Thursday 30 June 2016
Want a Bigger Marketing Budget? Optimize Your LTV to CAC Ratio
Almost every head of marketing, whether they be a CMO, VP, or Director of Marketing is thirsty for a larger marketing budget. With more money to spend, marketing can (theoretically) drive more growth.
But all too often marketing budgets are set without much rhyme or reason – there tends to be a huge correlation to how many sales were made in the previous month or quarter, or worse yet they are set as a percentage of the company’s revenue. This is particularly common in product driven SaaS organizations. But for growth oriented companies, these means of setting marketing budgets are simply not serving your growth agenda appropriately.
How much do SaaS Companies invest sales and marketing?
Take the chart below as an example. Based on a sampling of 300+ SaaS companies with greater than $2.5mm in revenue, the median sales and marketing spending as a percentage of revenue is 32%.
Does this mean all SaaS companies should simply set their sales and marketing budgets at 32% of their revenue? Absolutely not. There are a number of companies spending as much as 43% of their revenues on sales and marketing, with these companies achieving growth rates of 80%+.
While some of these companies may be spending so aggressively because they are heavily funded and are looking to capture market share, the companies that are the true darlings of the SaaS space are those that have such a strong ratio between the Lifetime Value (LTV) of their customers and their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) that they’ve built a compelling case to pour more dollars into their customer acquisition engines. They’ve built Ferraris and have a valid reason to believe that additional sales and marketing spending will keep their growth rates accelerating.
In your quest to obtain access to more financial resources, it’s the marketing leader’s job to educate the rest of the organization. And simply put, the idea of a “marketing budget” is outdated if growth is truly what you are after.
The Formulas Your SaaS Company Needs
Instead, you have two levers at your disposal – both of which can be optimized, and both of which are not typically considered areas of your business that marketing alone should own. The Lifetime Value (LTV) of your customer is impacted by many factors, including but not limited to:
- Sales selling to buyer personas that have the best chance of being successful with your product
- Product organizations delivering truly valuable features that make the product “sticky”
- Customer success teams working with your clients to make them successful after purchase
- Marketing developing pricing and packaging that pushes longer term contracts over month to month agreements.
The formulas:
Average Customer Lifetime = 1/churn rate (expressed in months or years)
Ex: 1 / 5% monthly churn = 20 month average customer lifetime
Average Revenue Per Account (in a given period) = Total revenue /total customers added
So for example, if last month you made $200,000 in revenue from 25 customers, your calculation would be $200,000/25 = $8,000.
And if customers stay with you for an average of 20 months, you multiply 20 x $8,000 and reach the lifetime value of $160,000. So the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) should be no more than $53k. ARPA = $200,000/25 = $8,000
In this example 20 months X $8,000 = $160,000 LTV
Just as there are many ways to extend your customers’ LTV, there are also a number of different strategies that you can employ to lower your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). Marketing can focus on more cost effective lead generation strategies like organic search, conversion optimization, and developing customer advocates. Sales teams can learn to more efficiently move prospects through the customer acquisition funnel and can do away with expensive events and client dinners in lieu of more cost effective inside sales techniques.
To calculate the cost it takes to acquire a customer, you simply divide the total sales & marketing spend by the number of customers added in a given period. So if you spent $100,000 in a year and acquired 10 customers during that time frame, your CAC would be $10,000.
As a general rule of thumb, a SaaS business with a LTV:CAC ratio of 3:1 is considered healthy – meaning you get $3 in customer revenue for every $1 you spend to acquire them. If you have this ratio or better, you have a customer acquisition engine that is performing well. It is important to mention that this is simply a benchmark – not a magic bullet. This ratio had held up well and provided a valid target at a number of companies I’ve worked with, but every company’s unique situation in terms of funding, growth rate, burn rate, and business goals should be considered. Never put all of your eggs in one basket by looking at any SaaS metric in isolation.
3:1 Ratio is Your Benchmark for a Higher Marketing Budget
With a ratio of better than 3:1, you have a strong argument for investing more money in customer acquisition programs if maxing out your growth potential is your objective. You can make a simple argument to the CEO by saying, “we know that for every $1 we spend to acquire a customer, we get $3 back in revenue.”
So it’s the job of the marketing leader to relentlessly look for ways, across the organization, to lower customer acquisition costs and extended the lifetime value of the customer. If you’re able to do so, you’re making a compelling case for marketing to be given access to whatever financial resources are available, whether you’re a funded or bootstrapped company.
In fact, a strong LTV:CAC ratio is one of the most important metrics you can show if you are trying to raise funding. In my opinion, perhaps the most valid reason a SaaS company should raise funding is if they have a very healthy LTV:CAC ratio and their growth is only limited by access to capital.
Gone are the days of marketing leaders waiting until after a big sales month to nervously ask for an increase in marketing budget. And gone are the days of the marketing leader advocating for marketing spending to represent a larger percentage of the company’s revenues. Relentless focus on increasing customer lifetime value and decreasing customer acquisition costs will blow the top off or your marketing budget (as it should!) indefinitely.
About the Author: Geoff Roberts is the Vice President of Marketing at Bizness Apps. Bizness apps is an app building platform used by small marketing and design agencies to build mobile apps for small business clients.
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Customer Match for Shopping Campaigns Now in Open Beta
By far, one of the biggest announcements Google made in 2015 was the ability to target lists of users via their email addresses with Customer Match. For the past 9 months, our customers have been ecstatic to apply this targeting to the Gmail, YouTube, and RLSA campaigns, often seeing conversion rates from customer match over 3 times as high as their new search visitors!*
While Customer Match targeting is amazingly powerful, many retailers felt left out of the fun since, previously, Customer Match didn’t extend to shopping campaigns. To their delight, Google announced on Monday that Customer Match for Shopping is now in open beta for all advertisers to test. Savvy advertisers will certainly hop on this opportunity quickly, and we’ve seen in the past that applying remarketing lists for shopping campaigns can boost CTR and CVR by over 400%!**
Advertisers interested in getting early access to Customer Match targeting for their shopping campaigns can opt into the beta here and expect to get access to the new feature shortly. Whether you’re new to managing shopping campaigns or you’ve been doing it forever, targeting on Google is evolving quickly and is sure to help advertisers take their campaigns to new levels in the coming months!
Data Sources
*Data here reflects 28 Wordstream clients using Customer Match Lists & proper conversion tracking on the Google Search Network in January 2016.
**Data here reflects 26 accounts (Wordstream clients) using RLSA audiences for their shopping campaigns on the Google Search Network in September 2015.
About the author:
Mark is a Data Scientist at WordStream with a background in SEM, SEO, and Statistical Modeling. Follow him on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google +.
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The 10 Greatest Social Media Advertising Tips for Content Marketers
Let's start with the bad news first. It's tougher than ever to get your content noticed.
Changes to Google's search results pages have further obscured content organically, especially on competitive commercial searches. Meanwhile, paid search CPCs are at all-time highs in established markets.
Organic reach in social media? It's pretty much dead. Half of all content gets zero shares, and less than 0.1 percent will be shared more than 1,000 times. And Facebook just announced that you're even less likely to get your content in front of people who aren't related to you. (Sorry.)
Additionally, the typical internet marketing conversion rate is less than 1 percent.
How Content Marketing Doesn't (Usually) Work
How does content marketing actually work? Many people believe content marketing is basically a three-step process:
- Create new content.
- Share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.).
- People buy your stuff.
Nope. This almost never happens.
Most content goes nowhere. The consumer purchase journey isn't a straight line – and it takes time.
So is there a more reliable way to increase leads and sales with content?
Social Media Ads To The Rescue!
Now it's time for the good news, guys! Social media ads provide the most scalable content promotion and are proven to turn visitors into leads and customers.
And the best part? You don't need a huge ad budget.
A better, more realistic process for content marketing would look like this:
- Create: Produce content and share it on social media.
- Amplify: Selectively promote your top content on social media.
- Tag: Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie.
- Filter: Apply behavioral and demographic filters on your audience.
- Remarket: Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to promote offers.
- Convert: Capture qualified leads or sale.
- Repeat.
You can use the following 10 Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks as a catalyst to get more eyeballs on your content, or as an accelerant to create an even larger traffic explosion.
1. Improve Your Quality Score
Quality Score is a metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads – and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a "Relevancy Score":
While Twitter calls theirs a "Quality Adjusted Bid":
Whatever you call it, Quality Score is a crucial metric. You can increase your quality score for Twitter and Facebook by increasing your post engagement rates.
A high quality score is great because you'll get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low Quality Score is terrible because you'll have a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.
How do you increase engagement rates? Promote your best content – your unicorns (the top 1-3 percent that performs better than all your other content) vs. your donkeys (your bottom 97 percent).
To figure out if your content is a unicorn or donkey, you'll have to test it out.
- Post lots of stuff (organically) to Twitter and use Twitter Analytics to see which content gets the most engagement.
- Post your top stuff from Twitter organically to LinkedIn and Facebook. Again, track which posts get the most traction.
- Pay to promote the unicorns on Facebook and Twitter.
The key to paid social media ads is to be picky. Cast a narrow net and maximize those engagement rates.
2. Increase Engagement With Audience Targeting
Targeting all of your fans isn't precise. It's lazy and you'll waste a lot of money.
Your fans aren't a homogenous blob. They all have different incomes, interests, values, and preferences.
For example, by targeting fans of Donald Trump, people with social media marketing job titles, NRA members, and the hashtag #NeverHillary (and excluding Democrats, fans of Hillary Clinton, and the hashtag #neverTrump), this tweet for an Inc. article I wrote got 10x higher engagement:
Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods help turn average ads into unicorns.
3. Generate Free Clicks From Paid Ads
On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Why? I have no idea. You have to pay for every user engagement (whether someone views your profile, expands your image, expands your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag).
If you're doing this, you need to stop. Now. It's a giant waste of money and offers the worst ROI.
Instead, you should only pay for the thing that matters most to your business, whether that's clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.
For example, when you run a Twitter followers campaign you only pay when someone follows you. But your tweet that's promoting one of your unicorn pieces of content will also get a ton of impressions, retweets, replies, mentions, likes, and visits to your website. All for the low, low cost of $0.
4. Promote Unicorn Video Ads!
Would you believe you can get thousands of video views at a cost of just $0.02 per view?
Shoppers who view videos are more likely to remember you, and buy from you. A couple quick tips for success:
- Promote videos that have performed the best (i.e., driven the most engagement) on your website, YouTube, or elsewhere.
- Make sure people can understand your video without hearing it – an amazing 85 percent of Facebook videos are watched without sound, according to Digiday.
- Make it memorable, try to keep it short, and target the right audience.
Bonus: video ad campaigns increase relevancy score by 2 points!
5. Score Huge Wins With Custom Audiences
True story: A while back I wrote an article that asked: do Twitter Ads work? To promote the article on Twitter, I used their tailored audiences feature to target key influencers.
The very same day, Business Insider asked for permission to publish the story. So I promoted that version of the article to influencers using tailored audiences.
An hour later, a Fox News producer emailed me. Look where I found myself:
The awesome power of custom audiences resulted in additional live interviews with major news outlets including the BBC, 250 high-value press pickups and links, massive brand exposure, 100,000 visits to the WordStream site, and a new business relationship with Facebook.
This is just one example of identity-based marketing using social media ads. Whether it's Twitter's tailored audiences or Facebook's custom audiences, this opens a ton of new and exciting advertising use cases!
6. Promote Your Content On More Social Platforms
Medium, Hacker News, Reddit, Digg, and LinkedIn Pulse call all send you massive amounts of traffic. It's important to post content here that is appropriate to the audience.
Post content on Medium or LinkedIn. New content is fine, but repurposing your content is a better strategy. This will give a whole new audience a chance to discover and consume your existing content.
Again, you can use social media ads as a catalyst or accelerant and get hundreds, thousands, or even millions of views you otherwise wouldn't have. It might even open you up to syndication opportunities (I've had posts syndicated to New York Observer and Time Magazine).
You can also promote your existing content on sites like Hacker News, Reddit, or Digg. Getting upvotes can create valuable exposure that will send tons of traffic to your existing content.
For a minimal investment, you can get some serious exposure and traffic!
7. Optimize for Engagement for Insanely Awesome SEO
RankBrain is an AI machine learning system, which Google is now using to better understand search queries, especially queries Google has never seen before (an estimated 15 percent of all queries).
I believe Google is looking at user engagement metrics (such as organic click-through rates, bounce rates, dwell time, and conversion rates) as a way, in part, to rank pages that have earned very few or no links and provide better answers to users' questions.
Even if user engagement metrics aren't part of the core ranking algorithm, getting really high organic CTRs and conversion rates will have its own great rewards:
- More clicks and conversions.
- Better organic search rankings.
- Even more clicks and conversions.
Use social media ads to build brand recognition and double your organic search click-through and conversion rates!
8. Social Media Remarketing
Social media remarketing, on average, will boost engagement by 3x and increase conversion rates by 2x, all while cutting your costs by a third. So make the most of it!
Use social media remarketing to push your hard offers, such as sign-ups, consultations, and downloads.
9. Combine Everything With Super Remarketing
Super remarketing is the awesome combination of remarketing, demographics, behaviors, and high engagement content. Here's how and why it works.
- Behavior and interest targeting: These are the people interested in your stuff.
- Remarketing: These are the people who have recently checked our your stuff.
- Demographic targeting: These are the people who can afford to buy your stuff.
Now you need to target your paid social ads to a narrow audience that meets all three criteria using your high engagement unicorns.
The result?
10. Combine Paid Search & Social Ads
For our final, and most advanced tip of them all, you're going to combine social ads with PPC search ads on Google using RLSA.
RLSA is incredibly powerful. You can target customized search ads only to people who have recently visited your site when they search on Google. It increases click-through and conversion rates by 3x and also reduces cost-per-click by a third.
But there's one problem. By definition, RLSA doesn't target people who are unfamiliar with your brand.
This is where social ads come in. Social ads will help more people become familiar with your brand.
Social ads are cheap way to start the process of biasing people towards you. Although they may not need what you sell now, later when the need arises, people will either do a branded search for your stuff, or do an unbranded search but click on you because they remember your memorable or inspirational content.
If your content marketing efforts are struggling, then these ridiculously powerful Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks will turn your content donkeys into unicorns!
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The 3 Layer Approach Of Pyramid White-Hat Linkbuilding
It seems to be absolutely clear what white-hat link-building is. But it’s not always that easy. It is hard to build links in the most natural way. Struggling and looking for a balance in my backlink profiles, I finally […]
Post from: Search Engine People SEO Blog
The 3 Layer Approach Of Pyramid White-Hat Linkbuilding
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Written by Victoria Klochkova, Spati.co
The post The 3 Layer Approach Of Pyramid White-Hat Linkbuilding appeared first on Search Engine People Blog.
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The Functional Content Masterplan – Own the Knowledge Graph Goldrush with this On-Page Plan
Posted by SimonPenson
[Estimated read time: 17 minutes]
On-page content is certainly not one of the sexier topics in digital marketing.
Lost in the flashing lights of "cool digital marketing trends" and things to be seen talking about, it's become the poor relative of many a hyped "game-changer."
I’m here to argue that, in being distracted by the topics that may be more "cutting-edge," we're leaving our most valuable assets unloved and at the mercy of underperformance.
This post is designed not only to make it clear what good on-page content looks like, but also how you should go about prioritizing which pages to tackle first based on commercial opportunity, creating truly customer-focused on-page experiences.
What is "static" or "functional" content?
So how am I defining static/functional content, and why is it so important to nurture in 2016? The answer lies in the recent refocus on audience-centric marketing and Google’s development of the Knowledge Graph.
Whether you call your on-page content "functional," "static," or simply "on-page" content, they're all flavors of the same thing: content that sits on key landing pages. These may be category pages or other key conversion pages. The text is designed to help Google understand the relevance of the page and/or help customers with their buying decisions.
Functional content has other uses as well, but today we're focusing on its use as a customer-focused conversion enhancement and discovery tactic.
And while several years ago it would have been produced simply to aid a relatively immature Google to "find" and "understand," the focus is now squarely back on creating valuable user experiences for your targeted audience.
Google’s ability to better understand and measure what "quality content" really looks like — alongside an overall increase in web usage and ease-of-use expectation among audiences — has made key page investment as critical to success on many levels.
We should now be looking to craft on-page content to improve conversion, search visibility, user experience, and relevance — and yes, even as a technique to steal Knowledge Graph real estate.
The question, however, is "how do I even begin to tackle that mountain?"
Auditing what you have
For those with large sites, the task of even beginning to understand where to start with your static content improvement program can be daunting. Even if you have a small site of a couple of hundred pages, the thought of writing content for all of them can be enough to put you off even starting.
As with any project, the key is gathering the data to inform your decision-making before simply "starting." That’s where my latest process can help.
Introducing COAT: The Content Optimization and Auditing Tool
To help the process along, we’ve been using a tool internally for months — for the first time today, there's now a version that anyone can use.
This link will take you to the new Content Optimisation and Auditing Tool (COAT), and below I’ll walk through exactly how we use it to understand the current site and prioritize areas for content improvement. I'll also walk you through the manual step-by-step process, should you wish to take the scenic route.
The manual process
If you enjoy taking the long road — maybe you feel an extra sense of achievement in doing so — then let's take a look at how to pull the data together to make data-informed decisions around your functional content.
As with any solid piece of analysis, we begin with an empty Excel doc and, in this case, a list of keywords you feel are relevant to and important for your business and site.
In this example, we'll take a couple of keywords and our own site:
Keywords:
Content Marketing Agency
Digital PR
Site:
Running this process manually is labor-intensive (hence the need to automate it!) and to add dozens more keywords creates a lot of work for little extra knowledge gain, but by focusing on a couple you can see how to build the fuller picture.
Stage one
We start by adding our keywords to our spreadsheet alongside a capture of the search volume for those terms and the actual URL ranking, as shown below (NOTE: all data is for google.co.uk).
Next we add in ranking position...
We then look to the page itself and give each of the key on-page elements a score based on our understanding of best practice. If you want to be really smart, you can score the most important factors out of 20 and those lesser points out of 10.
In building our COAT tool to enable this to be carried out at scale across sites with thousands of pages, we made a list of many of the key on-page factors we know to affect rank and indeed conversion. They include:
- URL optimization
- Title tag optimization and clickability
- Meta description optimization and clickability
- H1, H2, and H3 optimization and clickability (as individual scores)
- Occurences of keyword phrases within body copy
- Word count
- Keyword density
- Readability (as measured by the Flesch-Kincaid readability score)
This is far from an exhaustive list, but it's a great place to start your analysis. The example below shows an element of this scored:
Once you have calculated score for every key factor, your job is to then to turn this into an average, weighted score out of 100. In this case, you can see I've done this across the listed factors and have a final score for each keyword and URL:
Stage two
Once you have score for a larger number of pages and keywords, it's then possible to begin organizing your data in a way that helps prioritise action.
You can do this simply enough by using filters and organising the table by any number of combinations.
You may want to sort by highest search volume and then by those pages ranking between, say, 5th and 10th position.
Doing this enables you to focus on the pages that may yield the most potential traffic increase from Google, if that is indeed your aim.
Working this way makes it much easier to work in a way that delivers the largest positive net impact fastest.
Doing it at scale
Of course, if you have a large site with tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of pages, the manual option is almost impossible — which is why we scratched our heads and looked for a more effective option. The result was the creation of our Content Auditing and Optimisation Tool. Here's how you can make use of it to paint a fuller picture of your entire site.
Here's how it works
When it comes to using COAT, you follow a basic process:
- Head over to the tool.
- Enter your domain, or a sub-directory of the site if you'd like to focus on a particular section
- Add the keywords you want to analyze in a comma-separated list
- Click "Get Report," making sure you've chosen the right country
Next comes the smart bit: by adding target keywords to the system before it crawls, it enables the algorithm to cross-reference all pages against those phrases and then score each combination against a list of critical attributes you'd expect the "perfect page" to have.
Let’s take an example:
You run a site that sells laptops. You enter a URL for a specific model, such as /apple-15in-macbook/, and a bunch of related keywords, such as "Apple 15-inch MacBook" and "Apple MacBook Pro."
The system works out the best page for those terms and measures the existing content against a large number of known ranking signals and measures, covering everything from title tags and H1s to readability tests such as the Flesch-Kincaid system.
This outputs a spreadsheet that scores each URL or even categories of URLs (to allow you to see how well-optimized the site is generally for a specific area of business, such as Apple laptops), enabling you to sort the data, discover the pages most in need of improvement, and identify where content gaps may exist.
In a nutshell, it'll provide:
- What the most relevant target page for each keyword is
- How well-optimized individual pages are for their target keywords
- Where content gaps exist within the site’s functional content
It also presents the top-level data in an actionable way. An example of the report landing page can be seen below (raw CSV downloads are also available — more on that in a moment).
You can see the overall page score and simple ways to improve it. This is for our "Digital PR" keyword:
The output
As we've already covered in the manual process example, in addition to pulling the "content quality scores" for each URL, you can also take the data to the next level by adding in other data sources to the mix.
The standard CSV download includes data such as keyword, URL, and scores for the key elements (such as H1, meta, canonical use and static content quality).
This level of detail makes it possible to create a priority order for fixes based on lowest-scoring pages easily enough, but there are ways you can supercharge this process even more.
The first thing to do is run a simple rankings check using your favorite rank tracker for those keywords and add them into a new column in your CSV. It'll look a little like this (I've added some basic styling for clarity):
I also try to group keywords by adding a third column using a handful of grouped terms. In this example, you can see I'm grouping car model keywords with brand terms manually.
Below, you'll see how we can then group these terms together in an averaged cluster table to give us a better understanding of where the keyword volume might be from a car brand perspective. I've blurred the keyword grouping column here to protect existing client strategy data.
As you can see from the snapshot above, we now have a spreadsheet with keyword, keyword group, search volume, URL, rank, and the overall content score pulled in from the base Excel sheet we have worked through. From this, we can do some clever chart visualization to help us understand the data.
Visualizing the numbers
To really understand where the opportunity lies and to take this process past a simple I’ll-work-on-the-worst-pages-first approach, we need to bring it to life.
This means turning our table into a chart. We'll utilize the chart functionality within Excel itself.
Here's an example of the corresponding chart for the table shown above, showing performance by category and ranking correlation. We're using dummy data here, but you can look at the overall optimization score for each car brand section alongside how well they rank (the purple line is average rank for that category):
If we focus on the chart above, we can begin to see a pattern between those categories that are better optimized and generally have better rankings. Correlation does not always equal causation, as we know, but it's useful information.
Take the very first column, or the Subaru category. We can see that it's one of the better-optimized categories (at 49%) and average rank is at 34.1. Now, these are hardly record-breaking positions, but it does point towards the value of well-worked static pages.
Making the categories as granular as possible can be very valuable here, as you can quickly build up a focused picture of where to put your effort to move the needle quickly. The process for doing so is an entirely subjective one, often based on your knowledge of your industry or your site information architecture.
Add keyword volume data into the mix and you know exactly where to build your static content creation to-do list.
Adding in context
Like any data set, however, it requires a level of benchmarking and context to give you the fullest picture possible before you commit time and effort to the content improvement process.
It’s for this reason that I always look to run the same process on key competitors, too. An example of the resulting comparison charts can be seen below.
The process is relatively straightforward: take an average of all the individual URL content scores, which will give you a "whole domain" score. Add competitors by repeating the process for their domain.
You can take a more granular view manually by following the same process for the grouped keywords and tabulating the result. Below, we can see how our domain sizes up against those same two competitors for all nine of our example keyword groups, such as the car brands example we looked at earlier.
With that benchmark data in place, you can move on to the proactive improvement part of the process.
The perfect page structure
Having identified your priority pages, the next step is to ensure you edit (or create them) in the right way to maximize impact.
Whereas a few years ago it was all about creating a few paragraphs almost solely for the sake of helping Google understand the page, now we MUST be focused on usability and improving the experience for the right visitor.
This means adding value to the page. To do that, you need to stand back and really focus in on the visitor: how they get to the page and what they expect from it.
This will almost always involve what I call "making the visitor smarter": creating content that ensures they make better and more informed buying decisions.
To do that requires a structured approach to delivering key information succinctly and in a way that enhances — rather than hinders — the user journey.
The best way of working through what that should look like is to share a few examples of those doing it well:
1. Tredz Top 5 Reviews
Tredz is a UK cycling ecommerce business. They do a great job of understanding what their audience is looking for and ensuring they're set up to make them smarter. The "Top 5" pages are certainly not classic landing pages, but they're brilliant examples of how you can sell and add value at the same time.
Below is the page for the "Top 5 hybrids for under £500." You can clearly see how the URL (http://ift.tt/29eH2DW), meta, H tags, and body copy all support this focus and are consistently aligned:
2. Read it for me
This is a really cool business concept and they also do great landing pages. You get three clear reasons to try them out — presented clearly and utilizing several different content types — all in one package.
3. On Stride Financial
Finance may not be where you'd expect to see amazing landing pages, but this is a great example. Not only is it an easy-to-use experience, it answers all the user's key questions succinctly, starting with "What is an installment loan?" It's also structured in a way to capture Knowledge Graph opportunity — something we'll come to shortly.
create impactful headlines, testimonials (where appropriate), directional cues (so it's clear where to "go next"), and high-quality images to reflect the quality of your product or services.
Claiming Knowledge Graph
There is, of course, one final reason to work hard on your static pages. That reason? To claim a massively important piece of digital real estate: Google Featured Snippets.
Snippets form part of the wider Knowledge Graph, the tangible visualization of Google’s semantic search knowledge base that's designed to better understand the associations and entities behind words, phrases, and descriptions of things.
The Knowledge Graph comes in a multitude of formats, but one of the most valuable (and attainable from a commercial perspective) is the Featured Snippet, which sits at the top of the organic SERP. An example can be seen below from a search for "How do I register to vote" in google.co.uk:
In recent months, Zazzle Media has done a lot of work on landing page design to capture featured snippets with some interesting findings, most notably the level of extra traffic such a position can achieve.
Having now measured dozens of these snippets, we see an average of 15–20% extra traffic from them versus a traditional position 1. That’s a definite bonus, and makes the task of claiming them extremely worthwhile.
You don’t have to be first
The best news? You don’t even have to be in first position to be considered for a snippet. Our own research shows us that almost 75% of the examples we track have been claimed by pages ranked between 2nd and 10th position. It's far from being robust enough yet for us to formalize a full report on it, but early indication across more than 900 claimed snippets (heavily weighted to the finance sector at present) support these early findings.
Similar research by search data specialists STAT has also supported this theory, revealing that objective words are more likely to appear. General question and definition words (like "does," "cause," and "definition") as well as financial words (like "salary," "average," and "cost") are likely to trigger a featured snippet. Conversely, the word "best" triggered zero featured snippets in over 20,000 instances.
This suggests that writing in a factual way is more likely to help you claim featured results.
Measuring what you already have
Before you run into this two-footed, you must first audit what you may (or may not) already have. If you run a larger site, you may already have claimed a few snippets by chance, and with any major project it's important to benchmark before you begin.
Luckily, there are a handful of tools out there to help you discover what you already rank for. My favorite is SEMrush.
The paid-for tool makes it easy to find out if you rank for any featured snippets already. I'd suggest using it to benchmark and then measure the effect of any optimization and content reworking you do as a result of the auditing process.
Claiming Featured Snippets
Claiming your own Featured Snippet then requires a focus on content structure and on answering key questions in a logical order. This also means paying close attention to on-page HTML structure to ensure that Google can easily and cleanly pick out specific answers.
Let’s look at a few examples showing that Google can pick up different types of content for different types of questions.
1. The list
One of the most prevalent examples of Featured Snippets is the list.
As you can see, Media Temple has claimed this incredibly visual piece of real estate simply by creating an article with a well-structured, step-by-step guide to answer the question:
"How do I set up an email account on my iPhone?"
If we look at how the page is formatted, we can see that the URL matches the search almost exactly, while the H1 tag serves to reinforce the relevance still further.
As we scroll down we find a user-friendly approach to the content, with short sentences and paragraphs broken up succinctly into sections.
This allows Google to quickly understand relevance and extract the most useful information to present in search; in this case, the step-by-step how-to process to complete the task.
Here are the first few paragraphs of the article, highlighting key structural elements. Below this is the list itself that's captured in the above Featured Snippet:
2. The table
Google LOVES to present tables; clearly there's something about the logical nature of how the data is presented that resonates with its team of left-brained engineers!
In the example below, we see a site listing countries by size. Historically, this page may well not have ranked so highly (it isn’t usually the page in position one that claims the snippet result). Because of the ways it has structured the information so well, however, Geohive will be enjoying a sizable spike in traffic to the page.
The page itself looks like this — clear, concise and well-structured:
3. The definition
The final example is the description, or definition snippet; it's possibly the hardest to claim consistently.
It's difficult for two key reasons:
- There will be lots of competition for the space and answering the search query in prose format.
- It requires a focus on HTML structure and brilliantly crafted content to win.
In the example below, we can see a very good example of how you should be structuring content pages.
- So how does this whole mortgage broker thing work?
- Mortgage brokers can shop the rate for you
- Mortgage brokers are your loan guide
- Mortgage broker FAQ
The result is a piece that leaves no stone unturned. Because of this, it's been shared plenty of times — a sure fire signal that the article is positively viewed by readers.
Featured Snippet Cheatsheet
Not being one to leave you alone to figure this out though, I have created this simple Featured Snippet Cheatsheet, designed to take the guesswork out of creating pages worthy of being selected for the Knowledge Graph.
Do it today!
Thanks for making it this far. My one hope is for you to go off and put this plan into action for your own site. Doing so will quickly transform your approach to both landing pages and to your ongoing content creation plan (but that’s a post for another day!).
And if you do have a go, remember to use the free COAT tool and guides associated with this article to make the process as simple as possible.
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