

Where can I find a shoe store near me?

Who has the best pizza in Boston?

Who can fix a flat tire on the weekend?

Millions of queries are handled by Google day in and day out, and you want your business to appear in the organic listings as often as possible when it might be the best answer.

But organic search has become crazy competitive. Your listing is vying for space against an increasing number of ads, and the shrinking real estate available for search results on ever-smaller mobile screens.

What’s more, you’re up against other similar businesses, but they’re not your only competition. Publishers and bloggers who write about related topics, review sites, social media posts, videos, product listings and more all compete for eyeballs on the search engine results page.

How can you stand out in all that noise and get the clicks?

I’m super proud to present an infographic I created alongside the fabulously talented Brian Dean of Backlinko. Brian is one of the most talented and insightful SEOs you could hope to meet. Together, we’ve come up with a can’t miss collection of little known and sometimes counterintuitive click through rate hacks for marketers serious about making big gains in search this year.

These data-backed tips to improve organic click through rate in Google’s search results are going to help you not only get your content in front of more of the right people, but compel them to click through to convert.

Check it out:

 

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The post 11 Shockingly Brilliant Hacks to Get Searchers to Click appeared first on Customers.ai.

Your most loyal readers will read your content, of course. While feeding your existing audience great content is important, your existing audience is limited.

There is a much larger audience who has yet to even hear about you or the awesome stuff you’re writing.

So if your goals include giving your content a second life and continuing to grow your audience, Publishing in Medium can definitely help you.

What is Medium all about?

Evan Williams and Biz Stone founded the crazy popular blogging platform in 2012. It touts itself as the place where “everyone has a story to share and the best ones are delivered right to you.”

You can think of Medium sort of like Twitter for long-form content, except it has an algorithmic timeline that tells you what stories you’re going to be interested in.

I’ve been publishing on Medium for just over a year now and have discovered many great benefits.

If you haven’t yet taken the leap, here are 10 insanely good reasons why you should publish on Medium.

UPDATE: Be sure to check out my follow-up post: 7 Medium Optimization Tips to Make Your Posts Go Hot

1. Medium Has A Great Import Tool

If you have blog content anywhere on the web, Medium can import it. All you have to do is click on the “Import a story” option.

After you’ve imported it, you can edit it however you want. Change your title, move around the images, and play with the formatting until you’re ready to hit publish.

Medium even adds a line at the bottom of your imported post that says where and when the post was originally published, including a link to the original post.

2. You Can Take Your Audience With You

If you’ve already built up a good-sized social media following, there’s good news: yes, you can take your audience with you to Medium. So you basically have a built-in audience with no effort on your part!

You can link your Medium profile to your Twitter and Facebook IDs. Medium will then figure out which of those users are also on Medium and connect you with those people automatically.

3. Engagement Metrics Seems Real

Medium will tell you how many people viewed one of your stories, as well as how many people made it to the end. The average reading time is pretty amazing, usually between 7 and 11 minutes.

Engagement on Medium is much better than on Twitter. You could get millions of impressions on Twitter, but only 50 actual clicks on your content. That’s because users are spending all of 2 seconds on your tweet before all the other new tweets start flying by.

If you post something that’s memorable, inspiring, and interesting, your content might just make a stronger impact on Medium than it had initially.

4. You’ll Reach A New Audience

Medium’s algorithmic timeline will open your content to a different audience that otherwise never would have heard of you. Essentially, Publishing to Medium helps create a new audience for you, regardless of whether you already have a big audience. (Your audience could always be bigger, right?)

The key is getting people to recommend your posts. On Medium, it’s all about hearts.

As you can see here, based on an analysis of several hundred posts, I’ve calculated that the more people who click on the heart icon posts, the more likely it becomes that you’ll show up in other people’s timelines, including those people who don’t yet know you.

If you can get 200 hearts within 24 hours, you will likely end up being one of the top stories of the day – a Medium unicorn! Those top stories get featured prominently on the website and in the app.

In addition, Medium sends out a personalized email digest to users, where they will share two or three of the top stories for you.

5. You Could Get Discovered By Big Publishers

Many large publishers no longer accept applications from authors. They’re tired of being inundated with terrible pitches. Sadly, it’s turned into a “Don’t call us, we’ll call you” situation.

However, publishers are still finding and adding new contributors to their sites. How? By scouting for popular authors on Medium.

As long as you’re consistently publishing to medium a great posts, and you have talent and creativity, eventually you’ll hit a home run. Maybe, just maybe, a Business Insider, Huffington Post, or New York Observer might ask to syndicate one of your posts – or even ask you to become a regular contributor.

6. There’s No API

Medium has no API. Although APIs are essential in some ways, they also sometimes ruin social networks. Probably 99.9 percent of spam (like fake followers and people scheduling and tweeting garbage content) is due to aggressive API usage.

Unlike on Twitter (which is ridiculously noisy), the signal to noise ratio on Medium is pretty good. Way more of my 52,000 medium followers seem legit compared to your average Twitter “followers”, and the lack of noise has in part helped me become one of Medium’s top authors.

7. Certain Industries Do Really Well

Medium won’t be right for everybody. However, certain industries have really great, established audiences.

Topics that do really well on Medium include:

• Life learning
• Business
• Entrepreneurship
• Startups
• Culture
• Technology
• Politics

Marketing posts do OK, provided that you’re not overly tactical.

8. You Can Generate New Social Media Followers

You initially use Facebook and Twitter connections to create your Medium audience. But then a funny thing happens. Medium will start helping you generate new Facebook and Twitter followers.

One thing I do is put an “About the Author” footer in all my articles, which includes links to all my social profiles – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram – as well as, of course, a link to my company website.

Medium is actually the number-one driver of traffic to my Facebook page!

9. You Can Run Your Own Publication

Another great way to gain exposure is by starting your own Medium publication. So even if people aren’t following you individually, but they start following your publication, it’s highly likely they’ll start being exposed to your content anyway.

I started a publication called Marketing & Entrepreneurship that features tips and news on social media marketing, online advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing, growth hacking, branding, and more. It has over 10,000 followers as of this writing.

Quite a few brands have actually given up on traditional blogs and now just publish on Medium.

10. Minimal Effort!

This is crazy. Look at these stats – all just from syndicating columns I’ve already written and published. Nothing new or original required!

Hopefully this helps you understand the awesome power of publishing and syndicating content on Medium, especially for your personal brand. You can gain an impressive amount of traction by republishing your existing content with minimal effort.

Bottom line: There’s a lot for you to love about Medium. So what are you waiting for?

Originally published in: Wordstream.com

The post 10 Amazing Reasons You Should Publish On Medium appeared first on Customers.ai.

Getting links and creating great content would definitely be two of the more popular answers, and for good reason. After all, that’s what Google says are the two most important ranking factors.

But there’s one other factor you can — and should be — focusing on. It’s something that could double your traffic. Yet so many people are overlooking it.

Your organic click-through rate.

Why low CTR is kind of a big deal

You’re losing weight but not exercising. You’re constantly tired and having unexplained aches and pains. All of these symptoms point to something.

Does your website have cancer? Do you have the symptoms?

Are people bouncing off your pages like rubber balls? Is your click-through rate ridiculously low?

If so, it’s dragging down your overall domain-level engagement metrics.

What’s the cure? Is it to build more links to your crappy content? Is it to create more infographics or dream up some PR stunts? All of these may help in the short term, but your site still has a cancer you need to eradicate.

How do you figure out organic CTR & low CTR keywords?

Honestly, this is hard to do. Google doesn’t provide you with a Quality Score number to tell you if your content is above or below the expected click-through rate.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to figure out. In fact, I’ve developed a hack to determine which of your keywords are most likely underperforming compared to the expected click-through rate:

Export data from Google Search Console like query data and plot CTR vs. Average Position for the queries you rank for organically. Here, I’m using my own website data for wordstream.com:

Next, plot an exponential trend line. The queries that fall below your average CTR are your most at-risk queries.

You don’t need to worry about any queries that score above the trend line. After all, your goal here is to turn your losers into winners, which is far less risky than accidentally turning your winners into losers!

To prioritize your optimization efforts, you can do a secondary sort on your most “at risk” pages using a metric like page views or conversions generated by those keywords.

Click-through rate varies based on the vertical. WordStream.com (which is where my data comes from in this particular example) is in the internet marketing vertical, but I would expect similar results for other internet marketing sites like Moz and Search Engine Land. In any case, here’s what an average CTR looks like for my website:

However, there is great benefit of being a unicorn in a sea of donkeys.

• The top 1% of my highest CTR keywords beat the average CTR by 6x.
• The top 2% of my highest CTR keywords beat the average CTR by 3x.
• The top 10% of my highest CTR keywords beat the average CTR by 2x.

What does it all mean? There’s a lot of leverage here if you take the time to make your headlines more “clicky”.

Most SEO titles suck

Optimized titles are boring. Everyone is using the same keywords in their titles in the war for shrinking SERP territory in the hopes of attracting the most clicks.

Oh wait, you stuffed two or three high-value keywords in there? Great. But are people actually clicking on it? Is it ranking as well as it could be?

Oh, you’re thinking of adding a comma or an exclamation point? Really! That’s the solution to your low CTR?

When you’re doing SEO, content is a crucial element — both what’s on the page and around the page. Google looks at the context of your whole site (e.g., is it in a particular niche?), not just individual pages. Any given page on your site could rank for hundreds of different keywords. So how does Google know where to rank your page?

CTR is the difference between finding yourself in a virtuous cycle or a death spiral.

In a virtuous cycle, you’re getting more clicks. This sends important user engagement signals to Google that this is a good page/website, which ultimately results in better positions for more of your other pages and more traffic.

In the death spiral, however, you have stupid SEO title tags. You’re barfing the same title over and over and people aren’t clicking. The result: poor rankings and even less traffic.

But there is a cure.

The surprisingly simple cure for crappy titles

You need to write more clickable titles than everybody you want to outrank. Great SEO titles should be like click-bait headlines — just better optimized for your most important keywords.

It’s that simple, yet also that insanely difficult. Or at least, maybe it seems that way.

Many people struggle to write outstanding headlines. If only there were some research on what makes a viral headline.

Good news: There is!

According to Steve Rayson of BuzzSumo, the same emotions make people share or click on an article. Titles that inspire awe, laughter, amusement, anger, joy, empathy, surprise or other emotions are insanely powerful triggers and can transform your biggest losers into winners.

So, based on Rayson’s research — and using the most popular Moz content from the past year as our example — here are five high click through rate tips and hacks to write headlines that will get crazy  results.

1. Format

Your content can come in many formats. It might be a list, an ebook, an infographic, research, a quiz or a how-to.

Stating the format in your headline is a great start to encouraging more clicks. Just make sure your headline delivers on its promise to your audience — never do deceitful click bait!

All five of our Moz examples above make clear the type of content that we’ll get after we click. Three of these posts use a number: “3,” “10,” “Single” (aka 1). So when you click through, you’d expect to find a post organized to highlight the 3, 10 or 1 thing(s) promised in the headline.

The other two are Whiteboard Fridays, which is a format Moz regularly uses. But in addition, both of these popular posts have a second format element — one asks a question, while the other is a “how-to.” So if you want to know the answer to the question or want to learn how to do something, this encourages you to click.

2. Emotion/hook

Now you need to hook your reader. Use an emotional element or a superlative — words like “surprising,” “inspiring,” “funny,” “brilliant” and so on.

Surprisingly, again looking at our Moz examples, only two of our five headlines include the emotional element. My headline uses the word “Unusual” to spark curiosity, while Cyrus Shepherd uses the word “Best,” which will attract clicks from those who aspire to become the best.

The other headlines lack this hook (though the question headline gets a pass because questions do inspire curiosity). Sure, they did pretty well without it, but let’s be brutally honest. Had Joe Blow been the author instead of the Wizard of Moz, it probably wouldn’t have done nearly as well.

If you want higher click-throughs — and the ability to compete with the Rand Fishkins or bigger brands/businesses/influencers in your industry — you need any edge you can get. Add some emotion to your headlines and start increasing your CTR!

3. Content type

A great headline tells you what type of content to expect after you click through. It might be an infographic, video, chart or quote. There are tons of possibilities here.

In our Moz examples, four of the headlines have this element, as indicated by the words “Hacks,” “Predictions,” “Tip” and “Build.”

As for the question headline, this one is a bit unusual, as it differs from BuzzSumo’s structure for a “viral headline.” I suppose, by default, the question mark indicates the type of content it is: asking (and answering) a question.

4. Promise

Titles that get higher click-through rates promise something. What will someone who clicks on your content get out of it? Will your piece of content inform, inspire, educate or entertain your target audience? If not, why does it exist?

Four of the five Moz headlines we’ve been using as examples have this element. “Up” and “Improved” convey the same idea — improvement — so by clicking through, I will be educated and improve my knowledge or skills. “Right” and “How to” indicate that by clicking through, I will be informed the correct way to do something.

One headline doesn’t clearly indicate a reader benefit. Will the predictions help me in some specific way? Will they help me grow my traffic/conversions/sales? Will these predictions force me to rethink my strategy?

Again, if you aren’t Rand Fishkin, conveying a reader benefit could be the difference between your below-average or okay click-through rates and amazing click-through rates.

5. Topic

Obviously, this is the keyword or keywords you’re targeting with your content.

Topics can be evergreen or newsy/trending. These keywords should be relevant to your brand, business or website — whether you’re writing about coffee, drones or click-through rates.

What are the Moz topics? “Your LinkedIn Game,” “2016 SEO & Web Marketing,” “Web Traffic,” “Google Ranking Factor,” “Traffic Metrics Dashboard.”

Do your keyword research and understand your audience and the topics you want to be found for.

Bonus CTR hack: Use remarketing!

A smart way to encourage more organic clicks is to do remarketing with the Google Display Networkand Facebook.

Look, organic search can be a good source of traffic. But if you want it to become a great source of traffic, you need more people to click on your search result.

How do you do that? You need to make sure people are familiar with your brand. Remarketing will help you achieve that.

Using Google and Facebook, you’ll show ads to people who visited your site but left before converting. As they visit various websites, they’ll see your ads. Just as this helps increase your conversion rates, it can also help your organic click-through rates.

People who are familiar with your brand are 2x more likely to click on your ads and convert. I’ve found that targeting people who visit your website using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) always produces higher CTRs than generically targeting the same keywords to people who have never heard of your brand.

Is remarketing free? No. But neither is SEO. It requires huge investments of time and effort.

Remarketing is proven to:

• deliver more repeat visitors;
• increase brand recall (branded searches, direct traffic);
• improve brand engagement (more page views per visit, longer time on site, lower bounce rate); and
• increase conversions, leads and sales.

Conclusion

Improving your organic click-through rate has many benefits. It will mean more traffic, which will lead to better engagement signals, better rankings and more leads, conversions and sales.

So start figuring out which pages are your biggest losers and get optimizing. Just say no to low CTR!

Originally published in Search Engine Land

The post 5 Brilliant Headline Hacks for Crazy High Organic Click-through Rates appeared first on Customers.ai.