In this decade where everything has gone digital, everyone wants to create their impressions in the digital world. This is the prime reason behind the growth of online business today and thereby increasing the significance of SEO and other digital marketing techniques. 

It is an undeniable fact that a lot of marketing efforts are required to produce a website visible to its target audience. To ensure the proper working of the marketing efforts, you need to track it. This is where the Key Performance Indicators or KPIs take their amazing role.

Welcome to the world of Marketing KPIs. In this blog, we shall be looking closer at what KPI means, what you need to understand about tracking your digital marketing KPIs, and how to use KPIs to make successful decisions for your business.

Social media has been an integral part of our daily lives for years. It has extremely evolved from an instant messenger to one of the powerful tools to promote products and reach the online audience in this digital era.

As we already know social media has a great effect on the popularity of your websites and this makes it more important to focus on the social media engagement activities and strategies for driving sales of e-commerce products.

But have you ever wondered how social media plays a vital role in improving your website rankings? Does it really impact the SEO? In this blog, we are going to find answers to these questions by exploring the social media signals and their impacts on search engine rankings.

We all are living in a fast-paced environment where everything has gone digital in our life. Earlier, if you plan to boost your business more, you would have run ads on radio, television, etc. Times have changed the mode of marketing too. All establishments now rely greatly on social media marketing, as social media acts as a simple and powerful tool to convey whatever we are thinking, doing, or planning, to the outer world. In addition to this, the other crucial reason for the wide popularity of social media may be the ease of using it. Anyone can use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms effortlessly without digging deep into their roots.

Website traffic doesn’t directly generate revenue for a business, unless the revenue model is plain old display advertising. However, statistically even display advertising doesn’t bring a lot of revenue per visitor compared to other models.

Many studies suggest that only close 30% internet visitors actually check out a display ad. For an online business, monetizing traffic by converting them into leads is vital. These leads can then be provided with promotional messages or mails for a product or service.

For all this, you begin by directing traffic to your website. Pre-planned content marketing can help with that. And effective content marketing requires the marketer to post blogs, send emails, and leverage social media marketing tactics. Good search engine optimization makes a website more visible to people looking for information in search engines, thus driving traffic.

Conversion comes after attracting the traffic. Let’s delve deeper into that by exploring 5 effective ways to convert traffic into leads.
 

1. Appealing Landing Pages

 
Landing pages in a website are literally where a visitor lands after clicking a link that directs them to the website. There could be other pages in the website that provides information relevant to a visitor. But landing pages, on the other hand, are seen as one of the most effective ways to convert visitors into leads.

Building many landing pages inside a main content website for the most popular keywords can in turn increase the chances of visitors getting directed to them via search engines, direct traffic, or referral.  The key thing to note here is the fact that a landing page may not be appealing to all types of users. Analyzing the performance of landing pages can give the marketer a better idea on which landing pages attract which type of visitor.
 

2. Popup Forms

 
You may have already seen popups just appear out of nowhere while browsing through a website. Truth is, these popups that you may just close on a whim are actually another effective way to convert traffic into leads. The key is in the effectiveness of the offer that’s shown on the popup. If it’s relevant to the visitor, and if the offer is attractive, the visitor can likely be converted into a lead.
 

3. Notification Bars

 
These are screen-wide banners that you may see on top of a website page. Internet users tend to look at notification bars occasionally because that’s where warnings from the browser may appear like when it blocks popups or when a plugin is missing.

The bars can be configured to be displayed on top even when the visitor is scrolling down the website. Because they can catch some attention easily, it’s a wise idea to include email forms in the notification bar or some exciting offer that redirects visitors who click on it, to a different landing page for conversion.
 

4. Opt-in Forms in Sidebars

 
Opt-in forms should be present in various sections of a website, particularly in sidebars of a blog. This is because when people find the content to be uninteresting, they may take a look at the sidebar. Again, if the offer is good, they may opt-in converting themselves into leads.

The area below the blogs are also a suitable place to include opt-in forms as this would be the first thing visitors would notice once they are done reading an interesting blog.
 

5. Redirecting First-time Visitors

 
It’s much effective to redirect a first-time visitor of a business’ blog to one of their landing pages. The blog would attract them, and on clicking the link, they’d be redirected to a website with the display of an opt-in offer that promises something of relevance or value to them in return for opting in.

Plugins can be used for this, configuring them to redirect only the first-time users and not returning ones. However, this option is only useful for generating leads in a short time period. If not done right, this can affect user experience.

For instance, a returning visitor might be using a different device to access the website. The visitor will be treated as a new visitor by the plugin, and subsequently redirected. The plugins may not work when certain caching mechanisms are active. And if the caching mechanisms are turned off, the website may slow down. So it’s better to use this tactic in short bursts to generate leads quickly.
 

Conclusion

 
For the traffic part, businesses can either invest in their in-house marketing team or hire an integrated digital marketing solutions expert to do the job. For the conversion part, the business still needs to have an adept sales and marketing team, or rather ‘smarketing’ team.

These tips can up the chances of converting visitors into leads. The chances of failure depends on how well the marketing strategies are executed. Nevertheless, with proper analytics, the business can increase traffic and improve their lead conversion rates considerably.

It all began when people started believing that social media influences search engine rankings. Though it was stated otherwise, the debate on whether social media actually does impact SEO efforts is still discussed all over the internet by SEO experts.

Most SEO companies offer services that can be complemented with sufficient social media marketing for optimal results. So clearly, social media somewhat has a key role when it comes to search engine optimization.

So how does it impact SEO efforts?

For starters, it’s not a ranking factor. It doesn’t help SEO in a lot of ways like people think. But there is a connection.
 

Social media doesn’t influence rankings

 
Search engine optimization is all about Google now. Websites compete to rise up in Google rankings, but with no idea of how their algorithm actually works. They work with the information and guidelines they get from Google itself. Google also stated that social media is not a direct ranking factor. But there have been cases that proved that it influences rankings to some extent.

So was Google lying?

Not exactly.

Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan posted an article which stated that Google confirmed that the links shared on popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter are used as ranking signals. This was later confirmed by Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team.

However, last year Gary Illyes, a Google Webmaster Trends Analyst, again was asked the same question – does Google take social media into account for SEO. The answer was a no.

But with other studies proving that there’s a correlation between the two, the best approach is to keep creating good content that will be accepted in social media channels, and linked by viewers who like it. These links, in turn, boost rankings.

Have you ever noticed that high ranked websites have higher numbers of social signals?
 

Exploring the ‘correlation’

 
Though it doesn’t directly influence ranking, here are a few ways how it complements your SEO efforts.

• Link building: Social media is where people go for peer reviews. So if someone likes something and shares it, other people would check it out as well. The more shares you get for your content, the more people will like it subsequently giving you links in the process. With good content creation and social media promotion, your website may shot up the rankings for competitive keywords.
• Building an audience: With social media, you can let the world know that you have a unique product or solution that can help people or businesses for that matter. Social media can be leveraged to establish a solid web presence that will consequently impact click-through rates (CTR) when people click on content from your website that impressed them in social media channels. CTR in turn influences rankings.
• Promotion: Social media isn’t all about Facebook and Twitter. YouTube is the second most searched search engine. For businesses, YouTube can turn tides.

Many researches indicate that over 40% of YouTube users want to see more video content from marketers.

According to HubSpot’s reports, 48% of marketers plan to add YouTube to their content strategy next year.

Though the search queries on YouTube don’t have high commercial intent, the platform can still influence SEO performance if you can create good videos to promote your brand or your content. The videos may also rank organically in search engine result pages in addition to increasing the likelihood of getting more links.
 

Conclusion

 
These are but a few ways to leverage social media to complement your SEO efforts. The point is that social media does indeed impact SEO performance albeit indirectly. The key is in leveraging it. But it requires you to invest on both social media and SEO, and then utilize them both with sound strategies that align to your business goals. You may also hire a reputed SEO consultant to handle it for you, along with the technicalities.