Regardless of the size of your business, having access to free online tools that can improve your SEO and digital marketing campaigns can be highly beneficial. Of course, hiring digital marketing strategists can make creating campaigns even more manageable, but not every business can justify spending the additional funds. That is why knowing what the best free tools out there are is essential to getting the most out of your digital marketing campaign. Below is a simple guide to create a quality online presence for your business.

The Top Free SEO Tools

Here are some of our top picks for free SEO tools as an SEO consulting Cleveland-based agency

1. Answer The Public

Most SEO tools all get their data from the same place: The Google Keyword Planner. But Answer The Public is different.

This helpful tool searches for questions people ask on forums, blogs, and social media, turning those questions into popular long-tail keywords. This tool is different from other popular free tools because you will get updated popular keywords daily from a pool of data that no other SEO tool utilizes.

2. Woorank’s SEO & Website Analysis 

With this tool, you can access a list of SEO improvements in seconds. Woorank’s SEO & Website analysis is an easy-to-download chrome extension that focuses on not only providing you with an overall SEO score but also showing you EXACTLY how to improve your company’s SEO quality. What’s great about this tool is that instead of just telling you the areas where you’re lacking, it also gives you detailed solutions on how to improve.

3. CanIRank

Many businesses ask this question when utilizing SEO: “Can I rank for this keyword?”.

CanIRank is a complex keyword difficulty tool, and unlike most free SEO tools, CanIRank doesn’t give you generic advice like: “This is a competitive keyword” Or “This keyword isn’t used often.” Instead, it tells you whether or not your business can rank for that keyword. 

Plus, CanIRank isn’t just for evaluating your keyword competition. It also provides you with suggestions that can help you rank for specific terms.

4. Exploding Topics

Have you ever wanted to find popular keywords before they get competitive? Sometimes, even digital marketing specialists won’t provide you with that information.

This free SEO tool aims to help you with one specific thing: It provides you with topics that are just starting to trend online. This way, you can write content around these emerging trends without missing out or trying to jump on the trend too late. You can also try to optimize your old content around a new keyword.

This tool currently has about 2k topics in its database, and it continues to add more every week.

5. BROWSEO

Have you ever wanted to see your website through the eyes of a search engine? As it turns out, search engines see your website much differently than you do. BROWSEO was created to give you the amount of data and oversight that search engines have. 

Plus, you can get a preview of how your page appears in search results. This can be helpful for figuring out if your title and description tag are SEO-friendly or if they’re too long. Optimizing your title and description can help you get more organic clicks. 

The Top Free Digital Marketing Tools

Here are some of our top picks for free digital marketing tools as an SEO consulting Cleveland-based agency

1. Google Analytics

This tool allows you to have a better understanding of your customer’s behavior and measures all of your campaign’s return on investment (ROI). Google Analytics provides you with insights into how your users navigate your website, social media profiles, and applications, as well as processes these behaviors in various metrics like clicks, conversions, and average session time. 

2. Word press

WordPress is one of the most well-known basic free digital marketing tools that is widely used across the world. It’s free software created for content management. Its ease of use and flexibility are what make it so popular.

WordPress provides you with preinstalled themes that can be completely customized and personalized to suit your needs. There are options that allow you to customize the colors, the logo, create sliders, etc. It’s even mobile-friendly.

3. Canva

Nowadays, graphics are essential to make any content engaging. The more vibrant and catchy the pictures are, the better the attention span of the reader becomes.

Graphics are more than just utilizing images. It’s the art of communicating what you want through the use of images. More often than not, visual communication through graphics has a longer-lasting impression on your users than just words. Since graphic designing is an essential element of digital marketing, digital marketing strategists and business owners alike are always searching for a quality tool. 

Canva is one of the most useful free digital marketing tools on the market. With its drag-and-drop feature, it’s effortless to use, even if you’ve had no experience with graphic design apps before. It gives you access to photographs, graphics, fonts, vector images, etc. The amount of features it provides helps you create fun and vibrant images. It can be used to create logos, Instagram stories, social post images, etc. 

4. GTmetrix

GTmetrix is a free digital marketing tool that you can use to check your website speed. It’s a well-known fact amongst digital marketing specialists that good website speed is a necessity to rank better in search results.

A website with great content can still struggle because bad loading speeds hurt your chances of being ranked well in search results and hurt your customer approval ratings. This is essential because no one waits for a page that takes too long to load. The instant reaction is to skip that website and move on to the next relevant result. Therefore, a website speed testing tool becomes the most important to utilize among all other digital marketing tools available.

5. Mailchimp

Once your content is written and published after various stages of SEO, it’s time to organize your audience. What we mean by that is you need to make sure that content is delivered to the right audience in order to increase visitor traffic. With Mailchimp, this task becomes easy because this free digital marketing tool helps with email management.

MailChimp is an essential tool that helps a lot when creating email campaigns. Some of the amazing features that Mailchimp offers are prebuilt segments, predicted demographics, personalization, automation, signup forms, tags, etc.

If you want to learn more about the best SEO and digital marketing tools to utilize, check out our SEO consulting Cleveland agency, Shift Refresh!

Shift Refresh is a creative digital marketing agency in Cleveland that enables businesses to smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our social media growth services in Cleveland, Ohio. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website.

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What Is Color Theory?

Color theory is the study of color psychology. It defines how colors combine, how we are likely to react to them, and the type of feeling or message they usually convey. Color theory is built upon three basic elements: color context, color harmonies, and the color wheel. The standard color wheel is based on the 12 colors that are found in the visible spectrum. It’s an essential tool for creating color combinations or mixing colors. Color harmony is the process of matching colors to create a color scheme. Using the color wheel provides a basic set of rules to help determine which colors pair well together and which colors will clash. Color context essentially refers to whether or not our general response to a specific color changes depending on the context we see it in, and if it does, by how much does it change?

Different Colors = Different Reactions

People typically decide whether or not they like a product or design that they see in 90 seconds or less. On top of that, 90% of that decision is based solely on the color or colors used. So, a crucial part of your branding has to focus on color if you want to increase your website development leads.

While different colors produce different responses based on the person, many colors get similar responses from a majority of people. Due to these common emotions and responses, marketing companies have to focus on color psychology heavily when creating their marketing strategies and designs, regardless of what industry they are a part of. Below, we’ve broken down each color and the typical responses and emotions associated with them.

Red- This color is bold and exciting and has been shown as one of the colors that increases appetite, which is why many food brands utilize red in their logo. Red can also be used to signify danger.

Orange- This color is bright, fun, and cheerful. Since orange is a mix of red and yellow, it has a lot of the same traits. For example, orange is also known to stimulate your appetite.

Yellow- The color of sunshine is all about happiness, warmth, and optimism. Out of every color, this one draws your eye the most because of how bright it is, so it is often used in eye-catching designs to encourage impulse purchases.

Green- This color is the most often associated with wellness, peace, and freshness. When you see green, it has a calm and clean effect, which is why it can be used in fresh food campaigns as well as business logos. Green is also the staple color of environmentally friendly campaigns.

Blue- This color evokes trust and dependability. In general, most men prefer the color blue, and so it is very often used in male-centric marketing campaigns.

Purple- Purple signifies creativity and imagination. Purple is also more traditionally associated with royalty, which is why purple is very often used with luxury brands.

Pink- Pink evokes compassion and romance. It is often associated with femininity, which is why it’s used so often in female-centric marketing campaigns.

Black- When it comes to prestige and sophistication, black is the color most often thought of. This is why along with purple, black is very often used by luxury and high-priced brands.

Grey- This color is as neutral as you can get, which is why it is most commonly used to convey balance and calm. 

White- White is usually associated with innocence, purity, and perfection. It evokes a clean or crisp feel.

Is Color Theory That Important?

When appropriately used, the color of a product or design can make consumers believe that it tastes better and fresher than the same product that’s in a different color. Similarly, it has also been shown to make medicines look and feel more effective to the user. 

For example, have you ever noticed that call-to-action buttons are typically filled in red on top of a plain background? This is because marketing research suggests that red performs the best at getting someone’s attention. It pushes urgency onto the consumers to act. In fact, studies have revealed that a red CTA button performs 21% better on average than a green counterpart. 

As long as you are following the correct information and choosing the right color combinations, utilizing color theory is proven to substantially improve website development leads. It can easily become the most important thing you decide when creating your digital marketing campaigns. 

Shift Refresh is a Cleveland lead generation agency that enables businesses to smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our digital marketing solutions in Cleveland, Ohio. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive.

To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website.

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This is a question that everyone involved in digital marketing will always be chasing, whether you’re a blogger, business owner, or digital marketing professional. The problem is that trends and behaviors can change so quickly in the online world, so the best ways to get the most attention are constantly changing too. 

It’s important to find the most updated tips, and as a top Ohio digital marketing agency, we’ve got you covered.

The Best Ways To Gain More Website Traffic

Here are a few digital marketing tips that you should follow to gain the most traffic to your website. 

1. Focus On Social Media

Have you ever thought about how much people use social media every day? People pay attention to their social media pages now more than ever, and as a business owner, it’s an unparalleled traffic source. It’s not enough to simply produce good content and hope that the right people find it. Instead, you have to be proactive.

As far as content variety goes, different types of content work better on different platforms. Twitter is the best when it comes to short, snappy content, while Facebook can help your website show up in more search results and seems especially effective in B2B niches. If you’re a B2C company, you might find great traction with image-heavy social sites like Pinterest and Instagram.

The problem is, In using social media, you might be tempted to focus mainly on pushing your products or services or directing people back to your website. This can be a mistake, especially if you push this kind of content too often. Instead, you should focus on more fun and educational content.

2. Do Quality Keyword Research

If you take the time to perform your keyword research properly and use SEO, it can increase your conversion rates by 14.6%. The more time you take to optimize your website, the better. 

It’s best to find a company that has knowledge of SEO to ensure it’s done properly. There are several ways to incorporate keywords into your website design, including in the content you produce, and the page titles and URLs you link to across your social media profiles.

3. Post Content To LinkedIn

LinkedIn has become much more than a way to find another job. The world’s most popular professional social network has now become a valuable publishing platform all on its own, which means that your company needs to start posting content to LinkedIn on a regular basis.

Doing this can substantially boost traffic to your website, as well as increase your business profile within your industry – especially if you have a decent-sized following.

4. Don’t Underestimate Email Marketing

So many businesses are only focused on attracting new customers through content marketing, which can lead to them sometimes forgetting about more traditional methods. Email marketing can be an amazing tool, and even a very basic email blast can result in a significant gain in traffic.

Just imagine how much more traffic you could drive to your website if you had an email list of up to 10,000 subscribers. Email marketing is a great tool that any business can utilize to increase their website traffic, as long as they know how to use it correctly. 

5. Try Partnering With Influencers

Collaborations with influencers are quickly gaining popularity, and rightfully so. When you decide to work with influencers, they can market your products or services to their followers, as well as direct them to your website to check out what you have to offer.

If you choose to utilize this strategy as a part of your digital marketing plan, make sure that you take the time to find the right influencers for what you’re selling. Once you’ve found an influencer that meshes well with your brand, you then have to determine how you want them to market your products or services, whether that’s by posting a review video, making a social media post, or hosting a live stream to showcase what you’re selling.

6. Incorporate Videos Into Your Content Strategy

Video content has definitely been on the rise over the last few years, especially with the rise of TikTok more prevalent than ever. Video content is an amazing asset, both to attract new visitors and to make your website more engaging overall.

On average, information retention is significantly higher for visual material than it is for text, meaning that video is an excellent way to bith grab, and keep, your audience’s attention, as well as boost traffic to your website at the same time.

7. Write Guest Posts

In order to reach a wider audience and drive a large amount of traffic back to your website, you should think about guest posting on other websites.

The easiest way to find guest posting opportunities is to use the “in-url:writer-for-us + [niche] or inurl:/guest-post/ + [niche]” command on Google. This can help you find websites that accept guest submissions. You can also try looking at some popular media publishers within your industry to see if they’re looking for opinion pieces from authors.

Whichever digital marketing services you choose, if you’re looking for digital marketing agencies in Cleveland, Ohio, then Shift Refresh might be the perfect fit.

Shift Refresh is an Ohio digital marketing agency that enables businesses to smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our retail digital marketing services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website.

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Common Global and Local SEO Listing Management Mistakes

Below are some of the most common SEO mistakes we’ve found as an SEO consulting Cleveland-based agency that you should avoid making in order to succeed with your online marketing campaigns. 

Ignoring Your Google Business Profile

One critical SEO error that many companies make is not creating or properly managing their Google Business profile. With Google continuing to place so much importance on local searches when possible, the most significant opportunity for any small businesses is to clearly list their location and website on Google, as well as provide all of the necessary information and answer any questions that come in. If you don’t create a Google Business profile at all, the chance of your business popping up in local searches is slim. 

Ranking The Wrong Keywords

If you want to rank well on Google, you have to make sure that you’re optimizing your keyword usage on every page. One of the biggest mistakes that website owners often make is optimizing their pages for generic keywords. If you’re a small business that wants to rank for a generic keyword, such as ‘vegan food,’ you’re aiming too high. Try to use keywords that are more specific to what you sell. Otherwise, you’ll be competing with every single vegan food provider around the world, which is impossible. One great tip is to use location-specific keywords when you can, as long as they fit well in your content. 

The longer and more specific your keywords are, the higher your chances of ranking for that keyword are. Your website will eventually gain substantially more traffic using all of your optimized keywords than it ever would have if you continued to utilize any generic keywords.

Writing Bad Content

This mistake is one that many businesses make simply because they forget how important content actually is. It’s vital that each page on your website has quality content that is at least 300 words long. Google needs enough content available to distinguish what your page is about and whether you can provide the product or solution that people are looking for. You can’t expect Google to rank you higher than other businesses in your industry when you’ve only written two sentences about it on your entire website. Having such minimal content will only show Google that your website probably isn’t the best result to match any search question.

While ranking on Google is important, remember that you should write content for your audience first, not Google. Any search engine’s mission is to organize information and provide the best answers available. Writing quality content for your visitors is the best way to go about attracting quality customers. Writing quality content means writing original and well-written content that demonstrates your expertise or value. And make sure that you are just stuffing keywords into your content wherever you can. If your content isn’t readable, then no one will want to buy what you’re selling. 

Not Updating Your Website

Google also takes your website design and development into account before determining any ranking. You need to make sure that your website is fast, secure, and user-friendly. First, you should run your website through Google’s PageSpeed Insights. This will help you figure out what, if anything, is causing lag. Also, make sure “HTTPS” appears at the front of your domain name. If it doesn’t, your website needs an SSL certificate.

If your website is challenging to use, visitors will likely leave without exploring any additional pages. Your bounce rate will steadily rise because of this. A high bounce rate can indicate a negative UX to search engines, causing your organic rankings to drop. If these SEO problems sound like something you’re currently dealing with, make sure to hire an SEO marketing agency immediately.

Ignoring Trends

New SEO trends can significantly impact how your business ranks on search engines. Make sure to keep up with the latest trends to find new ways to appeal to your users. Keep in mind that many trends can be more or less popular with consumers of a specific age range.

There are a lot of trends that you can look into, but some of the most popular ones to look into right now are virtual assistants and chatbots. 

Having A Website That Isn’t Mobile-Friendly

Google always looks to see if your website is mobile-friendly when deciding how high your website should rank. So if the standard version of your website is set up well, but the mobile version doesn’t work well at all, this will be reflected negatively in your rankings. If this is the case with your business, make sure to work on mobile SEO.

A great way to test whether your site is mobile-friendly or not is to use Google’s mobile-friendly test. This will give you an indication of how easily visitors can access your website on any mobile device. Just make sure you don’t stop checking after this. Try visiting your website on your own phone when you can to check on it. Click on every button, link, and image to see if everything is working. It would help if you also verified that visitors are able to make purchases and can view all of your products easily. You don’t want to miss out on the large amount of traffic that your website will gain from the number of mobile users.

If you’re looking for an SEO marketing agency in Ohio with stellar eCommerce SEO services, then Shift Refresh is perfect for you. 

Shift Refresh is an SEO consulting Cleveland-based agency that enables businesses to smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our eCommerce SEO services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or Contact us today!

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As a Cleveland social media agency, we have a ton of experience with social media campaigns on multiple different platforms, but Instagram is one of the social media platforms we work with the most. As pros, we can provide you with all of the best advice when it comes to gaining more followers for your business on Instagram. 

How Does Instagram Marketing Work?

Instagram marketing is one of the ways that businesses can connect with and engage with their audience using image and video-based content. As a platform, Instagram is a great tool for brands that want to show users their brand identity and market their products and services in a new and exciting way.

When you market on Instagram with a good strategy in place, it attracts new customers while also building brand loyalty and establishing a strong brand identity. Instagram offers free insights into user analytics for all business profiles, so you can track user impressions and engagements on all of your stories and posts with the additional option to look at demographic information such as gender, age, location, and active hours. 

Marketing on Instagram is perfect for any business that wants to convert more users into leads, boost sales, create brand loyalty, and position themselves as influential thought leaders in their industry. Instagram marketing allows you to deploy key marketing strategies in several creative ways that can reflect your brand, including influencer marketing, advertisements, giveaways, and others. You just have to make sure that you shift social media strategies from your old habits to some updated, Instagram-specific strategies.

Best Cleveland Social Media Agency Tips To Follow 

While Instagram is a widely used social platform, some business owners and marketers are less familiar with it than they would be with Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin. What works on other social platforms isn’t always going to work on Instagram, and certain strategies work better on Instagram than on other platforms. 

Post Frequently 

To start, if you want to have a solid Instagram presence, you have to make sure that you’re posting regularly. The top brands post about five times per week on Instagram. While this can lead to spamming when done incorrectly, as long as you vary your content and stay creative, this regular posting rate is actually ideal.

It’s vital that you’re at the forefront of your customers’ minds — both current and potential. Posting frequently helps users feel more connected with your brand, see more of your products or services, and learn more about your business as a whole.

Promote Your Instagram

Most social media users are on multiple different social platforms, so you should always let your followers on your other pages know about your Instagram account. If they like your content, they’ll probably add you on that platform too – and that gives you at least two ways that you can gain their attention.

An Instagram business account is also required to be linked to Facebook, so you can always share your Instagram posts on your Facebook page seamlessly. This will give your Facebook followers a sneak peek of what they can expect to see on your Instagram feed.

Utilize All Formats

One thing that allows Instagram to stand out from other popular social media platforms is its different formats. These options keep the user’s attention and let you show off different facets of your brand. So try to take advantage of all of the below methods:

Feed posts: This includes photos and videos on your regular feed.

Stories: This method involves temporary content. It’s more in the moment and off the cuff.

Reels: These are videos with an emphasis on entertainment and clickbait methods.

Lives: These are real-time videos and are great for tutorials and AMAs, as well as showing off company events.

The more aspects of your business a customer can get familiar with, the more likely they are to begin to like and follow you. 

Use Popular Hashtags

Much like Twitter, Instagram is hashtag-driven, and utilizing the right hashtags at the right time can make your posts much easier for users to find. In fact, posts that have at least one hashtag see 12.6% more engagement on average than posts without any hashtags. Instagram allows you to use up to 30 hashtags on one post, but that doesn’t mean that you have to use them all. In fact, using too many can make you come off as inauthentic or untrustworthy to users. Instead, you should check your competitors’ Instagram accounts to see how many hashtags they’re using on average to get a feel for how many you should use on your posts.

Of course, you should always make sure that you double-check a tag’s meaning before you use it, and only use tags that suit your brand identity.

Create A Brand Aesthetic

When you look at your Instagram profile, do all of your posts look cohesive? Do they create an aesthetic for your brand? Will they catch the eye of your followers? These are questions you need to ask yourself when looking at your business page.

When the photos you use for your posts look cohesive in terms of style and filters, your profile will look much more professional, and it will help you get more followers. Just make sure that all of your images work well together and create a flow of color and composition.

Optimize Your Page

Your business page is your company’s public face – and there’s a lot to do with it to make sure it’s in top shape.

Your brand page is your biggest opportunity to introduce yourself to Instagram users and get some additional traffic to your site. Linking directly to your homepage from your profile bio is the way to go, and a promotional landing page, especially for Instagram users, might be even more effective.

To fill out your brand page, you’ll need a branded username, complete bio, profile picture, and captions for all of your images. You should also add important contact options depending on your industry, such as a phone number or email. These will all show up as clickable buttons on your page.

Engage With Users

The guaranteed quickest way to increase your follower count quickly is to focus on the followers of your closest competitors. Typically, the more local your business, the more effective this strategy is, but it still works with businesses of all sizes.

Engage directly with users by following them, liking a photo of theirs, and leaving a comment. You can even repeat this strategy multiple times over time until you see them respond in some way.

Research conducted on this topic shows that when done correctly, this method is amazingly effective. Out of 100 users you engage with, on average, you’ll find nearly a third will follow you back.

Shift social media strategies from your past into new effective social media strategies for the future of your business.

Shift Refresh is a Cleveland social media agency that enables businesses to smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our retail digital marketing services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website to get details on packages.

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Areas To Focus On To Increase Website Development Leads

Below are the different strategies that you should focus on to give your business the best chance at increasing your website development leads. While you can implement other strategies as well, these are typically the most effective methods.

Social Media Marketing

Posting content onto multiple different social media platforms, such as Instagram or Facebook, helps you increase organic traffic to your website. Social media creates brand awareness and brings people to your website who are genuinely interested in your brand.

Referral Traffic

Referral traffic can also help generate quality leads for your website. When new content is uploaded to your website, it’s announced through social media and email. If you’re partnered with another website, they can also link to the published content, which will increase traffic to your website even more.

Blogging

Publishing educational or entertaining blogs and content related to web development helps you target keywords, rank higher in search engines, and gain trust from current or potential customers or partners. You can also share blogs on your social media for additional clicks.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the process of optimizing webpages and content using optimized keywords, meta descriptions, and eye-catching titles for the pages. SEO improves the overall visibility of your SERP.

Email Marketing

Email is an effective and reliable way to generate quality website development leads. This strategy centers around sending out informative and promotional emails to the customers. This technique is much more effective compared to other lead generation techniques.

How To Generate Leads For Website Development With Google Analytics

When you know exactly where to look and what to look at, you might be surprised by the insights you’ll gain into your business. Google Analytics is the most popular free tool that your business can use to measure the success of your website development leads. 

1. Monitor Bounce Rate

This metric is crucial because it tells you a lot about your website quality. Simply put, the lower your bounce rate is, the better off you are. Having a low bounce rate means that your visitors are happy with the content that they found based on what they were looking for. 

Google Analytics doesn’t differentiate between a “good” and a “bad” bounce rate. A bad bounce can happen to any website. For example, when someone visits your page and suddenly decides that it’s not what they were looking for and return to the previous page they were on, usually Google. A good bounce happens when someone visits your page, decides to for a little while to look at your content, finds what they were looking for, and then leaves. In order to monitor your company’s bounce rate with Google Analytics, you should click on Behavior > Site Content > Landing Pages, and you’ll see the pages on your site that people click on the most. These pages matter the most because they are the first thing someone sees when they visit your website.

Any page marked as red in Google Analytics is below your site’s usual bounce rate. If a page is red and also has a bounce rate of 0-10%, it should still be OK. If the bounce rate is instead around 20-30%, you should verify it, especially if it’s one of your most popular pages.

2. Understand Your Organic Traffic

If you want to ensure that your website brings in more website development leads, you need to have great traffic and a solid conversion rate. Google Analytics offers you the chance to compare your traffic by date by navigating to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels. Once there, you can select and compare traffic in order to see whether there is growth in your business or not. This tab will tell you if your digital marketing campaigns are having an impact.

A very useful feature in Google Analytics is customized alerts. These alerts will keep you constantly up to date when something is happening to your site. In the Audience tab, you’ll find data that will help you to better understand your audience. Here you’ll notice details from various demographics to locations and technology as well. You’ll even be able to see which browser and device were used to access your site. 

The Acquisition tab provides details about how visitors ended up on your website. This tab can either provide a breakdown by channel or tell you how each user arrived on your page. In order to gain information for the SEO tab, you’ll have to link your Google Webmasters account. 

3. Utilize Internal Site Search

Data gives you the power to make valuable insights. Once you learn how to use Google Analytics, you can make informed decisions on your digital marketing strategy and improve your website development leads substantially. The Internal site search feature can paint a valuable picture of how your visitors got to your site. You can even check out a list of search terms that people have searched for on your domain by clicking on Behavior > Site Search > Overview. It’s a good idea to keep track of all of this data because it will provide vital information about what your visitors hope to see on your website. 

4. Identify Slow Loading Pages

If you want people to stay on your domain and be convinced to buy what you’re selling, you have to remember their short attention span. Slow speeds will destroy your mobile website traffic numbers. In fact, If an e-commerce website is making $100,000 per day, even a  one second page delay could cost your business $2.5 million in lost sales each year.

This is why it’s so important to keep an eye out for slow-loading pages, as well as monitor how they will impact your conversion rates. In order to check your page load times, you should navigate to Behavior > Site Speed > Page Timings. 

5. Analyze User Behavior

Some experts believe that the Shopping Behavior Analysis tab in Google Analytics is the best tool in the Enhanced Ecommerce feature-set in Google Analytics. Armed with this type of data, you can analyze your user’s online habits. You can even see if they proceed to checkout or if they quit in the middle of the shopping procedure. 

The Shopping Behavior Analysis tab in Google Analytics will allow you to change your website’s user experience from source to confirmation. This tool is so great because even though it’s straightforward, it’s also powerful enough to help you find some of the major problems your website might have. 

6. Examine PPC Data

The PPC data tab in Google Analytics can help you to create a better SEO strategy to improve conversions and website development leads. If you take the keywords data and combine it with what you know about your landing pages, you’ll find out what better optimization can be done. 

The PPC tab can tell you a lot of information. You can see which keywords have the highest CTR, conversion rate, and monetary value. The way to find the best keyowrds is to look for the ones that are the most expensive and have the lowest CTR. To get to the tab, go to Analytics at Aquisition> Adwords. There, you’ll find information about your paid campaigns, keywords, and so on. 

Once you create your entire marketing strategy based on all of the data you can examine in Google Analytics, your business is sure to bring in more website development leads and boost its sales.

Shift Refresh is a Cleveland PPC agency that helps businesses smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our retail digital marketing services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive, we have 3 different packages that suites your business. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website.

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Understanding Paid Methods Vs. Free Methods

There are methods that can drive traffic to your website that are both paid and free. The free methods involve methods like search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, etc. In contrast, the paid method involves Youtube, Facebook Ads, Instagram ads, Pinterest, Google Ads, or any paid advertising method.

It’s common knowledge that paid ads can drive traffic to your website, but not every company can afford them very often or at all. Regardless of the method you use, paid or unpaid, you need to know where the majority of your traffic comes from to create a successful strategy.

The most basic and straightforward way to figure out where your traffic is coming from is by using Google Analytics. More specifically, using the UTM (short for Urchin Tracking Module) that Google utilizes to create its tracking tools. This tool allows you to be able to see all the results directly in Google Analytics, giving you information on the specific places where your traffic is coming from.

Traffic Tips From A Social Media Agency In Cleveland

Below, we’ve compiled a list of the tips that we believe will give your organization the best chance of success. 

1. Create An Editorial Calendar

An editorial calendar is a comprehensive plan covering all your publishing activities across your different content distribution channels: your website, blog, social media, and any other third-party platforms.

The main goal of an editorial calendar is to provide you with a comprehensive view of all your activities and keep track of any progress or delays. Having an editorial calendar will not only keep your employees more organized but also help you achieve your business goals more quickly.

2. Focus On Quality SEO

As an online marketing agency in Cleveland, we’re basically experts on Cleveland SEO services. We do our best to make sure that each and every company we work with understands how SEO works and why our strategies are so effective.

In the current online space, if you don’t understand SEO, you’re only hurting yourself and your business. The basic algorithm changes every day, so you have to make sure you understand the basics of SEO, the new trendy features of SEO, and ensure that you’re using the best traffic delivery strategies. It’s best to look up the best SEO practices and guides to educate yourself and your employees, and then to increase your chances of success, find the online or local digital marketing agency that fits best with your business goals and values.

3. Try Guest Blogging

Influencers within the industry can help you drive traffic to your website through organic search by writing a guest article or content on your website for both your regular users and their audience to see. This exposes your company to a wider audience, gives variety to your content, and typically appeals to a younger audience (depending on the influencer).

Most influencers need to be paid for their content, but some influencers offer to at least mention your company for free. Here are some advantages:

• It exposes your brand to a targeted audience
• It expands your network
• Helps your ranking on Search Engine Result Pages
• Grows your social media following
• Improves your backlink score
• Grows brand awareness

4. Paid Advertising Campaigns

You should never ignore paid advertisements completely when looking to increase your website traffic fast. Sometimes it’s helpful to create an ad budget to get started.

Advertising on each social media platform has its pros and cons, so think carefully about what your goals are before you decide to place ads on a platform. You can adjust your paid strategies to suit your goals. For example, do you just want more traffic, or are you looking to increase conversions, too? Obviously, the most common platforms for paid advertising are Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Pinterest, and the rising goliath TikTok. 

If your main goal in driving more traffic to your website is to create more sales, you’ll need to make sure you target high commercial intent keywords as part of your strategy. Competition for certain search terms or keywords can be fierce and expensive, but if done well, it’s worth it.

5. Establish Content Guidelines

Establishing content writing guidelines can help standardize the quality of the content that you produce. Even as a large digital agency in Cleveland, we implement content guidelines with all of the content we produce. Content guidelines can include:

• Content format
• Tone of voice
• Content length
• Image use
• Fact-checking and citations
• Internal/external linking
• Editorial Process

6. Create A Responsive Website

The majority of people in modern society use their phones to access websites, especially customers under the age of 50. You need to ensure that your website is accessible and easy to view across multiple different kinds of devices.

Here are some things that can help you make sure everything runs smoothly: 

• Content is arranged based on importance
• Your website is tested on different browsers and device types
• All text, images, and content are aligned
• Fonts are checked across multiple devices and operating systems to ensure that you maintain consistency
• Make sure any website popups or chatbots are responsive
• Your render speeds should be quick

7. Answer Questions On Quora

Quora is a great online platform that can drive additional traffic to your website. You can answer questions from current or possible customers on this platform and link the right keywords to anchor content to your website or blog. Make sure that you don’t post so much of the same content that it’s considered spam, though. Ensure that your responses are extensive and that you have extensive product knowledge. This is also a good way to build trust with people, making them more likely to buy your product or service.

8. Be Proactive On Social Media

It’s not enough just to produce quality content and hope people find it; you have to be proactive. One of the most effective ways to increase traffic to your website is to use social media channels to promote your brand. 

Twitter is ideal for short, snappy content, while Youtube is great for long-form educational videos. If you are a B2C products company, posting images of your products on social sites like LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest could be really lucrative. If you’re looking to attract young customers, TikTok is the place to advertise. As a social media agency in Cleveland, we can tell you that the more social platform you advertise on, the better, as long as your company has the funds to do so. 

9. Utilize Influencers

In influencer marketing, the standard rules of PR apply. If you want to get some buzz going about your brand, you should create a mailing list of influencers and share free product samples or free access to services with them. Most of them will likely share their experience with their followers for free. You can also contact influencers to create skits about your products or services or ask them to keep a consistent ad spot in their videos for you. This kind of thing will require you to come to an agreement on payment for their promotion, though.

10. Don’t Forget About Email Marketing

Email marketing allows you to connect with your customers and drive traffic to your website. It can also provide your customers with information about your products or services, links to pages on your website where you can learn more with educational content and blogs, and landing pages with exclusive offers. Just make sure you don’t overwhelm your viewers with the number of emails you send. 

Here are some of the advantages of email marketing: 

• It’s cost-effective
• It provides an opportunity for real-time marketing
• It’s less intrusive than other methods
• Provides increased visibility and brand awareness
• ROI can be easily tracked

Whether you need Cleveland SEO services or Columbus SEO services, Shift Refresh has got you covered. We offer services to businesses of all industries and locations.

Shift Refresh is an online marketing agency in Cleveland, Ohio, that helps businesses smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our retail digital marketing services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website.

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Why Have Ecommerce Marketplaces Changed?

A B2B marketplace is a digital platform that allows businesses to connect with other companies to conduct operations, typically transactions or negotiations. This type of platform helps businesses place orders and transactions entirely online with the added bonus of a simplified and expedited transaction process all in one convenient place. 

The B2B platform has existed for over two decades, becoming a vital source of trade for many small and medium businesses. However, a lot of large companies are still hesitant to change the way that they’re used to doing business. They are used to working directly with suppliers due to concerns about scale, quality, and reliability. Of course, that all started to change when people began to realize the potential of modern technology and digital marketplaces.  

Most B2C enterprises, consumer brands, and retail sellers nowadays have enhanced the usage of digital platforms to get higher margins for their companies. So why should B2B eCommerce be any different? As long as you know the correct practices to follow, you can improve your opportunity to sell with other businesses too.

7 B2B Ecommerce Tips

Below are some of the most helpful tips that you should follow to ensure the greatest chance of success with eCommerce.

1. Divide Customers Into Personalized Groups

Dividing your customer base into personalized groups is referred to as customer segmentation. It’s a good idea to do this so that you can identify how to best communicate with consumers in each group based on their age, gender, sexuality, interests, and spending habits. Depending on the information you gather, you can determine key customer behaviors and create an effective marketing strategy.

While this practice is mainly used for B2C selling and strategies, it can also be helpful when dealing with companies. Instead of separating by individual customers, you can divide the businesses by industry, the average age of employees, social campaigns, and goals. Along with finding the best way to attract both customers and businesses alike who want to buy your products or services, you can aim your marketing efforts at your most profitable and loyal group to save both time and money.

2. Utilize Mobile/Social Shopping

In today’s technology-dependent society, the number of people shopping through mobile devices has increased dramatically, and B2B consumers are not an exception. With mobile and social shopping, B2B buyers can complete transactions and negotiations from absolutely anywhere. In fact, many people, especially younger users, prefer mobile and social shopping to shopping on a desktop.

In the United States, mobile commerce income via smartphones was predicted to produce sales of $221.2 billion in 2021. Going even further than that, mobile eCommerce sales are expected to exceed $400 billion by 2024. Why miss out on a rapidly growing platform? Having a mobile shopping option will do nothing but boost your sales.

3. Keep It Simple

Unlike a B2C eCommerce store, where features and benefits can be pretty straightforward, a B2B eCommerce store tends to over-complicate its product or service. When you’re working on your eCommerce website, you have to make sure that you give any website visitors a clear understanding of who you are and why they should buy your product.

Limit Technical Terms: Don’t confuse visitors with too many technical terms that are used widely in your industry. It’s common that even your most valuable customer won’t have extensive industry knowledge, let alone know what they need help with, so it’s important to keep things simple.

Don’t Overcomplicate It: Avoid adding too much copy, too many colors, or too many images to your eCommerce website. Use simple navigation and a few complimentary colors so that any website visitor won’t be distracted or confused about what to focus on.

Explain and Help: Try to use more copy that focuses on features and how your software or product can help rather than using flashy or obvious sales techniques. Most people don’t like to be sold to. Instead, show them how you can improve their lives and increase sales for their business.

4. Invest In Ecommerce Platforms

With eCommerce B2B on the rise, the number of B2B eCommerce platforms has increased significantly to help B2B businesses adapt more quickly. Whether you’re new to eCommerce or are just starting your B2B website, investing in eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, Opencart, and WooCommerce can help improve your eCommerce presence significantly. 

B2B eCommerce platforms give your business the opportunity to utilize several specialized features, such as B2B customer portals, bulk orders, and volume pricing, to help you run your B2B website smoothly while also saving you some time. The drawback is that when you start selling across multiple channels, you’ll need a dashboard of all of your inventory in real time. Similarly, you’ll also likely want to use a single source of truth for product information, such as a product information management system, so that you don’t have to enter product information manually on each channel where you sell. 

5. Offer Flexible Pricing

By offering flexible pricing options, you can increase sales for your eCommerce store. When customers are looking for products and services from a fellow B2B, they don’t want to be tied down to any major expenses, especially if they just found your brand.

You’ll want to start by creating a solid eCommerce Pricing Strategy. An eCommerce pricing strategy is simply a set of rules or processes that you should use to price your products. You want to make sure that you’re not just focused on being the cheapest option but rather allowing for competitive pricing in the marketing based on who your biggest competitors are; this could mean using:

• Subscription-based payments

• Yearly contract payments

• Pay-as-you-go features

• Payment tiers (basic, mid-tier, etc.)

6. Join Customer Review Websites

Reviews can either help grow your business or block you from a possible sale. In any industry, B2C or B2B, the reviews associated with your store are critical to getting companies to trust you. The majority of customers who shop online read reviews before making a purchase. In fact, 72% of customers refuse to make a purchase until they’ve read reviews.

The best eCommerce stores show off their good reviews and awards to build credibility and trust with brands. Think about the possibilities. If a business manager you have a good relationship with uses your products or services and is willing to leave a review, their review might sway other managers to buy from your store.

7. Utilize Ecommerce SEO Services

Search engine optimization statistics suggest that 39% of global e-commerce traffic comes from search engines. Simply put, just having a website has never been enough to help your business grow. Investing in eCommerce SEO services is a must for a B2B or B2C company that wishes to succeed.

Quality SEO can drive awareness of your brand and allow the B2B community to find you. With 1.17 billion unique searches every month, you want to make sure that your company is at the top of that list when people search for topics or keywords related to your business. SEO can be as simple as using a hashtag or as advanced as utilizing high-level keywords to rank on the first page of Google. The best place to start is with a great SEO strategy to build your website structure and meet your SEO goals.

Shift Refresh is an SEO marketing agency in Ohio that helps businesses smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our retail digital marketing services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website

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What Is CPG Marketing?

CPG stands for “Consumer Packaged Goods.” The term consumer packaged goods refer to products that are consumed or used on a regular, typically daily basis by consumers. These kinds of products require consistent replacement or replenishment. Common examples of consumer packaged goods include:

• Food items

• Drinks/beverages

• Alcohol

• Cosmetics, beauty products, and skincare products

• Common Household Products.

CPG marketing is a specific method for advertising perishable consumer goods. CPG marketing and advertising are extremely important because every single consumer uses some kind of consumer packaged goods on a regular basis. Everyone consumes food daily and uses hygiene or self-care products weekly at the very least. Because of this, the CPG market and all of the niche industries within it are extremely competitive with each other when it comes to the advertising space. Especially when it comes to online retailers. 

Despite the CPG market’s tendency to go through highs and lows over time. The CPG industry is still one of the most massive sectors not just in the US but all over the globe. There are industry giants that fall under CPG, like Coca-Cola and Kellogs, showing that many CPG brands are likely not going anywhere any time soon. Especially in the world of online retailers. And neither is the CPG industry as a whole.

While The CPG market is vast, unless it’s a large company. CPG brands have to constantly fight for visibility in grocery stores, supermarkets, and restaurants, especially if those brands are smaller in size. CPG brands also have to constantly invest in both advertising and marketing in order to increase their overall brand presence and recognition.

Insight Into CPG Marketing Trends With Online Retailers 

Now that you understand CPG marketing, we can go into the latest trends and insights into CPG marketing strategies for 2022.

Live Streaming

Live streaming is a trend that is on the rise across multiple industries, and with good reason. It provides an opportunity for brands to connect directly with their consumers and boost their sales. In fact, live streaming has become an incredibly popular method that salespeople use in Asia. With 83% of consumers buying from a live commerce event on their equivalent to Black Friday. While Live streaming hasn’t taken off the same way yet in America, there’s no reason that it shouldn’t. 

Subscription Boxes

Due to the rise of retail digital marketing services with online shopping and stay-at-home solutions during the pandemic. Trends like subscription boxes for CPG items like razors or shampoo have grown substantially. While consumers have ventured outside again, buying essential items from a subscription box has remained popular and likely will continue to grow in popularity. It can be more convenient and even cost-effective in the long run for the consumer.

Sustainability

Did you know that 80% of the 25 largest CPG companies have committed to switching to fully recycled packaging by the end of 2022? While this will cost a lot of money for these companies, it will help them in the long run because there has been a shift in demand for sustainable packaging from consumers. With the switch to green packaging, it will build both trust with consumers and revenue.

Online Accessibility

If consumers have a hard time buying your product online, it’s likely that they won’t buy it at all. Especially with CPG products, brand awareness and marketing is everything, and that starts with a strong online presence and social media presence. Without that, many consumers will never fully trust your brand enough to buy from you.

Hiring a responsive web design company with years of industry experience can help. You’ll get a team that knows how to create a lead generating website, receive cost-effective web design packages and get web design tips from creative web design experts.

Shift Refresh is an SEO marketing agency in Ohio that helps businesses smash their competition and emerge as a leader in their respective industries with the help of our retail digital marketing services. We are ready to help your business not only grow but thrive. To learn more, call us at 1-888-467-3249 or visit our website.

Get in touch with us today for a free consultation.

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