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10 Elements of Landing Pages That Convert

April 28th, 2021 No comments

Landing pages are central to successful marketing campaigns; they allow you to target particular customers with particular solutions to particular problems.

It’s easy to confuse what a landing page is because users “land” on many pages. When we talk about landing pages, we mean a page that is entirely dedicated to a particular type of customer. In fact, if we could create a unique landing page for each individual user, that would be awesome.

You might think your homepage is a landing page, but it’s not; users reach your landing page in various ways — directly, via organic search, or backlink. A landing page is normally dedicated to a specific marketing campaign. It is accessed from a link in an email, via social media, or most often via a PPC (Pay Per Click) advert.

Here are 10 elements of landing pages that are proven to convert successfully:

1. Use A Single Call To Action

Your potential customers must know how to move forward with your product or service as early in the experience as possible.

Are they signing up for a free trial? Are they signing up for your newsletter? Are they buying a product? Are they contacting you? Whatever you need them to do, make it clear.

The Hick-Hyman law of UX says the more choices you give a user, the less likely they are to make any choice at all; conversely, the fewer choices, the greater the likelihood that they’ll move forward.

Give the user one choice: click the button, or don’t click the button. A single CTA will out-perform multiple options.

2. Keep Forms Simple

Often, your landing page will need a potential customer’s information. They might be creating an account, setting up a trial, or just joining your newsletter.

If the potential customer is signing up for a trial, by all means, ask for their email address. But you don’t need their cell number, their mother’s name, the street they grew up on, their birthday, or any of that other junk that’s used to profile users.

Whatever the purpose, keep your form ultra-simple. That means as few fields as possible. If you really want it, give the user the option to fill it in later as part of an onboarding process — when they’re already invested — but not on the landing page.

3. Make the Headline Punchy

The first thing your potential customer sees on your landing page is the headline, so make it count.

Half a dozen words are usually more than enough. Your goal is to keep it short enough that the potential customer has read the headline before they realize it.

Often, you’ll want to clarify the statement with more information. That’s fine as a sub-heading after you’ve grabbed their interest, but make sure you grab their attention first.

The headline “Coyote Anvils” is best followed by the sub-heading “You’ll be eating roadrunner for dinner!”

Your goal for your headline is to explain your product or service in 2–3 seconds.

4. Center Your Content Around Your Value Proposition

What makes your product or service stand out? What makes it better than the competition? If you’re not sure, spend some time checking out companies in your space.

Creating a value proposition can be one of the toughest challenges a business faces because you need to put yourself in your potential customer’s shoes. But if you get this right, it will carry your marketing. You need to find the benefits within your product or service, not the features.

Value propositions are best when backed by facts. The “World’s Most Accurate Anvils” is best backed by proof: “9/10 coyotes said they were more likely to hit their target than themselves when using our patented AccuAnvil.”

5. Lists, Lists, and More Lists

You’ve got seconds to engage your potential customer, perhaps even less. One way to grab them is with a great headline, but you have to keep them interested beyond the headline.

One great way is bullet lists with short entries. Short-item lists naturally pull our eyes down the page because our eyes take in the whole line in one glance; we don’t need to read to absorb the information.

The longer you can keep someone on the page, the greater the likelihood they’ll keep looking, so pulling them down the page with lists is a great tactic.

6. Exploit the Zeigarnik Effect

The Zeigarnik Effect says that people remember incomplete experiences better than they do completed ones. This is because when a task is seen as completed, it can be filed away as a memory, but if it’s incomplete, then it remains at the front of your mind.

This is a boon for designers creating landing pages because we can create a situation where the potential customer begins an onboarding process and is aware that it hasn’t been completed — they might need to verify their email address, for example.

The lack of completion keeps the landing page and the product or service fresh in the potential customer’s mind. So when they see that onboarding email, they’ll use it.

7. Proof

Anyone can put up a website. It’s easy. And as a result, potential customers don’t necessarily trust you.

One way you can combat this is with some form of proof. That may be in the form of official certifications, or featured testimonials, or just independent reviews.

It rarely occurs to potential customers that you’re cherry-picking the testimonials and reviews you’re choosing to display, so even if only some of your reviews are good, it’s worth including them.

But be careful not to sound too good. If you post nothing but 5* reviews, people will smell a rat; that 3* review may actually do you a favor by making the 5*s seem more genuine.

8. Predictive Images

Potential customers lack imagination, they don’t have all the facts, and unless your product or service is very basic, they may not fully understand what the product does for them.

Use images to quickly show them what life may be like using your product or service. Paint an appealing picture. If they can see themselves in the image, they’ll grant you a little more time to persuade them in the form of further content.

9. Continuity

How did the potential customer arrive at your landing page? Chances are it was via a PPC link, or if you were lucky an organic search link. However they arrived, they were in a certain frame of mind, with a certain problem they wanted to solve; they aren’t going to take kindly to being diverted onto a different train of thought.

Your landing page has to match the tone, style, and value proposition of your adverts. The potential customer’s experience of your organization begins with the advert, not the landing page, so make sure that you don’t break the spell. If your landing page doesn’t match your advert, you could lose the potential customer altogether — and increase your bounce rate while you’re at it.

Remember: the customer was attracted by something in your advert, so give them the same attractive qualities on your landing page.

10. Drop the Nav

Most sites have a single main menu and a rich footer with links to customer service, contact pages, and so forth. These are detrimental on a landing page because you’ll leak traffic to other, less-focused parts of your site.

Your landing page is a streamlined selling machine. The only link you want on the page is your CTA.

It’s fine to keep legal text and even links to privacy policies — users rarely click those anyway. You can also link to your homepage using your logo. But don’t add any navigation that invites a click, or you’ll dilute all the work you’ve put in.

Source

The post 10 Elements of Landing Pages That Convert first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

Effective Lead Generation Techniques for Magento 2

April 27th, 2021 No comments

If you’re just starting out your business on Magento 2, you might be seeking ways to drive as many leads as possible. 

Lead generation is a constant active process aiming to appeal and convert targeted web browsers into qualified leads. The process requires a variety of tools, marketing services, and a substantial investment of time and money. 

In the following article, we’re going to share with you the top lead generation techniques for your Magento 2 store.

What is a Lead? 

A lead is any person who has some interest in a brand’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. 

Leads (or prospects) often hear from a business or company after opening communication (by entering personal details for an offer, trial, or subscription) rather than receiving a random cold call from someone who bought their contact information. 

Suppose you read an online survey to know how to take care of your air purifier. Several days later, you get an email from the auto company that generated the survey about how they could help you take care of your air purifier. This process will not be less intrusive than if they would make a phone call for you, right? This is what it’s like to be a prospect. 

And from a business view, the details the brand collects about you from your survey responses allow them to personalize that opening communication to resolve your current issues – and not waste time calling prospects who aren’t at all engrossed with auto services. 

Leads belong to the wider lifecycle that customers follow when they convert from visitors into shoppers. Not all leads are generated equal, or they’re not qualified the same. There are some sorts of leads based on how they are qualified and which lifecycle step they’re in. 

  • Marketing qualified leads (MQL) are customers who’ve engaged with your marketing department’s attempts but aren’t ready to get a sales call. An example of an MQL is a person who fills in a landing page form for an offer. 
  • Product Qualified Lead (PQL) are people who’ve experienced your product and take actions that show interest in becoming a paying shopper. Basically, this involves shoppers experiencing a freemium item or signing up for a free month of your goods or service. 
  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) are customers researched, screened, and evaluated by your marketing team. They have expressed sufficient intrigue in purchasing an item or service so that you can concentrate on moving them toward conversion. For instance, an SQL may fill out a web form on your site for more information or sign up for your brand’s email newsletter. 
  • Service Qualified Leads are contacts who have told your customer service team and claimed that they want to make a purchase – like if they were experiencing a free version of your goods and would like to move to the premium version. At this time, the customer service team will up-level this customer to the sales team. 

What is Lead Generation? 

Lead generation is the process of appealing leads to your brand and turning them into customers – usually deployed through marketing campaigns supported by marketing automation – driving potential customers to your company. It provides interesting access to digital marketing as it converts the typical customer to business relationship. 

Instead of exploring your Magento 2 via a cold call, customers engage as they find something they need via one of your online channels. This is a benefit for businesses and shoppers alike, as the people who come to you already comprehend your offerings’ value. 

However, despite potential business advantages, lead generation can be challenging to do efficiently, particularly if you’ve never utilized this marketing method before. Nevertheless, it’s truly worth learning. Lead generation brings you a chance to find more consumers and develop your business during the sales cycle. If you would like to promote your newly-operated business or renovate your strategies, lead generation should be a big part of your endeavors. 

How Many Steps in The Lead Generation Process?

There are four different steps of the lead generation process. 

  • Step 1: A visitor learns about your online store via one of your marketing channels, including your website, social media page, etc. 
  • Step 2: That visitors choose your call to action – a picture, button, or message that motivates website visitors to take some action.
  • Step 3: That call to action directs your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page created to collect lead information in exchange for an offer. 

Notice: An offer is the content or something of value that’s being “provided” on the landing page, like a whitepaper, an ebook, a template, or a course. The offer must contain enough perceived value to a browser for them to submit their personal details in exchange for access to it. 

  • Step 4. Once on the landing page, your visitor completes a form to take the offer. (Forms are basically hosted on landing pages, even though they can technically be inserted anywhere on your website.) So you get a new lead provided that you’re employing lead-capture form best practices. 

In short, visitors click on a CTA that directs them to a landing page where they fill in a form to receive an offer, at which point they are called leads.  

How Can You Qualify a Lead? 

As covered earlier in this article, a lead is a person who has shown interest in your brand’s product or service. Now we’ll find out how someone can actually express that interest. 

Basically, a sales lead is created via information collection. That information collection could appear as the result of a job seeker evincing interest in a position by filling out an application, a customer sharing contact details in exchange for a discount, or a person submitting a form to get an educational piece of content. 

Assess a lead’s level of interest

We’ve collected some ways in which you can qualify someone as a lead. These examples indicate that the amount of accumulated information used to qualify a lead can range. 

Job application: An individual who fills in an application form is pleased to share a lot of personal information as that person wants to be regarded for a position. Submitting that application indicates their true interest in the job, hence qualifying the person as a lead for the firm’s recruiting team – not sales or marketing teams. 

Content: Content does not show that a person has a direct interest in your goods or services. Thus, to truly comprehend the nature of the person’s intrigue in your company, you might need to gather more data to check whether the person is engrossed in your products and whether they’re a good fit.

Coupon: You may know a little about someone who has used one of your online coupons. However, if they find the coupon worthwhile enough, they’re likely willing to offer their name and email address to get the coupon. Even though it’s not a huge amount of information, it’s enough for a company to know that someone has concerned themselves with its offerings. 

Score leads

Scoring lead is a good method to qualify leads. With this technique, leads are assigned to a numerical value (or score) to identify where they fall on the scale from “concerned” to “ready to order“. You are the person deciding the criteria, but it must be the same throughout your marketing and sales team so that every member can work on the same scale. 

A lead’s score can be calculated according to actions they’ve taken, the information they’ve offered, their engagement level with your business, or other criteria that your sales department creates. For example, you might give someone a higher score if they often engage with you on social networks or their personal data fits your target audience.

Besides, you likely score a lead higher if they applied one of your coupons – an action showing that this person is engrossed in your product. 

The higher a lead’s score, the more likely they become a sales-qualified lead, which needs another step to become a shopper. Notably, you need to adjust the score and criteria all the way long until you identify the best formula, but once you do, you will turn your lead generation into customer generation. 

Incredible Lead Generation Techniques for Magento 2 

1. Use social media 

Your brand should be present on social networks. If you’re not, you’re being lagged behind, but it’s not too late for you to catch up with the trend. 

Social media is an ideal way to drive new leads and bolster your relationship with existing customers. If you do it in the right way, your followers will promote your content for you by sharing it on their social media accounts and creating new leads for your business. To market yourself on social networks, you had better produce your own content and share content from others. 

That eventually makes you more visible to potential clients and enhances your metrics on sites. The key to using social media to promote your company is to generate a dialogue with your consumers.  

2. Leverage email marketing

Email can be leveraged as a way to start contacting leads. Effective email marketing outreach begins with an initial email to a potential customer. You should create a list of potential customers and then contact each personally via email to raise a line of communication.

Here are some tips you can apply: 

  • Generate appealing subject lines – Your open rate is directly affected by your subject lines. If you want your emails to be opened, you need to ensure that you have a good subject line to catch people’s attention. 
  • Create opt-in offers – Develop offers that provide value (a free trial, free download, product discounts, and several forms of educational content that resolves your customers’ problems).
  • Ask leads to take action – Make it simple for leads to follow up. Limit your email to one clear-cut action you want your lead to take, whether it’s clicking through to a link, tapping the “reply” button, or affirming a time for a phone call. 
  • Make things shareable – Ensure that you include social media buttons so that customers can share your content with ease.

Moreover, you can consider employing email marketing automation to generate more leads for your business. Marketing automation is a powerful hybrid email marketing feature that connects with your CRM and allows you to deliver targeting emails to leads automatically. There are over 480,000 websites that utilize marketing automation to attract and nurture leads. 

3. Guest post blogging 

You can approach new audiences by accepting guest posts on your own site. There are several approaches you can try, including: 

Reach out to bloggers or influencers in your selected market and ask them to create content about your product or service. You’ll probably need to give them some commission, but you can access their following and have a good backlink. 

You also can hand these bloggers or influencers free access to your products, exchanging for an honest post and feedback of your products.

Or you can accept guest blog posts for your own website. You can use the following post blogging checklist as your guidelines: 

  • General themes: Be specific about the post type you can accept. All articles should contain concrete examples of source material to support your conclusions.
  • Search engine optimization: Do you want the author to create SEO-friendly content, or will you take care of it? 
  • Restrictions: Watch out for writers that include promotional materials blatantly. Links to their website or blog should be inserted in the bio at the end of the post. Links directing to relevant content on a blog from the body of the article are acceptable but should not be unnaturally promotional.
  • Content guidelines: You should get specific about the details. For instance, the article’s length: 600+ words, post titles: initial caps, no more than 70 characters in length, etc. 

4. Build a rewards system

You can consider building a rewards system where your shoppers drive leads to you in exchange for an appealing offer. Shoppers value and trust suggestions from their friends, so motivating current clients to spread the word about your business can be a clever way to fill your lead funnel. 

For instance, sunglasses company Shady Rays makes their existing customers create leads by asking them to offer an email address of someone they think will love the brand. In exchange, the brand pays $15 for the current customers if the lead places an order. 

5. Optimize your website 

To create more leads, ensure website visitors can find your lead magnet with ease. Design on-site funnels that group your audience and take them towards the lead magnet most likely to resonate with their demands and concerns. You can do this by promoting lead magnets around your website. 

  • Emphasize it as the main homepage call to action
  • Promote relevant lead magnets at the end of pages and blog posts
  • Employ a lead generation popup
  • Build a resource library full of gated content 
  • Insert a lead gen hello bar that stays at the top or bottom of your website
  • Promote your lead magnet in the sidebar 

For instance, Podio – a project management tool – doesn’t guide website browsers to their lead magnet. Instead, they instantly drive users into their free trial using the main hero section of their homepage.

6. Use PPC 

As we mention pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to advertisements on search engine result pages. Google has about 3.5 billion searches per day, making it ideal real estate for any ad campaign, particularly lead generation. The efficacy of your PPC campaign depends significantly on a smooth user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and many other factors. 

7. Install a Magento 2 extension 

Freshsales extension 

Freshsales is a robust CRM (customer relationship management) system established by Freshworks. It allows every business type to engage, manage, analyze, and nurture their leads. With the Freshsales integration extension, store owners only need to arrange a schedule and sync rules; then the system will handle the rest. 

The module also enables Magento 2 stores to decide which data is synchronized to which objects on Freshsales, which can be different for every sync rule. This function makes it flexible to match data between two systems, ensuring precise information allocations. 

Moreover, store admins can draw a schedule to update customers and order information constantly. Hence, Freshsales can use the newest information to take care of their shoppers more attentively in real-time. 

Does Your Business Need Lead Generation? 

If your calendar is empty and you want to run your business instantly, you can expand your business dramatically via lead generation, no matter what the price is. It can be like a gamble somehow, which is why selecting your target audience with care is critical. 

Lead generation can be a quick way to boost your return on investment and significantly broaden your customer base. Adapt it as you do with other advertising efforts: save a budget to test and check whether it works for your business. The key to triumphantly implementing lead generation is to enhance your sales and marketing skills so that the leads you get convert at a good rate. 

Let’s apply those above lead generation techniques to gain more leads for your Magento 2 store. And then don’t forget to share your results with us. We can’t wait to hear from you.


Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Categories: Others Tags:

Effective Lead Generation Techniques for Magento 2

April 27th, 2021 No comments

If you’re just starting out your business on Magento 2, you might be seeking ways to drive as many leads as possible. 

Lead generation is a constant active process aiming to appeal and convert targeted web browsers into qualified leads. The process requires a variety of tools, marketing services, and a substantial investment of time and money. 

In the following article, we’re going to share with you the top lead generation techniques for your Magento 2 store.

What is a Lead? 

A lead is any person who has some interest in a brand’s product or service in some way, shape, or form. 

Leads (or prospects) often hear from a business or company after opening communication (by entering personal details for an offer, trial, or subscription) rather than receiving a random cold call from someone who bought their contact information. 

Suppose you read an online survey to know how to take care of your air purifier. Several days later, you get an email from the auto company that generated the survey about how they could help you take care of your air purifier. This process will not be less intrusive than if they would make a phone call for you, right? This is what it’s like to be a prospect. 

And from a business view, the details the brand collects about you from your survey responses allow them to personalize that opening communication to resolve your current issues – and not waste time calling prospects who aren’t at all engrossed with auto services. 

Leads belong to the wider lifecycle that customers follow when they convert from visitors into shoppers. Not all leads are generated equal, or they’re not qualified the same. There are some sorts of leads based on how they are qualified and which lifecycle step they’re in. 

  • Marketing qualified leads (MQL) are customers who’ve engaged with your marketing department’s attempts but aren’t ready to get a sales call. An example of an MQL is a person who fills in a landing page form for an offer. 
  • Product Qualified Lead (PQL) are people who’ve experienced your product and take actions that show interest in becoming a paying shopper. Basically, this involves shoppers experiencing a freemium item or signing up for a free month of your goods or service. 
  • Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) are customers researched, screened, and evaluated by your marketing team. They have expressed sufficient intrigue in purchasing an item or service so that you can concentrate on moving them toward conversion. For instance, an SQL may fill out a web form on your site for more information or sign up for your brand’s email newsletter. 
  • Service Qualified Leads are contacts who have told your customer service team and claimed that they want to make a purchase – like if they were experiencing a free version of your goods and would like to move to the premium version. At this time, the customer service team will up-level this customer to the sales team. 

What is Lead Generation? 

Lead generation is the process of appealing leads to your brand and turning them into customers – usually deployed through marketing campaigns supported by marketing automation – driving potential customers to your company. It provides interesting access to digital marketing as it converts the typical customer to business relationship. 

Instead of exploring your Magento 2 via a cold call, customers engage as they find something they need via one of your online channels. This is a benefit for businesses and shoppers alike, as the people who come to you already comprehend your offerings’ value. 

However, despite potential business advantages, lead generation can be challenging to do efficiently, particularly if you’ve never utilized this marketing method before. Nevertheless, it’s truly worth learning. Lead generation brings you a chance to find more consumers and develop your business during the sales cycle. If you would like to promote your newly-operated business or renovate your strategies, lead generation should be a big part of your endeavors. 

How Many Steps in The Lead Generation Process?

There are four different steps of the lead generation process. 

  • Step 1: A visitor learns about your online store via one of your marketing channels, including your website, social media page, etc. 
  • Step 2: That visitors choose your call to action – a picture, button, or message that motivates website visitors to take some action.
  • Step 3: That call to action directs your visitor to a landing page, which is a web page created to collect lead information in exchange for an offer. 

Notice: An offer is the content or something of value that’s being “provided” on the landing page, like a whitepaper, an ebook, a template, or a course. The offer must contain enough perceived value to a browser for them to submit their personal details in exchange for access to it. 

  • Step 4. Once on the landing page, your visitor completes a form to take the offer. (Forms are basically hosted on landing pages, even though they can technically be inserted anywhere on your website.) So you get a new lead provided that you’re employing lead-capture form best practices. 

In short, visitors click on a CTA that directs them to a landing page where they fill in a form to receive an offer, at which point they are called leads.  

How Can You Qualify a Lead? 

As covered earlier in this article, a lead is a person who has shown interest in your brand’s product or service. Now we’ll find out how someone can actually express that interest. 

Basically, a sales lead is created via information collection. That information collection could appear as the result of a job seeker evincing interest in a position by filling out an application, a customer sharing contact details in exchange for a discount, or a person submitting a form to get an educational piece of content. 

Assess a lead’s level of interest

We’ve collected some ways in which you can qualify someone as a lead. These examples indicate that the amount of accumulated information used to qualify a lead can range. 

Job application: An individual who fills in an application form is pleased to share a lot of personal information as that person wants to be regarded for a position. Submitting that application indicates their true interest in the job, hence qualifying the person as a lead for the firm’s recruiting team – not sales or marketing teams. 

Content: Content does not show that a person has a direct interest in your goods or services. Thus, to truly comprehend the nature of the person’s intrigue in your company, you might need to gather more data to check whether the person is engrossed in your products and whether they’re a good fit.

Coupon: You may know a little about someone who has used one of your online coupons. However, if they find the coupon worthwhile enough, they’re likely willing to offer their name and email address to get the coupon. Even though it’s not a huge amount of information, it’s enough for a company to know that someone has concerned themselves with its offerings. 

Score leads

Scoring lead is a good method to qualify leads. With this technique, leads are assigned to a numerical value (or score) to identify where they fall on the scale from “concerned” to “ready to order“. You are the person deciding the criteria, but it must be the same throughout your marketing and sales team so that every member can work on the same scale. 

A lead’s score can be calculated according to actions they’ve taken, the information they’ve offered, their engagement level with your business, or other criteria that your sales department creates. For example, you might give someone a higher score if they often engage with you on social networks or their personal data fits your target audience.

Besides, you likely score a lead higher if they applied one of your coupons – an action showing that this person is engrossed in your product. 

The higher a lead’s score, the more likely they become a sales-qualified lead, which needs another step to become a shopper. Notably, you need to adjust the score and criteria all the way long until you identify the best formula, but once you do, you will turn your lead generation into customer generation. 

Incredible Lead Generation Techniques for Magento 2 

1. Use social media 

Your brand should be present on social networks. If you’re not, you’re being lagged behind, but it’s not too late for you to catch up with the trend. 

Social media is an ideal way to drive new leads and bolster your relationship with existing customers. If you do it in the right way, your followers will promote your content for you by sharing it on their social media accounts and creating new leads for your business. To market yourself on social networks, you had better produce your own content and share content from others. 

That eventually makes you more visible to potential clients and enhances your metrics on sites. The key to using social media to promote your company is to generate a dialogue with your consumers.  

2. Leverage email marketing

Email can be leveraged as a way to start contacting leads. Effective email marketing outreach begins with an initial email to a potential customer. You should create a list of potential customers and then contact each personally via email to raise a line of communication.

Here are some tips you can apply: 

  • Generate appealing subject lines – Your open rate is directly affected by your subject lines. If you want your emails to be opened, you need to ensure that you have a good subject line to catch people’s attention. 
  • Create opt-in offers – Develop offers that provide value (a free trial, free download, product discounts, and several forms of educational content that resolves your customers’ problems).
  • Ask leads to take action – Make it simple for leads to follow up. Limit your email to one clear-cut action you want your lead to take, whether it’s clicking through to a link, tapping the “reply” button, or affirming a time for a phone call. 
  • Make things shareable – Ensure that you include social media buttons so that customers can share your content with ease.

Moreover, you can consider employing email marketing automation to generate more leads for your business. Marketing automation is a powerful hybrid email marketing feature that connects with your CRM and allows you to deliver targeting emails to leads automatically. There are over 480,000 websites that utilize marketing automation to attract and nurture leads. 

3. Guest post blogging 

You can approach new audiences by accepting guest posts on your own site. There are several approaches you can try, including: 

Reach out to bloggers or influencers in your selected market and ask them to create content about your product or service. You’ll probably need to give them some commission, but you can access their following and have a good backlink. 

You also can hand these bloggers or influencers free access to your products, exchanging for an honest post and feedback of your products.

Or you can accept guest blog posts for your own website. You can use the following post blogging checklist as your guidelines: 

  • General themes: Be specific about the post type you can accept. All articles should contain concrete examples of source material to support your conclusions.
  • Search engine optimization: Do you want the author to create SEO-friendly content, or will you take care of it? 
  • Restrictions: Watch out for writers that include promotional materials blatantly. Links to their website or blog should be inserted in the bio at the end of the post. Links directing to relevant content on a blog from the body of the article are acceptable but should not be unnaturally promotional.
  • Content guidelines: You should get specific about the details. For instance, the article’s length: 600+ words, post titles: initial caps, no more than 70 characters in length, etc. 

4. Build a rewards system

You can consider building a rewards system where your shoppers drive leads to you in exchange for an appealing offer. Shoppers value and trust suggestions from their friends, so motivating current clients to spread the word about your business can be a clever way to fill your lead funnel. 

For instance, sunglasses company Shady Rays makes their existing customers create leads by asking them to offer an email address of someone they think will love the brand. In exchange, the brand pays $15 for the current customers if the lead places an order. 

5. Optimize your website 

To create more leads, ensure website visitors can find your lead magnet with ease. Design on-site funnels that group your audience and take them towards the lead magnet most likely to resonate with their demands and concerns. You can do this by promoting lead magnets around your website. 

  • Emphasize it as the main homepage call to action
  • Promote relevant lead magnets at the end of pages and blog posts
  • Employ a lead generation popup
  • Build a resource library full of gated content 
  • Insert a lead gen hello bar that stays at the top or bottom of your website
  • Promote your lead magnet in the sidebar 

For instance, Podio – a project management tool – doesn’t guide website browsers to their lead magnet. Instead, they instantly drive users into their free trial using the main hero section of their homepage.

6. Use PPC 

As we mention pay-per-click (PPC), we’re referring to advertisements on search engine result pages. Google has about 3.5 billion searches per day, making it ideal real estate for any ad campaign, particularly lead generation. The efficacy of your PPC campaign depends significantly on a smooth user flow, as well as your budget, target keywords, and many other factors. 

7. Install a Magento 2 extension 

Freshsales extension 

Freshsales is a robust CRM (customer relationship management) system established by Freshworks. It allows every business type to engage, manage, analyze, and nurture their leads. With the Freshsales integration extension, store owners only need to arrange a schedule and sync rules; then the system will handle the rest. 

The module also enables Magento 2 stores to decide which data is synchronized to which objects on Freshsales, which can be different for every sync rule. This function makes it flexible to match data between two systems, ensuring precise information allocations. 

Moreover, store admins can draw a schedule to update customers and order information constantly. Hence, Freshsales can use the newest information to take care of their shoppers more attentively in real-time. 

Does Your Business Need Lead Generation? 

If your calendar is empty and you want to run your business instantly, you can expand your business dramatically via lead generation, no matter what the price is. It can be like a gamble somehow, which is why selecting your target audience with care is critical. 

Lead generation can be a quick way to boost your return on investment and significantly broaden your customer base. Adapt it as you do with other advertising efforts: save a budget to test and check whether it works for your business. The key to triumphantly implementing lead generation is to enhance your sales and marketing skills so that the leads you get convert at a good rate. 

Let’s apply those above lead generation techniques to gain more leads for your Magento 2 store. And then don’t forget to share your results with us. We can’t wait to hear from you.


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10 Strategies to Increase Organic Traffic to Your Website in 2021

April 27th, 2021 No comments

Marketing teams continually aim to generate more organic search traffic, because organic search drives 51% of all web traffic and 40% of revenue. Backlinko reports the first organic Google search result fetches a CTR of 31.7%. That is obvious since users tend to click on the first few results instinctively. 

Rank in the top 3 positions or featured snippets for a particular keyword and you will see an exponential traffic jump. However, if you fail to rank on page one, it is a missed opportunity to improve the website click-through rates. 

Here are the 10 strategies to increase your website’s organic search traffic in 2021.

1. Write long-form content (often, but not always) 

A study by Backlinko found longer content receives more backlinks. This can lead to better ranking and more traffic. 

However, writing 2,000+ word blog posts is time-consuming and not for everyone. Remember that your content should satisfy user intent. For some search queries the readers might want a guide. For others, they may be looking for a few words to answer their question. 

For “link building do’s and don’ts” chances are the reader would not be looking for a detailed guide. A simple bullet-point list would suffice. 

On the other hand, for the keyword “link building tips” people could be looking for a comprehensive guide to link building strategies. 

You could consider targeting multiple types of search queries in a single post. For example, the link building guide could have a table of do’s and don’ts. Your content marketing funnel should have high-quality content, regardless of the format or length. 

In 2021, a content marketing strategy worth trying is to refresh your old content. Why not expand an existing blog from 1,500 to 2,500 words? Because your existing content has authority and readership, it is simpler to refresh and update existing information with extra content. 

Content refreshes work great for time-sensitive content pieces such as “listicles or statistic” posts. 

You could also consider supercharging your content with quizzes to make the content interactive and engaging.

2. Improve site architecture to get sitelinks 

Site architecture signals how crawlers can access your website and how human searches can navigate and engage with it. If your site architecture is confusing, crawlers would not know which pages are more important to your website. When users cannot find the information they need, they would bounce from the site. This sends negative signals to search engines, which is why your site drops in SERPs. 

The benefit of good site architecture is that it boosts organic traffic by positioning your website higher in results. This increases the chances of having your sitelink featured in SERPs and increased conversions

Sitelinks also take up valuable real estate on the results page, give searches more chances to click through to your page, and push competitor listing below the fold. 

How can you improve site architecture and get sitelinks? 

A good site architecture has a logical flow of URLs, moving from domain to category and subcategory. Tips to improve site architecture include: 

  • Large sites should be organized into meaningful categories and subcategories. 
  • Pay attention to the internal site linking structure. Crawlers need links to hop from one page to another on the site. A lack of links could result in some pages becoming uncrawlable. 
  • Add a sitemap. The sitemap.xml file extension signals to crawlers the most important pages on your website which you want to appear in sitelinks. You could add a sitemap to your Google search console account. 

3. Use long-tail and relevant keywords

Everyone talks about keyword optimization, but not enough people talk about long-tail or query-based keywords. Research and optimize your blog posts with these keywords to boost the volume of organic search queries you rank for.

Long-tail keywords are typically indicative of higher buying intent. For instance, someone who searches for “best running shoes under $100” is more likely to buy than someone who searches for just “shoes.” There is less competition for long keywords because they are more descriptive. By ranking for long-tail keywords relevant to your niche, you attract customers who are much closer to making a purchase.

You can use a keyword database to find actionable data about the keywords. From the basic Google ad metrics to augmented benchmarks, extended keyword metrics and historical data, you can filter the keywords and sort them by specific metrics. This enables you to compare ideas and select the most powerful keywords for your brand. 

How to use long-tail keywords? 

Here is how you can incorporate them into your content: 

  • After finding the keywords, write content around that topic in the form of a blog post or a webpage. 
  • Incorporate those keywords in the title, header, meta description, image alt text, and throughout the text. 

Google search provides alternative keywords to searchers. As these suggestions are based on real queries, they are an excellent place to find related searches.  

4. Have catchy but simple title tags

Most of the time, people will click on your link in the search engine results based on what they can see in the title. Some ways to make your titles more ‘clickable’ include using a numbered list, using brackets in the headline (a HubSpot study found that this boosted clicks by 40%), mentioning the current calendar year, and avoiding heavy title tags. Of course, be sure to test all of your headlines and pick the ones that work best.

5. Make your URLs descriptive

The third component of the preview text that your customers see in search engine results is your page URL. Moz first talked about the importance of descriptive URLs back in 2014.

Today, website URLs play a key role in search rankings. By adequately categorizing and sub-categorizing your pages, you can add more keywords to your URL and show your customers that they are looking at precisely what they searched for.

When you make the URL descriptive and add SEO-friendly meta tags, title tags, and meta, you optimize for click-through rate (CTR). Visibility on page one is only half the organic search traffic battle. Alongside, you need to convince searchers to click on your results than the other options. 

The two benefits of optimizing for CTR include: 

  • Enticing searchers away from competitor sites to your own site, thereby increasing your organic traffic. 
  • Sending positive signals to search engines. Google prioritizes search results based on high CTR. 

6. The impact of videos on search performance 

Having a video on your website or web pages helps you get traffic from video-specific searches. Additionally, it can increase the relevancy for certain queries, thereby increasing the rankings and visibility. 

When Wistia indexed their videos, they received 6,100 clicks from search and 1,387 direct clicks from video search. The indexed videos increased their organic search traffic by 10.6%. 

That means, your website traffic will see a positive impact by including indexable video content on your website. 

InVideo helps you create and edit online videos that look dynamic, appealing, and demand attention. 

7. Optimize your content for featured snippets 

One of the best ways to improve your website’s visibility is by showing up in featured snippets. This is the most appropriate answer to a user’s search query, according to Google, and appears at the very top of search results. A featured snippet can have diverse content formats such as a short paragraph, lists, tables, videos, or even images. 

Users are much likelier to click on the first result they see. Plus, the fact that Google has chosen your website out of all the hundreds of others to be at the top indicates that you are trustworthy and share useful content.

How to dominate featured snippets? 

As with sitelinks, featured snippets have to be won. You cannot request Google to give you a featured snippet. To increase your chances of appearing in a snippet, you can follow some steps. They include: 

  • Sites that do not appear on page one will not appear in a snippet. Find out the keywords that rank for the featured snippet and if your website is ranking on the first page for it. 
  • Snippet-friendly keyword phrases answer a question (how, why, or what). Your content should answer that question. 
  • Structure your answer for crawlers. The question should be in the H2 subheading, The answer should be in the text directly below the H2 heading with

    mark-up. 

  • Format the content as steps. This copywriting tip makes your content more reader-friendly and boosts the chances of ranking for featured snippets. 

Even if your content does not rank for featured snippets, these strategies will improve the performance by making the content more crawlable and sharable. The ultimate goal is to gain brand exposure and increase the online visibility of your business.

8. Repurposing content for other channels 

Repurposing a single content piece into multiple formats makes sense as you spend lots of time and effort creating a piece of content. Don’t neglect it after hitting the “publish.” 

Extend its shelf life by turning it into different content formats. The reason being, people consume content differently. While some prefer audio, others prefer visual or some like me, prefer to read. 

Gary Vaynerchuk uses the following content pyramid for content repurposing

Here’s the slide deck that explains his process.

While GaryVee has a team that helps him repurpose content, it doesn’t mean you can’t do it. Calibrate your expectations and resources and you are good to go. 

9. Build a diverse backlink portfolio with writing guest posts 

Even in 2021, backlinks are a crucial part of search engine optimization. And guest blogging where you write for other blogs have several benefits: 

Keep in mind, the quality of backlinks matters. Spammy links do more harm than good. 

When pitching guest posts, don’t only target the “big-hitters.” Smaller sites are also valuable. They are more responsive to your pitches and niche-specific. 

From personal experience, here are some guest blogging best practices to follow: 

  • Invest time in creating high-quality content. Build a portfolio of awesome guest posts in well-known industry blogs and use it as social proof. This can help you get a green light from publications that usually decline guest posts. 
  • Publishing a guest post doesn’t happen in a day. It can take 3-4 weeks because your post isn’t usually at the top of the blogger’s to-do list. Find out 3-4 topics you would want to write about and pitch them to 5-7 blogs. 
  • Interlink to your previously published guest posts. I use this opportunity to link to those in the industry I would want to build a relationship with.
  • For each article, link to different pages from your website. 

10. Referral marketing to reward loyal customers

One of the KPIs for every marketer to increase the volume of search traffic to their website. The problem with digital marketing strategies is that SEO takes time. PPC is costly. Social media has a limitation in terms of ROI. 

Referral traffic, on the other hand, has the potential to generate practical traffic and multiply sales quickly. Because the majority of people trust recommendations from friends and family over advertisements, referral marketing not only boosts your revenue but also the brand name. 

Reward your most loyal customers. Acknowledge their loyalty and increase conversions with incentive referrals. Xoxoday Plum helps you streamline and automate referral programs with instant rewards and benefits. The catalog of 15,000+ products and experiences ensures that your customers receive a reward that is not repetitive or irrelevant. 

Final thoughts 

We know that SEO is constantly evolving. Marketers need to adapt fast and giving your website an edge over the competition is very much in your control. Increasing organic traffic starts with spending time on the fundaments of solid content creation. Stay on top of the impact of backlinks, schema, featured snippets, and site architecture. When you implement these basics of SEO, you will see a significant difference in your website’s click-clickthrough rate, engagement, and rankings.


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20 Best New Websites, April 2021

April 26th, 2021 No comments

This month’s collection contains a combination of big and bold, and clean and minimal. Although basic minimalism is still trendy, with lots of white space and greyscale type, we are seeing it softened with color. This is implemented differently, ranging from hints of off-whites in images to gentle pastels as section backgrounds.

Playing around with type and using typefaces with a few characteristic quirks is another way minimalism is being tempered without negating the overall effect. Plus, we’ve got some strong examples of type rules being deliberately broken to good effect. Enjoy!

Crusta C

The new website for seafood company Crusta C makes clever use of the company’s simple logo mark ‘C’ with a cutout video effect.

How Many Plants

How Many Plants is a guide to house plants and how to look after them. A good combination of illustration and space gives a friendly but efficient feel.

Out of the Valley

Out of the Valley, make bespoke and prefabricated cabins focusing on natural materials and traditional craft. The subtle changes in background color add warmth to the minimal layout.

Saskia Wilson

Portfolio site for photographer Saskia Wilson. This is absolute simplicity, with a clear grid and nice, bold type to bare minimum text.

Made Thought

Design studio Made Thought has some pretty prestigious clients; for a designer, it doesn’t get more prestigious than creating a new brand identity for MoMA. Their bold aesthetic and approach explain their success.

The Great Lake

For-fun sites like The Great Lake are a great way for web creatives to show their skills. This one from designer and front-end developer Anna Sherruble is visually appealing and has some informative content.

Acayaba + Rosenberg

Architects Acayaba + Rosenberg use carefully curated photography and subtle scrolling animation to pull the user in and create a pleasing browsing experience.

Omexco

Soft colors and a well-ordered grid recreate the feel of a mood board that prevents this site for Omexco from appearing cluttered and overly busy while showcasing multiple products.

Johan Belin

For his own site, digital creator Johan Belin has opted to show off his skills by creating this single-page site instead of simply showing work. This can be a risky tactic, but it works here.

La Nouvelle

A combination of contrasting and complementary color combinations creates freshness in this site for digital agency La Nouvelle.

Found

Found Studio’s website uses a very basic grid layout to allow the work to stand out; varying the typeface, weight, and style within sections of text creates individuality.

CKMS

CKMS is a design and build company. Their site is minimal but with a few nice little touches, like the background color change button in the bottom right corner.

Slow

Slow is a collective of people–largely artists, designers, artisans–aiming to implement and live by the slow movement principles. The design of their site reflects these aims, creating a sense of calm and deliberation.

Anne Frank House

Practical information for visiting the Anne Frank House and museum is combined with historical information and educational resources in this thoughtfully structured and visually engaging site.

Runway

Runway is a platform for publishing open-source, pre-trained machine learning models, as well as for training your own models aimed at artists and filmmakers. If this site aims to make the user want to try Runway, it succeeds.

Fat Free

Fat Free video branding agency add warmth to their minimal site with soft color and occasional illustration.

Pinch

The furniture and other interior products produced by Pinch Design aim for a quiet, elegant aesthetic, and their website reflects that with pale grey and generous spacing.

Sentempo

Digital studio Sentempo manages to achieve glossy without being overdone. The star dividers are a nice detail.

One Year

Many companies, including creative agencies, have come up with ‘what we did/achieved in the last year’ microsites. This one from Context Creative succeeds as a good advert for them.

GT Super

This single-page intro to GT Super font has a certain drama in keeping with the font itself and allows you to play around with the size, weight, and style of the font in most sections of the text.

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How Mobile Apps Assist You To Grow Your Startup Business?

April 26th, 2021 No comments

Do you want to grow your small-scale business to a larger extent or want to start a new company online? If your answer to these precise questions is a big yes, there are plenty of ways to help you take a big step in the career.

For a startup business, you need to have a unique idea and a bit of understanding about launching it in the real world. Target audience, demand, and market evaluation, area-wise strategies are some of the essential points that you should consider before planning your startup. There is no guarantee for your business to run smoothly and seamlessly. However, the best way for your startup to survive is to make your idea go digital with a mobile app.

Let’s discuss how to grow your startup business with a mobile app and the involved benefits. 

Process of How to Grow Your Business with a Mobile App

There is no straightforward way to make your business a success, but one of the most effective ways is to make your business go online. According to the stats, currently, the majority of the online traffic comes through mobiles. Also, there is an increase in mobile usage over the past year. Thus it is a great decision to partner with mobile app development companies to grow your business successfully. 

If you want to have an efficiently working mobile app, there are a few things that you need to keep in mind. Here are a few tips that will make you grow your business to the next level. 

Understanding Your Potential Customer’s Problems

For any startup mobile app development, it is highly recommended to be aware of the main issues of the users. With the solutions to the problems, you can form the foundation of your startup mobile application. Once you are done identifying the challenges, you must research and work on how your app would help people with exceptional measures. 

Excellent Wireframing of the app

You need to have a proper wireframe of the app as it is pretty essential for the startup app development process. It gives you the correct idea about how your mobile app would look like. You can test the wireframe once it is completed. 

For those who don’t know – “Wireframe is a type of mobile app blueprint that demonstrates the picture of the objects on the screen along with its respective functions”.

Designing Your Startup Mobile App

Rightly designing an application would help you to achieve greater success as a startup app. You must ensure that the design of your application is user-friendly and attractive. Thus, it is suggested to hire a professional mobile app developer and designer to make you successful in the field. 

Create a Minimum Viable Product First

One must not focus on building a full version of the application at first, as you can initiate the app’s working with an MVP version. Most successful applications have put a little extra effort into building a Minimal Viable Product over the complete version of the app. 

For those who don’t know – “MVP or Minimum Viable Product version of the app has merely the key features that deal with the central matters of the users“. 

Monetize Your Startup Mobile Application 

It is highly recommended for the developers of startup applications to create a strong strategy for the monetization part of the app. It is quite an essential and crucial part of any app. You must hire a knowledgeable developer. Additionally, you can do self-research about the monetization strategies. Some of the strategies that can be considered are paid apps, in-app purchases, or premium versions of the apps. 

Launch and Start Advertising Your App

When you feel that you are about to complete the development part of the mobile application, you must start strategizing for the advertising part of the app development. It is highly recommended to choose marketing strategies such as social media marketing, email marketing, text message marketing, and much more. 

How Can Mobile Apps Help Startups To Grow?

With the changing time, every business needs to move ahead with the latest technology trends. Most smart entrepreneurs have taken advantage of mobile apps further to grow their startups to a whole new level. Here are some of the gains and key advantages of mobile apps for startup development.

Works As A Great Marketing Tool 

A mobile application is more than just an app, as it can work as a marketing tool as well. Do you know how? Mobile apps are linked with the social media apps of the user such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Thus, users can share the details or their experience with the app to their social circle with just a click. It is like free publicity of your mobile app. Furthermore, you can use push notifications and send updates to your users and other potential user-base. 

Helps You To Get More App Users 

You might have already known that the users are constantly changing their preferences and looking for something that would actually solve their problem. Thus, an engaging and useful app from your company is highly appreciated. Your app must have the quality to either kill or save your users’ time or must have great qualities so that people would even refer it to their friends or family. 

It Is Great For Boosting Your Brand Name 

Your company’s logo or slogan is easily visible to your customers through your mobile application. They can’t forget about it whenever they need a product or service from your app. It is a great business strategy that you must adopt in the early stage of your application launch. To boost your brand and make it reach a larger audience – it is great to use a mobile app. 

Help You Produce More Revenue and Profits

If your mobile application is developed to fulfill the order requirement of the clients, your app will help you earn more income than your website or a brick-and-mortar store. The applications must have functions such as booking tickets, shopping goods or services, reserving a table in a restaurant, booking hotels or travel packages, and much more. Other than that, in-app purchases or paid advertising in the app can help you earn more. 

Improves Consumer Experience 

Most people nowadays prefer to shop for anything or everything online. Thus, you can benefit your clients by giving them access to your product or service anytime, anywhere. It is great if you include 24/7 customer service for your users so that they can resolve their queries any time of the day or night. 

Key Takeaways

Your work doesn’t end with just launching the app. You need to come up with regular updates and never lose the visibility of the app. Thus, if you need long-lasting success, you need to enhance your app based on customer feedback. Simply maintaining, updating, and adding new functions would help your app to become a success in the long term. 

Unfortunately, several business owners are yet to recognize the importance of mobile apps for startup businesses. For such people, it is vital to understand the benefits of mobile apps and get started with them to boost their business results. 


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Popular Design News Of The Week: April 19, 2021 – April 25, 2021

April 25th, 2021 No comments

Every day design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!

Coca-Cola Presents New Packaging Design

Seven Mistakes To Avoid In Your Technical Interviews

10 Interesting Ways to Plan Web Design Projects

Web Developer’s Guide To AVIF Images

 

3 Effective Ways To Improve Your Site’s Carbon Footprint

Pure CSS Before & After Image Slider

Blank

25 Exciting New Tools For Designers, April 2021

Text In A Circle Using CSS & JavaScript

A to Z of Adobe XD: Tips & Tricks!

Content-Aware Image Resizing In JavaScript

Remove Distractions and Waste from Your Website

Top 18 Best Practices for Writing Super Readable Code

Atriom

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Eliminating five top compatibility pain points on the web

April 23rd, 2021 No comments

Robert Nyman and Philip Jägenstedt:

Google is working with other browser vendors and industry partners to fix the top five browser compatibility pain points for web developers. The areas of focus are CSS Flexbox, CSS Grid, position: stickyaspect-ratio, and CSS transforms.

[…] The goal in 2021 is to eliminate browser compatibility problems in five key focus areas so developers can confidently build on them as reliable foundations.

I’d say slow clap, but I don’t want to sound sarcastic. Full on, regular clapping.

Ten, fifteen years ago, the job of a web designer and developer was heavily thinking about, planning for, and dealing with cross-browser compatibility. These days, it’s still a thing, but it’s not about dealing with bugs, quirks, and frustrating implementation differences like it was then. It’s more edge-case stuff with more obvious work-arounds. And when we’re thinking about the browser and device landscape, we’re doing it through the lens of meeting our users where they are and embracing that landscape. Doing our best, anyway.

If the powers that be can keep chipping away at compatibility problems, that further cements the web as the correct place to build.

I vote for some kind of proper stab at reliable viewport units in 2022, that somehow sensibly handle scrollbars and other browser chrome.

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Quiz: Which CSS Snippet Is The Fastest?

April 23rd, 2021 No comments

CSS is an awesome tool for styling websites. It’s small, fast, and easy to learn. But like all code, there’s a right way, and a wrong way to write it. Badly written CSS renders slowly, impacting on the perceived speed of your site, and even damaging your SEO.

Writing fast CSS is about knowing your CSS selectors, knowing your shorthand, and understanding how properties are best applied. What better way to spend the final Friday in April, than on a CSS pop-quiz. Have fun!

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The Almost-Complete Guide to Cumulative Layout Shift

April 22nd, 2021 No comments

Here’s Jess B. Peck writing all about Google’s Core Web Vitals:

Let’s step back one. CLS is when you’re about to click on a link, and the whole page shifts and you click on a different link instead. It’s when you’re halfway through a blogpost and an ad loads and you lose your place. It is when… the layout shifts. At least, that’s what it’s trying to measure– both those shifts, how often they happen, and the irritation that causes the user.

I didn’t quite understand just how complex Cumulative Layout Shift is before reading Jess’s piece. As Jess explains:

CLS is a measure for a robot to approximate the user perception of instability. This means we’re getting a unit of change over time. It’s a three dimensional equation, and there are tons of things that can affect it. […] The idea is more to alert devs to a problem area, rather than be a perfect measurement of how annoying a page is.

I had this problem on, of all places, Google dot com. I kept tapping an element just as it appeared on screen and this sent me to the wrong page.

Jess notes that these metrics are sometimes more of an art than a science, and so we shouldn’t be obsessed with making sure that just these Core Web Vital metrics are okay. Chris mentioned a while ago that he worries folks might begin to game these metrics for improving their SEO:

This feels like the start of a weird new era of web performance where the metrics of web performance have shifted to user-centric measurements, but people are implementing tricky strategies to game those numbers with methods that, if anything, slightly harm user experience.

Harry Roberts mentioned something similar:

I feel like this is our responsibility as web developers, to explain that what we want to do here is reduce user misery on our websites. That’s not to say it’s easy, though, and there’s certainly not much we can do to avoid the shady folks who’ll game these metrics only to improve SEO.

As Jeremy wrote just the other day:

The map is not the territory. The numbers are a proxy for user experience, but it’s notoriously difficult to measure intangible ideas like pain and frustration.

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