Marketing Toolbox

For SEO track brand mentions and determine if the site mentioning your brand included a link. If it did not, request one.

Tools:

Talkwalker

Brand24

Fresh Web Explorer

Google Alerts

Moat is a helpful tool for seeing competitor display ads.

Great tool to remove background images from photos using AI:

https://slazzer.com/

It is possible to use Google Analytics to track users through your funnel and measure its effectiveness. However, setting this all up can be highly complicated. You have to build a confusing series of filters and a dedicated URL structure that allows GA to correlate content pages with each stage of the funnel.

It’s much better to use a single tool that follows users through your funnel. Pick one that logs abandonment points and the cumulative impact of your various key funnel touchpoints. You’ll also need a good way to track the activity of returning visitors, which is another weak point for GA, thanks to uncertainty about cookies, lack of reliability when tracking visitors across devices, and the aforementioned notorious data sampling issue.

And if you integrate a funnel analytics tool with your CRM, logging each lead’s engagement activity on your website, you’ll be in great shape to set up a smart lead scoring system for identifying sales-readiness levels.

To get started with funnel analytics, check out:

• Kissmetrics
• Woopra
• Yandex Metrica

Source: Search Engine Watch (2019)

One of Google Analytic’s biggest weaknesses is its inability to give context to visitor behavior. It can’t show you much about the identity of your visitors – at best, you can segment data about your entire pool of visitors according to their physical locations, devices, referrers, rough demographics and points of entry to your site.

What’s more, Google Analytics only uses a sample of your visitors, so that even if you tinker with your report settings to reveal the IP addresses of individual sessions, you can’t rely on this information as a comprehensive source of individual user insights.

Instead of GA, use audience intelligence tools that provide information about the interests, behavior, personal data (in a GDPR-compliant manner, of course.) and historic activity of every user, so that you can gain a deeper understanding of your visitors. This allows you to fine-tune your content to appeal to your audience, and it also reveals opportunities for account-based marketing.

To get started with audience intelligence, try Albacross, LinkedIn Website Demographics or Visitor Queue.

Source: Search Engine Watch (2019)

Brafton did a study of 181 websites and provided some helpful benchmark time on site metrics:

Instagram wasn't designed to post from the Mac desktop to Instagram. However, there is a way to get it done without too much effort.

How to Post on Instagram from Mac

1. Go to Instagram.com using the Safari browser and Login to your account
   
   
2. Open Safari and click Safari (upper left corner of screen) > Preferences > Advanced
   
   
   
   
   
3. Check  "Show Develop Menu in bar"
   
   
   
   
   
   
4. Close this and go to:  Develop (in the top nav) > User Agent > Safari - IOS 10 - iPhone
   
   
   
   
5. The Instagram site will reload or manually refresh the site. 
   
   
6. Click the camera icon on the bottom and a window should open asking you to select the picture you would like to upload to Instagram.  
   
   
7. Review the preview of the image, edit, add a caption and then click Share.

Every month I get a question from clients regarding the ability to embed video in email HTML templates. Unfortunately, the answer is that you cannot when using most email clients.

For the vast majority of desktop, tablet and mobile email clients, the answer is no, even with HTML 5. 

I found this chart from Email on Acid (they also supply all of the HTML code) that does a good job laying out the state of video support in email. From a market share perspective, about half of emails sent can support playback within the email client and a half cannot. Developers should code html so that the default image displays in any client that does not support video, particularly since some clients will display the video player, but the video is unplayable, creating confusion.

Net, the idea to embed video in email is still a bad idea unless targeting Apple Mail and Samsung Galaxy customers specifically that use the native mail applications of those platforms.

One important facet of Search Engine Optimization is understanding the depth and frequency of the GoogleBot crawl. Said another way, there are strategies for maximizing the number of pages indexed or crawled by the search engines. This is particularly important for sites that are not frequently updated, that do not focus on recent news or those that are 1,000 pages or more.

 Here are some helpful resources to understand the many sides of this issue:

• Googlebot Crawl Strategy
• Server Logs and SEO
• Advanced Log File Analysis and SEO
• Server Log Data and SEO
• Technical SEO Guide to Crawling