December 2018

All right, time to confess. Earning and building links is hard work. If you spam too many links in your content, you risk losing your ranking on Google search as well as customer confidence. If you don’t earn any links to your website, you won’t be seen as the credible source of information that you are.

If my experience as a digital marketing consultant has taught me anything, it’s this: a little elbow grease in building and earning links goes a long way when driving traffic to your site. The more (and better quality) traffic you get, the higher the potential for making conversions and sales.

Today we are going to analyze the benefits link building and earning can provide to your digital marketing campaign.

What are the Benefits of Link Building?

You may be thinking, “Why would I need to worry about building or earning links when there are literally hundreds of other SEO factors that go into Google’s ranking system?”

That’s a fair question. In short, it’s because link building and earning helps:

1. Grows Your Traffic – Let’s imagine that you are a grapefruit distributor, and you’ve recently written up a blog post highlighting your fruit’s sweetness, tartness, and uniqueness.

Not long after, you are contacted by a highly recognized company (e.g. Food Network) and are asked if they can link a recipe to your blog piece. This is great news for your business.

If this company that contacted you has a huge Internet presence, and if they are linking out to your website, that’ll help to direct online traffic your way. Once at your company’s website, a properly placed call-to-action can entice site visitors to purchase your fruit. If they have found your website helpful and engaging, they may even interact with your social media accounts.

2. Provides Value to Search Engines – Remember how I mentioned earlier that Google ranking is governed by 200 other factors? Well, links have a high value in this list of factors.

This is why a lot of authority websites have top spots in Google’s ranking system. Many other websites are likely linking out to these authority sites, which in turn helps to build up their credibility even more. Think of it as a vote. The more “votes” a website has, the higher its position in the search engine results page (SERP).

To build off the example above, since your website was linked to an authority website, Google will recognize that you are a credible source of information regarding grapefruit. So when someone is searching for grapefruits, your page is more likely to show up on the SERP.

3. Increases Brand Awareness – In tandem with everything above, link building and earning can enhance brand awareness through “influencers.”

If an influencer happens to run across your product and begins to promote it, you gain access, in a sense, to their followers and audience. To illustrate, let’s say that there is a “grapefruit influencer” that has over a million viewers on their YouTube channel. One day while searching for new and interesting recipes, the enthusiast happens upon the authority website that originally linked out to you.

Later, you get a notification from the influencer that they would like to create video content featuring your grapefruit. Of course, you give the okay so long as they link out to your company website. You notice not too long after the influencer has created their content about your product, that your traffic metrics have grown substantially.

Through that influencer, through the authority website, and through your own efforts, you have effectively increased your brand awareness and brought in a new swarm of customers.

Summing It Up

Link building and earning can definitely help to draw more traffic to your website, but it must come with a delicate touch. If you’re looking for some tips on how to earn links, we have a blog just for that as well.

It’s important to know that you can’t just spam links in your blog post as Google looks down on that. Being renowned as a link-spammer rather than a purveyor of a quality product is a surefire way to lose reputation and ranking with Google and, more importantly, future sales.

Link building and earning is by no means a “kickback” kind of thing either. It takes a certain drive, a hustle, to earn these types of relationships with other websites. One shouldn’t focus so much on paying for links or spamming, but you should instead focus on producing quality content and connecting that content with the right audience for maximum brand exposure.

Do you need an expert’s touch to help make your link building happen? Look no further than Mauricio Piña, your experience digital marketing consultant. Contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to find out how I can help improve your digital marketing campaigns.

Digital marketing is a science, and like any science, hypotheses have to be tested in order to become an accepted theory.

Digital marketing consultants are like scientists analyzing the effects of digital marketing on target audiences. Better results get implemented in digital marketing campaigns that create revenue.

Today, we’re going to develop a better understanding of a test that can help you figure out where the weak points in your digital marketing campaign are and how you can utilize the results to improve your conversion rates. To do that, that means getting down and dirty in your conversion rate optimization (CRO) tests – also known as A/B testing.

Hold Up…What Exactly is A/B Testing?

The reason we conduct A/B testing is to give us clear insight into how one version of a campaign compares to another. Oftentimes, the differences between campaigns aren’t that drastically different from one another. It can be something as simple as switching up copy in an ad or experimenting with colors in your call-to-action to see if it encourages click-throughs.

Because of this, A/B testing is also known as split testing, and it is known as one of the easier CRO tests to conduct.

How Does A/B Testing Work?

Let’s say, for example, that your company website doesn’t have the best conversion rate. One day you come across a blog that states that placing a call-to-action (CTA) in your content helps to improve your conversion rate.

Blogs that were written before never had a CTA and now you want to run a little experiment. In this experiment, one blog post has a CTA—known as the “challenger” in A/B testing. The other is staying true to the older blog post guidelines where no CTA was written in – this is the “control.”

Before you post the blogs, you set a number of 500 visitors that will be used as a sample size of sorts, depending on your audience settings or preferences. These visitors will be distributed randomly, yet equally, to view either the challenger or control blog post.

After a set amount of time, that you’ll determine,  you’ll check out the results of the test to see which blog post has more leads and conversions.

What you might discover is that the blog without the CTA required too many steps for visitors to complete before they could find the featured product in your blog. We’re talking having to go into the sidebar, click “Shop,” search for the actual item, all while your hope they don’t abandon their cart.

On the other hand, the blog with a CTA encourages site visitors via copy and a link to the actual product page to quickly find the product and purchase. You might find that this particular blog improved conversion rates by 20 percent.

Once the A/B test has concluded, you might find it in your best interest to continue writing CTAs into your content. Later on down the road, you might want to run another A/B test to see if CTA placement is better at the top or bottom of a blog, or at the beginning rather than the end of video content.

And that’s A/B testing in a nutshell. Essentially changing portions of your various marketing campaigns – from social to blogs and everything in between – to see what works best to convert visitors.

The possibilities are endless!

Need some additional A/B testing marketing tips? Reach out to the digital marketing expert, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998.