If you don’t have a lot of money to spend, you will most likely struggle to get off the ground.

If you are struggling with this, here are 6 tips for you to get started with SEO and SEM and produce great results even with a tight budget.

1. Target long-tail keywords

Long-tail keywords are excellent for a search engine optimiser who has a tight budget.

Although broad keywords have a very high volume of traffic, they also have a high CPC and intense level of competition (especially when big brands are involved). You cannot realistically beat them without spending thousands of dollars.

On the other hand, long-tail keywords are easier (and less costly) to rank for. Moreover, long-tail keywords also have a higher conversion rate, which makes selling and generating revenue easier.

2. If you have to use broad keywords, be strategic

Sometimes, some broad keywords are too important to ignore. If that’s the case with you and you must target broad keywords, at least be strategic about it. Otherwise, it may become a money pit that will exhaust your budget in only a few weeks.

If you are running ads on broad keywords, make sure to only target people who you are confident would buy your product, e.g., similar audiences.

3. Re-target website visitors

If you are already on a tight budget, you need to utilise every asset you have. The people who visit different pages on your website is one of those valuable assets.

Re-targeting website visitors is a less costly affair. Depending on which page they visited and how far they were in your sales funnel, you can easily craft a cost-effective search engine marketing strategy to convert them.

Remember that these people are not as cold as others. They have already shown some interest in what you have to offer. Converting them via re-targeting would almost always be less costly and more effective.

4. Focus on email marketing

If you have an email database, email marketing can be a powerful and (mostly) free tool to increase sales and revenue.

If you are getting a decent amount of traffic, make sure to put irresistible lead magnets on your website. This technique would encourage more people to sign up for your email marketing list, which you can later use for promotion and selling your products.

26 percent of small businesses use emails as a selling tool. Moreover, a simple welcome email can be responsible for 320 percent more revenue than other promotional emails.

There really is no reason not to try email marketing — especially if you have a low budget.

5. Try guest blogging

Guest blogging is free, and it is highly effective if done right.

Your website may not have a lot of traffic, but other websites have. You just have to get in touch with their owners, create a good piece of content, and have it published on those websites.

Guest blogging is a powerful tool for not only establishing your authority and driving traffic to your website, but it is also a great way to sell your products and increase the size of your email marketing list (by redirecting readers to a sign-up splash page).

6. Reverse engineer your competitor’s strategy

Crafting a working strategy is a tough job. It not only requires a lot of time and effort, but it also costs a lot of money.

If you have a low budget, that may not be the right option for you. But, as you know, you cannot really succeed without a solid strategy.

If you are in such a conundrum, reverse engineer your competitor’s strategy. They have already done the legwork and tested the different elements. It’s time you use them.

Find out their most popular blog posts. See where they publish guest posts. Subscribe to their email newsletter and take notes of their email marketing and promotional strategy. Monitor their search ads and see which keywords they are targeting.

From their landing page style to their ad copy, you can learn about everything, twist it a bit to customise as per your needs, and build your own strategy without spending thousands of dollars on it.

The post How to do SEO on a Budget appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

Combining both email marketing and SEO, however, can be tricky.

In this blog post, we share six ways how you can make email marketing and SEO work together.

1. Content promotion

Email is an excellent way to promote your blog’s content and drive additional traffic to it.

Often, it takes some time for a blog post to get indexed and ranked higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs). In the meanwhile, there is a couple of ways you can start promoting and driving traffic to it.

One of the ways is to share your content on different social media channels. The second method is to send an email to your subscribers promoting your latest blog post.

Content promotion is an effective way to promote your new content — especially long-form content and guides that your subscribers would love to read.

2. Building links

We all know how important backlinks are to search engine optimisation. It ranks among the top 3 search engine ranking factors after all.

Unfortunately, most online marketers miss an opportunity to build backlinks via email marketing. There are two ways of doing that:

1. First, you can create an email list of well-established influencers in your industry and start an outreach email campaign seeking backlinks to your popular content. This is a common technique that many online marketers and SEO experts use.
2. Second, whenever you publish high-quality long-form content, study, or original research, you can highlight it at the end of your emails. Also, mention that your post contains exclusive information and/or data, and if anyone wants to mention that information to their readers, they can link to your post. This is a more unique and very effective technique to drive new backlinks to help your overall SEO efforts.

3. Repurpose newsletter content

Most companies send a weekly, bi-weekly or monthly newsletter to their email subscribers. Those newsletters are usually in the form of a digest — containing 4-5 blog posts that they published recently.

Most importantly, quite often those newsletters contain exclusive information and tips for the readers.

Either way, the idea is to repurpose that content and share it on your blog so it can be ranked in the SERPs.

If you are sharing exclusive information with your email subscribers — which you should to encourage more people to subscribe — consider treating it as a “timed exclusive” content.

For example, you can make that information public — by repurposing it into blog posts — after, say, 3 months.

4. Send personalised content to different segments

One common email marketing mistake that some people make is that they send one type of content to everyone.

You shouldn’t do that.

Understand that different prospects may be at different stages of the sales funnel. Also, they may have different characteristics and want different things.

In order to keep them engaged and interested in what you have to say, try to personalise their messages. Share the type of content that they would be most interested in.

Divide your content by different types of customer segments, different stages of the sales funnel, or popularity level. Then share personalised content to different segments for best possible results.

5. Ask subscribers for reviews and content ideas

Online reviews matter a lot — especially to local businesses.

As search engines get smarter, the value of user-generated content and unbiased online reviews will gain in popularity.

This is why you should create email campaigns occasionally, seeking positive user reviews.

Additionally, to support your content marketing and SEO efforts, also ask your subscribers for content ideas. You can also run polls to identify topics that your audience is most interested in.

You are more likely to see higher traffic volume, engagement, and social shares if they give your readers exactly what they want.

6. Create newsletter archives

By creating and sending newsletters, you have already done the hard work.

Why not create archives for those newsletters and publish them on your website at the end of each month?

This method has two benefits:

• First, your website visitors will see what your subscribers get. It will encourage them to subscribe to your email list.
• Second, Google will start ranking that content in the SERPS (more SEO juice). However, don’t include to forget the canonical tag to help Google identify the links to the original blog posts.

Conclusion

By combining email marketing and SEO, you can improve your overall marketing strategy, make it more effective, and achieve your marketing goals more efficiently.

If you have any questions, let us know.

The post How to combine email marketing and SEO appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

It does not matter whether you have a business blog, an e-commerce store, or an online marketing business. A well-targeted email list is definitely one of your biggest online assets.

According to a recent study, email marketing has the best return on investment (ROI). For every $1 spent, email marketing produces $40 in revenues — making it a significantly better investment than PPC, or social media marketing.

But are you satisfied with the number of email opt-ins you receive from your website?

Don’t worry if the answer is no. It is a very common issue with most websites and blogs. They don’t have a very good conversion rate when it comes to email subscribers.

In this post, we discuss a few tips and tricks that will help you increase email opt-in conversion rates.

1. Make It Your #1 Priority

Every website has a goal.

If you want to generate leads and increase email subscribers from your website, that should be the #1 goal of your website.

Is it, though?

If not, it might be time to make some tough decisions and revamp your website design and content marketing strategy.

For example, Paul Jarvis is a blogger who always had a very simple goal, i.e., to get as many targeted email subscribers as possible.

He designed his entire content marketing plan and website to help him fulfill his goal. Here is an image of his website.

As you can see, his website encourages visitors to do only one thing, which is to subscribe to his email list.

He even removed the comment section on his blog to increase his email subscribers, and it worked. As of this writing, he already has 16,000+ highly targeted email subscribers. And in the past year, he generated $200,000 from the same email list.

2. Content Upgrades

Giving away content upgrades for free has now become an effective technique to increase the email list. Many professional bloggers, such as Brian Dean, Neil Patel, Noah Kagan, etc. are consistently using this strategy.

Here is an example.

3. Leverage the Homepage

The homepage of a website is rarely optimised for lead-generation. However, with a few little tricks, you can easily optimise it and make it more compliant for email lead generation.

One of those little tricks to have a welcome mat on the homepage of your website. This welcome mat should have the sole purpose of encouraging visitors to subscribe to your email list.

Derek Halpern uses an excellently designed welcome mat on his website.

See the following image:

Videofruit got inspired by this idea and came up with a variation of it. Here is what they created:

This welcome mat got them 223 email subscribers in just one month with a conversion rate of 14.89%.

4. Exit-Intent Technology

Pop-ups are often annoying — especially if you don’t pay much attention to how they operate.

However, the exit-intent pop-up technology has made it significantly easier to show opt-in popups without being annoying. Even the most successful websites are using these exit-intent popups without much hesitation — because it works without annoying the website visitors.

There are many tools available that allow this exit-intent technology. Two of the most commonly used tools are:

• Thrive Leads
• OptinMonster

However, both of them are paid tools and require a bit of money to invest on your part.

On the other hand, if you have a tight budget, consider using SumoMe. It is a set of various little tools that help you generate more email subscribers from your website.

SumoMe is based on a freemium model. You can use the apps for free — with limited features. But for most blogs and online businesses, the free model is more than enough.

Bryan Harris used SumoMe’s List Builder (which works on the exit-intent popup technology.

With this one, little free addition to its website’s armoury, Bryan managed to increase his email opt-in conversion rate by 5.52%.

Conclusion

If email lead generation is one of your primary goals, I’m sure these techniques will help you.

But one thing is for sure.

You will have to pay a lot of attention to it. Without focusing on lead generation as your website’s primary goal, it would be very hard to increase the conversion rate.

The post How to Increase Your Email Opt-in Conversion Rates appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.

However, if you do not have an email list, it is highly recommended to start building one right now. Email marketing is arguably the most productive and profitable online marketing methods. Email marketing offers the best return on investment (ROI) of 40:1. It means that, on average, for every £1 spent you get a profit of approximately £40.

There really is no reason not to have an email list.

But sometimes, even when you do have an email list, things do not work out as you’d thought they would.

There may be several reasons why your email list isn’t that profitable, but the lack of proper email segmentation is often one of the biggest reasons.

In this post, we are going to learn several important things about email segmentation and how it can improve your click through rate (CTR), conversions and sales.

What is Email Segmentation?

Let’s start from the top.

What is email segmentation?

Simply put, it is a process of “segmenting” or dividing your list into different categories. Once you do that, you can then customise your emails to perfectly suit those different segments or group of recipients. When an email is customised on an individual level, it has a better chance of performing well and increasing CTRs and conversions.

Now that you are aware of the basic concept and definition of email segmentation, let’s take a look at some of the important tips and tricks that can help you achieve significantly better conversion rates.

1. Segment by Geographical Areas

It does not matter how big or small your email list is, you can always segment it by geographical areas.

This is an important tip because different countries have different cultures, economic strength, and buying patterns. By closely following those patterns and particular characteristics, you can improve CTRs and conversions.

Moreover, another great idea is to send emails to people in different time zones at their own appropriate time. If you time your email correctly, it can achieve a better open-rate.

2. Segment by Purchase History

Most businesses design at least two different types of promotional emails.

One of the emails is usually for the potential leads you have. It introduces you, your business, and some of the products you have.

The second email, however, is usually designed for your existing customers. These are the people who have already bought from you. Unlike the 1st email, this one does not introduce you or your business. Instead, it focuses more on the related items, accessories, special discounts for your existing customers, etc.

The idea is to segment your email list by purchase history and send the first, introductory email to potential leads and the second email to your existing customers.

None of your existing customer would appreciate receiving an introductory email and vice versa. However, by properly segmenting your email list by purchase history, you can easily make your emails more targeted.

3. Segmentation by “Abandoned Carts”

Do you know that approximately 88% of buyers abandon a shopping cart every year?

This is a common phenomenon and by email list segmentation, you can overcome this problem.

You see, there are two major reasons why those 88% people abandon a shopping cart:

• 1. The cost was too high, or
• 2. The timing wasn’t right and they weren’t prepared to purchase.

If you could identify those people and either send them an email on a different time (hoping this time would be right) or offer them a good discount on shipping or a free-delivery package, you may get them to finally purchase from you.

But it’s only possible if you have them properly segmented.

In Conclusion

It may seem hard work, but email segmentation definitely has its rewards. The difference between a properly segmented list and a non-segmented list is massive.

For instance, according to MailChimp, segmented lists resulted in a 90.7% better click-through rate (CTR) than non-segmented lists.

As you can see, the difference is huge and you should avail the benefits email segmentation has to offer. The tips that are mentioned in this post will definitely help. Just make sure to follow them.

The post How to do Email Segmentation and Get Better Conversions and Sales appeared first on Improve My Search Ranking.