Boost Your Conversions: Transform Your Landing Pages In Just 14 Days via @sejournal, @unbounce

This post was sponsored by Unbounce. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Your landing pages serve as pivotal points for converting visitors into customers. However, too many websites don’t focus on the first impression and lose crucial moments to engage and convert their audience.

Crafting a compelling landing page isn’t just about aesthetics—it’s about strategically guiding your audience towards taking action.

Landing pages must hit it out of the park right away. They must match the interests and expectations of the users, provide a good and valuable experience, and clear next steps.

The following eight strategies can help you improve landing pages and focus on the KPIs that matter to drive performance. The right targeting, approach, and execution convert more visitors into leads and customers.

For a faster pace, implement the strategies below with the help of a 14-day free trial with Unbounce to quickly transform your landing pages and ramp up conversions.

Mameraman/Shutterstock, August 2024

Building an Effective Landing Page: Key Elements and Strategies

1. Set Clear Goals

• Define what you want to achieve with your landing pages: Whether it’s lead generation, sales, or webinar sign-ups, having clear goals will guide your design and content decisions.
• Understand your audience: Tailor the content, design, and offer to the specific needs and preferences of your target audience. Use language that resonates with them and addresses their pain points.
• Segmentation: If possible, segment your audience and create different landing pages for each segment to better address their specific needs.

2. Provide A Clear Value Proposition

• Make the offer front and center: Your landing page should clearly communicate what you offer and why it matters to your audience. Learn how to craft compelling value propositions with insights from Unbounce’s guide on effective messaging.
• Clearly state what your Unique Selling Point (USP) is. Clearly communicate what makes your offer unique and why the visitor should care. Show how you can address any pain points of your audience. Your value proposition should be prominently displayed, usually in the headline and subheadline.
• Benefits over features: Focus on the benefits your product or service provides rather than just listing features. Explain how it solves a problem or fulfills a need for the user.

3. Build Visual Appeal

• Engage your visitors with visually appealing content: Incorporate relevant images or videos that resonate with your target audience. Use professionally designed templates that are suited for your audience. Customize them to match your brand’s aesthetics and messaging.
• Clean layout: Keep the design simple, with a clear visual hierarchy that guides the visitor’s attention toward the CTA. Avoid clutter and unnecessary distractions.
• Mobile-friendly design: Ensure the landing page is mobile-friendly and looks great on all devices. With a significant portion of traffic coming from mobile, responsiveness is crucial.

4. Optimize Load Time

• Fast loading speed: Ensure your landing page loads quickly. A slow page can lead to high bounce rates, especially on mobile devices. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to optimize load times.
• Minimal scripts and heavy elements: Avoid heavy scripts, large images, or unnecessary elements that can slow down the page.
• Responsive design: Ensure your landing page is optimized for all devices. A responsive design enhances user experience, reduces bounce rates, and boosts conversion rates. This includes ensuring that your landing page is optimized for phones, tablets, and all desktop browsers.

5. Write A Compelling Call-To-Action (CTA)

• Guide visitors towards taking the desired action with a clear and prominent CTA button.
• Use language that is compelling and time-sensitive: This adds urgency to your CTA, such as “start, today, now”. Be specific with your CTA and spell out exactly what the value proposition is, like “Start your 14-day free trial today”.
• Consider the design and placement of your CTA: It should be prominently displayed, before the fold so it’s at a person’s eye line when they land on your page. Also, try using contrasting colors to draw attention.

6. Perform A/B Testing for Optimization

• Continuous testing: Regularly A/B test different elements of your landing page, such as headlines, CTAs, images, and forms, to determine what works best. If you’d like more tips on how to conduct effective A/B tests, check out this step-by-step guide.
• Data-driven decisions: Use analytics and user behavior data (e.g., heatmaps, session recordings) to inform your decisions and continuously optimize the landing page.

7. Build Trust And Credibility

• Social proof: Include testimonials, customer reviews, case studies, or trust badges to build credibility. Showcasing well-known clients or partnerships can also enhance trust.
• Transparency: Provide clear information about what visitors can expect after converting (e.g., what happens after they sign up). If applicable, mention any guarantees or refund policies.

8. Ensure Compliance And Security

• GDPR and privacy compliance: If you’re collecting personal data, ensure your landing page complies with GDPR or other relevant privacy laws. Include a clear privacy policy and obtain consent where necessary.
• Secure connection: Use HTTPS to secure data transmission and give visitors confidence that their information is protected.

Creating a high-performing landing page involves thoughtful attention to every detail that impacts user experience and conversion rates. By focusing on a compelling value proposition, a strong and clear CTA, trust-building elements, and ongoing optimization, you can develop a landing page that not only captures attention but also drives meaningful results.

Implementing these best practices will position your brand as a leader in the industry, ensuring that your landing page effectively converts visitors and meets your business goals.

How To Choose the Best Landing Page Provider

When looking to create a landing page we recommend choosing a platform that specializes in landing pages, so you get the best-in-class tool. Ideally, you are looking for a tool that can empower you or your marketers to create and optimize high-converting landing pages quickly and effortlessly without the need for developers or designers. Here are the must-haves from a landing page builder that will elevate your digital marketing strategy:

• Drag-and-drop builder: Look for a landing page provider that offers the option to customize landing pages to align with your brand identity without any coding skills required. This allows you to set up your landing page quickly and efficiently.
• A/B testing: Find a tool that allows you to experiment with variations to find the highest performing designs and content. This, in turn, allows you to increase your conversion rates.
• Templates: You want the choice of access to professionally designed templates tailored to various industries and goals for quick deployment.
• Integration: Choose a tool that offers seamless integration with your marketing tools.
• Tailored content: Find a landing page builder that allows you to create dynamic content based on your audience to build authentic connections and increase conversions.

Unbounce.com, August 2024

Expert Insights: Why Unbounce Is Essential

• Speed and efficiency: With Unbounce’s user-friendly, drag-and-drop interface you can quickly launch landing pages, saving valuable time and resources. This allows you to focus on other critical aspects of your business. (You can also include custom code, if you prefer.)
• Conversion-centric design: Unbounce has 100+ templates designed with conversion principles in mind, ensuring that your landing pages are both attractive and effective.
• A/B testing: Unbounce offers seamless, built-in A/B testing so you can make data-driven optimization decisions with confidence.
• Advanced targeting and personalization: Unbounce offers dynamic text replacement to deliver personalized experiences to your visitors, enhancing their likelihood to convert.
• AI-powered traffic optimization: Unbounce’s Smart Traffic automatically directs visitors to where they’re most likely to convert, based on data from over two billion conversions.
• Seamless integration: With dozens of integrations, including Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce, and thousands more available through Zapier, your worlds can talk to each other at the click of a button.

Free trial: Take advantage of the Unbounce 14-day free trial so you can test out the platform and see how you can transform your visitors’ journey into a positive and higher-converting experience today.

Real Success Stories With Unbounce

Businesses like Going and Webistry have leveraged Unbounce to achieve remarkable results in conversions and customer acquisition. Learn more about their success stories here.

Screenshots from unbounce.com, August 2024

Elevate Your Marketing Game With Unbounce

In the competitive realm of digital marketing, having the right tools is essential. Unbounce equips you with the expertise and resources to build landing pages that deliver results. Take the first step towards maximizing your marketing efforts with Unbounce’s proven solutions. Sign up today for a 14-day free trial and transform your digital presence.

Your journey to higher conversions and business growth starts now. Unbounce’s 14-day free trial offers you a risk-free opportunity to explore the platform and see first-hand how it can benefit your business.

By the end of this trial, you will have created, tested, and optimized landing pages that drive results. You’ll gain valuable insights into your audience’s behavior and preferences, allowing you to make informed decisions, refine your marketing strategies, and increase your ROI

Final Thoughts

In the competitive world of digital marketing, having the right tools can make all the difference. Unbounce gives you the expertise, resources, and insights you need to build high-converting landing pages that propel your business forward. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to elevate your marketing game.

Sign up for the Unbounce 14-day free trial today and take the first step towards unlocking your business potential.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Unbounce. Used with permission.

In-Post Images: Images by Unbounce. Used with permission

Impactful Local SEO At Scale: Delivering Better Results To Clients via @sejournal, @realserps

This post was sponsored by SERPs. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Providing SEO services to businesses with numerous locations can be challenging without a refined process. Multi-location SEO can be a drain on efficiency, impacting your ability to take on bigger projects or more clients.

However, delivering high-quality, Google-compliant SEO at scale doesn’t have to be difficult.

The secret is applying just enough automation where it counts to complement the real human work and knowledge of your agency. One highly effective strategy is leveraging AI for geo-targeted landing page creation – streamlining repetitive tasks and allowing you to do more with fewer resources.

With the right approach, you can achieve impactful local SEO at scale, ensuring better outcomes for your clients and sustainable growth for your business.

Not sure how to start? SERPs offers geo page automation tools and customized support to help you integrate white-hat landing page automation into your local SEO workflows.

This article covers four ways to enhance your multi-location service packages using AI and automation with tools like SERPs.

Build Standard Operating Procedures For Each Local SEO Client

Automation needs guardrails to ensure effective results and compliance with Google’s best practices. White-hat programmatic SEO requires planning, but this upfront work ensures a successful campaign that delivers the ROI your clients are looking for.

The first step is to develop a deep understanding of your client’s brand, ideal customer profiles (ICP), and current content strategy. This research gives you the keywords, emotional hooks, benefits, and features to guide the automation process.

This ensures that the landing pages your automated system creates are effective and also compliant with each brand’s style guide, voice, and marketing messaging.

When you use SERPs’ premium local SEO software, their team of experts will assist you by performing a full review of a domain of your choice. They will help you identify gaps in your clients’ strategy and website, as well as in your current SEO process.

Using this knowledge, you can build an SOP for all your current clients and future onboarding operations. A swift and insightful onboarding process will distinguish your agency from its competitors and set your campaigns up for success.

Use Human Assets To Seed AI Landing Page Creation

Before the algorithms generate new pages, develop high-quality seed content that they can draw from.

This is key to keeping the process white-hat and the outputs high-quality. Your team’s expertise shines during this stage because the better the seed content, the better the results of the campaign.

Think about how automated assets work in Google Ads. The AI tools take existing assets from a website and use them to generate new content to optimize ads. Your process will work similarly. The more you give the algorithms to work with, the better they’ll be able to optimize new pages.

The services SERPs provides are dedicated to helping agencies grow their local SEO programs and MRR.

They provide tools and strategies to streamline the production of geographically targeted landing pages. Your team provides the exceptional creative assets your clients already love you for.

This partnership of creativity and process leverages your expertise and knowledge of your clients to develop effective white-hat automation.

Apply Automated Landing Page Creation Using Consistent SOPs

Once you’ve established guidelines and developed seed content, apply AI tools to create landing pages for each geolocation your client wants to target.

To ensure that the new landing pages follow the necessary guidelines, place specific variables on your seed pages. This directs the AI where to apply variable content and ensures that critical messaging remains consistent across all of the new geo pages.

You maintain control of the quality standards because the AI isn’t creating the bulk of the original content. The purpose of the software is to allow your team to execute necessary optimization tasks automatically.

This is the ideal combination of expert human touch and automated workflow. It improves your capacity to deliver results at scale while also improving outcomes for your clients.

The results speak for themselves. SERPs has a number of testimonials and case studies you can review attesting to the effectiveness of this approach. Combining expertise and automation in this way is safe and efficient. Your customers will love the results, and so will ranking algorithms.

Apply Local Knowledge & Expertise To SEO Content

Different communities have different needs. Ask your clients about particular communities and locations they want to focus on.

High-priority pages will benefit from any insights you can gather about the needs of local customers. In addition to any information your client has, you can use reviews, questions, and local demographics to refine the messaging of individual pages once they’ve been created.

Local knowledge takes landing pages a step further in meeting Google’s quality standards. Identify any priority locations early in the client’s campaign so you can note which landing pages may require an additional touch after creation.

The best use of local SEO automation is in combination with your skills and knowledge as a marketer. Premium service and efficiency with automation don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Providing exceptional local SEO pages at scale while reducing the impact on your team improves both your service offerings and your ROI on those services.

Your Human Insight + AI Automation = Better Services & Bigger Profit Margins

Effective local SEO at scale can be achieved through best practices that prioritize human insight, efficient SOPs, and judicious use of automation.

The best way to think about AI is as a force multiplier to your efficiency. You must start with research, insights, and content created by humans to ensure high-quality outputs and white hat processes.

Then, apply AI to quickly execute landing page creation tasks according to specific variables.

The power of creating exceptional geo-targeted landing pages at scale is in freeing your team to do more of their best work and fewer monotonous tasks.

Deliver optimized local SEO landing pages with high-quality assets and content with SERPs.com. Increase traffic and revenue for your clients with fewer resources and a higher ROI on your services.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by SERP’s. Used with permission.

AI Integration in Marketing: Strategic Insights For SEO & Agency Leaders via @sejournal, @CallRail

This edited extract is from Data Storytelling in Marketing by Caroline Florence ©2024 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.

Storytelling is an integral part of the human experience. People have been communicating observations and data to each other for millen­nia using the same principles of persuasion that are being used today.

However, the means by which we can generate data and insights and tell stories has shifted significantly and will continue to do so, as tech­nology plays an ever-greater role in our ability to collect, process, and find meaning from the wealth of information available.

So, what is the future of data storytelling?

I think we’ve all talked about data being the engine that powers business decision-making. And there’s no escaping the role that AI and data are going to play in the future.

So, I think the more data literate and aware you are, the more informed and evidence-led you can be about our decisions, regardless of what field you are in – because that is the future we’re all working towards and going to embrace, right?

It’s about relevance and being at the forefront of cutting-edge technology.

Sanica Menezes, Head of Customer Analytics, Aviva

The Near Future Scenario

Imagine simply applying a generative AI tool to your marketing data dashboards to create audience-ready copy. The tool creates a clear narrative structure, synthesized from the relevant datasets, with actionable and insightful messages relevant to the target audience.

The tool isn’t just producing vague and generic output with question­able accuracy but is sophisticated enough to help you co-author technically robust and compelling content that integrates a level of human insight.

Writing stories from vast and complex datasets will not only drive efficiency and save time, but free up the human co-author to think more creatively about how they deliver the end story to land the message, gain traction with recommendations and influence decisions and actions.

There is still a clear role for the human to play as co-author, including the quality of the prompts given, expert interpretation, nuance of language, and customization for key audiences.

But the human co-author is no longer bogged down by the complex and time-consuming process of gathering different data sources and analysing data for insights. The human co-author can focus on synthesizing findings to make sense of patterns or trends and perfect their insight, judgement, and communication.

In my conversations with expert contributors, the consensus was that AI would have a significant impact on data storytelling but would never replace the need for human intervention.

This vision for the future of storytelling is (almost) here. Tools like this already exist and are being further improved, enhanced, and rolled out to market as I write this book.

But the reality is that the skills involved in leveraging these tools are no different from the skills needed to currently build, create, and deliver great data stories. If anything, the risks involved in not having human co-authors means acquiring the skills covered in this book become even more valuable.

In the AI storytelling exercise WINconducted, the tool came up with “80 per cent of people are healthy” as its key point. Well, it’s just not an interesting fact.

Whereas the humans looking at the same data were able to see a trend of increasing stress, which is far more interesting as a story. AI could analyse the data in seconds, but my feeling is that it needs a lot of really good prompting in order for it to seriously help with the storytelling bit.

I’m much more positive about it being able to create 100 slides for me from the data and that may make it easier for me to pick out what the story is.

Richard Colwell, CEO, Red C Research & Marketing Group

We did a recent experiment with the Inspirient AI platform taking a big, big, big dataset, and in three minutes, it was able to produce 1,000 slides with decent titles and design.

Then you can ask it a question about anything, and it can produce 110 slides, 30 slides, whatever you want. So, there is no reason why people should be wasting time on the data in that way.

AI is going to make a massive difference – and then we bring in the human skill which is contextualization, storytelling, thinking about the impact and the relevance to the strategy and all that stuff the computer is never going to be able to do.

Lucy Davison, Founder And CEO, Keen As Mustard Marketing

Other Innovations Impacting On Data Storytelling

Besides AI, there are a number of other key trends that are likely to have an impact on our approach to data storytelling in the future:

Synthetic Data

Synthetic data is data that has been created artificially through computer simulation to take the place of real-world data. Whilst already used in many data models to supplement real-world data or when real-world data is not available, the incidence of synthetic data is likely to grow in the near future.

According to Gartner (2023), by 2024, 60 per cent of the data used in training AI models will be synthetically generated.

Speaking in Marketing Week (2023), Mark Ritson cites around 90 per cent accuracy for AI-derived consumer data, when triangulated with data generated from primary human sources, in academic studies to date.

This means that it has a huge potential to help create data stories to inform strategies and plans.

Virtual And Augmented Reality

Virtual and augmented reality will enable us to generate more immersive and interactive experiences as part of our data storytelling. Audiences will be able to step into the story world, interact with the data, and influence the narrative outcomes.

This technology is already being used in the world of entertainment to blur the lines between traditional linear television and interactive video games, creating a new form of content consumption.

Within data storytelling we can easily imagine a world with simulated customer conversations, whilst navigating the website or retail environment.

Instead of static visualizations and charts showing data, the audience will be able to overlay data onto their physical environment and embed data from different sources accessed at the touch of a button.

Transmedia Storytelling

Transmedia storytelling will continue to evolve, with narratives spanning multiple platforms and media. Data storytellers will be expected to create interconnected storylines across different media and channels, enabling audiences to engage with the data story in different ways.

We are already seeing these tools being used in data journalism where embedded audio and video, on-the-ground eyewitness content, live-data feeds, data visualization and photography sit alongside more traditional editorial commentary and narrative storytelling.

For a great example of this in practice, look at the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Snow fall: The avalanche at Tunnel Creek (Branch, 2012)” that changed the way The New York Times approached data storytelling.

In the marketing world, some teams are already investing in high-end knowledge share portals or embedding tools alongside their intranet and internet to bring multiple media together in one place to tell the data story.

User-Generated Content

User-generated content will also have a greater influence on data storytelling. With the rise of social media and online communities, audiences will actively participate in creating and sharing stories.

Platforms will emerge that enable collaboration between storytellers and audiences, allowing for the co-creation of narratives and fostering a sense of community around storytelling.

Tailoring narratives to the individual audience member based on their preferences, and even their emotional state, will lead to greater expectations of customization in data storytelling to enhance engagement and impact.

Moving beyond the traditional “You said, so we did” communication with customers to demonstrate how their feedback has been actioned, user-generated content will enable customers to play a more central role in sharing their experiences and expectations

These advanced tools are a complement to, and not a substitution for, the human creativity and critical thinking that great data storytelling requires. If used appropriately, they can enhance your data storytelling, but they cannot do it for you.

Whether you work with Microsoft Excel or access reports from more sophisticated business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio, or Qlik, you will still need to take those outputs and use your skills as a data storyteller to curate them in ways that are useful for your end audi­ence.

There are some great knowledge-sharing platforms out there that can integrate outputs from existing data storytelling tools and help curate content in one place. Some can be built into existing plat­forms that might be accessible within your business, like Confluence.

Some can be custom-built using external tools for a bespoke need, such as creating a micro-site for your data story using WordPress. And some can be brought in at scale to integrate with existing Microsoft or Google tools.

The list of what is available is extensive but will typically be dependent on what is available IT-wise within your own organization.

The Continuing Role Of The Human In Data Storytelling

In this evolving world, the role of the data storyteller doesn’t disap­pear but becomes ever more critical.

The human data storyteller still has many important roles to still play, and the skills necessary to influence and engage cynical, discerning, and overwhelmed audiences become even more valuable.

Now that white papers, marketing copy, internal presentations, and digital content can all be generated faster than humans could ever manage on their own, the risk of informa­tion overload becomes inevitable without a skilled storyteller to curate the content.

Today, the human data storyteller is crucial for:

• Ensuring we are not telling “any old story” just because we can and that the story is relevant to the business context and needs.
• Understanding the inputs being used by the tool, including limitations and potential bias, as well as ensuring data is used ethically and that it is accurate, reliable, and obtained with the appropriate permissions.
• Framing queries appropriately in the right way to incorporate the relevant context, issues, and target audience needs to inform the knowledge base.
• Cross-referencing and synthesizing AI-generated insights or synthetic data with human expertise and subject domain knowledge to ensure the relevance and accuracy of recommendations.
• Leveraging the different VR, AR, and transmedia tools available to ensure the right one for the job.

To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the US and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.

More resources: 

Featured Image: PopTika/Shutterstock

What Can AI Do For Healthcare Marketing In 2024? via @sejournal, @CallRail

This post was sponsored by CallRail. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has huge potential for healthcare practices. It can assist with diagnosis and treatment, as well as administrative and marketing tasks. Yet, many practices are still wary of using AI, especially regarding marketing.

The reality is that AI is here to stay, and many healthcare practices are beginning to use the technology. According to one recent study, 89% of healthcare professionals surveyed said that they were at least evaluating AI products, experimenting with them, or had implemented AI.

To help you determine whether using AI is right for your healthcare practice, let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of using AI while marketing.

The Pros And Cons Of AI For Healthcare Practices

Healthcare practices that choose to implement AI in safe and appropriate ways to help them with their marketing and patient experience efforts can reap many benefits, including more leads, conversions, and satisfied patients. In fact, 41% of healthcare organizations say their marketing team already uses AI.

Patients also expect healthcare practices to begin to implement AI in a number of ways. In one dentistry study, patients overall showed a positive attitude toward using AI. So, what’s holding your practice back from adding new tools and finding new use cases for AI? Let’s take a look at common concerns.

Con #1: Data Security And Privacy Concerns

Let’s get one of the biggest concerns with AI and healthcare out of the way first. Healthcare practices must follow all privacy and security regulations related to patients’ protected health information (PHI) to maintain HIPAA compliance.

So, concerns over whether AI can be used in a way that doesn’t interfere with HIPAA compliance are valid. In addition, there are also concerns about the open-source nature of popular GenAI models, which means sensitive practice data might be exposed to competitors or even hackers.

Pro #1: AI Can Help You Get More Value From Your Data Securely

While there are valid concerns about how AI algorithms make decisions and data privacy concerns, AI can also be used to enrich data to help you achieve your marketing goals while still keeping it protected.

With appropriate guardrails and omission procedures in place, you can apply AI to gain insights from data that matters to you without putting sensitive data at risk.

For example, our CallRail Labs team is helping marketers remove their blind spots by using AI to analyze and detect critical context clues that help you qualify which calls are your best leads so you can follow up promptly.

At the same time, we know how important it is for healthcare companies to keep PHI secure, which is why we integrate with healthcare privacy platforms like Freshpaint. It can help you bridge the gap between patient privacy and digital marketing.

In addition, our AI-powered Healthcare Plan automatically redacts sensitive patient-protected health information from call transcripts, enforces obligatory log-outs to prevent PHI from becoming public, provides full audit trail logging, and even features unique logins and credentials for every user, which helps eliminate the potential for PHI to be accidentally exposed to employees who don’t need access to that information.

Con #2: AI Is Impersonal

Having a good patient experience is important to almost all patients, and according to one survey, 52% of patients said a key part of a good patient experience is being treated with respect. Almost as many (46%) said they want to be addressed as a person. Given these concerns, handing over content creation or customer interactions to AI can feel daunting. While an AI-powered chatbot might be more efficient than a human in a call center, you also don’t want patients to feel like you’ve delegated customer service to a robot. Trust is the key to building patient relationships.

Pro #2: AI Can Improve The Patient Experience

Worries over AI making patient interactions feel impersonal are reasonable, but just like any other type of tool, it’s how you use AI that matters. There are ways to deploy AI that can actually enhance the patient experience and, by doing so, give your healthcare practice an advantage over your competitors.

The answer isn’t in offloading customer interaction to chatbots. But AI can help you analyze customer interactions to make customer service more efficient and helpful.

With CallRail’s AI-powered Premium Conversation Intelligence™, which transcribes, summarizes, and analyzes each call, you can quickly assess your patients’ needs and concerns and respond appropriately with a human touch. For instance, Premium Conversation Intelligence can identify and extract common keywords and topics from call transcripts. This data reveals recurring themes, such as frequently asked questions, common complaints, and popular services. A healthcare practice could then use these insights to tailor their marketing campaigns to address the most pressing patient concerns.

Con #3: AI Seems Too Complicated To Use

Let’s face it: new technology is risky, and for healthcare practices especially, risk is scary. With AI, some of the risk comes from its perceived complexity. Identifying the right use cases for your practice, selecting the right tools, training your staff, and changing workflows can all feel quite daunting. Figuring this out takes time and money. And, if there aren’t clear use cases and ROI attached, the long-term benefits may not be worth the short-term impact on business.

Pro #3: AI Can Save Time And Money

Using a computer or a spreadsheet for the first time probably also felt complicated – and on the front end, took some time to learn. However, you know that using these tools, compared to pen, paper, and calculators, has saved an enormous amount of time, making the upfront investment clearly worth it. Compared to many technologies, AI tools are often intuitive and only require you to learn a few simple things like writing prompts, refining prompts, reviewing reports, etc. Even if it takes some time to learn new AI tools, the time savings will be worth it once you do.

To get the greatest return on investment, focus on AI solutions that take care of time-intensive tasks to free up time for innovation. With the right use cases and tools, AI can help solve complexity without adding complexity. For example, with Premium Conversation Intelligence, our customers spend 60% less time analyzing calls each week, and they’re using that time to train staff better, increase their productivity, and improve the patient experience.

Con #4: AI Marketing Can Hurt Your Brand

Many healthcare practices are excited to use GenAI tools to accelerate creative marketing efforts, like social media image creation and article writing. But consumers are less excited. In fact, consumers are more likely to say that the use of AI makes them distrusting (40%), rather than trusting (19%), of a brand. In a market where trust is the most important factor for patients when choosing healthcare providers, there is caution and hesitancy around using GenAI for marketing.

Pro #4: AI Helps Make Your Marketing Better

While off-brand AI images shared on social media can be bad brand marketing, there are many ways AI can elevate your marketing efforts without impacting the brand perception. From uncovering insights to improving your marketing campaigns and maximizing the value of each marketing dollar spent to increasing lead conversion rates and decreasing patient churn, AI can help you tackle these problems faster and better than ever.

At CallRail, we’re using AI to tackle complex challenges like multi-conversation insights. CallRail can give marketers instant access to a 3-6 sentence summary for each call, average call sentiment, notable trends behind positive and negative interactions, and a summary of commonly asked questions. Such analysis would take hours and hours for your marketing team to do manually, but with AI, you have call insights at your fingertips to help drive messaging and keyword decisions that can improve your marketing attribution and the patient experience.

Con #5: Adapting AI Tools Might Cause Disruption

As a modern healthcare practice, your tech stack is the engine that runs your business. When onboarding any new technology, there are always concerns about how well it will integrate with existing technology and tools you use and whether it supports HIPAA compliance. There may also be concern about how AI tools can fit into your existing workflows without causing disruption.

Pro #5: AI Helps People Do Their Jobs Better

Pairing the right AI tool for roles with repetitive tasks can be a win for your staff and your practice. For example, keeping up with healthcare trends is important for marketers to improve messaging and campaigns.

An AI-powered tool that analyzes conversations and provides call highlights can help healthcare marketers identify keyword and Google Ad opportunities so they can focus on implementing the most successful marketing strategy rather than listening to hours of call recordings. In addition, CallRail’s new AI-powered Convert Assist helps healthcare marketers provide a better patient experience. With AI-generated call coaching, marketers can identify what went well and what to improve after every conversation.

What’s more, with a solution like CallRail, which offers a Healthcare Plan and will sign a business associate agreement (BAA), you are assured that we will comply with HIPAA controls within our service offerings to ensure that your call tracking doesn’t expose you to potential fines or litigation. Moreover, we also integrate with other marketing tools, like Google Ads, GA4, and more, making it easy to integrate our solution into your existing technologies and workflows.

Let CallRail Show You The Pros Of AI

If you’re still worried about using AI in your healthcare practice, start with a trusted solution like CallRail that has proven ROI for AI-powered tools and a commitment to responsible AI development. You can talk to CallRail’s experts or test the product out for yourself with a 14-day free trial.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by CallRail. Used with permission.

Organic SEO Strategy Guide: How To Boost Search Visibility & Drive Growth via @sejournal, @idigitalinear

This post was sponsored by Digitalinear. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

In a world where consumers search online for nearly everything – from product recommendations to local service providers – your brand’s digital presence is everything.

The right organic SEO strategy can boost your search visibility and drive sustainable business growth.

SEO is becoming increasingly complex with sweeping algorithm changes, intense competition, and the recent flood of AI-generated content.

So how can you navigate these challenges to enhance your site’s visibility and raise brand awareness?

Here, we’ll break down a strategic approach to organic SEO, focusing on building a solid foundation and continuously optimizing and analyzing performance.

Step One: Web Inspection

The first step to address is the core user experience of your website.

SEO strategies should always begin with the end user, how you solve their problems, and how you communicate your value to them.

If your website is a new obstacle to them, they’ll find solutions elsewhere. So, your first job is to clarify your intended user experience and make it seamless. This will take both audience research and technical optimization.

The audience research portion of inspecting your website should include:

• Identify Success Metrics and Conversion Points: Your website must do its job well. You need a clear understanding of what you want users to do, which target audiences are likely to take those actions, what questions and pain points those users have, and how you can address them. Much of that strategy work comes later in the process, but for now, you need a clear view of your goals and intended user journeys. This will help you prioritize the most impactful technical fixes.
• Assess Content Coverage and Quality: High-quality, relevant content is crucial for engaging users and ranking well in search results. Moreover, you need content that addresses the real needs of your target audiences at multiple stages of their journey. Understanding users’ needs and questions is critical to their experience and to lead them toward desired actions. Conduct a content audit to identify gaps and opportunities for improvement: identify low-engagement pages and analyze competitors to see what content you’re missing.

A comprehensive technical website audit should include:

• Technical SEO: Ensure your site is technically sound by checking for issues like broken links, duplicate content, and proper use of meta tags. Many tools can assist with this, but individual tools may not provide a complete view. You may need to combine reports from multiple different tools.
• Site Speed and Core Web Vitals: Slow-loading websites can deter visitors and negatively affect search rankings. Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify speed issues.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Google uses mobile-first indexing. This means that mobile-friendliness isn’t only important for mobile users. Your website’s indexing and ranking depend on its mobile performance, no matter what device is being used to view it. The content of your pages should be the same and provide the same experience between desktop and mobile. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test can help you assess your site’s performance on mobile devices. If you want to lean into mobile trends, then mobile app development allows you to provide mobile users with unique, seamless experiences.
• User Experience (UX): A positive user experience encourages visitors to stay on your site longer, reducing bounce rates and improving SEO. Evaluate your site’s navigation, layout, and overall usability, keeping your success metrics and conversion points in mind. Users should be able to find the next steps quickly.

A full website audit is both technical and strategic. Sometimes, you need an external perspective to accurately identify the UX and communication issues you might be encountering. This is where an SEO agency can provide the perspective, research, and dedicated resources a website needs for long-term success.

Digitalinear specializes in organic SEO, and packages begin with deep research into your business and niche alongside technical audits.

With a team of dedicated SEO professionals, Digitalinear performs a thorough website inspection using the best tools available, ensuring no stone is left unturned in your audit.

Step Two: Deep Optimization

Once you’ve identified the areas of your site that need improvement, the next step is to optimize.

Optimizing your website ensures that it meets search engines’ technical requirements while providing a seamless and engaging user experience.

This is where you should get into the fine details of keyword research and query intent matching, ensuring that your SEO goals align with the business goals of your website that you identified in step one.

Top rankings for keywords won’t have a business impact if you haven’t matched them to your core audience. Traffic won’t result in signups or sales if you’re not effectively engaging those users.

Research is one area where an SEO consultancy can be particularly helpful in providing objective competitor and industry analysis.

Here are some key research elements for optimization:

• Keyword Research: Identify the most relevant and high-performing keywords for your industry. Use tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs to find keywords that your target audience is searching for.
• Content Optimization: Intent has been a big deal in SEO lately, and you must optimize for it as well as keywords. Matching your content to users’ needs and intents is where all your research will pay off in engagement, retention, and conversion. Use keywords naturally and ensure your content answers your audience’s questions and needs. Ensure you have wide and deep coverage of relevant topics demonstrating your unique expertise. Build strong networks of internal links to help users and search engines navigate and parse your content.

Key optimization techniques that lead to higher search rankings include:

• On-Page SEO: This broad category includes content-focused and technical implementations to make individual pages shine. Your research and analysis thus far should culminate in a page with exceptional user experience. The elements load quickly and provide a consistent experience. The content demonstrates your experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T). You implement keywords, metadata, and linking effectively.
• Link Building: Build high-quality backlinks to your site from reputable sources. This can help improve your site’s authority and search rankings. Creating content people share and want to link to is the first step. Then, you can actively seek links through many outreach strategies, such as digital PR, email, and social channels.

A full optimization process is a ton of work. Digitalinear is an SEO agency with services designed to simplify your process.

Their expert team uses advanced tools and techniques to ensure your site is fully optimized for search engines and users alike.

Additionally, Digitalinear provides web design and development solutions to enhance user interface and overall experience.

Step Three: Analyze Growth

After optimizing your website, it’s important to continuously analyze its performance to refine and improve your strategies over time.

This involves monitoring key metrics to evaluate the success of your SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions for continuous improvement.

By regularly analyzing your growth, you can better understand what’s working and what’s not.

Here are some key SEO metrics to monitor:

• Organic Traffic: Track the number of visitors coming to your site through organic search.
• Engagement Rate: Monitor the percentage of visitors who do not engage with content.
• Keyword Rankings: Keep an eye on how your targeted keywords are ranking over time.
• Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase, filling out a form, etc.
• Backlink Profile: Analyze the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site.

Digitalinear offers ongoing SEO consultancy. They can help you select the best metrics for your business goals and track and analyze them.

Their expertise ensures you make informed decisions that lead to tangible results, helping you drive continuous growth and stay ahead of the competition.

Start Meeting & Exceeding Your Growth Goals With Digitalinear

To navigate the complexities of SEO and achieve your growth goals, it’s essential to have a strategic partner that takes the time to understand your business, where you are now and where you want to be.

This involves a holistic approach to organic SEO through comprehensive site audits, deep optimization techniques, and continuous performance analysis. The audience research and testing involved are ongoing processes of learning.

Digitalinear offers expert guidance and tailored SEO solutions to help you enhance your online presence and drive sustainable growth.

With a team of professionals dedicated to exceeding your business objectives, they ensure that every SEO strategy is optimized for success.

Learn more about how Digitalinear’s tailored SEO services can make a difference for your business.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Digitalinear. Used with permission.

6 Local SEO Full-Guides That Help You Rank For Your Business Type

The elusive five-star review used to be something you could only flaunt in a rotating reviews section on your website.

But today, Google has pulled these stars out of the shadows and features them front and center across branded SERPs and beyond.

Star ratings can help businesses earn trust from potential customers, improve local search rankings, and boost conversions.

This is your guide to how they work.

Stars And SERPs: What Is The Google Star Rating?

A Google star rating is a consumer-powered grading system that lets other consumers know how good a business is based on a score of one to five stars.

These star ratings can appear across maps and different Google search results properties like standard blue link search listings, ads, rich results like recipe cards, local pack results, third-party review sites, and on-app store results.

How Does The Google Star Rating Work?

When a person searches Google, they will see star ratings in the results. Google uses an algorithm and an average to determine how many stars are displayed on different review properties.

Google explains that the star score system operates based on an average of all review ratings for that business that have been published on Google.

It’s important to note that this average is not calculated in real-time and can take up to two weeks to update after a new review is created.

When users leave a review, they are asked to rate a business based on specific aspects of their customer experience, as well as the type of business being reviewed and the services they’ve included.

For example, “plumbers may get “Install faucet” or “Repair toilet” as services to add,” and Google also allows businesses to add custom services that aren’t listed.

When customers are prompted to give feedback, they can give positive or critical feedback, or they can choose not to select a specific aspect to review, in which case this feedback aspect is considered unavailable.

This combination of feedback is what Google uses to determine a business’s average score by “dividing the number of positive ratings by the total number of ratings (except the ones where the aspect was not rated).”

Google star ratings do have some exceptions in how they function.

For example, the UK and EU have certain restrictions that don’t apply to other regions, following recent scrutiny by the EU Consumer Protection Cooperation and the UK Competitions and Market Authority about fake reviews being generated.

Additionally, the type of rating search property will determine the specifics of how it operates and how to gather and manage reviews there.

Keep reading to get an in-depth explanation of each type of Google star rating available on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

How To Get Google Star Ratings On Different Search Properties

As mentioned above, there are different types of Google star ratings available across search results, including the standard blue-link listings, ads, local pack results, rich snippets, third-party reviews, and app store results.

Here’s what the different types of star-rating results look like in Google and how they work on each listing type.

Standard “Blue Link” Listings And Google Stars

In 2021, Google started testing star ratings in organic search and has since kept this SERP feature intact.

Websites can stand out from their competitors by getting stars to show up around their organic search results listing pages.

Screenshot from SERPs, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Organic SERPs

If you want stars to show up on your organic search results, add schema markup to your website.

Learn how to do that in the video below:

As the video points out, you need actual reviews to get your structured data markup to show.

Then, you can work with your development team to input the code on your site that indicates your average rating, highest, lowest, and total rating count.

Screenshot JSON-LD script on Google Developers, August 2021

Once you add the rich snippet to your site, there is no clear timeline for when they will start appearing in the SERPs – that’s up to Google.

In fact, Google specifically mentions that reviews in properties like search can take longer to appear, and often, this delay is caused by business profiles being merged.

When you’re done, you can check your work with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

Adding schema is strongly encouraged. But even without it, if you own a retail store with ratings, Google may still show your star ratings in the search engine results.

They do this to ensure searchers are getting access to a variety of results. Google says:

“content on your website that’s been crawled and is related to retail may also be shown in product listings and annotations for free across Google.”

If you want star ratings to show up on Shopping Ads, you’ll have to pay for that.

Paid Ads And Google Stars

When Google Stars appear in paid search ads, they’re known as seller ratings, “an automated extension type that showcases advertisers with high ratings.”

These can appear in text ads, shopping ads, and free listings. Both the star rating and the total number of votes or reviews are displayed.

In addition to Google star ratings, shopping ads may include additional production information such as shipping details, color, material, and more, as shown below.

Screenshot from SERPs ads, Google, February 2024

Paid text ads were previously labeled as “ads” and recently have been upgraded to a “sponsored” label, as shown below.

Screenshot from SERPs ads, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Paid Ads

To participate in free listings, sellers have to do three things:

• Follow all the required policies around personally identifiable information, spam, malware, legal requirements, return policies, and more.
• Submit a feed through the Google Merchant Center or have structured data markup on their website (as described in the previous section).
• Add their shipping settings.

Again, some ecommerce sellers who do not have schema markup may still have their content show up in the SERPs.

For text ads and shopping ads to show star ratings, sellers are typically required to have at least 100 reviews in the last 12 months.

Paid advertisers must also meet a minimum number of stars for seller ratings to appear on their text ads. This helps higher-quality advertisers stand out from the competition.

For example, text ads have to have a minimum rating of 3.5 for the Google star ratings to show.

Google treats reviews on a per-country basis, so the minimum review threshold of 100 also applies only to 1 region at a time.

For star ratings to appear on a Canadian ecommerce company’s ads, for example, they would have to have obtained a minimum of 100 reviews from within Canada in the last year.

Google considers reviews from its own Google Customer Reviews and also from approved third-party partner review sites from its list of 29 supported review partners, which makes it easier for sellers to meet the minimum review threshold each year.

Google also requests:

• The domain that has ratings must be the same as the one that’s visible in the ad.
• Google or its partners must conduct a research evaluation of your site.
• The reviews included must be about the product or service being sold.

Local Pack Results And Google Stars

Local businesses have a handful of options for their business to appear on Google via Places, local map results, and a Google Business Profile page – all of which can show star ratings.

Consumers even have the option to sort local pack results by their rating, as shown in the image example below.

Screenshot from SERPs local pack, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Local Search Results

To appear in local search results, a Google Business Profile is required.

Customers may leave reviews directly on local business properties without being asked, but Google also encourages business owners to solicit reviews from their customers and shares best practices, including:

• Asking your customers to leave you a review and make it easy for them to do so by providing a link to your review pages.
• Making review prompts desktop and mobile-friendly.
• Replying to customer reviews (ensure you’re a verified provider on Google first).
• Be sure you do not offer incentives for reviews.

Customers can also leave star ratings on other local review sites, as Google can pull from both to display on local business search properties. It can take up to two weeks to get new local reviews to show in your overall score.

Once customers are actively leaving reviews, Google Business Profile owners have a number of options to help them manage these:

Screenshot from Google Business Profile Help, Google, February 2024

Rich Results, Like Recipes, And Google Stars

Everybody’s gotta eat, and we celebrate food in many ways — one of which is recipe blogs.

While restaurants rely more on local reviews, organic search results, and even paid ads, food bloggers seek to have their recipes rated.

Similar to other types of reviews, recipe cards in search results show the average review rating and the total number of reviews.

Screenshot from search for [best vegan winter recipes], Google, February 2024

The outcome has become a point of contention among the food blogging community, since only three recipes per search can be seen on Google desktop results (like shown in the image above), and four on a mobile browser.

These coveted spots will attract clicks, leaving anyone who hasn’t mastered online customer reviews in the dust. That means that the quality of the recipe isn’t necessarily driving these results.

Google gives users the option to click “Show more” to see two additional rows of results:

Screenshot from SERPs, Google, February 2024

Searchers can continue to click the “Show more” button to see additional recipe results.

Anyone using Google Home can search for a recipe and get results through their phone:

Screenshot from Elfsight, February 2024

Similarly, recipe search results can be sent from the device to the Google Home assistant. Both methods will enable easy and interactive step-by-step recipe instructions using commands like “start recipe,” “next step,” or even “how much olive oil?”

How To Get Google Stars On Recipe Results

Similar to the steps to have stars appear on organic blue-link listings, food bloggers and recipe websites need to add schema to their websites in order for star ratings to show.

However, it’s not as straightforward as listing the average and the total number of ratings. Developers should follow Google’s instructions for recipe markup.

There is both required and recommended markup:

Required Markup For Recipes

• Name of the recipe.
• Image of the recipe in a BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, or SVG format.

Recommended Markup For Recipes

• Aggregate rating.
• Author.
• Cook time, preparation time, and total duration.
• Date published.
• Description.
• Keywords.
• Nutrition information.
• Prep time.
• Recipe category by meal type, like “dinner.”
• Region associated with the recipe.
• Ingredients.
• Instructions.
• Yield or total serving.
• Total time.
• Video (and other related markup, if there is a video in the recipe).

To have recipes included in Google Assistant Guided Recipes, the following markup must be included:

• recipeIngredient
• recipeInstructions
• To have the video property, add the contentUrl.

For example, here’s what the structured markup would look like for the recipeIngredient property:

Screenshot from Google Developer, February 2024

Third-Party Review Sites And Google Stars

Many software companies rely on third-party review sites to help inform their customer’s purchasing decisions.

Third-party review sites include any website a brand doesn’t own where a customer can submit a review, such as Yelp, G2, and many more.

Many of these sites, like Featured Customers shown below, can display star ratings within Google search results.

Screenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

Rich snippets from third-party reviews, such as stars, summary info, or ratings, can also appear on a Google Business Profile or map view from approved sites.

For local businesses, Google star ratings appear in different locations than the third-party reviews on a desktop:

Screenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

On mobile, ratings are displayed on a company’s Google Business Profile. Users need to click on Reviews or scroll down to see the third-party reviews:

Screenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

On a map, the results from third parties may be more prominent, like the Tripadvisor review that shows up for a map search of The Hilton in Vancouver (although it does not display a star rating even though Tripadvisor does provide star ratings):

Screenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On Third-Party Review Sites

The best way to get a review on a third-party review site depends on which site is best for the brand or the business.

For example, if you have active customers on Yelp or Tripadvisor, you may choose to engage with customers there.

Screenshot from SERPs listing of a review site, Google, February 2024

Similarly, if a software review site like Trustpilot shows up for your branded search, you could do an email campaign with your customer list asking them to leave you a review there.

Here are a few of the third-party review websites that Google recognizes:

• Trustpilot.
• Reevoo.
• Bizrate – through Shopzilla.

When it comes to third-party reviews, Google reminds businesses that there is no way to opt out of third-party reviews, and they need to take up any issues with third-party site owners.

App Store Results And Google Stars

When businesses have an application as their core product, they typically rely on App Store and Google Play Store downloads.

Right from the SERPs, searchers can see an app’s star ratings, as well as the total votes and other important information, like whether the app is free or not.

Screenshot from SERP play store results, Google, February 2024

How To Get Google Stars On App Store Results

Businesses can list their iOS apps in the App Store or on the Google Play store, prompt customers to leave reviews there, and also respond to them.

Does The Google Star Rating Influence SEO Rankings?

John Mueller confirmed that Google does not factor star ratings or customer reviews into web search rankings. However, Google is clear that star ratings influence local search results and rankings:

“Google review count and review score factor into local search ranking. More reviews and positive ratings can improve your business’ local ranking.”

Even though they are not a ranking factor for non-local organic search, star ratings can serve as an important conversion element, helping you display social proof, build credibility, and increase your click-through rate from search engines (which may indirectly impact your search rankings).

For local businesses, both Google stars and third-party ratings appear in desktop and mobile searches, as seen above.

These ratings not only help local businesses rank above their competitors for key phrases, but they will also help convince more customers to click, which is every company’s search game.

How Do I Improve My Star Rating?

Businesses that want to improve their Google star rating should start by claiming their Google Business Profile and making sure all the information is complete and up to date.

If a company has already taken these steps and wants to offset a poor rating, they are going to need more reviews to offset the average.

Companies can get more Google reviews by making it easy for customers to leave one. The first step for a company is to get the link to leave a review inside their Google Business Profile:

Screenshot from Wordstream, February 2024

From there, companies can send this link out to customers directly (there are four options displayed right from the link as seen above), include it on social media, and even dedicate sections of their website to gathering more reviews and/or displaying reviews from other users.

It isn’t clear whether or not responding to reviews will help improve a local business’s ranking; however, it’s still a good idea for companies to respond to reviews on their Google Business Profile in order to improve their ratings overall.

That’s because responding to reviews can entice other customers to leave a review since they know they will get a response and because the owner is actually seeing the feedback.

For service businesses, Google provides the option for customers to rate aspects of the experience.

This is helpful since giving reviewers this option allows anyone who had a negative experience to rate just one aspect negatively rather than giving a one-star review overall.

Does Having A Star Rating On Google Matter? Yes! So Shoot For The Stars

Stars indicate quality to consumers, so they almost always improve click-through rates wherever they are present.

Consumers tend to trust and buy from brands with higher star ratings in local listings, paid ads, or even app downloads.

Many, many, many studies have demonstrated this phenomenon time and again. So, don’t hold back when it comes to reviews.

Do an audit of where your brand shows up in SERPs and get stars next to as many placements as possible.

The most important part of star ratings across Google, however, will always be the service and experiences companies provide that fuel good reviews from happy customers.

More resources:

Feature Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock
All screenshots taken by author