How Our Cannabis Client Grew 2000% in One Year Through SEO & UI/UX

It’s no secret that the cannabis and CBD industry has been growing at light speed for the last couple of years. Both cannabis and CBD are mainstream where every day people are talking about the health benefits and are curious about learning more about them.

In fact, the cannabis industry is projected to hit $66.3 billion by 2025 and the CBD industry is growing to all new heights as well. The CBD industry is expected to reach $22 billion by 2022.

With those times of numbers with a big fat “B” behind them, you know there are a lot of people trying to rush into a goldmine and make a huge profit.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how our client, 3Win Corp, decided to skip the gold and sell shovels to all the gold miners like back in the 1800s during the gold rush.

Who is 3Win Corp?

3Win Corp is a wholesale CCELL® distributor, in 29 states in the US and 5 foreign countries. The company originated in 2015, growing from 6 employees to 38 employees within the last 12 months, with over 50 in 2019.

Their main clients are dispensaries, research labs, and extraction facilities. 3Win Corp is one of only four distributors worldwide that can sell and distribute CCELL® products, known for being the industry standard.

 

Selling Shovels in the Gold Cannabis Rush

Ever since the cannabis boom, everyone is trying to get in somehow. The majority of business owners and investors try to break into the industry by owning dispensaries, growing cannabis, or launching cannabis products.

Not 3Win Corp. They noticed a need in the market. Marijuana and CBD aren’t going anywhere and they knew that. Instead of offering the actual product itself, they offer the highest-quality accessories.

3Win Corp offers CCELL® products that are known for being the industry standard in vape technology. The vaping market is estimated to reach almost 55 million adults who vape by 2021. That’s a lot of people who need high-quality products to go with their marijuana and CBD products.

The Cannabis Market is Cut-throat Competitive

In 2018 alone, the cannabis industry had over $10 billion in investments that went towards marketing, advertising, and R&D. Some might think that the marijuana industry is a bunch of “hipsters” or people that just like to smoke pot. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone is wanting a piece of this pie.

With that said, it has gotten more and more difficult to grow your cannabis brand over the years. Major investors and funding have got involved, which has made the playing field a bit unfair unless you have some massive firepower behind you.

This is one thing that 3Win Corp has ran into as the majority of its competitors are doing over $100 million per year in revenue and have major funding. They knew that they had to put forth more marketing firepower to saturate the market. They’ve since done just that but first, we’ll go into what they were dealing with.

Poor UI/UX/CX – Lack of Clarity and Consistency

3Win Corp was experiencing slower growth and loss of revenue. They had a website, but it wasn’t converting. Call-to-actions on the site were poorly displayed, and the customer experience was lacking – the site was not leading to an increase in sales. 

The site did not highlight 3Win Corp’s phenomenal product offerings and capabilities. This made it nearly impossible to close deals unless they were in person, resulting in high costs for travel and print collateral. The sales team was frustrated with the sales process, and customers were frustrated with the lack of clarity and accessibility of 3Win Corp’s product offering.

Poor Search Engine Visibility

3Win Corp had little no SEO work done prior to working with Avintiv Media. With how many laws and regulations hinder how the cannabis and CBD industries advertise their brand, SEO and content creation have become the most important tactic in growing these types of brands.

3Win Corp was resting close to the 26th page of Google for every keyword that they wanted to rank for, which put them very far behind their competition.

Extremely Slow Load Times

3Win Corp had a landing page with not much usability or functionality. The older website experienced extremely slow load times which made it harder to grow the business. Due to slow load times, visitors would leave before engaging with the site leading to little to no conversions. 

Slow load times were hurting 3Win’s Google rankings and increased bounce rates exponentially. Google now expects every website that wants to rank to have their website built properly with an amazing customer experience.

Over 47% of users expect a website page to load in two seconds or less. Even worse, over 40% of users won’t wait more than three seconds before leaving the site. Everything is customer-centric and to win in a competitive market, you must focus on the customer and not the competition.

The Solution – How 3Win Corp Grew 2000% in 2018

Custom UI/UX Design and Development

3Win Corp knew they needed a higher converting website and reached out to a couple of agencies, but the others didn’t play the part of what they were looking for. 3Win Corp stated, “When we reached out to Avintiv Media, we knew it was a no brainer with how professional you guys are and the experience you gave.”

3Win Corp, Web Design, Web Development, Award winning web developers, cannabis website, CBD website, Avintiv Media, UI/UX

What Avintiv Media Created:

  • Custom UI/UX Design & Development
  • Customer experience-centric UI/UX
  • Brand awareness and consistency built into the user interface and experience
  • Mobile-first and device responsive design
  • Conversion focused on engaging CTA’s built with clarity and consistency
  • Easy navigability, mobile-friendly and clean functionality
  • Built each page with on-page SEO enhancements
  • Website currently gets over a 92% rating with Google

“We get so many compliments on our website and brand, which gives more confidence to the employees and people that work with 3Win Corp.”

SEO Strategy and Implementation

We implemented SEO initiatives, strategies and campaigns focused on Google algorithms and visibility growth. 3Win Corp’s competition has invested heavily in SEO so there was a lot of catching up to do.

3Win Corp, SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, Cannabis SEO, CBD SEO, marijuana SEO, digital marketing, Avintiv Media

What Avintiv Media created:

  • Competitive research & strategy
  • 12 month SEO campaign
  • Rebuilt Google Analytics with campaigns and goals
  • Completed National keyword research
  • Completed over 300 On-Page SEO enhancements
  • Completed over 200 Off-Page SEO enhancements
  • Had a campaign strategy of 50+ primary keywords
  • Had a campaign strategy of 30+ secondary keywords

What Were the Results?

3Win Corp now has a convertible website and ranks on page 1 of Google for many of their targeted keywords. 

3Win has experienced consistent growth and the ability to build out entirely new teams for customer service as a result of steady traffic flow and lead generation. 

3Win Corp has experienced 8x growth in hiring employees since our campaign launch. In 2018, they increased 35% in sales, getting 8+ new leads per day, and their website traffic has gone up 2,000%.

As you can see, 3Win Corp experienced crazy amounts of growth in 2018. We can’t wait to share what we’re up to for 2019-2020 as it’s MUCH BIGGER!

If you’d like to see how Avintiv Media can help your brand become an industry dominator, reach out to us.

The 3 Biggest SEO Trends for 2019

Seems like you can’t leave your computer to see how dinner’s coming along without Google pushing out a new algorithm.  Just this year, for example, we had 2 big core updates.  Before that, we had Pirate, Pigeon, Panda, and Hummingbird among a long list of others.  That makes it hard for even the most seasoned of SEO pro’s—and for newbies, it’s like running through a minefield.

Above all, site developers need to know what’s new, and what’s going to impact how their companies appear in search results.  To simplify matters (if only a little), here are 3 of the biggest SEO trends for 2019:

1.  THE RAPID RISE OF VOICE SEARCH

“OK, Google.”  You hear it more and more these days.  The preeminence of voice search is rapidly changing the way people get information from the search engine, and that means site developers need to change the way they respond.

As Forbes notes, “The number of people who use voice assistants is actually growing year by year, at a very rapid rate; for example, 35.6 million Americans use a voice-activated device at least once a month, and one in six Americans now own smart speakers.  While it’s true that the world of search engines and SEO is constantly changing and evolving, the increase in voice search usage is one of the biggest changes yet. That’s because it’s something completely different and it requires a completely different optimization strategy.”

What does this mean for your SEO strategy?  Well, to begin, it means delivering content that conforms to the more natural language queries typical of voice search.  And it means providing more concise responses—the average voice search response is delivered in just 29 words.

2.  MOBILE-FIRST INDEXING:  SPEED COUNTS

It’s only been a year since Google announced that 60% of all searches were now on mobile devices—and quickly followed that announcement by rolling out its mobile-first algorithm—but it’s already having an impact on search results.  For one thing, sites that aren’t fully responsive will soon feel the sting, moving closer to the back of the pack (if they haven’t already). For another, it means that load time is more important than ever.

Said differently, Google is clearly convinced that speed is among the most important factor in mobile searches and mobile user experience.  Add to that nugget the fact that (according to Big Commerce) a delay of just one second in page load time cuts conversions by 7% and page views by 11% (do the math:  for a store that makes $50,000 a day, that’s about $1 million in lost sales per year), and it’s clear site developers will be doing everything possible to speed up mobile site load times.

3.  BLOCKCHAIN TECH MEETS SEO

When you hear “blockchain,” you probably think Bitcoin and cryptocurrency in general—but understanding blockchain technology is also increasingly important for SEO.  That’s because Blockchain can verify that users are who they say they are in online transactions with 100% accuracy. 

Augmenting their sites with a ramped-up ability to record the identities of site visitors—or spot which visitors have added value to key content—is something that’s grabbing the attention of search engines and site developers alike.  It’s one of the reasons, for example, Microsoft among other industry giants is already working with blockchain identity systems (like Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys) to enhance its apps and services.

CONCLUSION

Admittedly, search engine optimization is not for the faint of heart.  It can be both confusing and frustrating, even for those relatively well versed in its nuances—and the stakes couldn’t be higher.  If you don’t have the in-house talent to keep pace with the rapid change and need for immediate response inherent in the SEO universe, your best bet is to partner with SEO experts who can give you the advice and guidance you need to stay at the front of the pack.

To learn more about the ways we can take your SEO and digital marketing to the next level, contact us.  Better still, get your free SEO audit today.

How to Start and Market Your CBD Brand

With the boom of the cannabis industry over the last couple of years, it’s no surprise that an easier go-to-market solution has emerged and is BOOMING. Cannabidiol (CBD) is the new craze and everyone wants in. Even if you already own a CBD brand, keep reading to learn how to start and market your CBD brand correctly.

Starting and marketing your CBD brand is not as easy of a task as it was two to three years ago. The market is extremely saturated and there are some extremely big players in the game now with unlimited funding. CBD is officially mainstream in the entrepreneur and investor world, which makes everyone want to join the bandwagon.

We’ve been waiting for our 80yr old grandparents to give us a call saying how they are launching a CBD brand. All jokes aside, it seems like everyone is wanting a piece of the pie. How big is the CBD pie?

What is CBD?

Before we dive into how big the CBD market is, we want those of you that don’t know what CBD is. 

CBD is short for Cannabidiol. CBD is one of over 100 known compounds found in the cannabis Sativa plant. This compound is found in both THC-rich strains of marijuana and also hemp. These plants are both classified as cannabis but the difference is that hemp produces only small amounts of THC, which are less than 0.3%. The compound carries much higher amounts as CBD, which is non-psychoactive eliminating the “high” feeling that THC has.

How Big is the CBD Industry?

Before we dive into how to start and market your CBD brand, you need to know how big the industry as a whole is. 

Brightfield states that the market for hemp-derived CBD products was around $591 million for 2018, and speculated to grow to $22-23 billion by 2022. Yes, that is a B for billion!

Below is a chart of the industry’s growth and future sales forecasting.

• 2014 – $108 million industry

• 2017 – $190 million industry

• 2018 – $591 million industry

• 2022 – $22 billion industry

CBD, CBD Growth, CBD Market, CBD Industry, Grow CBD Brand

Is CBD Legal?

Everyone wants to know, “Is CBD legal?” If you’re growing industrial hemp with the sole purpose of extracting high-quality CBD, that sole purpose is currently backed by the federal government. In December 2018, the 2018 farm bill was enacted. Among many of its other provisions, it removed hemp (not cannabis) from the list of prohibited substances. Hemp is now a legal agricultural commodity, and so are the products made from it. 

Some individual states have taken a much different stance on this and have chosen to ban CBD products which is key for anyone who has an eCommerce CBD store. You can always see which states CBD is legal.

CBD is still available to purchase and consume across the majority of the United States and in most places products still appear to be available, although some cities have banned the sale of food containing CBD. “CBD cannot be lawfully added to food or be labeled a dietary supplement,” was stated by the FDA with their public hearing on May 31st, 2019.

How much THC can your CBD have to be Legal?

Hemp and certain forms of CBD are federally legal, but you need to understand what aspects to look for when purchasing a CBD product. Many CBD brands that start decide to work with white-label CBD manufacturers because they don’t have the necessary capital to go to some of the larger manufacturing companies. Do your homework before deciding to work with a white-label manufacturer.

For CBD to be considered legal, the industrial hemp must contain .03% or less of THC. Any more and the plant is classified as marijuana and has many different laws that will drastically affect you and your customers.

There is still much confusion between CBD vs THC, which leaves a lot of questions for the general public. Federal agencies have started enforcing 0.3% or less THC policy much harder, which will keep the public much more well informed and safe.

Start Your CBD Brand

After reading the above information, you now realize how much work you have in front of you. At Avintiv, we are very data and research-driven. Everything we’ve done with building and scaling over 200 successful brands, starts with research and strategy.

This information will help new start-up CBD brands and CBD brands that have hit a plateau. We highly recommend building a brief business plan or investor pitch deck that you can use as a roadmap towards success. 

 

CBD Business Plan

Writing a business plan is a good idea even if you never plan on getting a loan from a bank or bringing on investors. You are able to use this business plan as a road map and allows you to benchmark your progress to see how on or off track you are. We won’t go over all aspects of a business plan today. We will point out the key factors to focus on.

Market Analysis – The market analysis will give you a break down of the CBD market, what segments there are, and what type of consumers your company will be marketing to.

Competitive Analysis – You must research and present a clear comparison of your business to your direct and indirect competitors. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses between your business and the competition.

Products and Services – What type of CBD products will your brand carry? Are you launching CBD oil, edibles, topicals, cosmetics or vapes? What will differentiate you from the competition?

Marketing Plan – Your marketing budget must clearly explain how you’re going to reach your ideal customers to hit your sales forecasts. You must clearly define how it’s going to be done and what your marketing budget is.

Sales Strategy – This portion of your business plan explains how you’re going to be selling your CBD. Are you only selling on your eCommerce website or do you have national CBD wholesalers or retail accounts?

Funding – From personal experience, Avintiv Media is currently growing many CBD brands, and the average monthly marketing budget is $10,000 – $20,000. You need to list out how you are going to fund your CBD brand. Whether that’s personal cash infusion by the owner or going for funding.

Sales Forecasts – You must create a realistic sales benchmark of what your business can do in sales over the next 3-5 years. Break the first year down to monthly sales goals and then do years 2-5 by year. This will help you determine if you’re on or off track from your goals.

 

Grow and Market Your CBD Brand

Growing your CBD brand in 2019-2020 is going to be much harder than it was years ago. The market is flooded with new CBD brands every single day, so what is going to set you apart from the competition? We’re going to go over how we’ve been able to grow our CBD clients.

Branding for Your CBD Brand 

Branding is and will be one of the most important aspects of your CBD brand. This part is often overlooked as many business owners want to rush to market. They care more about Instagram, influencer marketing, and getting sales. Don’t fall victim to this or you won’t stand a chance with how competitive the CBD market is right now.

 

Company Naming

A lot of business owners pick a company name that they like for some reason and it never becomes a massive company because the owner was thinking about themselves versus the customer. When picking a company name, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Can I build a $100 million brand with this type of name?
  2. Will customers know exactly what we do when they hear the name?
  3. Does this name clash or interfere with any other CBD brand? (hire a lawyer for this)
  4. Is this a name that our company can build a community or tribe of customers around?

Logo and Brand Styleguide

Developing a logo and brand style guide is much more in-depth as this but for this article’s purposes, we are going to go in order with how our creative team decides on branding direction for our CBD clients.

  1. What is this brand’s ideal target market (customers)?
  2. What type of color scheme is this market used to?
  3. What are other major brands these customers buy from?
  4. What does our brand want to look like? Create a storyboard of brands, colors, and styles your company represents.
  5. What does our brand not want to look like? Create a storyboard of brands, colors, and styles that your company doesn’t want to represent.
  6. Hire an agency or freelancer to help begin the logo sketch phase
  7. Have them finalize 3 variations of logos to choose from (black and white – no color)
  8. Choose the top logo direction
  9. The agency or freelancer will then take your market research and decide on the 3 top color schemes to go with
  10. They will then present your main logo in 3 different color options to go with
  11. Once that is completed, the agency or freelancer should create your brand style guide so everything you do moving forward matches your branding 100%

You can even see how our creative team did a full rebranding for Avintiv Media and what went into the process.

CBD Product Design & Packaging

We won’t go into detail on how to develop your CBD product design or packaging as there are far too many steps to list in this article. Just know that this is by far one of the most important aspects of where your money should be going. If you want to win in the CBD game, it’s going to be the companies that products look better, feel better, and gives the customer a far greater experience.

Here are some examples of recent products we’ve designed in the CBD market.

CBD Branding, CBD Marketing, Goat Grass CBD, Product Design, Packaging, Branding, Avintiv Media

Marketing Your CBD Brand

SEO

Anyone who’s been in the Cannabis or CBD industry knows the trouble everyone has run into with properly being able to advertise or market their brand. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is by far going to be one of the best investments you can make for your marketing plan.

You will want to have an agency that are experts at SEO as the CBD market is a completely different ball game when it comes to SEO versus many other industries.

Things you’ll want to add into your SEO campaign

Read more to find out How much should SEO cost?

Content

Just like SEO, content creation for the CBD industry is extremely important. For one, not everyone knows what CBD is just yet and people are wanting to learn more about CBD before investing in it.

Writing content around your ideal customers and your keywords that were chosen from your SEO strategy will help you choose what articles to write.

If you’re a CBD brand, you should be launching 2-4 blogs per week of at least 750 words. Below are things to make sure you do:

  1. Install Yoast SEO for WordPress
  2. Make sure your blog has an A+ readability score
  3. Add in your keywords throughout the blog
  4. Carefully choose what your Meta Title should be
  5. Carefully choose what your Meta Description should be
  6. Make sure your slug is done correctly 
  7. Make sure you internally link 2-4 times throughout your blog
  8. Make sure you link external sites 1-2 times throughout your blog

Social Media

Social media has been the craze over the last 5-10 years but it has gotten extremely pricey to play on the advertising end of social media. For today’s purposes, we’re going to focus on posting organically on Instagram with 0 paid ads.

Tips for social media content:

  1. Thinking of your ideal customers, decide on what types of pictures or posts they will want to see
  2. Think of the verbiage or messaging your ideal customers will want to see
  3. Create a grid mockup over posts that all flow well with each other from an aesthetic standpoint (See below)
  4. Use a social media scheduler like Hootsuite to preschedule all of your future posts
  5. Make sure to engage with everyone that DM’s you or comments on your posts

Example of Instagram Grid that we did for our client, Goat Grass CBD.

Goat Grass CBD, Instagram Marketing, CBD Marketing, Instagram Grid, Instagram CBD, Avintiv Media

Advertising

As Facebook and Google start to loosen up with CBD advertising, there are still other ways to advertise your CBD brand.

A number of our CBD clients hire Avintiv to run retargeting ads for their online CBD stores. Below is just one of the options that’s available to advertise for the CBD industry.

Avintiv has access to a private display network that uses artificial intelligence to

aggressively optimize for click-through rate and conversion using a number of different

data signals that generate excellent results. On average our CTRs range from 1-3%

and up to as high as 8% (No this is not a typo). We offer this in the form of standard

display advertising, site retargeting or a blend depending on how much traffic the site

has.

We can run as many creatives as you like and can track conversions from the campaign as well.

This is helpful for tracking ROI.

Below are some examples of display advertising creatives that we’ve created.

CBD Branding, CBD Marketing, Goat Grass CBD, Retargeting Ads, Branding, Advertising, CBD Avintiv Media

CBD Branding, CBD Marketing, Goat Grass CBD, Retargeting Ads, Branding, Advertising, CBD Avintiv Media

In Conclusion

As you’ve read through our article, we hope you’ve learned how to start and grow your CBD. As you can see, there is a lot of information that you need to know before launching and growing your CBD brand. The days of quickly getting to market and making a million dollars are long gone.

If you’re interested in seeing how Avintiv Media can assist you with growth, feel free to reach out to us on our contact page.

How Much Should SEO Cost?

Page one ranking guaranteed! SEO services starting at $500 per month! We’ll optimize your site in 24 hours! If these taglines remind you of cut-rate used car dealerships or late night weight loss infomercials, you have good instincts. You need to cut through the BS and really ask yourself, “how much should SEO cost?”

While you can absolutely compare “before” and “after” SEO results, there is no magic pill to boost your website rankings. Effective optimization is a customized, multi-phase process, and honest SEO cost estimates reflect reality-based strategies.

Keep that in mind as you read on. 

There’s no cookie-cutter template for determining the cost of SEO, but when you’re shopping for a search engine optimization firm, these are the points to keep in mind when you’re accepting proposals: 

Important Factors That Positively Impact SEO

1. Website architecture

Search engine optimization begins with responsive, fast-loading websites and user-friendly navigation. Outdated servers, media-heavy sites, and cumbersome coding aren’t as easy to remedy when a site has hundreds of product pages or content assets. Clients in a position to take advantage of our free SEO audits are often ready for a top-down website overhaul, though our comprehensive analytics often reveal opportunities to streamline existing properties until our clients are ready to invest in a redesign. 

2. Management practices and preferences

Prior site management factors into pricing. We encounter more than a few clients who have assigned their digital marketing managers with the task of in-house updates and SEO management. Digital marketing and content managers are experts in their own field and often rely on the elementary and often incorrect advice of popular SEO “gurus”.

We respect the desire to manage websites in-house—for some businesses, it’s a necessity. If that sounds like you, you’ll want an SEO firm prepared to help you establish SEO best practices for continuity and performance, with scheduled audits and evaluations for course corrections. 

3. Relevant keyword research

Who’s your intended audience, and how will your SEO strategy predict their query habits? Is your brand competing for high-volume keywords, or targeting a local niche? Do your keywords attract qualified leads or traffic that will increase your bounce rate? 

Dynamic keyword research, integration, and reporting demands time, skill, and intimate knowledge of the customer’s audience and goals. SEO is less about competing for high-value keywords than it is about understanding your user’s search intent. That requires your SEO team to understand your market as well as you do.

4. Technical page optimization

Do your page titles, URLs, and schema send the right signals to search engines? Can search engine crawlers understand each page’s purpose when the on-page content is limited to alt text? After all, crawlers can’t “see” images or videos so metadata and page descriptions must advocate for your page’s value and relevance.

Snippet-savvy site descriptions help Google decide that your content aligns with user queries, and URLs and titles containing your prime keywords induce a better click-through rate. Your SEO consultant should identify and test technical page optimization techniques not just for SERP placement, but for traffic quality and conversion rates. 

5. User-valued, optimized content

It’s true: Quality content reinforces your brand’s legitimate use of keywords. But more important, content that’s useful to your audience keeps them engaged and draws them through the sales funnel. Longer dwell times improve SEO, as does content your audience shares on social media or their own sites. Blogs, infographics, and video generate legitimate, quality backlinks while elevating your brand as an industry authority. 

Content isn’t about stuffing keywords. We believe quality transcends quantity, and we connect our clients with creators who adapt to your brand character, speak to your buyer persona, and write with the skill and knowledge you’d be proud to present as your own. 

6. Backlinks and off-site authority 

How often is your brand referenced by other authoritative sources? On-site content generates backlinks, but we can help you identify and use off-site opportunities to generate domain and brand authority. Engage your audience on third-party review sites, update your Google My Business posts, and exchange guest posts with strategic partners and high-profile industry bloggers. Genuine, organic backlink acquisition takes time and effort, but it scores higher with search engines than do purchased backlinks or other “black hat” cheats. 

7. SEO analytics, reporting, and interpretation

Any SEO—or do-it-yourself site operator—can generate traffic and conversion reports. There are excellent keyword research tools available to anyone willing to pay the subscription costs. Even free plug-ins can provide useful insight into SEO success, but context is key. Your SEO success isn’t measured by charts and graphs alone. SEO strategies include A/B testing, industry-specific conversion experiments, and benchmarks set to monitor visitor behavior during cross-channel campaigns. 

Who you are and what you do influences your SEO strategy

We at Avintiv Media service clients in a variety of industries, tailoring our services accordingly. Our approach for optimizing a regional luxury auto dealership website will barely resemble our recommendations for a national organic skincare line, and both would very much differ from an eCommerce CBD brand. Site structure, content, keywords, and local SEO emphasis all differ among the three, as do customer intent and behavior. 

Think of us as your strategic partners. Like you, we’re not cheap; we’re experts in our field delivering measurable results. Quotes for our average cost of SEO reflect our dedication to your business’ growth and market agility, and we encourage you to regard the cost of SEO in terms of value rather than price. Contact us for a FREE SEO audit

Once we know more about you and where you stand, we can tailor your SEO roadmap to help you achieve your goals. See how our Cannabis/CBD client grew 2000% in under a year or how our Supplement eCommerce client increased organic traffic by 600%.

6 Reasons Why You Should Invest in SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the core of digital marketing. Still, the question is asked, “Why should you invest in SEO?” Over 93% of online experiences are happening every day due to search. More and more brand experiences begin with a simple query through search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

By not optimizing for search engines, you will lose relevant traffic from over two trillion searches launched every year on Google alone. To help, we’ve offered six ways to assist you in deciding if you need to invest in SEO.

6 Reasons for Deciding to Invest in SEO

Remember that keyword searches are about focused, intent-driven browsing. Your content should be clear, comfortable, and just right for the user when you optimize for intents. Likewise, considering an investment in search engine optimization forces you to consider all elements of your investment strategy. Here are six reasons to get started.

1. You need to save on advertising

Many businesses devote much of their marketing budget to advertising, but those dollars may be more sustainable when invested in SEO. If you need to save money on advertising, try allocating resources to SEO instead to increase your visibility. An increase in visibility will translate into more customers.

2. You need to increase conversions and lower bounce rates

I’m sure you’ve run into your fair share of aggressive ad campaigns that don’t bring you that laser-focused target customer that you had hoped for. Organic traffic from SEO brings in much higher quality traffic than unpredictable ad campaigns. At a much lower cost as well. 

It may be time to invest in contextual, long-tail keywords in your search engine optimization and content creation strategy. As you do so, express yourself in an evergreen, future-proof voice so that all users who find your content experience value in your content.

3. You need more customers

A search result page usually contains under 10 positively-matched links. To make sure Google will place your site in one of these top spots, you may want to invest in helpful, search-optimized content instead of ads and social. Most users will not look beyond these first ten results when choosing a solution, so make sure you’re among the top picks.

4. You need to establish authority, trust, and loyalty

Most searches seek expert, authoritative, and trustworthy information. This is another reason to invest in well-researched, optimized content and use only phrases matching target intents. A good SEO strategy will demand that you create content that increases trust among your target customer and feeds the customer’s journey. 

5. You want to grow your brand

Searchers often seek specific, highly relevant information, so you can increase the discovery and enjoyment of your site by optimizing to answer common queries. SEO can help solidify your brand platform by structuring your copy and taking advantage of query trends, giving you a competitive advantage and a USP. 

Search engine optimization will require you to consider what a user is after when they say [best pizza near me] and structure your content to match. Brands are built on a sound approach to search engine optimization.

6. You need to create relationships and increase your rank

Search engines will better find and rank your content with links from those who found your site useful. Investing in smart SEO strategies for building links can help your content get found by potential advocates and increase its rank.

You’ve now seen 6 examples of reasons that an investment in SEO would make sense for you. If you want happier customers that value your online brand, we recommend you consider launching an SEO campaign.

To play devil’s advocate, we offer two ways for you to evaluate whether now is a good time to invest in SEO or not.

Key Questions to Ask Before Investing in SEO

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Optimized search is about getting the user intent right the first time. It may be keyword-rich, focused, local, and just right for you, but does it delight your users? Search optimization encourages you to push the value envelope and make three considerations.

1. Do I have a budget for an intelligent SEO strategy?

By cutting spending in ad categories and prioritizing your position for top search queries, you may find you have some budget for search engine optimization. But, if your aim is to dominate the niche and top spot, consider giving your budget a much-needed boost. 

2. Will my SEO feature a thoughtful, evergreen strategy?

On the search for the right answer or product for them, users want speed as well as human and helpful information. If your aim is to delight people with value while saving money on ad spend, bounces, and conversions, you should investigate your content with a professional and invest in SEO

3. Do I have fair, measurable expectations of SEO?

If you know you want to make a connection with the problems, and passions that your users suggest with their queries, your next step is to consider if you can accept the positives and negatives of an SEO strategy. If you are able to appreciate that SEO will require smart investment, patience, and careful metrics, this makes it more likely that an SEO investment is the right choice for your business. 

 


If you are saying yes to these two important questions, you may very well be ready to invest in SEO and optimized content. Get a FREE SEO audit from Avintiv Media to learn more.

What is Off-page SEO?

You might have heard of the term “off-page SEO” but what do you actually know about it? After today, you won’t ever have to wonder. Off-page SEO (or off-site SEO) refers to actions that are taken outside of your own website that has an impact on how your website ranks within search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you haven’t started with enhancing your on-page SEO, make sure you start there before diving into your off-page SEO campaign. If you’d like to know the difference between on-page SEO vs of-page SEO, we wrote a blog on that as well.

Off-page SEO is one of the most important aspects of your SEO campaign. There are a lot of variables that come into play when perfecting your off-page SEO campaign. Like anything in life, it comes down to a site’s popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority. You can improve search engine rankings through other reputable places on the internet, such as sites, pages, people, social media, etc.

 

Creating popularity, relevance, trustworthiness, and authority

On-page SEO is doing everything you can to make your site awesome. You have a great looking and functioning mobile-friendly site, you’re writing great content and have a solid site structure. You’re off to a great start.

Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is focused around making your site an authority online so Google search engines rank you higher. 

One great aspect of writing quality content is ranking higher in Google’s search engines. Getting relevant sites to link to your content is going to increase your chances of increasing your ranking. As important higher rankings are, you want to make sure that you’re creating trust and a sense of authority with your visitors.

A great way of building trust with your visitors is with reviews, which can be found off your site. Reviews affect your rankings, which is why you want to make sure you have plenty of 5-star reviews on as many third-party review sites as possible. Popular ones are Facebook, Yelp, and Google.

Before we dive too deep into off-page SEO, let’s go over why it’s a must!

 

Why is off-page SEO Important?

 

Off-page SEO is tremendously valuable as it tells Google and other search engines that your website is more important than others on the web. The majority of any company that knows what they’re doing with SEO will have their on-page SEO fully optimized. Off-page SEO, on the other hand, is much more difficult. Think of it as a tie-breaker for websites so search engines know the best site to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Although we don’t know the lengths of the full algorithm Google uses to rank, Search Engine Ranking Factors study show that off-site SEO related factors likely carry more than 50% of the ranking factor.

 

Links and Off-page SEO

One of the most important aspects of off-page SEO is building backlinks. Google and other search engines use backlinks to indicate the quality of the linked content. A site with many high-value backlinks will usually rank much better than the same site with fewer backlinks. 

There are three main types of links that can be used:

  • Natural links are given without any action being done on the owners part. Once a site has authority, other sites will want to link their content and pages to yours. Example: Entrepreneur.com is writing an article about an entrepreneur and they reference your company in their article backlinking it to your site.
  • Self-created links are created by the site owner when adding backlink from sites like an online directory, forum, blog comments, press release, etc. Just make sure you stay away from black hat SEO techniques.
  • Manual links are acquired through planned link-building initiatives. This can be done through many outlets. One major one is content syndication.

 

Links that have the most value are the ones that Google and other search engines will be ranking the highest. There are quite a few variables that define “value” to Google. Some of those are:

  • The authority of the linking site
  • The relevance of the linking site’s topic to the topic of the site that created the link
  • The “freshness” of the link
  • The number of other links on the linking page
  • The trustworthiness of the linking site

 

Non-link Off-page SEO

Links are by far the most popular term to talk about when discussing off-site SEO, but there’s much more that goes into off-page SEO. Nearly every activity that happens off your website is considered off-site SEO.

Other forms of off-site SEO are:

Social Media

Social media by itself is not essential for ranking high in search engines. It does assist with your rankings and more importantly, allows your visitors and customers to connect with you and your content. Your social media popularity will add to your brand’s credibility and trust factor, more so than your off-page SEO.

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Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, and other various forms of social media, help to get your content out there. This can then lead to other sites wanting to link to your site if you have authority in your space.

NAP Citations

NAP citations are online mentions of your business and the contact information (Name, Address, Phone).

All local businesses should be utilizing local listings. According to Moz, citations are one of the top 10 local off-page ranking factors. This is a great way to get into Google’s “3-pack.”

Brand Mentions

There are linked and unlinked brand mentions, which Google talks about in one of its patents. Google started to notice that many brands get mentioned without ever receiving links. They thought that brands who receive unlinked brand mentions should also be added to Google’s ranking algorithm, just like linked brand mentions would. You’d still want to prefer linked versus unlinked but both are now taken into account for ranking.

A couple of good options for linked brand mentions are:

  • Be on a popular podcast
  • Write guest posts for other sites
  • Launch a blogger outreach campaign
  • Press releases
  • Influencer marketing

Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) is a free business profile from Google and essential to your local SEO strategy. Just creating a Google My Business profile won’t be enough. You will need to continuously optimize your Google My Business profile as it is the most important ranking factor to rank in the Google “3-pack” and the fourth most important factor for regular local organic search results.

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If you’re a local business, this is an absolute must for you.

Reviews

Reviews are an incredibly important factor for ranking in Google’s “3-pack,” as well as ranking for local organic search results. The most positive and genuine reviews you have on your Google My Business profile will not only make you rank higher but add trust and comfort when visitors are researching your business.

Grow Your Business With SEO

If you’d like help auditing how good or bad your off-page SEO is, you can use our FREE SEO Audit resource.